Aleks Sierz's 'five mighty moments' In his lecture entitled
Blasted and After: New Writing in British Theatre Today Sierz cites "five mighty moments in the history of the 1990s" that shaped in-yer-face theatre. Outside of this lecture Sierz has gone into greater detail about the importance of these moments:
The influence of North American plays and Scottish theatre Sierz first cites
Ian Brown, artistic director of Edinburgh's
Traverse Theatre, who during the late 1980s started looking "for provocative plays from Canada and America" to be staged at the theatre, Brown described himself as "a risk-taker; I had a taste for doing plays that are a bit between-the-eyes: most London theatres didn't dare put on Brad Fraser['s plays] because of the explicit sex". Fraser has been hailed by director
Dominic Dromgoole as "the early prophet, the
John the Baptist of the brutalist school that flourished in the mid-nineties. A lot of tricks that tired by the end of the Nineties, the rimming, the
sadism, the
antibodies, the sexual frankness, the cool
irony in the face of outrage, began with Fraser". Brown also developed "Scottish work with Scottish actors" such as the "provocative" 1992 play
The Life of Stuff written by "local actor"
Simon Donald.
Young British Artists and Philip Ridley The second "mighty moment" that Sierz cites is Philip Ridley's play
The Pitchfork Disney being performed at the
Bush Theatre in 1991. The artistic director of the Bush Theatre, Dominic Dromgoole, wrote that
The Pitchfork Disney "was one of the first plays to signal a new direction for new writing. No politics, no naturalism, no journalism, no issues. In its place, character, imagination, wit, sexuality, skin and the soul." Ridley started writing the play during the 1980s while he was an art student at
St Martin's School of Art, with the play evolving out of a series of
performance art monologues he had created in his final year of study. Ridley identifies himself as a contemporary of the
Young British Artists (also known as the YBAs). These artists are regarded to have started with
Damien Hirst's exhibition
Freeze in 1988 and have been described by Sierz as "the in-yer-face provocateurs of the art scene [whose] 1997
Sensation exhibition was an immensely influential example of that 1990s sensibility". Sierz in part attributes Ridley's originality as a playwright from him training at an art school instead of attending a drama school or a theatre's 'new writing programme'. Sierz therefore feels that the history of new writing during the 1990s should not start with The Royal Court Theatre, but "perhaps, more accurately" should look instead at "St Martin's College of Art and
Goldsmiths College. Culturally, there's clearly a nexus between the YBAs, Cool Britannia and
Brit Pop." because "in 1994 the judge in the boys' trial explained the murder by speculating that they had been exposed to a violent video, ''
Child's Play 3, this created a media storm which, I would argue, is the cultural context for the media uproar over Blasted''". Sierz credits a turning-point for the theatre when Daldry remodelled his programming policy in 1994 from focusing on American work and "gay physical theatre to text-based drama [where] he decided to stage a large number of first-time dramatists". Daldry's first season of work by new writers in 1994-95 included a number of in-yer-face plays, such as
Some Voices by
Joe Penhall,
Peaches by
Nick Grosso and
Ashes and Sand by
Judy Upton. Sierz notes "the key play" of this season being
Blasted by Sarah Kane. Sierz says that "one of the lynchpin moments of the 1990s was the script meeting [at The Royal Court] that decided to stage Sarah Kane's
Blasted. Although promoting new writing was a deliberate policy, this meeting might have chosen to pass on
Blasted, and the history of the rest of the decade might have been so very different." Sierz also states that "the resulting media furore of the shocking content and unsettling form of the play put British new writing on the map", with the controversy becoming a "significant cultural moment" and that with
Blasted "a new exciting sensibility arrived". Presented by Crimp as "seventeen scenarios for the theatre", the play has been cited as a pioneering work for its unconventional form and structure. Sierz has described the play as "a
postmodernist extravaganza that could be read as a series of provocative suggestions for creating a new kind of theatre. The recipe was: subvert the idea of coherent character; turn scenes into flexible scenarios; substitute brief messages or poetic clusters for text; mix clever dialogue with brutal images; stage the show as an art installation. The playtext doesn't specify who says which lines, but
Tim Albery's production brought out the acuity and humour of Crimp's writing, with its characteristic irony, and its pointed comments on the pointlessness of searching for a point." Sierz has called
Attempts on Her Life "one of the most influential pieces of contemporary theatre"
Decline of in-yer-face theatre Towards the end on the 1990s there were declining numbers of new in-yer-face plays being performed in Britain. In January 1997 Stephen Daldry said that "When I first arrived [at the Royal Court] there were a lot of gay plays, then came violent plays like
Mojo and
Shopping and Fucking. I feel that trend is on the way out now." Sierz credits three events, which for him "suggested that the tide was turning and that an era of confrontation had come to an end", signalling the decline of in-yer-face theatre: The first is "the enormous success of
Conor McPherson's
The Weir", Sierz has said that "[the play] – despite that unpleasant episode about paedophiles in one of the ghost stories and the emotionally fraught aspect of the final story about losing your child – has got a very redemptive feel which most 'in-yer-face' plays don't have" and that the play's "immense success suggest[ed] that the public's taste for shock has been superseded by a desire for a calmer aesthetic." Sierz has said that "After 1999, you still get individual plays that have that [in-yer-face] sensibility, but it's no longer the norm" In an essay published in 2008, Sierz wrote that "Although some playwrights, such as Philip Ridley,
debbie tucker green and
Dennis Kelly, use some of the techniques of in-yer-face theatre, the general scene has moved on". ==Critical categorisation==