April 29, 2007

‘Kissing Bone’: the wrightings of Rothwell

Judith Dale          posted 20 Apr 2007, 01:40 AM / edited 29 Apr 2007, 02:53 PM

In an earlier forum – The Duty of a Playwright – I floated some ideas about playwrights, what they do, and why, and quoted Robert Fisk in The Independent Online:

“The duty of an artist, I have always thought, is to place imagination on a higher level than history, to frame real events – if he or she must – to fit the interpretation that an author or playwright chooses to reveal about life.” (Reference from Peace Movement Aotearoa newsletter for 15 March.)

When Fisk says it’s a playwright’s duty (a term which ‘may disturb some people’, as they say on TV) to shape their script into their own imaginative and creative (re-)interpretation of ‘life’, I think he’s referring (albeit unknowingly?) to theatrical non-realism. Most drama we see is realist and so most theatre comes to be criticised in terms of realism, for failures in realistic action, characterisation, plot-line or whatever. We find it harder to talk about non-realism, especially when the play is also mythopoeic (for want of a better word). In live theatre, though, it should be easy to accept the impact of the dramatic experience whatever its style: everything that happens on stage is – in a way – quite real and natural, happening in real time with real people both here in the audience and up there in front of our very own eyes.

I suggest that ‘non-realism’ is how Paul Rothwell’s work is best described – though Rothwell may not agree but that doesn’t matter. In my view, it’s precisely their resistance to normativising realism that makes these scripts so interesting, as playwriting / wrighting and in the theatre.

For a start, the way Rothwell plays around with genre suggests this. Each script references a slightly different genre or dramatic structure, and then plays with that dramatic form. The most recent Rothwell play Kissing Bone neither gives us its back-story early in the piece (which is the traditional way of story-telling, “Once upon a time”…), nor allows it to emerge in the course of the narrative, which is what we’re most accustomed to (though this itself was a break with dramatic convention when playwrights, Ibsen for one, started to begin their story-lines in what would have been the fifth act in traditional terms).

Rather, in Kissing Bone we hear of the dramatic and formative back-story only well towards the end, where it appears structurally rather as an extended coda, coming after 33 of the 44 pages in the version I consulted. I don’t know, but I’d hazard a guess that Paul Rothwell decided to do things this way well on in the process of rewriting, and some viewers may think it doesn’t work…. (In realism, however, the ending is often the most difficult part to pull off, and an open-ended finish such as characterises a non-realist text may be more satisfactory, more elegant and maybe more convincing than attempts at closure.)

A considerable degree of shaping and rewriting takes place in developing a script. Plays begin with dramatic characters, but even though they’re a contrivance of theatrical artistry they have a way of taking over. It’s bad theatre that begins with pallid characterisation or doesn’t allow the emergence of unexpected complexity in its characters. Yet the shaping and development of a script and its characters inevitably interact with bigger societal structures which in turn help to create its back-story – and there’s always a back-story.

In Kissing Bone, having the back-story in a block at the end gives that eventful day something of the originary status of myth: the end of innocence and the golden years (or boys?). It represents that which is ‘always already lost’ but from which we wish there was someone or something to deliver us. Briar Grace-Smith in the last issue of Playmarket News describes her own plays as “brooding mythological stories with a contemporary take” and I feel Rothwell’s are similar, if with more dependence on a Christian context in place of the Māori. There is a strong sense of mortality in Kissing Bone, right from the title. Brittany arrives on stage, according to the script (thanks Playmarket) “dragging behind her a burden of bones, which represents the ties she has to her dead pets. They restrict her movement and are invisible to the other characters.” As Mr Marrow says later, “All animals die” and so “What’s the point of life when everyone else has died?” There are bones all around the set and several deaths in the course of the play, even if only two are of human animals. Laurie Atkinson’s Dom. Post review calls it a threnody, a poetic lament for the dead or a song of lamentation.

But that’s not all it is. In Kissing Bone as in Deliver Us, Hate Crimes and Golden Boys there’s also a powerful expression of sexual vitality and fertility, futile or not. That pun, a play on fertility/futility, emerges early and underpins the play-fullness of the script entirely. Brittany’s brother Norris says of his first kiss, “A kiss so deep it scraped my bones, tongue pushed out the back of my throat, probing my spine, attaching itself to my brain stem, stealing my thoughts.” A little later Enid/Edith responds, “When you kissed me you put something else inside of me. I felt it deep into my numb coccyx … in my bones where you kissed me.” A virile sexuality is evident in Kissing Bone right from the start, even in Enid’s lascivious – if it isn’t abusive – reminiscing about Norris’s own sexual precocity as a child.

(For the more literary among us, I’m reminded of that erotic alliterating line in a John Donne love poem, referring to a cadaver which might be dug up and discovered to have “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone”; the poem is called “The Relic”. Mr Marrow’s name evokes a similar image for me, if complicated by Marvell’s “vegetable love”.  Rothwell’s emphasis on flesh and fleshliness is elsewhere reminiscent of the metaphysical poets from the early seventeenth century too. So perhaps I could go even further, and say that John Donne himself would acknowledge this kind of writing and its author as a fellow poet?)

Then there is a shift in tone when the back-story is about to emerge, in the final fourth of the script. It begins with the almost nostalgic sense of a (pre-)pubescent time fifteen years earlier, when Brittany was fourteen and Norris six (they’re 29 and 21 when the play starts). There’s also a little boy with the interesting name of Ryan Mc Call, whose death occurs at the climax of that day. But to call this a flash-back isn’t quite right. In dramatic terms, that is, in structural, thematic and mythopoeic terms, it’s foundational. It becomes the day the beloved cow Butterfingers dies (such a marvellous moniker) in a kind of explosive and bloody Armageddon, having been subjected to the bloat by Norris who’d let her into the clover deliberately. Among other tragedies, this is also an act of betrayal just like Cain’s in the archetypal story of the first murder, a story that itself raises the question of why we should not all be vegetarian, as Brittany is.

But this is also how a certain redemptive overlay enters, with a nuance that Kissing Bone like Golden Boys, Deliver Us and perhaps even Hate Crimes is never entirely without. Even the titles of the three later plays are suggestive. Here there is a glimpsed return to childhood and its ever-available promise. Narratives of a ‘golden age’ or cultural childhood ground all mythologies that try to express the origins of human history. Butterfingers’ bell which was buried with her is rediscovered. In David Lawrence’s production at Bats even the disturbing ‘roadside’ white memorial crosses that encircled the set are both threnody and celebration. And so is the uncovering of a golden bovine skull, itself visually reminiscent of aspects of Greek mythology. Mr Marrow expresses it in clear if banal terms near the end: “There’s always hope, Brittany, there’s always hope.”

Playwrights are uniquely important. A script remains, beyond the specific production with its difficulties, to provide potential for something else, similar but new, months, years – or even centuries – later. And doesn’t that make scriptwrighting itself a visionary and perhaps even redemptive activity? Theatre is necessarily enmeshed in its own social and political immediacies, yes; but each production is a fresh opportunity and a new immediacy, each a current socio-political event. Paul Rothwell’s obscure narrative lines and complex character development are just part of what he’s doing. ‘Political theatre’ happens anywhere an audience is provoked into thinking as well as laughing, or crying.

By means that are variously surreal, absurdist, poetic and imagistic, Rothwell’s plays interrogate systemic power structures – including inherited narratives – which for better or worse have shaped our culture into being what it is. They respond to the mandate that asks a playwright to reveal their interpretation of life, by placing imagination on a higher level than history.

Sonal Patel          posted 20 Apr 2007, 11:31 AM

“I suggest that ‘non-realism’ is how Paul Rothwell’s work is best described – though Rothwell may not agree but that doesn’t matter”

May I ask why Paul’s opinion on his own work does not matter?  Surely he knows his work, the motive for his work better than what any of us may surmise?  I’d be interested in knowing what drives Paul to create the kind of work that he does, if he can indeed describe it in a style, what his influences are etc. 

I appreciate the discussion you have raised Judith, but as the playwright is still very young and only at the start of his career, I would hesitate to classify his work as any style right now.  If only because I don’t want him to feel boxed in so early on.

I also note that David Lawrence has directed all four of the productions you have mentioned above (unless you were fortunate to see the first production of Golden Boys) – what influence as director has he made in the way Paul’s plays are viewed by the audience (or rather David’s interpretation of Paul’s text – after all this is a collaborative process)?

John Smythe      posted 20 Apr 2007, 02:49 PM / edited 20 Apr 2007, 02:59 PM

Back in the 1970s Denis Potter and colleagues coined the phrase ‘realism but non-naturalism’ to legitimise their work (Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective, etc). I’ve always taken that to mean dramatising real but subjective human experience, as opposed to the more objective ‘fly on the wall’ naturalism. It’s a useful reference point for some of Paul’s work, or some aspects of it, Deliver Us being a prime example.

It is also a genre (or do I mean style or convention?) that allows fantasy and reality to merge within the present action of the drama without necessarily asserting the person having that experience needs a strait-jacket – usually because what’s ‘real’ and what’s not usually becomes clear by the final blackout. Again Paul’s plays, and/or the characters within them, are sometimes in that domain.

But Golden Boys also explores the relationships between reality and fantasy in an objectively astute appraisal of how popular television influences our lives. And Kissing Bone uses a heightened and somewhat poetic ‘reality’ that verges on the surreal to explore and critique the behaviour of human individuals and societies.

While Sonal makes a good point about not wanting to put Paul, or any other young playwright, in a box (in fact the only appropriate time to do that is when they have left this world in one, hopefully after a long and productive life), the naming of genres, styles and conventions can be useful as we are coming to terms with new work, provided we are willing (like Potter et al) to coin new terms when the old ones don’t fit.

I think the main reason we’re even having this conversation is that some reactionary forces have sought to dismiss and discredit a burgeoning talent who (as I have suggested in my reviews) is flexing his creative muscles by playing with various theatrical genres, even to the point of subverting them, in the process of confronting very real aspects of contemporary life. So Paul has become the poster boy – do we envy him? – for a wider discussion about the nurturing of fresh talent, and the role / rights / responsibilities of creative artists and the communities that value them, in a climate where our appetite is great for what we perceived to be ‘new’ and ‘innovative’.

neil furby             posted 27 Apr 2007, 12:59 PM / edited 27 Apr 2007, 01:02 PM

Judith  you write  that what  happens on stage is – in a way – quite real and natural, happening in real time with real people both here in the audience and up there in front of our very own eyes “.

For me Theatre is that place you go to on the train, in a window seat your face against the glass, looking out across the sea and land, and into your own sharp eyes .

Vive la difference

Anon     posted 27 Apr 2007, 09:42 PM / edited 27 Apr 2007, 10:18 PM

Here we go again – “…some reactionary forces have sought to dismiss and discredit a burgeoning talent…” 

No one’s ‘sought’ to do anything, John!  There’s just a largish bunch of people out there who happen to sincerely disagree with you, that’s all. That doesn’t make them ‘reactionaries’ (in fact quite a few of them are precipitously left-leaning!) But it does make YOU a bully!

John Smythe      posted 27 Apr 2007, 10:53 PM

Oh dear, ‘anon’, if my comments make you feel bullied … what can I say?

You will have to forgive me for assuming you “sought” to at least express your opinion, if not influence the opinions of others (fairly basic functions of a Forum, I would have thought). If indeed you have posted your comments with no purpose in mind, I cannot possibly mean you were one who “sought to dismiss and discredit a burgeoning talent”. But by what authority do you declare that “No one’s ‘sought’ to do anything”?

If you dislike Deliver Us and/or Kissing Bone because it they jolt you out of your comfort zones or fail to conform to an immutable set of rules you prescribe, then – by definition – I do mean you when I say “reactionary”. If not, the term does not refer to you, so please don’t take it personally.

It certainly is not my intention to brand everyone who disagrees with me “reactionary”. Nor do I wish to discourage difference of opinion in any way. I do prefer well-reasoned arguments to unsubstantiated disparagement and I doubt that I’m alone in that … But I am at a loss to understand why you feel bullied.

Katurian               posted 28 Apr 2007, 12:25 AM / edited 28 Apr 2007, 12:27 AM  

Well, I can see exactly why ‘anon’ might be feeling annoyed. It’s in what lies between the lines. Your post draws a division between your opinions, and the nasty elements who have disagreed (‘I think the main reason we’re even having this conversation….’) You’re then going on to single-handedly charge a widely varied body of opinion with being clearly ‘reactionary’ (a lot of them might have very good, not particularly reactionary reasons for not liking the plays, by the way), and then you’re turning to ‘anon’ and asking on whose authority they are making their claim?

Pot…kettle..black.

The Ref                 posted 28 Apr 2007, 08:45 AM

This is turning weird and silly. “No one’s ‘sought’ to do anything” is a fundamentally absurd assertion. John has pointed out his comment is fundamentally tautological: it only refers to reactionary resistance to Rothwell’s work; it does not refer to negative responses that are not reactionary. Nothing in the subtext contradicts the clear point that differences of taste and opinion are welcome – but once you’ve come on to the field, play the ball not the person, eh?

“Vive la difference” as Neil has already said. Where would theatre be without it? But let’s have more substance, less hot air. 

Mister Katurian                 posted 28 Apr 2007, 11:06 AM

(chuckle) I’d agree if your post wasn’t such a blatant exercise in erecting a moral high ground. And I’ve long since given up on trying to understand *anything* ‘Neil’ says. The anonymous poster was quite right to question what was at stake in the argument (I’m not quite as agreed about the bullying part, but anyway). I think what ‘anon’ has expressed, while it’s “fundamentally absurd” as a literal statement, is pretty clear if you think about how people talk informally – or at least, I could understand what they seemed to be saying, and I’m not about to throw it out wholesale just because there’s a problem in the way they’ve expressed it. It’s the feeling that some kind of agenda has been assigned to people, but I certainly don’t remember where this supposed agenda has come from or what evidence proves it.

You’ve pointed it out yourself, saying it only refers to “reactionary resistance”, and people can differ on any other grounds. Fair cop. And you’re totally begging the question. That’s precisely what is at stake – what is the reactionary resistance? So, in line with this, John, I’d like to know what the “reactionary resistance” is and was. Because I didn’t read a great deal from people who felt threatened substantively or formally. And, in case our aforementioned ref feels aggrieved, here’s my several cents worth:

-I didn’t feel at all threatened substantively or formally by ‘Deliver Us’. I think Rothwell has potential as a writer, but I found the piece itself (both as play and production) boring, formally conservative if anything (playing around with a few bits of genre doesn’t make something much of a breakthrough, and the piece itself plods), and as with most of his pieces I’ve seen, too long. By too long, I don’t mean that the duration was excessive, just that it kept going…and going…without adding anything…and it wasn’t keeping me waiting in Beckett-like way…it was just boringly repetitive, saying the same thing over and over to no greater effect. At the end of it, I didn’t feel I’d taken away anything of value.

-So, many people who liked it were “shocked”? And some people found it deeply moving? Okay. Fair cop, again. But, and this is a huge freaking but, I’m yet to be convinced by anyone that this arises from any intrinsic values of the work. Maybe I will be later, but I’m yet to hear it. All we seemed to see in those huge arguments were “I’m really shocked by the subject matter / I’m not really shocked by the subject matter”, “If you’ve had these kinds of issues in your own life, yeah, clearly this play would make you seek counselling”. On that basis, if someone had taken a big crap on the stage, and lots of people were shocked, and perhaps some people were traumatised by poo earlier in their life, then it’s an interesting piece because it creates a big debate between people who say “Yeah, shock the audience!” and those who say “No, let’s go to Circa!” And of course that would be ludicrous, and my example is deliberately ludicrous: because the logic is the same.

I’m sure that’s not what John would want at all. But I’m not about to assign him some kind of agenda because of it 🙂

Anon     posted 28 Apr 2007, 12:08 PM

Yes, I don’t like this implication that being “jolted out of your comfort zone” is some sort of guarantee you’ve seen something good, and ‘good for you’.  I know several people still jolting after seeing Menopause the Musical, for instance.  The Holy SInner.  (Endless list.)

neil furby             posted 28 Apr 2007, 07:22 PM

Mr K      Perhaps you might understand this        ” Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”

Judith Dale          posted 29 Apr 2007, 02:40 PM / edited 29 Apr 2007, 03:14 PM

To say the author’s opinions don’t matter refers to ‘the death of the author’, an idea fashionable a while ago which is still useful because it emphasises the reader’s, critic’s or audience’s point of view. Any ‘published’ production or script has entered a public domain, just like this forum. To say ‘the wrightings (writings? rightings?) of Rothwell’ (though it’s not my word-play) emphasises the written aspect of a playwright’s work. Of course, if we’re lucky enough to have a significant living playwright on our doorstep, it’s always extremely interesting to hear what they have to say about their craft. But they have their job and we have ours.

However, I think Sonal is right to say that a director’s style shapes the form in which a new script and a new script-writer is assessed,at least initially. As for ‘boxing him in’, it was my intention to avoid that which led me to use the term ‘non-realist’ suggesting openness. On the other hand, I emphasised that theatre is intrinsically ‘natural and real … in real time with real people’ in order to anticipate problems in talking about non-realism as a dramatic style. Non-realist theatre confronts its real-life audience by using a style that challenges apparently transparent realism.

Some people call this ‘breaking the fourth wall’, where the ‘fourth wall’ describes a certain kind of script or production that tries to make the stage area behind the proscenium seem like part of an actual building— the four walls of a real room. It’s the same as is meant by John’s ‘more objective “fly on the wall” naturalism’. If this is a kind of ‘glass wall’ that we spy through, is it the same as looking out of Neil’s train-window? No; indeed I’d have thought that non-realist theatre more easily has you ‘looking out across the sea and land, and into your own sharp eyes.’

As for ‘the main reason we’re even having this conversation…’, I began it because I wanted to talk about Paul Rothwell’s significance as a playwright (as I said, I think that writing plays is at least as important as acting/directing/producing them). Here, the playscript’s the thing, for me.

I began by talking about dramatic form. Whereas Anon and Mr Katurian say they’re not threatened either ‘substantively or formally’ by Rothwell’s work, I was initially talking about explorations in dramatic form. That’s where I saw the ‘intrinsic values of the work’, not in the challenge of its subject matter.

However, form and content are inextricably intertwined, of course: you can’t have one without the other. The content is indeed challenging, I believe, but not because it’s shocking. My long entry (above) was specifically about Kissing Bone and tries to identify why I’m so impressed by Paul Rothwell’s work. I felt that Kissing Bone in particular had not been considered seriously enough in the reviews I’d read (largely because of constraints of length). What I admired was his combination of a use of dramatic form — style — with his ‘vision of the world.’ There, I’ve said it. I’m afraid you’ll have to read my discussion all over again for the fine print but to save time refer especially to the last three paragraphs, on the way a playwright reveals their own imaginative and creative interpretation about life.

Katurian               posted 29 Apr 2007, 03:34 PM

Perfectly understood Judith – in relation to your posting, I understand your point of view. I didn’t see “Kissing Bone”, but on the basis of the other Rothwell work I’ve seen (everything else to date that I had been able to get to), I see what’s occurring, I understand the craft that is being employed, I just don’t yet find his manipulation of style especially *interesting*. Yes, it’s particular, it just doesn’t do much for me to date. So I’ll just agree to disagree until further notice.

Where I think you’ve been caught in the cross-fire here is in John’s implication, which is where the ‘the main reason we’re even having this conversation…’ clause came in, and that initial poster objected. It’s rather less to do with your meditation upon Rothwell above, and rather more to do with the idea that John puts forward, that there’s been some remarkable set of reactionary barbarians who have to be repelled, and clearly it’s all because they have some set of immutable rules, and they’re all very shocked by Rothwell’s work. It’s rather reductive in comparison with what you’re setting out, and I also think it’s rather odd because I haven’t seen these prescriptive neo-conservatives surface yet. Still, I suppose it is good to set up straw men to beat against.

Chesapeake       posted 29 Apr 2007, 04:52 PM

Katurian, exactly.  JS possibly doesn’t realise that some could read a veiled “if you’re not with me, you’re against me” in his remarks; and that given his position as a reviewer, it may be perceived that he is putting subtle pressure on those who feel their careers depend on his approval to shut up and fall in line. 

Anon     posted 29 Apr 2007, 05:33 PM

very grateful thanks Mr K; O that I could untangle verbals so expertly

natasha wyllie NATAZ     posted 29 Apr 2007, 05:58 PM

First of all I would like to just say that, if you think that a show is boring why do you go to see another of that same persons shows only a couple of weeks later or did you not go and just are making your mind up from seeing one show, or even no shows? If so then you should either go see less shows or try and enjoy them more

Also I have to say that I have not seen all of the plays I have seen golden boys which was ages but is my fav show ever*** it was about these boys who were being haunted, but you didn’t know if it was a ghost, or their fear of growing up. Then when I saw kissing bone I was going to write an assignment on it but I ended up writing about sunset café. Both shows were awesome but sunset café was easier to do because it related to the ass. question better

I would just like to say that people shouldn’t be hating on paul rotwell like Judith + other people say he is really talented and he isn’t a big sellout, like having shortland street people in all his plays to get people to come, all the actors are talented unknowns. He also does a good job and both of what I have seen were quirky but enjoyable

I think more people would like paul rotwell if he did movies, he could be like little miss sunshine which was really popular but also really good. If they made kissing bone into a movie, I would like to see the following actors in it people who are not big names but are well known for their top knotch acting. Britney:  Jennifer Connelly Norris: Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Ennid: Toni Collette Mr Marrow: The man who played granpa in Litle miss sunshine and also with Young Britney: Dakota Fanning. Ok I know she is a big star but I thik she would do justice with a kiwi accent. Also, the dude from the play who played the boy who died should be it in the movie too – he was already in black sheep***

well thats my two cents kia ora hope you all have a nice day 🙂

John Smythe      posted 29 Apr 2007, 09:40 PM / edited 29 Apr 2007, 11:07 PM

Heaven forbid that anyone’s career should depend on my approval. And to suggest, ‘Chesapeake’, that such approval would only go to those who fall in line with my opinions, is as inaccurate as it is insulting. As many will attest, with whom I’ve ‘crossed swords’, I have great professional respect for those who challenge me and stimulate me to reconsider or better articulate my thoughts and feelings.

I am here to learn and grow as well as to offer my contributions and provocations. That’s why I love live theatre. That’s why I run this multiple review and open forums website. And that’s why I could never don a uniform and conform to rules I was never allowed to question. Given all that, why on earth would I respect anyone who thought I was laying down immutable laws and then pretended to conform to them just to win my approval?

So when I say, “I think the main reason we’re even having this conversation is that some reactionary forces have sought to dismiss and discredit a bourgeoning talent who (as I have suggested in my reviews) is flexing his creative muscles by playing with various theatrical genres, even to the point of subverting them, in the process of confronting very real aspects of contemporary life,” I have no desire to shut down those “reactionary forces”. Indeed I welcome them because they spark off the debate people keep telling me they are enjoying.

The published comments I had in mind when I said all that, include those that asserted Deliver Us was superficial, juvenile and gratuitously out to shock, and the feature article in The Age arts review section (March 10, 2007), that asserted “the play is structurally a mess … It’s anti-abortion message is clear” and, “Some fellow Australians in the audience were so appalled by the writer’s stance they couldn’t even bring themselves to talk to him after the show.” I don’t admire their reticence when they had a mid-Fringe opportunity for robust debate, but I do thank Raymond Gill for putting out there so we could variously respond to it.

Many verbal discussions I had with a wide range of people also led me to believe that those who were deeply discomforted by the play then claimed it and/or the production were inept in various ways were discrediting it, rather than crediting it for getting under their guards, and being reactionary, rather than welcoming a work that took them out of their comfort zones. But that’s just my interpretation of their reactions.

To make it crystal clear once more: in no way do I mean to suggest that such opinions should not be heard. Indeed it’s vital that they are, just as it’s vital that everyone feels free to challenge each other in the interests of continuous improvement all round.