The heart of the matter ... Blasted by Sarah Kane. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
When The Coast of Utopia opened here in New York last year, the New York Times offered a reading list for audience members who may have felt ... well, let's say 'intellectually challenged' by Stoppard's historic and linguistic gyrations. (Those same audience members were probably relieved that there wasn't a test afterwards.) Similarly, when Michael Frayn's Copenhagen opened, there was patient journalistic investigation of the political and philosophical themes Frayn spun his dramatic variations around.
These plays of challenging ideas and philosophies, delivered by historical figures, have gained a time-honoured place in English-language theatre that goes back to Bernard Shaw. They're a salve to the egos of audience members who vaguely remember these figures from their undergraduate history and philosophy classes. Fewer, though, are the essays and reading lists offered for plays that might offer just as much of a challenge to an audience's emotional and psychic preconceptions as they do to their intellectual interests.
There's more of a home in New York for plays of the first kind (Stoppard's Rock 'N' Roll opened on Broadway this month, little more than a year after its London premiere); of the second, there's a dearth. To illustrate this, while it took fourteen months for Stoppard's latest to reach Broadway, it will have taken almost 14 years for Sarah Kane's 1995 debut play Blasted to have its New York premiere when it opens at Soho Rep in spring 2008.
Stoppard's and Frayn's plays take place in a comfortably distant past, and their appeal lies in the ways these characters, historic though they are, share the little romantic, moral and political intrigues that audience members themselves face each day. The larger-than-life figures' personal problems echo the audience's. Kane's play, and the plays of other writers of the in-yer-face school, are firmly set in the extreme emotional, often psychotic landscapes of the contemporary world: war, addiction, cruelty, the constant threat of instant annihilation - the postwar conditions of global existence.
They are not historical landscapes which time and intellectualism have rendered safe for exploration; they're psychic landscapes, scarred and violence-ridden, and every bit as challenging to the emotions and psychological certainties of their audiences as Stoppard's firecracker dialogue is to their intellectual certainties. The characters portrayed there resemble the audience only in the audience members' darker, more nightmarish, unconscious urges.
As well, American performance practice is still determined in the mainstream theatre by the Stanislavsky 'system', which, in its watered-down form, has become little more than a convenient kind of amateur psychoanalysis: the continuing legacy of psychological realism. Performers and directors are encouraged to find logical motives, to identify clear conflicts for the behavior of the characters, and in many of these plays such motives and conflicts simply don't exist within the protean identities they represent.
Sarah Benson, who is British herself and will direct Blasted at Soho Rep (of which she is also the artistic director), suggested to me this weekend that there may be another reason for the late arrival of work like this to our shores. "American actors often like to be liked. It's important to me to work with actors who are not afraid to be disliked, and ... to be really simple in what they do," she said in an email. "I'm interested in a more behavioural and less heady approach. That's a better way to reach the emotional violence and tenderness of the play than through purely psychological realism."
Stoppard and Shaw and Frayn, at their best, investigate the darknesses (though they're never too dark) of the mind and ideology; Beckett and Barker and Kane, the darknesses (and they're often very dark) of the heart and spirit. A theatre lacking the second demonstrates a fatal weakness - imagine the Shakespeare canon without the tragedies. There remains, on our mainstream stages, that profound absence.
