On the street, after Anthony Neilson's new play, a well-spoken
stranger asked me, "Did you think that was shite, or did you [with a
tang of distaste and incredulity] enjoy
it?" This was not, I fear, the beginning of a beautiful
friendship: I inclined towards enjoyment, and told him so. Two
years ago, in The Wonderful World Of
Dissocia, Neilson created a kaleidoscopically absurd world to
mimic that inside a mentally disturbed young woman's head. Realism ostensibly moves to the
opposite extreme, with a day on which its young male protagonist does
nothing whatever; its contents, however, belie the title, being instead
strikingly similar to those of the land of Dissocia. Neilson recognises
that we are an imaginative species, constantly running scenarios of
future events, grafting memories on to one another or engaging in more
or less wild fantasies.
Thus, whilst supposedly vegged out on his sofa, protagonist Stuart
McQuarrie (often here Neilson uses his cast's real names) is goaded by
an imaginary childhood friend, imagines himself dominating an edition
of Any Questions+ and reruns
and refashions moments from his two crucial romantic relationships. At
one point, his response to a bill becomes a big production number, a
song whose only lyrics are "What a bunch of fucking cunts", complete
with chorus line and black-face minstrels, which latter point leads in
turn to an interrogation of his own imagination's racism.
Although there is bad-taste humour, the graphic discomfiture one
associates with Neilson's work is wholly absent here: where Dissocia had a second act which
located its protagonist "objectively" in a coldly lit psychiatric
hospital, Realism has an anti-coup de théâtre coda
which neither resolves nor re-informs anything. The play, directed by
the author for the National Theatre of Scotland, is a testimony to his
belief that the era of "in-yer-face" theatre has passed and will be
superseded by Caryl Churchill-style absurdism. I suspect my
interlocutor's discontent was because he felt the piece was about
nothing - which is its whole point - or that the gags and caprices of
these 85 minutes were somehow easy. Of course it is easy to let our
imagination take flight; it is in our nature. What is harder is the
artistic portrayal of such flight. Neilson thinks he may have found a
way of doing this, and I think he may be right.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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