This talk was a keynote presentation at a symposium on Simon Stephens - British Playwriting/German Directing: Simon Stephens’s Wastwater and Pornographie - organised by Jackie Bolton and presented by TaPRA’s Directing and Dramaturgy working group and the University of Kent’s European Theatre Research Network.

The first thing to say is that the title is ironic. I don’t think Simon writes bad plays; the argument is that Simon is one of a number of playwrights that seem to break conventional dramatic rules but for an interesting end. I think, as a result, Simon writes very good plays. Just to make that clear.

I begin the paper by noting how in Wastwater his characters seem sometimes just to ‘do’ something, without explanation, without even a sense of character from which the action has issued; I then trace several examples of this throughout his work. I note how this would seem to me counter to conventional advice about playwriting - that action should issue from character, that the two elements support and enrich each other.

I then note that this is linked to a wider tendency to abandon conventional dramaturgical depth, produced through devices like irony. I note the ubiquity of irony in the 1990s, in music, culture, theatre, and then give examples of its absence in the 2000s. I draw in Duncan Macmillan, Dennis Kelly, Andrew Sheridan, Mike Bartlett, and, if I’d known her work at the time, would have added Katie McCullough.

Is this, I ask, a suspicion of fiction? of authorship? Is it linked to the disappearance of authors about which I’ve talked elsewhere? I argue that it is but that it also represents a kind of desire for an ethically direct speech, a renewed sociality of sincerity, of politics without politics.