Wastwater

Simon Stephens’s new play is a triptych set around Heathrow Airport. No characters recur between the three scenes and only side-references suggest that there are connections between the people and the stories we see. In that it resembles, formally, Under the Blue Sky by David Eldridge, though while that play goes from horror to redemption, in Wastwater, Stephens takes us steadily into the depths. It also reminded me, vaguely, of another triptych play, Far Away by Caryl Churchill. Partly because this also begins with Linda Bassett gently interrogating a young family member; but also because the three scenes are both disjointed and connected, building a sense of global vision and interpersonal mystery.

In the first scene of Wastwater a young man is saying goodbye to his foster-mother, awaiting his flight to Canada. In the second, a man and a woman meet in a hotel room near the airport for illicit sex; she reveals her secret history as a porn actress and she wants him to hit her, which eventually he does; in the third, a middle-aged man is with a woman who has arranged for him to buy a Filipino girl. The woman mocks him, threatens him, terrorises him; for a while we think he’s bought the girl for sex but it seems that he and his partner have been turned down for adoption. The girl arrives.

There are hints at connections; the woman in the third scene was probably a foster daughter of the woman in the first; the man in the first scene probably lost his job as a teacher for hitting the man in the second. All of them hum the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen: 'l’amour est un oiseau rebelle / Qui nul ne peut apprivoiser'.

Here’s the thing: I really love Simon Stephens’s writing. He’s gone on a fascinating journey from something pretty close to naturalism (Herons) to something very different (Pornography). He taught on the Royal Court Young Writers programme for almost a decade and he knows what he’s doing. But what he’s doing is deliberately writing badly and it’s fascinating.

Badly is too blunt. What I mean is that he does things with dialogue, scene and character that in a lesser writer you’d say are just errors. And, hey, it may turn out that it doesn’t work, looking back on it all. But at the moment, I feel that he’s creating a distinctive, absolutely contemporary vision of the world and is doing so through the reinvention of dramatic form. And I’m a total sucker for that kind of thing.

The thing he does is have people say and do stuff. That doesn’t sound very revolutionary, I know, but what he seems to be working towards is a kind of dramatic expression without subtext. The scenes are psychologically rather blank; the presence of actors performing them give them perforce a kind of presumed psychological coherence and tics and mannerisms (in the best sense) suggest thought processes, but elsewhere things happen, words are said and the psychology in the actions is opaque. A standard piece of dramaturgical advice would be to say that action (including dialogue) should arise out of character and situation. Revelations work well on stage when one feels that they have been forced from a particular character by a particular situation.

This isn’t really what happens here. In the first scene, the boy, Harry, admits that his bladder sometimes gets very full and he ‘leaks’: basically, he wets himself. His foster-mother is concerned about it but he is not; is he mad? is he contemptuous? is he lying? It’s not clear. In the second act, Lisa suddenly admits to her pornographic past (or is it present?). The speech is very long (two pages in the published text). Is this true? It’s hard to say (when she finds a porn movie on the internet at the end of the scene, the text insists that this is not of her). If it’s true, why does she say it? Is she confessing? Trying to shock? Trying to please and arouse Mark? Impossible to judge. By normal standards the quantity, relation and manner - and maybe quality - of her speech (to use Paul Grice’s terms) are awry. In the final scene, why does Sian bait and haze Jonathan? Is she trying to humiliate him? Terrify him? Is she seriously checking he is a fit foster-father? Is she taking out on him the absence of her own father? Her hatred of foster-parents in general? The scene doesn’t tell us.

Now in ordinary circumstances, this would be a disaster, dramatically. The characters would be opaque, random, arbitrary. Psychological consistency, truth, depth are all valuable assets on stage. Here the revelations are just things that happen, entirely on the surface; like sun splintered and rippling on a deep lake, it repels attempts to see below the surface. This could make the characters seem unengaging, perverse, comic, surreal. There are elements of the last three, but because Stephens writes with such vigour and energy and attention to verbal detail they are always compelling (to me anyway, I see that some ‘critics’ feel rather differently).

More significantly, though, I think in fashioning this strange surface, Simon Stephens is trying to do with sincerity what a previous generation did with irony: explore its complexity and contradictions. On one level though, he is trying to have people speak directly and clearly to each other, to simply see the truth, to be affirmative about the world. This is why I am puzzled by the critics who have found the play bleak and manipulative. It’s true that there are some wintry exchanges and the characters seem uneasy in their skins; but ultimately the play is affirmative about people’s need for each other. And most of all the play is not manipulative at all - well hardly at all. Instead, it’s laying its characters and situations out with virtually no commentary, no irony, allowing us to make our own judgments.

Throughout his plays - and increasingly - he gives us characters simply announcing thoughts and affirming the world. ‘I like this bar. I like the way they’ve screwed the tables to floor. I like it,’ says Nicola in A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, ‘I like train stations as a whole really. I like train travel. It’s my favourite means of transport’. Do you like living alone? asks one character to another in Pornography. ‘I do. You know? I do. I do. I do. I really do. I like shopping for food. I like discovering food shops in odd places and going there. I like eating out occasionally on my own.’ In Harper Regan, Mickey, a man that the eponymous Harper has just met in a pub, suddenly decides to tell her about his hatred of the Jews. In Motortown, Paul rants about the War on Terror, hardcore pornography and the shortcomings of the poor. In neither case are these sudden outbursts evidently emerging from character; in fact, in both cases the outbursts are pretty much the main evidence we have of their character. 

I say he’s exploring the complexity of sincerity. First though I think it’s important just to acknowledge the straight-ahead desire to show people just acting, just speaking, and speaking sincerely, honestly and clearly. At the risk of naivety, of being undramatic. His characters are always referring to things as ‘remarkable’, ‘fantastic’, ‘brilliant’. He likes the word ‘nice’, maybe because of its naivety, its excess of feeling over precision, its gauche affirmativity. (I think of Suspect Culture, whose original company name was ‘Art is Nice TC’.)

And the reason for that might well be a general impatience with irony. The 1990s were dominated by irony; think of the ubiquity of air quotes, of uptalk, of Chandler-speak (‘This is SO not funny’ ‘Oh, you THINK?’) where we don’t just get attitude but an attitude to the attitude. Think of Britpop, all irony and quotation. Compare that with Arcade Fire, all passion and sincerity. And remember that moment in Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London when Colin starts dancing and singing along to ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ and the stage direction dares it to be beautiful and warns us that there should be ‘No ironic moves’. Simon’s at the theatrical headland of this anti-ironic movement. It’s an impatience with irony and in some ways an impatience with fiction and dramaturgy: Pornography has some similarities with Attempts on Her Life (lack of stage directions, lines not assigned to characters, freedom of casting, fragmented structure) but Attempts’ openness only reminds you of the author’s furious precision and control whereas Pornography seems deliberately to give up authorial control altogether. You can do the play in any order. Does that go down to the words themselves? Is it really a grab bag of text? Certainly through all the recent work, there’s a sense you get that Stephens has no time for the elaborate contrivances of formal devices or what David Eldridge once called ‘clunky what’s-round-the-corner plotting’.

But there is more complexity going on here. First because it demands a different kind of performance, a new settlement between stage and auditorium. John Osborne wrote once that he wrote Look Back in Anger ‘in a language in which is was possible only to tell the truth’. I’ve always wondered what he meant but I think I see something here in the work of Simon Stephens. The excess of language over character and situation creates a kind of speech the speaks across the proscenium. Like Jimmy Porter, it feels as if the audience is being addressed as much as the characters, because the speech only has one foot inside the scene, the narrative. This requires of the actor both realism and a kind of presentational quality; to be both in and outside the fictional world.

Second, what Simon’s work does is portray a picture of the world that is distinct and original. It embraces chaos. Robert Holman - his friend and collaborator - once said that the way he writes is that he starts at 9.30 each morning by writing dialogue. Anything at all. And he does that until one of the characters says something that surprises him. Its a kind of ability to be surprised by randomness, the unconscious, the chaotic synaptic connections of the mind. And by embracing this it creates a vision of a world of chaos, of surprise. It’s a world that both affirms chaos and also free will. It’s a world of renewal and change and possibility.

Third, it renders character both transparent and opaque. Because while these characters reveal themselves they also hide. We know what Lisa is saying about herself but we are unsure why. And this perhaps says something about the puzzles of identity, the ways we can be strangers even to ourselves. It’s a technique that hints at depths, perhaps great depths, like the grey unfathomable depths of Wastwater itself, but leaves us staring only at our own reflections in its glassy surface.

I think this is one of the most remarkable plays of the last few years. Its dismissal by certain critics saddens but doesn’t surprise me. The critics want nice plays and Simon Stephens isn’t ready to make nice.