Telling Stories: The Point Blank Trilogy

By John Bull

At the end of Howard Brenton's 1974 The Churchill Play the inmates of a political concentration camp attempt an abortive escape. Jimmy, imprisoned for blowing up the Post Office Tower, gives voice to the pointlessness of an effort at escaping from the camp into what is effectively already a police state.

Nowhere to break out to, is there? They'll concrete the whole world over any moment now. And what do we do? (A slight smile. Smiles.) Survive. In the cracks. Either side of the wire. Be alive.

His conclusion incorporates two directly opposed arguments: that all political action is futile and that only an essentially fatalistic philosophy of personal survival is left; and, notwithstanding this, that there are cracks, that the concrete is not completely all-encompassing, that there just might be the possibility of continuing the struggle in some way.

Now, clearly the context for these opposed positions is one that assumes a basically homogenous totalitarian political model, and thus views all reaction against it from an essentially right-wing position. There are a number of reasons for starting my consideration of the work of Point Blank Theatre Company with this reference, not the least being that, from some time in the Thatcher years, there has developed a belief, itself seemingly set in concrete, in the first interpretation of Jimmy's outcry, that 'political theatre' as understood at the time of Brenton's play has had its day. It is a belief that has only hardened with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the continuing consolidation of global control by the forces of US imperialism/capitalism. The steady march towards universal hegemony can apparently only be faced through strategies of individual survival.

However, there are cracks, and cracks accumulate the debris of our consumer society from which shoots can begin to emerge. Point Blank Theatre is one such shoot. Formed in 1999 by Steve Jackson and Liz Tomlin, the Sheffield-based touring company has quickly become an established player in the current regional theatre renaissance. Their stripped-down and conceptualised sets complement the mixture of urgent contemporary argot and rhetorically poetic text that makes the dialogue of the company's work so exciting. For, although there is much evidence of a commitment to what has come to be described as 'physical theatre' in this work, Point Blank's is, above all, a theatre of words and of telling stories; and what stories they are. As a theatre company seeking to address contemporary political issues it is, of course, by no means alone. More uniquely, perhaps, its work necessitates a rethinking of what exactly 'political theatre' might be in the opening decade of the new century. And that this rethinking must inevitably start with revisiting the territory occupied by such as Howard Brenton in the early 1970s makes my opening almost irresistible.

Although Operation Wonderland (2004) - written jointly by Liz Tomlin and Steve Jackson - is actually chronologically the second play of this trilogy, in many ways it has claims to being the first in the sequence. It is a play that links the work of Point Blank, in its depiction and analysis of the nightmare world of the new century, with the radical politics and drama of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Set in a contemporary Wonderland Theme Park that offers children access to a world in which dreams and wishes can be made to come true, the unseen, and unknowable, establishment also ensures that those wishes are secretly graded as green, amber or red, dependent on the degree of threat that they pose to Wonderland's ideological status quo.

As the play opens a man 'in his forties, tired and worn, enters in a Wonderland cleaner's uniform' (42), for even (especially) dreams have to be kept scrupulously clean. His work among the rubbish bins is interrupted by the arrival of Kay, dressed as a Wonderland Blue Fairy who is seemingly empowered to make everyone's wishes come true, but who actually (as we learn) has an active role in policing the activities of the punters, through her grading of the wishes. She has come 'backstage' to get 'away from all the magic into the darkness and the silence' (42); the darkness because they are away from the neon lights and the silence because the man has cut the wires connecting his unit to the park's tannoy system. Right from the outset, then, the man's site is constructed in opposition to the prevailing ideology of the park. The pair agree on their experience of Wonderland:

KAY: There's something wonderful about the way you find yourself moving through Wonderland. Always as if someone is

JED: Watching you.

KAY: As if everything you're about to say

JED: Before you're even thought it

KAY: Has already been

JED: Scripted

KAY: By someone else. (43)

The overlap of the sentences as though each were an agreed party to the other's thoughts, that is to say the suggestion that there is a single reliable voice of political opposition, will gradually be called into question. The man wants to destroy the falsity of the celluloid-derived dream, to flatten 'every dancing cartoon character' (46), and to replace the delicately falling artificial snowflakes of the daily parade with elephant dung. The girl appears to go along with him, encouraging him in his potential revolt; but she is given a voice-over: 'And so it all began with a wish, as so many stories do' (47). This could be the opening of a conventional fairy story - the voice-over is, after all, that of a 'fairy' in a commercialized wonderland - but in this context it serves to relocate the notion of wish (as political desire) and story (as a device leading to political resolution). In other words, the opening appears to suggest a possible political strategy that might oppose the world of consumer capitalism; a world that Wonderland more than simply symbolizes, there being no world outside of Wonderland in this play. The plan backfires; 'We throw shit at them and they throw it back as snowflakes' (55), and the girl insinuates the idea of actually bombing the parade. At this point a number of important connections start to be established. For a start, and surely by no coincidence, the man shares a name, Jed, with that of the situationist would-be bomber in Howard Brenton's seminal post- 1968 play Magnificence3 - with whom Jimmy in The Churchill Play occupies a similar political position - a wonderfully broken-back work in which the playwright can be seen to be re-examining the politics of terror as he goes along. Whereas, in Magnificence, Jed precisely wishes to bomb the parade, or spectacle, in Point Blank's play he shows initial reluctance: 'Everyone needs to dream, Kay ... You can't seriously be considering blowing other people to pieces for dreaming the wrong dream? Can you?' (61)

In a key speech in Magnificence, Jed describes going to see a cinema screening of The Carpetbaggers, recalling how a drunk had thrown a bottle of ruby wine 'right through Miss [Carole] Baker's left tit'. The actress's image quickly moved on, but for the rest of the film there was a bottle-shaped hole in the screen:

And so thinks ... The poor bomber. Bomb 'em. Again and again. Right through their silver screen. Disrupt the spectacle. The obscene parade, bring it to a halt! Scatter the dolly girls, let advertisements bleed ... Bomb 'em, again and again! Murderous display. An entertainment for the oppressed, so they may dance a little, take a little warmth from the sight. Eh?

In Operation Wonderland, Kay eventually prevails on Jed to strap the explosives around his waist, and it is given to her to echo the speech from Magnificence, but in terms that call directly into question the point of the exercise:

At the end of the day you blow a fucking great hole where Wonderland used to be and they'll fill it with remembrance popcorn and flickering star lights and shrines where blue fairies work around the clock to heal broken hearts and shattered limbs ... They'll let off a thousand red star balloons in memory of the dead and clean up on sympathy and compliance across the world. Christ, Jed, that's if anyone even believes that the explosion is real. They'll edit the highlights and slap them in a promotional feature ... One spectacular simulation of terror that'll have them queuing for years. (67)

A further parallel with Brenton's deployment of situationist theory can be drawn by comparing Kay's conclusions with Brenton's 1972 film Skin Flicker, which concludes with the revelation that the terrorist-filmed abduction and killing of a cabinet minister has been incorporated into an anti-terrorist film by the authorities. What Kay eventually reveals to Jed in Operation Wonderland is that she is helping him bomb the parade 'because that was your wish. It's my job, granting wishes, it's what Wonderland pays me for' (67). Consumer/ consensual wishes, anarchist/oppositional wishes: all cannot only be incorporated into the operation that is Wonderland, but such an operation depends upon the oppositional strategies as a part of its structure. Far from destroying the parade, Jed's gesture will merely serve to reinforce it. It is something that Jed realizes all too well as the play ends. 'I think they know what's going to happen. I think they've always known what's going to happen. Kay, if they know what's going to happen why is no one stopping me?' (68)

For Kay, the answer to the question had been obvious all along. She had, after all, always declared herself as the Blue Fairy and it is only to be expected that any stories she might tell would be 'fairy stories'. Jed, in Operation Wonderland, has been led by the power of her constructed narrative to play the same role of lone bomber as had his counterpoint, of his own volition, in The Churchill Play. Nor is it simply the case that Kay's voice is somehow solitary in the construction of that story: she not only operates on behalf of the ultimate global and corporate ambitions of Wonderland, she epitomizes the very workings of the aspirant model. Hers is a story that seeks to offer a total narrative, a narrative in which 'the war on terror', for example, is a credible chapter heading: for Jed's actions will serve to justify a defensive racking up of the power of a Wonderland that is set to become Everyland, just as his previous symbolic act with the elephant dung had allowed for a further tightening up of security at the park.

In Nothing to Declare (2001) the Wonderland Park gives way to a desert location and, from the outset, the audience is aware that the play is set somewhere on the outskirts of current conflict. The cinematic metaphors of Operation Wonderland are switched to those of another medium, television, and the significance of the change is emphasized from the outset. Television here offers a supposed immediacy, the opportunity to tell a story as it is actually happening, and not as a pre-constructed model in which all parts and all actions have been already determined. The play has a single character, known only as Woman, and she moves from addressing a supposed television audience to talking directly to the audience in the theatre. Freeing herself from the wreckage of her lorry, she opens the play with a news item that already suggests a problematic relationship to her chosen medium:

The red of her lipstick echoes in the charred fragments of the Red Cross logo, this burnt-out lorry yet another stark reminder of the frailty of human endeavour against the war torn desert landscape. And so we must leave her where we found her. A splash of red cosmetics and rusting steel against a harsh and barren backdrop. Another tragic victim of the cruellest twist of fate. Kate Adie reporting from ... (Stops. Corrects herself.) Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, reporting for the BBC, on the wrong side of the border. (20)

The slip is revealing. Set up as an established political correspondent from a succession of war zones, she reveals herself rather as allied with a presenter of television shows about fashion and home décor. Her account is completely egocentric: she, not anyone in the terrain through which she has been passing, is the 'tragic victim', and her immediate surroundings only have a significance in that they can be related to her own appearance, in particular her use of red cosmetics.

In her role as commentator, she is again telling stories: telling it as it is, whatever that might be, giving shape to events, or giving shape to the cause of the larger grand narrative. As an alien in the landscape she is totally unaware of the political or military significance of events in the world she is passing through; for she is not even a political tourist, but an interior designer/fashion correspondent in search of a new trend. The conjunction of politics and fashion is deliberate. Her travel is in pursuit of the holy grail of the next fashion trend and, having identified it as crisis chic, she appropriates the war-torn objects that she comes across to accessorize her new look.

Although she is the only character in the play, her meeting with a border guard is acted out by the changing position of the boots that represent his presence. Her words enact the conflict of interests between them. She demonstrates how she has distressed the tarpaulin of her lorry with a Swiss Army knife (as depicted in the January 2001 edition of Wallflower magazine), and points out the flame effect on the metal shutter 'where I'd improvised with petrol and a match' (24). When he offers to show her 'where his grandfather's blood had stained the mountain snow crimson', she counters with a battered catalogue photo of 'the white sofa I bought from the Muji store in Kensington High Street' (30), before going into a long and detailed anecdote about the impossibility of getting, not blood out of snow, but red wine out of a white sofa.

The Woman's central concern in the play - her construction of its narrative - is, then, not with making sense of the appalling events that are evidenced by what she has passed through, but to make use of, or loot, what she can and get back as quickly as possible before her project of crisis chic has passed its sell-by date, just as public interest in any given clash is at the whim of fashion. The man's non-appearance in the play evidences the way in which his story, his narrative - one which would oppose that constructed by the West - is blocked out, and it is left to the Woman to construct it as she will.

Not enough froth on your overpriced cappuccino
The wrong shade of yellow
Blood red stains on a white muji sofa.
But crisis was also knowing
That dying alone on the wrong side of the border
Was no guarantee, in these death fatigue days
Of hitting the headlines. (32)

This sense of appropriation, of other people's narratives, of other people's lives, in the context of the Woman's claim that 'the world needs designers ... to bring a little order' (32), is given added point by an item that I recently spotted in The Guardian. The newspaper's extremely sardonic fashion advisor attempted to answer a question on the potential relationship between politics and women's wardrobes with the following acidly delivered information: 'In a recent issue of the New Yorker ... we learned that an "olive-and-khaki outfit of safari crispness" is known in political circles as "disaster casual"'.

'Telling Stories': it is a simple phrase and yet one almost endlessly interpretable. It includes the possibility of the simple narration of a tale that has a beginning, a middle and, most importantly, an end, something we might feel can be relied on; as well as the more slippery sense of a deliberate fabrication, of a lie. All three of the plays in this collection apparently offer to tell stories and, it might be thought, there is nothing unusual in that. Roses and Morphine is even set in a library, where stories are stored. But the concern with 'telling stories' in this trilogy is profoundly and absolutely consciously problematic. At root the phrase offers the promise of a narrative but, even as it does so, it does not bring with it either the certainty of absolute truth or of absolute mistruth, and in so not doing thus calls into question the very possibility of reliably distinguishing between those two absolutes. Furthermore, not only is the possible veracity of the stories called continually into question, but also the very notion of what might be meant by story is deliberately never made clear. In Shopping and Fucking, one of Mark Ravenhill's characters had memorably claimed that there are no large stories left in which to believe - political, religious, or whatever - in a way that connected with Jimmy Porter's angst of forty years earlier that there are 'no brave causes left'. In Ravenhill's play, the character seeks solace - a narrative to give meaning to his life - in the story of Walt Disney's The Lion King, and these two parameters are both central to Liz Tomlin's concerns in these plays: the grand historical narrative that offers to give shape to societal and political development - here denied a death in that the new grand narrative is now established as the supposedly inexorable move towards a US global domination through military and economic means - and what I will call, for the sake of convenience, the 'fairy story', that loosely offers to give shape to the individual questioner in a context of myth, magic or fantasy. That Kay told/sold 'fairy stories' in Operation Wonderland serves to demonstrate that they might represent not only a move into untruth but also into danger.