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In-yer-face theatre

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In-yer-face theatre is a form of drama that sprang up in Great Britain in the 1990s.

Contents

Description

Created by young playwrights, it intends to involve and affect the audience by presenting vulgar, shocking, and confrontational material on the stage. The term was coined by theatre critic and teacher at Boston University's London programme [link], Aleks Sierz, and popularized in his 2001 book.

Problems of definition

The 'sensibility' of 'In-yer-face theatre' was attacked at a two day conference at the University of the West of England in 2002 by many critics, with a report stating, ‘to be shackled to a specific era or genre places a responsibility on a play and creates expectations before reading or performance. In essence, it disrupts the artistic integrity through preconceived notions of a play because of a simplified label.’

Quotations

In his 2001 play Japes, Simon Gray has one of his characters, a middle-aged author called Michael Cartts, rave against that new kind of writing. After watching a new play by a young playwright, Cartts describes the figures he saw on stage as people who

had the impertinence, no, the hubris to utter those most terrifying of words, "I love you", [but] what did they mean by them? They meant "I've fucked you and now I need to fuck you again, and possibly a few more times after that and I'll be jealous, insane with jealousy if anyone else fucks you" […] All they do is fuck each other and all they talk about is how they do it, and who they'd really rather be doing it with or to—and they don't cloak it in their language […] No words that even hint at inner lives, no friendships except as opportunities for sexual competition and betrayal, no interests or passions or feelings, as if the man were the cock, the cock the man, the woman the cunt, the cunt the woman, and the only purpose in life to ram cock into cunt, jam cunt over cock […] And you know—you know the worst thing—the worst thing is that they speak grammatically. They construct sentences. Construct them! And with some elegance. Why? Tell me why? (Little pause.) Actually, I know why. So that the verbs and nouns stick out—in your face. In your face. That's the phrase, isn't it? That's the phrase! In your face!

Authors associated with in-yer-face theatre

Further reading

External links

 

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