More Dynamite by Craig Raine

Author:Craig Raine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Lecture given to the Larkin Conference, University of Hull, June 2007.

Rebecca Gilman: Dramatist

(2004)

Rebecca Gilman is thiry-eight and she is already an important writer.

In January 1999, the Royal Court Theatre put on The Glory of Living in the Theatre Upstairs to considerable acclaim. In February of this year, Spinning into Butter, her play about racism, had a six-week run, also at the Royal Court. Although the brilliant Emma Fielding took the lead and gave a performance characteristically rich in detail and inflection, the English critics were unimpressed. John Peter in the Sunday Times was the exception. Michael Billington’s Guardian review conceded the importance of Gilman’s subject. By and large, however, the critical response was an affected yawn – in the States, Spinning into Butter had occasioned controversy but we were less hysterical about race. Gilman’s new play, Boy Gets Girl, is about stalking and has just opened to mixed press in New York. It seems likely that this play too will be staged by the Royal Court. Yet another play, Blue Surge, about prostitution is also likely to find its way to Sloane Square.

Her early plays are as yet unseen in England. They are Smaller and Clearer as the Years Go By, The Land of Little Horses, The Adventures of Bobbi and Vaughan, Little Eva Takes a Trip, Speech Therapy and The American in Me. In interview, she has described them as ‘plays about IVF, crime and capitalism’. Even this laconic summary of a summary has its idiosyncratic note.

IVF?

It is, of course, a topical issue – ripe for television debate between the moral majority and medical advance. In the hands of Rebecca Gilman, the debate is guaranteed greater subtlety. More importantly, she guarantees drama, the powerful complicated emotions generated between couples in this situation – desperation, hope, exhaustion, conflict. Though she admires Shaw – ‘I ended up reading all George Bernard Shaw’s plays back to back’ – her plays anatomise issues without staging debate. There is no sense that her characters are ideologies rather than individuals. (Viscount Viewpoint looks through his lorgnette at Mr Opinion.)

In fact, the issue at stake in The Glory of Living isn’t easily identified. Gilman’s own epitome isn’t an epitome at all. It is actually a sociological overview: ‘[it’s] about a society that doesn’t care for poor people or for its children and about how that impacts on individuals.’ Reading this worthy, frowning, reductive summation, I am reminded of John Ray, Jnr, Ph.D. – who ends Nabokov’s cod-foreword to Lolita with this resonant platitude: ‘“Lolita” should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.’ How authentically inauthentic those cadences are.

‘Society’ isn’t a character – supercilious, careless, bored, brusque – in the ironically titled The Glory of Living. Nor is it an obligatory background presence as, say, South African apartheid is in Fugard’s Boesman and Lena. Gilman’s inert overt political analysis is at several removes

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