06.03.1997

Lifeless discourse

Helen Ellis reviews Mark Ravenhill's Faust (directed by Nick Phillippou)

Actors Touring Company at the Lyric Hammersmith, London until March 15, £8.50, £5 standby concessions

A modem-day Faust seems a promising enterprise in which to delve into the contemporary psyche, as well as the possibilities and limits of knowledge in a technologised age.

As you walk into the theatre, the set seems to offer such an exploration. The action is viewed behind moving screens, and a TV is permanently on, screening chat shows and comments on life in contemporary America.

The opening commentary by a young American girl on the TV also touches a truth in its flippant and stereotyped way. She tells of how she learnt to “cry in a special way” to hide her tears for the world from her mother.

Yet clearly both Goethe and Marlowe still have more to say which can be grasped for the future than the postmodernist/poststructuralist outpouring offered by Mark Ravenhill.

The play is deliberately built on the commentary of structuralism and poststructuralism. The programme quotes Jean Baudrillard on how “America is neither dream nor reality. It is hyperreality.” The theme the play begins with then is how the ‘hyperreality’ of American life is consuming the world. This does not bode well for the rest of the play, as one cannot help thinking that the increasing commodification of society has long since been a reality in most of the western world and its cosy, satisfying by-products are no longer so comfortable with the end of the long boom and the collapse into anarchy of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states.

The main protagonist is a young American who can only face the world through a camcorder lens and is on the run from his father, Bill, a computer magnate who has developed a chaos programme which his son has stolen. He aims to bribe his father so he can afford to “buy real experiences”.

He is haunted and drawn to a French philosopher whose enigma for the audience drops from him completely as soon as he begins spouting hack, poststructuralist formulas. It is at this point you can really take no more, as the two characters bring the virtually real experience of the internet into the physical reality of their motel room with devastating consequences. But who cares!

The only choice for the lead character is between despair and self-torture or joining Bill in the computer business. Not exactly a tragic dilemma.

Unfortunately this play transfers the language of philosophy to the language of theatre. There have been some very good postmodernist multimedia plays which explore new realms of communication with humanity and emotional insight into lived reality. This one does not. Emotion and dramatic action are themselves replaced with the signifier - the set, the speeches, the action itself are all lifeless.

Structuralist discourse must have run its course by now. It was important in its time and will no doubt be rehashed for some time to come. The real task now is not simply to continue on the road of poststructuralism, but to go beyond it and really explore the reality of today and in hindsight the beginnings of the intensification of capitalist commodification. Art as a medium of discovery which can awaken all our senses is in a privileged position to do so. ‘End of history’ theories are all very well, but postmodernist discourse itself could not avoid the fact that Faust’s search goes on.

Helen Ellis