04.02.1999

Moralism and morality

Jack Conrad reviews 'You’ll have had your hole', written by Irvine Welsh and directed by Ian Brown (Astoria 2, London, February 2 - March 27, Mondays to Thursdays £14.75, Fridays to Saturdays £16.75, cons £10)

As one would expect, the promoters of Irvine Welsh’s “new” - and first - play, ‘You’ll have had your hole’, revel in the childish disgust its premiere provoked from the mainstream bourgeois press. Having ventured out from their usual London haunts and journeyed to The West Yorkshire Playhouse in February 1998, the reviewers appear to have been universally vehement in their hostility. The cold-blooded creatures were made to feel - in itself something of a recommendation.

For The Daily Telegraph’s critic here was “the most obnoxious and contemptible play I have ever had to sit through”. Welsh’s drama supposedly “offers only pornography and unspeakable cruelty ... pandering to the public’s baser instincts”. The Express correspondent rolled out almost exactly the same conventional formula: “It is the saddest, sickest, most vile play I have ever sat through ... 90 minutes of unadulterated nastiness ... an orgy of humiliation, viciousness, profanity and suffering which will cause offence.” The Times was offended, but prissily could not quite bring itself to print Welsh’s offensive language: “After enduring this one, I feel like borrowing one of his character’s trademark aphorisms: ‘F*** off, you c***’.” The News of the World found itself no less upset: “As gruesome a piece of work as you’ll find outside an abattoir, a morally bankrupt, gut-churningly violent and empty play fit only for sadists, masochists and those who enjoy pulling wings off butterflies.” In the opinion of the Sunday Times the play was “nasty and empty” and “gratuitous”. Even the mouthpiece of liberalism, The Guardian, thought it a “disappointingly crude crime and punishment saga”.

Such publicity is, of course, designed to kill. The rulers of the arts pages take an aristocratic pleasure in making or more usually breaking productions. Commercial, subsidised and fringe theatre await their judgements with fear and trepidation. They offer the promise of fame. Usually though they bring humiliating death. The traditional audience is easily swayed. It is atomised and in no way organically linked to the producers of a commodified culture. Welsh and his small circle are an exception. Due to the success of ‘Trainspotting’ and by deliberately targeting the club scene he has to some degree won himself an alternative audience. Welsh can therefore afford to openly treat critics with disdain. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that there exists a symbiotic relationship. He positively thrives on notoriety. On being hated by them. The fact that ‘You’ll have had’ has secured a two-month run in a converted night club in London’s Charing Cross Road after being slated surely proves the point.

Welsh’s piece is undoubtedly dark. Despite that it is not without humour, poignancy and moments of tenderness. More, there is complexity, and through that we find truth. Welsh shines a sympathetic, but searing light on the underbelly of society. His subject matter are the so-called ‘socially excluded’ or lumpenproletariat. People he tries, and wants us, to understand or know. That explains, at least in part, the rancour reproduced above. Surprise, surprise: the comfortable hirelings of the fourth estate find themselves repelled and censorious when confronted by the actual human beings and human relations capitalism creates and recreates at its margins.

The bourgeois press could only see nihilistic drug-taking, rape, cynical manipulation and torture. The bourgeois press could only hear swearing and abuse. It sees, but does not see. It hears, but does not hear. Their bile says everything about them; their closed little world and closed ideological assumptions. Certainly not much about Welsh and his finely crafted play.

Welsh takes things to extremes. So what? Extremes have attracted playwrights throughout the ages. This enables the artist to lay bare the psyche, and at the end of the performance confidently leave an audience to come to its many-faceted conclusion. Those lacking morality typically froth and fume. Others will perhaps think about themselves critically and that to be human is to empathise.

As to the notion that theatregoers cannot, will not or should not enjoy something peppered with torture, rape and murder, that is - to say the least - hypocritical, given the purulent reports that fill the pages of The Daily  Telegraph, The Express, The Times,the News of the World, etc. It is moreover utterly philistine. Such is the stuff of drama. Welsh portrays in general terms nothing we have not seen on countless occasions before on the stage (let alone on page and screen). From Sophocles to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Christopher Marlowe to John Webster, from Howard Brenton to Sarah Kane, our common humanity is discovered under circumstances which one way or the other thrust particular people far beyond the norms of the everyday.

The four characters in ‘You’ll have had’ are in fact all easily recognisable. They inhabit not only Edinburgh - where the play is set - but every big city in Britain. They live down the road. They drink in that pub. They lack for the most part neither cash nor the necessary baubles of consumerism. Quite the reverse. Nevertheless they are outcasts. Money comes illegally from a bit of this and a bit of that. It comes quick and goes the same way. They leech off society, but are its victims. They are scum and they are avengers too. They dream of easy riches, but half expect to die by bullet or knife, or to rot year after year in a tiny prison cell.

Far from being amoral, they hold to a very strong ethical code. Towards outsiders they are often contemptuous or indifferent. But friendship, gangland loyalty and bonds of trust are given the highest value. Enemies and those who transgress must suffer. So even amidst cruelty, the infliction of pain and sordid brutality, humanity is actually made visible. Welsh might not have written the greatest play of the 1990s, but it is certainly a good play, not least because it is deeply moral. There is nothing vile about it, except the vileness that surrounds us. Nothing morally bankrupt, except to the paid defenders of a morally bankrupt system.

The basic plot line is simple. Small-time gangster Dex (James Cunningham) is kidnapped by two long-time friends, Jinks (Tam Dean Burn) and Docksey (Kenneth Bryans). A score must be settled. For Docksey this involves torturing Dex and, to make revenge all the sweeter, stealing his girlfriend Laney (Kirsty Mitchell). For Jinks there is also the prospect of wanton homosexual buggery. It would be wrong in such a review to describe how the story unfolds expect to say that human intentions invariably have completely unexpected results. Thus with Welsh things turn into their own opposites. Weakness finds its power. Retribution becomes hollow. Love triumphs and is perverted. Everything moves, changes and is uncertain.

Welsh and director Ian Brown are served by an outstanding cast. The location, staging, lighting, etc are excellent too. As to the ticket prices, not least those for concessions, all I can say is – fuck.

Jack Conrad