Long live history
Simon Reade on the Royal Shakespeare Company's London season of five new plays The Royal Shakespeare Company in London is currently presenting This Other Eden, a short season of five new plays whose starting point is to pursue a sense of history. They're playing in repertory with each other, as well as alongside the RSC's major Shakespeare project This England, The Histories — the generously welcomed, contrasting productions of the eight history plays from Richard II to Richard III. Together, these new and classic works play in theatrical counterpoint, off-setting their historical subjects, their themes and variations, against each other. They also throw light on the very question of what history is. With their titles borrowed from John of Gaunt's instantly anthologised yet hypocritical, nostalgic lament in Richard II, This England and This Other Eden show not just what Shakespeare felt England was then, and what a cross-section of dramatists think it might mean now, but also a number of contrasting approaches to the art of dramatising so-called 'history' itself.
History, and its appropriation, is the means by which we drive a wedge between an old generation and a new, between peoples and nations, by making claims and counter-claims according to belief, religion and so on. History is as vulnerable as a monumental Buddhist statue in Taleban Afghanistan. It can be as easily destroyed by Pol Pot's Year Zero, as it can be apparently determined by the latest Chinese Communist Five-Year Plan. History pretends to be factual, to convey dispassionate truth about the past. Yet history can only properly tell us the prejudice and opinion of the historian in the present.
Storytellers, fiction-writers, dramatists all know this in their marrow, and use it to good advantage. 'Once upon a time' establishes a fiction with the absolute authority of historical fact. But we all know that it's a conscious, disbelief-suspending invitation. The convention acknowledges, however, that greater truths are revealed through fictional exploration than anything stated in something pedalled as historical fact. Elizabethan playwrights, for example, all seem to make up history as they go along. Shakespeare ransacks the best episodes of war and peace, conflates dates, and brazenly refashions real historical people. Quite right too. We want to witness character in action, to be gripped for an hour or so. We wouldn't thank a playwright for letting historical accuracies get in the way of a good night out. Do the discrepancies matter? Maybe in the academy. For the rest of us, they help us to recognise how colourful invention makes better theatre than plain facts.
Like Shakespeare, This Other Eden's modern history plays are less concerned with historical fact, more with the timeless human condition. One play might seem to be just a riposte to the perception that Joan la Pucelle in Henry VI Part 1 is but a misogynist portrait, a French-bashing foil for crass England, embodied in the salt-ofthe-earth Talbot. The Thoughts of Joan of Arc on The English as She Burns at The Stake is David Fan's inspired new meditation for Joan. She doesn't only rehabilitate her reputation, she also takes us on a dark journey into our collective soul.
In the same way you can argue that Shakespeare's Histories aren't necessarily history plays (they're the tragedy of a nation), so too can you say that This Other Eden represents something different from 20th-century orthodoxies. None of the plays offers a social, political, feminist or ethnic history particularly, nor yet espouses the fashionable death of marxist/economic history. That's not how a younger generation perceives its history, not the tools it uses to reflect upon the cultural diversity of this nation. Not young dramatists, anyway. Indeed, just as history means something different to each new generation, so too does the old chestnut of what constitutes a public play, the political play.
Moira Buffini's deceptively skittish, witty Loveplay delves into time like a geneticist into DNA. It wonders about our sex drive and unrequited love, our desire and performance, the economic and philosophical imperatives that mobilise and intellectualise our base and noble ecstasies. Loveplay charts various combinations of men and women in ten scenes — from Roman Britain to the present day. As Roxanne says in The Enlightenment' scene, Buffini's sense of history is 'a plenitude of ages, different worlds and endless possibilities, a landscape of time that is nebulous and not definite'.
In Nick Stafford's Luminosity, time is a deceiver, history a scab over an unhealed wound. At the end of the 20th century a family's fortune seems to be built upon the wealth generated by its 19th-century, philanthropic patriarch who gave up lucrative diamond-cutting to trade in medicinal herbs across the world. But his wealth in turn is based on their 18th-century forefather's trade in slaves and the weapons of war — and that trade came about only because he murdered his way to his position in society. The play pursues the cupboarded skeletons of the morally dubious choices we all have hidden in our family histories — the revelation of our fundamental flaws (such as give diamonds their true luminosity): 'Is it possible that there could be one history? One absolute, allinclusive, truthful version? No, all versions are partial ... The versions of the past, the stories we choose to tell our past, decide our present, and our future.'
As well as David Farr's Joan of Arc monologue, there are two other workshop performances. Epitaph for the Official Secrets Act is a work-in-progress (largely for legal reasons) using the David Shayler case against the bureaucratic incompetence of MI5 as an excuse to look at daft, draconian, paranoid legislation that has soured the relationship between state and subject throughout the 20th century. It is a short, buttonholing play conceived by the filmmaker Paul Greengrass, whose two latest films for Granada — The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and Bloody Sunday (currently shooting in Ireland) — similarly take apparent fact and compellingly dramatise it.
Biyi Bandele's Brixton Stories, on the other hand, is never anything but fiction. His writing is fabulous (in both senses). He paints a vivid pageant of contemporary street-life. He finds joy in 'the ticking of time and the hypothesis of immortality, the falling out of teeth and the serenity of a toothless smile'. His poetic sensibility, however, also allows for wrong-footing selfmockery: 'What happened to the chronicling of recognisable, three-dimensional, plain simple folk? What happened
to art imitating, celebrating and reimagining reality?' He is a magical realist, improvising on the joys and tribulations of the freethinker in this nonsensical world. In his Land of Dreams, there are no historians, only visionaries.
New plays at the beginning of the 21st century have a foot in the past as they tiptoe into the future. Shakespeare's plays trail one foot in a mediaeval age while confidently striding into the modern. Whether it's the large-scale project with an awesome narrative trajectory This England, or a modest, witty collection of new plays in This Other Eden — or, indeed, another four new plays by Peter Barnes, David Edgar, Martin McDonagh and Peter Whelan, all rooted in history and politics, which have their premieres at the RSC in Stratford this summer — we can safely say that if history and the history play is dead, then long live history.
Simon Reade is the RSC's dramaturg and co-author of Epitaph for the Official Secrets Act. This England and This Other Eden play in repertory at London's Barbican Centre and Young Vic Theatre until 5 May: tel 020 7638 8891. The RSC's Stratford Summer Festival opens on 21 March: tel 01789 403 403. www.rsc.org.uk
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