Whilst generating a landscape that refers to certain aspects of ‘being’ in the media age, Pornography’s unattributed and discontinuous form along with the media--‐related motifs and discourses opens the text to multiple readings on stage and encourages creative input from the stage and the auditorium. At its world premiere in Germany, Pornography presented the audience with a stage set picturing a city in ruins, a contemporary setting with implied references to today’s world. The director Sebastian Nübling set the stage against an immense, fragmented image of Brueghel's ‘Tower of Babel’ as an unstable edifice, ‘like a huge unfinished jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces lying around the floor.’175 The presentation of Brueghel’s painting as a fragmented mosaic on the stage emphasised the fragmented structure of the play,
174 Ibid., p. 279.
175 Maik Hamburger, ‘Theatertreffen in Berlin, May 2008’ in ‘Backpages 18.4’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 18: 4 (2008), 531–544, (pp. 541).
and visualised the disintegration of contemporary society, the inability of human beings to communicate, and the destructive effect of the 7/7 and other terrorist attacks.
Nübling emphasised the anonymous form of Stephens’s text. He situated all the actors simultaneously on stage, sometimes attributing multiple roles to them and mostly refused to identify them with individual names. Nübling rarely used props to physically transform the actors into characters. There were a few instances where he used props and accessories to indicate an actor’s change of role from the one in a previous scene. For example, he used high--‐ heeled shoes to imply one of the male actors was enacting the role of a female teacher, or a relatively old actress represented the old woman in the second scene not only through age similarity, but also by carrying a walking stick. Nevertheless, despite such congruence between some actors and characters, the discontinuity of the narrative and the disconnectedness between characters did not allow for dramatic representation as such.
Nübling benefitted from the freedom the anonymity offers, and proposed alternative interpretations of some characters on stage by deploying actors who did not fit the role in terms of their physical appearance or gender. For instance, in the sixth scene of the play, a pupil called Jason falls for his teacher, Lisa, (one of the rare characters with names). On stage, however, Nübling presented Lisa using a male actor. Likewise, he interpreted the fifth scene in a way that differs from what the play suggests. As stated earlier, Stephens’s text suggests that the characters in this scene are siblings having an incestuous relationship and that one of the characters is the sister. Nübling, however, employed two male actors, making the incestuous relationship more transgressive. Besides the uncertainty about the characters due to the unattributed, fragmented form of the play, Nübling’s technique offered a form of disparity – yet not a complete separation --‐ between the characters and actors. The performance furthered the destabilisation of the liberal humanist characterisation and presented characters, by extension, humans as fluid, deindividuated subjects. Nübling did not use technology on stage to offer a direct link between characters and the mediatised self, but the mode of theatrical expression and the references to media--‐saturation (e.g. the verbal references to emailing, EBay, etc. in characters’ conversations) suggested a link between the setting, characterisation and contemporary society.
Nübling’s interpretation also reinforced the play’s reference to social relations by situating the actors in separate areas on the stage. Whilst the actors in the staged scenes performed, the other actors remained on stage, yet showed no interest in the ongoing action. They wandered around or gathered pieces of Brueghel’s mosaic. Their detachment and
indifference generated a sense of disconnectedness, which, considered in relation to the contemporary setting, could be read as a critical tool to foreground the looseness of human bonds. The actors’ failure to gather Brueghel’s painting also added to the sense of social disintegration. Nübling’s is a compelling interpretation of Pornography, exploiting its aesthetic dynamism and highlighting the text’s deliberate opacity as a critique of mediatised culture that was able to reach beyond the theme of British society at the time of 7/7 bombings.
In the first British production of Pornography,176 Sean Holmes’s setting illustrated the media--‐saturated landscape of modern society. The stage was a ‘big mess of TV screens, stereo speakers and exposed lights [...] all connected up somehow by a riot of wires and extension cables that stretched out from the auditorium.’177 The director presented a microcosm of London the week in July before the attacks on stage where ‘the faint sounds of Coldplay mix with the electric drone of a hot summer’.178 Holmes staged the play in episodes; however, rather than single episodes, the production cut between the different stories. Holmes’ staging technique furthered Pornography’s fragmented form and engendered a sense of disengagement, suggesting a critical reference to the disintegration of social relations. The intensified discontinuity enhanced the theatricality by exposing the workings of the performance and overexposing the seams between the fragments of scenes. This undermined the audience’s expectations of a well--‐made dramatic narrative that is based on a seamless connection between the scenes. The fairly unfamiliar form, which emphasised the theatricality of the stage action, raised the audience’s awareness of the theatre as a construct and their position in it. Besides the unfamiliarity, the epistemological instability that the production generated through the unattributed and fragmented speech invited the audience to fill in the uncertainties, and form their own interpretations. Holmes’s production therefore encouraged the audience to engage with the meaning--‐making process and its critical implications.
The production involved an ensemble of eight actors, all present on stage at once. Following Stephens’s characterisation, Holmes gave a glimpse of the characters rather than a detailed, psychologically motivated, figurative representation: a randy schoolboy, the incestuous brother and sister or a jaded lecturer.179 Unlike Nübling, Holmes did not generate incongruity between the characters and the actors; however, he did not form completely unified characters either. Rather, he staged what the text proposed: superficially connected,
176 Despite investigations and inquiries with Simon Stephens, Traverse Theatre and Birmingham Repertory Theatre, I was unable to locate any video recordings of the British production of Pornography.
177 Neil Cooper, ‘Review on Pornography’ (The Herald), Theatre Record (Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe 2008 Supplement to Theatre Record), (2008), p. 1519.
178 Gardner, ‘The finger--‐ pointer’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/aug/04/edinburghfestival.festivals 179 Cooper, ‘Review on Pornography’, p. 1519.
but essentially unspecified characters by refusing to attribute individual names and characteristics to the actors, and by merely gathering them in the same temporal space (day of the bombing) yet resisting a unifying narrative that would relate them and their stories to each other. Moreover, following Stephens’s text, Holmes refused to show characters--‐actors in communication with one another outside the scenes they took part in. Rather, as in Nübling’s version, they remained detached from each other and somewhat disinterested in the others’ narratives. Like the text, the performance addressed contemporary society and subjectivity through its form and content.
However, one might argue that the anonymous and fragmented character presentation on stage failed to represent the bombings or their social roots and implications. Joyce McMillan’s review of Holmes’s production reflects on the production and the play: ‘the piece fails to convince [...] the portrayal of the bomber, in particular [...] Stephens has suggested the play is a serious exploration of four British men driven to attack the very heart of the society that raised them, but it hardly even makes a start on that vital task.’180 McMillan would be correct if the ‘critical’ and the ‘social’ in contemporary theatre involved only direct thematisation of real--‐life events. Pornography refuses to give a fully developed representation of the bomber, or of any other character. However, she overlooks the critical implications of Stephens’s conscious refusal to generate dramatic certainty and to represent the contemporary world and subject as a manageable, stable and unified totality. As my analysis suggests, the form rather than the content renders Pornography critically able to map the darker elements of contemporary society and what it means to be human in this environment.
The interpretation of the final scene with the numbered lines in both productions puts forward interesting perspectives on human subjectivity and relationships in the mediatised world. Holmes set the scene as a text scrolling up the wall/screen after the curtain call evoking the credits at the end of a film. With this analogy in mind, this could be read both as a memorial to the victims of the 7/7 attacks and as a critical reference to the media culture reducing real lives to pieces of information and objectifying human beings as list of names at the end of, or mere images, in a film. In his conversation with Aleks Sierz, whilst talking about the closing scene in Holmes’s production Stephens mentioned how some audience members had not even noticed the scene and left the auditorium.181 This reference suggests an
180 Joyce McMillan, ‘Theatre Reviews: Fall / Pornography’, Scotsman, 5 August 2008. The review can be accessed at:
http://living.scotsman.com/performing--‐arts/Theatre--‐reviews--‐Fall--‐--‐Pornography.4356911.jp [Last accessed 15 September 2010].
181 The interview can be accessed through the theatreVOICE website: Sierz, Aleks, ‘Interview: Simon Stephens/ Playwright Simon Stephens on Pornography’ <http://www.theatrevoice.com/2307/playwright--‐simon--‐stephens- -‐on--‐ pornography/> [accessed 11 September 2011]
unintended reflection of how in the fast--‐paced life style of late capitalism, our attention spans get shorter and we become accustomed to rapid consumption and indifferent to one another. In Nübling’s production, the actors began eating apples quite expressionlessly as they listened to the pre--‐recorded text about the victims. Nübling presented a critique of social apathy more overtly than Holmes, since the actors showed a callous attitude whilst listening to the recording. The last scene in both productions enhanced the critical scope of Pornography through aesthetically engaging with the question of deindividuation and objectification of humans. Stephens’s strategies confer performative openness upon the text, allowing the text and its productions to expand the audience’s critical horizons and allow them to create their own associations, bounded by the productions’ own thematic concerns.
Pornography may at first seem to be only about the 7/7 bombings and British society. However, as this analysis suggests, beyond the historical details lie compelling techniques as critical tools, mapping aspects of culture and subjectivity through a link between the mode of theatrical expression and contemporary subjectivity as well as social relations. Thus, Pornography goes beyond its direct thematic concerns towards a critique of the mediatised, capitalist culture with its focus on mediatised subjectivity and the frailty of human relations.