Wednesday 25 October 2017

Grumbly Grandad's View of the World: George and The Dragon at the National

I can't believe it.

I stare, open-mouthed, at my phone screen in the lobby of the National Theatre.

Rory Mullarkey - writer of the play I've just watched - is just THIRTY years old. No. That's impossible. 

I don't mean because he's so good - although some of his dialogue is very good. 

But I thought he had to be much older than 30 because of how he thinks. I feel like I've watched a play by the country's most curmudgeonly grandad. You don't get the impression that Mullarkey very much likes British society "these days".

George and the Dragon is a three-act play in which Mullarkey is clearly trying to say something about the overall sweep of history, and about contemporary British culture. Despite striking set design, just feels like a pantomimic, sub-Blackadder re-run of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, if it had all been directed by the Daily Mail.

Act One and Two are set in medieval and industrial England. In both, the English are an essentially good people, but a malevolent "Dragon" rules them, ruining their lives - until St. George kills it and frees the people to be happy. Act Three is set in contemporary Britain, where the "Dragon" is now, for some reason, "within" all people, and cannot be slain, so the people decide to live as they are, and reject St. George.

It is made clear on several occasions that THE DRAGON IS A METAPHOR FOR SOMETHING, so heavy-handedly that they might as well have written it on a fist and punched us. But I persistently tried - perhaps unwisely - to understand what the play wanted to say.

Image result for george and dragon national

It's in Act Three, where Mullarkey turns his hand to something resembling "state of the nation" playwriting, that his views is most manifest. 

And this is why I can't believe he's 30: his take on "contemporary Britain" feels like the kind of thing your grumbliest grandad would come out with after boshing too much Daily Mail. It's dominated by concerns with "ladette" drinking culture (drunk women from a hen do make several appearances, for no reason), pre-teens playing violent computer games and football fans fighting in pubs. 

And it all feels like a bit of a throwback. His idea of "British society" seems to be entirely based on fly-on-the-wall documentaries from the mid-2000s about "working class culture". 

It's as if Mullarkey doesn't actually live in the UK in 2017, but has instead learned about it exclusively through watching Channel 5 programmes with names like "My Life On 30 Pints A Day" or "The Boy Who Died Because He Had Such A Fat Arse" or "Living With My Cunt Husband".

He's obsessed with the kinds of things Major Misunderstanding would moan about. The whole string of media-fabricated "national epidemics" which was fodder for the blame-the-poor paternalism David Cameron rose to failure on the back of. All the things Matt Lucas and David Williams once read about in the Times and used in their campaign for the extermination of working class life entitled "Little Britain".* 

Basically, all the things that your racist grandad sees in contemporary Britain (and believes are evidence "we're going to hell in a handcart") are the things which fascinate Mullarkey. I'm surprised he didn't include a brief section about "happy slapping", having just found out about it from a 2003 article your Uncle Keith emailed him, with the all-caps subject line reading "YOU WONT BELEVE THIS!!!"

Image result for major misunderstanding
Rory Mullarkey off to complain to the BBC, for some reason, having just found out that youths in "hoodies" ride mopeds these days. And by "these days" he means 2003, which is the year he still reads articles from.

The weird thing is that, in a normal play, it even wouldn't matter much if the playwright felt antipathy towards her society. Because a normal play would focus on about half a dozen characters, right? All of which the playwright would have some empathy with? That's what literature does, right? Make you feel a bit better by bringing you into communion with some characters you like a bit?

Not so with Mullarkey. He refuses to give us even one believable, fully-formed character to focus on, and instead drags us back again and again to his sweeping "sketch" of general society, thereby preventing us from ignoring his sneering, tabloidy generalisations. He wants to sketch the 'character' of English society, as if there is such a thing. And our society is not something he appears to have the facility to understand, let alone write about.

As Mullarkey stretches his canvas as broad as it will go, the characterisations become more thin, laughable and tabloid. At one point, a younger man in the pub challenges an older man's jingoism, yelling "WHAT ABOUT THE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BRITAIN ENSLAVED!". This is the first time in the play any English person has questioned England's essential goodness. Therefore, I think in Mullarkey's head, it was supposed to be a significant line. Maybe Mullarkey wants to say something about how England contains an element of post-imperial self-doubt, is generationally divided, and is both racist and obsessed with criticising racism. But again, it is as if Mullarkey has never met real people. It is as if he has just read about "leftie student types" in the Daily Mail, and wanted to include them in his play because they fascinate him anthropologically. It is as if Mullarkey has no interest in such people as human beings. The younger man screams this crude Russell Brandism in a pub, during a football match, in a way that literally has never happened IRL in the history of the world. There is no investigation into why he felt like shouting this. The man is a tabloid caricature, complete with Che Guevara T-Shirt and desert scarf. He looks like someone's fancy dress costume for a party with the theme "uni bellends".

Image result for russell brand
It is a little known theatre-industry fact that the peak of Rory Mullarkey's research for his George and the Dragon play was googling "left wing bellend" and finding this picture.

And all of it - the ladettes, the pub-goers, the computer gamers, the football fans, even the politicised student, are all treated by Mullarkey with a condescending contempt. A misanthropy runs through it, especially in his decision to paint contemporary Britiain as a binge-drinking multitude - and his lack of interest in creating, among this huddled mass, even one plausible, rounded, sympathetic character, even for a moment. No one has clear motivations or an authentic voice. Everyone is just an idiot. And they're all at war with every other idiot. A child is even given a long, whingeing monologue which -ironically - complains about how everyone's always complaining. Way to ruin the "wise child" trope, Mullarkey. Apparently everyone in 2017 is always complaining about other people "walking too slow or walking too fast".

And this is what makes it jar horribly when at the very end Mullarkey executes a sharp U-Turn and asks us to buy into his "happy ending resolution". Mullarkey's conclusion, heavy-handedly hammered home, is this: contemporary humans are imperfect. We must let go of any hope of perfectibility and be content to live as we are. Cue music by Pharrell Williams, everyone smiles and goes back to their lives happy, the National Theatre bring out an inspirational calendar with this message printed on every month over the top of a picture of a different waterfall - at least I think was the idea.

And this message at the end makes perfect sense; it is something any thinking person realised around the age of seven. It is of course unhealthy for an individual, or society, to maintain impossibly high expectations - this is why both Buddha and Stoics taught that managing expectations is the only way to ensure happiness; why every existentialist tract is 99% about persuading you to let go of any hope.

However, this message rings a bit hollow from a playwright who has just spent 60 minutes sneering at Britain's moral turpitude. And you can't really preach "embracing our imperfections" when the Britain you've shown us is not just "imperfect", but unrelentingly bleak! Not one redeeming act of tenderness was in your version of 21st Century Britain. Where was your "colour purple in a field"? Where was your moment where Sartre hears the singer?

And, more importantly, it makes no sense to preach "love-your-imperfections" in the context of the play's overall narrative, which as we've seen, suggests that Englanders were not always beyond salvation. They have been saved twice, in fact! 

But Mullarkey just thinks that "these days", as everyone's most tedious male relative loves to say, "it's all got worse". 

If, Mullarkey, you wanted to write a play with a "love-your-imperfections" ending, why did you give us Act One and Two, in which the imperfections are, in the manner of all good racist myths, vanquished?!  "Killing the dragon" did help the English people in Act One and Act Two, didn't it? After getting rid of the dragon, everything got better for a while? So the entire moral and narrative framework of your story suggests that it was possible, and helpful, to rid a nation of evil - but is not any more.

If you'd staged Act Three on its own, you'd (maybe) have staged a reassuring play about how we have to embrace our imperfection. But when you stage it with Acts One and Two, you're now saying that ideally, you would remove imperfection and things would be better, but for some reason in the 21st century only you can no longer kill off imperfection so we're just gonna have to settle for a shit life. A more shit life than they used to have in the good old days, after the two dragon-slayings. A life shitter than, according your story, the majority of world-history.

Why have you singled out the humans of the 21st century for a telling-off, grandad? Can we chill out?

* This was back in the bad old days, though, before Matt Lucas followed in the footsteps of the uncompromising antiracists Katy Perry and Eminem and Became Woke. Lucas has now had the messianic realisation that blackface is not appropriate, for which the media has rightly given him the appropriate amount of credit: i.e. all the credit in the universe.

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