Chels

When it comes to plays, I think we have a habit of focusing our attention on three key periods – I know I do. There’s the classics – the greek tragedies, then there’s the Elizabethan plays, largely Shakespeare, but sometimes Marlowe, too, and finally, there’s the 20th century Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams plays that we often have to study in English classes. They’re the most well known plays and playwrights for a reason – their stories are timeless, and they’ve captivated audiences for years. Of course, theatre has not survived for centuries on these plays alone. There have been countless eras and movements that are less well known, and less well documented, and while we tend to think of theatre as a continuation of an old tradition, new plays are still written, and some of my favourites, at that.

I think in a lot of cases, modern plays and playwrights don’t have the luxury of an iconic name or a rich history to boost their presence, and that’s why they go largely unheard of outside of theatre circles. They definitely rely on star power – which I don’t think is an issue. I discovered Stephen Beresford’s The Last of the Haussmans because of Julie Walters and Helen McCrory’s casting in the National Theatre 2012 production. It’s a great play that really set the scene for my personal taste in modern theatre – I love explorations of family dynamics, of people thrown together and forced to confront their pasts and their relationships.

It’s Helen McCrory’s theatre prowess that inevitably led me to Neil LaBute. Not because she ever performed one of his works (at least not that I can see), but because of her incredible performance in Medea in 2014. It was my first Greek tragedy, and I think that like with Shakespeare, your first ends up as your favourite. Ever since, I have been drawn to stories of the way women relate to motherhood – bad mothers, reluctant mothers, women who wish to be mothers but can’t, and women who wish to distance themselves from it all. I am fascinated by the way motherhood has been written about over time, the way cultural attitudes have impacted writing style and taboo.

Neil LaBute’s Helter Skelter is a modern retelling of Medea. It’s often paired with Land of the Dead, as both plays are quite short, with the same actress playing the unnamed woman in each. LaBute has said that the plays were not intended to be companion pieces, but the pregnancy theme running through them, along with the quite morbid tone that both plays take, makes sense. LaBute is often labeled as controversial, and even as far as a misanthrope, because his plays really get into the worst of humanity. So many of his characters are terrible people. As an aside, it does confuse me when people seem to be averse to characters who are complex or even outright terrible – they are often much more interesting, at least to me.

Land of the Dead runs for approximately fifteen minutes, and is a pair of alternating monologues from an unnamed couple, recounting a specific day. I’m going to have to spoil the twist in the play to properly talk about it, so do skip this section if you’d like to be surprised. I went into my reading knowing the context of the play – it was written for a theatre festival commemorating the first anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy – so I presumed the event would be somehow involved. It’s described as being a ‘solar plexus punch’ of a twist, and while it was tragic, of course, I can’t help but wonder how it wasn’t seen as inevitable, given the context of the performance.

Regardless, Land of the Dead follows a couple who are clearly going through a difficult period in their life. She is about to attend an expensive appointment; he has borrowed a portion of their cash to go out celebrating closing a big deal at his job. The characters speak plainly, recounting the day matter-of-factly. The appointment the woman was attending was an abortion. She had the morning off work. He couldn’t join her for the appointment as he had to be present at work to finalise the details. It was clearly a source of tension between them. By the time she had finished, he had left a voicemail – in it, he passively suggested they could consider keeping the baby. The woman replays the voicemail weekly to make sure it doesn’t get deleted. She misses her partner, and she misses the baby. 

It’s such a tragic story of being in the wrong place at the wrong time – or, in fact, the right place at the right time, following the implication that she too worked in the same building. One small decision could have changed all of their lives. The question that remains, though, is would this couple have survived had the tragedy not occurred? Clearly, they were not living in bliss. The complexity of their relationship makes you wonder why she cares for him at all – he comes across as not the best partner – but the twist ending reframes the narrative – perhaps she speaks so plainly about him and about the day to distance herself, perhaps she had rationalised the day to make it easier on herself. Where did his own monologue come from? We assume for most of the play, take for granted, even, that he is alive to recount the story, but clearly, he is not. 

Helter Skelter is a modern retelling of Medea, meaning that if you know the Greek tragedy, you know what to expect. A couple meet for lunch during a day of shopping for Christmas presents. They have young children at home; and the woman is very pregnant. It becomes apparent that he is hiding something, and that she knows at least something of what it is. The truth is then revealed – he has been having an affair with her sister. She is clearly furious, unwilling (as she should be) to hear his excuses. His monologues read as pathetic – grovelling, making pitiful excuses, trying to steer them to somewhere more private. She stands her ground. Her own monologue, when it comes, is intensely powerful, though at first she merely lets him speak, backing himself into a corner. The story is intensely gripping, and does not once feel like it’s escalating too quickly. Her anger is grounded, it rises along with his fear, and culminates in a drastic action. The woman believes that their story should not continue in secret – they should not quietly separate or brush the affair aside. In the end, much like the Greek tragedy, she commits the drastic act. She plunges a steak knife into her stomach. We do not find out what comes of the action. Perhaps she lives, perhaps she doesn’t. Perhaps the baby lives, perhaps it doesn’t. 

The two plays deliver both a sense of finality, but also, an ambiguity to their endings. Nothing is certain. I quite like that. There’s no concrete ending, the lights go down, and the insight into the lives of strangers is over. It’s true that LaBute writes about some of the worst of humanity – of carelessness and callousness, and of affairs and bad decisions, but I really don’t understand why that earns him the controversial label. It’s so important to engage with complex and even outright terrible characters, and stories that leave you unsure whose side you should even be on. 

Unfortunately for me, it’s almost impossible to find filmed performances of these plays, so reading them has to suffice for now. They were quite popular during the 2000s, so I’d like to hope that they’ll be performed again soon and I’ll have the chance to see them live.