acts of violence: guest blogger bridget mackey in conversation with theatre-makers about violence

A word from Bridget:

I believe that there is a restlessness to modern life, an overloading of the senses and that this leads to an unhealthy suppression of emotions. I’m a playwright. In my work my characters find escape through violence and I often have them commit violent acts. As an artist using violence as a narrative tool do I have any responsibility towards my audience, my work or myself?

Topping my list of Best Theatre Experiences of All Time are two pretty violent shows – Thyestes by The Hayloft Project and Tragedia Endogonidia by Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Did I enjoy these shows because they allowed me to access and purge repressed emotions? Or was my enjoyment more to do with aesthetics? I think back to Roy Orbison’s vibrato, theatre babes brandishing guns, the way the stage blood took its time to pool and expand across the blinding white stage space. I also remember enjoying how sick the shows made me feel. Maybe cool aesthetics gave me access to a deeper emotion, led me into the nightmare.

For the most part, I hate screen violence. I am extremely over seeing women portrayed as victims. I get pretty bored in action movies. My brain switches off. There are some exceptions to this (for example, I just held a David Lynch themed birthday party) but mostly when I watch yet another person killed on screen I wonder what the hell it’s doing to my psyche.

Baz Luhrmann demonstrating the appeal of babes, weapons and drama in his 1996 film Romeo+Juliet.

Thankfully, I grew up in a violence free environment both at home and in my wider community. This is a fact I find problematic when it comes to my enjoyment of violence on stage. Does my violence free past mean that for me violence on stage is a fetish? Is it dangerous? Or is it totally valid? Maybe even a necessity?

I have interviewed three Melbourne based theatre-makers: Daniel Lammin, Chi Vu and Rachel Perks about the different approaches to violence that they take in their work. These conversations will be published over three blog posts on School for Birds. Thanks Fleur!

Part 1: Conversation with Daniel Lammin

Daniel Lammin is a playwright and director. He also works as a film reviewer. Daniel’s work for the stage often explores real-life incidents of violent crime. We meet in the Malthouse courtyard for a chat but men in sequinned G-Strings keep running into our line of vision. This provides to be too distracting for the both of us so we settle for a park bench on Sturt Street.

Bridget: At one point during our dramaturgy internship with Playwriting Australia last year you said ‘I love violence’ and I was like, ‘I love violence.’ So, I guess I just want to talk to you about why you love it.

Daniel: I think that violence is one of the most exciting, dangerous and delicate emotional tools, or narrative tools, you can use in order to tell a story. A show I did last year, The Cutting Boys, ended in an act of murder, cannibalism and sex. I had to spend the entire time asking: am I justified in making this as blunt and extreme as it is? And if I had come to a point where I couldn’t justify it, not that everyone would agree with me, then I would never have done it. I feel that a lot of the time when people use violence it’s just to shock, because it’s kind of sexy. But, if your intention is just to be edgy or disturbing, or confronting, you’re only going to make work that only serves that purpose.

I’m keen to talk to Lammin about his thoughts on the difference between violence on film and violence on the stage. I tell him that Snowtown is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen but that I regret watching it because I found the violence so distressing.

Daniel: Violence doesn’t mean anything unless you’re seeing it through the eyes of someone else, through the eyes of a character, or the eyes of a community. If you were just watching the brother being killed in the bathtub in Snowtown, you would go ‘oh that’s horrific and disgusting’ and turn off. What makes that sequence so affecting, and so horrifying, is that his younger brother is watching, and then participating, and you’re watching the act through the relationship and the history that they have. It feels very dangerous making people watch a horrible act just for the purpose of shocking them.

A gentler moment from the 2011 movie Snowtown.

Bridget: You mentioned that you thought that violence on film could be more effective than stage violence?

Daniel: Yeah, I think that film can reach a level of reality a lot easier than theatre can. I don’t think you ever want a piece of violence on stage to really be completely realistic because that kind of turns people off. Maybe it’s that I’ve never found violence as much of a problem on film. Film also has the ability to play with genre. You can watch a film like Hostel even though that violence is stupidly graphic, but you can revel in that, because that’s what that genre does. Plus, with film there is a sense that it’s removed from you. If you watched Thyestes, on screen, you’d be like, oh that’s disturbing, but watching it a few feet in front of you? It’s right there, you’re watching living, breathing things sweating and reacting. It becomes something quite different.

Bridget: I loved Thyestes.

Daniel: It was one of the best things ever.

Our conversation moves to Ugly Mugs a show that was part of the 2014 Malthouse season.

Daniel: Making a piece of theatre that shows just the idea of violence towards a person, or a community, or a minority is kind of blunt if it’s not shown through the eyes of an actual person. Ugly Mugs was on at the same time as my show The Cutting Boys, and was about very similar ideas. I felt Ugly Mugs would have been a far more effective show if I had actually been made to confront the act. You’ve got a show about violence against sex workers. I want to see a show that makes me feel sick to my stomach about violence in the community against a sex worker and how horrific that is as opposed to –

Bridget: What about the argument though. Say, if you’re making an anti-war film, you run the risk of sensationalising war to make that anti-war film. Do you think maybe in Ugly Mugs, to have the depiction of violence could be seen as –

Daniel: Exploitative?

Bridget: Exploitative in a way.

Daniel: Yeah, I mean definitely, I guess it just comes down to how it’s handled. I think that it’s the job of the creator to sit back and ask if they are being exploitative. I did a short play years ago about the murder of James Bulger, the two year old who was killed by two ten year old boys in the early nineties. It was something I had always wanted to do because I found the whole thing so disturbing. But I skipped that step of actually questioning: is what I want this to do working? Is it effective in the manner by which I’m doing it? By accident it kind of was, but I learnt a big lesson. If you want to show that an act of violence is something that’s wrong, you need to make sure that you’re doing it in a way that it doesn’t exploit, and that your intentions are clear.

Bridget: When did you have the realisation that maybe it was exploitative?

Daniel: When it was in front of people, basically. When I was watching it with an audience, and seeing an audience react. I mean, there was no violence in it. It was the manner that the content was given to the audience that was uncomfortable. Enough people enjoyed and responded to the piece to suggest to me that I hadn’t made a massive mistake, but it scared me enough to go, there is a level of interrogation that I need to make sure I have if I keep wanting to do this.

Bridget: What’s the best use of violence that you’ve seen on stage?

Daniel: Barrie Kosky’s Women of Troy. It’s funny, because it was the first thing of his that I’ve ever seen and I’ve learnt that his shows are usually a lot more flamboyant and colourful and this was under fluro lights, stark, cold, blunt. There was a sequence in it where a woman was dragged into a locker, while the rest of the women were singing a Mozart Aria, she was trapped in there and raped by one of the guards. The woman comes out, she stands on a box with her underwear down around her knees, covered in blood, stands there and vomits –

Bridget: Fuck.

Daniel: – and by itself, well, that’s the point where you see most of the audience just get up and walk out. But he’d invested us in the plight of the characters, and in the plight of the narrative to the point where that happened and my brain just broke, because it was like seeing a succession of images that all amounted to something far more powerful.

Bridget: Were you in our dramaturgy class when Patricia Cornelius talked about needing to ‘earn moments’ from the audience?

Daniel: I think so.

Bridget: She said, you can’t give an audience a thing and say ‘deal with it.’ You have to lead them to it.

Daniel: I have this rule, with any of the disturbing things that I keep going back and making, that you have to make the audience laugh in the first five minutes. Because you’ve got to relax them to the point where they actually can ease themselves into what it is you have to tell them. And then they’re more susceptible. They’re more prone to listening to you. And they’re weakened so the punch in the face is going to hurt more. That’s what Stephen Spielberg does in Schindler’s List. He eases you in, makes you feel comfortable, and then assaults you with the most horrific images in humanity that you can imagine. And it is that thing, of earning the right to be able to do it. And I think generally in theatre that you have to earn big moments. You’ve got to earn a pause, you’ve got to earn a climax, and you’ve got to earn a twist. Patricia is completely right.

Bridget: Um, I’m really sorry to bring out a review of your work. The Rebecca Harkins-Cross review of The Cutting Boys?

Daniel: Yes! … Oh?

Bridget: At the end of the review she asks: What drives a theatre maker to lower us into the abyss? And I was wondering, from the way that you are talking, it doesn’t sound like an intention you have with the theatre you make, or is it your intention?

Daniel: With that particular show, it was a case of wanting to pull the audience right to the depths… because an act of two twenty-year old boys killing and cannibalising a sixteen-year-old girl is an act of complete inhumanity. I felt the only way to convey that inhumanity effectively was to take the audience to the darkest place I possibly could. I wanted it to be an unforgiving show. I had no illusions that people were going to enjoy the show. I couldn’t even watch sections of the thing because I found it so confronting. And it came out of my fucking head. When that review came out I thought, that is the question that needs to be asked of the theatre maker, certainly of me. In that particular instance, I felt like I had a justifiable reason. I loved that review. It was initially terrifying, but then it’s like, good, it’s an engagement with the work.

The Cutting Boys. Image Phoebe Taylor.

Bridget: I’ve been wondering about Aristotle’s writing about catharsis in the Poetics, in relation to violence on stage. I’m a bit suspicious about whether or not catharsis can actually be a thing that has a social function. Do you think that violence in art creates a space for people to purge emotion?

Daniel: I think it definitely does have the capacity to do that, for people who want that. I don’t think everyone wants that. I do. But in terms of violence, it’s not just physical acts of violence, it’s emotional levels of violence. To choose the lamest thing off the top of my head. Something like, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It’s preposterously emotionally violent, but I want to sit through that, because I want to have that catharsis. Some people don’t want that, and they are completely in their rights not to want that. And I would never want to force a violent show on someone. With anything I’ve done, I always make a point of making it very clear to people that this is not going to be fun. So you’re prepared enough before hand to know whether or not the show is right for you.

Bridget: It’s funny, my Grandma saw my play Hose and I was worried about how she’d feel that I’d written something so violent, and afterwards I asked her what she thought and she said ‘I saw things in nursing that you couldn’t even imagine.’ And I was like, ‘thanks Grandma’. But you know, humanity does have this darkness.

Daniel: Yeah, and that is the big reason why I love working with it, because it’s there. I actually want to be able to talk about the fact that yes, the world is a wonderful place, there are beautiful people in it, there are wonderful experiences, not everything is depressing, but you know what? Some people do really fucking horrible things to each other, and sometimes the way to learn how to deal with that is to actually just show it.

Just as I’m about to thank Lammin and let him return to rehearsals he throws a question back that shouldn’t catch me by surprise, but it does:

Daniel: Why do you love violence?

Bridget: Oh…!? … I think that’s what I’m trying to work out… Sometimes I get really angry and I throw shit and sometimes I have urges to physically hurt other people. Like, I have that, and I’m really ashamed of that, and I wonder if when I see violence on stage it allows me to express that.

Daniel: Stephen King wrote this book about horror, and his thesis is that good horror allows us to experience something that in a normal, moral society, we would not be able to. It allows us to actually be an enactor of violence, and to be a victim of violence and through doing these things, purge ourselves of the desire to do them. I’ve come up with the concept that as a theatre maker I want to hear what the universe sounds like. Everything I do is just built to answer that question. I’m writing a show about Ed Gein, he’s the guy that Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs and Psycho are based on. He was suspected of having murdered these women, and when the police confronted him about it they found his house was full of artifacts that he had made of women’s skin and body parts, but they were ones he dug up. I’m fascinated by how lonely someone must be that this is how they choose to fill their world. It’s inhuman, it’s impossible to comprehend, it’s like listening to the destruction of a star, or listening to the darkness that exists in the heart, because if I listen to this, if I can touch it for a fleeting second, I might understand the potential for violence between me, and potential in my friends, or my family or within anybody… … That’s a very big wanky concept.

Bridget: No, it’s great, it’s great.

audience conversation: the unspoken word is joe and the ritual slaughter of gorge mastromas

On Sunday Bridget Mackey and I saw two shows back to back, Zoey Dawson’s The Unspoken Word Is Joe and Denis Kelly’s The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas. We interviewed each other about them in the car between shows. It is worth mentioning that both of us are very, very happy with seeing shows that ‘upset’ and ‘sicken’ us, as these did. Please do not take our reactions as any kind of condemnation. We were so very into it.

Show One: The Unspoken Word Is Joe

Fleur: Okay. We’re recording. And we’re recording as we drive from one show to the next.

So what just happened?

Bridget: We just saw The Unspoken Word Is Joe, a play that’s been around for a while although that was the first time I’d seen it and I got a bit upset by it.

Fleur: What was it that upset you?

Photo: Sarah Walker

Bridget: I think it’s because… Well because I’m a writer and it’s really hard to make work. It’s really hard to see a fictional writer, who I know is a real writer making fun of herself and her own indulgences, but I also know that they are my indulgences too. I think we do have to laugh at ourselves and I was kind of annoyed at myself for getting upset by it.

Fleur: But it is a painful play. We’re laughing at the same time as being disturbed. I do wonder what the experience is for someone not within the industry.

Bridget: I don’t know. I don’t know. Is that how people outside of theatre generally see theatre people? As this indulgent, over the top little world of drama queens and –

Fleur: And all sleeping with each other. I’m pretty sure that’s a key component in the outsider imaginings of theatre. I was at a Monash Student Association awards night last year and they announced Student Theatre saying “we come to student theatre to change the world” and a guy at the next table whispered “and have group sex”.

Bridget: Well yeah. That too.

Fleur: Column A, Column B.

The thing that distresses me watching this play – And I think it is a good kind of distress! I’m not saying I’m distressed and I don’t think this theatre should be happening! I think this is a very intentional trauma! But something that distresses me in it is that it is very specifically about the female artist as the hysterical woman.

Art comes from a place of vulnerability. I think, “Is this the only way women can be perceived as being vulnerable? To be this hysterical, blabbering, public, humiliating, self-loathing, women-loathing mess?”

But it’s also interesting because it makes her the very stereotypically female mess whilst, at the same time, making her the sexual aggressor and other things that women don’t get to be all that often. That silhouette of her wrapped around Matt Hickey is fucking amazing.

Bridget: And she’s – not only the sexual aggressor – but she is confident, in her own way. In her own work! She does hold power over other people because of that. She’s saying to the male actors “I’ll put you in that role”.

(After thought: I just want to add that, while this is true, this is a line that gets a laugh of derision from the audience.)

Photo: Eugene Teh

Fleur: I think so often about what Joanna Murray-Smith said to us during our Masters: how being a writer is a constant battle between your ego and your self-doubt and you’ve got to make sure that your ego just wins or else you’ll never write again. This play is the moment where this writer’s ego loses the battle.

Bridget: The direction is pretty great. That moment where Natasha reads out that monologue and is lit so beautifully! It is a really stunning. Like, you do really connect to that monologue. Even though you’ve heard it before, there’s also this moment of “But theatre is magic. It can be powerful.” You can still be fooled by it and connect with it even though it is in the middle of a show that you know is a play within a play and you know it’s fake and you know the joke.

Fleur: I think that moment is so important because, as you are blown away, the ‘writer’ hiding under a chair with her knickers hanging out. She is in this moment of absolute surrender to her neuroses and absolute emotive chaos but we can still be fooled, still love and still have that moment of falling into something created from a place of messy, chaotic, fucked up-ness. From that fucked up-ness can come this moment where someone is just glowing – just glowing up there. Yeah.

Shall we leave it there? And we will re-convene in a few hours.

Play two: The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas

Fleur: Okay. This is Fleur And Bridget In The Car, Part Two. So, just as the show was about to start again after interval, you said –

Bridget: I said, “I’m actually really worried”. I know one other work by the playwright really well – Osama the Hero – so I knew from the very start of the play “he’s not giving us this information to be nice. He’s giving us this information and he’s going to use it to fuck with us.” I mean, I think what I like about his writing is that you don’t know where it’s gonna go. It goes to surprising places so I was kind of terrified after interval. I was just like “You’re just going to do something! Something awful is going to happen to us.”

Photo: Jodie Hutchinson

Fleur: Which is actually a really – It is actually surprisingly rare in theatre to really be surprised by the text at every turn. Like that wonderful moment when she says, “Because I have stopped time.” Each time you figure out what this play is…

You know, you begin the play and it’s this group narrative. And it’s beautiful. A beautiful act of storytelling. And actually the text at that point reminds me of The Virgin Suicides. There’s something about that almost mystical beauty of adolescence that’s both ugly and gorgeous at the same time. It makes me think particularly of this moment where a boy expresses his love for this girl by stepping off the roof of his parent’s house. He stands on the edge of the roof, declares, “I love her”, jumps, falls all of a meter and a half, dusts himself off and walks away, sated because he’s found a way to express it. Something about the description in that first act made me think of that: the beautiful ugliness of children and young messed up, desperate love.

So you think that is what the play is. And then it changes and becomes this weird corporate… thing. And then it changes again and becomes this mystical thing –

Bridget: And then it is almost gothic!

It is really refreshing to see something that is epic. Well not, like, epic but a tragedy, like a Greek tragedy. But at the same time there’s nothing really epic about it. He’s just a very bad man. He’s a very bad, selfish man. The resistance of the play to settle in any one style is like the confusion of trying to understand a world in which some people have nothing and some people have everything. And there’s this disconnect with that.

Fleur: At the end I was thinking about the title of the play and why it was called that. And partly I feel like again it is Denis Kelly finding another way to surprise us at every turn because what is says is “I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill him in this ritualised, destructive way.” I think it’s the slaughter of goodness. The ritualised destruction of any goodness – of any skerrick of the person that we were introduced to in that first act. That Gorge is slaughtered over the course of the play. But because of the set ups in the scenes, we are kind of waiting for him to die. And it feels a bit of an anti-climax and I’m into that in theatre. I like the dissatisfying ending because that means it defied my expectations.

So how did it make you feel?

Bridget: I mean I felt pretty sick watching it but I enjoy that. I think it is rare that theatre really makes you feel something that strongly. It was kind of the same feeling as watching The Wolf of Wall Street! And they didn’t give us any answers as to why he was this bad. There’s nothing we can do about him being like this and that seems true to life.

Fleur: Wolf of Wall Street is a really good analogy because there is no reason for those people to be as ugly and selfish as they are either. In this play I feel like that mystical element gives an optional out: “Oh we could blame the gods. Would that make you feel better? We could blame them.”

Bridget: Yeah! But it’s a club! It’s a secret club that they are in once they choose to be in it.

Fleur: And there is no point in the play where we see him using his powers. Everything that we see after that deal is immensely human because people are bad enough on their own without being able to stop time.

I make a sound that I’m going to describe as a series of consonants. Something like “Grrllllk!”

I don’t know how I’m going to transcribe that noise I just made. Thanks Fleur of the Past.

Photo: Jodie Hutchinson (I presume)

Bridget: It was on such a big scale without being a melodrama.

Fleur: Yeah. It is a step beyond the world. Despite being just the span of one man’s life, it feels bigger than that. Such good writing.

Bridget: He’s so fucking good. So fucking good. It made me excited about theatre.

Fleur: Yeah. It’s one of those scripts that makes me want to run and write. I want to surprise people! I want to have people leaning forward as I continually did throughout this text, even on second viewing!

Bridget: I’ve been trying to find alternatives to drama or to the main stage family drama and I’ve been thinking about how things can be epic and important without being that kind of a work and I think this play succeeds in doing that. It’s about something really important but it’s told in such a surprising way. I feel like the writer has tried to think about the audience’s experience of it.

Fleur: And yet, it also feels almost effortless at times. I feel that the first section was written on one of those beautiful days when you sit down and a first draft just pours out of you. There is such a flow to it. It doesn’t feel laboured. Its one of those light days of writing when it is just skipping out and you’re saying yes to everything that comes into your brain.

Bridget: Yeah. I can get out here!

Fleur: No it’s alright! I can get you closer because there’s the U-turn spot up a bit further.

Disclaimer: Bridget Mackey and I both work with MKA: Theatre of New Writing, who produced The Unspoken Word Is Joe.