I witnessed one of the last nights of Dennis Kelly’s Orphans at the Soho Theatre, having transferred from a successful run at the Traverse in August. Horrified, but satiated by attacking my companion’s lack of outrage on the bus home, it wasn’t until reading Michael Billington’s review I felt moved to offer a written response. So to offer a meta-review, a review, and an apology for both:
Fundamental to my outrage at the play’s form was its reliance on manipulation, something which the review notes:
“Kelly is not above manipulating character to suit his thesis”
It certainly felt problematic that the play shared in the most irresponsible values of its protagonists, and we might read instead: Kelly is not above [his] manipulating character[s]. Manipulation was at the heart of the play as well as its characters; centred, as it was, around a number of lies drawn out for as long as possible before a devastating revelation was the only possible release.
Billington’s description of this process feels inadequate on a number of accounts:
“Liam's claim that he went to the aid of a knife-slashed stranger lying in the gutter is soon exposed as a pathetic lie.”
First, only the most exhilarated spectator could believe that this exposition was ‘soon over’. Pathetic, however, is right on the buzzer, but it is not clear whether Liam is to blame for being a rubbish liar, and an implausible character, or Kelly himself. Whilst the aspirations of a dramatist who leaves the fourth-wall pristine allows the accurate observation of people’s mediocrity, one might hope that a dramatist could conceive of a liar talented enough to conjure as plausible a drama founded on deceit as the ‘real’ one which emerges once the ‘untruths’ have been revealed. The drama was impelled not by a withholding of the truth, but by creative deceit which, when we remember that the integrity of a ‘thesis’ is at stake, vitiates any possibility of insight, let alone honesty, truth, or any of those words which, in this context, feel like they might have been carted out of an eighteenth-century exhibition at the British Museum.
But Kelly’s thesis, for which we have to endure so much, is that (in Billington’s words)
“our society is so worm-eaten and corrupt that even decent liberals will resort, under pressure, to torture.”
‘Kelly’s thesis’, which hardly merits the possessive, is no more than the stock response of the gullible to their daily newspaper: that the world is somehow uniformly getting much much worse. ‘Even decent liberals’ is a phrase which exactly describes the level of sophistication which Kelly’s social critique maintained. Billington’s use of the future tense – liberals will – is similarly symptomatic of the play’s confused vision of society: a deluded and hysterical dystopian vision of the present, making claims for itself as a clear-sighted but saddened pragmatism. Kelly’s play is not proof that liberals resort to torture: it is a rhetorical imagining. Kelly’s representative liberal does resort to torture, and we understand that Kelly believes we would too.
“Kelly creates a genuine moral dilemma and along the way makes some salient points.”
Whilst Billington takes Kelly’s play as proof that a liberal can be moved to torture he forgets that the liberal state has and does legitimise torture on its own citizens as well as citizens of foreign countries. Binyan Mohammed’s case is the latest of such unnecessarily frequent reminders. The point about Kelly’s play is that whilst it may darkly allegorise something ‘genuine’, in order to illustrate our complicity with such suffering, it only has hyperbole at its disposal. In the play, these are revelations sensationalised to the extent that, paradoxically, they are as totally banal, the quotidian rantings of a tabloid editorial.
Again, paradoxically, it would be a more dangerous, and useful, revelation to draw the link between, say, eating a bowl of Cinnamon Grahams and the torture of suspected terrorists in US military facilities. That would be literary realism taken to its most satisfactory extreme, and is a common trope in contemporary drama. But is it possible that we, unlike Tom Cruise in Minority Report, would be able to extract ourselves from complicity in crimes committed daily? That really would be fiction.
“McGuinness does his best to convince us of the dithering Danny's plunge into the inferno.”
Billington’s journalistic love of the alliterative epithet here reminds us that Kelly’s most reprehensible move is to implicated in a hysterically world only possible in the imagination of a sociopathic Daily Mail literalist shortly after being verbally abused on the way back from buying a pint of milk.
And here Roxana Silbert’s production fails to recuperate the script; behind the hopelessly yuppie couple’s wallpaper stand oversized iron railings, a slightly freakish papier mache version of what you see at your local park, an amateurish evocation of the social violence of the world outside. What, an urban dystopia? Pinch me, I must be in a piece of post-war British drama!
Billington’s review ends in a satisfactorily arbitrary moment of Conservative bashing:
“The play makes chilling viewing. But in a week when David Cameron has been spouting nonsense about our allegedly "broken society", I find it disheartening for a talented young dramatist to be aiding and abetting his cause.”
Moreover, that Kelly’s youth should have any symbolic currency is dismaying, and it is here that Billington is most complicit with Kelly’s failure: to achieve any single moment of lucidity in presenting the world unprejudiced around us. Perhaps the author’s heroism, staring into the abyss of British society, is no more different to the saddened but steely resolve of the blue-sky politician in the neat suit. And in this similarity an obsession with dirt masquerading as a desire to clean up.
Fundamental to my outrage at the play’s form was its reliance on manipulation, something which the review notes:
“Kelly is not above manipulating character to suit his thesis”
It certainly felt problematic that the play shared in the most irresponsible values of its protagonists, and we might read instead: Kelly is not above [his] manipulating character[s]. Manipulation was at the heart of the play as well as its characters; centred, as it was, around a number of lies drawn out for as long as possible before a devastating revelation was the only possible release.
Billington’s description of this process feels inadequate on a number of accounts:
“Liam's claim that he went to the aid of a knife-slashed stranger lying in the gutter is soon exposed as a pathetic lie.”
First, only the most exhilarated spectator could believe that this exposition was ‘soon over’. Pathetic, however, is right on the buzzer, but it is not clear whether Liam is to blame for being a rubbish liar, and an implausible character, or Kelly himself. Whilst the aspirations of a dramatist who leaves the fourth-wall pristine allows the accurate observation of people’s mediocrity, one might hope that a dramatist could conceive of a liar talented enough to conjure as plausible a drama founded on deceit as the ‘real’ one which emerges once the ‘untruths’ have been revealed. The drama was impelled not by a withholding of the truth, but by creative deceit which, when we remember that the integrity of a ‘thesis’ is at stake, vitiates any possibility of insight, let alone honesty, truth, or any of those words which, in this context, feel like they might have been carted out of an eighteenth-century exhibition at the British Museum.
But Kelly’s thesis, for which we have to endure so much, is that (in Billington’s words)
“our society is so worm-eaten and corrupt that even decent liberals will resort, under pressure, to torture.”
‘Kelly’s thesis’, which hardly merits the possessive, is no more than the stock response of the gullible to their daily newspaper: that the world is somehow uniformly getting much much worse. ‘Even decent liberals’ is a phrase which exactly describes the level of sophistication which Kelly’s social critique maintained. Billington’s use of the future tense – liberals will – is similarly symptomatic of the play’s confused vision of society: a deluded and hysterical dystopian vision of the present, making claims for itself as a clear-sighted but saddened pragmatism. Kelly’s play is not proof that liberals resort to torture: it is a rhetorical imagining. Kelly’s representative liberal does resort to torture, and we understand that Kelly believes we would too.
“Kelly creates a genuine moral dilemma and along the way makes some salient points.”
Whilst Billington takes Kelly’s play as proof that a liberal can be moved to torture he forgets that the liberal state has and does legitimise torture on its own citizens as well as citizens of foreign countries. Binyan Mohammed’s case is the latest of such unnecessarily frequent reminders. The point about Kelly’s play is that whilst it may darkly allegorise something ‘genuine’, in order to illustrate our complicity with such suffering, it only has hyperbole at its disposal. In the play, these are revelations sensationalised to the extent that, paradoxically, they are as totally banal, the quotidian rantings of a tabloid editorial.
Again, paradoxically, it would be a more dangerous, and useful, revelation to draw the link between, say, eating a bowl of Cinnamon Grahams and the torture of suspected terrorists in US military facilities. That would be literary realism taken to its most satisfactory extreme, and is a common trope in contemporary drama. But is it possible that we, unlike Tom Cruise in Minority Report, would be able to extract ourselves from complicity in crimes committed daily? That really would be fiction.
“McGuinness does his best to convince us of the dithering Danny's plunge into the inferno.”
Billington’s journalistic love of the alliterative epithet here reminds us that Kelly’s most reprehensible move is to implicated in a hysterically world only possible in the imagination of a sociopathic Daily Mail literalist shortly after being verbally abused on the way back from buying a pint of milk.
And here Roxana Silbert’s production fails to recuperate the script; behind the hopelessly yuppie couple’s wallpaper stand oversized iron railings, a slightly freakish papier mache version of what you see at your local park, an amateurish evocation of the social violence of the world outside. What, an urban dystopia? Pinch me, I must be in a piece of post-war British drama!
Billington’s review ends in a satisfactorily arbitrary moment of Conservative bashing:
“The play makes chilling viewing. But in a week when David Cameron has been spouting nonsense about our allegedly "broken society", I find it disheartening for a talented young dramatist to be aiding and abetting his cause.”
Moreover, that Kelly’s youth should have any symbolic currency is dismaying, and it is here that Billington is most complicit with Kelly’s failure: to achieve any single moment of lucidity in presenting the world unprejudiced around us. Perhaps the author’s heroism, staring into the abyss of British society, is no more different to the saddened but steely resolve of the blue-sky politician in the neat suit. And in this similarity an obsession with dirt masquerading as a desire to clean up.
I saw this play when I was in Edinburgh last year. I thought it was one of the most incredible pieces of theatre I have ever seen. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it saddens me that such wonderful drama can be so mercilessly critiqued and measured against rigid academic theory. I was unbelievably moved by the performances and equally by the ability of the text to make the audience laugh and bring them to tears. I take your point that the story may not accurately reflect current social beliefs or politics, but that's why it is theatre and not a government report. Extraordinary theatre is an emotional experience; to assess the drama on an almost exclusively mental level is rather missing the point. The play was far more than mere social commentary; the depth and power of the brother/sister and husband/wife relationships were alone worth experiencing. It is not my interest to pick apart the structural choices of a play which has a profound impact upon me, but I guess that's why I'm an actor and not a reviewer.
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