The relationship between audience and actors is cosier and more complicitous, as well as trickier, than Stevenson allows. He mocks, naturally, Harold Hobson for remarking that an evening out at the theatre renders men ‘harmlessly happy’ (though in this litigious age it is perhaps as well that this is, generally, true). But one disturbing thing about drama is precisely its capacity to make the unbearable harmless, so that we enjoy it. Tragedy makes a good night out. When we go to see Bond, or Kane, we go wanting to be shocked, expecting to be surprised, as it were. You anticipate a few dead babies for your money.
Jane Lapotaire’s superb performance as Piaf, crackling with theatrical energy, launched a magnificent assault upon bourgeois sensibilities in Pam Gems’ play. And how the middle classes loved it! The night I went, I did see one working-class couple there: they left half-way through, tight-lipped.
This is not to say that radical theatre is a self-defeating notion, only that Stevenson’s disregard of its intrinsic ambiguities (of the sort implicitly explored by David Hare) sometimes makes this account almost comically blinkered. ‘Shopping and Fucking featured telephone sex, simulated homosexual intercourse, and much violence throughout … It showed 1990s drama once again using shock tactics to ensure that genuine feelings continued to be experienced, at least by its audience.’ Bad luck, then, if you didn’t make it to the Royal Court that year. Any emotions you thought you felt in 1996 were not authentic.
Much the best section in the book is that devoted to the novel. Here, at last, Stevenson lays aside his sterile attempts to set tradition in opposition to innovation, and recognises what Malcolm Bradbury celebrated in his 1996 survey of the modern British novel — the endless riches to be found within traditional forms and genres, which proved in the novel to be so gloriously and excitingly susceptible to re-invention. In the hands of our best writers, conventions, and language itself, are transformed into tools to be used, not masters to be overthrown — not rigid traps, but fluid potential for the imagination.
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