I don’t often get a chance to write about wonderful things. For various reasons these days I mainly find myself writing about a wide-range of lies and atrocities. But I did want to take a moment out from that routine to acknowledge something wonderful happening in London.
The Donmar Theatre is currently heading to the end of a run of a play called Teddy Ferrara by the American playwright Christopher Shinn. I’ve been a fan of Shinn’s since watching his play Now or Later at the Royal Court in 2008 starring Eddie Redmayne (whatever happened to him?). That play is an exploration of some of the political and religious sensitivities thrown up by the 2005 Danish cartoons controversy. Not only was the play beautifully nuanced and (over-used word in theatre-land) brave, it was also beautifully constructed and with original things to say.
Teddy Ferrara (first performed in Chicago two years ago, and here given its first UK production) is about a group of students on an American campus, with all the ‘trigger-warnings’ and gay, ethnic, disability, racial, Trans and other concerns which make one wonder when American students and their professors get any work done. The main character is the head of a student LGBTQ society and among those who come into his orbit is the title character, a slight misfit who ends up killing himself. Anyhow, everybody ends up using this tragedy — as some have a previous death on campus — for their own political and social ends.
And although the play’s programme has a double-page spread from the gay rights group Stonewall about the rates of depression and suicide among young gay people the play is not really about that. I was struck on the way out of the theatre to over-hear one audience member asking another ‘What do you think that was about?’ I certainly don’t envy any critic seeing it for the first time and trying to explain it to their readers after mulling it over for a few minutes.
It is an unusually subtle and complex work. The college President knows that because of his position he is at the mercy of the students rather than the other way around. Perhaps partly to further his own political career, and partly because he just isn’t the figure some of the students pretend he is, he is eager to give minority students whatever they want. The students in turn are aware that it is they, and not the authorities, who are the ones with actual power, although everyone pretends otherwise.
And the layers pile on. The people who are meant to be victims aren’t really victims or at least not in the way they pretend they are. And there is a striking demonstration of the fact that all the ‘celebrating difference’ stuff has some very uncomfortable intersections (to use the jargon word). For all the sympathy and support given by all the main characters to the wheelchair-bound student still none of them want to sleep with him. And while everyone seems desperate to claim Ferrara’s death as a ‘hate-crime’ there isn’t much evidence that he encountered any ‘homophobia’.
In fact in a world where being gay has become normal Ferrara’s death seems to be a reaction to other more ordinary frustrations and cruelties. But the insistence on reading society through the lens of oppressed minorities versus powerful majorities has to be sustained by the status quo anyway, with both minorities and ‘majorities’ having at least as much interest in sustaining this worldview. The play is also very funny about the awkwardness of young people and the complexities added to sex by the online world.
There aren’t many playwrights around who are really thinking both about and through the colossal tergiversations of our time. Christopher Shinn seems to me to stand out in that regard among others. Of course so do the terrific, mainly young, cast and the flawless directing (as with Now or Later) of Dominic Cooke. If I were a foundation or a theatre director, I would find a pot of money and ask Shinn to write about what happens next in our culture. Teddy Ferrara runs for another week and confirms my suspicion that the play of our era, when it is written, may well be written by Shinn.
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