Telling Stories: The Point Blank Trilogy

By John Bull

At the end of Howard Brenton's 1974 The Churchill Play the inmates of a political concentration camp attempt an abortive escape. Jimmy, imprisoned for blowing up the Post Office Tower, gives voice to the pointlessness of an effort at escaping from the camp into what is effectively already a police state.

Nowhere to break out to, is there? They'll concrete the whole world over any moment now. And what do we do? (A slight smile. Smiles.) Survive. In the cracks. Either side of the wire. Be alive.

His conclusion incorporates two directly opposed arguments: that all political action is futile and that only an essentially fatalistic philosophy of personal survival is left; and, notwithstanding this, that there are cracks, that the concrete is not completely all-encompassing, that there just might be the possibility of continuing the struggle in some way.

Now, clearly the context for these opposed positions is one that assumes a basically homogenous totalitarian political model, and thus views all reaction against it from an essentially right-wing position. There are a number of reasons for starting my consideration of the work of Point Blank Theatre Company with this reference, not the least being that, from some time in the Thatcher years, there has developed a belief, itself seemingly set in concrete, in the first interpretation of Jimmy's outcry, that 'political theatre' as understood at the time of Brenton's play has had its day. It is a belief that has only hardened with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the continuing consolidation of global control by the forces of US imperialism/capitalism. The steady march towards universal hegemony can apparently only be faced through strategies of individual survival.

However, there are cracks, and cracks accumulate the debris of our consumer society from which shoots can begin to emerge. Point Blank Theatre is one such shoot. Formed in 1999 by Steve Jackson and Liz Tomlin, the Sheffield-based touring company has quickly become an established player in the current regional theatre renaissance. Their stripped-down and conceptualised sets complement the mixture of urgent contemporary argot and rhetorically poetic text that makes the dialogue of the company's work so exciting. For, although there is much evidence of a commitment to what has come to be described as 'physical theatre' in this work, Point Blank's is, above all, a theatre of words and of telling stories; and what stories they are. As a theatre company seeking to address contemporary political issues it is, of course, by no means alone. More uniquely, perhaps, its work necessitates a rethinking of what exactly 'political theatre' might be in the opening decade of the new century. And that this rethinking must inevitably start with revisiting the territory occupied by such as Howard Brenton in the early 1970s makes my opening almost irresistible.

Although Operation Wonderland (2004) - written jointly by Liz Tomlin and Steve Jackson - is actually chronologically the second play of this trilogy, in many ways it has claims to being the first in the sequence. It is a play that links the work of Point Blank, in its depiction and analysis of the nightmare world of the new century, with the radical politics and drama of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Set in a contemporary Wonderland Theme Park that offers children access to a world in which dreams and wishes can be made to come true, the unseen, and unknowable, establishment also ensures that those wishes are secretly graded as green, amber or red, dependent on the degree of threat that they pose to Wonderland's ideological status quo.

As the play opens a man 'in his forties, tired and worn, enters in a Wonderland cleaner's uniform' (42), for even (especially) dreams have to be kept scrupulously clean. His work among the rubbish bins is interrupted by the arrival of Kay, dressed as a Wonderland Blue Fairy who is seemingly empowered to make everyone's wishes come true, but who actually (as we learn) has an active role in policing the activities of the punters, through her grading of the wishes. She has come 'backstage' to get 'away from all the magic into the darkness and the silence' (42); the darkness because they are away from the neon lights and the silence because the man has cut the wires connecting his unit to the park's tannoy system. Right from the outset, then, the man's site is constructed in opposition to the prevailing ideology of the park. The pair agree on their experience of Wonderland:

KAY: There's something wonderful about the way you find yourself moving through Wonderland. Always as if someone is

JED: Watching you.

KAY: As if everything you're about to say

JED: Before you're even thought it

KAY: Has already been

JED: Scripted

KAY: By someone else. (43)

The overlap of the sentences as though each were an agreed party to the other's thoughts, that is to say the suggestion that there is a single reliable voice of political opposition, will gradually be called into question. The man wants to destroy the falsity of the celluloid-derived dream, to flatten 'every dancing cartoon character' (46), and to replace the delicately falling artificial snowflakes of the daily parade with elephant dung. The girl appears to go along with him, encouraging him in his potential revolt; but she is given a voice-over: 'And so it all began with a wish, as so many stories do' (47). This could be the opening of a conventional fairy story - the voice-over is, after all, that of a 'fairy' in a commercialized wonderland - but in this context it serves to relocate the notion of wish (as political desire) and story (as a device leading to political resolution). In other words, the opening appears to suggest a possible political strategy that might oppose the world of consumer capitalism; a world that Wonderland more than simply symbolizes, there being no world outside of Wonderland in this play. The plan backfires; 'We throw shit at them and they throw it back as snowflakes' (55), and the girl insinuates the idea of actually bombing the parade. At this point a number of important connections start to be established. For a start, and surely by no coincidence, the man shares a name, Jed, with that of the situationist would-be bomber in Howard Brenton's seminal post- 1968 play Magnificence3 - with whom Jimmy in The Churchill Play occupies a similar political position - a wonderfully broken-back work in which the playwright can be seen to be re-examining the politics of terror as he goes along. Whereas, in Magnificence, Jed precisely wishes to bomb the parade, or spectacle, in Point Blank's play he shows initial reluctance:...