laughter in the dark
There’s a scene from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi which always sticks in my head. Bosola, the mordant but thoughtful executioner, takes Antonio in his arms and whispers softly into the dying man’s ear: “My Lord, your Duchess and children ” Antonio stirs, pride burning in his eyes, and gasps, “Their very name kindles some life in me!” Bosola pauses for a moment, then adds, “ are murdered.” “Oh.” says Antonio. Talk about dropping a clanger.
But why does the audience always laugh? Out of nervousness, perhaps the nervous comfort that comes from knowing that none of it is real. Or perhaps something more sinister, like the smug, selfi sh relief that what’s happening to Antonio is not happening to you. It’s a laughter that jerks out from the pit of the stomach, revealing more about the watchers than they’d care to admit. Anyone hoping for light entertainment this term is in for a nasty shock.
Maybe it’s the cynical aftermath of Christmas, but the next eight weeks will serve up severed heads and evil laughter by the bucketload. It kicks off in second week with the stage version of Anthony Burgess’s dystopian nightmare A Clockwork Orange at the Old Fire Station. Young Alex has a fi ne time maiming veks, raping devotchkas and dancing around with a huge porcelain penis before he’s made a guinea pig for a new, radical therapy which promises to cure his errant ways.
After that comes Strindberg’s classic psycho-sexual drama, Miss Julie, as well as Make Him Cure Me, a modern day Hippolytus about the grimmer side of medicine. Fourth week keeps the darkness up with Charles D. Booth’s Elusiver Desires at the O’Reily, a piece of new writing about the unrequited love of a stalker.
Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta should provide some old school horror in sixth week at the Old Fire Station, while the Oxford Playhouse takes us Into the Woods with a gruesome reworking of traditional pastoral fairytales. A Caryll Churchill double-bill is also being hosted at New College, consisting of The Seagulls and the squirm-inducing Abortive. It’s tempting to dismiss all this wickedness and misery as mere January blues, but Oxford has never been a stranger to dark, disturbing drama.
Recent years have seen unprecedented sex and mutilation in productions of Blasted and Phaedra’s Love by Sarah Kane. More lately, The Experimental Theatre Company’s Papercut used dark humour to challenge preconceptions about self-harm. We’ve also had Howard Barker’s Claw and The Maids by Jean Genet, not to mention Oxford’s never-ending love-affair with Harold Pinter.
These plays function to disrupt comfy, stabilized views of reality, defamiliarising and derationalising the world we thought we knew. Don’t have nightmares.
12th Jan 2005