More Murder and Added Feminism

Ann Hansen, who inspired Blow Off 

The strange matter of the Jazz Club Murder still unsettles me. I was charmed by many of its salient features, such as the live singing (any rendition of a spiritual will calm my aching soul) or the familiarity of the amateur and very English sleuth. Yet to come upon something that resembled a version of ‘the well made play’, which dominated British theatre before John Osbourne dragged theatre away from the bourgeois drawing room into the (admittedly mannered) working class kitchen sink, shocked me more than a full-bloodied version of Seneca’s Thyestes (a happening all the more likely in a time when Titus Andronicus is vying for status at the top of the Shakespeare hierarchy).

The same day, I saw AJ Taudevin’s Blow Off, which climaxed in a big explosion, like the one at the end of Fight Club. Taudevin’s work-in-progress boasted a punk aesthetic (mentions of Bikini Kill and Howie Reeves rocking the bass guitar), and followed a story that included brutal beatings and an anti-capitalist conscience. While neither Murder nor Blow Off satisfied Aristotle’s definitions of tragedy – Taudevin’s emphasis on character over plot tipped it away from a definitive catharsis – the two plays represent the extremes of contemporary Scottish performance. On the one hand, a polite nostalgia: on the other, a restlessly personal and political dynamism.

It’s dichotomies like this that make the life of a critic in a post-modern age so problematic. There are no real movements in theatre any more, nothing that can be said to be of this moment in history. Taudevin referenced Bikini Kill and other 1990s music: Runcie flipped back to the golden age of jazz. Beneath these surface references are deeper affinities to tradition: Taudevin evokes agit-prop theatre in her format (the monologue and music, the explicitly political content); Runcie goes for a 1950s atmosphere and detective story reveal.

Equally, one play does not comment on the other – both imply a spirit of nostalgia, even ironic distance – unless Taudevin is making a direct appeal for more terrorist actions on businesses. And neither work is unnecessary, or unwanted. They provide their audiences with a level of emotional release, either into fantasies of rebellion, or a time long ago when even murder could be solved by goodwill and British determination.

Neither play deserves to be condemned: indeed, Taudevin is clearly striving towards an emotional theatre that places it at the heart of public debate about the tyranny of big corporations and broken idealism. But my problem may lie at the heart of contemporary theatre itself: does it know what it is supposed to do any more? Is it merely entertainment? Should it have a serious intention? And since the past bears so heavily on the present, is there any way forward for the original voice?

Of course, the real philosophical action these days isn't in theatre: it’s in the ceaseless debate about whether Miley ought to keep her pants on when she is swinging about in pop videos. I've had a crack at that one: unfortunately, my sarcastic response was written before Miley mocked Sinead O’Connor’s mental health. It’s a measure of how alienated the discussion has become, that it didn't immediately end there: whatever the importance of Miley’s conduct on a symbolic level (either liberation or degradation), the moment it became personal, a far more crucial issue was at stake. Real human beings were being insulted. Even if Sinead had set herself up as a symbol (of old school feminist dignity), she did not deserve to have her mental illness held up to ridicule.

Theatre, possibly, has represented both the heights of human creativity and the potential for public discourse to be given an imaginative, artistic forum. Blow Off is striving towards this aim, Jazz Club Murders doesn't seem to be – its morality is so obvious as to be beneath discussion. But there are comparisons between the two that are intriguing. Both lean on music to provide an emotional depth to the script. Both rely heavily on the main character, and a single, determined narrative voice. The chasm between their styles occludes a set of shared assumptions, and both are concerned with building a contemporary theatre through the debris of the past.

I flicker through my thoughts, determining nothing: which play is better? It depends on the demands of the audience. 

The Jazz Club Murder

It is sadly appropriate that I am reading the assembled criticism of Kenneth Tynan in the same week that I have seen Oran Mor’s The Jazz Club Murder.  While the Murder has the well-mannered aplomb of a mildly ironic drawing room drama – despite the setting, the detective-vicar never loses his Oxbridge charm – it subscribes to a set of values that would, no doubt, have had Tynan plotting to become the first man to say ‘fuck’ on the BBC, thereby setting a bomb under post-war civil society.

There’s some fine trumpet-playing by George Drennan – a man given to whipping out his horn at any excuse, even when playing a pantomime baddie, a winning performance from Paul Dodds as the heroic priest, and even a sexy dual turn from Frances Thorburn, who plays the seductive American singer and teasing society mademoiselle with equal restraint. But from its structure  - mild investigation followed by almost dramatic revelation – to its underlying morality (vengeance corrupts the soul), Mr Runcie’s drama is comfortingly predictable.

To complain that it sentimentalises an era – the 1950s – is to miss the point: the drama depends on stock characters rubbing along happily. The murderer is barely glimpsed before the final scenes – preventing any possible shock or sympathy – allowing the play’s wit to rest on the vicar’s flirtations with the toothsome twosome. Undeniably, it goes for the easy path to the audience’s affection – the packed crowd laughed willingly at the strained jokes stolen from Mae West.

Yet the light irony it beings to its depiction of a London of jazz clubs and underworld villainy lacks any satirical bite: Murder is an entertainment, a light one, that ignores the tragedy of an innocent killed before her time or the journey of her killer from loyal son to condemned criminal. It signifies a past long forgotten, evoking the era more through the mannered conversations and the simplicities of plot: it rarely threatens to reveal the depth of the characters, even preferring to have fun at the expense of the cast’s changes of role.

Moments of fun abound – aside from an unfortunate misuse of the word ‘ball’ (is the jazz singer really asking the vicar to have sex with her, because that is what the word means. Ask Little Richard…), and the repeated phrase ‘catching the milk train back to Cambridge’ which sounds suspiciously like a euphemism after the heroic vicar has spent the evening with two different women – there’s a lively humour in the vicar’s commentary on events. Slight missteps in tone – some of the jazz numbers have a little too much of the Whitney Houston hysteria to convince – are quickly absorbed into a straightforward, facile plot. Drennan, although given little to do, is always charismatic: Doodad wins over the audience and acts both as plucky protagonist and obedient narrator.

But even by PPP’s conservative standards, Murder is whimsical. It seems churlish to attack so slight a piece of theatre (and this is neither tragedy, nor drama), especially since it aims to entertain. Yet Tynan’s ghost haunts me: like Aristotle, like Plato, he recognised the power of theatre as a moral force, as disruptive, as challenging. There’s nothing wrong with The Jazz Club Murder, beyond the occasional dodgy accent. But it isn’t enough.