Clickbait Dramaturgy: Milly Thomas and Holy Race Roughton @ Theatre503

Clickbait by Milly Thomas
Theatre503, 
The Latchmere, 
503 Battersea Park Road, London SW11 3BW

Tuesday 19th January – Saturday 13th February 2016

Clickbait is a darkly comic new play about society’s attitude to porn and the women who make it for themselves. 

From the exciting all female writer/director team behind A First World Problem (Milly Thomas and Holly Race Roughan) comes this blistering study of how pornography is
changing women's relationship to sex in the 21st Century.

What was the inspiration for Clickbait? 

Milly - I first got the idea after reading a news story a while back about a young girl who had gone on holiday to Magaluf and performed a sex act in a club in exchange for a holiday. I remember being particularly shocked at the bile that ensued and for some reason the story wouldn’t let me go. 

It made me look at myself and my sisters and friends and wonder about us all. About what we’d do. I had a conversation with Holly that turned into a first draft which then grew and turned into a story about sisters, the porn industry, the world of business, the internet and sexual politics. 

How did you go about gathering the team for it? 

Holly - Milly and I worked on her debut play A First World Problem last year at 503. This production was a turning point for me as a young director as it was the beginning of a real sense of who I was as an artist and having an exhilarating clarity on my aesthetic taste. 

I had a great team of peers working on this show, including the actor / movement director Katie Payne, JMK Award designer Frankie Bradshaw and the brilliant recently graduated producer Jessica Campbell. After Milly sent me the first draft of Clickbait earlier this year I was determined to reassemble this inspired female team. Milly’s writing to me is pulsing, youthful and often outrageous, and it demands bold decisions from its Creatives. I can’t wait to see what we all make together. It’s a generation Y play with a generation Y team!

What made you decide on Theatre 503? 

Holly - Theatre503 has supported Milly and I as a pairing for the last two years. It has become a safe space for us to make bold choices, and to develop as artists. Having been Assistant Director / Associate Director at the NT, RSC, and Royal Court in the past two years, there is a feeling of coming home to be back on the fringe, but in such a well-supported environment. The artistic team at this venue have such integrity and a rigorous attitude to new writing. Theatre503 has had a great year, and we are excited to be kicking off 2016 for them.


Was your process typical in of the way you develop a play? 

Milly - I would say this has been particularly unusual process in that while it is subject matter I’m chomping at the bit to talk about, this structure is somewhat of a departure for me, but feels right for this. Holly is an excellent dramaturg and I always leave sessions feeling fired and wanting to shake it all up. It’s been exciting to watch it grow into something that Holly and I proud of that we can’t wait to share.  

What do you hope the audience will experience? 

Milly - I honestly don’t know – but I hope whatever they do experience gets them talking about how they feel. Auditioning for Clickbait was fascinating as we had so many people come in with such extreme reactions to the script which was really exciting. Some people said they felt empowered, others said they felt horrified, so I’m really looking forward to seeing people’s reactions and hearing the discussions. 

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

Milly - I feel very lucky to be a playwright right now. There is a current wave of voices that make me so excited about British theatre. It feels pressing and immediate and it gets people talking. Writing is my way of documenting the world as I see it and my way of having discussions with people and making some noise. The creatives on our team, Holly, Jessica Campbell, Jack Sain, Katie Payne and Frankie Bradshaw are all young people with vision and guts. I’m thrilled to be working with them all again and getting messy. 

Are there any other questions that might help me to understand the meaning of dramaturgy in your work? 

Holly - Dramaturgy to me is a shape-shifting role - it comes in so many different forms and is completely different for each writer I work with. Sometimes it is just about reading the near finished draft and asking the right questions, and at other times it has taken me and the playwright days of knocking the play around with actors in a room.

Milly and I have a very personal and practical dramaturgical relationship, we tend to roll our sleeves up very early on in a process and discuss what Milly wants the play to be, and we go through many drafts. Scenes get cut and then added back, the play goes through different structures, we discuss the characters, their relationships, then we cut characters, add new characters, and we have been known to change whole sub plots. It is extremely collaborative and intensive process, but thrilling. It is underpinned by a long friendship that allows a shorthand and trust between us. 

Ban This Filth: A Male Feminist Writes

To be sure, the feminist movement is a pluralistic entity, full of competing strands that share only a concern with the status of women and a sense that things aren't quite right. There's the Dworkin/MacKinnon school, which identifies pornography with sexual assault; there's the followers of Camille Paglia with their sex-positive emphasis; Third Wave Feminists; post-feminists, body essentialists, lesbian separatists...

In all of this, only the male feminists have a single, simple role. They need to shut the fuck up and listen.

By this standard, Ban This Filth is an abject failure. Not only does it provide an example of a male artist parading his wounds at the hands of patriarchy, it picks out one writer (Dworkin) and makes her the epitome of feminist wisdom. Never mind that her work is problematic - for all her talk of male violence, her work is full of brutal imagery and aggression, or that her anti-pornography laws led to an urban myth that her own writings were banned by them - Dworkin is only a single voice, and is a divisive figure.

Her final years were marred by a controversy that is tragic and depressing: when Bissett calls her an Old Testament-style prophet, he could add that these prophets were, generally, unpopular during their lives. Her later exile may be seen as part of a failure on the part of society to accommodate her opinions.

Although the episodes from Bissett's life are familiar and funny, they work to marginalise the voices he supposedly supports. He makes a point of how women have supported him in his career, before writing and performing a one-man show that is all about him. Sure, he challenges himself, noting that his passion for Dworkin can be seen as a simplistic response to liberal guilt. Sure, he admits that he is climbing on the backs of women, but he makes that fundamental liberal mistake.

Expressing an opinion is not the same thing as working on strategies towards liberation.

Bissett can bang on about how bad he feels for looking at naughty videos - he can even offer to strip off on stage (thereby experiencing vulnerability). He can champion Dworkin, an extreme voice who lived an oppression far worse than getting shouted at for dancing funny in a Falkirk nightclub. He can ignore the serious critique of Dworkin by Nussbaum, allowing her a philosophical free pass (and making her sound like a radical feminist beat poet when he reads from her writings).

None of these things actually change the systematic oppression of women, or do anything about the pornographic industry.

(Note: this does not reflect my complete opinions on Ban This Filth).

Okay, that's enough on Wonderland

An image that does not appear in this version of the show.

Wonderland didn't go far enough. That isn't to say that a story about violent pornography, the destruction of the heteronormative relationship through the accessibility of on-line dark fantasies and the degradation of sexuality into a mere commodity is in some way mundane. But the focus on a particular sort of pornography and eroticism, ironically, softened the blow.

Although Wonderland - it shares a title with a film about the association of the pornographic and the criminal - sets out to unravel the sickening complicity of polite society and its darker underbelly, it descends too quickly into the world of violent, misogynist pornography. The allusions to Alice in Wonderland suggest a sort of "seduction of the innocent" but this Alice is already corrupted by the start of the play. She may act the innocent at the start, but she is merely posing, all the better to fulfil the pornographic fantasy.

The simple narrative of a woman losing her autonomy through  performing in pornography is complicated by Alice's own ability to switch between the compliant and the determined.  Although there is a moment when she resists the pornographers - sincerely, not in character - the switches between her porn persona, Heidi, and her true self, Alice, prevent the moral as being simply a condemnation of exploitation.

Then there is the sort of pornography being represented in Wonderland. It is not, as many reviews have stated, "hardcore pornography". It  is violent, hardcore pornography. Wonderland isn't making a point about the general availability of sexually explicit content. It is looking at a very specific strand of pornography.

Vanishing Point reduce the problem of on-line pornography into a matter of content, not its very existence. The tension between the complexity of Alice's story and the specificity of the pornography undermines Wonderland's immediacy. It is more philosophically satisfying - Wonderland is far from an angry polemic on exploitation - but lacks a visceral attack.

The danger presented in Wonderland is that certain men are getting their sadistic kicks through the proliferation of hardcore, violent film. Instead of an everyman character being seduced into nastier eroticism, the male starts off with some fairly vicious kinks: he tries to persuade a cam woman to abuse herself, has a thing for young girls. That the woman on cam draws a line under his antics is a forceful reminder that, actually, such behaviour is extreme. By the time he is watching a video of a woman being murdered (which the play makes clear is a performance and not a snuff film), he has already embraced his desires as liberating.

He's effectively insane by the time he is running about and cleaning his house in paroxyms of guilt.

By making the villain so specific, Vanishing Point allow the audience an escape. Lenton is clearly not interested in bland generalisations - the fuss made about the production at the Edinburgh International Festival implied that this was a scathing analysis of hardcore pornography's impact on society. It also suggested that the play had gone too far, and become as exploitative as the material it aimed to condemn. Neither of these are true. The appearance of the actors for the traditional bow reveals how far this show is from torture pornography. The blood can be wiped away.

Instead, Wonderland is about a specific perversion, one still generally regarded as beyond the pale. When The Skinny is full of articles about how pornography is okay, really, Lenton does well to find a subject that remains controversial: yet ultimately, few people will be challenged by the idea that being sexually aroused by violence against women is a bad thing.

However, Lenton does hint at a broader application. The dream-like sequences, familiar from Vanishing Point's last production, Saturday Night, encourage a more metaphorical interpretation. If the torture porn is a symbol for violence or pornography in general, the play is making a powerful point, examining how pornography can alienate. Yet, ironically, the class of the characters becomes important: it's a nice middle-class couple getting screwed by the internet. Again like Saturday Night, Vanishing Point are preoccupied with the horror beneath the facade of respectability.

It also becomes a man's story. Ultimately, Alice walks away, and the lingering image is of the consumer, covered in blood - very deliberately, Alice wipes the blood from her face in her "exit interview," designed to prove that the film she has been making is fictional. Vanishing Point have done such a good job of mixing fantasy and reality by this point, it is not clear whether the blood she wipes away is meant to be real. But the story of Alice is submerged beneath John's.

Vanishing Point are a brilliant company: Kai Fisher's design is superb, allowing the video footage to dominate the domestic bliss the straight couple have built in the form of a comfortable sitting room; Jenny Hulse is incredible as Alice, flickering between her pornographic role as a victim and an assertive young woman with ease. The cast is strong throughout and Lenton's ability to introduce a surreal visual sequence is deployed to disorientating effect.

But this brilliance can obscure the seriousness of the subject. An accomplished drama can hide the viciousness of its content beneath the veneer of theatrical intelligence. Wonderland tells one story - and rejects telling a great many others - with theatrical verve and philosophical integrity. But as a meditation on the power imbalance within pornography, it is trumped by Pamela Carter's short, Meat, which manages, in twenty minutes and a final wry smile, to deconstruct the acceptability of pornography in a similar heteronormative couple's life.

Wonderland: Take One

Vanishing Point do not shy away from difficult content: their reboot of The Beggar's Opera happily followed the original's vision of a world where police and thieves are essentially two extremes of the same system of exploitation, and Saturday Night opened up the precipice beneath the superficial safety of middle-class luxury. Wonderland grabs a few themes from Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, corrupting innocence and disappearing down a rabbit hole that is populated by surreal symbols of a world gone bad.

Director Matthew Lenton attacks on two fronts: the induction of Alice into violent pornography and the seduction of a husband by the increasingly brutal opportunities of the internet. The message, voiced by a mysterious, grubby character who exists only in the husband's mind, is that a darker, shinier reality exists beneath the bland surface of domesticity: both Alice and the husband - possibly her father - descend only to emerge covered in blood and guilt.

From the start, Alice is not presented as an innocent: her audition scene is a  clever mix of her sincerely nervous introduction and uncomfortably believable, but ultimately performed, terror. Her appearance, enlarged, brutalised and frightened, on the video screens at the back of Kai Fisher's brilliantly designed set, forces awkward questions about the reality of violence mediated through the industry that manufactures sexual fantasy. Yet in her final scene, Alice wipes away the blood and affirms that she made the film willingly and, indeed, she'll be back again tomorrow for some more.

It's in the husband's story that Lenton is more explicit about the consequences of violent pornography. If the actors aren't really injured, the husband has been sucked into expressing his  most brutal impulses. His final scene, sat on the couch with his wife, flicking through holiday brochures while covered in blood, is a bleak image of life on the home front. Having been initiated into the darker world, he can never quite return to the cosy domesticity of the first scene.

Wonderland is ambivalent about the cost of violent pornography - the creators are not seen as victims, only the consumers: the final scene suggests that while Alice's path is pretty miserable, it isn't as damning as the husband's fate. Yet the suggestion by the film-maker that tomorrow's filming will be 'spectacular' holds a sense of threat: lacking either a clear condemnation or sense of redemption, Wonderland refuses to judge, becoming all the more unsettling.


Tramway, until 29 September 2012

Wonderland: Porn and Parenthood

Over the past twenty years, partially thanks to the internet but also due to a softening of the laws around the representation of sexual imagery, pornography has become a big industry. Rumours abound that it has a larger income than Hollywood cinema, and art responding to pornographic's social impact has proliferated: Grant Morrison's The Filth is a bold attempt to innoculate the reader against the horror through the administration of a graphic novel, while Tumbling Doll of Flesh is a harrowing introduction to the extremities of  torture porn.

Wonderland engages with pornography's darker corners. A father and his daughter, in different ways, are drawn into the twilight world of violent, on-line pornography. Both are damaged - the daughter is rejected by her family, the father is alienated from his rather comfortable life - and Vanishing Point's dissection of the hidden brutality in sexual desire is unsettlingly ambiguous.

The father's story - he begins as a comfortable middle-class husband, at home with his wife, watching the television and enjoying domestic bliss - is the more forceful. Haunted by a grubby ghost, who insists that his desires are healthy, he gradually chases rougher imagery: an early encounter with a video-cam woman is replaced by full-blown torture and murder movies. The careful application of symbolic drama - it seems as if the father has committed a real murder - emphasises his brutalisation and his scene with the cam actress follows his decline from vaguely horny guy to vicious thug.

Director Matthew Lenton sketches out the reach of violent pornography: from the obscure location of the filming - probably somewhere in central Europe - to the polite middle-class homes of Scotland, it impacts on lives, alienating the husband from the wife, the child from the parents. Despite the flashes of nudity - male and female - it veers away from sensationalism, almost dour in its presentation of the filming. Lenton seems fascinated by the emotional consequences of watching violent pornography, illustrating the fragmented fantasies through a late intrusion of surreal visual theatre.

The almost casual finale shows the father, covered in blood and having lugged a suitcase across his front-room, attempting to reintegrate into his cosy life. Yet the ghost is now sat on the sofa, having previously been consigned to the outside, and the father's awkward gestures give the lie to the scene of marital unity. An earlier episode, when he frantically cleaned after a bout of on-line dirty action, pictured his guilt in a simple tableau. Lenton's awareness of the power of images - Kai Fisher's set allows the framing of certain moments as iconic tableaux- drives his theatrical imagination and doubtless informs his recognition of how watching violent pornography can corrupt.

It's perhaps telling that Wonderland does not follow many of the predictable narratives associated with pornography: the argument that it can liberating never comes up (interestingly, a moment of real danger during the filming reveals that the actors have no safe word, a commonplace in actual BDSM; the pretend pornography is potentially more dangerous than actual sex), the economic pressures that force women into pornography or prostitution are not explored, except in a brief, throwaway line. There's no attempt to identify pornograpy within a broader context of exploitation.

Since the characters are all unreliable witnesses - the father is a pervert, his taste for violent sex hinting at paedophilia, the ghost reckons himself to be some kind of Sadean messiah but looks like a tramp, the film-maker is a cynical capitalist, the daughter switches between her Alice and Heidi (her porn name) - and Lenton is constantly switching between the fantastic and the realistic, any grand statement would be as compromised as a man caught on the naughty pages by his mother-in-law.