Never mind 1984: Michael Billington's top five theatrical dystopias | Theatre
Theatre This article is more than 10 years oldNever mind 1984: Michael Billington's top five theatrical dystopias
This article is more than 10 years oldDystopian plays are rare, but from Samuel Beckett's Happy Days to Caryl Churchill's Far Away, there have been some standout original stage creationsThe arrival of 1984 at the Almeida theatre in London has prompted critics to resurrect the word "dystopia". But what does it actually mean? The term was coined by John Stuart Mill in 1868 and refers to an anti-utopia: in other words, a projection of present-day tendencies into a catastrophic or apocalyptic future.
As an idea, it's long been popular in fiction: apart from Orwell's 1984, there's Huxley's Brave New World, Golding's The Lord of the Flies, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But dystopian drama is much rarer, possibly because the form has echoes of science fiction, and theatre's strength lies less in futuristic visions than fidelity to the here and now.
Nonetheless, I've come up with a list of five top dystopian plays, excluding adaptations, and presented in reverse chronological order, to which you are invited to contribute …
1. Far Away (2000) by Caryl Churchill
Churchill's 50-minute play certainly lodges in the memory. It also exemplifies the problems of dystopian drama. It starts chillingly, in a recognisable rural world, where a young girl questions her aunt about things she has seen at night: men arriving in lorries and being beaten up by her uncle and bundled into sheds. One shudders when the aunt tells the child: "You're part of a big movement now to make things better". By the end, Churchill envisions a world that has descended into cosmic chaos. But even if there is something abrupt about the transition from political brutalism to natural disorder, the play defiantly endures.
2. Henceforward … (1987) by Alan Ayckbourn
Ayckbourn has always been fascinated by science fiction and social breakdown. He brings the two together in this rarely seen but darkly dystopian comedy. It's partly about a hermetic composer who lives in a computerised bunker and is serviced by a female android. It's also about isolated individuals trying to create art in a society where the streets are policed by vigilante mobs. If it works, and I think it does, it's because Ayckbourn himself is both a techno-junkie and intelligent enough to see the dangers of a world in which we start to prefer rational machines to to irrational human beings.
3. The War Plays (1985) by Edward Bond
I admit that the Bond I honour most is that of the masterly early plays: The Pope's Wedding, Saved, Bingo. But even if in his later years Bond seems to start from a position of dogmatic certainty, he retains his ability to create durable images. In The War Plays, a trilogy scarcely seen in Britain but revered in France, Bond posits a postnuclear future that produces unforgettable moments. In Red, Black and Ignorant, a ghostly figure, burned in the womb, attacks a bomb-crazed civilisation, while in The Tin Can People, survivors of a war rediscover the means of killing. Disquieting, dystopian and too important to be ignored.
4. Happy Days (1960) by Samuel Beckett
Is Beckett's play dystopian? I don't see what else it can be. A critic has made the distinction between a dystopia that is "a constructed negative place" and one that is "a destroyed place with little or no formal structure".
Nineteen eighty-four would be an example of the former; Happy Days of the latter. After all, the image of the progressively entombed Winnie and her helpless husband, Willie, suggests some form of cataclysm has taken place.
Beckett is too shrewd to be specific, but Fiona Shaw's Winnie at the National in 2007 seemed to occupy a postnuclear landscape, and while watching Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic, it struck me, as the shale cascaded down on her, that she was the victim of, among other things, profound climate change.
5. RUR (1920) by Karel Čapek
I've never seen this once-famous play by the Czech writer Čapek, but it clearly deserves its place in any list of dystopian plays. For a start, it introduced the word "robot" into the language (the acronymic title stands for Rossum's Universal Robots). But it's also the grandaddy of all those plays, films and novels that raise concerns about the power of artificial intelligence.
Set on "a remote island in the future", it shows the robots killing all but one of the human beings and then, desperate to reproduce themselves, discovering that they have the power to love and procreate. Wouldn't it be fascinating, just for once, to have a look at this pioneering dystopian piece?
Michael Billington reviews 1984 at the Almeida
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