Mark Ravenhill

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Mark Ravenhill (born June 7, 1966) is one of England's leading contemporary playwrights. He is primarily known for his 1996 play Shopping and Fucking.

Contents

[edit] Plays

Ravenhill exploded onto the London stage with his play Shopping and Fucking in the late 1990s, joining the already loud crowd of young, British writers who were later grouped under the term In-Yer-Face Theatre. The combination of seedy subject matter (including simulated sex and drug-taking) with an utterly contemporary attitude and a black sense of humour and morality made Shopping and Fucking an instant smash, which toured internationally.

His more recent works since haven't spread as widely, but he has continued to intrigue. Handbag combines a modern story of gay and lesbian marketing executives attempting to have a child with a prequel to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest which explains how the baby was lost in the handbag in the first place. Some Explicit Polaroids tells of a recently-released prisoner, who discovers the extremist ideological politics that drove him to his crime no longer make sense in the increasingly commercial world of New Labour Britain. Mother Clap's Molly House deals with the relationship between alternate sexualities and commerce, in both an historical and modern context.

He was also one of four writers to contribute to Sleeping Around, a modern variation on Schnitzler's La Ronde which, again, addresses the relationship between personal desires and commerce. He has written two plays for young people, Totally Over You (2003) and Citizenship (2005). Both plays were performed by school groups, and the latter was revived for a professional production at the National Theatre in 2006.

2005's Product was a satirical monologue, performed by Ravenhill himself, in which a film director talks a young starlet through an utterly preposterous movie project, in which she falls in love with an al-qaeda suicide bomber. The play satirises the language of film production and our attitudes to terrorism, Islam, and sex.

In 2006, he had three plays premier in London:

  • The Cut at the Donmar Warehouse, starring Ian McKellen is a dystopian play set in a state organised around the administration of 'the cut', an unspecified surgical procedure which seems to be part-torture, part-liberation. The play comprises three scenes: in the first an administrator of the cut debates with a young student who longs to receive the procedure; in the second, the administrator spends a soulless evening with his wife, disturbed at rumours of his son's involvement in politics; in the third, the administrator is now in prison, and his son is part of the new government. The tone is Pinteresque, unsettling and very funny. The play deepens Ravenhill's previously latent themes of death and revolution.
  • Pool (No Water) was performed by acclaimed theatre company Frantic Assembly at the Lyric Hammersmith and , and was scripted in conjunction with three other writers, about celebrity stardom, art, and jealousy. It toured throughout the United Kingdom, including the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, Contact Theatre, Manchester, and elsewhere.

In January and February 2007 he performed his monologue Product in a double bill with Stewart Lee at the Bush Theatre.

[edit] Pool (No Water)

Keir Charles, Cait Davis, Leah Muller and Mark Rice-Oxley play the four artists trapped in their jealousy to the old friend who they shared so much with in their youth, but who has now streaked ahead of them in success and wealth. The story focuses on the underlying jealousy of the situation, we also discover that several other members of the original gang have died or are terminally ill. One of the four even goes as far to project the blame for the death of their friend Sally on to the successful acquaintance.

Shortly after the group's arrival their friend suffers a head injury. Once their friend is lying in hospital slowly recovering from her injuries the group see the opportunity to create their own work of art and a chance for them to make their own mark in the art world.

The production moves slickly from scene to scene with the characters telling the story in short bursts of independent dialogue at a sometimes frenetic pace, with monologues exchanged like a baton passed between them. The story progresses over the two months their friend is injured as the protagonists keep vigil at the hospital and work on their art. The production includes a fair bit of nudity and strong language.

All four leads are strongly convincing as the different artists, each a unique character, but all of them speaking truthfully of the envy that everybody feels when somebody they were once close to achieves success, while your own life appears to be stuck in first gear.

Although the four leads are on stage throughout they each exist in their own private worlds, the dialogue although independent remains part of the wider narrative but there is no interaction between the characters speech. However the fast and precise choreography of movement between the cast and the pace that never slackens make Pool (No Water) a hugely enjoyable production.

[edit] Possible antecedents or influences

[edit] External links

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