By Mark Ravenhill
The creative writing faculty of America's Virginia Tech university has new guidelines for teachers to use when assessing students' work.
"Is the work expressly violent?" they are asked. "Do characters respond to everyday events with a level of violence one does not expect or may find even frightening? Is violence at the centre of everything the student has written?"
Similarly, in colleges all across the US, teachers are now asked to inspect creative writing for violent tendencies and to guide authors of such work toward counseling and even medication.
It seems a strange response to creative work, especially if one considers contemporary British theater. From the linguistic and emotional menace of Harold Pinter's first plays to the infamous baby-stoning in Edward Bond's Saved, from the anal rape in Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain to a soldier eating a journalist's eyes in Sarah Kane's Blasted, violence has often been a dominant theme on stage.
"Yes, I thought they were good," I overheard a member of the audience say, as she left my play cycle Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. "But that poor playwright. He must be so unhappy to write about such a horrible world."
I laughed about this later with the actors, who reassured me that I am an averagely balanced and reasonably happy person.
Yet many of the key moments of the plays are undoubtedly violent and upsetting: a woman turned feral by her grief, a headless soldier visiting a child's bedroom, an interrogation that involves knee-capping and branding, a soldier cutting out a detainee's tongue.
If written in a Virginia Tech class, these scenes might lead to me being counseled, or perhaps medicated. But these violent plays are an honest attempt to express the brutality of our "clash of civilizations", of "jihad" and "the war on terror", the white noise that fills our everyday lives, driving us to act in irrational, cruel ways. There may be an element of the personal, even the therapeutic in this writing, but they are, above all, political plays.
I once taught playwriting for a semester in a Californian university. There was a bland pleasantness to the place; students delivered polite chatter-on-the-page as their playwriting assignments.
A student with more abrasive work would have been welcome in my class. But maybe that would have been wrong.
