Cultural Impact as a Systemic Issue in the Theater

THE QUOTATION IN THE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER is taken from the British playwright Simon Stephens in an interview with Brian Logan in the Guardian in 2007. Stephens has been enjoying a good deal of success in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere in the past few years, and the statement concerns his attempts to get his play about a British subject, the London bombings of 7 July 2005, onto a British stage. Pornographie (Pornography, 2007) was commissioned by the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg and coproduced between Hamburg and Hanover for the Theaterformen festival in the summer of 2007 under the direction of Sebastian Nübling. In the interview with Logan, Stephens acknowledged that writing for the German theater gave him the freedom to construct a play whose material was too raw for the UK, and then went on to comment about the problems he has faced in finding a theater willing to produce the play in the country where it is set. While the text was given a public reading on 12 February 2007 by the Paines Plough company at the Trafalgar Studios in London, it was seen in Britain for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in summer 2008 (premiere 3 August 2008 at the Traverse Theatre) before transferring to the Birmingham Rep in early September for a seventeen-day run.

In Germany, the world premiere on 15 June 2007 in Hanover presented a tour de force of Nübling’s directorial talent, and the production was duly invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen, the festival of the best productions in German in any one theater season. Pornographie was also staged in the 2007/08 season by the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the Staatstheater Nuremberg, and the Theater am Alten Markt, Bielefeld; that is, the play has not only enjoyed a production on one of the most important stages in Berlin, it has also made it to the more provincial theater of Bielefeld. While we can only speculate on precisely what it was about Stephens’s dramaturgy that provoked rejection in summer 2007, it is likely that its characterless form may have daunted prospective British producers.