“Animal stands comparison with
the finest of 20th-century plays….Goldman’s
Red Room company, which has produced this presentation…
once again confirms its reputation for both theatrical and
political outspokenness. Adshead makes you want to take
to the streets while you still can.” - Financial Times
(****)
Intro to play text
We are living through extraordinary times. Earlier in 2003,
two million people marched in London against a Labour government’s
drive to barbaric war. There was direct action at army bases,
school strikes and widespread spontaneous acts of protest.
There is a growing public disillusionment with British institutions
and a demand for greater levels of democracy and accountability.
Animal was commissioned and written before this explosion
of dissent, but in the parallel universe of the play an
ongoing war is taking place, against which there is a wave
of mass protest. Charting the relationship between these
protests and an experiment on a man expressing anti-social
behavior, the play raises vital questions for our time.
What constitutes anti-social behavior in an inhumane society?
Should anger be socially managed/controlled or is it a vital
component of our humanity?
  Animal
centres on an anger management drug trial (with military interests)
and raises fundamental questions about the ethics of human
experiment. Most human vivisection takes place in the “third
world” or on vulnerable people, such as Pongo, in the
West. The poor, the mentally ill, prisoners and soldiers top
the list of “volunteers” in poorly regulated drug
trials. The recent horror stories from Nigeria and Thailand
clearly expose the inhumanity of this “scientific progress”
- children given placebos are allowed to die. In Animal “treatment”
turns to torture. Many treatments in the West are, in a sense,
pharmaceutical experiments. For example, Gulf War syndrome
is a side effect of a medical try out; anti-depressants such
as Prozac and Zoloft, (the long-term effects of which are
completely unknown), are prescribed on a mass scale to a trusting
public.
The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1992 prohibits the development
of any chemical for warfare that can “cause death,
temporary incapacitation or permanent harm.” Shockingly,
it is permissible for a state to develop and use such chemical
weapons on its own population - for riot control or crowd
dispersal for example. With the war on terrorism, and the
inevitable occupations, the lines between warfare and suppression
of a states dissenting population may become blurred. The
idea of non-lethal weapons (an oxymoron) is gathering support
amongst politicians and the military. It is also an emerging
market for the pharmaceutical companies who seem quite content
for their products to be weaponised. Many of the calmatives
currently in development are derived from the same chemicals
as Prozac and Zoloft, others from Valium. Ketamine (ecstasy)
and rohypnol (date rape drug) are also being used.
How should theatre respond to such global developments
and to the scale of political events since September 11th?
There has certainly been a resurgence of art activism on
the street and perhaps because truth is at such a premium,
a renewed interest in factual interrogation. The most artistically
exciting explorations at present seem to be participatory/democratic
in form or, rarely, like Animal, wild epic dreams which
seeks to free the imagination against the status quo and
offer a profound ethical questioning of humanity at a crossroads.
Perhaps we are moving, finally, into a new age of public
theatre.
Kay Adshead is a poet, a visionary. In Animal, the government
closes the park to anti-war protesters; there are school
strikes; calmatives are being developed; a man kills a swan
for food. In 2003 these unlikely combinations of events
have all been headline news. It is this struggle to see
patterns in the chaos of our world that makes Kay’s
work so vivid. Animal is set in an alternative reality,
but it is clearly about our reality now. It appears far
fetched, one version of events, but it is also actually
happening. It is an extraordinary and complex work which
raises disturbing philosophical questions about how we move
forward into the new Millennium. Will we be Animals or Angels?
Lisa Goldman – Artistic Director the Red Room
August 2003
“Adshead writes with immense imaginative
empathy…..superbly vivid… wickedly laced with
humour… evocative images…. committed cast…..
this is a refreshingly alive and thought provoking piece
of political drama.” - The Stage
“Kay Adshead’s new play, could
hardly be more timely…. provocative stuff given a
brooding production by Lisa Goldman….there are bold,
dreamlike images, memorably illustrating Adshead’s
vision of a state that tranquillises its own citizens rather
than let them express their rage.” - Time Out
“Disturbing… sinister… subtle
and well written…” - The Times
Animal opened at Soho Theatre and Writers Centre in September
2003 before touring nationally.
Photography Manuel Harlan
Photomontage by Jai Redman at UHC
Animal is published by Oberon
Books ISBN 1840023937 or you can contact
us for a copy.
A concise education pack is also available which identifies
three of the major themes from the play which have links with
the National Curriculum for PSHE and Citizenship and offers
teachers resources and activities for exploring these themes
with their classes in an innovative and challenging way. Links
to specific units in the Key Stages 3 and 4 curriculum are
highlighted at the beginning of each section.
The themes dealt with in the pack are:
Protest
Human Experimentation
Anti-social Behaviour
|
