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Animal

by Kay Adshead
directed by lisa goldman
designed by soutra gilmour
lighting design by chahine yavroyan
sound design by matt mckenzie
cctv by owen oppenheimer
cast: fiona bell, mark monero, Richard Owens

“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