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English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
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Terror Alert The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism. Translated by Sasha Dugdale. Nick Hern Books, 2003. 60 pp. £ 7.99 By Kevin Ewert, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford The phrase “cycle of violence” has perhaps become slightly overworked and underanalysed in our world political vocabulary, and its application to current events can simply serve to mask another cycle – a cycle of response to cycles of violence that moves from outrage to complacency to fresh outrage to further complacency. There is an implied determinism to any cycle, and there is also something strangely reassuring in the pattern – in a cycle, even of violence, you at least know where you are, as an action becomes a cause that leads to an effect which becomes the new cause for its own effect, etc. Here in the US at the time of writing we are in our own little cycle, one that has something to do with violence. When those that are in the know pick up on a heightened level of threatening “chatter” in the air, we move to a heightened terror alert level. We live for a time under a new color code until, presumably, either something happens or the threat for some reason is diminished. At the time of writing, it appears that this time nothing has happened – the airplane hasn’t been crashed, the nuclear facility hasn’t been attacked, the biological agents haven’t been released. The bomb hasn’t gone off. Or has it? Our Office of Homeland Security is understandably nervous about raising the national terror alert level; after all, they don’t want to become the office that every now and then cries “wolf.” We might also assume that they would understand the contradiction in telling the public that we just have to get used to being vigilant. Of course, no one actually wants a catastrophe so that some terror color scheme might be well justified. But, we might be kidding ourselves that the damage hasn’t always already been done, however the colors run. If not now, when? If not here, where? One of the many disconcerting things about the play Terrorism by Russia’s Presnyakov Brothers is the way it explodes the notion of a knowable, patterned cycle of violence its title may suggest, even as it creates its own La Ronde-style sequence of interlinking scenes. The play begins with its clearest and most recognizable dramatization of a terrorist threat: an airport has been shut down while authorities check suspicious bags left unattended on the runway (in the London production, audience members weren’t allowed to take their seats and had to stand along with the actors until the end of this scene). As it turns out, those particular suitcases were empty. The bomb didn’t go off – at least, not then, not there. But the Presnyakov Brothers’ play uses this incident as a springboard to considerations beyond direct cause and effect: if the bomb doesn’t go off here, then when and where might we witness the promised explosion? Surely, the play seems to suggest, all that fear and mistrust doesn’t just go to waste. Waiting on the tarmac in the first scene of Terrorism, nameless passengers contemplating suspicious suitcases conclude that things have already blown up, at least “inside”:
While this may be a simple enough point – how many times have we been told since 9/11 that everything is different now? – it is the exact nature of that nasty cold little draught, the explosion away from the bombs, that the rest of the play explores. What is most striking about the play is the casual, rather than causal, way this is done. While the airplanes are grounded, a woman (whose husband is supposed to be flying out of town on business) conducts a joyless affair with a disconcertingly philosophical lover. It’s a wickedly funny scene, skipping from disputations on dirty socks to S&M to how even bad sex is good for getting up an appetite. Here the worry and panic appears in a bizarre mid-coital riff on corporeal dissolution:
The only defense against this bodily disaster caused by terrorist cells – and organs – is not Viagra but memory: “my memory keeps me going.” The memory is, apparently, of pre-terrorist times, and it is a memory that the lover uses now but knows will soon be spent:
While this is a very intimate not to mention surreal vision of the body politic under attack, the notion of memory being used to combat terrorism is quite a potent one. But even with all this philosophy in the bedroom, the two lovers remain vulnerable to that “nasty cold little draught”, with games giving way to real violence and later to an unforeseen and gruesomely literal bodily dissolution. In the following scene, a woman’s suicide at the office barely disrupts the casual cruelties and petty sniping among surviving coworkers. In the next scene two little old ladies baby-sit while nonchalantly plotting to kill an unsatisfactory not to mention ethnically suspect son-in-law, with the more aggressive granny offering a concise (and insistent) ideological position on familial warfare:
It is a little chilling, to hear post-9/11 American foreign policy come out of the mouth of this murderous babushka. The next scene takes place in the changing room of a military police division. It is here that many of the play’s plot and character threads are connected, amidst locker-room bullying, cruel jokes enacting chemical weapons attacks with laundry powder, photos of severed limbs taken at a gas explosion, and a cautionary tale of animal abuse. The scene ends with a Marilyn Monroe impersonation performed by a semi-naked fat man with a caustic point to make about how something desperate and disturbing can get aestheticized into something beautiful, compelling and contagious. Once again, it’s the bombs that don’t go off that are going to wreak the most havoc – or so we’re told just before the fat man sings: “after all, it’s not about how many die in all this – the explosions, murders, terrorism … it’s about something else, way more frightening – this is the beginning of a chain reaction. Everyone, I mean everyone, is infected” (51). We return to the airport for the final scene, where the passengers from scene one alternately joke and argue amongst each other while sitting on board a (apparently) burning plane. Even here, a bizarre placidity greets the only passenger who attempts to act in the face of crisis:
There seems to be, at least from the vantage point of here and now, something more than just stereotypical Russian fatalism at work in such a cheery sentiment. After all, the play was actually written before 9/11, which makes its off-handed prescience all the more, well, spooky. For all its absurdist trappings and black humor, Terrorism feels most like a twisted fun-house ride to the new normal.
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