THREE FOR THE SHOW

By MIMI KRAMER/LONDON

There's a slant to the door in Bob Crowley's set for The Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh's play at the Royal National's Lyttelton Theatre, that might suggest rustic simplicity or rustic imprecision or perhaps the way in which even the most robust structures can shift and settle with time. It's not that the door doesn't work perfectly well, opening and closing to let in and out characters like Johnnypateenmike, the village gossip, and Billy Claven, the eponymous hero, who wants Babbybobby the ferryman to sail him over to the next island where the great Hollywood director Robert Flaherty's documentary Man of Aran is being shot. The door works like a champ, but the slant is the first thing you notice about it--a severe, almost violent list that announces as clearly as anything said with words that the world we're looking at is shown from a skewed perspective.

The Cripple of Inishmaan is one of a handful of plays by a new generation of young playwrights whose work has captured the attention of the British press and public and is making its presence felt in London this summer. All in their 20s and early 30s, they are seen as part of a literary "renaissance," which is being widely compared to the angry-young-man generation of British playwrights that emerged in the years just after World War II. Together they seem to be changing the theatergoing habits of a decade, attracting young audiences and inculcating the idea that going to see a new play--any new play, not just a hit or a critical favorite--is a hip pastime.

In the forefront of the movement are McDonagh, 26; Patrick Marber, 32, whose play Closer is running at the National's small Cottesloe Theatre; and Mark Ravenhill, 31, whose controversial play Shopping and F______ is finishing a month-long run at the West End's Gielgud Theatre before heading to Edinburgh; it will be seen in New York City early next year. An earlier trilogy of McDonagh's opened this past weekend at the Duke of York's, which makes him the only writer this season, apart from Shakespeare, to have four plays running concurrently in London.

Though in common they have youth, a propensity for bleak subject matter and an ability to write beautifully about it, the three playwrights are very different. Marber, a Londoner who got his start on the comedy circuit performing stand-up and working with the popular television comedian Steve Coogan, crafts intricately layered, well-observed, heartfelt plays in a realistic vein about contemporary relationships. McDonagh is more a folkwriter in the tradition of J.M. Synge. His macabre, wildly funny and over-the-top tragicomedies are slightly absurdist, set in remote parts of rural Ireland and peopled with comic grotesques--or literal grotesques, like the title character in Cripple, whom a young actor, Ruaidhri Conroy, plays with a convulsive total body limp of hideous and breathtaking precipitousness.

To many, McDonagh seems to have emerged from out of nowhere, for years leading the garret life, writing plays in isolation in the South London house he shared with his brother, until two theaters--the Royal Court and the Druid Theatre in Galway--finally showed an interest in his work. Much has been made in the British press about his never having lived for any length of time in the Ireland he writes about so critically and so lushly. The question of his national origin is something of a biographical crux: Is he Irish or English? Everyone wants to know. "It's not that I don't consider myself an Irish writer," says McDonagh, whose parents are Irish, and who spent vacations with family near Galway. "I just try to avoid any questions of nationality or nationalism. I've always felt kind of in between. I'm more of a London boy than anything else, but you can't help having those Irish leanings."

Alone of the trio, Ravenhill admits to a certain amount of book learning (he holds a drama degree and has spent his albeit brief professional life working in literary offices of small theater companies, nurturing emerging young playwrights like himself) and is the only one who seems to be working consciously within a particular form. His Shopping and F______ belongs to the subgenre of so-called smack-and-sodomy plays, in which drug use is rampant and sex is graphic, brutish and usually anal. We are in Trainspotting territory here. The pseudo-family of down-and-out drug-users and drifters in Shopping are--like the characters in Trainspotting, a stage version of which preceded the film (both based on Irvine Welsh's novel)--the alienated youth of Britain, uneasily poised between self-fulfillment and self-degradation, displaced, directionless and dispossessed.

Marber and McDonagh resist the suggestion that they are part of a literary movement: "That makes it sound as though we all know each other and sit around in cafes all day chatting," says Marber. In fact they barely know one another. What really seems to bind these playwrights together, from the perspective of an outsider, is the absence from their work of any overt political agenda. These are not issue or idea plays (like, say, David Hare's Plenty or Caryl Churchill's Top Girls), though they speak seriously to a contemporary audience and reflect the world their authors see around them. The lost children in Shopping, the vomiting drug users and underage "rent boys" that Ravenhill depicts with such clear-eyed intelligence, are not there to chastise or shock the audience any more than a stripper and a doctor in Marber's Closer are there simply to comment on sex as a transaction or on socialized medicine. These characters exist not to tell us something we already knew when we came into the theater but to represent particular, idiosyncratic habits of mind and give voice to something that could not be expressed in any other way.

All of this represents a break with the past. If anything can be said to have determined the course of contemporary British drama, it is the 1956 London visit of Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, which created a vogue for hortatory agitprop theater that has never gone away. The heroes and antiheroes of the postwar British stage--the Jimmy Porters and the Archie Rices--spoke for England; either they were England, metaphorically, or else they voiced the feelings of the new educated middle class in the audience. They were the growing pains of a nation struggling toward and against modernity--what John Osborne called in a stage direction for Inadmissible Evidence "the prison of embryonic helplessness."

Today's young people are writing about internal strife, and even their use of stage space reflects this. Where postwar drama was full of the imagery of confinement--even the proscenium read like a sort of cage hemming the characters in--these plays are dominated by the sense of an offstage world: a second city, like New York, which Marber's characters are always popping off to in Closer; or that place without "attachments" or "dependencies" that the pseudo-father-figure in Shopping wants to get to; or, in Cripple of Inishmaan, the Aran island of Inishmore, where, the hero assumes, a less stylized version of reality is being shot.

The current renaissance follows a barren period in British playwriting--much like the one that preceded the postwar revival. The late '80s and early '90s saw a sharp decline in the number of new voices writing for the stage in Britain--so much so that in 1991 Michael Billington, the longtime critic for the Guardian, was driven to declare "a state of crisis." A number of reasons for this have been put forward. One is the draining away of arts funding during the Thatcher years. Changing fashion may also have been a contributing factor. And typically, new theater writers get launched by having their work championed by up-and-coming directors. But the directors who rose to prominence during the '80s--artists like Deborah Warner, Declan Donnellan and, a bit later, Katie Mitchell--did so by staging their versions of the classics.

Ravenhill points to Thatcherism and the tremendous social changes it brought about. "In the '80s practically every given about British society was thrown up in the air. I don't think playwrights of any generation knew how to respond to that." Ravenhill thinks that during this period, writers turned to film and other more individualistic and introspective forms--the novel and the memoir.

But the didacticism of British drama may have had a part in putting young, creative people off theater. "I grew up with it being kind of dull and political and lecture-y," says McDonagh, who admits to having stayed away from plays he felt would try to force-feed him ideas. "You don't need to pay 10 quid to be lectured to. And the point is, the audiences at most of those political plays agreed with the political points anyway. I always felt that as long as you tell good stories, people will be more interested than they will in whatever political question is going around that month or that year."

McDonagh may be selling postwar British theater short. But the new generation of British playwrights seems less interested in exhorting us to reinvent society than in showing us the different ways in which we try to reinvent ourselves. "I think we all need stories," one of Ravenhill's drifters tells another. "We make up stories so that we can get by. And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them ... The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're all making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one."