Abstract
Boles posits that Joe Penhall’s Haunted Child and Birthday are important turning points in his casting off the final remnants from In-Yer-Face influences and embracing the influence of fatherhood on his writing. Using Sam Shepard’s True West and Lad culture of the 1990s as touchstones, Boles discusses how Haunted Child is Penhall’s final connection to the In-Yer-Face movement and his narrative reliance on male characters that behave badly. In Birthday, which is his most autobiographical play, Penhall writes about a father who embraces all feminine roles in the family, including giving birth to a child. Through both plays Penhall, a father himself, relies on the staging of fatherhood as a new inspiration in his writing, finally banishing elements from the In-Yer-Face movement from his canon.
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Notes
- 1.
Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy, “Joe Penhall: the best performance I’ve ever seen,” Guardian, June 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jun/17/joe-penhall-mark-rylance-performance (accessed March 15, 2018).
- 2.
Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), 214.
- 3.
See William C. Boles, The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).
- 4.
Alice Jones, “Guess who’s having a baby,” The Independent, June 28, 2012: 40.
- 5.
After being dared by his convict brother to commit a crime, Austin steals toasters throughout the surrounding neighborhood and then proceeds to make toast during the play’s final scene. Like Shepard, Penhall is fascinated by the power of food on the stage. Citing the effect of simply peeling an orange in Blue/Orange, Penhall said: “You could smell the zest and see the spray. My favourite part of Landscape with Weapons is where the characters have a food fight, throwing curry at each other. There’s something about those purely physical moments.” (Mark Lawson, “Regrets? Too few to mention,” Guardian, November 30, 2011: Sec. G2, 19.)
- 6.
Sarah Tejal Hamilton, “Joe Penhall—the interview Part 1,” Writerly, March 31, 2017, https://writerlyblogblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/joe-penhall-the-interview-part-1/ (accessed July 5, 2018). Simon Stephens has three children, but unlike Penhall, Stephens has been a father for the majority of his playwriting career.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
See Sierz, 153–177. See also Boles, Argumentative, 25–39; and William C. Boles, “Rise and Fall of the Lad: Joe Penhall’s Early Plays,” in Drama and the Post-Modern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre, ed. Daniel K. Jernigan (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008): 307–325.
- 10.
Sierz, 153.
- 11.
Joe Penhall, “The Outsider,” Guardian, June 14, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/jun/14/theatre (accessed March 15, 2018).
- 12.
Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Seven Plays (New York Bantam, 1986), 130.
- 13.
Joe Penhall, Haunted Child (London: Methuen, 2011), 25–26.
- 14.
Ibid., 56.
- 15.
Ibid., 62.
- 16.
Ibid., 60.
- 17.
Ibid., 8.
- 18.
While Penhall was the first of the In-Yer-Face writers to win the Olivier for Best Play, two others have also won since Blue/Orange’s victory. Martin McDonagh won for The Pillowman in 2004 and Hangmen in 2016, while Jez Butterworth won for The Ferryman in 2018.
- 19.
Hamilton, “Joe Penhall.”
- 20.
Viv Groskop, “He’s having my baby,” Evening Standard, June 26, 2012: 32.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Jones, 40.
- 23.
Penhall described the gestation period for the play. “Birthday … took six days to write, in fact it took three days to write—I wrote it day and night and didn’t stop. And then I gave it to director Roger Michell who said I really like it but the second half, does the baby have to die? I was like look man, I’ve been up all night for about four days drinking brandy! I could give it another three days, I’ll see, I dunno. So I went back, rewrote the second half, the baby didn’t die, gave it to him. I think it’s shit but you’re the boss, and he loved it.” (Hamilton, “Joe Penhall—the interview Part 1.”)
- 24.
Jones, 40.
- 25.
Groskop, 32.
- 26.
British Library Sound Archive, Birthday Post Show Talk, Royal Court Theatre, July 7, 2012. C1209/171.
- 27.
Joe Penhall, Birthday (London: Methuen, 2012), 4.
- 28.
Angela Smith, “‘New Man’ or ‘Son of the Manse’? Gordon Brown as a Reluctant Celebrity Father,” British Politics 3 (2008): 561.
- 29.
Stephen Williams, “What is Fatherhood? Searching for the Reflexive Father,” Sociology 42, no. 3 (2008): 540.
- 30.
Mark Finn and Karen Henwood, “Exploring Masculinities within Men’s Identificatory Imaginings of First-time Fatherhood,” British Journal of Social Psychology 48 (2009): 548.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Penhall, Birthday, 37.
- 33.
Ibid., 36.
- 34.
Ibid., 13.
- 35.
Tina Miller, “Falling Back in Gender? Men’s Narratives and Practices around First-time Fatherhood,” Sociology 45, no. 6 (2011): 1100.
- 36.
Ibid., 1101.
- 37.
Penhall, Birthday, 18.
- 38.
Ibid., 7.
- 39.
Finn and Henwood, 554.
- 40.
Penhall, Birthday, 9.
- 41.
Ibid., 68.
- 42.
Ibid., 71.
- 43.
Jones, 40.
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Boles, W.C. (2020). Joe Penhall’s Fatherhood Plays: Escaping the Influence of Sam Shepard and the Lad. In: Boles, W. (eds) After In-Yer-Face Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_13
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