Theater of Cruelty (34 page)

Leigh often displays a kind of horrified delight in the tawdriest aspects of English life: tiger-skin-patterned wallpaper, dolls of Spanish dancers on bedside tables, male hands groping large bottoms wrapped in pink chiffon. His England, populated by grasping used-car dealers, nosy social workers, randy postmen, frustrated housewives, office clerks, and croupiers, could not be further removed from the thatched-cottage or countryhouse image of England promoted in
New Yorker
ads or Merchant Ivory films.

Leigh’s loving reconstruction of seediness sometimes reminds one of Diane Arbus’s photographs. Like Arbus he has been accused of patronizing his subjects. This is because, like Arbus and her admirers, Leigh and his audience are, on the whole, not of the same class as the people portrayed. And there is, of course, a certain voyeuristic pleasure to be got from Leigh’s work. But unlike many of Arbus’s subjects, Leigh’s characters are not freaks. For the world he has created, with some but not very much exaggeration, is entirely normal. Much of England really is like that. And because he is so unsentimental in his depiction of the working class, or the striving lower-middle class, his characters are rarely caricatures.

Leigh’s method of improvisation has much to do with this. For if his actors and actresses simply acted out the tics and mannerisms of class stereotypes, his work would be no more than social satire. What makes Leigh’s theater so much more than that is the way his actors develop their characters. The mannerisms, the accents, the walks form just one layer of the complex personalities built up over time. It is as though Leigh’s method speeds up the natural formation of personality: the process of a lifetime compressed into the space of months. This does not always work, especially with minor characters. There may not always be time enough. Some of the weaker performances in Leigh’s films—the yuppie couple in
High Hopes
, for
example—look unfinished, for they are stuck in their mannerisms; their characters remain unformed. Usually, however, his characters come splendidly alive.

In his latest stage play,
It’s a Great Big Shame!
, performed this autumn in London, Leigh tries to undermine the sentimental, music-hall image of nineteenth-century London’s East End by showing the cold, rough reality behind its chirpy Cockney ditties. The play is in two parts. The first part is a long sketch of squalid Victorian street life and a disastrous marriage between a simpleton and a shrew. The second half is about lower-middle-class black people, living in the same place today. Leigh has as little patience with the conventional images of calypso and racial solidarity as he has with the mawkishness of the Victorian music hall. Like the white Cockneys a century before, the black Cockneys are sad, angry, bickering human beings who drive each other to violence. The violence, brought on by the usual Leigh mismatch of weak husbands, frustrated wives, and selfish, disapproving siblings, leads to murder in both instances. Faith, the black sister in this play (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), clucking with disdain and parroting the language of advertising brochures, was the perfect example of a developed Leigh character. You can see exactly where she comes from, so to speak, but she is also a unique person.

Leigh’s characters only turn into caricatures when he uses them purely to make points. This almost never happens with his working-class roles. It rarely happens with his nouveaux riches. The ghastly, giggling Valerie in
High Hopes
, slipping into a frothy bath with a champagne bottle stuck in her mouth, is an exception. But it often happens with his yuppies, such as the absurd sadist Jeremy in
Naked
, who drives around alone in his black Porsche, looking out for women to abuse. Members of the upper end of the middle class in Leigh’s work are never the nice sons of Jewish doctors, or the educated urban audience of his plays. They are what is known in Britain as Hooray
Henrys, braying cads in striped shirts who are brutal to everyone beneath them—that is, when they are not sitting around in Kensington drinking champagne or pelting each other with bread rolls.

Many of Leigh’s films and plays show how the different strands of British society connect—or fail to connect. The topography of big British cities, especially London, helps him, for London’s geography is full of tragicomic possibilities. It has been the strategy of postwar local governments to mix up, where possible, privately owned houses with so-called council houses, homes bought by municipal authorities to provide public housing. And the steady gentrification of the poorer parts of London and other cities has added to this social mosaic. The street I live in is fairly typical: our neighbors on one side are unemployed working-class white people; on the other is a family from Bangladesh and a cleaning lady from Jamaica. Next to them lives a stockbroker.

This sort of mixture sets the scene in much of Leigh’s work. The opening sequence of
Grown Ups
, a film made for the BBC in 1980, shows a row of modern semidetached houses in Canterbury. Dick and Mandy (“Mand”) have just moved in. Dick works in a hospital canteen, and Mandy as a cashier in a department store. They are visited by Mandy’s monstrously intrusive sister, Gloria (“Glore”). Gloria: “Tell you what Mand, I reckon you’ve really come up trumps ’ere.” Mandy: “It’s private next door.” Gloria: “I know, I’ve seen.” Mandy (proudly): “It’s private all the way up.” Dick (sourly): “Yeah, but it’s council all the way down, innit?”

The gap between council and private is also one of the ingredients of
Abigail’s Party
, one of Leigh’s funniest, most harrowing, and successful plays, first performed in the theater, then on television. It is set in North London in a patchwork of new housing developments and nineteenth-century terraced houses. Abigail’s mother is an upper-middle-class divorcée, called Sue, who owns her house. She is invited
over for a drink by her distinctly down-market neighbors, Beverly and Laurence. Beverly, beautifully acted by Alison Steadman, is a gross, overdressed, restless housewife with a taste for Mediterranean crooners. Laurence is an anxious estate agent with high cultural aspirations (Beethoven’s Ninth on the stereo). Laurence is being slowly destroyed by the endless humiliations meted out by his wife. They are joined by an ex–football player, whom Beverly tries to seduce, and his wife, Angela (Ange), a garrulous nurse. Genteel, buttoned-down Sue is almost as much out of place in this company as the Saudi businessman is with Vernon’s friends in
Goose-Pimples
.

But Leigh’s most perfectly realized battle in the simmering British class war—perhaps the best thing he has done—is a BBC film called
Nuts in May
(1976). The action here does not take place in row houses but in tents. Keith and Candice Marie (Alison Steadman) are an earnest middle-class couple on a camping holiday in Dorset. They eat health food, listen to birdcalls, and play folk music on the banjo. Keith likes to lecture his wife on nature, health, and local history. Candice Marie has a hot-water bottle in the shape of a cat called Prudence. Keith ritually kisses Prudence good night before turning in. Ray, a burly college student from Wales, turns up on the camping site. Ray likes beer, football, and pop music played at high volume. Tension begins to build, especially when Candice Marie appears to like Ray. Then Finger, a plasterer, and his girlfriend, Honky, arrive on a motorbike. Finger and Honky are loud, lusty working-class people who like to fry sausages and beans when they are not making love or farting in their tent. Candice Marie eggs Keith on to do something about the noise. Keith has to prove his manhood. And the tension explodes in a scene of comic violence when Keith loses his temper and runs amok.

Much of the comedy in
Nuts in May
, as in all Leigh’s work, lies in the minutely observed mannerisms of British class. But to say that his
films are
about
class is like saying that Buñuel’s films are about the Catholic Church. In fact,
Nuts in May
, like Leigh’s other plays and films, is as much about the sex wars as the class wars: the two are subtly interwoven. Keith’s weediness is constantly shown up by virile local farmers, as well as by Ray and Finger. That is why Candice Marie, mousy as she may seem, goads him into action. In the contemporary half of
It’s a Great Big Shame!
, it’s the strong presence of Barrington, the muscle-bound friend of the pipsqueak Randall, that finally drives Randall’s wife, Joy, to murder her husband. Likewise, the key to Leigh’s latest film,
Naked
, is not, as the critic of
Le Monde
thought, a critique of “Thatcherism” or the homeless problem; it is sex.

In
Naked
, Johnny, played brilliantly by David Thewlis, needs sex but is terrified of domesticity. Homelessness, far from being his problem, is Johnny’s chosen path to self-destruction. He wants women to love him, but backs off when they do. He is a disturbing character to watch, especially in the current state of gender politics, because he is a charming misogynist. Which is not to say that the film is misogynistic. As in other Leigh movies—
Life Is Sweet
, for example—the strongest, most sympathetic character is a woman. Compared to the others, Johnny’s ex-girlfriend Louise is a rock of stability who is trying to throw him a lifeline.

Leigh’s dark vision of London’s wet, neon-streaked streets, where young drifters huddle around fires under Victorian railway arches or holler madly in the night, gives
Naked
the air of a French film noir. The movie looks different from anything he has done before. But
Naked
is not as much of a new departure for Leigh as some critics have suggested. For Johnny is trapped in the same dilemma that runs through all of Leigh’s work: Hell is the others, but the others are also our only salvation. The lifelines of family and marriage are potential prisons too.

Louise almost manages to turn Johnny around from being a manic destroyer of himself and others in his orbit. There is a scene of great tenderness, after Johnny has been beaten up in the street by thugs. Louise washes his wounds, and they revive their former intimacy. Together they sing an old song from their native Manchester—a typical Leigh touch. And at last Johnny looks at peace with himself. Louise decides to give up her job in London and they plan to go back to Manchester together. The Mancunian tune is like a Siren song, full of promise of a better, more settled life. But like a cardboard-city Ulysses, Johnny resists it, and when Louise goes off to hand in her notice at work, he lopes off into the grubby streets as fast as his wounded legs can take him.

We are not supposed to admire Johnny. He is too perverse, too destructive for that. But we can recognize, nonetheless, that his predicament is a common human problem, for which Leigh offers no solution. He just stares at it, picks at it, ponders it, and shows it in every film and play he has done. Family lives, particularly relations between husbands and wives, are almost always disastrous in Leigh’s work. Yet some of the strongest scenes in his films are of reconciliation.

In
Meantime
, Mark and Colin, his slow-witted younger sibling, live in the domestic hell of a cheap housing estate. Colin is a humiliated, cowering figure, whose only gesture of defiance against his bleak existence is to shave his head to look like the local skinheads. Mark has taken out his own frustrations on Colin throughout the film. But now he strokes his brother’s bald head, in a gesture of solidarity. “Kojak,” he says. And for the first time in the movie, we see Colin smile. In
Grown Ups
, family life is a mixture of mayhem and smoldering rows, yet Dick and Mandy decide to have a baby. In
High Hopes
, the elderly mother is mistreated by her coarse and selfish daughter, and family relations are catastrophic, but still her son,
Cyril, a working-class romantic who worships at Karl Marx’s tomb, and his girlfriend, Shirley, want to start a family of their own.

And so it goes on. People persist in getting married, in having families, even though the chances are that it will all end in misery. But there is one thing sadder than connecting badly with other people, and that is not connecting at all. Leigh’s first feature film,
Bleak Moments
, made in 1971, offers an interesting parallel to his most recent one. Both films are about failing to connect. In
Naked
the sex is loveless and brutal, in
Bleak Moments
the sex is suppressed. Both films show how people use language without being able to communicate feeling, except in song (hence, perhaps, the British fondness for community singing).

The main characters in
Bleak Moments
are a typical Leigh cast. Sylvia and Pat work as secretaries at an accountant’s office. Hilda is Sylvia’s mentally retarded sister. Norman is a hippie from Scunthorpe, and Peter a schoolteacher. Pat is unattractive, but disguises her unhappiness behind a veil of hysterical good cheer. Sylvia is attractive but repressed. Norman is so shy, he can only express his feelings by singing folk songs atrociously. Hilda is emotional but cannot talk at all. And Peter, who fancies Sylvia, is as tight as the white collar around his neck. It is as though middle-class English life has made all these people, except Hilda, emotionally constipated.

In one marvelous scene, they are all gathered for a cup of tea in Sylvia’s house. None of them knows what to say to the others. They are all too embarrassed to talk. Like an English Bergman or Dreyer (there is something Scandinavian about the English affinity for unhappiness), Leigh trains his camera on their faces, one by one: Peter, anxious, disapproving, jaws working, lips pursed; Sylvia, unsure, unhappy, eyes darting about the room; Pat, embarrassed, sucking a chocolate; Norman, catatonic, fidgeting; Hilda, close to tears.

That same evening, after an excrutiating meal in a local Chinese restaurant, Peter and Sylvia return to her house. Desperate for some connection, physical, mental, or preferably both, Sylvia forces Peter to drink sherry with her. After a great deal of embarrassment, they kiss. Sylvia breaks away and asks Peter whether he would like a cup of coffee. “That would be very nice,” he says. End of love scene.