Guest Blog: Playwright James Mannion on MITES at the Tristan Bates Theatre

My play Mites, which will be performed at the Tristan Bates Theatre from 7-26 October, tells the story of a vulnerable woman, Ruth, and the deterioration of her mental health as she is manipulated by two predatory companions.

Seeking to cure the infestation of dust mites that plagues her home, Ruth hires a young pest controller, Ken, who opportunistically reveals himself to be her long-absent husband, his namesake Kenneth. Ecstatically, she welcomes the return of 'Kenneth', but her humanoid pet cat, Bartholomew, has other ideas, and Ruth's home becomes a battleground as Ken and Bartholomew compete to exploit her for their own sinister ends.

Ruth must keep her head above water to resist these wolves in sheep's clothing, or, in the case of Bartholomew, cat's clothing. Mites is an absurdist dark comedy which uses a disorientating blend of chaos, fear and anxiety to mirror the capitulation from reality to delusion.

What is meant by 'absurdist' here? The 'Theatre of the Absurd' was a term coined by Martin Esslin in a 1960 essay to describe collectively the movement of dramatists including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee (among others), whose plays had swept across the cultural landscape from the late 1940s onwards, initially centred around Paris but, within a short time, spreading to Britain, the rest of Europe and the United States.

What these plays had in common was both stylistic and intellectual. Thematically, they tended towards notions of pointlessness, insanity, irrationality, frustration and unhappiness, making use of nonsense, dream states and farcical, often slapstick comedy. The plots would meander or be lacking entirely; characterisation too was thin, narrative arcs being replaced by static situations to be examined.

On an academic level, these writers were influenced by the French existentialists' concept of 'The Absurd': since there was no higher purpose or meaning to existence, life was a pointless struggle, symbolised for Albert Camus by the mythical figure Sisyphus, condemned eternally to drag a boulder to the summit of a hill by day only for it to roll back down during the night. The 'absurdity' lay in the fact that, despite the futility of existence, humans were still obliged to seek meaning in what they do. Cheerful stuff.

Theatre of the Absurd irrevocably changed the theatrical landscape, but in the half-century since its heyday, it has ceased to occupy a dominant position in the cultural zeitgeist. Why, then, return to it now? To put it simply, because we live in times that have themselves become absurd.

In 2019, we face crises equally capable of undermining our sense of human progress as catastrophes such as World War Two and the Holocaust did for the original absurdists. In the 1950s, the existential threat of nuclear war lurked behind daily life - so now the destruction of our planet as a habitable entity becomes more imminent by the day.

The political far right, resoundingly defeated in the 1940s, is reviving to positions of prominence across the globe. Our elected representatives are locked in a dilemma from which it seems there can be no escape. If there's an historical situation more absurdist than Brexit, I am yet to discover it.

And so, I believe we need a New Absurdism, one that reflects the nightmarish qualities of our own situation, as our whole species careers towards a potentially unavoidable suicide. Potentially unavoidable because, as with Pandora's box, when everything else has flown away, there still remains hope.

And Mites, despite the darkness at its heart, does retain the possibility of a happy future for Ruth, if she can somehow overcome her demons. In a world where the individual is constantly being watched, influenced and controlled by unaccountable corporations, at the mercy of callous governments and invisible power structures, Mites asks whether madness might be the sanest response to its conditions.

Mites at the Tristan Bates Theatre 7-26 October

Photo credit: Lidia Crisafulli

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