Article on Lally Katz PART TWO

Katz’s plays do not occupy the space that clearly rejects the mainstream in favour of a radical political agenda, but they are political, drawing attention as I will go on to demonstrate, to the unseen elements of cultural representation and discourse. Her plays have narratives, and songs, and are obsessed with human relationships, especially with love. These are not the plays of an angry, disenfranchised youth. They are not calling for revolution, but exploration, mainly of the human condition, and just kind of, how to be happy. Her plays are ontological investigations of the soul and of how to look pretty and why we can’t all be really skinny. There is no end of paradox, of contradiction, of confusion and chaos. Her plays are beautiful and hopeful, and dark and unkindly cruel. More in the tradition of Artaud than Brecht, Katz’s plays take a good long look into the human heart and remain confounded by what they see. This is what separates Katz from the majority of young angry theatre makers with a message. Katz is preoccupied only with the imagination in her writing through an ongoing inquisition of reality, and the power of a really good story. In investigating reality she pushes it to its limits, expands it beyond any realistic representation to a kind of hyper-reality. She is interested in exploring and exposing the world of the imagination and in so doing generates a space for alternatives. ‘The beauty of “performance consciousness” is that it activates alternatives: “this” and “that” are both operative simultaneously…performance consciousness is subjunctive, full of alternatives and potentiality.’ (Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (1985:6).
These hyper-real representations function to critique reality. That is not to say they are not believable, but that there is always the coexistence of two or more levels of consciousness going on. Lally’s exuberant imagination creates a theatrical world, which is wholeheartedly engaging, whilst at the same time, undermining that world through the strange treatment of time, space, language and representation. The hyperrealism acts as a ruse to take over and invade the dominant discourse of the narrative, and resists the resolution of the well-made play. Katz doesn’t have resolution in her scripts. Even in The Eisteddfod which sees Gerture finally freed from the claustrophobic world of her childhood bedroom and Abolone’s control, Katz’s own voice is the last we hear, unravelling all her hard work in ending the play by, as has already been stated, pondering the existence of these characters outside of the confines of the narrative world.


Gerture sent me a postcard once, it was a picture of frozen water lilies
and a very small duckling. She wrote on it that she has never felt so close
by. She didn’t send a return address. I look for early scenes of them in my
laptop and on disc. It makes me feel so nostalgic that they might have been
anything, once. (Katz 2004:39)


Katz’s skill lies in breaking down all notions of boundaries. She resists closure of any kind and generates a space in her writing for the transgression of borders and boundaries, between men and women, past and future, real world and play world, good and bad. In so doing she is resisting the encroachment of the dominant systems of representation and discourse. She is forming her own image and her own language. No other model will fit. It seems not in the least surprising then, that a place in the hallowed grounds of mainstream theatre would be hard for her to fit into.

As Rachel Fensham has said recently of Jenny Kemp, a writer Katz has studied under, Lally’s theatre, too, takes place, ‘…between the social and asocial; or between language and the emotionally chaotic; or between the symbolic constructions of the stage and the subtle shifts that take place in an audience’s imagination’ (2004: 53).

Hers is a writing that draws the unseen into visual range and makes the seen appear strangely new, and difficult to deal with. Her writing is a process of defamiliarisation that attempts to extend the parameters of representation as a means by which to expand upon the bounds of reality. Katz’s plays have been described as fantastical, dreamlike and surreal. But I would disagree with all three of these. The events that are depicted in Katz’s plays are done so with such sincerity that it appears impossible to read them as anything other than literal events in the first instance. These strange and wonderful things really do happen. And this is essential to Katz’s writing for it is this world, the one that is our day-to-day experience, that Katz is interested in exploring. In Katz’s hands, however, it becomes immediately apparent that reality is a far more complex web than realist theatre might want to depict.