Stage Struck

Cussing can still cause a shiftstorm, says PETER CRAWLEY

AT SOME point in the 1980s, David Mamet began to receive so many complaints about the bad language in his plays that he kept a form letter handy that read: “Too bad, you big cry baby”.

By Mametian standards, this was a sensitively worded palliative, remarkable for its sweet restraint. Now that Glengarry Glen Ross, his dispatch from the piranha tank of real estate sellers, is playing in the Gate, you could be forgiven for thinking that our entire national swearing rate, measured in fucks per minute, has risen by at least 300 per cent.

But while it’s hard to find an excerpt from the play that won’t burn up my monthly allowance of asterisks, the experience of watching Glengarry Glen Ross is not one of pummelling abuse. After about a dozen F-bombs, all detonated within the first scene, you barely register the next 140. Instead, it becomes just another beat of a very precise rhythm; guiding the music of inarticulacy and frustration among men who establish their worth through either browbeating tirades or hypnotic sales pitches.

Swearing stands out in the theatre, though, because its always had a piquant place. Everybody knows Lady Gregory’s famous telegram to WB Yeats, in 1907, describing the Playboy riots: “Audience broke up in disorder at the word ‘shifts’.”

In truth, their unrest had been brewing – an Irishman had just killed his father with a shovel and now had some thoughts about womanhood he wanted to share – but the word took the blame.

These days, “shift” is unlikely to raise much of a gasp, but remove one letter and I guarantee you that, among a certain sector of the audience, it provokes a much worse response: giggling. This is the unforeseen evolution of profanity through theatre history, from disorder to titillation. I’m not sure how to account for it. Shift happens.

The problem with bad language, which the Glengarry boys will appreciate, is that the market has been flooded, the words devalued. I was surprised and actually rather touched to see a handful of people walk out of a recent revival of Enda Walsh’s Bedbound, which seemed an odd reaction to a play about the torment of wild and whirling words.

More economical and creative swearers, such as Harold Pinter (to whom Glengarry is dedicated) and GB Shaw (“Not bloody likely”) really do use swearing for shock value, because shock should have a value. And don’t even get me started on William Shakespeare, thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter.

Put the text of Glengarry Glen Ross into an online word-cloud generator, and instead of that multi-purpose four-letter word leaping out of the cumulus, you get another, which I suspect Mamet uses to create the same incantatory rhythmic effect: “pause”.

Well, if you can’t say something nice...

pcrawley@irishtimes.com