Today, last night, 1991, 1931
A few hours ago there was violence at Westminster, on the bridge and outside Parliament. Details are all a bit fluid at the moment, but it’s been confirmed that people have died, and more are injured. As news was coming through, I was at work in deepest East London — about as far away from Westminster as the Gobi Desert, or Niagara Falls. A world away. Later, I would get the tube to a meeting at KCL by London Bridge. There, a receptionist would cheerfully give me directions “through the archway by the lawn” while a large screen flashed a SAFETY ALERT behind her head.
London has been strange tonight. People smile at the police officers standing in corridors and on concourses. A subdued, self-conscious hush arrives when the tube driver announces that Westminster station would remain closed for the rest of today. There has been “an incident”. We all know.
Mum texts, apologising for worrying, confident-not-confident that this is just her embarrassing parochial mum-instincts making a fuss over nothing.
I am strangely unbothered. I remember watching the Paris attacks unfolding from a hotel room in Bruges and feeling somehow really close to the horror of it, really unsafe. In contrast, this feels like a low-budget soap opera that I don’t even watch: as if it’s playing, muted, on a screen in the corner of a pub. It feels so distant. So rather than following the news updates, the rolling feeds, or thinking about those that have died — their families — or even wondering what might make someone do something like this, I’m thinking instead about how unbothered I feel. How anaesthetised I am to what happens in my city. I’m thinking about the tourists who were held in the London Eye as operators enacted their security procedure. I’m wondering how long they’re visiting for, whether this is their first day in London, trapped in a glass bubble 100+ metres in the air, watching as people on the bridge below lying dying in the open air. It would be a great setting for a play, wouldn’t it?
Last night I saw Normal by Anthony Neilson. It’s part of the 90s season being staged by Rift at Styx in Tottenham. I saw Blasted there a few weeks ago; a great production — slow to get started but as flowers fell from the ceiling, lights strobing, Bosnia thrown at us, it was like momentary exposure to that first production. There’s no such thing as depravity anymore but we’ll always have its memory.
Normal is filled with images of horror: knives, hammers, gruesome sexual attacks, vaginas packed with dirt, blood and sweat and cum. Peter Kurten — the real ‘Dusseldorf Ripper — is awaiting trial for multiple murders, sexual assaults, arson. If he’s judged clinically insane he’ll be saved from execution, but to his audience he is certainly a monster; that is never in doubt. Instead it is the effects of his monstrosity that matter. His lawyer spends day after day listening to gleeful, sordid tales — smashing the skull of a child, drinking the blood of a swan, ejaculating over the gushing wounds of a recent victim. Eventually, Mr Lawyerman seeks his own violent outlet, but a question remains about where that urge to kill comes from. Do we all carry it within us? Or does it come from our environments, our experiences? Is there an Overton Window for bloodshed?
The trial of Kurten took place in the last days of the Weimar Republic, Hitler about to take over a growing National Socialist Party. The Rift production had a lot less of the Nazi stuff than the original 1991 production. Our atrocity benchmarks have been shifted ten, twenty times since then. Bosnia, James Bulger, Columbine, 9/11, Lee Rigby, Darfur, Fallujah, Aleppo, the Bataclan. Normal may be about someone else’s nation in someone else’s time, but a state-of-the-nation play it remains. A state-of-all-nations play. Always will be. It’s just normal.
