MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Simon Stephens, born in 1971, is a contemporary “in-yer-face” playwright like Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh, Simon Ravenhill and Joe Penhall, but his work has a strong musical affinity. His first play was based on a Tom Waits song, his latest inspired by Thom Yorke. He spend 12 years in a post-punk band called the Country Teasers, adapted The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time into a play with music, and has written several plays including Country Music, Punk Rock, and two of his latest Carmen Disruption and Birdland, which as the titles indicate, are all based on music. In his plays the music is not only a reference and structuring principle, but the fundamental conflict in his plays tends to revolve around musicality and the content. In Country Music, the music frames the action and in Punk Rock, which can be seen as a reply to Stoppard’s 2006 Rock ‘n Roll, music sets the condition for the action. For Stephens, “rock music’s the music of dissent, of dissidence, of the alternative and the forbidden;” and the punk rock movement combined a sexual craving for chaos with political alienation in an art school tradition that for all of its proletarian icons was the middle-class music of the 1970s and 80s, and therefore particularly “appropriate for the world of the play” (Innes, 2011). This paper will examine how the music supports the structure and influences the perception of Stephens plays focusing on Country Music, Punk Rock and Birdland.