patrickjones

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Brutally candid

REVELATION

Revelation

Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff

July 17, 2008

For all the expletive ridden psychological warfare
throughout Patrick Jones latest play - a brutally
candid self-autobiographical account of a man
suffering from domestic abuse - the truism "men
don't talk" shows how taboo the subject remains.
Jones has never shied from challenging subject
matter and Revelation finds him in a rich vein of
form. But despite the religious subtext in the title
and writhing screenplay, there's little redemption
to be found.

Thirty something Welshman Steve, played by the
excellent Nathan Sussex, is piecing his life back
together after being made homeless.When he meets
Stacy Daly's sympathetic Dionne his life finds new
meaning.
But an unplanned pregnancy soon escalates to
physical and psychological abuse fuelled by
postnatal depression.

Dionne's resentment of everything Steve does is
total.
Her belittling of his every interest and studying
come in implacable torrents of abuse. She taunts
him, tells him he's worthless and hits him for being
him. This is domestic drama without the kitchen
sink, a life that's become existing.
"Jihad in the bedroom" is how Steve describes his
life. His unflinching monologues describe the wall
of silence from friends and the police when the
desperation of his situation becomes too much and he
speaks out.

"When someone hits you, you start to believe in some
glamorous afterlife", he explains in the play's only
nod to resolution.Aided by James Dean Bradfield's
brooding melancholic soundtrack, Faction
Collective's Revelation is a work that cuts straight
through the bone.

Reviewed by:
Alex Donahue the big issue






Revelation


Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff

Elisabeth Mahoney
Thursday July 10, 2008
The Guardian

Patrick Jones's new play was never going to make for
comfortable viewing. Confronting the taboo topic of
domestic violence against men - based on interviews
with 40 straight and gay men, and Jones's own
experience of an abusive relationship - this is raw,
angry theatre. There is one moment in particular of
shocking violence, but mostly Jones portrays the
reality of living under ceaseless, unfathomable
emotional cruelty, interspersed with physical
trauma.

Revelation does not begin bleakly, though the
discordant opening hum of the music by the Manic
Street Preachers' James Dean Bradfield hints at
trouble ahead. Steve (Nathan Sussex), living rough,
is invited home by Dionne (Stacey Daly), and despite
worrying asides - Dionne refers to being left by men
looking for "another victim" - life is good. After
the birth of their son, however, which seems to
trigger memories of her own sexual abuse, Dionne
turns abuser, sinking into a world in which she
berates, belittles and beats Steve. This slip into
dysfunction and brutality, with its endless
arguments and sudden physical punishments, is
horribly convincing. Both performances are
terrifically affecting, especially Daly in an
extremely challenging role.
There is, however, a tendency towards heaviness in
Jones's writing. Some lines are overwritten and he
tends to tell us things ("that's what abuse does to
you") that should be shown dramatically instead.
However, the play is well worth seeing for its
clear-eyed, powerful depiction of domestic abuse
that remains hidden behind closed doors.


By Rhiannon Harries
Sunday, 3 February 2008
The Independent on Sunday

When Johnny Keane (not his real name) left Brighton two years ago he threw his mobile phone and house keys into the sea. With nothing more than a rucksack on his back, he abandoned his old life and lived like a fugitive for the next 10 months, sleeping on friends' floors and park benches, stealing vegetables from greenhouses when he had no money to eat.

Only a few months earlier he had been enjoying a seemingly enviable lifestyle, with a successful career, a seafront home, expensive cars and enough money to send his children to private schools. But after six years of relentless psychological and physical abuse from his then-girlfriend, the mother of his children, sleeping rough was a welcome escape.

"When I told her I was leaving for the last time she nearly pulled the skin from my face," Johnny recalls. "That was pretty normal behaviour from her – clawing, kicking, spitting, punching. One night she hit me over the back of the head with a marble chopping board. That was 12 stitches. I've been attacked with scissors, knives, everything. If I fell asleep on the sofa after work, she'd put her cigarette out on me to wake me up."

If there is nothing extraordinary in the grim details of an abusive relationship, hearing a man speak candidly about his experience as a victim remains highly unusual. Although government statistics estimate that one in six men suffer some form of domestic abuse during their lifetime compared with one in four women (and there is consensus among those working in the area that men are far less likely to seek help than women, meaning the number could be even higher), violence perpetrated by women against men remains one of the least openly discussed problems in today's society.

Johnny met his girlfriend when he was 30; she fell pregnant within six weeks. "I thought it was everything I wanted," he says. "I was 30 and felt ready to be a dad. I had no idea what was in store for me. I wanted to end my life on more than one occasion.

"Pretty soon it became clear that she was using a lot of drugs and often drank too much, but she had violent tendencies even when she wasn't using. It wasn't just an incident once a month or once a week even. It was a deeply harrowing incident every day. Sometimes a dozen times a day. There was no respite, so I didn't have any time to reflect and think, 'This is wrong.'"

Johnny experienced domestic violence in all of its forms – "mental torture, manipulation and control through our children, as well as physical violence. But when you love somebody and they tell you they love you, it's very difficult to leave or pursue prosecution. She'd been a victim herself in the past. All I wanted was for it to stop."

Last month, Erin Pizzey, founder of one of the world's first women's refuges in 1971, launched an online campaign and research project to raise awareness of the issue and help men such as Johnny. "This kind of violence is one of the last taboos," she says. "Much is known and studied about male violence, but very little is written about women, and any attempt to discuss female violence is met with howls of 'blaming the victim'."

Pizzey also condemns the "shocking" lack of outlets available for men who do find the courage to speak out – a difficulty Johnny encountered first-hand when he first looked elsewhere for help.

"You don't hear men talking about this at the pub," he says. "The first time I went into the police station five years ago and said I needed help, they laughed and told me to go home. People can't believe it. She's this tiny little thing, seven stone, and I'm a big bloke, about 14 stone. In the end it took a nervous breakdown for me to seek help again. I was a wreck, I'd lost four-and-a-half stone in weight. I lost my job, my home – I lost everything."

Patrick Jones, a writer from south Wales who spent seven years with an abusive partner, believes that fear of ridicule and a lack of services dealing specifically with this problem keeps many men in violent relationships.

"I never sought medical help for any of the injuries," he says. "I just thought no one would believe me, it sounded so silly. I tried talking to my doctor about my depression and where it was coming from but he just prescribed me some tablets.

"On the few occasions I talked to other men, the response was terrible. It was like a brick wall. So I just put my head down, got on with it and lived for the tiny moments that were OK. I still don't really feel I can moan about it. It's not like I'm fighting in Iraq."

While Patrick eventually managed to make the break from his partner and move on with life on his own – writing a play, Revelation, about his experiences in the process – Johnny found salvation of a sort after coming across the ManKind Initiative, one of a handful of specialist charities in Britain dealing with male victims of domestic violence. "I was walking out of a police station one day after another incident with my partner and I saw a leaflet for ManKind. They were the first people to listen and help me and without them I wouldn't be here. I made them a promise that when I had structure and stability in my life again that I would give something back to them."

It says a lot about the general silence surrounding female domestic violence that ManKind's telephone helpline is in danger of closing in the next few months because of a lack of funding. "And it only costs £30,000 a year to keep it going," says Johnny. "It's nothing, but it's so important."

Johnny is now living in council accommodation while he seeks employment, but in the meantime he is trying to give back to those who helped him by serving as a member of a local domestic-violence forum and talking about his own experience to other victims and professionals working on the issue. It is a dramatically different life from the one he was used to, but he says he has never felt happier. "Our whole relationship, for eight years, was just total destruction. Looking back, I'm amazed I lasted so long. Now I know my kids are safe in the care of other people, I've got peace in my life for the first time in years."

For information on ManKind, call 01823 334 244 or go to www.mankind.org.uk. Patrick Jones' play, 'Revelation', is at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 029 2031 1050, www.chapter.org, from 8-10 July

Domestic help: The politics of violence

Erin Pizzey, 68, campaigner and founder of Britain's first refuge for victims of domestic violence

"I've always said that domestic violence is not a gender issue, but a learnt pattern of behaviour in early childhood. It's caused me no end of trouble: I had death threats because of it. The politics of the 1970s meant that the subject was hijacked and it became all about the patriarchy. But of the first 100 women who came into the refuge, 52 were as violent as the men they left, or more so. In my case, my mother was always more physically violent than my father.

"I've written an article for femininezone.com about men who have spoken to me about violent women in their lives and appended a questionnaire for women to fill in. I want to study the responses, because there's still so little known about women's violence.

"We have to stop the war between men and women. Children have a right to be born into peace – adults can choose their relationships, children are just precipitated into them. A huge amount of money goes to women's refuges and forums but none for men. It's grossly unfair. How can we discriminate against half the population?"

REVIEW OF EVERYTHING MUST GO
CARDIFF 1999
NME
HARD-HITTING doesn't even come close. Patrick Jones' debut play, "Everything Must Go", is one long scream with no sigh. It's bitter, angry, political, ugly, ruthless, painful and shocking. it is, if you'll excuse the pun, wired.
We're sat here at the Cardiff Sherman watching the second ever performance. Behind us sit James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and a roomful of expectant Manics fans, all of whom know the story by rote: Nicky's brother writes play with same title as fourth Manics album; Nicky's brother enlists the Manics' help to produce said play at Cardiff's Sherman Theatre; Nicky's brother fills said play with Manics quotes, songs, references and imagery. What they probably didn't expect was that Patrick's voice is even more intensely intense than his brother's, that the elder of the two brothers Jones is by far the least mellow. In a big f***ing way.
"Everything Must Go" is emotional carnage from start to end, systematically taking five characters and plucking off their wings with the casual brutality of a pre-teen bug killer. Drugs, unemployment, crime, self-mutilation, alienation and rage take such a toll on the play's five central characters that one dies, two may as well die and two just about scrape through intact. Well, intact-ish. Which isn't great odds, is it? In fact, Patrick's vision of modern Wales - with its post-mining culture of factory-line exploitation, woefully deficient welfare and alienating social divisiveness - is so damn bleak it makes "The Holy Bible" look like "Janet and John".
"Actually, I don't think we are that similar," James Dean Bradfield tells The Maker after the show. "It's more a 'quintessence' thing. Obviously, there's a shared belief system and all that stuff, shared values. But I think Pat really gets his points across in a different way to us."
Yeah, a nastier way. All five characters suffer horribly throughout "EMG", and their only hope lies in their ability voice their pain via the powerful, poetic monologues which bookend each scene. But, sadly, for all their rage, these speeches all too often flail about in the nebulous nihilism of punk: expressing too much hate, too little love. More than once, "EMG" reminds me of "Jubilee", one of Derek Jarman's films, and its exasperatingly directionless rage.
"I'm frustrated writing about all this stuff in a way," admits the hyperactive Patrick, "because there are no real answers. It is pretty nihilistic, I suppose, but it's also idealistic - the big phrase is "Something must grow', after all."
Rhys Miles Thomas, who plays the socially inept Curtis (a character so unsure of himself he speaks solely through song lyrics), thinks that raging against the machine is enough in itself.
"It's just nice that our generation finally has a voice," he hollers at The Maker, minutes after coming off-stage. "We've always been kicked down, treated like shit, and finally someone says, 'This is why we're like this. You f***ing educated us to be like this.'"
The "you" in question being Thatcher, Blair and the evil, Japanese factory owners who fire the father of main character A. Which would be fine if "EMG" offered any answers beyond that railing and a constant idolisation of NHS founder Aneurin Bevan; someone else to vote for, perhaps, some other way to employ the masses. As it is, it's like watching an Oxfam advert on TV, seeing kids starving, with no donation-line number at the end. And watching the character Cindy cut herself, though squirm-in-your-seat shocking, just feels like looking in a mirror which shows only spots and wrinkles - gruesomely effective, but essentially futile ...
All of which threatens to reduce "EMG" to the level of a visually brilliant Nine Inch Nails video, or it might, were the music not infinitely better throughout (numerous Manics songs plus the odd smattering of Catatonia, Stereophonics etc.) Of course, there's bound to be those who'll say Patrick Jones is merely exploiting his access to his brother's work. Utter crap, of course: the title "Everything Must Go" was originally his before Nicky half-inched it. As Rhys Miles Thomas says: "It's not a f***ing Manics tribute and it's not "Everything Must Go" the album on stage."
Sure, but there is a strange pleasure to be had watching James and Nicky squirm in their seats tonight, as the quotes and songs come thick and fast.
"I can't deny that, now and again, it felt awkward," blushes James afterwards. "But some of the songs sounded better than they'd ever, ever sounded. Ever. As if they'd been brought home and meant what they initially meant, to me."
To him, perhaps. But, though it was impossible not to be stunned by the performance, the volume and the production, maybe you had to be a Manic Street Preacher to find the meaning.
ROBIN BRESNARK