Chapter One

An Examination of the sense of Belonging

The English character always represented by heroic actions and

traits in the 15th and 16th centuries and the periods that followed that time;
obviously represented the English character as a hero who was looking
for authority or for power, and his down flow was because of his
greediness, nativity or because of being a veteran in philosophy that led
to his hesitation in taking an action. However, in nowadays drama, the
English character is being represented as the one who is far away from
the logical, the moral, or even the religious backgrounds; just to be an
apathetic character. There is a great shift from the old character's interests
to the modern one, which makes gab by separating those modern
characters from the greatness of their ancestors. This separation is the
core of the identity loss by which Jez Butterworth represented his
characters as the chaotic and messy characters. Those characters that lost
their sense of belonging to their own identities turned the society to be a
messy world; the world that seeks for wars, disasters, and conflicts as a
kind of entertainment not because of being a king or because of glorious
ambitions. This sense of being lost is a result of, from Butterworth's
viewpoint of modernity and its penetration inside of everyday life which
.is known in literature as a postmodernist period
It has been always said that the first rap was fun, then rap was
gun, and the exaggerations of modernism which is known as
postmodernism is no exception. In other words, the exaggeration of
indulging in the ideas of change leads to the wrestle of postmodernism
which has become in the last few decades a trend of thought that has been
taken for granted by a lot of critics. Among those, Huyssen's simple
:statement
What appears on one level as the latest fad, advertising
pitch and hollow spectacle is part of a slowly emerging
cultural transformation in Western societies, a change in
sensibility for which the term "post-modern" is actually,
at least for now, wholly adequate. The nature and depth
of that transformation it is. […] there is a wholesale
paradigm shift of cultural, social, and economic orders […].
[A]n important sector of our culture there is a noticeable shift
in sensibility, practices and discourse formations which
distinguishes a post-modern set of assumptions, experiences
and prepositions from that of a preceding period. (181)
Here, Huyssen's statement about post-modernism is a clear announcement
of it as a real change in the matters of passions and feelings, and that
change is in a profound level to dig deeply in the social, economic and
.cultural backgrounds
Obviously, Butterworth portrayed identity loss as a result of such
change. His characters have undergone through a world of lost as if
Butterworth tries to declare that all of modern problems are kind of a
little damage occurred in our visual picture of simplicity and innocence of
feelings and emotions. He gains his fame due to his dealing with the issue
of looking for comfort and relief through picturing troubles and sufferings
through which the characters go, and at the end they gain nothing except
.loss of their properties, and their own selves
Unlike his contemporary competitors, Butterworth doesn't resort to
fancy and imagination to portray the exact picture of our modern times.
He puts that picture directly, and most importantly, he deals with the
reasons behind that picture and the results it produce. The author, instead,
refers to mythical figures through his plays, not to tell the audience that
mythology is a perfect subject in our modern times, but to initialize the
idea of change for the real and effective way to us, not the one for
modernity. He is "not interested [in myths] anymore, […] can't study [any
book of mythology]" (Butterworth, Interview). He simply uses myths in a
black comic way to say that there is no solution to the identity loss,
.except by using a hidden power; i.e., the power of myth
In his Mojo, Butterworth deals with the masculine identity by
representing just male characters throughout the play. Setting his play in
the 1950s, Butterworth represented those kinds of men known as "Angry
young men". This is a "journalistic term which is applied to a loose group
of British writers who emerged in the 1950s after the creative hiatus that
followed World War II. They revolted against the prevailing social
mores, class distinction, and 'good taste'." (Helicon, par. 144). Those men
rampaged against the sense of loss that invaded the society at that time.
That may also refer to the period, from Butterworth's view point, at which
the masculinity crisis began. This group "of mid-20th-century young
British writers express the bitterness of the lower classes toward the
established sociopolitical system and the mediocrity and hypocrisy of the
middle and upper classes." (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia 74).
Unfortunately, this movement ended by the early 1960s and achieved
.nothing from its aims
Butterworth's fervor for writing this play generated from his
conversation with Malcolm McLaren when Malcolm spoke about Soho
and the amazing collision between "rock and roll and the gangland
violence" (Interview in Butterworth ,2011, plays: one, par 2). Butterworth
actually didn't intend his play to be merely about gangsters. He rather
wanted it to be about people who misunderstood themselves and thought
:they are wicked, but they are not like this. He quotes in that interview
hat I didn’t want [Mojo] to be was about gangsters. ]w[
I wanted it to be about people who think they are – or
who possibly know – gangsters, but aren’t. Because they
[a]re a bunch of children, everyone in the play: it’s like
a school playground game really. Sweets and Potts aren’t
gangsters. Skinny’s not a gangster. Nobody in it is, really.
Baby’s just a lost soul... It was always taken as a gangland play,
.but it’s not at all.(par 3)
So Butterworth didn't represent all of the play's characters, except for
Mickey, as criminal persons at all. They were just victims of Mickey's
greed for gaining more business. They are, at the same time, responsible
for allowing such a character, like Mickey to be existed in the society; by
paying no attention for his deeds, and by being apathy with their roles
.that they should play
Butterworth deals with male characters in Mojo and discusses the
crucial issue which is the crisis of masculinity. He uses the black comedy
to highlight the importance of that issue in a comic way not to blacken the
picture in front of the audience which might lead them to commit a
suicide. The author energizes violence through comedy to focus on the
.damage of the absence of manhood; especially the fatherhood
The opening scene of Mojo begins with Silver Johny, dancing like a
fighter before a fight, rehearsing his performance. It is a night club where
the music rises loudly, and the dancers become ready to dance. Then,
Butterworth shifts the audience's focus to the two young men; Sweets and
Potts, setting at the table with a pot of tea and three, not two cups. Sweets
opens the play with his question: "Is that brewed?" (Butterworth 1.1.12)
which may refer to the strained and angry spotlight on the ordinary in
Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter (1960), in which two gangland
assassins find their coalition extended to "breaking point under
increasingly mysterious forms of external pressure." (Rabey 40).
However, the three shoddy cups changes that shift because the audience
will assume that Sweets and Potts are playing with the objects of another
person, or they are waiting for a company. By representing those two
characters; Sweets and Potts, Butterworth not only refers to Pinter's The
Dumb Waiter, but also refers to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead. In Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are the two characters whose deeds are absurd; as they flipping the coins,
travelling with no aims, and then remembering that the king ordered them
to travel, just near the end of the play; they recognized that there is no
escape from death. Sweets and Potts also represented Samuel Beckett’s
characters Vladimir and Estragon in his Waiting for Goddot. Throughout
the whole play, Vladimir and Estragon repeated the silly speech to
represent the sense of loss in our world. Butterworth's references to those
:two plays become apparently through the following lines
SWEETS. Good rule.
POTTS. Great rule.
SWEETS. There’s got to be rules and that’s a rule.
[…]
POTTS. So what?
SWEETS. So what happened?
POTTS. Nothing.
SWEETS. Right. (Butterworth 1.1.76-78, 104-107).

From that point, the audience can touch the loss of identity, as that sense
of being lost began by the apathy of those characters that Butterworth
introduced in the opening scene of his play to hit the heart of humanity to
.heel an attention for the dangers of that issue
When Sweets offered Potts a drug, Potts makes the first confused and
perplexed admission, which is repeated in comic reiteration by every one
of the characters in the twenties, 'My Piss is black'(14). This is a result of
the digestion of Sweets' pills. They continue their speech about Mr. Ross,
Ezra, and Silver Johny. There is a prepared meeting between Mr. Ross
and Ezra; the owner of the night club, to "let [Ross] see the merchandise;
( 47) [Silver Johny]", a seventeen-year-old singer. Sweets and Potts talk
about the outstanding effect of Silver on women, through the exaggerated
statement "One day he’s asking his mum can he cross the road the next
he’s got grown women [queuing] up to suck his winkle." (58-59). Both of
them continue their speech about Johny's jacket and the discovery of
.Johny's gorgeous sound
Another effective method to evoke the excitement is introduced
through the recurrence and the exaggeration by Sweets and Potts in front
of Baby; Ezra's son and the heir of the night club, because they assumed
that Ezra tell him nothing about Johny. Baby enters aimless "stands there
for a bit", and sings a meaningless song to himself. When Baby asks them
what is going on, they answer "nothing". After Baby's existing, Potts and
Sweets uses a repetition as a kind of a "self-reassurance" (Rabey 42) in
the matters of Silver Johny's opportunity of management in his songs.
"Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high", which is quoting from an
American composer and paint; George Gershwin's song, Summer Time,
is one of those of those repetitions through which Potts and Sweets share
their speech to hide their speech about Johny in front of Baby. They
continue talking about Sam Rose who "has got dyed hair" till the
.appearance of Skinny
Since the entrances of Skinny who "is seething, furious", talks began
to take a cruel direction; they turned up to be skirmishes. The skirmish
and that cruel direction overwhelmed the rest of the play. Skinny want to
abandon the night club for another job in a bank because Baby's behavior
bothers him. Skinny complains to Potts and Sweets that Baby "does the
thing […] about bad breath. The thing about that I’ve got bad breath." To
mitigate Skinny's anger, Potts tells Skinny that his "breath smells
beautiful […] It smells like English roses." Here, Butterworth manifests
the comic spirit as identified by Brendan Kennelly: the declaration of
'hilarious war’ on ‘drab decencies', [as the hero should endure because of]
the resources of irresponsibility – lying, duplicity, cunning, idleness,
deception, hypocrisy, treachery and, above all, the strength of selfishness"
(qtd.in Rabey 43). However, that comic hero gains the audience support
and they love him. This is the reason behind Butterworth's penning the
play in a black comedy; to cause pain but not to cry, to highlight the
sorrow and to mitigate its effects. Baby awes those qualities due to being
his father's careless victim and by his death at the end of the play, the
audience is going to be sorry for his death and in the same time they will
.be happy for him because his pain will not end without his death
By creating Baby's character, Butterworth adopts the dangers of the
loss of Ezra's manhood as well as Baby's childhood. Those dangers lead
to Baby's psychological problems. Both of them; the perpetrator and the
victim, are male characters, and the reason behind Butterworth's
presenting just male characters is to avoid misunderstood by feminist
critics who will take the advantage of the creation of female victims. He
simply reflects the bad effects of abandon the male role instead of playing
.it as it has to be
Messy and noise pervades the stage by the opening of the second
scene, as Baby ties Skinny's "hands around the back of a jukebox,[and]
his pants round his ankles", and Baby threatens Skinny to kill him, so
Potts and Sweets try to calm down baby. The course of events becomes
aggressive to reveal Mickey's plot to share the night club with Baby.
Sweets observes that Mickey tries to controls Baby's mind; he teaches
him how to cheat at cards to be friendly with Baby and to make Baby
listening to him alone. Mickey's manipulation of others' minds is an
allusion to "the ridiculousness of this purported exemplary masculine
maturity" (Rabey 44), which is exposed the crisis of masculine identity.
Later on, Mickey exposed the news of Ezra's death and an intense feeling
of fear pervades the scene. Their hesitation becomes clear through their
:behaviors and speech as following
.SKINNY. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. We’re fucked
]…[
POTTS. All right. All right. All right. Stupid question Mickey
and good. Let’s ask questions. Stupid, brilliant, we don’t ...
?know till it’s asked. Exactly. Right. Good. Are you sure
]…[
.SWEETS. Suffering Jesus. They sawed him in half
.SKINNY. Poor fucking man
...SWEETS. You sweat your life away
They began to worry about their lives because of the parts of Ezra's body.
Mickey says "[h]e’s fucking cut in half. He’s in two bins". The
description of cutting Ezra's body in two parts and putting them in two
separate bins didn't evoke them, and the only thing they worried about if
Mickey is sure about that or not. They didn't call a police to report about
that accident, or rather run away from the night club. The surprising
reaction from those characters is that they stayed in the club and went on
in their life as if nothing happen at all, as if there is no missing soul or
body between them. They treated like frozen souls that couldn't feel
.enough to realize that sad situation
Selfishness is the only adjective that can be used to describe those
characters at this situation. They began to worry about themselves; how
they can be in safe, or even how they can avoid being noticed by the
killer. Baby; the victim's son, is unaware of what is going on around him.
On the other hand, Mickey who acts alike a baby's agent doesn't pay any
sympathy with Ezra's death or even the way by which Ezra is killed and
put in two pins. Mickey instead began to instruct Baby and acts like the
.owner of the night club
The audience could recognize the psychological problems of Baby's
character; especially at the moment when Mickey informed him by the
news of Ezra's death. His reaction may be a clue made by Butterworth to
Mickey's crisis of masculinity as he initializes his words with "[i]t’s all
right. Baby, I call... I got a call this morning. Somebody’s murdered your
dad". This way of telling a son about his father's death is kind of ironical
statement to tell somebody that it is all right or it is fine or okay that your
father is killed as if Baby and Mickey are waiting for Ezra's death and
finally after planning and accomplishing that mission it is fine that they
finally succeeded and got what they waited for. Firstly, Baby's reaction is
silent as Baby stands, walks, and sits down. Then, his reaction is
:translated into words as following
.BABY. Guess what I just saw. (Pause.) Out there. Go on. Guess
]…[
.Have a guess. Out there on Dean Street. Have a guess
]…[
.Mickey. I don't know
.BABY. Guess
– MICKEY. Baby
.BABY. Sidney? Have a guess
.POTTS. I don’t know
.BABY. Have a guess. Have a guess
.POTTS. Tony Curtis. Give up
.BABY. Guess. No. Guess
?POTTS. Henry the Eighth
.BABY laughs at this. Pause
BABY. There’s a Buick parked out there. A Buick in Dean
Street. Right outside the Bath House. It’s brilliant.
(Pause.) Makes it look like Las Vegas. (With a soft G.
Pause.) Tonna kids hanging off it pretending they’re...
they’re in a film. (Pause.) What’s happening to this town?
.A Buick
The repetition of Baby's question for a guess is the keynote of his
character. He pays no attention for the news of the dead father, he just
plays puzzle