Culture War in the Theatre

by David Hamilton (April 2012)

A significant force in The Culture War was nihilist and subversive dramatists. Their technical abilities are excellent and their facility for embodying nihilism and ideology into dramatic form exemplary. An aspiring young playwright would do well to study their use of styles and genres to explicate their message. Their works were frequently televised, films were made of them and they were performed in many countries especially on Broadway.

A brief overview of drama since 1956 can not cover them all but the best known and most representative, but it is necessary to understand how we got where we are as there is now a similar dearth of quality drama as before the big change: a pregnant pause.

Nihilism and Disintegrating Worlds

Hotel Amsterdam and “West of Suez” he dealt with affluent but spiritually empty characters like writers, journalists, politicians, actors, media types, no longer the disaffected.

The Dwarves and his 1963 play of the same name is derived from it. It follows Len through a mental breakdown and retreat into madness. Pinter has used this theme of the mind's retreat into its own kingdom as an escape from the unbearable demands of the world several times. There are “Beth” in Landscape (1967) and Kate in Old Times (1970). Women who insulate themselves from reality in a sort of dream scape.

The Birthday Party (1958) to Ruth's memories of her career as a photographic model in The Homecoming (1965). Whether they are fantasies or deliberate ploy to disconcert an opponent in a psychological game is never certain, but they are not believable recollections of the past.

1974), Hurst admits under pressure from the intruder Spooner that for him life has ceased: “No man's land does not move or change, or grow old, remains forever silent.” He is trapped in a frozen world. No Man's Land is in some respects a re-working of The Caretaker. In both one occupies a space then comes an intruder to ingratiate himself, move into the space but finally is rejected. The outsider is Spooner who tries to insinuate himself into a permanent place as secretary in the household of Hurst, the writer. Whereas in the earlier play, Aston, the mental defective, and Davies, the tramp, are barely articulate, Hurst and Spooner are educated men. One is a writer and Spooner claims to be a poet only without Hurst's financial success.

My true friends look out at me from my album.”

The typical Pinter battle between occupant and intruder is played on a higher level and is largely a claim to an authoritative version of the past: if you control the past you control the future, as Orwell put it.
In Betrayal (1978) Pinter succeeded in using the flashback technique, which he had begun to experiment with in “Old Times”, to scrutinise the mind's conscious and unconscious betrayals of reality. The play deals with the developing relationship between three people: Robert and Jerry have been close friends since their schooldays and Emma, wife of Robert and former mistress of Jerry. Pinter tells the story in a series of scenes moving backwards in time: there are nine scenes beginning in 1977 with meetings between Emma and Jerry and Jerry and Robert – two years after the adultery ended. We are taken back to a moment in the married couples bedroom in 1968, when the affair began. We are shown key episodes enacted after we have heard them discussed. With this technique for the first time in his work Pinter verifies the past. But does it accord with memories and conversations we see the characters have. We learn that there is a lot of deliberate deception which makes a dramatic event that is entwined with tricks of memory that the mind has no control over. They deliberately miss-remember and also involuntarily get the past wrong.

David Storey (1933) wrote of the futility of life. Storey was a painter and novelist as well as a playwright and wrote the screenplay for the British Social Realist film version of his play This Sporting Life (1960).
His first play: The Restoration of Arnold Middleton (1966) was on the breakdown of a schoolteacher Home(1970) is set in a mental hospital but the location is only revealed gradually as the story proceeds. There are five characters including apparently benign Harry, opinionated Jack, cynical Marjorie, and flirtatious Kathleen. As we are shown their interactions we realise their delusions and pretensions are similar to those of people living in normal life. This is a poignant evocation of the passing of a way of life – the subtext of most of these plays. In several of his works but more so here, Storey achieves an elegaic quality that has been compared to the mood of Chekov’s last plays. Home has little plot; it is the carrying through of a process of a dramatic image of growth and decay, rise and fall, advance and retreat. Two well-spoken, gentlemen, approaching old-age meet coarse working-class women and try to establish a relationship with them but fail. At the end they are alone again, back on the deserted terrace where we found them, weeping quietly together.

After uncertainty in the opening sequence the audience have realised that their talk of the weather and items from their newspapers is not the small talk of casual acquaintances, but the careful avoidance of subjects too painful to face by two inmates of another institution, a mental hospital, the Home of the title.

Peter Shaffer's (1926) Equus (1973), is about the vile crime of a boy blinding six horses by stabbing. The boy is sent to a child psychologist, Dr. Dysart, by his social worker. Technically, the play is constructed like a detective story with a narrator who has his hat over his eyes and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth a la Humphrey Bogart. He is a professional psychologist but narrates how he goes about the mean streets. It uses the detective genre for the purpose.

There is a scene on stage where the girl is grooming them by mime. However, the intellectual content is more objectionable and corruptive than the theatrical content.

Forty Years On (1968) is set in an English Public School, symbolically named Albion House. Bennett counterpoints the reminiscences of a retiring headmaster with an end of term play which his successor is putting on. It is a play that offers a view of 1960s England which is at odds with the old-fashioned values of the retiring headmaster. The final two speeches make explicit the allegory of a nation that has lost a world-wide Empire and is looking for a role for itself. Guess where? in Europe! This was in 1968 when we joined the Common Market. These last two speeches give a funny and satiric but also sad and nostalgic flavour of a society going through change. The headmaster’s speech:

The schoolboy at the lectern is reading the final bit of the school play:

Agitprop and Dramatised Ideology

There are overtly Socialist writers and here we move from well-written nihilism and negativity to cultural warfare, violence and advocacy of revolution.

Arden became disillusioned with parliamentary democracy under the pragmatic Socialism of Prime Minister Harold Wilson and like the younger writers he was disillusioned with established theatres seen as promoting bourgoise cultural values. He had many acrimonious disputes with the managements in the late 60s and early 70s. He and his Irish wife were proponents of Agitprop. He wrote a three-part play, The Non-stop Comedy for the Liberty Hall in Dublin which was the HQ of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in 1975.

He favoured techniques derived from Medieval morality plays and Brechtian Epic Theatre as well as popular entertainments like music, songs, stand-up comedy, rather than methods of Naturalism and Social Realism used in Kitchen Sink drama. He developed these techniques to the fullest in The Non Stop Connolly Show to present an account of Irish Revolutionary James Connelly, who was shot by the British after the failed Easter Uprising of 1916. The Play is in six-parts and was performed non-stop over the Easter weekend of 1975. The audience could come and go. It is presented in the form of a review interspersing dramatised events from history with songs and popular spectacle. For example, there is an election staged as a tag-wrestling match.

They frequently re-worked classic plays from our cannon to undermine our cultural traditions and were redolent of brutality and violence.

But he does live, unlike Kiero of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, who committed suicide when he reached that level of insight. Lear lives on and learns to believe in the possibility of changing the world. He is eventually shot when he tries to put his new knowledge into practice and starts dismantling the wall that symbolises the barriers that he was once responsible for. That is the first group of plays with people reaching consciousness and either giving up in despair or trying to do something.

In the second group of plays, Bingo (1973), The Fool (1974), and The Woman (1977) he took the lives of William Shakespeare in Bingo, John Clare in The Fool and the classical story of the Trojan War in The Woman. These very different periods and stories he uses as the focus for his view of the way we are deformed and limited by the ideology enshrined in our culture. He uses different periods of history to explicate different stages of development. He saw his task as re-assessing and adjusting the conceptions that modern man has of the past.

The third phase began with The Bundle (1978). He claimed that he tried to develop from plays burdened with problems to those that dramatise the strength of people to find answers. The answers his characters find are hard decisions and to be ruthless in trying to change the world. Like The Bundle which is a Brechtian parable play. A guerilla leader called Wong throws an abandoned infant into a river because his conventionally good deed of caring for the child would prevent him bringing about a successful revolution against the corrupt order of society that causes babies to be abandoned by their parents.

1968 brings the rise of The New Left who replaced Liberalism. There were race riots in the States, the French Government was nearly brought down by student riots and Russian tanks suppressed the Prague rising. The war in Vietnam had a major impact because it was seen as not in the American national interest but a Capitalist invasion. These events helped to form the outlook of a new generation of young dramatists.

I only have space for three: Howard Brenton, David Edgar and David Hare.

Magnificence (1973) the central character, Jed, is a terrorist and closes the play with a futile gesture of despair and blows up himself and the cabinet minister he is holding hostage.

The juxtaposes are supposed to raise important questions about the nature of Imperialism and what it does to both the oppressed and the oppressors.

But if you do not conform you are exiled. Ian Curteis submitted a play about The Falklands War to the BBC, which was sympathetic to Margaret Thatcher. It was rejected. If he had attacked Mrs. Thatcher as a warmonger or an Imperialist it probably would have been accepted.

These people with the BBC and The Arts Council became the new Establishment and promoted The Culture War from within. If a young playwright wrote about the destructive psychological effects which abortion can have on women Mr Stephenson would reject it. (1)

The nihilists and the ideologues are passing into history while contemporary playwrights merely write Politically Correct platitudes leaving a vacuum crying to be filled by a contemporary explanation of our world expressed by new Traditionalist or Conservative playwrights. As they would be refused money by the Arts Council and refused a stage by the theatres they would need places to develop plays, practice and perform.

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(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/media/5873063/BBC-executive-says-corporation-should-foster-left-of-centre-thinking.html

(2) http://www.westendextra.com/news/2011/jan/campaign-honour-sir-terence-rattigan-amid-writer%E2%80%99s-revival-theatreland-urged-name-venu

 
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