Analysis
First and foremost, Bernard Kops is a lyric poet who uses the theater, television, and radio as vehicles for poetry. Theatrically, he is an innovator in his use of music and songs and in his often successful attempts to restore vitality to hackneyed themes. Kops’s exploration of fantasy, of inner states of being, and of schizophrenia is juxtaposed to the presentation of realistic, sordid surroundings. His handling of dream logic is superb and explains why he is so attracted to the radio as a dramatic form. Radio drama depends on pauses, sounds, words, silences, and the intimate relationship between the listeners (the unseen audience) and the unseen performers in the studio. Such a form is ideally suited to Kops’s synthesis of past and present, actuality and fantasy.
Kops’s plays have been hailed as triumphs of sordid realism much in the kitchen-sink mold, as imaginative explorations of psychic worlds, and as politically charged allegories. Kops was at first bracketed with Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, two other East End Jewish dramatists who emerged in the new wave of British drama heralded by the 1956 Royal Court Theatre performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Each subsequently went his own way, the differences being greater than the similarities. Unlike Pinter’s work, Kops’s theater is frequently overtly Jewish. While hostility in Pinter is characterized by innuendo and body movement, sometimes erupting into violence, hostility in Kops is overt; it does not simmer. Unlike Wesker, Kops does not preach. Most of Kops’s drama, even when focusing on old age and death, has a vitality, an instinctive sense of life, and often a coarse humor that are lacking in Wesker.
Much of Kops’s work revolves around family situations, the basic conflict he sees in such situations, and the individual’s doomed attempt to free himself from the family and its nets. He is obsessed with family themes, with people tied together in intense love-hate relationships. Like O’Neill, Kops uses the theater to express the inner life of human beings. All of his plays are shadowed by the streets and sounds of the London of his childhood, by his Jewishness, by his family, and by his wild, anarchic, surrealistic inner life.
The Hamlet of Stepney Green
The plot of The Hamlet of Stepney Green provides a good illustration of the nature of Kops’s drama. Kops transforms William Shakespeare’s Hamlet into an East End London Jewish lyric fantasy. Hamlet becomes David Levy, twenty-two years old, tall, and intelligent, who wants to be a singer like Frank Sinatra. He refuses to see his future in terms of inheriting his aging father’s small pickled-herring street stall. Kops describes two ways in which David Levy can be played—as someone who can sing, or as someone who cannot: “The crucial thing about David is that although he is bored with the life around him he is waiting for something to happen.” Hava Segal, the daughter of Solly Segal, David’s father’s best friend, becomes Ophelia and dotes on David. Throughout the first act, Sam, David’s father, is dying; the curtain to the first act falls as he dies. At the moment of death, father and son are united. Like so many of Kops’s subsequent creations, the old man is unwilling to relinquish his hold on life. He is sad because there is a gulf between him and his son and because there is no love in his relationship with Bessy, his young and still quite attractive wife.
In the second act, Sam returns to the stage as a ghostly figment of his son’s imagination, calling on David to avenge his death....
(This entire section contains 2851 words.)
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In David’s heightened imagination, his mother has poisoned his father. Bessy is going to marry Solly Segal. David, imitating Hamlet, dresses in black and is treated as though he were insane by relatives and a chorus of salesmen. Meanwhile the ghost attempts to dampen David’s vengeful desires. Sam, aware that only good can come through Bessy’s marriage to Solly, arranges, through a séance, for the marriage to take place.
In the final act, the ghost persuades David to mix a seemingly deadly potion to be used on the wedding day, but the potion is actually life-giving. The drama concludes on a frenzied note of love and reconciliation, and the ghosts haunting David’s mind are liberated and disappear into nothingness.
Throughout The Hamlet of Stepney Green, realism and fantasy interweave. The play, like much of Kops’s work, is rooted in the East End of London (the equivalent of New York’s Lower East Side)—its characters, noise, bustle, rhythms, and songs. Music is used to great effect by Kops, to re-create the East End ambience, to evoke nostalgia, and to provide a sad, ironic commentary on the action. During the mourning period at the end of the first scene of the second act, for example, Sam’s family and friends gather around the home in the traditional Jewish way to remember him. David, in black, disrupts tradition by singing “My Yiddisher Father” to the tune of Sophie Tucker’s famous “My Yiddishe Mamma.” The “shiva” rituals (for mourning the dead) are parodied by transforming the gender of popular song lyrics. Reviewers noted that the play was far too long, especially when it indulged in lyric fantasies concerning the past—a reflection of Kops’s lack of discipline. Kops often forgets his plot, forgets the limitations of the stage, and even forgets the patience of an audience; Sam takes a long time to die. In spite of these defects, the play generates a tremendous sense of life and bustle, brilliantly rendering ordinary London Jewish existence with its hopes, fears, music, and tears.
Good-Bye World
Good-Bye World, performed in Guildford Surrey in 1959, has long, rambling dream sequences that make it theatrically unsatisfactory. Kops enjoys conveying the details of low-life London. His setting is a Paddington boardinghouse, and the protagonist is a thuggish, obsessive dreamer, a hardened criminal of twenty-two who breaks out of prison because his mother has committed suicide. The play contains three of Kops’s basic dramatic ingredients: London rhythms and atmosphere, dreams and fantasies, and mothers and their influence on their sons. The protagonist, John, has two objectives: to find out whether his mother has left him a message, and to give her a decent burial. In his room, the characters who knew his mother—a landlady, a drunken Irishman, and a blind circus clown—come and talk to him. While John listens, the police wait outside to recapture him. The long personal monologues of each character reveal Kops’s fascination with the poetry of the inner mind, his handling of dream logic, his sudden switches of mood and tone, and his exploration of schizophrenia. These dramatic elements achieve their summit in his mature drama, Ezra.
Change for the Angel
Kops’s next play, Change for the Angel, which had a limited run at the Arts Theatre in London in March, 1960, develops many of the ideas introduced in The Hamlet of Stepney Green and Good-Bye World. Paul Jones is a teenager in search of a meaningful life; his sister, Helen, is a machinist; and his brother, Martin, is the leader of a local gang of fascist youths. Paul’s father, Joe, is a baker whose business has been adversely affected by a supermarket. He takes to drinking in the pub to escape from work and the family. Paul wants to be a writer and resists his father’s efforts to turn him into an engineer. By the end of the first act, Paul is praying for his father’s death, and Helen has been seduced by an American serviceman.
The second act introduces the first of a long line of Kopsian characters, just released from mental institutions, who have to face a hostile world. In this instance, the former mental patient is the victim of Joe’s attempted rape.
In the third act, Paul hates his father so much that he invokes the Angel of Death, who takes the wrong life—his mother’s instead of his father’s. The audience is treated to a very lengthy deathbed scene and to frenetic, hysterical reactions. Paul leaves home and, in a manner reminiscent of the ending of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), goes into a hostile world after his beloved mother, rather than the detested father, dies.
The name of the family in Change for the Angel may be Jenkins, but the cadences are those of East End Jewish family life. The play contains Kops’s recurrent ingredients, but there is also an overt political conviction not so evident in his earlier plays. The threat of nuclear disaster dominates the play, as does the continual fear of anti-Semitism.
The Dream of Peter Mann
Oedipal elements, the bomb, and lyric fantasy are the essential ingredients of The Dream of Peter Mann, which suffered the insult, on its Edinburgh Festival premiere early in September, 1960, of having half the first-night audience walk out. The play proved to be too expensive to perform satisfactorily and too much goes on in it; nevertheless, it remains one of Kops’s most interesting works. The author reflected in a personal communication that he “wanted to write a play about a man who was up with progress but got mixed up in power and in so doing helped to create the destruction of the world.” The protagonist, Peter Mann, dominated by his strong Jewish mother, has grown up in a London street of run-down small shops. A small, cunning tramp named Alex persuades Peter to travel the world to make his fortune. After he robs his mother’s safe, Peter’s fantasies take over most of the remainder of the play. The people in the street become robots compulsively digging for uranium, then change into savages prepared to lynch Peter on his return from his travels, into slaves working twenty-four hours a day preparing shrouds for the next war, into rebels, and finally back into themselves. During the action of the play, Peter is defeated, victorious, penniless, and enormously wealthy. Clearly, Peter Mann is Everyman, a leader and a victim, hopeful and despairing, generous and selfish, shrewd and simple. The fantasy is an enlargement of reality, another dimension of the everyday. Kops keeps the play in control by grounding its frenetic fantasy in the sounds of London Jewish life, conveyed through colloquial dialogue, Cockney backchat, dance-hall rhythms, catchy songs, and contemporary political references.
Enter Solly Gold
Superficially, Enter Solly Gold may appear to be different from Kops’s earlier working-class-oriented plays; nevertheless, it has much in common with them. It won a competition organized by Centre 42, an early 1960’s movement designed to bring the theater to people outside London and to factory districts where little if any theater had been performed. The hero of the drama is a carpetbagger, Solly Gold, who informs the audience within the first few minutes that “work is all right for workers . . . but for Solly Gold?” Solly is scavenging in London’s East End, trying to get enough money to emigrate to America, his “spiritual home,” where he believes “dog eats dog and . . . that’s the way [he] like[s] it.”
The opening scene is Rabelaisian. Solly fiddles money out of a tailor, carries on with the tailor’s wife, sleeps with a hard-bitten prostitute, and dons the clothes of a widow’s deceased husband, a rabbi, in order to cheat her out of a bunch of large chickens.
In the second scene, Solly, still disguised as a rabbi, has gate-crashed a wealthy home where a wedding is taking place. Solly announces the start of “Rabbinical Chicken Sunday” and gradually takes over the household, making himself indispensable to Morry Swartz, head of the house and king of a shoe business, a melancholy millionaire. Solly sets about making Morry the Messiah so that Morry will find the peace of mind he lacks and Solly will get the cash he needs.
In the course of the drama, Kops lashes out at Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, and big business, writing some of his most sustained and brilliant comic lines. Many of these reflect the love-hate attitude he has toward his own Anglo-Jewish background. The play’s warm reception in non-Jewish communities is evidence, however, of its universality: Carpetbaggers exist everywhere, and Kops’s depiction of greed and hypocrisy speaks to audiences of all kinds, as does his blend of slapstick comedy and exuberant verbal wit.
David, It Is Getting Dark
David, It Is Getting Dark, produced and performed in France in 1970 by the distinguished French actor Laurent Terzieff, depicts the conflict between a right-wing English writer and a socialist English Jewish writer. In this play, Kops tackles an issue that has continued to absorb him: how to reconcile great writing with inhuman political theories. The play also examines the relationship between victim and victor. While David, It Is Getting Dark can be viewed as a trial run for Ezra, it is a valuable work in its own right. Success and failure, the need to love and be loved, loneliness and the need to communicate, Jewishness and anti-Semitism, the need for God, the way human beings use and are used in turn by one another, sterility, and creativity, the dark forces within the self transcending political conviction—all these themes swirl together in the play. The long final scene, which depicts David, the Jewish poet, returning to his room and dancing with his mistress, Bella, while Edward, the reactionary artist, pleads with him to look at his manuscript, is made unforgettable by Kops’s powerful, haunting, and evocative poetry.
David, It Is Getting Dark is intensely autobiographical: David’s sense of failure is Kops’s. There is superb irony in the fact that nearly a decade after its composition, Kops decided to restore Ezra Pound to life. A seemingly failed English Jewish writer uses a great anti-Semitic writer’s last, sad years to show how human that writer was and, in the process, achieves fame for himself. In David, It Is Getting Dark, Edward Nichols appropriates David’s autobiography; Kops transforms Pound’s last years in Ezra.
Ezra
Ezra explores the relationship between insanity, political extremism, and poetic power. Kops has long been obsessed with the question of how great poetry can be written by a man holding vicious political opinions and insidious economic ideas. At the same time, Ezra continues his exploration of extreme mental states. Kops gets inside Pound’s mind by creating a world in which all things coexist at the same time: the past and the present, the living and the dead, fact and fantasy, truth and illusion. Once again, Kops’s drama inhabits the territory of fantastic juxtapositions. Benito Mussolini and Antonio Vivaldi are as real for Pound as his wife, his mistress, and the officials who put him into a cage and then into a Washington, D.C., asylum. Kops’s Pound is sensitive, learned, egotistical, and eccentric. Onstage he is exhibited as a gorilla in a large cage, all the while producing poetry for his seminal work, The Cantos. Kops intertwines snatches of poetry, dialogue, ranting, animal sounds, contemporary popular songs, and fragments of great lyric insight. The effect is profoundly moving—the summit of Kops’s theatrical achievement. Using stream-of-consciousness techniques, Kops enters Pound’s mind, developing surreal scenic juxtapositions to structure the text and convey the howling sounds of genius at bay. Ezra encapsulates all of Kops’s recurring themes and techniques: his social and political awareness, his obsession with down-and-outs, with the antisocial and the insane, with the victim-predator relationship, and with the family. Pound is caught in a love-hate relationship with his wife, his mistress, his country—and himself. Theatrically, the power of the play lies in the visual presentation of entrapment. Kops uses a wooden set with protruding nails. The prison and the cage are projections of the entangled web of Pound’s mind. Ian McDiarmid played Pound in the London performance. His long white hair hung from his head like that of an Old Testament prophet. Accompanied by the music of Antonio Vivaldi and Richard Wagner in the background, McDiarmid switched in mood from King Lear to his Fool in less than a second.
Kops is a supreme dramatist of frenetic states. The distinguished English theater critic Irving Wardle, in a 1980 review in The Times (London), wrote that “no other living playwright matches” Kops “in the virtuoso handling of dream logic.” Kops has progressed from the often undisciplined rendering of Oedipal fantasies and dreamy young poetic rebels and confidence tricksters to the exploration of the subconscious mind, where reality and illusion intertwine and provide the vehicle for richly resonant dramatic poetry. Kops is a writer aware of the drama inherent in the sudden shifts in perception and changes of mood he has always found so natural. In Ezra, the London working-class Jewish poet has found his métier: Ezra places Kops in stature and achievement with the best dramatists of his generation.