Analysis
Howard Brenton’s plays represent an important contribution to radical and poststructuralist English drama. He belongs to the second wave of modernist English theater, the generation after Arnold Wesker, John Osborne, and Harold Pinter. His frequent, highly successful collaborations with such writers as David Hare and Tariq Ali suggest almost as forcefully as do his dramatic works Brenton’s belief in theater as a social phenomenon and a social force. Though sometimes attacked for the political content of the writing, his theater is vivid and powerful propaganda. As a playwright, he has never failed to excite critical and public comment and to stir controversy.
Brenton’s plays aggressively and unapologetically exploit contemporary public issues to promote revolutionary socialism and antiestablishment social causes. Whether the dramatic setting is historical (The Romans in Britain, Bloody Poetry) or contemporary (Magnificence, H. I. D.: Hess Is Dead) or futuristic (The Churchill Play, The Genius), the plays depict class struggle and the necessity of nonviolent change on a universal scale. Brenton’s drama is, nevertheless, remarkably evenhanded in its treatment of the characters, sometimes critical of the radicals for their fuzzy thinking about politics and sometimes sympathetic toward the human foibles of the rich and powerful. It portrays even political conservatives, usually the villains of Brenton’s stage conflicts, in the best possible light, notably in the touching dialogue between Alice and Babs in scene 4 of Magnificence, and in the sympathetic characterization of Captain Thompson, the physician at the English concentration camp in The Churchill Play. Brenton’s plays frequently make the point that self-interest and misspent passion occur on all sides of a political issue, thus contributing to the general malaise in society. It is a point scored expertly in the 1969 play Revenge, in which opposing sides of the law are represented by a single actor.
Christie in Love
Brenton’s early one-act play, Christie in Love, demonstrates the writer’s interest in the criminal mind and the banality of evil. Based on the case of the 1950’s mass murderer John Reginald Halliday Christie, the play combines elements of psychological naturalism and self-conscious structuralist theater. The Constable and the Inspector, the only actors in the drama besides Christie, are intentionally flat characters, offsetting Christie himself, who is (after his initial entrance) dramatically believable and psychologically complex. In the first two scenes, the two law-enforcement officers exchange inane comments about their activity and sexist jokes that are painfully ill-timed and unfunny. When Christie appears, in scene 3, he arises slowly out of a grave of newspapers in the manner of Count Dracula, wearing a large, disfiguring fright mask. In all the subsequent scenes, Christie is maskless, revealing a quite ordinary looking and surprisingly defenseless man. The contrasting imagery suggests that the concocted tabloid image of Christie (or, for that matter, any “villain”) as a monster is a false one, and that the real person who was Christie performed his heinous crimes out of love, peculiarly defined and experienced by the individual. Moreover, in the context of the play, Christie is far more genuine in his passions than his interrogators, who delude themselves with ideas of normality and morality that they enforce through violence, willful ignorance, and deprecation of sex and love.
Certain elements of the play have appeared again in Brenton’s later work. Christie’s theatrical resurrection from the dead is very similar to Winston Churchill’s escape from the catafalque in the play-within-a-play at the beginning of The Churchill Play. The startling synthesis of exclamations of true love and images of brutality appears again in Sore Throats ,...
(This entire section contains 3360 words.)
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in which sudden dramatic reversals and extremely contradictory actions muddle the real nature of the characters’ emotions. The bleak, Cold War background and the surrealistic middle-class setting of the play recur in numerous other Brenton works, includingThe Churchill Play and The Genius. At the same time, Christie in Love is unique among Brenton’s plays in the comparative subtlety of its politics and theatrical violence. In the plays most characteristic of the playwright, revolutionary socialism is openly espoused, and terrorism and violence are gruesomely reified on the stage.
The Romans in Britain
Critics and reviewers frequently complain that Brenton’s theater is too violent, that it is in reality only sensationalistic. A certain amount of the outcry against his play The Romans in Britain was directed against its graphic portrayal of torture and murder, as well as its profuse male nudity. Brenton deliberately uses shock techniques, violence, profanity, nudity, and scatology to provoke his audiences. There is a prophetic intensity about his writing, particularly in the plays of the middle 1970’s and early 1980’s, which are public spectacles condemning oppression and collaboration with oppression through passivity. Brenton calls this element in drama “aggro,” a British slang term that suggests a mix of aggression and aggravation. Its purpose is to draw the audience together into the play’s (and playwright’s) outrage. Brenton has commented that his agitprop theater frequently succeeds better at agitation than at propaganda, and the usual critical and public response to his plays seems to bear him out on this point. In a much-quoted interview from 1975, Brenton commented that his plays were intended as “petrol bombs through the proscenium arch.”
Magnificence
Another aspect of Brenton’s writing that draws criticism on occasion is the unevenness of his dramatic style. Scenes that are dark with pessimism and brooding alternate with slapstick comedy, and sensitive character drama intermixes with pornographic and Grand Guignol stage effects. For example, the ironically titled revenge play Magnificence begins with five young radicals occupying an abandoned flat in protest against the landowner’s legal oppression of the poor tenants. The opening scenes center mainly on the two female members of the group: Mary, who is pregnant and whose approach to revolution is largely aesthetic, and Veronica, who formerly worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and who is the most intellectual (and moderate) member of the group. A sort of climax is reached in the play at the end of scene 3, when Mr. Slaughter, the landlord, in the company of a constable, breaks into the room and bodily attacks the occupants. In the process, he kicks Mary in the stomach, accidentally causing a miscarriage. The setting of the play then changes to Cambridge College, and two new characters are introduced: two men who are friends, Tory bureaucrats in government and academia, who go by the nicknames Alice and Babs. The scene, which is the center of the play, is peaceful, full of reminiscences and flirtations between the two old friends as they punt a flat-bottomed boat across the stage. In the course of the scene, Babs reveals to his friend that he is about to die, and at the scene’s end, he expires quietly in Alice’s arms. The final third of the play centers on Jed, a minor and mostly silent character in the opening scenes, who now seeks revenge for the death of Mary’s child. The other members of the radical group have chosen a less active public course; in Jed’s opinion, they have debased the principles for which they stood at the beginning. The play concludes with a riveting horror scene in which Jed attacks Alice and forces him to wear a bomb in the form of a mask on his head. When, after agonizing dramatic suspense, the explosive fails to detonate, Jed and Alice attempt to strike some sort of bargain, and then unexpectedly the bomb explodes, killing them both.
In the end, Magnificence leaves the audience with a sense of having watched three individual plots, each with its own impetus and tone, and—except for the obvious continuation of characters from scene to scene—little coherence is evident between the three principal parts. Brenton treats each scene on its own terms without imposing unity of action. In respect to this professedly unconscious stylistic element, Brenton categorizes himself, along with Wilson and Hare, as a “maximalist” playwright, in contrast to the dramatic minimalism of Beckett and Pinter. Brenton’s goal is to depict a situation realistically by incorporating into the play as many facets or aspects of the situation as possible. The result is a deliberate hodgepodge of styles, characters, and events.
Weapons of Happiness
Perhaps the quintessential Brenton protagonist is Josef Frank in Weapons of Happiness. Like Christie and Churchill, Frank is an actual historical figure whom Brenton “resurrects” to make a point about political activism. The real Frank was one of the twelve prominent members of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party hanged by the Stalinists in Prague in 1952. Brenton’s Frank survives to 1976 by emigrating to England, where he inadvertently becomes involved in a workers’ strike at a potato chip factory. Frank, a sullen and silent old man plagued with painful memories of his interrogation in the 1950’s and nightmare fantasies about Joseph Stalin, is alienated not only from the factory owner and managers but also from the youthful rebels who attempt a minor coup by taking over the factory. Unable to side with the capitalists and reactionary police who want him to betray the young radicals and also unable to side with the Communists for whom violent force and half-digested Marxist ideology are legitimate tools of revolution, Frank is forced once again into a solitary position. In the end, he is able to confide in Janice, one of the young English Communists, and warns her against the utopian and terrorist tendencies that have become a part of the radical movement. He dies alone in a drain leading out of the factory. The final scene shows Janice and her comrades establishing a socialist commune in Wales, hopefully modeled on Frank’s Trotskyism.
The Genius
Aspects of Josef Frank’s character are typical of Brenton’s antiheroes—lapsed idealists who fall, at least temporarily, into inactivity because of disillusionment and embitterment about the status quo and the state of the revolution. In The Genius, the American physicist Leo Lehrer, perhaps modeled on Brecht’s Galileo, invents a weapon capable of destroying the whole world at once. Distressed that the U.S. military establishment has perverted his mathematical genius in the interest of power and oppression, he flees the United States for a small university in England, full of self-loathing and paranoid fears. There he meets Gilly Brown, another mathematical genius, who has accidentally completed the formula for the weapon also. In the closing scene, Gilly and Leo have left the university to camp outside the wire fences surrounding a military installation, which they, along with another student and the university bursar’s wife, periodically invade in order to publicize the vulnerability of lethal military weapons to outside attack.
The Genius also presents an example of another class of Brenton character: the sideline observer who lacks the courage or will to act on his convictions. In The Genius, the university bursar, Graham Hay, is a liberal humanist who is initially sympathetic to Lehrer, even after, midway through act 1, Lehrer cuckolds the old man. Hay is a gentle man with somewhat rarefied academic tastes, but he is the lackey of the university vice-chancellor. In the end, Hay is interrogated by the English secret police and betrays Lehrer. Despite his right-thinking liberal humanist philosophy, Hay fails in the end for lack of moral passion.
Bloody Poetry
Another disillusioned radical is Percy Bysshe Shelley in Bloody Poetry. Like Frank and Lehrer, Shelley is a refugee. He has fled from England, where his female entourage (Mary Shelley and Claire Clairemont) and he are viewed with suspicion and moral repugnance, and sets up residence in Switzerland and Italy with George Gordon, Lord Byron, a fellow radical and anarchist whose moral dissipation is portrayed in his continual drunkenness and unawareness of the consequences of his sexual liaisons. Like Frank, Shelley is haunted by the ghosts of his past life, in this case the ghost of Harriet Westbrook, Shelley’s first wife, who was unable to live the life of a revolutionary (or a revolutionary’s wife) and so was abandoned, eventually to go mad and kill herself. Shelley’s dilemma in the play is that his wild libertarian ideology contradicts his social conscience. The puritan indignation of his countrymen and the irresponsible self-destruction of Byron do not represent his own conscience and his own concept of personal liberty, which, moreover, he cannot quite reconcile within himself. The play concludes with Shelley jubilant and adrift at sea shortly before his death. He sings about the utopian future when the men of England will rid themselves of tyrants and become free. After a blackout, Byron is seen onstage with the sail-draped corpse of Shelley and the silent, brooding ghost of Harriet. Dismayed at the unexpected death of his friend, Byron shouts, “Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! Burn us all!” thus crying down the old order in a renewed spirit of social revolution.
Bloody Poetry, like The Genius, also presents a sideline figure: Dr. William Polidori, whom Byron’s publisher has sent to spy on the circle of radical friends in Italy. Polidori lacks the involvement in the dramatic action that would make him a sympathetic character; his moralizing commentary on Shelley’s and Byron’s actions is invalidated by his own lack of commitment. In his final appearance, Polidori circulates solo in the theater with a glass of wine in one hand, lying to his listeners about his close ties with the Shelley circle and supplying grisly details about Shelley’s “suicide.”
The Churchill Play
Both The Genius’s Hay and Bloody Poetry’s Polidori are part of the “vast conspiracy of obedience” Morn describes in the last act of The Churchill Play. It is a bureaucratic conspiracy for which everyone is and is not responsible—one which leads ultimately, so Morn thinks, to military dictatorship. The most seductive aspect of the conspiracy is its anonymity. No one needs to feel individually accountable for the atrocities that one’s government (or one’s private organization) perpetrates. The conspiracy of obedience absolves the individual participant from personal guilt. Polidori accepts this absolution as a matter of fact. Hay, on the other hand, has to be “taught” through intimidation not to feel responsible. The character of Captain Thompson, the concentration camp physician in The Churchill Play, is perhaps the best developed of Brenton’s sideline observers, and the play delineates a certain progress in the ethical development of Thompson.
Thompson is the chief supporter of the seditious entertainment the prisoners of the Churchill Camp are preparing for the visiting Members of Parliament. When first seen, Thompson is defending the play to Colonel Ball, the commanding officer of the prison. Shortly thereafter, Sergeant Baxter attempts to intimidate Thompson into withdrawing his support for the play. Thompson is so shaken by the threat that he becomes deaf to the story that the new prisoner Reese tries to tell him and walks officiously away. In act 3, Thompson takes an evening walk with his wife Caroline. Their conversation reveals that their position at the camp is repulsive to their liberal humanist ideals, but at the same time, Thompson feels powerless to take a stand. He is shocked at the unjust, murderous treatment of the prisoners, but because the injustice is apparently no one person’s responsibility, he does not know where he can turn for justice. Thompson and Caroline’s ideology, represented by their wish for seclusion and a quiet home, tends to be obscurantist; they are unable to face the harsh reality of the camp, much less to fight against it. At the end, Thompson offers to accompany the prisoners as they attempt to escape from the camp. To the prisoners, however, Thompson is a collaborator, and despite his professed goodwill toward them, he is not one of them. They turn from him in disgust, leaving him in the company of the right-wing Members of Parliament and the camp guards.
Later Plays
Brenton’s focus on controversial political themes has remained constant, but a vein of satire and humor, always present in the playwright’s best work, became more prominent in the 1980’s and after. During this period, his plays also became, if possible, more immediately topical, dealing not only with issues but with particular current events and public figures. A Short Sharp Shock!, for example, was written just after Margaret Thatcher rose to power and satirizes England’s leading Tory politicians. Pravda, written in collaboration with Hare, lambastes Fleet Street publishers who put profits ahead of journalistic truth, with a thinly disguised figure of Rupert Murdoch at the play’s center.
Ugly Rumours and Snogging Ken
One would expect such treatment of the British right from Brenton, but he also spared none of his acrimony, or his wit, when turning to his examination of the “New” Labour Party of Tony Blair in Ugly Rumours. This play, examining how power politics can corrupt even good intentions, made plain Brenton’s view that the promise of the socialist Labour party had been sold out in an attempt to increase the party’s appeal to an electorate enamored of easy solutions, slick rhetoric, and middle-of-the-road policies. Presumably because its politics were deemed a bit too sharp, the National Theatre refused a commission for the play, and Brenton and coauthor Tariq Ali had some difficulties in finding a venue for it. Their next joint effort, Snogging Ken, continued this attack on “New Labour” by showing the party at the heart of an attempt to keep old-style Labour candidate Ken Livingstone from being elected London’s mayor.
Iranian Nights
In addition to the public life of his native Britain, Brenton turned his attention increasingly to the international scene after the mid-1980’s. Iranian Nights (cowritten with Ali) used humor to turn the spotlight on a deeply serious issue, the fatwa against the life of author Salman Rushdie issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Neither the racism of the West nor the intolerance of the Middle East comes off well in this exploration of international politics and the clash between religious fervor and artistic freedom. The play also targets pseudo-intellectual liberals who defend Rushdie while admitting that they have never read the book in question.
Moscow Gold
Also cowritten in 1989 with Ali was Moscow Gold, a play that marks a significant shift in Brenton’s political development. Before the collapse of many communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Brenton, like most British leftists, felt the inevitable movement of history was toward a more communistic system. However, when many formerly communist nations began to embrace a more capitalistic model of governance in the 1980’s and 1990’s, this certainty was called into question. Using many of the nonnaturalistic and epic staging techniques of such earlier works as Weapons of Happiness, Moscow Gold asks its audience to cast a critical eye on history, not as it should be but as it actually is, and to consider the effect of that history on the lives of ordinary men and women.
H. I. D.: Hess Is Dead
H. I. D.: Hess Is Dead continued Brenton’s project of reassessing history in the light of the present. The play follows the movements of an investigative journalist intent on discovering whether the official story regarding the suicide of Nazi leader Rudolph Hess in Berlin’s Spandau prison is really the whole story. As the play unfolds, Brenton leads the audience to question not only the truth of this individual story but also the very mechanism by which history is constructed and transmitted through an ideological framework masquerading as neutrality.
Berlin Bertie
Berlin Bertie, set after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany, stages the reuniting of two sisters, one who remained in their native London while the other chose to live in East Germany. Disappointed by the collapse of the socialist state in which she had put her idealistic hopes, the exiled Rosa returns home, only to find herself shadowed by a mysterious member of the old East German secret police. Such plays demonstrate clearly Brenton’s willingness to evolve in his thinking and tackle new subjects without ever compromising his firmly held political and ideological positions.