Howard Brenton: The Privilege of Revolt
Brenton has survived the demise of the Fringe and has gained a controversial position unequalled among the writers of the late 1960's. But critical acclaim, commercial acceptance, and diversity of interests have in no way threatened the intensity of Brenton's political commitment. He remains one of Britain's most dedicated political writers and unapologetically states, "All my plays are written unreservedly in the cause of socialism." And though "agit/prop" is a label he eschews, he openly avows, "My purpose is to agitate by satire, by intelligent argument, by writing scenes of verifiable truth … and to propagate an idea"; he thus attempts to revitalize the revolutionary's vocabulary while avoiding such stock conventions as sermons, placards, and facile solutions. In depicting the struggles of people trapped in a world without political or social morality and in avoiding traditional psychological analyses, Brenton establishes himself as a descendant of Brecht. He adheres to the Brechtian imperative of man as the sum of social circumstance and of the drama as the study of social contradictions as manifested in the individual.
Brenton, with this political focus of an unabashed dedication to socialism, uses the theater to investigate revolution. Not surprisingly, early Brenton plays embrace the political or moral rebel as a leading character. Christie in Love follows the progression of a love that can find its ultimate expression only in murder; John Christie, in following his own erotic and ethical code, violates all social laws and usual concepts of affection. In The Churchill Play, prison inmates who have been incarcerated for various innocuous forms of political protest perform a satirical play for government officials. The Saliva Milkshake focuses on the confrontation between a radical-turned-assassin and a liberal acquaintance whose political commitment consists of mere ideological flirtation. And in both Magnificence and Weapons of Happiness, a radical faction seizes control of a building in an aborted attempt to effect social change. (p. 30)
The curious power of Magnificence springs from Brenton's double-edged view of the situation. The energy, fervor, and (in some ways) innocence of the revolutionaries are admirable and compelling; indeed the play is prefaced with Brecht's injunction, taken literally by the characters, to "Sink into the mire. Embrace the butcher. But change the world." At the same time, a sense of frustration permeates the play. Politicians are ineffectual and petty, changing the world becomes impossible, and the eulogy offered by Cliff (Jed's best friend) at the end of the play concludes: "The waste. I can't forgive you that. The waste of your anger. Not the murder, murder is common enough. Not the violence, violence is everyday. What I can't forgive you Jed, my dear, dear friend, is the waste." Magnificence is a play of frustration, leaping from the devotion to ideals that sees not only "magnificence" in spilling blood but the simultaneous awareness of the impossibility of a viable, radical revolution.
Weapons of Happiness … continues to explore these themes, this time using the historical figure of Joseph Frank, a Czech wrongly convicted of treason and executed during the Soviet spy trials of the early 1950's. Brenton allows his Frank to survive this purge and places him in contact with a group of disgruntled British workers who seize a potato crisp factory and threaten to ruin a corporation. These rebels are more sullen, more violent, and less educated than their predecessors in Magnificence and thus link the idealistic rebels of the late 1960's with the punk movement of the late 1970's. Frank can see these revolutionaries only as children playing games they cannot understand. History recalls friends driven to suicide, betrayals, recriminations; revolution, having been crushed before, now seems impossible…. Frank's experience counterpoints the naivete of the others throughout, and the revolution, in going underground, continues without waste.
This evolving sense of practicality is intricately related to Brenton's understanding of the failure of the Fringe: he ultimately sees the ruling society as remorseless, inescapable, incapable of coexisting with Brenton's more socialistic perspective. Revolution thus must be achieved from within; it cannot be imposed from the outside. This philosophy makes Brenton an urban guerilla of sorts, a position he has achieved gradually. His early plays focus on the relationship between idealism and power. In the mid-1970's, however, Brenton's characters come to equate power with physical freedom. The inmates of Churchill prison, the rebels who flee the potato crisp factory through the sewer—all battle incarceration and test the tension between spiritual freedom and physical liberty, a tension that emphasizes the importance of civil liberties while measuring ideological commitment in the face of survival. A further step is taken in Epsom Downs: power and freedom are defined by money, which is seen not as the root of all evil but as the root of all social attitudes and conceptions of good as well. Though characters realize the social order is corrupt and that life is really without meaning, all classes pursue material gains with the same reckless fervor. Such materialism in turn reinforces existing class structures and obscures more significant goals—a theme that anticipates Sore Throats.
In Sore Throats, Brenton creates an intricate mesh of money, morals, and marriage; he decries a social framework defined by the materialistic impulse. Characters must choose between survival, implying the acceptance of money and therefore of existing moral and social standards, and freedom, which rejects ethics and finances together. Judy's final line, spoken with a flaming match poised to burn the stack of torn banknotes, is a first step to total freedom through anarchy. There can be no question of these two societies—the materialistic and the anarchic—coexisting. In Brenton's typical fashion, the political problems are raised but not solved.
Such attitudes point to Brenton's socialist origins, yet it would be misleading to cite his social convictions as the source of his dramatic power. Brenton above all is a man of the theater, a poet of extraordinary originality and freshness, a craftsman trained by early experiences in the theater to work with minimal technical facilities, a scholar well versed in theater history. Brenton himself may emphasize the political message of his plays as their defining characteristic, but an American audience unfamiliar with the specific political incidents or structures will be immediately drawn by Brenton, the poet.
Brenton writes out of a rich theatrical heritage and exploits literary allusion, both past and present, to anchor his work. Magnificence is a prime example: the rebels call their settlement "Anarchy Farm" and pay homage to the Brechtian imperative that precedes the play. In the play within The Churchill Play, a gong is struck to prevent obscenities from being heard and thereby frightening the ladies—an echo of A Midsummer-Night's Dream—and the 1984 setting clearly evokes Orwell. Brenton's use in Epsom Downs of naked men to play horses who refuse to race without a "fixed idea" is surely a gibe at Equus, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is readapted to exploit specific parallels to Harold Macmillan and Enoch Powell. History for Brenton offers a rich mine to be tapped, a wealth of associations that can easily be exploited for new and shocking effects. (pp. 30-2)
A Brenton play is likely to strike an audience as a patchwork affair—at one moment violent and angry, at another fanciful and humorous, sometimes painfully realistic, often bizarrely creative. Epsom Downs, which combines actors playing helicopters by twirling orange day-glow batons, a ghost of a racing accident victim, and such characters as The Race Track and The Race, curiously fuses the blatantly theatrical with naturalistic confessions of self-doubt or sentimental moments of reconciliation—a fascinating combination typical of Brenton's creative eccentricity.
Sore Throats may be seen by many as an exception to this larger rule of creative audacity. The play lends itself to a naturalistic style of interpretation; the setting (within a single room) places the characters in a world one more often expects of Pinter than of Brenton. Jack, Judy, and Sally continually defy naturalistic conventions of psychological consistency, however, and their violent, savage outbursts are all the more brutal for being set in a mundane bare or garbage-strewn apartment. To read the play naturalistically without seeing the larger juxtaposition of the everyday and the darkly primal is dangerous; the theme of wife-beating, for example, then assumes disproportionate importance, and the lurid violence is reduced to mere psychological expression. Brenton, the man of political conviction, is examining issues of far greater scope and uses violence only in the service of larger social themes.
In Sore Throats Brenton achieves a new poetic and thematic power. The language is skeletal, clipped, brutal—a verbal reflection of the physical violence, itself a reflection of a perverted social order. Brenton's characters assault one another with every resource; an apparently civil conversation, a traditional dramatic opening, is allowed a mere three words before the veneer of politeness is stripped aside and seething anger is allowed to surface. Secrets become recriminations, key themes are immediately aired—the role of obscenity as a form of social rebellion, the obsession with sexuality, the primary importance of money, and an inability to separate these. The poetic images are horrifying ones—Judy's desire for adders' heads to replace her breasts—and the verbal texture often hypnotic, as in Jack's tale of the baby. At times the play almost becomes a stark, subtle poem, infused with concentric images, yet the sheer theatricality of the story alone keeps the play continually dramatic.
Even in this darker vision,… Brenton's typical dependence on humor, albeit black humor, shines forth. Brenton has often commented on the importance of gag writing as a defining mark of maturity in a playwright, bespeaking a confidence and an ability to manipulate the audience. His early humor is frequently epigrammatic—"You are a politician. You never had a political thought in your life" (Magnificence)—as well as situational. The Churchill Play opens with Churchill springing up out of his coffin; the liberal friend in The Saliva Milkshake concentrates only on drinking from his friend's lips as she expounds the merits of social revolution; Brassneck follows the rise and fall of a powerful family finally reduced to running strip joints and selling Chinese heroin to British school children; the revolutionaries in Weapons of Happiness target a potato crisp factory. Sore Throats especially recalls those early, comic book-like plays. Jack's desire to mate with a twenty-four hour cash-dispensing machine is humorously macabre but thematically revealing in the obsessive conflation of money and sexuality—a reminder that Brenton is at his most serious when he seems most playful and that he employs the fantastic only in service of seriousness.
This condemnation of society, created through theatrics and humor, makes Brenton's solidly socialistic viewpoint more accessible to his audience. Political conviction, complemented by a growing social awareness and by an increasing poetic power, enables Brenton to transcend the trivial and the glib in political theater. (p. 33)
Ben Cameron, "Howard Brenton: The Privilege of Revolt," in Theater, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 28-33.
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