Howard Brenton

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Inventing the Past

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Howard Brenton has a terrifying imagination that makes his "The Churchill Play" … a very disturbing experience. It is an experience one would not like to have missed, but it unsettles the foundations of the world on which England unsteadily rests. One of the few matters on which it is still generally assumed that there is a consensus of opinion is that in May, 1940, England found a man who could, and did, save her. The haunting and alarming suggestion made in Mr Brenton's powerful play … is that the man England found was the wrong man; that the war of 1939–45 was less Hitler's war than Churchill's; that the British, and especially the Scottish, people were so demoralised by bombing that they bitterly resented Churchill's keeping them at war; and that this was the cause of our loss of empire, and the moment when our freedom went.

Now there is nothing in my experience of the war that can be squared with Mr Brenton's account of the demoralising effect of the German bombing. I was in the east, and most heavily hit, part of London during every raid but two during the entire war: I saw London burn and explode round me: but, with the exception of a couple of foreign journalists, I never heard anyone express even the smallest fear or tension. Mr Brenton was very young at the time, and there is much evidence in his play that he has listened to, and been impressed by, some very lurid stories: stories no doubt factually true, but not because of that necessarily universally truthful. I do not therefore accept as valid his attack on Churchill for allegedly hounding into battle a nation whose spirit was broken. What I do accept is that "The Churchill Play" is a work of great aesthetic and intellectual power, a work as impregnably self-defended and ambiguous as was Sartre's when Sartre was at the height of his creative power.

For it is defended, and it is ambiguous. The portrait of Churchill in "The Churchill Play" is drawn in such a manner that Mr Brenton could himself repudiate it. "The Churchill Play" is set in 1984, when England has become a country of concentration camps. A gentle, bewildered, liberal officer in this camp, Dr Thompson …, thinks it therapeutic for the internees to write and present a play of their own…. They act their play before a Parliamentary delegation, and it is in this play that the attack on Churchill is made.

It is perfectly possible to maintain that the attack is only what one would expect from political prisoners. But there is no suggestion of a counter-case. The furthest the play will go in defence of the class from which Churchill came is a passage in which Mr Brenton shows, in speaking of the shining youth of Lord Randolph Churchill before he was stricken with syphilis, that he is not indifferent to the grace of an English aristocrat who has been to a great public school.

There is a very moving scene … [which] suggests that Churchill was haunted by the fear that he might inherit his father's appalling disease: a suggestion paralleled in my mind by the thought that Mr Brenton himself is haunted by tales of bombing that he heard in his childhood. He is as compassionate towards his internees as William Douglas Home was to the prisoners in "Now Barabbas." Is this compassion an implicit approval of what they say? Everyone must make up his own mind.

Our two most arresting political dramatists are Brenton and David Storey, because beneath the politics of their work there is a mysterious spirit of poetry. In Storey there are Words-worthian quietness and regret: in Brenton the wild strangeness of the best scenes in Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White." This strangeness, in the frantic walk of Captain Thompson, or the inexplicable tale of an incident on an unidentifiable plain told by a Welsh internee …, is what makes a Brenton play memorable. The wind is malign, and ever so slightly the bones are ill at ease in their sockets.

Harold Hobson, "Inventing the Past," in The Sunday Times, London, May 19, 1974, p. 37.∗

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