Arnold P. Hinchliffe

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[John Arden is not] lacking in personal anger but he is the dramatist par excellence who translates that anger into situations of a strictly impersonal nature. Arden's characters are primarily used as representatives, and his plots bring about conflicts between social groups. His characters, of course, exist as very colourful individuals, but their personality is shaped at all times to suggest what they stand for … and add to the picture of the community as a whole. Thus, the isolated town or national politics reflected in local government is observed with an accurate social eye and a strong historical sense which combine to 'translate the concrete life of today into terms of poetry that shall at the one time illustrate that life and set it within the historical and legendary tradition of our culture'. (p. 76)

Like Brecht, Arden is a political playwright but only in the sense that he feels it is impossible to avoid being political since man is a political animal. Everything that man does is a political act. For Arden politics means the art of living together and if the actual technical aspects are the province of the politician everyone should be concerned and recognise that any play about people is political. But where Brecht, as a practising communist, is didactic, Arden sees the Marxist analysis as only one of many sources and solutions. It can be used, as in Sjt. Musgrave's Dance, but not to the extent of making the play Marxist. Arden discovered Brecht the theatre technician only after writing plays and believes that both Brecht and himself had been inspired by the same things: the Middle Ages, the Elizabethans and various styles, such as the Chinese and Japanese theatres. Arden does invite us to watch and judge the action of the play (like Brecht) but like his contemporary dramatists on a human rather than an ideological level. [Brecht] achieves alienation through the use of blatantly theatrical devices, like song and dance, but for Arden such devices must be integral rather than interrupt the performance.

The Waters of Babylon (1957) showed the Arden method albeit in confused shape. Starting as a satire on Macmillan's Premium Bond scheme it deals with the career of Sigismanfred Krankiewiecz—a pimp, an unscrupulous landlord and at work during the day in an architect's office. The play shows a use of plot, a large amount of incident and a large number of characters—all three necessary to exhibit the triple life of the central character…. The dialogue is written in too many styles, and the private lives of the characters are too lively for them to be submerged in the public events which are Arden's main interest. But the play is always interesting and presents, if one looks at it closely, the embryonic shape of that opposition between vitality and order which is the basis of most of Arden's work.

This opposition emerged in his next play Soldier, Soldier (1960)…. Here most of the characters speak in prose but the central character uses a rough type of blank verse. Arden intended this to suggest values: the strident, disorderly soldier (verse) and the respectable, quiet townsfolk (prose). The soldier enjoys the kind of life which invites trouble while the townsfolk sacrifice everything, including pleasure, to avoid trouble…. Arden intends this soldier to be seen as representative of every soldier and likeable: as the poetry in life. But he also insists that we do not think of the victims as contemptible, a balance explored dramatically in [Live Like Pigs (1958)]…. It is written almost entirely in prose and looks at the results of putting a gypsy family on a housing estate somewhere in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Many critics felt … that it needed pruning; but they also noted the racy, turbulent vitality of the play. Most critics also seem to feel that our sympathy was intended for the intruders and that at the end, as with the town in Soldier, Soldier, order may be restored but life is none the better for that. If sympathy on Arden's part is limited for restored order his dispassionate presentation scarcely makes the gypsies likeable as neighbours. (pp. 77-8)

Arden broke with naturalism fairly decisively in Sjt. Musgrave's Dance (1959) and has since been moving towards simplicity, extreme formalism and a bold use of primary colours…. [The] complex plot is hardly susceptible to précis and confusing in the theatre. Is Arden supporting pacifism in his play, as he certainly does in life, or is he pointing out the complex roots of violence with a pessimistic conclusion? Arden himself confesses that he had problems; he started with the climax of the play and was then left with the task of making that climax credible in a number of scenes which would allow both the soldiers and the townsfolk to reveal their attitudes…. The play owes something to Brecht's version of The Recruiting Officer—Drums and Trumpets—and took hints from an American film called The Raid. It is Arden's first excursion into a historical setting. But where dramatists like Osborne and Bolt concentrate on an individual, isolated and therefore modern, and using language in a heroic manner, Arden is interested in groups and his historical setting deliberately suggests no particular period while evoking many…. Some of the characters are still far from convincing even as representatives (e.g. the mayor and the parson) but Arden has described them as caricatures by omission rather than exaggeration. Some of the situations are clearly decided by the plot rather than by character—for example the reaction of the soldiers to Annie in the stable. The colliers, who are to look like figures in a Lowry painting, do not need to stand out but when one has to speak as an individual the dialogue is not strong enough. Possibly this weakness stems from the ballad tradition espoused by Arden. (pp. 79-80)

Arden sees the ballad as the bedrock of English poetry and the method by which he could become a poet of the theatre. He recognised that he must not become too private or his plays would be valuable only for reading, or, like Yeats's, actable only in a drawing-room theatre before an inevitably élitist audience. The ballad, with its sense of season, the passing of time, strong primary colours and strong narrative line was suitable for a theatre where costumes, movement, verbal patterns and music must all be strong and hard. If verse is to be used it must be obviously verse as opposed to the surrounding prose and never allowed to droop into what Arden calls 'casual flaccidities'. Arden, therefore, sought simple but basic situations and themes to express social criticism and a framework of traditional poetic truths to give weight to what might otherwise be only contemporary documentary facility. Such a technique can be misunderstood since audiences find it difficult to give a simple response to the story. In the ballad, as in the fable, we draw our own conclusions. Arden chose verse though he recognised that other forms are available and has remarked, for example, on the effects gained by Pinter whose dialogue becomes poetic. His choice of the ballad is political. It reaches back into history and works in a moral atmosphere of multiple standards which he prefers and demonstrates in Sjt. Musgrave's Dance. There we meet the dilemma of war and violence in which pacifism (his own instinctive choice) is shown to be not self-sufficiently right…. The issue of war and violence, of order versus anarchy, has … shifted into terms of good government and the clash between principle and expediency. (pp. 80-2)

The commedia dell'arte mask obviously appealed to Arden for [The Happy Haven (1959–60)]. He wanted a style of theatre which used types [as he] was using young people to play old characters. The masks were appropriate, for age is seen as a mask which has hardened over the years and can be ripped off by rejuvenation. Possibly, too, the circumstances of the play led Arden to award the victory to anarchy in this play as the old people refuse to be made young (albeit for very childish reasons) and turn the doctor into a child.

Arden returned to the subject of good government in 1960 with his nativity play…. The Business of Good Government is an odd title for a Nativity play but Arden's version is scarcely orthodox. Its central character is really Herod, a man pushed into a corner from which the only escape is by massacring the innocents. Arden admits that his Herod is blatantly unhistorical. Critics have complained that the end of the play is inconclusive and that Arden should have kept his initial focus on Herod. However fascinating that exercise would have been the play is restored to its proper direction and ends with the miracle of the field of corn that shields the Holy Family on its flight into Egypt. Arden is noticeably trying to simplify the dramatic action aware that people have no time to watch and listen. But he still uses language contrasts. The Angel [for example] speaks with Biblical grandeur…. Herod on the other hand uses colloquial prose although at the end of the play when he discusses the business of good government this rises to something nearer the poetic. (pp. 82-3)

[The Workhouse Donkey (1963)] is an apparently domestic play, a comedy or as he called it a 'vulgar melodrama' in an idiom close to that of 'low music-hall and seaside picture postcards'. In this he revived a favourite character Alderman Charlie Butterthwaite…. It is a full picture of the local borough as a modern city state (and hence not domestic in scope) derived from Arden's observation of how councils still ran the boroughs of the West Riding in the grand nineteenth-century manner. Its subject is the business of good government dealt with through groups which cover all the social elements (except, curiously, the working class) attached to a story which centres, as in Ironhand [a translation and rewriting he did of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen], on two men, Butterthwaite and Feng…. In the end both men lose their positions and Arden pointed out that if his personal preference was for Butterthwaite he does not want to convert anyone. There are many people who would have integrity at any price rather than corruption. But the only conclusion, as in Ironhand, is that the ones who survive are the compromisers, the little men. (p. 84)

Arden reaches his clearest statement of the basic theme in his work with Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964)…. After reading Conor Cruise O'Brien's To Katanga and Back he fused the desire to write a play about the Congo with this incident in Scottish history making O'Brien into Lindsay and Tshombe/Lumumba into Armstrong. Through these characters he shows the inadequacy of political expediency and yet deliberately avoids suggesting whether there is an alternative. As before, the characters fall into groups and the plot resolves itself into the familiar conflict between two principles: anarchy (the robber baron Armstrong) and order (the mature, but devious, Lindsay). (pp. 84-5)

As in his Nativity play Arden shifts the centre [in Left-Handed Liberty (1965)] to the character usually thought to be the villain of the piece: King John. The conflict here lacks epic scope but it also lacks the linguistic difficulties encountered in Armstrong's Last Goodnight where Arden had deliberately invented his own version of Middle Scottish. The themes are liberty, the value of treaties and the irony of history. There is clarity of argument but also the sense that texture and individuality are lost beneath historical research…. The play sustains the idea that 'an agreement on paper is worth nothing to nobody unless it has taken place in their minds as well'. (pp. 85-6)

If the central attitudes to naturalism have not been seriously challenged, Arden has added ambiguity to identification and illusion as a theatrical method. This is more than lip service to Brecht whom Arden places with dramatists like Euripides, Jonson and Ibsen as makers of a new idiom in the theatre. Since Brecht is closest in time he is probably the strongest influence. But Arden's dramatised attitudes are seldom absolutes—right or wrong—and his personal preferences never obtrude and are, as he continues to insist, irrelevant. These attitudes he tries to strengthen and make universal by the use of historical parallels which challenge an easy judgement and require, as it seems to him, that mixture of prose and verse he has worked at with such earnestness. (pp. 86-7)

It is the plays themselves [and not the staging] that create a sense of strangeness—by incident and language—revealing a vision of the world which is essentially pessimistic, and shows life as senseless, absurd. But it is more than Brechtian devices that separates Arden from the theatre of the Absurd. His plays are acted out in the real world not dream or fantasy, and the vision is not subjective. Absurd Drama reaches social problems through individuals whereas for Arden individuals are representative, and however vigorous and lively as individuals, their failure or success is first and foremost a tragic comment on the state of society. It is always the social predicament that faces us at the end of the play. Moreover, Arden needs plot to create the network of social inter-relationships from which this judgement proceeds, whereas the theatre of the Absurd must positively discourage plot to convey its sense of futility.

Arden appears to be sitting on a fence; and he pleases few. As he ruefully recognises, from Live Like Pigs onwards, his plays have resisted the propagandist and the poetic: not programmatic enough for the former and too documentary for the latter. The only absolute to emerge from Arden's work is that absolutes—even in good causes and for better reasons—only drive their followers into a simplistic attitude. This attitude overlooks the complex nature of human beings and society and finally serves only itself rather than human ends and desires. By Armstrong's Last Goodnight Arden can show sympathy towards both Lindsay and Armstrong but he curtails warmth towards either; the audience probably expects warmth. More than any other contemporary dramatist Arden seems to find the lack of forms and conventions frustrating. He continues to be worried by the fact that people find his plays incomprehensible. Theatre, after all, is a public art and a dramatist who is out of touch is failing to practise his art properly. On the other hand, if theatre is not to atrophy, a dramatist must get out of touch to step forward. Perhaps a lapse of time is needed to show whether Arden took one step too many and resolve the paradox of this twentieth-century poetic dramatist. (pp. 88-9)

Arnold P. Hinchliffe, in his British Theatre 1950–70 (© Basil Blackwell 1974), Rowman and Little-field, 1974.

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Love and Anarchy in 'Sergeant Musgrave's Dance'