G. W. Brandt
[Serjeant Musgrave's Dance] had the great virtue of crystallising and sharply dividing critical opinions; the one thing with which it did not meet was indifference. Some of the reactions to the play make an interesting study. They were, incidentally, comments on the parable as a dramatic form. (p. 49)
[We] have three distinct attitudes: hostile, mixed, and friendly…. We may feel that the argument is loaded: Musgrave is too peculiar, indeed pathological, a character to give any general validity to the parable. What cannot be said is that the play is impenetrably obscure. Could it be that some of the hostile critics found the message not so much obscure as unpalatable? (pp. 50-1)
We are only shown a wrong reaction to an iniquitous state of affairs [in Serjeant Musgrave's Dance]. But why should a playwright dot all his I's and cross all his T's?
He must of course expect to run into trouble if he demands of the spectator that he do his own brainwork in the theatre. A well-told parable stirs up questions and then refuses to give all the answers. This is hardly the proverbial tired businessman's idea of after-dinner fun, and somebody has to give in—the would-be passive spectator or the thrustful playwright. In the case of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance the anti-parable faction won the day. (p. 51)
[It] would make for an easier acceptance of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance if the fanatical sergeant were to be either wholly condemned or wholly approved of. But is it not disturbing to see a morally sensitive man trying to start a public massacre? It is. Does his fanaticism invalidate his moral protest as such? It does not. The contradiction between laudable indignation and reprehensible conclusions drawn from it may either alienate the spectators out of all sympathy with the play (as happened to some critics), or else it may jolt them into stirring moral speculations (as was the experience of some other critics).
It is only fair to say that Arden does not guide the spectators' response with any regimental firmness. The play is diffident in putting forward its moral—a diffidence in curious contrast with the violence of its action….
Perhaps a structural flaw in the play is the division in its dramatic purpose between the demands of suspense and surprise. Musgrave and the three Soldiers under his command are under great mental pressure, thinking about the impending day of reckoning, the recruiting-meeting in the town square. The study of this strain builds up suspense and constitutes the main psychological interest of the first two acts. Then, in Act III, the surprise is sprung: the hoisting up of the skeleton, and the training of the Gatling gun on the crowd. As a surprise it works powerfully. But the more genuine the surprise, the less the audience were in a position to understand the causes and the significance of the strain under which the Soldiers had been labouring before.
Arden's language in Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is earthy, with a rich north-country flavour; but it is not naturalistic for all that. It is a highly charged prose that at times abruptly rises into verse. There is no need to seek for the roots of Arden's dramatic poetry in Brecht, although the analogy is obvious enough. (p. 52)
The essentially poetic conception of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is reinforced by recurrent colour imagery—particularly black (the blackness of the night, of the coal-fields, of the haunted mind of Black Jack Musgrave himself); white (the snow of the winter scene, the white skeleton of Billy Hicks); and red (the colour of blood, of the Mayor's gown and the Soldiers' coats). Visually as well as verbally, these colours are firmly established in the very first scene, with references to the darkness of the night, the snow, the red and black of the Soldiers' pack of cards, and the Bargee's taunting of the Soldiers as 'blood-red roses'. (p. 53)
In its protest against the folly and beastliness of war, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance does not use the all-out expressionism of The Silver Tassie. But like O'Casey's play it uses elements of realism in order to build up an image going beyond realism. The parable has been made to yield poetry-of-the-theatre. (p. 54)
G. W. Brandt, in Contemporary Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 4, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (© Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 1962), Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd, 1962.
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