J. D. Hainsworth
Arden is very much more than just a provincial playwright. Though he often draws on his northern background, he writes plays which should be of interest to playgoers anywhere. One of the difficulties—it is also one of the strengths—of Arden's plays, is that he doesn't create characters who are simply black or white…. Nor does Arden create characters who are simply mouthpieces for his own point of view. Musgrave, in Serjeant Musgrave's dance, is a soldier so revolted by the bloodshed of a colonial war, that he wants to get over the horror of it to the civilian population back home, and convince them of their responsibility for what has happened. So far, both playwright and audience must be on his side. But this is no longer so when Musgrave, through the very strength of his convictions, himself resorts to violence and bloodshed.
Failed idealists like Musgrave are fairly common in Arden's plays…. Set against them are more cynical characters like Crooked Joe Bludgeon, the Bargee in Serjeant Musgrave's dance, and Dr Blomax in The workhouse donkey. Blomax and Crooked Joe are the ones who triumph in the end, when Musgrave is waiting to be hanged, and Colonel Feng has been forced to resign. These cynics, especially in Arden's later plays, are treated just as sympathetically as the idealists. We learn to understand their cynicism and even to wonder whether "cynicism" is a fair description…. Arden's plays are all plays about society. This is true in a more superficial sense—he writes about the colour question, about "problem" families, about the state of local politics, etc.—but equally true at a deeper level of his drama. Whatever their starting point, the impression his plays finally leave us with is of the basic anarchy of our society. The intricate entanglements of his plots—at a time when many dramatists are trying to make do with as little plot as possible—help to get over this anarchy to the audience.
Arden's plays offer no solutions either to the surface problems of local politics, etc. or to the underlying anarchy of our society. This is not a weakness in them but a strength. For it would be very silly to imagine that questions of such importance can be solved inside a theatre. (pp. 25-6)
Paradoxically, Arden's concern with present reality sometimes leads him to set his plays in the past. Serjeant Musgrave's dance reminds us of the Cyprus situation of the 1950s, and Armstrong's last goodnight of the recent civil war in the Congo, but the first is set in Victorian England and the second in sixteenth century Scotland. If Arden had written directly of Cyprus or the Congo, his plays would have had to take a more documentary form, and he would have had to concentrate on being objective and accurate in his facts. The historical settings allow him much greater liberty in shaping his material and dramatising the issues which seem to him important.
You can get some understanding of Arden's plays from reading the scripts of them, but nothing like their full impact. A reading will give a sense of what he is trying to say and some indication of his powers of language—he can create as convincing an impression of the speech of sixteenth century Scotsmen as of a "problem" family on a northern council estate (Live like pigs, 1958) and his vernacular dialogue is heightened, in the appropriate places, by poetry and haunting song. But you miss, in a reading, his visual qualities…. Arden is a playwright who compels his audience to thought, he is also, first and foremost, a playwright. (pp. 26-7)
J. D. Hainsworth, in The Hibbert Journal, Autumn, 1966.
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