Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Wednesday, 31 December 2008
Plays of Howard Barker: Cheek (1970)
Tom Chadbon, Kenneth Cranham, Liz Edmiston and Cheryl Hall in the Theatre Upstairs production of Howard Barker's Cheek, 1970
Cheek. Play in three acts. First presented at the Royal Court Theatre's Theatre Upstairs on 11 September 1970. Directed by William Gaskill. Designed by Di Seymour. With Tom Chadbon (Laurie), Ken Cranham (Bill), Diane Hart (Mum), Richard Butler (Dad), Susan Littler (Shirley), Liz Edmiston, Cheryl Hall and Marshall Jones. Published in New Short Plays: 3, London: Eyre Methuen, 1972. Out of print.
A young bloke who's just left school with no work, with friends in a similar situation and a father who's dying, is persuaded to make a living, not exactly by crime, but by developing a way of life in which they don't have to work – what he calls work by cheek. If you're cheeky enough you can get by doing very little in life, succeeding by exploiting other people. Capitalism is, basically, a great swindle. An immense cheek.
Howard Barker
Interview in Catherine Itzin, Stages in the Revolution
1980
Barker's first stage play, like the later Claw and Stripwell, is among the few with a contemporary setting (a British "domestic interior" of around 1970). A response to Edward Bond's Saved, the three acts of the play descend linguistically from an almost Ortonesque elegance and wit:
LAURIE: You know, I could have a lasting, deep, meaningful affair with one of them little whores ... get my hands round them firm little buttocks ... I'm going to, you know. ... I'm not passing my twenty-
third birthday before I've had one.
BILL: I like to see a man with an aim in life.
To, finally, a form of baby-
You are difficult. You haven't died, have you? Have you? You wouldn't admit it if you had, you poor bugger. Come on, let's go. ... Is that all right? See the sunsa shining? And all the little birdies? Say boo to the birdies, go on, say boo. Say boo! Say boo!
Apart from this descent into monosyllabic burbling (perhaps a comment
on Bond's laconic monosyllabic dialogue in Saved), the play's three
acts also evolve from a kitchen-
Laurie seeks to avoid work by becoming a property owner, a landlord.
"There are a couple of ways open to you. One is crime. But that's not for
me. Not that there's any risk, it's just that criminals haven't got any
class. Take the Krays. ... The only other thing is property. ... You see,
the thing to do is to get hold of some bleeding great Victorian house and
let it out to students and immigrants. ..." He attempts
to seduce a next-
The play retains its edge as a satiric exemplar of the kind of angry "youth plays" set among the lower and working classes with which many British dramatists of the postwar period (Look Back in Anger, Saved, Steven Berkoff's East and Jim Cartwright's Road) began their careers. Barker's commentary is more politically savage, more trenchant and ambivalent, than these, though the structure and language of the play itself mark it as an early work, even if it demonstrates the concerns with political power, ideology and sexual transgression that Barker would mine through the rest of his career.
More from Barker on Cheek and its themes, this from the Itzin interview cited above:
It's very important to the working class to avoid work. It's a very middle-
class, puritanical concept to see evils in working- class habits like gambling. For them it's a means of not working and the avoidance of the work experience is very basic to the working class. It annoys me when socialists glorify work, when all the work available is of a soul- destroying nature, and always likely to be.
And this, from the 1999 radio portrait Departures from a Position:
In order to enter the stage, I was either encouraged or decided to write about something I knew about, something literally almost autobiographical. So that play, which was called Cheek ... concentrated on the kind of melancholic existence of teenagers in south London in the late sixties and early seventies. But I didn't repeat that again. That's the only time I entered that world, I think.
Posted at 8.58 am in /Dramatists/Howard_Barker
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Monday, 29 December 2008
Looking Back at Look Back in Anger
Mary Ure, Alan Bates, Helena
Hughes, and Kenneth Haigh
in the original Royal Court production of Look Back in Anger,
1956
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne. Premiered 8 May 1956 by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Directed by Tony Richardson; décor by Alan Tagg. With Kenneth Haigh (Jimmy Porter), Alan Bates (Cliff Lewis), Mary Ure (Alison Porter), Helena Hughes (Helena Charles) and John Welsh (Colonel Redfern). In John Osborne, Look Back in Anger and Other Plays, London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
John Osborne's play, one of the two plays of the 1950s to change the
face of the English-
The source of Jimmy's acidic sourness (he runs, of course, a sweets stall in a local market) lies in his early experience of his own father's death. Jimmy's father, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War (perhaps the most famous of lost causes), wastes away slowly and painfully as Jimmy watches with a hopeless compassion:
We all of us waited for him to die. ... All that feverish failure of a man had to listen to him was a small, frightened boy. I spent hour upon hour in that tiny bedroom. He would talk to me for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one, lonely, bewildered little boy, who could barely understand half of what he said. All he could feel was the despair and the bitterness, the sweet sickly smell of a dying man. ... You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless.
Alison's parents, who despise her husband, still live, and Alison herself is without the experience of death until she miscarries her and Jimmy's child. In the last moments of the play, she confesses:
Don't you understand? It's gone! It's gone! That – that helpless human being inside my body. I thought it was so safe, and secure in there. Nothing could take it from me. It was mine, my responsibility. But it's lost. ... All I wanted was to die. I never knew what it was like. I didn't know it could be like that! I was in pain, and all I could think of was you, and what I'd lost.
Her confession leads to reconciliation as Jimmy and Alison finally, at
the third act curtain, regress into the childish "bears and squirrels"
game which had always been their refuge when their anger had run dry. Like
Jimmy, Alison battles against the senselessness of a lower-
Conventional wisdom has it that Look Back in Anger and
Waiting for Godot mark the twin sources of two divergent formal
streams in the post-
What differentiates Osborne's anger from that of the other politically active dramatists coming of age in those years is that Osborne realizes that this anger is useless as an agent of revolutionary action: that it doesn't lead to change. One of Jimmy Porter's needs is to have the last word in every argument; Osborne has the last word on the question of anger as well, a pointed comment coming from a writer who was characterized (by a Royal Court publicist, no less) as one of the first of the "Angry Young Men." In Déjàvu, Osborne's 1992 sequel to Look Back in Anger, the character J.P. speaks for both Porter and Osborne himself:
"What's he angry about?" they used to ask. Anger is not about ... It comes into the world in grief not grievance. It is mourning the unknown, the loss of what went before without you, it's the love another time but not this might have sprung on you, and greatest loss of all, the deprivation of what, even as a child, seemed to be irrevocably your own, your country, your birthplace, that, at least, is as tangible as death.
This is also Osborne's justification for his later political conservatism, but more broadly cast it is made of a profound melancholy: mourning not for the days of the British Raj, but for the Garden of Eden, before the emergence of the original sin of knowledge.
Look Back in Anger is not a perfect play. It just barely skirts
sentimentalism and melodrama. There is some justification to the charge
of misogyny that has been cast against it; it needed an Edward Albee to
more skilfully draw the dynamics of passivity and aggression and avoid
that charge. The character of Helena is dreadful: two-
Slovenly writing invites slovenly performance. ... And there still prevails a common assumption that a B Flat or C Minor here or there is no matter except to be left to the improvised hindsight of the interpreter. You can't or shouldn't do it to Pinter, Beckett or, I hope, myself. The notations are indicated for meticulously constructed reasons. The "ands" and the "buts" are the map-
markings of syntax and truth, not the stammering infelicities of another's haphazard personal selection. A play is an intricate mechanism, and the whole mesh of its engineering logic can be shattered by a misplaced word or emphasis.
Worthy of note: Aleks Sierz' new Methuen guide to the play; the play itself is available from Penguin. John Heilpern's biography of Osborne was released in paperback earlier this year.
Below, the conclusion of Look Back in Anger, from the 1989 film directed by David Jones, with Kenneth Branagh as Jimmy Porter, Emma Thompson as Alison and Siobhan Redmond as Helena:
Posted at 9.33 am in /Dramatists/John_Osborne
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Friday, 26 December 2008
The self-
A comparison of the final film with the screenplay as published in the Complete Plays is instructive. The most interesting difference is the cutting of an unnecessary and mute commentary by the old black man who appears very briefly in the beginning, middle and end of the film: his compassion is less forced in the film than in the script, and a particularly unnecessary sentimentalism is excised; the compassion here is gentler, more subtle and more powerful. (I also note the mordant commentary on "communication," here rendered as a satire on the cellphone and answering machine, a few years before cellphones became ubiquitous; that the skinheads use them to coordinate a violent racist brawl is a dark commentary on the technology. So much for the "text swarm.")
Though produced in 1995, it received its television debut only in 1997 on the BBC's Channel 4. Due to the depiction of violence and racism in Skin, the Daily Mail called it "one of the most violent and racially offensive programmes ever to be made for television in this country." Despite this, director Vincent O'Connell was nominated for a Golden Bear award for the film at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival.
More on Sarah Kane.
Posted at 9.26 am in /Dramatists/Sarah_Kane
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Thursday, 25 December 2008
The last reel unspools:
Harold Pinter in his final stage appearance, as Krapp
in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in 2006
Harold Pinter passed away yesterday, 24 December 2008, at the age of 78. The New York Times obituary, credited to Ben Brantley and the late Mel Gussow, is here.
Pinter's work was central to my finding my own way as a dramatist; The Homecoming and No Man's Land were among my first experiences of contemporary theatre. More important to me is not his style, which is most easily imitated and parodied (I wasn't the first to imitate and parody it in my juvenilia, and I won't be the last), but his example, which is not. No doubt we'll be hearing a lot about both in the next few days; finally, for me, it will be the example of his intransigence in the face of criticism and his refusal to compromise with the desires of the day that endures, since the voice and style themselves are finally all his own. A few years ago, writing about Pinter's winning the Nobel Prize, I said:
Lear standing alone on the heath is a universal figure of tragic human consciousness – shorn of the trappings of royalty, of the community, he recognizes the horrifying mockery of the essence of humanity that royalty and community constitute. His enemies are his offspring: love rendered meaningless by death, treachery, his own illusions. Only a small, seemingly insignificant gesture here and there, such as the loosening of a shirt's button that seems to constrain the final throes of death, offers compassionate respite. So Lear, so Hamm – the reluctant ministrations of his manservant (his son?) Clov still keep them together, alone against an empty world; it isn't Hamm who shunts his own parents aside, but time and aging and the decay of the body, the vehicle of humanity; an ashcan is his own next stop. Pinter's own characters (even to the point of parents and children; procreation is no relief, not when the children are Lenny, Teddy and Joey of The Homecoming, the psychotic brothers Aston and Mick of The Caretaker, or the surrogate sons Foster and Briggs of the playacted marriage of Hirst and Spooner in No Man's Land) are not at all dissimilar. His torturers and victims exist in unnamed countries; this lack of names renders them universal. His simple tables, chairs and bare rooms parallel the bare heath of Lear, the sparsely furnished bunker in which Hamm and Clov spend the last days of life on earth.
What Pinter shares with Shakespeare and Beckett is an increasingly uncomfortable truth in a consumerist age: that all the money, all the success, all the nationalistic or racial pride, all the conviction in our own victimhood, all the conviction in the unerring rightness of our own cause, all the possessions we can collect, all the children we can produce, cannot possibly fill the abyss we pretend to ignore every day. To come face to face with the terrorism of the world, be it a sudden war in Iraq or the plunging of a jet plane into a tall building, the last thing we should do is to pretend that we couldn't do the same thing ourselves, in the most geopolitical or the most intimate contexts. The most radical, the most revolutionary act that Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter suggest is to recognize and accept this abyss, and that, to do so, we needn't do more than glance into the nearest mirror.
I suppose I could add to this, but I prefer to allow Pinter at the last to speak for himself. (There will be much bullshit said, positive and negative, by others about Pinter over the next week or so, along with the sincere appreciations; I think this will be my only post on the matter and leave it at that.) First, there's Pinter's 1954 note about Samuel Beckett which can be found in the collection Various Voices, a note that applies just as much to Pinter himself:
The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don't want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He's not fucking me about, he's not leading me up any garden, he's not slipping me any wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy, he doesn't give a bollock whether I buy or not, he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.
And, finally, "Art, Truth & Politics," Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize address, below introduced by David Hare:
Earlier "Notes on The Homecoming" here.
Posted at 11.47 am in /Dramatists/Harold_Pinter
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Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Below, Departures from a Position, the 1999 radio documentary
(42 minutes in length) about dramatist Howard Barker, presented by
long-
Posted at 1.53 pm in /Dramatists/Howard_Barker
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