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-talk when Laurie and his dying father at the end of the play are abandoned by both his mother and his friend Bill:
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-sink-style naturalism to a more metaphorical landscape. Bill, who unlike Laurie has determined to enter the work force, summons the “cheek” to attempt (and succeed) with a seduction of Laurie’s 43-year-old mother, discharging the Oedipal energies which had been building up since the first scene. The final act then becomes a dynamic of energies between the capitalist “cheek” of Laurie, the more confidently sexual “cheek” of Bill, the sexual reawakening of Laurie’s mother (who had been born into a wealthy family) and the descent to dementia and senility of Laurie’s working-class father.
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-door-neighbor (with a young baby) of his age, making the promise of a free apartment in one of his houses in exchange for sexual favors; when he admits that he is unable to provide the apartment, the neighbor stalks out and denies Laurie access to her body. But Laurie has fallen in love with her, and her departure leads to his eventual frustration, impotence, loneliness and entrapment.
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.