 "Beckett was my bible": Patricia Quinn in Stripwell, 1975 |
Stripwell. Play in two acts. First presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 14 October 1975. Directed by Chris Parr. With Michael Hordern (Graham Stripwell), Patricia Quinn (Babs), Constance Cummings (Dodie), Tim Woodward (Tim) and Roger Sloman (Pennells). Published in Stripwell and Claw, John Calder Publishers, 1977 (out of print).
Stripwell is an anomaly in the early Barker canon. It lacks the energetic innovation of Claw and the raw sensuality of Cheek; instead, it suggests an attempt to reach the West End stage. Certainly the presence of British stage veteran Michael Hordern in the lead role of the Royal Court production suggests that a West End transfer may have been hoped for.
The play itself seems that way as well. Less formally innovative, Stripwell is a straightforward, rather melancholy two-act comedy, primarily in a realistic formal mode (though self-aware of that mode throughout). It covers the last days of Graham Stripwell, an Assize court judge who though the years has lowered and lowered his professional and personal expectations, haunted by his own compromises with the world. He is the constant butt of ridicule by his wife Dodie and her father, a former Parliamentary minister who is beginning to go senile; he is also carrying on a desultory affair with Babs, a go-go dancer with intellectual pretensions; his son Tim (an echo of Cheek‘s Laurie and Claw‘s Noel) plans to smuggle tons of heroin into Britain, hiding it in the vaginas of two elephants. A death threat provokes him to attempt to seek happiness and a new moral fibre outside of the confines of his conformist life: he attempts to leave his wife and begin a new life with Babs, and he turns his son over to the police. But all for naught, as the threat of death becomes a reality.
“Blimey, talk about Chekhov, I can’t breathe for the stink of melancholia,” Dodie complains at one point, and the play never entirely escapes that risk. There are virtues: Stripwell is a well-drawn character, a middle-aged man suddenly haunted by the realisation of mortality (one would like to see what a slightly younger Michael Gambon would do with the role); Pennells, an ice cream truck driver with a viciously caustic edge, introduces some very comic relief as a supporting character. But it all seems quite schematic, and though its targets – the dislocation of the humanist ideal and the rotting of the socialist urge to moral and economic justice – are clear, the effectiveness of the attack dissipates in the play’s winsome melancholic tone. Indeed, the Barker’s success at presenting Stripwell as a sympathetic figure undercuts its final scene, which itself echoes the close of Claw, but lacks its horror.
David Ian Rabey on the play:
[Stripwell's character and humanist sympathy] are the main features which lodge in the minds of West End theatregoers, and so the indictment of the partiality of Stripwell’s morality may not seem as clear as it might have done were Cargill [Stripwell's assassin] a less elementally structural force; whether or not the drawing-room comedy vehicle could sustain this, is admittedly difficult to speculate upon.