The final entry in the series of Howard Barker’s notes on several of his early plays are these, written to accompany the 1980 RSC Warehouse (now the Donmar Warehouse) production of The Loud Boy’s Life. The play was published by John Calder in 1982 in the volume Two Plays for the Right (currently out-of-print).
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My plays have always been concerned with power, only rarely with conscience, and not yet with happiness. I am at present writing my first play about happiness, but inevitably in the context of power, because they are disordered twins, siamese who pull agonizingly in opposite directions. The pursuit of power, like the pursuit of sexual love, is the mortal enemy of happiness. To be happy is to be without want, to be therefore in a state of intellectual and sensual suspension. And who will settle for happiness when he might have pain? Passion, the pain of wanting, is the only affirmation most of us can have.
The protagonist of The Loud Boy’s Life is a man of huge passion and extreme cunning. Cunning is a virtue in politics, perhaps even in love. Without cunning, passion has poor prospects. It will be trampled out of existence, or bored into insignificance by the sordid, everyday maneuverings which constitute most social and political life. Passion needs its armour. Ezra Fricker therefore appears well-suited to his mission, which is no less than the governance of England. Yet, for all his gifts, he gets it wrong. Why? It is History which trips him up, History which is invoked as authority or witness by nearly all the characters in the play, and which is a religion of which he regards himself as the high priest.
It is one of the great political ironies that the extremes of Left and Right both appeal to History as the source of their authority. The Left claim to employ it scientifically, Marx having caged the beast in the confines of a theory, while the Right sieze upon it as an emotional bludgeon to stir up demons which have, it appears, their residence in our blood. In both cases there is a crushing sense that, struggle as we might, something constrains us — the dead have their fingers on our necks. There are two matching complacencies which go with this — the Left complacency which sees communism as inevitable, even if perhaps not always recognizable — a very comforting sense of being on the bus when everyone else is walking, which at its most positive enables peasant armies to overthrow the massed firepower of supertechnological empires, but at its most negative gives men an excuse to refrain from struggle — and the Right complacency, which affirms that all the intelligence and good will in the world will never wash away the essential dirtiness of the human spirit, and insists we are all capitalists at heart and incapable of community.
Ezra Fricker is a man of the Right, a man who believes that Reason is of very limited value in conducting human affairs and that we perform a grave disservice to mankind by following the teachings of Jesus. Happiness, for those who are content with it, consists in the elimination of hope. The means by which man is to be governed is through a balance of selfishness, and the instrument is that highest expression of the English genius, Parliament, the cockpit where the dirty struggle is deemed to take place. It is the grappling pit of interests, kept regular in its motions by the two-party system, and flushed at five-yearly intervals.
Now this passionately held conviction — that Parliament is the truest form of government — isolates Fricker from his natural allies, and indeed, from the British people, many of whom would like to thrust him into office by some other means. Scrupulously, he warns his headstrong followers that he is a constitutionalist, not only by conviction, but by interest too. That the two-party system represents no more than alternating varieties of capitalist authority has not escaped his notice. It is the futile muzak which masks the horrific sounds of a nation being systematically dispossessed.
Fricker cannot gratify his following without assuming power, and in the play he finds the prospect dangled before him in two forms. One is the creation of a new political party, populist and nationalist, a party of small men reaping the resentment of a humiliated nation. The other is to climb into the leadership of his own party at a moment of supreme crisis. He fails in the first through a combination of fastidiousness and sound judgement; he fails in the second by association. Having once raised the spectre of the mob, he is the mob’s man, and capital can never trust him.
History will provide a precedent for anything, and is therefore an unreliable source of inspiration. Yet it haunts all the peoples of the world, and none more than those left blindly struggling with their disinheritance. For all his failure, Fricker lodges in the consciousness of his time. He is, for an ashamed people, The Man Who Is Not Ashamed. Round him a thousand myths revolve, like gnats in summer shade. Clever and a hater of cleverness, ruthless in his demolition of the weak argument, yet profoundly illogical, he has the stamp of Character, and all his eccentricities, cultivated to the point of habit, stir the imagination of a people weary with faceless careerism. Plagiarized, he fascinates beyond the grave.
The Loud Boy’s Life was commissioned as a two-part television serial by the BBC. I prepared it, as I have always, with the freedom a serious writer requires to put his stamp on a piece of work, but ready, as I always have been, to retrace my steps in the event the language or the content should be deemed unsuitable. I was given no opportunity to trade with my integrity. It is quite possible that people watching this will say, well, what did you expect? And indeed, that is the extent of the tragedy. So quaint as the notion of free expression become as we blunder into the 1980s.
There has been for some time now a critical notion of “The Warehouse Play,” crudely characterized as political and violent. This somewhat studied aversion will undoubtedly increase with the coming years, if the Warehouse wins its struggle to survive. There is a tremendous pressure on writers to “mature” as we move into a new decade, as if somehow our consciousness operated in ten-year cycles. The reluctance of critics to give us houseroom unless we develop in conventional ways (show more detachment) will become more marked. Of course we are changing; new interests, different assumptions, are evident across a range of new plays. But we cannot be hurried, and a tragic loss of plays of a “second period” will occur if the theatres are not in existence where they might be shown. And that is political. All the maturity in the world will not change that fact.
