John Thaw as Leary and Max Wall as Old Gocher in the Royal Court production of Fair Slaughter. Photo: John Haynes

Fair Slaughter. Play in 21 scenes. First presented by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, 13 June 1977. Directed by Stuart Burge; designed by Patrick Robertson and Rosemary Vercoe; lighting by Jack Raby. With Max Wall (Old Gocher), John Thaw (Leary), Nick Edmett (Young Gocher), Tony Mathews (Stavely), David Jackson (Tovarish), Judith Liebert (Moira), Robert Gary (Doctor), Jan Chappell (Melanie), Tony Halfpenny (Porter) and Robin Meredith (Fireman). Published in Crimes in Hot Countries/Fair Slaughter (Playscript 107), John Calder, 1984. Out-of-print.

GOCHER: Hopeful, yes! You make it sound like a weakness, that I have hope in you, Christ, we are fucking maggots without hope!
LEARY: And silly bastards with it.

From the book jacket: “Gocher, a veteran communist and oldest living murderer in England, lies in a prison hospital bed plotting his escape. Through his often comic attempts to persuade the warder, Leary, to help him, Gocher’s past is revealed in a series of flashbacks starting with the British Expeditionary Force in Russia after the Revolution. Each scene that portrays the young Gocher in the Depression, thirties’ Music Halls, factories, a burning whisky warehouse in World War II and catastrophic fatherhood alternates with one of the old Gocher’s farcical escapes and his futile effort to rebury the hand of Trotsky’s engine-dirver — symbol of his commitment — in Russian soil. In a final powerfully surreal trial on the South Downs, the hard-line communism of Gocher’s youth confronts the humanity gained from sixty years of struggle.”

Fair Slaughter is a great leap forward formally and thematically from 1975′s Stripwell. There is now considerable fluidity of movement among various time periods, and Barker’s focus is now more intent on the intersection of personal and political morality, of intimate and public experience. Gocher is driven by fanaticism, righteous hatred and a sense of injustice, poured into the purity of the Marxist dream; his ideological struggle leads him, until the end of the play, to violence and alienation from the culture he desires to save. In the penultimate scene of the play, Barker creates one of his most remarkable and powerful monologues in his career to date when Gocher explains to his seven-year-old daughter Moira why he clings so tenaciously to the socialist dream:

Justice, you see. It cries out. It is always crying out. You look around you, and before you know where you are, it’s crying out. We ask for nice, not nasty. And nothing could be easier, you might think. You like niceness, don’t you? So do I. But some people, they don’t like niceness, or to be more accurate, they want the niceness for themselves. They want to HOG THE NICENESS. (Pause.) So we have [to] go grab it. We have to drag it out their hands, and then what do they do? They attack us! Yes, they set about us! Violently! They attack us, they set on us the WHOLE FORCE OF THE BOURGEOIS STATE! THEY PUT THE STATE AGAINST THE PEOPLE! LOOK WHAT THEY HAVE DONE TO ME BECAUSE I WOULD NOT PLAY THE BANJO TO THEIR BLOODY LIES! A FATHER AND A CHILD IN THIS DISGUSTING ROOM! LOOK AT THE FILTH THEY FLING US IN, THE BASTARDS. THE PARASITIC BASTARDS. THEY DRINK OUR BLOOD! I WILL KILL THEM, I WILL KILL THEIR BABIES, IT WILL BE A SLAUGHTER WHEN WE’VE FINISHED, A FAIR BLOODY SLAUGHTER, LET ME, GOD! (He bursts into a fit of weeping, rocking back and forwards in his chair, hands to his face.) Daddy upset darling … sorry, darling … sorry, sorry, sorry, love … (101)

Like other Barker characters, Gocher is far from inarticulate despite his background and upbringing (this a consideration of many early Barker plays, built on his early responses to Edward Bond’s Saved); but this articulacy seems to drive him still further to mania. Stavely, Gocher’s capitalist antagonist, is nowhere near as expressive, and reaches the final curtain as a pathetic mess of a man, drooling over a Picasso reproduction; but it is Stavely’s stumbling, drooling capitalist with whom the play ends, standing over Old Gocher’s dead body on the South Downs.

Calling Fair Slaughter Barker’s “first great play,” David Ian Rabey draws a parallel between it and Krapp’s Last Tape, “another dramatisation of sublimated energy and the final crushing realisation of its futility, where old and young selves confront each other, in a sudden illumination of lost ideals and forfeited love.” (Rabey 52) Though a consideration of the socialist dream in postwar Britain, both the play’s passion and its ambivalence render it ripe for a revival in a progressive America.