Below, Howard Barker’s RSC Warehouse series notes on his 1978 play The Love of a Good Man, posted with the kind permission of Mr. Barker. The play is available in the third volume of Barker’s collected works published by Oberon Books.

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In some perverse accolade to my abilities, The Love of a Good Man was one of the tiny handful of plays which, on his own admission, drove Bernard Levin out of theatre reviewing. To be joint winner of such a prize cannot be allowed to go to my head. This same critic only a few years earlier had expressed fervent admiration of my play Fair Slaughter, believing that, whatever my intentions, the piece was an indictment of revolutionary passion. A readiness to filter plays through the sieve of private prejudice is a burden most critics seem happy to bear, and writers soon become accustomed to seeing their work misrepresented in the columns of the press. It is worth investigating, however, why Levin and others like him no longer actually enjoy themselves in the theatre, and particularly why they are unable to enjoy a play like The Love of a Good Man which, they are prepared to admit, is powerful, skillful, original and so on, terms which usually carry with them the highest recommendation.

Those who follow the skirmishes of theatre politics will know that my play was banned by the management of the Cambridge Arts Theatre where it was due to tour after a copy of the script fell into the hands of Commander Andrew Blackwood, who, with the wholehearted support of academic George Rylands and the board of management, obliged the Oxford Playhouse company to rent the premises. All publicity for the play carried, as it were, a Government Health Warning, urging regular patrons of the theatre to stay away, as presumably to watch the play would do some irreparable damage to their consciousness. One might reasonably deduce from this that language was the culprit, and indeed language was singled out, like a pernicious disease. But the Arts had echoed to these words before in various plays, and as ever, it became clear that it is never the word that hurts, but the man who speaks it. It is now a cliche of modern theatre for gangs of working class youths to utter “fuck” as a recurrent adjective, it is indeed deemed wholly appropriate language for an inferior species. But for the Prince of Wales to say to a bourgeois woman, in the expectant silence of a 700 seat theatre, “I would like to fuck your cunt,” is to convert a patronizing giggle into a slur on monarchic manners. Such is the thinking behind the ban.

Language is powerful, and will never lose its power so long as it discovers its proper context. This strange magic has not failed to register with those who would like us to believe that Princes of Wales neither swear nor fuck.

A similar outburst of hysterical opposition came from the Mayor of Oxford, who in an address to the British Legion, described the play, amongst other things, as sick-minded. This is harsh indeed, familiar though the phrase may be in the mouths of angry old men wanting to trample over works of imagination. And I say works of imagination, rather than works of art, because really it is imagination that hurts them, provokes their spitefulness and makes them suffer by forcing them to look at the world differently.

The way I have approached my work as a dramatist is to employ imagination to dislocate the expectations of an audience, to continually surprise them and in so doing make them confront reality with different eyes. I have said elsewhere that what I held to be wrong in the naturalistic theatre was above all its predictability, which enables an audience to slip into moral idleness. As long as the work is daringly imaginative, this intellectual drowsiness cannot occur, and that is why it earns the contempt of those who prefer sleeping minds to active ones. Imagination is the great liberator, the key to exposing the absurdity of the condition of our lives. If imagination is strangled, society fails to observe itself, stagnates and ossifies. The imaginative play is the subversive play; the predictable play, of left or right, is disarmed and impotent.

The English, we are often told, have humour if they have nothing else. Yet what nation possessed of humour could tolerate the pretensions of monarchy, the absurdity of ceremony, the fatuous routine of the House of Commons, without laughing them away? Is there anything more essentially ridiculous than a Queen in a crown, a judge in a wig, or a mayor in a nickle chain, parading their comic costumes in the happy expectation (alas, fulfilled!) that we shall be overawed? No, there is no real humour, not the humour that sweeps away in a giant, popular laugh, the pretensions of a vulgar minority. The public event is the essence of comedy in a frightened and backward-looking society, and it is the public event which is the heart of The Love of a Good Man. A society that conceals its shame in a ritual needs all the laughter it can get.

It is always going to be said of artists who expose the hypocrisy of public events, the dubiousness of motives, that they are in some way “life-denying.” Good plays, by this criterion, confirm life, and they do this apparently by implying that the world is really all right — by and large — or at least, if the world’s not all right, we are. They concentrate on the little spark of comfort that somehow seems to make the massive sins dwindle into insignificance. They are the plays that in the end, quite simply, “cheer you up.” These are, alas for Bernard Levin, the sort of plays the better dramatists no longer want to write. Somehow being a happy pig doesn’t seem to satisfy, even if the pig is full of psychology.

Let us once and for all dismiss this cunningly employed notion of the “life-denying” play, used as it is like a bucket of cold water to douse critical minds. There is no happiness in The Love of a Good Man, and rightly there is none. But there is something as important as happiness, which is dignity. There is in Hacker, the protagonist, a man of passion, a man above all who has no real evil for all his scheming. Not believing in saints and being tired of heroes, I find Hacker wins sympathy the way other protagonists in my plays have earned theirs — Noel Biledew in Claw, Billy McPhee in That Good Between Us — uneasily, but through the discovery of a personal dignity that no amount of insult will eradicate. Is this life-denying? And the soldiers, who in the main fail to learn by their mistakes, are not dismissed as incapable, are not patronized, nor are they, as they would be in a conventional left-wing play, given sudden access to the light. It is not political consciousness that is won by the end of the evening, but one man’s assertion of his right, a refusal to serve that comes from a primitive assertion of his dignity. Is this life-denying? It is the proper source of socialism too. And the girl who comes to the graveyard with an arrogant innocence that is actually more perceptive than experience, who will not be trampled, and who combines a rigorous idealism with a readiness — perhaps an appetite — to suffer, is this life-denying? Of course she is not. But then the hostility this play has earned, as well as its passionate support, comes from precisely this equation, that our dignity comes from rejection of rituals, social, sexual and political, and not, as we are encouraged to believe, from our complicity with them.

Nicholas Le Prevost, Fulton MacKay and Gaye Brown in the 1978 RSC production of The Hang of the Gaol

Miscellaneous projects and endeavors will require my full attention over the next few days. In the meantime, here is the first in a series of Howard Barker’s own notes on his early plays, originally published as a series of photocopied pamphlets called “RSC Warehouse Writers.” This first entry discusses The Hang of the Gaol, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company on 15 December 1978.

While Mr. Barker’s thinking on these early plays has evolved over the past three decades, he has agreed to make these available here to scholars and others, and they are posted here with the dramatist’s kind permission. David Ian Rabey generously provided copies of the texts themselves.

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In April this year I was in Stockholm for the Swedish National Theatre production of my play Claw, and was surprised by the feverish interest shown by the Swedes in the state of England. It was as if they were staring hypnotically at a raging flask, waiting for it to explode. What keeps the lid on, they asked? How soon will it blow? From this distance I shared their expectations, yet when I returned to England I found no sense of crisis, no tangible despair. The Thorpe case was only a rumble. Corruption and murder looked indeed like the fantasies of a mildly hysterical playwright. For a moment I thought I had perpetrated a fraud. But, of course, if history tells us anything about decline, it tells us that it is not essentially chaotic, but insidious. Like a malignant disease it attacks the nerve endings first, the senses deteriorate before the flesh. What was once automatic becomes confused. The state of our theatre is, I believe, a perfect barometer of this sickly state. On the one hand, chiefly but not only in the West End, the reflexes are still working. Here are the plays of reassurance, the plays which offer you more of the same — a seemingly endless future of sham sex and futile comedy. On the other hand, there are the plays, often shrill, but shrill with the despair of men who think the galley is sinking and the slaves are still singing at the oars.

I do not deny the quality of pessimism in my own work. Anyone who is a keen observer of the political and social scene at the present time would be hard put to detect signs of encouragement. An economic system rabidly incompetent, a political system in which change is effectively stifled, and a Socialist party actively pursuing the economic policies of the opposition, along with a real sense of panic and insecurity in the streets, this provides for a spectacle in which optimism would be glib and irresponsible. But I believe it is vital to confront the worst of our time rather than be self-congratulatory over a social system once notoriously stable and now notoriously stagnant.

The protagonist of The Hang of the Gaol is a man who shelters his sanity behind simple moral imperatives. A civil servant on the threshold of a knighthood whose task is the exposure of corruption in public life, Jardine is not deterred by the knowledge that the choice of accountant is often all that separates the good citizen from the bad. Riding the ambiguities of moral extremism, he bears down with an Old Testament vindictiveness. The circumstances of an act of arson that destroys a famous English prison compel him to a moral compromise in which his private satisfactions are weighed against the hard-baked political realism of our time. The play has no heroes. Who are the English heroes now? Those who sustain fundamentalist beliefs and moral certainties, and consequently suffer from a form of eccentricity, or the much-despised lepers of compromise, morally shapeless through the conflict between public and private belief, those who play the system and have learned “the hang of the gaol”?

Is it possible to be English, fully conscious, and sane? Is it possible to carry so many contradictions in one’s head and yet retain a sense of purpose and a fund of hope? The theme of moral exhaustion is a major one in my plays. In Fair Slaughter I examined the decay of a political ideal in one man through constant friction with that peculiar stability which has characterized our society this century — a stability which is not, in spite of what we are led to believe, a racial characteristic. In That Good Between Us I showed where I believe the failure to break out of this condition into significant social change would lead us — to moral collapse and the breakdown of community. I received all the usual brickbats for daring to envisage the demise of the so-called democratic consensus — charges of paranoia, apocalyptic self-indulgence, lack of evidence. The latter, seemingly the most reasonable objection to plays of this kind, was in fact the most pernicious. A demand for factual information to substantiate intuitive artistic statements is a disguised demand for a literary style. It is the kind of demand which has created the artistic impasse in TV drama, where a fetishistic attachment to documentary realism is preventing imaginative work reaching the public. I am not a good political writer. I have not, as many writers of the left, a coherent Marxist viewpoint. The contradictions which exist in my work are due to a growing and fixed interest in character and the effect of character on social or moral attitudes. The political world is nevertheless an arena for the working out of these conflicts.