Michaela Lieberman and Jan Maxwell in the upcoming PTP/NYC production of Victory. Photo: Stan Barouh.

Victory: Choices in Reaction will receive its United States premiere next Tuesday, 12 July, as part of the PTP/NYC summer season at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street in New York. The play is directed by Richard Romagnoli and stars four-time Tony nominee Jan Maxwell as Bradshaw, fresh from her critically acclaimed performance in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in Washington, DC. More information on the production can be found here; tickets are now on sale from Ticket Central (search for “Victory” in the “Search Events” box). I wrote about the play last month; that short essay is reposted below.

Victory: Choices in Reaction. Play in two acts. First presented by the Joint Stock Theatre Group in association with the Royal Court Theatre on 23 March 1983. Directed by Danny Boyle; designed by Dierdre Clancy; lighting by Gareth Jones. With Julie Covington (Bradshaw), Toby Salaman (Scrope), Kenny Ireland (Ball), Nigel Terry (Charles Stuart/John Milton), David Lyon (Hambro), Eleanor David (Devonshire) and Martin Stone (McConochie). Published in Howard Barker: Plays One, Oberon Books, 2006.

SCROPE: A man may be beaten, and his wife violated, and his house burned, and his children murdered by his enemies, and yet stay whole. But to be so treated by his friends … you encourage madness.
BRADSHAW: I DO KNOW THAT. Do you think I found it easy? It wasn’t easy. But that’s my triumph. Any fool can rob his enemy. What’s the victory in that? (43)

Set in the immediate aftermath of the restoration of Charles II to the English crown in 1660, Victory: Choices in Reaction may be the most accomplished play of Howard Barker’s first full decade in the theatre. And it’s surprising in that it is not a tragedy but a comedy, though a comedy of the darkest, most Swiftian hue — a satire of both revolutionaries and royalists, possessed of several reconciliations, even a victorious homecoming, at the final curtain. The Oberon Books edition lists 35 speaking roles, and the locales reach from a village hut to the vaults of the Bank of England.

Victory takes the form of an epic, if unusual, quest. Upon the Cavaliers’ return to England, they have begun collecting up the bodies of the Puritan republicans to be posted on spikes in front of the palace as a fit if posthumous punishment for their 1649 regicide of Charles Stuart’s father, Charles I. One of these bodies is that of John Bradshaw, the judge who presided over the execution of Charles I; his widow Susan then sets out to collect the pieces of the corpse which have been scattered around London. She is accompanied by Scrope, her husband’s former secretary who still adheres to the principles of the Utopia that Bradshaw laid out in a book, the Harmonia Brittania, written in Latin and a copy of which also accompanies them. As she collects the pieces of her husband’s dead body, she also begins to construct her own identity in the post-catastrophic landscape, making those “choices in reaction” that would constitute a valid self in the world. Her own story dovetails with that of Ball, a violent Cavalier who is smitten with desire for the widow, and that of Charles Stuart himself, whose mistress Devonshire hires the widow to run her domestic staff.

The quest belongs to Bradshaw, but to accomplish it she first realizes that the landscape of the post-Restoration, post-catastrophic world has changed, and so must she, in the interest of mere survival: “Because we must crawl now, go down on all fours, be a dog or a rabbit, no more standing up now, standing is over, standing up’s for men with sin and dignity. No, got to be a dog now, and keep our teeth.” (31) Her emerging consciousness of the world shocks Scrope, her husband’s secretary, who retains his faith in the republican principles of the Harmonia – as it would Ball, the Cavalier who remains devoted to the ideas of the monarchy. Both Scrope and Ball fail in their attempts to put their ideals into practice, leading to death for Scrope and mutilation for Ball, although the comic highpoint of the play is when Ball pathetically pleads to the King, “Oh, come on, be a FUCKING MONARCHIST” (80).

At the other end of the social spectrum from Bradshaw is Charles Stuart himself, the monarch who has been restored. He is in many ways the most entertaining figure of the play — a cynic who fully recognizes that the monarch in the Restoration era has become a mere figurehead, a front for the machinations of the technocrats and bankers who brought him back from France and restored him to the throne. Because he has no meaningful power, Charles is largely bored, whiling away his time with licentiousness as the country is administered by the business class. But he is not stupid. He quotes at length, and not without some approval, from the Harmonia (“I know my Bradshaw, banned book but I got him in my library. … Word perfect, ain’t I?” (54) ), and at the end of the play he provides the most melancholic, because honest and clear, understanding of his own condition to Bradshaw:

The cavalier [Ball], he thought he stabbed for me … he loved something I’m only pretending … I don’t think anybody cares whether monarchs live or die now. No, no, don’t be shallow, don’t make soft replies, the cavalier, he knew after my dad there would be no English monarch would do anything but tickle crowds for bankers, I looked in that man’s eyes and I was all humiliation, may I touch your belly? It’s round as a football. I think a woman in late life and pregnant is a precious sight. … Pity me, will you? I make you very gently, I am no rocking billy, overlook my shallowness if I say that I love you, but I do now, you kind woman … (82)

And, his speech finished, Charles falls asleep in the lap of Bradshaw, who in a heartbreaking gesture of compassion “covers the sleeping figure with a cloak.” And with this show of compassion, Bradshaw’s education complete, there is nothing left but for her to return home, pregnant with Ball’s child, to find that her own daughter Cropper may be instigating the circle all over again. “I read his book,” she tells her mother. “By night. Run my dirty finger through the words. … The sentence coming to me like a birth in the pale morning. I am translating it. ‘Harmonia Brittania.’ I am printing it.” (85) Her admission is greeted with silence from Bradshaw, who leads her new husband — formerly the enemy of both herself and her first husband — into the shelter of Cropper’s house.

Upon the play’s premiere in 1983, Victory was interpreted as Barker’s comment on Thatcherite England and the threadbare weakness of the progressive left, but since then its more enduring virtues have become apparent (Kenny Ireland directed the play for Barker’s Wrestling School company in 1991, and it was also revived by the Arcola Theatre in 2009). It is a landmark play in Barker’s career, closing his early period of satiric state-of-the-nation plays — The Castle, Scenes from an Execution and Women Beware Women would follow in the next three years, launching a new direction in Barker’s aesthetic. Many traits of this new path can be seen in utero here, including the power of sexual desire to transform both self and world (exemplified in Victory by Ball), the tortured and liberating nature of the master/servant relationship and Barker’s refusal to provide figures with whom the spectators can easily empathize. And — because Barack Obama as well as most of the other leaders of the world continue to be sustained by financiers, businessmen and bankers — Victory is likely to remain viable and speak to contemporary audiences for the foreseeable future.

Howard Barker on Victory

The protagonist Bradshaw, widow of a republican intellectual, chooses to expose herself to the full blast of circumstances by abandoning her home, and, in gathering the dismembered parts of her husband’s body, live a life of suspended morality. The act of collecting her husband together, futile as she discovers only in the final scene, is itself an act of extreme piety, but in doing so she consciously destroys in herself the moral habits of a lifetime. She creates a character better suited to the changed politics of the state. … In [the scene in which she physically attacks Milton], which exemplifies the collapse of solidarity and the suspension of morality, the beauty of Bradshaw’s exhilaration, her poetic recollection of lost and unrecoverable life, combined with her terroristic attack on a helpless man, serve to create a dramatic climate where political values are loosed into the air, and the audience, deprived of the predictable, is obliged to construct meaning for itself, at least until the stricken Milton, nursing his smacked face, settles the chaos in a moving but essentially trite revolutionary catechism.

“Beauty and terror in the Theatre of Catastrophe”
Arguments for a Theatre, pp. 59-60

Good endings tend to be reconciliations. One squirms at the idea of a good ending. Take Victory, which is a “well-ended play.” The arrival of Ball and Bradshaw onstage together as two ends of a spectrum of defeat — one the republican and one the nationalist figure — both of whom have been betrayed by the system they felt affinity for, is actually an image of great conciliation and reassurance — the notion that somehow, at the end of the day the lion will lie down with the lamb. There’s an element of sentimentality in that which I felt I needed. Of course, it’s one thing to say you’re going to break narrative because you realize it’s suspect and reactionary, but it’s quite another thing to know how to do it. … [Disrupting narrative] is getting to be a greater problem because audiences are less and less tolerant of interruptions because they’re fed on narrative.

“Articulate explorers in an age of populism”
Interview with Charles Lamb
Howard Barker Interviews, p. 45

Other viewpoints on Victory

Bradshaw’s ability to reformulate her own set of personal imperatives contrasts with the despairing satire uttered by King Charles, wryly lamenting his loss of appeal to divine right to rule, and replacement by a society of financially regulated conspicuous consumption. The newly ascendant bourgeoisie is represented by the technocrat, Hambro, a reconstructed republican who is now “prime mover” in bringing back the monarch from exile: significantly, the Bank of England’s currency bears Charles’ name but Hambro’s signature. Hambro’s murder by Ball, who demands the restoration of absolute monarchy, is futile because of the unalterable shift of capital from the monarch to the state. A new Governor of the bank will be installed.

Bradshaw and the (now physically broken) Ball affect a union; she finally returns to her daughter Cropper with her husband’s “bits” and Ball’s child. However, Cropper refuses to acknowledge the “scrag” contents of Bradshaw’s bag as her father. The play characteristically provides tentative opportunities for unity, which are then denied, compelling the audience to share the nausea produced by the contradiction of these “correct” impulses. Accordingly, the traditional image of the home as haven and site of reconciliation conceals Cropper, resisting her mother’s efforts to keep her “bovine, religious and clean” by translating her father’s supposedly defunct work from Latin into English. Victory develops Barker’s avoidance of easy recourse to contemporary analogues, and his confounding of notions of characters as repositories for facile sympathy or ideological recognition.

Ian Cooper
“Institutions, icons, and the body in Barker’s plays, 1977-86″ (unpublished essay)

Amid the shattered human, dramatic and philosophical forms are injunctions to reconstitution: Scrope’s explosive cry to the theatre audience “Oh, all you who come after, make your revolution right!”, and Milton’s appended warning “Next time, should we start there must be no finish, or we shall slap one another’s faces in the gardens of our enemies.” Thus the audience are invited to recognize and learn from historical moments of collapse. and Barker does not advance, impose or extract a simplistic fomula for future success; the onus of “choices in reaction,” reformulation and regeneration, is located in the audience, should they rise to the challenge, extending the process into their own lives. Spectators accustomed to passivity may be confused and resentful, but Barker refuses conventional appetites for patronizing drama of celebration or deterministic didacticism. His audiences are offered the chance to participate in, and extend, the processes depicted in the plays.

Nietzsche’s reclamation of the term “victory” and Barker’s play stand in mutual illumination. Nietzsche:

A sudden terror and suspicion of what it loved, a lightning-bolt of contempt for what it called “duty,” a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangement, coldness, soberness, frost, a hatred for love, perhaps a desecrating blow and glance backwards to where it formerly loved and worshipped, perhaps a hot blush of shame at what it has just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it, a drunken, inwardly exultant shudder which betrays that a victory has been won — a victory? over what? over whom? an enigmatic, question-packed, questionable victory, but the first victory nonetheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great liberation. It is at the same time a sickness that can destroy the man who has it, this first outbreak of strength and will to self-determination, to evaluating on one’s own account, this will to free will …

David Ian Rabey
Howard Barker: Politics and Desire, p. 139

Other material

• Archival material relating to the 1983 Royal Court Theatre production
• Lyn Gardner’s review of the 2009 Arcola Theatre production