Category Archives: David Rudkin

New books from Rudkin and Barker

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Keeping up with latest developments in drama, especially that which challenges the status quo consensus of what drama is and should be, requires a great deal of reading — these plays rarely receive productions in their native countries, less so in those across the seas. Though theatre books publishing remains a risky business in challenging economic times, nonetheless this is where the traces of the new will lie. Fortunately a few publishers still recognize the value of published drama texts; a few have come across my doorway in the past few months.

David Rudkin’s Red Sun and Merlin Unchained (Bristol, UK and Chicago IL: Intellect Ltd., 2011) brings together the dramatist’s two most recent works, the first a two-hander that investigates the golem legend in contemporary times, the second an epic about the last days of the legendary magician. The volume also comes with an essay by Robert Wilcher that looks at Rudkin’s entire career; additional critical essays by Karoline Gritzner and David Ian Rabey (who directed the world premiere of Merlin Unchained in Aberystwyth in 2009); and prefaces to each of the plays by Rudkin. Rudkin’s Gothic imagination draws together the legendary past and the tautly catastrophic present, “a unique blend of ritual and realism, of Artaudian imagery and bloodshot language,” the Guardian says. The book is available from amazon.com here, and Rudkin’s own Web site can be found here.

In the past few months Intellect has also released Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, edited by Mark Brown, which brings together 17 interviews with Howard Barker that have taken place over the past three decades. Mark did yeoman service in tracking down many of these interviews in obscure journals, and they add inestimably to an understanding of the dramatist’s project: there are interviews about Barker’s plays for puppets, on Shakespeare, and his creation of the Wrestling School. I must second Mark’s description of Barker himself in the introduction to the book: “On the three occasions on which I have interviewed Barker, I have been struck by both his sharp intelligence and his intellectual certainty … Barker has a remarkable capacity to formulate ideas seemingly instantaneously and to express them with style, wit and clarity”; it is a pleasure to see Barker’s personality come through. Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph calls it an “absolutely necessary book, not just for the Barker aficionado but for anyone wondering what happened to the battle of ideas in British theatre … a critical survey, intellectual autobiography and dictionary of Barkerian quotations rolled into one.”

Barker’s most recent play BLOK/EKO premiered at the University of Exeter with little notice from the press. Fortunately, the text itself is now available from Oberon Books. It is “a large-scale drama about death and its status in the world,” the publisher says. “Eko, an aging despot, seemingly on a whim liquidates the entire medical profession, asserting that consolation — in the form of song — is a better way with sickness than drugs or surgery. A connoisseur herself, she knows great song is itself the distillation of suffering and so deliberately exposes her greatest poet Tot to a life of crime, poverty and humiliation in order to extract from him his finest work.” Along with last year’s Hurts Given and Received, BLOK/EKO marks a return to the consideration of the artist and the place of the artist in culture, which Barker examined early in his career in plays such as No End of Blame and Scenes from an Execution. The text is available from amazon.com here.

Finally, I should note that I discuss both Rudkin and Barker briefly in my own book, Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros and Contemporary Tragic Drama, published earlier this year by Eyecorner Press. Because I receive no royalty or sales information from my own publisher, I can only wonder who’s reading it, and I wouldn’t dare to place my own writing in a league with these two writers. If you’ve read it, I wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts, either in the comments section of this post or via email. But these are four books which may keep you up-to-date on a theatre which exists, these days, only in the darker corners of the world stage.

New Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit: Readings

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Potsdamer Platz. 1914. Oil on canvas. 6' 6 3/4 x 59 1/16" (200 x 150 cm). Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York

Though he wrote more extensively about it in his English Drama Since 1940, David Ian Rabey first suggested a “New Expressionism” as one of the strands of contemporary theatre in his 1997 book on David Rudkin:

Rudkin’s drive to express the poetry of otherness, from the wellspring of conventionally submerged inner possibilities, has some affinities with the objectives of the early twentieth century German Expressionists, whose savage and passionate affirmations of Dionysian dynamism sprang defiantly from their profound sense of individual isolation and fascination with sickness and death. In 1917, Kasimir Edschmid described the visionary imagination of the Expressionist writer as crucially different to that of the documentary or social realist: “The Expressionist does not see, he beholds. He does not describe, he experiences. He does not reproduce, he creates. He does not accept, he seeks.” In 1918, Kurt Pinthus extolled drama as “the most passionate and effective form” for expressionism: “There Man explodes in front of Man.” Lotte H. Eisner notes how expressionist phraseology is ruled by a desire to amplify the “metaphysical” meaning of words towards a “total extravasation of self,” where “exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized.” Michael Patterson observes that “the very name of the movement suggested that … having rejected realism, artistic creation could have its source only in the subjective personality of the artist; and yet, especially in a public medium like the theatre, the artist’s desire to communicate remained intense.” To this end, the Expressionist “sought renewal not in mass movements” but in the “passionate search for individual regeneration,” where dramatic progression is dictated by the writer/protagonist’s search for self-realization as possible redemption of his suffering. Expressionism’s “bold violence of images …” made the theatre once again a place of intense sensory experience.”[1]

Rabey goes on to mention that Rudkin himself identifies his own drama with gothic art, but I’d like to back up a little to the historical basis of New Expressionism and examine for a moment its relationship to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement that followed it in Germany and which suggests an additional dimension of this description. Although the Neue Sachlichkeit movement is often characterized as a reaction against the internal and personal vision of Expressionist writers and painters, it can in another sense be seen as its continuation. The painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement like Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad reacted against Expressionism’s abstractions but did not entirely abandon them for photo-realism. The paintings and portraits rendered by the painters retained the two-dimensional quality of Expressionist work, which foregrounded all the subjects of an individual painting rather than dispersing some of them through perspective, and in their subject matter seemed to claim some of the dream-like qualities of Surrealism as well. More importantly, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement foregrounded art’s relationship to urban modernity (though, as the above Kirchner painting demonstrates, the Expressionists themselves also rendered urban scenes and subjects).

Schopenhauer’s will operates through urban modernity and its residents as well as any other site, and the new sharpness with which both painters and writers of the Neue Sachlichkeit foregrounded the sensuality of the human body suggests various avenues for the exploration of both New Expressionism and erotic tragedy, especially in its ambivalent relationship to gender roles and erotic experience. In a 2001 study, Richard W. McCormick discusses the emergence of the Neue Sachlichkeit from the decline of the historical Expressionist movement, a movement “that began in German painting around 1905, became important in literature around 1910, flourished just before and during the war (especially in the theatre), but by 1920 was nearly exhausted. Only then, when this once revolutionary aesthetic had begun to degenerate into a fashionable, decorative visual style, did it enter the cinema, and by 1924 it was pretty much over there too.”[2]

More observations from McCormick follow below, but before that, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate Prof. Rabey on the 25th anniversary of his Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu theatre company, which will celebrate its quarter-century birthday next Saturday, 26 February, with a reading of Howard Barker’s Victory at Aberystwyth University. In 1986 Rabey launched his company with this play, and for the event he is bringing together many of the same participants of that production; more details about the celebration are here.

… I want to make a point of affirming as emancipatory the blurring of fixed gender and sexual identities — not just to take a position that is now much more acceptable, but because the enmity to such blurring seems to me clearly connected to the crimes of the Third Reich. In this I differ with more canonical interpretations of Weimar “decadence”: in my opinion what ought to be celebrated includes precisely that wich has been derided as decadence and “effeminate weakness” by many writers on the left — work in the postwar era on Weimar culture by Peter Gay and by Siegfried Kracauer come to mind….

I disagree strongly with this intepretation both of Weimar culture and of “decadence.” The comparison with the Third Reich is instructive, however, for in that regime “decadence” was denounced as biological degeneracy, a denunciation that was clearly connected not only to anti-Semitism but to misogyny and homophobia as well. As opposed to the open anxieties about gender expressed in Weimar culture, Nazi misogyny was embodied in a cultural politics that had much less space for any acknowledgement of male weakness (except in submission to the state) or for any confusion on the part of either sex about “natural” gender roles — not to mention confusion about “race.” It ought to be obvious today that this drive for clear boundaries and identities led only to barbarism.

In contrast, I want to emphasize again that what was most emancipatory about Weimar’s crises of identity was precisely the blurring and confusion of traditional categories of identity. We find in Weimar culture a relatively open discussion of the hollowness — indeed, cynicism — of the masquerade that prescribed roles and identities seemed to demand. … [In both masculine and feminine masquerade] one notes an anxious attempt to conceal any deviation from traditional norms for gendered behavior. This anxiety in turn can be interpreted as a tacit admission of what Judith Butler has called the performativity of gender roles, a concept that involves the realization that there is no underlying “essence” to them at all: “If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is not a preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.”

… [T]he New Objectivity and Expressionism were in many ways merely two sides of the same “coin,” as it were — a rather undialectical shift from a romantic and idealistic inwardness to a somewhat forced “unsentimental,” materialistic affirmation of the external surfaces of modernity — and it was a transition made by many artists and intellectuals of more or less the same generation. Furthermore, it is clear that to the extent that this move to “sober” New Objectivity was an attempt to come down from the idealist, anti-modern heights of “auratic” art to embrace modernity, the masses, and the metropolis, it was a moved that was marked by ambivalence on the part of the intellectuals and artists who were engaged in it. It is also true that this move can be seen as the attempt of an endangered social group, the intelligentsia, to find a niche for itself in the emerging modern society that preserved some of its former prestige and autonomy. It was also an attempt that largely failed. The book burning in May of 1933, soon after the end of the Republic, would provide the most visible demonstration of this failure. …

But I want to stress again that there is a need to celebrate the emancipatory aspects, especially those emancipatory, indeed utopian moments of “polymorphous perversity” in Weimar culture — an emancipatory “queerness,” if you will, that still fascinates us to this day. I use this term not just to imply a questioning of traditional norms with regard to gender and sexuality, but also to imply a contestation of fixed categories and identities that must be seen as crucial to the project of radical democratic politics. This, I would insist, is a project important for people of all identities. What better legacy from the Weimar Republic can we salvage as we face the new millennium?[3]

Second image: Otto Dix. Portrait of Dancer Anita Berber, 1925. Oil & tempera on plywood. 47 1/4″ x 25 5/8″.

Related links:

Footnotes
  1. David Ian Rabey, David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997, p. 12. [↩]
  2. Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity.” New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 7. [↩]
  3. Selected from Ibid., pp. 7-14. [↩]

New Expressionism: Prologue 1

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In Schopenhauer’s conception of knowledge and the world, mankind is phenomenon par excellence, the object through which subjectivity can be known and the will as thing-in-itself recognized, if not described or describable in the symbol-system of language available to the individual. The will itself, because it is not describable, can’t be characterized as tragic, but this locution is available to describe the phenomenal world in relation to that will. Only that which can be directly experienced by the individual can be said to exist: it is far preferable to the abstract concept as a valid recognition, as a valid object of knowledge. Just as color cannot be described to the blind, or music to the deaf (for the vibrations under foot and hand at the concert hall are not in essence dissimilar to the vibrations of the subway or the earth), one who does not experience an extreme or a quality cannot recognize it as something known. The individual body through which the will can be recognized, and the words with which it can be explored, become the instrument of exploration and experience.

This places particular weight on the theatre and drama as aesthetic means of this exploration of the phenomenon; it is a quality of the art which most theatre practitioners (dramatists, directors, producers and critics alike) and audiences today are loathe to admit. It makes of the art a far more urgent discipline than they’re comfortable with, in that it renders the entertainment, amusement and business that attaches to the form irrelevant, especially in the forms of mimetic social realism or ironic post-modernist distance that attach to its practice even today. Obviously, in this conception, theatre and drama are the truly experiential arts, for the mediation is through the body, not the page or canvas, and it is the body that is the primary vehicle for experience. Apart from music, tragic drama is at the apex of the aesthetic imagination as conceived by Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was prophetic in more senses than one, inspiring many of the artists, writers and composers of the Expressionist school that arose in Austria and Germany beginning in the late 19th century. But there is a New Expressionism as well, and one which has its philosophical roots in the old. David Ian Rabey in his English Drama Since 1940 identifies a stream of post-war drama which he names a “New Expressionism,” which predated In-Yer-Face theatre, an off-shoot of this New Expressionism, by several decades, citing the work of David Rudkin, Heathcote Williams and other dramatists. “This involves a consciously heightened form of presentation which is unapologetic about its anti-conventional strageness, in which often ‘exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized,’ in a passionate expression of, and search for, individual regeneration. … This form of renewal is prioritised as preliminary to epic theatre’s foregrounding of social relations to address the political collective. [Emphasis mine] … Unlike Absurdism, which may reflect a loss of faith in language, reference, action and consequence, Expressionism recreates an unconventional faith in consequence: the power of individual defiance to trigger wider seismic upheavals of power, countering ‘information’ and passivity with a demonstrative capacity for active transformation.” (Rabey 128)[1]

Rabey’s description takes in a broad swathe of post-1970 drama in his book, but it is also a useful corrective to the characterization of a dramatist like Samuel Beckett as “absurdist,” especially when it comes to Beckett’s prose and drama after 1960, when the novel How It Is and the play Play marked a division between his early work and his later; especially in the late plays Catastrophe and What Where, political and ideological considerations are secondary and founded upon a metaphysical ground. What’s more, all of this later work, especially pieces like Not I, are experiential rather than discursive, and the subjective psychic events are those which provide the necessary sensation. Because they also exhibit “a demonstrative capacity for active transformation,” they are immediately relevant to a consideration of the plays of Howard Barker, David Rudkin and Sarah Kane.

The later work of Beckett and the plays of Barker, Rudkin and Kane are beyond considerations of optimistic and pessimistic. Or, more accurately, they may be both. A capacity may exist, but it may or may not be fulfilled, and possibility may or may not become probability or ever realized: it is these that are demonstrated in the theatre; it remains to the individual spectator to fulfill or realize these capacities and possibilities in their own lives, having first recognized them through the aesthetic experience. But it is this capacity and possibility that is demonstrated in the theatre, and because it is beyond the currently fashionable Procrustean formal beds of social realism or post-modern irony, it remains marginalized, however awesome may be its power to transform both the art of theatre and the experience of those who attend it.

The “In-Yer-Face theatre” that emerged in the 1990s, and of whom Sarah Kane is a common (if inappropriate) exemplar, is described by Aleks Sierz; it is interesting to note in this context, since it too is a theatre founded in experience:

[In Yer Face theatre] is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation. … Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially, it tells us more about who we really are. Unlike the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we see in detachment, the best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under our skin. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative. [Emphasis mine] (Sierz 4)

This is correct in so far as it goes, but I would insist that it is this theatrical experience itself that becomes the object of speculation; it must do so, if it is not to remain a solipsistic sensual experience which ends at the theatre door. Howard Barker’s conception of theatre as a crucible for moral speculation certainly does not obviate the practice of extreme and excessive stage activity and dramatic language. Indeed, speculation and experience revolve and feed upon each other on the New Expressionist stage. The theatre remains an arena of contemplation and speculation, even as this is generated by the experiential events that take place between performer and spectator, mediated by the symbol-system of dramatic language.

It is my hope in this series of posts to explore this conception of New Expressionism as described by Rabey and Gritzner, and trace its development back through the original Expressionist movement to its philosophical origins in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. This is not to say that Beckett, Barker, Rudkin and Kane share much beyond these bare outlines. Beckett’s constricted, de-eroticized landscape is a far cry from Barker’s expansive, even excessive, re-eroticized imagination, and they are barely recognizable, perhaps, as exemplars of the same school. But it seems to me that their emphasis on the subjective experience, their deliberate intent to operate as far outside the Culture Industry as it may be possible to do, is a critique of the same metaphysical, moral and aesthetic stance in which that Industry stands as was Schopenhauer’s opposition to the ameliorist Enlightenment of his time.

All four dramatists begin with dislocation: dislocations of narrative and character. These dislocations are similar, if not identical, to the freeing of dissonance — that is, the thing-in-itself allowed liberty to express itself phenomenally — that defines the work of Arnold Schoenberg, that twentieth-century composer who provided the underscore to the Expressionist movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

To be continued.

Footnotes
  1. Rabey’s discussion is the basis of Karoline Gritzner’s 2008 essay “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” which is crucial to the start of any discussion of this dramatic and theatrical mode. It was published in Contemporary Theatre Review: 18:3, and I will no doubt reference it further on. [↩]

David Rudkin on the social function of the dramatist

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David Rudkin

… If academics and critics — and theatres — overlook me, it’s a poor response for me as a dramatist to complain. My job is to go on doing my job.

… In Britain, the term political is narrowly understood. And it tends to denote, of theatre, a drama that espouses a particular ideology or polemic, almost always toward the Left. I was never classed as a “political” dramatist, rather as some wild marginal creature, unpolitical. Yet I’ve always felt that life has stationed me at the centre of the essential conflict where our authentic identity confronts all that is ranged against it. In that existential sense, I am political.

… It’s not granted to us all, to be heroes or martyrs. But in our culture at least, spared some of the “hierarchy of needs,” we have the energy and means — I would say, the obligation — continually to re-author ourselves. The impulse of political institutions will always be reductionist: to limit us to identities that stop growing, that can be mechanically satisfied, predicted and controlled. I believe it to be our moral human duty to subvert that. It’s an anarchist stance, in the classical sense of that word. And if I look back over the protagonists in my drama, I see almost each one in a process of unruly becoming, virtually a coming to new birth. At last, each seizes his or her own life, wrests it from those forces that would seek to control it, and makes a naked gesture of starting to live. (One conspicuous exception is The Triumph of Death, a title which speaks for itself. And that it is an exception, that too speaks for itself.) However daunting the play’s end-state, to the character on the space, that end is a beginning. I have been howled down by various political activists for not “giving” my characters a creed or value-system to take into their new lives. That’s the whole point. It is of such prescripts that we must be free.

David Rudkin
“A Politics of Body and Speech”

David Rudkin on John Whiting and Saint’s Day

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David Rudkin

This appears to be John Whiting Week on Superfluities Redux (as last week was Art and Money Week; odd how these things work out). I’m glad to offer here dramatist (and John Whiting Award winner) David Rudkin‘s essay on Whiting’s Saint’s Day, written for David Ian Rabey’s 2003 production of the play at Theatr y Castell, Aberystwyth, Wales. It is posted here with the very kind permission of Mr. Rudkin.

David Rudkin’s first play, Afore Night Come, was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. Along with Edward Bond’s Saved, it was the play that most helped to bring to an end the Lord Chamberlain’s function as a theatre censor. It received an Olivier Award for its latest revival in 2001. His other stage work includes The Sons of Light (1975), The Triumph of Death (1981) and The Saxon Shore (1986); and more recently Red Sun (2003) and Merlin Unchained (2009), to be published together by Intellect Books. Radio work includes Cries from Casement as his Bones are Brought to Dublin (1974) and The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock (1993); television work includes Penda’s Fen (1974) and Artemis 81 (1981); film screenplay work includes Fahrenheit 451 and Testimony. In 1999, David Rudkin was the subject of a 20-minute BBC Radio 3 interview in the Postscript series. You can listen to it here:

Saint’s Day itself is available in Whiting: Plays One, published by Oberon Books. Rudkin’s Red Sun and Merlin Unchained will be published by Intellect Books in February 2011.

***

“…darkness visible”

Watching Saint’s Day now, we see through it to the shadowy background figures of the theatre that its author inherited: the civilized discourse of Shaw, and particularly here – the Eliot of the “Judgment in the drawing-room.” What is more important is to see how Whiting severs himself from that inheritance – or, in other terms, advances it. With Eliot’s religious attitude to experience, and his classicizing, comes inevitably a sense that there is an ultimate “rightness” informing even the worst that happens – what Aeschylean scholars call a theodicy. In Saint’s Day there is no theodicy. I know no play in which I feel so strongly, God is gone from the world.

I first saw Saint’s Day in a student production at Oxford in 1958 or 59 – the time of The Birthday Party and Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. But Saint’s Day had been there long before Arden and Pinter, before even 1956 “and all that”; already its author’s third mature play, winning in a Festival of Britain competition in 1951, it had been awarded a production – and critically mauled. The play was driven underground, and Whiting himself effectively condemned to ten years’ silence. In a Britain waking up from the nightmare of war, hungering for a restoration of normality, to write Saint’s Day was indeed a suicidally courageous thing to do. Yet I doubt if courage was much present in Whiting’s consciousness as he was writing this: with such a play he would have no choice but to go where it was taking him, submit to his vision and the necessity of its appalling process.

For what, in Festival Britain 1951, would this “normality” be? We yearned for sure to have again the cherished rural England of village churchbells and country doctor – a yearning powerfully problematized in an extraordinary 1942 film very little known, Went the Day Well?, storylined by Graham Greene, where this idealized landscape is in fact under Nazi infiltration, and the iconic figure of the village squire proves to be a Nazi himself. I sense that the young Whiting might well have seen this film and been affected by it. But what will be abroad nine years later in his own subverted pastoral is more dangerous than any undercover enemy. It’s the visceral fury of our own English kind. Before our eyes, this cherished parish becomes a nihilist universe, and in it, so far from a “mere” absence of God, the emblems of Divine Justice – the Last Trump, the very name Christian itself – function as instruments of a new existential morality, visiting rage and terror on England’s green and pleasant land. Only logical, then, one of the play’s extremer images: the village clergyman, immolated with his theological books on his own church tower in exterminating flame.

So it’s little wonder, the hostility with which the play was received. To make matters worse, it transgresses that ancient contract between stage and audience, by which a play is a dream that however bad will end in resolution, a promise of some agency of redemption, a norm at least implied, reconciling drama and audience and setting the audience free to wake into their own world again. If Saint’s Day violates that code, it’s because there is nothing else it can do. For it shows not so much our civilization breaking down, as our civilization as an appearance that is breaking down. The only “norm” that at the end can be asserted is the nihilism that underlay it. The play brings the audience into a nightmare from which there is no waking.

We none of us as dramatists (or as any artist) necessarily like being told how we have “anticipated” somebody else. It always implies that the “somebody else” is more important. Yet it is eerie what Saint’s Day prefigures: Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave and his three deserters dispensing Judgment on the winter moors; Pinter’s Avenging Angels in the seaside boarding-house, come to give Stan Meadows his birthday party; my own pastoral England exploding in an act of atavistic human sacrifice “afore night come.” Pulling back from the play toward our own day, we see other things prefigured too: what Bond grimly called his “social realism”; the signpostless “catastrophic” landscapes of Barker, the intestine violence of Sarah Kane … But the issue, as always, is not that a particular artist is “prophetic.” It’s how deeply he sees into the implications of the world around him. I knew John Whiting at one remove – we shared an agent – and to all of us apprentice dramatists he was a legendary figure, austere in his isolation. We thought of him as the one who, in trench warfare language, was the first to go over the top. But whether we knew him, or his work, or not, he had identified our landscape for us – not because he was “ahead of” his time, but because he was tuned accurately into it.