Category Archives: John Whiting

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.

John Whiting on the art of the dramatist

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At his ease: John Whiting (1917-1963)

British dramatist John Whiting (1917-1963) had a peculiar career in the English-language theatre. After writing A Penny for a Song, Saint’s Day and Marching Song, which enjoyed brief runs in the West End and were greeted with considerable confusion if not contempt in the early 1950s, he wrote nothing for the theatre between 1954 and 1960, though he did contribute criticism and reviews to publications such as London Magazine. Whiting returned to the theatre in 1960; of his major work he completed only The Devils before dying of cancer three years later at the age of 45. Upon his death, actress Peggy Ashcroft said, “We have lost one of our finest dramatists but also a major critic. Perhaps a critic is even more rare than a dramatist … [he had a] marvelously balanced attitude to the theatre — no involvement in one camp or the other but a completely clear and absolutely honest view of his own.” In 1965, the John Whiting Award was established, its honorees selected by Arts Council England, to honor work that “shows a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing with particular relevance to contemporary society.”

Whiting’s plays are very occasionally revived (Ian W. Hill is directing The Devils this month at The Brick playhouse in Brooklyn, for example), but Whiting should also be remembered for his fine essays and criticism, most recently collected by Oberon Books in At Ease in a Bright Red Tie: Writings on Theatre in 1999, edited by Ronald Hayman. The book opens with Whiting’s lecture to the Old Vic in 1957, “The Art of the Dramatist,” delivered three years into his self-imposed exile from the theatre. At the time the lecture too was greeted with derision and ridicule, especially from Kenneth Tynan. “In the annals of the theatre, it may indeed come to be regarded as Romanticism’s Last Stand,” Tynan wrote puckishly, “the ultimate cry of the artist before being engulfed by the mass, the final cry of individualism before being inhaled and consumed by the ogre of popular culture,” going on to caricature Whiting as an “attenuated hermit saint bravely keeping his chin up while being sucked through the revolving doors of a holiday camp.”

“There are instances today,” Whiting said in the lecture, “as Mr. Eliot has pointed out, when a writer may be misunderstood because he is saying exactly what he means”; perhaps Tynan’s response demonstrates the truth of that observation. Given that Tynan’s words are commonly available and Whiting’s are not, a few pieces from “The Art of the Dramatist” here to allow Whiting to say exactly what he means. They continue to be of interest.

***

A work of art is the statement of one man. It is one of the noblest, because it is one of the most selfless activities of human existence. It has nothing to do with an audience or a wish to please. It does not necessarily entertain, instruct or enlighten. It can do any one or all of these things, but that it should is not the artist’s concern. That is the work of art in its perfect state. The thing is there: an audience taking from it what it can. It is not the artist’s job to simplify the means of communication.

***

I suggest that the voice you hear today in all branches of literature is not the individual voice but the collective voice. And this especially from any writer under forty. In other words, the writer has become the spokesman not for himself but for a group, an organisation, a class or a sect. The danger is that some don’t know they are doing it, and those who do know often consider, and are led to consider it a virtue. “This young man speaks for his generation.” “This young woman is the rallying point for all young women with big feet.” You know the sort of thing.

The communal voice. We have settled for the time being and for better or for worse on the democratic life. We must hang together and speak as a man. But must we not consider that in these circumstances we shall have to give up what we call art? At least, in its conception of the past few hundred years. Why should we think that as an activity it is timeless? Why shouldn’t this be the end? After all, like human life it is a fairly modern invention and neither are entirely satisfactory. Perhaps to make our days on earth longer we must also make them duller. And noisier. We must get through. We must be heard. We must communicate. One voice will never be enough. Call in the boys. And it is encouraged. It must be. Art has to conform to the conventions of life. It must also conform to its catchwords. Such as freedom. Freedom from authority, yes, it has that, apart from censorship. Freedom from the people? Certainly, it has freedom to speak just what they think. The cult of the individual is now [in 1957] almost as great a social crime in the West as it is a political crime in the East. This is unfortunate, as the cult of the individual is the basis of all art.

***

The questions are continually posed. What effect does the atom bomb have on writers today? What effect the Welfare State? Are we aware in our work of the extermination of the Jews in Europe during the war years?

Well, of course, anyone writing today is aware that these things happened and are happening. But it is the blind spot of the journalistic mind, so pre-eminent and so pre-occupied with art today, that it thinks the problems should be directly involved. In other words, the play must be set in a concentration camp, beneath an immanent explosion, or in a new town. The assumption seems to me naive, but understandable. After all, the art of journalism, and a very fascinating and considerable art it is, must concern itself with the present happening in its exact place. But journalism is not the theatre or literature. Let me put it like this. Suppose a play is set in that uncontroversial place — an English drawing room. And the play is about — say, adultery. Suppose atom bombs, concentration camps and social welfare are never mentioned. And you know it’s extraordinary how rarely they are in ordinary conversation. But this does not mean that they are not present or non-existent. The writer has been touched by these things, as we all have, and if the play is anything of a serious work it must be shadowed by them.

***

I said earlier that [the dramatist] should not be aware of [the audience] as an audience whilst writing the play. But he must be aware of them as people.

Am I wrong in thinking that audiences, and especially young audiences, today won’t accept the theatre because of its death’s-head artificiality? I think it’s true. People no longer want to be taken out of themselves, as the saying was, because now they are themselves and are aware of how good a thing that is.

Two institutions are notably in decline these days: the Arts and the Church. And both for the same reason. They are practicing an abracadabra which takes in no one. The feeling is that both artists and the Church are trying to trick people into accepting something which is worthless. The sales talk, the little free packets of wisdom we both give away, quite obscure the fact that both the Church and the Arts have something real to offer.

People are too wise now, and the young too charmingly cynical for artists to go on in the old way.

The remedy lies with one man, because all the buildings, the managerial offices, the impresarios, the directors, the designers, the actors, the musicians, the men who move the scenery, the people to take the money at the box office, the critics and the gossip writers, depend on that one man. The dramatist, alone in his room, happily or miserably, with ease or with difficulty, cynically or whole-heartedly, writing a play. The dramatist practicing his art.

Money matters

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A night at the theatre: Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company's 2009 revival of Caryl Churchill's Serious Money

UPDATE (5 AUGUST): Up to 103 comments now, and Ms. De Sisto’s response? “It seems that Bank of America can’t, in fact, spare one of their 300,000 global employees to reply any time soon to any of the points raised (many of which were great: thanks for that),” writes Guardian editor Andrew Dickson. “I guess you can draw your own conclusions about how seriously they take the project of improving cultural understanding if they can’t find time to get involved.”

***

It’s bracing to hear from a corporate executive on corporate arts funding: that is, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Rena De Sisto in yesterday’s Guardian. Ms. De Sisto, identified as a “global arts and culture representative,” offers a few rare thoughts from her businessperson’s perspective as government funding for the arts in the UK is now under the knife, and discusses rather specifically how the company perceives its role as a supporter of the arts. Ms. De Sisto writes:

Companies have many people to answer to – shareholders among them – and must extract sound business benefits, such as access for employees, brand visibility and client outreach opportunities. … That said, companies have an obligation not to interfere in artistic matters. And more companies need to learn what support for the arts can do for their company. These may include connecting to existing or potential customers; creating benefits for employees; providing arts education to tomorrow’s workforce; being a good corporate citizen; creating a more culturally aware society; enriching the community it is doing business in. Or perhaps all of these things.

Noble words, as is Ms. De Sisto’s  assertion that the reconceived financial services giant recognizes that it has “a vested interest in improved cultural understanding. In fact, one of the most compelling reasons for corporations to invest in the arts is its power to create greater cultural understanding. Problems of economic stability, standards of living, the environment, peace and prosperity among nations and peoples all require a foundation of cultural understanding and tolerance to progress towards solutions.” (Ms. De Sisto, by the way, sits on the board of Opera America, so I suppose revivals of Fidelio and La Boheme must push these noble goals along somehow. I enjoy these operas too, but how either of them will be efficacious in mitigating diesel emissions or providing a solution to the civil wars in Darfur is beyond me, as I assume it would be beyond Beethoven and Puccini.)

We should be glad that Ms. De Sisto contributes to a transparency, to use that benighted word, of a corporation’s motivations for arts giving, even if it provides little comfort to artists who have a less instrumental conception of the arts. And from her perspective, it’s hard to argue with. True, a corporation’s primary responsibility is to its shareholders, and she outlines the obligations that inhere to that responsibility. She also rather lightly treads over the question of “an obligation not to interfere in artistic matters”: indeed. And the best way to meet that obligation is to maintain an arm’s-length attitude to any work or company that might mitigate the corporation’s desire to connect to their customers, create new employee benefits or even “enrich a community.” Better not to fund at all, than to dictate aesthetics.

Community is yet another benighted word, which will have different meanings to corporations, governments and individuals. To the immediate point, a “community” to a corporation is a market: a pool of existing and potential customers; so is the audience, then, for the art work.

I wish I could work up an angry anti-capitalist rant here, but there’s not much point, especially when the left-progressive lukewarm-socialist community shares so many similar goals for art — arts education, economic stability, hand-wringing concern for “the environment,” a more culturally-aware society (whatever that is) and of course cultural understanding and tolerance. Very nice. Wiser minds than mine are on the subject, as the nearly 90 comments on the post (at this hour) attest. As I’m currently fundraising for What She Knew, I read this with some amusement, but little hope that sexy Jocasta, as she ecstatically straddles her son’s loins, bears his children then stabs herself in her womb, will much appeal to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s executives, though I suppose I could be wrong. I am most reminded here, as I prepare for this eight-performance run (total potential BAML customers: 400, if we sell out every night) in December, of British dramatist John Whiting’s words, which seem to have a vague application to the issue:

No art exists by any man’s favour. Public entertainment certainly does so, but art exists in its own right as something worth doing for its own sake. A play, like any other created work, must have the arrogance of its convictions. …

A playwright must not think that he will extend his audience beyond that of the novel or poetry. It was a mistake to see the theatre as a popular art. It may have been fifty years ago, but new mediums have changed all that. The play must now be directed towards a specialised audience. That may well be the theatre’s salvation. … In all ways it must become smaller, but more concentrated.