Ben Brantley of The New York Times.

First published on 7 April 2011.

From Ben Brantley’s “The Joys of Feel-Bad Drama,” in today’s New York Times:

Still, more than three decades after it was written, [Wallace Shawn's] Marie and Bruce …  continues to make many people recoil. And that’s because it is the opposite of a feel-good play. It’s a feel-bad play. That means it lacks the emotionally redemptive features of other works with similarly bleak worldviews: the catharsis of classical tragedy, or the outsized, blazing pessimism of Strindberg’s plays of marital warfare or the exquisite, compassionate lyricism of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams’s melancholy dramas. …

Similarly, we still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style. If you’re going to say something nasty, or flout taboos, say it with satire or poetry or larger-than-life passion. The Book of Mormon, this season’s hot-ticket Broadway show, makes fun not just of Mormonism but pretty much all religions, and it has a relentlessly foul mouth. But it is also a classic feel-good musical. Even the dark, violent Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Rajiv Joseph’s new play about the war in Iraq, uses the artifice of comedy to keep us at a distance.

The last show at which I sensed the kind of unease I felt among the audience of Marie and Bruce was the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted several years ago. This British drama imagines an England in the grip of an internecine, nobody-wins civil war (inspired by accounts of the Balkan wars), and everybody in it behaves about as badly as people can. Unlike Marie and Bruce, Blasted is a shocker. It features acts of rape and mutilation. But it shares with Mr. Shawn’s play a hopeless view of humanity that goes way beyond cynicism. …

At a time in the theater when anything goes (to borrow the title of an old comfort-making musical now being revived on Broadway), making audiences squirm isn’t easy — and perhaps not even desirable. …

Brantley may be offering that last clause (emphasis added by myself, by the way) as a rhetorical gesture to spur further conversation. Or perhaps not; it is hard to tell whether Brantley is speaking for himself, or if he is speaking for what he considers to be the mindset of the audience (a mindset which, to grant him the benefit of a doubt, he may not himself share).

Classical tragedy, Strindberg and Williams are all found to be “emotionally redemptive” (whatever that may mean, whoever is to be redeemed, whether it’s the characters in the play, the dramatist or the audience), but Shawn and Kane apparently fall short of this laudable goal. In this, the conservative quality of contemporary theatre is to be found: the need for catharsis far outweighs any discomfort which might be created in the spectator, lest the spectator be expected to take that discomfort home with him. Regardless of the headline on the story, there seems to be very little joy in what Brantley characterizes as “feel-bad” theatre. The catharsis of classical tragedy was a social convention as well: the haste with which so many Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies seek to tie up any loose ends bespeaks a fear that the tragedy has unleashed ungovernable energies that can’t be tied together in Aristotelian closure: the ending, the catharsis, is imposed, not organic to the dynamics of the drama.

As Mr. Brantley says, “We still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style.” Indeed; it is expected to behave with propriety, to refrain from exploration beyond those formal and topical limitations; a theatre work must be a “classic feel-good musical” or adhere to the “artifice of comedy,” however much its energies may lead it astray from these apparent virtues.

I was speaking the other day to a friend who has seen more — and written more about — theatre over the past several decades than I possibly ever could hope (if that’s the word) to do; I wager she’s also got Brantley beat by quite a few miles as well. “I don’t go to the theatre for fun,” she told me. “If I want to have fun there are plenty of other things I can do that are far more fun than the theatre. I go for a walk or I watch TV or almost anything else.” The theatre should be a place that opens us to those “undesirable” recognitions that are denied to us by the television or film or music that must appeal to a far broader audience. Its intimacy makes it the pre-eminent arena for the searing investigations that the best theatre offers. But indeed, they do not close at the end, but should remain open: open for us to bring to our homes, to consider both our selves and our place in this world. And this, it must be said, is a talent at which Kane and Shawn excel.

I’ve written in the past on both Sarah Kane (here) and Wallace Shawn (here).

Dennis Kelly.

Lyn Gardner pointed the way to Dennis Kelly’s speech “Why political theatre is a complete fucking waste of time” the other day, and despite that puckishly sensational title the speech itself is worth a look for what it says about the efficacy of theatre that describes itself as political — or, at least, as a reaction to political events or ideologies.

Aleks Sierz called Kelly “one of the most distinctive new voices to emerge in the 2000s” and described Kelly as having “an uncanny ability to grasp contentious issues, and to blow apart theatrical form in his search for the most provocative way of addressing a subject” (Sierz 80-81) in his early plays, so it’s instructive to read about Kelly’s growing disillusionment, not with the form of political theatre, but with audience response to it:

I knew that once people saw my argument, things would change. People would listen. The war on terror was essentially over and I fully expected a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of the year. So. I sat back and waited.

This didn’t happen. I got some good reviews, I got some bad reviews, some people liked it, some didn’t and I was commissioned to write a new play. Something was wrong, very wrong. I decided to try again.

To expect that audiences would rise up to hang politicians like Tony Blair and George Bush from lampposts was, he admits, perhaps premature. But his message, it seemed, did even less than that: it stayed within the insular, hermetic world of theatre, revolving around and around, garnering some praise and some dismissal but happily leading to new commissions.

Rather than change the world (and the world needs it, Brecht insisted), Kelly found that he needed to narrow his artistic focus to something that seemed simultaneously more important and more individual — a quest for what he calls truth:

Truth is a tricky thing. It often doesn’t look like itself and it likes to hide. I believe that no-one can know they’re telling the truth — the moment anyone tells you they’re definitely telling you the truth, well for god’s sake just don’t believe them. But everyone can aim for truth. It is something that we can head in the general direction of and hope we get close to. What complicates the journey to truth is the layers of other stuff that gets in the way — our egos and prejudices, our anger, our love, our hate and our desire to do well. But beneath all this lies truth. It is often very hard for a playwright to really know they’re telling the truth. But, unfortunately for us, it’s often very easy for an audience to tell when we’re not. I’ve come to believe in truth as a real thing, not relative, not abstract, but strong and existent. And I’ve come to believe that it is the job of theatre makers who genuinely believe in theatre to somehow try and get close to truth, no matter how hard that may be.

Well, my ears pricked up at that, not least because the question and definition of truth — whether one thinks they possess it or not, or whether on this quest for truth a writer would ever know that he can really recognize it — has been a bit of a bother for a few people recently, not least Mike Daisey and Ira Glass. It’s not that truth itself is hard to define; it’s that there seem to be many kinds of truth — journalistic truth, poetic truth, narrative truth theatrical truth, political truth, scientific truth; one can split this particular hair almost endlessly, and before long one has to go and have a lie-down.

But Kelly here is attempting to define a very complex and delicate kind of truth — the truth that resides in individual consciousness, and to call it “truth” simplifies this consciousness. This “truth” is based upon an individual experience of the world, and while it takes this experience as its fodder, it is also based in prejudice, ideology, and conviction, all of which resist any status as “truth” as we might find it in the court of either the justice system, the theatre, or public opinion. But it is this truth, however provisional, that the artist must seek to express.

It’s when prejudice is promulgated as truth that it becomes potentially deadly. Marxism, like any political approach, is a useful lens and set of tools through which culture and society can be analyzed; it’s when it’s been taken as ideological truth and enters the world of realpolitik that it becomes dangerous. But I think the reason why Kelly’s audiences failed to pick up pitchforks and torches and march to 10 Downing Street was that they recognized this status — that they were, perhaps, smarter than Kelly gave them credit for; and I read between the lines in his essay that he recognizes this now.

In addition to his injunction to “try and get close to truth,” Kelly offers one more:

I believe young theatre makers need a very healthy dose of “go fuck yourself.” I think it’s useful for a young theatre maker to look at the things they’re being told, to think about them, assess them and then — if necessary — say “go fuck yourself.” … I’m sure that right now in this audience there are people listening to this and thinking “go fuck yourself,” and that is actually right and proper and good luck to you. Although please don’t feel it necessary to tell me after — let’s just assume that I’m already going to go fuck myself in some way or other. But if over the next couple of days, or weeks or months or years you are thinking “go fuck yourself” then that’s not a bad thing. But just make sure it comes from the right place. Make sure it comes not from arrogance or an inability to see your own flaws, but from a desire to change things, from a belief in the power of theatre that is bigger than writers, directors, artistic directors and dramaturges, that it belongs to all of us and is never to be taken for granted.

And of course the best time to tell somebody to go fuck themselves is when they promise to be the sole repository of truth — about society, politics, or anything else — because this is the most emphatic clue that whatever they’re about to tell you, whether they’re a playwright or a politician, a performer or a pundit, is, by definition, a lie.

That said, Kelly’s essay is essential reading for anyone seeking to create political theatre. I disagree with some of his conclusions — “Theatre lies in emotion; it is an emotional medium, not really an intellectual one,” he writes; theatre is a visceral immediate experience, but certainly it partakes of both emotion and intellect, as well as eroticism and spirit, the body and the mind; there’s no need to engage in this kind of binary differentiation. I agree with others — Edward Bond’s The Hidden Plot is an essential book for understanding the political possibilities of contemporary drama.

Among the greatest explicitly political dramas of the twentieth century, The Measures Taken, St. Joan of the Stockyards, and even The Investigation, perhaps to date the greatest of all documentary, verbatim drama (all these are German plays, making these examples appropriate to the context of Kelly’s speech), end not with firm uncontrovertible truth, but with continuing mystery — of motivation, of character, of the dynamics which drive the characters to action — of why human beings continue to treat each other, and the world they live in, the way they do. “Change the world, it needs it,” was Brecht’s own injunction; but clearly, as both Kelly and Brecht continue to warn, it is the individual who needs to change first.

Again, the full text of Kelly’s speech is here.

But on to happier matters. Terry Teachout filed his 500th column as the Wall Street Journal‘s chief drama critic this week; in this post on his blog, About Last Night, he takes a brief look back. Terry began writing for the WSJ — and started his blog — only a few months before I started Superfluities in 2003 (we began to correspond and meet occasionally for lunch and a few theatre outings shortly thereafter), and what a long strange trip it’s been for the both of us. He has proven not only a continuing champion of the blogosphere’s ability to disseminate important arts criticism ordinarily marginalized by the mainstream press; he has also remained intensely committed to the health of the regional theatre scene, which he covers with a frequency and seriousness that has no parallel. Mine and Terry’s aesthetic paths have diverged, to put it mildly, but he was the first critic to give an early play of mine a rave review, and that it came from a writer with such indisputable and uncompromising critical integrity has meant all the world. He and I remain in friendly contact, despite our differences, and I offer him my own best wishes as his own first play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, opens at the Long Wharf Theatre this fall.

There are now 15 hours left in the LuckyAnt fundraising drive to save the Living Theatre. The campaign seeks to raise $24,000, which would permit the group “to pay its rent, bring in a consultant to develop a five-year strategic plan, and turn itself into a financially sustainable arts organization.” As of this hour, they are about $6,000 short of their goal.

The Living Theatre has been one of the most influential collectives in the life of the American theatre. You can help continue their 65-year history by making a donation to reach their goal. Below, Judith Malina, who founded the Living Theatre with Julian Beck, makes the argument for your support. Donations can be made here.

No One Was Saved sustains the theme of exploitation, characteristic of this period of his work, here focused in the story of a working-class unmarried mother, written as an act of double-edged criticism: of Edward Bond’s play Saved (staged 1965) and of the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby.” Barker:

“I’d gone to Saved on the strength of a review we’d read saying that this was life in South London epitomized. We just didn’t think that this was so — we didn’t understand much about what Bond was trying to do with the language of the play. That was why I wrote Cheek, and also why I took up the gang of youths from Saved and used them in No One Was Saved …

“The song had a rare concern with despair and defeat — very unlike a modern pop song — but I was always suspicious of the Beatles, and Lennon in particular: all the financial manipulation and posturing with maharishis struck me firmly then as an indictment of the Sixties. So I created a fantasy in which Lennon had actually known this girl Eleanor Rigby, who was not an old woman as I thought the song implied, and served her up as song material.”

It is a piece of early Barker — apprenticeship work and perhaps juvenilia, and only approachable bearing Barker’s characterization of the production in mind, but quite rare. The film can be seen in full below.

“[Credentials of a Sympathiser's theme is] the relationship between the army and the ‘terrorists’ who oppose them at a time when the latter are in a position to negotiate terms. Written before the events leading to the birth of Zimbabwe, and at a time when increasing concern is felt over the rise of terrorism (or the aspiration for freedom and human rights) and the escalating powers of the guardians of authority, the play is topical and urgent in its relevance.”[1]

A disused hall is chosen as the site for cease-fire negotiations between government representative Gildersleeve and a group of terrorists. Government contractor Hacker (who also appears in The Love of a Good Man) is hired to clean the hall and provide catering for the negotiations; as he is cleaning the clerestory windows, he is mistakenly shot by a soldier and plummets through the window and to the floor to his death. This interrupts the negotiations only briefly; after they resume, they finally break off in acrimony. To his aide, Gildersleeve reveals that the government never planned to conclude a ceasefire at all; the meeting was only meant to identify those terrorist leaders who were wavering in their commitment and open to compromise, and this was accomplished.

Barker continues his ongoing examination of those who believe that their non-commitment to explicit political ideology is without its own politics. Hacker explains to his assistant Clout that “Terrorists may come and terrorists may go, but conferences will last forever. And the issuing of contracts to the likes of us” (81); but this does not relieve him of his status as the “sympathiser” of the title.

Rabey (pp 63-66) discusses the teleplay in detail, concluding:

The limitations of Credentials, and of the early plays, are their comparative restriction of imaginative interest to engagement with those who pride themselves intellectually on running the game — or, more precisely, believe themselves to be running the game (Gildersleeve is comparatively rare … in that he really is running the game of power as defined within the world of the play, making that world quite hermetically sealed). Credentials demonstrates how much of the action of the play and the society takes place over the head of Miller [the soldier who shoots Hacker and stoically maintains his innocence in that he provided fair warning and went by the rulebook] and his kind; it is not until Barker’s portrayal of Ball in Victory that we encounter a full imaginative engagement with his position. (66)

1. Jacket copy of the John Calder edition.

Jorge Vega , A.Z. Kelsey, Rachel Jett, and Sophie Chapadjiev in Caridad Svich's The Way of Water at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Centre's National Theatre Insitute in April 2012. Photo courtesy NTI.

Two of the most critically and commercially successful theatre productions in the United States currently are the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and the Goodman Theatre (Chicago) revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Far from traditional audience-pleasers, they are two of the darkest plays in the canon of American drama, and their appeal is due not only to their star casting (Philip Seymour Hoffman in the first, Nathan Lane in the second), but also to the possibility that these plays may be meeting a need in their audiences — a sense of the tragic dimensions of contemporary culture and individual experience, perhaps. Perhaps their popularity is also a result of the fact that so few contemporary American playwrights have as dark a vision — and that the audience, unconsciously, needs to share in it.

This sense may be common enough in classic drama (and this status as “classic drama” may make the sense more palatable to audiences), but what of contemporary drama, and especially contemporary political drama? Yesterday at the TCG Circle blog, Caridad Svich (whose new play The Way of Water, about the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a few years back, is currently being performed around the world; read about the scheme here) wrote in “An Environment for Change?” that contemporary drama resisting simplistic emotional response is in some danger in the US, and that this danger may be the product of fear, particularly the Lomanesque and quintessentially American fear of not being well-liked — a fear shared by theatremakers, theatres both profit and non-profit, individual donors, and institutional funders alike. She writes:

… our discussion turns to what we think of when we say the words “political theatre,” especially in the US. Creeping into the conversation one of US theatre’s “dirty words,” rears its head. It is a word bandied about quite often pejoratively by administrators, marketing folks, and even within the creative personnel of our wide-ranging industry.

The word is “darkness.” It is a word that tends to send shivers down some people’s spines in this field, as they try to pitch plays to their constituents and disguise “darkness” in blurbs and press packets with any number of adjectives in order to obscure its visceral presence. Darkness, even in dark times, or the intimations of a jangling, upset theatrical universe where not every question is answered by the theatre-makers and/or presented in pop-friendly forms, is the dirtiest of dirty words next to the word “politics” in US theatre. Will the world presented on stage be too bleak? Will we run the risk of alienating the audience? And if we indeed want the audience to mobilise, to feel empowered to at least try to effect a measure of change within their local community, what tools can we offer them through our storytelling in order to instill the possibility without wrecking all reasonable hope altogether?

A recent New York Times article in the Arts and Leisure (Sunday 22 April) was actually devoted to the subject of darkness in plays in lieu of the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a text that is being met by a new generation of theatre-goers with a mixture of awe and mild shock at the “depressing” nature of the piece’s downwardly spiraling story. Has US theatre, for good or ill, and time will be the judge of that, retreated from the portrayal, without exploitation, of the troubling nature of much of the lives of those who live in the US in order to instead “do good?” In this “doing good” is theatre’s potency as a live medium of expression, as a meeting place and communal gathering of strangers, being castrated? What new lies get told in this “do-gooder-ness” and what markings on theatre’s pages are left unsaid in the fear of losing an audience?

The full text of “An Environment for Change?” can be found here.

Ian McDiarmid and John Nettles in the 1977 RSC Warehouse production. Photo: George Xanthos.

Play in two acts. First performed at the RSC’s Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden, 28 July 1977. Directed by Barry Kyle; designed by William Dudley; lighting by David Boshell. With Ian McDiarmid (McPhee), John Nettles (Godber), Patrick Stewart (Knatchbull), Barbara Leigh-Hunt (Orbison), Cherie Lunghi (Rhoda), Hubert Rees (Major Cadbury), and others. Text in That Good Between Us/Credentials of a Sympathiser, London: John Calder, 1980, pp 1-59 (out-of-print, but may be available through amazon.com here).

“That Good Between Us … is set in Britain under a Labour government, perhaps slightly in the future. The unconstitutional and arbitrary use of power by the Home Secretary, the conduct of the police and their informers and treatment of ‘subversive’ elements are in line with the direction in which our society is moving. Readers may be tempted to give names to some of the public characters and they will recognise the authenticity of the private ones.”[1]

Home Secretary Orbison of the Labour party is warned by Knatchbull, an officer of the Special Branch (a forerunner of our own Department of Homeland Security), that seditious elements in the army are threatening an overthrow of the government. He convinces her to allow his agents to infiltrate the group and make secret arrests and even conduct executions when he deems it necessary. Two operatives, Godber and McPhee, gain entrance into the small group, led by an army major named Cadbury and calling itself the Democratic Movement of the Army. While Knatchbull is successful in crippling the group, Godber, McPhee, and Orbison’s own daughter Rhoda are caught in the crossfire, while the more radical elements of the movement increase their deadly clandestine activity.

Barker’s dystopian view of Labour politics in 1970s Great Britain is an early response to the technocratic surveillance state then being instituted by both conservative and progressive functionaries — each to their own ends of course but with a similar totalitarian outcome. While the spies and informers themselves claim to be without ideological prejudice — when asked by Knatchbull why he wants to be a spy, the cynical and opportunistic Godber replies, “It thrills me” — naive and sensualist outsiders like McPhee (a Scottish homosexual and fan of the Rolling Stones) are easily swayed from one end of the spectrum of political rhetoric to another, suggesting that one’s very participation in the apparatus of the state, however naive, is to become simultaneously a victim and an agent of its fascistic tendencies.

Cherie Lunghi (Rhoda) and Barbara Leigh-Hunt (Orbison) in the 1977 RSC Warehouse production. Photo: George Xanthos.

Fantastic sequences have always been a part of Barker’s work; here, one of the most disturbing takes place when Knatchbull takes his daughter Verity, a paraplegic who suffers from spina bifida, out to fly a kite on Wimbledon Common. There she stumbles across the body of one of Knatchbull’s victims, and Knatchbull is at a loss to keep the violent death from her — “You’ve always liked dead things, Christ knows why,” he mutters to Verity. The stakes are raised when Barker brings the first-act curtain down on a dialogue between the corpse and Verity herself:

VERITY: Like this man. Where did he come from? How did he die?
(Knatchbull holds out a hand to lead her away.)
KNATCHBULL: Ah well, if we knew that …
CORPSE: HE DOES KNOW THAT!
KNATCHBULL: All right? Leave the kite here, help the police to spot it.
CORPSE: WHERE I CAME FROM. HOW I DIED.
KNATCHBULL: Come on, sweetheart.
CORPSE: THEY INFILTRATED US. I WENT TO WARN HIM AT THE PUB.
VERITY: Warn who?
CORPSE: THE MAJOR.
VERITY: The Major?
CORPSE: AT THE OAKLEIGH ARMS!
VERITY: What’s that?
CORPSE: OH CHRIST! … THEY TIED ME TO A CHAIR. POURED PETROL UP MY NOSTRILS. TWISTED COMBS IN MY HAIR.
VERITY: That rhymes!
CORPSE: I DID NOT SPEAK! I HAVE NEVER KNOWN SUCH PAIN. TELL THEM I NEVER SPOKE.
KNATCHBULL: Verity. Sweetheart.
VERITY: I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.
CORPSE: TELL SOMEBODY ABOUT MY PAIN!
(Pause, then she turns to Knatchbull. He has his hands on his hips and is looking at her quizzically.)
KNATCHBULL: All right? (She goes to him. He puts an arm on her shoulder.) Let’s get an ice-cream.
(They walk away. The lights fade to black.) (32)

Clyde Pollitt, Ian McDiarmid, Judith Harte, and Hubert Rees in the RSC Warehouse production. Photo: George Xanthos.

Once it comes into power through realpolitik, every government — Labour or Conservative, Democrat or Republican, whether it’s run by a white male, a white female, a black male or female, what have you — is dependent upon a security apparatus; every security apparatus takes as its enemy the Other, as a threat to its own legitimacy. It is perhaps always easier to believe in the totalitarian tendencies of the opposition, but every ideology tends to totalitarianism. This is true even of the very real threat of the Democratic Movement, though, ironically, its founder Major Cadbury had warned against clandestine activity. The play concludes:

(Suddenly, the two figures in woollen face masks rush on and cover both [Rhoda] and Godber’s heads with sacks. They then shoot them through the sacks. The bodies slump to the floor.)
CYCLISTS (in unison): The Sentence of the Court of the Democratic Movement is death. Have you anything to say?

On 31 December 2011, President Barack Obama signed into law the far-reaching National Defense Authorization Act. Chris Hedges wrote about the NDAA here and here; you may draw your own conclusions as to whether Barker’s play is as much a paranoiac fantasia, limited to the political arena of mid-1970s England, as some think it to be.

Barker however retains his faith in the autonomous individual — rather miraculously, McPhee survives his attempted assassination, but only with repeated shouts of “I! I! I!” at the final curtain, self-determination apart from the collective the only hope. Ian McDiarmid, one of Barker’s long-time stable of actors, made his first appearance in a Barker play here as McPhee. “I can’t think of a play since King Lear which shows a man so utterly unaccommodated, in every sense, as the Glaswegian homosexual spy Billy McPhee — so inescapably degraded by the society that exploits him, and yet so capable of warmth and courage,” Jeremy Treglown wrote in a review of the premiere production. “Ian McDiarmid’s performance was remorselessly unsentimental, triumphantly ugly, breathtakingly self-contradictory and vivacious.”[2] In a 1980 interview, Barker said about the play:

McPhee is a rootless individual with vast resources of untapped humanity. His survival is not the ground for optimism in the play. Survival is never enough for that. But he has achieved certain insights, and we know he will go on surviving, if only because he is never the victim of an idea. All the other characters are governed by thorough notions. All McPhee has is a passion for contact, and this overcomes persistent betrayal. I think that is good going as optimism goes.

The play is not so much about politics as about moral collapse — which I believe follows from bad politics: the loss of community, the fascist urge in sex and government. All the characters prey on decay. There are no positive gains from relationships, which are grabbed selfishly. Sensation is substituted for sensuality. … I have no time for Orbison’s limp liberalism. She has often been identified as the focus of sympathy. It’s not true. Her humanism is defunct and essentially cruel. It is McPhee’s limpet-like capacity for hope that makes the play vibrate. He won’t be prised away from hope.[3]

Rabey discusses the play at length (pp 54-63). Ian Cooper writes in his essay “Institutions, icons, and the body in Barker’s plays, 1977-86″:

In That Good Between Us, the Home Secretary, Orbison, declares “our system relies entirely on consent.” However, here and elsewhere, Barker’s drama shows how this consent is enforced and maintained by those in power: they characteristically deploy and ordain the repetition of such abstracting phrases, to secure a superficial dressing of liberal humanism as a cosmetic for a realpolitik supported by totalitarian brute force. In That Good, Orbison’s nominally socialist government attempts to assure others and itself of its own decency by invoking the civil system, but also straddles it in such a way that allows suppression and torture to quell riot and conspiracy. The corrosive rhetoric, enshrined by and within state terminology and discourse, ensures that, although violence and oppression exist and occur in Orbison’s Britain, the true forms of its manifestations are smothered beneath a very English sense of propriety, which Barker’s plays of this period persistently expose as an endemic falsehood. Orbison clings to a purposefully reductive sense of what is appropriate and necessary, in order to justify the morality of her actions. The special branch agent, Knatchbull, also characteristically deploys euphemism to cloak his activities. Although Orbison condones his “disappearance” of suspects, she expresses unease about Knatchbull’s obfuscations of such unconstitutional atrocities: “We have to get back to the personal pronoun. Stop hiding in the semantic wood.” Ironically, it is another character, McPhee, who will finally seize the nascent power of the personal pronoun.

1. Jacket copy of the John Calder edition.
2. Jeremy Treglown, “That Good Between Us.” Plays and Players, September 1977, pp 24-25.
3. Mark Brown, editor, Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2011, pp 29-30.

“All Bleeding throws into contrast two phenomena of contemporary society, the urge to die and escape from an unsavoury world, and the life force that often finds its outlet in the desire to kill or be killed. Three attempted suicides in the course of a few minutes overwork the Metropolitan River Police, while members of a teenage judo club, the violence of their instruction fresh in their ears, watch and cheer. As the stories of the protagonists unfold, Barker’s dramatic technique exposes the unhealthy tissues in our society, the cancers that are growing beneath the skin of everyday apparent normality.”[1]

Veracek, a Hungarian emigre political cartoonist, is recovered from the Thames after an attempted suicide. He is joined in his hospital room by Gary, a young man who has attempted suicide in the same manner after being hounded by a group of judo students whom their teacher, Mr. Mik (who, in his working life, has replaced Veracek as the editorial cartoonist for a newspaper), has instilled with nationalistic hatred. Veracek’s rise and fall as a political cartoonist in England is told in a series of flashbacks which detail his conflicts with both Hungarian and British authority (in the person of Winston Churchill himself). In the end, Veracek’s faith in reason and the socialist dream is tested by both Gary’s faith in a redemptive Christ and his own growing doubts about the political efficacy of art.

Although All Bleeding is most significant as an early version of the 1981 stage play No End of Blame, which would sharpen focus more intently on the relationship of Veracek’s art to that of his less politically-oriented artist friend Gregor, it is noteworthy for other reasons as well. It is the first of Barker’s plays to examine the relationship of the artist and the culture in which he finds himself, a theme which Barker would explore throughout his career from Scenes from an Execution all the way through I Saw Myself, Blok/Eko, and Hurts Given and Received; it continues an ongoing concern with the competing socialist/capitalist ideologies of the Second World War, also examined in Claw and Fair Slaughter; and, finally, it predicts the thread of “anti-history” that would run through Barker’s plays with the on-stage presence of Winston Churchill, who appears to censor Veracek’s wartime drawings. Churchill does so, significantly, while he is engaging in the creation of art himself, as he paints a landscape, telling Veracek, “Art … is the epitome of the endeavor of mankind. … You have degraded art. You have swept art in the gutter. You have poured the poison of your prejudice into the holy house of art.” (91) His censorship is physically crude as well:

(Churchill bends, takes up a package of card-board mounted, large format reproductions of Vera’s cartoons. He places them on his easel. The top one shows Himmler standing over a mound of bodies. The caption reads “Heil Hitler.” Churchill paints a large red tick across it.) Good. (He pushes it off onto the ground, exposing the second. This shows Hitler as a dentist, bloody handed, beckoning Churchill into his surgery. Churchill has a concealed a bigger pair of pliers behind his back. Churchill ticks this too.) Good. (And so on to the third …) Good. (He pushes that onto the floor, exposing a fourth.) Good. (The final one shows a drowning merchant seaman. Underneath the caption reads “The price of Petrol is to be Increased by one penny.” He paints a large cross through it.) Bad.
VERA: The oil companies are making an obscene profit.
CHURCHILL: You cannot fight a war with water. You must fight it with petroleum.
VERA: Seamen are drowning.
CHURCHILL: Do not dare to tell me our sailors our drowning. Do not presume to lecture me upon the sacrifices of our people. DO NOT DARE.
VERA: It is a vile profit.

Many years later, censorship would become more insidious, exercised not directly through government but through the ownership of newspapers, demonstrated in the first scene of the second part of the play.

Perhaps the most significant difference between All Bleeding and No End of Blame is in their conclusions. No End of Blame ends on an ambivalent note, with Veracek begging the theatre audience for a pen with which to continue his art. All Bleeding, however, concludes with Veracek’s suicide, and his injunction to his doctor to destroy his final work as an editorial cartoonist, “a grotesque caricature of the stereotyped terrorist, bloodstained and wading through a sea of innocent victimis. It is titled ‘The Future.’” (106) It is an early indication of Barker’s growing impatience with satire and a recognition of its dead end as an aesthetic genre.

Neither Lamb nor Rabey discusses the teleplay in detail.

1. Jacket copy of the John Calder edition.