Television play in 25 scenes. Unproduced in that medium; first performed in the season “Plays Television Would Not Do” at the RSC Warehouse Theatre, 21 February 1979. Directed by Barry Kyle; stage directions read by Terence Harvey. With Edward Jewesbury (Gildersleeve), Nicholas Le Prevost (Amber), Christopher Benjamin (Hacker), Roderick Smith (Clout), Charles Wegner (Tully), and others. Text in That Good Between Us/Credentials of a Sympathiser, London: John Calder, 1980, pp 61-98 (out-of-print, but may be available through amazon.com here).

“[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. [↩]

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. [↩]

Television play in two parts, written 1976 according to Brown. Unproduced in that medium; first performed in the season “Plays Television Would Not Do” at the RSC Warehouse Theatre, 20 February 1979. Directed by Barry Kyle; stage directions read by Teddy Kempner. With Edward Jewesbury (Veracek), Nicholas Le Prevost (Gregor), Peter Hugo-Daly (Gary), Iain Mitchell (Mr. Mik), Caroline Hutchison (Dr. Mahony), and others. Text in The Love of a Good Man/All Bleeding, London: John Calder, 1980, pp 71-106 (out-of-print).

“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. [↩]