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Reviews John Arden; A Lifetimes involvement with drama. Galway Advertiser, November 05, 2009. By Charlie Mcbride Over an afternoon chat at his home in St Bridgets Place, Arden reflected on his career and discussed his latest collection. It seemed a fitting occasion on which to interview Arden. His 79th birthday was just a few days previously and October 22 was the 50th anniversary of the premiere of his best-known play, Serjeant Musgraves Dance. English playwright The play is about a group of British soldiers returning from a colonial war who plan to bring a taste of the conflict to an English village in order to work that guilt back to where it began. Its themes of dirty foreign wars remain as relevant as when Arden first wrote the piece, as he acknowledges; It is still very topical. That first production at the Royal Court was very good but it didnt go down very well with the critics, most of them didnt like it at all. It was regarded as a cold rhetorical play with didactic overtones. It took a while for it to get going. Arden was part of the celebrated wave of writers nurtured by George Devine at the Court, along with John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, and Edward Bond. What are his recollections of that period? Well they never quite gelled as a group of writers or directors, he observes. I didnt know much about theatre then and George Devine did issue tickets to young writers to go to rehearsals and see other peoples plays being done and that was a great thing because you got some idea of how directors worked and how the theatre worked which was very helpful. George was very good talking about the theory of the theatre and ways in which it worked and different styles of production and its history and all that. I learned a lot from him. But it didnt last very long; the whole problem was the Royal Court never had enough money for this kind of experimental activity; they didnt have a proper endowment and were dependent on the goodwill of a board of businessmen. If George Devine didnt get audiences in for his new plays they would be scanty with the money and he needed successes that would transfer to the West End which meant that the philosophy of the theatre as a home for new writers was rather diluted. By this time Arden had also met the Irish actress Margaretta DArcy with whom he would share a life-long professional and personal partnership. I met this extraordinary woman at a party who was the first person Id ever met who worked professionally in the theatre, he recalls. I thought she was a very exciting person, lively and exciting and stimulating. Weve collaborated off and on ever since we first got together. I consulted her on my early plays; while the first play with both our names on is The Happy Haven which we did in 1960. That first meeting with DArcy was in 1955 and the couple married two years later. While plays like The Workhouse Donkey and Armstrongs Last Goodnight were recognised as important works, they enjoyed little commercial success and the couples political activism also led to some infamous disputes with the theatrical establishment, notably when they picketed their own play Island of the Mighty at the RSC in 1972. After that episode, Arden largely withdrew from mainstream theatre and he and DArcy worked almost entirely in Ireland or on Irish themes. In Ireland A play he remains especially fond of is The Non-Stop Connolly Show, an epic six-play cycle about James Connolly which he and DArcy staged over the Easter weekend of 1975 at Liberty Hall. We directed it ourselves though we had the assistance of a lot of other people such as Jim Sheridan. Arden explains. It was got together as a special event over Easter with the help of Des Geraghty, who is still busy with SIPTU, and Eamonn Smullen of Sinn Féin The Workers Party who has since died. They used their muscle with the establishment at Liberty Hall to let us do the play there, and the subject was appropriate of course. We did very well with that, it got big audiences. Arden is sometimes described as a lost voice of English theatre, and there are many who bemoan his long absence from the mainstream. Does he feel any personal sense of regret about the situation? Not really, because whatever I was doing I was doing something I wanted to do, he replies. I like telling stories and I dont mind very much how I tell them. If I cant do it comfortably in the professional theatre then well do it ourselves and if that proves too difficult because of setting up the productions then Ill work for radio – Ive done a lot of radio plays, the last one was in 2007 for the BBC, so Ive always been involved with drama rather than the theatre. Theatre remains a source of inspiration for Arden; many of the protagonists in the fiction he has been producing steadily since 1981 come from the world of theatre. These include a Roman-era actors agent in his debut novel Silence Among the Weapons, the Reformation playwright John Bale who became Bishop of Ossory is the main character of Bales Books, and the motley crew of theatre-types that make up the cast of Jack Juggler and the Emperors Whore. Theatre does remain a source of inspiration for me, he agrees. Its all part of the atmosphere of entertainment and storytelling, and so forth, and communicating with the public whether thats through the printed word or plays. Throughout the sixties Arden and DArcy often spent time in Ireland and they settled here in 1971. Did his move from England induce any personal sense of dislocation? Margaretta was brought up in Dublin so I wasnt totally without a guide to Irish life, he notes. Then things started getting overheated politically and we found ourselves involved in various scenarios and thats when I did feel a sense of displacement. All sorts of things began to affect me psychologically because there were things going on about the role of the British government and army in Northern Ireland and Bloody Sunday and all that and later the hunger strikes. I found myself viewing English activities from the viewpoint of someone living out here which is a different perspective, I could no longer experience British public life entirely as a native Englishman. I got a new slant on it altogether. I never entirely identified with Ireland, I always felt I was English. So Ive been slightly between the two countries ever since. Gallows and other tales of Suspicion and Obsession And so to Gallows and other tales of Suspicion and Obsession. Arden may be 79 but his stories, by turns dark and funny, are full of rambunctious energy and exude a delightful relish for language. The book is in three sections with stories set in Galway, London, and Ardens native Yorkshire. The title story is partly set in 17th century Galway and features the murderous Dr Azariah Brude and sees RTÉ's Galway studio being beset by ghostly manifestations. I was thinking of Dr Mengele who experimented on children in Auschwitz and I decided to put him back in history and then in Galway because I live here and I wanted to make it a ghost story as well, Arden explains. Then theres The Masque of Darkness which is about the Gunpowder Plot which has always fascinated me because of the nearness it came to Ben Jonson the playwright which is historically true. Dreadfully Attended is about a young fellow who becomes a clergyman and ends up joining the Fenians; its a sort of odd one its a kind of melodrama but it grew on me as I worked it through. The Yorkshire stories, some are based on stories my father told me with variations, while the last three are all entirely made up. The collection vividly attests to Ardens continuing vitality as a writer of imaginative force and distinctiveness. Gallows humour, and the late Ms Barbara Cartland I was surprised to learn recently that I shared a theatrical experience with the journalist and commentator Fintan OToole. Years ago Fintan went to the toilet during one of the many intervals in John Ardens The Non-Stop Connolly Show (it was non-stop for an amazing 24-hours). The toilet was just behind the stage. When Fintan came out, the performance had restarted, and he was on stage. The audience applauded the embarrassed young Fintan. I was in London in the late 1960s and was sitting in the audience at the Roundhouse Theatre, Camden Town, enjoying Ardens The Hero Rises up. In the Arden style, the play was a burlesque debunking of the much revered Horatio Nelson. Inevitably there was a huge battle scene. The playwright, wearing a long overcoat, suddenly came on stage. He shouted over the noise of battle, and a manic steam organ, and divided the audience with his hands saying:This half are the French; this half are the British. Now everyone on stage, and lets have a battle. And thats what we had. But the Frenchwon which was not supposed to happen. For a time there was confusion, before the play got back on track. Imagine my surprise when later I came back to work in Galway, to see John Arden, in the same long overcoat, walking down Shop Street. He had become the darling of the subversive British Look back in Anger theatre of the late 1950s and 60s. His best known play is probably Sergeant Musgraves Dance, which is a play on many levels, but tells the story of three soldiers and their sergeant who desert from a foreign war, and arrive in a north of England town in the grip of cold winter and a coal strike. The men are traumatised by the revenge taken by the army who had killed five civilians following the killing of one of their own. In some convoluted way the deserters come to believe that if they execute 25 townspeople now, the original atrocity will be excised There were several more plays, usually received with high critical acclaim, including The Workhouse Donkey , about municipal corruption, Armstrongs Last Goodnight, inspired by political events in the Congo, and performed by the National Theatre starring Albert Finney. And then later with his wife, and artistic collaborator Margaretta DArcy, there were novels, awards, more plays and protests. As well as a sizeable artistic output, the couple enjoy a long history of being associated with radical left-wing politics in the UK and Ireland. Educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh universities Arden was a founder member of the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, and was involved with the pacifist weekly Peace News. He became a member of Sinn Féin, and was bitterly critical of the British governments presence in Northern Ireland, and its anti-terror legislation. For a time Margaretta was imprisoned in Armagh where she went on a protest and hunger strike. In his lexicon of pet hates, Arden couldnt bear landlords. Back in the late 1970s, there was a long protracted row on behalf an elderly tenant in Oughterard and Commander Burges in Sussex, who sued him for libel. In the end, Arden and Margaretta even fell out with the British theatre establishment. In one famous incident they both picketed the Royal Shakespeare Societys premiere of his Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty. But at this stage, Britain finally threw up her hands in exasperation; and the couple moved first to an island on the Corrib, then to Corrandulla (where they ran an annual arts festival), and finally to Bohermore (where Margaretta ran a pirate radio station), where they have lived for almost 30 years. No happy endings You might imagine that after all that John Arden would be a humourless old curmudgeon. Far from it. Both he and Margaretta were in expansive mood recently at the Galway Civic Museum where Fintan OToole launched his latest collection of short stories: Gallows - And Other Tales of Suspicion and Obsession.* John is entering his 80th year but speaks loudly with an English accent with a slight Yorkshire brogue. He explained to the crowded room (which included some of his old Cambridge friends) that he could no longer hold a pen or use his computer for any length of time. Margaretta reassured everyone that this impediment would not stop his writing. He would simply talk into a newly adapted computer which would type out his words. Its exactly what Barbara Cartland used when she couldnt write any more, enthused Margaretta, and we all laughed at the thought of the ludicrous white blond hair and the elaborate costumes worn by the late Miss Cartland. John Arden, who does share her white hair, was hugely amused. But without her money, he said regretfully. John and Margaretta have five sons (one of whom sadly died). Finn is a film maker. His fathers latest book includes a CD of the illustrations Arden did for the book, as well as an interview with him working and living in Galway. I love to observe Galway people, says Arden, wearing a Col Gadaffi hat when he works. They all seem to have some sort of obsession, or a suspicion about someone, or about the city council, or the church. The degree of paranoia in personal relationships is really quite horrific! I am fascinated by the origin of conspiracy theories. The Guy Fawks conspiracy, the Fenian plots of the 19th century. No one really knows what went on at 9/11, or the cause of the war in Iraq that got the Irish involved with the Shannon stopover. Its all unaccountable. And when the facts do turn up years later its too late to do anything about it. I dont do happy endings. Amusing and lusty It was while waiting for the London publishers, Methuen, to make their mind up whether to accept Ardens latest collection of short stories or not that prompted Arden to take up illustration. In the end, Methuen, which published all Ardens work to date, pleaded cut-backs and turned it down. The book is self-published. And there are 27 interesting pictures which are featured on Finns C D.** Many of Gallows stories, and they are probably like nothing you have read before, are a mixture of Hogarthian melodrama, and black humour that dip in and out of earlier centuries and the present. From a ghost story to the gunpowder plot, to the murderous breakdown of a soldier after Belfast and the Gulf War; a London clergyman out of his depth with the Fenians in the 1880s, a Yorkshire family ducking and weaving its way through corrupt provincial politics, to the xenophobia on a Bus Éireann express. The latter story was prompted, writes Arden,after a perfectly dreadful experience with a ill-tempered bus driver in Limerick. I went so far as to complain to the Bus Éireann company: They said he was quite right to have tried to prevent waiting passengers getting onto a bus in a snow storm; it was company policy. But he should not have been so rude... Its vintage Arden. The illustrations, with lots of bottoms and boobs, are in the tradition of the outrageous 18th century satirist Rowlandson. They are amusing and lusty. Nothing is sacred. He even enjoys a gentle dig at his life-long artistic collaborator. In his story Molly Concannon and The Felonious Widow, he touches on the visits of American presidents Ronald Reagan, and George W Bush and the protests of Molly, who at one stage threatens to burn down a police station... Molly Concannon was a small excitable personage between fifty and sixty years old, of some literary reputation and well able to put backs up, public authorities no less than fellow writers....She had very little money; her poetry and stories were not as well known as perhaps they should have been...her countenance was strangely attractive, the look of a quick sharp tabby-cat sidling around your ankles, expecting to be stroked but only too ready with its claws... Finn asks: Is this a description of Margaretta? Arden just giggles. One thing is certain: Arden may be entering his 80s, but he is still an artist in full inventive flight. Fintan OToole said that it really should be Britain that honours John Arden, not only his adopted land. |
The Irish Times - Saturday, November 28, 2009 by John Kenny
OLD AGE, says the adage, is no place for sissies. As if to prove the point, while writers traditionally soften up as the years pile on and angry young pens are weakened or calmed, John Arden, now entering his 80th year, goes on robustly, raging more than most. Still perhaps most immediately noted for Serjeant Musgraves Dance (1959), the play that ushered him to the forefront of British drama for the 1960s, Arden emerged, after a sequence of major plays during that decade, as a force to be reckoned with off the stage as well as on. An embodiment as well as an aesthetic exponent of the radical spirit of this formational period, he has continued in the intervening decades to speak out as he sees fit about the vital issues of the day. The usual view is that his uncompromisingly leftist cultural and political stances, and a related tendency towards didacticism over artistry in his work, have done a disservice to a career that began with great promise. It is easy to understand why Arden fell foul of the British theatrical establishment, and critical opinion generally. With his long-time artistic collaborator, Margaretta DArcy, a politically active Irish actor who performed in some of his first plays and married him in 1957, he has never tempered his sense of personal integrity with the quietism often necessary for the fulfilment of professional ambition and remuneration. The couple were so resolutely independent that in 1972 they picketed the Royal Shakespeare Company over their own play, The Island of the Mighty , because of issues to do with script control. At this time, they had also, after regularly holidaying in the west of Ireland since the early 1960s, moved permanently to Galway, and their interest in the civil rights movement in the North, along with their membership for a period of Official Sinn Féin, probably did little to convince Ardens increasing number of detractors that he would be compromising on any front any time soon. Because of his close involvement with causes from anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam War campaigns, to anti-Shell Oil and anti-Bush demonstrations, Ardens work has been regularly dismissed as the product of a programmatically agitated and agitating sensibility. WHATEVER THE social responsibilities of writers, it is less easy to understand why Ardens fiction, the site of his better literary endeavours for the past 30 years, has not been granted proper critical attention. While he has continued to turn out important radio and stage dramas since his move to Ireland – at 26 hours long, The Non-Stop Connolly Show , written with DArcy and staged at Liberty Hall in 1975, is regularly mentioned as one of the grand events of modern drama in Ireland – the readiest evidence for Ardens continued extravagant creativity is to be found in his novels and, more recently, his short fiction. His novel Silence Among the Weapons was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982. Books of Bale (1988), a door stopper about the eponymous 16th-century Bishop of Ossory, was never going to be a crowd-pleaser; and it was indicative of the developing animus against his work that when his last novel, Jack Juggler and the Emperors Whore , appeared in 1995, even the delightful title itself was scorned in some reviews as evidence of whimsy. Lest any doubt remain at that point about his intentions, with the earlier Cogs Tyrannic (1991), a quartet of novellas, with its titular nod to William Blake, Arden had affirmed his place at the forefront of the idiosyncratic creative legacy of Romanticism. The Stealing Steps (2003), a more conventional arrangement of nine short stories, proved more broadly popular and it was at that stage arguably the best of his output in any genre. To coincide with his landmark birthday, Arden has collected 12 new stories in a manner similar to The Stealing Steps . Organised into three sections (Ireland, London, and his native Yorkshire), Gallows was not written as an orchestrated volume but was compiled after individual compositions when a mutuality of theme became evident. Aside from its sheer size, unusual for a series of stories, this book is an event. Gallows comes with a short DVD film about the author by his son, Finn, which allows Arden to contextualise himself in his own words and which includes a slide show of scenes from the stories that Arden has painted as accompaniment to his own act of writing and as illustration for his readers. While Arden admits in passing that the paintings may not be very good, it is appropriate that the originals are on display in Galway City Museum this month in that they perfectly encapsulate, by way of a neat counterpoint, an aspect crucial to any initial understanding of his fictional world. The paintings are in stylised miniature, whereas it may be the main difficulty of Ardens novels and stories that the world he portrays is bigger and broader than what we are generally accustomed to in contemporary fiction. In keeping with his sense of the impact of external forces on peoples lives, Ardens fictional settings have ranged impressively from ancient Egypt to late 15th-century Germany, from Ireland in the 16th century to 20th-century Northern Ireland and Britain, from 14th-century Yorkshire to Napoleonic France to 19th-century Liverpool. History, for Arden, is always all. THE TITLE STORY of Gallows moves between modern and 17th-century Galway, and its two companion Ireland stories are forceful treatments of equally aggressive public bus drivers and American presidents. Molly Concannon, the deranged Galway campaigner we were introduced to in The Stealing Steps , resurfaces to tremendous effect. A Masque of Blackness , concerning Ben Jonsons involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, is the highlight of the London stories. The Yorkshire stories, while focused on present-day happenings, highlight the distinctive qualities for which Arden should be more attended: an effortless moving between historical periods; interest in textual flotsam (posters, letters, journals, headlines); a capacity for digression rare in current fiction; a sense of the clamorous that realistically precludes happy endings for his characters. To begin appreciating such work, readers must cast off any expectations of narrative reduction or control. Like most of his protagonists, Ardens fiction is characteristically unruly, consciously devoted to what he once invoked as the old essential attributes of Dionysus. As with all his work, Gallows is simultaneously a declaration of individual freedom and a provocation of collective conscience. Ardens pen may be more blunderbuss than blade, but it is heartening to think of him still up there, head high on the battlements, blasting away into the open while others plot more cautiously below. |
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© John Arden 2009 |
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