John Arden by Frances Gray (review)

Book Reviews provides a good introduction to his work. Susan Rusinko should be lauded for her contribution to Rattigan scholarship. She concentrates on his stage plays, but devotes a section to his major film, radio and television scripts. Professor Rusinko presents each play chronologically. She discusses recurrences in themes and progressions in character development, along with pertinent historical, literary and biographical implications. Plot summaries are kept to a minimum; indeed, Rusinko's plot recounting mostly unfolds through her analyses of the plays' characters. Throughout her book, Rusinko touches upon the several themes that run through Rattigan's dramas. Among the more important are the sexual and emotional needs of characters which result in their humiliation (TheBrowning Version, TheDeepBlue Sea, Separate Tables, A Bequest to theNation), relations between parents and children (Love in Idleness, Separate Tables, Man and Boy, In Praise ofLove, Cause Celebre), and internal and external conflicts of conscience (The Winslow Boy, Man and Boy, A Bequest to the Nation). Rusinko highlights Rattigan's progress and maturation in characterization. Beginning with Crocker-Harris (The Browning Version), and includ­ ing Hester Collyer (The Deep Blue Sea) and Major Pollock (Separate Tables), many of Rattigan's characters learn to "survive beyond hope and, therefore, beyond despair, with their dignity intact" (p. 68). Rattigan allows them to grapple with life and face devastating and wounding situations (frequently self-inflicted); he has them face the truth. Rusinko places Rattigan's plays in their historical perspective- plays written in the years preceding World War II, during the War, following the War, before and after the 1956 theatrical turmoil, and from 1970 through 1977- and suggests the particular effect of each of these periods on his writing. She also draws comparisons between his dramas and those of Chekhov, Strindberg, Willliarns, Albee and others. Biographical data is introduced where it is relevant. The only negativereaction to this volume has to do with the editing, which overlooked some errors and omissions. The index, for example, lists "Howard" Pinter; and the chronology omits the year 1960, so that neither Ross nor Joie de Vivre is listed. On the whole, however, Terence Rattigan is an excellent overview. Rusinko sums up the current state of Rattigan scholarship and provides the first step to what one hopes will be future works devoted to more detailed study, which will corroborate ·her belief that Rattigan was not merely a popular playwright, but also a significant artist. JEAN DAUBENAS, ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY FRANCES GRAY. John Arden. New York: Grove Press 1983. Pp. vii, 173. $9.95 (PB). . In one of the better contributions to a rather uneven series, Frances Gray offers a lucid introduction to the sole dramatist whose career began ·in the British theatre of the late I950s and whose recent plays I find as interesting as his earliest. Unlike his successors Brenton, Hare and Griffiths, who started in the alternative theatre but now occupy the commanding heights of the institutionalized theatre and their associated media, Arden together with his Irish wife and partner, Margaretta d'Arcy, has moved steadily and Book Reviews deliberately away from the centre, their dispute with the Royal Shakespeare Company over The Island of the Mighty in 1972 proving a turning-point in their own work and, perhaps, in the wider history of the British theatre. The result has been undeserved critical neglect; and as the author of the first full-length study of the dramatist since Albert Hunt's in 1974, Gray sets out to review the earlier plays in the light of the most recent period, in which works like Pearl and Vandaleur's Folly rival and sometimes surpass the quality of predecessors which have achieved the dubious distinction of becoming class-room texts. The starting-point for this study is clearly stated: "To watch a play by Arden, or to participate in one, is to engage in a debate about theatre- what it is for, and whom it is for." The radical context of Arden's thinking about theatre (present, as one can see with hindsight, right from the beginning) is carefully set out, and the book leads the reader through a discussion of the tradition of naturalism against which Arden reacted, of the...