Joe Orton by C.W.E. Bigsby (review)

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 influences upon him (Brecht and, more interestingly, O'Casey), and of the literary and theatrical qualities of the plays against the background of Arden's political awakening as the adoption of a Marxist stance is conventionally called. The work concludes with a more detailed study of four plays (Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, inevitably, but there is useful if brief discussion of The Island ofthe Mighty and Pearl). All this is valuable, especially at the introductory level, but one often wishes that the format of the Grove Press Modem Dramatists series had allowed the author to develop her ideas in greater detail. If I have a major criticism, it is one that must be directed at the series as a whole and indeed at much academic criticism of modem dramatists, which seem to favour a simplified picture of the theatrical world in which all naturalistic drama for a decade or so before 1956 was timid and conventional, whereas the drama which followed in the wake ofLookBack in Anger needs to be defended and explained remorselessly before an uncomprehending and largely hostile public. The truth is far more complex, and I suspect readers are far less blinkered by the traditions of thirty years past than much critical writing assumes. Even his strongest admirers should admit that Arden is a patchy dramatist whose record embraces work of engaging eccentricity and outright failure, as well as the unqualified successes which make him a major dramatist by any reckoning. Gray's unswerving loyalty to her author may be commendable, but it lends an occasional air of naivety to the analysis. The time has come, surely, to inject a greater element of critical discrimination into discussion of contemporary dramatists, before our support for the modem theatre falls victim to an alternative orthodoxy as complacent as anything it has tried to replace. MICHAEL ANDERSON, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF NORTH WALES c.w.E. BIGSBY. Joe Orton. London and New York: Methuen 1982. Pp. 79· $4.25 (PB). Orton has taken a lot of flak from contemporary British critics. He has either been patronized as a trivial, commercial dramatist, for example by John Russell Taylor, or else greeted with horrified scorn as the theatrical equivalent of the football hooligan and Book Reviews ruffian poet, as in Martin Ess!in's essay in Contemporary English Drama (1981), a collection edited by the author of the present book. We are very grateful to Bigsby, therefore, for taking Orton seriously as a postmodemist playwright of high achievement both in language and in social discourse. Bigsby sets Orton firmly in perspective as "more profoundly revolutionary" than the Osbomes and Weskers who preceded him: Unlike them, he was as suspicious of dramatic form as he was of social imperatives. He set out to undermine both.... Orton was prepared to taunt his audience with the disturbing thought that only disorder can generate vitality and a compelling humour - that true liberation may lie in cutting loose from the moral world rather than trying to reconstruct it, in abandoning liberal notions of individual identity and social...