Writers with Dirty Hands: Howard Brenton's A Sky Blue Life: Scenes after Maxim Gorki

Writers with Dirty Hands: Howard Brenton's A Sky Blue Life: Scenes after Maxim Gorki RICHARD BOON The production in its main house by the Royal Court Theatre ofMagnificence in July 1973 signalled the arrival in the established British theatre of a new generation of young political dramatists. The play's author, Howard Brenton, may in retrospect be seen as the figurehead of this second "new wave" of playwrights who have re-vitalised British theatre since '956; most important among the others are David Edgar, Trevor Griffiths, and David Hare. All emerged towards the end of the 1960s, producing work fired by contemporary political unrest and designed to reach new audiences through a Fringe theatre circuit of community halls, college venues and small avant-garde theatre spaces. Much of this early work - particularly that produced by Portable Theatre, a group founded by Hare with which all these dramatists, but especially Brenton, were associated - was fuelled by a determination to challenge the perceived assumptions and complacency of the established theatre with shows that were provocative and controversial in content and style alike. Yet each of these writers, albeit in differing ways and to some extent for differing reasons, followed Brenton into the mainstream of "official culture", working on the large public stages - subsidised and West End - or on television, or in the commercial film industry. For Brenton at least, the Fringe of the early '970S had become "a cultural cul-de-sac," the "new" audiences as sophisticated and as isolated from the rest of society as their West End counterparts. It was largely this perception that led him to turn to the large, subsidised, public theatre spaces: since '973, he has written regularly for the Royal Court, the RSC, and most significantly, for the National Theatre. For some, he has "sold out"; for others, he remains "the wolf within the gates" of the established theatre. I In fact, to See Magnificence as marking an abrupt volte-face in Brenton's career has always been too simplistic. For one thing, the continuing unease of the establishment regarding his work (witness the Romans in Britain furore at RICHARD BOON the National in 1980, and reaction to his 1986 TV thriller Dead Head)2 is an index ofhis success in "forging a brand new public theatre out of what had been learnt in the small theatres.'" At least as important, he has remained a writer determined to reach as many audiences - and as many kinds of audience as possible, working not only for the National but also for Fringe groups like Foco Novo; not only for the theatre but (increasingly) for TV and film. Alongside the big, solo, epic pieces for the mainstream stages must be set plays made collectively with companies like Joint Stock, and collaborations with other writers, the effect ofwhich has been to allow him access to areas of interestthat may otherwise have remained untouched: one thinks of 1980'S A Short Sharp Shock! with Tony Howard, and 1983'S Sleeping Policemen with Tunde Ikoli. Occasional satires like Shock!, "issue plays" like Thirteenth Night (1981), or "intimate" three-handers like Sore Throats (1979) are as important a part of the Brenton corpus as such large-scale epics as Weapons ofHappiness (1976) and Romans: of all our contemporary British playwrights, Brenton is surely the greatest polyglot. The 1971 play A Sky Blue Life: Scenes after Maxim Gorki offers a unique insight into why Brenton has become the kind of writer he has.4 The piece is essentially a series of adaptations of a number of Gorki's dramatic and non-dramatic works, and its writing pre-occupied Brenton intermittently for much of the early and formative phase of his career. I identify the date of production as 1971, but an early version was performed by amateurs as early as 1966, the year after Brenton left Cambridge and some three years before he could confidently begin to think of himself as a full-time - if still apprenticeprofessional writer. Between that first production and the preferred 1971 version (directed by Walter Donohoe at the Open Space Theatre in London), Brenton "had several cracks at writing it,"S and, even now. remains less than entirely...