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The curse of John Arden is that he simply won’t play ball. —Charles Marowitz John Arden: So it’s not as good as it was. I started off with bad notices and then after that they kept on saying “he doesn’t live up to his promise.” I’m not the only one who suffers from that. Margaretta D’Arcy: We were really quite shocked when we went to Canada, because we’ve found out that John has been totally removed. . . . He’s only talked about as a personality of the sixties— that’s the only time he’s mentioned. . . . We’d just been wiped out.1 John Arden’s early plays are associated with the postwar London theatre, but even early in his career Arden had become involved with fringe and regional activities, eventually shifting the center of his activities outside of London. From the second decade of his career, he wrote most of his plays in collaboration with his wife, the actress and playwright Margaretta D’Arcy.2 There are puzzling turns in Arden’s career. The reception of his early plays reflects the difficulties critics encountered with his theatrical work, making his rise to prominence in the mid-1960s intriguing. More puzzling still, considering his acknowledged merits as a dramatist and the prominence he achieved in the 1960s, is his later descent into oblivion. The role played by mediation in the London phase of Arden’s career provides a possible explanation for this trajectory. JohnArden 3 The Playwright WhoWouldn’t Play Ball 120 john arden beginning at the royal court: a center of controversy3 The English audiences were not ready for the Brechtian style, although they’d had the Brechtian Company four years before. There was a dislike of that kind of thing. —Arden interview The beginning of John Arden’s theatrical career is associated with George Devine and the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. But Arden’s first play, All Fall Down, was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1955, staged by a student company from the College of Arts in Edinburgh, where Arden had completed his training as an architect. The first professional production of an Arden play, broadcast by BBC radio on April 16, 1956, was The Life of Man, which won the Northern Region New Play prize. According to various accounts it was this play that attracted the attention of Devine. Arden recounts that following a letter of request from Oscar Lewenstein, he sent the Royal Court a stage play based on the legend of King Arthur, which was rejected. He then sent another play to a drama competition run by Kenneth Tynan in the Observer. The winning play would receive a one-night production at the Royal Court. Arden’s play “did not win, but it was commended.”4 The Waters of Babylon, directed by Graham Evans, was eventually presented at the Royal Court on October 20, 1957, as part of the Sunday Night Productions without décor. When Devine then offered Arden the position of first reader, one of the preliminary readers of submitted scripts, Arden left the architect’s of- fice where he had been working,5 becoming a full-time writer by the end of 1957. According to Irving Wardle, George Devine admired people with verbal skill, partly due to his own “feeling he lacked it himself.” Moreover , being “by temperament a teacher” and also “a team man,” Devine sought to involve writers in the team without infringing upon their work. He devised the system of the “writer’s pass,” which gave the writers free admission to the Court’s rehearsals and performances. Arden regarded the writer’s pass and the Court’s offer to read manuscripts, both of which enabled him to spend all his time “in or around theatre,” as the two most important gifts he had ever been given.6 Although most reviews of The Waters of Babylon had been unfavorable , the Court commissioned another play from Arden. Live Like Pigs, written in collaboration with Margaretta D’Arcy and directed by Devine and Anthony Page, was performed by the ESC on September 30, 1958 and john arden 121 it too was unfavorably received by reviewers. Arden’s next plays were Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, directed by Lindsay Anderson and performed at the Royal Court on October 22, 1959, and The Happy Haven, directed by William Gaskill and also performed at the Royal Court, on September 14, 1960. Both plays, but...

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