Retreating to the Future: Brenton in the Eighties

Retreating to the Future: Brenton in the Eighties RICHARD BOON In the Spring of 1988, the Royal Court Theatre in London launched a season of work by Howard Brenton under the title "Three Plays for Utopia." The first two pieces were revivals: Sore Throats, an "intimate"three-hander in two acts, was first produced by the RSC in 1979; Bloody Poetry, a treatment of the life of Shelley, bad premiered at the Leicester Haymarket in 1984. The third was an original play on which Brenton had been working intermittently for some seven years: Greenland.' As a group, the three vary enormously in subject and approach, but each marks a stage in the development of an idea that had first come to the writer during a visit made with the Joint Stock Theatre group to the 1977 Derby for Epsom Downs: that of writing a "Utopian" play. The utopianism of Sore Throats is, as I shall show, by no means its most immediately obvious characteristic: it was not until the early nineteen eighties that Brenton confronted head-on the problem of articulating what a better, more free and just way of living might be. The impulse to do so was partly born of a response to pressure from friends and critics for the dramatist- more renowned, after all, for dystopias like The Churchill Play (1974) and Thirteenth Night (1981) - " to say what I really do want, what I really mean.'" But it is also the case that collectively the plays represent a reaction, sometimes clear and emphatic, sometimes uncertain, to the greater pressure of social and political change in contemporary Britain. They are concerned to re-discover and re-affirm the necessity and importance ofclear personal vision on the left in the face of an apparently solid right-wing government and an opposition that continued fragmented and inward-looking. At heart, their subject is the self, and its power to survive, adapt, and transform. Each play in its own way attempts to answer the question that flickers across the minds of many characters in earlier work, a question that is most clearly put in Thirteenth Night: "How can we keep the richness of dreams, yet be fully awake?" (p. 12). For a dramatist who had made his reputation a decade earlier on large-scale, Brenton in the Eighties 31 wide-ranging political epics like Churchill and Weapons ofHappiness (1976), it is tempting to see in this smaller-scale, more "private" work a withdrawal from the greater issues of public life, and an implied sense of defensiveness if not defeat. With his contemporaries David Hare, Trevor Griffiths and David Edgar, Brenton had succeeded in the nineteen seventies in forcing into the mainstream of British theatrical life both political concerns and a stylistic philosophy which had their origins in oppositional Fringe theatre. For much of the later part of the decade their work effectively set the agenda for new drama on the big public stages of the National and the RSC, wresting the initiative from the Stoppards, the Pinters, and the Ayckbourns, whom they saw as the high priests of reactionary bourgeois theatre-making. Their work - not only Churchill and Weapons, but Hare's Plenty, Griffiths's Occupations, and Edgar's Destiny, and so on - was described by Brenton in 1979 in tenns of plays which are big, in cast, staging, theme, and publically {sic] declared ambition (they do want to change the world. influence opinion, enter fights over political issues); they are "Jacobean" in a mix of the tragic and comic taking great pleasure in the surprises and shocks of entertainment the huge stage can arm the playwright with as a showman; they are epic in that they are many seeDed. full of stories, ironic and argumentative, and deliberately written as "history plays for now."3 Only eight years later, however, Brenton was bemoaning the lack of such work in the eighties, citing his own collaboration with Hare, Pravda (1985), and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, comic satires on the press and the City respectively, as rare examples of large-scale, leftist plays that could confront Thatcherism in the public arena.4 It as for this reason that he revised Churchill for...