The Ironic Anger of David Storey

The Ironic Anger of David Storey WILLIAM J. FREE • DAVID STOREY CAME TO THE THEATRE in his middle thirties after careers as a painter, professional Rugby player, teacher, and successful novelist. His four published plays to date display a remarkable consistency of craftsmanship, and, in spite of occasional lapses of structure and a few weak moments, all manage to achieve a degree of dramatic excitement and intensity which establishes him as one of the more talented playwrights of the contemporary British theatre. American reviewers have compared Storey to Pinter,1 I think unfairly. His two most recent plays, The Contractor and Home, have moved from an earlier conventional realism to a Pinteresque subtlety of dialogue and structure, but his themes and tone have remained uniquely his. A second comparison could be drawn with John Osborne, whose influence has been so pervasive on British theatre since 1956. But Storey's sense of outrage is more restrained and his sense of irony more biting than Osborne's. His themes touch those of Arnold Wesker; but he avoids the evangelical tone and epic sweep which tend to make Wesker's plays somewhat pompous. His ironic view of life somewhat resembles that of John Arden; but he does not indulge in the open theatricality that has alienated Arden from popular audiences. In short, Storey typifies the British theatrical revival of the sixties while retaining the stamp of an individual style. Of all the arts, the theatre is perhaps the most completely situated in time and space. Certainly Storey is thematically a member of England's angry generation of now-not-so-young men. More sepcifically, he is a Royal Court dramatist, almost archetypically so. Born in 1933, the son of a Welsh coal miner, he rose into an intellectual bourgeois society which he clearly dislikes. His roots and his intellectual sympathies reach back into the working class; 307 308 WILLIAM 1. FREE his various careers span the interests of the sensitive men of his class and time - the arts, education, athletics. He is part of the vanguard of that class of overeducated and disaffected men and women who rose from the working class and who were outraged and stimulated by the failure of the Labor Party to achieve the Camelot they had been led to expect. Educated for a way of life denied them, they created the cultural revolution which we identify with England in the sixties. Storey addresses himself to the issue of the disaffected generation, particularly in In Celebration and The Contractor, both of which played at the Royal Court in 1969. But the thing which sets him apart from the other angry dramatists is a sense of irony which mitigates his anger. His comedy is not so dark as theirs. There are traces of Look Back in Anger in both plays, particularly in In Celebration, but in both - and particularly in The Contractor, which achieves a use of dramatic space and expression new for Storey - the dignity of man's efforts and the humor of his ironic situation in life overshadow his frustrations and absurdity. Paradoxically, Storey's least successful play, In Celebration, is in some ways his most revealing and seemingly autobiographical play. The three sons of a Welsh coal miner return home to help their parents celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. Andrew, aged 38, has abandoned his comfortable career as a solicitor to become an artist, much to the puzzlement of his wife and parents. Colin, aged 36, is a successful labor relations expert for an auto manufacturer. Steven, 33, is a university professor who has stopped writing his book which would explain modern society by, in Andrew's words, "Indicating, without being too aggressive, how we'd all succumbed to the passivity of modern life, industrial discipline, and moral turpitude.,,2 As the evening wears on, the social amenities gradually deteriorate into a family quarrel. The sons are, each in his own way, failures. Colin, the most insensitive of the three, is the butt of his elder brother's jibes. Andrew accuses him of being a traitor to his class (the son of a laborer who earns his living helping the company trick other laborers), taunts him for...