Insanity and the Rational Man in the Plays of David Storey

Insanity and the Rational Man in the Plays of David Storey ALBERT E. KALSON • There are things in your life Not even your wife Would think could pass through your brain. But give me a light And I'll show you a sight That would turn even Satan insane.I THE VERSE WHICH a provincial schoolteacher recites to his wife in act one of David Storey's first play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, may well stand as an epigraph for the Yorkshireman's entire dramatic output. In six of the first seven plays which Storey has written since 1966, at least one character is on the verge of insanity, an idiot or a certifiable lunatic. To grasp Storey's dramatic use of madness which is frequently at the center, occasionally on the periphery of his work, is to understand an artist's attempt to reconcile himself to a bewildering universe where the line between sanity and insanity is often invisible. Unlike those characters of Pirandello who was also obsessed by the relativism of sanity, Storey's do not question the fact of reality. His dramatic world is an artist's conscious rendering of the real one, and the question which Storey's characters must ask themselves is, "How does one cope with the reality one is forced to accept?" For some of them, to lose the mind is to gain the self. Arnold Middleton, Storey's first study of contemporary man at odds with his world, is a history teacher. He has been rehearsing his class in a III 112 ALBERT E. KALSON play about Robin Hood, who, Arnold knows, could not exist in a world which no longer offers any opportunity for heroic action. Arnold, however , closely identifies with the romantic figure, seeing him in contemporary terms as "a usurper. An outlaw! ... Always on the outside of things ... cynical of the established order: disenfranchised, dispossessed. A refugee ... from the proper world" (95). As a good teacher should, Arnold fills his classroom with reminders of the past - swords, model engines, model castles. But his collection of objects has begun to overflow into his home. While his students may appreciate them, Joan, his wife, does not. She has resigned herself to living with most of his things, yet the newest acquisition, a suit of armour, disturbs her; "It's the first lifelike thing he's ever had here," she says to Mrs. Ellis, her mother (16). Constantly cleaning, Joan is herself unaware that of the two Middletons she is the one who would turn living-room into life-denying vacuum. Paralleling her desire to rid the house of the armour is her equally strong desire to rid the house of her attractive mother, who lives with the couple, for Joan is jealous of the attention which Arnold pays to anyone or anything, be it inanimate being - the armour - or human object - Mrs. Ellis. -At first Arnold seems to be a bright young teacher, not unlike his friend and colleague, Jeff Hanson, the school's English master. When they are together, their exaggerated high spirits, game-playing and namecalling seem a norm of behavior for vaguely dissatisfied young intellectuals , and Arnold's words with Joan over the armour, over her mother - both of which he refuses to banish from the house - seem the usual arguments which young married couples feed upon. Arnold, however , has begun to act in a decidedly peculiar manner. He has taken the suit of armour to school and walked it across the stage of an assembly hall filled with students at morning prayer. Later, at a party, he terrifies Jeff by aiming a loaded rifle at him and pulling the trigger; fortunately, the firing pin has been removed. If his actions are not yet necessarily those of a lunatic, despite Jeff's calling him a madman, Joan becomes convinced that playfulness has turned to madness when he tops his earlier capers by taking his mother -in-Iaw to bed. That the suit ofarmour is under the bed at the time suggests that Arnold is attempting to protect what he loves from his devouring wife, to him the agent ofsterility, who, earlier, with her mother's help, had...