Dualism and Paradox in the "Puritan" Plays of David Storey

Dualism and Paradox in the "Puritan" Plays of David Storey JOHN J. STINSON IN HIS CAREER as a dramatist David Storey has by now piled success upon success' but has received relatively little attention from the academic critics. This response, though, is perhaps to be expected. Despite the general infatuation of the daily and weekly reviewers with most of his plays, many critics have shunted him off the track reserved for their really serious attention and been content to regard him as an exponent of cinema verite on the stage, a conscientious naturalist, Of, at best, a skillful documentarian with a certain talent for capturing a mood, a feeling, an atmosphere, and overlaying it with what is merely a semblance of dramatic form. Advocates, on the other hand, are prone to see him as a Yorkshire Chekhov subtly investing materials thought promising only for naturalism with a kind of unforced poetry found as bittersweet experience in the real life of any halfway sensitive soul. Others have suggested Pinter for comparison, seeing in Storey's minimalist techniques and in his silences, not nameless menace, but a kind of saving grace unsuspectingly found abounding in the dreary world of everyday, especially when men come together in work or play. They are prone to see The Contractor, Home, and The Changing Room as muted but beautiful hymns to life. Nearly all of Storey's plays leave audiences captivated; of that there can be no doubt. Detractors will find the reasons for audiences' fascination perfectly and depressingly obvious: the notorious tendency of most theatregoers to be mesmerized by any process realistically performed on stage, whether it be as simple as the frying of bacon and 131 132 JOHN J. STINSON eggs, or as complex as the erection, by a relatively complicated and quite exact process, of a huge tent that covers nearly a whole stagethe situation we have in The Contractor. "Terrific tent, and didn't those actors go through their paces in setting it up," goes this argument , "but was there a play there someplace?" The appeal of The Changing Room can be seen as equally explicable: audience intoxication from the smell of all that liniment pervading the theatre and from the sight of fifteen athletically built males engaging in crude horseplay while, at times, totally naked. At the other extreme, the most vigorous proponents of Storey's art tend to see the situations in both plays (and some in Life Class as well) as large, beautifully unobtrusive metaphors of almost infinite suggestiveness. So far, no intelIigent, concentrated mediation between the very diverse positions of admirers and detractors has really been attempted. However, a close comparative look at the themes of Storey's plays, a brief exploration of the ways in which themes and motifs present in his plays are more fully developed and extended in his five novels, and some cautious attention to a few of his extra-literary statements, can reveal much about Storey's art and craft. Storey's very basic and constantly reiterated theme is that of the divided self. The body/soul, matter/spirit conflict Storey sees as universal , but like D. H. Lawrence (whose background as son of a coal miner, art student, and schoolteacher parallels Storey's own'), whose themes Storey to some degree redevelops, he regards the fragmentation of the self as a more distinctly modern phenomenon. Psychic disintegration, mental collapse, deep spiritual malaise, and "madness" (Storey, as the English generally, feels more comfortable with this word than Americans do) are conspicuous elements in most of the works, although they are present in more subtle and deeply subsumed ways in The Contractor, The Changing Room, and Life Class than they are in the other plays or the novels. In Storey's first play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, the title character, a kind of Jimmy Porter cum Miniver Cheevy schoolteacher, is busy restoring himself from spiritual impoverishment and a nervous breakdown. In the highly allegorical and grotesque novel Radcliffe (where Storey heavy-handedly insists that we see the body/soul dichotomy he is getting at), the sensitive but severely disordered title character, Leonard Radcliffe (who represents soul), kills his homosexual lover, Victor Tolson (the body...