Language as Life: Christopher Fry's Early Plays

Language as Life: Christopher Fry's Early Plays DIANE FILBY GILLESPIE POETRY IN THE THEATRE. Christopher Fry says, is a response to the twentieth-century need for a new realism.' In saying so, he follows in the wake of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and T. S. Eliot, and is joined by other English-speaking dramatists like Archibald MacLeish. Maxwell Anderson. Robert Frost. W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood. However diverse and uneven their achievements are in practice, these men are remarkably consistent in theory: the realistic or naturalistic theatre dominated by imitators of Ibsen's social-problem plays, they insist, must be amplified or replaced' Instead of mundane. trivial human lives lived in powerlessness and despair, they emphasize deeper emotion and sensitivity in man, or they insist that man and his efforts are potentially noble however much his modern environment seems to degrade him. Poetry, they insist, communicates these complexities more successfully than prose.' Fry's own emphasis is on the spiritual dimension in the human experience and the poetic language that can say "heaven and earth in one word.'" Fry. like the other poet-dramatists, is an inveterate experimenter. Because "there is no present established tradition of verse in the theatre," he says, "you seem to have to start to make it every time you start a new play: not only creating the finished article, as it were, but also the tool you're going to create it with.'" Exploring different relationships between subjects and forms, Fry's works are sacred as well as secular. His settings are English and continental, ancient and 287 288 DIANE FILBY GILLESPIE relatively recent. One-act as well as full-length plays reflect a number of traditional theatrical modes from the verse romance, the comedy of manners: and-the moiafiiy play to the more contemporary and expressionistic dream play_ In style, Fry's plays include both witty language imposed on all the characters and more subtle characterization by means of dialogue and dialect; the dialogue includes a mixture of selfconsciously poetic devices, strikingly appropriate heightened language, and poetry-prose combinations_ Some critics greet Fry's eady experiments in plays like A Phoenix Too Frequent, The Lady's Not For Burning, and Venus Observed with considerable enthusiasm and treat his themes seriously.' They note his preoccupation with general, fundamental truths and discuss his simultaneous affirmation of the joy, mystery, and contrariness of human experience as well as the resulting tragicomic tone.' A formidable group of detractors, however, consider his verbal effects cheap and superficial, his dramatic skill severely limited, and his thought trivial.' The same elements and the same plays praised by one group of critics are denounced by the other. This contradictory response cannot be explained solely by the diversity of Fry's methods. Derek Stanford tries, on more than one occasion, to uncover some of the hidden biases responsible for the negative reaction. What Fry has to say, Stanford thinks, everyone can understand; in certain "high-brow circles," however , clarity is identified with banality or superficiality. Moreover, it is part of the "reaction against romanticism ... to believe that wealth of words must inevitably go with poverty of thought.'" More recently, Stanford attributes the decline in Fry's reputation to the emergence of poets and critics nurtured on Critical Positivism and to the rise of "Kitchen Sink Drama." In contrast to these tendencies, Fry's works begin to look not only "too ebulliently profuse, too tentative, explorative , unanchored, imprecise," but also too aristocratic because too articulate.I. It is also likely that some of the negative response comes from a distrust of the measure of affirmation implicit in the tragicomic view of life. Central to that affirmation are the abundance and exuberance of Fry's language. Affirmation, certainty, confidence, joy, however , are suspected of naivete and escapism; both charges are levelled against Fry. What Fry affirms is no paradise, however; it is the complex chaos and contrariness of human experience itself. The early plays he calls comedies do not suggest a definition of the comic as the producer of hearty laughter or as a civilizing force designed to correct the absurdities exhibited by people in social situations. Like all comedy, his...