Symbolic Naturalism in David Storey's Home

Symbolic Naturalism in David Storey's Home CAROL ROSEN WHEN DAVID STOREY'S HOME first opened in London and New York in 1970, some critics were quick to categorize it as "a kind of Briticized Waiting for Gada/" or as "a revue-sketch parody of Pintef.'" Such associations are easily made. Like Beckett's plays, Home is characterized by static surface action and a lack of plot. And like Pinter's The Birthday Party, Home never actually confirms just who or where its characters are. Yet unlike these plays by Beckett and Pinter, Home was a Broadway success. The complementary performances of Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson contributed substantially to this success. Nevertheless, the play itself, an evocative "Chekhovian mood piece,'" stands on its own. It works metaphorically as a model of modem life, and it works concretely as a close-up of the private world of five mental patients. Storey's Home is a symbolic play built on a firm foundation of new naturalism. This "new naturalism" of Storey's' results in the creation onstage of a heightened, pervasive reality. In his famous comment on The Wood Demon, his fITSt verion of Uncle Vanya, Chekhov argued for his kind of naturalistic drama: The demand is made that the hero and the heroine (of a play) should be dramatically effective. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating. drinking. running after women Of men, talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage. A play ought to be written in which the people should come and go, dine, talk of the weather, or play cards, not because the author wants it but because that is what happens in real 277 278 CAROL ROSEN life. Life on tbe stage should be as it reaUy is and the people, too, should be as they are and not stilted." Storey's kind of naturalism, however, goes beyond Chekhov's insistence on the illusion of every day. Storey's plays attempt to reconstruct with an almost documentary accuracy the world of clocks and calendars , schedules and routines in a circumscribed world. Characters are subordinated to an environment which defines as well as supports their action. In Storey's The Conlraelor, for example, a tent for a lawn party is erected, and then, afier an unseen marriage ceremony, it is dismantled. The Changing Room also focuses on traditionally peripheral action in a traditionally baCkstage setting: in this play, the stage space is converted into the locker room of a Rugby stadium in the north of England before, during, and after an offstage game. Again in Life Class, Storey limits the action of his play to a single, defining, regulating environment, in this instance, an art class. And the title of The Farm, too, identifies its setting as its subject. In Home, however, Storey's between-the-acts mode extends itself into a way of life. Here, Storey builds a heightened situation around just four metal garden chairs, the sturdy outdoor furnishings of an institutional estate. Storey's simplest setting becomes his most elaborate structure, for in Home the backdrop takes center stage. Purposeful action is completely circumvented by the inhabitants of Home; time passes slowly; aimless shapes amble in listless fellowship. Finally, Home's naturalism is markedly symbolic, for the world-weary mental patients who shrug, sigh, and stroll around the minimal set of Home seem to chat in an everyday, offhand, random manner, but the cumulative effect of their dialogue, like that of Pinter's people, is to tum naturalistic speech into symbolic vocal gestures. What one critic has called the "poetic polyvalence " of Storey's plays' is most pronounced in Home. Action reverberates on multiple levels here. The minimal setting of this play houses a naturalistic reconstruction of contemporary asylum life, a paradigm of thwarted yearnings, a dramatic idea of petrified action, and a selfconscious sense of the stage as the world in a parenthesis. Such are the dimensions of Storey's apparently shapeless structure. At once an image and an idea of total...