Granville Barker's Sexual Comedy

Granville Barker's Sexual Comedy DENNIS KENNEDY Harley Granville Barker's reputation suffered heavily when he left active theatre work after the Great War, hyphenated his name, and became a "mere professor." His admirers, who acknowledged him as the leader of the cause for a new theatre, felt abandoned in favor of a comfortable second marriage and a leisurely life, and his plays, already looked upon with suspicion, endured an added decline. Other external factors, such as the subsequent dominance of Shaw and the general reaction against naturalism, have obscured them further. It is an unfortunate state of affairs for English drama (though in the last few years there have been signs of change), for Granville Barker wrote four of the most significant plays of the Edwardian period, marked by their unusual sensitivity to language and originality of form. The Marrying ofAnn Leete, The Voysey Inheritance, Waste ("our greatest modem tragedy," according to William Archer), and The Madras House are distinguished also by an even rarer characteristic for their time: while they deal outwardly with public subjects like politics and business, inwardly they are all centered on the sexual relationships of the main characters. Archer thought the last three plays "the biggest things our modem movement has produced,'" and in one sense they all are, for they are unique among English plays of the early century in the use of sexual relationships to define the worth of human action and to signify larger, moral, concerns. In the comedies this symbolic use of the urge to couple is especially apparent. Most comedies are "sexual" in some sense, of course, but Granville Barker's three major ones are less interested in the standard bawdry and mating we associate with the form, and more interested in using sexual relationships as an index of human sensibility. Before Ann Leete he had written three apprentice plays with a fellow actor, Berte Thomas, and Barker, despite his youth, was the dominant partner in the collaboration.' While their flaws are many, these unpubliShed early pieces make clear that from the beginning he was concerned with the same subject that was to occupy the rest ofhis careeras a playwright. In them he struggles to work DENNIS KENNEDY out how a heterosexual attachment can be used to define moral strength and signify an ability to meet absolute moral dilemmas. Tessa in "The Family ofthe Oldroyds" (c. 1895-6) refuses to accept conventional sexual restraints and strikes out to find her wild "destiny," but commits suicide when she discovers how badly her ignorance has deceived her about the man she loves. In "The Weather-hen" (1897), much indebted to A Dol/'s House, a woman named Eve leaves her unhappy marriage but only at the prompting of another man, who then forces her into real independence by refusing to take her with him. John Greatorex in "Our Visitor to 'Work-a-Day'" (1898- 9) is an example of the miserable accommodation a dark genius makes after failing to achieve happiness in two sexual relationships: he escapes into the ordinary, "work-a-day" becoming an opiate for passion. A fourth play, "Agnes Colander" (1900-1), which Barker wrote alone, more successfully shows a woman fighting against conventional morality to find sexual identity. "It comes to me," Agnes says at the end of the first act, "how one hammers eternally at the door of this sex question.'" The line amounts to a precis of Barker's work. Barker first found his voice and the model for his sexual comedy in The Marrying ofAnn Leete, which he wrote in 1899 at the age of twenty-two and produced for the Stage Society three years later. It is set at the end of the eighteenth century; Ann is an example of the New Woman a hundred years removed. The outer subject is public: Camaby Leete is a failing parliamentarian who sees a chance for political renascence in a family alliance with Lord John Carp, just as he had earlier disposed of his elder daughter Sarah to a member of the opposite party. Her marriage, now falling apart in bitter mutual contempt, is a negative example for Ann. Her brother, George, in a futile attempt...