Maps of the World: "Neo-Jacobeanism" and Contemporary British Theatre

Maps of the World: "Neo-Jacobeanism" and Contemporary British Theatre RICHARD BOON and AMANDA PRICE In 1986, the Royal Court Theatre in London premiered Howard Barker's version of Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women.' Accompanying publicity material credited the playas jointly authored, and indeed its first three acts were almost entirely Middleton's; Barker's contribution consisted of his own, original, concluding sequence. What struck many at the time was the seamless transition between Middleton's work and Barker's. a transition achieved despite a separating history of over 350 years and without recourse on Barker's pan to parody or even, except perhaps in its most fannal sense, pastiche. In thematic concern, fann, and style, there seemed an absolute confluence of interest between the theatre of the Jacobeans and that of one section , at least, of modem British theatre. Contemporary dramatists' awareness of the use that may be made of historical models to articulate their own critiques of modem society may be traced back almost to the beginnings of the revolution in post-war British drama and is not, of course, confined to reference to Jacobean theatre alone. But the work of John Webster, Cyril Toumeur, Middleton ef al., and indeed the "darker" plays of Shakespeare, seem to have offered a particularly potent source of inspiration. One thinks especially of Edward Bond's Lear (1971), a landmark in contemporary British theatre. Perhaps more significantly, the explosion of activity on the Fringe from the mid1960s to the early 1970s, work often driven by despair and outrage at what was seen as an increasingly corrupt, inept, and ruthless establishment, found voice in subject matters and forms that, albeit for the most part unconsciously, echoed those of Jacobean antecedents. Writing in 1971, John Russell Taylor grouped together a number of the new writers by identifying both similarity of theme ("child murder, sex murder, rape, homosexuality, transvestism, religious mania, power mania, sadism, masochism") and approach ("outrageous comedy," working from a basic premise of authorial refusal to take moral sides in the depiction of what are often terrifying and horrific events).' Nor Modern Drama, 41 (199B) 635 RICHARD BOON and AMANDA PRICE did the relocation of some of these playwrights into the mainstream of British theatres in the I970S do anything to diminish their commitment 10 charting what they saw as a decaying society on the edge of terminal collapse through the use of dramaturgical practice that seemed at least to parallel that of the Jacobean stage. Specific and acknowledged influence is comparatively rare, although by the 1980s Howard Brenton and David Hare's Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy ([985) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money ([987) were being freely described as "city comedies,"3 and the origins of Barker's Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good ([989) could hardly be more obvious. What seems to have emerged is a sense in which two periods of British history characterized by the collapse of cultural, social, and moral systems have produced theatres which, by design or accident, have found echoes of each other's dramaturgical and scenographical practice. The purpose of this article is to offer a speculative introduction to what might loosely be termed a "neo-Jacobean " tendency in contemporary British theatre. The essays that follow have been written by two academics, one a specialist on the work of Howard Brenton, the other a specialist on Howard Barker. Although there was some preliminary discussion, the essays were written independently and without a predetermined critical approach or shared agenda. This was done partly to acknowledge the many dissimilarities between the two subjects, playwrights who are normally isolated from each other in general discourse, and partly to lest our "neo-Jacobeanist" hypothesis by ensuring that such connections as seemed to emerge did so freely and as "found" rather than given relationships. HOWARD BRENTON Howard Brenton's awareness of and interest in Shakespearean and Jacobean antecedents seems demonstrable throughout his career. His version ofMeasure for Measure (1972) reworked Shakespeare, making clear identifications of Harold Macmillan and Enoch Powell with Duke Vincentio and Angelo respectively , in a deliberate and specific assault on Powellism generally; the play caused considerable controversy, with pressure from the producing theatre...