Howard Brenton: An Introduction and Interview

Howard Brenton: An Introduction Howard Brenton is thirty-six and one of Britain's leading playwrights. To date, he has had approximately thirty of his plays performed, including four pieces written in collaboration with other writers and two adaptations. His early work and experience was in fringe theatre. After leaving the University of Cambridge, he worked for a time as an assistant stage manager in various provincial repertory theatres, but in 1966 joined the Brighton Combination as an actor and writer. The work of this group closely matched Brenton's own concern for a form of theatre which was socially and politically active, aggressively experimental in style, and responding to immediate contemporary events. Brenton's early short plays such as Gum and Goo, Heads, and The Educationof Skinny Spew are like violently real comic books; psychology and explanation are suppressed and the action of the plays seems to throw up image after image with ruthless speed. In 1969 Brenton joined the Portable Theatre. As its name implies , this was a touring company which took fringe plays around the educational circuits and arts centers and festivals. The group commissioned from him the play Christiein Love, a study of the notorious English murderer John Christie. It comically exposes the sham of conventional social and moral values and develops further the controlled aggressiveness of style of his earlier plays-in Brenton 's own description, "a kind of dislocation tearing up one style for another." It was also during this period that Brenton experimented with a number of "plays for public places," writing for non-theatrical environments such as a skating-rink (Scott of theAntarctic )or a Methodist church (Wesley). A number of short plays were written to be performed during or after university rock concerts. A growing worry about the scope of fringe theatre, coupled with the realization of the failure of the dream of an alternative culture which characterized the late sixties, found Brenton moving in the seventies into larger, more conventional theatres. During 1972-3 he was Resident Playwright at the Royal Court Theatre, and since that time he has completed four plays for orthodox theatres, among them the Nottingham Playhouse and the National Theatre. Magnificence, Brassneck written with David Hare), The Churchill Play, and Weapons of Happiness are all on a larger scale than most of his previous work, but they maintain the same attack on society's values. Aware of the tension between writing for 132 bourgeois theatres while radically attacking the society which endorses them, Brenton is determined about the course he is following : "I'd rather have my plays presented to 900 people who may hate what I'm saying than to fifty of the converted." Brenton is the most radical writer of his generation, both stylistically and conceptually. His characters are regularly seen as part of a social group or movement in a world of corrupt morality and political depravity. He has frequently been occupied by figures he terms "saints, who try to drive a straight line through very complex situations and usually become honed down to the point of death." As his political consciousness becomes more prominent, Brenton begins to show a world heading for disaster, in which characters either acquiesce and become corrupt or offer violent responses. Revenge shows Britain as a vast gamblers' paradise, Magnificence the tragedy of a group of violent revolutionaries, Brassneck the survival of a family of deeply corrupt local politicians . The Churchill Play has a Britain dotted with internment camps for all dissenters from the state, and Weapons of Happiness explores the idea of revolution in Britain through the character of an old Czech communist. His most recent play, Epsom Downs, is a celebration of ordinary people on Derby Day, unconsciously part of the structure which promotes horse-racing as "the sport of kings." With this play Brenton returned in some measure to working with a group of like-minded theatre practitioners, the Joint Stock Company. He has recently completed a version of Brecht's The Life of Galileo for the National Theatre. The Saliva Milkshake, adapted from Joseph Conrad's novel Under Western Eyes, was written for television and transmitted in 1975. Since then it has had stage...