The Communal Dream of Myth: David Rudkin's The Triumph of Death

The Communal Dream of Myth: David Rudkin's The Triumph of Death ROBERT WILCHER Two years after the success of Afore Night Come in 191'2. and before he had completed a second play for the stage. David Rudkin described himself as "afflicted by images. by things that are seen. pictures of things." He continued . "They are extraordinary. momentary. but they stay with me. and slowly accumulate around them some hardening of dramatic ritual life. and I find that my plays. my ideas of plays. tend to be processions towards climaxes which are enactments of such images...• The Triumph of Death. first perfonned in March 1981. can be seen in its entirety as such a climactic enactment - a work distilled out of the twenty-year-long fennent of ideas. language. and experiences that followed its author's impressive debut as a dramatist.' Rudkin himself. in an account of the "painful history" of another of his plays. has drawn attention to an aspect of its composition which seems to be of particular importance for the genesis of The Triumph of Death. He explains that in the first draft of The SOilS ofLight. going back to September 1965. the underworld area of the play's topography "was a frankly pornographic construct. ... a kind of homosexual brothel-environment." This underworld . which is referred to as the "Pit" in the printed text of the play. was broadened in the 1970 version (the third in a series of seven) "to encompass the Freudian theory that economic activity is a manifestation in politically organized fonn of suppressed anality in Adult Man." Rudkin. writing in 1976. goes on: In fact, in this version and through the versions IV and V that followed, the Pit took over; and only recently have I realised that this whole area is really altogether another play. In the version you shall see, the Pit retains its Freudian theoretical base, but has been cut down to proper dramatic size.J Modem Drama. 35 ('992) 57' 572 ROBERT WILCHER This predatory offspring of the Pit. which at one time threatened to devour The Sons ofLight. must be none other than The Triumph ofDeath. Its progress towards the shape it was finally to take can be traced through a number of other works - notably The Filth Hunt. a short stage play performed by Ed Berman's InterAction Company in 1972. Penda's Fell. televised in 1974. and Hippolytus. a treatment of the Euripidean tragedy produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978. In The Filth Hunt, a satire on those who set themselves up as guardians of public morality. there is a grotesque parody of the Nativity, in the course of which the Christ-child is crucified in the manger for manifesting signs of sexual pleasure. and the self-appointed commission of "Filth Hunters" exits singing: The Death Kick, the Death Kick. We're off upon the Death Kick! Ensuring the child of tomorrow inherit a whip from the world and a cage for the spirit: bow to Peter, scrape to Paul, but follow Death the Lord of all!' Among other features of Penda's Fen that look forward to details in The Triumph ofDeath. there is a discussion between Stephen and his father about the status of Joan of Arc - "a witch" or an "official patriot. and French 'saint·... The Father's attempt to explain the relation between competing systems of belief illuminates Rudkin's later re-working of the story of Joan/Jehan within his own mythic recreation of medieval history: Stephen. When a church - any church, goes to war against an older god, she has to call that older god the 'devil'. In her last moment, we are told, Joan screamed through the flames to (almost he sings it, half-echoing Gerontius:) 'Jesu . . Jesu . .' ,.. (More to himself.) Whom did she see? The plaster Christ of the cathedrals? Or her old elemental village-god, the son of Adam, Son of Man, the tom flayed hero bleeding on the tree? The old Man-God unchanging ever-changing Samson-Mardllk-lesus-Balder-HerakIes, by whom this earth is haunted since the first beat of the heart of man.5 In the classical myth of Hippolytus...