Poetry and Politics: The Verse Drama of Auden and Isherwood

POETRY AND POLITICS: THE VERSE DRAMA OF AUDEN AND ISHERWOOD THE EXPElUMENTS of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood with the verse play are centered in the nineteen-thirties and, in every instance , reveal the political and social preoccupation of the times. Their experiments cannot, however, be dismissed merely as the products of a Leftist political bias, now outdated by the conversions of their creators to more conservative positions. In spite of Richard Hoggart's rather typical judgment that the importance of these dramas "in the history of the modem theatre is negligible,"l the Auden-Isherwood plays are of interest in their own right in the development of modern verse drama, because in them there is an attempt to convey wholly modem content in the most immediately relevant terms. The fact that these dramatic experiments often resulted in uncontrolled extremes or in a failure to rise above the chaotic mass of contemporary experience they sought to express makes their contrast with conventional verse drama even more marked than would have been the case in less outspoken forms. The failures of Auden and Isherwood are not subtle ones, but their approach to verse drama was not a subtle approach. In the thirties, Auden and Isherwood took full advantage of the stage of the Westminster Theatre, where the availability of the direction of Rupert Doone and the facilities of the experimental Group Theatre made it possible to reach an audience with direct political statement. As the energetic heirs of the poetic (if not the political) idiom of Eliot, the activities of this group were impressive enough to make Ashley Dukes caution that Our new dramatic poetry in the English theatre did not begin (as is often supposed) with the production of Murder in the Cathedral at the Canterbury and the Mercury. It began with the occasional work of the Group Theatre around 1930 under Rupert Doone, . . . Eliot's only contribution to this particular movement was a permission to perform Sweeney Agonistes which had been written some time earlier.2 As members of the Group Theatre movement, it was Auden and Isherwood who startled the little theater public with demonstrations of the variations on a political theme which were possible to modem verse 1. Richard Hoggartt Auden: An Introductory Essay (New Haven, 1951), p. 74. 2. "T. S. Eliot in me Theatre," T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. Richard March and Tarnbimuttu (London, 1948), p. 111. 123 124 MODERN DRAMA September drama. What Sweeney had suggested on the linguistic level, Auden and Isherwood extended to the levels of action and theatrical effects. Their methods were always startling, "modern," iconoclastic, and often, a little highhanded. In this respect, the plays often reveal marks of immaturity or carelessness reflected in an almost adolescent delight in viewing the modern world as it is exposed by contemporary psychology or in an extravagant handling of contemporary political and social issues. The result, in spite of virtuoso techniques, is often bad verse and careless construction, whether on the printed page or on the stage. But the world in question is always the same: a world in which there is no traditional, no satisfactory role for the modern individual, who stands in no-man's land between the We's and the They's, the Westlanders and the Ostnians-knowing the one choice unsatisfactory, the other impossible. The expression of this complex dilemma and its possible solutions led to wholesale experimentation in the verse drama; it led to the statement of uncomfortably modern themes in vocabulary and images drawn from contemporary science, clinical psychology, Marxian economics, power politics, and mechanized warfare. Even before collaboration with Isherwood began, Auden's interest in the dramatic as a vehicle for political statement can be seen in his early charades, Paid on Both Sides (1928) and The Dance of Death (1933). Both of these works reveal his usual preoccupations. Paid on Both Sides is an expression of Angst besetting man in a world broken up into "sides" for perpetual, unmeaning warfare in which all human relationships are wrenched out of normal context. The Dance of Death, an ironic presentation of the death of a society (the English bourgeoisie), opened the Group Theatre season...