Safety Area: All Text, Logos & Barcode should remain inside the Pink Dotted Lines Bleed Area: All Backgrounds should extend to, but not past, the Blue Dotted Lines DAVID RUDKIN Contemporary Theatre Studies

A series of books edited by Franc Chamberlain, Nene College, Northampton, UK

Volume 1 Playing the Market: Ten years of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, 1976--1986 Anne Fuchs Volume 2 Theandric: Julian Beck's Last Notebooks Edited by Erica Bilder, with notes by Judith Malina. Volume 3 Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre: A Documentary Record Edited by Susan Bassnett and Jennifer Lorch Volume4 Who Calls the Shots on the New York Stages? Kalina Stefanova-Peteva Volume 5 Edward Bond Letters: Volume I Selected and edited by Ian Stuart Volume 6 Adolphe Appia: Artist and Visionary of the Modern Theatre Richard C. Beacham Volume 7 James Joyce and the Israelites and Dialogues in Exile Seamus Finnegan Volume 8 It's All Blarney. Four Plays: Wild Grass, Mary Maginn, It's All Blarney; Comrade Brennan Seamus Finnegan Volume 9 Prince Tandi of Cumba or The New Menoza, by J. M. R. Lenz Translated and edited by David Hill and Michael Butler, and a stage adaptation by Theresa Heskins Volume 10 The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation Cecil Davies Volume 11 Edward Bond Letters: Volume II Selected and edited by Ian Stuart Volume 12 Theatre and Change in South Africa Edited by Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs Volume 13 Anthropocosmic Theatre: Rite in the Dynamics of Theatre Nicolas Nunez, translated by Ronan Fitzsimons and edited, with a foreword, by Deborah Middleton

Please see the back of this book for other titles in the Contemporary Theatre Studies series DAVID RUDKIN SACRED DISOBEDIENCE

An Expository Study of his Drama 1959-96

David Ian Rabey University of Wales, Aberystwyth

~ l Routledge ! ~ Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK Published by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Copyright© 1997 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in India.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Rabey, David Ian David Rudkin: sacred disobedience: an expository study of his drama, 1959-96. - (Contemporary theatre studies; (v. 24) 1. Rudkin, David, 1936- - Criticism and interpretation 2. English drama- 20th century- History and criticism I. Title 822.9' 14

ISBN 90-5702-127-7 (softcover)

Cover illustration: In the Belly of the Wolf by Helen Kozich

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. Dedicated to Charmian Savill and Isabel Morgana Rabey Page Intentionally Left Blank CONTENTS

Introduction to the Series ix Acknowledgements xi

1 Introduction: To Blazing Point 1 2 Locate, Separate, Eliminate 15 No Accounting for Taste, Afore Night Come, The Stone Dance, Children Playing, The Grace of Todd, Gear Change, Sun into Darkness, Blodwen, Home from Rachel's Marriage 3 Mind-Forged Manacles and Demonic Release 29 Moses and Aaron, House of Character/No Title, Fahrenheit 451, The Dybbuk, Burglars, Sabbatai Zevi 4 Stolen Future, Discarded Self 45 Cape Wrath, Cries from Casement as his Bones are Brought to Dublin, Bypass, Atrocity, The Filth Hunt, The Man who Stole Children, Ashes 5 A Sense of Place 63 Penda's Fen, Pritlin, The Coming of the Cross, Sovereignty under Elizabeth 6 Stolen Flames 73 The Ash Tree, The Living Grave, The Sons of Light 7 Burning Questions 93 The Triumph of Death 8 Artemis Rising 105 Hippolytus, Artemis 81 9 Sublime Monstrosity 119 Hecuba: Queen into Darkness, The Golem, Across the Water, Peer Gynt, The Saxon Shore 10 Transforming Transgressions 135 Deathwatch, The Maids, When We Dead Waken,

vii viii Contents

Rosmersholm, Testimony, Stone Virgin, Fiend My Brother, December Bride, Day of Atonement, Gawain and the Green Knight, Fire from the Womb, Farewell Dresden 11 Work in Process 153 Hansel and Gretel, Will's Way, Space Invaders, White Lady, John Pip~r in the House of Death, The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock, The Fool of the World

12 Indefinition of a Man 169 Broken Strings, The Haunting of Mahler, Symphonie Pathitique Appendix: Testimonies 183 Ian Hogg, Charlotte Cornwell, Lynda Murtagh, Peter McEnery, Gerard Murphy, Ian McDiarmid

David Rudkin: A Chronology 197

Notes 203 Index 211 INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Contemporary Theatre Studies is a book series of special interest to everyone involved in theatre. It consists of monographs on influential figures, studies of movements and ideas in theatre, as well as primary material consisting of theatre-related docu­ ments, performing editions of plays in English, and English translations of plays from various vital theatre traditions worldwide.

Franc Chamberlain

ix Page Intentionally Left Blank ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to record my thanks to the following people: The British Academy for providing a personal research grant to assist this project; Anna-Marie Taylor for help with reference points on Expressionism; Richard Downing and Rosalind Reedman for providing connections with Plato; Howard Barker for Kristeva' s Powers of Horror; Colin Rose (BBC Bristol) and Roger Gregory (BBC Pebble Mill) for assistance in locating and releasing archival material; the performers who generously contributed to the section 'Testimonies'; Sally Bartholomew-Biggs and Andy Smith for permission to quote their observations; and Franc Chamberlain, series editor, for his acceptance of this project. Special thanks to Robert Wilcher for introducing me to the work of Rudkin through one of his departmental lectures when I was an undergraduate at Birmingham University in 1978; and for much more. And to those with whom I learnt most about Rudkin's work, the cast and crew of the Terrible Beauty I An Ailleacht Scamuil production of The Sons of Light in 1990; particularly my co­ director John O'Brien who devised the rehearsal process and those cast members who gave themselves to its fullest extent: Andreas Braunizer, Miriam Delahunt, Robert Donegan, Lindsay Goulding, Andy Griffin, Paul Lucas, Iestyn Llwyd, Richard Lynch, Graham Mcinroy, Lynda Murtagh, Roger Owen, Maria Pride, Karen Rees, Kenny Reid, Owain Rogers, Elizabeth C. A. Ryan, Jesse Schwenk, Andy Smith and Jacqui Wheble.

David Ian Rabey

xi In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. 1heodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happi­ ness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in Leonard Cohen, Anthem

For see now, from This self-inflicted weal How cleverly I sicken How easily I heal Nigel Wells, 'The Dumps', Wilderness

I grow taller Driving us to crash On my father's back In a re-enactment Yet still he rides me An atonement To a certain end And I will teach you What sin has been committed How to dance That the land will not forget To dance freestyle What creeping revenge For your partner, Death, Screaming in the rock Knows only the tango, A freestyle flicker Through a dark stone hall John O'Brien, 'Taking Steps'

Teach them below, to know [Death]. If she ever come again. To hate her. To disbe­ lieve each word she speaks. Teach them, Nathan: their living duty is to disobey ... I will you all, a legacy of sacred Disobedience. David Rudkin, John Piper in the House of Death 1

INTRODUCTION: TO BLAZING POINT

How do you tell your people that the unthinkilble has happened? The Saxon Shore

What constitutes human identity, and what are the terms of its manifestation in the space it might inhabit? In the present crisis of social meaning, these questions might be rendered, with even more immediacy, thus: how might the human artistic imagination re­ spond morally to a climate that denies its value or rights? This book is an attempt to discover some terms of response, whilst offer­ ing an exposition of the drama of David Rudkin. This first chapter assembles a conceptual matrix, prismatic rather than schematic, to suggest some approaches to, and reverberations from, Rudkin's work, placing him within an unusually wide context of philosopher-poets who are not normally imagined to be likely bedfellows. But, when dealing with the imagination, anything is possible.

(i) Imagination Live Imagine: Kearney and a Postmodem Poetics

The Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, in his 1988 book The Wake of Imagination (the title of which is consciously double-edged, referring to dying or awaking), outlines a view of the predicament. In our postmodern era, Kearney claims, 'the very notion of a creative human imagination seems under threat. We no longer appear to know who exactly produces or controls the images which condition our consciousness'l. The consequent postmodernist model of the imagination - characterized in art and philosophy in terms of 'mirror-play, the crisis of inter­ pretation, the logic of the simulacrum, the disappearance of man as a creative subject, the cult of pastiche and parody'2 - 'runs the risk of eclipsing the poten­ tial of human experience for liberation. It risks cultivating the ecstasy of self-annihilation by precluding the possibility of self-expression. And it risks aban­ doning the emancipatory practice of imagining alternative horizons of existence (remembered or anticipated) by renouncing the legitimacy of narrative coher­ ence and identity'3• 2 David Rudkin

The role of the imagination is central to crises of social meaning because identity and existence - 'ex-sistere, standing out beyond oneself in a process of endless self-surpassing'4 - are creations of imagination. Kearney reviews the principal philosophical models of this force. The Hebraic Imagination character­ istically 'enables man to think in terms of opposites - good and evil, past and future'5: that is, in terms of antitheses. Here 'there is an essential ambiguity of imagination as it relates to both a divine and a human source'6, and the most for­ bidding Talmudic interpretation of Divine Law involves the renunciation of the human impulse to transcend what exists in the direction of what might exist: in short, 'Imagination is here equated exclusively with sin'7, a notion itself imagined in the Hebraic legend of the Golem, to which we shall return in Chapter Nine. In the Hellenic Imagination, 'The biblical story of Adam's fallen imagina­ tion finds its closest Greek equivalent in the myth of Prometheus', whose name, 'meaning fore-sight (pro-metheus), designates the power to anticipate the future by projecting an horizon of imaginary possibilities'. With the use of the fire which Prometheus stole from the gods, 'man was able to invent his own world, creating the various arts which transmuted the order of nature (the cosmos of blind neces­ sity governed by Zeus) into the order of culture (a realm of relative freedom where man could plan and control his own existence)'8: hence, the Renaissance, Roman­ tic and Existentialist movements' heroic reclamations of the legendary sinners of traditional morality (Prometheus, Adam, Lucifer, Don Juan): 'the modern por­ trait of the artist, as a young person or old, is habitually that of a proud demonic overreacher who negates the given world and resolves to produce a new one out of his or her own imagination'9• The Postmodernist paradigm of the imagination denies this capacity for the original creation of meanin~ positing the demise of the creative imagination and its replacement by a depersonalized consumer system of pseudo-images, where the imagination has degenerated into the comparatively impersonal'imagi­ nary', 'a mere "effect" of a technologically transmitted sign system over which the individual creative subject has no control'10• Fellini cites commercial televi­ sion culture as an example of imaginative violation and mutilation, through its propagation of 'derived images which wallow in an atmosphere of obligatory festivity, a celebration of emptiness ... hence we come to expect no more of our­ selves than the reaction of spectators, all desire for reflection and even feeling being annihilatedm. From the postmodernist context of corrosive paralysis and nihilistic de­ terminism, Kearney proposes 'an ethical-poetical imagination': ethical in its conviction that interpersonal confrontation demands resistance of assimilation into debilitating commodity fetishism by insisting on individual capacities for decision and challenge, which Kearney characterizes in the statement 'here I stand': 'Here and now, in the face of the postmodern logic of interminable deferment Introduction: To Blazing Point 3 and infinite regress, of floating signifiers and vanishing signifieds, here and now I face an other who demands of me an ethical response. This call of the other to be heard, and to be respected in his/her otherness, is irreducible to the parodic play of empty imitations'. Thus, Kearney locates a thread leading beyond the 'deconstructive labyrinth of parody' towards an ethical relation, in 'the face which haunts imagination: the ethical demand to imagine otherwise' 12• Moreover, Kearney's model of the imagination is poetical in its sense that 'The logic of the imaginary is one of both/and rather than either/or. It is inclusive and, by extension, tolerant: it allows opposites to stand, irreconcileables to co­ exist, refusing to deny the claim of one for the sake of its contrary, to sacrifice the strange on the altar of self-identity'. This is the discovery that 'occurs when the controlling censorious ego is off-guard, taken by surprise, overtaken from behind by that otherness which precedes the sense of self and subverts the priorities of self-possession'. To these ends, Kearney embraces Levi-Strauss's definition of play as 'a cathartic power to make what is impossible at the empirical level of exist­ ence possible at a symbolic level'13• He summarises the social ·role of a postmodem poetical imagination: 'By deconstructing our pseudo-images of selfhood into a play of undecidable possi­ bilities, the poetical imagination can bring us to the threshold of the other. It can shatter not only the chains of imposed reality, but also the imagos which enslave us in self-obsession, fixation and fear. So doing, it releases us into a play of desire for the other ... Resisting the pervasive sense of social paralysis, the poetic imagi­ nation would nourish the conviction that things can be changed. The first and most effective step in this direction is to begin to imagine that world as it could be otherwise114• Finally, Kearney identifies three means by which a postmodem poetical imagination might begin to achieve these objectives. These are, firstly, the hermeneutic task: 'to discriminate between a liberating and incarcerating use of images, be­ tween those that dis-close and those that close off our relation to the other'15: as he describes it elsewhere, the ethical readiness to decide between responses that disfigure and those that transfigure, those that care for the other in his/her oth­ erness and those that do not. This task intrinsically demands the historical task, 'to transfigure the postmodem present by refiguring lost narratives and prefigur­ ing future ones', reinterpreting foundational myths and cultural memories in terms of an 'anticipatory memory - in order to reread history as a seed-bed of prefig­ ured possibilities now erased from our contemporary consciousness'. This involves a 'radical pluralism' 'ethically and poetically attuned to the lost narratives of historical memory', in order to 'offer ways of breaking the stranglehold of the dominant modem ideology of progress - an ideology which has tended to re­ duce the multiplicity of historical experiences to a single totalizing doctrine'16• This task, in tum, intrinsically demands the narrative task which not only recalls 4 David Rudkin forgotten 'others' from history but equally demands the continual reinterpreta­ tion of the self through narrative identity, which 'in contrast to egological identity (permanent sameness), includes change and alteration within selfhood. Such a model constitutes the self as the reader and the writer of his own life. But it also casts each one of us as a narrator who never ceases to revise, reinterpret and clarify his own story ... Self-identity, in whatever sense, is always a "tissue of narrated sto­ ries"117. Kearney's thesis can be linked, at this point, with the proposals of Jean­ Franc;ois Lyotard in his essay 'Lessons in Paganism'. Lyotard asks 'How can you possibly grumble when the intimate and infinite power of stories is unleashed, even if you do find those who spread them despicable? If you think their version is worthless, you have only to come up with a different version'; this is why he calls for a politics based on narratives- 'after all, anyone can tell stories'18• Un­ like theories, narratives are social elements which challenge the very things that ideological authoritarian systems depend upon: namely, an exclusive monopoly on identifying what is historical, factual, valuable and possible. Anthony Kubiak moreover identifies Theatre as possibly 'not really of the symbolic order ... It is specular and as such is the site of seduction and "cap­ ture" by the Imaginary Other', thus disclosing Artaud's quarry, the "truthful precipitates of dreams", in 'the dream of the political unconscious'19•

(ii) Descent into the Hell of Naming: Kristeva and Expression

The Other, as Enemy: 'all that survives of the Beloved' Herbert Blau 20

Adrian Page has distinguished between two responses to Antonin Artaud' s vi­ sions for a theatre: that of Martin Esslin, who interprets Artaud' s title The Theatre and its Double in the sense that theatre is a representation of a reality which is essentially identical to it; and that of Jacques Derrida, who reads Artaud as dis­ missing the imitative objective of theatre, as 'denying that theatre is the re-presentation of something that already exists', rather 'it must be a creation of a new, uniquely moving event which is disturbing in itself, not because it refers to disturbing realities'21 or theories. Thus Derrida links Artaud to poststructuralist impulses, in that his vision of theatre surpasses the function of communication between playwright and audience. Page also characterizes an aspect of the work of the French philosopher Julia Kristeva with helpful succinctness: 'Kristeva's critique of semiotics attacks its reliance on a scientific model whereby a theory enables us to predict how signs will be used. Rather than producing a global theory which characterizes all potential uses of signs, semiotics is, for Kristeva, a theory which is constantly modified by its discovery of new sign-systems. As Introduction: To Blazing Point 5

Toril Moi remarks, "Language then, for her is a complex process rather than a monolithic system'"22• Kristeva' s book Powers of Horror dredges the work ofArtaud, Freud, Celine and others, in search of confronting the 'skewed' response which she characterises as abjection, 'topology of catastrophe' where the object of desire 'bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the Other': 'The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment where revelation bursts forth' 23 • Kristeva' s apocalyptic aperfUS resonate in relation to the work of Artaud, and can also be extended and applied to Rudkin, for whom language is also an index of process, fought out in an unstable landscape of ambiguous oppositions, experienced through a theatre which is first and foremost a creation of expression rather than a medium of communication. For example, in Powers of Horror Kristeva characterizes the psychological reflex of primal repression: 'the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, repeat', unable to be encompassed by the generally prevailing symbolic order. The abject is that which primal repression seeks to repress: 'The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imag­ ined as representatives of sex and murder'. On the other hand, the abject' confronts us, and this time within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the con­ stant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling ... In such close combat, the symbolic light that a third party, eventually the father, can contribute helps the future subject ... in pursuing a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject. Repelling, rejecting, repelling itself, rejecting itsel£'24• Kristeva notes the 'Freudian aporia called primal repression' as 'curious primacy, where what is repressed cannot really be held down, and where what represses always already borrows its strength and authority from what is appar­ ently very secondary: language'. At the point where symbolic function has 'its most significant aspect- the prohibition placed on the maternal body (as a de­ fense against autoeroticism and incest taboo)', there occurs a crisis of instability, where

The abject is the violence of mourning for an "object" that has always already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken 6 David Rudkin

away . .. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance. 25

Rudkin's drama is unique in its compulsive poeticization of abjection and tra­ versing of the symbolic boundaries where the human is conveniently separated from the animal, where sex and murder offer forms of definition against neo­ matemal oblivion, where language and other forms of symbolic light become matters of life or death in the battle towards individuation into subjecthood. The Sons of Light in particular is an astonishing excavation of an imaginary world composed of both causes of the crisis of abjection: 'Too much strictness of the part of the Other, confused with the One and the Law. 1he lapse of the Other, which shows through the breakdown of objects of desire'26• In this world, Child Manatond both suffers from the self-expelling, dividing, rejecting, repeating reflexes of internalized primal repression, and is characterized by the islanders as the beast­ like embodiment of abjection which loiters at the edge of (and thus partly defines the symbolic order of) their community. Gower demonstrates another form of abject inscription within a symbolic system, establishing himself in an integration that paradoxically demands his turning inside out, a form of "becoming" at the expense of his own disintegration and death. Rudkin's drama confronts that which is normally thrust aside in order to live. His poeticization of the abject can even be identified in his compulsive use of a characteristic verbal trope, the prefix 'un' (as in the coinages 'unman', 'unfact', 'undead', 'unhistory', 'UnGod'). 1his trope challenges the imagination to confront the spectre of the abhominable, yet trembles with a sense of the spectre's mockery as it abjects itself from the capacities of the imagination, even as the imagination is compelled to pursue it in attempt at comprehending definition (for example, 'undead' is manifestly a term of oppo­ sition to 'dead'; however, it is troublingly unequivalent to the normal antithetical term, 'alive', and creates within such terms of antithetical definition a simulta­ neously mocking and tantalizing wound of meaning, an intolerable significance which incorporates both attractiveness and repulsiveness: the speaker of such a trope leaves his audience surprised by their own demons, the shadows of sense).

(iii) Messengers of Whose Gods?: Psychotics, Shamans and Mercurials

Dark is a way and light is a place Odin Teatret

In his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt contends that attain­ ing and maintaining power are matters which depend on making others believe and participate in the fictions you devise27• Morality is one such fiction. Being human is another. Being British is a third. Introduction: To Blazing Point 7

Morality claims to safeguard general welfare through the imposition of restraint, and promotes attitudes of self-regulation. In William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, one child throws stones at another, aiming to miss: though they are marooned on an island, the tentative antagonist remains constrained by 'the taboo of the old life', his adversary surrounded by 'the protection of parents and school and the law'. The irony is that the civilization which has instilled this conditioning 'knew nothing' of either child 'and was in ruins'28 • The children later invent themselves anew in forms of victimization and imaginations which cannot be comprehended by notions of British restraint. Injunctions to "be human" often invoke less a refinement of our essential animality, more a dissociation from it. Even in extreme instances of self-defence, an individual may be loath to countenance acting at a certain pitch of violence if this involves forfeiting what are normally identified as attributes of civilized humanity; and this reluctance may be less to do with fear of equivalent reprisal, more to do with how the individual might be defined after, say, delivering an utterly debilitating counter-attack. The fiction of being British rests upon the twinned illusions of the conti­ nuity of social form and of the objectivity of law. Ignorance of the law is supposedly no excuse for its infringement, yet the law is labyrinthine, endlessly rewritten in ways inaccessible to the individual, and ultimately only as objective as its execu­ tors. Thus, transformation is imitative of the ideologues of society, but can also represent a strategy for resistance. When the promises of conventional popular morality prove hollow, its essence is revealed as systematic debilitation. Those who seek to triumph over this entropic landscape reach apart after some new forms of mythology which might embrace, rather than shun, the urgings of their imaginative instincts to chaos. Such mythological forms may involve rediscovery and reinvestment of the demonic and animal, straying along and beyond the ter­ ritory of the "human", at the borderline of what Kristeva terms the abject, in the sense of that which is culturally separated. Richard Pine has written of Brian Friel as a playwright who occupies the dangerous position described by Victor Turner in referring to that of shamans, as outsiders in society's rites of passage; rather, they precipitate 'actions and rela­ tionships which do not flow from a recognized social status but originate outside it'. Pine makes further observations which, I would contend, are more deeply applicable to Rudkin than Friel: for example, the striving for the recognition of Self as self-consciously Other, as 'destroyer of love, freedom and language in order to know himself as the creator of love, freedom and language'29• Ferdinanda Taviani further characterises the shaman as one who permits 'dark forces to come out into the light, who illuminates them and changes them into fertile forces'; hence, the naming of Eugenio Barba's theatre company Odin Teatret after a god who, in his shamanistic aspect, represents 'that wisdom which 8 David Rudkin balances opposing poles and forces, wisdom as tension and not as the illusory denial of alleged "Evil"'30• In Rudkin's The Triumph of Death, the character Gil mutates into the char­ acter Black Giles, in ubiquitously malign imitation of social psychosis. In contrast, Richard Schechner identifies the shaman as one who is 'not psychotic, though he may display psychotic symptoms'; rather, he is a sick man who has succeeded in curing himself, who orchestrates transformations 'into animals or other nonhu­ man beings' through focus on the body and extension to an audience, who represent 'a sort of gravitational field within which the relationship between sorcerer and bewitched is located and defined'31 • In transformation into Other, Mircea Eliade claims 'One becomes what one displays'; E. T. Kirby notes 'an enforced connection between earth, plant, animal and man in the re-creation of an ancestor' who is nevertheless mysteriously associated with the present (a process particularly pertinent to Rudkin's Penda's Fen); and Schechner notes how transformation is not limited to either person or place, but 'identifies person-time-place', where the successful transformation of any element involves the transformation of the other two, and 'A shaman is the transformer = the one who is transformed = the sur­ rogate = the link = the one who connects different realms of reality = the one who facilitates change by embodying change = the one who by changing himself helps others change'32• I propose a related but distinguished category of figure, the Mercurial, who incarnates response to social tension but who is not paralyzed into self­ / destructive psychotic imitation of it (as exemplified by Black Giles and Child Manatond), who attains the transformational power of the shaman but who strikes directly at the power base of the society of which the disease is the product (as does John Bengry). Such figures have a shamanistic effect, in that the audience provide a gravitational field ('the audience' in the case of The Sons of Light being both Nebewohl's Pit workers and a theatre audience witnessing a performance of Rudkin's eponymous narrative), but they do not stop at addressing the intermediary-patient (Child Manatond), they also expose and strike at the disease-generating social matrix (Nebewohl's Fog King/King of Love hegemony) by demonstrating that change is possible. The political signifi­ cance of such a mercurial lies in their demonstration that power is not only given, but may also be taken.

(iv) Self

In the 1973 edition of the reference book Contemporary Dramatists, David Rudkin (born 1936) introduces himself thus: Introduction: To Blazing Point 9

My self? Like you, I have two selves: an actual social, and an inner utopian, self. My Jekyll is timid, versed in the classics, fond of Mahler and Dreyer, a devotee of Hitchcock and the game of bridge, diligently learning new languages and practising the piano. My Hyde is an anarchist who would work the guillotine without remorse; also a potential sexual psychopath .... I think the theatre is a place where everybody gathered finds himself dreaming for two hours or so a communal dream. So, what is a dream? I'd say, a metaphor of the dreamer's predicament. The dramatist must therefore be at the same time asleep and awake, asleep to see, awake to show. There are many contradictions in my temperament; I think the most radical is that I am half English, half Irish. The curse of belonging both here and there is that one feels a stranger both there and here. Contrary to popular superstition in this matter, the de­ monic-romantic-mystical element in my work springs from my Saxon side; it is the Celt in me whose head is hard. 33

Rudkin's vision of self and selfhood is profoundly poetic, in Kearney's terms, in that it is actively inclusive of ostensible contraries, not without effort or cost, and self-mythologizingly aware that 'its story, like that of the imagination which sus­ tains it is never complete'; rather, it is responsive to what Kearney terms the narrative self's inexhaustible' commitment to the other~ the other who addresses me at each moment and asks me who I am and where I stand'34• Rudkin's profound sense of duality and contradiction is informed not only by his dual nationality but also by his acknowledged bisexuality. Rudkin's image of the drama as a dream can be developed further, through reference to observations by Jan Svankmajer:

Dreams are those parts of our lives where neither natural nor social laws have any power over us. That explains the contemptuous attitude towards dreams on the one hand, as opposed to a desperate attempt on the other to rationalise the dream and its function within "scientifically controlled systems". In the dream, where the greater part of the personality takes control - that personality which during our conscious state is drowned beneath the surface of the sipping crowd - we are at our own mercy, at the mercy of our own laws. And that is why in our own dreams we are not spared repression. A repression which we chase ourselves ... it could come in useful if we reversed dreams into reality and, conversely, as a certain model for prevention against real repression. 35

Reinterpretative creation constitutes a central factor in Rudkin's drama. His most romantic heroic creations, such as Hannan in The Dybbuk and John in The Sons of Light, break restrictions of perception and so radically transform the designated norm, accepting the penalties of isolation, excommunication, scorn and destruc­ tion that this may involve. His more internally beleagured protagonists lack a ready sense of mythic inventiveness to which they can appeal for association, or else they struggle towards it. But Rudkin's drama always exemplifies an expres­ sionistic faith in the capacities of the self to locate a wellspring of images - a 10 David Rudkin connection to a metaphorical dimension of being which is consciously opposi­ tional to conventional identifications of history. Such images offer a landscape and language through which to recognize self-imposed repressions, and strate­ gies for breaking their laws.

(v) Others

However, in order to express (dreams or anything else) to others (however briefly), human identity has to discover a means of manifesting itself in the space it might inhabit. Kearney's identification of the hermeneutic task is particularly salient here, in its imperative to distinguish between the liberating and incarcerating, the communicative and the manipulative, between disclosure and closure. My earlier invocation of Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning may be less bizarre than it might first appear, as Rudkin's work frequently raises paral­ lels between England in the period leading up to the sixteenth century, and that of the second half of the twentieth century. As England emerged as a nation state and as a Protestant state in the sixteenth century, the myth of the English self was in the process of formation, not least by poets and dramatists. A similar reassess­ ment of the nation state and individual identity is discernible in twentieth-century post-colonial reassessment of myth, such as the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney and the drama of JohnArden and Margaretta D'Arcy, amongst others. The Rudkin work most directly related to this tradition is Penda's Fen, which extols the liberation of some 'primal genie of the earth' poetically attuned to the otherwise lost narratives of historical memory; the objective is an exposure of life-enhancing chaos, an essential human ungovemableness infinitely defiant of reductive, totalizing historical doctrine. But Rudkin's nightmarish fables are often less optimistic in depicting the human needs to survive and to transmit knowledge to the future, in collision with the dictates of the collective, tribal ideal. For example, in The Saxon Shore, social determinism issues in the infestation of the protagonist, who both resists and capitulates to the pressure of joining his community, through becoming a werewolf. Rudkin's protagonists are usually Hellenically heroic in their impulses to detach and break free, to achieve indi­ viduation and self-determination, to refuse incorporation into any social fiction that does not acknowledge their self-invented uniqueness. They are powerful in their dissonance, individually insisting that any contact or communication take place 'Only on my own terms'36• This reflex of response accounts for the lack of meeting grounds between many characters, who are, rather, involved in construct­ ing separate realities: this process proves their triumph and/ or their tragedy, but demands an ethical response. Rudkin's characters are often engaged in the self­ narrating process which (however briefly) enables them to proclaim 'here I stand', Introduction: To Blazing Point 11 calling to be recognized, heard and respected in his I her political I sexual cultural otherness, which resists ideological pressures towards both inclusive uniformity and exclusive polarisation. Joseph Campbell's conclusion to his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces is pertinent here:

Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed . .. It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair. 37

Rather than the bright moments of tribal victories, it is the silences of personal despairs which Rudkin articulates for audiences to witness, publicly.

(v) In the Beginning was the Word

Rudkin's drama works through intensely poetic language and similar stage im­ ages to create moral landscapes which uniquely externalise inner turmoil. His plays are not naturalistic: rather, they are reinterpretations of narratives from cultural history or new-forged creation myths which assault disturbingly the settled priorities of self-possession as achieved through political "rationalities" which are exposed as essentially sanctifications of self-obsession, fixation and fear. The journey of many Rudkin characters is one towards the terms to ex­ press a personal despair, which, when expressed, is to some extent triumphed over. In beginning to become, they search for language as a mode of being: its discovery and use acts as an ever-unfolding map of the self and imagination. In this respect, Rudkin describes himself as a 'symphonic' dramatist38 in that the dramatic concord and discord of his plays depend to some extent on a language being discovered between performers and audience members, and that language is the prime mode and instrument of his characters' being (though not the only one); accordingly it evolves, as they do, in the course of the action. James Roose-Evans's significantly prurient and sensationalistic response is nonetheless informative: describing Martha Graham's dance ritual Ardent Song, he comments 'The sense of thralldom to lust, of the dark night of depravity, the terrible, relentless and inexorable impetus of passion, have rarely been so sicken­ ingly and superbly portrayed in the theatre. Only Jean Genet and David Rudkin, as writers, have been able to articulate this, the dark poetry of perversion'39• The dark poetry of otherness, which makes the ethical demand to imagine otherwise, would be a less conservative identification. In his use of the term 'perversion', 12 · David Rudkin

Roose-Evans implies the existence of a single true and right course/law of being, from which Graham, Genet and Rudkin are attempting to divert or corrupt oth­ ers. This reflex of prescriptive totalization is precisely what Kearney's paradigm of the imagination seeks to overwhelm ('The logic of the imaginary is one of both/ and rather than either/or . .. refusing to deny the claim of one for the sake of its contrary, to sacrifice the strange on the altar of self-identity'40 ). Rudkin's drive to express the poetry of otherness, from the wellspring of conventionally submerged inner possibilities, has some affinities with the objec­ tives of the early twentieth century German Expressionists, whose savage and passionate affirmations of Dionysian dynamism sprang defiantly from their pro­ found sense of individual isolation and fascination with sickness and death. In 1917, Kasimir Edschmid described the visionary imagination of the Expressionist writer as crucially different to that of the documentary or social realist: 'The Expressionist does not see, he beholds. He does not describe, he experiences. He does not reproduce, he creates. He does not accept, he seeks'41 • In 1918, Kurt Pinthus extolled drama as 'the most passionate and effective form' for expres­ sionism: 'There Man explodes in front of Man'42• Lotte H. Eisner notes how expressionist phraseology is ruled by a desire to amplify the 'metaphysical' meaning of words towards a 'total extravasation of self', where 'exterior facts are continu­ ally being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized'43• Michael Patterson observes that 'the very name of the movement suggested that ... having rejected realism, artistic creation could have its source only in the subjective personality of the artist; and yet, especially in a public medium like the theatre, the artist's desire to communicate remained intense'44• To this end, the Expressionist' sought renewal not in mass movements' but in the 'passionate search for individual regeneration'45, where dramatic progression is dictated by the writer I protagonist's search for self-realization as possible redemption of his suffering. Expressionism's 'bold violence of images ... made the theatre once again a place of intense sensory experience'46• However, it should be acknowledged that Rudkin has identified his drama, not with expressionist, but rather with gothic art, the realm of deliberate distor­ tion where extemalised spatial metaphors reflect inner psychic explorations and discoveries, and 'the realm of the synthetic heightened utterance that is extrava­ gant about its own strangeness'47• Angela Carter describes the gothic tradition in fiction as an interpretation of everyday experience 'through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas beyond everyday experience', a tradition which 'grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. Characters and events are exaggerated beyond reali~ to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural- and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a singular Introduction: To Blazing Point 13 moral function- that of provoking unease'48 • Rudkin's shorter works for televi­ sion and theatre have particular affinities with Carter's characterization of gothic tales in these terms. Further acknowledged influences are cinematic: films nair of the 1940s, Hitchcock, and Welles's Citizen Kane (with its bold and playful treat­ ments of Gregg Toland's German Expressionism-influenced cinematographic settings and atmospheres). But the individual writer who might be nominated as the closest kindred spirit to Rudkin is the novelist William Golding. Both men are Oxford-educated ex-schoolteachers, passionately interested in music, Greek myths and literature; both are committed to enquiry into the essential condition of human identity, what Golding describes as 'themes of man at an extremity, man tested like build­ ing material, taken into the laboratory and used to destruction; man isolated, man obsessed, man drowning in a literal sea or in the sea of his own ignorance', where the writer's business is 'to describe the indescribable'49• James Gindin writes of Golding's work: 'The locations, the places, are the tangible moments of par­ ticular intensity, while the ... constant [polar] opposition of the rationally understandable and the mysterious ... is the nature of all human experience'; as this polarity leads to the constant 'dissociation of thought and feeling', 'The com­ pressed metaphors of Golding's fictions are most frequently attempts to synthesise the constant problem' by suggesting a 'bridge' between otherwise separated worlds50• Gindin makes other comments on Golding which are also pertinent to Rudkin: in his work, rather than stigmatised as simply physical, 'sexuality be­ comes a tangible means for exploring a world of richer and more rewarding imagination'; primitive sources of religion and 'graphic descriptions of waste, of the functions of excretion' are connected with 'the limitations of rationalism' and its presumptions; the stripping away of 'the falsity of confidence in civilisation' is combined with the religious impulse 'to excoriate evil' and with 'the constant symbiotic struggle to combine and break away'; Gindin further links Golding with Tennyson as a creator of the extended 'dramatic poem' where the most in­ tense passages are 'not sequential statements, but ... crystallisations of emotions and states of being'51 • But the principal affinity between Rudkin and Golding is their common fascination for the point where metaphor extends into myth, and the creativity of the linguistic imagination becomes, itself, the focus of the work: the point where, according to Golding, 'For all the complexity of literature there is a single focus in literature, a point of the blazing human will. This is where definition and explanation break down. We must call on a higher language'52• For both writers, the most positive manifestation of the human imagination and identity is the constant striving towards integrity and integration by including all osten­ sibly opposing facets of their selves, and expressing rediscovery through language. My title, Sacred Disobedience, is consciously mythological, dissonant and double-edged. Seen in one light, it refers to iconoclasm: injunctions to be disobe- 14 David Rudkin dient towards the ostensibly "sacred", which can be identified more properly as ossifying, sterilising boundaries to the imagination as enshrined in terms of so­ cial morality and mythology. This is the thrust of Solomon's injunction, in Rudkin's John Piper in the House of Death, that future generations be taught to know Death, to recognize and disbelieve her lies; in other words, to develop the ability to discriminate between a liberating and incarcerating use of images. Seen in another light, 'Sacred Disobedience' might refer to the glimpsed sense of the artful human impulse to deny incorporation, except on the individual's self-defined terms. This is the 'legacy' of defiance which Solomon wishes his children to cultivate for themselves. If, like Solomon or like Rev. Franklin in Penda's Fen, one entertains the notion of divine inspiration being expressed through life­ enhancing revolutionaries, then the 'demon of ungovemableness' symbolized by Penda's flame might indeed be 'sacred' -on its own terms, of course. Thus, Rudkin's drama testifies to the essential hope which resides in the imaginative abilities of each individual to recreate myth in their own individual terms: to recognize, like Hannan in The Dybbuk, that there are other paths to truth, beyond laws which enshrine a sealing of their eyes 'against the light' of their own flame.