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Alien Nation: David Hare's History Plays

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Alien Nation: David Hare's History Plays Alien Nation: David Hare's History Plays A thesis submitted in partial fulfIlment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Canterbury by Stephen Coates University of Canterbury 1989 Abstract This thesis will examine seven plays by David Hare, which together constitute a social history of Britain since the Second World War. Hare's main project is to demonstrate to the members of his audience, most of whom will be "middle class;"· that they are psychologically damaged by the capitalist-patriarchal system. The ideological fictions which have evolved to justify the existing structure of society and to discourage the oppressed from challenging that structure create psychological contradictions which cannot be resolved without radical social change. The middle classes are suffering from alienation no less than the oppressed, even though they may not be aware of it, and the loss of their privileged economic and political positions would be a small price to pay for the greater happiness which would accompany the removal of these contradictions. The history plays are therefore an attempt to create a counter-hegemony, by undermining established myths about the nature of contemporary British society. Chapter 1 provides brief accounts of British political theatre since the 1960s and the origins of Western Marxism. It also introduces the Marxist concepts of alienation, ideology and hegemony (in particular, the theories of Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse), relating them to the oppression of women as well as the oppression of classes. Chapters 2-8 examine the plays separately in the light of these concepts, with different emphases determined by the content of the plays. Specific issues which are examined in these chapters include the loss of individuality in contemporary capitalism, and the stultifying effects of certain current myths - about the transcendent power of romantic love, the liberating force of the sexual act, the social revolution which took place during World War Two and the alleged benevolence and contentment of the 1950s. Chapter 9 provides some brief comments on political theatre in general, and realist political theatre in particular, and considers how far the intentions of the playwright may be sabotaged by theatrical conventions and the preconceptions of the audience. 2000 Contents Preface 1 1. You say you want a revolution: Historical and theoretical background 3 2. Love and war: Licking Hitler 19 3. The age of Reason: Plenty 40 4. Sgt. Pepper's lonely hearts club band: Teeth 'n'Smiles 64 5. The condition of the middle class in England: Brassneck 85 6. The Guildford file: Knuckle 105 7. Escape from freedom: Dreams ofLeaving 127 8. All the lonely people: Wetherby 145 9. Genre-bender: The possibility of political theatre 169 Bibliography 179 Preface In September 1973 the Nottingham Playhouse saw the premiere of David Hare's Brassneck, the first of a series of plays in which he traces the changes that have taken place in British society since the Second World War. In the following sixteen years he has written another seven: Knuckle (1974), Teeth 'n'Smiles (1975), Licking Hitler (1978), Plenty (1978), Dreams of Leaving (1980), Wetherby (1985) and The Secret Rapture (1988).1 This catalogue, which constitutes roughly a third of Hare's dramatic output so far, includes five stage plays, two pieces for television and one feature film. In 1984, three of these works were published in one volume by Faber and Faber under the title of The History Plays. This title applies equally well to the other five, so I have adopted it for my thesis. At first glance, it may not be obvious why Hare's works should be called "history plays." They are not set in the distant past, like Walter Scott's great historical novels. Nor do they deal with major historical occurrences, like Shakespeare's chronicles of the English kings. Hare's characters are all fictitious, and when they are involved in momentous events they are always on the periphery. Brassneck, and some of the others to a lesser extent, could be described as broad historical sagas spanning several generations in the Harold Robbins mould. But by no stretch of the imagination could Knuckle or Teeth 'n' Smiles be said to be sagas, so we are left with the problem, why "history plays"? The most accurate description of Hare's project is probably sociological history. The focus of the plays is on the daily lives of people in the community, showing how they are affected by the larger changes going on around them: For five years I have been writing history plays. I try to show the English their history. I write tribal pieces, trying to show how people behaved on this island, off this continental shelf, in this century. How this Empire vanished, how these ideals died.2 If history is conceived as the attempt to understand how people from a particular place at a particular time thought, and why they acted as they did, then Hare's portrayal of a disintegrating rock group in the late sixties in Teeth 'n'Smiles deserves the name just as much as Edward Thompson's discussion of the Corresponding Societies of the 1790s in The Making of the English Working Class. It could be argued, however, that I have omitted some texts which fit this definition of a history play, while including others which do not. What justification is 1. The last of these was published too late to be incorporated in my thesis. 2. David Hare, "A Lecture Given at Kings College, Cambridge, March 5 1978," in Licking Hitler (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 66; hereafter cited as "Lecture." 2 there for choosing Teeth 'n' Smiles, Knuckle and Dreams of Leaving ahead of Slag (1970), The Great Exhibition (1972) and Pravda (1986)? I have relied on my intuition in this matter, and the first three seemed to me more typical of British society in general, or at least of substantial portions of it. The others were less interesting because they were too limited in scope. ,In The Great Exhibition, for example, the section of society under consideration is very small, so that it is impossible to draw from it any interesting conclusions about society as a whole. The same is true of Slag, which describes an attempt to establish a feminist Utopia in a small private school, and Pravda, which concentrates almost solely on the corruption of the media. Another point worth mentioning is the order in which I have arranged the chapters of this thesis. Instead of examining the plays in the order in which they were written, I have arranged them according to the chronological periods which they cover. In those which span several decades, I have used the latest period as the dominant one. So Brassneck, which runs from 1945 to 1973, is placed between Teeth 'n'Smiles (set in June 1969) and Knuckle (set in 1974). Since I am primarily concerned with British history and the political lessons to be learned from it, this structure seemed the most appropriate. I have not simply imposed my own ideas on Hare's plays, as the deranged Charles Kinbote does in Nabokov's Pale Fire. Nevertheless, the "Hare" of my thesis is a textual creation, quite distinct from the real Hare who lives in London and directs at the National Theatre. It should be borne in mind throughout what follows that whenever I discuss "Hare's" political beliefs, his intentions, his development or his errors, I am always talking about a literary device. This thesis is openly polemical, and I believe that it is important that it should be accessible. Most readers will find reference to a personalised author easier to understand, since this is traditional critical practice, so I am quite happy to talk about an author even though I am really talking solely about texts. Even the real Hare's own statements about his work, which I cite frequently, have no special authority. This does not mean that they are irrelevant, but an author's plans can only ever have a limited influence on the text which he or she produces, because other factors - such as what things cannot be said or even imagined in a particular society, who decides which books are published and which plays performed, and the limitations of the various genres - are equally important.3 In any case, these interviews and lectures are also just texts, no more or less definitive than the opinions of any other critic, theorist or historian. Their purpose is to provide clarification rather than proof. 3. See Terry Eagleton, "Categories for a Materialist Criticism," in Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 44-63. Chapter 1 You say you want a revolution: Historical and theoretical background In one of the best books on the left-wing theatre movement which arose in the sixties, John Bull distinguishes two fonns of committed drama.1 On one side stands the agit-prop tradition, which was conventionally Marxist, regarding the capitalist system as the cause of all injustice in society and the working class as the natural agent of change. Groups such as CAST and 7:84, and playwrights such as John McGrath and David Edgar, thought of their productions as weapons in the class struggle, intended to raise the consciousness of the proletariat. On the other side, there is what Bull calls the avant-garde, which "occupied the territory of a counter-culture intent on bypassing the discourse of orthodox political debate. "2 Initially, this was a radical movement more concerned with personal liberation than with social change. In so far as it had a political creed, it emphasised political change through cultural revolution.
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