THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL THE PLAYWRIGHT AND HIS THEATRE: HOWARD BRENTON, DAVID HE AND SNO0 WILSON being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the University of Hull by HANS CHRISTIAN IB ANDERSEN CAND.PHIL.(COPENHAGEN) January 1987 23 21A1 198V THE PLAYWRIGHT AND HIS THEATRE: HOWARD BRENTON, DAVID HARE AND SNO0 WILSON In the context of changes in British theatre theory and practice, in particular in the post-1968 Fringe, is it possible to consider playscripts as literary works, expressing the views of individual writers? The emphasis within the early Fringe was on collectively organized work- shops and group creativity, and on the exploration of non-verbal expression on stage, something which had been anticipated by the pre-1968 avant-garde and which amounted to a challenge to the playwright's traditionally dominant position in the theatre. However, the playscript, as an example of written fictional narrative, dependent on the theatre for its realization but not its creation, still commands an independent status as a work, and the fiction enables the playwright to explore and evaluate reality in his own terms. Snoo Wilson's works illustrate his clear awareness on the power of fiction to posit the equal reality of the rational and the irrational in dramatic terms, as a metaphor for our way of understanding reality outside the theatre, where reality and fiction seem difficult to distinguish. David Hare focusses on the discrepancy between fiction and reality in the way we experience our lives and interpret history, and he seeks, as a conscious story-teller, to reveal, in imaginative terms, how that discrepancy leads to actual suffering. Howard Brenton's declared preference for content and fact, rather than form and fiction, and for the theatre as a democratic medium, cannot conceal his consistent endeavour to use fictional narrative as fantastic as Wilson's to oppose bourgeois versions of reality. In spite of their having learned to work with theatre companies and, hence, come to see themselves as parts of a larger, complex art, these play- wrights, like their predecessors, continue to write fictions which express their personal vision in a form, print, that is accessible and analysable in isolation from actual performance. Hans Christian lb Andersen, Cand.Phil. (Copenhagen) DRAMA Al kunst er udtryk og tydning. Men al anden kunst er menneskets for4g paa at fastholde og bevare, at tyde og faestne det flygtende Sjeblik, et led i menneskets evighedsdr4. Skuespilkunsten derimod, som selv er saa flygtig, er potenseringen af Sjeblikket, det fuldkomme "Sjeblik, det fuldkomme nu, nuet med alt, ikke blot hvad det rummer, men hvad det kan rumme. Frederik Schyberg: Skuespilkunst, 1947. TABLE OF CONTENTS page no. Table of Contents. Acknowledgement and Declaration. Introduction. 1 Chapter One: Text and Context. 20 Chapter Two: Snoo Wilson - the Playwright as Creative Maker. 66 Chapter Three: David Hare - Finding Truths by Telling Lies. 117 Chapter Four: Howard Brenton - Moving the Audience Towards Enlightenment. 180 Conclusion. 236 Appendices. One: The Stage Plays of Brenton, Hare and Wilson. 249 Two: Visits by Foreign Avant-Garde Companies to Great Britain. 255 Three: Playwrights' Debates in Print. 257 Bibliography. 259 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I should like to express my sincere gratitude to the University of Hull, whose generosity enabled me to carry out my post—graduate research there, and to my supervisor, Mr. Donald H. Roy, for his support and advice. I am also indebted to my wife and my parents for their moral and practical support, to the University of Newcastle for the use of resources and to Mrs. Annemarie Rule for her secretarial expertise. / DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and that it was completed solely by myself. #-eaa. 1 INTRODUC TI ON 2 "You could certainly plan a fascinating symposium on the subject 'Death of the Contemporary Playwright: Who Cares?'". / So wrote the critic Michael Coveney in Plays and Players in 1985, in the context of the fashion, then, for adaptations of novels in the British theatre. Such adaptations had, he said, worked well on stage, but their relative dominance in the theatre could be seen as a sign that original dramatic work was becoming scarce, and he blamed this on the development of collaborative creation on the theatrical Fringe of the 1970s. Because of this, he concluded, the playwright "may not be all that crucial a presence or functionary" in the 2 theatre. Even though Coveney's remarks were written tongue-in-cheek, they were not entirely without foundation, and they point to two significant facts about recent British theatre, which form the background to this work: the British theatre relies on its playwrights, whose welfare is a source of regular concern among theatre critics; and the playwright's position in the theatre and that of his art, the written play, have changed over the last thirty years, from being central and, apparently, indispensable to theatrical performance, to being optional, at least in theory. As somebody used to approaching playscripts as examples of a major literary genre, I have wanted to investigate whether it remains possible to consider the playscript in those terms, not least in the light of develop- ments in literary, dramatic and theatrical criticism, but also, and crucially, in the context of changes in the British theatre itself, changes away from the traditional view of the playwright as a literary artist working outside the theatre itself. One might put it, as Arthur Symons did in 1924: The question is this: whether the theatre is the invention of the dramatist, and of use only in so far as it interprets his creative work; or whether 1 M. Coveney, "From Page to Stage", Plays and Players, (henceforth: PP), No.380, (May 1985), pp. 16-19. 2 Ibid., p. 18. 3 the dramatist is the invention of the theatre, which has made him for its own ends, and will be able, once it has wholly achieved its mechanism, to dispense with him altogether, except perhaps as a kind of prompter.3 The question might be expressed differently: does the playwright belong to the theatre or the theatre to him, is he in command of the complex medium of the theatre or simply one of its constituent parts; can you speak of 'the playwright's theatre' or even keep him distinct from the theatre in which he works? In a European context - and this also applies to the British theatre from the late nineteenth century - the playwright became increasingly iso- lated from the theatre. Joachim Fiebach, in his work on twentieth century theatre theory, Von Craig bis Brecht (1975), claims that this process of separation goes back to the seventeenth century and that it was started by the division of labour that resulted from the development of European capitalism. 4According to Fiebach, this separation was complete by the nineteenth century, when the playwright had acquired the status of the 'true initiator' of the theatrical event, which was essentially seen as a presenta- tion or embodiment of the playwright's script. The separation of playwright and theatre became evident when the theatre - the so-called artistic theatre - began to develop its own non-verbal language late in the last century. With this development, the playwright came to be seen as a verbal, literary artist, whose work might not forever dominate the theatre. The British theatre has not developed exactly along the lines suggested by Fiebach. The playwright did come to be considered as a litera- ry artist from the late nineteenth century, and several serious playwrights of our own century have been both novelists and playwrights, among them 3 A. Symons, "A New Art of the Stage" in Studies in Seven Arts (1924), quoted in G. Lloyd Evans, The Language of Modern Drama (1977), p. 7. 4 J. Fiebach, chapter entitled "Theater und Drama" in Von Craig bis Brecht (1975), p. 303ff. 4 J.B. Priestley, Somerset Maughamand John Galsworthy. 5 But the artistic theatre was slow in developing in Great Britain and could not be said to provide a viable alternative to the playscript-dominated theatre until after the Second World Wax. So strong was the position of the scripted play that when George Devine set out to create a modern native British theatre in the 6 1950s, he began by approaching the nation's novelists. In fact, only in the modern period in the British theatre, beginning with the presentation of John Osbornds Look Back in Anger at Devine's Royal Court Theatre in 1956, did modern European theatre theory begin to play a full part. The resulting conflict between the script-based theatre and the artistic theatre became particularly obvious in Britain after 1963, coming to a head in the formation of the so-called Fringe theatre from 1968. This is therefore an ideal period for an investigation of the relationship between playwright and company, playscript and performance. The period to be dealt with in this work can be said to encompass the period after 1956, when the British theatre became truly international and began not only to absorb foreign ideas but also itself to influence foreign theatre. In this period, the theatre began to be seen as a major contempo- rary art form, capable of providing a focus for the British post-war welfare state, at a time when Britain, like other European nations, was undergoing radical cultural change. At the same time, an expanding system of state sponsorship for the arts, administered by the Arts Council of Great Britain, was instrumental in giving the theatre the material support which it needed in order to be able to develop into the very varied and lively sector of British cultural life which it now is.7 5 According to K.J.