Rebels without Applause
The electrifying revival of A Prayer For My Daughter at the Young Vic is yet another testament to the durability of the best new plays from another era. The same fate seems not to have befallen Howard Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness at the Finborough.
Brenton’s play was the first new piece on the Lyttelton stage, not its inaugural production (as The Times stated) — that was Peggy Ashcroft in Beckett’s Happy Days — and it got critical short shrift then as it did the other day.
Mainly this is because critics think that equating a strike in a British potato crisp factory with the old upheavals in Eastern Europe is an essentially fatuous dramatic tactic. I don’t know why critics think that, but they do, as if Brenton hadn’t seen the irony of this parallelism himself; indeed, it’s part of the dramatic spring of the play.
I remember Brenton’s play as being rich, raw and funny (and brilliantly directed by David Hare) with superb performances from Frank Finlay and Julie Covington. My memories of Max Stafford-Clark’s first production of A Prayer For My Daughter are similarly potent, but Dominic Hill’s Young Vic version is at least as comparably compelling.
It is a strange phenomenon that my generation is revisiting these plays without the intervening upheavals endured by our parents in a world war. We are fortunate that this is so, not least because we are able to spot very clearly the legacies and discontinuities in our cultural life.
I honestly don’t think that the critics who felt that “time has been unkind” to Brenton’s play would have felt any differently about it had they seen it in 1976. Sure, his picture of “contemporary” England has dated, but so has John Osborne’s and Bernard Shaw’s.
Plays and theatre take you to other worlds as well as to a heightened version of your own. Is no-one really still interested in how the first fringe generation occupied the large stage in the National for the very first time, and what were the issues?
Utopianism is the great theme in Brenton’s plays, and I like Dominic Dromgoole’s phrase that his subject is “the one true journey, the journey towards the light.” Dromgoole likes the muck, blood and chaos in his work, and so do I. Heroically, Dromgoole rescued Brenton’s Abelard and Heloise play, In Extremis, from the American college circuit.
He is doing a similar rescue job for the on/off reputation of actor/playwright Jack Shepherd and, who knows, another actor/playwright, Che Walker, who has written some fine pawky stuff already and has produced a new piece, Frontline, for this summer’s Globe repertoire.
Che is stuck with a giveaway moniker, but he bears it lightly. His parents are the television director Robert Walker (once a winningly rude and aggressive director of the old Half Moon Theatre in Alie Street; he sprung Simon Callow on us as Arturo Ui) and that magnificent actress Ann Mitchell.
So he’s got talent in his genes, and his jeans. His street scene of Camden Town is certain to be lively. Whether or not it has the political scope and ambition of Brenton remains to be seen. Brenton once wrote a wonderful quasi-Jacobean panoramic play about a day at the races, Epsom Downs. It might yet prove a good model for Che’s revolutionary night out in the tourist season.
