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Plays 1: Christie in Love / Magnificence / The Churchill Play / Weapons of Happiness / Epsom Downs / Sore Throats
Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists Christie in Love is based on the story of John Christie, the 19th century serial killer, "like Genet, [Brenton] feels for the outcast But he's less sentimentally involved with his criminals, clearer about his ultimate strategy to show the unreality of straight lines in a curved universe, of the roles society forces on us." (Observer). "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am to wreck society", Magificence puts the small people and their protests against the bourgeois state on stage; it was described as "A wonderful piece of theatre; annexing whole new chunks of modern life and presenting them in a style at once fruitful and magnified." (The Times) In The Churchill Play, Brenton brings Churchill back to life to view the future that he invented for England and "Brenton finds a way of making us look again at the past which has shaped the future into which he sees us drifting" (New Society). Weapons of Happiness is "a vision of revolution which is quite extraordinary in its creative ambiguity, its richness, its power to stimulate, to threaten and to inspire" (Sunday Times) while Epsom Downs "echoes Bartholomew Fair: a great public festival, held on common land and pulling in punters of every degree a teaming, Bruegel-like composition" (The Times) The last play in this collection Sore Throats, is a witty and harsh examination of sexual proclivities from within and outside marriage: "No recent play compares for theatrical power and painful bravado." (Observer)
406 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1987
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August 28, 2016
Christie in Love: This is definitely a postmodern play, with all the weirdness that entails. Thematically, Christie in Love is about sexual perversion and police procedures, but it is more interesting structurally. The play is jerky, by which I mean Brenton relies on sharp shifts in things like tone, style, lighting, and scenery to throw different plot elements into contrast and create a rather confusing disjunction.
Magnificence: Not quite as disjointed as Christie in Love, but this is still a play that relies heavily on shifts of focus. I don't know, it doesn't work very well for me. Maybe because the heyday of revolutionary Maoist fervor is over and there are few radical violent Leftists left. The play's revolutionary politics don't seem to offer much in my reading.
The Churchill Play: So far this has been my favorite play in this collection. Like the previous two plays, there is definitely a socialist edge to The Churchill Play, but it seems more lucid and Aristotelian. There are some experimental elements to it, but by and large this is a nicely postmodern critique of the ways in which political figures and a mainstream sense of history are utilized as tools of oppression and social constraint. The play is metatheatrical, with a group of detained prisoners in an imagined 1980s England putting on a play about Churchill for a group of government inspectors checking on the camp.
Weapons of Happiness: A really good play about the struggles of the working class, Weapons of Happiness is simultaneously anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist, and condemns the sometime pedestrian utopianism of English (though it's the same in the US) youth. On the one hand, there is a group of young factory workers who have some manner of communist notions, but who fundamentally misunderstand what is involved in really existing socialism--they think it is sufficient to take over the factory where they work without ever thinking or planning for the actual logistics of setting up a worker's collective. On the other hand, there is the factory owner who seems to suffer from affluenza. His marriage is over, he is an alcoholic, and he doesn't really care that his business is failing. And then on the third hand is Josef Frank, who actually was hanged in 1952 after a show trial in his native Czechoslovakia. Brenton imagines him still alive and living in Britain, trying to live a quiet out of the way life. Frank is haunted by the memory of how he was tortured and made to confess to crimes he never committed, as well as by the memory of his own devotion to the Czechoslovak communist party. So he has little sympathy for the disorganized utopianism of the young factory workers who more or less conscript him as a 'real communist.'
Epsom Downs: No real plot to this play, rather a kind of slice-of-life set of vignettes and mini-plots all revolving around the Derby. The play draws in all different kinds of people--poor people hoping to win enough to buy ladders for a roofing business, a socialist peer, reformed gamblers and alcoholics now serving as missionaries, bookies, trainers, jockies, gypsies. Each character or set of characters has their own fears, hopes, worries, ideas--but their lives all revolve around the Derby for this one day. And the Derby is not merely the race, it is the entirety of the experience.
This is also a Brechtian play, alienating viewers from the experience of the race itself. The horses are played by naked actors, and both the course and the race itself are personified, addressing the audience. All of these elements alienate viewers and draw our attention to the performative nature of the Derby.
Sore Throats: Not really my kind of play. This seems like a precursory to In-Yer-Face theatre, with some graphic domestic violence and explicit sexual themes.
Magnificence: Not quite as disjointed as Christie in Love, but this is still a play that relies heavily on shifts of focus. I don't know, it doesn't work very well for me. Maybe because the heyday of revolutionary Maoist fervor is over and there are few radical violent Leftists left. The play's revolutionary politics don't seem to offer much in my reading.
The Churchill Play: So far this has been my favorite play in this collection. Like the previous two plays, there is definitely a socialist edge to The Churchill Play, but it seems more lucid and Aristotelian. There are some experimental elements to it, but by and large this is a nicely postmodern critique of the ways in which political figures and a mainstream sense of history are utilized as tools of oppression and social constraint. The play is metatheatrical, with a group of detained prisoners in an imagined 1980s England putting on a play about Churchill for a group of government inspectors checking on the camp.
Weapons of Happiness: A really good play about the struggles of the working class, Weapons of Happiness is simultaneously anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist, and condemns the sometime pedestrian utopianism of English (though it's the same in the US) youth. On the one hand, there is a group of young factory workers who have some manner of communist notions, but who fundamentally misunderstand what is involved in really existing socialism--they think it is sufficient to take over the factory where they work without ever thinking or planning for the actual logistics of setting up a worker's collective. On the other hand, there is the factory owner who seems to suffer from affluenza. His marriage is over, he is an alcoholic, and he doesn't really care that his business is failing. And then on the third hand is Josef Frank, who actually was hanged in 1952 after a show trial in his native Czechoslovakia. Brenton imagines him still alive and living in Britain, trying to live a quiet out of the way life. Frank is haunted by the memory of how he was tortured and made to confess to crimes he never committed, as well as by the memory of his own devotion to the Czechoslovak communist party. So he has little sympathy for the disorganized utopianism of the young factory workers who more or less conscript him as a 'real communist.'
Epsom Downs: No real plot to this play, rather a kind of slice-of-life set of vignettes and mini-plots all revolving around the Derby. The play draws in all different kinds of people--poor people hoping to win enough to buy ladders for a roofing business, a socialist peer, reformed gamblers and alcoholics now serving as missionaries, bookies, trainers, jockies, gypsies. Each character or set of characters has their own fears, hopes, worries, ideas--but their lives all revolve around the Derby for this one day. And the Derby is not merely the race, it is the entirety of the experience.
This is also a Brechtian play, alienating viewers from the experience of the race itself. The horses are played by naked actors, and both the course and the race itself are personified, addressing the audience. All of these elements alienate viewers and draw our attention to the performative nature of the Derby.
Sore Throats: Not really my kind of play. This seems like a precursory to In-Yer-Face theatre, with some graphic domestic violence and explicit sexual themes.
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