Serjeant Musgrave's Dance: An Unhistorical Parable

by John Arden

Written in 1959 and premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on October 22 of that year. In Arden's introductory note to the text, he describes it as "a realistic, but not a naturalistic" play.

The work follows three privates in the British Army and their sergeant, all of whom are deserters from a foreign imperialist war. Serjeant Musgrave and his men, Hurst, Sparky and Attercliffe, come to a northern English coal mining town in 1879. The community is in the grip of a coal strike and cut off by winter snow. The one means of reaching the town is by canal barge. They arrive in the company of the Bargee, a foul-mouthed, disrespectful individual who teases and abuses everyone, especially those in authority. In the local inn the soldiers meet Mrs. Hitchcock, who runs the inn, and the barmaid Annie. The soldiers are greeted by the mayor, parson and constable, who ask them to recruit men in hopes of alleviating some of the town's unemployment as a way to rid the town of their economic dead weight. Musgrave pretends that this is indeed his goal, and asks Mrs. Hitchcock about Billy Hicks, a dead fellow soldier from the mining town. It is revealed that Billy was the father of Annie's illegitimate child, but the baby died, and Annie's sanity has suffered from the loss of both Billy and her child.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, 20th Century

118 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

One of the most important of the British playwrights to emerge in the mid-20th century. His plays mix poetry and songs with colloquial speech in a boldly theatrical manner and involve strong conflicts purposely left unresolved.

Arden grew up in the industrial town of Barnsley, the character of which he captured in his play The Workhouse Donkey (1963). He studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and at Edinburgh College of Art, where fellow students performed his comedy All Fall Down (1955), about the construction of a railway. He continued to write plays while working as an architectural assistant from 1955 to 1957. His first play to be produced professionally was a radio drama, The Life of Man (1956). Waters of Babylon (1957), a play with a roguish but unjudged central character, revealed a moral ambiguity that troubled critics and audiences. His next play, Live Like Pigs (1958), was set on a housing estate. This was followed by his best-known work, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), set in a colliery town in 1860–80. Both plays caused controversy.

In 1957 Arden married Margaretta D’Arcy, an actress and playwright, with whom he wrote a number of stage pieces and improvisational works for amateur and student players. The Happy Haven, produced in 1960 in London, is a sardonic farce about an old people’s home. The Workhouse Donkey is a crowded, exuberant, and comic drama of municipal politics. Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1964) is a drama set in the Borders region of Scotland in the 1530s and written in Lowland Scottish vernacular. Left-Handed Liberty (1965), written to mark the 750th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, characteristically dwells on the failure of the document to achieve liberty. His writing became more politically committed, as evidenced in the two radio plays The Bagman (1972) and Pearl (1978). Later plays—The Non-Stop Connolly Cycle (1975), a six-part drama based on the life of the Irish patriot James Connolly, as well as the Arthurian drama The Island of the Mighty (1972), Vandaleur’s Folly (1978), and The Little Gray Home in the West (1982), among others—were written with D’Arcy. Arden’s fiction includes the novel Silence Among the Weapons (1982; also published as Vox Pop) and the story collection The Stealing Steps (2003).

At his death, he was lauded as "one of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s".

Reviews

[Barry Pierce · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange but poignant play. There are some images in this that will take a while to forget. However, it is quite slow, somewhat over-long and the songs get tiring by the end of Act 1. *shrugs*

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is one of the curios of the "Angry Young Man" era of the 1950s, when writers like Arden, John Osborne and Harold Pinter transformed the British stage from a theatre of tasteful dramas and witty comedies into a forceful, subversive, often surreal lampooning of national decline, complacency and class strictures. Musgrave is a bizarre parable about a squadron of British soldiers, fresh from a Victorian military campaign, who arrived in a hardscrabble mining town. Ostensibly planning to recruit for their regiment, their leader in facts plans to punish the town in imitation of his unit's atrocities abroad, bringing the sharp edge of "Rule Britannia" home. Arden's play is very much of its moment in British theatre; angry, artful, but also crude and sometimes ill-structured, more fond of Brechtian alienation devices (an endless parade of marching and drinking songs) and striking symbolism (the climactic scene features Musgrave's squad aiming a Gatling gun straight at the audience) than coherent plotting. Written at a moment when the Suez Crisis and colonial wars in Kenya and Malaya were still fresh in the British mind, Arden's play at least captures the uncertainty and betrayal of postwar Brits who realized that the old patriotic slogans wouldn't avail them of much in a postcolonial world. Whether it works as drama (and to be fair, such a symbolism-laden play is hard to fully capture on the page) is up to the individual reader, or audience member.

[Rima · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Join along with my madness, friend. I brought it back to England but I've brought the cure too - to turn it on to them that sent it out of this country - way-out-ay they sent it, where they hoped that only soldiers could catch it and rave!"

My new favourite modern classic play! Showed in 1959 but set between 1860-1880, Sergeant Musgrave's Dance shows the desire of Sergeant Musgrave to avenge his fellow soldier's death in a colonial war that has lost its fire because the colonised victims have started taking up arms. He comes to an impoverished town in the north of London believing they will join his 'dance'. Little does he know that these people are hungry and hungry people don't want to fight. They want food.

I love how this play calls to attention the problems people face living in a country that has been at war for so long. Just as much as Sergeant's Musgrave's Dance suggests the futility of colonialism, it's shockingly relevant for the wars in Vietnam, Egypt, Iraq and let's admit it, the global wars we are currently living in.

[Granny Swithins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting piece with a lot to say about how the ruling class exploits the working class both here and abroad; soldiers are sacrificed to create a justification for slaughter, and no one cares about the dead whether they're striking miners or "rebels" resisting occupation. The Mayor and Parson care little whether the town's unemployed are shot by the soldiers as rioters, or whether they're enticed by the Queen's shilling to enlist and get killed overseas instead. Meanwhile the deserting soldiers fight among themselves, while the threat of capture grows nearer. Musgrave enters the town with what he believes to be worthy intentions, telling the truth about what life in the army entails, but is soon overcome with the desire to take revenge on the ruling classes, a life for a life. But can violence ever be justified as a means against violence?

[Athena · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather terrible.

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took a while into ----however did enjoy it.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

The vertiginous buildup of the first two acts sadly sputters in the third

[savanna renee lambert · Rating 4 out of 5]

first play I read at RADA. Some of the images from this story will stick with me forever.

[ecem · Rating 2 out of 5]

asker savaş sarmaz

[Arda Dinçer · Rating 4 out of 5]

1930 menemen olayı

[T. Melisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

rest in peace serjeant musgrave you would have loved army dreamers by kate bush

[Gergő Tóth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A grave story about violence on the verge of senses.

[Julian Munds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is good. The images are striking the language and dialect is rich. I felt this one in my gut.

[Alex Sarll]

Something of folk horror in the frozen northern town, its industry shut down, and the soldiers who arrive in the middle of the tension with their own haunting secret. Something all too timely, as well, in the treatment all factions of the men dish out to Annie, the only young female character. A bleak and in places didactic play, but I'd be keen to see it performed.