Theatre
A Clockwork Orange 2004 (Barbican)
Hollow drum
Christopher Edwards
Defending himself against accusations that his 1962 novel celebrates violence, Anthony Burgess points out, rightly, that the work is really an enquiry into the nature of free will. His central character, Alex, is a teenage thug and leader of a flamboyantly violent gang of other teenage thugs. Stylishly decked out in tight black clothes and bowler hats, they talk in Nadsat, a teenage patois created by Burgess as a cross between Anglo- American and Russian. We encounter them at the start of a typical night out on the town. They start at the local milk bar, where the innocent-looking beverage is laced with hallucinatory drugs. Beating up an old man carrying library books whets the appetite for a bout of 'ultra violence'. Pausing only to engage in a bit of ritual gang warfare, they make their way to the house of a writer, beat him half senseless and gang-rape his wife. She dies. The book their male victim is writing is A Clockwork Orange.
The title lends a memorable image to the book's debate about free will. Alex is finally put away after beating one of his victims to death with a bust of Beethoven, whose music Alex reveres. Taste and evil coexist in young Alex. But once inside he is selected for a cure, ironically called the 'Ludovico Technique'. His evil is burnt, out of his system by a drug that causes him to vomit whenever he has violent thoughts. Unfortunately the aversion therapy also makes him sick of the sound of his beloved classical music. Alex the reformed killer and rapist cannot choose good or evil any more. He is propelled to the good by chemical restructuring. Nor can he enjoy, other morally neutral pleasures whose beauty may, incidentally, help redeem him — such as classical music. The pith of humanity is torn out and Alex becomes a robot.
The novel is easily as schematic as this account suggests. What makes it potent, even almost 30 years on, is its depiction of violence through the literary conceit of Nadsat. Nadsat makes the terrible acts both more vivid and less realistic. It also catches the exuberant, if chilling, spirit of youthful destructiveness that Burgess is at pains to demonstrate is creative and hu- man. These elements just about compen- sate for the book's ending which manages to be both bland and breezy at once. Alex, having recovered from the treatment, grows out of his vicious sadism and is visited instead by visions of cosy domestic bliss. This may not be a cop-out from the moral perspective, but it cannot but strike us as perfunctorily imposed, with little concern for artistic harmony.
Adapting all this to the theatre poses enormous obstacles, which have not be surmounted by the RSC. Burgess's dia- logue is neither supple not tough enough to bear the weight of his moral debate. What is redeemed on the page by its clever and Persuasive literariness is cruelly exposed When allowed to stand starkly alone on stage. There is absolutely no tension, no dramatic drive and very little character development. The moral discussion comes across as just leaden and cliched moralis- ing. 'I'm not a thing to be used,' cries out Alex. And we know it to be so because we are told often and at key moments. We even have the despairing prison chaplain Popping up to declare, 'It's all a matter of freedom of choice. We all have the right to choose evil.' And the padre has certainly fingered an essential truth, only we never assent to it because the greatest resource of theatre, the bodying forth of life through the interaction of character, remains un- tapped.
Not that the production lacks spectacle. The milk bar, for instance, features a bevy of spaced-out futuristic characters, posing and gyrating with painstakingly choreo- graphed loopiness. But even this seems too carefully packaged to carry any real edge. The music, by U2, provides some suitably sinister urban atmospherics combined with witty synthesising of Beethoven's Ninth. The success of the evening is undoubtedly Phil Daniels's Alex, a glittering, devil-may- care portrayal of evil. Here is an actor for whom several roles of Jacobean villainy beckon. Richard Hudson's blood-red riv- eted steel set looks like an urban cauldron but, due to the lack of drama inside it, ends 1113 as a hollow drum.
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