Theatre
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE Chips with Everything. (Royal Court.) I COULD fill a short book in describing why Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything is a bad play. But, to be brief, its central fault is that Wesker has started with a wide-ranging dossier of conclusions about our class-ridden society and has then laboriously built them into a familiar setting, an RAF training camp, which is quite incapable of accommo- dating them. /Esthetically the result is that his gobbets of significance stand out as uncom- fortably as undigested mouthfuls spaced along the length' of a snake; and politically the effect 01 the clash between content and context is to make Wesker's already over-simplified sociology appear quite grotesque. It is one of the problems of serious artists in our self-conscious age that they are too aware of the need to build 'signifi- cance' into their work; but it remains their re- sponsibility to make it fit so snugly that it seems to arise naturally.
The play starts well. John Dexter has directed a brilliant silent impression of conscripts arriving at the camp to begin a strange new life.
But, within moments of their settling down in their hut, Aircraftman Thompson, a rich banker's son, launches into a long description of a cafe he once saw where the menu announced 'Chips with everything.' He builds this into a sYmbol of the drab sterOtyped existence which the working classes accept. And he has decided, we later learn, to stay in the ranks so that he can lead them to demand something better.
He speaks with a repellent arrogance and scorn which produce electrifying hostility in Oneself and should do the same (or more) among the other conscripts—but Thompson goes unin- terrupted. Such blatant disregard of character and situation results in a screeching dramatic hiatus. There are many such moments, and they arise directly from the clash between Wesker's setting and his symbolic intentions. This is true also of the exaggerated brutality of his officers and policemen. Such simple-minded evil is acceptable' in a fable (the Empress, for example, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle), but it becomes laughable in a naturalistic context which is part of our own experience. The obtrusive self-consciousness of the play's sYmbols and allusions may even be apparent if I recount the full story in Wesker's own terms. He has, in Thompson's speech, laid the base for his Play. Will Thompson be able to lead the others to fuller awareness, to a more critical attitude to- wards authority? He tries several tacks. A cul- tural one: at a Christmas party he persuades thenn•to recite Burns and to improvise a modern Bomb-conscious version of an old ballad instead Of, as the camp commandant wishes, drugging themselves with rock-and-roll. An anarchistic one: he leads a raid on the coke dump, whereas they would just have shivered passively beside an empty stove. He fails, however, to impress them with his heroic refusal to take part in gory bayonet training.
Meanwhile, there is constant drill practice, symbolising the pressures towards conformity which Thompson is challenging. And, more privately, the officers have been giving Thomp- son himself the full Establishment treatment of a rebel—a mixture of tolerance, threats, flattery, promises. His chief opponent is an officer of his own age, a sinister fellow and homosexual to boot, who is made to pronounce more than once the weighty post-Eliotism: 'We listen but we do not hear, we befriend but we do not touch, we applaud but we do not act.' This officer finally undermines him by suggesting that his real mo- tive is power, easy power among the small fry. Thompson stumbles back to the but a broken man.
But this play is not just another version of the Establishment digesting the rebel. Wesker goes much further and questions the nature of all leadership. In the first act Thompson himself has suggested that leaders are unnecessary, and in the second half of the play we are speci- fically shown two Messiahs, one true and one false. At one point in his final interrogation, Thompson exclaims, 'Good God,' and the crafty officer snaps back : 'Good God? Why do you call upon God, are you his Son?' He is not, by the very fact that he is militantly a leader. But just after he slumps back into the hut, the duffer of the squad, Smiler Washington, comes stumbling in too. He has been bullied and bashed by the NCOs and has even been punished for the permanent smile on his face, which everyone takes for a smirk because they 'won't believe it's natural.' Smiler is, we are soon, to learn ali too brusquely, the Suffering Servant. In ex- treme despair he has run away from camp, has got nowhere and twenty miles later is now dragging himself back into the hut. The bastards won't believe it's natural,' he gasps to his friends, adding, 'Wash my feet,' as he faints. They are washing his feet when the officer comes in. 'Leave that man,' he orders, 'he is wanted in the guardroom.' For the first time the men refuse. The martyred Christ-figure is the only leader who gives real strength.
At this point the play takes a final turn into extreme pessimism. Thompson, seeing this new sense of purpose, exploits it and resumes the leadership of the men. Although he is still leading them against the officers, in Wesker's simplified symbolic terms he becomes by this very act of leadership an officer himself; and therefore, by the same simplification, evil. During his final speech he changes into officer's uniform, having been, we now see, a crypto-Gauleiter all along. We are left to assume that no community is tolerable short of the Communist Utopia after the State has finally withered away, but that the vicious circle of leadership ending always in corruption must • make this axiomatically un- reachable. The play ends with the ironical blaring of 'God Save the Queen' during the triumphal passing-out parade.
1 increasingly find myself on a one-man crusade against contemporary settings being stretched beyond their limits and against plays in which the author's intentions stick through a thin hide of naturalism like the bones of a sick cow. The fullest possible use of contemporary naturalism was made by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman. •The emphasis was all on the particular story of Willy Loman, which rang completely true in its own context. The Wider applications were left implicit—Miller relied on our own knowledge of our modern society forcing us, unaided, to recognise the play's full relevance. When a playwright specifically wants to paint the wider picture he achieves far more freedom by setting his play in another time or country. This is not mere escapism, nor a desire for the theatre to be cosy and remote enter- tainment. Miller could never have achieved such a sane picture of mass hysteria had he set The Crucible in contemporary witch-hunting America. None of Brecht's, major plays are set in modern Germany. And, with specific refer- ence to Chips, I believe that a far better account of the battle between the Establishment and the rebel was given in John Osborne's Luther and of the nature of militant leadership in John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance. Neither could have achieved its wide sweep of truth in a contemporary setting.
The expressionistic plays of the Twenties were full of thinly veiled Messianic figures appear- ing to the workers and assuring them 'you are men, men and women unqualified, free men and women' (from Ernst Toiler, this). I am all for the message, but God save us from a return to that way of expressing it.
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