Theatre
Overblown
Peter Jenkins
The Churchill Play (RSC, Warehouse) Howard Brenton is much possessed by violence. He sees a form of fascism beneath the skin of the society in which we live. In The Churchill Play, which was first performed in ,1974, he imagines a concentration camp somewhere in England' in the year 1984. He provides us with scraps of background Information. A Con-Lab coalition is in Office and the Emergency Provisions Act is In force. The civil use of the army has spread out from Northern Ireland; troops were Used in the pits in the miners' strike of '80; a rash of neo-Luddite violence provoked the authorities to repressive measures. Now, we are told in what is no more than a casual aside, electric torture is in use at Churchill Camp. Before I give reasons why this is a rotten Play — among them its crudeness of characterisation, the leaden literariness of its language, the balls-aching boredom of its pretentious longeurs — let me remark once More upon the gullibility with which leftWing rubbish is gobbled up in the subsidised theatre by critics and audiences who for reasons of social guilt, doctrinal obsession Or plain cowardice in the face of fashion absolve political plays from the test of artistic truth they would apply to any work about, say, love or any other human experience which they would expect to see honestly treated.
Howard Brenton relies upon his audience's meek acceptance of his assumption that capitalism naturally degenerates into a form of fascism. It is plainly necessary for Brenton to believe this, to regard it as a Morally self-evident probability. He has closed his mind to history before it has occurred. There" is not a mention, not even a hint, of the great ideological disaster of the 20th century, the seeming incompatibility of socialism and liberty; it is 'capitalism' which has the best record in liberty's defence, especially the mixed and mild capitalism which has been practised in most of the West since the war. It is precisely from this mixture that Brenton asserts, for he does not deign to argue, that fascism will emerge.
He does suggest that its genesis is to be found in Northern Ireland. One of the soldiers at Camp Churchill is made to say, 'The British army's got politicised, y'see, Sir.' The dishonest implication here is that the sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland are an analogue for the coming class war, a kind of proving-ground as was the Civil war in Spain for the wider World war which followed. Brenton has one of the officer's wives recall seeing political prisoners on a holiday in Spain — 'Never in England we said.' Thus on the strength of the cliché, violence breeds violence (which I am not saying it doesn't) Brenton would have his audiences believe that the intractably sui generis troubles in Northern Ireland are foundation enough for a general recourse to the repressive violence which he thinks is endemic in the system. The expropriation of the particular in the cause of the general is, of course, the central device of left-wing untruth. _ Brenton's several-times collaborator David Hare, who has himself graduated from agitprop, recently asked: 'Why the insulting insistence in so much political theatre that a few gimcrack mottoes of the Left will sort out the deep problems of reaction in modern England. Why the urge to caricature? Why the deadly stiffness of limb? Brecht uncoils the great sleeping length of his mind to give us in everything but the greatest of his writing exactly that impression, the godlike feeling that the questions have been answered before the play has begun. Even his idea of irony is insufferably coy.'
I had side-lined this quotation in a newspaper cutting and Brenton at once reminded me of it. For even if we pass over the dishonest foundations of The Churchill Play we are left with a stale metaphor and hackneyed device executed with the kind of feebleness, almost contemptuous, which flows from glib moral certainty. The inmates of Churchill Camp perform a play-within-a-play before a visiting parliamentary delegation. The stage-within-astage has a union jack for its curtain which rises to reveal a soldier, sailor, airman and marine guarding the coffin of Winston Churchill. From this he rises from the dead smoking his cigar and spouting the prose which won the war. A coup de theatre this, you might think but not at all; the idea of Churchill as an upper-class monster, the architect of victory in the class war too, is neither new nor shocking; indeed the most striking aspect of Churchill's posthumous reputation is that it has remained as monumentally rounded as it was in life. The working class, quite rightly has never accepted him as a one-dimensional warwinning national hero.
The play-within-the-play fails to achieve the status of sacrilege and this fails dramatically. Brenton should learn that to bore is not the same as to shock. It is not clear from his muddle-mindedness whether we have concentration camps in the England. of 1984 in spite of Churchill winning the war or because of it. Brenton, characteristically, is content to parade Churchill's upper classness, to guy the bulldog and to parody the speeches; by this dramatic means he squares the circle of his own mind and, dispensing with cause or effect, arrives at his pre-chosen destination — to thunderous applause from the co-religionists who have remained awake during the sermon. Of course, Churchill, the man who fought fascism, had to be a fascist!
My contempt for Brenton and The Churchill Play is deep because the theatre is a serious place of amusement. It is a most powerful medium which requires honest use. Political and artistic honesty are inseperable. Indeed, a political mind as stunted as Brenton's is unlikely to approach truth of other kinds. The Churchill Play is overblown, overwrought and overrated. Let me say again, my contempt for it is not because it is preposterous or shocking or infuriating or disgusting or upsetting — for it is none of these genuine things: it is bad and dishonest art.
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