Abstract art
STUART HOOD
Murderous Angels Conor Cruise O'Brien (Hutchinson 30s) We Bombed in New Haven Joseph Heller (Cape 35s) Conor Cruise O'Brien has chosen as his play's theme one of the most interesting topics of our day—`the working of the poli- tical fate of human beings: the veiled logic which requires from political men actions which are the function of what they repre- sent—and to a lesser extent what they are— in circumstances they cannot ever have fore- seen.' The concept is that of a demytholo- gised anangke, the remorseless drive of fate from which there is no escape. His scene is the Congo; his chief characters, Dag Ham- marskjold and Patrice Lumumba.
It is a bold choice in defence of which he quotes the Aristotelean view that tragedians should keep to real names because what is possible is credible. The thesis he develops— for this is a play with a clearly defined thesis—is that these two men represented respectively the great abstractions of Peace and Freedom. The tragic dilemma round which the plot revolves springs from the incompatibility (in the context of the Congo) of these two immense human aspirations; for Lumumba, in order to achieve his free- dom, would have precipitated a nuclear con- frontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Or so it seemed to Ham- marskjold. Therefore, when he knew that Lumumba was likely to be murdered on Tshombe's orders, he did nothing to pro- tect him. Lumumba had to be sacrificed to the greater ideal of world peace.
It is a theme which the author develops with skill in his preface, backing his argu- ment from his own personal experience as a servant of the United Nations and, to- wards the end of the action, as representa- tive of Secretary-General Hammarskjold in Elisabethville. The notes provide in con- siderable detail the evidence on which his argument is based. To controvert his argu- ments one would require to be a consider- able authority on an involved and obscure episode in African history. The point, in any case, is rather: Does it read well as a play and—more importantly—does it pro- mise to work well on the stage?
The answer is that it is interesting to read (considered as a thesis) but uninteresting as a representation of dramatic action and that, consequently, it seems doubtful that it can be successful in production. The reasons are to be sought in the fact that much of the dialogue is of an extremely abstract nature spoken by characters who, in so far as they are abstractions are uninteresting, and in so far as they are something in the nature of `representations' of actual men and women, unconvincing. Baron d'Auge, who repre- sents in two senses the type of Belgian financier who backed Tshombe, is a carica- ture; so is Colonel Alcibiade Zbyre, the French specialist in subversive warfare; so is Monsignor Polycarpe, the prelate. He is intended, the author explains, to `typify the Europeans of Katanga collectively'. But these 'typical' characters, along with mouthpieces like the First Representative of the Secretary-General and the Second Repre- sentative of the Secretary-General, are set alongside human beings more or less realis- tically portrayed: Hammarskjiild himself, his Senegalese confidential assistant and per- haps boy-friend, Lumumba and his white girl-friend. Here, and in the whole presenta- tion of the play, there is a muddle between genres and a fatal weakness. There might have been a solution in the use of masks and some more expressive style of writing. What we are left with is a political argument un- sustained in terms of drama.
Joseph Heller is also concerned with Peace and War. His action is set in a future when the Strategic Air Command has taken over and is working its way through a list of targets from Constan- tinople to Denver, Colorado. The play is a protest against the impersonality of war and at the way men adapt themselves to the war machine. The author strives throughout to achieve an effect of Brechtian alienation by making the characters explain that they are really actors, and that nothing of what goes on on the stage is `really' happening. The effect is to wrap up in a great deal of business a not very new thought presented in terms which are emotional to the point of sheer sentimentality, as when (at the close of the play) an officer is compelled to send his own son on a death mission. The whole thing is conceived of as a highly controlled improvisation (lines to be improvised are indicated). I had rather go to the Living Theatre and see a real argument with the audience about war and peace than stick in this half-way house on Broadway.
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