John Arden, the
most interesting of
Two stills from the
Royal Court production of
Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. In
the final scene, Musgrave
(Ian Bannen) hoists the body
of the soldier on a gibbet
in the town square, and
begins his speech and his
dance: “Private Billy Hicks,
late of this parish, welcome
him back from the wars,
he’s bronzed and he’s fit,
with many a tale of distant
campaigning to spin
around the fireside . . .”
the new playwrights,
is also the most
misunderstood and
the least appreciated.
His work has been
dismissed as “too
confused” or “too
difficult”. This article
argues that “The
individual flavour of
John Arden’s plays
arises from the fact
that each raises a
contemporary
question, but refuses
to allow conventional
reactions from the
audience”. The study
is byTom Milne,
who edits Encore.
 The portrait of
John Arden (p. 19),
and the stills
from The Happy
Haven (right) and
Live Like Pigs
(below) are by
Roger Mayne. Our
thanks to the
Royal Court for
permission to
reproduce them here.
touch of the poet
A study of John Arden’s plays by Tom Milne
BAFFLEMENT, INDIFFERENCE, boredom, fury. One
performance of The Waters of Babylon (1957), 23
of Live Like Pigs (1958), 28 of Serjeant Musgrave’s
Dance (1959), 22 of The Happy Haven (1960).
London’s record of attention to the plays of John
Arden is not a happy one. His three publicly
performed plays all lost money, played to restive,
half-empty houses. The critics growled: a few
scented some sort of quality, hardly anybody
liked the plays. In the case of The Happy Haven,
two of our tiny handful of responsible critics not
only echoed the general dismissal, but actively
protested against the play being produced at all.
The touch of the poet is still a leper’s handshake.
It is an old, old story, of course. It has happened
before, and will undoubtedly happen again,
although in a context where the non-u play
(serious theme, uncouth characters) is receiving
considerable attention, one might have hoped for
more sympathy. But the public, it seems, is willing
to have its nose rubbed in the raw dirt of life only
so long as it can bring along its own disinfectant
to soften the smell when it gets too strong. If
Jimmy Porter’s criticism of Alison as a dead soul
comes too close to home, then soften it by labelling
him a self-pitying neurotic: you can then enjoy a
guying of English Sundays and a turbulent sexual
struggle, and complacently pass over the fact that
the whole thing is based on a damning indictment
of the complacency of British society . . . Almost
anything will get by in the theatre so long as it is
presented in the approved manner.
A few months after Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance
was jockeyed off the stage, a play by Jerome
Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind,
transferred from the Pembroke Theatre, Croydon,
to the West End, with critical blessing as a good
play. It had a liberal theme, condemning the
bigotry of the Tennessee “monkey trial” of 1925,
when a schoolmaster was indicted for teaching
the Darwinian theory of evolution. The play did
not, in fact, run very long (69 performances), but
it was approved of. The audience was right in
there, rooting for the hero, and came out feeling
uplifted and liberal. Splendid. So we are all liberal.
We all hate intolerance. Then who is it who tags
along when, say, apartheid crops up? Nobody was
ever prodded into wondering why the trial took
place, or whether they themselves, in those cir-
cumstances, might have been numbered among
the bigots. Is the average member of that audience
so very different from the average inhabitant of
Dayton, Tennessee, who aided and abetted the
monkey trial?
The point is that, right from the word go in a
play like Inherit the Wind, you know where you
are, what you are supposed to think. The school-
master is young, clean, upstanding, and he loves
the pretty girl; his defence counsel is quizzically
amiable. The girl’s disapproving father is un-
pleasant, the prosecuting counsel is a bigoted
bible-thumper. Of course the audience is on the
right side. But are they approving the person or
the idea? Suppose that the schoolmaster were
dirty, loudmouthed and a perverter of little boys
on the side. The right to teach the Darwinian
theory would remain unchanged, the trial would
still be intolerable—but audience reaction would
almost certainly be less clear-cut. Inherit the Wind
is not a good play, and is an easy target for such
criticism, but it does illuminate the way in which
many far better and subtler plays enlist the
audience with an easy emotional plea.
The individual flavour of John Arden’s plays
arises from the fact that each raises a contem-
porary question, but refuses to allow conventional
reactions from the audience. Live Like Pigs, for
example, deals with a family of gipsies, forced
against their will by welfare officers out of the
broken-down tram in which they live, into a
bright new housing estate. They revolt, brawl,
bawl, jeer at the neighbours, break up the place.
They are undoubtedly antisocial, detestable, and
all one’s instincts are with the outraged neigh-
bours. Yet, towards the end of the play, you
suddenly realise that Arden has forced you into a
sort of sympathy with the gipsies, making you
view the situation from their point of view.
Against your will you are forced to revalue your
attitudes. The result is not dissimilar to that
achieved by Brecht in his didactic plays, where
instinctive emotional reactions are conquered by
reason. Die Massnahme, for example, argues that
a young communist was wrong to try to alleviate
the sufferings of coolies in China, because by so
doing he undermined the pressure of suffering
which would ultimately lead to the greater good
of a full-scale revolt. What Brecht achieves by
dialectic, Arden achieves by indirect emotional
means—by presenting human beings in all the
complexity of their lives and motives, so as to
show how abstract conceptions can be influenced,
even nullified, by this complexity.
This approach is shown at its most naked in
Arden’s first play, The Waters of Babylon. The
“hero” is a refugee Pole called Krank. Amiable
and engaging enough personally, he keeps a
brothel-lodging house in North London into
which he crams 80 tenants, and as a side venture
swindles inoffensive citizens out of their savings.
He claims to have been in Buchenwald, but it is
eventually revealed that he had been a guard,
not a prisoner. When Krank tries to explain, his
friend Paul—also a Pole, ex-concentration camp,
a politically-minded patriot with a plan to blow
up Bulganin and Kruschev during their visit to
21
England—reacts in the obvious way, and
threatens to shoot him, crying “We know what
you were”. But for the audience, Arden makes
the obvious reaction less easy. No excuses are
made for Krank, and he has no self-illusions
throughout the play, but he is situated. At the
very beginning, his genuine concern at what
happened in Germany is revealed in his haunting
song, which starts:
“As I went down by Belsen town
I saw my mother there
She told me, Go by go by my son
But leave with me here
Your lovely yellow hair.”
Never stressed again, the song sticks in the
memory throughout the play. Add to this the
respect and friendliness shown him—and de-
veloped in the action—by the two whores,
Bathsheba and Teresa (the two most likeable
characters in the play, with a rough honest ofy
their own), and you find yourself, not necessarily
condoning Krank, but paying attention to him.
When Paul cries “ We know what you were”, the
audience is excluded from the “we”. Krank
replies:
“But I don’t know what you are. Or you, Henry
Ginger,
Or all of the rest of you, with your pistols and your
orations,
And your bombs in my private house, and your fury,
And your national pride and honour. This is the
lunacy,
This was the cause, the carrying-through of all that
insensate war,
This is the rage and purposed madness of your lives,
That I, Krank, do not know. I will not know it.”
This attempt to force audiences to revalue their
attitudes is at the basis of all of Arden’s work,
and partly explains, on two separate counts, the
extreme distrust with which the plays have been
received. Firstly, people are fond of their own
prejudices and judgments, and prefer a play
which corroborates rather than challenges them.
Secondly, audiences have grown accustomed to
plays like Listen to the Wind which carry an
explicit statement of what they are about, and
have lost or buried the faculty of responding
imaginatively to a play which communicates
obliquely (in effect, through poetry). Hence,
people were puzzled because The Waters of
Babylon chronicled a swine and apparently
approved of him; Live Like Pigs was called anti-
socialist because it apparently suggested that the
Welfare State left no opportunity for people to
live like brutes if they so chose; Serjeant Musgrave’s
Dance was called anti-pacifist because it made an
overwhelming plea for pacifism, then apparently
discredited it by showing its failure; The Happy
Haven was called anti-humanist because it
apparently treated old-age pensioners lightly, and
was not funny while doing so.
22
Many people who disliked the plays, of course,
saw very well that Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance was
a pacifist play examining the nature of violence,
and that The Happy Haven, through its farcial
surface, was crying the need to regard old-age
pensioners as living, significant individuals. Their
criticism—the most frequent against Arden—was
that the plays were boring. “I get the message,
but . . .”. Oddly, while Arden’s power as a writer
has grown enormously from play to play, the
outcry of boredom has grown stronger and
stronger, until with The Happy Haven, the bore-
dom seems to have reached the proportions of
physical pain. The paradox is that, despite the
complexity of Arden’s work, the audience must
make the simplest of responses in order to
approach the poetic statement (his meaning):
sophistication gets you nowhere. Unhappily,
speaking generally of people today, it is true to
say that those who lack sophistication also lack
the power of concentration which would enable
absorption of, and imaginative use of, the
immediate impression; while those who have this
power of concentration, lack the simplicity to
make a direct response. It is rather like an
unsophisticated man looking at a Picasso portrait
for the first time and saying “That is not like a
woman”, while a sophisticated man glances at it,
saying “Ah, yes, Picasso, of course”, but neither
of them bothers to imagine why Picasso painted
like that, what he was getting at. In painting,
time and snobbery help a lot; in the theatre,
where the effect must be immediate, they do not.
Lament for Musgrave
The scene in Serjeant Musgrave where the
colliers desert Musgrave to join in a dance of
exultation after his plan fails, illustrates very well
this lack of response. Because the plan has failed,
because free beer is dished out and the colliers
all dance round Musgrave’s platform, lustily
singing “There was an old man called Michael
Finnegan”, immediately the play was accused of
nihilism. But this is to ignore the essence of the
scene. Musgrave and Attercliffe have moved
downstage: it is Annie, the barmaid, who is
seated on the platform, cradling the remains of
the skeleton on her knees, while the colliers
dance round her. The dance becomes a macabre
dance of death: the scene, a lament—a lament for
Musgrave, the man who cared enough to try, and
for the colliers who could not hear that in his
tale which went astray there was truth.
As a playwright, Arden has declared his interest
in both the Elizabethans and the border ballads.
Both Waters of Babylon and Live Like Pigs have
the richness of speech, movement, plot and action
so characteristic of the Elizabethans. The two
later plays, however, pare everything down until
the style has a kind of purity which requires the
same close attention as poetry. They follow the
ballad form more closely—a single, strong theme
with direct, undecorated speech which gathers the
force of poetry because of the pressure of emotion
which lies behind it. In both Serjeant Musgrave
and The Happy Haven, the theme is simple and
direct—Musgrave’s mission to deliver his message
against war, the Doctor’s mission to perfect and
administer his elixir of life. But Arden’s concern
for people is beyond the statutory “what do they
stand for?”, and his sympathies lie with anybody
who cares enough to live actively, who struggles
for a personal approach to life. The real stuff of
the plays is therefore the way in which the
characters are built up and revealed, so as to
illuminate the central theme, rather than the
theme itself.
Giving Themes A Context
The final act of Serjeant Musgrave, when the
town is held at the point of a gun and forced
to listen to Musgrave’s maniac plan, was generally
admitted to be exciting. It was the lead up which
bored. But without the slow build up of the
earlier scenes, the play is nothing—not only
because the cold, relentless wintry atmosphere is
stamped on the whole play, but because in these
scenes Musgrave’s plan is given a context. The
town is created with rich and precise diversity;
the townsfolk and soldiers begin to stand before
us as complex individuals, and the two groups
begin to interact; they begin to illuminate and
influence the theme. There is not a superfluous
scene in the whole play, although many have
implicit, rather than explicit, significance. Take
Sparky, for example, the youngest of the four
soldiers, who is terrified of Musgrave. The
opening of the play shows him standing on guard
on the canal bank, while Attercliffe and Hurst
play cards. He sings to himself and tries to talk
to them, but is ignored. This image of the isolated
man and his fear is developed gradually. In the
drinking scene in the pub, it is Sparky who jokes
and does card tricks, trying to make himself liked
by the colliers, to interest the barmaid. The
barmaid Annie prefers Hurst, but is touched by
Sparky’s terror and loneliness, and agrees to run
away with him; because of this Sparky is killed
by the other soldiers; because of this, Annie
challenges Musgrave; because of this the whole
plan crumbles. The centrepiece of the plan is to
be the skeleton of a former comrade (the barmaid’s
lover) killed abroad, which they hoist on the
platform to bring home with a vengeance the
meaning of war. This achieves its effect of horror,
but it is the accidental death of Sparky which is
the real influencing factor. Only by being situated
as he is, could Sparky fulfil his role in the testing
of Musgrave’s thesis.
This sort of oblique comment is characteristic
of Arden, and because of it, many scenes of
capital importance are bypassed by the audience
because they seem to be irrelevant to the main
theme. In The Happy Haven, for example, the
Doctor realises that he is on the point of dis-
covering the elixir of life and will be able to try
it out; excited, he calls for a telephone:
“Hello—Charlie?—Jack. How are you, sport?
Ha, ha, go on, go on, you don’t tell me, he he, watch
it, Charlie, watch it, she’ll have you at the altar
before you’ve buttoned your breeches. Now
seriously Charlie, look, I’m going to have to
scratch from the match on Saturday. No no, of
course it isn’t because of last week, of course I
don’t bear a grudge, boy . . . But the fact of the
matter is, there’s something big coming up at the
hospital. Oh, the usual line, you know, nothing
earth-shaking, bedpans and thermometers—but it
may be important and I just daren’t commit myself,
I’m sorry”.
The conversation continues with suggestions for
rearranging the rugger team, and a joking agree-
ment to supply rubber goods in a plain envelope
on the Health Service. The audience laughed.
But an important point is made in this apparent
digression: at a moment which may radically
affect a number of people’s lives, the doctor can
respond only with prep-school smut and a sense
of responsibility which treats people as no more
than guinea-pigs. Never stated, this point is
inescapable if viewed in its proper context.
The same sort of paring down and avoidance
of emphasis has taken place in the language as
well. In Waters of Babylon, Arden could out-
Synge Synge. An Irish character, for example,
says to a West Indian girl, “Why, Bathsheba, sure
I hadn’t seen you, and you irrigating the morning
wilderness of London with your tropical two
eyes”. Compare this to the directness of, say,
Sparky’s speeches in Serjeant Musgrave or in The
Happy Haven—Mrs. Phineus’ beautiful speech
when she is forced to reveal her thoughts in
playing the “truth” game: ninety years old, she
believes that she is to be exterminated to save
trouble and expense:
“I’m an old old lady
And I don’t have long to live.
I am only strong enough to take
Not to give. No time left to give.
I want to drink, I want to eat,
I want my shoes taken off my feet.
Simple, unadorned like a child’s prayer or a
ballad, but if you listen, it has heart-rending
beauty. If you do not listen, but take only the
“meaning”, it is nothing.
23