CULTURE SHOCK: For all its liberalism, English mainstream culture is still uncomfortable with its radicals such as John Arden, who has found artistic freedom in Ireland. For all its faults, this country has embraced his tradition, and finds his presence gratifying
LAST SATURDAY, at the Galway City Museum, John Arden launched his new book of stories, Gallows, alongside an exhibition of his own illustrations for what he calls his "tales of suspicion and obsession". It was a fine occasion and an opportunity to mark, not just Arden's 79th birthday, but his 40-odd years of connection to the city.
Yet it was also impossible to avoid an element of strangeness and indeed of estrangement. The warmth and respect that surrounded Arden in Galway are not especially obvious in England. Gallows, fizzing with energy and invention, is self-published – his long-time publisher Methuen decided it could not afford to lose money on it. Yet Arden is a deeply English figure, not just one of the great figures of post-war English theatre, but a writer steeped in the traditions of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of William Blake.
To say this is not to minimise the importance of Ireland in Arden's life and imagination. He has worked with his wife and comrade-in-arms Margaretta D'Arcy for 50 years. Their writing partnership goes back all the way to The Business of Good Governmentin 1960 and includes the Irish-themed The Ballygombeen Bequest, Vandaleur's Follyand the famous six-play cycle The Non-Stop Connolly Show. Ireland, indeed, is a presence in Arden's first professionally-produced play, The Waters of Babylon, put on at the Royal Court in 1957. One of the characters, Conor Cassidy, is self-consciously a stage Irishman, a pimp who is shocked to discover that his sister is on the game. As the sister, Teresa, interjects: "The minute he sees me, he thinks he's on the stage of the Abbey Theatre." (The Abbey had its revenge: its board's refusal to stage Arden's Live Like Pigswas the proximate cause of the departure of Lelia Doolan as artistic director.)
That explicit interest in Ireland is undoubtedly one of the reasons Arden was never fully embraced by the English theatre. Another is more mundane: his plays were often too challenging and radical for commercial success. John Osborne, in his autobiography, wrote that, at the Royal Court, “Arden became an in-house joke for box office disaster.” It was estimated that between 1956 and 1961 the Royal Court made about £50,000 from Osborne’s plays but lost nearly £15,000 on Arden’s.
Yet Arden is an incomparably greater figure than Osborne. Compared to the dreary, misogynistic and self-pitying Look Back in Anger, Arden's early Royal Court plays – The Waters of Babylonand Live Like Pigs– still have a ferociously sharp edge of humour, anarchy and theatricality. And the play that followed, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, which had its premiere at the Royal Court 50 years ago last month, is one of the half-dozen greatest English dramas since the war. It is as important to English theatre as, say, Philadelphia, Here I Come!or A Whistle in the Darkare to Irish. At least six of Arden's solo plays – the three just mentioned and The Happy Haven, The Workhouse Donkeyand Armstrong's Last Goodnight– would, in almost any other country, be fixtures in the contemporary national canon.
Arden’s is, moreover, a quintessentially English imagination. It may not be overstating it to say that he is, in some respects, the last of the 16th-century playwrights. What I mean by this is that, like Shakespeare, he is completely at home in two worlds: an erudite, self-conscious communing with both classical learning and English literary tradition on the one side and the mediaeval, carnivalesque mindset of popular culture on the other. With Arden, you are in the presence at one and the same time of the accumulated force of a language honed over centuries to be muscular, direct and vivid (the language, in other words, of the King James bible) and of a folk culture of elaborate tales, stirring ballads and music hall jokes.
The usual explanation for the relative neglect of Arden in England is that he and D'Arcy have had, in their relations with the established theatre companies, an argumentative history. This is undoubtedly true: few playwrights have ended up picketing performances of their own play, as Arden and D'Arcy did with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Island of the Mightyin 1972. But it hardly suffices as an explanation – they are hardly the only playwrights to have been involved in rows and German theatre, for example, seems to have no great trouble treating Arden as a major modern figure.
The real reasons are probably twofold. One is general – the absence of a broad sense that good playwrights are rare creatures who need to be cherished throughout their careers. In Ireland, for all its faults, there has been a kind of tacit contract with writers such as Brian Friel and Tom Murphy who emerged at the same time as Arden’s generation at the Royal Court. The theatres have by and large stuck with them through periods of awkwardness and lack of commercial success. There is no such contract in England.
The other reason is political. For all its liberalism, English mainstream culture is still uncomfortable with its radicals and republicans. Arden’s case may be extreme, but it is well to remember that Harold Pinter’s 75th birthday was celebrated at the Gate in Dublin rather than in London.
It's important to say, of course, that none of this seems to matter in the slightest to John Arden himself. The thought of being embraced as an English national treasure, which he ought to be, would probably horrify him. And England's loss has been Ireland's gain: Arden's continued presence in Galway is gratifying and fortifying. It is certainly worth marking that presence next year in the run-up to his 80th birthday. A major production of Serjeant Musgrave's Danceis surely in order, and it would be good to look again at The Non-Stop Connolly Showin the approach to 2016.
