TIMES HIGHER
EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT
Aleks
Sierz
Published:
02 January 2004
Are
playwrights better judges of their work than academics? On the one hand,
probably not: the ego is a great distorter of judgement. On the other,
playwrights have the enormous advantage of intimate proximity to their subjects
and, while they may often be cagey about their working practices -
superstitiously afraid that talking about creativity might in some way diminish
it - they are always revealing about the imaginary world of their plays.
This series of books, which gives
playwrights the space to tell their stories in their own words, gives us the
chance to assess the pros and cons of their points of view. The first four
authors - Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel and David Hare - offer a
panorama of some 80 years of English-language drama, from O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) to Hare's The Breath of Life (2002). The series has a distinct
format, with each expert offering a short biographical essay on the playwright,
some economic, social and political background to the plays, and then quoting
at length from interviews with them and their collaborators (usually directors
and actors). Smart chronologies and brief annotated bibliographies give the
books a student-friendly feel, and all four are readable and jargon free.
The best of the series so far is About Hare, not only because the writer has
been interviewed frequently, but also because he has contributed polemical
articles of his own to newspapers and magazines. This enables Richard Boon to
chart Hare's career neatly and offer a simple introduction to postwar British
economics, society and politics - the main theme of Hare's most important work.
Boon shows how Hare evolved from a fringe political writer to a mainstream
moral playwright and gives a sympathetic account of his work, which has
appeared on all kinds of stages (from touring venues to the National Theatre),
and on television and film. His account of the collaborative classic Fanshen (1975) is typically lucid.
Boon weaves extracts from Hare's
interviews and essays, and includes new interviews with actors such as Bill
Nighy and Lia Williams and with other theatre-makers such as designer Vicki
Mortimer and director Richard Eyre.
Occasionally, Boon's predilection for
politics leads him astray, as when his analysis of Skylight
(1995) highlights the politics of the two main characters but ignores the
play's emotional core.
If Hare is a good example of a political
playwright, Brian Friel is less comfortable with this label. In Tony Coult's About Friel, the writer is quoted as
saying that he prefers "the dark and private places of individual
souls" to more public issues. Still, his best work - which includes Volunteers (1975), Translations (1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)
- marries the personal and the political in an imaginative and provocative way.
Despite a rather breathless beginning, with a dash through Irish history from
the prehistoric Gaels to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 in just
15 pages, Coult's book soon recovers, and his account of Friel's working life
is measured and revealing. But while Friel emerges as a humane and committed
writer, who is also sceptical of extremists on all sides, Coult's attitude is
annoying in its flagrant political bias. Readers of his book are reminded time
and again that the British have colonised and oppressed Ireland, but they are
never told about IRA crimes. On one page, Friel is quoted as correctly saying
that 13 people were shot by the British army on Bloody Sunday in 1972, but on
another Coult exaggerates the number to 17.
John Fletcher's About
Beckett is less controversial politically. It suffers from
one major drawback - his subject's reluctance to give interviews and his
unwillingness to explain what his work meant. Despite this, it is remarkable
how often the Nobel prizewinning writer talked to journalists and admirers, and
Fletcher has culled some fascinating material, including rare recollections by
novelist Edna O'Brien and art critic Charles Juliet.
This is followed by an interesting
section on Beckett as a director and by a collection of extracts from more
familiar interviews with Beckett collaborators, from director Peter Hall to
actors Billy Whitelaw and Jack MacGowran. But, more than any of the other
volumes in the series, this one expects the reader to know Beckett's work.
Although Fletcher's introduction sets the plays in the context of debates about
modernism and postmodernism, a newcomer might find it hard to relate this to
the playwright's career.
Sadly, Fletcher has also plagiarised the
first 55 pages of his own Beckett: A Faber
Critical Guide (2000) and ignores Mel Gussow's collection of
interviews with other Beckettians.
Victoria Stewart's study of O'Casey is a
book of two halves. The first is an exemplary collection of newspaper
interviews that show that even in the 1920s celebrity journalism was as
probing, gossipy and vivid as it is today. O'Casey's character, which mixes
pugnacity and whimsy, comes across perfectly. But Stewart's choice of
interviewees is poor and, with the exception of O'Casey's daughter Shivaun and
actress Dearbhla Molloy, there is not enough about the role of Dublin's Abbey
and Gate theatres.
The strong point of the books in this
series is the distinctive voices of the writers, their attitudes and how these
are reflected in their plays.
The main weakness is their rather vague
nods to the economic, social and political background, and the assumption that
most readers will already be familiar with their work.
Aleks Sierz teaches
journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and drama at Boston
University, London.
Yours sincerely
TONY COULT
http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx
- nav THES Editorial ©2003 TSL Education Ltd.
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