Joy and Tyranny

Arnold Wesker

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849431088
• eBook ISBN: 9781849435468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

'My preoccupation, ' says Arnold Wesker in his interview/portrait Ambivalences (published by Oberon Books) 'with-violence-stemming from-perceived-intimidation-by-the-bright-ones who dare to be cleve ror simply different, began with an incident at school. While queuing for a school meal, one of the other boys wanted me to try his liquorice stick.I didn't want to. This other pupil insisted. I continued to decline. I didn'tlike liquorice! That I didn't want to share what he liked, what he thought was good, enraged the other boy who couldn't bear my indifference to his taste, and he hit me. I've never lost this image of violence induced by the outsider, the one who dissents, the one who doesn't share in what others like or believe. One day', Wesker vowed, 'I may write a play beginning with that image – of the boy who wants another boy to share his taste in liquorice and hits him because he doesn't. It'll be an exploration of the nature of violence.' In late 2010 he wrote just such a play, Joy and Tyranny, but the playwright doesn't describe it as a play, rather as: Arias and variations on the theme of violence. In fact it is a patchwork quilt knitting together many extracts from other of his works, as though throughout his career he was infusing those works, ghost-like, with a hidden play waiting the right time to emerge.

Part One

SCENE 1

is a film.

Setting: a comprehensive school playground.

End of day, pupils coming out into playground.

Two of them meet and stop to chat.

BOY ONE is the slighter, more anxious of the two.

BOY TWO is bright-eyed, confident, long-haired, self-assured in tone and gesture.

BOY ONE: Just twenty-four hours to go!

BOY TWO: Stop counting or the hours won’t pass.

BOY ONE: What time does the record shop open?

BOY TWO: 10 a.m. probably.

BOY ONE: We can sleep outside to be the first.

BOY TWO: We can’t sleep outside Harum Records, not in Crouch End. The police will think we’re up to no good.

BOY ONE: I can’t wait.

BOY TWO: Stop fretting, we’ll be the first ones there to buy copies.

BOY ONE: Never! Everyone will want the new Led Zeppelin.

BOY TWO: Stop fretting I tell you!

BOY ONE: (Fretting.) Physical Graffiti. Wonder what it sounds like.

BOY TWO: A double album, bound to have good tunes in it.

BOY ONE: It can’t be better than ‘Houses of the Holy’.

BOY TWO: But if it is, it’ll be bloody amazing.

BOY ONE: How about the Kubric film tomorrow night?

BOY TWO: 2001? Seen it! Twice! Best film ever.

Two other kids, BULLIES, approach the two chatting.

On ‘best film ever’ one of the BULLIES kicks BOY TWO from behind.

Clever!

BULLY turns on him menacingly.

BULLY: Get lost!

BOY TWO: (Fearlessly.) OK, I will.

But doesn’t move.

(To BOY ONE.) So where were we?

BOY ONE: Two thousand and one.

BOY TWO: Oh, yes. The Kubric film.

BULLY: (Furious to be ignored.) I said get fucking lost.

BOY TWO: You didn’t say ‘get fucking lost’. You just said ‘get lost’, and I said ‘ok, I will’.

BULLY: Move then.

BOY TWO: When I’m ready. I’m talking to my friend here. Do you mind?

BULLY: Yeah, I do mind. You talk too much.

BOY TWO: How can one talk too much?

BULLY: Talk too much, smile too much, posh too much.

BOY TWO: ‘Posh too much’??!!!.

BULLY: There you go. Fucking know-all!

BOY TWO: I don’t know all, just some. And I can’t un-educate myself, not even for you. Sorry, but that’s me.

BULLY: And this is me.

BULLY smashes a straight-from-the-shoulder fist into BOY TWO’s eye.

NOTE: it is important that the offending arm is filmed moving horizontally to its target because the arm must mix and morph – filmically – into the aeroplane crashing into the TWIN TOWERS, just as the bone thrown in jubilation into the air by the victorious ape in Kubrick’s ‘2001’ morphs into a space ship.

The Kubrick images link across eons from a first simple thought (the bone as weapon) to a complex one (the space ship).

Our images link the BULLY’s spiteful action to the murderous spiteful action of the TWIN TOWER DESTROYERS, suggesting that both actions spring from an adolescent-like inferiority complex.

The BOY TWO’s cleverness like the skyward thrusting towers, intimidates those who imagine that only violence, death, and destruction can assuage their frustration, can make the world behave as they want it to behave.

FILM ENDS.

SCENE 2

A PUB BAR.

CHRISTOPHER and JASON.

CHRISTOPHER: When did you start hating me?

JASON: From the beginning. When I was two years old and happy and then you came along and usurped my place in the scheme of things.

CHRISTOPHER: That’s understandable. What’s not understandable is why you never got over it. Why did it persist, this hatred?

JASON: Because you didn’t stop draining my happiness. You were cleverer than me, better at sports, better looking.

CHRISTOPHER: But you possessed charm. Everyone loved your sweetness. We were a family full of love.

JASON: Ah! Family! Full of love!

CHRISTOPHER: Isn’t that what you experienced?

JASON: What I experienced was the tyranny of family love!

CHRISTOPHER: Not tyranny, our parents were disappointed perhaps. They wanted to see us involved in the arts but you chose politics and I chose law.

JASON: The tyranny of expectations, then.

CHRISTOPHER: They couldn’t have been really disappointed by our choices whatever their expectations.

JASON: You didn’t feel the disappointments, I did.

CHRISTOPHER: That was your problem not the family’s.

JASON: Family! Family! You can’t hate him, he’s your brother. Your flesh and blood! What an absurd notion. Just because we were baked in the same oven doesn’t mean we had to share the same feelings. There’s nothing inherent in the notion of family that guarantees love. Nothing! Go back to the beginning of it all, God himself wanted us to know that family does not equal love.

CHRISTOPHER: Cain and Abel?

JASON: Yes, brother, Cain and Abel. Why did God have Cain kill Abel? We had to learn it at school: ‘Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to the Lord…but unto Cain and his offering he had not respect.’ Why? Why was Abel’s offerings of ‘firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof’ more acceptable to the Lord than Cain’s ‘fruit of the ground’? Why was Abel beloved of the Lord and Cain not? Explain it to me. The Bible offers no explanation. ‘If thou dost well’ said the Lord, ‘shalt thou not be accepted?’ But Cain did well. He was a tiller of the ground and offered the fruit thereof. What is so unacceptable about the fruit of the ground? Wheat, barley, corn, olives…? Of course Cain was angry. Who wouldn’t be?

CHRISTOPHER: Enough to murder your brother?

JASON: In some circumstances? Yes!

CHRISTOPHER: Good Lord! What kind of political policies will you be promoting to win votes?

JASON: Honesty! The truth of things. Family is not the basic unit of civilised society, intelligence is. Stupidity is the offence. And sentimentality.

CHRISTOPHER: Sentimentality?

JASON: Dishonest feelings. Feelings that encourage you to fall in love with yourself.

CHRISTOPHER: I don’t believe you can do good unless you fall a little in love with yourself.

JASON: But not fall in love with yourself falling in love.

CHRISTOPHER: And Abel did, you think!

JASON: Abel, for sure – cleverer, better at sports, better looking.

CHRISTOPHER: But you can’t know that for sure.

JASON: I can safely assume, though.

CHRISTOPHER: Safely! Sunny, self-satisfied, and smiling too much, the tyranny of family joy.

Long pause.

CHRISTOPHER: You know mother is dying?

JASON: How could I not know!

CHRISTOPHER: And it’s her birthday in a few weeks time.

JASON: That I had forgotten. What are we buying her?

CHRISTOPHER: She told me what she wants.

JASON: That’s the surprise ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Characters
• Part One
• Part Two