The Wye Plays

The Back of Beyond and The Battle of the Crows

David Ian Rabey

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781841509020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

THE BACK OF BEYOND

By David Ian Rabey

What are we to make of the strangers we are to each other and to ourselves?

Brendan Kennelly, The Trojan Women

I’ve run out of reasons for keeping it neat

Becker & Fagen, Ida Lee

And that’s true too

King Lear, V.2.

Dedicated to Roger Owen, Eric Schneider and Charmian Savill, who admitted the consequences...

On Being a Shakespearian Dramatist:

An Approach to The Back of Beyond

David Ian Rabey

The lack of constant speech is not contempt
But silence measures those compelled to speak.
What does not change is will to change, they say,
Though changes do outrun the will’s control.
Each person has a story that rolls on
Beyond the boundaries of the play in which they’re placed,
Unless they fall in love at last with limits
And try to die into an old play’s shape.
Not even witches know what happens after,
But once I met an actor, wild and broken,
Who said, ‘The play is dead: long live the play’, with laughter,
Then wept at faces he saw in the bracken.

So speaks the witch named Wye, anti-heroine of my plays The Back of Beyond (staged 1996) and The Battle of the Crows (staged 1998). Thus she associates the death wish of exhaustion with an impulse to subside into a predetermined dramatic form, whereas life pushes on beyond all man-made boundaries and limitations of definition. Nevertheless, the actor of whom she speaks is powerfully, compulsively self-contradictory. He discovers himself bound to acknowledge melancholy - cracked and haunted by the sensed inevitability of irrevocable loss - even as he heralds the equal inevitability of the next transformation which he will embody, in demonstration of the spirit of wild laughter. This self-consciously and deliberately riven figure might also serve as a paradigm for a Shakespearian dramatist, such as I attempt to be.

At this point, you may think, or even object, that even to harbour the temerity to consider the ambition of being a Shakespearian dramatist is arrogant, hubristic and pretentious. I would counter as follows: it is not arrogant to admit, or even to proclaim, a profound influence and inspiration; and that the identification of that influence does not propose an equality or even a similarity but points to a dialogue which invites further negotiation by others, and thus strives to transcend a potentially disastrous isolation. And any art, but particularly dramatic art, externalizes inner life in a way which might justly be termed pretentious, in that it bids to manifest an unusual and unconventional (if not always enviable) sensitivity to something, attempting to identify transcendent things in the everyday, expanding the narrow vocabulary of being which is afforded by literal description of objectified facts. The question is: how well does it realize its pretentions by challenging imaginatively a dominant discourse of sterile presumption? The theatre is not a place for false modesty, or a monument to pseudoegalitarian functionalism: it is always being specifically artificial, and I would even suggest that this is what human beings do best.

Howard Barker has noted how Shakespeare is ‘now a negligible influence on the tone of contemporary writing in Britain’ and how this situation is ‘itself a tragedy for the theatre of our time’; rather, the uncontested authority of Chekhov in British theatrical and cultural circles ‘has made of him a more luminous icon in this part of Europe than even in his country of origin’.ⁱ The effect of this, as I have noted elsewhere,ⁱⁱ is an enshrinement of ‘realism’ expressed as conformity in objectified defeat, in order to deny the socially unmanageable individual capacity for unpredictable self-transformation. The purposefully metaphorical drama practiced by Barker, David Rudkin and myself is deliberately opposed to such supposedly inevitable confinements. Barker explains how his divergent exploration of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Seven Lears (1990), grew from ‘a writer’s feeling for the architecture of a text, and we have slowly re-learned that architecture is about emptiness as well as substance, void as well as materiality’.ⁱⁱⁱ This intuition reverberates into Peter Holland’s observation: ‘Action, the physical event that Shakespeare incompletely prescribes, becomes a necessary choice at each and every moment of performance, one choice inevitably excluding many others.’^iv The genius of Shakespeare’s drama might aptly be said to reside in the incompleteness of its prescriptions: hence its challenging power and infinitely renewing fascination. I would add that the ‘necessary choice’ of the dramatist, like that of the performer, also excludes, yet somehow simultaneously illuminates, others. My play The Back of Beyond marinaded in my unconscious through my fascination for Shakespeare’s play, an admiration of the ‘Lear plays’ by Barker, Bond and Rudkin (The Saxon Shore), and also because of an instinctive drive to interrogate the material differently, and to pursue the different consequences which might be seismically triggered. Shakespeare may have been institutionalized, canonized and abstracted into a national icon for purposes of tourism and commerce, but he is also a dramatist who is enliveningly dangerous and therefore important to learn from. The best directors approach his work with respect, but not with deference to a notional stability; dramatists might well do the same. ‘Fear is a pretty sceptre but a useless tool’, says Echternacht, another character in The Back of Beyond, of whom I will tell more later. It is worth reminding ourselves in this context that this is how Shakespeare himself usually worked. With the exceptions of the apparently ‘sourceless’ plays (Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest), every Shakespeare play is a consciously surprising re-emphasizing reanimation of some pre-existing story or play, and the explosive power of King Lear is amplified by its startling final departure from the happy ending of its chrysalis play, King Leir.

The first germination of The Back of Beyond perhaps occurred in Berkeley in 1979, where, as a graduate student on a travel scholarship to the University of California, I attended the M.A. colloquia of Stephen Booth, who was developing some of the ideas which would feature in his book, ’King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’, Indefinition and Tragedy (1983). These were not traditional colloquia, more philosophical-psychological workshops in the form of intellectual cliffhangers approached at escape velocity in order to split conceptual atoms, and the most exciting times in my formally directed education. The group sessions basically required those involved to take their senses of their own sanity on a series of kamikaze missions exposed by Shakespeare’s tragedies: the possible ‘necessity of recognizing that what makes sense may not be true’.^v Part of Booth’s reading of King Lear might be summarized thus:

I submit that audiences are not shocked by the fact of Cordelia’s death but by its situation and that audiences grieve not for Cordelia’s physical vulnerability, or for the physical vulnerability of humankind, but for their own - our own - mental vulnerability, a vulnerability made absolutely inescapable when the play pushes inexorably beyond its own identity, rolling across and crushing the very framework that enables its audience to endure the otherwise terrifying explosion of all manner of ordinarily indispensable mental contrivances for isolating, limiting and comprehending. When Lear enters howling in the last moments of the play, Shakespeare has already presented an action that is serious, of undoubted magnitude, and complete; he thereupon continues that action beyond the limits of the one category that no audience can expect to see challenged: Shakespeare presents the culminating events of his story after his play is over.^vi

Booth notes how, for all ‘the characters constantly and vainly strive to establish the limits of things’, ‘not ending is a primary characteristic of King Lear and, hence, ‘the intensity of patterning in King Lear compensates for the equal intensity of its demonstration that the characters’, the audience’s and all human perception is folly’.^vii It was from him that I learnt that the most centrally purposeful line of King Lear might be: ‘And that’s true too.’

In 1982, I watched Adrian Noble’s RSC production of King Lear four times, profoundly disturbed and riveted by the performances of Antony Sher as The Fool and Jonathan Hyde as Edgar in particular. Both characterizations seemed to confront and respond to the demonic aspects of the characters, more usually tamed or ignored. Sher’s chilling, crippled, Grock-like mongrel discovered a brief epiphany of supernatural release in proclaiming and physicalizing the Albion speech which concludes with the psychic hand-grenade of a line: ‘This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.’ As Edgar, Hyde suggested an alternately cool and wracked chameleon, a deliberate tactician who could strategically render himself into the shape of a monstrosity of suffering. He seemed most disturbingly and bleakly knowing when Edgar’s surprising and oddly autonomous psychic construction of Poor Tom was discarded and stigmatized as a vicious fiend, in order to support the illusion of a benign cosmology which we, as his implicated audience, know to be merely the illusion generated by an experiential experiment in invisible theatre.

Later that year, my career as a full-time lecturer began with a temporary appointment in English and Drama at the University of Dublin, Trinity College. With his permission, I quote some words from an essay by Ron Callan, one of the students in my first seminar group on Shakespeare’s Tragedies:

Lear gropes his way back to the fixed center of order, but this is not within himself (as it is in Edgar) but centered in Cordelia; and in this play external images (especially superlatives) are fated to fail to sustain life. Through Lear we experience chaos; Edgar, Kent, the Fool and Cordelia help him make the journey; Edgar (with his tendency to shy away from important sensations) alone help us to hold that experience.^viii

Whilst the events of the play force Edgar t...