Political Progress of a Paralyzed Liberal

John Arden has been a bête-noire for middlebrows and a blue-eyed boy for intellectuals ever since Serjeant Musgrave's Dance got its first critical drubbing at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1959. But until recently Arden's reception has had little to do with political or ethical sympathies. The most conservative critics have been ready to go into raptures over Wesker's william-morrisy socialism or Orton's freebooting sexuality: and such playwrights are welcome to declare cold war on the establishment till kingdom come, as well it may. They have, it is assumed, the decency to stand up and be counted: the sabbatical critics therefore sink back into their stalls to do the counting, handing out awards to promising playwrights as if to bright but bolshy sixth-formers who'll soon learn the right side of their bread to butter. But with Arden the talent-spotters never used to know where they were: turning his own declared pacifism topsy-turvy in Musgrave one minute, the next he'd be suggesting that the action of Armstrong's Last Goodnight, a play about medieval Scotland in dog-gaelic, was tangential to the Congolese civil war

Art · Art history · Communism · Dance · Literature · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Spanish Civil War · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies

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  Open Access•Jonathan Renan Da Silva Souza•2019

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