'The Theatre', claims Howard Brenton, 'is a dirty place.' And Brenton, as much as any dramatist of recent years, has been associated with an obsessive interest in public and private violence—seeming assaults on all versions of law and order…. Brenton has a particular view of the power which lies behind the drama, both past and present, which he most admires. It is obvious, for instance, that dramatists have often been more concerned with portraying individuals who break rather than obey the law. The history of theatre can be read in these terms as a history of some pretty spectacular criminals; from Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon in his bath; to Oedipus slaying his father; to Hamlet's sudden slaughter of Polonius; to the crimes of a Macbeth unleashing a seemingly endless tide of blood upon his Scottish kingdom. It is only with the rise of the naturalist theatre, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that the criminal loses his central place on our stages. Now Brenton and many writers of his generation are consciously attacking the norms of the naturalist stage…. But, as is often pointed out, the criminal acts presented in the most famous tragedies, like Oedipus or Hamlet, are nearly always compensated by a moral law which is restored at the end of the drama. Tragedy, one definition runs, is the story of an individuals who decides to break the laws of his or her community and is destroyed by following through a particular, extreme course of action. Howard Brenton's plays are peopled with individuals who choose to pursue a perverse, but direct path of action through a world in which there are no clear patterns of law and order to judge a man. This can be seen in Brenton's fascination with the figure of the murderer Christie in Christie In Love (1969), who pursues a path of erotic fulfilment from his wretched Rillington Place home. It is also present in Revenge [1969] where the criminal Hepple and the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Macleish, engage in a game of 'cops and robbers' in a society which judges their criminal concepts as an anachronism. (pp. 2-3)
One feature of Brenton's development as a writer has been his direct involvement in the groups for which he has written. He has been able, through the underground circuit, to find a style of presentation which most closely mirrors his own theatrical preoccupations…. For the 1969 and 1970 Bradford Festivals, Brenton produced various environments for his plays Wesley and Scott of the Antarctic. Wesley was played in a Methodist church showing the father of that religion ending up in a mess of contradictions and moral confusions. In Scott an ice rink was utilized to spell out a message about the British Empire. Scott, out to win the ice pole for England's Empire, kept tumbling over on the ice. His party collapsed on the ice—revealing again Brenton's fascination with failed heroes, men who try and 'skate' a straight course through a slippery, confused and clumsy world.
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