'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 b...

Brenton has survived the demise of the Fringe and has gained a controversial position unequalled among the writers of the late 1960's. But critical acclaim, commercial acceptance, and diversity of interests have in no way threatened the intensity of Brenton's political commitment. He remains one of Britain's most dedicated political writers and unapologetically states, "All my plays are written unreservedly in the cause of socialism." And though "agit/prop" i...

Brenton is as political as Trevor Griffiths, and perhaps even further to the Left. Like Griffiths, he expresses strong dissatisfaction with present-day Britain but, instead of being naturalistic and relying largely on rational argument, Brenton's plays are fantasies, full of bizarre and theatrical visual effects. The dialogue is often artificial and surrealistic, attempting to show people as they really are, beneath the veneer of conventional behaviour and polite talk. Brenton is obsessed with the vi...

[The critic W. Stephen Gilbert] once hesitatingly dubbed Brenton and [David] Hare the Lennon and McCartney of the New Wave. Indeed, the comparison has its point. Brenton is most at home when creating startling and often outrageous coups de théâtre or when composing choice, vernacular exchanges for his favourite characters, who are usually villains, policemen or angry, disenfranchised youngsters. Hare once confessed, albeit wryly, that he can only write about the middle classes; and while it is...

The poverty of political theatre in England is so great that almost any drama with political intimations gets welcomed as if it were the long-lost grandchild of Bertolt Brecht. It creates a real dilemma for those (like myself) who genuinely hanker for a piece of relevant theatre that isn't ideologically prepackaged and offensively 'all thought out', Weapons of Happiness is about political subjects but, if your definition of political art includes moral fair-play and aesthetic equilibriu...

Howard Brenton has a terrifying imagination that makes his "The Churchill Play" … a very disturbing experience. It is an experience one would not like to have missed, but it unsettles the foundations of the world on which England unsteadily rests. One of the few matters on which it is still generally assumed that there is a consensus of opinion is that in May, 1940, England found a man who could, and did, save her. The haunting and alarming suggestion made in Mr Brenton's powerfu...

Brenton is, if not resentful, at least rather puzzled at the recurrent comparison of his dramatic method to that of a strip cartoon, since he disclaims any particular interest in strip cartoons or any conscious influence. All the same, the comparison is irresistible. Psychology and explanation are ruthlessly suppressed, dialogue is reduced to the skeleton indications of a cartoon's bubbles, the action of his plays proceeds from image to image with virtually no transitions, no gradations. (p. 217) [Ch...

Back in 1943 J. B. Priestley, who could (I suppose) be regarded as Howard Brenton's political and theatrical grand-dad, wrote a play entitled We Came to a City, in which a cross-section of hallucinating citizens were confronted with a socialist utopia. Some winced away in genteel distaste; others eagerly embraced its share-alike lifestyle; and the best and boldest made the trip back to waking reality with the intention of transforming glum old Britain into the new Jerusalem whose glistening avenues t...

There have been plays that have used the years 1945 and 1968 to deliver little homilies about socialist hopes raised and dashed. Now, it seems, 1974 must be added to that list. A Short Sharp Shock begins with the fall of the Heath government, and proceeds to show the nation succumbing, after a long, strength-sapping bout of Wilsonitis and Callaghanosis, to what the authors fear may be a terminal assault by the bacillus M-Thatcher…. Unluckily, both the voltage and wattage of Shock are disappointingly ...

In Sore Throats, Howard Brenton has gone further than most of his contemporaries in exploring the intimate, bringing to bear on three fractured people in an unwelcoming South London flat, the social vision that sustains the broader, public canvas of his earlier work…. In the wake of divorce, Jack …, a chief inspector, has returned to see Judy … to claim half her money, and in so doing hits, kicks her and stamps on her head. Enter Sally … to look at the flat, knowing, because she ...

[Magnificence is] a social drama in a rougher mode than [those] of the English 1950s. The play begins with a scene showing a number of young people—several of the working class, an uneducated hippie and a girl emigrated from the BBC—who break into an unoccupied flat as a protest against a housing situation that allows landlords to hold out for high rents while the poor are left virtually homeless. But the police come to evict the "squatters," and though they meet with very little...

Howard Brenton's poems follow after ten years of plays, in performance and in print, and at first sight they seem like a new departure. The collection is a sequence of 74 sonnets, and has the kind of completeness and individual authority associated with the traditional sonnet sequence. Yet in two important respects Brenton's poems are at least as organic to his dramatic purpose as those of Brecht and Bond. First, as his title, Sonnets of Love and Opposition, suggests, the poems are an attempt ...

[The Churchill Play] is not, in the strictest sense, a 'documentary': Brenton's vision is too personal, and perhaps too romantic, for that. Certainly, there are reconstructions…. But these glances into the past, like the more substantial projection forward into the future which gives the play its circumstantial basis, are merely elements in a metaphor which Brenton develops in order to comment on our present. The historic image is poeticised. The metaphor rests squarely on the id...

Through such plays as Revenge and Christie in Love, Howard Brenton has quickly won himself a reputation as one of our most strikingly original young dramatists. However, this new piece [Fruit] … is so shrill, hysterical and uncoordinated, that it makes one wonder where precisely Mr. Brenton's acknowledged love of excess is leading him. Admittedly it bears all his familiar trademarks: the relish for grotesque physical detail, the fascination with the corrupting effect of power, the love of thea...

Howard Brenton's new play The Genius will not offend the eye though it does abuse the ear. Trevor Eve, clenched fists by his side, clad in a black suit, and looking altogether like a statue of a Bulgarian hero, rants his way through the ungratifying role of Leo, an American Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who is mysteriously exiled to a Midlands university. 'A prickly little shit', the Vice-Chancellor … calls Leo, and takes the words right out of my mouth. Leo creates havoc, wa...

The Churchill Play is a powerful transference of what is happening in Northern Ireland now to what might be happening in England in ten years' time. Its swift dialogue in a masterful variety of dialects masks a cunning battery of cross-fire, a play about the immediate past is performed within the play, as an implicit criticism of our disregard for present events is contained within a warning of future events we could not so easily disregard. This is a controlled and sophisticated play, a marked advan...