Revolutionary

Of all the stuff I read in KL back in December it's probably been David Hare's play Fanshen that has had the most lasting impact upon me. Certainly reading it served to make me conscious of the virtues of a certain kind of politically-committed theatre in a way that has surprised me. I read it along with four other plays from the mid-seventies (which I think I picked up as review copies for a student newspaper I wrote for. I certainly don't recall buying them.) These included another play by Hare, Teeth & Smiles, concerning the fortunes of a rock band playing at a university ball, which I found considerably less interesting.

Fanshen concerns the process of revolution as it plays out in a small Chinese village over a period of several years and is based on meticulous research. It's political in a Brechtian manner, and I thought I would find it overly schematic if not dogmatic in its approach to its subject. I suppose I'm firmly in the camp that believes that somewhere along the line revolutions inevitably get betrayed, the sort of Animal Farm, Won’t Get Fooled Again school of thought. I still believe that to be the case, but Fanshen made me see some of the complexities embedded in the lives of those really experiencing revolutionary change and just how interesting, illuminating and moving those experiences are in their own right. It's a case of particularities transcending generalities that's the mark of the best writing. I think Teeth & Smiles was also intending to make some kind of comment on a changing society but I found it got bogged down in the personal (especially as applied to sexual relationships), rather than the particular - if that makes any sense.

Two other plays I read were also concerned with the battle of the sexes, as it were. (I know that sounds reductionist and more than a little corny but, honestly, that's what it seemed to boil down to.) Of the two Christopher Hampton's Treats was genuinely funny all the way through but overall felt a bit thin, like the pilot for a comedy series, whilst E.A. Whitehead's Old Flames featured an extraordinarily dull and preachy second half after a reasonably promising first act. This, the second bit, revolved around a group of women talking about how dreadful men are, having just murdered a particularly unpleasant representative of the gender. The playwright claimed this is how women really talk when they are together, which convinced me that he's the kind of chap that doesn't get around very much. What struck me about both of these plays, and Teeth & Smiles for that matter, was the sense that the writers seemed to be doing little more than moaning about personal misery, which is all very well if you do it with genius, but rather petty if you don't.

I also read Edward Bond's The Fool, a meditation of sorts on the life of the poet John Clare. The deeply political approach taken to its subject struck me as refreshing and, as with Fanshen, illuminating, even if there were issues that one might have liked to have debated. And I suppose that's what struck me about these plays (Fanshen and The Fool): they construct a way of viewing experience that gives one something to react against and which draws one into a kind of tussle with their writers' imaginations. I like that.

I think I'm losing patience with notions of the transcendent power of art, something I might have vaguely believed in when Fanshen was first written