Robert Graves has, in many books and essays, declared his view of the purpose of poetry, which I understand as being the celebration of the Muse—seen by the ancients as a manifold goddess, but comprehensible in modern psychological terms as the forces of birth, fertility and sexual power, the feminine tenderness of life and the irreversible deprivations of death which nevertheless contain their own capacity for renewal. Against these he sets the more masculine ‘ concepts of aggressive strength, the domination of the will, the arrogant rational assertiveness of scientific rectitude, straight lines, as it were, in contrast to curved. These he seems to regard as basically anti-poetic: and with this concept I am in agreement. But the promulgation of such ideas in the drama as opposed to lyric poetry involves certain problems. The playwright is compelled by the circumstances of his art to communicate with a public, a public gathered together in one place at one particular time, and his communication is a collaborate act needing actors, a producer, a designer, stage-staff and so forth to make it possible at all.
This means that the personal working out of the poet’s relationship with his Muse is not practicable. Where a lyric poem can satisfactorily be addressed to tine person only, or even be a kind of soliloquy, a play will not work as a play unless the author bears in mind that he is addressing an indeterminate but nevertheless plural audience. There is a limit to the amount of interest such an audience will take in the private cogitations of a writer. The themes handled in a play must have some general relevance, and the greater this relevance, the greater appeal it will make. Yeats, towards the end of his career, became so disillusioned with the responses of audiences that he took to writing his plays for audiences almost as small as those which he might have hoped to reach with his poems: and there is today a resentment and disgust of the stage often expressed by poets—Mr. Anus illustrated this very well with a recent review he wrote of Arnold Wesker’s plays. ‘ The theatre,’ he said, in effect, ‘is not improving at all, it is just what it has always been—a conceited and inconsiderable place where good writers are destroyed by the world.’
But this has not always been the case. The examples of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and others shew that it was once possible for poets to adapt their work either for private circulation or for public performance without diminution of its quality. The essential element of the theatre is that there the writer speaks through the lips of his actors; it does not necessarily give him an opportunity for direct statement. He has to find a fable that will of itself express his image of the world and express it in away that will make sense to the audience. Aristotle said that the heroes of tragedy should be princes and governors, upon whose actions the fate of society hung, and granted the changes in social organization since his time, I think that this is a rule that still holds good. The type of poetic commitment I have outlined in my first paragraph must be applied to a vision of the world in action which can be conveniently presented by, actors on a stage, and therefore is likely to be enriched (or diluted, according to taste or the skill of the playwright) by other matter, which may appear only marginally relevant to the main theme. Thus the workings of politics, the exposure of social evils, the manners of a particular section of society, may all have a place (and a sincerely felt place) in a play which is not basic-ally about them at all. They are all themes of public import and may serve to publicly illustrate the poet’s prime preoccupation, the celebration of his Muse and her part in his personal world.
Therefore I cannot see myself in any deep way connected with other writers. A technical connection there is indeed—playwriting is a craft and is learnt by example and experiment, and the work of others can provide this—but when it comes to the essential subject matter of the plays I can only write what I personally understand and feel: the phrase ‘a school of playwrights ‘ cannot for me mean more than ‘a school of carpenters’.
Carpenters can share a workshop and produce furniture together with a common supply of wood and tools. But furniture can do no more than be sat upon and eaten off.
Plays, at their best, must speak to their audience with one man’s voice, even though this is modified by the collaborate circumstances of their performance. It was possible in the Middle Ages for good plays to be communal—how many writers worked on the York Mystery Cycle?—but there was a shared body of belief in those days. Now we are faced with audiences who, taken as a mass, believe in nothing in particular; a play has to present its meaning to both the sympathetic and the antipathetic at the same time. The former must be fulfilled and the latter converted, if possible. This demands a degree of passionate affirmation on the part of the writer that cannot be shared.
But audiences are hard to come by in this country, and clearly some form of collective action is necessary by the theatre if we are to survive as a means of communication at all. The only way I can see this happening is at the carpenter-shop level. We are faced with a situation where we must plug the idea of a theatre as a place where interesting things happen without regard to what the things specifically are, before we can indulge ourselves with internecine disputes about subject matter, styles of presentation, or philosophies. It is necessary, for instance, that remarks such as those of Kingsley Amis be proved to be wrong before we can boast ourselves a force for anything in the life of this country.