Word: arden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reign of Elizabeth I, Britain has suffered from terror of the tramp. She has whipped her beggars back to their parishes, enclosed them like sheep in workhouses, and now, in what may be the coup degrace, she is starting to file them away under the Welfare State. John Arden has not exactly taken up the tramps' cause, but in Live Like Pigs he looks into the plight of the Sawneys, a group of nomads who live something like a family and something like pigs...
...champion his individualists, no matter how loathsome they are, over that bourgoeis juggernaut. But he never does; he never takes sides. He doesn't entirely approve of either the Jacksons or the Sawneys, but he writes a play about them because they are all good for a laugh. John Arden is a playwright who has negative capability in spades...
Another thing about Arden. He began his professional life as an architect, and in the course of that career he seems to have worked all calculated design out of his system. As a playwright, he scatters dramatic climaxes around as if they were props. His last act contains at least three brilliant curtains, as if he couldn't decide when to end his play, and ended it three times just for good measure. Not only that; his second act goes on forever, and some of his poetic dialect is redolent of the absurd sailor-talk O'Neill wrote when...
...produce Arden, any Arden, is to attempt to solve two problems which have confounded the author himself since he began writing for the stage 11 years ago. The first is, how should the ballads and rhymed verse he so enjoys be stitched to the colloquial dialogue? The second is, how can one pick sides in plays where all the characters are likely to chuck their ideas and, in a completely metaphorical way, mind you, drop their pants...
...problem of picking sides, however, has not been solved, and the first two acts languish a bit because of it. Arden says in the introduction to the play, which is excerpted on the Loeb poster, that he is a timid man and that the play advocated complete pacifism timidly. The vacillation is within the play as a whole, in the dealings between characters and not neatly bottled in any one of them...