Word: ardened
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...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...
...subdued and somehow melancholy production of John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance opened, one day late, at the Loeb last night. I cannot say how the play will run when John Ross regains his voice and rejoins the company, but last night's performance was a thoroughly competent job interrupted now and then by brilliance...
...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...