This review was rejected by the Independent Newspaper in
August of 1994
A Trip To The Theatre
As I was in London I thought to myself that I would go and see a play at the National Theatre on the South Bank. I usually go the National Theatre in London because - apart from it, supposedly, being the best - as a wheelchair user my companion gets in free and the parking is free and/or easy. (Though, no companion means no admittance.) Though I must admit something first: I don't really like the theatre. The main reason for this is that I am a child of the cinema - class affiliation guaranteed that - and that it is usually (no, always!) full of middle class people who have come for their individual and collective consciences to be eased by the cathartic fodder that is usually on offer. At least cinema rarely claims to be anything other than entertainment.
Broken Glass, by Arthur Miller, was, I am afraid to say, no different. It reassured the audience that it is (bordering on the it was) a horrible world where people do horrible things to one another, with nightmarish consequences. The audience feels better at the end because they can walk away saying "Isn't it terrible, remind me to renew my direct debit to Oxfam (or whoever)". Consciences' are eased and fifty quid is spent on a good night out: a small price to pay to be seen by your friends in the right place, and have seen the latest play by that 20th century cultural icon - Arthur Miller - in the bargain; perhaps even a celebrity or two in the bar/foyer (Bernard Hill the night I was there). Seeing - and being seen - the play for these people is as important at the cocktail party table as is what it was about. Knowing the cannons (having seen them is true one-up-manship) has superseded the moral of the tales themselves, the authors' intent is lost forever in the chatterings of the people whom the play was designed to jolt out of their comfortable lives. Isn't culture wonderful! We can enjoy it, comprehend it, agree with it and then ignore its controversial messages (if there is one!).
I do not blame the play, or even the writer (though its cosy closure, neat ending, and telegraphed plot line don't help) for the audience's ability to enjoy it whilst ignoring it; that is the beauty of bourgeois culture; it embraces its enemies only to destroy them. But the National Theatre must take some of the blame for its pandering to the aesthetic preferences of the middle classes in its choice of plays and the construction of the theatre's ambiance - one senses that a dress code is not far off! Art is only of use if it challenges and changes. Some art does (Picasso for example), but nothing at the National ever will. The Hare Trilogy is a perfect example of what I am talking about: the audience is told (rather patronizingly) that society is 'not all right' and that perhaps something ought to be done about it. Wow!
Such fodder enables the people with power - the educated middle-classes - to argue amongst themselves that, for example, what's wrong with this country is that the C. of E. is not as Christian as it should bed. Wow! The English legal system isn't what it claims to be. Wow! Wakey Wakey...we know it isn't and we are being screwed by it everyday. We don't need some liberal intellectual pointing out the obvious, we live it. The issues of these plays, and 'the theatre' itself, is irrelevant if you are the mother in Toxteth who can't feed her children because the dole ran out three days ago; or you are the woman in Wolverhampton who is regularly raped by her boyfriend (but thinks that that is how it is supposed to be); or you are the woman with cerebral palsy who is sexually, physically and verbally abused everyday by her care workers, teachers, people in the street and work-mates (if she is lucky enough to have a job that is); or you are the unemployed farm labourer in Yorkshire who is going to commit suicide tomorrow.
Such cultural highlights as the latest Arthur Miller (even with out its dodgy metaphors, that again parasitically use paralysis for its tried and tested views - however honourable or true those views may be) are socially irrelevant to most of us and do little to solve the problems that are experienced by most of us every day of our lives. I would argue that such theatrical games in fact distance us all further from any possible solutions to our social ills by acting as simple cathartic experiences for their audience, and furthermore, it distances the oppressed (or the dispossessed, or what ever you wish to call the ordinary, the average, this week) from their oppressors by enabling the oppressor to feeling that they have some insight into the real state of human existence (when they do not). As for this male wheelchair user from Camberley, alienation and irritation is my main experience on a trip to the National Theatre; alienation both from the culture that claims to represent the nation (the theatre in general) and from the audience that then claims to have a greater understanding of life having participated in that supposed cultural high point of going to the theatre. And irritation in that it was a play that also claimed to have some insight into the lives of the crippled (emotional and physical), when its only insight was cliched and tragically based on false, widespread, ideas of what being a cripple (or disabled) is.
So not only did the playhouse and its audience alienate me, the actual play did as well. The play used a woman's sense of helplessness (and hopelessness) in the face of Nazi atrocities in the 1930's, symbolised by the character's development of paralysis (with no medical rationale), to explore both the apparent political paralysis at the time and the effect such a situation had on her relationship with her husband and doctor. Sadly every cliche of disability is used; even to the extent of having the doctor claim that all doctors are in some sense disabled and that that is why they become doctors in the first place: to cure the disabled. As if the disabled spend their lives wishing for a cure (another media fallacy if little else, that panders to ordinary peoples' false sense of superiority). All plays are entitled to a cliche or two, but this one is full of them.
The play even uses age old stereotypes of macho posturing: the husband becomes permanently impotent when his sexual prowess is questioned, and - yes there is more - the woman ends up detesting the husband because of his apparent social and sexual weakness; she finally admits that she hates her husband because she is stronger than him. Sensitivity is constructed as weakness here and becomes a crime against humanity, and reason enough for social exclusion and isolation. The shallowness of the metaphor is rather disappointing coming from a master playwright such as Miller, and fails to show any understanding, or sensitivity, of the strength that is required to just survive having been repeatedly crushed by the unrelenting social machine that is everyday life (any disabled person knows what I mean).
Disability as psychosomatic is another tried and tested plot technique that is becoming a little dated, and Miller's use of it is disappointing at best. Few wheelchair users have not been told that they could get out of their wheelchair if they wanted; cliches have an incredible power, even to the extent that many wheelchair users often believe them themselves (PC Olds is a prime example). When the woman with psychosomatic paralysis finally stands up (self cure) in the final moments of the play, upon the death of her husband (the strong can only be free when the weak are dead!), the play (and the actors) hits the nadir of a formulaic plot that any routine melodrama, or whodunit, would be proud of (one suspects that Hollywood will buy this play fairly quickly).
All though the play is a metaphor it is also supposed to be taken on a more literal level, if it wasn't it would, to some extent, become incoherent. And the argument that something is metaphorical (or ironical, for that matter) cannot not expect to be taken by some literally, in which case the author's intent is largely irrelevant because a piece's power and meaning rest within the audience (how else could you explain the complete misinterpretation and negation of most art by most critics/audiences). And, as a disabled person, the use of my life as a metaphor is becoming a little tiresome.
Don't get me wrong, the middle-classes and the liberal reformists will love Broken Glass, they will be able to say: "How terrible" (when it is much worst than they can imagine, and when the social paralysis discussed in this play is probably originated by them in the first place) and then they can tut and discuss it at their next cocktail party. Thus ensuring that the terribleness this, or any other, play explores will not stop and that theatre, especially the National, will continue to put on party pieces for party goers (written by party goers) to discuss at their next party. Some may think of this as an attack of the politically correct, but it is not - the more distasteful the better I say. I'd go as far as to say that Broken Glass's problem is that it is far too PC: and not just passably cliched. My main problem may be that I am not a party goer in the first place, but for that I am grateful, and I think I'll give the next party piece a miss. Thanks, but no thanks.
1650 words