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A Defence of D'Arcy and Arden's Non-Stop Connolly Show

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Michael Cohen
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Extract

Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden's six part cycle, The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), is probably the most ambitious attempt in English to dramatize working-class and socialist history. However, productions have been remarkably few even in the ‘alternative’ theatre, so that the work has seldom been seen, even by its critics. Arguably, it is as important as anything in the Arden canon and is certainly the major achievement of the D'Arcy/Arden one. But to say so is to challenge a widely-held view that the D'Arcy/Arden collaborations of the 1970s are significant only in so far as they illustrate a decline in Arden's career. Even when admired, the Connolly plays are usually discussed primarily as an aspect of Arden's development. When not, they are perceived as the clearest indication of his supposed demise as a major playwright, a fall from favour which is often attributed to D'Arcy's influence. Perversely, such discussions may simultaneously fail to acknowledge D'Arcy's role as senior partner in The Non-Stop Connolly Show.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 78 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1990

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References

Notes

1. The text used is The Non-Stop Connolly Show, 5 vols (London: Pluto Press, 1978).Google Scholar

2. The premiere took place in Liberty Hall, Dublin, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, over the Easter weekend of 1975 in a continuous performance of twenty-six hours. For details of the subsequent performances in Ireland and of the ‘rehearsed readings’ at the Almost Free Theatre in London in 1976, see Arden, and D'Arcy's, essay ‘A Socialist Hero On the Stage’, in To Present the Pretence (London: Eyre-Methuen, 1978)Google Scholar, subsequently referred to as TPP.

3. See, for example, Gray, Frances, John Arden (London: Macmillan, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Page, Malcolm, John Arden (Boston: Twayne, 1984).Google Scholar

4. Variations in the order of attribution here usually arise because The Non-Stop Connolly Show is by D'Arcy/Arden but ‘A Socialist Hero On The Stage’ is by Arden/D'Arcy.

5. See, in particular, Schvey, Henry I., ‘From Paradox to Propaganda’, in Essays On Contemporary British Drama, eds. Bock, Hedwig and Wertheim, Albert (Munich: Max Hueber, 1981), pp. 47–70.Google ScholarDrama, No. 122, Autumn, 1976, p. 68Google Scholar, claimed that The Non-Stop Connolly Show marked a disastrous step on the part of the playwrights as they moved ‘from the centre to eccentric agit-prop’.

6. Especially by O'Hanlon, Redmond in ‘John Arden: Theatre and Commitment’, Crane Bag, VII, i, Dublin, 1983, pp. 155–61.Google Scholar

7. See Marsh, Paddy, ‘Easter At Liberty Hall’, Theatre Quarterly, No. 20, 1975–1976, pp. 133–41.Google Scholar

8. Held 4 January, 1983 at their London Home in Muswell Hill.

9. TPP, p. 99.Google Scholar

10. See ‘Connolly Re-claimed’, Platform, No. 5, Spring 1983, p. 13.Google Scholar

11. In our conversation D'Arcy and Arden explained that the technical resources for documentary theatre-slides, etc. – were not available for the Dublin production. They also had reservations about a ‘split’ between language and such devices.

12. TTP, p. 103.Google Scholar

13. Discussed in our conversation. Written for the Socialist Labour League and performed at a rally at the Alexandra Palace in 1971.

14. Authors' preface to The Non-Stop Connolly Show, p. VII: given in each volume.Google Scholar

15. Leach, , p. 13.Google Scholar

16. For example in sections of Theatre Workshop's Oh What A Lovely War.

17. Redmond O'Hanlon excludes the work from ‘dramatic poetry’ on the grounds that it is preoccupied with the ‘extra-dramatic discourses’ of history and politics: p. 159.

18. See authors' preface to the Connolly Show, p. VI.Google Scholar

19. TPP, p. 129.Google Scholar

20. Part 6, 1, 1, pp. 7–9.

21. In our conversation.

22. D'Arcy felt that in Ireland labour audiences were less in thrall to realistic conventions than in England with its ‘working class utilitarian, puritan kind of society’.

23. New Statesman, 11 04, 1980Google Scholar, quoted in Arden On File, ed. Page, Malcolm (London: Eyre-Methuen, 1985), pp. 56–7.Google Scholar

24. Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 55.Google Scholar

25. Schvey, , p. 65.Google Scholar

26. Ibid.

27. Schvey, , p. 66.Google Scholar

28. Marsh, , p. 140.Google Scholar

29. TPP, p. 98.Google Scholar

30. O'Hanlon, Redmond, p. 159.Google Scholar

31. ‘The terms upon which author, performers and audience agree to meet’. See Drama From Ibsen to Brecht (London: Pelican, 1976), p. 4.Google Scholar

32. Schvey, , p. 66.Google Scholar

33. Quoted by Campos, Christophe, “Experiments for the People of Paris’, Theatre Quarterly, 11, 8, p. 59.Google Scholar

34. TPP, p. 106.

35. See, for example, Act 1 of Part 4.

36. Schvey reproaches the dramatists with not raising the kind of doubts about the Rising that Yeats does and concludes, ‘such doubts have no place in propaganda’, p. 67.Google Scholar

37. TPP, p. 137.Google Scholar

38. Brecht's working notes, quoted by Hauptmann, Elisabeth in Erinnerungen an Brecht, ed. Witt, Hubert (Leipzig, 1964), p. 64.Google Scholar

39. At one point in the Cohen interview they expressed the view that Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, Arden's best-known individual work, was ‘very thin’ in comparison.