| Dario Fo-style absurdist satire |
At Sgript Cymru |
| Ruth is Stranger than Richard / Sgript Cymru- An Enemy for the People , Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff , August 2, 2006 |
Gary Owen’s new play was always going to be an eagerly-awaited event but this time the Welsh wunderkind (albeit a rather mature wunderkind) has also provoked controversy not about the style or the form of his new play but about the content.Being critical through ridicule of those that govern, and of their ideology, has a long tradition and in theatre it’s a theme that we can find in various nations’ plays during the struggle for independence: in Wales the most controversial play ever is still Caradoc Evans’s Taffy which in 1923 caused riots from the outraged London Welsh when it opened at the (ironically-named) Prince of Wales in the West End and it’s a play which helped to make its controversial and provocative author still despised in many quarters. And Gary Owen shows here a hitherto unrevealed talent for Dario Fo-style absurdist satire, with in the first scene a government of a newly-devolved government somewhere on the edge of Europe discussing a ridiculous useless tank-trap project that could be sold to the electorate as public art, while it ends with them faced with 801 amendments from new members arguing only about the seating arrangements in the new parliament. But I suspect there will be those who will see Gary Owen, like Caradoc Evans, as a traitor, though the very opposite may be true. Why ? Not simply because his three politicians are all cynical, devious and ruthless but because he has the temerity to present a nation that is actually worse off because of devolution, a failed experiment because there are simply not enough people of high enough ability to run a country. Enemy for the People is, of course, fiction, a play, and these are not real people – and neither is the evidence real statistics. In fact not once are we told that this small nation is actually Wales: it could be Ruritania or Illyria. However audiences in Wales will be in no doubt that this is a satire on the ineffectualness of the Assembly, it is also a kind of meditation on power, truth and how to achieve real political change in a nation that has no recent history of self-government. Yes, An Enemy for the People is an engaging, witty and generally well-acted political comedy that has a universality as well as a topicality rare in Welsh theatre. It deserves to be seen well beyond the border, and I am sure will be. But just what is Gary Owen saying here ? His director, Adele Thomas, insists that the text throws up debates and that it is an impressionistic rather than realistic look at life after devolution. She speaks for many when she insists that it is not so much about Wales but about any small nation that has tried to break away from a larger central power (the nations of former Yugoslavia being most often quoted). Debates about what ? Freedom and independence, and the confusion between those two ideas, or truth or compromise or democracy or politics… ? For theatregoers the title is all-important, with its prepositional variation on Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. That literally minimal change immediately makes it all rather problematic, with its perplexing apparent self-contradiction. Clearly this lies at the heart of the drama. Yet, it seems to me, it has hardly been resolved in discussions or in criticisms – or even, perhaps, within the play’s production itself. What is the original, Enemy of the People, about ? A scientist discovers that the water supply of his town is contaminated; to reveal this would destroy the tourist trade on which the town depends; to fix it costs more than the town can afford; the scientist defies the press and the politicians and exposes the threat to public health and he finds himself and his family is ostracised. What is Enemy for the People about ? A political leader of a newly-devolved nation discovers that under devolution things have got worse in every department; to admit this would mean people would lose confidence in the government and power would revert to the “old capital”; the minister calls for a referendum on independence, which he nominally opposes, but sets the electorate against him and his policies by telling the truth about the failures of the government; the vote is for independence and he finds himself ostracised. Ibsen struggled with the question of truth and the absolutist dilemma: was it always the proper thing to do, to tell the truth ? The Wild Duck, which followed, suggests not. But An Enemy for the People would seem to be an argument for telling the truth regardless – mainly because in this case broader humanity, as well as personal integrity, would suffer if the truth were concealed. Dr Thomas Stockmann’s principled idealism hardly chimes in with today’s relativist world and we might think from our postmodernist perspective that his inflexible insistence on the truth is ultimately undemocratic: “I would rather ruin my native town than see it flourishing upon a lie,” the doctor says in his defence, having discovered that the town’s water supply is contaminated but seeing his evidence suppressed by the corrupt liberal bourgeoisie, and his superiority alienates any potential supporters. Terry (Rhodri Steffan) , the First Minister of the anonymous nation where An Enemy For the People is set, is no Dr Stockmann. He is duplicitous, morally ambiguous, pragmatic, elitist, sexist, obsequious, sexually dishonest, but also ultimately idealistic– a politician, in other words. He’s in many ways likeable – after all, he’s a Talking Heads fan (David Byrne rather than Alan Bennett). Crucially he believes in an independent nation and has had to settle for a government with limited powers. (And, let’s be frank, this really is about Wales even if it could also be about various other new nations still with ties to their former rulers – and maybe a little less obvious reference to Welsh politics would make the play better.) What happens is that Terry suspects that this young government is doing rather less well than the hype suggested and so uncovers statistics that indicate that the people are in fact sicker, thicker and poorer as a result of devolution. At the same time, more or less, he comes up with a strategy for getting an unwilling populace to vote for full independence: offer a referendum with a choice – independence or continued support for a dominant power that sends their lads off to die in foreign wars. The politician Terry would presumably justify the devious tactic by saying that the end justifies the means,. He has admitted to his attractive, ambitious, assistant, Sian (Claire Cage), herself a member of parliament (here meaning, I assume, an AM), that he is a closet gay. He attacks the Old Labour eminence grise Glyn (Ifan Huw Lloydxxx) for being part of an organisation that squandered its inheritance, the people’s trust of the party, in what I felt was an important scene that didn’t register as much as it should; this is Terry as the accountable elected politician bemoaning as many real younger Labour supporters do the ineptitude, corruption and complacency of the Labour Party in Wales. Terry’s next moves are, to me, confusing. But on them hang the plot and the point of the play. He gives a tv speech in which he concedes that there is not enough native talent to run the country, in so doing committing political hara-kiri, of course. This seems to be truthful Terry again... or calculating Terry, since he is theoretically asking the electorate to vote against independence in the upcoming referendum. This speech, with his contempt for his fellow-countrymen is, I guess, a clear reference to Stockmann’s offensive tirade in Ibsen’s original; Stockmann meant it, but we assume Terry is playing at being a Stockmann and deliberately ostracizing himself from society. He finds himself in a homosexual honey-trap, during the course of which he repeats his contempt for his fellow-citizens (“I hate my country, I really do,” he says), and goes off with a male prostitute knowing he will be exposed by his party enemies - New Labour in the form of Sian, Old Labour in the form of the corrupt councillor, Glyn (Ifan Huw Lloyd) – although the exposé is not for his sexual indiscretion but for repeating his anti-patriotism. While Terry has, we assume (but it’s not that clear), set himself up as a martyr for the cause of independence, he confesses in the last scene that he does actually hate his country, hate his people, because he “wants them to be great and they’re not”. He did it, he says, to set his people free – free “to think about why we’re alive”. “We need the revolution that makes every single human life an adventure. And you could start it here, in our fearless, frightened country,” says the defeated Terry. Now I find this a curiously muddled romantic end to an often sharply-told, cynical story. The referendum has resulted in a victory for independence – what Terry wanted. But Terry himself ends up as a park-bench drunk, thrown out by his wife for his Ron Davies moment of madness, thrown out by his party for his attack on his nation. Sian is the new president of the republic with a very New Labour non-radical agenda. Now I don’t expect old-fashioned ideological arguments from the Cambridge-educated duo of Gary Owen and Adele Thomas, neither of whom, perhaps would have much truck with Stockmann’s stubbornness; these are intelligent theatre-makers of the twenty-first century, where such arguments would be seen as reductionist and elitist and anti-democratic. But I do still have problems with what the debates are about. Yes, questions are asked – but I can’t see where any debate would go. Or have I just missed something ? |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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