Playwright John Arden

John Arden: a playwright ahead of his time

Arden may have fallen out of favour, but the intoxicating vigour of his language set him apart. I hope his day comes again

Michael Billington

The Guardian


John Arden and his wife Margaretta D'Arcy picket the stage door of the Aldwych Theatre, London, 1972. Photograph: S O'Meara/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

To anyone of my generation, the death of playwright John Arden is a bitter blow. His work is rarely seen these days – partly because he fell out badly with the British theatre establishment. But he was one of a quartet of dramatists, including John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, that energised the theatre of the late 1950s. Each was different. But what I loved about Arden was the intoxicating vigour of his language: he wrote a muscular, colourful prose, interspersed with ballad and song, that ricocheted off the walls of the theatre like a ball in a squash court.

Open Arden's work on any page and the dialogue sings. Take his early play, 1958's Live Like Pigs. On one level, it's a social document about an anarchic group of tramps living cheek-by-jowl with a respectable council-house family. But at one point, the vagrant's daughter recalls her mother's memories of her dad. After a hard day's working and drinking, he'd be "home like a traction engine and revel her three times down to Rio without he'd even take off his boots". Over-romantic? Possibly. But we hadn't heard prose like that since the heyday of Seán O'Casey. And Arden's great play of the following year, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, begins with a Victorian military deserter singing a ballad that perfectly sets the scene:

One day I was drunk, boys, on the Queen's Highway
When a recruiting party came beating that way.
I was enlisted and attested before I did know
And to the Royal Barracks they forced me to go.

From the start, Arden was a figure who aroused controversy. Picking up my original paperback copy of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, I found a leaflet printed 10 days after the play's opening by the pugnacious theatre magazine, Encore, where, following Harold Hobson's dismissal of the play in the Sunday Times, it featured ringing endorsements from Peggy Ashcroft, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Osborne and Michael Redgrave. What made the play so hard for many people, critics especially, to grasp was its moral ambivalence. As Arden later admitted to me, audiences didn't know whether to take the character Musgrave, who seeks to bring home to civilians the reality of colonial slaughter, as a dangerous lunatic or a crusading hero. The greatness of the play lies in the fact he is probably both.

Will Arden's time come again? I sincerely hope so. He is too rich to ignore. Live Like Pigs has plenty to say to us today when the conflict between Travellers and others has once again become a big issue. National Theatre of Scotland should take a look at Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964), which shows the poet and politician David Lyndsay trying to counter feudal power on the 16th-century Scottish borders. And I live in hope of one day seeing again The Workhouse Donkey (1963): a vast, rackety, Dionysiac play about civic corruption in a northern city that paved the way for state-of-the nation epics by David Hare and Howard Brenton.

In many ways, Arden was ahead of his time. One of his dreams was of theatre as an all-day event that embraced the whole community, and that is exactly what happened last year, when the Wildworks team staged for National Theatre Wales a contemporary version of the Passion story in Port Talbot over the course of an Easter weekend. But, although Arden felt increasingly confined by the theatre of his day, he left behind a formidable body of work, written in a surging poetic prose. It would be good if a new generation had a chance to experience it.