Making History: the Plays of Howard Brenton

Abstract

Since the performance of his first play, Ladder of Fools, at Cambridge University in 1965, Howard Brenton has written more than fifty dramatic works - a truly prodigious output for someone his age.¹ Like most major contemporary British dramatists, Brenton began his theatrical life in the ‘fringe’, with such shoestring companies as Brighton Combination and Portable Theatre. His career, then, is very much a post-1960 phenomenon; it could not really have existed (not, at any rate, in the form it has taken) before the proliferation in England of fringe theatre in the sixties. Brenton’s approach to drama was simply too far removed from that of ‘traditional’ West End theatre; only in the fringe could he find the sort of ‘laboratory’ in which to explore new concepts of theatrical writing: socially and politically active, aggressively experimental. The fringe thus provided Brenton with a ‘poor’ theatre that was for him paradoxically rich, a theatre whose very poverty nurtured him. His early play Gum and Goo (1969), for example, was created ‘with what was to hand - three actors, a few days, a budget of thirty shillings for a ball and three bicycle lamps’.² Eventually, however, the confines of the fringe proved more constraining than liberating: while he has never completely abandoned his dramatic roots, his work since the mid-seventies has been written progressively for large mainstream theatres like the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company. This attempt to infiltrate the mainstream with values developed in the fringe was regarded by Brenton as a kind of guerilla action, an ‘armoured charabanc . . . parked’ within the very heart of the Establishment.³ ‘I’d rather have my plays presented to 900 people who may hate what I’m saying’, he commented in 1979, ‘than to fifty of the converted’.⁴