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Life
1930- ; b. 26 Oct. Barnsley, Yorkshire; ed. Sedburgh, King’s Coll., Cambridge, followed by military service; worked as arch. assistant in London; held Fellowship in Playwriting at Bristol Univ., 1959-60; visiting lect. in Politics and Drama, NYU 1967, during which time he staged The War Carnival, in the NYU Drama Dept., culminating with his announcement that the play was CIA-commissioned to weed out anti-war activists, after which he trampled the US flag; Regent’s Lecturer, Davis (Univ. of California), 1973; Writer in Residence, New England Univ., Australia, 1975; m. D’Arcy, 1957, and settled in Co. Galway; |
a Marxian playwright often compared with Brecht, he writes chiefly about English provincial politics; The Waters of Babylon, slum landlordism (1957), first presented with All Fall Down by students at Edinburgh Univ. in 1955; wrote The Life of Man (1956), for radio; Live Like Pigs (1958), dealing with a housing-estate conflict between the itinerant Sawneys and the settled Jacksons Sarjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), dir. by Lindsay Anderson, Court Th., London, and set in Yorkshire 1860-80, an anti-war play and his best-known work in which four returning soldiers in the 1860s range themselves against the Mayor, Constable, and Parson in a strikebound Northern town, using the bones of a dead comrade to win over the community; |
The Happy Haven (1960), dealing with an insurrection in an old-age home; Business of Good Government (1960); Ars Longa Vita Brevis (1963), concerning an art-teacher’s efforts to control his class-room; The Workhouse Donkey (1963), on a puritanical police chief’s encounter with municipal corruption; Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1964), dealing with Scottish border violence in the 1530s; Left-Handed Liberty (1965) written to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Magna Carta; The Royal Pardon (1966); his use of non-professional actors triggered a professional ‘blockade’ lasting many years; The Hero Rises Up (1969), written in collaboration with D’Arcy, was edited without authorisation by Martin Esslin, Head of BBC Drama; Arden accused Esslin of political censorship in Plays and Players; |
picketed the Royal Shakespeare Company production of their collaboration The Island of the Mighty (Aldwych Th. 1972), based on Arthurian legends; contrib. to New Statesman 1972, article on comic relief in English playwrights since the sixteen century, and passionate denouncement of the treatment of the Irish as troublemakers; Irish plays incl. The Non-Stop Connolly Show, a twenty-six hour cycle about James Connolly in Dublin commissioned by the BBC but shelved in view of of the troubles in Northern Ireland, subsequently performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1975; The Ballygombeen Bequests (1972), later issued as The Little Gray Home in the West (1982), has strong republican overtones and deals with a housing-estate eviction brought by an English landlord; defended a libel action arising from it; |
Vandaleur’s Folly, produced by 7:84 Theatre Co. (Edinburgh 1978), depicts the collapse of William Thompson’s socialist commune in 1831; Pearl (1978), radio-play given to the BBC, depicts a viceregal administration in seventeenth-century Ireland; also The Romans in Britain (1980) and also Whose Is the Kingdom, a nine-play epic (q.d.) his first novel Silence Among the Weapons (1982), a picaresque novel set in the 1st century b.c., was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Book of Bale (1988) a novel, based on the career of Bishop John Bale in Ireland; issued with D’Arcy, Awkward Corners (1989), controversial second part of autobiography; Cogs Tyrannic (1991), an ambitious mix of history and romance, winner of PEN Short Story Prize; won V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize with "A Breach of Trust", collected in The Stealing Steps (2003); living Galway in 1996; The Stealing Steps (2003), nine stories set in different historical periods. |
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Works| Plays (premiers) |
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| In collab. with Margetta D’Arcy |
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| Separate editions |
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| Collected Editions |
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| Novels |
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| Short fiction |
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| Poetry |
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| Prose |
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| Miscellaneous |
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| Autobiography |
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Criticism
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See also R[onald] E. Ewart, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance [York Notes](Librairie de Liban 1982) [as infra], and |
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Commentary
David Ian Rabey, British and Irish Political Drama in the Twentieth Century (1986), writes that ‘[t]he first appearance of a genuinely Brechtian impulse and influence in British and Irish political drama takes place in the plays of John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy and Edward Bond [...] concerned with dramatising social problems [...] demonstrating the human tragedies which are the direct result of their [official law-and-order forces’] power [...] increasing involvement of D’Arcy in the life and work of John Arden contributed considerably to [Brechtian] development.’ Cites The Waters of Babylon (1957), featuring landlord Krank.
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Paul Hadfield & Linda Henderson, ‘Getting Time For Adjustments: The Making of Whose Kingdom, John Arden and Margaretta Darcy’, interviewed over their nine-part radio drama, in Writing Ulster, Nos. 2 & 3 (1991-92), pp.85-109 [with photo ports.]. Authors report that ‘[t]he playwrights regard their present commission as the end of a ‘blockade’ amounting to the rejection of their collective artistic identity by the cultural Establishment; notes The Hero Rises Up (1969), which underwent ‘unauthorised’ politically-motivated editing by Martin Esslin, then Head of Drama at BBC; also an article, Plays and Players’ by Arden stating his objections. Refers to The Island of the Mighty (1972), the Royal Shakespeare Co. production of which they picketed at the Aldwych. The Ballygombeen Bequest, based on their experiences of a family’s eviction in the West of Ireland by the English landlord, withdrawn and then reissued as The Little Gray Home in the West. Reference made to Pearl, a radio play about the Anglo-Irish problem in the 17th century. Authors further discuss process of writing Whose is the Kingdom, and express their total belief in the collaborative process, and mention Duchas na Saoirse [trans. as Artists for Liberation but recte Hope of Freedom]
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Quotations
Harrowing century: ‘There is no way to interpret the harrowing experiences of the twentieth century in terms of the theatre except by making plays about them. And there is no way to make plays which will communicate directly to the public without trying continually to find some new physical context for their realisation. The view of society from even the most engagé university chair is a little like the view of Setzuan from the gods’ cloud in the Brecht play - extensive; but depressingly astral.’ (Quoted in Graham Reid, Remembrance, London: Faber & Faber; cited in Books Ireland, Oct. 1985 [review].)
Sundry: ‘This was not history. It has not passed.’ (The Non-Stop Connolly Show, 1975). Admiral Nelson: ‘We turn the world into a wilderness and have the nerve to call it peace’ (The Hero Rises Up, 1968).
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References
University of Ulster Library holds Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1965); Ars Longa Vita Brevis (1965); Business of Good Government (1963), with others incl. Left Handed Liberty (1965); Sarjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1960); Three Plays (1961, new eds. 1964, 1967); To Present the Pretence, [essays] (1977); Squire Jonathan and Muswell Hill [q.d.]; with Margaretta D’Arcy, Awkward Corners (London: Methuen 1989), 271pp; The Book of Bale (1988); Cogs Tyrannic (1991).
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Notes
7:84, the Scottish radical theatre company, produced a version of Sarjeant Musgrave Dances On in which the historical parallels are stressed by making Musgrave a veteran of Derry’s Bloody Sunday.
Art O’Leary: Arden participated as actor and organiser in the filming of Airt Ui Laoire (1975), commissioned by Official Sinn Féin, the first independent Irish-language film, led by Bob Quinn with Thaddeus O’Sullivan as cameraman, and drawing on a cast from Corrandulla Arts and Entertainments Club in Connemara in which he was active. See Kevin Rockett, et al., eds., Cinema & Ireland (1988).
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IT reposte: John Arden writes in answer to Kevin Myer’s “Irishman’s Diary” [column] offering on Engels and Mary Ellen Synon, disputing that Myers lives up to his pretence of reviling hatred, and instances his use of the unacceptible term ‘knackers’ for Irish Travellers [itinerants]. Arden gives as his address St Bridget’s Place Lr., Galway (Letters to the Editor, Irish Times, 20 April 1996).
Directorial role: John Arden collaborated with Bob Quinn on the the Irish-language film Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (1975), taking the part of the English film ‘director’ in the contemporary mis-en-scène.
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