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Winnie--Now, the Musical
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14188 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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7 / 1988 |
3,020 Words |
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Herb Greer
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For about three decades it has been fashionable and correct, not to say obligatory, for the British theater to run down the rulers of Britain--present and past. Barring a few friendly BBC and ITV biographies (Lloyd George and the ITV Churchill series The Wilderness Years were two in this vein), the viewers and theatrical audience have been able to count on a sour and usually sanctimonious retread of the antiestablishment pique first seen in the early plays of John Osborne. The most faddish corners of British theater were even willing to play host to foreign gestures in the genre, as when Kenneth Tynan and the radical chic producer Michael White staged Soldiers by Rolf Hochuth, which accused Winston Churchill of political murder. The musical theater got in on the act with O What a Lovely War, in which the middle-class Leftist Joan Littlewood drew a caricature of lovable and suffering common soldiers betrayed and slaughtered by the whims and indifferent stupidity of their leaders. The scene was the First World War, but the implication--that the semicriminal fools up there never change--was unambiguous.
In the 1980s it was the theater that had not changed. Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain was a typical example, provoking public anger with its story of invading Roman (really British) brutes who indulge in beastly oppression of the poor British (really Irish), including lickerish scenes of homosexual rape. Television viewers, especially those who favor BBC drama, have been fed a consistently agitprop image of Britain in works by such writers as Alan Bleasdale and the Trotskyist dramatist Jim Allen. Blandly approved and transmitted by the BBC drama department, their plays tend to be variations on the class-war theme, with an invariably cruel, corrupt, or indifferent establishment cheating, betraying, starving, or otherwise preying upon the hapless underclass.
Form of Jingoism
After the British victory in the Falklands, the dramaturgical consensus was to look down on the conflict as a low form of jingoism, supported in Britain by a drunken, bloodthirsty rabble. When this unofficial party line was broken by Ian Curteis in the BBC-commissioned The Falklands Play, there was trouble. The BBC's drama executives demanded that Curteis falsify history and present Mrs. Thatcher as a cold-hearted bitch who manipulated the war for purely domestic aggrandizement. They were also upset that Curteis presented the war as a legitimate campaign in defense of Western freedom and against an invading oppressor. So daring, so unusual--in the prevailing atmosphere of dramaturgy--and so unacceptable a treatment of Britain and its rulers was canceled by the BBC, and has yet to find an alternative producer.
Sad Figure
Against that sort of background, what was one to think when a large-scale musical was advertised, with Winston Churchill as its subject? The title, Winnie, sounded neither respectful nor serious, though the brochures assured the public that "Churchill does not sing and dance." The natural response was astonishment that something like this should be tried at all, plus a certain wariness. The possibilities for put-down and satire were all too obvious: Churchill had sometimes been a sad figure in his declining years, hobnobbing with the likes of Aristotle Onassis while fighting a failing battle against the decay of his physical and mental powers. And of course, the British had rejected him after the war. Winnie
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