It is often difficult to sit through a new play at London's National Theatre. The proceedings are usually dominated by red-eyed intensity, a pose of great importance that makes the performance and its content hard to swallow (e.g., David Hare and Harold Pinter); in other words, the shower of grit from axes being ground thickens the atmosphere and tends to obscure the innocent view of what is happening onstage. The subsidized playwright is seldom content with being a playwright. He or she must also assume the role of mama pelican, retching up a gutful of half-digested, rather stale food for thought, which is then crammed down the collective throat of an eagerly gaping audience.
Battering Ram
This grim proceeding has become a kind of rule on the South Bank of the Thames. When exceptions do turn up, the effect is slightly numbing at first. One sits in the stalls, waiting for the sermon or the MEANING to jump out of the play (or at least the production) like a pantomime demon king bursting up through a smoke-blurred trapdoor. Slowly, very slowly, it dawns upon the honest spectator that there will be no battering ram of enlightenment. One is watching a play, that is all. In the case of The March on Russia it happened to be quite a good play, much better for being modest, compassionate, and calm, with all the assurance of a writer who knows his own limitations and does not try to tell the audience what theirs are.
David Storey is rather special among the writers of his generation (he was born in 1933). About thirty years ago, when "working-class" writers were more or less literally the rage in Britain, he was one of the very few who really were working-class. (Others, like John Osborne, tended to be either petitbourgeois or a species of university-educated proto-yuppie.) Storey is a Yorkshireman, the third son of a miner. He was educated first at a grammar school, then at the famous Slade School of Fine Art in London. He was a professional athlete, a teacher, and a laborer before he became a full-time (and eventually prizewinning) writer. His first success was a novel, This Sporting Life, filmed in 1960 by the director Lindsay Anderson, beginning a partnership that in time moved into the theater. Anderson has directed eight of Storey's plays, and The March on Russia is their latest collaboration.
There is a continuous undertone in Storey's writing, both novels and plays, of the tension between class-bound elders of the northern English working-class family and their children, who after the war began to pull away from the values, the ideas (really prejudices), the emotional patterns, and the group loyalties of an older England, a time and society that since 1945 has steadily faded into the distance of memory. (This postwar British ordeal has a great deal in common with the American experience of immigrants, whose first-generation children belong to a world that the parents will never know and can understand only very dimly, without real sympathy.) Storey has expertly observed the pain that is ignited as these working-class parents and children are slowly, inexorably, torn apart by the movement of the times; he has gathered it and distilled it, simply and with compassion. The best part of his theatrical work is that it has no trace of the pitying contempt and condescension with which the old-style working class is so often treated by his contemporaries. His writing expresses the experience of human beings; it is not a means of collecting fodder for some wretched neo-Fabian
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