|
By Owen Knowles,
University of Hull Research Fellow
Richard J. Hand, The
Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions. London:
Palgrave, 2005. Pp. xvii +192. £45.
Richard Hand begins his study on a note of
teasing understatement: “Of all things, why Conrad’s
plays? Why write about such an unfulfilled enterprise if not downright
failure? What’s the point of venturing into a shallow and
stagnant backwater of both literary and theatrical history?”
In fact, as readers of The Conradian
and Conradiana, will
know, this “stagnant backwater” is already in the process
of being reclaimed as an area of fertile cultivation.
Through a number of articles and as a stage-director,
Hand himself has contributed significantly to the growing interest
in Conrad’s theatre, as have Alison E. Wheatley and Neill
R. Joy, the editors of the planned Cambridge Edition of Conrad’s
plays. So Hand’s study comes at an opportune moment –
it is the first full-length monograph on Conrad the playwright as
well as a token of things to come, including a reliable edition
of the plays themselves. Has the opportunity been taken? The answer
is a virtually unqualified “Yes.”
Hand approaches his subject with relish, writes
well, and has produced a valuable addition to Conrad studies. Careful
scholarship and patient analysis combine with one other quality
absolutely necessary to this kind of project – that is, an
acute sense of how the play-text translates into working theatrical
performance.
The monograph is clearly and unfussily organized.
After a small gallery of illustrations, it opens with a preface
and broad introduction to Conrad’s theatre (which also sets
out Hand’s methodology for dealing with the adaptation process).
There then follow four chapters on the individual plays –
One Day More, Victory,
Laughing Anne, and The
Secret Agent – with a final summarizing coda. Victory
is included in the corpus since, if not strictly a self-adaptation,
it shows Conrad enthusiastically collaborating with Macdonald Hastings;
although composition of Laughing
Anne followed that of The
Secret Agent, the latter – as Conrad’s most ambitious
and high-profile piece – is reserved for the final chapter.
Hand has four stated aims: (1) to give a fuller
and more systematic account of the plays than hitherto; (2) to examine
them as “self-adaptations” that simultaneously throw
light on Conrad’s dramatic practice and on the stories being
adapted; (3) to provide an appropriate contemporary theatrical context
for Conrad’s plays; and (4) to explore the ways in which they
foreshadow later stage practice.
In almost all respects, this study makes good
on its promises. The detailed and wide-ranging contextualization
of the plays brings Conrad the dramatist into meaningful relationship
with many of the most important theatrical movements, genres, and
practices of the day. Its parameters embrace the English Literary
Theatre Movement of the 1890s, Victorian melodrama, “New Woman”
plays, the tradition of French symbolist drama, contemporary acting
styles and the “star” system, and French Grand-Guignol,
upon which Hand has written a separate general study.
The age’s popular tastes are also measured
through its reviews and – in an illuminating addition –
the stage-censor’s reports on Conrad’s plays. The only
significant omission here is the period’s high opera, the
possible impact of which on Conrad is acknowledged but un explored,
even though it might have added a further dimension to the account
of Victory as novel and stage-play.
Hand draws on these contexts selectively and adeptly in the main
body of his study, making his chapters into a series of absorbing
case-studies. In the analysis of both One
Day More and Victory,
there is a mainly convincing defence of varieties of stage-melodrama
(although in the case of the Victory,
Hand is perhaps overly defensive about a play whose happy and idealized
ending is, in his own words, “troubling if analysed in any
depth”).
But the most rewarding parts of his study
are those showing the importance of Grand-Guignol conventions in
the formation of Conrad’s last two plays,
Laughing Anne and The Secret
Agent. Conrad called the first his “little Guignol
play” and seems to have written it specifically for the Little
Theatre, which in 1920 introduced versions the French “theatre
of horror” to London; likewise, in adapting The
Secret Agent, he was always aware of the play’s nearness
to Guignol effects once he had resolved to make it as “horrible”
as he possibly could in order to force easy-going people to “sup
on horrors” (CL6 518,
520).
Hand traces the evolution of Grand-Guignol
(which, he notes, has the equivalent meaning of “Punch and
Judy for Adults”) from its violent and bloodcurdling beginnings
on the turn-of-the-century Paris stage to its less brazen British
counterparts at the Little Theatre. Seeing it as a distant precursor
of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, he comments: “Grand-Guignol
is distinctly an evolution of melodrama, but it is melodrama in
a post-Nietzschean world.… The Grand-Guignol parades horrors
in an erratic, unstable universe resulting in a terrifying nihilism.
It is little wonder that Conrad shares an affinity with it.”
Just what this “affinity” entails
is made clear in an excellent analysis of the shaping power of English
Grand-Guignol conventions on the themes and structure of Laughing
Anne and parts of The Secret
Agent, with attention given to the pot-pourri of performance
horrors (ranging from grotesque physical malformation to darkly
escalating terror), the yoking together of violence and the erotic,
and the heightened combination of sensationalist melodrama and naturalistic
detail.
In pondering the way in which Conrad’s
plays anticipate – albeit sometimes only shadowily –
later developments in drama, Hand produces some brilliantly apt
analogies (with, for example, the plays of Eugene O’Neill,
Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett). Only on one or two occasions
do analogies seem strained, as with the comparison of The
Secret Agent play and Howard Brenton’s Christie
in Love, or under-developed, as in the brief allusion to
possible links between Conrad and Harold Pinter.
This analogy would bear much more weight than
Hand places on it. From the closet-drama of “The Return”
(with its intriguing resemblance to Pinter’s The
Lover) through Lord Jim
to One Day More, Conrad can
be found to be Pinteresque avant
la lettre in his exploration of a dialogue that exploits
indeterminate pause, agitated repetition, silences, and speech fragments
in order to create what, in relation to his first play, he described
as “the mental and emotional atmosphere of the situation.”
For his part, Pinter’s screenplays are invariably prompted
by a strong sense of affinity with the adapted author, a fact that
surely helps to explain his engagement with the theatrical and cinematic
possibilities of Conrad’s work in his screenplay of Victory.
These are, however, only minor queries and
cavils. While acknowledging the more practical motives that led
Conrad to write for the stage, Hand’s study nevertheless argues
forcefully for the intrinsic qualities of the plays, clearly shows
how the short story and full-length novel pose different sets of
problems for Conrad the self-adaptor, and follows his response to
those challenges. In shedding considerable light upon potentially
theatrical qualities in the adapted works (as is especially the
case with the analysis of “To-morrow”), it also has
a much wider appeal than its specialized title might imply.
In general, Hand trusts to the well chosen
example to make his case, without veering into inflated claim. His
overall view of Conrad’s drama is that while it can be “peculiar,”
sometimes plainly deficient, or occasionally over-faithful to the
original text, it is almost always provocative in its awkwardly
placed relation to the period’s standard theatrical fare and
positively striking in its proto-modern elements.
The Theatre of Joseph Conrad
develops the basis for this view with an impressive command of the
period’s theatre history, much persuasive evidence, generous
open-mindedness, and an exhilarating range of reference.
© 2006 Owen Knowles
|
|