‘When the Revolution Comes’: Ideological Indoctrination vs. Individual Identity in Caryl
Churchill’s Lights Shining In
Buckinghamshire and Mad Forest
Dr. Mamata Sengupta teaches English at Islampur College, West
Bengal. She has done her doctoral research on the plays of Caryl Churchill and
her M. Phil research on the plays of Arnold Wesker. Presently she is engaged in
a Minor Research Project on the Post War British Theatre. Her areas of
specialization and research interest include Performance Studies, Audience
Reception Studies, Orality and Folkloristics, and Gender Studies.
ABSTRACT
The word ‘ideology’ roughly translates into a set of
doctrines that reflects the social, cultural, economic, religious, political or
philosophical needs and aspirations of an individual or a group. Ideology,
therefore, forms the basis of an institution wherein the ideas of the dominant
social group are prescribed and promoted for the perpetuation of the group’s
hegemonic control on others. In the present paper, I shall deal with two plays of Caryl Churchill
i.e. Light Shining in Buckinhamshire (1976)
and Mad Forest (1990) with a view to
highlighting how the state ideologies attempt
to condition, cajole and/or coerce individuals to conform to its parameters of thought,
action and behaviour. I shall also try to show how the characters of the two
plays desperately attempt to overthrow the respective ideological hegemonies of
their states i.e. Britain and Romania, and thereby ultimately assert their own
individual identities.
Keywords: Ideology, State, Power, Hegemony, Identity.
Right from its inception as a socio-political institution,
the State has operated as a machinery of and a tool for fulfilling the socially
dominant group’s desire to access, mediate and control both the human and the
non-human/natural resources. The way a man’s self and all its projections are
perceived and assessed by the state, needless to say, is shaved and determined
by certain preset ideas about what man is and what a man ought to be. These
ideas of identity perception and identity assessment, taken together with both
ideational and repressive methods and processes of controlling the same, become
the constitutive factors of a state’s preferred ideology. In the present paper, I shall deal with two
of Caryl Churchill’s plays i.e. Light
Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Mad
Forest (1990) with a view to highlighting the interface of ideology and
identity. Efforts will be made to see how ideological
indoctrination causes severe damage to the individual identities of people who
are made to put up with it. I shall also try to show how the suffering
individuals ultimately become able to resist and neutralize these damaging
forces.
Set
against the English Civil War of the 17th century, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is the
product of a three week Joint Stock workshop with Max Stafford Clark. The play
is divided into two acts and was first performed on September 7, 1976 at the
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, under the direction of Stafford-Clark himself.
While the decidedly political stance practiced by the Joint Stock writers and
actors gave the play its unique vision of history as a product of politicized
thinking, Churchill’s association with the Monstrous Regiment made her include,
perhaps for the first time in the history of British main/malestream Drama, a
decidedly feminist viewpoint on politics, religion and war. With Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, writes
Jean E. Howard, Churchill returns to ‘some of the questions raised in [her 1972
play] Owners’ but only with one
difference that whereas Owners is
situated in ‘the contemporary Britain’, Light
Shining in Buckinghamshire is set in ‘the English Civil War of the 1640s
and 1650s when radical movements and sensibilities flourished and regimes of
ownership were profoundly, if fleetingly, called in question’ (Howard in Aston
and Diamond 38). While such a backdrop allows Churchill to trace the early
periods of English capitalism it also, by extension, enables her to show how
blind adherence to any politico-economical ideology only subjects the
individual to mindless torture.
According
to Christopher Hill, the mid seventeenth century represents ‘the greatest
upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain’ (Hill 14). The conflict of opinions
between the Parliament and the King regarding the king’s sovereignty on the
land and power over its people and the parliament’s rights to control such
sovereign powers was already posing serious problems for the English politics
since the beginning of Charles I’s reign. The situation exacerbated when for
eleven consecutive years Charles I declined to summon the Parliament and
resorted to tyrannical ways of extorting taxes from the masses. In the
religious front too, the tension was felt when in 1637 William Laud, the Bishop
of London, proposed a new book of prayers for Scotland under the active
patronage of Charles I following which riots broke out in Edinburgh.
On
February 28, 1638 the Scottish nobles and ministers signed an agreement titled the National Covenant
declaring their faith in Presbyterian discipline
and unanimous rejection of the English attempts at enforcing English liturgical
practices and Protestant church governance on Scotland. This together with the
inner conflicts resulted in the English Civil War from 1642 to 1651
which, according to Hall, brought about an era of ‘great overturning,
questioning, revaluing of everything in England’ during which the Royalists
supporting the King Charles I were pitted against the Roundheads who were in
favour of both the Long Parliament and the Rump Parliament (Hill 14). The civil
war came to an end with the victory of the
Parliamentarians at the Battle of
Worcester on September 3, 1651,
but the dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell failed to bring positive
changes in the British society — to the lives of the suffering masses.
According
to Dimple Godiwala, Light Shining in
Buckinghamshire ‘is a
radical re-interpretation of history and takes its place beside the many
‘history plays’ of the post-war period’ (Godiwala 59). In the play, Churchill
tries to present an alternative history of the seventeenth century Britain by
highlighting this virtually unchanged relationship between the state’s will to
power and the resultant suppression of the masses. The play can profitably be
seen as Churchill’s answer to the grand narratives of the officially sanctioned
versions of history which just like any other supremacist discourses tries to
suppress subversions or what Hill calls as ‘the revolt within the Revolution’
(Hill 14):
The
simple ‘Cavliers and Roundheads’ history taught at school hides the complexity
if
the
aims and conflicts of those to the left of Parliament, we are told of a step
forward to
today’s
democracy but not of a revolution that didn’t happen; we are told of Charles
and
Cromwell
but not of the thousands of men and women who tried to change their lives.
Though
nobody now expects Christ to make heaven on earth, their voices are
surprisingly
close
to us. (P1. 183)
That the ‘Cavliers
and Roundheads’ history the schools teach and by extension preach includes what
happened to ‘Charles and Cromwell’ and to the well-known men like them but
excludes the sufferings of the general masses seems to correspond to Napoleon’s
definition of history as merely a ‘version of
past events that people have decided to agree upon’.
The same conviction is bolstered when Churchill includes
lines from a 1648 Digger pamphlet “More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire” as the epigraph to the play. The ‘light’
that the title of Churchill’s play refers to is as much the ‘light’ that the 17th
century Digger’s pamphlet attempted to throw at the problematic state of
England as that ‘light’ which keeps on ‘shining’at the Buckingham palace in
spite of and irrespective to the dismal darkness that has descended on the
country and its people. The ‘Diggers’, alternatively called the ‘True
Levellers’, were the 17th century group of agrarian communists who were Protestants by faith and radicals by
political orientation. Led by
Gerrard Winstanley and
William Everard, they fought for the farmer’s rights on the lands first against
the king during Charles I’s reign and against the landowners during
Commonwealth’s rule. Needless to mention, the Digger’s rebellion was brutally crushed
by destroying their houses and their agricultural lands by the Commonwealth which was greatly alarmed by their subversive
activities and intent. Therefore, Churchill’s reference to the Digger’s
pamphlet at the very opening of her play and the innumerable direct and
indirect quotations from a number of other 17th century documents
transforms it into both a documentary and an epic narration of the
marginalization of mankind that goes on unabated in the name of politics, war
and religion.
The
movement of Light Shining in
Buckinghamshire revolves round subversion of certain atemporal rules of
state and religion. Both the state as a political entity and organized religion
as a cultural discourse need to subjugate the people into acceptable sets
behaviours or thoughts through repressive or ideological means for their own
perpetuation. When the play opens we find such an example of religious
indoctrination whereby the masses are taught to ‘fear’ the ‘pit’ of damnation
and are programmed to ‘confess’ and ‘repent’ sins such as ‘subversion’ and
‘heresy’:
Fear, and the pit, and the snare are upon
thee, O inhabitant of the earth.
And
it shall come to pass that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall
into the
pit;
and he that cometh out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare; for
the
windows
from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake. (P1. 189)
According to
Godiwala, this reading from Isaiah ‘evokes a universal terror by the
hell-fire-pit sermonizing’ (Godiwala 60). No doubt, the ‘terror’ that Godiwala
talks about is ‘universal’; for it is either the infernal pit of suffering or
the smothering webs of punishment that have traditionally been perceived to be
the fate of all/every human acts of willing/unwitting deviance.
Therefore,
it is not without significance that while praying to God the first character of
the play Cobbe is more conscious about ‘word, thought or faint motion’ (which
he or Christianity condemns as sins) that he fears might have been unknowingly
committed despite his ‘strict guard set’ than those committed in full knowledge
and sense. In fact, just like Dan in A
Mouthful of Birds, Cobbe is a victim of religious indoctrination. He too
perceives the world to be too full of sins to be redeemed so easily. The
confession that Cobbe ultimately blurts out considers an act of insubordination
within the family:
At
table last night when father said grace I wanted to seize the table and turn it
over so
the
white cloth slid, silver, glass, capon, claret, comfits overturned. I wanted to
shout
your
name and damn my family and myself eating so quietly when what is going on
outside
our gate? (P1. 191-192)
This thought of
rebellion against the father is potentially disruptive in nature; for this
rebellion is not merely against the paterfamilias but also against the symbolic
order and the values that the father represents and endorses. Cobbe’s anger at
his father’s toasting of ‘grace’ during the dinner indicates that everything
might not be so graceful as his father wants his family to believe.
Evidently,
Cobbe’s inability to join the dinner is due to his awareness of ‘what is going
on outside’ the ‘gates’ of the upper class family house. It is here that his
refusal to participate in the lavish dinner that his father holds becomes a
means to express his resistance to the great show of paternal feeling by the
king and to the unwavering, unfulfilled promises of the God and his agents like
the Vicar. Thus, by subverting what Godiwala calls the ‘trinity’ of the
biological father, the earthly father and the heavenly father, Cobbe ‘prepares
the ground’ not only for ‘the movement of the play’ but also for the
negotiating the tripartite ‘matrix’ of normative ‘order’ which ‘straitjackets’
men like him.
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire offers the audience a highly fragmentary
episodic narrative wherein separate tales coexist without any necessary
connection between them. As Churchill puts it, ‘Each scene can be taken as a
separate event rather than part of a story’ (P1. 184). While this kaleidoscopic
nature allows the play to concentrate on what Churchill calls ‘larger events
like war and revolutions’ and their aftermath, it also provides her with an
opportunity to point out the similar nature of all human sufferings or how
‘people share the same kind of experience’ (P1. 184). Besides, it also proffers
to the play the Churchillean avoidance of closure whereby characters appear
onstage, leave without completing their tales and wait until their stories are
taken up once again by the playwright, if they are taken up at all. In one of
her interviews, Churchill explains how the disturbing fragmentariness of her
script which initially scared her, eventually matured into an emblem for the
fragmented existence that man is made to live with since the beginning of
civilization:
With Light
Shining I’d come with a very unfinished script, because I’d written a
version which didn’t work at all. So then I wrote another version in ten days
before rehearsals began, but it wasn’t finished. [...] But then we [Churchill
and Stafford-Clark] had the idea jointly—we suggested it jokingly, and then
came back to it: ‘What we ought to do is let everybody play different parts,
and not worry about characters going through’. (Churchill 27)
Quite
in keeping with this fragmentariness, Cobbe’s narrative is immediately followed
by that of a Vicar who represents the religious authority (P1. 192). His
conversation with the servant during which he emphasizes the necessity to adhere
by the Christian doctrines of suffering and repentance and emphatically
supports the operations of the state as represented by the king and the church
reveals a strong bias against the humane will to freedom, ‘This is a Godly
estate and they will be evicted if they don’t submit’ (P1. 193). But before the
Vicar is allowed to speak more in favour of the religion-state nexus, Churchill
brings in another character i.e. Margaret Brotherton (P1. 193).
In
fact, Margaret Brotherton happens to be the first female character to appear
onstage in Light Shining in
Buckinghamshire. Unlike Cobbe or the Vicar who represent the Elite class
and the Church respectively, Margaret Brotherton hails from the very bottom of
the socio-economic hierarchy. She is a woman, a beggar, and a vagabond who has
managed to disrupt from all available identity groups that are acceptable in a
civilized socio-cultural setup. The society therefore has no qualms in denying
Margaret’s rights to beg and instead punishes her for putative attempts at
stealing by ‘stripping’ her to the ‘waist’, beating to the ‘bounds of [the]
parish’ and only then making her return to the ‘parish where [she was] born’
(P1. 194). Interestingly, during her trial Margaret is not allowed to speak on
her own except for a single instance wherein she accepts her sin of vagrancy.
While this highlights how women have been silenced by patriarchy since time
immemorial, it also indicates the utter failure of the state machinery to
locate the real dangers to the state. It is only during her next appearance
that Margaret is allowed to speak her mind (P1. 197).
Margaret’s
drunken conversation with an anonymous man gives voice to an all pervading
sense of loss and futility that has engulfed the entire humankind. Margaret’s
proposal of selling the Bible for getting shelter during the stormy night
stands in sharp contrast to both the lavish dinner offered by Cobbe’s father
inside the warm family house and the man’s ability to offer her a halfpenny in
return of sexual favours (P1. 197). In a similar way, her dubious reply ‘If
[Christ] comes tomorrow and you’ve not drunk your money. Sitting here with
tenpence in the cold. Christ laugh at you for that’ stand in sharp contrast to
the man’s strong conviction about Christ’s ‘coming’ in order to save the
humanity, highlighting thereby the illusory and then therefore delusive nature
of such beliefs (P1. 197-198). As Godiwala puts it, ‘Brotherton understandably
doesn’t share in the utopian dream, preferring the solidity of a tangible and
fulfilling present moment rather than a tomorrow which is not promised to her’
(Godiwala 61).
Margaret’s
inability to have faith in religion is immediately counterpointed by the
promises of Star, a corn merchant who is busy gathering soldiers for building
the army of saints (P1. 198). Star is an avowed Christian who stands in sharp
contrast to the unholy nexus of politics and religion. During his speech he
urges the masses not to wait for any divine intervention but to take upon
themselves the task to bring about a revolution that will ultimately free
themselves and their religion from the clutches of an overpowering political
authority; for as history has taught him to fear that ‘It (...[might]) be too
late when Christ comes to say you want to be saved’ (P1. 195). Therefore, the
war that he is preparing for is as much against the king of England as against
the institutionalized religion that the king is promoting in guise of the
Church of England.
His
vision of Christ ruling over ‘England for one thousand years’ expresses his
strong conviction in a better tomorrow that will be free from all kinds of
social, economic, political and religious injustice. And the beginning of such
an era he already foresees with his ability to pay his soldiers eight pence a
day which is ‘better than labouring. And it’s everyday (…) not just the days
you fight. Every day’ (P1. 195). Obviously when people like Briggs join the
Saint’s Army it is as much for the regular money as for the hopes that Star is
able to generate in the common man. Very soon a similar kind of hope is seen in
Cobbe’s vision of the arrival of the Saviour:
I
saw a great body of light […] Amen, Halelujah, Halelujah, Amen. […] My most
excellent
majesty and eternal glory in me answered and said, fear not. I will take thee
up
into
my everlasting kingdom. […] And I heard a voice saying, ‘Go to London, to
London,
that great city, and tell them I am coming’. (P1. 206)
In
the highly fragmented world of Light
Shining in Buckinghamshire, the next prominent character is Hoskins. If
Star’s rebellion is against the politicization of religion, then Hoskins
refuses to comply with the gender stereotypes promoted by Christianity. The
more she listens to the Preacher’s words the more she develops doubts about the
veracity of its contents (P1. 200). This is indicated in her gradual
progression from an anonymous listener (implied by her adherence to the
collective voice of the mass) to a self-appointed deputy to the Preacher
(highlighted by her echoing of the Preacher’s words) and then to a deviant
figure (symbolized in her ability to complete sentences that the Preacher
leaves for the masses to fill in). Therefore, when the Preacher starts talking
about the Christian doctrine of sin and damnation, Hoskins can hardly stop
herself from voicing forth her protest, ‘God would not send us into the pit.
Christ saves us from that. [...] Yes he will cast them down but he not damn
them eternally [...] what sort of God takes pleasure in pain’ (P1. 201-202).
However, instead of answering her queries, the Preacher questions her basic
right to speech: ‘Why are you speaking? I let it pass but you are too loud.
Women can’t speak in church’ (P1. 201).
This
traditional proscription on female speech that the Preacher as a representative
of a patriarchal religion seems to express here can be read on two levels:
first ‘Women can’t speak’ and second ‘Women can’t speak in church’. If the
first injunction denies female right to expression in human society, then the
second one bars her from expressing herself even before God and those who claim
to represent him. However, the more the Preacher tries to smother her voice the
more subversive Hoskins’s queries become, “You say we are chosen to be damned
before we are born. [...] How can God choose us from all eternity to be saved
or damned before we are born” (P1. 202). When Hoskins starts quoting from the
Bible verbatim in support of her questions the Preacher is left with no other
alternatives than banishing this woman from church premises, “Get her out” (P1.
202). His closing remark, “Woman, you are certainly damned”, is both a decree
of punishment on counts of Hoskins’s attempts at breaking into the male domain
of language and theology and an expression of the Preacher’s frustration with
himself at once as the male superior and as a religious head for not being able
to coerce a woman into submission (P1. 202).
The
next time when Hoskins appears onstage we find her in a battered condition. She
has been subject to mass violence from which a young man Claxton has rescued
her (P1. 203). Significantly, the wife of Claxton is identified not by any name
but in relation to the husband i.e. ‘the wife’. Needless to say, this anonymity
has strategically been constituted by the patriarchal culture for women whom it
can neither expect nor accept to have a name and by extension an identity
separate from and independent of the paterfamilias. It is her conversation with
Hoskins that brings the wife of Claxton vis-à-vis
certain hitherto unquestioned socio-religious givens which she as a
victim of normative femininity is unable to accept:
But women don’t preach. We bear children in
pain, that’s why. And they die. For our sin, for Eve’s sin. That’s why we have
pain. We’re not clean. We have to obey. The man, whatever he’s like. If he
beats us that’s why. We have blood, we’re shameful, our bodies are worse that a
man’s. All bodies are evil but ours is worst. That’s why we can’t speak. (P1. 204)
The female body has traditionally been perceived to be
‘unclean’ and ‘shameful’ on counts of its biological compulsion to menstruate
notwithstanding its importance and desirability for child bearing. This
attitude of the wife of Claxton to her own body is an offshoot of the gender
hegemony whereby the male child is taught to praise himself for his ability to
ejaculate semen which is emblematic of a desirable masculinity while the female
child is programmed to abhor herself for her ability to bleed which is
socially, culturally and religiously perceived to be ‘filthy’ and ‘shameful’.
In fact, a menstruating woman’s acceptability in society depends as much on her
reproductive capacity as on her perfect adherence to what can be called the
menstrual codes. Iris
Marion Young describes these codes when she writes:
[...] from our earliest awareness of
menstruation until the day we stop, we are mindful of the imperative to conceal
our menstrual process [to] follow a multitude of practical rules. Do not
discuss your menstruation […] leave no bloodstains on the floor, towels,
sheets, or chairs. Make sure that your bloody flow does not visibly leak
through your clothes, and do not let the outline of a sanitary pad show. (Young
106-107).
It is this
experience of living with a culturally programmed hatred of her own body that
prompted the wife of Claxton to vehemently oppose Hoskins’s proud proclamation
of feminine rights to speech.
However,
Hoskins’s resistance does not go in vain as in one of the following sections
two anonymous women representing the entire womankind, for the very first time
in their lives, face a mirror and try to perceive who they are, ‘Look. Who’s
that? That’s you. That’s you and me’ (P1. 207). Through this symbolic act of
looking at the mirror the women break out of their normative existence formed
and framed by patriarchal imagination and religious injunctions by exercising
their right and might to know their self-identity. Their next wish to face the
‘bigger mirror’ where their entire body can be seen at once in a similar way
expresses their desire and need to let their selves and their bodies ‘know’
(perceive) what ‘they look like’ (their self-reality) in its totality which
patriarchy has never allowed them to do:
There’s an even bigger mirror [...] You see
your whole body at once. You see yourself standing in that room. They must know
what they look like all the time. And now we do’ (P1. 207).
Before the first
act of the play ends with the highly condensed Putney debates, this newly found
power of the two anonymous women on their own bodies, together with the
optimism of Star and Cobbe, is celebrated when the chorus sings Walt Whitman’s
‘Song of the Open Road’, “All seems beautiful to me / I can repeat over to men
and women, you have done such good to me” (P1. 208).
The second act of Light Shining in Buchinghamshire brings together all the characters
of the first act and situates them against the 17th century
background (P1. 209). The act opens with the Diggers talking about the state
machinery and their revolt against it — how ‘the General gave consent that the
soldiers should come to help beat off the Diggers’ (P1. 220). In the series of
fragmentary scenes that follows Churchill hints at a number of socio-cultural
changes that the 17th century England was witness to. She also lays
bare how, in spite of all these changes, the basic story of human suffering
remains unperturbed. No matter how well the Vicar welcomes Star as the new
landlord, numerous women will fail to feed their children. The same sense of
disillusionment pervades the penultimate scene titled ‘Meeting’ wherein a
frustrated Briggs cries out “Jesus Christ isn’t going to change it” (P1. 233).
The play ends with a post-restoration scene ‘After’. While Hoskins attempts to
overcome the collective frustration by relying on divine intervention although
she suspects mankind to have missed it “Christ did come and nobody noticed”,
Cobbe does the same by changing his name and identity (P1. 240). The play ends
with Claxton’s expression of a Whitmanesque wish to look out upon the sorrows
of the world, “My great desire is to see and say nothing” (P1. 241). Needless
to say, this wish to see and say nothing is not an escapist tendency. It is
rather symbolic of the wish to secure agency through waiting and seeing and
gaining knowledge thereby which can be used in future.
If
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire attempts
to reconstruct the history of the English Civil War from the perspective of the
general public and also portrays the individual’s struggle against religious, capitalist and socialist ideologies about private
property, political domination and revolutionary
ideals, then Mad Forest ties
to present an alternative version of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Mad Forest was first performed by the
students of the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, on June 25, 1990.
Then the play was staged at the National Theatre, Bucharest, from September 17,
1990, before it moved to the Royal Court Theatre, London, on October 9, the
same year. It is interesting to note that shortly after the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the then President of Romania and the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, in
December 1989, Churchill personally visited the country to conduct
preliminary research works for writing the play. This rare experience of
getting to know people who were the direct victims of the revolution proffers
to the play a documentary like clarity of narration and an empathic view into
the characters’ lives.
The
Romanian Revolution was a part of the
revolutionary wave that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period
otherwise known as the Autumn of Nations, resulting in the fall of Communist
rule in Central and Eastern Europe. The revolution was the result of some nine
years of extreme totalitarian communist regime under the leadership of the then
President Nicolae
Ceauşescu. During 1960s and 1970s, notes Peter
Siani-Davies, Romania was hailed as one of the fastest growing economies
in Europe (Siani-Davies 21). However, it
was not until the late 1970s that the real crisis was felt. Romania’s decided
preference for large scale industries was slowly but surely breeding trouble
for the country’s economy. The production rate was much higher than the
consumption rate which along with Romania’s failure to increase their export
market and continued reliance on foreign loans resulted in underused capacities
and unsold production. It is at this state that the 1979 energy crisis
following the Iranian Revolution triggered both real and perceived fiscal
calamities.
It is at this time that the President Nicolae
Ceauşescu approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a line of credit
and decided to pay off the entire amount of loan that Romania had borrowed from
different foreign sources till then within a very short period of time (Siani-Davies 70-91). With this, Ceauşescu announced the heinous austerity program whereby all
welfare state policies were abandoned, import facilities were restricted,
domestic energy resources were channeled to regularize foreign export systems,
the radio and television stations were silenced as per the ‘Systemization
Policy’ and last but not the least, basic human necessities, such as food,
electricity and medicine were rationed. By 1986, Romania was able to pay off
half of its debt but by that time the standard of living in country thanks to Ceauşescu’s
‘Rational Eating Program’ had already hit its
pit bottom. Acute food shortage due to this ‘Rational Eating Program’ coupled
with total absence of medical facilities increased the rate of mortality in an
unnatural manner. Throughout this period the Romanian ubiquitous secret service
agents/cops the ‘Securitates’ guaranteed the citizens’ perfect adherence to the
laws by suppressing mass media, liquidating the activists, quashing the
political parties and by such other repressive technologies. Though the entire
debt was paid by 1989, Ceauşescu did not withhold this austerity program.
The early protest against the regime was seen in Timișoara in
mid-December 1989 when the government tried to evict Hungarian Reformed church pastor László Tőkés who was well known for
his scathing criticism of Ceauşescu’s policies. The ‘Securitate’ was assigned the duty of crushing the protest, but
riots broke out in the entire Romania. Within a week, Ceauşescu, his
wife and the Deputy Prime Minister were arrested on charges of genocide, power
abuse, oppressive state mechanics, and potential damage to the country’s
economy. They were found guilty by a Kangaroo Court and were sentenced to
death. The execution was carried out on December 25, 1989. Set against this violent
time, Churchill’s Mad Forest traces
the Romanian life before, during and after the revolution. Mad Forest is one among those very few Churchill plays in which
scenes can be read or seen not as parts of a larger structure but as complete
units. The play is divided into three distinct parts. As Mary Luckhurst puts
it, this tripartite structure allows Churchill to take ‘the challenge of
representing revolution to new levels of sophistication’ (Luckhurst in Aston
and Diamond 62). Churchill in this play, Luckhurst notes further, ‘draws a
great deal more attention to the mechanisms of narrative in performance, and
places the act of spectatorship under particular stress’ (Luckhurst in Aston
and Diamond 62). The first part is set in the pre-revolution Ceauşescu regime
which narrates the wedding preparations of Lucia Vladus, the daughter of a
working class family of Romania to an American man. The second part shows the
revolution times by presenting a series of eye-witness accounts of the
Revolution Bucharest saw between December 21 to 25 1989. The third section of
the play narrates the post revolution era wherein the marriage preparations of
Lucia’s younger sister Florina are under full sway. It is this episodic
narration that links Churchill’s Mad
Forest to the Brechtian epic theatre wherein each scene is a free standing
structure. As Elaine Aston puts it, “The Brechtian style of Mad Forest is
structurally encoded in the three-part montage of scenes, captioned with titles
announced in Romanian and English” (Aston 78).
In
her note to the play, Churchill assures her directors and audience not to be
“afraid of long silences” since Mad
Forest, as she conceives it, “goes from the difficulty of saying anything
to everyone talking” (P3. 104). It is this ‘difficulty’ of speech
counterpointed by the ‘clamour’ of voices that
lend to Mad Forest its unique
approach to communication and language. The first part of the play which
consists of sixteen small scenes can profitably be seen as a study in the
failure of communication. All most the entire of the part fails to develop any
well-formed dialogue system. The conversations between the Vladu parents Bodgan
and Irina or between the daughters Lucia and Florina are drowned by the
programs and announcements of the radio standing for the state controlled
nature of enjoyment and information in Romania (P3. 107-108).
In
a similar manner, the conversation between the members of the Antonescu family,
though uninterrupted by radios or televisions, is punctuated by confusion and
uncertainty which are as much due to their familial problems as because of the
disturbed condition of Bucharest (P3. 108-109). Even when Flavia Antonescu
teaches history to her students, the version of the country’s past and present
that she blurts out is highly mediated in nature which makes her speech another
name for silence (P3. 110-111). Similarly, when the Securitate man interprets
Lucia’s marriage into an American family as an indication of the entire Vladu
family’s lack of patriotism, threatens severe measures against each of the
members of the family and instructs Bodgan to report to the Securitate once a
week without giving him an opportunity to speak in favour of his rights to
choose a match for his daughter, the audience can easily see the culture of
silence that Nicolae
Ceauşescu led government promoted (P3. 111-113). That Lucia had to bribe the
doctor to terminate her pregnancy since abortion was legally banned in Romania
is another instance of the supreme control that the state wanted to exert on
its citizen’s private life (P3. 113).
If
Lucia has to silently accept the tag of a ‘slut’ for her sexual liberties, her
brother Gabriel has to submit himself unquestioningly to the wishes of his boss
to prove his patriotism (P3. 117-118). The sudden rage and enthusiasm with
which Radu, Ianoş, Gabriel and the anonymous soldier and the waiter chase a rat
and ultimately kick it out of vicinity like a football is actually an
expression of their frustration with the totalitarian regime that they are made
to put up with (P3. 118). A similar frustration can be seen in the utter
disinterestedness with which Lucia and Ianoş, most probably her lover, stand in
silence, watch time while holding each other in close embrace (P3. 120).
Radu
and Florina too are unable to communicate with each other because of the same
frustration arising out of the order of silence that defines the current
situation of things (P3. 120-121). In the entire first section of the play
there are only two characters who can speak out the horror that the others are
living through. However, what is interesting is that none of these characters
belong to the mortal world. The first is an Angel (P3. 115-116) while the
second one is the apparition of the Flavia’s dead Grandmother (P3. 119-120).
Though both these characters talk against the government, they ultimately
retrace their own footsteps:
ANGEL
(...)
I try to keep clear of the political side. You should do the
same.
(P3. 116)
And,
GRANDMOTHER
(...) Or sometimes I did nothing. It was me doing nothing.
(P3.
119)
Radu too has to
pretend submissiveness immediately after announcing his rebellion ‘Down with
Ceauşescu’ and tries to start a communication with Florina (P3. 121). The
penultimate scene wherein Lucia tries her wedding gown reduplicates the
cultural gaze that decides an individual’s acceptability in society (P3. 121).
The first part of Mad Forest ends
with Lucia’s Marriage to Wayne (P3. 121-122).
The
second part of the play records eyewitness accounts of some fourteen people — a
girl student, two boys students, two students whose gender identities are not
disclosed, a translator, a doctor, a soldier, a securitate, a housepainter, a
flower seller, a bulldozer driver and a painter. As Churchill herself
clarifies, ‘None of the characters in this section are the characters in the
play that began in Part I. They are all Romanians speaking to us in English in
Romanian accent’ (P3. 123). The myriad narratives of the general public give
voice to the sense of utter confusion permeating as much the state operatives
as the revolution. As Donna
Soto-Morettini rightly asseverates:
The important point made by these accounts is
the apparent lack of organisation guiding these events, and the absence of any
sense of an underground movement that might have directed the takeover of the
palace and the television station (Soto-Morettini
110).
The
final section of Mad Forest opens in
the post-revolution Romania with a surreal encounter between a Vampire and a
Dog. Both of them have been drawn to Bucharest by the smell and taste of blood
that has been shed due to the revolution:
VAMPIRE I came here for the revolution, I could
smell it a long way off.
DOG I've
tasted man's blood. It was thick on the road, I gobbled it up quick, then
somebody kicked me. (P3. 137)
Interestingly, the
blood thirst that drives the Vampire out of its grave can now be noticed in the
Dog; for by tasting the human blood it has transgressed the limits of living
world and thereby has alienated itself from the civilization of the livening
beings to which it originally belonged. Therefore, the Dog’s wish of getting
transformed into a Vampire Dog and the Vampire’s decision to take it as his
companion by sucking its blood and transforming it thereby into a vampire dog
is as much fuelled by their mutual search for company as by their thirst for
blood. By extension, this blood thirst is an emblem for the continued suffering
of common humanity even after the revolution.
This
sense of continued suffering is bolstered by the following scenes wherein a
number of Romanian citizens are seen writhing in pain in hospitals. While the
wounded Gabriel can hardly believe that his wife Rodica has survived the
revolution, another anonymous citizen finds it difficult to grasp the very
factuality of the Revolution:
Did we have a revolution or a putsch? Who was
shooting on the 21st? And who was shooting on the 22nd? Was the army shooting
on the 21st or did some shoot and some not shoot or were the Securitate
disguised in army uniforms? [...] Most important of all were the terrorists and
the army really fighting or were they only pretending to fight? And for whose
benefit? And by whose orders? [...] How many people died at Timișoara? And
where are the bodies? Who mutilated the bodies? And were they mutilated after
they'd been killed specially to provoke the revolution? By whom? For whose
benefit? (P3. 142-143)
Unlike in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire where
the citizens take active part in the revolution, in Mad Forest they remain quite distant from the political upheavals
in the country. In fact, this is the first instance in the play that someone
has the time and opportunity to give voice to his doubts and anxieties. Highly
unsettling in nature, these unanswered questions counterpoint the glorious
promises of the Revolution with the reality of disillusionment, suspicion and
unabated violence. This breaks the vicious cycle of imposed silence and suffering
and soon Florina too is seen expressing her doubts regarding the Revolution
while Flavia questions the very historicity of what the schools, as ideological
state instruments, teach as history:
FLORINA How
many people were killed in Timișoara? Where are the bodies? There
were bodies found in a sandpit for the
longjump. Where are the rest?
(P3. 147)
And
again,
FLAVIA All I was trying to do was to teach
correctly. Isn’t history what’s in the
history book?
(P3. 157)
It
is in the final scene of the play that almost all the characters including the
Vampire and the Angel reunite for Florina’s wedding (P3. 176). Still troubled
with the effects of the Revolution, the characters nearly forget the occasion
that has brought them together until Flavia’s comments make them aware of the
wedding, ‘This is a wedding. We’re forgetting our programme. It’s time for
dancing’ (P3. 178). However, as one can easily see, the revolution and its
aftermath have rendered the characters emotionally barren to such an extent
that they can hardly participate in the merrymaking and obsessively engage in
political argument. At this point all the characters quite instinctively stop
conversing in English because this adapted language has failed in adequately
expressing their angst. They revert to their mother tongue Romanian and start
babbling in it (P3. 178-181).
During
this phase of overlapping dialogues and monologues, Bodgan emphasizes the need
of a strong leader for the country while Irina worries about how both Ceauşescu
and the Revolution have robbed the people of their vitality and potency. In a
similar manner, Gabriel expresses his strong racial hatred towards the French
while Radu still wonders about the identities and the fates of the
revolutionaries. Thus, while the other characters are too submerged in their
worries, Flavia announces her decision to write an alternative version of
Romania’s history that will at once uncover the mystery surrounding Ceausescu's
fall and chronicle the real post-revolution Romania, “I'm going to write a true
history so we'll know exactly what happened” (P3.179). The conversation
concludes with brief comments from two unearthly guests to the wedding ceremony
— one an Angel and the other a Vampire. While the Angel prefers to keep himself
aloof from political strife “I try to keep clear of the political side” (P3.
180), the Vampire expresses the ineffectuality of such desires “You begin to
want blood” (P3. 181). Needless to say, the Angel voices a common human wish
whereas the Vampire expresses a compulsive desire.
According
to Stuart Hall, ideology is “the mental frameworks — the languages, the
concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation”
that “different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of,
figure out and render intelligible the way society works” (Hall in Morley and Chen 26).Ideologies not only
promote and legitimize the interests of a ruling group or individual but also
perpetuate its/his hegemonic control on others who belong to that
socio-cultural framework. In fact, ideology operates
as the looking glass
through which a man is made to perceive one another and
the world at large constituting thereby the ‘interiority’ of an individual or a group
based on their acceptance of the prescribed rules and roles, as opposed to and
by the ‘exteriority’ of yet another individual or group for their resistance to
the same. It is this interiority/exteriority dichotomy that determines the
respective subject positions of the individual(s) or the group(s) as docile or
deviant in relation to the ideology promoted by a given society. While docility
guarantees acceptance and accommodation, deviance invites ostracism,
surveillance and punishment.
In
the two plays under discussion i.e. Lights
Shining in Buckinghamshire and Mad
Forest, we can see how both the states try to constrict
the lives of their citizens in such a way that their individual identities are
smothered and puppets are produced who can sing and dance to the tunes of their
sovereign masters at their whims. However, we can hardly forget that when
ideology reinforces its hold on the individual or the masses through the
exercise of condign, compensatory or conditioned power, then it is the
individual and/or the collective’s claim on identity that offers both the means
and the incentive of thwarting this imposition. In the plays, therefore, characters like Cobbe, Margaret Brotherton,
Florina and Flavia stand up to face the constrictive ideologies of their
respective states and thereby assert their own individual identities. The pain
they undergo, the battles they fight, the struggles they put up and the losses
they endure all give voice to their strong denial to surrender their individual
identity at the much glorified alter of the state. And it is this eternal
spirit of the chainless mind, as celebrated in the plays, which keeps hope
alive for the rest of the humanity.
Works Cited
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