Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 37, Number 9. 1st May 1974

Drama — The Sea:

page 12

Drama

The Sea:

Drama header

Edward Bond begin his playwrighting career with sharply realistic studies of contemporary working-class London. As his themes have become more universal, he has looked to myth and history to structure them. Each in its own way, 'Eariy Morning', 'Narrow Road to the Deep North' and 'Lear' examine the violence and ideological distortion generated within authoritarian power structures. 'Early Morning' conveyed the contradictions of Victorian England by treating history as black fantasy. 'Narrow Road to the Deep North' used the distanced, neo Brechtian setting of Basho's Japan, while in 'Lear' Bond returned to Shakespeare's original source, the better to write about our own times.

Why, in 'The Sea' has he chosen an Edwardian coastal village for his setting? It offers neither the immediacy of contemporary realism nor the panchronic possibilities of myth and history. However it does offer satiric possibilities and a variety of comic types not present today.

The play charts the responses of the villagers to the drowning of one of their members. The most extreme response comes from Match, a paranoid draper, best described as a cross be tween Erich Von Daniken and Enoch Powell. His speech is coloured by xenophobic, near Powellist imagery of invaders from outer space who will take the villagers jobs and convert their land into alien territory. He suspects Willy Carson — the drowned man's companion who survived the sea storm — of being one of them. His attempts to destroy Carson bring him into conflict with the upper-class Mrs Rafi whose erratic purchasing patterns already threaten to bankrupt him. These tensions drive Hatch to distraction. In one powerful scene he attempts to order his deranged mind by cutting interminable yards of cloth; in another he stabs the washed-up body of the drowned man in the mistaken belief that it is the sleeping Willy Carson.

The comedy of the play arises out of the irruption of the chaotic and the absurd into the formal dignified rituals of Mrs Rafi. We see this in the scene involving the amateur dramatic rehearsal, but most especially in the final scene. Mrs Rafi attempts to confer dignity on the drowned man's ashes — but several events varying on the degree of disruptive power, all conspire to thwart her purpose until Hatch finally bursts the entire scene apart.

One character I haven't mentioned is the beach dwelling sage, Mr Evens. He regards the drowning of the young man, the excesses of Hatch and his followers as inconsequential ripples on the surface of the world. In the play's closing speech. Evens articulates at great length his view of man's relation to the universe. It is clearly an anti-humanist vision which sees man as a transitory phenomenon, not as the centre of the universe. There is a parallel to this in Frank Sargeson's story 'An Attempt at an Explanation' in which the boy says: "If I'd been older perhaps I would have made a picture for myself of the earth as just a speck of dirt drifting in space, with human creatures crawling over it and crouching down and holding on tight just as the lice had done on the back of my hand". The sea itself is presented as in infinite reservoir of the end destruction which precedes and stands above man. It is within this comprehensive perspective that Evens exhorts the departing Willy and Rose to change the world.

The scenes discussed above are the most satisfactory of the play. Not at all successful are the scenes involving the developing relationship between Willy Carson and Rose Jones. They come across as fiat and banal concessions to the boy meets girl syndrome.

The production itself has some moments interspersed among tedium. This is due, in great part, to Bond's text whose eight scenes don't quite add up to a total, self cementing structure. Even's great speech, for example, is somewhat tacked on to the main body of the play.

The staging of the play is quite satisfactory. The director and the designer have equipped themselves with an acting area which can easily translate into a beach, a draper's shop, a park house and a clifftop. John Banas demonstrates that when given a challenging character role he can produce the goods. He gives a fine performance as Hatch. The only other performances which made me sit up were those of Mrs Rafi (Janice Finn), Evens (Michael Haigh) and Hollarcut (Colin McColl).

All Edward Bond's plays to date have excited, provoked and torn at their audiences and, in this, 'The Sea' is no exception.