In place of strife
Peter Jenkins
Strife (Olivier) The Machine Wreckers ((Half Moon) In a century whose shattering discovery has been that the abolition of capitalism is incompatible with the preservation of liberty it is strange how few plays have concerned themselves specifically with what sociologists call the work situation. At that more mundane level the bleak discovery of the twentieth century is that work is work is work regardless of the ownership of the means of industrial production. It was at the very heart of Marxist humanism to believe otherwise: end the exploitive capitalist relationship and you would end man's alienation from his work; the abolition of property, communism, Marx wrote, 'is the genuine solution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man.'
The belief in the possibility of a radical transformation in the nature of work, and indeed in the nature of man, gives dramatic charge to two plays about the industrial struggle: Galsworthy's Strife which was written in 1907 and the German expressionist classic The Machine Wreckers, which is of 1922 vintage. The two have little else in common beyond their subject matter and the possibilities this presents for staging. Scenic and lighting effects were an important aspect of the expressionist movement and in the tiny Half Moon Theatre in Tower Hamlets the tradition is brilliantly recreated by Mike Bearwish; the audience sits surrounded by pipes with its feet in the boiler room of the machine which is the villain of the piece. In the Olivier, where there is a great deal more room (and tax payers' money), the inferno of a tinplate works — raging-red furnace, gremlin-like figures shovelling and a great wheel turning — which we see as the play begins, makes for a lasting reminder of what it means to talk about industrial work. John Bury's design is the most spectacular yet at the National.
Galsworthy's play works on two levels. It is the story of a bitter clash between capital and labour. At the same time it is a titanic duel in obduracy between an ancient captain of industry and an embittered unofficial strike leader. John Anthony, played by Andrew Cruikshank, is an unreconstructed social Darwinist who at the age of seventy-six is unshakeable in his conviction that to appease the insatiable demands of labour is to guarantee his country a dark future under the rule of the mob. Roberts, the strike leader, played by Michael Bryant, learnt the true nature of capitalism when he received only 1700 for an invention which earned the company £100,000 but there is sincere moral passion also to his denuciations of the evils of capitalism. 'Masters are masters, men are men,' declares old Anthony; Roberts enthuses his strikers in the belief that theirs is 'the fight of the country's body and blood against a bloodsucker'.
It seems that Galsworthy intended the play to aspire to universality through the collision of these two characters in motion. If there is a moral to the play it is perhaps to be found in the line 'The essence of things is to know where to stop'. Andrew Cruikshank, at his most Methuselah-like, and Michael Bryant, with a fine display of inner force, do their best with the play at this level but, in 1978 it works more powerfully at the political level. I found myself persiaded by both leading protagonists to the conclusion that labour relations are inherently intractable. In 1907 Galsworthy may have thought himself a prophet of sweet compromise in suggesting that obstinate spirits rather than irreconcilable interests and values were the causes of industrial strife. We cannot be so hopeful today.
The play as a whole, which involves, by modern standards, a Cecil B. de Mille cast of thirty plus eleven extras, hardly justifies the National's revival. I found it stilted and dated when it moved away from its political centre into the manners of the board room or the proletarian parlour. The more resourceful the direction at the National, in this case by Christopher Morahan, and the more elaborate the production, the more I find myself questioning the literary judgements. However, the scene of the strike meeting, which has twenty five figures on stage to compose a Lowzyesque tableau was one of the most spectacular pieces of staging I can remember seeing anywhere.
Perhaps Strife belonged in the Cottesloe as a small-scale period piece revival. The Half Moon's faithful version of The Machine Breakers, another period piece, shows what can be done with more limited resources especially when you have the additional advantage of the intensity of audience proximity. Ernst Toner's play is more interesting than Galsworthy's although no less dated. Toiler was himself a revolutionary politician, a member of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet. For him there was no dilemma between capital and labour. The capitalist in The Machine Wreckers, the story of which is based on a weavers. strike in Britain in 1815, is a 1920s earl; cature (excellently done by Simon Cal low) straight out of Otto Dix, currennY on display at the Hayward Gallery, Fic sits enthroned on a platform raised on scaffolding above the industrial workplace and wearing always immaculate evening, dress. For Toner the question abc)th socialism is not if but how. His hero, Jim Cobbett, tries to Pei' suade the wreckers that they are desP.is: ing the very persons they are purPorrilt to emancipate, prefering revenge to 11,„ erty; he urges them to harness the ne" machine not to destroy it. His is the reformist's dilemma and he meets tilee reformist's martyrdom at the hands of wn, militants when he is virtually crucified 7 the machine — god or devil? — is draiin'. ically smashed. Toiler, one may sisPectit himself leant towards my conclusion a the end of Strife — that the smashers' ease.c is the more logical. Cobbett is a tragif hero. Expressionism is a lurid forin cid representation and the polemic coota1ll.1, within this play is much of it trowel-00cl'; But the style has great theatrical p0wf. still and its images are the subject of tn'e latest nostalgia craze. I felt more Oak, on my hard seat at the Half Moon than did in my pullman at the National as came to my similarly bleak aintie twentieth-century conclusions about nature of industrial strife.
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