Pyrrhic Victory.(Theatre)(Theater Review)

SOMETIMES PLAYWRIGHTS find their ideal reviewers. Such is the case with Howard Barker's Victory, currently being performed by the Sydney Theatre Company. In the Australian, April 20, Jo Litson's lengthy review is headed "An Education in Sex, Violence and Power". Litson describes the play as "savage" (evidently a tribute) and is especially impressed by the performance of Judy Davis who, according to Barker, "gave an incredibly wonderful audition" for the female lead when the play was first produced in the inaptly named Royal Court Theatre in London, although Davis did not play the role then of "the widow of Charles I's assassin", to use Litson's phrase.

Davis is co-director with Robin Nevin of this production, as well as playing Mrs Mary Bradshaw, and her "involvement has had subscribers booking in droves and the season is almost sold out". They will experience "a night they are unlikely to quickly forget" (sic). Barker's language is "dangerously seductive, rich, fecund, muscular, poetic and especially obscene". As incontrovertible evidence of the last attribute, Litson notes that the "c word" is used nine times just in the first scene.

The play exposes the "depravity" of the court of the restored Charles II:

 
   Mrs Bradshaw wants to recover the pieces of her 
   husband's body, which has been dug up and 
   exhibited as a warning by the new king--by whom 
   she will end up being forced to have sex, while 
   heavily pregnant after being raped by a royalist 
   soldier. 
 
According to Litson: 
 
   Barker says with a chuckle, "... when you have an 
   audience coming to the theatre, which is used to 
   rubbish it generally sees--and I say that without 
   apology--it needs to be warned, or educated rather 
   quickly. It's a very honest scene." 

Barker may be right that audiences at Sydney Theatre Company productions generally see rubbish. But historical education is not among the benefits they will gain from Howard Barker, even though he modestly admits of his play, "I didn't have any doubt that it was a masterpiece." Barker's claims to truth are of a postmodernist character: his play contains "emotional truths" and since "all good plays escape their era", he thinks he is justified in "situating plays in mythical or historical periods" and then purporting that the events displayed on the stage, or something very like them, actually took place. Barker has "two degrees in history from Sussex University but doesn't call himself a historian". He admits that he is "not interested in the truth at all"--but how many of the audience of Victory will be aware that their emotions are being exploited by a tissue of sheer lies?

John Bradshaw, like me, was once a pupil at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Middleton, Lancashire. He presided over the court that condemned Charles I to death in 1649. The actual historical situation at the Restoration continues to be of immense interest. The English Republic, or Commonwealth, collapsed mainly through internal conflicts. Bradshaw was one of the most active and influential critics of Oliver Cromwell's personal rule. The royalists returned to England as the result, not of military victory, but of a compromise with leading figures in the republican regime. Revenge was kept to a minimum, so that many vexed former Cavaliers described the main Restoration Act of Indemnity and Oblivion as indemnity for Charles I's enemies and oblivion for his friends.

With few additions, only the regicides who had actually voted for the death of Charles were outside the pale of indemnity. Those regicides who were already dead, such as John Bradshaw and Oliver Cromwell, had vengeance wreaked on their disinterred corpses. However, the absence of major bloodletting, despite the hatreds of the long civil wars, was harbinger of a new constitutional system in which political opposition to the executive power was not regarded automatically as a form of treason.