Victory

Confession time again.  I shall own up to a) never having seen a play by Howard Barker before b) always getting him muddled up with Howard Brenton.  My excuse for ignorance, as always, is that I missed nearly 20 years of English theatre by being abroad in the 1970s and 1980s. So, now I've made the trek to the Arcola theatre in Stoke Newington to see this production of Victory by the iceni company, am I in a position to repair the holes in my knowledge?  Is Howard Barker a pontificating shitbag (his language, not mine) or a great and neglected English dramatist? 

A French friend studying at the Sorbonne for an MA in modern English literature recently told me she was studying Barker, and that the Odeon theatre had staged a season of his works.  Like Edward Bond, he's a writer who's much bigger on the continent than here.  I haven't read any of Barker's writings on theatre, so I can't comment on his theories, but I was fairly underwhelmed by last night's play.  What I liked about this historical fantasy set in the time of Charles II, was above all the language.  Barker comes from the shit-piss-cunt-fuck school of writing, so he's not likely to be much performed in schools.  But his language, violent and poetic, sardonic and bitter, has flights of Shakespearean intensity. 'I have licked Frenchmen's bums for nourishment,' exclaims the revenge-seeking cavalier Ball who has returned from exile with the restoration of the monarchy.  He tells Bradshaw, the widow of one of Cromwell's republicans, that her husband's body has been disinterred and displayed on a spike: 'We have the rat-gnawed stinking thing you clutched in bed once.'  There are other phrases that hang in the air: 'A tongue whose habit is to lie lower in the mouth.'  But language isn't quite enough to carry this play.  There are moments of real pain and tragedy, particularly in the final scene, but Barker doesn't have Shakespeare's skill in creating characters or plot.  There were long periods of tedium when I felt quite detached from what was going on a few feet in front of me.  Victory carries echoes of Jacobean revenge plays, which also score highly on violence and severed heads, but fall short on characterisation.  I really could not care very much about any of the characters, and many of the historical scenes summoned up memories of a long-dead TV comedy series. 'If there's one thing I hate above all, it's a cheerful cockney' is a line that would fit very nicely into the mouth of Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder.  I was looking into the backstage area expecting Baldrick to appear with a cunning plan.   This was particularly true in the scenes featuring Charles II, a less-than-endearing priapic monarch played with haughty disdain by Nicholas Rowe, who was last spotted (by me, anyway) as a vicar in See How They Run and as a Tory MP in Whipping It Up.  The play has too many characters played by too few actors, and I had a hard time keeping up with who was supposed to be who.  In the end it didn't matter too much.  The standout performance was by Matthew Kelly as Ball, a greybearded giant of Falstaffian dimensions.  Geraldine James is a wonderful actress, but as Bradshaw she seemed to me wholly miscast;  I could not reconcile her appearance of injured purity and innocence with the sardonic and cynical lines she was speaking.  Perhaps I missed something here, but the part of Bradshaw seemed to me to demand a performer of a quite different stamp -- someone who might play Mother Courage.  Perhaps Kathryn Hunter would have been just right.