Pacifist Manifesto

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. Give some playwrights a stage and they turn it into a combination lecture platform and thundering pulpit. Scarcely bothering to dramatize their themes, they simply harangue the playgoer as if he were a retarded child or a calloused sinner.

It is greatly to be feared that Britain's John Arden is just such a playwright. In this play he has managed to fulminate for very nearly three hours on General Sherman's admirably succinct text: War is hell.

Serjeant Musgrave (John Colicos) is a deserter from a station in an unidentified British protectorate of a century ago. The slaying of a buddy and the ensuing messy retaliatory action against the native population have turned Musgrave into a peace fanatic. He heads back for his buddy's home town in the north of England with the boy's crated skeleton, a Gatling gun, several rifles, and three fellow deserters.

They pose as army recruiters. But Musgrave is a slow-witted Brechtian soldier of dumb pluck who believes that he has finally wised up to the ways of the wicked war breeders. He plans to string up the skeleton and then mow down the town bigwigs in wrathful reprisal, a mortal atonement for war guilt. His trigger finger is numbed by the playwright: "You can't cure the pox by further whoring." This is presumably Arden's pacifist manifesto.

The play is symptomatic of British attempts since the end of World War II to adjust to lost world influence. The frustrating impotence of vanished power masquerades as the moral virtue of a troubled conscience. Going off on tangents, staging diversionary incidents, piling on self-indulgent rhetoric: all these would have been enough to spoil the play. But Arden has a much more drastic flaw. He tries to practice consensus drama, a contradiction in terms. For Serjeant Musgrave's Dance to possess any intrinsic vitality, there would have to be a respectable body of thought holding that war is heavenly. As it is, Arden is merely preaching sermons to the converted, and universal agreement is the most potent sleeping powder in the theater.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.