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Folk, Devils and Con-Dem Nation

8 May 1956, the opening night of John Osborne’s groundbreaking Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court theatre, has attained a quasi-mythical status in modern British
theatre history. The audience was shocked – so legend has it – by the sight of
an ironing board onstage; the play ruffled establishment feathers, challenged
the moral fibre of a moribund post-war Britain and the Angry Young Man was
born. It was a turning point, certainly. But perhaps not as significant as
tonight’s. National Theatre Wales may well have planned their schedule so as to
produce The Devil Inside Him to
coincide with the anniversary of that famous date, but they certainly could not
have foreseen that the second week of May would also be the week of a historic
hung parliament, frantic coalition talks and the end of thirteen years of New
Labour. As the curtain rose in Cardiff, Gordon Brown’s prime ministerial car
made its final journey to Buckingham Palace; by the interval, David Cameron had
already accepted the Queen’s invitation to form a new government.

Last time there was a coalition government in Britain, it was led by Winston Churchill; John Osborne was only ten. Just eight years later, he wrote this play. Now under Labour’s Clement Atlee,
Britain was an entirely different country, emerging battered from war into a
new age of austerity underpinned by radical social reform. The unfolding of
events on stage in Cardiff and in Downing Street, bring some important
parallels into sharp focus. Cameron comes to power promising to cut the deficit
and mend Britain’s ‘broken society’, conservative code for a perceived epidemic
of teenage pregnancies amongst working class girls and a new jobless generation
of ‘angry young men’. More than anything else, what Osborne’s play proves –
through the microcosm of a ‘respectable’ household in a small Welsh village –
is that most universal of maxims: twas
ever thus.

Huw Prosser, portrayed here in a talismanic central performance by Iwan Rheon, will inevitably be seen as a proto Jimmy Porter. His creator’s name will always be synonymous with his most famous play
and, to an even greater extent, the glib journalistic label ‘Angry Young Man’.
But in significant ways, Prosser is more than that. He foreshadows the rise of
the teenager that was to come in subsequent decades. His body language and
behaviour seem somehow anachronistic, typical of the modern, sullen youths
demonised by later generations – the kind identified by sociologist Stanley
Cohen in his classic study of mods and rockers, normal"">Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Certainly, ‘the devil inside him’ is
a ‘folk devil’; if it exists at all, it has been planted there by others.
Prosser is an Everyman, the archetypal individual who refuses to be constrained
by society. There are plenty of archetypes here, as you might expect from an
eighteen-year-old playwright: Huw’s overbearing father and sympathetic mother;
the dogmatic, judgmental local minister; the garrulous Mrs Evans, a ‘daily
woman’ who provides much needed comic relief from a sometimes unbearably
angst-ridden examination of relations between good and evil, body and soul.

The production is the most traditional of those in National Theatre Wales’ first year programme, and Cardiff’s New Theatre by far the most traditional venue. The stage set itself is the
apotheosis of kitchen sink drama, a perfectly realist rendering of a
comfortable dining room and sitting room, replete with Welsh dresser stacked
with blue and white plates and topped by two china dogs. The attention to
period detail in the furnishings, wallpaper and skirting boards would lend the
play an aura of cosiness – lamps lit, curtains drawn – if it were not for the
animalistic intensity of Rheon’s performance. Huw Prosser prowls the stage like
a caged animal, alternating between outbursts of nervous energy and periods of
sullen introspection. The contrast between the actor’s movement – and indeed
the vicious nature of much of the language of the play – and the comfortable
setting is at the heart of the feeling of constriction that Osborne’s script
aims at, and director Elen Bowman must take considerable credit for making this
a successful and, for the most part, smooth production of what is a passionate
and interesting but occasionally flawed script.

There are moments, inevitably, where the rawness of Osborne’s writing comes through: ‘What is it you want?’ asks Dilys, the Prossers’ servant girl at the heart of the play’s tragic twist; ‘A little
beauty in an ugly world,’ says Huw, guilty of writing poetry described by his
father and Mr Gruffuydd, the minister, as ‘vile filth’. ‘The way of the flesh
is the way of weakness,’ Mr Prosser contends, warning his son against ‘damn
fool impulses.’ Diagnosing him variously as ‘possessed’ or ‘mad’ or ‘wicked’ or
‘soft in the head’ - a lovely example of Osborne’s early immersion in south
Wales – the other characters all seek to label Huw, sometimes physically
surrounding him while he holds his head in enraged frustration.

Osborne recounts his experiences of Wales and Welshness – his mother was Welsh - in his autobiography as being bound up in Old Testament fire and brimstone and cold-heartedness. On the evidence of
this play, you feel he must have experienced those stifling aspects of mid
twentieth century valleys’ life which were not so much obsessed with religion,
but with sin. The outside world is represented by the impression of a
colourless day of wind and rain, the view through the window a single leafless
tree. The sterility indoors is hardly alleviated and the intense realism of the
set creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, the perfect way of emphasizing Huw’s
aliveness in the face of the dead world that surrounds him. It is telling that
when people leave the household it is to deal with a death or sing at a chapel
choir festival on a makeshift stage made of coffin lids. This is recounted humorously,
but the implication is clear: this is a society far too concerned with the next
life to be overly bothered looking after the weak and vulnerable in this. Even
at this tender age, Osborne’s anger was impeccably directed; the censors didn’t
pull the play for nothing, and NTW would not have been able to stage this
production had not the sole surviving dog-eared copy turned up in the Lord
Chamberlain’s archive in 2008. Despite the existential-tinged debate at the
dinner table, it is left to the ironic wisdom of Mrs Evans to deliver the
sucker punch where religion is concerned: ‘You can’t be religious all the time,
can you?’

However, it isn’t just religion that is the focus of Osborne’s ire. The play is ahead of its time in many ways. If it, understandably, fails to anticipate the proliferation of children born ‘out of
wedlock’ – it is strangely moving to hear the stigma that comes with this
debated in an accent that belongs to the area which now has the highest teenage
pregnancy rate in Europe – it certainly offers a sympathetic portrayal. This is
a play that seeks to understand rather than condemn. It rails against the lack
of compassion shown by the church and is startlingly modern in its exposure of
misogyny: fear and hatred of women run through the bone marrow of the
community, from the painted statues of the Virgin in the Catholic church to the
deeply unsettling language - Mr Burns: ‘I don’t know why they don’t eat their
babies like an angry bitch eats its pups’. Far from being shared by the
playwright, these kind of views are challenged powerfully in the final scene
when Helen Griffin, playing Mrs Prosser, draws a huge gasp of approval as she
delivers a telling rebuke to her overbearing, uncomprehending husband: ‘I am
your wife, but I am still myself.’

Language becomes more important as the play goes on. As Osborne warms to his theme, his protagonist grows in eloquence. His elemental, animalistic grunts subside into terrible beauty when we discover his
‘very rare and precious gift’. Prosser is a poet. ‘Words are wonderful, lovely
things,’ he says, ‘we all have the seeds of poetry in us… but only a few ever
blossom, only a few in a hundred years.’ The crucial plot twist elevates
Prosser from a proto Holden Caulfield, a confused young man teetering on the
brink of insanity, to a kind of proto Mersault, from Albert Camus’ The Outsider, a man who, having broken
the ultimate societal taboos, finds a new kind of freedom. Barely articulate at
the start of the play, the closing act finds Prosser discovering a sudden
verbal eloquence which breaks through the rehearsed arguments of both religion
and science. He too rebukes his father - ‘You have been interrupting me my
whole life’ – before ascending the stairs in a memorable and thought-provoking
finale.

If the new coalition government really wants to mend what it perceives as ‘Broken Britain’, it would do well to begin by listening to the Huw Prossers of the world, the tens of thousands of angry
young men – and women - who have been interrupted their whole lives too,
painted as folk devils by the very newspapers that got them into power. After
all, as this play contends, ‘people are human, even in a Welsh village.’

© Dylan Moore, May 18, 2010