Book Report: Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance

I believe that Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is one of those plays that theeyater people know about, without ever having read, much less seen it. John Arden is still around and working (there was a collection of short stories out in 2004); it must be very strange for him. And, of course, he probably thinks that now would be a terrific moment for a major revival of Musgrave. That’s why I picked it up, myself.

I’ll throw out a SPOILER WARNING here, although as y’all know, Gentle Readers, I don’t particularly attempt to avoid spoilers in these notes, and besides a forty-five year old play might be considered past spoiling. Still. I’ll be talking about the back half of the play more than I usually do the ends of books, so if for some reason you are thinking of reading it, and don’t already know about the Dance, and don’t want to know in advance, surf elsewhere for a bit, and come back once you’ve got your hands on a copy.

OK, then, for anyone still reading, Serjeant Musgrave has deserted from putting down some colonial uprising, and taken with him two of his men and picked up another along the way. He has determined to Stop the War (and perhaps wars generally) with a display of some kind; he has brought with him a case of bayonet rifles, a Gatling gun, and the dead body of another of his men. The dead boy was from this town, a mining town; he had knocked up the local barmaid and fled to the army. The baby was born deformed, evidently, and died; his former girlfriend is now a half-mad barmaid and prostitute. The town is a coal-mining town, and there’s a Union agitator, and a strike or a lockout, and when Serjeant Musgrave arrives posing as a recruiting officer, things are already near violence. The presence of soldiers and guns brings things to a head.

Anyway, the third act is a ... well, everybody but the soldiers thinks it’s a recruitment rally. Serjeant Musgrave’s men think it’s going to be an anti-war rally, with the dead body of their comrade strung up as an object lesson in the madness of war. Serjeant Musgrave, on the other hand, wants it to be a bloody massacre, an apocalyptic revenge, violence to end all violence, a lesson not for the villagers whose corpses he will strew across the green but for the country, which will be unable to deny the “wild wood madness” of soldiering. Serjeant Musgrave is mad, but he knows he is mad, and he wants revenge for his madness as much as for anything else.

It should be a powerful play, particularly as we are, at this moment, sending our own boys off to fight far from home, and ignoring or postponing the question of what to do about them when they come back, mad (some of them) killers overseas, lovers and buddies in their hometowns. After his dance under the corpse, Serjeant Musgrave announces “[the soldier] was killed because he had to be—it being decided; that now the people in that city was worked right up to killing soldiers, then more and more soldiers should be sent for them to kill, and the soldiers in turn should kill the people in that city, more and more, always”. It’s a thing you read in blogs, if you read those blogs, but it’s different from a madman with a gun pointed at you and a corpse swinging behind him.

And yet, somehow, it doesn’t quite work. It’s a very Brechtian play, with the artifice up front, and the point impossible to miss. But its abstraction—we don’t know the name of the town, or the mayor, or most of the townfolk, or what conflict the soldiers fled from, what war, what year, what country—isn’t complete enough, because it’s still very much about Victorian England. Or maybe that isn’t the problem at all, maybe it’s the language, which seems to be awkwardly translated from German (but isn’t). Or maybe it’s my own failure of imagination; I can see what a production might look like and sound like, but I can’t quite imagine the audience’s response to it.

Anyway, I’m wondering what plays (other than Shakespeare’s) would be good to revive just now, to play on the nerves of today’s audiences. I mean specifically about the war, although a couple of months ago I mentioned Rhinoceros, in the context of, as I put it “conformism, war fever and the end of the world”. Any suggestions?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.