The Communal Dream of Myth: David Rudkin's The Triumph of Death

Abstract

Two years after the success of Afore Night Come in 1962, and before he had completed a second play for the stage. David Rudkin described himself as "afflicted by images, by things that are seen, pictures of things." He continued, "They are extraordinary, momentary, but they stay with me, and slowly accumulate around them some hardening of dramatic ritual life, and I find that my plays, my ideas of plays, tend to be processions towards climaxes which are enactments of such images.” The Triumph of Death, first performed in March 1981, can be seen in its entirety as such a climactic enactment — a work distilled out of the twenty-year-long ferment of ideas, language, and experiences that followed its author's impressive debut as a dramatist.