The Ideological Ambiguity of Touch and Go

Abstract

The interest of D.H. Lawrence’s theatre lies not only in its experimental nature and formal research with reference to different theatrical traditions (naturalism, comedy of manners, epic theatre), but in its themes and characters which, considered in their historical perspective, appear rather innovative if not provocative. Indeed, in most of his plays, Lawrence chooses to put on stage the lively ferments and turmoils of the workers’ world, the common people and their problems in the struggle for better conditions of life, thus presenting a world that had been somehow marginalised from the British stage: a second class world, with its misery, its physical and moral dehumanization, and its struggle against the arrogance and haughtiness of an efficientist master class. This social conflict, present in the background of the first colliery plays (1912), is brought to the foreground in Touch and Go, written at a later stage (1920), in a much more complex personal and historical period: a more mature and difficult phase for Lawrence – the artist and the man – who in 1919, after World War I was over, chooses to be an exile for the rest of his life; an eventful period for British society, particularly for a decisive awakening of the working class whose struggles call into question and impeach a large part of the capitalist structures within and outside Great Britain (the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the strengthening of the Fascist movement in Italy). Lawrence seems to feel the change in the atmosphere and, in Touch and Go, he shows his responsiveness to the political events shaking contemporary society by making the socio-political themes and class struggle the pivotal points of the play. As Lawrence writes in the “Preface” to Touch and Go, there is “a new wind getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism […] it is a mechanico-material struggle” in which “two dogs [are] fighting for a bone”, a mere “pretext for a fight with each other.” Only a deep awareness of the true reasons for fighting will bring “dignity, beauty, satisfaction” to man and the struggle would turn into “a creative activity”. An analysis of the play in a socio-political and historical perspective reveals a controversial ideological position on Lawrence’s part. References to essays and poems will support and clarify Lawrence’s ideas about people and social classes.