W. H. Auden’s Plays for the Group Theatre: From Revelation to Revelation

Abstract

W. H. Auden’s Plays for the Group Theatre: From Revelation to Revelation Edward Callan Moments of revelation when we truly cry “Eureka” are never planned. They occur in odd places. “Revelation came to Luther in a privy,” Auden wrote in “Thanksgiving for a Habi­ tat” (CP, 526). And revelation apparently came to Auden himself, aged fifteen, in a ploughed field “one afternoon in March at half-past three”; for having previously thought of himself as a potential mining-engineer, the chance remark of a school friend caused him that spring afternoon in 1922 to entertain the novel notion of poetry as a vocation: But indecision broke off with a clean cut end One afternoon in March at half past three When walking in a ploughed field with a friend; Kicking a little stone, he turned to me And said, “Tell me, do you write poetry?” I never had, and said so, but I knew That very moment what I wished to do. (CP, 98) The friend, Robert Medley, who was Auden’s senior by a year at Gresham’s School, has his own memory of this moment of revelation: “Walking one afternoon towards the woods . . . on the far side of Sheringham Road, I made an attack on the Church and discovered to my surprise that Wystan was devout. An argument followed, and to soften what I feared might be­ come a serious breach, after a pause I asked him if he wrote poetry, confessing by way of exchange, that I did. I was a little surprised that he had not tried and suggested that he might do so.”l Medley, the unwitting if providential instrument of Auden’s discovery of his poetic vocation, was later instrumental in affording him an opportunity to write plays for the public 326 Edward Callan 327 stage rather than closet dramas for the reader’s mind, like his first dramatic work Paid on Both Sides: A Charade.2 With Rupert Doone, a former Diaghilev dancer and choreographer, Medley had helped to found the left-oriented Group Theatre in London in 1932. In the autumn of that year when Auden was their guest in London at Medley’s invitation, Doone suggested that he write a play for the Group Theatre on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice with a part for dance or mime. Auden accepted the idea, and by the following summer, 1933, de­ livered the script of The Dance of Death which was published by Faber in November that year. Apart from the stage direction, “Solo dance as Sun God Creator and Destroyed’ (and a dancer’s or choreographer’s interpretation of this), there are very few discernible survivals in The Dance of Death of the original notion of a play on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice, other than some allusions to vegetation rituals in the chorus that fol­ lows the Sun God dance. The play is essentially a Marxist allegory that owes little to the myth of Orpheus and a great deal to the Anti-Duhring where Engels draws a parallel between the death of the seed-grain before its regeneration and the necessary death of the old order before communism’s new order can be brought about. After a trial Sunday performance in February 1934, a modified version of The Dance of Death, with Doone in the Dancer’s role, opened the Group Theatre’s 1934 season at Westminster Theatre together with T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. The avant-garde Group Theatre, its intellectual and generally left-wing following, and the whole panoply of pub­ licity surrounding the theatre in a metropolis like London, brought Auden a good measure of popular acclaim in the thirties. No other London theatre could have ensured an audi­ ence more sympathetic towards the propagandist theme of the Dance of Death: the inevitability of the collapse of bourgeois society and the triumph of Marxism. Many members of such an audience—united at least by anti-Fascist sentiments—would find this play entertaining; for they could enter into the spirit of some ingenious Brechtian contrivances designed to involve them in the play’s action. In this respect the play follows closely on the prescription for...