Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Introduction to The Devil and Mr Mulcahy [and] The Band Rotunda

Introduction to The Devil and Mr Mulcahy [and] The Band Rotunda

In two ways The Band Rotunda meant for me a breaking of new ground. The material of the play is subconscious, personal and highly familiar, since I am myself a member of the great tribe of drunks who hold a mirror to the world of chaos we inhabit. This meant that I had no problem in digging out the material. It was already embedded in the marrow of my bones. I only had to write the play.

The language of the play was novel, I think, for a New Zealand audience. In its first production I had the immense advantage of the full co-operation of a skilled and bold producer, who was concerned solely to put on plays that made sense to him. Mr Patric Carey of the Globe Theatre in Dunedin recognised from the start the liturgical quality of the street language which is the language of the play. Since he is not himself by birth a New Zealander, his unerring capacity to grasp the tone and meaning of The Band Rotunda (in his hands it became a Passion play and a parable of the Fall of Man) proved that the play itself was universal rather than indigenous.

A modern playwright has the choice of two kinds of language – street language, or the language of the bureaucracies. Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights were more fortunate; they could choose among the language of the Court, the language of the trades, the language of countrymen, and perhaps also a religious language belonging to traditional Christianity. Nowadays one has no such advantage. Bureaucratic language can be well used for stage satire; I have used it for this purpose myself on occasion; but without the vigour of street language, a modern play is inclined to become desiccated. I count myself lucky that I spent a long time in the pubs when I was young. There exists somewhere at the bottom of my mind a cavity containing an unlimited reservoir of biological metaphors and existential anecdotes. I remember a man I worked with in an iron foundry raising his glass and saying, ‘The men up in the marble orchard would like to have a bit of this.’

page 166

The formal structure of The Band Rotunda is choral and the plot is episodic. In talking one day with Patric Carey about the physical movement of the actors on the stage, I compared this movement to the whirling of leaves on a winter pavement, or the eddying movement of the souls blown across the dark sky of the First Circle of Dante’s Inferno. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that because the characters are drunks their inner states are radically different from those of their neighbours.

The quartet of characters (three men and one woman) makes for a strong grouping, since they are roughly equal in dominance. Grady, the mediator, is the tent-pole of the play; but I suggest that any producer would be wise to keep him from taking control of the play.

The woman Rose is no different from other women because she happens to be at times an amateur prostitute. The boy Larry is in degree an instrumental character, since, without him, Snowy, the Christ of the play, cannot exhibit the nature of his love dramatically or be effectively betrayed. I would emphasise that the Salvation Army characters are not intended to be portrayed as grotesques. The collision between their vigorous folk Christianity and Snowy’s undenominational religious individualism is very relevant to the world of the streets.

As in other plays of mine, it does not trouble me if the audience interpret biological aphorisms simply as jokes. The subconscious effect of jokes can be considerable; indeed the meat of a play can be in its jokes.

The Devil and Mr Mulcahy is a play with an obvious New Zealand rural theme. Indeed I had in mind a particular murder case when I wrote it. It seemed to me it could carry the weight of a good deal of prose poetry. The apocalyptic Biblical language of the father gave scope for this, and equally the efforts of his son to construct an alternative nature religion that will permit incest. The giant hawk Golden Eye did seem on stage quite as real as the more prosaic gun.

Some would see the mother in the play as the key character, because of her middle-earth normality. She wishes well to everybody. But I think her limits are obvious enough. The solution of her son’s difficulties would require an alternate theology, in which God did not require a crystalline purity of His creatures and the Devil did not possess private parts. Mulcahy is actually presenting somewhat diffidently a humanist Catholicism which allows for human disorder and growth. He is an Irishman by descent. And among the European New Zealanders, an Irishman, if he did not hate himself, has seemed at times to be a Maori in disguise. It is aroha, the tribal love, that leads Mulcahy to extend his adult knowledge and pragmatism to an adolescent who is being driven mad. But he fails, and indeed precipitates disaster, because, like the mother, he under-rates the force of a theology that considers human beings simply not good enough for God to stomach. False theological solutions are generally the most plausible. My own interest page 167 in the whole matter springs from a lifelong instruction by my society that Calvinism or Jansenism does not die; it merely takes other forms, like a body swelling with another kind of life as it decomposes. Most of our so-called criminals have had a Calvinist or Jansenist formation in early life. They hate themselves because they think they are personally to blame for the Fall of Man.

I had to allow the father his expression of the pure doctrine of the elect. It has its own semi-Biblical poetry, and is, I think, balanced by the mother’s love of the earth and Mulcahy’s hammer-and-anvil sexual pragmatism. My own intuition that the play was not just about maniacs, but concerned the hidden problems of a modern audience, was borne out in performance. The Dunedin audiences undoubtedly had no difficulty whatever in identification. Their only problem seemed to be that the patriarchal emphasis of the play was unfamiliar to them, since in New Zealand the remnants of the pioneer patriarchy exist now only in rural areas.

The dramatic development of this play seems to be very clear cut. In the Globe performances two capable and spirited young actors, under a first-rate producer, took hold of the brother and sister parts with no trouble. They seemed to understand readily what the play was about. I suggest that any producer who wished to put this play on the boards should look around for the liveliest and most explosive of young actors, even though the girl Rachel is the passive and sacrificed lamb who enables the play to be a ritual happening.

In some ways I have found it an advantage to write plays in a country with no viable dramatic tradition and a social life where all the key situations are apprehended, if at all, in a deeply subconscious manner. It has meant large areas of unbroken ground waiting for the plough and the spade. But without an inspired and sympathetic producer I would not have written the plays.

1970? (613)