The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [345]
The scale and speed of the change which came over the nature of films and plays between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s was more dramatic than any in the history of storytelling. Within just a few years the sentimental, romantic Hollywood movies and respectable, `well-crafted' plays of the post-war era were made to seem unimaginably innocent and old-fashioned, as the cinema and the theatre were taken over by a `new wave' of stories altogether harder, more overtly sensational and more surreal in tone. Leading the field were some of the more `daring' playwrights of the time, notably in England. In 1962, just when the first James Bond film, presenting its own sanitised version of sex and violence, was being launched in London's Leicester Square, a series of new plays was staged at the nearby Arts Theatre. It opened with Johnny Speight's The Knacker's Yard, described by a critic of the time as showing the arrival at a squalid boarding house of `a mysterious and sinister figure' called Ryder, whose nightly pleasure was
`ritually slashing a series of voluptuous nude pin-ups with a razor on a little patriotic altar of Union Jacks. All of which, plus his large collection of handbags, seems to suggest that he must be the Jack-the-Ripper-like killer in the neighbourhood.'
Ryder ended up by gassing himself. Another play in the series, David Rudkin's Afore Night Come, put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company, came to `a gruesomely compulsive climax involving a ritual murder beneath the poison-sprays of a pest-control helicopter'. A third, Fred Watson's Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger, ended in the gratuitous killing of a child.
Such avant-garde plays were only a small symptom of a much wider and deeper transformation which was now taking place all through Western society, nowhere more obviously than in Britain. This revolution in moral and social attitudes, reflecting what I have analysed elsewhere as a collective fantasy state, came to a head in the extraordinary events of the year 1963. It was a year characterised in Britain by a kind of endless hysteria, most obviously expressed in the explosion of nyktomorphic fantasy surrounding the supposed sex scandals associated with Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and that generated around the emergence of the four Beatles as the `dream figures' at the centre of the most hypnotically glamorous bubble in the history of show business. It was the year which culminated in what, in terms of its universal personal impact, was the most shockingly sensational event of post-war history, the assassination of that other supreme `dream figure' of the time, President Kennedy. And this mood of hysteria helped drive the new English drama even further into its violent, sexually-obsessed and freakish fantasy world, as when a few months later the Royal Shakespeare Company staged an `experimental season' dedicated to the `Theatre of Cruelty'. This took as its manifesto an excerpt from the book Le Theatre et Son Double, written in a lunatic asylum in 1938 by the French psychopath Antonin Artaud:
`We need a theatre which wakes us up, nerves and heat ... in the anguished catastrophic society we live in, we feel an urgent need for a theatre which events do not exceed ... a transcendent experience of life is what the public is fundamentally seeking, through love, crime, drugs, war or insurrection.'
The playlets chosen to open the season included a sketch by Artaud himself, entitled `The Spurt of Blood' (in which `colour, light and sound are used expressively'); and another in which an actress representing Christine Keeler performed a `strip-tease act of grotesque symbolism' standing next to a bath, in what was meant to echo the image of Jacqueline Kennedy looking down