Albion the brave

Two works illustrate the ambivalence–loyalty and pride mixed with disgust and anger–that playwrights, from Shakespeare to Alan Bennett, often display towards England

- Alan Bennett

I APOLOGISE to readers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but I wanted to focus this week on plays about England. This is not for nationalist reasons, but because I’ve recently seen, on successive nights, two works that deal with one part of our disunited kingdom.

One is a revival of Mike Bartlett’s Albion at the Almeida (closing this weekend but with plans for a TV broadcast). The other is the bluntly titled Death of England by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer at the Dorfman. Both are extraordinary plays; both reveal the mix of love and loathing, admiration and anger, that dramatists display when they address the state of our nation.

You can see that ambivalence in the most famous of all speeches about England: the one by John of Gaunt in Richard II. How often one has heard politicians, looking for a bit of morale-boosting rhetoric, quote the lines about ‘This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise’.

They conveniently forget, however, that the speech is a fierce attack on Richard’s governance of the realm and concludes: ‘That England that was wont to conquer others/ Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’ The last time I heard those lines spoken on a public stage, as Parliamentarians grappled with the 2016 Referendum result, people broke into spontaneous applause.

Where Shakespeare led, others followed. I’ve noticed how often dramatists are caught in two minds when they address the subject of England. J. B. Priestley’s fine play, The Linden Tree (1947), offers both a vigorous defence of the post-war Attlee government and an attack on the ‘grey, chilly hollowness’ of the trade unions and the civil service.