Waste
Almeida, London
CAN the shocks of yesteryear withstand the test of time? In 1907, Harley Granville Barker’s Waste was refused a licence by His Majesty’s Lord Chamberlain, the theatre censor, because it mentioned an illegal abortion. The ban provoked an anti-censorship campaign in which 71 British directors appealed to Parliament to change the law. But although Waste was finally staged in 1936, censorship was not abolished until 1968.
So what was all the fuss about? Well, not very much: the play is a rather plodding account of a topic which, while not exactly red-hot, does occasionally emit a familiar glow of warmth.
As the story begins, Henry Trebell, a rising political star, looks set to be invited to join the Cabinet in order to steer a bill through Parliament which will divorce the Church of England from the state.
But while it’s good to be reminded that the disestablishment of the good old C of E has been talked about for years, but never actually attempted, the core of the drama lies in the unhappily married Trebell’s brief fling with Amy O’Connell, the estranged wife of an Irish Republican. When Granville Barker rewrote Waste in 1926, he updated the play’s politics to include the latest developments in Britain’s oldest colony.
Amy, it doesn’t take much to guess, gets pregnant. She doesn’t want the child; Henry doesn’t help her; she has a backstreet abortion and dies as a result. Now the scandal threatens both Henry’s career and the future of his bill. Can the wily cabal of politicians save the situation — and what price will Amy’s husband, Sinn Feiner Justin O’Connell, extract from them?
If the play’s allusion to an abortion is hardly likely to shock even the most sensitive soul nowadays, there is something quite appalling at the heart of Granville Barker’s text and that is its revoltingly sexist tone.
Yes, I do know that social mores were different then, but — and this is true also of much of George Bernard Shaw’s work — the typical English man of that time was simply insufferable.
It is hard to imagine a more unerotic character than Henry Trebell. His seduction of Amy is cold, callous and brutal, while his claim to have had no sex for 10 years is only too credible. But although Granville Barker gives her a couple of anguished moments when she confronts her uncaring lover with the results of their coupling, Waste comes ludicrously close to being a piece of propaganda: the English are hopeless at sex.
And not much good at love, either. When his wife, Frances, finally confronts him at the end of the story, Henry shows a sublime indifference which makes you wonder why the couple haven’t gone their separate ways long ago. No, the chief erotic drive in the play – and the only thing that makes it bearable to watch– is its boys’ club politics: not sex, but power. When the men talk affairs of state, the pulse quickens.
Directed stolidly by Samuel West, Waste is a perfect example of the ghastly lack of warmth between the sexes among the English upper classes during the first part of the last century.
Despite excellent performances from Will Keen as the self-lacerating Henry, Nancy Carroll as Amy and Phoebe Nichols as Frances, this is a long, tedious and emotionally repellent piece of work. Waste indeed.
Aleks Sierz
