Roche in Afore Night Come RSC, The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon 1974)
Cambyses / Old Farmer / Llyr in The Saxon Shore (Almeida Theatre, 1986)
Ian McDiarmid in
David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: an expository study of his drama, 1959-96
by David Ian Rabey
Overseas Publishing Association: Amsterdam B.V.
pages 195-6
David Rudkin's work has a deep and complicated erotic charge. He understands-not so much the "relationship between" sex and violence, but how one contains the other.
Ron Daniels's early 70's production of Afore Night Come addressed the play as partly a 'work of play' of a similar nature to those of David Storey, partly as a play placed unusually close to the audience: both in the physical dimensions of The Other Place, and the geographical location of the rural Midlands: so that audiences felt, to an unusual extent, that they were in the middle of something, not necessarily in a naturalistic sense (though that might have been part of it), but in a mythic sense. A further resonance for the area was the stigmatization of Roche as "Shakespeare", the one who is too clever by half, and the way that he almost invites his persecution and wills the end by his insistence on speaking and acting in a different idiom to those around him. Like Shylock, he remains someone of immense personal pride and attempted dignity; someone who realizes when he is identified as the outsider that this is a special role, and, again like Shylock, determines to play that role absolutely, to the hilt, and beyond. It's a risky business, for that way disaster lies, but there is a great deal of temporary satisfaction in it. And that has to be true of the actor who plays him, too. I seem to have played many outsiders: people who, often unconsciously, expose and subvert morality, despite the likely failure or grim consequences.
My costume assembled some of the naturalistic trappings associated with tramps, such as the overcoat with safety pins, but Rudkin's specified addition of the teatowel lends him both an absurdity and a mad, Lear-like grandeur; the addition of sunglasses also recalls Hamm in Beckett's Endgame. I remember working towards a sense of the mouth as not at all defined by teeth: they were blacked, and I moved my mouth in a strange, flaccid way as if not governed by the jaw.
The character who is regarded as, or affects to play, the charlatan, is a recurrent figure in Rudkin's work. Roche is like an actor of a style which has gone out of fashion: as soon as he appears, he creates a sense that he is doomed because his "performance" smells of sham, though he plays it out to the final act with an admirable recklessness. There are some similarities between Roche and Davies in Pinter's The Caretaker, for example in Roche's attempts to bend facts to fit his own mythic version of them and suggest that the fruitpickers 'are not bad men, just a wee bit-rough'; but Davies remains more pathetic and craven, content in his own petty dignity rather than stirred by aspirations to grandeur, tending to attempt alliances and ingratiation by playing low status, whereas Roche is compelled to play high status, insist upon himself as a Celtic, poetic 'writer of sorts'. Roche self-consciously plays the stage Irishman, the role allotted to him, sometimes with commanding sweep, sometimes like a rank amateur. Rudkin is unusual in that he places the stage Irishman in the tragic centre of the stage, rather than on its comic peripheries, in order to provoke.
I came into The Saxon Shore at the very last moment, as replacement for Robert Eddison, who had fallen ill, and found it alarmingly easy to become a werewolf at short notice. At best, actors deal in myths, which is why they enjoy the poetic challenges of work like that of Rudkin and Howard Barker, contacting forces and emotions which are, contrary to conventional assumption, often immediately accessible though rarely immediately explainable. These areas only really provide problems for directors or critics who are personally uneasy outside the realms of rational discourse, territory which is of limited, and limiting, use to the actor in terms of orchestrating performances. The demand that the actor experience themself as, or become, a wolf, only conflicts with various drama school inculcations to illustrate or do impersonations of, say, a dog. The challenge is, not to embody a wolf, but to allow one's own lupine qualities to emerge. Actors are always aching to use the raw material of the self to discover more about it. Writers such as Rudkin provide opportunities for this.
Individuation and self-authorization which results from extremity or crisis may be a difficult notion for an English audience-though less so perhaps for an Irish one. Rudkin is quite ruthless, even brutal, with himself and with his characters, so there is never any danger of false emotion or sentimentality if you're playing what he's written. His work denies facile separations of sexualities, violence, the possible and impossible; separations which some will seek to categorize and marginalize as "problematical", seeking to discount the active hunger for, and relish of, difficult truths.