The Stage

Victory, Arcola Theatre, London, 2009

Victory is a play I return to over and over again: it’s always a play for today. Howard Barker is so fulsomely and outspokenly committed to looking at history and politics in a certain way, which is neither about spoon-feeding someone a point of view nor infantilising the audience. Also, Barker is not being journalistic. He comes at politics poetically and that’s what I’m always hoping to do. He’s making serious political points alongside almost slapstick comedy, coupled with very acute personal landscapes.

For someone who is considered to be quite macho, he writes women so beautifully. Bradshaw, the central woman in Victory, is such a complicated, elusive, difficult, contradictory heroine who refuses to do what she is ‘supposed’ to do.

It’s set during the Restoration, after Charles I has been beheaded, and Bradshaw is the wife of the man who signed his death warrant. Now, in the reign of Charles II, who has had her husband’s body dug up and spread around the country, she’s on this strange quest to collect his body back into one piece. She has just conceived a child and has a line about having forgotten how often you have to urinate when you’re pregnant, and everyone says: “Not in front of John Milton!” There are very few male playwrights who pay such granular attention to women’s physical experience in the world, especially in an epic, two-hour play set in a very specific historical moment.

It’s also a play about the moment that banking started to run this country. I first saw it at university in Edinburgh, which had a great student theatre, the Bedlam. I went to plays there all the time but it was this one that leaped out. It was incredibly grown-up: the language of it, the sophistication of the political argument and the fact that it was all wrapped up in this really ribald fun. To me, it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

But the professional production that I thought was great was at the Arcola with Geraldine James and Matthew Kelly. He was playing Ball, the Cavalier character taken on a journey to such a point of humbled degradation – he was so good. He brought out all of the kindness and tenderness in the writing. You could easily do this play as broad and one-note, but this production found all the colours and gradations in it: it was such a generous piece of work.
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Analysis – David Benedict

Howard Barker’s 1983 play was originally presented at London’s Royal Court, directed by Danny Boyle. Directing the 2009 revival at the Arcola, Amelia Nicholson said of Barker that his plays “enable vivid imagination and moral speculation to flourish. His is a theatre that proposes nothing is impossible, presenting the human in all its complexity. In Victory, nothing is left to waste and the result is brutal, poetic and visceral”.

Covering the contradictions of capitalism, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after 11 years of republicanism, the actions of Charles II and Nell Gwyn, a skull in a bag and a very large sum of gold, no one would accuse the play of lacking ambition.

The production was strongly reviewed, not least by Lyn Gardner who hailed it as “a swaggering piece of epic political theatre… so meaty and juicy that it makes what currently passes as political playwriting seem bloodless and trivial”. Praising the cast, especially Geraldine James, Matthew Kelly and Nicholas Rowe’s Charles II, she declared it “an exhilarating and urgent evening”.

Equally enthusiastically in the British Theatre Guide, Kevin Quarmby welcomed its “breathtakingly adventurous direction”. It demonstrated, he added, “how accessible Barker’s drama remains and how, given an enormously talented cast and creative team, good theatre can be transformed into great theatre”.