Serjeant Musgrave's Dance

Description

Set between 1860 and 1880, four deserters bring the body of a dead soldier back to his home town, a mining community in the grip of a coal strike and cut off by snow. Their leader, Serjeant Musgrave, plans to hold the town at gunpoint and confront its people with the realities of warfare. Arden's play questions the military principle of "Obey or suffer" and the cruelty and futility of war. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1959.This volume contains expert notes on the author's life and work, historical and political background to the play and a glossary of difficult words and phrases.

John Arden (1930-2012) was a British dramatist, noted for his politically challenging and linguistically rich plays in the tradition of Brecht; he has written for radio and television as well as for the stage. After 1965 he collaborated on many works with his wife, the Irish playwright Margaretta D'Arcy. Arden's first professionally produced play was a radio drama, The Life of Mars, broadcast in 1956. In the late 1950s Arden was associated with the Royal Court Theatre, where his stark anti-war play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance opened in 1959. The play was something of a commercial failure at the time, but has been frequently revived since. It was during the 1960s that Arden produced most of his major stage works; these include The Happy Haven (1960), The Workhouse Donkey (1963), which concerns municipal corruption in Arden's native Barnsley, Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964), which drew parallels between contemporary political events in the Congo and machinations in medieval Scotland, and Left-Handed Liberty (1965). In 1972 Arden and D'Arcy had a major argument with the RSC about the staging of their Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty. The argument culminated in Arden picketing the theatre and vowing that he would not write for the British stage again. He settled in Galway, Ireland, in 1971. He was elected to Aosdana in 2011, a year before his death.