D'ARCY-ARDEN INTERVIEW -A COMMENT

and Margaretta D'Arcy, interviewed in Workers Press on December 12, explained the important issues behind their picketing of the Aldwych Theatre. It was in protest against the misinterpretation of their script Island of the Mighty, and advo. cated the rights of dramatists to a say • in the production of their work.

However, the opinions they express on a whole number of questions require an answer from the standpoint of Marxism.

Not having seen the play which is the subject of the current controversy (Island of the Mighty') I am at a disadvantage, and my remarks here refer only to the interview.

Arden and D'Arcy are obviously very sympathetic politically to the revolutionary movement, but they are just as obviously in basic disagreement with the Marxist position on the questions they raise.

The most important problem here is that of the working class, its revolutionary role, and its consciousness of that role. All previous revolutions, i.e. revolutions in which one exploiting class was replaced by another exploiting class, had to dress themselves up and imagine themselves in the glory of past heroic ages.

This was not just for purposes of deception, to conceal the real exploitation underneath, but it actually concentrated and made effective the consciousness of the revolulutionaries, e.g. the Jacobins of the French Revolution who acted out their parts as Romans. A scene from John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's play 'Island of the Mighty' script in the Royal Shakespeare Company's , Aldwych production that the authors picketed the theatre demanding the Hellenism and the Roman Empire as a basis, also no modern Europe.

'We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development has as its presupposition a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognized. In that sense we are entitled to say: without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism.' (Anti-Duhring.)

'We should never forget'! But John Arden wants to contrast 'roads' with 'culture'. The Romans ('like Mussolini') built roads 'but the general effect of the Roman Empire was 400 years of rigid repression and control which actually stultified the culture of all the communities in it.' (Are roads not "culture'?) and philosophical' but all this disappeared without trace! It was 'replaced by roads'.

Finally we get the Common Market compared with the Roman Empire-masses of migratory workers.

Well, you might say that the late Roman Empire, like the EEC, held back the further development of the productive forces by perpetuating an outdated social system. But the content of the two processes is essentially opposite.

The Roman Empire had to give way to a break-up into smaller economic and political units, to permit the development of agriculture. Feudalism, resulting from necessary period of barbarian invasions, wars, and the actual decline of culture (both material and spiritual), in the Dark Ages, Arthurian legend. was in protest against theatre demanding the cases is completely, different because of their relation to the development of the productive forces.

To ignore these historical necessities and make an entirely superficial comparison between the 'large and discontented masses of migratory workers going from country to country' is dangerous. Modern wage-workers looking for work are not in any way the same as marauding bands of warriors or migratory peoples colonizing new land as declining barbarism meets the disintegrating Roman slave empire.

But I wonder if this 'left' interpretation of history in terms purely of oppression and struggles does not imply in fact a rejection of the 'economic, political and intellectual development' referred to by