Arden, John (1930- ) playwright, critic, novelist

John Arden was born in Yorkshire, England, to Charles Alwyn Arden, a glass factory manager, and Annie Elizabeth Arden. Arden was educated at Cambridge and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he studied architecture. In 1957 his first play, The Waters of Babylon, the story of a pimp who cleverly deceives those around him, was accepted for production by the Royal Court Theatre. Arden sets up the unappealing nature of his main character, Krank, in the opening scene: “Why don’t I wash my cups and plate more often than only once a week? ’Cause I am man of filthy habit in my house, is why.”

Arden’s early work earned him a place among the Angry Young Men, a group including Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, and John Wain. This group was characterized by their scorn for both aristocratic tradition and the new British welfare state. Arden’s play Live Like Pigs (1958), for example, traces the struggle between tenants in a housing project and the British Housing Authority. “Why don’t you folk leave us alone?” declares one of the main characters, Rosie, “We didn’t come here cos we wanted; but now we are here you ought to leave us be.” The New York Times called the play “[r]ibald, brawling, roaring.”

These early works also reveal Arden’s Marxist analysis of class struggle, manifested in the everyday battles that shape the lives of his main characters. In his introductory note to Live Like Pigs he states, “When I wrote this play I intended it to be not so much a social documentary as a study of differing ways of life brought sharply into conflict and both losing their own particular virtues under the stress of intolerance and misunderstanding.” Arden’s first plays frequently had only the barest of sets, so that the focus is on the dialog exchanges between his characters. The lack of elaborate staging often gives these dramas an improvisational feel.

Named the “most promising playwright” by the London Evening Standard in 1960, Arden captivated audiences through his examination of the character of English life during and after the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s. Much of his later work was greatly influenced by his collaboration with his wife, Margaretta D’Arcy. Together they wrote a number of plays, radio dramas, and documentaries for television. In 1974 they received an award from the British Arts Council for The Island of the Mighty. First produced in 1972, this historical play explores the themes of exploitation and oppression in the context of Great Britain’s relationship to the rest of the world.

Arden has moved away from the theater because of changing working conditions for playwrights that put profitability above the creative process. These shifts, he claims, have inhibited his ability to express himself fully as an artist. He has, however, continued his interest in the stage, and in 1977 published To Present Pretence: Essays on the Theatre and its Public, a critical analysis of the modern theater.

Arden’s solo radio play, The Old Man Sleeps Alone, (1982) was included in Best Radio Plays of 1982. His novel Silence Among the Weapons (1982) is set in the period of the Roman Empire and discusses the important influence that Rome had over the people of the Mediterranean. The novel was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 1982.

Many critics consider Arden one of the most original voices in modern British theater. As John Russell Taylor writes in the introduction to Arden’s Three Plays (1975), “Arden has continued to shatter any preconceptions we might have about what to expect from him almost before they have formed in our minds. . . . Arden is a genuine original, and far more important than the differences between his plays and those of his contemporaries is the internal consistency which makes them a logical, coherent progression, all first, foremost, and unmistakably the product of one exceptional mind.”

Other Works by John Arden:
- The Business of Good Government. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
- Left-Handed Liberty. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

Works about John Arden:
- Malick, Javed. Toward a Theatre of the Oppressed: The Dramaturgy of John Arden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
- Wike, Jonathan. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy. New York: Garland, 1995.