Bouncer–Teacher–Doctor:Gentrification and the Role of the Outsider in the Plays of John Godber

John Bennett

It became more and more apparent that the world I inhabited – the world, that is, of the industrial West Riding – was an acutely physical one, a world of machines and labour and commerce, and one in which the artist, the man whose work had no apparent use or purpose, was not merely an outsider but a hindrance and a nuisance.

(Storey, 1963)

Not, as you might rightly expect, the words of John Godber but those of the rugby-playing novelist and playwright, David Storey, cited by Godber in his MA thesis (1979). Although the historical decline in heavy industry in the north has moved the employment emphasis from machines to commerce – from hard work to software – for Godber this has not lessened a sense of the artist as outsider; the sentiment expressed by Storey applies equally to Godber. This 'externality' is a key aspect of Godber's writing and one that particularly informs the subject matter of his later plays and their migration from the 'acutely physical' world described by Storey.

In this paper I will outline the representations of work in the plays to date, develop a simple taxonomy suggested by Godber and conclude by interrogating a significant moment of departure from this pattern. I will suggest reasons for this departure and speculate on what this may imply for the subject matter of future plays.

To appreciate the broad significance and personal context of the professions as portrayed in the plays of John Godber it is necessary to spend time outlining Godber's early biography, noting a key event in his childhood, his early working life and considering how these experiences impact on his playwriting. It is crucially important to realise that Godber is a playwright for whom personal experience constitutes the key source of theatrical inspiration. He has stated that the five years spent investigating and collating material for his, as yet unfinished, doctoral thesis on the playwright John MacKendrick was 'enough research for one lifetime' (Curtis, 1994).

John Godber was born in 1956 in Upton, West Yorkshire. His mother was a factory worker, his father a miner. Both grandfathers were miners, as were his great grandparents. His parents were keen for him not to continue the family tradition. Godber's father's involvement with the Worker's Education Association convinced him that the key to avoiding the apparent inevitability of working down the pit lay with education.

In 1967, the household was stunned when Godber failed his eleven-plus. The sense of devastation was heightened by the realisation that Godber was one of only three pupils to fail in a class of twenty-five. No comfort could be derived from the assumption that this was a bad class or poorly taught; this was failure on a deeply personal scale (Godber, 1997). It is a moment that still haunts Godber and one that is chronicled in some detail in the 1987 play, Happy Families(1992).

The capacity of education to increase social mobility amongst the working classes became, if not common after the 1944 Butler Education Act, then at least possible. It produced a generation of groundbreaking working-class artists, including David Storey. What is distinctive about Godber's relationship to this idea of empowerment through education is that he failed at what was then the first and most critical stage. His parents' chosen escape route collapsed in on him at eleven years of age. Godber now feels that this early academic failure was the beginning of his chronic sense of externality, of being an outsider looking in.

However, Godber went on to do well at secondary modern school and, acceding to his parents renewed hopes for him, rather than his own instincts, trained as a teacher of Drama at Bretton Hall College, West Yorkshire. While at Bretton, Godber's prolific career began in earnest.

This is a chronological list of plays with a description of the work (or lack of it) associated with the central dominant character or characters. Considering the plays prior to 1992, two distinct categories emerge. As Godber explains:

There's two strands to my work. There's the sporting side – Cramp, Up'n'Under, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Bouncers – which are very athletic in their approach. Then there's a sort of lyrical, working-class, almost sort of Stan Barstow, David Storey side – Happy Jack, September in the Rain, Salt of the Earth.

(1997)

In 1992, he writes The Office Party. This play marks a significant departure for Godber in both form and content. It is the first non sports-based play to demand a single, detailed naturalistic set; the play makes no reference to northern working life; it demands a cast of seven with no multiple-role playing. The characters are all salaried employees in a Leeds-based advertising agency, and although there is the usual hierarchical structure within the office, there is homogeneity of class amongst the characters. The play examines the sexual politics of office life and is played out against the backdrop of the preparations for and the aftermath of the office Christmas party.

The more perceptive critics thought this a radical departure from the concerns of previous work; Beverley Wing, writing in The Yorkshire Post, comments: 'Has John Godber, the champion of the working classes, finally turned his back on those closest to his heart?' (1992). Robin Thornber of The Guardian is more negative:

He's tried to aim for the West End by writing one of those brittle, up-market assaults on the amorality of Thatcherite values that we had from writers like David Hare and Caryl Churchill in the eighties. But this isn't Godber's world.

(1992)

That last phrase is particularly telling. This is not 'Godber's world'; neither is the world of the next play – Passion Killers(1995). We are now solidly in the territory of the professional classes. The central characters in Passion Killers are Tom, a thirty-eight year old journalist, and Andy, a thirty-seven year old businessman. They set out on a golfing holiday to Spain and become entangled, both sexually and otherwise, with other guests at their hotel. Again the play's theme is sexual politics, particularly sexual fidelity within a long-term relationship. The author's note in the programme for the first performance reads:

In Passion Killers, the angle is quite different; (referring to the other two plays in what some critics all Godber's 'Britons Abroad' trilogy, April in Paris and On the Piste) We take two middle-class British men, and put them jam-smack right in the middle of an alien situation. It is not the foreigners who pose the problems here; it is the other British people abroad.

(1995)

The play marks a gradual geographic drift away from the north of England and a thematic move into comedy of Nineties' class-conscious, sexual manners. Malcolm Rutherford, reviewing the play in The Financial Times, made a logical comparison with the expert in this field: '... In terms of output he is becoming almost as prolific as Alan Ayckbourn; and other similarities have developed' (1994). Robin Thornber, ever critical of Godber's work, echoes this observation and questions the success of the transition:

John Godber moves into Ayckbourn's territory of middle-class infidelity with his latest comedy, but you wouldn't say he's made a complete conquest ... Godber's writing always feels more authentic to me when he's evoking his working-class roots.

(1994)

Godber, when asked if Passion Killers was a genuine watershed in his career, replied;

Well, it doesn't have a rugby ball in it. It is a cross fertilisation of my more comic and my more serious work.

(1997)

Or, one might argue, a blending of the sport play and the nostalgia play. How successful this particular hybrid was can be measured by the fact that, despite some positive press from critics such a Michael Billington, the play has never been performed professionally since its first outing in Derby and subsequent tour in 1994/95.

With the arguable exception of Lucky Sods, Godber's satirical play about preternaturally fortunate lottery winners, the profession of the central protagonist in the plays has changed fundamentally. As Thornber said, we are now in middle-class territory. Gym and Tonic looks at the executive stress felt by an over-worked businessman with an English degree, the TV series Bloomin' Marvellous features a successful radio journalist married to a novelist/university lecturer (with a PhD) The hero of Weekend Breaks is a screenwriter/university lecturer (with a PhD) It Started With A Kiss tells the story of an assorted group of student teachers in the seventies; Hooray for Hollywood, a successful playwright turned screenwriter/director. The next play, interestingly a commission from Alan Ayckbourn for his new Scarborough Theatre, is entitled Perfect Pitch and set in a scenic spot popular with caravan owners. Unleashed considers middle-management let loose in the red-light district of Amsterdam, Thick as a Brick argues from a teacher's perspective for a more liberal, arts-based school curriculum, Seasons in the Sun, ostensibly concerned with 'bin-men' is an examination of the culture clash between prospective students spending a summer 'on the bins' and their relationship with 'genuine' refuse collectors. It is further distanced from being contemporary social comment by being set in the mid-seventies – again a hybrid of nostalgia and the physicality (i.e. sport) of demanding manual labour.

Why such a change, why depart from the nostalgic content and physicality of form that often led Godber to be described as the third most performed playwright in the countryand brought acclaim to a medium-scale touring theatre perched on the north-east coast? I would like to outline some possible personal, pragmatic and aesthetic reasons and to explore the paradoxes this change represents.

On a personal level, it is important not to lose sight of the significant events that occurred in Godber's life in the early and mid-nineties. Firstly, and of the most personal significance, he nearly died. In 1993, a car journey of several hundred miles in a cramped position caused him to develop deep vein thrombosis in his legs which moved to his lungs and threatened his heart. From this point, he starts to get panic attacks. (Godber writes this condition into the male character of his TV sit-com Bloomin' Marvellous.) This incident caused Godber to take stock of many things in his life. He married his long-term partner, the playwright and actress Jane Clifford-Thornton; they started a family. These events force him to pause and reflect on the work so far. As he said:

It used to be plays about big blokes, Up'n'Under and Bouncers; there are people who think they are the only plays that I have ever written. Now I think it is becoming plays about sensitive blokes, albeit big sensitive blokes.

(1997)

It has already been suggested that he writes about the world he knows. He reiterated this position in our last interview: 'I'm always the starting point for the work. And why shouldn't you be, because that's presumably why you are a writer in the first place' (1997). In the twenty-first century, Godber remains a biographical writer, but the circumstances of that biography have changed significantly; 'Godber's world' is now very different. He left teaching in 1984 to become artistic director of the Hull Truck Theatre Company. By the time we get to The Office Party he has been at Hull eight years. He has been a professional playwright and director far longer than he was a quasi-rebellious teenager growing up in the shadows of the pit, or rugby-playing, club-going student.

Success at Hull Truck ensures that, albeit on a modest scale, he now routinely deals with advertising people (see The Office Party), he's regularly interviewed by journalists (Bloomin' Marvellous), his punishing workload means that he suffers with panic attacks and executive stress (Gym And Tonic), he's a visiting lecturer (Weekend Breaks) and, after Up'n'Under the film, a screenwriter (Hooray For Hollywood). As he says:

I go to posh hotels and I know rich people and I've got some money and all the rest of it; should I therefore write about that or should I still write about being the son of a miner?

(1997)

It is not within the scope of this paper to debate the merits, or otherwise, of such a personal approach, but what is significant is that here is a playwright who, having written extensively about his family, their working lives and their leisure-time, then finds his world has undergone fundamental change. Family is still significant, contact with his father and mother vital, but now he is a father himself, in the midst of a successful career and enjoying the most comfortable, although far from lavish, lifestyle he has ever known. The paradox here is that as he grows away from his roots, so the focus of his inspiration swings ever more subjectively inward. The plays become a public dissection of the changed Godber consciousness.

On a pragmatic level, when appointed to Hull Truck, Godber faced an immediate crisis: if the theatre was to survive then box office income had to improve. It was a hard fact of economic life. Certain strategies were closed to him. They could not compete on the large-scale musical front, as that was catered for by the Hull New Theatre, the audience demographic suggested that productions of Ayckbourn would not prove the 'banker' that they do for most provincial theatres; therefore Godber set out on a crusade to win a new audience. The first thing he did was write a play that centred on Rugby League (consciously not Rugby Union, which was his sport of choice at Bretton Hall), the professional game for which Hull was famous. That play was Up'n'Under and proved to be a great commercial success. As The Financial Times theatre critic wrote, 'The audience came knowing all about rugby and left knowing much about theatre' (Macaulay, 1995). What Godber had discovered was the importance of utilising the 'cultural capital'of his audience. Their expertise and experience of rugby gave them an investment in the play, and Hull Truck began attracting more of a non-traditional theatre audience.

On more than one occasion, Godber has stated that he is now tired of this crusade. His comments to Sheena MacDonald on Radio Four sum up this change of heart:

Gone are the days, I'm sad to say, where I thought I could single-handedly bring all the ex-miners and ex-steelworkers and ex-shop assistants to the theatre to see my plays, it's a non-starter, that needs massive subsidy now. I've kind of taken the view that I've done all I can do, I've felt like a lone voice in the wilderness for a long time saying to people, look theatre can be great fun, come and have a go, it's great. I feel that I've run out of a little bit of steam. I want to exercise particular aspects of my own psyche, which perhaps isn't as popular as it has been in the past.

(1997)

The paradox here is that a play such as The Office Party is still working that profitable seam of cultural capital discovered in Up'n'Under. However, rather than a play appealing to the rugby fan, here is a play which appeals to all office workers who have enjoyed/endured an office Christmas party. This allows theatres to try a strategy of niche marketing and can pay high dividends, particularly if canny management stage the production around Christmas time. Local clerical staff may, and often do, choose to celebrate Christmas by coming to see The Office Party, complete with party hats, streamers and Christmas cracker humour on-stage and off.

Godber has not abandoned this notion of cultural capital in the more recent plays, just moved it resolutely up-market. One would enjoy the frisson of Gym and Tonic more had one personal experience of expensive health farms. The sense of identification for the audience of It Started with a Kiss is greater for those university graduates in the audience than it is for those who have not lived through the joys of student life, and more particularly, seventies student life. Weekend Breaks makes more sense to those countless thousands who have benefited from their working-class parents' selfless insistence that their children will be better educated than they were. Perfect Pitch is aimed squarely at the caravan-owning classes. Godber no longer feels compelled to continue his populist crusade with the same working-class emphasis. The price of buying into the cultural capital of recent Godber plays has increased markedly.