John Whiting

English playwright

• Born: November 15, 1917
• Birthplace: Salisbury, Wiltshire, England
• Died: June 16, 1963
• Place of death: Duddleswell, Sussex, England

Biography

John Robert Whiting, while virtually unknown to general audiences, is recognized by serious critics as a major force in twentieth century drama. He was born in Salisbury, England, on November 15, 1917, the son of a retired army officer turned lawyer. An indifferent student who later claimed that he had never passed an examination, Whiting left his upper-middle-class schooling at age seventeen to train as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. With the outbreak of World War II, he enlisted in the Royal Artillery. After marrying actress Jackie Mawson in 1940, he returned to acting at the end of the war, joining John Gielgud’s company in 1951.

In spite of this lengthy association with the theater, Whiting exhibited no interest in writing plays until a casual conversation with a friend in 1946 inspired him to make the attempt. During the following five years he wrote four plays—half of his entire canon of stage drama—as well as four radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). His first stage play was A Penny for a Song, a comedy set during the Napoleonic Wars. Directed by Peter Brook, it was performed in March, 1951. A vivid, theatrical play, it traces the rise and fall of Sir Timothy Humpage as he attempts to preserve happiness and a sense of purpose—illusions for Whiting—at the expense of self-deception. “We find reality unbearable. . . . And so we escape, childlike, into the illusion,” one of the characters says. In September of 1951, Whiting’s second stage play, Saint’s Day, was performed at the Arts Theatre Club. It closed after three weeks amid hostile popular criticism and audience rejection, a pattern which was to continue during most of Whiting’s life. With a central theme of self-destruction, the play sets forth in bleak terms the tragedy of the elderly poet Paul Southman, who had isolated himself and his family from the local community. In this dense, dark play, Southman learns, “We are here—all of us—to die. Nothing more than that.”

Whiting’s next play, Marching Song, appeared in 1954. Describing it as formally austere and antitheatrical, Whiting used the figure of General Rupert Forster, who was guilty of war crimes involving the slaughter of children, to present images of death and violence, underscoring the nihilistic forces operating in the universe. Whiting wrote only one more full-length stage play in the 1950’s, a withdrawal directly resulting from negative reactions to his work. He did, however, write many screenplays.

In 1960 Whiting was invited to write The Devils, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun (1952). Successfully performed in 1961, the play explored the diabolic possession of a group of nuns through the influence of a charismatic priest named Grandier, who was horribly tortured. Another of Whiting’s self-destructive characters, he was a tragic figure, flawed by his refusal to accept responsibility for his actions. Epic in style, the play achieved its effects through a relentless series of visual and verbal grotesqueries, stressing that “the purpose of man [is] loneliness and death.”

Whiting’s death of cancer on June 16, 1963, abruptly ended his reestablished dramatic career. Other plays discovered among his papers and performed posthumously include Conditions of Agreement and No More A-Roving, both written in 1946.

All Whiting’s best plays, the editor Simon Trussler has suggested, are “most readily understood as parables and paradigms of human behavior.” Whiting was concerned with exploring the human soul in its abstracted, self-destructive preoccupation with the processes of dying. At the center of his plays stand tormented men who are caught in webs of unmotivated cruelty. In their isolation, they radiate hatred toward others and especially toward themselves. Southman, in Saint’s Day, and Forster, in Marching Song, commit suicide; Grandier, in The Devils, provokes others to torture him to death. The structures of Whiting’s plays are marked by density, austerity, and ambiguity; the tone is dark and pessimistic. Whiting characteristically uses potent and provocative stage pictures to frame the words of the text, as in the opening scene of The Devils, in which a corpse hangs from the gallows and a sewer worker labors in his pit.

During his lifetime, Whiting’s plays were neither popular nor the subject of much literary criticism. He allied himself with the tradition of the intellectual elite, writing plays that were obscure and difficult even for a discriminating audience. Embedded within his theater were structural and thematic references and allusions that were often part of a private mythology. In his recurrent concern with the nature of violence and the limits of personal responsibility, Whiting anticipated the work of later writers. In his use of Brechtian techniques in The Devils, he paved the way for further experimentations in the theater. Whiting’s contributions to the development of British theater were significant, although they have been underestimated. In 1965 the Arts Council of Great Britain instituted the John Whiting Award, an annual stipend given to younger British dramatists whose work is only beginning to be known.

Bibliography

Demastes, William W., and Katherine Kelly, eds. British Playwrights, 1956-1995: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. An essay on Whiting discusses his life and works plus provides an assessment of the playwright’s career. Includes bibliography.

Goodall, Jane. “The Devils and Its Sources: Modern Perspectives on the Loudun Possession.” In Drama and Philosophy, edited by James Redmond. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. The essay shows how Whiting shifts the emphasis from Grandier’s villainy to his inner struggle. It also compares the play with Henry de Montherlant’s Port-Royal (pr., pb. 1954; English translation, 1962) and Jean Genet’s Le Balcon (pb. 1956; The Balcony, 1957).

Goodall, Jane. “Musicality and Meaning in the Dialogue of Saint’s Day.” Modern Drama 29 (December, 1986): 567-579. This essay defends the play against the early charges of abstruseness by demonstrating its underlying logic. It seeks to show the dramatic elements of this logic in terms of the search for revelation. Looks particularly at the play’s dialogue.

Robinson, Gabrielle. A Private Mythology: The Manuscripts and Plays of John Whiting. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1988. Robinson examines myth as it is manifested in the works of Whiting. Includes bibliography and index.

Salmon, Eric. The Dark Journey: John Whiting as Dramatist. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1979. An account of Whiting’s complete oeuvre. It traces in particular Whiting’s obsession “with the innate tendency of the sensitive towards self-destruction.” Includes appendices, a bibliography, and an index.