Serjeant Musgrave's Dance by John Arden

First published: 1960

First produced: 1959, at the Royal Court Theatre, London

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: c. 1879

Locale: Northern England

Principal Characters:

• Serjeant Musgrave, a crazed regular soldier
• Hurst, a hardened soldier
• Attercliffe, an old soldier
• Sparky, a young soldier
• Mrs. Hitchcock, the manager of a pub
• Annie, a maid in the pub
• Walsh, the spokesman for the colliers
• The Mayor, the owner of the mine in the town that Musgrave visits

The Play

Most of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is set in a coal-mining town in northern England. The action takes place in the winter; the town is isolated, thus giving Serjeant Musgrave the chance to carry out his plan. In the first scene, though, the sergeant and his three soldier-confederates are about to board a canal barge to take them to the town. A group of soldiers could be going to a mining town either to recruit soldiers—the recruiting sergeant trying to draw unemployed young men into an unpopular trade was a familiar sight in England through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—or else to assist the authorities in putting down civil disturbance. Since the town to which Serjeant Musgrave and his men are going is a mining town in the middle of a strike (or, the men say, a “lock out” by the employers), the latter would seem to be a likely explanation. The soldiers in act 1, scene 1, however, seem too nervous for such obvious explanations, as if they have some private and irregular purpose. They also have a large amount of baggage with them, including a Gatling gun (an early form of machine gun), which seems out of place for recruiting and too extreme for crowd control. One of their crates further contains, the audience learns later, the skeleton of a former comrade, Billy Hicks, who came from the very town to which they are going.

In scene 2, the soldiers’ arrival causes some uncertainty. This scene is set in a neutral place, the bar of a pub, where both the striking colliers and the town authorities could conceivably be found. In this scene, the authorities hold the stage: the parson (a clergyman of the Church of England, the established church, which is closely connected with the upper classes and the government), the constable (a rough equivalent of an American town sheriff), and the mayor (a mine owner and therefore a major employer). These men all assume that Musgrave must have come to their assistance, though they have not sent for him. He can help the constable maintain order, they surmise, or maybe he will recruit some of the striker-troublemakers and take them overseas. All assume that he can be bought.

In scene 3, the audience is shown that this assumption is a desperate mistake. Musgrave sends his men to scout the town, and they meet in a graveyard. As the soldiers begin to squabble, Musgrave asserts his authority, especially on Hurst, whom it is clear that he can dominate because Hurst is a known criminal, on the run for murdering an officer and living in terror of the gallows. Musgrave, however, is in some way or other on the run too; if nothing else, he has embezzled army money and stolen army property. At the end of this scene, and of act 1, Musgrave appears as an Old Testament prophet, dedicated to scourging sin and vice for some reason—and in some way—of his own. He tries to show the colliers (who threaten him in the graveyard) that he is on their side; he calls God to approve his “Deed” and his “Logic.”

Act 2 returns to Mrs. Hitchcock’s bar, this time occupied by the colliers. One clash in scene 1 is between the colliers and the constable, who tries to close down the bar. Another is between Musgrave and the slatternly Annie. She has had an illegitimate child by Billy Hicks, and she does not know that he is dead. She expects now to sleep with one or all of the soldiers. Musgrave, however, strongly disapproves of this promiscuity, though not exactly of her, seeing her sexuality as a betrayal in some way of God’s (and Musgrave’s) plan.

Musgrave has meanwhile won over the colliers, to some extent, by lavish supplies of drink. They now think that he has come to recruit them and are not totally against the idea. Their spokesman, Walsh, nevertheless is clever enough to see recruitment as a possible employers’ plot, and he tries to intimidate Musgrave into leaving. He rejects Musgrave’s assurance that he is really—if in an unexplained way—on the colliers’ side.

The final scene in act 2 is the most complex to that point, and it demands careful staging. Briefly, Annie goes in turn to Hurst, to Attercliffe, and to Sparky. Hurst rejects her advances because he is in awe of Musgrave. Attercliffe is mostly sorry for her. Sparky, finally, is afraid of what Musgrave is going to do and tries to get Annie to flee with him. When the others realize what is afoot, there is a scuffle, and Sparky is accidentally killed with a bayonet. In between these events, Musgrave is seen in the grip of a nightmare, and an attempt is made by Walsh to steal the Gatling gun. Musgrave calms the frightened mayor by saying that he will begin recruiting the next day, in the marketplace.

The next day, though, with all assembled at the start of act 3, Musgrave’s plan becomes clear at last. The sergeant has been driven mad—or perhaps sane—by remorse. In a far country of the British Empire, terrorists killed one of his men, Billy Hicks. In the ensuing roundup, five innocent civilians, including perhaps a child, were killed. Their deaths are on Musgrave’s conscience and he has decided to avenge them. However, he cannot harm his men, for they, too, are victims. Revenge must fall on those who sent them: the British public and the British rulers. In the square, he sets up his Gatling gun and explains that “logic” demands that if five civilians were killed for one soldier, then five times five Britons must die for the civilians. In a macabre gesture, he runs his flag up the flagpole: It is the skeleton of Annie’s lover, Billy Hicks.

The massacre is halted by the arrival of other soldiers, the dragoons sent for by the mayor. Hurst is shot and Musgrave overpowered by the bargeman who brought them to the town in the first place. Order is restored in a drink-and-dance scene joined even by Walsh; only Annie sits out—with the skeleton. In a final short scene, Musgrave and Attercliffe moralize, waiting for the gallows.

Dramatic Devices

Perhaps in compensation for its highly abstract theme, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is a play which has strong visual and auditory appeal. The scene is always dominated by the bright scarlet coats and shining metalwork of Queen Victoria’s infantry; Musgrave refers several times to the white chevrons on his sleeve (much larger and more clearly marked than in modern armies). In contrast to this striking display stand the grimy colliers. Both groups, at one time or another, perform the rituals of their trade or culture onstage. The colliers do a clog dance in act 2 (a form of tap dance in heavy wooden-soled shoes, local to the North of England). In act 3, Musgrave and his men perform a grisly parody of arms drill. In between, the colliers, half-persuaded to join the army, are found executing what they think is drill: It is a scene for which Arden wrote extremely careful directions, pointing out that all the movements must be made alertly and efficiently but that all the drillers must do different things, and none must obey the word of command—a most difficult effect to achieve. The idea in each case, it seems, is to show men deluded and dehumanized by false jollity or false solidarity.

The suggestion of falseness is further emphasized by several dance scenes. The scene in Mrs. Hitchcock’s bar trembles on the edge of violence, as dance turns into brawl. By contrast, at the end of act 3, scene 1 (the play’s climax), the fight with the dragoons rapidly turns into a dance. However, joining the dance, as Walsh realizes, is tantamount to betrayal and surrender. Cooperative movements, in this play, tend to mean abandonment of judgment and personal responsibility, not (as they are supposed to) good fellowship or community.

Individual voices are raised in the play, in song. Arden has in several plays been affected by the ballad-poetry of northern England, and in this play there are several traditional songs and several imitations of traditional song, usually expressing sadness, fatalism, or resignation. The songs often come from the play’s most oppressed characters: Annie, Sparky, and, at the very end, Attercliffe, waiting for death with his sergeant. There is a suggestion here, perhaps, of a traditional culture older and wiser than the rituals of the British Empire. Arden, who is himself a northerner, may well identify with this sense of antiquity.

Finally, it is clear that Arden sometimes is prepared to strain for shock effects. The raising of a skeleton on a flagpole rises beyond the macabre to the bizarre. Musgrave’s nightmare in act 2 recalls the sleepwalking sequence of Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pr. 1606); few modern playwrights would risk the comparison. At several points, Arden’s own stage directions admit implicitly that his effects will prove hard to stage.

Critical Context

Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance can be set firmly within two contexts: the “angry young men” of the 1950’s and the “Yorkshire writers” of the same era. The two groups are not quite the same but had considerable similarities. Briefly, the “angry young men” represented a reaction to the end of World War II (1939-1945) and the decline of British power, even after victory. The feeling they expressed was one of futility, that so much had been suffered for so little result. The “Yorkshire writers” expressed a sense of having been shut out of national wealth and culture after having done so much—in the “rust belt” of northern England—to create it in the past. These two strands, one may say, are combined in the “imperial” and “economic” strands of this play, the returning soldiers and the strike.

The actual incident that gave rise to this play also contains a certain symbolic appropriateness. In 1958, Greek Cypriots attempting to overthrow British rule shot a sergeant’s wife in the back while she was shopping. The ensuing roundup was carried out by British troops with obvious rage: Three Cypriots were killed. British public opinion divided between condemning the first murder and condemning the troops’ behavior. Arden is clearly trying to mediate between the two knee-jerk reactions.

In that sense, his play has proved a failure. The Cyprus scenario has been repeated many times, with repeated escalation, in Belfast and Jerusalem, Algeria and Vietnam. The removal of British rule from Cyprus ironically prompted only invasion by the Turks. Attercliffe’s hope, at the end of the play, that he and Musgrave would plant a seed in people’s minds, has proved fruitless. The play, however, after initial hostility, has been repeatedly revived, translated, and produced for television. Its artistic power has outlived its contemporary references.

Sources for Further Study

Anderson, Michael. Anger and Detachment: A Study of Arden, Osborne, and Pinter. London: Pitman, 1976.

Brown, John Russell. Theatre Language: A Study of Arden, Osborne, Pinter, and Wesker. New York: Taplinger, 1972.

Counts, Michael L. “John Arden.” In British Playwrights, 1956-1995: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Hayman, Ronald. John Arden. London: Heinemann, 1968.

Hunt, Albert. Arden: A Study of His Plays. London: Eyre Methuen, 1974.

Leeming, Glenda. John Arden. Harlow, England: Longman, 1974.

Malick, Javed. Towards a Theatre of the Oppressed: The Dramaturgy of John Arden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Taylor, John Russell. Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama. Rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1969.

Trussler, Simon. John Arden. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.

Wike, Jonathan, ed. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1994.