Ashes

by David Rudkin

Book by Rudkin, David

Genres: Drama

Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

British playwright for theatre, film, television, and radio.

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has a reputation for being one of Rudkin's best plays, if not his best. It tells of a married couple trying (unsuccessfully) to have a baby, the various humiliations they experience at the hands of the medical profession and fertility experts, and the emotional toll it takes on them. At the close, it opens out into making their sterility a metaphor for a wider sterility which has to do with the man's Protestant Irish lineage. The first aspect, the attempts to conceive based on expert advice and the harrowing depiction of a miscarriage, have the potential to be powerful, moving, and mordantly funny. I was less convinced by the wider aspect, and it points to the unease I have about the play.

Rudkin wants to draw a connection between one sterility and the other, but can only seem to do it by talking about it. Worse, because the male character has a lot of biographical similarities with Rudkin - he's Irish Protestant, bisexual, a playwright who spent a long time writing an epic which no one staged (perhaps The Sons of Light?) - there's a tendency for the play to leave the realm of drama and become polemical, confessional, and forced as a result. Rudkin developed an idiosyncratic progressive paganism in outlook, and here that seems shoehorned in as editorialising rather than growing from the organic soil of character drawing and development.

The play ends up being a kind of way for Rudkin to think through masculinity and sterility, at the detriment to the drama of the piece. The man - and this is terrible for a play which consciously attacks patriarchy - is given a lot more emphasis than the woman. Worse, the minor characters (doubled by two actors, one male/one female) are thinly sketched cartoons representing a cold-blooded system through which the couple is processed. Rudkin even adds snide put-downs of these characters in the stage directions. It's like the play never escapes his own consciousness. Still, its unflinching portrayal of the struggle to conceive is probably enough to make it a powerful piece fo theatre with the right actors.

[Bryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good, bleak, hard-hitting play about fertility and oppression and masculinity and other tough subjects. It is very much of its moment, I think, both in the experience of infertility it depicts and the situation in Ireland, but that didn't lessen its power for me.