Liberty and Terror

Liberty, a new play by the poet Glyn Maxwell, premieres at the Globe in September. He talks to Nicholas Robins about the French Revolution, retelling a story by Anatole France and writing verse drama.

What is the background to the story?
Liberty is set at the height of ‘the Reign of Terror’ during the French Revolution. It tells the story of a young artist, Evariste Gamelin, who becomes a Revolutionary magistrate and turns rapidly from a radical idealist to a bloodthirsty apologist for State violence. It’s the story of him, the girl he loves, his best friend, and the people they know.

Gamelin says at one point ‘The past is up in arms and means to annihilate us’. There was an obsessional need to ‘make new’ at that time, wasn’t there?
The most conspicuous manifestation of that in the play is the new Calendar: ‘Year One’, ‘Year Two’, months called ‘Floreal’, ‘Nivose’, ‘Fructidor’ and so on. The old nursery rhyme of the months, ‘Flowery Showery Bowery’, was the English sending it up. Yes, the Jacobins wanted to remake society utterly, and those who tried to halt or slow that movement mostly perished. Gamelin believes only in the future, and sees the past itself as his antagonist: he calls England ‘the great white cliff of History’, and himself, mounting the scaffold, a ‘sacrifice to a just future’.

According to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, ‘Liberty’ asserted that every citizen had the right to do what he pleased unless it was against the law. What went wrong?
Simply that phrase: ‘unless it was against the law’. The Revolutionaries had killed a king, so of course every monarchy in Europe was at war with them and they became insecure, then terrified, then absolutely paranoid, until everyone but themselves was suspect: of course former nobles or Catholic priests were first in line for death, but then came prostitutes, petty criminals, war profiteers, foreigners, bankers, people related to anyone suspect – at the height of the Terror they were guillotining little girls and old ladies – and eventually anyone accused of anything. I think the rabble-rouser Marat was responsible for uncorking this particular hellhole, by suggesting that moral proof – not legal proof – was all that was needed to condemn someone. Anyone who tries to truncate legal process is setting a foot on this path.

French ‘liberty’ also brings with it nationalism and the creation of the modern state doesn’t it?
Gamelin explicitly states that a future will come when liberty, equality and brotherhood will be so taken for granted that no one will notice them. He talks of universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, education for all, equality of citizens – everything that would indeed come to Europe, however imperfectly. So this ‘terror’ is not in the service of a medieval fantasy of scripture, or xenophobia, or misogyny, or the possession of oilfields, it’s in the service of the civilization we have now. However monstrous or merciless Gamelin appears in the end, it has to be remembered that the Declaration of the Rights of the Citizen is one of the most progressive and beautiful documents in history, and the Jacobins felt they were fighting for it. Also, in terms of the balance of the play, the case for terror has to be made.

The revolution was led by intellectuals, but not all of them became Jacobins. Is the difference between the moderate Demay and the extremist Gamelin chiefly one of temperament?
I think that idea goes right to the heart of my play, that our private temperaments are forged in reaction to loved ones as much as to enemies, and that’s what determines the public mark we make. Gamelin and Demay have been firm friends since art-school days, still calling each other ‘Genius’ and ‘Prodigy’ – but where Gamelin believes in purity, Demay is a man of the world. When Gamelin mentions principles, Demay says: ‘I got rid of mine and the world turned fascinating.’ In fact it’s about to get very scary for him, because all the little compromises and deals and messes such a man leaves in his wake will make him highly suspect in this black-or-white world. But I think of the two as Apollonian and Dionysian, which is broadly how I see Robespierre and Danton – not to mention Lenin and Trotsky. Do all revolutions have these ill-starred twins at the core? It was Danton who told Robespierre that virtue – the concept that Robespierre held sacred above all – was ‘what I do to my wife every night’. This remark appalled Robespierre, who let Danton go to the guillotine when he could have saved him. In the play Demay too makes a connection between virtue and sex, or makes Dionysus’ case against Apollo.

Robespierre was known as ‘The Incorruptible’ – but if he wasn’t corrupted by money he was by power.
Never by money; utterly by power. A few weeks before his fall, Robespierre organized the Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champ de Mars. This was his apotheosis: immaculately dressed, the only revolutionary who still wore a powdered wig, he held a laurel branch at the head of the procession: after that it began to be whispered that he thought of himself as the Supreme Being. It’s said that some of the other revolutionaries were giggling at the sight. He was doomed after that, because he’d become the focus of that instinctive revulsion the Jacobins had for dictators. And he had so much blood on his hands.

Does Gamelin’s career resemble that of a lesser Robespierre?
I’m sure this is what Anatole France intends in the novel. Robespierre is Gamelin’s hero; they fall on the same day. Both are quiet idealists who suddenly find themselves important, then mutate with frightening speed into powerful and pitiless men. At the start of the play Gamelin thinks Revolutionary France a kind of Eden. Robespierre as a young lawyer was opposed to the death penalty – a remarkable position for the time.

The paintings of David and his contemporaries were often deeply political or became politicized. Is it significant that Gamelin starts out in life as an artist?
The artist David was political in the most despicable sense, as of course he survived everything by ducking and weaving and wound up sanctifying Napoleon in oils just as he had the Jacobins. Perhaps Anatole France had this in mind when he chose Gamelin’s career. How chilling to think that in 1912, while he was writing the novel, there was another inadequate painter about to scrawl his name in history.

Your working title for the play was ‘The Man of Terror’ and of course it is set during the Reign of Terror. Are there parallels to be drawn with latter-day terrors?
Terrorism seems to me a victory of abstract thought over creaturely feeling: hence religious violence, human rights abuse, state murder. The mind cuts loose from the body: that’s why so many failed artists and writers get involved. The true artist can’t cut loose from the body.

Does the Reign of Terror remain an object lesson for us in never suspending the Rights of Man?
That future civilization glimpsed by the idealists of 1789 – based upon equality and freedom – is under attack: externally by ruthless extremists who believe in neither equality nor freedom, and internally by our own authorities whose first response to danger is to start dismantling equality and freedom. The external threat is despicable and obvious; the internal one insidious but more potent. I couldn’t resist one direct allusion: when it’s explained to Demay that witnesses and proof are no longer needed to send a man to death, he remarks that ‘they always did seem rather quaint’ – that being the word by which Bush’s Justice Department described the Geneva Conventions in documents that would license the torture at Abu Ghraib. But the point is that the man who thinks this – Demay, a war profiteer – is the very man it threatens.

Someone quotes at one point ‘Danton’s law’, which seeks to justify emergency powers: ‘We are at war. We need the legislation.’ Does your play suggest that we should fear latter-day Dantons?
We should fear anyone who trades in fear. But Danton is a tragic figure (as Büchner showed in his play Danton’s Death) in a way that Robespierre isn’t. Danton had the grandeur of self-knowledge: he went to the guillotine knowing he’d been destroyed by the draconian laws he himself had pushed for. He showed a hindsight which gave him foresight, as he accurately told Robespierre: ‘You will follow me in three months.’

Much of Gamelin’s authority derives from a redefinition of virtue: the virtuous citizen must be a self-denying patriot. That has a familiar ring. Are there similarities between the betrayal of ideals in France and more recent assaults on the American Constitution (whose writing was dramatized at the Globe last year)?
There are no history plays, just the same news breaking again like waves. The Bush administration has in seven years – a biblical cycle for the biblically-minded – wrought dreadful harm upon the US Constitution, a thing of beauty which helped to inspire the French Revolution. This image says it all: as Robespierre and his associates waited for the guillotine, most of them hideously wounded by botched suicide attempts, the only one unmarked – Robespierre’s ice-cold colleague Saint-Just – pointed to the framed Declaration of the Rights of Man and said: ‘Well, that’s something we did’. Five years – everything trashed and bleeding. It doesn’t take long.

Is terror in the service of liberty more than just a grotesque paradox?
No. It’s just a grotesque paradox, and I try to bring it to life in the play by the story of Gamelin’s wife Elodie, whose innocence and devotion get distorted into a kind of warped eroticism, as he forces her to actually symbolize Virtue, Liberty, France, until she simply parrots slogans like a toy. Let’s bear in mind that crowned Liberty raising her torch now has to battle in the minds of us all with a hooded prisoner trailing a slew of cables.

Liberty is based on Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif (literally, ‘The Gods are Thirsty’, but usually published as ‘The Gods Will Have Blood’). How faithfully have you struck to the original?
The novel’s panoramic: I discarded some strands and focused on six characters. The picnic that forms Act I in my play happens halfway through the novel, but I wanted to start at a bright time of holiday, and let the clouds gather. In the end I’ve retold the story, rather than staged the novel. The dialogue’s all mine.

Did it lend itself easily to the stage?
Pretty well. In the novel Gamelin is an intolerant prig from the start. I felt I had to give him more humanity and humour, so he has further to travel, and we can see things his way. The play will fail if you hate him. Anatole France’s counterweight to Gamelin is the humane old aristocrat Maurice Brotteaux, a lovely character who of course I wanted in the play but I also wanted a strong and complex woman at the heart of things, so I amplified the role of Rose, the actress. At the start of the play all she has is a dry wit, but events force her to deepen and start thinking. I think of her and Demay as being stand-ins for our modern attitudes. When we first meet them they’re two savvy wits who’d rather be at a party whatever’s on the news – but life is about to get serious, and we’ll see just how much use comedy and sarcasm are when soldiers come banging on the door.

You are best known as a poet and Liberty is in verse. What is the function of verse in the play?
The verse is a function of composition, and that’s all. It’s in verse because I wrote it. Verse on stage is nothing to do with lyrical uplift, or the past, or mystery. It’s right here right now. I happen to believe the verse-line – specifically the flexible five-beat line you find in poets like Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, and which I’ve found myself running with – is a truer way of sounding the note of the passing moment than prose is. Verse includes the ending of the breath (in the life as well as the line), the pressure of silence, the gesture towards memorability – like a plant towards light – and, in strict craft terms, it deflects the author from simply following his usual paths. The needs and patterns of one’s own created characters override that, and to feel that occurring in the course of composition – the creature’s voice displacing your own – is as much mystery as I can take in one life.

Few playwrights have written in verse over the last century. The names which usually come up are T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. Do you feel yourself part of a different tradition?
All I can say about tradition is that my faith is based on Shakespeare, my form on Robert Frost, my stories on old stories, and my characters on the life I know.

Do you think the Globe is particularly well suited to staging history?
I’m kind of Peter Brookian about that – anywhere’s well suited – but I think that knowing what life and art went on in that acre of English ground, and standing outside seeing the Thames and St Bride’s and St Paul’s and the Gherkin – I don’t know a theatre place as resonant, and I wonder if the noisiest crowd in London theatre may not also be the most attentive, or at least the crowd who know best what they’re doing there.

Nicholas Robins is Head of Periodicals at Shakespeare’s Globe and editor of Around the Globe.

This article is published in the magazine of Shakespeare's Globe 'Around the Globe', issue 38, Spring 2008.Subscription details.

Back to top