The Wolf in the West, 2005

PS

I owe my interest in history to two men (three if you count John Logie Baird): Michael Wood OBE FSA, and Sir Tony Robinson. It was mainly due to their TV series – the former’s In Search of the Dark Ages and the latter’s Time Team – that I came to realise there was a lot more to the boring school subject than Martin Luther nailing his faeces to the floor of a church in Wittgenstein, Henry VI’s eight wives, and the Repeal of the Bow Street Runners.

I had a downer on history in school because we always seemed to have it on Friday afternoons when I couldn’t have been less energised if it were physics. And I’d viewed all history teachers with suspicion ever since one corrected my spelling of the word ‘renown’ in an essay by inserting, in red, the letter K in the middle of it. I knew indignantly that I was right and he was wrong because I had the Airfix kit of the Elizabethan battleship with that name. (Or at least, this had always been my recollection of this origin story. On checking the facts recently, however, I’ve come to the weird conclusion that it can’t be true because Airfix never made a kit of the Renown, and anyway the first English ship with that name was captured from the French in 1651 and Renown was simply the English translation of the original’s Renommée – which also never had a K in it. So what the hell was I thinking of? No matter, the principle held true: I was right, he was wrong, and history sucked.)

But Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages, which I remember seeing sometime in the early 1980s, was an eye-opener because we’d skipped over the entire period in school, jumping from the Romans leaving in 410 AD to the Normans invading in 1066 (“they didn’t call them the Dark Ages for nothing”), and suddenly here was Mr Wood explaining that a hell of a lot more was going on than the traditional wisdom insisted. And later in Time Team, Mr Robinson (as he was then) would stand week after week up to his knees in a newly excavated Saxon grave delicately poking towards the camera shiny glass trinkets in gold settings of a dazzling artistry. Yes, they were called the Dark Ages because a lot of learning was lost, knowledge and crafts were not passed down, the light of civilisation momentarily guttered – but that didn’t mean people weren’t still living and dying and striving and trying to make as good a life for themselves as they could. It was a dark period in terms of wars and invasions and bloodshed, but out of these turbulent times heroes rose, and not the picture-book phantoms like King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, but real men and women like Alfred the Great and his daughter Aethelflaed and his grandson Athelstan, first true king of all the English.

It was Alfred who intrigued me the most because he seemed to embody so many contradictions: a pious and scholarly man who nevertheless was still soldier and politician enough to preserve Wessex intact in the teeth of repeated attacks from the marauding Danish invaders, ultimately driving them back beyond the Danelaw, the border that finally divided the country in a ragged line from London to Chester. I was interested to explore how he managed it and this play, The Wolf in the West, was the result. I did more research for it than anything else I had ever written, took great pains with the structure and dialogue, and in 2005 it won an award from the Somerset Fellowship of Drama. But I have yet to see it performed and in fact I’m still tinkering with it, so maybe that’s down to me.

I had several excellent models to guide me. For a start, we had done Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons in school and Fred Zinnemann’s 1966 film stands as a ravishing account of that marvellous drama. (I happen to be of the faction that suspects More was probably a lot tougher and nastier than the hagiographers would have us believe, but that’s a question for another time.) I was also very familiar with Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), which tells the (essentially true) story of how the entire Inca Empire in Peru was conquered and looted in the 16th century by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro at the head of just 167 men. How do you convey such an epic story on a tiny indoor stage? Shaffer found a way. And that gave me a kind of structure – the notion of invasion and the confrontation between the two main protagonists. I had also always loved James Goldman’s play and film The Lion in Winter, about how Henry II came to decide which of his three sons would inherit the throne of England after his death in the 12th century (I was so ignorant the first time I saw the film that I didn’t know which one it was going to be. Turned out it was Anthony Hopkins), and that tuned my ear to the kind of elevated faux-historical speech patterns I wanted to employ. (In these historical dramas, by the way, it’s important to get the level of language right. It needs to be instantly intelligible, but you can’t use completely modern idiom as that wouldn’t sit right with the situation and the trappings. In his autobiography Charlton Heston recalls that the British playwright Christopher Fry was on hand throughout the eight months’ shooting of Ben-Hur specifically to ‘age’ the dialogue. The line “You didn’t like the food?”, for instance, became “Was the food not to your liking?” Heston was right – the difference is subtle but crucial.)

And then, again thanks to Mr Logie Baird, The West Wing started and I became an instant fan of Aaron Sorkin’s blazing wit and rapier-fast dialogue and I knew I wanted if I could to use some of his brand of sophisticated humour to leaven the message and lighten the mood. For these reasons, in order to reflect my main influences and give the audience a heads-up as to what to expect, the ideal title for the piece would have been The Royal Hunt of the Lion in the West Wing, but since this might have been a bit too on the nose, I settled (eventually; for a long time it was called Dragonfall – what the hell does that mean?) on The Wolf in the West. It still has a faint echo of Mr Goldman’s seminal inspiration (albeit lupine rather than feline), but mostly it fits because the consonance (or do I mean alliteration?) is euphonious, there is a hint of danger there – a predator restlessly roaming its territory just beyond the horizon where the sun goes down, and the Danes were mainly invading from east to west – and of course -wulf was a common suffix in Dark Age names; Alfred of Wessex’s own father was called Aethelwulf.

I have no great knowledge of or even interest in politics or religion or military strategy, though all of these must have played a part in Alfred’s story. But since I was writing a play and not a history book I told myself that I didn’t need to be too literal about any of these things. Whatever Alfred did, it happened; all I had to do was make it sound plausible. (That’s the damnable limitation of fiction - it has to be plausible; truth doesn’t.) And anyway, the history was really only background to the central conflict that interested me most: civilisation versus barbarism. How, I wondered, did a measured, intelligent man like Alfred come to terms with – and ultimately overcome – a wild and immoral bully like the Danish war leader Guthrum? (Or at least, that was how I set up my principal dramatic conflict; for all I know the historic Guthrum could have been a wonderfully warm and wise human being… though somehow I doubt it.)

I suspect the play may never be fully finished for the simple reason that I don’t think I ever found a completely satisfactory answer to that question. The obvious one – that you have to be prepared to play just as dirty as your enemy because the end justifies the means – sounds harsh and barely in keeping with what I would like to think are sound and sensible liberal democratic values; this sounds more like the ethics of the playground and the gutter and the prison corridor. On the other hand, if they started it, what else is there to do but fight back with everything you have? As Clive James says in Latest Readings, reacting to Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, “Peace can’t be obtained without a capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of the threat,” and it may only be Conrad’s wishful thinking that cultivation might be enough to ward off brutality: “barbarism doesn’t care if we are cultivated or not.” In other words, “unarmed goodwill is useless against armed malice.” Hardly comforting, but necessary to accept as true. So what else can we do? Show a better example? Sure, but we’d need to live long enough to do that, and limited minds are not known for their extensive patience.

Certainly in fiction we all want to see the bad guys defeated in the end because in real life the bullies aren’t always cowards and they’re certainly more vicious than us. There’s a kind of necessary human catharsis at stake here. For that reason I tried to provide my play with a ‘happy’ ending, but as someone else has wisely pointed out, “Happy endings are just stories that haven’t finished yet.”

While preparing this piece I found among my notes for possible rewrites of the play the following jottings, and I wish I could still remember which source inspired them, because they seem to sum up precisely what I wanted the thing to be about:

Which is more dangerous – the vicious man who is also clever, or the evil man who is stupid? I think the stupid, as he would know no restraint. He lacks the imagination to see the consequence of his actions. The clever man might at least be reasoned with (hence desire to meet Guthrum and weigh him up, to decide what strategy – hopefully diplomacy and talk might work if Guthrum has a brain, otherwise it must be all-out war)

(I should add at this point that while I had no interest in making any comment about current-day politics – the play was not a metaphor or an analogy, it was only ever meant to be about the historical Alfred – there may still be a modern-day parallel should you be into that kind of thing. Putin, to take just one example, is both evil and cunning; Trump, on the other hand, is even more dangerous because he’s equally vicious but he’s also a moron. I get the impression with Putin that someone once kicked his smarmy little arse in the playground and he’s been taking it out on the world ever since; Trump, swaddled in entitlement since day one, has never once had to take responsibility for his actions so he is completely and genuinely ignorant as to the concept of consequences.)

My notes continue:

If Alfred doesn’t have a touch of iron and malice, he couldn’t do what needs to be done. Sentimentality would be the death of everyone. So basically Alfred’s journey and progression and development is his slow but reluctant realisation that in order to win he has to be prepared to kill. His guilt is having to put into practice, for the sake of his country, a philosophy he doesn’t necessarily agree with.

‘I want to be all good, but to save the kingdom I need to be a little evil too. But how much? That’s the question that keeps me awake. How bad can I afford to be before God abandons me?’

I like that last one in particular, and if I have any sense I’m going to have my Alfred say it at some point in the next rewrite because it seems to sum up the whole crux and essence of the drama. And it’s possibly the kind of conundrum we all have to wrestle with ourselves in this ethically complex age.

We must also be prepared to accept, I think, that spin is not a modern concept and there is evidence to suggest Alfred mastered that dark (age) art as well as all the others. He had in his court a tame Welsh bishop, Asser, who wrote his biography (“often,” as my Asser character says dryly in the play, “at dictation speed”). It seems to me that how the story is told, and the reasons for the telling, are almost as pertinent as the events they cover. When the wars were over Alfred had an entire country to rebuild, and in a world without the world wide web, he needed to do everything he could to bolster his PR, and remind the people he was a better proposition than the man he had just wasted so many lives and so much treasure defeating. History is indeed written by the winners, but how much of the story that has come down to us is true? We may never know, and quite how much Alfred and Asser embellished between them is another strand of inquiry that I might have considered weaving into my warp and woof had I the time and the intellect and the talent. (Tom Stoppard would have done it easily, look at the number of balls he manages to keep so effortlessly and elegantly in the air in Arcadia, for instance.) But I had enough on my plate as it was just telling the story. The chronicles and the artefacts and the TV programmes gave me the starting point. For the rest, I did what I could to fill in the blanks.

Here are the first twenty minutes or so – as they currently stand – of The Wolf in the West.