THE FACE OF VIOLENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 652, 4 January 1952, Page 6

THE FACE OF VIOLENCE

\JHY is it that crime, brutality and violent death fascinate and excite us? We read about them in books and newspapers, listen to them on the air, queue up to see them in films. Is this preoccupation a new thing? How are we to explain it? Does the gangster story, the sensational court report, the radio crime serial, the violent film satisfy the same wish for power and adventure which the criminal, the thug, or the storm trooper satisfies. in a different way? The BBC’s award-winning programme "The Face of Violence," soon to be heard here, attempts to find the answer to these questions.

EARLY two years ago when the controversy on corporal punishment was filling English newspapers with "the great battle of cosh versus birch-rod," the BBC broadcast a dramatic programme, The Face of Violence, which made everyone who heard it sit bolt upright and take notice. One critic described it as "the one really effective contribution to the controversy convulsing the newspapers," and said it "really got down to the question of why the lawbreaker has become hero number one ‘and why everyone from the bishop downwards regards tales of bloody murder as the one sweet relaxation for the mind oppress’d." The Face of Violence was the work of Dr. J. Bronowski, who, in the Radio Times, told how he came to write it. "Towards the end of his life Charles Dickens used to give public readings from his works," Dr. Bronowski wrote. "One of the passages which he read most often was the scene from Oliver Twist in which Bill. Sikes murders Nancy and then, trying to escape, accidentally hangs himself. This reading always had a prostrating effect both on Dickens and *on the audience. Yet Dickens insisted on giving it against his doctor’s orders, when he was already very ill; and there is some evidence that on occasion he hired a man to protest against the reading from the audience in order to heighten its dramatic effect." This example (Dr. Bronowski argued) showed that the obsession with brutality in books, the cinema and the Press was not a new thing. Even earlier the same preoccupation had run under the gay surface of The Beggar's Opera, and late in the 18th Century admiring crowds still gathered at dusk at the notorious Dog and Duck alehouse to see the highwaymen and the foodpads set off, ostentatiously farewelled by their flashy women. "The same crowds went all the way to what is now Marble Arch to see them hanged, end enjoyed that as much. These -seenes give us a vivid insight into the "meaning of the gangster and the gangster story in all ages. The crowds that cheered and jeered at».these men led narrow and humdrum lives. They were starved of adventure, and the prizefighter, the pirate, the men of violent action, expressed for them all the colour

and daring of which their own lives were starved." ) Dr. Bronowski believes that both in the past ‘and today men have felt that adventure and risk have been taken out of their own lives by the conditions of civilised life itself. Seeing the great impersonal rule of law as the force restraining them, they have equated spirit with lawlessness, and adventure with the criminal. "We all like.to score off the forces of order-the schoolmaster and the customs inspector’; and even the detective heroes of fiction are most often men more. nimble-witted than the-solid law-"a Sherlock Holmes or a Peter Wimsey with whom we can share, the vicarious triumph over the flat-footed guardians of society." When daily life seems unbearably monotonous and mechanical, there is always the danger that the daring and violence of the lawbreaker may be painted as worthy examples-the only manly actions in a world of. machines. "This is what draws young men into gangs: they see their leaders as heroes in the fight against the forces of order which seem to be thwarting them ... This kind of worship can engulf a whole nation: Mussolini and Hitler recruited their followers with just such slogans, making them feel that their brutality was virile and natural in contrast with the dead oppression of a mechanical world." Dr. Bronowski and Douglas Cleverdon, who produced The Face of

Violence, discussed the subject off and on for three years before they made up their minds about the form the programme would take. They finally decided on a parable. Fhe central character, Mark, a decent citizen, is haunted, obsessed by an act of brutality seen in the war. He cannot remember the act in detail; the face of the evil-doer is

| blurred in his memory, and he isn’t sure of his name-though it could be Crump. Seeking inward peace, Mark decides that he must first seek ‘violence in order to find-and-then kill this man. He journeys. into..an-alien, society, to the haunts of criminals, and into the company of circus freaks and people whose minds and bodies are warped and twisted into hate. But slowly he sees that these forms of violence cannot answer the question he has begun to ask: What is violence, and why? Now he knows that it is not "the venom of a pervert or a hunchback’s. spite," but the thwarted passions in .every jiuman heart that. rise and strike. He tuirfis to ordinary people-and there at last catches up with the "villain," "The streak of MHogarthian horror" which ran through Mark’s encounters in dives and boxing booths was "tempered by the grave, compassionate commentary of a two-part Chorus which summed up the moral of the journey at convenient intervals," said W. E. Williams, then radio critic-of The Observer, in praising this programme. ‘These two voices comment in verse, and they draw the moral finely: Life stares at the man Out of the stony eyes of his boyhood And the man shivers to think What he has become. If the stony face will not flinch Under his pleading look, Forgive the man his violence _ For violence has a human face. The Face of Violence was placed first equal for last year’s Italia Prize, which has been awarded annually since 1949 by European radio organisations to the best literary or dramatic or mainly musical radio programmie. The prize, which is awarded alternately for literary and dramatic works and musical works, was founded on the initiative of Radio Italiana~to induce the best creative talent to write and compose particularly for broadcasting. In the BBC transcription which New Zealand listeners are to hear Lewis Stringer takes the part of Mark, Ivor ‘Barnard plays Crump, and Anthony Jacobs and Julian Orde are the Chorus. The music was specially composed and conducted by Antony Hopkins. The Face of Violence will be heard from 2YC at 7.30 p.m. this Saturday (January 5). Later it will be broadcast from other NZBS stations. 3 ape