ABSTRACT
The gist of this new play is a war-crisis between two countries, Westland and Ostnia, which represent the totalitarian and the monarchist-democratic state. It is not entirely the dwarfing effect of the recent crisis which makes ‘On the Frontier’ seem the least successful of the Auden-Isherwood plays: it possesses neither the vitality and invention of ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin’ nor the deeply realised moral conflict of ‘The Ascent of F6’. Through the character of Valerian, the Westland industrialist, we are given a different but less subtle aspect of the problem of power than was offered by Michael Ransom in ‘F6’. Charming, ironic, the complete a-moral Superman, Valerian is equally contemptuous of the common herd (‘The truth is, Nature is not interested in underlings – in the lazy, the inefficient, the self-indulgent, the People’), and of the neurotic Leader whom his own wealth and cleverness have raised to power. The best scene in the play is the one where this Frankenstein loses control over his monster. A moment after deciding that he will propose to Ostnia a non-aggression pact, the Leader gets word of an incident on the frontier and declares war instead: up to this moment Valerian has been the absolutely dominant figure: now, in a flash, all his apparently infallible calculations fall to the ground; the episodes of war and revolution that follow show him to have been wrong all along the line – his self--interest is proved as gullible as that of the underlings he so much despises. This is an admirable dramatic turn. But it cannot quite rescue a play in which almost all the other characters appear as the nonentities that Valerian considers them. The Westland-Ostnia Room, a stage device by which the authors present the reactions of ordinary people on either side of the frontier, is occupied for the most part by stock figures or abstractions: Colonel Hussek, for instance, is no better than any Indian Army Colonel in a school-magazine skit. The change of key in Act 2, Scene I, where, after an orgy of patriotism on the part of their elders, Anna and Eric, two lovers of the opposed nations, come together, is a dramatic trick which only the most careful production will save from obviousness, just as the dialogue that follows between them is only just saved from sentimentality by sacrificing every ounce of rhetoric. Throughout the play, in fact, the authors have consistently rejected the rhetorical openings that their theme offers them. While sympathising with their motive for doing so, we are likely to feel that they have sacrificed too much: the texture of the verse-passages is often thin, the effect sometimes banal: lines such as the following have nothing but their sincerity to recommend them: ‘ For Truth shall flower and Error explode And the people be free then to choose their own road’.
