Это 1985 год. Не ратированная телевизионная драма "PITY IN HISTORY"...Одна из самых первых ролей Рикмана, где он еще совсем молодой...

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The Review
Reviewed by Rebecca, January 2000
Overall rating: 3 hands (for intellectual content)
Rickmaniac rating: 2 hands for AR's limited characterization and screen time

Howard Barker (b.1946) is a prolific British political dramatist whose plays address issues of societies and governments, and people's relation to and within them. Often set in historical periods, Barker's plays frequently invoke images of past wars and strife as metaphors by which the author addresses and comments on present-day issues of conflict, pain and treachery. Barker juxtaposes uncomfortable or harsh images or characters; his style and language can be strident. The result is complex, multi-faceted dramas of conflicting ideas.

PITY IN HISTORY, an hour-long television drama commissioned by the BBC in 1982, not produced until 1984 and finally broadcast in July 1985, shows many of these themes and qualities. It is a densely textured debate of ideas which asks to be thought about.

It is 1644. The English civil war is concluding and Cromwell's anti-royalist army has the upper hand. In a country church, stonemason Michael Gaukroger and his apprentice Pool are finishing carving a memorial to a local landowner. It's a paid commission by his widow, Venables, an art collector. Suddenly a troop of Puritan soldiers bursts into the church, bearing their cook, Murgatroyd. He has been accidentally shot by one of his own company and is dying loudly and angrily, in great pain. "I want to protest!" he shouts. "Is anyone in touch with God?"

Wheeling around to him, only then, is a thin young man in a long black overcoat and muffler: the company's chaplain, Croop (Alan Rickman). His dark hair is worn short, he wears eyeglasses, and he has the beginnings of a beard and moustache. His bearing is rigid with a barely-contained, furious energy, his expression a mixture of disgust, incredulity and perfunctory patience. He paces while Murgatroyd rails, then bounds to his side to reel off conventional pieties of consolation, which the cook angrily rejects. Murgatroyd tries to invoke pity in Croop by mentioning his children and rubbing his cheek against the chaplain's sleeve, but when he says he became an army cook to assure himself of food, Croop angrily shakes him off and moves away.

For Croop sees his principal duty as a chaplain not to offer spiritual comfort, but to constantly examine the Puritan soldiers, to make sure they are fighting for the "right" reason: religious zeal. "We fight Christ's war and carry out his gospel!" Pronouncing the church full of sin and idolatry, Croop appeals to the captain, Factor, to allow the soldiers to break it up. ("After dinner and discussions," Factor promises.) "There will be no monuments," Croop warns Gaukroger a moment later. "We demolish all pagan ornament."

At the after-dinner "discussion," Croop impatiently catechizes the troops. One soldier, Sponge, admits he is motivated to fight mostly by his desire to assert poor against rich, have-nots against haves, to bring down the idolatry of possessions. Croop is furious. "Property is the basis of all order, we fight for the rights of property!" he snaps. "Shuddup!" roars Sponge: but the widow Venables (a truly scary Anna Massey) appears out of nowhere and silences them by pronouncing them all thieves and traitors.

Gaukroger, meanwhile, is trying to finish his work despite knowing it will soon be destroyed, and despite abandonment by Pool (who, impatient with his master's attitude and influenced by recruitment rhetoric, has joined the soldiers). The demolition begins. (Barker says, "Croop presides over an orgy of destruction.") At last the chaplain's pent-up energy breaks loose. He sways, waves his arms, and shouts as the sledgehammers ring and stonework flies around him. "Oh Jesus, thy servants attack thy prison, tear down the walls of thy incarceration!...This is also a war, this is also a battle! Cast down the fortress of hypocrisy!"

When the soldiers come to Gaukroger's monument, Pool strikes the first blow. Captain Factor explains to Gaukroger that they could not tolerate his working for money which the landowner had gotten through exploitation. At this, Croop runs up in a rage, protesting that this is no motivation for action! "Banners fray, slogans crack," remarks Factor. Croop, shocked and puzzled, turns to the soldiers one more time: "Why are we stronger?" "Because God's on our side!" they chorus dutifully.

Croop's lip curls triumphantly into something resembling a smile. Then he says, "I think we've done enough destroying. I think if there is one sin more loathsome than all the others it is the sin of excess. I think we now learn patience, tolerance and self-control..." (Barker says of the soldiers, "They stare at him.")

With the cook, Murgatroyd, dispatched at the hand of Venables (who thought him a menace to her hidden art collection), the soldiers move on. The repentant Pool rejoins Gaukroger, sitting among the ruins of his stonework, and urges him to survive and find new modes of self-expression.

PITY IN HISTORY is an ensemble work for many voices and AR's is but one part of the whole. Croop serves as a mouthpiece for the role of religion in motivating and enforcing social action. The one dramatic contradiction comes when Croop halts the destruction he has ordered. Out of genuine if belated appreciation for the act of artistic creation? Or is he still invoking his clerical authority to command and control, now in the service of new tactics? AR delivers the speech with characteristic ambiguity.

Physically, AR resembles a younger Eamon de Valera and brings to the role a similar unyielding bearing, fanatical sense of purpose, and doctrinaire zeal. This man definitely does not suffer fools gladly (or at all)! Croop, indeed, is yet another of the various holy and not-so-holy men AR has played in his career: Obadiah Slope, Jacques Roux, Rasputin, Metatron; one might also add the secular characters of Mesmer and Dev. Special contrast might be made with Israel Yates (SPIRIT OF MAN: FROM SLEEP AND SHADOW, 1988), politically also a follower of Cromwell but spiritually of a very different type than Croop.

(For further reading about the multiplicity of religious sects in Puritan England, see "The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution," by Christopher Hill. Thanks for the tip, Melissa!)

Alan Rickman once said in an interview,
"I enjoy being involved in work that tests the audience, that they're not just passive, where you know that once you've finished your contribution it's not over, that when the film is being shown there's going to be another conversation going on between the film and the audience." (AR, "Closing His Eyes to Fame," The Observer [UK], 1995).
PITY IN HISTORY indeed tests watchers and invites their conversation.