TONY:
Do you know what it is you've created, you and your lot? What a vision it is! A house for every family. Just imagine- two hundred million families- or is it four hundred million families? To every family a front door. Behind every front door, a family. A house full of clean, well-fed people, and not one of them ever understands one word anyone else says. Everybody a kind of wilderness surrounded by barbed wire shouting across the defenses into the other wildernesses and never getting an answer back. That's socialism. I suppose it's progress. Why not? To every man his wife and two children and a chicken in the pot on Sundays. A beautiful picture- I'd die for it. To every man his front door and his front door key. To each his own wilderness.
Even in Tony's own family they are shouting at each other and never getting an answer back; non-communication isn't simply between neighbours but it is within families; even, sometimes, within the people themselves.
If you thought the 50s was about bland conformity then have another look at Doris Lessing's play 'Each His Own Wilderness', where, as we see, it was charged with debate, disagreement and discussion.
Tony, a returned soldier back from his stint of national service despairs at the mess and chaos of his mother's life, an activist campaigning against the H-bomb. He yearns for the order of the army and begins to make plans to order the house. His mother, Myra, is uninterested in her son, being wrapped up in her own plots and schemes to wind up the government. And her love life is becoming unmanageable.
The long suffering Mike Ferris, a left-wing politician, becomes yet another victim to Myra's long list of love-victims, a consequence of her irresponsibility. In many ways Tony is the maturest out of all the characters. He is a steady man with a level head who merely wishes to re-decorate the house. Rosemary is the innocent, the babe in the wood, about to marry middle-aged architect Philip Durrant.:
ROSEMARY:
What's the matter with being safe- and ordinary? What's wrong with being ordinary- and safe?
The conflict between son(s) and mother(s) is given the drawing room treatment, but it isn't a gathering of professionals having cocktails as in a T.S. Eliot drama speaking in high verse, but of socialists and soldiers digging into each other with cutting remarks. The usual spikiness of Lessing's writing comes through like sharp little daggers and is perfectly put to good use in a drama such as this.
The political details etch this piece in a place and time and Lessing does a good job of recording the feelings of people during this time.
TONY:
One half of this lot are bogged down with the emotionality of the Spanish Civil War, and the other half came to a sticky end with Hungary. If you'd cut them open you'd find Spain or Hungary written on their soft hearts- but not Britain. Certainly not poor old Britain.
It is a play about the different generations, 50's politics and domestic squabbles. Yet for the period details it has aged well. The dialogue is sharp and the relationships between each characters develops satisfyingly, which has a hot kick to it as few come out of this without some critique on their personality.
I was lucky enough to be in London when The Orange Tree theatre was putting it on. Lessing only wrote two or three plays so a staging of one was quite the event. It is a shame that her playwriting output was so small, as it is evident that she can 'do' them, and it is the type of mature drama that can often be lacking. She is very much writing as a modern Virginia Woolf or George Eliot.
