Cartoon Nightmares

Abstract

Peter Ansorge, in Disrupting the Spectacle,³ makes the overt critical connection between the political plays which emerged in the 1970’s and ‘the obsessive, murderous plots and characters of the late Jacobean dramatists’, thus likening Brenton, Hare and Snoo Wilson to modern versions of the ‘sixteenth and early seventeenth century “university wits” … who drew their inspiration from the most violent and scandalous events of their own epoch, which proved the most vital in our dramatic history’. The thematic and stylistic correspondence now verges on being a critical cliché, and requires both expansion and qualification.

This is a nightmare. This doesn’t happen in England.

Sus ¹

They want to make me into art, do you know why? ’Cos art don’t hurt. Look at Goya. His firing squad — I seen it on stockbroker’s walls! But I still hurt, see? I touch their little pink nerve with my needle, like the frog’s legs on the bench. I shock their muscle and they TWITCH! They don’t want to twitch, see? They’re so much happier lying dead! But I twitch ’em! I SHOCK THE BASTARDS INTO LIFE!

No End of Blame ²