There was a time—perhaps an illusory golden age, but I cling to the idea—that the English stage produced men of stature, characters hewn from the rock of destiny, and not this queasy tide of degenerates and mendicants. One does not so much read Richard Craven’s The Senseless Counterfeit as wade through its lurid debris, recoiling and yet, against all instinct, pressing on—if only to see what new depths the characters will plumb.
It is, make no mistake, a work of conscious depravity, and yet one must admit that within its pages a dreadful kind of genius is at play. Craven’s world—if such an anarchic spectacle can be called a world—presents a Bristol reduced to its most fetid elements: a city festooned with rust and slime, its inhabitants engaged in an endless danse macabre of self-interest and moral disintegration. At its heart is Squalor—one of the least repentant prologue-speakers in recent dramatic literature—a man so rank in thought and attire that one suspects the very pages of the script should be handled with gloves.
What follows is a scabrous, Shakespearean grotesquerie in which thieves, charlatans, and cuckolds trip over one another in an endless contest of debauchery. Sleaze, a tantric mountebank of considerable loquacity, and Mr Luvvertory, a libertine of unspeakable appetites, are figures who might—had they existed in an earlier time—have been given their due reward on the gallows. Instead, they strut, leer, and monologue through a society so spiritually bankrupt that one wonders whether even anarchy could improve it.
And yet, one cannot dismiss The Senseless Counterfeit entirely. Indeed, it is difficult to dismiss at all. The play clings to the imagination with the same stubborn persistence as a bad conscience. Craven’s language—half Restoration bawdry, half Gibbonian sneer—lends the whole enterprise a terrifying vitality. His characters are possessed of such rhetorical excess, such undeniable wit in their own damnation, that one begins to wonder whether they are not, after all, the true heirs of our age. What is Sleaze, if not the natural conclusion of the professional guru? What is Luvvertory, if not the modern paterfamilias in his final, disgraced form?
It is tempting to compare The Senseless Counterfeit to earlier comedies of vice—Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside—but such comparisons would be misleading. Those plays, for all their amorality, existed within a world that still recognised virtue, if only to transgress it. Here, there is no virtue. There is only the spectacle of collapse, the slow unfurling of moral gangrene. It is a difficult thing to endure, and yet—one must confess—it is also, at times, very, very funny.
Craven is undoubtedly a playwright of singular talent, though one might say he prefers to excavate the depths of human folly rather than sculpt grand moral edifices. His vision is unflinching, his wit as caustic as lye. For those with a constitution strong enough to stomach it, The Senseless Counterfeit is a singular theatrical experience—one that is unlikely to be forgotten, even if one might occasionally wish it could be.
Will The Senseless Counterfeit be performed? One wonders. The modern stage is not necessarily hostile to the obscene (quite the contrary), but there is a ruthlessness to Craven’s vision that might sit uneasily even with today’s jaded audiences. And yet, one suspects it will be read. If only because, like a particularly grisly roadside accident, it cannot be ignored.
And that, one suspects, is exactly as Craven intended.