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Insanity and the Rational Man in the Plays of David Storey

THE VERSE WHICH a provincial schoolteacher recites to his wife in act one of David Storey's first play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, may well stand as an epigraph for the Yorkshireman's entire dramatic output. In six of the first seven plays which Storey has written since 1966, at least one character is on the verge of insanity, an idiot or a certifiable lunatic. To grasp Storey's dramatic use of madness which is frequently at the center, occasionally on the periphery of his work, is to understand an artist's attempt to reconcile himself to a bewildering universe where the line between sanity and insanity is often invisible. Unlike those characters of Pirandello who was also obsessed by the relativism of sanity, Storey's do not question the fact of reality. His dramatic world is an artist's conscious rendering of the real one, and the question which Storey's characters must ask themselves is, "How does one cope with the reality one is forced to accept?" For some of them, to lose the mind is to gai...