It is too much to suppose that the combatants will ever drop the obvious old bone.  But it is not too much to imagine that some men might acknowledge the bone to be merely a pretext, and hollow casus belli.  If we really could know what we were fighting for, if we if we could deeply believe in what we were fighting for, then the struggle might have dignity, beauty, satisfaction for us.  If it were a profound struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a struggle that we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a new life, then it would be a creative activity, a creative activity in which death is a climax in the progression towards new being.  And this is tragedy.

Therefore, if we could but comprehend or feel the tragedy in the great Labour struggle, the intrinsic tragedy of having to pass through death to birth, our souls would still know some happiness, the very happiness of creative suffering.  Instead of which we pile accident on accident, we tear the fabric of our existence fibre by fibre, we confidently look forward to the time when the whole great structure will come down on our heads.  Yet after all that, when we are squirming under the debris, we shall have no more faith or hope or satisfaction than we have now.  We shall crawl from under one cart-wheel straight under another.

The essence of tragedy, which is creative crisis, is that a man should go through with his fate, and not dodge it and go bumping into an accident.  And the whole business of life, at the great critical periods of mankind, is that men should accept and be one with their tragedy.  Therefore we should open our hearts.  For one thing we should have a People’s Theatre.  Perhaps it would help us in this hour of confusion better than anything.

Hermitage,
  June, 1919.

CHARACTERS

Gerald Barlow. 
Mr. Barlow (his father). 
Oliver Turton. 
Job Arthur Freer. 
Willie Houghton. 
Alfred Breffitt. 
WILLAM (a butler). 
Clerks, miners, etc. 
Anabel wrath. 
Mrs. Barlow. 
Winifred Barlow. 
Eva (a maid).

TOUCH AND GO

ACT I

SCENE I

Sunday morning.  Market-place of a large mining village in the Midlands.  A man addressing a small gang of colliers from the foot of a stumpy memorial obelisk.  Church bells heard.  Church- goers passing along the outer pavements.

Willie Houghton.  What’s the matter with you folks, as I’ve told you before, and as I shall keep on telling you every now and again, though it doesn’t make a bit of difference, is that you’ve got no idea of freedom whatsoever.