Peripeteia

David Ian Rabey

The Theatre and Films of Jez Butterworth

Moral Panic vs. the folk devil
Costume used to create a sense of Johnny as a gunfighter, prepared for the ‘final, fatal showdown’
Johnny is able to undermine the moral authoriy of Fawcett, her moral probity, because he knows about her affair - sense of Johnny as supernaturally all-seeing
Parsons deleting from the recording undermines his authority
The state is ‘morally licenced’ and ‘armed’
Johnny undermines this licence by suggesting that corruption and vested commercial interests are the real reasons why the council wants to evict him.
Johnny’s playfulness is itself subversive, a refusal to abide by the values of mainstream society, to take things seriously
Johnny assumes the power of the folk-devil
His defiance recalls both King Lear and Coriolanus.

David Rabey: The Theatre and Films of Jez Butterworth

Detailed notes on
Moral Panic versus the folk devil: The showdown

‘Johnny can challenge the surveillance, moral authority and superiority’ of the council ‘because he knows about’ Fawcett’s ‘extra-marital dalliance’. Parsons ‘promptly demonstrates the double standards of officialdom by assurring Fawcett that he can delete this evidence from the official transcript recording’. P.123.

Calling her Linda, Johnny challenges Fawcett to personalise her complaints, naming the individuals behind faceless officialdom.
Johnny questions the ‘moral licence’ by which the authorities seek to evict him from the woods, suggesting it is ‘further officially sanctioned and reinforced facade for the nepotistic corruption of moral and financial entrepeneurs’: ‘Who gets the contract? Who gets the kickbacks?’

Quotes Stephen Greenblatt on the nature of the disruptive powers of ‘play’. P.124.

Confronting the camera, Johnny ‘self-consciously and self-dramatizingly’ assumes the ‘power and disturbing intimacy of the folk devil’. Quotes, Hall on the nature of the Folk Devil.
Johnny’s threats ‘constitute a return to his vengefully apocalyptic self-dramatization’, appropriating the language of corrupt authority to issue his own warning.

The series of valedictory encounters, such as with the Professor, creates the sense that time is running out, ‘shadows are growing longer elsewhere in the play’ despite Johnny’s defiance.
Rather than being a damsel-in-distress, Phaedra proves to be ‘edgy, volatile and demanding’.

Quotes Carney who claims the dance ‘figures Johnny as a weary and beleaguered knight and Phaedra as his fearsome Queen in the midst of an enchanted forest that is now passing from the mortal world’.

Phaedra’s puncturing of gold fish’s water bag, ‘threatens to break the spell of suspension associated with Johnny’s ‘Neverland’’, by bringing in the imperative of time.

Phaedra asks crucial questions about Johnny’s identity. P.126

Time is also running out for Phaedra as the May Queen.

Their dance is a ‘graceful ritualization of the pleasure of movement’ and expresses ‘the melancholy of irrevocable loss’.

Quotes Carney again on the meaning of the embrace between J & P.

Johnny's speech to Marky is a ‘poetic denunciation of the confidence trick of conformity’.

References Rickson’s production and the shiver going through the on-stage trees as Johnny begins to bang the drum as well as the sound of heavy footsteps. P.129.

Although Johnny is ‘legistrated against, vilified, scapegoated as a sacrifice to the gods of order,’ the play makes his ‘daemonic vision of sacred disobedience attractive’, certainly compared with the world of conformity.