A Clockwork Orange, Still Juicy

When we began Clocktower Arts back in May 2010, doing away with the old ‘Croydon Clocktower Croydon’ nonsense…  We thought it would be a nice idea to try and shift how arts centres communicate with their audience, experiment with how we get our mission across to the people that matter – the people who buy tickets.

The result was ‘Ignore This!’ a magazine that doubled up at an events brochure, with all the usual listings and show information you would usually find in a season brochure but embellished with interviews and articles and with a design aesthetic that really made it stand out from the plethora of bland marketing materials churned out by regional arts centres across the country. It was a real statement of intent, meant to express exactly what Clocktower Arts stands for. This article is taken from the second Ignore This! We commissioned Will Carr from The Anthony Burgess Institute to write a short piece about the cultural impact of A Clockwork Orange.. Think it sums up nicely what ‘Ignore This!’ Was for… (our production of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ kicks off at the beginning of March btw – and it’s looking fantastic)

You can see versions of Ignore This! here http://issuu.com/clocktowerarts

A Clockwork Orange, Still Juicy 

A study by Will Carr Deputy Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation

‘I meant it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness […] Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.’ – Anthony Burgess (1986)

Well, what is it going to be then, eh? What does A Clockwork Orange taste like for us: should we eat it up or spit it out? Burgess’s 1962 novel exerts a vicious power over our imagination. Its powerful themes, such as the relationship of the individual to the state, the terrifying potential of the young, and the possibility or otherwise of redemption, remain entirely contemporary; and its linguistic innovation, totalitarian imagery, fierce ultraviolence and fiercer moral questions are still resqueezed and resucked throughout popular culture.

Burgess himself hated popular music, but bands take their names from his text (Heaven 17, Moloko, The Devotschkas and others), they write songs using its concepts (for example ‘Ultraviolence’ by New Order, ‘Horrorshow’ by The Libertines, Sepultura’s recent album ‘A-Lex’ ) and they dress up as droogs for their live performances (David Bowie, Guns n Roses, Usher and Kylie have all succumbed). Korova Milk Bars – places of vice and vodka – currently do brisk trade in New York, Melbourne, Glasgow, Manchester and elsewhere. ‘The Drughi’ are a feared group of ‘ultra’, indeed ultraviolent, supporters of Juventus FC. Bart Simpson, juvenile delinquent if perhaps not sociopath, frequently quotes Alex in cod-Cockney and has been subjected to variants of the Ludovico Technique. Cartman of ‘South Park’ suffers the same treatment. The list goes on. The book itself has never been out of print, and is in translation all over the world.

While Burgess’s novel developed a counter-cultural following in the sixties, with its prophetic colliding of drugs, music, youth culture and thrilling, violent release, Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film is of course the way in which the dystopia of A Clockwork Orange reached a mass audience. The violence in the novel, in some ways toned down but now of course painstakingly shot in vigorous colour, retains its ability to shock. Burgess sought to distance himself from what he viewed as the gratuitousness of Kubrick’s film and expressed frustration that his short novel would now forever be his best-known work, even while there were others – remorselessly prolific, Burgess wrote thirty-three novels in all, as well as twenty-five books of non-fiction, reams of journalism and over a hundred musical works – that he was more satisfied with. However, he never stopped writing about it, giving interviews about it, and preparing new stage versions of it: A Clockwork Orange continued to tick in his creative imagination. Kubrick worked from the American edition of the novel, which has an important difference from Burgess’s original text in that it leaves out the final chapter (Burgess claims against his wishes) and so fundamentally changes the conclusion; Burgess’s stage version reinstates it. There is no need to reveal what happens for you now, but the changes represent one of the ways in which Burgess sought to re-assert his authorship over the text and the ideas that it contains. It was always too late, of course, and new generations of performers and audiences will continue to grapple in new ways with the questions that A Clockwork Orange asks: this ambitious production by Fourth Monkey gives us an exciting and powerful take on a text that continues to resonate.

www.anthonyburgess.org