CAPÍTULO III: GENERACIÓN DE ENERGÍA ELÉCTRICA EN BASE A GAS NATURAL
CONSIDERACIONES ECONOMICAS RELATIVAS A LOS CICLOS COMBINADOS
3.2. ANTECEDENTES HISTÓRICOS DEL GAS NATURAL EN EL PERÚ
^ Letter to the author, 5 May 1992. ^ Letter to the author, 5 May 1992.
^ David Campton. British. Bom in Leicester, 5 June 1924. Educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, 1935-41. Served in the Royal Air Force, 1942-45; and in the Fleet Air Arm, 1945-46. He worked as a clerk for the City of Leicester Education Department, 1941-49, and for the East Midlands Gas Board, 1949-56. He was a recipient of an Arts Council Bursary in 1958 and of the
British Theatre Association Whitworth Prize in 1975,1978 and 1985. See Contemporary
an excavation deep into the subconscious mindscape. The Lunatic View, though offered as a coherent unit, provides four separate views of madness. The plays reflect a distorted world where communication is breaking down and the individual is losing his sense of self. Each of the short plays is called a “glimpse”: each constitutes a brief insight into the mind of an insane person:
The "Lunatic" of the title is not an individual, he’s all of us, Everyman. Modem man is mad and these glimpses into his mind explain w hy... The audience must feel it is moving into the mind of the insane, into its own mind, so to speak.^
Campton's intention to present the interior world on stage follows the precedent of the French absurd. The internal vista of the first of the "glimpses". Memento Mori,
is particularly powerful, displaying man at his most elemental and vulnerable.!® The stage, which is suspended in semi-darkness, consists of an endless maze of winding corridors, with doors leading to decaying rooms, without wind ows or obvious exit points. Campton has created a dramatic metaphor of the mind, following the examples of Beckett (Endgame), Adamov ÇThe Invasion) and Vian
(JThe Empire Builders), in which the hollows and corridors reflect the channels and chambers of the brain, ü Two spectral figures move into this cerebral arena to act out the conflicts and ambiguities of the internal world. They are universalised figures, the Old Man and the Young Man. From the outset, the conversation is shifting and elusive and its twists and turns repeat the geography of the house:
YOUNG MAN: The drive? OLD MAN: Pits and potholes.
YOUNG MAN: Discourages visitors.
OLD MAN: A load of gravel works wonders. YOUNG MAN: Or a little earth.
OLD MAN: For charity. YOUNG MAN: Eh?
OLD MAN: A quotation. Unbusinesslike. I apologise.!^ From the mosaic of evasions and non-sequiturs which constitute the opening duologue, the elements of a sparse plot can be ascertained. The Young Man is seeking to buy a new house, but the Old Man is reluctant to sell. A web of veiled
^ Letter to the author, 16 June 1993.
!® Michael Anderson is typical of Campton's reviewers: he interprets all of his early experimental
pieces as exercises in a purely external and political absurdism. Anderson's examination of
Campton's absurd plays overlooks Memento Mori and concludes (inaccurately) that these works
are "lacking in the darker and deeper exploration of the human psyche characteristic of other writers
in the school of the absurd". Michael Anderson, 'David Campton', in A Handbook of
Contemporary Drama, ed. by Michael Anderson and others (London: Pitman, 1972), pp. 81-2. !! The play's title is evocative of the inwards focus. The archetypal 'memento mori' is the death's-head: the title suggests an excavation of a mind which is, spiritually and emotionally, dead.
threats and taunts results, as the Young Man strives to intimidate the other into relinquishing his property.
The momentum of the interaction is provided by the implication that both characters have something terrible to hide. The images of violent death, brutality and incarceration colour their conversation. To the Old Man's revealing comment that, "there is a part of my life buried in this house" (p. 24), the Young Man responds:
I can’t see the car from here. I parked it by a sort of burial mound. It can’t be seen from the road either, I suppose? There’s a bundle in the back that mustn’t be touched. Remembrances of my w ife... She ran away with. With a plumber’s mate. (p. 26)
From this point on, there is a close integration of action and dialogue. The gradual realisation of hidden passages, hollow floorboards and sliding panels becomes a direct representation of the winding, mental landscapes of the protagonists. Throughout the tortuous conversation buried levels of aggression and of supp ressed secrets are slowly unearthed, culminating in the revelation that both have murdered their wives, the Old Man has buried her in the house, and the Young Man needs a place to hide the body:
OLD MAN: There are no skeletons in the cupboards in this house, sir. Not in the cupboards, (p. 29)
Like the house and the dialogue, the act of murder assumes metaphorical
proportions. Man has killed that part of him which is finest and most noble - his capacity for love and compassion - rendering him a shell as empty and decaying as the set.
The play ends in the style of Ionesco's The Lesson, The Old Man murders the intruder by sealing him in a hidden chamber:
OLD MAN: This cupboard has been waiting since I first knew it. Now I know why it was built. It is just your size. Measure it. YOUNG MAN: I haven’t time.
OLD MAN: But you have aU the time in the world, sir. YOUNG MAN: I measured the other.
OLD MAN: But this is your cupboard, sir. (p. 35)
He disappears into the darkness to greet the next prospective buyer, and, presumably, to perpetuate the cycle of destruction. 13
!3 Styan is the only reviewer of Campton's work to recognise in this play the movement into "a
subconscious world... into another dimension of life", one which bears resemblances to the
sinister and violent dimensions explored by Kafka. See J.L. Styan, The Dark Comedy: The
The second "glimpse". Getting and Spending, is transitional. Campton moves away from the universalised fears which haunt the subconscious world in
Memento Mori, and suggests that man's psychological problems have a specifically social cause. He forges an obvious link between subconscious chaos and an insane social and political environment. Though the internal focus is retained. Getting and Spending looks outwards: the results of social conditioning are witnessed from within.
At the beginning of the play two newly-weds, Evelyn and Bobby, still in their wedding-clothes, rush on to the stage. Their speech is a pastiche of exclam ations of maiital contentment and enthusiasm. The words may not necessarily mean anything, yet the impression that they give is of excitement and hope:
EVELYN: There! BOBBY: Here! EVELYN: So soft! BOBBY: So sharp! EVELYN: My wife! BOBBY: My husband! T O G E T H E R : O u r h o u s e ! 14 ( p . 3 7 )
This reference to the house at such an early stage is important. The house, the room in which they stand, is symbolic of them and their togetherness. Evelyn clarifies this point towards the end of the play: “This house is our hfe" (p. 59).
Initially, the couple believe the house to be, like themselves, pristine, and they indulge themselves in plans for making it bigger and better:
BOBBY: Oh, there’s the nursery. EVELYN: And there’s the study. BOBBY : The nursery and a cot.
EVELYN: And there’s the reception room. BOBBY: The nursery and two cots.
EVELYN: There’s the Prime Minister’s bedroom, (p. 38)
The descriptions of the plans for the house strike at the theme of the play. Evelyn is trapped in a fantasy of social success. He dreams of social promotion, economic reward and political power. Bobby's expectations, which are to fulfil the duties of the mother and wife and to ensure the social ascendancy of her offspring, are also socially conditioned. Neither character is capable of looking beyond the narrow
14 Linguistic parallels of this technique exist throughout Ionesco’s plays. Take, for example, the
following exchange from The Chairs:
OLD WOMAN: If only!
OLD MAN: To ours and to theirs. OLD WOMAN: So that.
OLD MAN: From me to him. OLD WOMAN: Him, or her?
range of aspirations which society demands of them, in accordance with their sex. 15 This gulf in aspiration drives the couple apart. They drift to either side of the stage, trapped in pools of light which separate them and prevent further contact, and embellish their myths of social convention:
The lights lower, except for a deep pink spot on one side o f the stage, and a cold blue on the other. They get up and each acts out higher particular dream. He is launching himself: she, her daughter.
EVELYN: “Eliminating your Inferiors.” Not the right tie, old man. Not the right regiment.
BOBBY: Debrett, dear, not the telephone directory. Why should a Count be concerned with a common telephone? (p. 49)
Like the characters in Beckett's later plays and those of Pinter's most absurd works, Landscape and Silence, Evelyn and Bobby are physically isolated and limited within spotlights, muttering an obsessive monologue which denies communication.
The house and the physical appearance of the characters are the dominant poetic images of the play. During the monologues, temporal events telescope “rather hke a piece of stop-motion photography”. At various points Evelyn dons the symbols of old age - spectacles, a moustache, braces, white hair - in the same way that Madeleine assumes the accruements of old age in Ionesco’s Victims of Duty. After his vigorous introduction, he ends the play crouched on all fours, too old and stiff to straighten up:
BOBBY: Oh, you poor old thing ... EVELYN: Old?
BOBBY: No. Of course not old. That was just a joke. Not old. EVELYN: Not old. Why, I carried you over the tlu'eshold only an hour ago. Or was it yesterday? Or last year? Not long ago. (p. 61) The decay of their physical environment is also expressive. Initially, the house is strong and stalwart, representing the health and the positive nature of the couples’ love for one-another. As they become locked within their interior lives, restricted by the aspirations which have been programmed into them by society, the house begins to crumble:
I wouldn’t knock off ‘cause it cracks the plaster. You’ve got some nasty cracks in your plaster... And your paint’s peeling off. (p. 38)
15 This theme recurs in later, less overtly experimental, plays. 16 Taylor, p. 182.
The half-hearted attempts of the couple to rectify this are fruitless: the repairs that are made in their rare moments of escape from self-indulgence are cosmetic. The further they move into their destructive interior world, the more the house coll apses. At the end of the play, as the old couple sit, still preoccupied with their social fantasies, it becomes obvious that their house has fallen in:
BOBBY : Is something wrong with the light?
EVELYN: The Electricity Board gets tired sometimes. I shall have a word or two with them when I am Prime M inister...
BOBBY : I had no idea the ceiling was so high. EVELYN: It’s part of the air-conditioning.
BOBBY : And tiiere are points of light all over it - just like stars. (p. 62)
Decay, to the house and to the body, reflects the disintegration of the mind into madness. The characters are obsessed with the fantasy of social advancement and social success which, being unrealistic and impossible in itself, ultimately destroys them.D
In the final plays Campton's focus is wholly external, examining the social pressures responsible for the insanity witnessed in the first two "glimpses" . A Smell o f Burning and Then... are parodies of the 'real' world, a world in which war, political injustice and mass conformism are standard. The structure of A Smell of Burning makes apparent the connection between man and his environ ment. A series of circles radiates outwards from the characters, to their immediate environment, and ultimately to the world at large; the circles then collapse inwards again so that the insanity of the world focuses steadily downwards and finds its centre in the characters. The opening episode concentrates on the breakfast routine of a grotesquely caricatured middle-class, middle-aged suburban couple, the Joneses. The interaction of the couple is puerile and directionless. As with the Smiths from Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, they are obsessed with their breakfast. So limited is the scope of their daily lives that the most meaningless domestic incident becomes a crisis. Mr Jones is outraged because his eggs are over-boiled; the toaster over-does the bread and chaos ensues:
JONES: We should send this toaster back to the makers. MRS JONES: But we need a toaster, dear.
JONES: It was guaranteed.
Campton and Ionesco both show human beings which have been reduced to machines, though the reasons given for the transformation differ radically.
One of the early titles which Campton considered for this quartet of experimental plays was A
View from the Brink. In some respects A View from the Brink is more suitable than A Lunatic
View as it suggests both an internal and an external focus: the ’brink' alludes to the precarious
position of society, pushed to a dangerous extreme, and to the mind which has been forced to the edge of sanity.
MRS JONES: It toasts.
JONES: It was guaranteed for twelve months. It should toast on both sides of the bread, strike a warning bell, and eject the toast. Does it? No. Incompetence. The curse of the country, (p. 12) The conversation is a microcosm of madness, a repetitive exchange of non- sequiturs which reflects their inherent insanity:
MRS JONES: There was nothing wrong with your eggs this morning.
JONES: Like lumps of granite.
MRS JONES: There was nothing wrong with your eggs this morning.
JONES: Like cannon balls.
MRS JONES: There was nothing wrong with your eggs this morning.
JONES: Prove it!
MRS JONES: You had haddock... It wasn’t very pleasant haddock, though. It had been dead for too long. (p. 7)
The Bald Prima Donna begins, in similar fashion, with comments about food. These also assume a relentless, insane rhythm, reinforced by a stylised repetition:
MRS. SMITH: Potatoes are very good fried in fat; the salad oil was not rancid ... Mary did the potatoes very well, this evening ... The fish was fresh ... But still, the soup was perhaps a little too salty. The Joneses are so involved with irrelevant domestic minutiae that they are unmoved by the social disruption taking place beyond their small world.2®
Throughout their interactions, extracts read from the newspapers and heard on the radio, remind the audience of political atrocities which are accumulating in the world: revolutions in Asia; mass murders throughout the Third World and Eastern Europe. The Joneses dismiss the bloodshed entirely:
JONES: Revolution in Algeria. Didn’t amount to anything. Whole thing was squashed in three days. Ringleaders strung up in the market place, and a couple of hundred political prisoners shot. Some women and children still missing.
MRS JONES: Their blood is hotter than ours. JONES: What are we having for lunch? MRS JONES: Sausages.
JONES: Again? (p. 17)
Campton focuses his attack on the complacency of the British, secure in their traditions and protected by their faith in their own supremacy. Mr Jones
Four Plays by Eugene Ionesco, trans. by Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 9.
An interesting thematic parallel exists with Raymond Briggs’ social satire. Where the Wind
remarks that the political collapse of other nations is attributable to the fact that they are not British. At the beginning of the play, the British radio fails to mention the political Armageddon and concentrates instead on picturesque nonsense, the stereo type of a rural England which Jones venerates:
At Hampton Court, a snail has been observed on the thorn. The Meteorological Office forecasts a fine day for the Test Match which opened yesterday, (p. 5)
With the arrival of Mr Robinson, a surveyor from the city council, the political significance of the play intensifies. He informs the Joneses that the “smell of burning” which interrupts their breakfast at intervals is the result of the town hall being set on fire. He refers casually to the riots in the streets and the political executions taking place in the towns of England. Although the madness has now infiltrated the streets of England the Joneses remain unimpressed. In the spirit of true complacency, they dismiss any form of horror because it does not directly affect them.
Robinson, a government ‘hit-man’, borrows a hatchet and exits to murder an unwanted Alderman. The Joneses are inevitably blind to this and can remark only on the petty details of his appearance and conduct when he has gone:
JONES: Pleasant young man. MRS JONES: Well spoken.
JONES: Right school. Did you notice his tie? MRS JONES: His umbrella.
JONES: His hat.
MRS JONES: His gloves. JONES: Impeccable.
MRS JONES: English, (pp. 11-12)
The linguistic formulas would seem to be lonescan: the accumulation of unneces sary details which obstructs the protagonists from appreciating any of the real horror of their predicament; the deliberate stylisation and repetition of clichés.
The play ends with Robinson, with the greatest cordiality, taking away Mrs Jones, to hang her from the bedroom window. Only at the end does Jones think to ask who Robinson is. His reply is revealing and emphasises the political intention of the play:
You can hardly tell me apart from several million other Robinsons. I go to work at nine, and finish at five-thirty. I live in a semi-detached villa with a small garden in front. I observe the correct holidays. I am not a deep thinker: it is so much easier to believe almost
everything I am told. I believe there is no place like home, and beer is best, and the sun never sets on the British Empire, (p. 21)
Robinson is, in fact, Jones. They are ciphers of the millions of conservative, apathetic civilians who occupy the British isles. It is owing to the political and emotional ignorance and xenophobia which they represent that the world has turned