Essay Questions

Why is Archie so angry throughout the play?

Archie knows that the music-hall business is dying out. He is frustrated at not having achieved the same level of success as his father and at being forced to accept a lower-middle-class standard of living despite his extremely good education and his very hard work. He feels cheated by the decline of the business overall, and he feels emasculated by the fact that Brother Bill, who has become wealthy and successful, not only gives Phoebe money for essentials but paid for the portion of Jean's education not covered by her scholarship. He considers himself a failure as a businessman and a performer. Having been exposed to a truly excellent and emotionally compelling musical performance by a woman who truly cared about what she was singing about, he is aware that his antisocial, careless attitude toward everything and everyone makes him less adequate as a performer. He is vaguely aware of the way his hurtful behavior affects others, and this causes him to be angry at himself. Finally, he feels helpless. He cannot protect his son, Mick, who is serving in the military. He also feels responsible for the death of his father, who returned to stage performance to raise money caused by Archie's dishonest business and romantic dealing.

Why are the "Negress" and her musical performance significant to the play?

Archie, while serving with the military in Canada, watched a singer in a bar deliver what he considers to have been a perfect musical performance. The woman was elderly, fat, of African descent, and not possessed of any particular beauty or social standing: indeed, she belonged to a group of people that had until recently been very oppressed in a way that even the lowest-class Briton was not. Yet the emotion she felt and expressed in her song, which he vaguely recalls as being "something about Jesus", was so overwhelming as to make Archie realize that his emotional distance from everything and his purported inability to feel anything was keeping him from reaching excellence as a performer himself. He spends the rest of his life wishing that he was that poor, downtrodden old woman simply because he wants to know what it would be like to feel, and perform, as she did.

During Billy's funeral scene, a woman (possibly the one Archie described) sings a hymn while another woman mimes to the music, dances, and picks up Billy's gloves, cane, and trappings of the successful performer. Symbolically, she is picking up Billy's success and musical tradition. Instead of passing to his son, musical and artistic excellence is passing to someone unexpected: a woman instead of a man, a member of what had recently been regarded as an "inferior" ethnic group, and a person from a former British colony instead of a Briton. This symbolically describes the rise of African-American influenced "rock and roll" music, which took the world by storm and out-competed the more traditional forms of music and entertainment.

Why does Jean reject Graham?

Jean realizes that Graham truly does not understand her. He believes her to be radically different from her family of origin and fails to understand her emotional ties or loyalty to them. He appears, to her, to be a nascent version of her Uncle Bill, whom she despises for what appears to be his distance from the family and his contempt. She is right about Uncle Bill's disapproval of Archie's lifestyle, but she cannot see that her uncle provides as much support as he can in a discreet way that does not undermine or emasculate Archie any more than can be helped.

Jean believes she is in an "either/or" situation. One option is to marry Graham Dodd and become more like him, in which case she will have to distance herself from her family in order to survive, thrive, and raise a family of her own without getting pulled back into their disordered, dramatic chaos. She recognizes that, by doing so, she will inevitably alienate them and be resented for helping the way her Uncle Bill is. She decides that she would prefer to be among the people benefiting from his largesse and resenting him for it.

What does the character of Frank add to the play, that would not be present otherwise?

Frank is Archie's son. He refused military service and spent six months in jail for it, and works as a boiler-stoker. This means that he shovels coal all day in exchange for money that helps to support him and the rest of the household. Unlike Jean he did not earn a scholarship to allow him to become university-educated like his father, uncle, and grandfather Billy. He therefore takes on the class identity of his mother Phoebe, accepting a lower working-class lifestyle. He is a good singer and talented pianist, yet he recognizes that there is no significant future in music-hall entertainment.

In many respects Frank begins as a flat character, nothing more than a yes-man for his father. He follows Archie's orders, fetches drinks, and is treated as an adult child despite the fact he his nineteen years old. Yet he is touchingly devoted to Phoebe, his mother. In many respects he is a foil for Archie, whose inconsiderate and self-absorbed behavior precludes any sort of sensitivity or regard for others.

Frank is also the only person in the play who can see, think, and feel clearly. He's the one who plays the piano and sings after his brother Mick is killed, because he's the only one who is free to feel the pain: he's not hiding his emotions so as to advance an agenda. After the funeral, he's attending to Phoebe and points out to Jean that it simply isn't the right time or place to criticize her father or start another argument. He is the one who tells Jean that she isn't going to actually be able to change anybody, including her philandering father who is plotting to divorce Phoebe. Despite his subordinate position in the first part of the play, when the rest of the family is stunned with grief it is Frank who takes up a position of leadership.