Phoney folk in Loamshire (2001)

Theatre Review from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

House and Garden. The National Theatre

Alan Ayckbourn’s separate but linked plays, performed by the same group of actors on two of the National’s stages at the same time, were the hottest tickets in town during the late summer. Ayckbourn was fêted, called variously a wizard and a magician, and praised for “his astonishing ingenuity”.

No doubt some of this was justified. To write interlocking plays which can be performed at the same time on two stages, by the same group of actors playing the same characters, clearly requires no little skill. And certainly there was an edge for the audiences, watching in the Lyttelton and Olivier theatres, as they imagined the actors scuttling backstage between the two theatres, leaving one stage only to reappear on the other with seconds to spare. But to my eyes the experience was all about style rather than substance; a triumph of the pseudo.

In the early 1950s, in the days when theatrical productions were still the subject of censorship by the Lord Chamberlain—when for most people contemporary plays were as remote from everyday life as money for the starving poor—Kenneth Tynan had a fine time lampooning the theatrical establishment. He complained that most new plays seemed to be set in some fictitious county which he called Loamshire. He noted that they involved such worthies as the Rt. Hon Angela This and Lord Archibald That. He observed that they all took place in country houses with large lounges or drawing rooms complete with (seemingly compulsory) French windows. And that all the houses were staffed by country bumpkins, or cockney housekeepers and supercilious butlers. It was drama courtesy of Mills & Boon, and it was a sham.

I was reminded of Loamshire as I sat, ever more uncomfortable by the minute, watching first House, and then Garden. I recognised none of the people on stage. I wouldn’t have known them in the 1950s but now, fifty years later, they were even more crass and unlikely. Shallow fictions in a make-believe world. But wouldn’t you just guess? The critics loved the plays, and most of the supposedly sophisticated audiences seemed to share their feelings.

For my part I’m not really interested in the fate of some supposedly successful businessman, boozy and promiscuous by turns, whose behaviour on stage confirms that he wouldn’t last a day in the real world of 21st-century capitalism. I find it impossible to laugh when someone goes out of their mind because they have been ditched by their lover, and I find it hard to sit next to people who think such things are funny. And as for the well-heeled young man, a sixth-form student at some prestigious school and supposedly the ace reporter on the local rag, whose naivety and lack of nous would embarrass an eleven-year-old—he was straight out of the world of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.

It says much for the dumbing-down of critical taste, to say nothing of the prejudices of the broadsheet press, that such vacuous nonsense should be received with such acclaim. These are plays which are hurtful. Glib and invalid, masquerading as significant social commentaries. My judgment: patronising pap about phoney folk.

Michael Gill

Foolish Totem of a Hapless World (1999)

Theatre Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. National Theatre.

The National continues to boast proudly in its programmes that “The National Theatre is for Everyone”, whilst its newish director, Trevor Nunn, seems increasingly to pander to safe bourgeois tastes.

Last month Noel Coward’s Private Lives joined the repertoire, and audiences were invited to identify with two spoilt members of the “upper set” whose egotism and selfishness leads to the break-up of not only their own marriage but also threatens the well-being of their subsequent partners. The critics in the broadsheets had a field day affecting to see “significance” in the puerile machinations of the two combatants, whereas arguably the real significance lies in the fact that by producing such witless tosh in favour of other fare, the theatre offers an experience of stunningly irrelevance to the lives of most of their audience: Mills and Boon for the chattering classes. And this month Money by Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian son of a rich aristocratic mother, one-time Liberal Member of Parliament, novelist and playwright, Conservative MP for Hertfordshire and briefly Colonial Secretary, and latterly Baron Lytton of Knebworth.

If Bulwer-Lytton’s biography is hardly encouraging, neither is his play Money. In what seems a long evening Bulwer-Lytton is at pains to make what he sees as a crucial point: that money conjugates with success; poverty with failure. When Evelyn, the play’s central character, is in the funds he has friends by the score; once seemingly bankrupt his friends desert him like rats from a sinking ship. Bulwer-Lytton takes nearly three hours to ram his message home. Three hours in which to expose hypocrisy, but not a minute to question the economic and social structure which lies at its base. Cosy sentimentality in lieu of analysis. A triumph of escapism.

The talented cast do wonders with a turgid script. Bulwer-Lytton may well have been a successful novelist but on the evidence of this play he is an indifferent dramatist. His characters don’t so much speak as give voice to lines of prose. Close your eyes and you might be listening to someone reading a book rather than speaking.

Writing in the programme Peter Ackroyd paints a warts-and-all picture of Victorian London, and I wondered what the audience made of this. In easy, uncomplicated language Ackroyd describes everyday life in mid-century London “in terms which Lytton’s contemporaries would have preferred not to recognise”. Here is a real picture of Victorian London—”the streets filled with teeming and struggling life; the city as a prison, with walls and buildings towering above the people”—not the fay, prissy fantasies of Bulwer-Lytton.

Michael Gill

Bulgakov's 'Flight' (1998)

Theatre Review from the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Flight, National Theatre, Olivier.

Flight, by Mikhail Bulgakov, is a knockout. For sheer exuberant theatricality, high octane ensemble playing, and dramatic frisson, I have seen nothing like it for years. And the text is so dense and rewarding that a second visit revealed much that in the excitement of the first occasion we had missed. Rarely does a play provide such a whirligig of different emotions which sit so comfortably together. Through the evening the audience is presented with moments of terror, hope, apprehension, side-splitting humour, poignancy and despair, through all of which shines an indomitable will to survive.

The play, which is set in Russia, Turkey and France in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, is a biting commentary on the tragedy and absurdity of civil war. It follows the chaotic journey of two refugees caught in the war between the White Russian Army of the Ukraine and the advancing Red Army, whose fates become enmeshed with the Ukrainians. Called a play in dreams the first act dramatises the bitterness of losing; the second act describes what Lesley Milne calls, “the wish-fulfilment dream of winning”. The style is reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht. Just when you think you have grasped the narrative—the essentials of the plot—Bulgakov throws sand in your eyes. Given the world in which we live, he seems to be saying life is unpredictable.

And Bulgakov, who was born in Kiev in 1891, seems to have enjoyed (or, perhaps more properly, endured) the kind of chaotic existence so typical of many of the characters in Flight. In 1919 he qualified as a doctor and was forcibly recruited into the Ukrainian Republican Arms. He escaped, returned to Kiev and was immediately mobilised by the White Army and sent to the Caucasus. Discharged the next year he began a career in literature, writing a string of novels and plays, many of which were banned or censored.

Small wonder then that Flight, written between 1926 and 1928, was not performed in his lifetime. It is a damning critique of Soviet revolutionary politics; a heart-rending account of the way in which most of the Russian population were little more than pawns in a cruel struggle for power between the emerging Soviet state and the residual White Russian Army. And to think that as recently as the last decade there were so-called communists living in Britain who thought that what happened in Russia in 1917 and the following 70-odd years, had something to do with the triumph of socialism.

As a socialist I loved the final moments. In the last dream one of the White Russians, having won a fortune in a French gambling salon, invests it all on a horse. Standing centre-stage, arms outstretched, Charnota's words end the play. "Put everything on Shooting Star to win!" Occasionally, like Charnota, we need to dream if we are to fight the good fight.

Michael Gill

Three new plays (1998)

Theatre Review from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kevin Elyot had a huge success four years ago with My Night With Reg (Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards etc, filmed by the BBC, and already 17 productions world-wide). His new play The Day I Stood Still at the National Theatre (Cottlesloe) makes for a marvellous evening. By turns funny, sharp and revealing, it tells of Horace, a bumbling curator at a London museum, for whom life stood still on a never-to-be-forgotten day more than 30 years ago when he fell in love with Jimi. Elyot, together with his peerless cast and director Ian Rickson, catch the mood the swinging 60s with great conviction, and manage Horace’s chance meeting with Jimi’s son 30 years later as a sustained climax which is both elegiac and liberating.

Writing in the programme Elyot discusses the power of theatre—of seeing a live event in an age when our lives are so much dominated by screens. He writes, “There should be a moment, at least a moment, during the course of the play, when an audience thinks, ‘I couldn’t have got that anywhere else’, that the hassle of going to the theatre that night has been worth it.”

There are many such moments in Elyot’s latest play, and even more in Conor McPherson’s The Weir at the Royal Court (Theatre Downstairs). On a routinely dull night in rural Ireland the regulars settle to drink their ale in a Sligo snug, only to be disturbed by the arrival of Valerie, an attractive woman from Dublin. Released from the tedium of wasteful chat, they tell a series of unlikely stories full of Irish folklore, and blind unreasonable superstition. But as they strut their stuff and tell their tales they also reveal themselves, and the loneliness and wasteful poverty of their lives. Valerie moved by the alcohol and the revealing openness of her hosts has a rather different tale to tell: a real tale of personal tragedy, such as “to melt a heart of stone”. The effect of Valerie’s story is almost cataclysmic. Pomposity and pretence are replaced by sympathy and concern, and one of the characters—liberated by the honest truth-telling of Valerie and wishing to comfort and sustain—tells us of his own wasteful, unhappy life, and of one never-to-be-forgotten moment when in the pits of utter despair a total stranger offered him an unsolicited kindness.

This is theatre at its most sublime. The atmospheric set, and the superb playing of the cast and imaginative direction, conspire to produce a powerful, poetic and realistic drama. You can smell the turf burning in the stove, see the dust lying thick on untended shelves, hear the wind whistling wildly outside; as before the arrival of Valerie the characters reveal a conversational emptiness in tune with the emptiness of their whole lives. Valerie’s revelation serves both to underscore this emptiness and to offer an alternative which might be reached through honest, open discourse, about matters of real concern, managed in an empathetic manner. Were it that the people who decide what should appear on the screens which “so dominate our lives”, were prepared to offer the same opportunities for drama which is both enlightened and potentially enlightening. But an enlightened population is anathema to those who collectively manage the mass media, even if it can be tolerated in the theatre. The Weir might be seen by 30,000 people in its six-week run at the Royal Court. As against this one episode of crude, dishonest EastEnders, is seen by 15 million people.

Stanisława Przybyszewska

Thoughts of enlightenment are also prompted by a new play by Pam Gems, called The Snow Palace (touring widely). Gems has taken a script written by Stanisława Przybyszewska about the French Revolution, and adapted it so that we see some of the major elements in Stanislawa’s play as well as something of her own life. Stanislawa was the illegitimate daughter of an “avant-garde writer, wild man, drinker, reputed Satanist”, who conceived such a passion for Robespierre that she lived alone, writing, almost demonically, her 600-page drama. She died of malnutrition and hypothermia, in an unheated hut partially buried in snow, in 1935.

Pam Gems has fashioned an elegant drama. She is helped by an imaginative set and subtle lighting (which signals a shift of action from Stanislawa’s story to the French Revolution and vice versa) and by a splendid cast. She manages the discussions between Danton and Robespierre with great conviction, contrasting Robespierre’s passionate commitment to “a virtuous life” with Danton’s pleasure-seeking pragmatism.

Socialists will sympathise with many of Robespierre’s sentiments. “A life shaped only by commerce and self-interest,” he says, “leads to bestiality and the rape of children.” But the revolutionaries were undone because, like leaders before and since, they tried to lead people to what they saw as a more desirable future. The essence of the socialist case is that it is only an enlightened working class, conscious of the nature of the world in which we all live, that can transcend vile, unjust capitalism, and build a new world founded on freedom, equality and justice. We have to do it for ourselves.

Michael Gill

Inadequate and incomplete (1999)

Theatre Review from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remember This by Stephen Poliakoff. National Theatre.

Stephen Poliakoff is a playwright who is clearly very interested in science and innovation, and in social consequences of technological innovation. In Breaking the Silence a dispossessed Jewish patriarch succeeds in inventing “the talkies” ten years before the trick was managed in the USA; in Blinded by the Sun (reviewed Socialist Standard, October 1996) market forces appear to distort the procedures of science and lead to the falsification of results; and now in Remember This we follow Rick, an imaginative innovator, who seems unable to cash in on his own inventions.

Unfortunately the play as presented still seems at the draft stage. The narrative line is frequently more fanciful than convincing, with the result that the behaviour of Rick and the other characters in the drama often seem implausible and unlikely. I found my credulity stretched almost to breaking point as the evening unfolded. Years ago they used to “try out” new plays—especially musicals—”out of town”. As a result early performances were seen as experimental, and changes were anticipated. I could have wished for a reprise of this antique tradition now.

Some years ago Peter Hall said of Poliakoff, “He always has an eye fixed on where society and fashion are going. His plays are evolutionary reflections of the social scene”. I don’t know what Hall meant by “evolutionary reflection”, but on the evidence of Remember This Poliakoff has yet to find a set of theoretical perspectives which would allow him to make sense of technological innovation and of the interplay between science, technology and social change.

Rick was first into wedding videos in the early 1980s and into the stretch cars which frequently ferried guests from marriage ceremony to reception, and now he makes the discovery that all his home videos made at the time are deteriorating. What are the implications, especially the economic and technological implications? How can punters be persuaded to transfer the treasured images of their past—their holidays, their children growing up, their children being born even—on to a new digital tape using digital cameras? How should Rick proceed? Poliakoff’s response is as unsatisfactory as it is incomplete.

A socialist would set any analysis of science and technology in an economic context. A socialist would hone in on the idea that it isn’t technology which drives society, but rather society which determines both the kind of technology which is produced and the use to which it is put. And spiralling through the whole analysis would be the notion that the economic system is prime, and that the interests of those who own the means of producing goods and services are paramount.

I’m not for a moment criticising Poliakoff because he hasn’t written a play from a socialist perspective. That is, quite properly, his choice. But a standard textbook on science, technology and society would mention the above ideas as being the basis for explaining observed behaviour. They are hardly contentious. Poliakoff’s writing needs to be informed by them.

In the programme Jack Bradley points to the supposed gap between the sciences and the liberal arts—the two cultures, as CP Snow had it 40 years ago—and he suggests that this debate is “a key to the heart of Poliakoff’s work”. If this is the case Poliakoff’s apparent ignorance of key aspects of history and contemporary social science seems especially ironic.

The play does offer some powerful ideas. Like the observation that as far as the captains of industry are concerned the greatest question of the day is “How (in a world of new products) to coax the average punter to keep up. The market depends on it! To make them keep upgrading their possessions . . . How to make people take the hook?” Or the idea that since the world of finance is so unpredictable and apparently irrational, and the impact of technology (as evidenced by the decaying of video images) so uncertain, that “everybody in the City has got really superstitious” and “like the Middle Ages . . . have little offerings on their computers, like lucky charms, and mascots, their favourite toys and trinkets”.

But a few interesting ideas are not enough. To my eyes Remember This is inadequate and incomplete. The cast do their best, but for the most part the occasion seems eminently forgettable.

‘Antigone’ by Sophocles at the National Theatre (2012)

Theatre Review from the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Greek tragedy Antigone by Sophocles was recently staged at the National Theatre in London, starring Christopher Eccleston as Creon and Jodie Whitaker as Antigone, the character Hegel described as “the heavenly Antigone, the most magnificent figure”. This production opens with a tableaux modelled on the photograph of President Obama and aides watching the live video feed of the killing of Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.

Antigone, the woman of personal courage confronting state oppression has been a source of inspiration for dramatists. For Brecht she was the symbol of popular resistance to the horrors of Nazism. For ‘The Living Theatre’ founder, Judith Malina, Antigone “speaks with an ancient voice that is present wherever there is a willingness to speak against conventional strictures and punitive laws and to invoke the boundless human potential”.

Athenian audiences in the Hellenic Enlightenment would have adopted a more nuanced approach to Antigone, one that was based on the society they were living in.  Marx and Engels identified Ancient Greece as a society based on slavery, where agriculture was still developing, the ‘polis‘ (city state) and private property had appeared, and a ruling class was based on land and slave ownership.

In 5th century BC Athens, a form of ‘democracy’ had developed with a franchise that extended only to male citizens (with no say for slaves and other non-citizens). Athens was run by Boards of Jurors (who were salaried, chosen by lottery, and subject to scrutiny and de-selection), and the Council of 500 (chosen by lottery and examination with restricted tenure). Neither were organs of representative government. The source of direct democracy was in the People’s Assembly where any citizen could vote and speak. The Assembly met 40 days a year, had a quorum of 6,000 and drafted all major legislation.

Antigone, as an individual set against the tyranny of the state in the person of Creon, was appreciated by Athenian audiences because only 70 years before there had been authoritarianism. The play’s major themes can be seen as divine/natural law against man-made/state law or private/family life versus public life/citizenship.

JH Bradley in Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy saw the dialectical conflicts in the ethical views represented by Antigone and Creon.  Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit sees sibling fidelity and the sister-brother relationship (“mutually self-affirming free individualities”) as the strongest possible relationship for a woman within circumscribed family life. In Athens women did not have the vote; they were legally dependent on men, and in the case of Antigone her male guardian is also Creon. Athenian audiences would appreciate the depth of her rebellion not only against the state but also against a man. Hegel identified gender politics, and that patriarchy creates “an enemy within its own gates”. Hegel adores Antigone and believes her to be nobler than Creon.

Sophocles does not have the gods save Antigone, and in Tiresias’s prophecy there is no praise for Antigone. Creon loses his wife, and his ward Antigone, but it is the loss of his son that is the patriarchal tragedy.  For Sophocles and Athenian audiences it is the hubris of Creon which causes this tragedy.

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ (2013)

The Mixed Media column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Doctor’s Dilemma by Bernard Shaw at the National Theatre

Bernard Shaw’s 1906 ‘serious comedy,’ The Doctor’s Dilemma, was recently produced at the National Theatre starring Aiden Gillett as Sir Colenso Ridgeon and Tom Burke as Louis Dubedat.

Shaw based Ridgeon on Sir Almroth Wright, a celebrated and fashionable bacteriologist, who when asked by Shaw what he would do if there were too many applying for a certain treatment, replied, ‘we should have to consider which life was worth saving’. This would become the central plot of the play where Shaw indicts privatised medicine because of its lack of impartiality, its pecuniary interest, rationing, moralising, unaccountability, ineffective treatments, negligence, and sees private doctors as competitive tradesmen in ‘a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity and human suffering’. The Doctor’s Dilemma is an argument for the creation of a public health care system such as the NHS in 1948 (which Shaw himself welcomed as an example of ‘gradualist Fabian socialism’).

Lenin felt that Shaw was ‘a good man fallen among Fabians’, and Alick West saw Shaw as a ‘second Proudhon’. In 1882 under the influence of Henry George and reading Marx’s Capital, Shaw wrote: ‘the importance of the economic basis dawned on me’, and was on the point of joining the Marxist SDF but instead opted for the Fabian Society. Shaw disagreed with Marxian concepts such as the labour theory of value and the class struggle and wanted ‘to place socialism on a respectable bourgeois footing’.

Shaw’s 1912 The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism was republished in 1937 and Hardy in the Socialist Standard wrote that Shaw’s views were ‘essentially utopian – that there will be money incomes under socialism, and that the capitalist foundation can be made to support a socialist system of society’. The welfare state and the NHS established from the 1942 Beveridge Report and the 1944 White Paper are Fabian ‘socialist’ constructs within capitalism. Marxists see the welfare state and NHS essentially as the ‘redistribution of poverty among the workers’ from those without to those with dependants, maintaining a sufficiently healthy and efficient working population, keeping unemployed workers from becoming unemployable, and insuring the capitalist class against working-class discontent. For the capitalist class the welfare state and the NHS meant increased profits and were seen as ‘a necessary expense of production’.

As we said in the Socialist Standard June 1944, ‘only under socialism can doctors truly serve their fellow workers, and a real health service for all be established’.

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: Children of the Sun (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Maxim Gorky play Children of the Sun directed by Howard Davies was performed last year at the National Theatre in London.

The play captures the unease and violence of what the historian Lionel Kochan called the ‘dress rehearsal for revolution’ in Russia in 1905. Gorky wrote the play while imprisoned for accusing the Tsar of the massacre of 1,000 workers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January 1905 outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. For Kochan ‘this was the spark that set alight the flames of revolution. In all social groups revolt flared up. By the end of January nearly half a million workmen were on strike. The professional intelligentsia joined in.’ A ‘soviet’ in St Petersburg ‘formed of some 500 delegates elected by about 200,000 workers, represented the peak of working-class achievement. It was a spontaneous creation. But it was a lesson in revolution, not the revolution itself’.

The Children of the Sun are a group of privileged, self-absorbed, middle class intelligentsia who are floundering and philosophising about the world, who sense revolution is in the air but lack vision, energy and dynamism. Geoffrey Streatfield is amiable as Protassov, the ‘student of natural science’ who is prescient about the role of science in the future but blind to romantic advances, and the philandering around him. Protassov’s sister Lisa played by Emma Lotfield is anguished by the harsh reality of the suffering peasantry while his wife Elyena played by Justine Mitchell knows something is wrong, of the need for action, and embodies the revolutionary spirit.

When the play had its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre in October 1905, the atmosphere was tense, and ‘the audience panicked when they mistook the arrival of the protesting workers at the end of the play, for a real demonstration entering the theatre from the streets’ (Cynthia Marsh). Stanislavsky wrote that the role of the Moscow Art Theatre was ‘not a simple private affair but a social task. Never forget that we are striving to brighten the dark existence of the poor classes.’

Gorky’s father was a joiner, and Tolstoy called Gorky ‘a real man of the people.’ Gorky had worked as a skivvy in a shoe shop, in a bakery, as an errand boy, a stevedore, a dishwasher on a River Volga steamer, and a railway night-watchman before educating himself and becoming a jobbing journalist and a Marxist.

The 1905 Revolution was suppressed with 14,000 people executed and 75,000 imprisoned. Gorky wrote ‘our sick society will not become healthy until the sources of light, beauty and wisdom have become accessible to everyone.’

Steve Clayton

Love Doesn't Conquer All (1997)

Theatre Review from the August 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Amy's View by David Hare

In the early 1980s David Hare wrote a play called A Map of the World. A bleak, realistic piece its centre was a United Nations conference on poverty, which was taking place in a sumptuous hotel in India. The poor were literally dying of starvation on the doorstep, whilst inside the great and the good discussed food shortages with full stomachs in five-star luxury.

Hare's plays are consistently located in the here and now. And whilst other playwrights might focus on particular, and perhaps trivial, matters. Hare is concerned with the broad sweep of ideas and behaviours which mark out life at the present time. His characters are both true to themselves and also revealing of the spirit of the times. They are unique individuals who nevertheless have a symbolic function. What they say and do, and how they think and feel, tell us something both about themselves and also about people generally. Perhaps more than any other contemporary playwright Hare's plays offer us a map of the world; or at least a map of the so-called developed world. Amy's View (National Theatre. Lyttleton) is no exception.

It is 1979 and Amy brings her new boyfriend. Dominic, to visit her mother. Esme, a well-known actress. Amy's view of the world is simple; "You have to love people.You just have to love them." But Amy singularly fails to persuade mother and boyfriend of the virtues of this imperative, with almost predictable consequences. Over the years mother and boyfriend find reasons to fight, especially about television, films and the theatre. Others become enmeshed in their squabbles: by 1997 mother has become a victim of "the market", and boyfriend/ partner a beneficiary.

Hare is too knowing and complex a dramatist for easy analysis. Amy's View may be said to be about a strong mother and a loving daughter, about growing old. about the uncertainties of life, and so on. and to an extent this is the case. But more than this it is about living in the 1980s and 90s, and being exposed to particular features of life in capitalist Great Britain. And it is clearly a paean to the theatre and an attack on the dumb, gratuitous violence which is such a feature of modern filmmaking. Dominic has become a success by making some Tarantino-like blockbuster, and this prompts Esme's final outburst:

"I did see the film. I’m appalled by the violence. I know it's important to people like you. All that shooting and bloodshed. But I don't understand it . . .  It isn't as life is. Perhaps I’m just getting old. I'm tired of it. Dominic. This need you all have to get out the guns. and bam! And wham! And 'kill the little fucker' and 'shoot off his stupid bloody head'. What is it? What is this need you have now? What happened? Are you just bored? Or is it that you don’t dare deal with real experience . . .  with the things that really go on in real life? . . .  Like grief . . .  and betrayal . . .  and . . . "

The question hangs in the air. Hare, like all good dramatists is leaving work for the audience to do. Is cinema unredeemably lost—the Hollywood dream factory incapable of anything other than alienating violence, absurd fantasy, and empty whimsy? And if so, why is this? Socialists would have tentative "answers" to such questions based on their analysis of the capitalism and the function of "cultural products" in a capitalist society.

And socialists would also have answers to the other question which Hare leaves hanging in the air. Why is Amy’s view apparently flawed? Why isn't love enough? Socialists would argue that loving actions need to be informed by knowledge and insight. Young adults becoming parents for the first time recognise very quickly that if they are to love their offspring they need to know what best to do to keep their child healthy and happy. Loving a baby carries with it implications about adults making knowing decisions about what is good for children: decisions which are based on knowledge of what babies need in order to develop. More generally, if we care about people and their well-being, we will do what we can to meet their needs. This means being familiar with what is in their interests: what economic and social conditions are likely best to ensure their development as healthy and happy human beings. One way we can care about other people is by trying to help them understand the world in which they live, and how we might collectively change it so that it provides a more caring environment for us all. And one merit of Amy's View is that it faces the audience with such questions. Another is that it does so in ways which are always involving and entertaining, and which take the audience and its capacity for thought and reflection seriously.

Note: Hare's earlier play Skylight, which I discussed in last May’s Socialist Standard, has returned to the Vaudeville Theatre in London. Here is something very special: a play which resonates in the memory. One critic called it "the play of the decade". It's a plausible description.

Michael Gill

Publish and be damned (1996)

Theatre Review from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blinded By The Sun by Stephen Poliakoff (National Theatre)

Many people have very strange ideas about the nature of science and the behaviour of scientists. Television adverts, for example, tend to perpetuate the myth of scientists as seekers after “the truth”; dressed in spankingly-clean white coats, wearing regulation horn-rimmed glasses they stride the floors of massive laboratories piled to the roof with complex pieces of glass apparatus from which emerge ominous gurgling noises. More generally scientists are still seen as essentially impartial, rational, dispassionate individuals, engaged in uncertain laboratory experiments. The reality, however, is very different.

True some scientists are involved in fundamental research, an activity seemingly both intensely romantic and intellectually mysterious, but one which commonly involves little more than "crawling along on the frontiers of knowledge with a hand lens”, as Sir Eric Ashby famously had it. Most scientists are employees and, as the insatiable demands of capitalism for more profit take their remorseless hold, they are increasingly employed to solve mundane problems. As an onetime industrial chemist I can remember the quest to reduce the amount of mineral oil in a proprietary hair cream (from 45 to 44 percent as I recall), a subject which detained some of the best minds in the "research” department for several months; and later being involved in a similar attempt to save money by making the hair cream at lower temperatures.

Scientists, like the rest of the labour force are under pressure to produce—more research papers, books and consultancies in universities; more savings on routine analysis and safety control in public service laboratories; and more economically (i.e. profitable) outcomes in the brave new world of industry. Sometimes the pressures become too great and some scientists cheat. They produce fraudulent results.

Blinded By The Sun, a new play by Stephen Poliakoff at the National Theatre is about scientific fraud. Or is it? Poliakoff tells the tale as a detective story, but it is a story with an inconclusive ending. Did Christopher fake his results or was he simply the victim of pressures to publish? Certainly in contravention of the usual conventions he announces his spectacular triumph to the press—he has succeeded in producing hydrogen, a clean fuel, by irradiating water with sunlight—rather than describing his work in scientific literature and allowing his peers to repeat his experiments. But is his subsequent failure to confirm his results evidence of fraud or simply a quirk of fate? His high-flying colleague, Elinor, is in no doubt; he is entirely innocent. The laboratory manager—a pushy administrator under pressure to save a failing department—is suspicious. We are left to make up our own minds.

But if we are unclear about what happened, we are left in no doubt about the pressures which might have pushed Christopher towards faking his results. Problem-solving of the kind which underpins Christopher’s work is rather like solving a puzzle. The initial insight may seem conclusive: a solution is at hand and further work points to all the major difficulties being overcome. Ninety percent of the puzzle has apparently been solved, but the rest seems elusive. Perhaps time to announce your triumph to the world—before someone else gets there first—and manage the rest of the work later?

Writing in the programme David Jones draws parallels between the events of the play and a "recent scientific scandal which came close to fraud”. He notes that “Scientific frauds are not common, but they occur; indeed they are probably increasing. This perhaps reflects the growing pressure on scientists. Scientific research is no longer a hobby for a distinguished gentleman, but a career. Its motive is not only the search for understanding, but a quest for advancement and recognition in an overcrowded profession. Its rewards—grants, promotion, tenure, prestigious jobs, titles and other goodies, are fiercely contested.”

So, far from being dispassionate seekers after truth, contemporary scientists, wherever they are employed, are exposed to the same pressures as other workers. If they are not effective—if their work is not associated with profitable outcomes—they will be seen as unacceptable failures, and they may be dismissed.

Blinded By The Sun makes for a wonderful evening in the theatre. Poliakoff unfolds his tale with an effervescent élan which is entirely appropriate to a tale set in a science laboratory; a spirit matched by the performances of an excellent cast in a quicksilver production. Highly recommended.

Michael Gill

Leave Taking (1995)

Theatre Review from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leave Taking by Winsome Pinnock, National Theatre, Cottlesloe and touring.

Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking is sturdily unusual. Written by a black woman—the child of a West Indian immigrant—it tells the story of Enid, a single mother, and her two adolescent daughters. Delores and Viv, as Enid tries to deal with the death of her own mother in Jamaica, and her daughters try to discover their identities as adults. Its refreshing simplicity contrasts starkly with the spurious glitz and glitter, the condescension and the pretence, of much of the commercial theatre. It is faultless and touchingly played by a small company of black actors and actresses. It is a breath of fresh air.

Pinnock's characters have a rounded credibility which makes them immediately acceptable. They are true to their own lights—persuasively recognisable as unique human beings—and yet it is easy to imagine that we might meet them in the street, on a bus. at work. Only the best dramatists are able to do this: to convince us of the genuineness of their characters and yet allow us to recognise in their experiences and their dilemmas, something of the common currency of all our lives.

Leave Taking is nominally about being a West Indian immigrant; about growing up in a predominantly white society. But it is also about being rootlessness, coping with life in contemporary Britain, and becoming an adult. In the experiences of half-a-dozen black people living in London we begin to see the impact of larger social forces on their lives and. by extension, on our lives too. Pinnock’s characters may be black but most of the challenges they face transcend their colour. They are also our challenges, and they are shaped by relative poverty and their need to find employment—in a word by their class.

Leave Taking is about particular individuals facing particular psychological challenges. But these challenges are rooted in a social context; one which, as members of the working class, we share. And as the lives of Enid, Delores and Viv unfold, we also learn something of our own lives, and of the class-based communalities which bind us together.

Michael Gill

Mistaking Your Wife for a Hat (1995)

Theatre Review from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

I remember my first “meeting” with Oliver Sacks. When you find your partner reading a book entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, the moment tends to stick in the memory.

Sacks is a doctor who works with people suffering from neurological disorders. In The Man Who he wrote movingly about some of his patients: about, for example, a musician who could not recognise everyday objects: a man who remembered nothing of his life after the age of seventeen; a woman who had lost all sense of her own body; a man who imagined that his left leg was not his own; and. of course, of the man who thought his wife was a hat.

After a year of painstaking research—talking to experts, reading, watching tapes, and spending time with patients suffering from neurological illnesses, etc.—director Peter Brook, writer Helene Estienne, four actors and a musician, have miraculously transformed Sacks's warmhearted and sensitive book into a compelling work of drama. Playing variously patients, doctors, nurses and technicians. Brook's actors offer us a series of clearly differentiated snapshots of abnormal behaviour; the result of malfunctions deep inside the brain. Writing in the programme Brook observes that "whatever the social and national, barriers, we all have a brain and we think we know it. But the moment we go inside, we find we are on another planet".

Brook says of Sacks that "his most essential clinical instrument is his own heart", and certainly what illuminates a glorious piece of theatre is not so much the mysteries of neural dysfunctionality as a sense of shared humanity. We are in the presence of compassion and imaginative empathy, rather than peering voyeuristically through keyholes.

Theatre like this has the capacity to change the way we see both the world and ourselves. I shall long remember the penultimate scene in which a man who presumes—as we all do—that he is voicing words in what he imagines as a sensible discourse, turns on a tape recorder and hears himself speaking gibberish. The audience was engulfed in stirring compassion. How shocking then to leave the theatre and be presented with another reality: newspaper headlines screaming with Clinton’s demand that the Oklahoma bombers should be executed.

Dramas like The Man Who are deeply subversive. They offer in a class-riven world a view of other possibilities. Socialism won’t end neurological disorders but. by changing the climate in which we live—by replacing profit and exploitation with the satisfaction of human needs through co-operation—our efforts will be directed towards the well-being of humankind rather then the legal but brutal murder of other likely victims of a violent society.

Michael Gill

Ways of Seeing (1997)

Theatre Review from the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Closer by Patrick Marber

Becoming a socialist is an educational experience. It is about discovery and knowledge; and the experience changes people.

Once people know and understand the essence of the socialist case—that various historical "epochs" are characterised by different kinds of class relationships (landowners and serfs in feudal societies, capitalists and workers in capitalist societies, etc.); that history is a record of class struggle; and that the economic system is prime, so that nowadays the interests of the capitalist class determine the dominant ideas and values in society—they will use this body of knowledge in analysing and responding to the world around them. Knowledge of the socialist case is. like other knowledge, internalised. It affects the way that people think and behave; it changes the very essence of their thoughts and feelings. In a very real way, once people have been persuaded of the essence of the socialist case, they will never be the same again. They will bring their newfound knowledge to the task of understanding the world in which they operate, including the behaviour of characters in a play. Other people, with different worldviews, bring a different set of analytical perspectives with them when they go to the theatre. Or. as increasingly seems to be the case, they bring only their ignorance of such matters. When I saw Patrick Marber's new play, Closer, in preview. I reached a set of judgments about it; judgments informed by my historical and sociological knowledge. I imagined that other critics, especially those working professionally (sic) for the national, newspapers, would reach a different set of conclusions. How right I was.

Like his first play, Dealer's Choice which has been hugely successful world-wide since its opening in 1994, Closer (Cottesloe). is marvellously well crafted. Marber's story line is full of surprises, yet at the same time it has a convincing inevitability, given the apparent “natures" of the four characters who meet as the story unfolds, and whose lives become horribly enmeshed. Dan meets Alice and they start to live together. Dan meets Anna and proposes a liaison. Anna resists. Dan, in revenge, surfs the Internet and affecting to be Anna (who he impersonates as a wildly salacious nymphomaniac) dupes Larry into a meeting. Larry meets Anna, discovers he has been set-up. but manages, nevertheless, to persuade her to live with him. Dan, having discovered that his deception has backfired continues to pursue Anna. Eventually Anna capitulates. Alice distraught takes a job as a "hostess" and meets a drunken, miserable Larry in a strip joint. United in adversity they begin to see one another. Dan hears of their relationship and decides that he is really in love with Alice and returns to her. Etc.. etc.

Told in this way the plot sounds like the worst kind of populist soap; a kind of wearisome episode of some Islington-based EastEnders lookalike. But Marber writes wonderfully convincing dialogue with a serious voice. And he seems genuinely concerned with the fate of his four characters whose lives he suggests are, given the nature of life in the 1990s, almost capriciously out-of-control. (My partner suggests that Marber, whose first play, Dealer’s Choice, was about playing poker, is really interested in games playing, and that Closer might be seen as a game of sexual poker. It seems a productive insight, but it was apparently lost on the critics.) The three newspaper critics whose reviews I consulted were wildly enthusiastic. They saw it as a play "about love and passion", which was "very much in the spirit of the time". They lauded Marber's "realism" and "humour".

But they offered no comment about the behaviour of the four protagonists. They failed to consider that love might need to be differentiated, significantly, from sexual passion, and whether being in love with someone carried with it certain obligations. They had nothing to say about why people in the 1990s seem so unable to form lasting relationships, why—at least superficially— some people are seemingly disposed to "throw away" relationships with as much thought as they might give to getting rid of an old sock, and whether this might have anything to do with our throwaway economic behaviour in a society which prizes newness as though it was one of the four virtues. Yet these things were at the heart of the play for me. I am not surprised when people, responding to economic imperatives which put making money and looking after oneself as prime, treat other human beings with the same contempt as they treat other "things" in our throwaway society. But the critics who wrote about the play in the three so-called quality papers which I consulted were either unable or unprepared to locate the behaviour of the four characters by reference to such perspectives. In consequence their reviews were glib and superficial. Perhaps it is consciously part of the process of "dumbing down" which is apparent in most contemporary criticism. And in education, too, where the diet offered to students must be as vocationally relevant and as intellectual barren as possible. But that's another matter.

Michael Gill

History Lesson (1977)

Theatre Review from the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

“State of Revolution” by Robert Bolt, at the Lyttelton Theatre.

“But, Comrade Lenin”, says Anatoly Lunacharsky, “that would not be Socialism—but a blind peasant revolt!”

In those few revealing words is summated the rest of the play, and the inevitable tragedy (and death) of Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianov=“Nikolai Lenin”. This play is a masterpiece, sticking consistently to facts and dramatically portraying the heroism of the Russian people against both Czarist and Bolshevik tyranny.

“We take the peasants’ corn, and when driving his pigs away, hand him a pamphlet, Which he cannot read”, says Lenin. There is the explanation, in a nutshell. The millions of peasants were not Socialists, and would not become Socialists before they were wage-workers.

Robert Bolt, whether aware of the Socialist Standard's estimate in 1917 of the Russian events or not, has amply confirmed what we said then: “There will be no Socialism in Russia.” His piece makes a magnificent history lesson.

For the only dramatic critic the play will have who actually heard Lenin, Trotsky and the rest in the Kremlin, the simulated Politbureau meetings without a table were somewhat comical.

Horatio

History from below (1978)

Theatre Review from the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World Turned Upside Down, National Theatre, London. (Available in Penguin Books.)

Christopher Hill's book The World Turned Upside Down tells of the other English Revolution—the one that did not succeed; that was not led by Oliver Cromwell and Fairfax; the revolution that wanted to turn the world upside down. This is not the revolution that most histories revolve around. It is probably far more interesting. As Hill puts it, some of the figures in this story "speak more directly to us than Charles I or Pym or General Monck, who appear as history makers in the text books". At the time of the Civil Wars (1640s) and in particular in the period immediately after the execution of Charles I, England was rife with subversive ideas. A melting pot of dissenters, levellers, diggers, ranters, and early Quakers; every level of English society, including the church and the army, was touched by the passion of revolution. 

The common link was religion. From Cromwell downwards, those who were interested in changing the world sought authority and respectability from the bible. Those who opposed revolution used the bible to justify repression. For some, revolution meant a new way of approaching God; for others, the ranters in particular, revolution meant the end of the doctrine of sin and the idea that God inhabited everyone and everything; in effect the dissolution of religion.

The most interesting character was the digger Gerard Winstanley, whose ideas were briefly outlined in the Socialist Standard in June this year. Winstanley wanted a community without money, buying and selling, wage working, without army and law. Although the disasters of the digger experiments (strife within and brutal repression from without) caused Winstanley to recant somewhat on aspects of his more extreme views, he stood for common ownership of the earth by locally self supporting communities. Nor were his views utopian. Winstanley had practical views on the organisation of production; which may not have resulted in the abundance that is now possible, but which might have led to the majority being immeasurably better fed, housed, and clothed.

Hill's book is history from below, the story of the common, though extraordinary, people of the time. Keith Dewhurst has made a valiant attempt to turn this huge canopy of religious and revolutionary fervour into a play. The stage is crammed with incident; the execution of Charles I, Winstanley's insolence, (he refuses to doff his hat to Fairfax, a mere "fellow creature"), his anti-property and law views, the disputes between capitalist and landlord, the confrontations between army and people, the extreme sexual liberation of the ranters, disputes between property based, and real concepts of freedom; and the ultimate failure and disillusion of all except Winstanley. All this and more is crammed into the two hours traffic of the stage.

Why does the play fail? Ultimately, what it does not bring out is Hill's main thesis — that this was a period of real potential for an alternative society. Looking back now, one can say that it was bound to fail. But, argues Hill, looking at it then it was different; for the people involved an alternate society seemed viable. Perhaps in attempting to present a grand sweep of mid-seventeenth century history, Dewhurst was too ambitious. He might have succeeded better had he concentrated more on one digger community, and allowed the turbulent and exciting background to emerge through it. However, the play is yet another reminder of the long history of communist ideas, and as such is another blow at the absurdity of private ownership.

Ronnie Warrington

Fantasy masquerading as reality (1997)

Theatre Review from the March 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, Lyttleton Theatre.

Harold Pinter is perhaps the most lauded English playwright of the past thirty years. The National Theatre has premiered three of his new plays and revived five others in the last 20 years, and now revives a sixth, The Homecoming. For its part The Homecoming has been seen widely both in the United Kingdom and across the world. The programme for the current revival at the National Theatre lists forty-four major productions, across five continents, since the play was first performed in 1965. Pinter is seen as a serious and successful dramatist. His plays both command respect and can usually be counted upon to fill a theatre. Several have been successfully filmed. Performances of his new work are seen as significant events, not least by those arbiters of taste, the critics of national newspapers.

Years ago Kenneth Tynan noted that Pinter's ability to hold an audience seemed to depend upon three qualities: "his bizarre use of dramatic technique"; "his skill in evoking atmosphere" (especially feat and apprehension); and "his command of contemporary idiom" (A View of the English Stage, K. Tynan).

These three qualities are vert evident in The Homecoming, the tale of the return of a prodigal son and his wife to some anonymous tenement in North London, the son now teaching philosophy in an American university. Who are the four males in residence? What are their positions as members of the family? Pinter reveals his secrets slowly, teasingly. And as he does so he preserves an atmosphere of uncertainty, not to say menace. As the four males circle each other violence never feels far away. It is spat out in the dialogue. It is apparent in the body language. And with the arrival of the returning son and his wife it becomes manifest.

But there is a problem. Pinter's use of language may be convincing—some people do, on some occasions, speak in the intensely aggressive and idiomatic way that is commonplace in his work—but it is nevertheless often very difficult to square what the characters say to one another, with that we know about them and what they do. So if the dialogue is convincing, its use by characters on stage is not. Thus it appears that brother Lenny is a pimp. In such circumstances would Lenny continue to live at home where he is the butt of aggressive behaviour from his almost psychotic father? And when locked in a row with his returning brother, a successful philosopher, would we expect Lenny rather than his brother to win the sophisticated discussion about the nature of philosophical discourse?

If Pinter's characterisation is unconvincing his storytelling is almost perverse. Why would the successful son want to bring his wife home to the alienating hell from which he had successfully flown? And what happens between the end of the first act and the beginning of the second, to transform a group of six adults who were previously locked in a violent, physical struggle, and who now emerge like some fawning members of a college sophomore group? Pinter offers no reasons for their inexplicable behaviour. And as for the apparently demure wife who is revealed as a potentially promiscuous woman—would she really exchange life in America with her husband and her three children for the charms of being a part-time prostitute. as well as a part-time housewife and comforter to four variously unattractive males? The proposition is at once as hugely unconvincing as it is significantly misogynistic.

Many/most of the characters (sic) in The Homecoming have neither substance nor validity. The actors are superb and they demand our attention. However, although the set convincingly captures the essence of a shabby tenement in the 1960s, its realism contrasts markedly with the frequent implausibility of Pinter's characterisation and narrative. Never mind that almost without exception Pinter's characters are significantly disadvantaged and/or unfailingly unpleasant—a view of the world which is at odds with most people's experience even in the barbaric world of the market—their behaviour seems to be based almost entirely on primitive physiological and psychological needs and drives; drives which barely acknowledge the social world beyond home and hearth. Pinter's writing may have many qualities, but he ultimately presents us with a preposterously uni-dimensional view of human behaviour; a kind of unreal, invalid fascist nightmare.

Michael Gill

The Theatre of the Absurd (1997)

Theatre Review from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

Regular readers of this column may remember a less than enthusiastic review of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman last summer. Now we have more nonsense about nineteenth-century capitalism from the same author: a view of the world so patently absurd that it is surprising that the audience are prepared to take it seriously. But then most people who attend the National Theatre know that Ibsen has a serious reputation, and they react with reverence rather than disbelief.

I find Ibsen enigmatic. Plays like Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, and, perhaps especially, A Doll's House are full of insights about the unresolved tensions of family life, the oppression of women, and the hypocrisies which abound in bourgeois life. As credible representations of life in the nineteenth century they seem both psychologically astute and dramatically persuasive. And their resonance are such that it is easy to see their relevance for contemporary audiences.

But on a bigger scale, when Ibsen writes more directly about the impact of the wider society on people, he seems to get it spectacularly wrong. In An Enemy of the People we follow the fate of Dr Tomas Stockman, the medical officer of the spa baths in a small Norweigan town. The town's well-being is much dependent on the appeal of the baths to wealthy tourists, but Stockman has made an unfortunate discovery. The spa waters are polluted by a dangerous effluent from a nearby factory. Stockman sees this as an opportunity to upstage his brother, the town's mayor, and to increase his own reputation in the town by publishing a series of articles in the supposedly radical town paper. Predictably, mayor, factory owner and newspaper proprietor conspire to challenge Stockman's  evidence, and the mass meeting of tradesmen and shopkeepers which Stockman subsequently addresses is similarly more interested in tourism than the "truth". Isolated and enraged, Stockman turns and delivers a devastating critique not of the pernicious evils of a social system which puts profits and people's livelihoods before public health, but of the intelligence of the town's people.

The play is not, as the programme infers, a clash between "The Individual and Society". Rights and wrongs, in a moral sense, must always be informed by the facts of the case and by reasoned argument, and on the basis of the evidence presented in the play it isn't that Stockman is "right" and the townspeople "wrong". As far as we can see Stockman is clearly right about the spa being polluted, but grotesquely wrong in attributing the behaviour of the townspeople to a lack of intelligence. What they do is entirely consistent with, as they see it, their interests. They react, as people will and must do in a capitalist society, precisely in their own interests. Were Stockman the intelligent and principled man that he claims to be, he would have understood the townspeople's motives, and offered them a critique of their situation under capitalism rather than an absurd attack on their intelligence. His position seems to imply the existence of a superior intellectual elite, whose freedoms are being denied by the intellectually challenged. It is, in essence, a fascist, non-democratic position.

An Enemy of the People was first performed in 1882, more than 30 years after Marx and Engels had published The Communist Manifesto. And it prompts the question, "How can a playwright who is so astute about the motivations of people when they are locked in intimate family relations, be so ignorant of the larger world of which families are a part?" Ibsen's position is so extraordinary as to feel contrived. It is almost as thought he deliberately set himself up as an apologist of the capitalist class, intent on deception based on elitism.

On this evidence a plausible case might be made out that it is Ibsen who is "an enemy of the people". And yet I remember a stunning production at the Young Vic ten years ago in which Arthur Miller managed to suggest that it was capitalism rather than the stupidity of people which was at the heart of Stockman's dilemma. But then Miller described his work as an adaptation of Ibsen's text not a translation of it.

Not only is the play misconceived. In Trevor Nunn's production text has been sacrificed to movement. The sophisticated technology of the Olivier Theatre is very much to the fore. The stage revolves interminably, with actors still delivering their lines as they are whisked out of our view. At the slightest pretext the stage is filled with people, a brass band appears regardless of its spurious relevance, only to march off again. It's horribly reminiscent of another production — Nunn's dreadful Les Miserables.

Michael Gill

Venal system under scrutiny (1997)

Theatre Review from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, National Theatre.

In the best television, cinema and theatre we can often observe people living out their lives in contemporary capitalist society, and sometimes we can learn lessons, vicariously, from their experiences. Nowhere can we see the process at work better than in the great plays of Arthur Miller, of which Death of a Salesman is perhaps the peerless classic.

Willy Loman is a salesman possessed of "the American Dream'. While some of the early settlers may well have had a heroic vision of a free and just society, "the American Dream" has, for most citizens, become a tarnished nightmare. But Willy is still a subscriber. Intent on becoming "number one", his vision infects not only his relations with his clients but also those with his family and friends, perhaps especially his two sons. The two acts of Death of a Salesman chart his fall and register its impact on those around him.

There is not a single explicit reference to capitalism in the play but everywhere the venal system is under scrutiny, and its dehumanising impact registered. Miller recalls in his autobiography Timebends that at the first night in 1949 an outraged woman called it "a time bomb under capitalism". And Miller adds, "I hope it was, or at least under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last."

The play's greatness lies in its ability to present us with real people with whom we can identify, not to say emphasise. Willy's collapse envelops others in its wake, and we are all engulfed in the tragedy. Capitalism has claimed yet more victims.

There are some memorable lines—lines which bear witness both to the viciousness of contemporary capitalism and the triumphant ability of humanitarian feelings to survive and flourish, come what may. Willy's friend, Charley, remarks icily, "All you've got is what you can sell", and yet it is the self-same Charley who gives Willy money each week and observes on another occasion, "No man just wants a small salary on which to survive", the implication being that money is a counterfeit coinage for things that really matter.

The present production at the National is excellent. It is difficult to imagine anything better. At the end I cheered through my tears.

Michael Gill  

Flawed fairy tales (2000)

Theatre Review from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Honk, The Ugly Duckling. National Theatre.

I was about fourteen when I first went to the theatre. It was 1945 and we went to see Aladdin at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. I remember the occasion vividly. After the dark, dank dullness of war, the theatre was ablaze with light and colour, and from the moment the band started to play I was enthralled. Of course it helped that periodically half a dozen high-stepping chorus girls would appear, with legs clad in shimmering silk that seemed to go on forever, and invite my intense, admiring gaze. The heroine was wistfully beautiful, the adults simply differentiated by dress, facial expression and body language as either good, bad or comic, and I was quickly lost in the excitement, the glamour, the giddy pleasure of it all, all these people on stage, real people not film stars, performing for us. I wanted it to go on forever.

Two years ago, when our eldest grandson was four, we took him to the theatre. It was not a success. He was too young (and probably too impressionable). The first appearance of Stinky Poo was enough. With rolling eyes and malevolent chuckle, Stinky Poo quickly had Tom hiding under his seat and after the interval he refused to return. Last year was much successful. Tom had seen a video of The Snowman and knew what to expect, but we were a long way from the stage and the impact of the live show was much reduced. Then last week we took him to the National Theatre to Hans Andersen's fairy story about the ugly duckling who turns into a swan, sat him near to the stage and watched and waited. Tom sat in rapt attention, eyes aglow, lost in . . . who knows what? And yesterday, in traditional theatrical fashion, he wanted to reprise the occasion. So my partner and Tom went through the plot and linked it to the twenty-odd scenes that are mentioned in the programme, and their associated songs. He says he wants to go again.

When I was a child there was little theatre for children, but now that children are significant consumers the market has responded accordingly. There are stories especially written for children to which "adults maybe admitted if accompanied by a child", small touring companies specialising in children's theatre, and lots of shows which, like films released under a "universal" certificate, are presumed to be suitable for both adults and children.

Honk is such a show. The National claim that it is suitable for anyone over six, but I'm not so sure. Certainly anyone over six would have no difficulty following the story, but on the other hand they certainly couldn't follow a script which contains many lines with clear adults-only significance. Most films, TV shows, books and theatre are of this kind. The demands of selling the product to a large audience mean that minority interests have to be sacrificed. The script for Honk is arguably less convincing than it might have been, because in trying to ensure wide appeal the writers have come up with something that satisfies neither children nor adults. But then this is how capitalism works. It's not the needs of people that matter, but the profits of the manufacturer.

It's easy to empathise with the ugly duckling. The emotions surrounding the duckling's experience—the insults, the abuse, the threat of physical assault—are not difficult to identify with. The duckling is despised because he is different. Hans Christian Andersen suffered a similar fate. "Gawky, dreamy, pale, weak, disliking the company and games of other boys, Andersen was relentlessly humiliated and bullied for much of his childhood." (Tim Goodwin, 1999.) Others are similarly despised and disparaged because of their colour, or sexual orientation, or beliefs, or accent, or whatever.

On another level, the duckling's world—the place where he is hatched and the farm where he hides—are metaphors for the hierarchical, bourgeois society with which Andersen was only too familiar; not least because he was at the bottom of the pile. As such Andersen's fairy story is based on a substantial social critique. The pity is that it is flawed.

The ugly duckling is eventually transformed into a swan, the implication being that it is to nature that we must look to if we are to know our destiny, and "that inborn qualities are more important than upbringing". However, The Ugly Duckling was written in 1842, long before the importance of environment on human growth and development had been empirically demonstrated. It must be doubtful whether Andersen would have written a similar tale today. After all it's one thing to write a fairy story which sees the lives of farmyard animals in human terms, and quite another to go on believing in the 21st century that nature is the significant determinant of human behaviour. Now that is a fairy story. An unhelpful, anti-working class fairy story, because it denies the possibility of change. No wonder the capitalist establishment is happy to feed Honk to children of all ages.

Michael Gill