Cause Célèbre

Terence Rattigan’s last play is also one of his best and one of his most uncharacteristic. Uncharacteristic because it is not domestic and it’s not linear; it’s a dizzying, brutal, time-and-place-jumping, epic piece of work. He’d done a few more epic pieces before - Adventure Story, Ross, Bequest to the Nation - but this is far more effective than those.

The play concerns the true story of Alma Rattenbury who was discovered one night in 1935 standing above the brutally battered body of her husband. During the trial it was revealed that she’d taken a younger lover and both she and her lover initially claimed to have done the deed. Eventually she cracked and claimed her innocence. To a public outcry, she was found not guilty, whereupon she took herself off to a field by a river and stabbed herself three times in the heart. The play is, as so often, about forbidden desire and the British resistance to it. He parallels it with a fictional story of the forewoman of the jury who dislikes sex, has a son who is desperately pursuing it, and a husband who wants her back. She begins by sharing in the mob’s hatred of Alma and her lust but ends up understanding, though losing much.

This is not a good production. There are good things; the second half is much better than the first as the barristers camp it about most enjoyably in the courtroom scenes; Anne-Marie Duff is rather effective as Alma, both innocent and flirtatious, flippant and hurting. But otherwise, the play doesn’t work. Mainly the fault is the building; the Old Vic is so huge that the actors are all turning out and bellowing. It ruins the distinction between the shabby domestic scenes and the grand theatre of the courtroom - and that distinctions is part of the point. And the set and lights by Hildegard Bechtler and Bruno Poet just don’t work at all; visually, the stage is all so dark and drab, which means that we get no distinction between indoors and outdoors, past and present, night and day. It all looks dark and the grimness is flagged up for us. Bechtler’s sets tend towards the monumental and this has a rising and falling ceiling that may, for all I know, be intended to suggest the crushing judgementalism of an unforgiving world, but made everything look machine-like and soulless and this is a play with a lot of soul. The final scene, by the riverbank, should be pastoral and beautiful in horrible contrast to her suicide but in rich amplification of her simple mantra: ‘What a lovely world we are in, if only we would let ourselves see it’. Instead it was bleak, hollow, dark and stagey.

I liked Niamh Cusack as the jurywoman; she had a brittle sexuality about her - much better than playing her as prim and stuck-up. This was an earthy woman and her feeling for her son was very believable. But the son - in fact both the sons in the play - were much too old and much too priggish. I’d accept this is partly in the writing but surely you can get eleven-year-olds who look eleven? The father never seemed sexual, just sententious.

I’m spoiled, of course, because I still remember so vividly Neil Bartlett’s luminous production at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1998. That one was fluid, roguish, sexy and camp; light in a way and then crushingly sad. It’s good to see a production of this play but this won’t have helped its - or Rattigan’s - reputation. This is Rattigan’s most experimental work; it came over last night as his stodgiest.

Coalition

David Laws’s 22 Days in May is a first-hand account of the talks that led from the inconclusive general election of 2010 to the formation of the first Coalition cabinet. It suggests that Labour didn’t seriously want to form a coalition and Ed Balls pretty much sabotaged the talks; the Tories meanwhile were professional, eager to compromise and constructive.

Is this true? Well, I wasn’t in the room, of course. There are disputes about the sincerity of the Labour talks, though Peter Mandelson in The Third Man has said ‘I doubted whether there was a real prospect of a government combining ourselves and the Liberal Democrats. It would have been a coalition of the losers’. Since Mandelson was leading the Labour talks, perhaps he is acknowledging that there was no real appetite for talks.

However, it serves David Laws to blame the Labour Party for the failure of a new Lib-Lab agreement, or a ‘progressive alliance’ that Paddy Ashdown and others had dreamed of. The book makes it clear that talking to the Tories was extremely unpopular with some members of his party. In one striking section, Laws shows up at a meeting of the parliamentary party and sits next to Ming Campbell: ‘I knew Ming would be disappointed that the prospect of a coalition with Labour was over, but I did not realise just how angry and upset he was until I sat down next to him. Ming and I are friends [...] but on this occasion he was in no mood to talk, and I was relieved when I was eventually asked to come to the front of the room to join the other negotiators’.

The book is throughout written with hindsight, so we know the Labour talks will go badly even before they are begun. There is quite unconcealed personal contempt for Gordon Brown that runs through the book and, on the other hand, a breezily admiring attitude to the Tories. Laws notes that ‘there is a clearly a strong relationship between David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and the importance of this can’t be underestimated - it sets the tone for the government at every level’, an opaque phrase which might say as much about their shared class background as anything else.

David Laws is an odd Liberal. He was offered a post in the Tory shadow cabinet in 2006, with the promise that this would translate into a cabinet post if they were elected. He turned it down, saying that ‘the truth is that I am a liberal, not a Conservative. I believe passionately in creating a fairer country, but I happen to believe that this will be done through liberal means and not by big government solutions’, which is pretty much saying he’s a liberal because the Tories are too socialist for him. He speaks like a true Tory when he observes that ‘the Treasury was relishing getting back to fulfilling its traditional role as guardian of the public finances and taxpayer interest after a long period of public profligacy’. After his first (and only) performance as the despatch box as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, one Conservative MP called him ‘the biggest Tory in the Cabinet’ and it’s hard not to disagree.

David Laws was coeditor of The Orange Book, a collection of essays published in 2004 with the subtitle ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ which, broadly, means reclaiming economic liberalism for the Liberal Democrats. The first of his two contributions to the book is a strongly-argued call for the Liberal Democrats to embrace libertarianism at the personal level and economic liberalism (i.e. neoliberalism) at the state level. He argues that the Party has drifted towards what he calls, with typically Tory rhetoric, ‘nanny-state liberalism’. In fact, he breaks the liberalisms he thinks the party should embrace into personal, political, economic and social headings, arguing for rolling back the frontiers of the state, repatriating powers from the EU, embracing privatisation, lowering taxes and introducing more market competition into the NHS. It’s Thatcherism, though without her emphasis on Victorian morality.

His last proposal is set out more fully in his second chapter, which considers how to improve the NHS. Inevitably, he disdains the idea of a ‘better-funded status quo’ (an option that he deals with peremptorily and tendentiously), then dispatches the Labour reforms and the Tory voucher system, and proposes a National Health Insurance Scheme in which everyone would choose from a range of health providers, including the NHS. We’d be able to change every year. The transaction costs would be enormous and - rather nannyishly - it bossily demands that we research into our doctors in a way that the evidence is that most people don’t want to do. The majority of people never change their bank account; where would we get unbiased, reliable and appropriate information about the quality of our health provider? It’s a nerve-racking and silly system that could only be born in the head of someone with a madcap love of market mechanisms and no understanding of people.

So David Laws is basically a Tory who thinks the Liberal Democrats could be repositioned to the economic right and social left of the Tories. He was never going to be sympathetic to a coalition with the Labour Party so I am left wondering if the lack of goodwill is entirely to be laid at the feet of Ed Balls.

These thoughts matter because the Coalition currently seems more splintered than at any moment in its first year. Nick Clegg and David Cameron have expressed precisely opposite views about the nature of apprenticeships. Vince Cable has been outspoken in his rejection of David Cameron’s anti-immigration speech. Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes and Chris Huhne have been extremely vociferous in their criticism of the low, lying tactics of the ‘No’ campaign in the AV referendum. William Hague and others have tried to sound conciliatory and it may be that the Lib Dems are trying to reassert their independence fearing a haemorrhage in their support at the local elections, but it’s going to be awkward round the Cabinet table next time they meet.

Laws paints the Party has having surprisingly embraced the Tory coalition, pace Ming and Paddy, but if - as looks likely - the AV Referendum fails and senior Tories are responsible for lying about the proposal, it would be very difficult for Nick Clegg to retain the support of his MPs and of the Tories, Could the Coalition fracture? Well, if it was the perfect marriage, as Laws suggests, then maybe it’s solid. But if he’s wrong, or simply seeing it with blue-tinted spectacles, then we may see the Coalition split apart, with the Tories forced to soldier on as a minority administration, facing constant votes of confidence and unable to legislate. We’ll see.

Three other small things: first, the book is very boringly written indeed. Banal, impersonal, Pooterish in places. Take this piece of reportage: ‘We strolled back in silence across Portcullis House, and then down the escalator that connects with the main Palace of Westminster. We turned right before reaching the Terrace of the House of Commons, and then right again to the lifts to take us up to the first floor of Parliament’. A literary stylist he ain’t. And that confirms my sense that he’s not a ‘people person’.

Second, it seems as though university tuition fees were barely mentioned in the negotiations. Could the Lib Dems really have given up their pledge on fees without a whimper? David Laws was not a supporter of any pledge on tuition fees so maybe he plays this down too much, but it does look as though the Lib Dems and Tories seriously underestimated the significance of the tuition fees debate and the level of resistance they would meet.

Finally, and quite off-topic, this is the first eBook I’ve read. In fact I read it via the Kindle app on my iPhone so it’s about as unfriendly a reading experience as you could imagine. But it was surprisingly pleasant and easy to do. Being able to find quotes by the app searching the text - as I’ve done to write this - is extremely helpful. It’s making me seriously think about trying to move away from paper...

The Stock Da'wa

Hampstead are opening their downstairs space for an experimental season. This is becoming the thing for established new writing theatres to do; Soho recently announced a similar idea. In Hampstead’s case this experimentalism extends to not inviting critics yet giving somewhat full productions. An earlier example of this work was Small Hours. The Michael Frayn Space - as this downstairs is called - is, to judge simply by these two showings, highly adaptable. For Small Hours, the space was transformed into a front-and-back living room, immaculately real, a full immersive installation in which we shared the space of the performer. Here it’s a somewhat more conventional theatre space on three sides, but it’s a large rural kitchen (pictured) that runs on beyond the limits of the stage. The experimentalism is also that the script here seems to me an improvisation, a draft, a work-in-progress. This is a David Eldridge script so it’s still very highly achieved but you can feel ideas being worked out, choices still finally to be  made.

SPOILERS: Paul turns up at Joan’s house late one night covered in blood. Paul was a good friend of her son, Oliver, who was knocked down and killed by a train 22 years before. Paul was so often at Joan’s house before and after the accident, that he became a kind of surrogate son, despite being from a much poorer family. But now he has converted to Islam and he brings with him the severed head of a British soldier. He’s come to preach and he’s come to explain; he’s come to tell Joan that Oliver was suicidal but that it was he, Paul, who pushed him under that train. He has also come to reveal that Mr Wilson, his old teacher and a longtime friend of Joan’s who is there that night, knows more about Paul’s story than he let on. Eventually Joan collapses and dies, perhaps from an injury sustained just before Paul arrived, perhaps from the stress of his visit.

A Da’wa is a preaching of the Muslim faith. Stock is a small village just north of Billericay in Essex. This is a play about the feared other coming home. It reminded me of Simon Stephens’s Motortown; that play shows us a British soldier, having served in Iraq, coming home and seeing Britain for the first time as decadent and cruel and he exacts a meaningless but vicious revenge. Here it’s the same, though Paul has become Other himself.

The basic shape is a simple one. A figure from the past turns up with a story to tell; the action of the play is the telling of that story. In this sense it resembles a play like Orphans by Dennis Kelly (whose intruder also shows up covered in blood). It’s a play of exposition, of gradual revelation. The energy of the play is verbal, once the situation is established - which here is that Paul is violent and the two other characters are old and weak, so they have to listen. It is difficult to maintain momentum in a play like that, for two reasons: one, the revelations really need to pay off; I felt with Orphans that Dennis Kelly was having to ramp up the horrors of the revelations beyond credulity just to keep the play from stalling; two, a play of revelation is really a play of concealment - all the energy has to go into not spilling the beans early on. In fact, writing such a play is a fascinating balancing act, because the writer has to satisfactorily answer two questions: (a) why is he telling this story? (if he doesn’t there’s no play) and (b) why isn’t he telling this story? (if he tells it straight away, there’s no play). You have to find a perfect balance between these two opposing forces.

Here, once we have discovered (with echoes of Emlyn Williams’s brilliant 1930s potboiler Night Must Fall) that the intruder has a severed head in a bag, the revelations are more delicate: Paul confronts Joan with his sense of how she made him feel about his class and confronts Mr Wilson with the truth of his predatory behaviour and deception of Joan. I did feel that Joan’s death was a moment where the script - in this draft - was confecting a climax rather than letting it emerge fully from the action. (It’s complicated because the play begins with Joan appearing having bumped her head; it’s not tonally clear whether there is a mystery in this, whether it’s comic slapstick, or whether it’s sheer accident, so the significance of her death is also opaque.) I was more concerned by the way the play - and Paul - seemed to be spooling out its revelations too slowly. Why didn’t Paul say it all more quickly? Why did he choose to pre-announce his revelations so portentously? I wasn’t convinced that this was wholly character and not at least partly the necessity of the form.

Our view of Paul swings erratically through the play. At times he seemed like a true zealot, convinced of his cause; at others, he seems still to be the frightened boy, terrified and even apologetic for what he had done; and then at others it seemed that the religious rhetoric and ideological zeal was simply a cover for personal revenge and even class and sexual confusion. I really felt the first two were the most interesting and the last seemed just personal. I thought it might be interesting if it seemed as though Paul’s religious conversion were a response to a society’s fucked-up attitudes to class and desire, less so if it was a response to Joan and Mr Wilson.

The dialogue style is vigorous and dynamic, as always with David Eldridge’s stuff. There are probably three different styles that by and large he combines, though I feel the mixture splits on occasion. There’s a realist, human story of psychological hurt and dignity; then there’s an Ortonesque aphoristic comedy (from memory: ‘You have no dependents!’ ‘I have my cats’ ‘That’s no albatross in financial terms’). And then there are moments that remind me that David did a (brilliant) version of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck - another play in which an outsider enters a home, forces the inhabitants to face the truth about themselves, and in doing so results in the death of one of them. Here it’s a kind of nineteenth-centuryish. At one moment, Joan murmurs (to herself? to the audience?) ‘Betrayed!’ and sounds like Lady Audley. This is not a criticism, I should say; it was an interesting moment that suggested that these are grand passions that are boiling over in this kitchen.

It felt first- or second- drafty. I’d be prepared to bet that it was written straight through and perhaps only tinkered with afterwards. I think it’s quite likely that he wrote with only a light sense of where he was going with the story. It’s a script of discovery and what he’s discovered, it seems to me, is the makings of a very powerful play about our own otherness, the way that, horrifically, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 have made our own culture strange to us, how we all know how hateful we have become.

Bad Dress, Good First Night

Emily Raymond in the middle of everything

It’s a thing we often say in the theatre. Bad dress, good first night; meaning, if the dress rehearsal is rubbish, the first performance will probably be good. There’s no magic to this; it’s perfectly possibly to have good dress and first night; a truly awful production is likely to have a bad dress and first night. But if it is a real phenomenon - and my experience suggests that it is - it’s not hard to see why. The technical team are still rehearsing in the tech; certainly in ours on Wednesday afternoon lights were being added in and taken away during scenes. But most of all, the actors have gone as far as they can without an audience and now they are consciously holding back, not wanting to expend that energy that comes from contact with an auditorium full of people. So it’s likely to be flat. I was horrified to see several bad line dries in the dress, though I look back at this blog and discover exactly the same thing happened in the Plymouth dress.

Then the first preview happened. A full theatre, with a pretty extensive complement of Twitter friends. The show completely took off. I think three things happened. First, the cast’s energy and talent was unleashed from a relatively short re-rehearsal period. It’s striking that the show has come on a lot since Plymouth. It’s sharper in places, more hard-edged. It’s a lot quicker too. This gives the show more bewildering, hysterical energy. It refuses the pretence at depth; it keeps things interestingly blank and odd.

Second, it was a very friendly, supportive audience. They were in the mood to enjoy it and they enjoyed laughing. We even got laughs much of the way through ‘Northern Lights’ which I’ve never seen before. To be honest, I probably don’t want that but the play didn’t seem to suffer. And the scene does hush people by the end. The Twitterati gave ‘James Ward’ a big laugh which immediately perplexed the other 80% of the audience. The fullness of the audience meant that the laughter came as a roar. There was momentum to it. And Ruth’s long speech in ‘It’s a Totally New Concept in Light Entertainment’ got a round of applause. Some people even stood at the curtain call. Not sure I’ve ever had that before.

Third, it’s London. There is a noticeable difference between the London and Plymouth audience. The young Plymouth audience was hugely responsive, chatty, laughing. The older  audience was thoughtful, reflective, moved. It struck me that it was rare to find an audience that did both at once. It may be that the play is a bit metropolitan, requiring that immersion in the continual bullshit of London life to both find it funny and upsetting, to balance the laughter and tears. (Which sounds very Russian, now I say that.) I should say, I was very happy with the Plymouth responses. I know there were certain jokes that never worked there (‘Abi Titmuss’, for example) and the cast have already noted that certain things are going over much easier at the Soho. But that’s also because the production has changed. It’s a more brutal and breathless experience.

The Killing

We succumbed to the box set and addictively worked our way through the 20 hours of The Killing, a Danish crime series from 2007.

A young woman, Nanna Birk Larsen, has been found raped and murdered. DCI Sarah Lund investigates her murders and discovers a whole series of plausible murderers, including her teacher, a family friend, and the up-and-coming candidate for mayor.

It’s beautifully shot and very exciting and the cliffhanger endings are always thrilling. In some ways watching it in a box set is the wrong thing to do because it works best, I imagine, if you have to wait for each episode. And also when you watch them virtually back to back, the twists, the numerous suspects can occasionally get a bit ridiculous. And don’t listen to the people who says that it in any way subverts the crime drama or avoids the cliches; it’s full of cliches, but hey, it’s a whodunnit and a thriller. These genres have rules.

That said, I do think there are two very distinctive things about the series. The first is how mature and unsensational is its handling of character. In fact - rather formulaically - each episode proceeds rather slowly, lingering over the characters and their relationships, the camera taking in tautening of skin, momentary glances, stillness. For me the main beneficiaries of this are the dead girl’s parents, Pernille and Theis. They are a lower-middle class couple and we see them from happiness to despair, into revenge, breakdown, break up, reconciliation, hope, love and tragedy. Theis is a man of few words. Pernille has a strong, mature expressive face. Many of her most eloquent moments are glances, looks. In the depths of her despair, her eyes roam sightlessly around, looking for an explanation, an answer, her daughter.

The second thing is that everyone behaves honourably. I suppose I mean by this that the characters are not driven quickly into excess, vengeance, underhand behaviour. There are exceptions, early on, when Nanna’s teacher from an immigrant family - a low level of racial tensions rumbles through it - is suspected, Theis goes to take vigilante action. Later Pernille has a kind of breakdown and almost sleeps with a stranger. There are other examples, but by and large we watch people in extremely difficult situations trying to do the right thing, rather than fighting fire, as it were, with fire. Sarah’s relationship with her colleague and successor is beautifully sketched, from early hostility to genuine affection in a terribly truthful way.

I was struck by this because the telescoped narratives of mainstream cinema drive the characters quickly to reveal secret selves; the good man who crumbles under pressure, the strong woman who babbles for support, the priest who is quick to lie, cheat and steal. These things can happen, of course, but not always. Here we see characters like the mayoral challenger Troels Hartmann trying to hold his life together, do the right thing by his campaign and the police and the press. He makes mistakes but ultimately they seem to be honest mistakes.

And right at the heart of the show is Sarah Lund, played hauntingly by Sofie Gråbøl. Apparently, she was involved in the creation of the character and asked for someone serious, sombre, who was not defined by men. (That last reminiscent of the request Lisa Dillon made of David Eldridge.) This she manages. Her relationships does hit problems, but no one behaves unreasonably (okay, maybe her mother, but that portrait is also terribly true). She’s intuitive, but thoughtful; there are no magic solutions. She makes a lot of mistakes. She’s a beautiful observer of human darkness, deep black eyes, frowning over the puzzles in the story.

That said, what drives the story finally is the opposite. The ending - to give nothing away - reminds me of Se7en, a challenge to someone who has tried to behave honourably, to maintain perspective and decency, to cross a line. And you notice that in the other stories too there are compromises, finally, that the world has been sullied just a little, that everyone has shifted. And that’s perhaps its most powerful statement; it’s a personal vision and a social vision. Not pessimistic, but clear-eyed to the ways we can fall.