Magical Thinking

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​Colin Wilson: Bananas

I’ve just had the terrible misfortune to read Colin Wilson’s memoir and analysis of the Angry Young Men: The Angry Years (Robson, 2007). I read it because that era - Look Back in Anger and so on - was a great research interest on mine and while I don’t publish much on it now I like to keep up with what’s being published in that area. Colin Wilson was one of the key figures in that movement; his book, The Outsider was published within days of the opening of Look Back in Anger and the two men were grouped together, alongside other figures like Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain and others, as figures in the vanguard of a literary dissatisfaction with the current world. It’s a movement that, in cultural terms, can fairly be regarded as having presaged the artistic explosions of the 1960s.

The subtitle of Colin Wilson’s book is ‘The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men’ and Wilson rose and fall more steeply and quickly than most. The Outsider was acclaimed on publication by some leading critics and became a surprise best-seller - surprise, because the book is a dense work of quasi-philosophical commentary, thick with quotations from Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and others. He was acclaimed, feted, became a figure in the gossip columns, not merely on the literary pages. But this turned to farce when his girlfriend’s father turned up unannounced, horsewhip in hand, to break up their relationship. Further tabloid skirmishes and controversies ensued - Wilson was goaded into making some ridiculous remarks (not mentioned in this volume) and his friends and associates, particularly the disgusting neo-Nazi Bill Hopkins, revealed themselves to be low-talent semi-fascists. When his next book appeared, Religion and the Rebel (1957), it was utterly destroyed by the critics. His moment in the sun was over. But doggedly he continued writing with an increasing interest in esoterica: alien landings, true crime, the paranormal, studies of spiritual thinkers like Gurdjieff, Jung, Ouspensky and others. There have been novels too. He has written over a hundred books.

Okay, let’s start with what’s good. Well, it’s good to have a record of the period from the point of view of one of its lesser but still important figures. There are some interesting insights into the cultural flows that link Paris and London. He paints a particular picture of the quasi-commune at 25 Chepstow Villas, where he and his little Hitlers hung out ruminating on their superiority to the rest of us. He anecdotalises interestingly on his encounters with some other Angries. I was intrigued by Wilson when I wrote my book on the period. He seemed to be someone who represented a defiant continentalism and intellectualism that was counter to the Anglo-anti-intellectualism of Osborne and others.

Wilson’s view of the era is that the whole ‘Angry Young Men’ phenomenon was a media fad that debased everyone involved, misrepresented some (Wilson & Co.) and overpromoted the rest (everyone else). He makes this distinction overtly and covertly; the ones he like are ‘thinkers’, and are usually extremely - and I mean extremely - right wing. Bill Hopkins, whose first and only novel, The Divine and the Decay, told an approving story of Nietzschean overcoming focusing on the leader of a quasi-fascist political party. And ‘thinker’ is a term that Wilson seems to think applies indifferently to philosophers and artists; he judges everyone on the quality of their thought. He has absolutely no sense of artistic value and certainly doesn’t comprehend the idea that artistic complexity might embody thought. This leads him to some startling judgments. You have to pity someone who thinks Chekhov, Osborne and Beckett are bad playwrights, but has bags of time for Ronald Duncan and Nigel Dennis.

The book is unintentionally funny in places, where he reveals a love for the pedantic detail and the small-minded observation. His dinky little psychologising dismissals of people endlessly smarter and more talented than him are priceless entertainment. The flat sentences are relentless in their weird, uninteresting detail (‘As soon as his book, Crowds and Power, came out in 1962, I bought a copy’, ‘a letter from her of 13 May - a fortnight before publication of The Outsider - refers to Chepstow Villas and mentions that “I much enjoyed that evening with you and Bill”, an occasion I have forgotten’). But it becomes worse than that. Ultimately the book becomes a portrait of a deeply unpleasant person.

Secured in his Dorset retreat, he is able to make astonishingly Olympian judgments about thinkers like Sartre and Camus, so vastly his superior that it seems peculiar that he should occupy the same sentence as them. But no, in the epilogue he corrects Sartre on a couple of matters; oh and then reads a biography to explain why Sartre made this elementary mistake. Indeed throughout the book, Wilson has a strange and increasingly horrifying habit of explaining away entire oeuvres by reference to people’s personal shortcomings. Tynan is ultimately just his spanking; Amis his promiscuity; Braine his drinking; Trocchi his syringe. These things were important to these lives but for Wilson their work can be uncomplicatedly reduced to them.

It suggests someone with a chip on his shoulder and this is revealed in time. His problem is that he has never really studied philosophy; he’s read it but without anyone to challenge and extend his reading, help him to really formalise and test his ideas. In the book he is quite defensive about not having been to university - ‘since I had spent the past ten years or so educating myself, the idea seemed pointless’ he declares. Now, I don’t think everyone needs to go to university, but Colin Wilson suffers badly from the pitfalls of the autodidact; he only knows what he knows and seems to have gained absolutely no understanding from the thousands of books he’s read. He reads voraciously, indifferently, ignorantly - and driven, it seems to me, entirely by prejudice.

When he condescends to read the novels or the plays (and he usually only reads plays), he dispenses dull, mid-century opinions. The first act is too long. The central character is too passive. Oh dear, oh dear, the ending is a little implausible. It’s like Pooter’s been put in charge of the Times Literary Supplement. The truth is that his aesthetic tastes and his philosophical beliefs were formed amateurishly in the early fifties and he hasn’t moved on. His account of European philosophy after Sartre would be flatteringly described as ‘sketchy’. His psychological vocabulary - everyone is psychologised by this stupid little man - is full of defunct terminology like ‘alter-ego’ ‘domination’ ‘the psychology of the Right Man’ ‘introversion’, the unmistakeable psychobabble of the 1950s. He quotes the people he read as a young man and hasn’t read any more. (Anyone with the slightest interest in the contemporary world would hesitate before referring to black people as ‘coloured’.) He subscribes to a laughable creed about sex: creative people, he insists, have a particularly vigorous view of sex as self-fulfilment and cannot be tied down to a single partner. He leers at other people’s sexual histories in a mixture of envy and contempt. He is clearly freaked out by homosexuality. In other books, Wilson has revealed himself as a panty-fetishist but here he vicariously presents himself as the grand Marquis de Sade. Vicariously, of course: he’s much too pusillanimous to discuss his own casual fucks.

Most appallingly, he justifies himself by gloating over the decline of his peers. Oh he pretends the opposite (claiming to experience ‘a feeling of sadness as I contemplate the wreckage of so many of my contemporaries scattered over the literary battlefield’), but he’s lying. His discussion of his rivals (he refers to them as rivals - and that ‘battlefield’ metaphor is instructive) is unmistakeably gleeful. He reels off a gossipy, partial view of Tynan’s misfortunes. He leers over Osborne’s failed marriages. He tut-tuts about Braine’s alcoholism and his sneers over Amis’s impotence. But what did you achieve,  one is tempted to ask? Wilson scorns the fad of the Angry Young Men, but without that media fad you’d not even have published your tawdry Encyclopedias of Murder and idiotic accounts of alien abduction tales. You never deserved fame and this book demonstrates it. You can’t write. You can’t think. And you can’t feel.

Indeed, ironically, this would-be Nietzschean Overman actually reveals himself to be consumed with Nietzschean ressentiment. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that the powerless only achieve dominion over the Overmen by turning their puny resentment into a grand moral system that reins in their superiors. I’m no Nietzschean, but it’s hard not to think of this as, time and again, Wilson aims his philosophical pinpricks at finer stylists, better thinkers, more successful writers.

One of the key moments of Colin Wilson’s downfall was a very damaging review that pointed out that for all his supposed reading and thinking, The Outsider was full of misquotations and other errors. He’s not changed. This is a terribly sloppy book. Some of the errors are no doubt slips of the finger (‘Irish Murdoch’ anyone?) and some are failures of memory (he writes ‘Bellecqua’ for ‘Bellacqua’) but the largest error is, of course, his ignorance that seeps through the book, turning everything complex into the simple, wrong thing.

Towards the end of the book, he refers to Sartre’s concept of ‘magical thinking’: ‘in which people convince themselves of a piece of wishful thinking which they know to be untrue; clearly it is a mild form of insanity’. He uses this as a stick to beat Tynan. But it is more evidently true of Wilson, the man who announced himself a genius in 1956 and has continued to believe it, despite all evidence to the contrary. A nasty little book by a nasty little man.

Small Hours

Small Hours is written by Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime, directed by Katie Mitchell. It is an environmental piece. An audience of twenty is led into a basement (?) flat, a front and back room, sparsely decorated. A TV, two sofas, a table, some shelves, a couple of pictures, a mirror. A telephone. In this room, in the early hours of the morning, a new mother is trying to fill the silence. Her husband is away and she cannot sleep. Her baby is wakeful and crying. She talks on the phone. She watches TV. She hoovers. Anything to fill her head with noise. In an extended and almost unbearable sequence she dances to The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ trying to find in it some exaltation, some ecstatic, ritual release. She never makes it. The neighbours bang on the walls and she is reduced to silence. Then her baby wakes. She leaves the room and soon the baby is crying no more. She returns, coldly. The show ends.

It is one of the most terrible things to watch, a virtually wordless hour in the heart of the night, unfolding in real time and in one space. It never states it but by the end of the play, she has undoubtedly killed her child. It’s a moment of controlled horror that retrospectively makes sense of everything else we’ve seen. The manic energy, the obsessiveness, the desire to escape. Sandy McDade plays the mother with gaunt, ashen intensity, a woman on the very edge. It’s a portrait, I guess, of post-natal depression and, in these surroundings, you feel as trapped with her terrible feelings as she does herself. It is an elegantly bleak sixty minutes, deliberately unleavened by any humour. The expanse of tough carpet, the muted colour of the walls, the lack of decoration, the cold glow from the street lights against the net curtains, they all create an unrelieved urban thinness of lived feeling, that seems to bring life closer to death and makes the move from one to the other horribly easier, making that move more understandable. It’s monochrome. But it also has terrific taste. Katie Mitchell’s austere style is always graceful, exquisitely judged, and here it is judged again so well and with tremendous heart. At no point does it feel leering, intrusive or cheap.

It’s haunted me since I saw it on Monday. I know it will go on haunting me.

The Heretic

Richard Bean’s new play The Heretic focuses on a climate change sceptic. Typical of Bean, the play is keen to stir up the settled liberal consensus and tip over sacred cows and all that kind of stuff.

Dr Diane Cassell is an academic in the Department of Earth Sciences in York, an expert in sea levels and she has discovered that in the area she’s been studying, the Maldives, the seas don’t appear to be rising. The university is very keen to attract the sponsorship of  an organisation with a lot staked on the conventional climate change picture, and Professor Kevin Maloney asks her to delay publishing until the deal is done. She disobeys him and, worse, goes on Newsnight to denounce climate change academics as a ‘small cohort of hippies who ... have suddenly become the most powerful people in the world’. She is suspended. The second half of the play moves to her rural cottage on Boxing Day. Diane has been receiving death threats and we see the campus security guard, in balaclava and combat fatigues, make his way into the cottage and hide himself upstairs. meanwhile Diane  has been bickering with her anorexic daughter, Phoebe, and is waiting for the arrival of her neurotic student, Ben, who she is trying to turn into a scientist, and who fancies Phoebe. He does turn up and so does Kevin, whose wife has left him. More important, Ben has hacked into the files of an academic at the University of Hampshire who has recently published evidence of climate change based on tree-ring findings. They discover that the recent evidence is very slight and that he’s doctored the evidence. Phoebe and Ben fall for each other and when Diane tries to talk to him about the relationship, Phoebe attacks her mother, which brings on a heart attack. Her life is saved by the security guard/green vigilante who does CPR on her. In the final scene, it begins as if Phoebe’s died, but in fact it’s her wedding day. Diane reads her speech to Kevin.

Richard Bean’s a very funny writer. The play is packed with huge laughs. He is very good on university politics and both Diane and Kevin are excellent characters, cynical, tart, bolshy and quick. The curtain line that ends the first half - ‘Maureen says that in the twenty seven years she’s worked in industrial relations she’s never met a bigger pair of cunts’ - got a response of shocked hysterical delight from the Royal Court audience. There are moments in the play that are very touching and, of course, he’s picked a great subject to write about.

I think quite often the play goes for the laughs to the detriment of the play. I don’t think Bean would deny that this is a pretty old-fashioned play. It’s got five acts and solid sets and a plot and entrances and exits. But that’s just the coat hanger. What Bean’s really interested in is sideswipes on various topics. There are dozens of little digs at various politically correct nostrums - grammatical errors in the Koran, eating disorders, paedophilia. And it becomes very clear that this play is not really interested in its story, which is only there as a vehicle for the gags and the aggro.

Not interested in the story? Well, lots of it makes no sense. Why does the academic invite her student to her house for Christmas? Yes, it’s true, he’s threatened to self-harm in front of her, but that still doesn’t convince - this character is very self-assured and confident in her dealings with students; I didn’t buy that she’d be cornered so easily. And anyway, it’s just inviting an unstable student - who says he fancies your daughter - to your home.

And then, the student. He’s an environmental fanatic. He won’t get on a minibus. He worries about the CO2 emissions produces by breathing. He worries about the methane emissions from farting. And yet a couple of tutorials with Dr Cassell and he’s gleefully hacking into a climate scientist’s computer to discredit the global warming thesis. He’s written Phoebe a song (a very good one, in fact) and this neurotically awkward boy decides he will sing it to her in front of everyone. ‘shouldn’t this be in private?’ asks Phoebe and she’s right, it should. It makes little sense of his character that he does this.

And the Professor. He gives Diane and verbal warning. Then he is involved in getting her suspended. Then he turns up on Boxing Day and that story is forgotten. And the security guard - who is somehow also a member of a quasi-terrorist green activist group - hides through most of Act 4 but bounds in to save the daughter’s life. That’s not completely improbable, but Diane’s reaction is: she says virtually nothing. It just becomes a comic, absurdist, farcical moment, with Green activists being shooed off with pitchforks, an air ambulance trying to land and a khaki-clad intruder pounding Phoebe’s heart.

Because he always goes for the laugh and everything else comes second to that: plot, story, character, argument. He elaborately sets up moments of conventional drama and then fucks them up because he’s thought of a joke. Ben holds a Stanley knife to his wrist and Diane’s response? ’Do you always slash your wrists in front of people?’ Really? She really says that? The play is an other example of Dominic Cooke’s stated desire to put the middle class on stage - and the middle classes filled the auditorium too, some around me mmm-ing in knowing approval at the various sabre thrusts against the pieties of the liberal left. Despite that, it’s in a very noble Royal Court tradition. The play was very reminiscent of John Osborne, especially the later plays where the old-fashioned carpentry is all carving out space for characters to be waspishly offensive at everything the author senses its audience might hold dear.

And then there’s the environmental debate. He’s created a composite renegade climate scientist out of various contemporary figures and added in a thinly-disguised version of the media-spun ‘Climategate’ affair at the University of East Anglia - which no one who knows anything about how research is actually conducted would have thought of as worthy of the -gate. We hear all about doubts and nothing about the overwhelming evidence. It begins as a play about the need to separate politics and science (a similar debate is had in Greenland) but by Act 4, it’s a conspiracy theory play about how the evidence for Global Warming is all made up. Believers in climate change in this play are either ineptly violent thugs, pusillanimous academic careerists, or socially inadequate teenagers working out their own narcissism by posing as environmentalists.

In fact if the play has a thesis - oh God I’m slipping into Billington language - it’s that environmentalism is a kind of narcissistic religion. Diane has a couple of speeches to that effect. But what does that mean? Fucking nothing, as far as I can see. Why isn’t climate change denial also narcissism? Any belief will have a self-regarding element because our beliefs aren’t separate from our sense of ourselves; we are the things we believe. So it sounds like a beefy call for some more robust kind of politics - who knows what that might be? Revolutionary socialism? Common-sense pragmatist centrist politics? Entrepreneurial capitalism? - but doesn’t really say anything. The final speech, Diane’s mother-of-the-pride address, is a touching tribute to human beings as the most special force in the universe that sounds good but is unanchored to the rest of the play and so it’s vacuous phrasemaking.

There’s nothing wrong with a sceptical attitude. Real knowledge and understanding needs to face out sceptical questions and they’re made stronger by it. But I’m not sure this play is so much sceptical as cynical. It prefers to ask only the questions that encourage us to do nothing. It’s riding on a general public cynicism which may well, really, destroy us in two or three generations’ time. Like English People Very Nice, I just worry that Bean is hitting at soft targets because he’s got no real opinions, he’s just a contrarian. I can imagine him being pleased that I am pissed off by the play; that’s probably the point, to annoy liberal leftists like me. But that strikes me as a dumb and trivial thing to aim for, unless he just is a right-wing provocateur. I’ve liked some of his plays - Harvest, for example, is one of the best plays of the last decade - but he’s on course to become the Jeremy Clarkson of British playwriting.

Modern British Sculpture

Jacob ​Epstein's Adam (1938-39)

The new-ish exhibition at the Royal Academy is very much in the contemporary style. It does not purport to be a survey but rather an argument about modern British sculpture and, to show how original its thinking is, contains many objects that are neither modern, British, nor sculpture.

It’s basically pretty good. There are some very witty and provocative juxtapositions. The first room contains banners depicting Epstein’s mistreated BMA sculptures and a smaller reconstruction of Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall. The room therefore contained, in the definition of the exhibition, sculptures of sculptures. So far, so witty. The second room, by far the most cluttered, juxtaposes modernist sculptures with some ancient treasures brought to Britain in the twentieth century and inspiring the primitivist strand in the Modernist movement. The clutter is to great effect because one’s eye initially takes in the whole picture and we see only continuity and coherence between the geographically and historically discontinuous pieces; only as you walk around observing the objects one by one, or in pairs, do you see the complex affiliations and divergences. In the next two rooms there is a more outrageous juxtaposition: Jacob Epstein’s Adam (1938-39), a stunning sculpture of immense power and presence, brutally physical and with an enormous swinging penis and two full opalescent balls, juts its face up to the sky, while, through the archway, Alfred Gilbert’s fussy Jubilee Memorial statue of a bethroned Queen Victoria (1887) looks down with unamused disdain.

Epstein’s Adam, which I’d never before seen, was the highlight of the exhibition, given virtually an entire room to itself, and seeming to fill the generous air around it with energy and sex. It bursts with questions: is this Adam being born? The face upraised against a new sky, the lungs suddenly filled with unfamiliar air, the arms still tucked in like those on Leon Underwood’s Embryo (1924-25) in the previous room? Or is this the Adam of hubris, puffed up with power, body swollen with newly-discovered sex, his face set against God? The only other sculpture in the room is Henry Moore Snake from 1924. Where Adam is in a roseate alabaster, its tones flooding from seminal white to engorged oxblood-red, the Snake is insinuating white marble, swiftly rowled in tangles, to make intricate seem straight.

Barbara Hepworth’s elegantly monumental Single Form (Memorial) (1961-2) is fascinating and deceptive. Enormous, heavy and dominating, yes sensuous, hollow and tactile. I found it much more entrancing than the more familiar Henry Moore that shared its space. Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton’s An Exhibit (1957) was well presented, filling a room, demanding it be inhabited, allowing the polished surfaces to reflect each other, changing the inhabitant’s sense of the wider space, its cheap materials and gaudy colours accumulating a kind of maze-like complexity of planes, reflections, corners and volumes.

Things pivot oddly and unsatisfyingly with Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning (1962). The curators both wanted to acknowledge its conventional placing in art history - Caro as the student of Moore, we were only two rooms away from Moore’s Reclining Figure (1961), which this echoes in its forms - but also wanted to challenge it. The commentary on the wall plaque was rather mealy-mouthed about the piece, suggesting that it was perhaps more of an ending than a beginning. This was a piece that to me didn’t benefit from being given its own room, nor from being juxtaposed by a nagging, sceptical 1969 essay by William Tucker (oddly saying similar things that Michael Fried had said about minimalist art in 1967’s ‘Art and Objecthood’, though Michael Fried had been an early American champion of Caro). The spare form seemed to be to want friends around it, context for the industrial elegance to pick up, echo; other sculptures to be seen through it.

And then, for me, it went a bit downhill. I like a bit of conceptual art, me, but they seemed to pick some stubbornly minor items: Siobhan Hapaska’s Under Lying (1991), basically 2000 Maltesers in tiny plastic bags on a glass coffee table didn’t reveal its secrets to me. Bill Woodrow’s Electric Fire with Yellow Fish (1981), in which from a metal electric fire a fish has been cut, painted yellow and inserted in front of the bar, seemed to me to be asking no question that needed asking. Damien Hirst’s Let’s Eat Outdoors Today (1990-91) doesn’t go much further than 1990’s A Thousand Years, and, in this instance, once you realised that many aspects of it (the suppurating cow head, for example) were artificial, the effect was blunted.

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​William Turnbull Parallels​ (1967)

The minimalist and environmental sections were an exception. Tony Cragg’s Stack (1975) is beautiful; massive, delicate, full of stories, wonderfully balancing chaos and containment. William Turnbull’s Parallels (1967, pictured) is mesmerising and seemed to repay being looked at from every point in the room. Carl Andre’s famous ‘bricks’ (actually Equivalent VIII [1965]) was awkwardly placed with an ugly grey line around it that thoroughly interfered with the internal relationships of the work and Richard Long’s Chalk Line (1984) had its impact blunted by being placed on a zigzagging wooden floor. Others have wondered where Anthony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread were. You don’t expect completism but I found it a rather odd view of the last hundred years, as if the curators were trying to say that contemporary sculpture has basically got a bit shit. I’m prepared to believe that they think there’s unsettling power and wit in Grenville Davey’s Right 3rd and 6th (1989), but not that they think the whole room can compare with Jacob Epstein’s Adam, in any way.

It is worth seeing, and perhaps they want you to argue passionately with their choices - and, yada yada, they’ve kind of made their choices explicit, so you can argue - but you’ll have to argue - and bring your own memories of other work.

Little Platoons

Steve Waters’s new play at the Bush is a real treat. It’s part of the Bush’s ‘School Season’ which has also featured John Donnelly’s The Knowledge. Both have been very well reviewed.

Rachel and Martin are splitting up because Martin’s met someone else. They are both concerned about their son, Sam, and how he is faring in the west London comprehensive where Rachel also teaches music. Martin thinks they might move him to an ex-grammar in Bicester. Rachel, though initially sceptical, becomes drawn into a group who are planning a Free School. Led by the charismatic rogue, Nick Orme and his wife Lara, the project appeals to Rachel when Nick outlines a school with music at its heart. She accepts the role of future head. A year later and the project is underway, about to receive state approval from the Coalition. But there are divisions within the team - is this a school with a traditional curriculum? Should it favour middle-class values? And when the team are to make a presentation to the relevant representative of the Department of Education, Martin appears and rails against the plan. The kids from Mandela they’ve brought in aren’t strictly on-message and Lara seems to have walked out on her husband. The school will go ahead but probably without Rachel.

Steve Waters writes, in the best sense, slightly old-fashioned plays. By which I mean, he writes plays that very squarely wear their issues on their sleeve. The Contingency Plan was unmistakeably about climate change; Fast Labour is undisputably about migrant labour in Britain; World Music is about third world aid and The Unthinkable skewers New Labour. Little Platoons is very precisely about the ‘free school’ movement and, insofar as a play can do, it debates the pros and cons of the scheme and even - very nostalgic, this - has a rallying speech towards the end, evidently expressing the author’s views:

I want us to get off our knees, I want to fight for what we fought form, our parents fought for, I want to defend every benefit and every extra year of school and every free place at uni and every bit of social housing and every park and public holiday, all of the things that almost made the world a little more just, all those things they say we can’t pay for, that we don’t deserve, all the things they tell us don’t belong to us - and this, all this is just a massive diversion from that - I want you to wake up (p. 84)

It’s unfashionably direct and the play is unfashionably specific about what it is discussing, but it is none the worse for that. (A rather more ‘editorial’ final speech has been - wisely I think - cut from this production.) Waters writes with enormous wit, warmth and elegance. The characters are plausible, rounded, rich and complicated; rarely do we feel - as we sometimes feel in other issue-based plays - that a character has been brought before us purely to exemplify a point. No character really exemplifies a single point here. The Free School movement, certainly in the first half, is given all the best arguments; it acknowledges the number of different idealisms that might come together to found a Free School. There are no saints and no demons in this play. Toby Young has apparently co-written an answer-play to this for the Bush; I’d be amazed if he can be more persuasive of the values of the Free School idea than Waters is before the interval.

And, of course, it’s fascinating. Like many people I suppose I’ve thought a bit about the policy, decided I don’t like it and not thought much more about it. It’s just very interesting to really go through the arguments and in such detail and with such an intelligent guide, always, of course, refracted through plausibly real lives and real dilemmas.

It’s very funny too. First, he creates a barnstorming role in Nick, which Andrew Woodall seizes with relish, swaggering around the stage with all the intelligent loucheness of Bill Nighy. He’s outrageous, idealistic, unreliable, brilliant and finally inept. And then there is Polly, charged by the Coalition to make the Free Schools happen. Hers is a brilliantly funny role; clipped, precise, efficient, relentlessly bright (‘We’re certainly mad keen on - grass roots’ p. 74). She’s also authoritative and powerful and Waters keeps us beautifully balanced between derision and awe. And there is a brilliant little exchange about the tiny niggles that conspire to destroy a happy relationship (pp. 69-70).

There are one or two moments where I’d have liked to see a different kind of finesse in the telling. The dramatist’s clumsy short-cut, the character wandering in through an inexplicably open door happens not once but twice (pp. 15, 68). I felt the puppeteer pulling Rachel’s strings once or twice: a dramaturgically convenient tearful breakdown (p. 22), a slightly over-neat plot pivot at the end of Act One, and I found it puzzling that she executed such a swift change of mood between her fury at commercial partnerships and then a sudden impassioned speech in favour of selectivity in admissions policy (in a lovely speech though, about how tired she was of saying ‘no’ and how she’d decided to say ‘yes’, which recalled Bradshaw’s similar speech in Howard Barker’s Victory). I did not wholly believe the way that she spoke to the kids towards the end - unless the idea was to suggest that she’s actually a rather poor communicator - though also I didn’t really find the kids that believable (would they really know who Michael Gove was and what he looked it? Would the excluded Brandon really know what Free Schools were for?).

But these are quibbles and largely occurred to me afterwards. It’s good for me who tends to bang on about metaphor and indirection and theatricality to see how enormously satisfying and enriching plays can be that consider a significant part of their role to educate and debate.