Dick Whittington and His Cat

We took our best friends’ seven-year-old to the panto on Saturday. Dick Whittington (and his cat) is the Lyric’s Christmas show. It’s written by Joel Horwood and Steve Marmion who were partly responsible for the same theatre’s Jack and the Beanstalk last year.

This was pretty good. The story is traditional, in the sense that it’s traditional for the story to be twisted and bloated out of shape. In this the characters head off by boat to Timbucthree, a mysterious exotic island where the King turns out to love the cakes that Sarah the baker makes. As is now also traditional, the show features recent pop hits rewritten to fit the show. So the Glee version of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ became Dick’s dream of London. Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ very pleasingly became King Rat’s ‘Bad Rodents’. Jay-Z’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ became a hymn to London as did Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ (‘Ham-mer-smith, West 6, it’s unforgettable / Big red bus, we’re waving on top’). All of these transpositions were tremendous fun and sung with huge pleasure and verve by a terrific cast, especially the sweet-voiced, slightly camp and very funny Dick (Steven Webb), the utterly, thrillingly evil King Rat (Simon Kunz), and Alice, played by Rosalind James who had a truly amazing live voice.

The story is narrated by Bow and Belle, two bells who appeared on either side of the proscenium and were voiced by Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, in recordings. Some of this was fun, though to be honest pre-recording the voices meant they couldn’t meaningfully respond to the audience and some of the script came across a little flat. Most of the rest of the time, the story cantered along brilliantly. Having been spoiled by seeing Francis Tucker in the Liverpool Everyman Dick Whittington last year, I was slightly underwhelmed by Shaun Prendergast’s Dame, though in fairness our borrowed seven-year-old found her a hoot. Paul Medford was the cat and serviceably got the audience onside.

Made me think, once again, how I’d love to write a panto.

Language Death

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​The Rosetta Stone

In February 2010, Boa Snr, the last living speaker of the ancient language of Bo, died in the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal. She was in her 80s but the language was many thousands of years old. With her died a store of folk memory, songs and stories, a part of human culture. Not the language, of course. She was the last speaker, so the language died many years ago. Linguists debate how many speakers you need for a language to survive much as zoologists debate how many animals you need for a species to be viable.

It gives rise to a fundamental debate about value. Does it matter if a language dies? The Darwinian or the Neoliberal might say that if a language dies, that’s because it no longer serves a purpose and no amount of propping up is going to help it. Such arguments are sometimes heard to scorn efforts to support the Welsh or Cornish languages, or the efforts taken by the Irish government to preserve the speaking of Gaelic. But others disagree of course. For them, a language is not merely a tool, a means of communication; it’s also a storehouse of human history, a repository of knowledge, speculation and imagination, a record of how other people thought that helps us to understand ourselves and our history.

I think there’s a play in this.

The Death of the University

Yesterday, by a narrow 21 votes, the Coalition managed to get through its bill to raise the cap on tuition fees from the current £3290 to a maximum of £9000.

It’s probably the worst day for higher education of my lifetime. This change is being introduced under the guise that it’s to help reduce the deficit. It’s nothing of the kind. If it were about the deficit, the government would also be explaining that in five years off, when it thinks it will have got the deficit down, the cap will return to the current level. They aren’t saying that; they aren’t going to do that. This is nothing more or less than the marketization and privatization of university education.

For thirty years now, we have had an unbroken series of governments with a dogmatic and blind faith in the free market. Despite having just experienced the worst economic crisis in eighty years, possibly longer, because of the failures of a free market in financial services, they are using the mess that caused to push through yet more market reforms.

There are so many problems with the market solution for universities. First, education is a public good. It has positive externalities from the individual transactions made by universities and students. An educated workforce is a good thing for the whole of society. A thinking population is good for our culture and the health of our common existence. A critical citizenry is healthy for our political and intellectual life, for our claims to be a civilization.

Second, in a simple market transaction you select the product you want at the price you’re prepared to pay and you make the deal. Universities are more complicated, because we mark our ‘customers’. If you applied to go to Sainsburys, tried your best to do the best shopping you can, with advice from Sainsburys staff, and then you emerged with a grade and a certificate from Sainsburys, it would profoundly change the nature of your experience of the shop. But they are trying to assimilate universities to supermarkets. What will this mean? Well, occasionally, you see the attitude that ‘we’re paying for our education, we deserve better marks’. Students deserve the best teaching available, but we, as teachers, need to have unalloyed freedom to mark accurately and honestly. The market transaction complicates this in a way that is in no sense helpful or productive.

Third, what is a university education? The rhetoric around the bill has been entirely that graduates earn on average more than non-graduates, and over their lifetime earn substantially more. Therefore, the argument goes, they should pay for their education. There are so many things wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start but (a) it may be that the qualities you need to get into university might also be the qualities that would get you a higher salary. In other words, they are making a post hoc ergo propter hoc error. (b) The government is raising the point at which you have to start paying back your loan (for the fees now) from £15,000 to £21,000. This is a good move, but why £21,000. That’s still far below the national average salary of £25,900.

Men Should Weep

Confession: I’ve never seen or read this play before. This is a fairly embarrassing gap in my knowledge, what with me supposed to be a modern British theatre specialist. So going to the National to see this new production was in quite a large part to fill this gap. I didn’t really expect to enjoy myself very much. I knew it was set in the grinding poverty of a Glasgow tenement in the Depression of the thirties. That sounded to me like the recipe for a grim evening.

The Morrison family live in a tenement flat in Glasgow. The father is out of work, the five children range in ages from a baby to around 18. The youngest child is sick, the oldest brother is married to a woman who no longer loves him. The oldest daughter dyes her hair platinum blonde and can’t wait to get out. Maggie, who holds the family together, is a tough, warm woman who longs for better. The youngest boy has developed TB and his only chance of returning home is if they get out. Maggie’s mother lives with them, moving to Maggie’s sister for a short while; she is insistent that she’ll be dead soon and is barely tolerated by the family. The neighbours in the tenement come and go; one is regularly beaten up by her drunken husband. The main action of the story concerns Jenny, the oldest daughter leaving dramatically, taking up with a man with whom she lives, and returning, on Christmas Eve, with an offer to find them a proper flat with hot running water. Maggie is grateful but when the father comes home, he’s furious and grievously insults his daughter and her ‘whore’s winnins’. This pushes Maggie over the edge and she pours out a lifetime of resentment.

It’s a play in five scenes, organised in three acts. The period the play covers is hard to say. The first act is the evening and midnight of a winter day. The second act’s two scenes take place a week and a month later respectively. The last act is Christmas Eve, but the amount that has changed (John’s got a job, Jenny’s got a boyfriend she’s living with, the family have a wireless) suggests that the first scenes might be January/February and the last act December. So it covers just under a year.

Oh my fucking God, what a sensational play. And a sensational production but what a FUCKING extraordinary play. So, here’s the stuff everyone else knew and I didn’t: (a) it’s fucking hilarious. Really, truly, constantly funny and aphoristic, all of it coming out of character and situation; (b) it’s not mawkish or sentimental in the least but the characters have the most extraordinary dignity. Even when they’re making terrible mistakes, even when they are fucked over by one another, they have the most immense sense of value and dignity as individuals; (c) it’s a real slow burner; nothing much happens by way of story until the third scene, which is a good hour into the play, but this gives a chance for the play and the characters to really stretch out and establish themselves in the round; (d) it’s heartbreakingly sad in places. The point where the father returns home and pours his bile on the estranged daughter, but is then met by Maggie’s own invective is desperately awful, sad and humiliating but made of course true and remarkable by the dignity of the character.

I was struck as well by its genre. It’s Naturalism of a very nineteenth-century stripe. Reminiscent in some ways of The Lower Depths, but also of The Power of Darkness, aspects of Strife and The Weavers, it does everything that Naturalism wanted to do; creates a vivid slice of life but also explains the causes behind the behaviour and attitudes of the characters. It may be Britain’s great Naturalist play. (Extraordinary that Naturalism was so long-lived. From 1887 in the theatre, it’s still producing work in 1947. There have been many naturalistic plays since then but have there been any that are Naturalist? I can’t think of an example.)

The ensemble in this production, under Josie Rourke’s direction, are uniformly excellent. It’s a thrill to encounter this play at last.

Nouveaux Pauvres

The Daily Mail has done it again. If you thought their parodies of middle England couldn’t get any more sublimely perfect, they’ve outdone themselves.

The latest satirist of genius to join their esteemed ranks is Charlotte Metcalf. In an article called ‘Merry Christmas? Along with millions of other middle class families, I can't afford one’, the writer, purporting to be a journalist, laments the state of her finances. The genius of the conception is that the journalist was, until recently, earning a lot of money (£1200 per week) but now was having to scrape a pitiful living on a little over double the minimum wage.

It doesn’t sound funny but it really is. She begins by lamenting that she can’t shop at Harrods any more and extols its virtues in a way that make it seem completely ridiculous and her extraordinarily trivial (you can send your purchases downstairs so you don’t have to be ‘hulking heavy bags’ around the shop). She fondly remembers doing up their country house (added to the two they had in London - oh, and the second cottage that she mentions in an aside they bought as an investment) and fussing over the ‘kitchen, oohing and aahing over Farrow & Ball paint and butler sinks’. In a moment of Onion-like magnificence the supposed narrator, wide-eyed in horror, observes that even Boden is getting too expensive. Imagine!

Like a contemporary Dickens she populates her story with an assortment of contemporary grotesques. She talks about her friends being in ‘quiet despair’ because they can’t afford to do things like buy their fifteen-year-old daughter an iPad. She even creates a hilarious vision of her own pampered child, reminiscent of Violet Beauregard from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who simply will not accept not receiving exactly what she wants. Of course, we’re supposed to infer between the lines exactly where the child got these appalling values.

In a bravura passage, Metcalf looks shudderingly at the Christmas she has ahead of her. In a complex piece of layered irony, she recalls spending £50 on Christmas ribbon, now she claims to have discovered that this is ‘truly shocking. Obscene even’. The most extraordinary touch of satirical magic - though one that risks being too absurd, too revolting to be quite plausible - is the narrator’s description of people in her position as the ‘nouveaux pauvres’. It’s so perfect; turning poverty into fashion (poor is the new rich); the use of French; the phrasemaking self-regard.

There’s no explanation of why she has fallen so far. What did she do as a ‘TV and film producer’? What was this ‘business’ that she set up with her husband? What happened to her investments? She doesn’t say, but that’s of course the crowning joke. She doesn’t have to say because the character’s sense of sheer entitlement overwhelms any sense of realism in her situation at all and that is, of course, the brilliant point.

Much modernist-era fiction - especially in the comic mode - uses the device of the fallible narrator. I think of Diary of a Nobody, of course, but Augustus Carp, Esq. is equally good, and then, in a more complex way, there is The Conscience of Zeno by Italo Svevo. This is in that tradition. Charlotte Metcalf is an extraordinary creation and of course pungently satirical because she stands for everything in our society that, while pretending to deep sympathy, cruelly turns its back on the real suffering of other people and refuses to understand that the real source of their misery is the behaviour, attitudes and privileges of people like Charlotte Metcalf.

You can read the article here. It won’t take you to the Daily Mail; much though I love their comedy, I don’t want to send them any more traffic. I want to keep them to myself.