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Editorial - Issue
26
Heigh-ho-on-Wye
Review - A Proper State -
Leon Rosselson
Alexis Lykiard's latest bombshell
Review: David
Edgar's Testing the Echo
Review:
The Children's Hour
Review -
Waiting for Godot
Review - Collected Poems - Alun Lewis
Dockers & Detectives Relaunched
ROOTS - REVIEW by ALAN
DENT
FOUR POEMS by R.L.
HUGHES
FLY AWAY PETER
REVIEW - THE
NIGHT TROTSKY CAME TO STAY
HIGHGATE - RICK BROWN
REVIEW - A CONVERSATION
OLD BILL - MARTIN DOMLEO
EDITORIAL
FORTHCOMING ISSUE 26
What must be written must be written. Writers dream of being
able to choose their subjects but necessity imposes all the
same, the thing that made Flaubert complain about les affres
du style and which sent him running after St Anthony and
scribbling about Carthage. Madame Bovary, c’etait lui, but it
was a subject he had to force himself to write about, or rather,
his wise friends had to badger him into. Censors understand
this. They forbid writing about what needs to be written about.
Presumably, had Milton had sight of The Saturday Sport he
might have amended Areopagitica, but not much. Milton’s
high-minded assumption, of course, was that writers and
publishers would exercise strict responsibility. After all,
writing and publishing are responsible functions. What drives
the inevitability of Paradise Lost is the urgent need to
explain the ways of god to man, a need that springs from
Milton’s compulsion to explain the ways of god to himself. Where
lies the responsibility of the writer and publisher in our
post-modern paradise ? Where the inevitability ? Apparently, the
primary responsibility of a writer is to win prizes and that of
a publisher to make money, for a writer without prizes is as
ignored as a fat girl among teenage boys and a publisher not on
the make is unlikely to be a publisher long. These two freaks,
the ungarlanded writer and the profitless publisher survive on
scraps, slink in dark corners, occasionally emerge into the
light only to reviled by the cocktail party novelists and
astronomical advance publishers (wouldn’t it be sensible to
distribute the astonishing largesse which brings first-time
novelists deals which would keep a bus driver and family
comfortable for thirty years, among dozens of writers so each
might have something to get by on for a while, or is that
pre-post-modern naivety, the old-fashioned belief that
distribution should undo excess and each man (and woman) have
enough ? Then, what is enough ? Poor old Grey Gowrie couldn’t
get by in London on a government minister’s petty income. A chap
has to be seen in the right places. Eating in the Ivy isn’t
cheap. And there’s nothing worth living in for less than a
couple of million. To the victors the spoils. Stop using your
elbows and you’ll be at the back of the queue. The metropolitan
elite must have their fortunes or the sun will cease shining.
(It rains an awful lot up here.) . What must be written these
days seems slightly less urgent than Milton’s masterpieces but
Einstein has already explained the ways of the universe to man,
or at least to the half dozen who understand him, Karl Marx has
explained the ways of history, though no-one believes him,
Charles Darwin has explained the stunning variety of life-forms
by two simple principles, though a lot of Americans think he’s
the anti-christ; perhaps there’s little left for creative
writers to do. But there’s always something: the cat has been
sick on the carpet or mum’s won at the bingo or you just have to
tell the world about your years as a teenage groupie. Everyone
has a story to tell if only they can ferret it out. But poor old
John Milton was seized by his, it took him by the throat and
threw him around the room for a decade or two. He had no choice.
It demanded to be written. Still, I wonder if his cat ever was
sick on the floor and if he enjoyed a game of dominoes now and
again ? Aren’t we lucky to live in age that scoffs at a
hierarchy of values ?
Now writers like pop stars sell themselves and pose
slick models in the market-place of fame,
and pigeon-minded tv hosts spew inspissated prose
and literature’s a petty, catwalk game,
the not-so-great-and-good assemble every year
among the hills and books of little Hay,
to talk of Akhmatova, Charlotte Bronte and Top Gear
and who might Mariella get to lay;
a fine event for business, for the cameras, for the rich
who eat posh nosh and swill expensive reds,
but those who understand the truth’s persistent, nagging itch
stay desk-bound or sit sharpening their leads;
a president or two, a glib-tongued, car-mad nerd
today can the take the place of Proust or Crabbe,
for who would read, alone, when all the passing herd
assemble here to own what they can grab?
Fran Virgo
Review
A PROPER STATE,
by Leon Rosselson,
Fuse Records, 28 Park Chase, Wembley Park, HA9 8EH.
The second song on this CD, The Ghost Of
Georges Brassens, pays witty homage to the great
French chansonnier, who Kenneth Rexroth thought of as the
best poet of twentieth century France, and whose work has
influenced everyone who is genuinely interested in how to craft
a song, how, as Brassens himself put it, to create un petit
labyrinthe, to please, tease , challenge, delight and
embolden the listener. Leon Rosselson is our own Brassens but
unlike the Frenchman he has never reached a mass audience,
though some of his songs have, notably The World Turned
Upside Down, that great celebration of the Diggers and of
the thrilling tumult of ideas of the era of the English Civil
War, heartening ideas like Rainsborough’s defence of the
poorest he (and she also we should add), recorded and taken
into the charts by Billy Bragg, which goes to show, I suppose,
that the argument from consumer choice is feeble: when people
have Rosselson’s work put before them by an artist they know,
they respond. The effort to ensure the majority listen only to
what Rosselson has called mashed potato music is huge and
vigilant. Big money is at stake. More. The very economic
arrangements which permit a relatively small number to make
fortunes from a relatively large number. Rosselson has been
deliberately sidelined because if too many people listened to
this work, they would start to understand what a real song is,
their sensibilities would shift, their ideas would change. It’s
all too dangerous and must be reserved for a minority.
What a lucky minority.
Rosselson is on great form here and has lost
none of those qualities which have made him for so long such a
fascinating and uplifting presence: a wonderful ear for melody,
a poet’s skill with words, a subtle and highly intelligent
humour and a brilliant ability to make his theme poignant by
concealment. He begins with an hilarious and spiky ditty about
mobile phone culture which brings to mind the comment of Thoreau
when he was told men could communicate from one end of America
to the other by telegraph: Yes, but what would they say to
one another ? The slick technology of communication
renders ever more banal and redundant what is communicated and
Rosselson explores this through a lover’s conversation where the
usual misunderstandings and misinterpretations are increased by
inevitable technological interpolations like, my battery’s
running out . As always, Rosselson’s sharp intelligence and
objective insights are softened by his humorous angle.
The song in honour of Brassens touches on the
thickened stupidity of our culture, as if the majority want
nothing better than pop songs whose melodies are weary,
harmonies barely present and lyrics trite and dull, as if this
anti-song is demanded by the people. Brassens was a great
example of high-standard popular culture which combined
erudition with bawdiness, anarchism with self-deprecation, a
love of life with a wry take on death and a consistent spiking
of pomposity, arrogance and the corruption of power with an
easy-going, good natured celebration of friendship and love. In
reviving the spirit of Brassens, and the song is wonderfully
constructed, robust, energetic and memorable like his, Rosselson
is pointing up the terrible sadness and waste of a culture which
is too cowardly to offer people real artistic sustenance.
Rosselson revives the old song Barney’s
Epic Homer and adds a new one Barney’s Got A Job Now, a lovely broadside against the unimaginative and
depressing conformity and regularity of the workplace. There’s a
clever little song about death in which, like all the best
artistic work on the subject of our mortality, he manages to be
funny, a love song that’s real love song unlike mawkish and
false tripe promoted on the radio day in day out and, of course,
great songs of protest. Rosselson is a master of the protest
song, always composes and writes from a position of high
principle, bracing and uncompromising in the best sense, and
imbues these pieces with exactly the right tone of indignation,
resistance and generosity so any sense of ranting or
simplification is eliminated. Many years ago he made, from the
plans by the property developers to revamp Piccadilly Circus
into a profiteers paradise, the wonderful anthem Plan
whose chorus began, that’s not the way it’s got to be
, the defiant leit-motif of all his songs of protest. Here, The Third
Intafada, Faslane 365 and The
Power Of Song are vibrant, rich, compelling and inspiring.
As the final song says:
Though we’ve nothing but our voices, yet our
voices make us strong
Turn despair into defiance and defiance into song
Give us hope and give us heart
Hold the line and hold the fort
Solidarity forever when our voices weave together into song.
Long live Leon Rosselson and down with Radio
1.
Alan Dent
UNHOLY EMPIRES, Alexis Lykiard's fiercely
witty collection deals with what he terms "the 3 Rs" that cast
shadow on humanity — rulers, royalists, religionists. In UNHOLY
EMPIRES, rhyme and metre are used artfully and memorably to
focus some angry yet often hilarious satire.
Earlier poetry collections by Lykiard -
including Safe Levels (1990), Skeleton Keys (2003)
and Judging By Disappearances (2007) - tackled issues of
nuclear catastrophe, civil war and collaboration, sexuality and
Aids, feminism versus political correctness, and the current
consumer culture. UNHOLY EMPIRES highlights the Iraq invasion
and its dire consequences; the poisonous evasions and
absurdities of Bush, Blair & Co, alongside late-capitalist
decadence and the troubling rise of assorted forms of
fundamentalism.
Alexis Lykiard, the "uncompromisingly
direct", "mucky bard", also dubbed "the true lineal heir to
Rochester and Swift", has remained an independent, concerned but
provocative voice. The 'controversial' label has led to
censorship or banning of his work in various countries and
contexts. Though resolutely anti-political, Lykiard is pleased
to have been praised by the Morning Star and vilified by
The Sun.
Ted Hughes once described a poetry book by
Lykiard as "sharp, cleaving, carving, piercing - bright, sharp,
clean stabs." UNHOLY EMPIRES is Alexis Lykiard on top form,
hard-hitting as ever.
Available from
Anarchios Press, PO Box 619, Exeter EX1 9JE
Review
Testing The
Echo
by David Edgar
Library Theatre Manchester and touring.
I could have sat through
this one-hour-forty-five minute, sixty-eight scene,
whistle-stop exploration of the idiocies, intricacies and
absurdities of testing Britishness simply for the pleasure of
the acting. Max Stafford-Clark’s Out Of Joint are superb.
David Edgar is equally excellently served by Matthew Dunster’s
intelligent, sensitive and disciplined direction. This is a
marvellous show which combines serious ideas, wit, satire,
revue-style nail-on-the-head almost sketch-like scenes and still
manages some subtle characterisation. It’s the work of a mature
dramatist in command of his medium and the writing is pacey,
bracing and attention-holding from start to finish. Its subject,
the straight-from-outer-space lunacy of a definition of what it
means to be British through an arbitrary set of general
knowledge type questions, is of course a symptom of a wider
malaise. Christopher Lasch called it the revolt of the elites.
Edgar, in something akin to agitprop technique, closes in on his
prey. In spite of the questions this piece raises, running
through its veins is a beating contempt for the condescension,
arrogance, prissiness and sheer stupidity of the current drive
to churn out British citizens like Cowley used to produce
runabouts. There is almost a sense of disbelief in the play’s
conception. And in fact, that such a play needs to be written is
a measure of our contemporary tragedy. Just as this production
fills you with delight and admiration at the skill, commitment,
intelligence and imagination of our actors, so it makes you sick
to the pit of your stomach at the time-serving crassness and
dull-witted conservatism of our politicians. This is a play
about the crisis of democracy. It should leave you appalled,
angry and wanting to act ( in all senses).
Edgar enlists the experiences of various
characters who, for one reason or another, want or need to
undergo the Britishness test. The very fact of widely varying
motivations undermines the standardising intention. Probably the
most convincingly drawn character is Emma Goodman-Lee, played
wonderfully by Teresa Banham. Emma is an ESOL teacher and
Banham renders exquisitely her enthusiastic competence and
lightly worn expertise. She is required to integrate Britishness
into her language teaching, a nice example of how education can
be manipulated to serve ideological ends. Late in the play she
finds herself accused of bullying and discrimination by Nasim, a
Muslim who supported the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, for what
are innocent classroom procedures. Easy-going, liberal, a
product of those post-war values which produced CND, Oxfam,
Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Jack Jones ( the trade unionist, not
the singer) even the you’ve-never-had-it-so-goodism of Harold
MacMillan who, reputedly, built more council houses than Nye
Bevan, it’s a lovely and frightening irony she’s accused by a
past supporter of murderous intolerance. Kindred points are
made by Pauline, an articulate, cynical, funny guest at the ESOL
dinner-parties who points up the obvious dubiousness of
protesting in the streets of London against the invasion of Iraq
along with a component of radical Islamists who want to build a
society where such protests would be impossible. It’s a good
point, if easily rebutted: the best defences against any form of
tyranny are thoroughly democratic institutions and the rule of
law, including international law. Yet Edgar is right to raise
these revealing dilemmas. They show us how choices are seldom
commensurate and the achievement of one desirable end may
require the attenuation of another. Life doesn’t deliver up
babyishly simple choices, which is why a simple test of
Britishness is so risible.
At the heart of the play also is Mahmood,
a Brummy, who is voluntarily undergoing cold turkey. This is
Britain. This is Britishness. Drugs. Guns. So-called feral kids.
What has this to do with the distance from John O’Groats to
Land’s End ? Mahmood wants to pass the test to avoid
difficulties over property ownership when he goes back to
Pakistan. But he’s a junkie. So is this what it means to be
British in 2008 ? In demolishing a single, universal , reduced
definition of Britishness Edgar reveals what’s really sinister
about the test: it encourages us to see our primary definition
in our nationality rather than our humanity. A national identity
which is easily defined isn’t worth having. We `are human beings
first and as such may feel more affinity with people of our own
ilk on the other side of the world, or from a past century, than
with our neighbours. What’s wrong with that? Everyone has to
make his or her own agreement with existence. We do so out of a
shared social identity, but within that identity are many and
often very finessed variations. An identity worth having is one
that celebrates the variety which exceeds it.
The identities in this play, Jasminka
the Kosovan prostitute, brilliantly played by the remarkable
Farzana Dua Elahe who conveys her coldly manipulative but
lusciously irresistible sensuality with terrifying accuracy
(that she doubles as the child Muna and can switch in a jiffy to
vulnerable and charming innocence is testimony to her
versatility), the Ukranian Tetyana, played with consummate
confidence by Kirsty Bushell, also portraying Pauline
beautifully, who wants British citizenship to protect her from
being deported if her marriage ( which she wants to end anyway)
is revealed as a sham, Derek, played by the excellent Robert
Gwilym, a red-top reading, football chant barking, typical
working man Brit who revels in his low-level interests and
anti-intellectualism, and the other twenty or so, are
inspiringly unalike. Surely it is difference which is delightful
? What has happened to us as a society, what has happened to our
Britishness that it has become so insular, fearful,
inward, withdrawn, suspicious ? What has happened to us that we
need to test people who come to live here, who bring their
difference which should make us rejoice ? This is the bigger
issue adumbrated here. John Berger once remarked that
totalitarianism is characterised by the reduction of reality
to the proof of a single idea. We might also say, by the
reduction of identity to the proof of a single test.
Alan Dent
Review
The
Children’s Hour
by Lillian Hellman
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester,
5th March – 5th
April 2008.
This is a play about the nature of deception:
the most effective lie contains a grain of truth. In its final
scenes, it also raises the Kafkaesque spectre: accusation
engenders guilt in the accused. Falsely accused, by a disturbed
pupil, of sexual relations with her colleague Karen Wright,
Martha Dobie begins to wonder if there was some fire behind the
smoke. Did she love her fellow teacher in more than an
affectionate sense ? Had the child spotted something ? Hellman
is very astute about the way imputations play on our minds. It
is every bully’s delight to sow the seeds of self-doubt and
watch them grow into self-hatred. In this case, the bully is a
child. She is more than a bully, she is seriously demented. One
of those personalities which sees everyone as a mere extension
of itself to be manipulated, she is conscienceless, incapable of
remorse, vicious, cunning and utterly plausible. What has made
her so terrifyingly inhuman ? All we know is that her father
killed himself and she is being raised by her grandmother. Were
Mary Tilford an adult, she would be horrifying. That she is a
child makes her thoroughly diabolical. Malicious accusations
against teachers are, of course, commonplace and have ruined may
careers and lives. Few though can have been so coldly
calculating, clever and deadly as this.
Karen and Martha have worked hard to
establish their school and have been running it for eight years.
They are committed, kindly, dedicated. Like all teachers, they
can take their role too seriously, but they are noble women. Why
does Mary want to destroy them ? The absence of discernible
motive is disturbing. Mary wants to destroy because she wants to
destroy. Her tantrums, her wild accusations of victimisation are
no reason. They are part of the drama she must always be the
centre of. She exists only in crisis. Without a terrible
injustice she’s the recipient of, she’s a cipher. Like all such
people, walking a tightrope over insanity, she is utterly
oblivious of the damage she does to others. Others don’t exist,
after all. Mary has control of her peers because of her
willingness to use violence and her clever emotional torture.
When a conversation between the teachers is overheard and
over-interpreted by two girls, Mary seizes her little
opportunity and exploits it with all the wickedness of her
perversity. She takes her story to her grandmother. But can’t
the adults deal with this wilful and twisted child ?
Amelia Tilford is a brilliant creation.
Faced with her grandchild’s wild stories, she dismisses her as
foolish, self-indulgent, ridiculous. She responds firmly and
without a hint of exaggeration or sentimentality. She is the
very model of a good carer: calm, judicious, able to absorb the
hysteria of her ward and to respond with plain good sense. Any
ordinary child would give up in seconds. But Mary knows her
grandmother’s weakness. Like Iago insinuating vile lies into
Othello’s mind, she whispers the devastating rumour to the old
woman. Why does she believe her ? Why doesn’t she dismiss this
as readily as the rest ? Because it is too vile. Because in her
own mind are a horrible fear and disgust which when ignited burn
away all her strength and judgement. She acts on her fears. The
results are devastating.
The one man caught in this maelstrom of
female machination is Dr Joseph Cardin, Amelia’s nephew. She
summons him. He is appalled at what she has done. He reviles
her. Throughout the play, he remains steady in his love for
Karen and resolutely rational in the midst of rampant
irrationality. All the same, his life is destroyed. The slow
working out of the terrible logic of destructive falsehood, the
impotence of truth against the catastrophic hurricane of lies
tinged with plausibility, the dreadful, irresistible attraction
of such lies, an attraction far more compulsive than mere
veracity, ensures that all that was sure becomes doubtful,
everything noble, suspect, everything genuine, questionable.
Like The Crucible, this play asks who can speak honestly
when a mania for lies is abroad ? Here, it is a small community
wrecked by falsehood, but why not whole nations, entire
civilizations ?
Karen and Martha go to law and lose. How
difficult it is to establish our innocence. Karen notices tiny
changes in the way Joe relates to her. That he might believe the
rumours, even for a second, even in some tiny detail, undermines
her trust. Their love goes begging. The school is lost. An
Ibsenite off-stage gunshot puts an end to the tormented Martha.
Amelia, too late, repents her gullibility and seeks to make
amends. It is always too late. The human mind is so constituted
it will respond to fabrication so unhinged it would have no
connection to reality, except for that tiny, hard, irreducible
grain of possible truth on which it depends for its effect. The
Jews were to blame for the economic ills of the Weimar Republic
? Dreyfus was a traitor ? The Zinoviev letter was authentic ?
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ? The bullies,
sociopaths, psychopaths and goons flourish on the tragic fact
that lies are easy to believe, comforting, uplifting. Amelia
Tilford begins her campaign in a spirit of moral certitude and
rectitude. Children are being educated in an atmosphere of
corruption ! She is of her time. Lesbianism is beyond the pale.
Sunk in a conventional set of values, as most people most of the
time, she takes them for an over-arching truth and
justification. Another tragic facet of the human mind.
This not usually thought of as Hellman’s best play, but it is
real drama and high tragedy. Its exposure of the frailty of
truth and the permanent potential for vicious lies to hold the
public mind is accomplished at the highest artistic level.
Sarah Frankcom introduces quasi-expressionistic elements into
her direction to overcome some of the difficulties of
representing a school. Excellently done. The whispering pupils
surrounding the stage, the beautifully choreographed suspenseful
moments of collective action, are highly intelligent uses and
enhance the sinister undertones. Franckom’s direction of the
actors is of the highest order too. She elicits wonderful
performances. Maxine Peake (Karen Wright) and Charlotte Emmerson
(Martha Dodd) appear on television. All to the good that a wide
audience can appreciate them. But their gifts are wasted on that
reaching-down medium: they are both superb, especially in the
subtle modulations of emotion necessary as their worlds fall
apart. Kate O’Flynn as Mary Tilford carries off a remarkable
performance. From the moment she comes on stage, you can’t take
your eyes off her. Her Mary is thoroughly obnoxious, utterly,
flesh-creepingly convincing. There is one point when seated and
lying through her teeth, she forces her toes against the floor
and arches her feet in tension: a beautiful metaphor for her
inner twistedness and perfectly executed. Flora Spencer-Longhurst
(Rosalie Wells) is also exquisite. Aided by her striking beauty
and brown, innocent eyes as big as plates which convince you she
really is fourteen, she evokes the terrified, shifting,
bewildered innocence of a healthy young girl at the mercy of a
monster. If you don’t fall in love with her you haven’t got a
heart. Milo Twomey (Joseph Cardin) is perfect as the brisk,
down-to-earth physician whose confident reason is battered by
the lunacy of murderous tittle-tattle. And at the heart of these
performances of international stature is June Watson (Amelia
Tilford). She judges every detail perfectly: accent, gesture,
intonation. This is a thoroughly first-rate performance, acting
of extraordinary poise, grace, intelligence and finesse.
A
pity this runs for a mere month.
Alan Dent.
REVIEW
WAITING FOR GODOT
by Samuel Beckett
Library Theatre, Manchester.
Beckett is reputed to have remarked
that only an Irishman could understand Godot. Here, Estragon
and Vladimir speak with Mancunian accents. Does it alter the
lines ? Probably, because accent is neither superficial nor
arbitrary. Imagine Prince Charles in his best RP saying: Is
it your round ? and the same words being spoken by Wayne
Rooney. Is there a change in meaning ? Even if you didn’t
know PC was a royal the “posh” accent implies social status
and authority while the Liverpudlian tends to suggest the
opposite. Speaking isn’t just about denotative meaning and
tone of voice makes all the difference. Accent is a variety
of tone of voice and it carries meaning. Try speaking in a
“posh” accent and you’ll find the corners of your mouth pull
down ever so slightly. There is a sneer contained in RP
because it’s a class accent. In the same way, there’s a
warmth a friendliness inherent in native Mancunian. It’s an
accent forged in close, working-class communities where
mutual support was a cherished value. Part of the reason
middle-class southerners think of northern accents as
gormless is because they contain this emotional tenor of
easy-going camaraderie: it’s not the way go-getters speak.
Even an eminently middle-class girl like Joan Bakewell who
hailed from posh Cheshire worked hard to eliminate any trace
of the northern from her speech in order to get on in the
media. A Mancunian accent implies Mancunian attitudes, and
in Manchester they vote Labour as naturally as folk in
Reigate toast the queen. I think Beckett intended Gogo and
Didi to be Irish when the play was performed in English. The
French version is, of course, another matter. Some of the
lines are distinctly Irish: Get up while I embrace
you isn’t said in Salford. So the accents take something
away and part of it is comedy, for as Irishmen, Gogo and
Didi are historically marginalised. It is natural they
should be waiting. Colonised peoples don’t act. Usually, the
play is taken to have no social context: it speaks of
existential matters. The existential tag arose partly
because the play was first performed in Paris when Sartre
was the most famous intellectual in Europe and his
philosophy was dans le vent. There is little in the
play which speaks of existentialism as a self-conscious
philosophy. Rather, there is regret for lost opportunity (
We should have done it a million years ago, when we were
young. Hand in hand off the Eiffel Tower. We were
respectable then.) and longing for change in a situation
of stasis. Beckett was born in Ireland at time when people
still lived on the road and slept in ditches. The image of
Gogo and Didi must have been implanted young. During the
war, Beckett had to flee south to avoid the Gestapo and
worked as an agricultural labourer. Boring work, waiting for
the war to end, the cruelty. And it’s when cruelty makes its
entrance in the guise of Pozzo that this production takes
off. Russell Dixon is perfect. He speaks snooty RP, he is
pompous and high-handed, his perfunctory politeness conceals
a vicious character. And he is English. Dressed for the
city, for posh milieux, he lords it over his shabby
interlocutors whose dearest wish is a hayloft bed. Pozzo has
cooked food. A chicken leg. Lavish compared to the carrots
and turnips Gogo and Didi exchange and confuse. He throws
the bones to his carrier. Pozzo is distinguished by
property. Unlike Gogo and Didi, he doesn’t wait: he
advances. He drives Pozzo. Not his destination but the fact
of his going is the source of his power. Even when he loses
his sight he remains in command. He shortens the rope. Yet
as he is driven so he is led. His slave pulls him along. His
property makes him arbitrary and cruel. He has to live up to
it. Dixon captures all this perfectly. Pozzo, like Gogo and
Didi is a man doing what he has to do. He is locked into his
fate. He goes on. He drives his slave. They wait.
The arrival of the boy introduces a curious note. He comes
from Godot who is, therefore, no mysterious, inaccessible
force. He brings a message. Godot sends his apologies. Gogo
and Didi are waiting for a real person who is lax in meeting
his promises. Godot employs the boy and his brother. He is a
man of at least a little property. He is violent towards the
boy’s brother. Gogo too gets beaten. Daniel Shaw captures
the timidity and bewilderment of the boy excellently. He is
a go-between with a simple message and no answers. Didi
takes his frustration out on him. He sees him as a conduit
to Godot. He treats him harshly. On his second appearance,
the boy has to flee ( in the original French comme une
fleche – like an arrow). He is rightly wary of the
adults. He is made use of and has to find his own space.
The famous remark that this is a play in which nothing
happens twice is cuter than it’s accurate. The second act,
though almost as long as the first, has the feeling of an
appendix. There are one or two moments where Beckett
struggles to move it along in keeping, perhaps, with one of
the most telling lines: Pozzo declares petulantly, Haven’t you finished
tormenting me with your accursed
time (in the French, Vous n’avez pas fini de
m’empoisonner avec vos histories de temps). Beckett, of
course, had studied Proust. No doubt he had also absorbed
the 20th century’s relativistic view of time. The
old certainty that the onward march of time leads towards a
desired destination and the temporal faith in progress, or
in what Ortega y Gasset called uchronianism, have collapsed.
The result is disorientation. This production captures well
the loss and longing of Didi and Gogo. It’s a good Godot.
But those Mancunian accents speak of a warmth and community
at odds with their loneliness in a world of apparently
arbitrary cruelty.
Alan Dent
Review
COLLECTED
POEMS: ALUN LEWIS.
Edited by Cary Archard
Seren ISBN 1-85411-316-X £9.99
This is the paperback edition of a collection
first published in 1994. It contains the poems from
Lewis’s two collections: Raider’s Dawn and Ha!Ha!
Among The Trumpets plus twenty-seven further
uncollected pieces, 123 poems in all. Lewis was born
in 1915, the greatest influence on his work was
Robert Graves. It would need a critic more familiar
with Graves’s work to assess just how great a debt
Lewis owed, but these poems are too achieved to be
derivative. Lewis evokes precisely the tenor of his
age. He is thought of as a Second World War poet and
there are, of course, many references to that
conflict, but he was a poet before 1939 and his work
exceeds the fighting for which he enlisted despite
his pacifist inclinations. Love makes plenty of
entrances; love interrupted, foiled or denied by war
certainly, but in writing about love Lewis recreates
the emotional landscape of an age before easy
knowingness, widespread divorce, ubiquitous sexual
images, the extreme self-assertion of the modern era
which makes it hide its face. The whole of the
collection, in fact, exudes the aura and odour of a
more innocent age where possibilities we have ruined
still loomed large in spite of the rise of fascism
and the stupidity of war:
We are of Life,
Teeming and musical
Perfect and instant
As the sift silk flash of the swifts
Which do not care for the houses of the wealthy,
But have instead their own instinctive life,
The flight and rhythm of the blood.
This from Lines On A Tudor Mansion has obvious
echoes of Lawrence and in its subtle nod in the
direction of a remaking of social relations speaks
of a what, from our perspective, seems a naïve faith
in generosity. Similarly, in one of the uncollected
poems, The Suicide, Lewis writes:
Why such a harsh reply to his request?
Why was the mortgage so abruptly closed?
Why was he so alone in a People’s Age?
He could have hitched a lift, you’d have supposed.
Tender, compassionate, questioning, almost
inherently alien to cynicism, Lewis is also, to use
a Sunday review cliché term, thoroughly “assured”.
Given that he died at twenty-eight, his achievement
is remarkable. He was a mature poet by his
mid-twenties. His writing is full of the attractive
rhythms which much modern poetry, inheriting a
mid-Atlantic preference for the conversational and
an American tendency to the excessively personal,
can lack. Very few of his poems aren’t lovely simply
in their sound when read aloud. He also has a true
genius for le mot juste. Over and again he brings an
image to life with freshness and vitality by a
choice of word which fits to perfection. He is
especially good with that dangerous bit of lexis,
the adjective:
the coal-tipped misty slopes
Across the high-flung bridge
the impersonal drone of death
trembles the throbbing night
Has any twentieth century British poet written more
memorably than Lewis? What appeals most about him is
his evocation of his time in such honesty and
reclaimable emotional poignancy that looking back
though his gift to us we can sense, with shame and
pain, what we have lost in failing properly and
courageously to attend to his genius and others like
it. Lewis was found with a wound to his head and his
revolver in his hand while on active service in
Burma. The judgement was accidental death. Let’s
hope so for if it was otherwise our debt and our
shame are the greater. It would be an exaggeration
to call Lewis neglected but his status isn’t as high
as it should be. If this superb volume helps to
remedy that, so much the better.
Alan Dent
Dockers & Detectives - The Relaunch Review
It’s probably fifty years since Ken
Worpole attended a launch in Liverpool. Back then it’d
be a nuclear sub from the dock he was helping to build
at Cammel Laird’s. Last night (March 6th
2008) he was launching his own craft - the re-write of
his classic analysis of prole lit – Dockers and
Detectives which first appeared in 1983. Next to him, on
the top table at the News from Nowhere Bookshop at 96
Bold Street, was screenwriter Jimmy McGovern.
Ken’s thesis is that London and Liverpool
are special sites – port cities with a vital working class
culture energised by immigrants and the strong story telling
tradition of sea-faring men. He remarked how, as a teenager on
his first stay at a men’s hostel near the docks, he was
constantly pestered by yarn spinning sailors. Jimmy grinned.
The great, but now submerged, scribes of
that earlier period were James Hanley, George Garrett and Jim
Phelan. Not realist writers but expressionists (has this got
something to do with their eclipse?). We were reminded by a
member of the audience that Malcolm Lowry was a scouser who
joined the Merchant Navy and whose first book Ultramarine was
influenced by sailors like Melville, Conrad, and Jack London.
The Merch in those days was a quick, cheap way of seeing the
world and an escape route for desperate fathers of illegitimate
kids. Ken mentioned unwanted pregnancy as an important motif in
the novels of the 50s (eg Sillitoe, Barstow et al).
Perhaps west coast ports like Glasgow,
Cardiff and Liverpool had the edge on others being on main
routes to America. We don’t hear much of the school of
Felixstowe or Harwich. New York was a magnet. Ken wistfully
admitted to still treasuring his old Verve jazz records. Rock an
Roll, the Beat poets and Kerouac (another sailor) were
liberating influences from the dominant US popular culture - and
- “the tough guy vernacular style of writing was often adopted
by many British working class male writers as the appropriate
register for writing about their experiences” (D&D p71)
Another strand Ken explored is the
re-writing, and even erasing, of working class history. The
period of World War II was replayed in the aftermath as a
triumph of elite heroes like Guy Gibson, Douglas Bader and
Barnes Wallis rather than the tenacious resilience of docklands
workers. It seems we were fighting to preserve the
quintessentially English rural idyll – a thatched roofed pub in
the Cotswolds – rather than a working class community and its
values.
His most off-the-wall notion is that the
built environment acts as an anchor and definer of
consciousness. That people of different ethnicities or creeds
can feel a common bond in their attachment to place; and that
our destruction of even industrial installations weakens this
social glue. He “reads” these environments as he would a book.
Declining to give a conventional book-launch type recital he did
chose to quote at length one paragraph from Robert Colls
Identity of England which he uses on page 10 of D&D.
When the
staple northern industries began to splutter from the 1970s,
very deep meanings choked with them. Buildings that for years
had given habitude to landscape were brought down without a
second glance. Elegant mill chimneys, dramatic colliery
headgear, sun-bright shipyard cranes, all hit the ground in
clouds of masonry, and with them fell a whole visual culture.
Where ships' hulls had once swerved across the skyline, there
was now only sky. Lodges and institutes, formerly places of
association and learning, became derelict. The bands ceased to
march. Banners were furled. Methodist chapels, emotional
heartlands of the Industrial Revolution, became carpet stores.
Pine pews were ripped out and sold as antiques. A landscape was
humiliated, piecemeal.
The event hostess wondered what we’d do
with all these disused mine shaft installations. Wouldn’t the
place start to look like a museum? Ken thought, gnomically, a
proper integration would be “difficult”.
The idea of “reading” environments arose
when he was questioned about the influence of the internet and
the possible decline of book reading. In the future, the
questioner reasoned, we’d be absorbing most of our info from TV
and DVDs via the activities of people like Jimmy. JM looked
puzzled, as well he might, being a writer who still sits at a
keyboard most of the time. But maybe it is possible to produce a
show by simply exhorting actors to say something interesting.
Big Brother eg. Ken guiltily admitted to being a keen reader
still, but thought the academic obsession of 1980s radicals who
believed writing more fat books on theory would usher in the
revolution was now exposed as a dead end. You can come in now
Karl; sorry the position is filled.
As for the internet, personally I prefer Chou
en Lai’s answer when asked if he thought the French revolution
had been a good thing – it’s too soon to tell. Ken is no luddite
on the web and said generous things about this site and the one
on Voices. I sense he sees important synergies in prospect – and
perhaps even the building of an electronic community on the
ruins of the physical wilderness. One thing the web does do is
give everyone, working class included, an ease of access to
literature and art works which would have astonished even Louis
XIV. Ken’s final section, on East End literature mentioned a
writer unknown to me – Dan Billany. Twenty years ago I might
have searched bookshops in vain for this rarity. Now I log on
and immediately find a first edition of The Trap for three quid
in Belfast.
Ken’s encouragement of working class
writers like Jimmy back in the 70s was generously acknowledged.
JM has said elsewhere “it was always a boost to get a story in
Voices”. His connection with his roots has remained strong. Why
do some proletarian writers fade away? They get rich, move out
and wither. Jimmy recommended the Liver Vaults in his home
suburb of Kensington as a top boozer and all purpose prole hub
(no not that Kensington). But even the playing fields in
Kensington have been built over so that the sportsmen of the
Liver Vaults have no pitch. Thanks to the City of Culture cash,
however, one will be created on a reservoir. Christ! These
scousers are so blest they don’t just walk on water the play
footie on it!
Jimmy had some sound advice to the writers
of historical reconstructions. Leave out apostrophes. Your
modern man says “You’re an idiot” but Elizabethan man says “You
are an idiot” I searched frantically for a pen. He might
even say “Verily Sir, thou art an idiot” The possibilities for
an overworked scriptwriter are vast. Jimmy’s TV series could be
played again in doublet, hose and codpieces. They just need
translating. Look out for Ye Street coming soon on channel 97.
Ken, unfortunately, wasn’t booked into the
Liver Vaults but the less salubrious Adelphi (it has improved a
bit recently). At least there he shouldn’t be too bothered by
yarn spinning sailors.
Ken Clay
REVIEW
ROOTS by Arnold Wesker
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
It’s odd that a
play taken to be about working-class life should have been set
amongst a disappearing rural workforce at a time when the
industrial working-class was on the cusp of a period of high
influence. This is partly, of course, to do with the play being
drawn from the author’s own experience. Nevertheless, from a
twenty-first century perspective it raises a sense of mild
inappropriateness. Wesker has said the play is about
self-discovery and from that point of view, the class question
barely matters. Beattie Bryant’s need to find her feet is every
young person’s and particularly, every young woman’s. Yet the
theme of socialism, of unemployment, of being put on casual
labour, of the bosses responding to every increase in pay with
sackings, this theme which hovers at the edge of the play and
bids for a full admission the playwright denies, tantalizingly
suggests that world of car park strike votes, of “wildcat”
actions, of trade union leaders’ tanks on prime ministers’
lawns, which is remote from the backward rusticity of the play’s
setting. Beattie is full of life, but only because she no longer
belongs to this agricultural world whose slowness, absence of
intellectual values, cultural impoverishment and plain bovine
dullness she wants to subvert. She lives in London. She’s in
love with Ronnie, the argumentative culture-loving leftie we
never meet but whose ideas she recycles. She’s experienced the
excitement of city life. She wants to educate her family. She
wants the thrill she’s known to enliven their mud-on-the-boots
existence. In this she is attempting the impossible. Perhaps
this is why the play was so unthreatening to even conservative
critics. Bernard Levin called it “this great shining play”.
There is a sense that Beattie is trying to push water uphill.
She wants to educate the apparently ineducable, to bring culture
to the resolutely ignorant, to make these poor, exploited folk
see not merely the sense, but the joy of socialism. It’s
hopeless. When she speaks the word “equality”, her
brother-in-law jumps up and calls her a communist. To people
like Levin, a play showing the futility of trying to improve the
cultural landscape of the poor and ignorant must have been very
reassuring.
Joan Plowright
loved the role of Beattie and it is justly remarked that Wesker
created marvellous female roles, the like of which had never
been seen on the English stage. In a sense, this is a one-woman
play. It’s almost a monologue with interventions. Apart from
Beattie, who is a remarkable creation, a woman it’s impossible
not to admire and love, only her mother comes into real focus as
a character of significance. It’s between these two the genuine
drama is played out. Yet the battle is very unequal, for Mrs
Bryant lives like a horse in a gin. The best she knows of
culture is slushy radio pop. And here is another theme
contesting for space: the condescension and exploitation of a
slick, commercial popular culture which assumes the masses are
worth no better and want no better and so diligently and
cynically feeds them superficial, cheap, ephemeral kitsch which
leaves their minds as poor as their pockets. Against this, as
against the cruelty of the exploitation of her father’s labour,
Beattie struggles with the second-hand ideas and the post-war,
urban cockiness she has absorbed from Ronnie. Yet from the very
start we know her attempt at transforming her folks’ conditions
of life will get nowhere. Dramatically this works excellently,
for in the final, exultant apotheosis in which Beattie at last
speaks for herself we feel that the only possibility for
her has been realised. She can escape. She can leave her rural
roots behind and take her place as an articulate and thinking
young woman in the urban culture which will offer her some
opportunity. It’s impossible not to celebrate this. She has
triumphed. She has railed against her lack of roots, the failure
of her family and its culture to provide her what she needed to
fulfil the best in her, yet she has found herself. She has done,
in fact, just what the incipient meritocracy of the 1950s
prescribed: she has got out of crippling conditions. The
socialism she has embraced postulates something else: the
elimination of those conditions through collective action.
Wesker’s honesty as socialist sympathiser, is to acknowledge
that at the time and in the prevailing circumstances, individual
escape was possible but social transformation a different
matter. Had Beattie waited for the revolution, she would have
ended up like her mother.
Dealing
naturalistically with the lives of the agricultural poor
inevitably pulls the play into slowness. Its naturalism is
excessive: the frying onions of the opening, the stage business
with crockery and tin baths. Claire Brown, a wonderfully good
actress who endows Beattie with exactly the right combination of
exultant expectation and post-adolescent naivety, takes her
clothes off for the bath scene. It’s delicately handled so her
dignity is preserved and she’s a physically delightful young
woman; but is such absolute naturalism necessary ? Wouldn’t it
have been easy for her to disappear behind a screen ? The
naturalism distracts. The first two acts suffer from the
conventionalism of Wesker’s conception. He has acknowledged the
play is not in the least formally innovatory. Perhaps it is a
little too much of a well-made-play. At the time he wrote it,
the ninety minute drama hadn’t been perfected. Would a dramatist
addressing this material in 2008 write three acts ? The form of
the play seems dated. There are moments in this production when
no lines are being spoken and domestic tasks are being fulfilled
in such a naturalistic way you might have wandered into your
neighbour’s kitchen. My guess is modern audiences can fill in
quickly from dramatic hints and the staging needs to take that
into account. The pace of the first two acts is also very slow.
Given that everything is driving to Beattie’s final speech, to
her life-enhancing moment of escape both from the oppression of
her family’s narrow horizons and Ronnie’s insistent tutoring,
there is no need for so much insistence on the dim, depressing
round that makes up the Bryant’s life. At one or two moments,
you can almost hear Wesker straining to find the next line. The
problem, again, is the naturalism. Nine-tenths of what is
conveyed in conversation is transmitted non-verbally. When
characters exchange banalities, there has to be something
significant behind them. At one or two instants the dialogue
comes dangerously close to the flat transcription of soap-opera.
The Bryant’s
lives are impoverished in every way but the terrifying aspect of
the play is their impoverishment of spirit. A decent income will
lift them materially, but how will they rise in other ways.
Wesker is straying into some of the territory of The Uses Of
Literacy. He was writing at a turning-point. The expansion
of education, a rising disposable income for the working-class,
the arrival of television in many homes inspired the hope of an
improved culture for the majority. Hope rather than glib
historical optimism is where Wesker places his faith. But the
commercial interests weren’t going to miss the opportunity, and
we all know what happened. Historical hindsight imbues the play
with a predictive wisdom: it saw the cultural decline on the
horizon and was seeking to defend against it.
This is a fine
production. The qualms about naturalism aren’t a criticism of Jo
Combes’s direction. She gets the best out of an excellent cast,
especially Claire Brown and the remarkable Denise Black as Mrs
Bryant whose ability to reveal how a painfully restricted
domestic routine carried through in straitened and emotionally
crippling circumstances can set the limits of a woman’s life is
as stunning as it is heart-rending. David Beames exudes the
care-worn exhaustion of Mr Bryant: when he comes on stage you
really believe he has just finished a hard stint on the farm.
Owen Oakeshott conveys the resigned, quiet tragedy of Jimmy
Beales and Caroline Devlin is superb as his accepting wife whose
tolerance, insight and compassion haven’t been crushed by having
to cope with unmarried pregnancy and a loveless marriage. John
Cording enlivens his scenes as the crippled, cynical, drunken
Stan Mann whose sense of humour and vigorous love of life gain
the most vulgar expression and Lorna Lewis and Patrick Connolly
provide thoroughly poised support as the exceptionally
conventional and predictable Pearl and Frank Bryant.
Roots
occupies a central place in twentieth century British drama. A
revival is always welcome. The flaws in the play don’t prevent
it being a landmark, above all for the character of Beattie. She
is magnificent and we could all benefit from some of her joie
de vivre, hope and resilience.
Alan Dent
FOUR POEMS
SPECTATOR
There he stands,
old man with a dry mouth
waiting for his soul to sing,
anything;
conscious that he cannot always
choose the song
and never call the tune.
Spectator
who sees most of the game
but, tongue-tied by despair,
cannot give
a coherent commentary
or find words
of comfort for the losers.
WALKING IN WINTER
Frost has put white flesh
On the bare bones of trees,
Thickened and stiffened the leaves
Of grass and herb that crisp
And crackle underfoot
Mist encloses the mountain.
It's cold enough for snow,
Which will not be slow
To spread from the far peaks
To these wooded slopes below
And sheathe white flesh in
Even whiter skin.
JANUARY FIRES
Smoke is rising from the bay:
men are building bonfires on the beach,
raising pyramids of brush and driftwood:
root and branch and twisted trunk of trees
wrenched up, dismembered, drowned,
picked clean by sea and surf and left
to moulder bone bare on the stony shore;
wrack of the last of last year's storms
cast away by wind and wave and strewn
haphazardly across the beach,
now gathered up and stacked on pyres,
slyly probed by fingers of fire
that flare in sudden breaths of air
and fan out into flaming palms,
sparks flying wildly to expire
in the sunlit January sky,
then die away to smouldering ruins,
where charred remains disintegrate
and ash and embers disappear
among the shingle, shells and shards.
TWO PHOTOS
One black and white, slightly
out of focus, faded
with age; the other
in colour and clearly defined.
In each a fair-haired child in
a white dress turns her head
towards the camera, looks
at me out of the photo.
Each child is two years old.
Thirty six years lie between them.
Looking at the colour print
I found I was afraid,
waiting for the child
to pass the other's age,
never having imagined
that another might come
even this close. (She too would
ask for me in my absence.)
What surprises me is that
it does not seem like betrayal;
rather, something to celebrate.
R.L. Hughes
FLY AWAY PETER
A sticky wicket needs a bat as straight
as C.K.’s whiskey;
a steady nerve, a hunter’s eye, an instinct for what’s
risky;
and Peter was our hero once when he put paid to bowling
by racists from apartheid’s land whose sweet death knell was
tolling;
he rose above corruption’s stench, he stood for all that’s
classy
we watched him on our black and whites and loved him more
than Lassie.
He gave us hope that principle might kick the arse of
grafting
and politicians find more joy in justice than in shafting;
but Peter shinned the greasy pole like any shabby creep
and found that McCord’s tricky case just sent him fast
asleep.
He knew that power must be bought, he preened in front of
mirrors
he thought himself a lofty sir and all the people sirrahs.
Now Peter fights to save his skin and we all find it funny
how young ideals get sucked into the septic tank of money.
Review
THE NIGHT TROTSKY CAME TO STAY
by Allison McVety
Smith/Doorstop
ISBN 978-1-902382-906 £7.95
Allison McVety’s work has the feel of necessity.
In all her poems you sense she has worked hard to get to the heart
of things. She has a writer’s impatience with cliché and the
penetrating attention of the artist who stares hard at the ordinary
to find what makes it work. The ordinary is everywhere. Here’s some
of the lexis: pavement, hopscotch, fags, flags, kerbs, scullery,
sequins, slop bucket, newsprint, smog, pub, canal, docklands, street
lamps, prams, tarmac, rum, shilling, stove, tat, corporation,
wireless, gabardine. This short list speaks of three things: the
commonplace, the north and the past. McVety is brilliant at quickly
evoking an era or milieu:
De-mobbed, you skulk
the day away in
an ill-fitting suit.
or
That school gabardine of mine
with its slip-in, slip-out lining
quilted for winter use
She has an acute sense of how identity is built
from small details and of the way the past tugs on the present like
the reins on a toddler. She conveys the feeling she’s amazed by
existence and finds the remarkable in the banal, and the sensibility
that shines through this collection is as subtle as Emily Dickinson,
as wry as Jane Austen as without illusions as Aphra Behn.
McVety’s style isn’t remote from that of most
modern poetry. She isn’t an innovator in that sense. Yet she is
startlingly original. Her originality lies in her eclecticism, her
ability to make connections between the material and the abstract,
the familiar and the remote, and her astonishing care in leading the
reader to the delightful little insights the poems deliver. Holub’s
toothache is entirely absent from this collection which is
remarkable when so much of it is rooted in McVety’s own experience.
How does she do it ? How does she take the stock-in-trade of
contemporary British verse and quietly make it deliver McVetyism ?
My guess is the answer is too complex to be fathomed but one crucial
element , I would suggest, is that she has that rare combination of
a down-to-earth background, high gifts and fine education.
D.H.Lawrence had the same and it permitted him to write about
experience denied to middle-class writers. Yet it isn’t merely a
question of subject matter, it’s also a mind made in circumstances
which allow the elaboration of a perspective and sensibility as
surprising as a camel on Deansgate. Most of all though, McVety is
beautifully precise with language. I think this is what gives her
the edge over many poets. All poets strive for his precision of
course, but there’s a Flaubertian quality to McVety’s choice of
le mot juste which sets her apart:
Past the nail bar where
masked
manicurists, like dentists,
buff, polish, de-scale
the debris of the morning.
The ghost
of coal lingers in the grain as the boat
stretches
and shrinks in the clink of its skin.
where we ate cold ham with
new potatoes,
waited for Dad, the pocket-jangle of his
loose-change tips,
home from a run to Blackpool or Scarborough or
Rhyl,
Not many poets can make a line about cold ham and
new potatoes interesting without needing to stretch into archness.
Mcvety can because of her belief in her artist’s task and her
exemplary discipline in its pursuit. There is not a moment’s
self-indulgence here, no playing to the gallery, no showing-off, no
deliberate attempts to please , just a real writer at work
determined to get to the core of things. She succeeds wonderfully.
There are forty-five poems here. If McVety didn’t write another word
she would have won her place as one of the very best poets of her
time. Let’s hope, however, there’s much more. She is a thoroughly
excellent writer.
HIGHGATE
I might’ve known; in any case,
Katrina’s
nothing but a breath,
a few puddles in the
universe’s playground,
and my daughter ending
her destiny
a less than pettiness
to all but us.
I’d suck the ink back in my pen
sell my
labour as a railway clerk,
touch my cap to
the boss,
to turn that round.
It’s tight in here.
My coffin’s like
yours except
I didn’t build it.
That
tightrope you’re on
as the rock melts
and
frail as houses everything solid’s
nothing
more than kettle vapour,
I walked it in my
head
in a café in the
cinquieme.
I was twenty-nine.
She
was forty-three.
At three she could recite To
be or not to be.
Sigh no more ladies, sigh no
more.
What choice do you have ?
Gravity’s
a law you can’t evade.
Your choices are
inevitable
and your inevitabilities as chosen
as hers.
Rick Brown
REVIEW
A CONVERSATION by David
Williamson
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester until 8th December
David Williamson is a prolific Australian dramatist whose work has been
well received in his home country and abroad. His themes focus on the
gap between Australia’s perception of itself as a country of openness,
freedom and opportunity, and the reality of its inequality, violence and
unease. A Conversation is exactly what it says: the play
recreates a restorative justice session in which Derek and Barbara
Milsom meet the family of the sociopath, now in prison and refusing to
take part, who has raped and murdered their daughter, Donna. The
purpose of such a session is not to heal all the wounds, but to permit
the aggrieved to gain sufficient purchase on the tragedy for their lives
to regain some degree of worth. Williamson gives us eight characters
seated in a circle and lets the resentments, tensions, grief, anger,
bitterness, aggression but also understanding and compassion play
themselves out. It sounds like it might be dull and hard going but the
writing is sufficiently sturdy and the structure dynamic and subtle
enough for it to be compelling. Williamson also cleverly weaves in the
prevailing theoretical views of sociopathic behaviour and its treatment
or punishment. This is potentially perilous in a play but he is astute
enough to undercut the possibility of preaching or parched
philosophising by enlisting the anger or defensiveness of the characters
so we swallow the dry cracker of theory with the rich butter of raw
emotion.
The Milsoms are middle-class. Donna has been privately educated. Scott
Williams, the killer, was raised in poverty by a single mother who
worked sixty-five hours a week to provide for her three children. Has
Scott been damaged by deprivation ? Yet his sister Gail has turned out
well, been to university and has a high-powered job working for a
government minister nor does his brother Mick show any signs of the
unhinged violence Scott was capable of. Coral Williams, his mother,
blames herself. Mick wishes his brother dead. Gail accepts the horror of
his actions but insists there are “factors”. Derek Milsom is consumed by
desire for revenge and wishes the attack Scott has recently suffered in
prison had been fatal. Barbara Milsom feels essentially the same. She
and Derek are splitting up because every time they look at one another
they recall the day of Donna’s murder. Overseeing the meeting is Jack
Manning, the facilitator. His role is relatively reduced. He intervenes
only when he must to prevent the meeting collapsing prematurely. The
form of the play ensures that whatever the preconceptions of the
audience, they will find them first confirmed and then undermined. This
happens so quickly is forces you to think through your responses on the
fly and the effect of this is liberating. What you are left with is the
sense of how little we understand, how much we have to learn, how easily
we rest comfortably with unchallenged preconceptions and how tragic are
the results of our complacency. Perhaps the crucial character is Bob
Shorter, Scott’s uncle, the man in his life who let him down by sacking
him from his business after his first offence, by encouraging his macho
attitudes, by telling him, in one of those moments of masculine
conspiratorialism that are as common as they are stupid that “sometimes
girls say no when they mean yes”.
What makes the play excellent is Williamson’s skill in raising all the
questions but providing no answers. Finally, he leaves us with the sense
that our pity, though not availing in and of itself, is the best of us.
The acting is of the highest standard all round. Jonathan Hackett
conveys perfectly the distraught bewilderment of the conventional,
middle-class Derek faced with a side of human nature he has never had to
confront, except in the newspapers. Margot Leicester is superb as his
bereft wife who makes in the course of a couple of hours a crucial
journey into forgiveness and Susan Twist gives a truly remarkable
performance as Coral Williams, a poor, uneducated woman who has done the
best she can but has been cruelly torn apart by a quirk in her son’s
brain and the violence permeating her culture.
Alan Dent
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE 25
Martin Domleo
OLD BILL
The Burton Years
They knew Old Bill at the Red Rose Social
As the bloke who arrived at seven of a night
In his perennial flat cap,
Tall, with a hand on the door’s upright,
Black-suited wispiness stooping slightly,
Two bony fingers supporting a quiet fag.
Years ago, his cigarettes glowed brightly,
Earning him the name of Terminator
But he rarely inhales these days (and the
Tinder that once turned so quickly to red
On his knuckles had long since gone to earth).
At eighty-and-a-half, Bill’s thin right arm
Was the steadiest part of him, as steady
As a Newcomen beam. That practised lever
Was for cocking pints. A sage on racing tips
Picked from the Sun and Mirror, Bill more than
Held his own with four furrowed and whiskered
Ex-brewers twenty years his junior.
Around nine of a night he would slip away
Two quarts heavier, and walk steadily
And mindfully across the road to his crumbling
End-of-terrace more shack than house,
And relieve himself as best he could
In his cold privy – a half-mortared windsock
Some part-time jobber had tacked to the kitchen
Between bouts of drinking and flatulent sleep.
At least this abutment was more accessible
Than the defunct Victorian dumping heap
At the end of his garden strip, sinking
Into piles of bottles, cans, planks, old bricks.
Bill left for good, just as quietly, without fuss
In his chair in front of his portable
As the lottery balls lifted and danced.
The set was still flickering a ghostly light
When they found him, the smell of his last fag
Mingling with burnt carpet, hot plastic, stale beer.
Although he bragged a little, he never won much.
Once he made twenty quid, gave forty away.
Always he bought the first clutch of the night
Before settling into side shadow, shunning
Centre stage, biding time as a good sage ought.
The crematorium was crowded out.
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