Wars of the Rose(s)

The Rose Theatre in Kingston recently announced its cast for The Wars of the Roses, its revival of the compilation by John Barton in 1963 of a bunch of Shakespeare's history plays (All the Henry VIs and Richard III) into a single continuous saga. Trevor Nunn is to direct and if anyone can handle the scale and pageantry of such an event, he can. It's a great idea to revive it and I was looking forward to seeing it. And then they announced the cast (above). A cast of 22 and not a single non-white face. Nor, apparently, anyone self-identifying as disabled.

The production's been quite strongly criticised for this, not least by Equity which has been campaigning for theatres to reflect the demographic of the acting profession. This has prompted the theatre to defend its casting decision. Apparently, it made its decisions on the basis of 'historical accuracy'.

What fresh bullshit is this? Historical accuracy?

(a) it's theatre, not a history book. In the theatre, old people play young people, young play old, rich play poor, women play men, men play women, black play white, chairs play thrones, backcloths play the fields of France, words play swordfights and on and on. Where did this demand for accuracy come from?

(b) It's the Rose Kingston, based on the non-realist Rose Theatre of Elizabethan London. It's an open, presentational stage; the audience can see the rest of the audience; it's not a theatre that tries to represent the world realistically. Historical accuracy is weirdly inappropriate for that space.

(c) How historically accurate are the original plays? Clue: not very.

(d) And these plays, the ones you are being so strict about, they were written to be performed with a small acting company who would just have the parts allocated between them - with boys playing the women. These aren't plays written for historically accurate casting.

(e) And  how historically accurate is the rest of the casting going to be? Are French actors going to play the French? And, if you are going to be historically accurate, then you remember last year when they dug Richard III out of a car park and everyone could see his scoliosis of the spine. Why don't you have a disabled actor playing Richard III? 

(f) Is a lack of black people historically accurate? There is archaeological and other evidence of Africans in Britain from Roman times and by the fifteenth century there were black people in English armies. These are big war plays. Why no black people? 

(g) And anyway, in a big, ambitious project like this, that tries to show a whole nation at a moment of transition and flux, isn't it a great opportunity to emphasise the diversity of Shakespeare's characters and the range of his imagination with a cast that reflects our own nation in transition and flux? Why create an arbitrary rule that keeps Black and Asian actors out of your production?

In other words, the Rose Theatre is ignoring the nature of theatre, the nature of the theatre building, the nature of the plays and the theatre of Shakespeare's time, the nature of his history and ours, and the rest of its own casting in order to defend an all-white non-disabled cast.

The casting was bad enough; the excuse is even worse.

UPDATE. The wonderful actor, Tanya Moodie (who was in my A Modest Adjustment at the National), has forwarded me these details from Hans Memling's Seven Joys of the Virgin, painted as an altarpiece for the chapel at the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, but now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Note that this is dated as 1480, so basically painted during the events of Richard III Act I.

Notice anything? And you can see the full thing here.

Good Breeding

In 1904 a Royal Commission was established to look into The Care and Control of the Feebleminded. 'Feebleminded' was, then, a new addition to the psychiatric taxonomy of mental incapacity; the Idiots Act 1886 had put a distinction between 'idiocy' and 'imbecility' in law. Idiots were the least capable members of the society, under this definition, and the newer term 'feebleminded' was to refer to that group of people who could possibly work but needed help to overcome mental shortcomings that limited their independence. The Commission took a great deal of evidence from a range of experts and made its recommendations in a Report published in 1908 . These included placing the 'mentally defective' in 'colonies' where 'the inmates spent most of their time in workshops or working on the land [...] ' (p. 76). They considered whether it would be appropriate to restrict the ability of the mentally infirm to reproduce through either a programme of sterilisation or by preventing them from marrying, though they suggest that such a move would be contrary to 'the general feeling of the people' (p. 185), except in the most severe cases, where they recommend it.

Winston Churchill had no such reservations. By the time the report came out, he had been a cabinet minister for three years, with an even more longstanding concern for the impact of the 'feebleminded' on Britain, writing to his cousin Ivor Guest in 1899 'The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life'. He had followed with interest the introduction of a Eugenics Law in Indiana in 1907, which mandated the sterilisation of inmates deemed mentally unfit, and banned them from marrying. Despite the opposition of public, parliamentary and most scientific opinion to such measures, Churchill was convinced of their rightness: 'I am drawn to this subject in spite of many Parliamentary misgivings ... Of course it is bound to come some day'. He asked the Home Office to explore the possibility of introducing such a law and tried to explore what might be the most appropriate surgical procedure. When he became Home Secretary in 1910, his enthusiasm was unabated, fired by reading he Sterilisation of Degenerates by Dr H C Sharp with its dire warnings of 'the degenerate class' threatening 'the purity of the race'. In December of that year, he wrote to the Prime Minister, Asquith, in these terms:

I am convinced that the multiplication of the feebleminded [...] unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a very terrible danger to the race. [...] The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed before another year is passed.

Churchill's enthusiasm for eugenics grew, despite being moved to the Admiralty; he was Vice President of the first International Eugenics Congress held in London in July 1912. He tirelessly lobbied his colleagues advocating for sterilisation of the mentally unfit. However, his efforts to introduce such a measure to the Mental Deficiency Bill 1913 failed, the Act preferring the Commission's recommendation of confinement. Indeed, sterilisation never made its way onto the statute books in Britain (unlike in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States).

Churchill's enthusiasm for such legislation was, strange though it seems now, progressive and liberal principles. 

To his officials, he had advised that sterilisation was morally superior to segregation: 

I think it is cruel to shut up numbers of people in institutions, to them at any rate little better than prisons, for their whole lives, if by a simple surgical operation they could be permitted to live freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others.

It is not impossible to see how sterilisation might have seemed a more humane response to the 'problem' of feeblemindedness. To liberals and leftists, taking seriously the discoveries of Darwin, worried evolution might, in some circumstances, lead to degeneration, the unchecked spread of biological abnormalities which could lead to the destruction of a people (or, as they would have said then, a race). It was perhaps less clear to the Edwardians than it is to us that the application of Darwin to different types of people is scientifically illiterate, expressive of a deep-seated inhumanity, and resting on a false belief in biology as an explanation of disability.

In any case, eugenics fell dramatically out of favour among progressives in the 1940s because of its association with the Nazis and the 'Final Solution' and such views faded from mainstream debate. 

But not entirely. In Edgbaston in 1974, the Conservative MP Keith Joseph made an infamous speech. He noted

a high and rising proportion of children born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment.

He argued that the result of these unsuitable mothers was an epidemic of 'problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons and hostels for drifters' and noted darkly that 'these mothers, the under-20s in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births'. The implications that Joseph drew from this were apocalyptic: 'the balance of our population, our human stock is threatened [...] the nation moves towards degeneration'.

It is exactly the same concern expressed by Churchill sixty-four years earlier, in much the same language - and with the same solution: 

proposals to extend birth control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition. Is it not condoning immorality? I suppose it is. But which is the lesser evil, until we are able to remoralise whole groups and classes of people, undoing the harm done when already weak restraints on strong instincts are further weakened by permissiveness in television, in film, on bookstalls?

In other words, the population is threatened by degenerates and the only sensible solution is to prevent them from giving birth. Rightly, Keith Joseph was lambasted for his comments. His attempts to clarify and apologise only compounded his fault and the episode dealt a fatal blow to his widely-touted chances to take on the leadership of the Conservatives.

The main beneficiary of his failure was his friend and colleague Margaret Thatcher, who assumed leadership of the economic right-wing of the party and got the leadership less than four months later. Joseph became a key advisor, in part through his personal advocacy, but also through his foundation of the economically liberal Centre of Policy Studies. The influence he had would go on to help Margaret Thatcher get elected in 1979 and bring about the most decisive shift rightward in British politics since the war.

In some ways, this forestalled a different kind of rightward shift. In the unstable 1970s, various right-wing individuals spoke more and more openly about the possibility of a right-wing coup. Most of these people were delusional, but there was a eugenic aspect to their thinking. Eccentric millionaire John Aspinall - and his horrible associates Jimmy Goldsmith and Lord Lucan - liked to refer to the majority of human beings as 'the urban bio-mass'; in a review of a book about their circle, Christopher Bray notes: 'When Richard Nixon told him that a nuclear bomb could kill two million people, Aspinall expressed disappointment that the victims would be so few'. Thatcher never expressed views quite like this, but eugenics has never quite gone away.

Five years ago, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Howard Flight, who had just been ennobled by David Cameron, offered the Evening Standard thoughts on one unintended consequence of a strong welfare state:

We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive, but for those on benefit there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible.

The same old tropes are here: describing human reproduction like the breeding of cattle; the quasi-racial division of classes; the worries about the middle classes being swamped by the fuckful feckless poor. Flight was, of course, forced to apologise.

And then we have yesterday's budget. One of its well-trailed provisions was to remove any increase in tax credits and housing benefits after a family has two children. This is a view that has been championed by Iain Duncan Smith, so you already know it's a nasty idea. But what does this mean? Why do this?

It comes hard on the heels of five or more years of tabloid scare stories about large working class families. The same old eugenic images are here: the lazy poor, their unrestrained appetites, their freakishly large families compared to middle class restraint: 'Hard-pressed families across the country sit round the kitchen table working out if they can afford another child,' explained a spokesman for the lying fascists The Taxpayers' Alliance, 'and nobody on benefits should be any different.' 

But this isn't eugenics, is it? Putting a cap on benefits is very different from sterilising the poor. Of course it is. It's not the same. But the effect is the same. Note something: they haven't made this retrospective. Any family claiming for more than two children already can continue to do so. The policy kicks in in April 2017. Why? Presumably because it would be unfair to cut the benefits of people who have already made the decision to have these children. But you know what? That's an admission that this is a policy designed to change people's decisions. It's a policy designed to stop the poor from having so many babies.

Churchill and Aspinall were ignored. Keith Joseph and Howard Flight were censured. Who will stand up and name this new policy for what it is? A new economic eugenics.

Enter the Greeks

"Greece runs the risk of bringing an end to the European civilisation that they invented, which would be a tragic irony - something else they invented." Jon Stewart

I write this on the day the Greeks are voting in a referendum on whether to accept the EU, ECB and IMF's grotesque offer to their government, which would continue the austerity economics that has already brought the country to its knees. Who knows what is rhetoric and what is clear-eyed logic, but certainly one possible outcome is Greece leaving the Euro and possibly the EU itself; the co-called Grexit.

But in British theatre, we have the opposite. We have a Grentrance.

2015 looks likely to be the year of the Greeks. The Almeida has just opened Robert Icke's re-telling of Aeschylus's Oresteia. It's following that up with The Bacchae and Medea, a reworked Lysistrata and a one-off performance of the whole of Homer's Iliad. The Iliad is also going to be the given epic theatrical shape by Mike Pearson for the National Theatre of Wales. There's a re-working of Medea at The Gate, who gave us the faux-classical Idomoneus last year. We've had the classical tragedy of A View from the Bridge in the West End already this year. There are Oresteias also at Shakespeare's Globe and Home Manchester and rumours of another coming from National Theatre of Scotland. The Unicorn also has a 'Greek season' with retellings of the Minotaur and Odysseus myths.

Why the Greeks? Why now? Whenever we think about theatre we always reinvent the theatre. It's not as if there are permanent and unambiguous features of Greek plays that we always return to. Every visit to Ancient Greece, we see it with fresh eyes, find new things, pull out new features and find new parts of those plays and that world that resonate for us. So what is today's classical Athens?

Ironically, I think the reason the Greeks seem to be speaking to us so clearly now is austerity. I don't mean by that the economic meaning. I mean austerity in the sense of  unadorned severity. There is something austere that we can find in those plays. Stripped of the fuss of naturalism, the flinty poetry of the work presents a series of archetypal conflicts: individuals against the mass, the dissenter against the state, mothers and against children, husband against wife, brother against sister, men against women, women against men, and everywhere human beings against the Gods and against destiny and against their own fundamental weaknesses.

Somehow these plays - and these productions - do this without pretending to some kind of ahistorical human nature; they remain political. These are conflicts that take place in clustered political worlds, in cities facing political crises in public health, or the conduct of unpopular foreign wars, or the machinations of rival families and factions, in which reputation is as subject to public opinion, to spin doctoring, to brand control as it is now. But they seem to present these conflicts stripped back to a state of bare life. There is a forbidding darkness as these figures move forward in pursuit of their ideals. Resentments are kept preserved over years, justice is meted out with implacable brutality; everywhere we see civilisation as the other side of barbarism and the characters struggle their way to negotiate between them.

So when I say I don't mean austerity in the economic sense, that's not quite true. Austerity economics is a world of intense, friendless cruelty. If Euripides had written a play about the current treatment of Greece, he'd have drawn our attention to the arbitrary, implacable and brutal decisions of the IMF just as he presents the insanity of the Gods in Iphigenia in Aulis.  If Sophocles were to write about today's referendum, he'd tell a story about people standing up against a tyrant trying to starve dissenters into submission and it is likely that play would end up looking very like Antigone. 

The advocates of austerity economics like to present it as simple common sense rather than the right-wing ideology policy that it is. It's an extreme form of Thatcherism. That's right, an extreme form. It is based on a neoliberal commitment to minimising the state as far as possible to a series of safeguards against private property (some laws, a police force) that sees anything more as an unacceptably socialistic attempt to buck the market that will always fail. These people genuinely believe that if you removed all unemployment benefit, people would find jobs; that if you make people pay directly for their own healthcare, they will try much harder not to get sick; that if you removed all arts subsidy, the private sector will simply - and much more efficiently - step in to provide the same or better.

I think they honestly think austerity makes economic sense, despite the fact that there is zero evidence of it. Greece has been running an austerity policy for five years and it's completely run into the ground. It didn't work in Britain; we had the slowest exit from a recession in our history and only started to recover when Osborne backed down from his most hardline approach. America had a much faster exit, because they didn't go down the austerity route. The issue is I think they also think austerity makes moral sense. They find it morally disgusting for someone to spend years on benefits - not, as you and I probably do, because people should be able to get good, rewarding jobs, but because they think welfare makes people lazy and austerity improves everyone's moral character. And, trying to imagine what it would be like to be an austeriarch, I think that if they ever have any doubts about the economic sense, they can comfort themselves that it's still morally good.

The problem is that we're so far from the foundation of the Welfare State in the 1940s that we've lost that collective memory of what life was like in the 1930s without it. Someone who was 21 when the Beveridge Report was published, in 1942, would be 94 today. There aren't many of them around to remind us that when you deny people a basic standard of health, income, nourishment, cleanliness, culture and work the whole society suffers. Austerity is immoral and humiliating and makes societies much worse. This convenient historical amnesia allows the delusional cheerleaders for free markets in everything to believe that reducing people to bare life will only be good for us. The Greeks remind us what a cold universe it is if our fate is in the hands of arbitrary and capricious judgments from our jealous and temperamental divinities, whether they sit in Brussels or Parnassus, Frankfurt or Olympus. The Greek tragic austerity is a way of showing us the horror of our own Austerity.

Robert Icke's retelling of Aeschylus's Oresteia is a completely captivating. It's a broad open stage, with two receding upstage spaces, shielded from us by translucent sliding screens, a witty contemporary take on the classical paraskenia. A long table dominates the stage for the first couple of hours, the family dining table around which we see a series of fraught meals, but also becomes a balcony for a returning hero and a deathbed for a murdered girl. The language is spare and clear, unfussy, unadorned. The text gives plenty of space for fascinating, horrifying scenes, like the one in which Agamemnon is persuaded to kill his daughter Iphigenia. This is hard enough to take in the original, so I wondered how this contemporary version could possibly make this plausible, but, with a terrible remorseless and cynical politician's logic, Agememnon's advisor makes the choice seem unavoidable. Oh God and the murder itself is devastating, precisely because it is so unfussy, so clinical, so caring; Iphigenia is put to death like a wounded dog, sitting on her father's knee, taking the tablets, slipping slowly away.

It's a real ensemble piece but I can't not mention Lia Williams as Clytemnestra and Angus Wright; she the ferocious politician's wife but with steel in her mind and a savage sensuousness; he the awkward, burdened statesman keeping nothing together, not his family, barely his state, trapped by circumstance. Jessica Brown Findlay is an astonishingly powerful, sexy, brooding Electra whose repeated emptying of a wine bottle into a decanter is a warning, an accusation, and a bodycount. The design is sensational: Hildegard Bechtler's screens give us shades and shadows of other lives and doubles the on-stage characters as ghosts and echoes. Natasha Chivers has produced perhaps the best lighting design I've seen in a theatre this decade. A series of pulses and punches, the lights ruthlessly expose the characters and their stories, the air itself feels like steel. I'd be surprised if I have a better evening at the theatre this year.

A reminder though of the stark choices that we have to make in this austere world. I hope the Greeks today vote for dignity against austerity, for democracy against tyranny, for Antigone against Creon.

20 Reasons Why Jurassic World Is Rubbish

First let me say, I'm not a film snob. I love a good blockbuster and I was particularly looking forward to Jurassic World. It had good previews and people were praising it for returning to the values of the original Jurassic Park, which I just loved. I still remember sitting in the Coronet cinema in Elephant & Castle when the movie first came out, watching that scene where Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler stop their jeep and see, for the first time, a herd of brachiosaurs eating vegetation from the trees and thinking 'Dear God in heaven, they have actually filmed dinosaurs'. It was a completely thrilling moment, which is why got a tram out to AMC Manchester last night to see Jurassic World. 

But what is going on with this new movie? Spielberg has his limitations but at his best he knows about story and tells it through human beings. This movie really doesn't care about those things. But here's the thing; it seems embarrassed about dinosaurs as well. So what does this film really think it's doing?

There are things I liked about this movie, mostly visual sequences. The theme park is pretty convincingly realized. The camouflaged Indominus Rex is great (and they hold back from showing the whole thing well). The bit where the raptors join the I-Rex is nicely scary. There's a good bit with raptors chasing an ambulance. The bit where the raptors and Chris Pratt on a bike chase through the forest is beautifully shot. Chris Pratt himself is a likeable presence.

But here are 20 things I didn't like about Jurassic World. VERY SPOILERY.

Story

1. They've genetically engineered a huge new dinosaur because people have become jaded about seeing dinosaurs. Really? Are they? The film seems to be set in our world. Would people really get jaded about seeing a T-Rex? How quickly? I mean, Alton Towers is still open. It creates new scary rides but seeing a T-Rex is way scarier and more exciting than anything. I just don't buy it. And hey, nor does the movie, because when we see the T-Rex exhibit, the little child hero can't get a look because there are so many people crowding to see it. The audience for the Mosasaurus show seems thrilled by what they're seeing - and we're told, in fact, that there are 20,000 people on the island. 
2. Someone has plans to train velociraptors to hunt down the Taliban. For actual fucksake. Even the movie seems to think this is a dumb idea since the only person who expresses it is (a) a moron and (b) punished in a poetic justice way. But, guys, the whole movie is predicated on this idea.
3. The scientist who created the Indominus Rex for the park refuses to say what he made it out of. They what? They 'refuse'?? What is this, a Surprisosaurus? Bring Your Stupid Idea To Work Day? And, let's remember, this chief scientist is the same Henry Wu who fucked up  the original Jurassic Park. 'Okay, Dr Wu, we'll take it on trust; you must know what you're doing by now'.
4. The I-Rex that they grew ended up being cleverer than they realised, more madly murderous and much bigger and the scientists are pretty much fine with that. 'Come on, guys. I mean, what's the worst that can happen?'
5. Two young teenagers get a jeep that hasn't worked for 20 years up and running in a matter of minutes. Kids these days. Mad skills.
6. Does anyone else worry that hundreds of pterosaurs are flying around? Is it possible they got off the island, say by flying?

Transport issues

1. The army arrives in a helicopter but then let a guy who doesn't yet have a helicopter pilot's licence fly them into battle with unfortunate results. Hey guys, why not let your trained army pilot do that?
2. Owen Grady rides a motorbike through a forest. Ever been in a forest? It's kind of bumpy. Seriously, it's an almost entirely wild island. Who let him bring a fucking motorbike?

Characters

1. Claire Dearing. She's running the park. Sort of. Though security can apparently march in and take over, which she was unaware of, despite being operations manager. She has no children and doesn't seem to want any which is this movie's shorthand for 'unfeminine bitch'. She also wears this white trouser suit (in a wilderness theme park, très bonne idée) with her jacket over her shoulders for the first hour of the movie, which seems to be this movie's shorthand for 'frigid bitch'. And then, the movie doesn't even know if she's any good at her job: we see her in a lift trying to remember the names of three major backers she's about to meet (bit late for that, ma'am) and we don't actually see her do her job at all well. But it's okay because then she gets into a vest and looks after her two nephews, so she's basically learned to be a non-frigid proper maternal woman who lives in the real world. She cries when she sees some dead dinosaurs, to show her new-found emotional chops. And there's a bit - which others have commented on - where she manages to outrun a T-Rex, in stilettos (her, not the dinosaur, obvs). Completely ridiculous.
2. Owen Grady. Chris Pratt is quite a likeable actor, but this is a daft part. He's boorish, rude, arrogant, and thinks he can ride a motorcycle through a forest. He miraculously escapes the I-Rex by keeping very still in front of a car (though this didn't work for the security guard near the beginning). And there's a really dumb bit where Claire saves him from a pterosaur and they do this horrible weird loveless kiss (and... priorities, guys?). Also, why actually is he in the park. Oh yes, he's training velociraptors. Um, why? It's a 'field test'. Um, for what?
3. The kids. Oh Christ, those kids. One of them is a pre-teen dinosaur nerd (so basically he's copied directly off Tim Murphy in Jurassic Park). The other one is really into girls, which we know because he walks around the island staring at girls, who giggle and simper. He doesn't care about dinosaurs much. He thinks that it's a great idea to go exploring behind a broken fence in a clearly-marked restricted area in a dinosaur theme park. So I'm not sure if he has a sex drive or a death wish. Paging Dr Freud. I think Spielberg's kid characters are mostly just this side of bearable. These are not. I longed for them to get eaten. Oh and then it seems that their parents are splitting up but maybe they get back together because of the kids; I really don't know.
4. Zara Young and Simon Masrani. Zara is Claire's PA. Completely incompetent, loses her boss's two nephews within a few hours. And she ends up being eaten by the Mosasaurus in a way that seems vaguely like she's being punished for something, though God knows what. Something slightly similar happens to the park's CEO, Simon Masrani, who seems to be vaguely punished for hubris in trying to fly a helicopter, but really it feels like they just need to get rid of a character they don't understand, the CEO who is both insistent on strong moral principles but also won't let the I-Rex be killed because they've instead $26m in it.
5. Vic Hoskins. Ludicrous. This character makes no sense at all. He's head of security for the park. The Head of Security. He's basically he head bouncer. Where does he get off saying what they can use the velociraptors for? How does he end up taking charge? Why actually does the movie make he behave like such an asshole?
6. Jake Johnson. He's a 'character'. He is off-the-peg nerd. He's a less interesting version of Dennis Nedry from the first movie. He's classic Mr Potato Head character construction: he's a nerd; he has plastic dinosaurs on his desk; he's cocky; he has unrequited love for his colleague (a sadly wasted Lauren Lapkus); he's messy. There you go: a character.
7. Dr Henry Wu. Um, sorry Doctor, I pay your wages: you'll tell me what's in this dinosaur you created, and you'll tell me now, you stupid asshat.

Dinosaurs

1. The Indominus Rex works out how to fake an escape and lower its temperature so it's not detectable by the thermal sensors. How? The film doesn't seem to think it's ever dropped its temperature before, so how would the I-Rex know what effect that would have? How does it know what an escape would look like? Does it have a concept of escape? How does it understand what the humans would think by seeing the claw marks on the wall (which, incidentally, don't look much like an escape to me)? Also, they keep saying it's very intelligent; but is it? How come? It's got T-Rex, cuttlefish, velociraptor and tree frog and... what, Einstein? Bamber Gascoigne? 
2. The velociraptors see Owen Grady as the alpha male, then they transfer this to the Indominus Rex, and then back to Owen Grady again, for no very good reason. This is a sequel problem; in the first movie the velociraptors were pretty much unbeatable, except by the T-Rex. In subsequent movies they were being killed quite easily. Now they seem to be trainable. But then there's an (admittedly very good) scene where they confront the Indominus Rex and Grady realises the I-Rex is probably part raptor, at which point the raptors literally turn tail and starts attacking our heroes. But then we get a moment where our heroes are cornered by three raptors and Grady goes up, strokes one, and, I think, takes off its tracker. This seems to get them on side. Who knew they were so fussed about trackers? Seriously this makes zero sense.
3. The Mosasaurus Ex Machina. In the end, the Mosasaurus comes out of nowhere to kill the I-Rex. It's very like the end of Racine's Phèdre, incidentally, and the end of Racine's Phèdre is also rather stupid. The thing that's annoying about this ending is at the very moment that you think 'oh that's surprising', you also think 'oh so that's why they shoehorned that [terribly badly CGI'd] monster into the first half'.
4. The movie really wants to have its cake and eat it. It's all trying to be clever about the fact that we're now a bit jaded about CGI dinosaurs, that movies have to be bigger and better and scarier and more spectacular. But actually, I'm not jaded about CGI dinosaurs. I'm jaded about shitty storytelling. CGI dinosaurs are always excellent, which is why I took a tram out to central Manchester to sit in an almost-empty cinema to watch this movie. So the movie makes all sorts of jokes about product placement, and rapacious executives, and commercial imperatives, forgetting, in its smugness, that all of these jokes were in the original Jurassic Park. 

Conclusion

1. It just doesn't want to care about people. I don't think everything has to be realism, but what the fuck is this? No one in the film acts in a way that is at all recognisable except from other movies. You sense that everything has been put in place to give us the visuals, which they think is all we're waiting for. Basically, these films are like porn. There's a story, but that's just a way of giving shape to the action sequences and delaying our gratification. Would it have killed the filmmakers to create characters that we can recognise, care about, see ourselves or others in? Has anyone in the production watched Jaws? Do they think it would be improved if those characters were more cartoonish, less full realised. Watch this movie and afterwards ask yourself if you can imagine the life these characters were leading before the events of the movie. You won't be able to. The characters are all stereotypes. The story makes no sense. It's a shame.

Look Left, Look Right

About ten years ago, whenever I visited Europe, I always used to look the wrong way when crossing the road. But not, as you might think, just out of habit and instinct; it's slightly odder than that. I consciously thought about which way to look but still got it wrong. It was just the dumbest thing. I would actually stop, think about the way I should be looking, and still somehow look the wrong way.

Eventually I came to realise what was going wrong in my head. Basically, I had TWO instructions going on: one was (a) here in France, you need to look left as you cross the road, and (b) here in France, you need to look in the opposite direction from what you think. Both of these instructions are fine and each would on their own likely produce the right result. But both of these instructions together are a disaster; they cancel each other out. I'd think 'look right' then the other instruction would suggest I reverse that, so I'd look left. You have to choose one.

And which one? Well, (a) is actually much better than (b), because (b) is ultimately self-cancelling. If it works and becomes instinctive, then it will at some point come to feed on itself. You start by using the instruction to look left when habit told you to look right; but once you're now instinctively looking left, the instruction tells you to look right again.

Strangely enough, it's simpler when there's more than two options, when changing currency or learning a new language and it's not simply a binary. No one speaks French by thinking 'fromage is just the opposite of cheese'. You just learn to say fromage. In other words, you need to teach yourself to do what's right, not what's different.

I bring this up because of the Labour leadership elections. A whole series of candidates have put themselves forward (and some have already taken themselves back) for the job. But look what's happening: candidate after candidate has denounced the 2015 manifesto, the manifesto that they all signed up to and on which they all campaigned. Most of the candidates have been insisting that what the Labour Party needs to do is ditch their former policies and do the opposite. Liz Kendall has declared that Miliband's Labour was not 'aspirational' enough, that it should distance itself from the trade unions, and embrace privatisation in the NHS, the school system and in university teaching. Andy Burnham has complained that Miliband's Labour was anti-business and that the party needs to 'celebrate the spirit of enterprise'. He's also said it was a mistake to be running a deficit before the crash of 2008, as does Mary Creagh. Yvette Cooper also thinks Miliband was anti-business and has pledged to support cuts in Corporation Tax and to set up a advisory group of business leaders. Caroline Flint, standing for the Deputy Leadership, has suggested that the party should give a 'kick up the backside' to people on benefits.

All of these positions seem to be based on ditching the principles on which they fought the election. This is stupid for many reasons: Labour got 9.3 million votes last month. The Tories got 11.3 million. It was hardly a landslide; it was close. In fact, as this chart shows, only twice in the last forty years has it been closer. Why this rush to sweep everything away?

General Elections since 1979: 2nd-placed party as a proportion of 1st

A widely-circulated article in The Mirror suggested that - due to the vagaries of our first past the post system - the votes of only 900 people secured Cameron his majority. Why go for Tory policies?  11.3m people voted for the Tories but 19.4m voted for other parties. That hardly says to me that there's electoral gold in them policy hills. It also makes the candidates look absurd: how can we take seriously someone who believes in a Mansion Tax in March but fulminates against it in May?

But most of all, the stupidity is that they are doing (b). They're looking at where we were and just doing the opposite. We wanted to rein in the fatcats? Let's encourage the fatcats. We wanted to protect the unemployed? Let's kick the unemployed. We opposed NHS privatisation? Let's support NHS privatisation.  We rejected Tory claims that Labour ruined the economy? Let's agree that we did.

I think we're being misled by the topography. In 1789, during the French Revolution, when the Assemblée Nationale was founded, supporters of Liberty tended to gather on the left side of the room (relative to the Chair), leaving supporters of the King on the right. This more-or-less spontaneous grouping slowly became sedimented into French political life: when the Legislative Assembly was formed in 1791 and again, a year later, when the National Convention met these divisions were duplicated. and by 1815, after the Restoration of the Monarchy, the left-right axis had become an established way of identifying not just the broad political groupings, but, within them, the level of radicalism (with the terms far right, far left, centre right and centre left coming into usage). The left-right axis spread through the press and by the 1820s spread out of the chamber to the public who began to identify themselves as being on the left or the right.*

Labour has to get out of this left-right thinking. In part, because it has no option. Labour faces twin threats of SNP and UKIP. The SNP has, on the whole, a much more leftish programme; UKIP have a much more right-wing programme. The more Labour moves to the left, the more it risks shedding voters to UKIP; the more it moves to the right, the more it entrenches its incredible losses to the SNP. There is no future for Labour in repositioning; it needs to reject the whole topography. 

What Labour must do is reassert and argue firmly, clearly and uncompromisingly for its basic values, of making the UK a fairer, more just, more creative and open society. Let's not fall into the delusion that because we looked left last time we have to look right the next. Conceding Tory policies to send out a signal that Labour is listening will actually just send out the signal that the party has no values and its members no integrity. The whole 'repositioning' debate is a distraction. Labour must do (a) not (b): what's right, not just what's different.

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* Marcel Gauchet, 'Right and Left,' Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, In Realms of Memory, Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence D Kritzman, Rethinking the French Past, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 241-98 is a rather brilliant history of these terms.