New College of the Humanities

A C Grayling has announced the formation of a new private college of Higher Education. The New College of the Humanities will charge fees of £18,000 and students will be taught be such renowned media dons as Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Ronald Dworkin, David Cannadine, Niall Ferguson, Steve Jones, and Peter Singer. There will be core courses in scientific literacy, applied ethics, and critical thinking, and then students will specialise in law, philosophy, economics, history, English literature, or some combination of those.

I say students will be ‘taught’ by these dons. Let’s be more specific: they’ll be given lectures by them. They won’t get one-to-one tuition from them. They won’t sit in seminars discussing their ideas with them. They won’t be marking your essays or handing out reading lists or responding to your questions by email. That will all be handled by hired teaching staff, with who knows what kind of research profile. And lectures have value in education - the group experience, the event, the demonstration of attitudes to knowledge - but they’re really not the most effective form of education. As Donald Bligh showed some time ago, after three weeks or so, students tend to retain only 10% of the key ideas in a lecture. This compares to figures like 60-70% for seminars and tutorials. So, it’s not going to be the key way that those students learn; they’re going to be getting their real education from the hired help.

In fact, are these guys even going to be employed full time? I doubt it. Grayling will have a full-time post but the rest will just be paid handsomely by the hour. They won’t be around. And bear in mind, these academics are at the end of their respective careers. In ten years time when you think it might be useful to get a reference from Richard Dawkins, your old science professor, well: good luck with that. 

So this is basically a standard University of London Degree with some flashy lectures dropped on top, for £18,000 a year. Bear in mind that these are media dons, so you can actually get their teaching on YouTube and on telly. You can get just as good an education - in fact, probably better - in the public sector for half the price. Grayling has boasted that his students will get 12-13 contact hours with teaching staff per week. Wow. So do mine. But most of my students’ contact time is high-quality, in small groups. Much of the contact time at this New College will be in large anonymous lectures.

And why is A C Grayling doing this? Does he genuinely believe that these famous intellectuals will guarantee a better education? If so, he’s a fool. Does he genuinely believe that the structure of his degree is impossible to achieve in the public sector? If so, he’s ignorant. Does he genuinely believe that the time he and his colleagues spent being paid and supported by the public sector was ‘serving time’? If so, he’s contemptible. He’s doing it for the money. Clearly.

I have some questions. Apparently 20% of the places will have bursaries attached. How much will these bursaries be? Since this is a private university, will students have access to tuition fee loans, like those in the public sector? For the full amount? If so, how can the government afford it? If not, how can the students afford it? And one report says that the organisation has raised £5m of private capital. That’s really not very much for a university. Where will the students live? Where are the lecture rooms? Where are the seminar rooms? Where will admin be housed? Who will set up the computer networks? Where will the students’ spaces be? Are they parasitically using University of London facilities? And this consortium of private financiers: does this private institution have guaranteed independence for its teachers? Or will whoever pays the piper call the tune? I see the students are going to emerge with a University of London degree. When was this agreed? Why is my university lending its support from a divisive, elitist, privatised institution like this? 

According to Grayling, ‘it is quite a struggle now to see into the future with how we can cope with these cuts. Either you stand on the sidelines deploring what is happening or you jump in and do something about it’. That all sounds very fine, except, Tony, you’re not jumping in; you’re jumping out.

A C Grayling, you’ve decided to become the Toby Young of the Higher Education sector. Shame on you.

The Acid Test

Well, what do you know? A good play at the Theatre Upstairs. Anya Reiss’s follow-up to Spur of the Moment is hugely, massively enjoyable and beautifully played.

Three girls in their very early twenties share a flat. Ruth has just split up with her boyfriend. Dana is contemplating whether to sleep with her boss. Jessica’s mum is going off with the roofer working on the family home, so Jessica’s letting her Dad sleep on the sofa. Over twelve hours, the four drink through the night in mordant celebration of being ‘losers’. Ruth and Dana flirt with Jim. Dana decides to sleep with her boss, after which he sacks her. Ruth discovers that her ex-boyfriend is so miserable that he made a melodramatic and incompetent suicide bid. Jessica and her father row and recriminate. Eventually, Jim turns on the girls accusing them of being wrapped up in themselves and making everything a drama. Jess is furious but the girls agree with him. It looks as if it will be Jessica who will be forced out when Jim gets a call that the roof has fallen in and he rushes back to his wife.

The dialogue is brilliant, really brilliant. Reiss is great at capturing, affectionately, how some 21-year-olds speak: the self-dramatising, the bullshit philosophy, the flirtatiousness and the bravado and the fear. It’s this that really powers the play forward for the first half of the play. And it’s very very funny. She’s quite good at capturing the linguistic generation gap (Jim explains his presence due to ‘bit of a spat back at, at, at HQ’). I felt Jim was more of an idea than a character; someone seen by the young, rather than a person in himself, but that’s the kind of play. Jim is a catalyst to disrupt the identities and relationships in the flat. It’s a pressure-cooker kind of play in which truths are forced out into the open.

I think all playwrights have vices. Dramaturgical ones, I mean. These are the things that they are dangerously good at and they become seductive, they can overwhelm a play. Anya Reiss’s feel for contemporary, wickedly-observed, very funny dialogue might be her vice. But it may be the opposite: a feeling that meticulously-observed, brilliantly funny dialogue is somehow too cheaply won.

How do you write a play like that? I said that the dialogue powers the play for the first half. The second half the play, like the carpet, gets a little stickier. The thing is that you’ve set up a group of girls getting drunk and stoned; this, and their age and attitudes, allows for the dialogue to be fast, funny, ridiculous, and wild. But where’s the play going to go?  Drunk people are only funny for a while. Being less in charge of their actions, there is somewhat less at stake in their decisions. The disasters are distanced, frozen. You look for what will happen in the room. The flirtation between two of the girls and Jim looks set to end in a misjudged fuck, but that doesn’t happen.

In fact what happens is the play alights on father and daughter and begins to excavate their relationship. This is okay and often works: it’s brilliant at showing how a dysfunctional relationship shows itself through a complete stalling of conversational energy (‘You not going to say anything?’/‘What do you want me to say’/‘I don’t want you to say anything’ etc.). There is also some uncertainty of tone. The daughter strikes me as obnoxious; it’s not clear whether she’s meant to be.* The father lurches between bumbling ineffectiveness and lacerating truthfulness. And, mostly, the play stops being funny. This makes Jessica a rather thankless part: in the penultimate section of the play, as she is on the point of being forced out by her ‘friends’ I really didn’t understand what the emotional force of this moment was meant to be.* Were we meant to be* horrified at the turn of events? Celebrating the rejection of a monster? The production lost its focus there too but maybe taking its cue from the script. (Similarly, it seemed out of character for Jim to laugh so openly at Twix’s suicide bid; and when Dana returns, make-up down her face, the writing - or maybe performances - don’t find the emotion of the moment very well.)

The plotting isn’t as sure-footed as the much of the dialogue. To pep up the action, Reiss gets some of the characters out of the room. Dana goes to shag her boss; Ruth visits her boyfriend in hospital. These feel like artificial stimulants. Worse still is the deus ex machina phone call about the roof falling in, which is so convenient it may even be a sort of ironic ending, though the production didn’t play it like that. Even within the dialogue there are some uncomfortable lurches into new topics (Jim’s comment about ‘conspiracy theories’ is a feed line) and some of the discussion of new slang feels a bit clunky (even the Cragga dubstep moment feels, in hindsight, like a bit of a set-piece rather than a truthful bit of characterisation).

Basically, I think the problem with writing this sort of play, which Reiss obviously spotted, is how to get from the brilliant fun idiotic drunken dialogue to something both more emotionally meaty and grander in scope. I suppose I don’t think it quite achieved either in the way it was trying - the emotional heart-to-heart was a bit limp and the attempt to create an image of the generation (the ‘losers’ toast and Jim’s outburst towards the end) felt forced. Jim has been enjoying drinking, smoking and flirting with the girls all the way through; it’s not clear why he has such a sudden change of heart. There are some moments of jammed-in heightened dialogue (Jessica has a poem she recites near the end), which didn’t work for me.

The key thing is, I think, that it didn’t need to go for these lurches of tone. It implied something more interesting and persuasive through the ‘shallower’ dialogue: both a vivid portrait of a generation and hints at some level of emotional yearning that the conviviality didn’t satisfy. Yes, it needed to go somewhere, but this could have been low-key. We could have watched the modulation of relationships, the awkward reshifting of the social geometry as the older man enters the room, the way that forces out some attitudes people didn’t even know they had. The choice to lurch into big character events felt less like deep urban tragedy and more like melodrama. I think Reiss felt that too, so when the fifth scene ends with Dana saying ‘Fuck what a drama’ I think it’s part-admission, part-apology.

Oh look, this has turned into a bit of a put-down. I really enjoyed myself in this play. It’s very funny, very true, and at its best creates conditions for a wholly enjoyable ensemble performance from a great cast. The three girls are completely believable, fluent, funny, sexy and fucked-up. Denis Lawson brings awkward charisma and some light authority to the stage. As you enter the theatre, you go along a series of dimly lit tower block corridors, which was a fun way into the space but had pretty much nothing to do with the play. But what the hell. I’d recommend it very highly. There’s a really interesting writer here evolving before our eyes.

* [UPDATE] ‘Meant to be’ ‘Meant to be’ ‘Meant to be’. What does that mean? I’m not sitting there, waiting to be told what to think. I don’t like that kind of theatre, or that attitude to theatre. So what do I mean? I suppose I think I look for a kind of guiding structure to a play in which people’s roles are more or less clear. This generates a sense of purposiveness to the whole and, because plays are often organised into fictional characters and situations, we apply the functions of that whole to characters. Put more plainly, we need a sense of what function characters are meant to have in the idea structure of the play, not what we are meant to think about them as characters.

Going, Going, Gone

Chekhov in Hell finished its run at Soho Theatre last night. I’ve got a slight feeling of post-show blues, but mainly just a feeling of tremendous satisfaction. I loved the production; I love the cast; I love the design; it was the right theatre for the show and we had healthy audiences throughout and great responses.

It was different in London than it was in Plymouth. Soho strong-armed us into providing a 90-minute, rather than 100-minute, play and so we decided to cut one whole scene (‘Positive Flows of Energy’) rather than nip and tuck. That worked hugely to the benefit of the play which raced forward at that key moment. The whole thing felt pacier and less lingering (that was a long scene). On Thursday I saw a production of the play performed by CertHE students at East 15 Acting School. It was a terrific performance, full of youthful energy and got a wonderful response from the audience. I was struck though that with the extra scene in the pace of the show is kind of wrong. By that point we need to be moving forward and that scene lingers in the satire; by then we’ve got the point.

1. The reviews were interesting. We had a very curious mix - from the Guardian and the Times raving about it and giving us four stars to the Independent and Time Out damning it with two stars. Bad reviews are momentarily winding but not that psychologically damaging, I’m finding. Obviously, one would love to get those across-the-board raves, not least for the box office, but we did fine. Very good word-of-mouth too. Two things perversely pleased me about the reviews: The good reviews described the play in the way I’d describe it. This hasn’t always happened; I’ve had good reviews where I’m pleased they like it but it’s not the play I conceived of. This suggests that what we wanted to do works. The bad reviews don’t describe the play in a way I recognise. Fiona Mountford’s amazingly damning review in the Standard and Michael Coveney’s in the Independent both describe it without giving any indication that it’s funny or even noting that the audience were laughing (even if these particular critics were not). They really didn’t ‘get it’. It’s much more worrying when critics ‘get it’ and hate it too. 
2. The criticisms are very varied. Some found it boring; some found it too slight; some found it offensive. Some have seen it as a satire, some as a melancholic and nihilistic statement. At least one person has seen it as a vaguely religious play. Some have criticised it for pessimism, others for being too affectionate towards its targets. One blogger thought it was racist. The Morning Star (who knew they had theatre critics?) thought we had contempt for the working class. Time Out thought we delighted in the degradation of women. Some of these accusations are demonstrable nonsense, but together they make up an interesting picture of the play, namely its political illegibility. At least, its illegibility to a set of fixed and familiar positions in political theatre. Michel Foucault said in an interview once, ‘I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean’. I rather like what the reviews mean, because it’s a play that is trying to do political theatre differently.

Part of the problem, I think, is that if you’re having to write a review, you inevitably start thinking about the review as you’re watching it - and this play doesn’t explain itself too readily so I sense that some of the critics foreclosed on the play, made crass decisions about what it meant too early, and therefore produced ludicrous conclusions. But hey, all responses are fine. It’s a difficult thing to respond to a new play.

I’m also encouraged by the stirrings of interest from a variety of places. A Broadway producer liked it; a German agent liked it; a director in New Zealand and another in Australia liked it. There’s a school in Somerset keen to do it and at least two acting schools interested in it. It seems like a play that speaks to people and I’m proud of us all for managing to do that.

Moonlight

I was drunk when I saw Moonlight. Not under the table, not by a long chalk. I was never a man of that stamp. I had passed the time of day with an old friend. You probably know him. He was known to imbibe the finest wines without breaking step, a game at which I was strictly the amateur.

It’s true. Weak Pinter pastiche aside, I saw the first production of Moonlight at the Almeida in 1993 after a day of drinking with a friend so its memory is very hazy. I do remember Ian Holm, bedridden and misanthropic, and Anna Massey, extremely chilly as his scornfully suffering wife. At the time, the scenes I most relished were the two brothers, played by Douglas Hodge and Michael Sheen (what a cast that was), whose bantering role play seemed a thin crust over two hollow selves, hollowed out by loss and the imminence of death.

It’s a play that defies summary but broadly a dying man taking his mortality out on his stoic, unloving wife. Elsewhere their two sons banter and replay imagined episodes of their life. Two family friends - remembered? actual? imagined? - engage in vapid bourgeois chit-chat while elsewhere, through the wreckage of these lives, wanders Bridget, a lost daughter, a ghost, recalling a life lived at moonlight.

It’s a very beautiful play and oddly uncharacteristic in some ways. It’s a play whose meaning is relatively clear; it’s a play about death, approaching death, our fear of death. The title, probably, suggests an image of fading life struggling against the darkness of the grave. The family are living not only with the father, Andy, and his impending demise, but also in the shadow of the daughter’s disappearance or death. In this fine production, Fred, one of the two sons, is pale and sickening, lying on his death bed. Their jokes are desperate improvisations, it seems, to evade the horror of life ending.

There's a thing almost all playwrights do where we write a speech which is meant to express some core meaning of the play. Often it takes a more lyrical or more strident tone than the rest of the play, signalling out, trying to have an effect. It can be rather moving, a yearning that rolls out over the footlights. But it's always - isn't it? - an admission of defeat, a moment of thinking that the means of production, the techniques and processes of dramaturgy, aren't working for us, can't be trusted. So this desperate new course is pursued, trying to have a direct effect, opening a wound to the audience.

Pinter never does that. His words are always actions; they are blunt and complex, harsh and lyrical. They do things onstage without any desire to please. This is no doubt connected to the personality of Harold Pinter himself, apparently blunt, uncompromising, not placing a great priority on being liked. In his interviews, well some of them, there’s a grouchy, piss-taking, passive-aggressive refusal to comply with the questions. I remember reading an hilarious interview with Peter Hall po-facedly explaining the indigenous cockney custom of ‘taking the piss’ and how he adapted this obscure native custom to his production of The Homecoming. Here we get a disquisition on ‘taking the piss’ which in itself takes the piss. There’s an aggressive relish in language here, rolling the cliches around the tongue, allowing them to bump into each other to startling, comic, alienating effect. There are lurches between register and tone. There are moments of luxurious verbal excess, parodic literary style, crudity and aggression. Always there’s a fluency and rhythmic, prosodic expertise that was always Pinter’s great gift. Listen to this speech Bel’s (the wife):

Yes, it’s quite true that all your life in all your personal and social attachments the language you employed was mainly coarse, crude, vacuous, puerile, obscene and brutal to a degree. Most people were ready to vomit after no more than ten minutes in your company. But this is not to say that beneath this vicious some would say demented exterior there did not exist a delicate even poetic sensibility, the sensibility of a young horse in the golden age, in the golden past of our forefathers.

With the sense of someone reviewing their life, the play is haunted by earlier Pinter plays. Bridget’s speeches remind me of Ruth’s in The Homecoming (‘And there’s lots of insects there’). Late Pinter is increasingly drawn to these monologues to find bursts of something poetically other to the brutality of his scenes. The last speech of Party Time for example (‘When everything is quiet I hear my heart’) or Rebecca’s recollection (imagination?) of seeing a refugee (?) woman (‘She listened to the baby’s heartbeat. The baby’s heart was beating’). It has some affinities with the weird bourgeois roleplaying and chilly mental landscape of No Man’s Land, too, but it is its own play.

In 1993, I was most transfixed by the young men. But then I was a young man. Now it’s Andy and Bel, the love and regrets, the anger and affection, that seems to speak so eloquently. I liked this production very much. A stage and rear wall in Yves Klein blue, edged in white light; the characters disposed across the stage; and the girl, Bridget, in her underwear, wandering through the ruins. It may be lesser Pinter, but lesser Pinter is better than most.

#No2PD

This Thursday, we are to vote on a reform to our electoral system: the introduction of the Alternative Vote. The No2AV campaign have offered a number of striking arguments against this change.

Always keen on the long view, I have dug out a political pamphlet from 1689, the year of the Bill of Rights and therefore the birth of Parliamentary Democracy and I publish the full text below.

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Sirs, th’unruly MOB hath lately fulminat’d for CHANGE to the POLITICK of this NATION & certain BILLS are presently laid before the HOUSE offering provision for ELECKTIONS unto PARLIAMENT & limitations o’er the power of the MONARCH. It is our settled VIEW that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is a naughty doctrine & would be resist’d by all good MEN. We do venture to set forth our REASONS below.

ONE, we do declare that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is expensive, demanding much of the publick PURSE in the nature of BALLOT BOXES, PAPERS & sundry PENCILS. The vulgar OPINION of the people will needs be carried by HORSE and ERRAND-BOY at further expense. Who is to bear the EXCESS COST of this frivolity popularly nam’d VOTING? DECISIONS made by the King & agree’d by such hereditary MEMBERS as whimsickally choose t’attend at the HOUSE cost naught to the PUBLICK who ergo may go about their lives spending their BAUBLES on BREAD and SOIL, &c.

TWO, we do find that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is a wretched BURDEN and TOIL to the BRAIN of the ORDINARY MAN, who will perforce be addl’d and confound’d by th’TASK to choose between divers CANDIDATES. Do we consider it a proper USE of publick TIME for each ENGLISH SUBJECT to discover FACTS and OPINIONS and DEBATES in the matter of GOOD GOVERNMENT? Sirs, we venture to say NO. To place an EX in THIS box or THAT is no TASK for an AMATEUR & we do judge it bothersome & unnecessary to rouse the PEOPLE from its BED to demoralyze it with this obscure INTERROGATION. 

THREE, though we have sought in EARNEST, we do find no NATION or KINGDOM in th’entire WORLD that do make USE of this PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY. Our efficacious & belov’d SYSTEM of ROYAL DECREE may be found in fully all DOMAINS save where there be but SAVAGES. Do we not trow if PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY were the SPLENDID FANCY that its FANATICKS pretend, we might have discover’d it OTHERWHERE?

FOUR, PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY do offend agin our TRADITIONS of JUSTICE. Indeed, Sirs, we say it is UNFAIR. Why, its CHAMPIONS themselves judge it possible that the BEST CANDIDATE, plainly judg’d by his WEALTH, PATRIOTISM & sporting PROWESS, may come second or e’en THIRD according to the insensible OPINIONS of the MOB? This KINGDOM already is possess’d of a fine CUSTOM to allow the best of us to come forth & assume AUTHORITY, namely WEALTH, STOCK & PRIMOGENITURE. What NEED hath ENGLAND of the accurs’d VOTE?

FIFTH, we do have it on AUTHORITY that the beliefs of MISS NELL GWYN were oppos’d unto REFORM, which, Sirs, surely settles the MATTER.

ROYAL PREROGATIVE on all CONCERNS works. Sirs, we hereby declare the HEALTH of PARLIAMENT as currently constitut’d & counsel with VIGOUR that it should never be modify’d. As the common PARLANCE tells us, if it be not broke, forbear to FIX it.

On Thursday, please vote YES to AV.