Chicken Soup With Barley

We get to see Arnold Wesker’s first two plays this year. The Kitchen is on the Olivier stage of the National in the Autumn but now the Court has given us the first part of Wesker’s Trilogy, Chicken Soup with Barley.

It falls into three parts, 1936, 1946 and 1956, and it traces the rise and fall of a family held together by political convictions from the Cable Street anti-fascist demonstrations, through to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The character who emerges most strongly through the play is Ronnie Kahn, a child in 1936, but a fierce socialist in 1946, but a disillusioned nihilist in 1956. That said, this is an ensemble piece. Wesker is - very unusually - better at writing group scenes than duologues. The opening with its chaos of comings and goings, plans and politics, jokes and hopes, is a wonderfully exuberant way of showing the Cable Street action, politics embedded in the home and a way of living. We see the physical decline of Ronnie’s father, the escapology of his sister, and the persevering optimism of Sarah Kahn. Against that we see Monty’s drift from one side of the battle between capital and labour to the other.

It’s a really beautiful production of a tremendous, generous, big-hearted, ramshackle play. Just like Look Back in Anger, it’s feeling that drives it on. It’s all about the final clash between Ronnie and Sarah and her anguished ‘If you don’t care, you’ll die” which is a mother’s care for her son and an optimist’s care for the world. Samantho Spiro’s beautifully heartfelt and remarkable in her transformation through the evening.

Wesker’s writing is skilful, intuitive, sprawling and joyful. It’s not always good; there’s a lot of clunky insertions of contemporary fact that probably didn’t work then and doesn’t work now. The characters have a tendency to say exactly what they mean, which means you are being handed the whole play on a plate which, if you’re feeling jaded, means it’ll seem a bit boring. But where it’s good, it’s very good: the ensemble first scene, the tracing out of Harry’s physical decline; the final confrontation. The scene with Monty is well done.

What struck me watching it is that he may have deliberately or inadvertently have developed a quite original historiographical dramatic form. The first scene bubbles along buoyantly ending with Harry alone on stage swaying a huge red flag on the stage. My initial feeling is to distrust it - not because of the politics so much as because of the dramaturgy - are we supposed to be swept up in the feeling? In fact we know that Harry’s a bit of a thief and a coward and his socialist fervour is strictly temporary. But it quotes a kind of agitprop dramaturgy which by 1956 will certainly have felt completely outdated. It’s that moment of suspicion that prepares us, I think, for the final scene and the collapse of faith. Just as the play asks what the meaning of all that pre-war socialist optimism was, it also asks how could we have written plays like that?

I Am The Wind

I saw Jon Fosse’s I Am The Wind a month ago and it’s taken me a while to feel able to write anything about it. Not that I didn’t like it, didn’t respect its integrity, or didn’t respond in various ways to it, but it is a show that clearly resists encapsulation. It offers you a very still, unadorned experience, depriving you of most facets of character and story and offering a kind of pure experience of itself, stripped of expectation.

Summarising the play, therefore, is absurd so let me just say that I Am The Wind involves The One and The Other. The One seems horrified by something he (?) has done, some impulse that made him do an awful thing; but more, he seems horrified by action itself, by doing or saying anything, feeling everything to be a weight, his very existence a kind of dull, concrete weight. They agree to take a boat out into a bay, and then out onto the open sea. They eat and drink and then, at one point, far out at sea, The One ‘sort of stumbled’ into the sea and drowns. This, it seems, is that action the horror of which has animated the whole play.

It’s this strange circularity that asks you to abandon demands for character and story. The drowning is the beginning and end, and reflected on throughout, so the characters are both here and not-here, now and not-now. The One and The Other are typically post-Beckettian abstract names and there are no anchors in ‘real-world’ experiences to encourage belief that they are real people at all: I often wondered if they were perhaps aspects of a single mind, the one shrinking back and fearful, the other impetuous and despairing. This circularity, the abstraction, the simplicity of the language (beautifully rendered by Simon Stephens, I thought) make this a cool, still piece of theatre. It doesn’t really ‘move on’ over the course of its 65 minutes; instead a terrible sense of atemporal stasis unfolds before us. 

This is evoked most beautifully at the beginning. The Other appears on stage, holding The One in his arms. Occasionally, his grip slackens and The One appears to sag, threatens to fall; then he hoists the other up. Their clothes are wet and heavy. It’s the beginning and it’s also the end and when they talk, it’s clear they are both inside and outside the situation, their clothes wet, their minds, as it were, dry, describing a situation that they seem no longer to be in.

The show is kind of about theatre’s battle with itself, the tension between art and materiality. Everything about the theatre that aspires to be weightless, immaterial, aesthetic, pure affect and intensity is always negotiated through the blunt materialism of its circumstances of production, the foursquare stage space, living, breathing, mistake-making actors, hard seats, finite duration, hot lights, ticket prices. The One complains:

if I’m on my own
​and all I can hear is myself
​Then there’s nothing there
​and then I start getting heavy
​I turn into a rock
​and it gets
​the rock
​gets heavier and heavier
​I get so heavy that I can barely move
​so heavy that I
​that I sink
​I can barely speak
​it’s a struggle
​to get a single word out
​to extract a single word
​and then
​when the word is out
​when the word has been spoken
​it feels so heavy
​that it drags me down too
​it makes me sink and sink
​(All stage directions and several lines omitted - pp. 29-31)

The feeling here is a mixture of writer’s block and stage fright, combining in a general sense of horror at the very physical experience of theatre. In this, the play connects to a very nineteenth-century, early-modernist sense of theatre’s mission to transcend the material conditions of its enactment. Think of Symbolism, with its gauzes and dim light, its auratic figures intoning poetic evocations of the Beyond. Think of Maeterlinck’s insistence that Shakespeare should only be read, not acted, because when we see Hamlet on stage, something of Hamlet dies for us. Think of the wave of interest in puppet drama, shadow dramas, that fascination in the idea of effacing the physical presence of the actor altogether. Think also of the earlier, Romantic tradition of the closet drama, the “spectacle dans un fauteuil”, the play designed to be read, not acted, the mind being the perfectly immaterial stage. I Am The Wind (what an evocatively evanescent title) sits squarely in that tradition, in its attempt to explore a wholly mental landscape.

That said, the visual centrepiece of this production is an extraordinary thing: the boat is a kind of raft, a section of the floor that rises up hydraulically, tilts and pivots, and gives a sense of effortful grace, as The Other pushes and eases the raft around with a kind of gondolier’s pole. It’s the experience of being in a boat that provides the play’s central metaphor for a floating above the dull earthly physicality of things. ‘I like,’ says The One, ‘being light / rocking gently / in the heavy boat’ (p. 57). It’s beautifully achieved in this, both light and heavy, simple and yet cluttered with meaning. And the small amount of water on the stage surges and floods as the raft rises and falls (see picture). 

There was a witty piece by Martin Cohen in Times Higher Education a month ago detailing some myths about the French. He lists things like the French being proud of the Revolution, being literary people, and having a great train system, all of which he thinks are much overstated. We might add to that list their intellectualism. It is, of course, true that the French have produced a huge number of intellectuals who get interviewed on mainstream chat shows and write bestselling theoretical books. But perhaps we understate how cerebral our own theatre can be: this production, co-produced by the Young Vic, text by Simon Stephens, from Jon Fosse, sold out its run and was treated respectfully by many reviewers. Patrice Chereau, who directed it, is famous for his deconstructionist productions, but here offers clarity, lucidity, and a kind of bleak, wintry theatre spectacle in this punted, pivoting raft. Our language is rather good at capturing this; in the simplicity of the words, we are able to capture a densely rich barrenness and the play really does evoke a vision of theatre as intellectual experience.

Flare Path

Flare Path is not Terence Rattigan’s finest play. It’s certainly not his most adventurous play. It was written at a time of great uncertainty, with him fearing for his career, his career, his abilities. He had been burned by the relative failure of his rather more daring After the Dance and, of course, it was wartime, so he needed a play to meet the mood of patriotism, sentiment and wishfulness. When Trevor Nunn revealed that he was going to revive Flare Path as part of the centenary celebrations, I had serious doubts that it was a good idea. What about Ross? What about a reinvigorated Winslow Boy? Why not, even, First Episode or Variation on a Theme? But it’s been the great surprise success of the centenary so far, so what do I know?

Flare Path is set in a small hotel in Lincolnshire near an air force base. The cast are the staff of the hotel and various bomber pilots and their wives. Into this setting comes the film star Peter Kyle, who is having an affair with Patricia, Flight Lieutenant Teddy Graham’s wife. In the central act we listen alongside the wives to the planes taking off on a night raid and coming back. It seems that one of the men has been killed after ditching into the sea, and this precipitates Patricia to decide that her place is beside her nervous husband. Peter leaves and in the final minutes the lost pilot returns to the delight of all.

David Hare has written a rather sour article claiming that the Rattigan revival - and the belief that he was hard done by - is an example of the right-wing cultural climate we are living through. Hare has been on record as admiring Rattigan very much; he’s written South Downs, a companion piece to The Browning Version, for Chichester, and one might observe that the central idea of Plenty, the difficulty felt by those who experienced the thrilling dangers of fighting for justice during the war in adjusting to life after it, was articulated rather well twenty-five years earlier in The Deep Blue Sea. He’s right to say that one can overstate Rattigan’s martyrdom - he was always being produced - but nonetheless, it is evident that Rattigan suffered personally by his rejection. Perhaps he shouldn’t have cared so much about being liked, but he did care and the withdrawal of love hurt him like the end of a thousand love affairs. Is it right wing to lament his rejection? Hardly. What’s conservative is to insist that the meaning of Look Back in Anger and all that came with it - and all that came before - is unambiguously fixed in the way a handful of critics understood it.

This play can seem somewhat conservative and in this production it seems so. Patricia is presented as a woman sacrificing herself for the war. We uncomplicatedly admire the RAF officers. The working class characters are sometimes figures of fun. This is, basically, the way the play’s always been seen and it might have been risky to shift the play too much.

But shift the play it does, a bit. In fact, the working-class characters are played with verve and seriousness, for the most part. Dusty (a Sergeant in the RAF) is played by Joe Armstrong without a hint of mockery; his lines come off fresh and true. Maudie is a bit of a caricature but Emma Handy finds more and more in it as the show goes on and the moment where the three wives find themselves together joining forces to distract themselves from their overwhelming tension is very powerful: it reminds me of the exemplary moment in The Deep Blue Sea with the three women left alone in the flat, sharing just a glance of complicity in their disappointment with their men. Most magnificently, Sheridan Smith, whom I’ve hymned before, brings out Doris as a breath of sheer life, urgent vitality, warmth and feeling, cutting through the slang and the stiffness, she just seems wholly alive. It’s a completely satisfying performance, adorable and moving.

Sienna Miller is not, to my mind, completely comfortable as Patricia. It’s a part that could be played such as to suggest deep ambivalence between lust and loyalty, dark thoughts in the night, and terrible conscience in the day. Miller’s just a bit flat in this. The ending, following Rattigan’s stage directions, has her silently long to follow Peter out of the hotel, which keeps alive her dignity and complexity, but I would like to see a production that dared to show Patricia unwillingly prepared to see her husband die, releasing her to her lover. In this, Trevor Nunn has given up on the emotional complexity for some CGI antics with crashing planes that weren’t a replacement. For me, the revelation among the leads was Harry Hadden-Paton as Teddy. The scene where he confesses his terror at flying is really shocking, raw and unexpected. In the War, it must have seemed absolutely on the edge between humanising and dangerously defeatist. Hadden-Paton is manically convivial - and rather camp too - and suggests increasingly a hysterical unmanliness or rather a retreat into unmanliness to cope with the funk that overwhelms him in the cockpit.

Much of Rattigan’s stagecraft is rudimentary, compared to the elegance his later work. Patricia and Peter conduct their affair in the public lounge, in which there are four entrance points which could be used at any point. This stretches credibility, especially when he also has a key moment where a conversation (on another matter) is overheard by Doris. But there are expert moments of compression and concision: the moment where Peter reads the Count’s letter to Doris - he’s translating a letter in French, written by a Pole, into English, to the man’s wife. The layers are expertly done, funny and tremendously touching. And the scene contains two revelations: Doris discovers that the man she always dared hope truly loved her truly did; Peter realises what Teddy means to Patricia. And none of this is verbalised; it’s all a dab of a hanky, a dignified walk upstairs, a slump of emotional defeat.

I don’t know that this production will establish this play entirely in Rattigan’s canon, but here it comes up shining like a new penny and I hope one day to see a production that explores the play’s darker corners.

iEverything

I succumbed to the iPad, as I knew I would. I’ve had it just over a month now and I wanted to reflect on this device, what it’s like, and what it means.

When it first arrived I was disappointed. I think I was expecting a computer. I took it to the British Library loaded up with a fairly complicated document and tried working on it. That was laborious; the iPad isn’t geared up for working in that way. I found myself thinking I had basically bought a very rudimentary laptop.

If there is a problem for Apple - and given that they projecting 385 million iPads sold by the end of this year, there probably isn’t one - I think it’s this mentality. The iPad is trying to carve out a new space between the phone and the computer and it’s easy to imagine it’s an inferior computer or a bulky phone. 

In fact, it really is something quite new. It’s a space that’s been occupied before by the Netbook. These were actually rather high-powered machines, often running desktop operating systems, with full-featured versions of desktop software, but with internet connections and smaller hard drives. The iPad tacks slightly west of that; it’s nearer a phone - it shares the iPhone OS and needs scaled-down versions of the desktop software. Of course, the huge difference is the touch-screen which transforms the experience. Using an iPad is a delightful, seductive thing. You get so used to swiping and tapping that already my computer keyboard feels clunky.

And once you get the idea, once you shake yourself free of the idea that this must be either a phone or a computer, you also realise that you’re heading into an entire new world of computing. For twenty years or more, we’ve assumed that when you buy a computer, you’re buying a data storage unit too. The web is now ready to be our storage. For most day-to-day purposes, all you need is a lightweight interactivity device with your own specified group of applications and a fast internet connection. Your data is in the cloud, on a server somewhere, and shared across all your devices.

It also becomes clear that most of us don’t need very complicated software. I use the Microsoft Office suite, but I’m sure I only use 25% of what Word can do, even less of Excel. So why not just buy a basic version and then add apps for the specific extra functions you need?

On Monday, Steve Jobs and co. announced, among other things, iCloud which is their revamp of MobileMe, already a cloud computing service. iCloud looks to be the service that will make even more sense of the iPad. Automatically backing up your documents to the Cloud, it means you have access to all of your documents and photos, anywhere you go. And, for a fee, you’ll also have all of your music. My old iPod, 160GBs of it, will be happily redundant, because I’ll be able to get one of my (currently) 36,742 tunes on my phone.

In the last month, I’ve found myself leaving the laptop at home and taking my iPad everywhere. I took both to a development event in York and I only used the iPad. I took the plunge and took only the iPad to a conference in Germany. Not only could I very happily make notes on other talks on the iPad, I delivered my own talk from the iPad as well. It doesn’t need to power up, you just take it out of your bag, flip it open and start working. I’ve used it on trains, planes and on the tube.

What about its carbon footprint? One green website, using Apple’s own figures, suggests that in terms of CO2 emissions, it’s equivalent to 17.4 books. So if you read 18 e-books on the iPad - actually, if you just buy 18 e-books on the iPad - you’re making a saving. There are issues about the materials used, their disposal, and indeed ethical issues about the poor working conditions in the Chinese Foxconn factory, where there has been a wave of suicides amongst its workers. We need to keep watching this story and not forget it as we gaze into the iPhone’s lovely surface.

A note on eBooks, though. I have now read a few books both on the iPad’s resident iBooks app and on Amazon’s Kindle app for iPad. It’s a pretty good experience. You’re holding something that feels like a glossy magazine in a way, so it’s less unfamiliar than reading a book on a laptop, which is a rather grotesque experience. Magazines do particularly well on the iPad and I enjoy The New Yorker and Times Higher Education on iPad more than the paper version.

However, four caveats. First, the choice of books is still lousy. Especially if you want to read academic books and not just bestsellers, you have very limited choice. iBooks is significantly more limited than the Kindle.

Second, the formatting of the books really suffers. I bought a book of poetry, which in the paper version has parallel English and French text on facing pages. The Kindle app was completely unable to deal with that and the book was basically scrambled. More minor, but still irritating, reading Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test on iBooks, where, in the paper version, a word is split across a line and hyphenated, the hyphen still exists in the digital version, wherever it is in the line. It trips you up to read a sen-tence where a word is pointlessly hyphenated.

Third, the format makes all books look the same. I don’t want to seem like a book fetishist, but there is something important about the different fonts, the page size, the paper quality; book designers think about this stuff and have done for 500 years. It’s a pity that may disappear. In fact, iBooks allows for a number of fonts and some degree of page design, but I hope this will continue to develop. I’m concerned because, famously, Steve Jobs thinks nobody reads any more and if it’s not his priority, it’s probably not Apple’s priority.

Fourth, when I finished Jon Ronson’s book, I thought Lilla might enjoy it. But I’m stuck. If I had a paper copy, I’d lend it to her. Short of lending her my iPad for a fortnight, I can’t let her read it. This is a major flaw. It’s part of the brilliance of books that they can be passed around, shared, circulate and help strengthen relationships, communities and so on. You can buy them second hand and so on. None of that is currently possible. Apple must introduce a function whereby you can lend your iBook to someone else. I wouldn’t mind it, like the paper version, it disappeared from my iBookshelf while they had it. It would be very good if you could also quickly and weightlessly borrow it back, if you needed to check something in it. You’d never lose a book to an unscrupulous friend, either. The thing is this has to happen and it has to happensoon: because if they don’t do this, people will crack the software and Limewire/Pirate Bay-type sites will start appearing for books and then, just as in the music industry, publishing and bookselling’s entire financial model will collapse. The music industry didn’t look forward and they suffered; let’s hope the books world thinks differently.

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.