Death Duties

What is 'ideology'? It's a confusing word because it has a variety of meanings. Sometimes ideology is used loosely to mean any strongly-held political creed ('a clash of ideologies'). Sometimes it is a pejorative term to mean a dogmatic political position (the mayor of Brescia's wish to reinstate a fascist-era statue is 'overtly ideological').  But it can also carry an implication of not just the sort of idea but the way that idea is presented; what differentiates an ideology from a set of ideas might be that ideas are discussed whereas ideologies are insinuated to us. For example, a very particular and contestable policy is presented as 'simply good old-fashioned common sense', which makes it harder to object to because who wants to sound like they have no common sense? The connection between these definitions is the level at which they are grasped. Ideologies are (usually) political creeds, presented as if they are something else, and often unmasked as dogmatic political positions. It carries a pejorative taint at all times, which is why, as Terry Eagleton observed, we are about as likely to describe our own thought as ideological as we are to refer to ourselves as 'fatso'.

Here's Margaret Thatcher with a classic piece of ideology: it's from a pre-General Election interview on the BBC's Panorama programme, 8 June 1987. The interviewer is Robin Day.

In case you are reading this somewhere without audio, here's a transcript:​

Robin Day: You have stamped your image on the Tory party like no other leader has done before. We never heard of Macmillanism. We never heard of Heathism. We never heard of Churchillism. We now hear of 'Thatcherism'. What is it - what is it for the help of the undecided? What is that Thatcherism means?
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​Thatcher: Sir Robin, it is not a name that I created in the sense of calling it an 'ism'. Let me tell you what it stands for. It stands for sound finance and Government running the affairs of the nation in a sound financial way. It stands for honest money—not inflation. It stands for living within your means. It stands for incentives because we know full well that the growth, the economic strength of the nation comes from the efforts of its people and its people need incentives to work as hard as they possibly can. All of that has produced economic growth.

​It stands for something else. It stands for the wider and wider spread of ownership of property, of houses, of shares, of savings. It stands for being strong in defence—a reliable ally and a trusted friend. People have called those things 'Thatcherism'; they are, in fact, fundamental common sense and having faith in the enterprise and abilities of the people. It was my task to try to release those. They were always there; they have always been there in the British people, but they couldn’t flourish under Socialism. They have now been released. That’s all that Thatcherism is.

It's a brilliant piece of off-the-cuff ideological mystification. I say ideological because it presents a particular, partisan political view but systematically disguises just how particular, partisan and political that view is. Look at the five moves she makes in this short passage.

1. First, she denies that Thatcherism is an ideology. It's not an 'ism', she insists. Isms are clearly identified positions (Communism, Stalinism). Isms make your thought sounds factional, something you can contest. She doesn't want people to think that hers is a political position at all. (As if Thatcher weren't the most deeply ideological thinker to run the Tory party perhaps since Robert Peel).
2. She then replaces her political policies with a series of unquestionable moral virtues: 'sound finance' (who doesn't want that?), 'honest money' (sounds great), 'living within your means' (to do anything else would seem profligate). The problem here is that these terms are meaningless. No economist would propose 'unsound finance' or 'dishonest money'. 'Living beyond your means' is plainly a bad idea. (Even though, as the financial crash of 2008 revealed, the kinds of financial deregulation promoted by Thatcher and her followers produced deeply unsound finance and, in the form of the complex securities that brought about the disaster, the most dishonest money in history.)
3. She sums up. There's no such thing as Thatcherism really. It's not an idea. It's 'in fact, fundamental common sense'. It's what we all know to be true. And if we don't know it, we have no common sense.​ 
4. In fact, it's not just common sense, it's innate. It's deep within the British people. All she did was release this native virtue.​ So it's not a political position, it's just some ordinary common sense virtues, lodged deep in the British character.
5. And what was blocking it? Socialism. It's a brilliant rhetorical trick. She begins by denying that Thatcherism is an -ism. She ends by reminding us that Socialism is an -ism. It's the irregular verb of politics: I know. You think. He she or it is ideological.

It's the perfect ideological answer. It presents a political position and masks it as anything but. Blair did it, presenting himself as non-ideological. Cameron began his time as Tory leader with the statement: "I'm not a deeply ideological person. I'm a practical one". All the current rhetoric about austerity economics (a very particular and narrow view of how to deal with the state of the nation's finances) pretends that it's the only possible approach ("there is no plan B"), and making the same illegitimate equation between household and government finances.

Ideology has been on my mind because of the extraordinary, outrageous, and disgraceful spectacle of Margaret Thatcher's funeral. The whole spectacle was about depoliticising her political views and redescribing her as almost a force of nature. She 'saved our country' said Cameron, as if this is a simple fact and not a grotesquely tendentious view. The mantra of the Right has been that she is our 'greatest peacetime prime minister' ('peacetime' because Churchill has already been given this kind of funerary whitewashing). ComRes even conducted a poll to find out, as if this were the sort of question that could be answered by a poll or any other means. They concede that she was 'divisive' but this has been trivialised into 'dividing opinion', which in itself becomes proof of her strength of character. It is neatly forgotten that she was divisive because she presided over a massive rise in inequality, that she treated gays, miners, the unemployed and her political opponents as outcasts. Hell she didn't even trust half of her own party ('is he "one of us"?' she would querulously enquire of a colleague). Her apparently off-the-cuff remark about 'the enemy within' during the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 was actually pre-scripted. It's there in her notes to a July 1984 speech to the 1922 Committee. She was a hardliner, an ideologue.

Most grotesquely, her death has been used ideologically to stifle dissent. We are told that it is in 'bad taste' to hold street parties to mark her death, to celebrate her passing. In death, Thatcher is simply a human being and deserves the respect owed to any human being. But nothing is changed by her death. I never advocated murdering her or physically harming her; these are the kinds of duties she is owed as a human being. William Oddie, writing in The Catholic Herald, is right to say that at a funeral we must respect another person's humanity, but he is wrong in thinking that criticising a person does their humanity any disrespect. By arguing with someone, by taking them seriously, by holding them responsible, by including them in our circles of moral regard, that's how we respect their humanity. We owe no duties of false deference to the dead and the attempt to claim that we do is, once again, ideological. It tries to take the politics out of her life when, in fact, politics ran through Margaret Thatcher like Brighton through a stick of Brighton rock.

The sheer hypocrisy of all this was visible in the funeral. After a week of being told that her death was not a moment for politics, we had the most political funeral imaginable; surrounding Thatcher in the trappings of state - the military, the monarchy, the church - the whole thing given blanket coverage on most television and radio channels, this was not a way of marking her greatness, it was an attempt to confer greatness upon her. The mechanism was precisely to pretend her greatness was apolitical: The Sun, as one might expect, extolled "her courage, ideals, dignity, resolve' and remarked on the 'dignity' of the 'poignant ceremony'. This is in contrast to 'Left-wing protesters [who] had threatened to turn the solemn occasion into a crude political demo': again, she's not political: her opponents are. (You can read the whole of that extraordinary article here without adding traffic to The Sun). The Dean of St Paul's gave a pretty good oration in near-impossible circumstances; he also insisted that this was not a day for politics (which kind of implied that on any other occasion he'd have happily let rip about her record in office) but still managed to toe the line by converting her deeply divisive catchphrase into a warm, fuzzy, humanising punchline: 'Lying here,' he said, 'she is one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings'. Great! I look forward to my televised funeral in St Paul's. 

And can we note the double standards In July 2003, in the early months of the Iraq invasion, Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay were killed by US forces. How did Tony Blair and George W Bush respond to this?​ Did they respect their humanity? Did they insist on a measured response? Did they feel that in death, these two men were beyond politics? Did they condemn celebrations? No, they both celebrated. Blair and Bush both described the deaths as 'good news'; they both reminded the public of the horrible acts that Uday and Qusay committed in life; Blair remarked that that the celebrations in Iraq were 'an indication of just how evil they were' and Bush that they expressed the 'real desires of the Iraqi people to be rid once and for all of Saddam Hussein, his sons and his odious regime'. And imagine if someone had got into The Ritz and got a photograph of Thatcher's dead body! Imagine the outrage! And yet the US officially released images of the two sons mutilated bodies. When Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS, were any of these celebrations condemned?

A persistent theme in the eulogies has been to list her many virtues: conviction, hard work, determination, getting things done, changing things, energy, passion, huge personality. But are these virtues? You can have the wrong convictions; your hard work can be misdirected; there are no doubt passionate, energetic and determined rapists. These so-called virtues are surely only as good as the actions they support. They might well be essential qualities to support effective ethical behaviour, but they are ethically neutral in themselves.

The philosophical principle underlying these claims, though no one has named it as such, is known as 'virtue ethics'. This, derived from Aristotle, but much-revived and much-discussed in moral philosophy since the 1950s, is a distinctive contribution to normative ethics (i.e. the branch of ethics concerned with what is right and wrong). Before the revival of virtue ethics, the two dominant normative theories were deontology and consequentialism: that is, the belief that the failure of an action derives from, respectively, the principle under which the action is done or the consequences of that action. Virtue ethicists came along and pointed out, with some justification, that these approaches both (a) concentrated only on individual actions and (b) were petty and rule-based; they both seemed to think that you would be moral if you stayed within certain abstract lines of moral conduct. But, they said, the sort of person who sees a child drowning and either (a) selects a principle under which it would be appropriate to save the child or (b) calculates the consequences of jumping in is, in the words of Bernard Williams, having 'one thought too many' ('Persons, Character and Morality' in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 18).

Instead the virtue ethicists said that we should think in terms of what is a good character. And that's not an abstract thing you need to work out; just look around you. Who are the most admirable people we know or know of? Many of us might agree that if we had to have someone's set of personal qualities, we might choose Nelson Mandela, someone who seems to have strength, intelligence, fortitude, a sense of justice, forgiveness, kindness, courage, generosity, dignity and clarity, and much more besides. And it wouldn't seem absurd to think, if faced with a difficult situation, 'what would Nelson Mandela do?' In other words, rather than seek for rules, principles, or consequences, just think what a really admirable person would do and do that.

I'll come back to Thatcher, I promise.​

Virtue ethics goes on to observe that when we admire someone's personal qualities, a near-universal aspect of that is that we admire people who have not-too-much and not-too-little of these qualities. We admire courage, and we don't admire cowardice, but nor to we admire the reckless or foolhardy. We like people to have a middling amount of these qualities. This is the principle that Aristotle called 'the golden mean' and less sympathetic critics call the Goldilocks theory of morality.

I find the golden mean to be the least impressive part of the theory; it's very unclear what counts as a personal quality - is a predisposition to incest a personal quality? If so, what would just the right amount of incest be? A virtue ethicist might insist that incestuousness is at one end of a spectrum of 'familial dutifulness' with matricide at the other end, and 'loving and respecting your family' somewhere in the middle, but that's just making it up as you go along and it leads to is exactly the kind of jumbled set of virtues (are they virtues? are they characteristics? predispositions? ticks?) that we've seen with Thatcher. Any old personal characteristic gets held up as a triumphant personal quality without any regard to whether these were employed to any good end. But when you remove principles from your politics you get ideology. When you remove principles from your moral philosophy, you get virtue ethics.

​The political problem with virtue ethics is that it relies on the quality of the society you are in. To find a good personal we don't transcendentally derive a definition of them (as, sort of, Kant would do), we just look around and think who we most admire. But if you live in a corrupted society with bad values, your good person is going to be similarly wayward. Put crudely - because Godwin's Law insists on it - in 1930s Germany, a good many people would have pointed to the Führer as someone embodying an examplary moral character. In classical Athens, some people I suppose might have seen Socrates's humility, intelligence, perseverance and generosity as pretty great, but, by most accounts, he was largely mocked for his ugliness and poverty (and eventually executed). The moral leaders would have been people who approved of slavery and believed women were lesser beings than men. The moral icons of a society will, in many ways, embody the imperfect values of that society. Deontology, with its derided insistence on principles, takes us beyond the actual practices of our society and establishes ethics as a normative horizon, against which our society can be criticised. In crude terms, virtue ethics is rather conservative while deontology is potentially revolutionary.

Because if you can't look beyond our society for the principles governing our actions, we are trapped in the way things are. This is eerily similar to the characteristic ideological formulations of Thatcherism. One of the great slogans of the early eighties was 'There Is No Alternative', sometimes abbreviated to TINA. It is why the great anti-globalization slogan was 'Another World Is Possible'. It's also the great anti-ideological slogan - anti-ideological in the sense that it insists on the gap between what is and what might be that dominant ideologies always seek to efface. Even if Thatcher were right and that competition is somehow deep in the heart of British people, that states really do have to run their finances exactly the same way as households, and privatization is in some peculiar way a piece of common sense, another world is possible and things can change. 

Children of the Sun

Gorky's 1905 play, Children of the Sun, ​is set among the intelligentsia of early 1890s small-town Russia. Protasov is a scientist (or at least a would-be scientist), who is convinced that his chemistry experiments will soon discover the source of life and point the way to the future. As with several Gorky plays, the relationships are all one-sided. Protasov's marriage has cooled and his wife, Yelena, is being wooed unsuccessfully by the preening artist Vageen. Protasov is unrequitedly adored by the rich widow, Melaniya, whose brother brother, Boris, a cynical vet, is loved by Protasov's sister, Liza. A few characters fancy the maid, Feema, but she runs off with someone else. Meanwhile the labourer Yegor beats his wife, Avdotya. While these characters discuss the values of art and science, beauty and truth, there are outbreaks of cholera in the town and the townsfolk blame Protasov's experiments. Soon the anger overspills and the house is invaded. 

This is a play in a group of Gorky's most Chekhovian plays, Summerfolk ​(2004), Children of the Sun (2005) and Barbarians (2006). Earlier plays like Philistines and The Lower Depths (both 1902) were set among the downtrodden and the underclass. Later plays like Enemies (1906) were more explicitly political in their depiction of class struggle. These three plays, in the middle, have an obvious debt to Chekhov in their ensemble casts, upper middle class settings, their mixture of laughter and tears, their use of comedy and irony. Sometimes, as in Summerfolk, the debt to Chekhov is rather sardonic: the play feels more like a parody of Chekhov that an hommage. In this play, the characters spend much of the time imagining life in the future, like Three Sisters's Vershinin, but their predictions are the centre of a fiercely political critique rather than the object of despairing humour.

​Not a great deal happens in the play. People pine after each other. Boris finally falls for Liza but she misses the moment and he kills himself, though, rather like Varya and Lopakhin or Irina and Tuzenbakh, it's not exactly centre stage. With Gorky it's a little more melodramatic, but there's still the sense of the emotional squalor of a missed moment rather than anything heroic. Otherwise, the relationships remain pretty stagnant; Melaniya declares herself to Protasov, but the passive hero doesn't get it; Yelena definitively turns down Vageen; Feema flirtatiously turns down the landlord's son and leaves. While much of the play appears to be devoted to the characters' discussions of science and art, this is clearly not the point; the nature of Protasov's scientific enquiry is conspicuously unspecific. The painting that the characters all discuss is never actually painted; instead we see a rather petulant small-scale work. It underlines the sense that these characters, for all their grand talk, their grand vision of the future, their apparently broad ideals, are actually deeply self-regarding and selfish. The stasis draws our attention to the play's outside: the real action, one senses, is offstage, the growing illness of the townspeople and their growing antagonism. At the same time, the moment where Protasov does express his vision of all humanity as children of the sun it's hard not to be seduced. I think it creates a sense of a utopian ethical horizon that is out of reach for these characters but nonetheless provides a broader perspective in which to judge their actuality.

I think the play has two key uncertainties in it that are invigoratingly complicating. One is that much of the discussion about art and science in the play feels like an analogue for a Marxist view of history (a view that Gorky held). I guess this is because we're so much less likely now to talk confidently about humanity marching towards a clear future. In 1905, I imagine, that kind of teleological view of history was so common across so many different things that it was sort of mentally cancelled out. Gorky only saw the differences between these discourses where we may well only see the similarities. But as a result, I wondered towards the end if Children of the Sun could be seen as a play about revolutionary ideas being pulled down by the ignorant mob rather than the complacency of a bourgeois intelligentsia ignoring the suffering of the real agents of history, the rural working class. The debate is further complicated because Naturalism, the tradition in which Gorky is most directly writing now, is avowedly a scientific form of theatre, yet science on stage is hard to sustain because the stage thrives not of objectivity, clarity, and logic but on implication, ambiguity and affect. When Ibsen writes An Enemy of the People​, a play about a scientist trying to tell the truth to a hostile society (and certainly a comment on the hostile reception of Ghosts the year before), the play nonetheless can't help but draw attention to Dr Stockmann's naivety and arrogance and end with him adopting - I exaggerate only slightly - a kind of fascist view of humanity in which only the minority can be trusted to embody the future. It is a dramatisation of the role of scientists in society - and by analogy of naturalism - but also a ferocious and possibly inadvertent critique of the same. Here one might expect a discussion of science and art to be warmly considered by a playwright working within a tradition of scientific art; instead it seems to be deprecated but perhaps this is a kind of displaced abjection, attempting to disgorge the poison from the play's ideas, situating them as external to its meaning. But does it work? Is that a sustainable distinction?

A second aporia in this play is whether Protasov's experiments are in fact part-responsible for the ill-health of the townspeople. We know that the copper-lined vat that he has commissioned to hold the waste from his experiments has cracked, because of an either incompetent or corrupt deal on the copper from the entrepreneurial/capitalist landlord Nazar. We know that as a result, the chemicals have spilled into the water supply. The townspeople think that he is responsible and the bourgeois characters deny this. We know the illness sweeping the town is cholera, but do we know that the chemicals haven't, for example, attacked the people's immune systems? In our more environmentally-aware era this aspect of the play - as with the deforestation in Uncle Vanya - stands out to us in a way it did not, at least not in the same way, 110 years ago. If there is a possibility that the experiments, apparently conducted in the light of progress, universalism, reason, and humanity, have actually brought about mass destruction, we are in the realms of Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, 1947). Writing in the immediate wake of the Holocaust, they argued that the Enlightenment - the flourishing of rational philosophy and politics in the eighteenth century in which progress, universalism, reason and humanity were guiding concepts - had promised liberation from authority through reason; instead it had brought a closing down of enquiry through mastery and knowledge. What is known is controlled, subject to power. Our sovereign rationality gives is confidence to declare everything knowable and thus everything controllable and, ultimately, we close off the 'enchantment' of things that would lead us to truer (dialectical?) knowledge. As they put it at the very beginning of the book, 'Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity' (Stanford University Press translation, 2002, p. 1). In their sense, one might say that Protasov has so swallowed the Enlightenment vision of science that he ironically no longer pays attention to the world and, in the process, destroys it. The play might be seen as foreshadowing the concentration camp and the Gulag, rationally-organised mass destruction on the basis of Enlightenment principles of progress. 

I don't wholly swallow Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of Enlightenment; nor, do I think did they, really. The arguments against genocide are best articulated within the Enlightenment through notions like the dignity of the individual, the right of all people to equal moral regard, the obligation to treat people as ends not merely means, and so on. Yet there is clearly an debate to be had here about the value of abstract ideas in guiding particular actions. These are of particular pertinence to Gorky who would go on to be a leading ideologist for the Soviet Union, an enthusiast (in print, anyway) for Stalin, and a cheerleader for the grotesque policy of Socialist Realism, implemented in 1934, which did for many of his contemporaries like Bulgakov and Meyerhold. There are rumours, apparently, that Gorky's own death was on the orders of Stalin, after the writer threatened to leave the Soviety Union. Gorky lived to see the massacre of the Kulaks, the Ukrainian genocide, the deaths by famine elsewhere of 1932-33 in part due to inflexible Soviet policy, and the beginning of his systematic purge of the party. Was there, in 1905, a hint of the risks to come, the terror of not liberating but enslaving people through an abstract idea of freedom?

In this production, Howard Davies and Bunny Christie, as they did with Philistines and The Cherry Orchard, have moved the action of the play forward to the first decade of the twentieth century rather than the last decade of the nineteenth. The women are feistier, the technology is a touch more recognisably modern. The restiveness outside is more directly connected to the political stirrings of 1905 (though the resonance was entirely clear at the first performance in the Moscow Art Theatre, when the lead actor had to address the audience to reassure them that the people invading the stage were just actors). When Vageen brings in his painting of Yelena, it's a post-impressionist pastiche rather the symbolist painting I'd assumed they were describing. This clarifies the play, I think. Andrew Upton's version is very contemporary and Howard Davies allows the lines to tumble over each other. I'm not sure that the production always avoids stereotype - Nanny really is just Nanny - but Geoffrey Streatfield as Protasov, Lucy Black as Melaniya, and Paul Higgins as Boris in particular bring a vigour and authenticity to their roles. Bunny Christie's set is, as ever, a joy to look at (you kind of want to get on stage and explore it). The play begins by showing us the back wall, with a metal gate that a workman is struggling to fix. This is entirely drawn from the play, where the permeable boundary of the Estate is a literal and metaphorical concern throughout. I wonder if this responds to Gorky's conditions of life when he wrote this: he'd been imprisoned for his actions during the January 1905 uprising and I imagine him maybe unconsciously imagining walls and doors that you could burst through.

It's an enjoyable, low-intensity production (until the ending, which has been tricked up with an exciting but rather meretriciously explosive ending) though I think the play is a slow affair at the best of times. No characters is wholly likeable but, unlike Chekhov they're not always fully enough realised for us to care about them either. So it feels a rather chilly evening.

If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep

On one wall of the Royal Academy's superb exhibition of Manet's portraits, hang his paintings of Zola and of Mallarmé. Painted only eight years apart, in 1868 and 1876, respectively, and hung within touching distance, their style and approach could hardly be more different. 

Manet's figures always have a certain glassiness, a detachment; the gaze that emanates from a picture, if it does, is rarely uncomplicatedly inviting; in a great work like the Dejeuner sur l'herbe (1862-3), Victorine Meurent, the model for the central nude, looks coolly out of the picture, perhaps anticipating the viewer's startled response and smiling gently at our bourgeois propriety. In the great and mysterious The Railway (1873), Meurent peers out at us, her expression at once fearful, reproving, and amused, leading us into the aporetic structure of the painting. In both (and most) paintings, the figures are awkward, detached. Manet's Zola is certainly no exception. He sits stiffly, uncomfortably, slightly apart from his desk, a large book cradled in his left hand, his right resting on his knee. 

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There are many reasons why Zola might have been uncomfortable: Manet was notorious for the number of sittings he required of his subjects (another painting in the exhibition, of Georges Clemenceau, is brilliant but a sketch because the young politician could not commit to the hours posing for the artist); and also this is not Zola's home. While the painting might lead us to think we are looking at the author in his study, it's actually Manet's studio. But one of the great puzzles of the picture is what Zola is looking at. His gaze is directed off to the right of the canvas, but slightly below the horizon. It's unclear whether he is gazing at something with his famous cool amoral detachment, or if he is lost in thought; is his attention directed outwardly or inwardly? 

As it happens, that's rather a faultline for Zola's work. Is he an empiricist, meticulously itemising the data of the world without judgment or favour? Or is he offering us a vivid sense of his own perspective on things; how far is everything knowingly and proudly coloured by his temperament? Manet was painting in the wake of the great figure of mid-century French art, Courbet, whose realism was founded in a rather Romantic (though he denied this) assertion of the free individual: it was by asserting his own individuality that he was free to be a Realist, and it was by being a Realist that he asserted his individuality. Zola has flushed the Romanticism out of his system much more than Courbet, though his characteristic formulation of Naturalism - 'a corner of life seen through a temperament' - is a not-wholly-successful attempt to square the circle of artistic creativity and scientific objectivity. So the question of Zola's engagement with the outside world is a significant one.

Indeed, the whole orientation of the picture is strange. Zola is looking off canvas, but also away from the canvas. Manet has placed around Zola several items that represent the author's literary and artistic interests - books, a pen, and a reproduction of Manet's Olympe (1863), which Zola had defended, and the large blue pamphlet is Zola's commendatory defence of Manet from the catcalls of the Salon - yet Zola's gaze specifically seems to be away from all of these things. There is a profound sense of disconnection between Zola the man and his artistic context.

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​Fantin-Latour L'Atelier aux Batignolles (1870)

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​Bazille Mon Atelier (1869-70)

In a stimulating essay on Zola and painting, Robert Lethbridge argues that perhaps the painting is offering an implicit critique of Zola's attitudes to Manet, which tended to see the painter as a figure triumphantly of his time, and had the downside of denying the painter autonomy; he was, as it were, simply the most vigorous symptom of his era. (This was, as it happened, how Zola tended to describe everything - in very mechanistic, functionalist terms.) He notes that Zola's eye-glasses are left dangling in the picture, adding an imputation of sightlessness. Zola is turned away from Manet in the very moment of affirming Manet. Lethbridge also notes that in two more-or-less contemporary collective portraits of artists and critics - Fantin-Latour Un Atelier aux Batignolles (1870) and Bazille's Mon Atelier (1869-70) - Zola is again turned away from the main action and once you notice it, you can't unnotice it. It's almost as if all these artists are saying, look at Zola; so close, but always looking the wrong way.

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The image of Mallarmé, however, is different again. Zola is framed by his (and Manet's obsessions). Mallarmé, by contrast, is in an an indistinct space; it's an interior, but the size, scale, main use of the room is unspecified. The details of the room - in contrast to the meticulous rendering of paintings within paintings and other decorative elements that characterise the Zola portrait - are very loosely sketched in. It’s hard to make out if the wall behind Mallarmé is wallpapered, or directly painted; it's just, I suppose, possible there is a plant behind him. There is almost a hallucinatory quality to the picture as if the background is out of focus, part-imagined.  The heavy impasto turns the air thick, which seems to blend with Mallarmé's generous cigar smoke. Showing someone smoking was a mid-nineteenth century pictorial trope suggesting Bohemianism (one of the many ways Courbet established his avant-gardism was to paint himself smoking). Here the smoking suggests we are at the interface between this and another world; all that is solid melts into air, the material becoming ethereal. Unlike Zola's bourgeois uprightness, Mallarmé lolls to his right in a position that could be comfortable, but could be narcotic. Indeed, Manet's hooded eyes might suggest that he is shrouded in thought, but it might also imply he's on opiates. 

It's easy to point up the differences and see in the Zola portrait the arch-naturalist and ardent empiricist while Mallarmé is all cosmic unities and transcendental experience. But I wonder if actually Manet saw the portraits as rather similar. It's tempting to think that Zola's gaze is his being caught by some curiosity, his instinct for empirical observation even manifesting when sitting for his portrait, while Mallarme is caught in a moment of apprehending the 'beyond'; but, in fact, the gazes are fairly comparable. Look at them again and imagine that Mallarmé is observing the movement of a beetle, while Zola is the lost in the realms of Higher Thought; it fits well enough. 

Indeed, while Zola and Mallarmé were exponents of opposed and rival schools - Naturalism and Symbolism - in 1880s Paris, it's a mistake to think that they occupied positions on either side of a fiercely-defended Berlin Wall of literary modernism. One might see the portraits as emphasising the overlaps and continuities between the two. Mallarme's gaze is, as I have suggested, as ambiguous as Zola's. Is he seeing or are we observing someone unseeing? Is he looking or imagining, in a state of concentration or of reverie? Both Zola and Mallarmé, the paintings seem to say, in their own ways, are ambiguously related to this and another world. Indeed, placed side by side, the two portraits reveal a series of rhymes and reflections of each other. Zola looks away from the rear wall in the painting to the right; Mallarmé looks away from the rear wall to the left. Zola has one hand on his leg and the other on some papers; Mallarmé has one hand in his jacket and the other on some papers. Zola looks stiff and awkward and Mallarmé lolls, but neither of them is entirely 'there'. Mallarmé is surrounded by thick air in which, one fancies, revelations and emanations pulse. Zola is equally hemmed in, but by the art and culture of his time.

Can you have both? At the time, followers of Zola and Mallarmé frequently came to blows, particularly at fledgling performances of the Theatre d'Art. The manifesto culture of early Modernism meant that masts were there to have colours nailed to and it's hard now to think that there might have been much overlap. But, of course, their followers came to blows because they'd both been to the same theatre shows. Did they just go to heckle? Surely not - at least surely not all of them. It is worth remembering that, with the philistine and corrupt years of the Second Empire still in living memory, it is perfectly likely that the Naturalists and Symbolists considered themselves fellow travellers in the cause of pushing art and literature to the centre of debate.

In any case, can one survive without the other? It would be a grotesque simplification to suggest that Symbolism lacked any reference to the contemporary and that Naturalism was artless. In a smart article ('Zola by Mallarmé', New Approaches to Zola, ed. Hannah Thompson. London: Emile Zola Society, 2003, pp. 79-89) Roger Pearson argues that their differences, and specifically Mallarmé's disdain for Zola, have been overplayed; he suggests that Mallarme was ready to 'absorb himself in the "poesie" of the Rougon-Macquart' (p. 88). That is, Mallarmé perhaps saw what it took critics decades to see: that Zola great novels have profound aesthetic virtues, and not just sociological ones. Similarly, Mallarmé's poems, for all their gestures at the metaphysical, at transcending time, are steeped in the culture of the 1880s and 1890s. Mallarmé caught the distinct character of the present every bit as much as Zola. 

I thought of this while watching Anders Lustgarten's play at the Royal Court, If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep. The play is a polemic against austerity economics. For the first half it presents a satirically-imagined version of the world we are in, only very slightly exaggerated, in which bankers create new financial instruments to monetize a drop in social ills like unemployment, rape and murder, and then create further instruments to hedge against those things rising: in other words, capitalism can literally profit from misery. The poor have meters installed in their houses, meanwhile young white men indulge in vicious racism "for a laugh" and the welfare state is increasingly staffed by volunteers. In the second half, a group of revolutionaries occupy a disused courtroom and plan to put capitalism on trial. This becomes a long debate about the history of the current austerity bullshit. Towards the end of the play, the two halves join up: a council worker has been sent in to assess the health & safety aspects of the squat. He is the black man abused in the first half, who reacted, and was sent to prison. One of the revolutionaries was in that white gang and, as the lights fade, they have effected some kind of reconciliation.

My hopes for this show weren't particularly high. I saw a previous play of his, A Day at the Racists, which seemed to me to see political comment as something too important to be worked through things as trivial as pleasing theatrical form, character, or dialogue. It was agitprop. This play is too and it had been preceded by some rather self-satisfied interviews with the playwright so I kind of feared the worst.

And, look, I don't think this is a great play. I don't know that it's even a good play. But I liked it. The first half has tons of energy with the short, punchy scenes setting out a vision of the present. The scenes are sketchy, the characters are functions, but there was a real power in the scenarios. Even in the second half, which I thought was pretty terrible, the arguments about austerity economics are fascinating and, for what it's worth, I completely agree with them. 

Why is the second half terrible? Well, it's a long scene that tries to bring characters and storylines together, so it's where his ability not just to skewer a contemporary type but to create story, character and action needs to come to the fore - and he's not very good at any of that. What is the situation? Seriously, what IS it? An activist group have occupied a disused court room to put capitalism on trial. They've done what? There's no real representative of capitalism in the room. So it's a conceptual trial? Not very active activists, then. And if it's conceptual, why bother occupy a court room? They could have done it in the comfort of their own homes or on Skype or something. And you realise that it's one of those attitude to playmaking which says, lock people in a room because that way they have to sit around and debate the issues of the play. Nothing really needs to happen. And, as if he realises this, he makes something happen. A health and safety inspector comes round and one of the activists recognises him as the black guy that his racist friends attacked in a pub earlier in the play. The activist is now politically re-educated in prison, of course, but he now needs to get the guy's forgiveness. Or something. Does he? Can't he keep out of his way? And another question: the inspector is likely to get them evicted - was this because he'd spotted his previous nemesis? Or was he always going to do that anyway? (Isn't that why he was sent in?) If it's the former, it's (a) a clumsy coincidence and (b) makes the politics smaller; if it's the latter, why does the activist need forgiveness from him at all? What difference will it make? In the event, in a horribly clunky scene, the two seem to have a rapprochement of some kind, though exactly what that is, except for a vague sense that the left should stick together, remains mysterious.

But as I say, I liked it. I know it doesn't sound like it. In theatre, if this is a meaningful thing to say, I guess I lean more towards the Mallarmé than the Zola end of things. I like imagination, formal invention, experiment rather than observation, commentary, and content. Or I think I do. But actually, the theatre is one of those fantastic large social spaces that bring people together to experience the same things and that has a real political value. It was just simply very thrilling to sit in the Royal Court hearing those things said about austerity economics in public. I've thought, read, and said things like that with friends, on Twitter, in the New Statesman, and so on. But it's easy to feel that you're a member of a tiny band in those contexts, nodding along to the things you'd like to believe are true. In a theatre it feels quite different.

In February 2003, when two million people marched through the streets of London in protest against the coming invasion of Iraq the march organisers hit a problem. There were so many people that a dangerous bottleneck was building up on Waterloo Bridge. In order to stretch the march out on the approach, they created an additional loop of the march which took us down across Upper Ground and then up through the terraces of the National Theatre. I wish I had a photo of the National that day, thronged with demonstrators, orderly and disorderly, bedecked in badges and banners, spikey with people and protest. Flash forward 18 months and Stuff Happens by David Hare opens inside the building, on the Olivier stage. In between times, the Iraq War went ahead anyway, in the teeth of popular opposition. The predicted smooth victory, in which British and American troops were to be hailed as a liberation force, draped with garlands, gave way to a chaotic handover, the stubborn non-appearance of those WMDs, and the beginnings of a lethal insurgency. And in that theatre, twice in the play the audience burst into applause at a couple of the sentiments. Again, Stuff Happens​ was not a play I loved very much, but you had to respect the power of theatre as a public space, a large forum for collective thought and feeling.

​That's what I felt about Anders Lustgarten's play. For all its 'technical' faults, it gave us a chance to feel collectively and to experience these heretical thoughts being expressed in public. And while it's so easy for aesthetically-minded critics to be sniffy about Zola's earnestness, his research, his naivety, who captured the Second Empire better than he? Sometimes, art needs to bring us the real news and Anders Lustgarten has done that.

Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher has died. It's not a very noble thing to rejoice in the death of another, and, of course, nothing is achieved by her dying. Her end as an active figure in public life came with her ousting in November 1990. She anointed various hopeless successors as Tory leader (John Major, William Hague, and Iain Duncan Smith were all the hapless recipients of her benediction) and their failures as leader underlined her poor judgment and disconnect with the electorate, the very reasons she was booted out of No. 10 by her own Cabinet. It was clear throughout the 2000s that her health had declined so much as to render her incapable of contributing to public life. But of course she didn't need to be personally active. The principles she enacted and came to embody are still with us. Thatcher lives. 

I've been thinking about her death for an unhealthily long time. The soundtrack to my university years were songs like 'Margaret on the Guillotine' by Morrissey (February 1988) and 'Tramp the Dirt Down' by Elvis Costello (March 1989). One of my favourite political indie songs is Hefner's 'The Day That Thatcher Dies' (October 2000). I have a pact with my friend Alison that we are going to dance on her grave; I think that pact goes back almost 25 years, though we have since amended the pact to allow that dancing very near​ her grave is an acceptable substitute. I may have a dance on 17 April, the day of her funeral. I suspect I will not be alone.

I'm not, in general, a particular hateful person. I'm rather easygoing and I find it easy to sympathise with people who make bad decisions. So ​why do I - did I - hate her so much? I certainly don't think it's a noble thing or morally defensible to celebrate her death. But I don't think we are really celebrating her death. The celebration, such as it is, is a shout of defiance against the fact that Thatcherism has become the political air we breathe. Free market economics, deregulated financial markets have manifestly failed, as has its own brand of rescue remedy, Austerity Economics. But still it seems impossible for any major politician to offer anything alternative. Keynesianism must never be named. Instead, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband talk coyly of 'investment for growth'. So we say what shouldn't be said in lieu of saying what cannot be said.

But that's to turn hatred into a romantic gesture. Actually, I do think Thatcher had a hateful influence on the whole of British society, and inasmuch as she was globally influential, on us all.​ Let me say why.

One expects a bit of exaggeration when listing the virtues of the recently-deceased, though surely David Cameron's assertion that she 'saved our country' stretches the permissible limits of politesse. Elsewhere, I was startled to hear on Radio 4 the abysmal Gillian Shepherd refusing to accept that Margaret Thatcher ever said 'there's no such thing as society'.

Yes she did. It was an interview with Woman's Own, published in 31 October 1987. In it she is quoted as saying:​

There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

Now, in fact, this is a composite quote, drawn from two slightly different sections of the interview, the fuller version of which has been transcribed on Thatcher's own website. This is the fuller context:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation

And later she says:​

it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. 

The context makes clear that her point was less apocalyptic and more ethically subtle than is generally acknowledged, but I don't think the central claim is qualified out of existence. On some level, Thatcher really think that society lacks substance or foundation.​ She really did say and she really did mean 'There's no such thing as society'. And in this short quotation I think we can find the root of everything that has gnawed away at our spirit, hollowed out our society, corrupted our better selves, made us definitively worse. I want to say why, because perhaps then I can let her go.

‘There’s no such thing as society’. This quotation is regularly trotted out as an example of Thatcher’s callous disregard for the common good. As even Samuel Brittan, the economist and Thatcher cheerleader, concedes they ‘seemed to be the epitome of an uncaring pursuit of personal self-interest’ (Capitalism with a Human Face, Aldershot: Elgar, 1995, p. 87). 

What might the quotation mean? Let’s take the second half of the sentence (as published) separately. To claim that there’s no such thing as society might be an epistemological point; while there are palpably individuals and even groups, ‘society’ seems to involve a mental concept which is not directly sensible in the world. We cannot point to society in the way we can point to an individual. This is true, surely, and we might read her to be making a distinction between kinds of statement about the world.

In this sense, Thatcher may be making a Humean point. Just as Hume argued that cause and effect was not part of the observable world (regardless of how microscopically we examine things, we only see one event happening after another, not causality as such ). (Samuel Brittan unflatteringly glosses the line as Thatcher reminding us that ‘society consists of individuals, just as herds and flocks consist of individual cows and sheep’ ibid.). It might be that Thatcher was being Humean in suggesting that individuals are empirical objects but a society is not and that we should therefore be sceptical about the existence of the latter.

While Thatcher was probably not thinking about epistemology when she spoke, there is an important intellectual genealogy that links her. Hume was great friends with Adam Smith, the founder of market economics; indeed, it is to some extent a quirk of history that Hume is thought of as the philosopher and Adam Smith the economist, since Hume wrote important works of political economy and Adam Smith constructed a moral philosophy. In a rather Thatcherite style, in his essay ‘Of National Characters’, Hume wrote ‘A nation is nothing but a collection of individuals’ (Selected Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 114). From Hume’s moral theory there is a line of succession to Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarian moral philosophy, which informs conservative social theory, while Adam Smith informs their economic liberalism. It was precisely this liberalism which fell out of favour in the early twentieth century, such that Hayek in 1944 had to call for its revival. The collapse of the Keynesian consensus and the Bretton Woods arrangements to whose design Keynes had so crucially contributed paved the way for the revival of nineteenth century liberalism in a new form, now stripped of its Humean notion of moral sentiments, in the radicalised doctrine of neoliberalism.

The idea that there is no such thing as society, only individuals, is consonant with Adam Smith’s famous invocation of the invisible hand. The market’s mechanism is to work simply by the separate actions of consumers; conferral, government intervention, windy talk of moral values, will simply gum up its mechanisms, chaotically causing problems as the market tries to shake off this threat. It would be better to stop thinking about society at all; there is no doubt a common good, but it is far more efficiently served by the sleek responsiveness of market mechanisms than by the cumbersome, idealistic and moralising posturing of government.

Hume's moral philosophy rests on the idea that we have a series of natural moral instincts; they are not rational principles or prudential calculations, merely a set of impulses to be nice to each other. I exaggerate but I don't think significantly for the argument. Hume's is a moral philosophy that prepares the way for the triumph of the market. The market will respond to what people’s actual views are and it is better not to claim to know. Let the market decide, and leave morality to individual consumers. If we all have altruistic impulses, the market will reveal that. Hume thought we did, but his philosophy doesn't seem to require that; it would be fairly consistent for Hume to discover that we actually have a different set of moral sentiments than he imagined and be quite relaxed about it. Better that than insisting on what constitutes an appropriate set of moral sentiments. If you think you know what morality is, the danger is that you will start acting as a break on the possible development of actual moral positions in the light of new circumstances, arrangement, products. Hume’s ethical egoism is preserved—so that bit of human nature is fixed, it seems—but his idea that we have a moral sentiment of altruism or justice is quietly dropped. We may have moral sentiments, but the market will find out how strong they are.

That’s the idea, anyway.

However, this leaves us with a problem. For the very same scepticism that remarks on the ontological dubiousness of ‘society’ also applies to the family. We might well say, there’s no such thing as the family, only individuals. Yet Thatcher firmly believed in it; Victorian Values was as much about personal sexual morality as it was about economic self-help and self-reliance. Of course, the bonds between parents and children are very strong, but to assert them as separate from market mechanisms is inconsistent with the disdain for society-thinking. If she actually believed that the market would protect familial bonds perfectly, then there would have been no need to single it out. One need say ‘there’s no such thing as society, only individuals’ safe in the knowledge that this will protect the family.

The market does of course interfere with this bond; market-led education, food and health; in the C19 children up chimneys; but also killing girls in China; paedophile tourism; in Thailand, following the Asian crisis, children were withdrawn from schools to be put to work and this has happened here too. Thatcher’s squeamishness about exposing the bond between children and parents to the judgment of the market is commendable. But isn’t it also applicable to society? Aren’t there excellent things about society, many noble moral sentiments, common goods, things of value to preserve and protect, that the market threatens?

And if they say that these things can’t be so valuable to people if they vote against it with their wallets and purses, well we should accept that if these same wallets and purses should be permitted to vote for children in prostitution and pornography, sweatshops, chimneys and slavery. Because there's no such thing as families, only individuals. And individuals might want to make use of children for these things.

The wider context of the glaring headline 'There's no such thing as society' is the perfectly reasonable remark that we have no rights without corresponding obligations from others. And what Thatcher is cunningly doing is moving from observing that 'society' is not an empirical object to suggesting, quite illegitimately, that there's no such thing as government. Because government can supply such things as grants and homes and other solutions to the problems that may reasonably afflict the best of people.  ​

The point here being that there is a faultline in Thatcher’s remark between a view that sees the market as responding to and revealing the real ethical commitments of a society—the market fundamentalist position—and one that sees the good as diverging from the market, with an independent value and which requires marking out for special protection, if necessary against the market.

This is the root of everything foul and degraded that Thatcher's government did and our current government is doing. And let me say, what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne are doing is worse, many times worse, but because they are so sunk in Thatcherism that they never rise to the surface to breathe clean air. Withdrawing disability benefits, capping benefits, cutting the arts, privatising the NHS, schools and university teaching,​ all the other nasty, vicious, callous things the Coalition are doing, they are doing out of ideological conviction that 'society' does not exist - or, if it does, it will be revealed by unleashing the full power of the market. You can't argue with them; there simply are no principles prior to the market, so the market is unstoppable. Like morality, like families, like the health of children, society will be only preserved if the market - which is supposedly the embodiment of our collective will - thinks they are important. This is why there's no such thing as society.

The post-war consensus survived for 34 years from November 1942, when the Beveridge Report was published, to November 1976, when the Labour Government applied to the International Monetary Fund for emergency loans. Thatcherite principles were installed in government in May 1979 and we are now 34 years on from  that watershed. That's why I want to tramp the dirt down. It's time to bury Thatcherism as we bury Thatcher. Thatcherism unleashed the worst, the very worst of us.

Carpentry

In the first act of Rodney Ackland's Before the Party (adapted from a 1934 short story of the same title by Somerset Maugham), the doorknob breaks.

Ackland is one of those writers from an era where playwriting was dismissed in terms of its 'carpentry'. They were thought to be soullessly crafted according to abstract rules, not forged in the fires of artistic commitment. The plays were considered to be - and perhaps they were - created within the confines of the well-made play, the pièce bien faite​, that set of rules for play construction set out in the mid-nineteenth century by those French boulevardiers, Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou. The broad shape of the well-made play is a situation brought into crisis by a secret or a challenge which grows in complexity until everything is brought out in the open by the scène à faire (the obligatory scene, as it is appallingly translated) in which everyone learns the truth about everything. (The only genre in which that really works is the Agatha Christie-style whodunit in which everyone is brought together to learn the truth of the murder.) 

So it's interesting to find a moment where the plot is genuinely enhanced by carpentry. In Terence Rattigan's 1939 After the Dance , there's a door that sticks: "Turn it hard. Try and surprise it, if you know what I mean." This isn't key to the plot, but it's a means of intensifying a key scene - one of the best scenes in C20 theatre - in which a young woman explains to another, older, woman that she is about to steal her husband. The other woman says she doesn't mind - the whole relationship has been a kind of bohemian joke - but through the scene we come to realise she minds very deeply. As the scene concludes, the younger woman is being ushered out and we realise the older is on the brink of tears. So when the door sticks, it's a kind of third-act jeopardy, a heart-in-mouth ratcheting up of the tension at the last minute. Rattigan handles it quite perfectly. In Before the Party​ the doorknob breaking doesn't significantly change the shape of the act, but it becomes another, amusingly absurd, obstacle in a scene all about an upper-middle class family attempting smoothly to  prepare for a social engagement. It disrupts the regularity of the family rhythm just as the revelations do but unlike the revealed secrets the doorknob remains banal and prevents the story becoming high tragedy: this is a play about foolish people with foolish values being made to look like fools. The doorknob's precarity - in whose hand will it come away? - reveals the precarity of all the social relations based on appearance, reputation and manners.

The title Before the Party​ describes both acts: in the first, the Skinner family are preparing for a garden party thrown by some leading locals; this is particularly important because the father of the family, Aubrey, wants to stand as Conservative candidate in the forthcoming (1945) election. They are buffetted by two successive revelations; Harold, the daughter Laura's husband, has died eight months before the play begins. Everyone believes he died of fever while in Africa, but it is discovered by someone who knew him out there that he committed suicide. This is scandal enough, but Laura is forced to confess that Harold's drinking got so out of control that at a moment of intense rage she killed him and let it appear to be suicide. In the second act, we are before another party: the Skinners have returned from the rained-off party and some of the guests are coming to dinner. But it's the war; they have insufficient rations and anyway the cook has been summarily dismissed for being a Nazi. Laura's mother has already persuaded herself that the murder is a figment of her daughter's imagination and has palmed the deed off on a black servant. Throughout the play Laura has been reprimanded by her mother for no longer wearing black and indeed for her new relationship with commercial traveller David, who has distasteful but convenient contacts in the black market. When they discover that David may in fact be heir to Blakiston Hall and the future Lord Wraysbury, they change their view of this exemplary young man. The play ends with the family rushing the receive their guests.

The carpentry is there in the title. Before the Party describes the ticking-clock structure of each act; there is insufficient time to react calmly to each bit of news, which creates the hysteria. Indeed these framing social occasions are part of the standard carpentry of mid-century theatre. Terence Rattigan wrote Before Dawn, After Lydia, After the Dance and key scenes in French Without Tears, Love in Idleness, The Winslow Boy, and Separate Tables are given their urgency (or laughter) by the onset of a social occasion. But carpentry is a belittling term, intended to indicate that these plays were purely a matter of expert construction, without passion, without art, without politics, without engagement in the world around it. In fact, these plays use the structures of the well-made play as a kind of knowing choreography through which art and the world can move. Before the Party is a typical Rodney Ackland play, in that it is a brutal, black-hearted satire of bourgeois attitudes, just like The Dark River (come on National Theatre, revive that) or Absolute Hell. On a profound level, the play is deeply unsympathetic to most of its characters; as the play ends, the youngest sister, Susan, a child, declares 'I don't think there's any excuse for grown-up people's behaviour [...] I hate them all. They make me sick' (Plays Two, London: Oberon, 2001, p. 327) and it is very clear that this is Ackland's view too.  The play has been given a good production by Matthew Dunster at the Almeida. The acting is all pretty good but all very different: Michael Thomas as the patriarch gives a rather light comic performance while Michelle Terry as the spiteful moralist older sister is, as always, completely truthful and precise. Katherine Parkinson as Laura lands her spiky retorts with great wit and power and switches to emotional distress with deftness while June Watson's nanny is a comic type. The set by Anna Fleischle is kind of in inverted commas, suggesting a too-good-to-be-true pink bedroom (perhaps a sly reference to Ackland's The Pink Room?) which suggests fantasy, naivety and innocence, in which the sordid realities must unfold. It is, however, quite horrible to look at.

Meanwhile at the Old Vic, Terence Rattigan's near-contemporary The Winslow Boy has been given a superb revival by Lindsay Posner. I have in the past quietly wondered if this is the play that most justifies the carpentry charge. It all hangs on the brilliantly written final scene of the first half, in which Sir Robert Morton interrogates Ronnie Winslow. It is beautifully constructed: the high-powered barrister taking the boy through his testimony with increasing intensity until the boy appears to slip up and to admit his guilt; Sir Robert's is furious and denounces the boy, who bursts into tears; the family are outraged and Sir Robert turns to go and asks for the papers to be sent to his chambers. 'But surely you won't need them now,' asks the bewildered clerk. 'Oh yes, the boy is plainly innocent,' replies Sir Robert. 'I accept the brief'. It is a brilliant curtain line which, when I saw it in the mid-90s, forced me to my feet applauding before I even realised what I was doing. It is, in that sense, a claptrap in the old sense - a mechanism that forces you to clap - but the suspicion has always lingered with me that maybe it is claptrap in the more recent sense too. Why does Sir Robert denounce the boy so ferociously when we know he has made up his mind about the boy's innocence by that point? Is the scene just there to produce the curtain line? 

​Charlie Rowe as Ronnie Winslow, unable to face his father. Photo: Nobby Clark

Lindsay Posner's production is a subtle but thorough re-examination of this play. The simplest decision, which turns out to be the most pervasively transformative, is to cast the biggest stars as Ronnie Winslow's parents. Henry Goodman and Deborah Findlay are fine actors and famous too. Peter Sullivan plays the flashier part of Sir Robert and he's a splendid actor but less well-known. What this does is rebalance the entire play to draw the eye to the family story and not simply to the theatrics of Sir Robert's late entrance in the play. In particular it brings out Act Three very sharply. This is the act which usually suffers from following the Sir Robert interrogation and deals unheroically with the family's disarray, its emotional and financial resources depleted by the ongoing trial. What the act is asking is a profound set of questions about whether justice is an absolute good that must outweigh other pragmatic considerations. Should justice be done, though the heavens fall? Or, as the play asks it, is it worth proving the boy's innocence, if the rest of the family suffers as a result? Ultimately, the play does seem to come down on the Kantian side of things, though Rattigan is alive to the complexities. Sir Robert behaves like an actor-manager, in a sense rather as a play-carpenter is supposed to, working his rhetorical tricks, building the flourishes, playing the part in the court room to get the effect. But, as with Rattigan himself, the mask slips and we find there is real commitment and feeling beneath.

When the play was premiered in 1946, some saw its defence of the individual against the Admiralty's faceless bureaucracy as a comment on the emerging Welfare State and the socialism of the new Labour government. Personally, I've never been convinced by that. Rattigan wasn't party-political in that sense, and while he drifted towards the Liberals, he'd flirted with the Communisty Party just before the war. I think it was 'justice' that interested him (when Arthur Winslow hears the phrase 'Let Right Be Done' he replies 'I like that phrase, sir' and I think his reaction is also Rattigan's). Indeed, Catherine (Ronnie's older sister) is clearly pitted as a figure of the left against Sir Robert's conservatism and she is in no sense bested by him. But clearly the play can look like a conservative statement that pits the individual (hooray) against the state (boo). But interestingly when I saw The Winslow Boy this time, it seemed clearer to me that the play is a defence of a notion of human rights and justice and it seemed that there's consistency there between Sir Robert and Catherine. The debate emerges through the play's subtle formal organisation which allows the characters to breathe and for the various encounters to build up, dialectically, the antithetical positions that have to be weighed, emotionally and ethically. (Of course, the carpentry is more pronounced here because Rattigan has also written the play, to some extent, in the theatrical style of the period he's writing about; so it's a four-act play with servants and a Knight of the realm.) The movement through the first act: the boy coming in through the garden door and then hiding in the garden; the family arriving through church; the long scene with Catherine's fiancé and Arthur, mother and Catherine in the next room and the comedy of Arthur's attempted signal; then Catherine meeting Ronnie and spiriting him upstairs; finally the toast to the engagement disrupted by news about Ronnie. It's a very careful and elaborate piece of stagecraft but it rather cleverly isolates Arthur from the family and places Ronnie at the centre of a structure of deception which establish a complex series of feelings and associations which help the debate be more emotionally embodied in the play later on. In other words, the carpentry is where the art and the politics and the feeling come from.

The Winslow Boy is a better play than Before the Party, I'd say. Ackland's satire can sometimes be so savage that the play seems a little thin. Ackland was a great admirer of Chekhov but he doesn't quite create the ambivalence and richness of character than Chekhov does. Perhaps he is constrained by the source material; Maugham's story is rather intrusively narrated to emphasise how critical the portraits are. For me the most remarkable moments are also the most uncomfortable: the cook is dismissed for being a Nazi but in the same conversation the family reflect on the deviousness of the Jews, expressing precisely the opinions that they apparently deprecate in their cook. Later in the play, similar racism is allowed to let Laura off the hook, with some pretty nasty remarks about indigenous Africans. These moments were met with icy silence in the theatre where I went. I suspect the audience didn't quite know whether Ackland was sharing in the racism; I don't think he was, but what's interesting is how far he is prepared to push the audience's uncertainty. 

I wrote something about Rodney Ackland for John Bull's British and Irish Dramatists since World War II (4 Vols) Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2000-2005. It has what I think is the most accurate and detailed list of his plays and screenplays ever assembled and a fairly substantial essay on his work. Though now I come to think of it, I have no idea if it was ever published. I certainly wasn't sent a copy, so I'll publish it here. Oh and I find that in working on that, I wrote some summaries of lesser-known Ackland plays. You can read those here.