Adam Mills

When I first met Adam Mills I thought he was the most infuriating man in the entire world. Once I got to know him I realised he was only the 4th or 5th most infuriating man in the entire world. He was also one of my favourite people, a dear and cherished friend, a sweet, funny and extremely kind man, a good man, a brilliant thinker, and one of the biggest intellectual influences on my life, and now he's dead and I miss him so much.

Yesterday was his funeral. Andy Piasecki was a colleague of Adam's at Royal Holloway in the 1980s and had left in 1989, a year before I arrived to begin my PhD. Andy gave a lovely eulogy, talking about his train journeys to and from college, recalling how Adam used their 40 minutes of proximity to mount an interrogation (the word is exactly right) about a range of topics: the value of cultural studies, the point of studying theatre, the values of higher education. I realised during the speech that after Andy had left, I was his replacement. Throughout the 1990s, we must have shared close to a thousand train journeys on which he would interrogate me about the value of cultural studies, the point of studying theatre, the values of higher education.

As I say, initially I found this infuriating. I'd only recently graduated and my head was full of the new ideas which were going to provide the foundation of my thesis: post-structuralism, critical theory, cultural studies. Adam was none too impressed with this and had, instead, been reading mainstream philosophy of the kind taught in British philosophy departments. This Anglo-American tradition was less excited by the rhetorical force of a Baudrillard, the labyrinthine paradoxes of a Derrida, or the delicate ambiguities of a Barthes. It's still only rarely sighted in British theatre studies. In those conversations, Adam would quiz me about these ideas, make me defend these positions, argue forcefully against them, point out equivocations, false steps in the arguments. This drove me mad, used as I was to being pretty much the only person who had read this stuff and had even halfway understood it; I was used to it making me feel like the smartest guy in the room. And then Adam came along and made me realise how little I understood what I thought I thought.

And at first I just understood this as hostility. Why is this man having a go at me all the time? And it was unremitting. As the train would pull in to Waterloo, I'd assume the conversation was over. Sometimes I'd breathe a sigh of relief. But then next time I'd see him, he'd pick up exactly where we left off and it would all start again. But, slowly, I realised that it wasn't hostility at all. It was a serious compliment. He genuinely wanted to know what I thought. Most of all, he just loved the argument, the ideas. Debate and argument mattered to him. He thought deeply and cared deeply about thoughts. I say he'd pick up exactly where we left off, but that's not quite true: if I'd said something that conflicted with his beliefs, or had given him pause for thought, he would chew on it, think about it, go over it in his mind. He couldn't wait to continue the discussion. Related to this, he had the smallest small talk I know. Sometimes I'd get a call from Adam which would go something like this:

(Phone rings. I answer)
ME: Hello?
ADAM: I think you're wrong about Arthur Danto.
ME: Hi Adam.

He was a dog with a bone and it was brilliant.

Because it was a key part of my intellectual training. On the theory course I would lecture in in the mid-nineties, Adam often gave an early talk on the Kantian aesthetics. He'd set a piece by Roger Scruton, which got my hackles up (a Tory? on my reading list?) and I read it one week and made a series of objections to it on our way to College, but they were random, ill-thought-out, trivial, in a sense. I was picking on phrases, not the ideas. The next week I read it again, carefully, for the moves of the argument. I worked hard at it and I had some new objections. These were rather more serious, sharper, difficult to counter. Adam couldn't have looked more pleased. I think that week, intellectually, I grew up.

Adam was a kind of Marxist, I guess, though he liked the debate so much, he'd have hated to settle on a position (where's the counter-argument? he'd want to know). Typically, he had little time for the Western Marxist tradition; instead he introduced me to G. A. Cohen's rather brilliant analytic reconstruction of Marx's ideas, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978, 2000), still the most careful and lucid account I've read. He lectured on Kant and Marx. Initially, I resisted both of these traditions in the name of Derrida and Foucault. By the time of my book Theatre & Globalisation (2009), Kant and Marx were my guiding lights and I acknowledged Adam's formative role in its thinking. I still see more in the post-structuralist tradition than Adam ever did (though I did get him to acknowledge the power of Derrida's brilliant deconstruction of John Searle, 'Limited Inc a b c...'), but I've drifted somewhat analytic-philosophywards. I do look for the arguments rather than the phraseology (and no accusations of logocentrism will stop me). I came to love the debate too.

Adam and academia grew apart and in the early 2000s he left to raise his three children. We stayed in touch; I babysat a few times; I'm (a very negligent) godfather to their youngest son; he and Gina were at my wedding; Adam and I would meet every few months for a pizza near his Islington home. He'd quiz me about developments in higher education; he'd explain some philosophical idea he'd been grappling with; he'd talk about his children. It was wonderful. The last time we met, earlier this year, he was worrying away at Kendall Walton's notion that when we see a photograph of something, we have genuinely seen it. We had a fascinating conversation about it over our La Reines.

Adam was only 63. That's no age. I was expecting another twenty, thirty years of this. 

Yesterday's ceremony was at the Epping Forest Burial Ground. Adam was an atheist and it was a fully humanist service: friends and family listening to readings, memories, and music. More than any funeral I've been to, it brought his presence, his personality right into the room. There was laughter, there were memories; and when Gina chose Bob Dylan's 'Wedding Song', one of their first memories together, I was overcome with love and loss and sadness. Afterwards, his body was lowered into the ground and he rejoined the earth. He wanted to be buried beneath a tree, to help it grow, as so many other things - friendships, children, ideas, love - he helped grow.

The building in which the ceremony took place was round, wooden, with big glass walls, looking out onto the forest.

We were invited to remember Adam as we listened to Elgar's Cello Concerto, played by Jacqueline du Pré. 

It is autumn and as the music swells, a gust of wind shakes the trees. I think of Adam on this last day as a cello surges and, outside, red and golden leaves tumble in the air towards the ground.

Goodbye and thank you, my dear friend.

10 Audiences I Have Known

Are audiences getting rowdier? Weirder? Less able to concentrate? Some people seem to think so. Sometimes I hear it said that young audiences chatter and text through a performance though I've never seen it. There's always been a worry about declining standards of audience behaviour, ever since Plato in The Laws denounced the shift from respectful silent attention to 'catcalls and uncouth yelling' that he called a 'theatrocracy', a damaging unbalancing of performance in favour of the ignorant audience and against the skilled performers. In the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was writing the rules for audience behaviour into his plays - the prologue to Bartholomew Fair announces a contract for the audience imposing limits on their dissent, right to judge, the expectations it is reasonable to have and their interpretive freedom. (I wrote more about this here, lucky lucky you.) There have been periods where audiences have been noisier and periods where audiences are quieter; there have been times when riots have been deliberately provoked and others where directors have dreamed of entirely empty auditoriums. I'm not sure we're really seeing any significant change at the moment.

What does interest me is that conviction that some people have that there is a correct audience behaviour. The Platonic ideal of silent attention seems obvious to some but it confers all the power on the stage. As Jacques Rancière said in his essay 'The Emancipated Spectator' (2004), maybe audiences know more than we think? Maybe audiences are always active, rather than passive, contributing significantly in the nature and style of their co-presence to the theatre event. This is not to say that some kinds of audience behaviour aren't to be condemned; Theophrastus, in his taxonomy of contemporary moral character types, talks about the 'disgusting man' (bdeluros) who ‘claps when others stop, and he hisses at those things that the rest of the audience watch with pleasure. When the audience is silent, he stands up and burps in order to make them turn around and look at him’. That's sheer self regard and not really a response to the theatrical event as such. But audiences collectively are worth listening to. 

Rather pleasingly, audiences often respond badly to being told what to do. I'm sure we've all had that aesthetic shudder of disgust at a play that thinks it can manipulate us too easily or assumes that we are more ignorant, less enlightened, more riddled with unthinking prejudice than it is. A fairly recent play which I won't name spent two hours hectoring its audience and then ended by implying we were all too passive (well if I could have gotten a word in edgeways...). As Tim Crouch puts it in The Author, these plays have written us badly.

One of my favourite instances of audiences behaving badly came in 2000, when the novelist and Conservative politician Jeffrey Archer opened his play The Accused. It’s a clunkily old-fashioned courtroom drama about a doctor accused of murdering his wife, but the real drama lay in the event of the play, because, for reasons known only to him, Archer decided to play the role of the defendant himself. At the time he was just about to go on trial for perjury related to a previous case where he had sued a newspaper for libel. Perhaps he thought that this was his chance, in some peculiar way, to rehearse for his court appearance, a pre-emptive strike on public opinion to correct any presumption of guilt they might have. The audience is addressed as the jury; the Jury Bailiff urges us to pay no attention to anything we might read or hear outside the courtroom (Archer's forthcoming trial has been widely covered in the press). Archer’s dreadful dialogue is painstakingly determined to explain what is proper evidence and what is hearsay. And the play constantly alludes to the real events of Archer’s original trial, most daringly in the climax to Act 3 Scene 1 when the defendant removes his shirt to demonstrate his supposed lover’s imperfect knowledge of his body, which recalled a similar legal crux in Archer’s own first trial.

For many people, though, Archer was simply offering a preview of him in the dock for those of us too impatient to wait for the official Old Bailey opening. The audience is required at the end of the play to vote on the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Reportedly, audiences, unwilling to be patronised by the disgraced peer, tended to vote ‘guilty’ regardless. And then, as if anticipating that the audience would not respond well to being told what to do, Archer created two endings: perversely, if the audience find him guilty, the ending reveals him to be innocent; if you find him innocent, a coda reveals his guilt. The public are always wrong. It's a peculiarly aggressive defence and a striking instance of the theatre's failure to get the audience to do what it wants written in to the very fabric of a play.

I had a think about some audiences I've been in, trying to think about the surprising, perverse, accidental and peculiar responses I've witnessed. I'm not including theatre that directly and explicitly cajoles active responses from its spectators. These are unanticipated responses, supplements. 

I'm also not including cinema, though I still remember fondly a visit in 1988 to the Cube Cinema in Bristol, a tiny little community cinema seating maybe 40 people, to see I forget what. What I do remember is that they showed adverts beforehand including a long one for Moosehead beer which had high production values and featured an alien spaceship landing outside on old shack somewhere in the rural American south; lights flood through the gaps in the planking walls and the door bursts open; an alien with glowing eyes walks through, ignoring the resistance of the old timer in residence; the alien is on a mission and is inexorable, walks through the house to the fridge, pulls it open and retrieves his prey: the cold bottles of Moosehead lager. Immediately from the back of the audience, in the strongest Bristol accent you can think of, a voice declared 'I've had Moosehead. It's crap.' I can't see a bottle of Moosehead beer without thinking of that voice.

 So these are 10 audiences I have known.

1. Top Girls (Royal Court Theatre) April 1991

I'd read this play, studied it at university. I'd seen extracts on TV, I think. I was very excited that it was being revived in the same theatre where it premiered almost a decade earlier and in a production by the same director, Max Stafford-Clark. If you don't know the play, its stunning first act brings Marlene, a successful businesswoman, together with five apparently successful high-achieving women from history, including the thirteenth-century Buddhist nun Lady Nijo, the ninth-century Pope Joan, the nineteenth-century explorer Isabella Bird and others. They are at a restaurant, to celebrate Marlene's recent promotion and they order and consume a full meal - and quite a lot of wine - through the course of the scene. The dialogue, which was hugely inventive and has been highly influential, has tightly choreographed overlaps and is written with a beautiful ear for ordinary talk, big and small, formal and informal. It is a staggering piece of writing and was beautifully staged. As the scene ended, I was still on a high from having seen this extraordinary theatre sequence. This was only slightly punctured by the American man behind me who turned to his companion and complained in a whisper, 'she didn't finish her avocado'.

2. Oleanna (Duke of York's Theatre) October 1993

David Mamet's play came to London with its combative US premiere behind it. It was apparently Mamet's pugnacious intervention in the Culture Wars, a blast against so-called political correctness, a playwright standing up against a feminism that had run out of control. In the play, a young female student makes a complaint of sexual harassment against her lecturer. The university is obliged to take her complaint seriously and after a series of increasingly abrasive encounters, the lecturer looks set to lose his job. At the end of the play, he snaps and physically assaults the student, shouting 'you vicious little bitch, you think you can come here with your political correctness and destroy my life?' On Broadway, apparently, audiences had responded to John's assault on Carol with cheers and shouts of 'kill the bitch'. I had liked Mamet's earlier work and so, with some misgivings, went along. I can't speak for the US production, but the London version, in Harold Pinter's directorial hands, was unrecognisable from those descriptions. It was a play about power and language in which both sides sought to establish control of meaning; it was fiercely even-handed, ironies resonating against ironies, asking deep and honest questions about our mutual existence. The initial action that led to the first accusation was masked from us: it was undecidable, impossible to say who was right. The moment where Carol hears John on the phone call his wife 'Baby' and corrects him was a moment of horror, a terrible transgression, a thrust too cruel. And when John attacks her, he had finally lost. He had made himself the brutal patriarch that Carol claimed him to be. It was, in a sense, a cathartic and tragic ending, for me, anyway. But not for the man sitting next to me. Alone in the audience, he responded to John's attack by bursting into applause. I shrank away from him, worried people might think it was me who had celebrated this assault. But why did he clap? Was this a spontaneous response to the tensions of the story that has unfolded before him? Or had he read the reports from America, experienced some 'excess' of anti-racism or feminism in his own life, and bought a ticket with the express intention to register his support? Did he want to clap because he'd seen the show? Or did he see the show because he wanted to clap? I don't know. I didn't want to ask him.

3. Oklahoma! (Liverpool Empire) December 1993

I spent Christmas with my lovely friend Alison and her family in 1993 and we went for a treat to the Empire to see Oklahoma! which has always been a favourite musical of mine. Now, I don't approve of mocking the afflicted but these were simpler more carefree times, so I will admit to finding it riotously amusing that someone in the stalls seemed to be suffering from Tourette's and kept shouting filth at the stage. The most spectacular piece of timing involved Ado Annie's first song which turned into an impromptu duet between her and the man in the audience. 'I'm just a girl who can't say No,' she sang. 'Cunt!' came the savage rejoinder. He left at the interval.

4. Look Back in Anger (National Theatre: Littleton) August 1999

Gregory Hersov's re-mount of his 1995 production at the Royal Exchange, also starring Michael Sheen as Jimmy Porter was a revelation. I am slightly embarrassed to say that when I wrote 1956 and All That, I had not managed to see a production of Look Back in Anger. I'm not that embarrassed; it was striking that perhaps the most decisive landmark in post-war British theatre had not been revived in London for over a decade. I wrote an essay in the programme for this production and was hugely looking forward to it. What's very striking on stage - rather more than on the page, I think - is the way the play draws on the old-fashioned carpentry of the well-made play, with its curtain lines, plot twists, romantic intrigues. At the end of the second act, Jimmy, the malcontent at the heart of the play, returns home to discover a note from Alison, his long-suffering wife. She has left him, after years of verbal battering and contempt. Her friend Helena, another victim of his withering articulacy, is there to crow over his loss - and she has another revelation too. Alison is pregnant. He has lost a wife and a child. The show I saw was a matinee and it had a party of American students sitting in the stalls. They were enthusiastic, attentive. But one student's response underlined for me the curious mixture of old and new in the plotting. As Jimmy reels from the impact of these two blows, he approaches Helena. We think he might actually strike her. In fact, he seizes her and the two of them kiss passionately as the lights fade. As Jimmy and Helena locked into their embrace, a young American voice shouted 'NO WAY!!!' It's a brilliant little response, precisely balanced on the edge between two responses: (a) it's entirely absorbed within the drama - and it's registering delight at a twist that you don't see coming but yet still makes sense (of course Helena falls for Jimmy; their mutual hostilities were a flirtation) and (b) it's a protest against the crude mechanics of the plot, the convenient transfer of affections just at the point of the curtain (how could Helena fall for Jimmy? It's complete fakery).

5. The Danny Crowe Show (Bush Theatre) October 2001

The old Bush Theatre was a cramped little space. You sat on steps rather than chairs; unless you were on the back row, if you leant back you leant against other people's shins. There were no clear divisions between places to sit; popular shows would mean a sweaty, uncomfortable couple of hours, pressed up against your neighbours. There appeared to be one exit; maybe there was another for us in emergencies, but if there had been a fire on the stairs, I used to wonder if we'd all burn. I don't remember a great deal about David Farr's The Danny Crowe Show. I'd liked him as a writer since seeing some kind of one-off show at the Cottesloe in the late 80s and then his brilliantly eccentric Neville Southall's Washbag at the Finborough (rewritten, retitled and slightly spoiled as Elton John's Glasses in the West End in Summer 1998 in a not-very-successful attempt to cash in on World Cup fever). I still think David Farr's plays are an interesting lost glimpse of playwriting before the In Yer Face theatre thing got going. But in 2001, a minute or two into the show, there was a slight disturbance in the audience. Someone a few people along my row slumped forward. He was making noises though it wasn't clear what they signified. After a few seconds, Mike Bradwell (I think) asked for the actors to stop; the man had suffered a heart attack. We all cleared the way and he was helped from his 'seat' and down the stairs. We waited for the ambulance to arrive, which it did after a gratifyingly swift couple of minutes. The play then restarted. This intimation of mortality has rather overshadowed my memory of the actual play. It was a real thing that really happened and, for a while, the stage seemed to be merely shadows.

6. Absolutely (Perhaps) (Wyndham's Theatre) May 2003

This was a new translation, by Martin Sherman, of Pirandello's Così è (se vi pare), more usually translated as something like Right You Are (If You Think So). It got a surprising West End outing because it had a Major Star in the cast, Dame Joan Plowright, and was directed by a Star Director, Franco Zeffirelli. The story is a typical Pirandellian riddle: Signora Frola believes that her son-in-law is not letting her see her daughter, his wife. Signor Ponza, conversely, believes that his mother-in-law is mad: her daughter was his first wife, who died, and she cannot face her loss; this woman is his second wife. Frola claims, in response, that he sent her daughter mad but has somehow married her again. The play plays with this intractable dispute, asking whether we can ever know the truth about each other. Plowright played the role of the mother-in-law, Signor Frola, and her appearance is delayed in the play for maximum effect. And on came Joan, grand, superior, furious. It was an impressive entrance, though one man in the stalls clearly didn't think we had acknowledged it sufficiently and burst into an enthusiastic round of applause, what sixty years ago they called an 'entrance round'. The Zen question about the sound of one hand clapping is one thing; in a theatre, the sound of only two hands clapping is the loneliest sound in the world. I heard somewhere that a team of Italian researchers had demonstrated that it is impossible for one person to start a standing ovation; it requires the spontaneous and collective actions of many. Similarly, it is impossible for one man to bring back the theatregoing customs and practices of the 1940s. His percussive claps stung the air for a second or two and Joan continued to walk, stately but somehow diminished, onto the stage.

7. Stuff Happens (National Theatre: Olivier) September 2004

David Hare's play was a semi-verbatim, semi-imagined account of the process that led the US and UK to go to war in Iraq. It was exactly what David Hare was born to do, use a huge national (National) stage to explain and debate a subject of recent national and international importance. I remember the audience unusually intervening twice by breaking into applause to support a sentiment expressed on stage. One came when a 'Palestinian Academic' gave a speech that reflected on some of the ironies of the Middle East and ended: 'The victims of the conflict have become the problem. We are the Jews of the Jews'. A similar round of applause greeted Colin Powell's remark to George W. Bush, 'People keep asking, how do we know he's got weapons of mass destruction? How do we know? We've still got the receipts.' I'm less interested in the particular sentiments being applauded than I am in the choice to applaud. It's unusual for British audiences at the National to interrupt a play in this manner to express support for a particular viewpoint. But in this instance, I felt that the moment had been prepared for; eighteen months earlier in February 2003, almost two million people had marched through the streets of London to voice their lack of support for an attack on Iraq. The government had ignored them - and now it was already clear that the WMD, the reason for the attack, were not to be found. And on that march, so great had been the numbers on the streets that there was a serious danger of a crush crossing the river, so the organisers created an additional loop to slow down the flow of people onto Waterloo Bridge. This loop took the marchers down to Upper Ground, to the National Theatre and then spiralling up across the National's concrete terraces before making their way up onto the Bridge. It struck me, as I sat i that auditorium, that for most people in the auditorium this might be the first time they had been back to this theatre since that earlier, ignored act of protest; and probably it was the first time since then that they had been in a crowd of people in such numbers. Even seeing these sentiments expressed on stage felt like a certain kind of protest in which the theatre connected, as the National was always intended to, quite directly with the physical and mental landscape of the nation.

8. The Small Things (Menier Chocolate Factory) February 2005

Paines Plough did a brilliant season at the Chocolate Factory in 2005, called This Other England, which offered four radically unfamiliar linguistic explorations of this country, from four distinctive and diverse writers. The plays were David Greig's Pyrenees, Douglas Maxwell's If Destroyed True, Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur and Enda Walsh's The Small Things. I went to The Small Things with my friend, the playwright Linda McLean. The play is a two-hander, a duet even, between an elderly man and woman who offer us alternating monologues, reminiscing about two childhoods that weave in and out of each other. From the beginning there were noises from somewhere in the audience. I couldn't locate the source - the audience was shallow and very wide and it was hard to look round - but the interruptions became louder and soon more verbal. After about fifteen minutes of this, Bernard Gallagher, playing the man, said to his fellow actor Valerie Lilley 'I think we should stop, Val'. The audience burst into applause. Immediately two ushers appeared. We applauded them. They persuaded what turned out to be a very drunk guy in a tracksuit, about thirty years of age, to leave the auditorium. We applauded his departure. Then Bernard Gallagher said 'let us resume' and we applauded that too. It was cathartic applause of tension and release. It was applause that marked the expulsion from a community and the restoration of order. It was applause that enjoyed the space created by the interruption of performance to add its own additional celebratory interruption of performance. 

9. Hedda Gabler (Almeida Theatre) March 2005

I'm sitting in the balcony, waiting for the show to begin. The man next to me is looking at the programme and the list of sponsors for the theatre. He motions to his friend, 'look at these names.' He runs his finger down the list: 'Jew... Jew... Jew...' I confess I am so shocked I don't know how to challenge him or what I would say.

10. Static (Soho Theatre) May 2008

It's my website, I'm allowed one of my own. Static is a play in part about music and in part about loss and in part about love. It has a speech, near the end, when music-obsessive Sarah describes her relationship with Chris, the husband whose sudden and unexpected death has set her own a process of terrible broken grieving. She's slowly coming to terms with the awful truth that he is never coming back. She tells Martin, her friend,

You know when a song starts with all the instruments playing their stuff, but it feels loose and chaotic. There's a kind of rhythm but it feels casual somehow. And then the drums come in, and everything locks into place, everything makes sense, That's what he was in my life. He walked into my life and everything made sense. He was the moment when the drums come in.

I snuck into the theatre and watched a matinée on a hot afternoon. The theatre was about half full, most people were fanning themselves with the script of the play. But as Pauline Lockhart spoke these words, a few rows below me, a woman reached across and put her arm round her boyfriend and squeezed him a little tightly.

Table

We're holding our first Table meeting to discuss Britain, politics, and the future. It will be Upstairs at The Green Man pub, 36 Riding House Street, London, W1W  7EP, 6.00pm for 6.30pm on Thursday, 6 November 2014. Everyone welcome. If you get there early I might even buy you a drink. Might.

They do food there or we could all go grab a pizza or something afterwards. 

First, could you click on this link to indicate whether or not you can make it? No binding commitment, but it would help me to estimate numbers and gather emails.

• https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YWMWYT

What's the context?

Scotland just went through at least 2 years of intensive thinking, debate and discussion about what kind of country they wanted. It was a conversation that almost the whole population was involved in. The turnout at the referendum was 84.5%. No General Election in Britain (since 1918 when most adults got the vote) has ever achieved that level.

Since the No vote in Scotland

• the Government is exploring restricting votes on laws that affect only England to English MPs.
• Ed Miliband is pushing for a constitutional convention to look at how Britain is governed.
• if the Conservatives win the next election, they've promised a referendum on our membership of the EU.

In other words, significant constitutional change is afoot, possibly the most important constitutional change for a century. We should be part of this. We need to engage with what this country is and could be. We should show the same care and consideration to our future as Scotland showed to theirs.

'Table' is just a start. No commitment to anything more than just sitting down and talking.

How will it work?

Absolutely no idea. I'm happy to bring some questions and ideas to a first meeting, but I hope you'll have better ideas and will be prepared to share them.

Only a couple of rules:

• let's try to keep things open and positive; let's not get stuck in pessimism or negativity or always seeing the problems with ideas. 
• the people who turn up are the right people; let's not waste time worrying about who didn't show.
• if we want to talk about something, let's talk about it, rather than wait for someone else to raise it.
• We don't need to be perfect; we just need to talk. Let's allow good ideas to stay good ideas. Let's not get bogged down in the detail yet.
• let's be imaginative, let's dream a little bit, let's remember that things can and do change and people make things change.

What sort of ideas?

I think we should try both to be practical and to take leaps of faith. The politics we have at the moment seem very narrow; our thinking should occupy a broader landscape.

Some people will be interested in economics; others in digital futures; some know a lot about the environment; some are experts in transport issues; some want to talk about the constitution; others will have ideas about reforming our legal system. This is all good. I want to find out things from you. We should all become a little bit more expert in stuff. And I'm as self-deprecating as the next person, but I'm also up for taking ourselves a bit seriously.

I really want us to come up with some new ideas.

Such as?

I've been trying to gather together some interesting articles and ideas. It's been getting too big for this page so I've put them on a new page here. I will try to update that regularly. If you find anything you think is worth our collective attention, email me and I'll add it.

Of course, there's no need whatever to look at anything before the meeting. It's just if you are interested. Please also feel free just to turn up. 

So are you in?

Thanks for reading this far - and if you didn't follow the link at the top of the page, could you just do this? It'll take a minute of your time. Just so I have a vague sense of numbers.

• https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YWMWYT

See you there!

Dan

It's the Stupid Economy

The Tories are in crisis. They are losing supporters - and now MPs - to UKIP. There's no chance that UKIP will form a government but it may gain a couple of seats and, in several places, split the right-wing vote and let Labour or the Lib Dems in. They've also just suffered a slightly embarrassing sex scandal and all of this threatens to overshadow their annual conference, about which, only a couple of days ago, they were feeling quite chipper, owing to what the press seem to have decided was a not-very-good Labour conference. This is the context in which George Osborne stood up today and announced a two-year freeze on benefits.

He's doing this because he's discovered that over the last couple of years, benefits have risen faster than wages and, he has concluded, 'the fairest way to reduce welfare bills is to make sure that benefits are not rising faster than the wages of the taxpayers who are paying for them'.

First, what this actually means is unmistakably hitting the poorest people in our society. Jobseekers Allowance starts at £57.35 per week and can be as much as £72.40 per week. Do I need to say that this is not very much money? And a benefits freeze is a real-terms cut, of course; not a huge cut, because inflation is pretty low at 1.5%, so over two years it'll feel like around a £2.50 cut in spending terms. Child benefit is also frozen and that's a universal benefit, so it doesn't just go to the poor, but freezing it will mean very little to a middle class family, but much more to a very poor family. The cuts will hit 5m families defined as the 'working poor'.

But second, look at the extraordinary admission here. In Osborne's first budget in 2010, he changed the way benefit increases were calculated. They were pegged to the Retail Price Index, but Osborne changed the system so that they would be pegged to the Consumer Price Index. The big difference between these two measures is that the RPI includes house prices and CPI does not; and, mostly, this means that the RPI registers higher price rises than the CPI. So benefit rises have already been lowered.

The extraordinary admission - as far as I can see, not commented on by any of the journalists reporting his speech - is that if benefit rises are outstripping wage rises, then wage rises have been, for the last few years, consistently lower than the rise in prices. In other words, Osborne is faced with the fact that benefits are going up in line with prices, while wages are lagging behind prices, and he thinks the scandal there is the rise in benefits. It's like someone seeing two hospitals, one with a death rate much higher than the second, and wondering what's gone wrong with the second hospital.

This is all politics, of course. Osborne has tapped into a deeply unpleasant instinct among the core Conservative vote that imagines the unemployed living a life of unparalleled luxury at the taxpayers' expense. Talk of benefit caps and cuts plays well with this group, which is why he does it. It's completely untrue but it seems to be working. As zero hedge.com have noted, opinion polls suggest that the public on average believes that 41% of social security goes to the unemployed; the actual figure is 3%. We apparently believe that the Government spends 29% more on Jobseekers Allowance than on pensions; in fact it spends 1500% more on pensions than on benefits. (The flagship tax break that Osborne announced was to reduce the tax paid on inheriting a pension untouched from the age of 65 to 75. Note that this is not reducing tax on pensions; it's actually another tax reduction on inherited wealth.)

It's all part of the greatest confidence trick that this Coalition have perpetrated, which is to ram home the widespread belief that Labour left the economy in a mess because of their high public spending. Insofar as the money used to bail out the banking sector in 2008 was public spending it's true, but it's nothing to do with welfare payments which were actually very low under Labour in the 2000s (mainly because unemployment was so low). Welfare payments are much higher now because this is the slowest recovery in living memory and unemployment levels are higher than at any time from 2000 to 2009.

And the Tories have never satisfactorily explained what they would have done differently throughout the 2000s to ensure that the banks would not creep to the edge of systemic collapse. Indeed, when the run on Northern Rock happened, when the contagion was spreading through the system, the Tories were completely paralysed. They literally had no idea what to do. And when Gordon Brown kicked into action and spearheaded a rescue mission that Europe and the US followed, they simply supported him. 

But it's inconvenient for the Tories to remember this. Much easier to pretend that Labour spent billions and billions of money on the grasping, the lazy, the workshy. Much easier to pass off their hardline, extremist allegiance to cutting public spending and their decision - decision, not obligation - to rule out tax rises or investment in jobs as some kind of iron economic law. Horribly, Osborne can dismiss the suffering he wants to inflict on the poor as being tough with the economy and this will play well with that tiny sliver of ignorant misanthropic floating voters who might otherwise go to UKIP to fuel their hatred of their fellow citizens. Because to actually face the real scandal at the moment, that the Tories have looked after business but not the people business employs, would unravel the whole stupid economic story that George Osborne is peddling to his Nasty Party.

Critical Thinking

Is criticism in crisis? Spoiler alert: No.

Like winter flu or X Factor or the hawthorne blossom outside my window, rarely does a year go by without someone declaring that theatre criticism is in crisis. This time it was Mark Shenton of The Stage, who made an offhand remark about there being 'no jobs' for younger critics. Matt Trueman reprimanded him, so Shenton defensively called Trueman defensive then Karen Fricker weighed in and it all kicked off in the comments. Which is all a bit yada yada we've been here before.

The issue that Mark is raising is that so far, in the drift towards online reviewing and blogging, no very clear financial model has been put in place to make this work as well as it has done for the broadsheets. As far as I know, this seems largely correct. Matt Trueman makes his living as a critic, but lots of people don't, despite contributing to the new-ish world of theatre blogs.

What is less clear to me is why Mark suggests that, because of this, he fears for 'quality journalism'. It's true, of course, that if someone can't 'put food on the table', they won't ultimately be able to write reviews. But while having an income may be necessary for quality journalism, it's not sufficient (viz. Quentin Letts, Tim Walker). It's possible that the future's theatre critics will find some way of 'monetising their content', through partnering with theatres or publishers or newspapers or advertisers or maybe Web 3.0 will seamlessly produce flows of income in some as-yet unanticipatable way. It may be that theatre critics support their work by taking on day jobs, like resting actors. Either way, it seems to me very unlikely that theatre criticism will disappear; the evidence is, startlingly, that people want to be theatre critics and happily do it as a hobby.

More importantly, I'd say that it's the broadsheets that  are threatening the quality of theatre reviews and have been doing so for decades. For a while I've been editing new editions of Terence Rattigan's plays; whenever I call up those original reviews, no matter how many times I do this, my jaw always drops to see the space critics had in the 1950s; two, sometimes three columns to expatiate with complexity and at some length on the play they've seen. Tynan, Hobson, Trewin and others sometimes had over 1000  words to respond with wit, style, and erudition to the theatre. This has been cut back and cut back and now a critic is lucky to get 600 words on an evening of theatre, quite often 350. Once you've set the scene and complemented a couple of actors and the set, what do you have for analysis and discussion? 150 words? Critics rarely have the chance to think aloud, to speculate, to take an idea for a walk. They don't have the space.

They also don't have the time. We still seem to be obsessed with the overnight review and, yes, it's exciting if you're involved in a show, but actually, would it hurt to wait a couple of days? It's no surprise that the best critics have often been the Sunday reviewers, where they have a few days to let a performance settle in the mind and can build something more substantial in an essay that compares two or three shows.

Our best critics - and I think we have good critics - are good at quickly compressing large insights into tiny spaces and conveying the tang of a performance in a few words (look at Michael Billington on Maxine Peake), but at best these are hints and glimpses; they can't be developed into anything more. Everything is instant, capsule judgments.

On the contrary, the highest quality critical writing about theatre at the moment is on the blogs. While I do check out the Guardian reviews (because the theatre page is a bookmark on my computer) I more eagerly seek out Andrew Haydon, Matt Trueman, Catherine Love, Megan Vaughan, Maddy Costa, Dan Hutton, Exeunt, A Younger Theatre, and more. And I do it because the blogger now has the space afforded to the critics of the 1950s and when they want to they can use that space to really work through a set of ideas and in the best of that writing you can that vivid, thrilling sense that the theatre is something that matters. It has got inside these writers and they are trying to figure out how it has changed them. They can really take time to think.

It's also a matter of style. Again, because I did a lot of work on theatre of the 1950s, I can understand that excitement about what Tynan would say on Sunday but also how would he say it? He famously used his column as a space to explore different styles, often as opportunities to display caustic wit, but  it meant he would write rather wonderful reviews as dialogues; there was an famously acid review of Rattigan's Separate Tables (1954) in the form of a dialogue between Aunt Edna (middle-class middle brow theatregoer) and a 'Young Perfectionist', ending with the devastating couplet: 

A.E.: Clearly, there is something here for both of us.
Y.P.: Yes. But not quite enough for either of us. 

It's a stylistic conceit that maybe in 1954 only Tynan could have carried off or would have though to try.

But the bloggers have a different freedom. Just today, I find Megan Vaughan's review of Teh Internet is Serious Business; seriously, how great is that - marvel at what the internet has made possible in the form of a review. I haven't seen the show yet but it is so delightful and witty and smart and also incisive, I can't wait to go. And this has been happening for a while; one of the pioneer theatre bloggers, The West End Whingers, wrote a review of the shonky old play Fram by Tony Harrison in rhyming couplets. And more generally, you get a strong sense of style off each of these writers I've mentioned: Andrew Haydon's meticulously raging passion; Matt Trueman's sternly intelligent inspections; Catherine Love feeling her way empathetically through the turns of a production; Maddy Costa's tumblingly confessional intensities and so on. It's a pleasure to turn to these writers to get a sense not of a capsule review, but an unfolding project of cultural engagement.

Things flared up again a week ago at the ITC Conference, on 16 September, when Bryony Kimmings declared that, apart from Lyn Gardner of The Guardian,  UK criticism was rubbish. This, not surprisingly, caused a bit of a flap-doodle among the online bloggers who may have felt a little slighted. An interesting debate emerged on Twitter between what we might call the interested parties. My inclination with Bryony Kimmings is to agree with everything that brilliant woman says and in this instance, I don't think she was wholly wrong. I mean, as I've been saying through this article already, I think she's wrong in that there is some great criticism, but the whole model still seems to be wrong: that is, the review as a sort of one-off judgement-from-high for-all-time that places the critic on the other side from the artist as sparring partners - though with the artist unable, realistically, to fight back.

(Is that right? Can the artist not fight back? Well they can. The Guardian briefly ran a right to reply thing on their website. It never worked; artists always seemed petulant or pleading or arrogant. Mind you, anyone remember that documentary from the early nineties when a bunch of theatre critics were invited to direct plays at the Battersea Arts Centre? The sequence where Nick de Jongh read the review written of his show by Stephen Daldry was a remarkable demonstration of self-righteous petulance that I've rarely seen from an artist. The artist can only probably fight back through brilliantly unfair means. A playwright I know, tired of the pissy reviews they got from the Sunday Herald's Mark Brown - who, full disclosure, has also given me a couple of gloriously shitty reviews - toyed with the idea of introducing an off-stage character in their next play who would only ever be referred to as 'the cunt Mark Brown'.)

The shorter the review, the more pugnacious and unappetising it seems. Summing up what might be two years of work in 400 words with some condescending dismissal just doesn't accept the weight and value of people's lives and work. I wrote, very early on in maintaining this blog, a short piece explaining that I wasn't writing reviews, just things that looked a bit like reviews. By and large I've tried to maintain this jesuitical distinction. The fact I don't write about everything I see and that I don't accept press tickets helps me keep this distinction in my head. I try not to give summary judgments of the shows. (When I do post something very negative, I take great pains to show my working, so that I can be argued with, that I'm not descending on it from a high horse but struggling to make sense in the middle of it.) The aim with all these pieces is to engage with what they're doing and think about what it means to do things like that and to walk some of the way with the artist.

And this is where I think the blogging world is really changing things. There is a real move away from this one-shot smackdown in the online reviews. First, because of space; when you've got 1000 words or more it admits complexity and that allows for a much more complex response. Second, because of time: because when you're freed from the overnight deadline, you can reflect - not just on the show but on other reviews. A dialogue can be set up. It's brilliant that Megan Vaughan and Stuart Pringle and Aleks Sierz wrote the first wave of reviews of Little Revolution at the Almeida; then Matt Trueman and I were able to write reviews puzzling over those initial responses; and then Andrew Haydon writes his review where can reflect on our commentaries. Which might seem all a bit incestuous and getting further away from the work but it doesn't feel like it - it feels more like a really good conversation in the pub afterwards just with more time, space, maturity of response and reflection. I've had loads of reviews for things in my life: I'd far rather have a play of mine battered around in an argument between bloggers like these than have it exposed to summary execution in the inky fingers of the traditional critics. Or rather, I'd simply learn so much more from the former than the latter. The latter is marketing, the former is criticism.

And there may be something here for the economic model of the critic; the embedded critic, which seems to have taken off much more online than offline, that is, the critic who is invited into the rehearsal room - as Andrew Haydon was with Secret Theatre at Lyric Hammersmith, for instance - is someone who might not be paid by a newspaper, but by a theatre or by a publisher. (Actually, that's not new: one of my favourite theatre books is Jim Hiley's Theatre at Work [1981], a long account of watching the rehearsals for John Dexter's National Theatre production of Brecht's The Life of Galileo, a production I watched, aged twelve, standing at the back of the Oliver circle. Hiley was, to all intents and purposes, an embedded critic for that show.)  It might seem risky to have critics paid by artists because we won't get fearlessly objective commentary; true, but there will always be space for the short star-system review. This is a way of improving the quality of the critical culture we have around theatre and the blogosphere (yuk that word) seems to me more likely to be its salvation than its damnation.