Psmith

As I’ve blogged before, I’m on a bit of a Wodehouse binge. I’ve read and reread the sublime Jeeves and Wooster books many times but this year I thought I’d branch out. I started by reading the Blandings books, which are just as wonderful as everyone claims and I’m now encouraged to keep going. I am aware that there are lots of entirely stand-alone books without repeating character, but while I figure out a logical way to explore those I’m going to stick with the series. The next book series I’ve read concerns Psmith.

In fact, I’ve already read a Psmith book because he crosses over with Blandings in the second in that series Leave it to Psmith. This is actually the last of the Psmith books. There are four or five Psmith books. I say ;four or five’ because I’ve read a single volume called Mike and Psmith which seems to be a repackaging and revision of two earlier books (though I’m not sure Psmith appears in both). The complete series, in order of events depicted, is Mike and Psmith (1953), Psmith in the City (1910), Psmith, Journalist (1915), and Leave it to Psmith (1923). Psmith is, therefore, an earlier creation than either Blandings or Jeeves and Wooster.

Who is Psmith? He’s a public schoolboy, immaculately dressed, very wealthy, with a monocle. The most notable thing about him is his most of speech which is elegantly voluble. In fact his speech is the chief pleasure of these books. The wit of them almost entirely derives from Psmith himself, his unconceited high opinion of himself, his lordly high status, and his ability to talk his way out of or into any situation he desires. His chief interlocutor is Mike who appears in all the books as his right-hand man (though he is absent for most of Psmith, Journalist) and Mike is very ordinary, normal, down to earth, an excellent cricketer, a reliable fellow, and a stout friend. He serves, in other words, to emphasise the extraordinary creation that is Psmith. In fact, Psmith seems somewhat Wildean; partly in the taste for paradox, but also in the sublime brilliance of his manner of speech, his attention to aesthetics above almost all else, and a fondness for dramatic exaggeration.

There is also, I might add, a certain queerness to Psmith. He exists in almost entirely male company, is effete and beautifully dressed. He has a camp turn of phrase that seems to suggest fin de siècle aestheticism: in Psmith, Journalist he imagines not solving a particular social problem:

If I were to depart without bringing off improvements […], I shouldn't be able to enjoy my meals. The startled cry would go round Cambridge: 'Something is the matter with Psmith. He is off his feed. He should try Blenkinsop's Balm for the Bilious.' But no balm would do me any good. I should simply droop and fade slowly away like a neglected lily.

When he is shot at in the same book, he is more concerned about the damage to his hat than to his person; And when he does settle down with a woman, he does so with the noticeably slender and boyish Eve Halliday.

But really to know him is to hear him. It’s the way he speaks that is so delightful. A classic mode of speech, almost a catchphrase of his is to imagine that his doings are the talk of the town. In Psmith Journalist, he introduces himself to guests to the newspaper at which he has started working:

‘I am acting sub-editor. The work is not light,’ added Psmith gratuitously. ‘Sometimes the cry goes round, “Can Psmith get through it all? Will his strength support his unquenchable spirit?” But I stagger on. I do not repine.’

He sprinkles his conversation with Latin phrases and literary references (actually a very Wodehousean style). In Mike and Psmith he urges Mike to stay and listen to him:

"Don't dream of moving," said Psmith. "I have several rather profound observations on life to make and I can't make them without an audience. Soliloquy is a knack. Hamlet had got it, but probably only after years of patient practice.

Often there is great comedy out of the graceful way he places a positive construction on bad situations. In Psmith, Journalist, he describes being asked to go down to the police station by some violent and corrupt cops:

There, standing on the mat, were three policemen. From their remarks I gathered that certain bright spirits had been running a gambling establishment in the lower regions of the building--where, I think I told you, there is a saloon--and the Law was now about to clean up the place. Very cordially the honest fellows invited me to go with them. A conveyance, it seemed, waited in the street without. I pointed out, even as you appear to have done, that sea-green pyjamas with old rose frogs were not the costume in which a Shropshire Psmith should be seen abroad in one of the world's greatest cities; but they assured me - more by their manner than their words - that my misgivings were out of place, so I yielded. These men, I told myself, have lived longer in New York than I. They know what is done and what is not done. I will bow to their views. So I went with them

And very often he wriggles out of situation by sheer force of language, as in Psmith in the City where he talks his boss out of sacking him and then ends:

'It has been a great treat to me, this little chat,' he said affably, 'but I fear that I must no longer allow purely social enjoyments to interfere with my commercial pursuits. With your permission, I will rejoin my department, where my absence is doubtless already causing comment and possibly dismay. But we shall be meeting at the club shortly, I hope. Good-bye, sir, good-bye.'

The high-minded tone is beautifully done. In Mike and Psmith, he has snatched a prized study away from another boy simply by grabbing it and giving the boy no chance to claim what is rightfully his. Too late, the boy appeals to the teacher, to not avail. Psmith has advice for him:

‘This tendency to delay, Spiller,’ he said, ‘is your besetting fault. Correct it, Edwin. Fight against it.’

It is Psmith himself who makes these books work. He has to because there is no real consistency in the style of the books. Mike and Psmith is a series of School and Cricket japes, enjoyable but simple. Psmith in the City is much better, but essentially transplants the school ragging into the workplace, with a rather awkward diversion into the world of left-wing politics. Psmith, Journalist is entirely different, a comic thriller, set in New York with gangsters, boxing, slums and a campaigning newspaper. It is arresting to see Wodehouse describing with real feeling the horrible conditions experienced by people living in slum housing and there is a genuinely heroic desire to expose the horrors of capitalism in the book. There is also a brutal description of a boxing match. The peril never seems entirely perilous, in part because Psmith rises above it at all times. There is also quite a lot of racist language and at one point an undeniably racist comment about an African-American character in the mouth of the book’s sidekick hero Billy Windsor and surely meant to amuse rather than scandalise. Leave it to Psmith is again, different, this much more on the traditional Wodehouse ground of the romantic farce set in a stately home. Indeed, it rather feels like he brings Psmith to Blandings to liven up the place but realises that Blandings has more potential than his hero so he married Psmith off and proceeds with the 9th Earl of Emsworth and the rest of them.

In fact it is Psmith’s language that provides the continuity across the books, because his character is all over the place. He shows no sign of interest in romance in book before Leave it to Psmith until he woos Eve Halliday;, but then neither did he seem likely to show compassion for the victims of slum landlords before Psmith, Journalist. In Mike and Psmith he reveals a hitherto-silent talent for cricket at the end of chapter 26 of a 30-chapter book that is largely about whether these characters can and want to play cricket. His ‘socialism’ - Psmith declares himself to be a socialist and refers to everyone as Comrade - is really just a verbal joke that isn’t explored in any meaningful way.

And yet it all works. These are deliriously enjoyable books, because Psmith is such a magnificent comic creation and a creation almost entirely of speech.

Value Engineering

Value Engineering is the latest in the ‘tribunal plays’ that Nicolas Kent pioneered at the Tricycle in the 1990s. Tribunal plays are plays whose source material generally comes from a public enquiry (from which most of the public has no direct access). At their best they correct the deficits that blight our democracy; they reveal the vulnerabilities of power; and, in their stately way, they can be massively rousing, shocking, and devastating.

This play draws on the public enquiry into the terrible night of 14 June 2017, when a small fire spread across the exterior of Grenfell Tower in West London, killing 72 and injuring 70 more, most of them Black and Global Majority residents, most of them very poor, many of whom had complained about safety standards in the tower for years.

The show is, quite rightly, harrowing and devastating. The most emotional material happens early on as we learn the story of a fire fighter who took upon himself the task of rescuing a 13-year-old boy, thought to be on the nineteenth floor. His attempt is hindered first by the fact that the boy has taken refuge two floors above, but then also that the upper floors are unexpectedly filling with thick black smoke. So consumed was he by the task of this singular rescue, he does not think to alert other residents to their peril. The firefighter breaks down on the witness stand as he faces the fact that if he had simply knocked on a door, he might have saved lives.

Then we get into the intricacies of the relations between the architects, the Tenants Management Organisation, the contractor, the subcontractor, the manufacturer of the cladding, and the Building Control Surveyor, all of whom pass the buck for the fire. A plan had been hatched to renovate Grenfell Tower and the architects submitted a design that underwent a process of ‘value engineered’ (i.e. cost-cutting). Most crucially, a series of zinc panels were replaced by aluminium panels filled with polyethylene (a highly flammable substance). As such, when a small kitchen fire in a 4th floor flat spread through the window, the exterior panels ignited and the fire quickly spread on the outside of the building, reaching the very top in about half an hour. Most of the witnesses claim that it was not their job to check the fire-retardant properties of the cladding and most of them don’t seem to have seen the need to check that the panels they were fixing complied with building regulations, which themselves seem to be confusing and hard to understand.

The crisp, formal business of the enquiry creates a patina of mostly rational, unemotional calm, which makes the reports we get of that night all the more horrifying. The many deaths and the real human suffering of smoke inhalation, the fear, the horror, emerge as a kind of subtext. The visual blandness of the enquiry room - a large blue wall, three teak desks, microphones, men and women in formalwear with lanyards and ring binders is replaced in our minds with the terror of the burning building. Only once, early on, do we see any images of Grenfell on fire, a short sequence to show evidence of the polyethylene having liquefied and dropping thick hot sparks onto the ground below, while also feeding the fire above.

The actors beautifully underplay and give us glimpses of telling evasiveness, arrogance, bland abdications of responsibility, contradiction and more. The emotions of the first half hour are replaced by a furious anger that no one is prepared to accept responsibility. At one point a senior member of the TMO expresses confidence that he did a good job because the work was completed on budget, which gets an unusually waspish rebuttal from the examining QC: ‘if I may say so, the fact that the project was delivered on budget is not of great assistance to us, given that we know what happened to the building’ (p.90).

The Arts Desk review describes it as ‘bruising, necessary theatre’ which makes it sound like physiotherapy and, yes, it is a painful experience, particularly when we are reminded that this horrific mass death happened ‘within a pocket of one of the smallest yet richest boroughs in London, one of the richest cities in Europe, and one of the richest cities in the world’ (p.41). I felt a sense of shame and collective responsibility. The show is, deliberately of course, being performed less than a mile from the Tower. We are almost literally in its shadow.

So you should see it. I found it powerful, chastening, beautifully acted, serious and compelling. Which should be enough for anyone.

But… there are things that nagged at me during the performance, things that troubled me about the experience. I felt at times strong-armed, as if the obvious moral importance of the events of 14 June 2017 were being deployed impatiently to override any doubts or questions I might have. As if the undeniable real-world seriousness of the events discussed should disqualify us from wanting more.

(Am I being picky? There’s a lovely joke in a Frasier episode (‘Retirement is Murder’). Frasier and Niles return from dining together in a new restaurant. ‘How was dinner’ asks Daphne. ‘Fine,’ replies Niles, ‘except for one small flaw’. ‘Oh good,’ says Daphne, ‘just the way you like it’. And I’m aware that finding tiny flaws in otherwise superb theatre shows might be a vice of mine…)

But here’s the thing. There is a substantial section in the first half that focuses on the evidence of the architect, Bruce Sounes, of the design firm Studio E. An edit of his testimony is prefaced by an edit of a statement by a legal representative of the bereaved survivors, Stephanie Barwise. She notes that the aluminium cladding marked ‘an obsession with aesthetics, which was to dog the project’ (p.23). The idea, clearly stated, is that Studio E had recently had been commissioned to construct the nearby Kensington Academy and Leisure Centre and had come to think that the brutalist appearance of the Grenfell Tower was enough of an eyesore to damage the viability of the Leisure Centre. Therefore, ‘over-cladding Grenfell was seen as a solution to RBKC and others' aesthetic concerns’ (p.23). Placing aluminium panels around the Tower was, therefore, about prettying up a piece of council housing not for its residents but for those more well-heeled visitors who might have to glance at it.

There are several respects in which this is a distortion of what Barwise says. It is true that she uses those words in her statement (see the official transcript, 3:22-23, 4:6-7). But in the truncation of her statement - from, let’s be clear, around 50,000 words to around 750 words - the suggestions of aestheticism take on a far more prominent role. In her statement, not included in the edit, it becomes clear that the cladding was also put in place to improve the heat insulation of the building which was currently poor (2:25) and which the cladding was designed to improve (an aim described as ‘laudable’ and ‘admirable’ 5:9,22). Of course, the cladding eventually chosen was wholly inappropriate and the process of choosing it clearly negligent. But is it right to say that this was entirely driven by ‘aesthetics’? Well, it seems not, because initially zinc panels were chosen, which apparently would have provided far better protection against fire, but it was the ‘value engineering’ of the title that saw the contractor, pressured by the TMO, offer a saving of £243k by swapping the zinc panels for the aluminium panels (7:20). The zinc and aluminium panels were visually very similar; the difference, it seems, was the highly flammable polyethylene core of the latter and was driven , in other words, not by aesthetics, but economics. As Barwise puts it: ‘The change from zinc to ACM was an important instance in this case of the obsession with cost , not so much choosing cheaper materials known to be unsafe, but a concentration on cost at the expense of all else’ (104:8-11 my emphasis). So while the architects may have had a focus on aesthetics, the final cause of the choice of those fatal panels was economic. But you would not know that from the edit of Barwise’s statement which seems to assign blame to the architects’ ‘obsession with aesthetics’.

Why pick on this small detail? I understand, of course, that turning the millions of words produced by months and months of the enquiry into a 2½-hour theatre show will inevitably mean some shifts of emphasis, the foregrounding of some material over others. This is how good analytical work proceeds, cutting through the mass of information to see the clear outlines. But it does expose what choices the editor, Richard Norton-Taylor, has made and possibly the subliminal assumptions that may have guided that choice.

Because as I watched the show, I was struck by the show’s apparent obsession with aesthetic impoverishment. Pale teak furniture, men in dull suits, powerpoint slides. This seemed to be a vision of theatre that says aesthetic pleasure is inappropriate when considering serious matters of public moment. And certainly the type of theatre in which Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor have specialised evinces a naive realism that says the facts should be presented unadorned, certainly not turned into something pleasurable or entertaining. Discussions of serious public policy should be bruising and necessary and nothing more. In a sense, the approach of this kind of show is to strip away the aesthetic cladding to reveal the brutalism of the simple, damning truth.

But where this attitude to theatre falls down is that we know brutalism to be very much an aesthetic choice, a certain kind of adornment, a visual attitude to what urban architecture might be, a deliberate exposure of form (the rough concrete surfaces) and of function (exposed ventilation ducts and so on); these may have come clad in moral rectitude (that this was more ‘honest’ architecture) but these things date and we can see that the preference for exposed form and function was an artistic vision first of all.

Because, let’s be clear, it is preposterously puritanical to criticise an architect for thinking aesthetically, as if there were a way of designing a building that had no visual appearance or that council buildings must be purely functional. If my analysis of Stephanie Barwise’s testimony is right and aesthetics played very little role in the specific choice of a flammable material, then criticising aesthetics is actually a kind of mise en abyme where the debate about cladding on the Grenfell Tower is actually a playing out of certain anxieties about the nature of the Tribunal Play.

The Tribunal Play, after all, is also an expression of aesthetic preferences and choices. The testimony from the enquiry has been selected and reordered, with certain images and ideas (‘aesthetics’) turned into leitmotifs. The suppression of rhetorical or performative flamboyance is itself an aesthetic choice; it is what Roland Barthes, in a 1968 essay calls ‘The Reality Effect’. He notes how certain realist novelists use an excess of tiny inconsequential details to give the impression of realism. He suggests this works because of the very excess and pointlessness of those details; they serve no particular symbolic or narrative purpose, and so sit inertly as a token of reality by virtue of their apparent artlessness - or, we might say, their apparent refusal of aesthetics. There are quite a few of these reality effects in Value Engineering: when a witness falters in their answer, as when Ben Bailey is asked about his role: ‘Erm... (Pause.) I don't think my role is a technical role in terms of being able to agree - or, sorry, specifically discuss these things with John Hoban, but I could probably facilitate that discussion - erm’ (p. 50) or moments where Sir Martin Moore-Bick the chair of the enquiry asks someone to make themselves comfortable, or the fastidious slides that tell us there was a lunch break between two parts of a testimony. These do not appreciably contribute to the story being told (I never found it significant that a witness had experienced a lunch break between paragraphs), but they are there, I would suggest, to give the impression of reality. They are aesthetic techniques that imply an absence of aesthetics.

As we have seen with the discussion of aesthetics in the architects’ decision-making, this risks presenting a particular interpretation of reality as if it were transparent reality. And there are more concerns I had as the show went on - much though, let me say, I admired and was shocked and enraged by what the show exposed.

In the reduction from the great mass of evidence - with hundreds of witnesses, over many months, involving many thousands of documents - to the performance one particular thing seems to have happened, which is a troubling individualising of blame. As I’ve said, the show comes to focus on the relations between the various decision-makers who, between them, chose the lethal Arconic Reynobond PE cladding. It is instructive, exasperating and, if it were not so tragic, would almost be funny to see each of these men and women serially declare that they did not see their role to check the technical specification of the cladding or whether it conformed to building regulations. These figures seem sometimes to be woefully out of their depth, sometimes infuriatingly complacent, occasionally even mendaciously attempting to cover their back.

Inadvertently, though, I found myself - despite myself - feeling some sympathy for these people. They were plainly overworked, most of them were working in contexts where money and time was tight. It is clear that the UK building regulations are both less exacting than those in the EU and much more confusing. Although of course I wish it weren’t so, it does not seem surprising to me that in these circumstances, a chain of decision-makers will think or hope that someone else somewhere else is making the right decision. When one witness notes that he accepted the manufacturer’s estimate of their own product on trust because why would they lie, the audience laughed, but this seems to me simplistically to underestimate the enormous force when the economic pressures are telling you to do one thing and everyone else around you seems to think this is the right thing to do, and there seems no easily available way of checking whether it is the right thing to do. Trust is an essential component for all of us in our daily dealings and there should be structures in place to ensure that companies and stakeholders deserve that trust, not the voluntaristic actions of pressed individuals. After all, I found myself thinking, here I am, taking Richard Norton-Taylor’s material on trust; would he, I wondered, think me absurdly negligent to do so?

This is not to excuse the individuals involved in the Grenfell decision making, but it is to raise a question about whether individuals - and these individuals - should be the target of our anger. Although there were higher ranking political figures who gave evidence at the enquiry, none of them are represented in the show. (The Tribunal Plays have a bit of form in this respect: when they made Justifying War in 2003, a redux of the Hutton Enquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly and, through that, the reasons behind the Iraq War, the decision was made not include Tony Blair’s testimony because too much attention would be paid to him, unbalancing the careful presentation of the evidence in favour of a focus on a divisive personality.) This, again, aesthetic decision has the unfortunate impact of laying blame on people fairly low down in the food chain of these decisions and renders opaque the structural forces at work. It seems to me not irrelevant that these local government decisions took place at the height of Austerity economics and during the era of the ‘hostile environment’ which moved public sentiment against migrants (even second- or third-generation migrants). Reducing the focus to these few individuals runs the risk, it seems to me, of offering up scapegoats and missing the structural racism, the incompetent regulatory framework, and the overwhelming economic imperatives that contributed to these horrific deaths.

And this leads me to my final concern about the performance. When the casting was first announced, there was some outrage that in a show about an event that led to so many Black and Global Majority deaths (85% of those who died that night, the play tells us [p.42]), the cast was almost entirely white. I did not wholly join in those concerns: if you know what the Tribunal Play method is, you know that it is trying to reflect - in a documentary way - the events of an enquiry or trial. If there was a preponderance of white people at the enquiry, arguably that is the fault of the enquiry not the play.

But as I watched, I became uncomfortable with the optics of the performance. As I said earlier, the relative visual impoverishment of the performance means that the stories about what happened to the residents of Grenfell Tower on that night emerge horrifyingly through the gaps and hesitations and moments of break down in the witnesses’ testimony. The main QC leading the questioning,. Richard Millett QC (beautifully embodied by Ron Cook), provides a focus for our anger in his rare moments of impatience with the self-serving evasions of his witnesses. But is this a kind of middle-class white saviourism? We watch largely working-class white men and women being roasted over the coals by a highly educated white man (and his highly-educated white assistant), presided over genially by the retired white judge (played elegantly by Tribunal play veteran Thomas Wheatley).

I found myself wondering if there is a risk here of ‘white cladding’, a kind of theatrical gentrification of the Grenfell story, where the urban brutalism of what happened that night is prettified in a redemptive story of journalistic and legalistic penetration, while the real lives and the real deaths of those who died is allowed only to emerge as subtext.

Blandings

I’ve just finished reading all of P G Wodehouse’s Blandings books. That’s 11 books from Something Fresh (1915) to the posthumously-published and unfinished Sunset at Blandings (1977), plus Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best a handy volume that collects all the stray Blandings short stories from other volumes.

I read the Jeeves & Wooster books as a teenager and found them eye-wateringly funny. I probably read a bunch of them every six or seven years and they are as funny to me now as they ere then. They are certainly the funniest books I’ve ever read. But, for various reasons, I’ve never ventured beyond that series. I think the Jeeves & Wooster books are so perfect I worried that Blandings would fall short. Also, I’m aware that Wodehouse is enormously prolific (around 80 novels, another 20 collections of short stories, a good half dozen autobiographical works) and feared that if I ventured out too far, I would get sucked under by the tide.

But so many people had recommended the Blandings books that earlier this year I asked for them for my birthday. I took them slowly, wanting to savour them, so I guess I got through about two of them a month, just reading them as a treat every Saturday morning. I read them in order of publication (except the short story collection which contains stories written between 1924 and 1966 and which I read in one sitting between Leave it to Psmith [1923] and Summer Lightning [1929]). And last weekend I finished reading the notes at the end of Sunset at Blandings which give a fascinating insight into the work in progress.

And everything they say is true. They are brilliant, extraordinarily funny, exhilaratingly plotted, and endlessly charming. By the end of the series you will have come to love Gally and Beach and Lord Emsworth and the various Aunts and of course The Empress of Blandings. It is striking, too, how sustained Wodehouse’s talent is: the later books are really as good as the early books: perhaps there’s a peak in the run of books from Summer Lightning (1929) through Heavy Weather (1933), Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939) and Full Moon (1947) which are immaculate but a late novel like Galahad at Blandings (1965) easily stands up with the best of them.

What are these books? They are farces. The action of the farce is Blandings Castle, though the characters often converge on the Castle from other country seats, London, or New York. Reading them all in one sequence, you notice very clearly how, essentially, all the books are the same - or rather, Wodehouse uses the same elements in minutely different permutations to create distinct novels. There’s almost something of Philip Glass in the way he will take an imposter, an undercover investigator, a marriage forbidden, an engagement broken off, a threat to Lord Emsworth’s pig, something overheard in the pub, someone hiding in a bedroom, another person locked out of the castle, a dilemma for the butler, a night-time escapade, an accidental unmasking, the theft of a necklace (or book or painting), the arrival of a despised relative, a threat to the family honour, a horrid youth, and more and rearranges them in each book so that you both notice the repetition and marvel at the differences. These are not retreads of the same thing; each one is more delightful because you know the rules of game.

And the farces are beautifully carpentered, as all good farces must be, piling stratagem upon stratagem, misunderstanding upon misunderstanding, the artifice delightfully defusing any sense of genuine jeopardy, just producing a giddy laughter. And they are magnificently funny. The farce mechanism is a way of revealing his joyful characters..The central cast are superb and pretty much every guest star (The Efficient Baxter, The Duke of Dunstable, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, Sue Brown, Percy Frobisher Pilbeam, George Cyril Wellbeloved, and more). There is even Marvel-Universe-style crossover with characters and events from other non-Blandings novels making their way through these pages: Psmith, Pilbeam, The Drones, Monty Bodkin, Sir Roderick Glossop.

One of the things that is fascinating about reading these books in chronological sequence is watching how Wodehouse, perhaps through trial and error, finally creates the perfect structure of characters. Lord Emsworth’s younger brother Galahad ‘Gally” Threepwood, a rakish, generous-spirited, mischievous alumnus of the London fin de siècle is an inspired invention. He relieves Emsworth of any need to become morally involved in the lives of the residents, temporary or otherwise, at Blandings Castle. He only appears in 1929’s Summer Lightning, fourteen years into the saga, and while the preceding books are excellent, there is a certain lift that happens here as the structure of forces becomes truly robust. The long-serving and long-suffering butler Beach also changes subtly across the books; in ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’ (1936), collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937), he is described as ‘a man who invested all his actions with something of the impressiveness of a high priest conducting an intricate service at some romantic altar’ (p. 28). This sense of enormous dignity, which of course places him alongside Jeeves, tends to diminish somewhat as the stories go on, as we find out more about his personal life, his weight problems, his family, his preference for port, and he is drawn into the seamier sides of the Blandings intrigues. But this works too: that the man holding the whole operation together should be himself slightly ridiculous is all to the good of the books.

It is certainly true that the women are much more colourless than the men (apart perhaps from Lady Constance, who is one of an otherwise interchangeable series of tyrannical aunts in the Lady Bracknell mould). It is an entirely white, privileged cast. But then these are not books that pretend to be anchored in daily life; the artifice and artistry is about plotting, character and verbal wit. They are not especially snobby books, despite their often snobby characters. They are not particularly straight books, despite their uniformly heterosexual characters. They are not necessarily white books, despite their caucasian casts. The magic of these farces is they turn everything upside down, show the absurdities in everything, and leave us affectionate for the characters without any requirement to love their lives, situations, or aspirations.

The humour is surprisingly different from the Jeeves and Wooster books. The peculiar genius of those is the fallible narrator Bertram Wooster whose chipper naivety adds an extra layer of linguistic precision and delight. Here we are more in the world of the omniscient narrator - although one who occasionally stops to remark on the complexities of doing a really good narration - and we are looking in on the characters more directly. The language is still magnificent, with its familiar mixture of slang, quotation and absent-minded whimsy. There are some moments of indirect free style, but the writing is mostly very straight but endlessly witty and light. It is noticeable that the earlier books are much more grounded, spend more time in London, and have a sharper satirical eye. By the time Wodehouse has moved permanently to the US, the books are much more focused on Blandings, are more (not a bad word) artificial, and increasingly mix American slang in with the British. (This just occasionally jars as the reference to the wholly US notion of a ‘three-alarm fire;’ in Sunset. In Service With a Smile a character talks about wanting to ‘get to first base’ with a woman; he is an American character, though, perhaps because the meaning has shifted since 1961, but it introduces a rare moment of sexual desire into these otherwise innocent worlds.)

Enjoyably, the characters don’t age. Well they sort of don’t age. It is a characteristic of Galahad Threepwood, repeated in every book where we meet him, than he appears to be ageless; but, in fact, all the characters seem to be exactly as they are in the last book as when we first meet them. Yes, a couple of characters do marry. Perhaps Beach the Butler does put on a few pounds over the series. The Empress accumulates awards at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. But otherwise they stay preserved in aspic. Several of the characters seem old enough to ensure that the books can’t plausibly cover decades of history. It is hard to place exactly when they take place. In a couple of the earlyish novels, the Wall Street Crash appears to be a precipitating event. There’s a reference to Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen and to science fiction movies (‘horror from outer space’) in Galahad at Blandings that seems to place us in the fifties rather than the 20s/30s that seems to be the natural placing for the bools. But they are, in a way, like their near contemporaries, the Christie’s Poirot & Miss Marple books, or Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. The character remains the same and the changing world seems to press in only gently on them.

The Blandings books are superb and effervescent and joyful. Every moment reading these books was happy and careless and full of laughter. If you haven’t read them, treat yourself.

UPDATE: Audible have released The Blandings Collection, the second volume in their P G Wodehouse readings by Stephen Fry. These are pretty great value (especially if you have an Audible membership). Last year they released volume 1, which contained three unabridged Jeeves and Wooster novels and two unabridged J&W short story collections. This year it is three full-length Blandings novels (Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, Uncle Fred ion the Springtime) and two Blandings short story collections (Blandings Castle and Lord Emsworth and Others, both of which also include some Mulliner stories, a Ukridge, a Bobbie Wickham and more, so an excellent way to dabble one’s feet in the wider Wodehouse universe). As you might expect, Stephen Fry is a blissful reader of these books, properly bringing out their humour, and choosing superb voices for the characters: his Rupert Baxter is magnificent in its steely dry-throated iciness; his Lord Emsworth’s quavering absentness is a delight; he manages to distinguish (perhaps better even than Wodehouse himself) the various dim young men from Freddie to Ronnie, and he has a tremendous actor and comedian’s way with Wodehouse’s great set pieces: two drunken exhibitions spring to mind - Gussie Fink-Nottle’s inebriate handling of the Market Snodsbury Grammar School prize-giving in Right Ho, Jeeves, one of the great comic scenes in literature, is so vividly done, you feel you’re listening to a full-cast dramatisation, while Percy Pilbeam’s tipsy interview with Lady Constance and Lady Julia in chapter 12 of Heavy Weather, another outrageously brilliant scene, is just exquisitely funny.

Maryland

A couple of weeks ago, the wonderful writer, Lucy Kirkwood, enraged and horrified by the revelations in the Sarah Everard case and the murder of Sabina Nessa wrote a short, twenty-minute play, Maryland. She emailed it to the Royal Court who quickly saw what this was: an urgent, funny, brutal, challenging rallying cry from one of our most important writers, capturing a structure of feeling about one of the most appalling stories of the year that points to the underlying horror of hundreds of years of men brutally assaulting and murdering women. And so they immediately put it on, in a semi-staged, script-in-hand production in the Theatre Upstairs. (The Court has a good history of doing this. I remember Iranian Nights by Howard Brenton & Tariq Ali in 1989, a rapid response to the Rushdie Affair. Then there was Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children in 2009, a response to Operation Cast Lead, a sustained Israeli attack on Gaza. This is in that remarkable tradition.)

This is not a review. To review such a cultural intervention would be absurd. The performance is a cry of pain and you don’t review a cry of pain; you listen, you respond, you try to empathise, you search yourself for the source of that pain, and you bear witness.

The stage arrangement was six chairs facing the central bank of audience (who were on three sides), with another chair at right-angles to the rest at stage right facing stage left. There’s a microphone on a stand and two speakers. There’s a potted plant. There are some white tape markings on the floor that divide the stage into an upstage and downstage area. As the cast appear some of the cast write in chalk that the upstage is the POLICE STATION and downstage in THE STREET. On the back wall, they write ‘Furies’. Most of the cast sit in the chairs; they are, I guess, themselves Furies, certainly Furious women.

The play has a loose narrative. Two women have been assaulted within a few hours of each other and are brought to the police station where they are given photos to look at, but the photos hide the most distinguishing figure of the assailant and they are unable to identify him. The two police officers - one male, one female - are ineptly insensitive in their handling of the women and there is a twist.

All the women characters we meet are called ‘Mary’, hence the title, though also the policeman recalls that his mother (Mary) would go into reveries and his father would dismissively remark that she was off in Maryland. I wondered if we might think of this play as the mother’s reverie, a moment where she forgets everyday coping strategies and faces the true scale of the horror: that men are constantly assaulting and killing women.

The word Mary of course is resonant. Mary, the woman forcibly impregnated against her will in the Bible. Mary the prostitute. Mary the saint. Mother Mary,

Interspersing these scenes are some sections in which the cast, sometimes severally, sometimes chorally, address the audience, often asking playful questions that fence around the ways in which women feel exposed to male violence at home, in their neighbourhood, on the streets, and, of course, at the hands of the police. Some of these questions seem to be posed for the audience to respond (it wasn’t quite clear to me whether we were actually supposed to answer). That these are the experiences of all women, isn one way or another, is simply demonstrated by the broad and diverse cast and moments in the script when one young black woman notes that, because black women don’t bruise like caucasians, the physical evidence they present of assaults is often missed or ignored.

The momentum builds. It starts darkly funny; the male policeman’s ineptness is wittily shown. But the humour slowly fades out at the performance goes on and at the end the women of the cast chorally challenge us (and by ‘us’ I think I mean the men in the audience) asking when will we be as angry about what is happening to women as women are.

It’s rough, of course. It’s written at speed - though but a ferociously good writer so it’s beautifully turned. The play throws fragment after fragment to build a picture and a pattern. It addresses, through humour and anger, questions about police procedure, about the dull insistence that ‘not all men’ assault women (there’s an excellent analogy with a box of Maltesers that I will not spoil here), and it asks why women shouldn’t walk home at night despite the threats. It’s landscape is epic and finally casts a long line back through history. Although it is often very funny, there’s a brittleness to the laughter, because it’s a play that knows laughter can be a survival mechanism and maybe this is a moment not to try to survive but to change things.

There’s a particular device that I found powerful and unbearable. I feel bad mentioning the word, because the play doesn’t. But whenever any reference to ‘rape’ approaches in the script, the word is replaced by a sound, a horrible, ear-splitting sound, a mixture of screams and machinery and pneumatic drilling: a sound that forces its way into your head and knocks out all other thoughts. It’s a sound that is a kind of assault. It tears through the Theatre Upstairs whenever they mention is, more and more unbearable each time, and at one point the sound is extended to breaking point. It’s a very powerful idea, the neatness of the r-word, so freighted with pictorial and narrative baggage (Sabine Women, Nordic Noir, alarms, kits, accusations, etc.) replaced by a sound that represents the chaos in the cultural mind, the aggressive horror of that threat forever lurking.

The cast of nine are terrific. The direction is unfancy and to the point. It’s a grim, exhilarating, shaming twenty minutes and it’s a remarkable sign of our theatre stepping up to a cultural moment and challenging us all to care, to not let dead women be priced into the way we live our lives.

It’s on till Saturday 16 October. Do please go.

Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act

Diane Page’s fierce, harsh, beautiful, tearfully raging production of Athol Fugard’s Statement After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act has taken me several days to even start to process. The story is pretty simple: an interracial couple have been conducting a brief (illegal) sexual relationship when they are shopped by a neighbour and arrested. That’s pretty much it. We don’t see it quite in that order, though, and after a first half that is, I think, one continuous duologue between the lovers, their world caves in, as, in a way, does the structure of the play, fragmenting into monologues, and reportage. The effect, I found, was overwhelming.

Page has pared everything down. It’s a pared-down text but she’s kept things as simple as possible. The stage is dark car-tyre gray and designer Niall McKeevor has sunk a Torus shape into the stage, which you can kind of see in the picture above. It means, effectively, the stage slopes down into a shallow pit. (It faintly reminded me of the drain in the middle of the same stage for 2014’s Pomona.) Early on I worried that this might be a mistake, pushing the actors to the sides, putting a void at the middle of the playing area, and restricting their ability to interact. But I soon stopped worrying. For one thing, it did restrict their movements and forced the actors into the shadows, and that helped a physical sense of the illicit, dangerous relationship between Frieda and Errol. This wasn’t just metaphorical; their embraces were discontinuous; they were unable fully to relax. There was also a powerful blankness to the set that refused to disclose where we were; I didn’t know the play and assumed they were outside, somewhere beyond the town, but eventually it becomes clear we’re in an office in a library. Everything feels provisional, hard won.

And then, this Torus pit started to take on different resonances; at times it felt like a pool, a ledge, a dungeon, a hiding place, a refuge. When the two characters sat on either side, they felt flung apart. As you enter the theatre, the pit is surrounded by metal barriers that are obligingly removed by stage management as the play begins; the barriers are, of course, to stop unwary audience members from falling in. And then in a glorious final moment there was a beautiful moving projection turning it into a kind of vortex, like a mathematical model of a black hole. This came at the moment of the most raging despair and I swear I felt like we were all being sucked into it. The play ended as it began, with a warning not to fall into the darkness.

The technical design for the show is great. As I said, it’s a very pared-down show, but the minimal elements used are stunningly effective. The semi-darkness of the opening, in which a lit match terrifyingly exposes the space, is suddenly transformed as a series of harsh floodlights snap on and the dimensions of the location and the theatre itself change utterly. The benign voyeurism of the first half gives way to a ferocious witnessing. Our eyelids propped open with matches, we watch the brutalisation, the lingering prurience of the South African policeman as he salaciously takes us through what he knows and what he found., the light pitilessly complicit.

And then there is this sound. At first I thought it was some industrial sound bleeding through from a nearby building. A bass note, rising and falling, a kind of mechanic groan that starts quietly, distant, and becomes more intrusive as it gets louder. It’s very uncomfortable, slightly nauseating, and it lends the action after the arrest a deep unease. It brought our bodies into the action of this play. (I mean, I hope this wasn’t bleed through from an adjacent building, because if so I’ve just favourably reviewed noise pollution.)

And bodies are key to this play and this production. The beginning of the play is extremely sensual. Shaq Taylor and Scarlett Brookes appear, half dressed, a sheen of sweat on them, and the early dialogue lingers on the sensual immediacy of a world sparked into vividness by love and desire. Theatre-in-the-round gives bodies a particularly sharp three-dimensionality and I really felt a sense of the weight and sensuous presence in the forbidden proximity of these two bodies. The two actors give an extraordinary intensity to the relationship. I said the neutrality of the stage means we don’t know exactly where we are, but emotionally we know exactly where we are. The fractious intimacy of the first scene is beautifully established and pulls us right in. And the journey these actors go through - in a crisp 75 minutes, let me say - is phenomenal. The play ends with two different kinds of despair, beautiful bits of writing by Fugard. Frieda realises that she’s lost her lover, that he is slipping away from her, his presence, his smell, his memory:

My hands still have the sweat of your body on them, but I’ll have to wash them … sometime. If I don’t, they will. Nothing can stop me losing that little bit of you. In every corner of being myself there is a little of you left and now I must start to lose it. I must be very still, because if I do anything, except think nothing, it will all start to happen. I won’t be able to stop it.

It’s sensual again, but even more intense because we’ve now closed in on her attempt to slow her own mind to a halt to prevent the erosion of his presence in her mind. And then he speaks and his final speech is raging eloquence of what it is to have your sense of self stripped away:

If they take away your legs you can’t walk
If they take away your arms you can’t work
If they take away your head you can’t think
I can walk
I can work
I can think
I can’t love
[…]
If they take away your soul you can’t go to Heaven
I can go to Heaven
I can’t love

I mean, dear God, this is moving and it builds further to a confrontation with God as Errol imagines everything taken from him and God finally taking the nothing that is left. And the two actors did these speeches with such power, and conviction and moral force that I couldn’t breathe.

It’s a superbly powerful play, a wonderful example of a political play that speaks to - and beyond - its immediate circumstances. It’s a play of elegant revelation and sinuous paradox. I’ve mentioned that the play begins with sensuous intimacy and ends by confronting the Heavens; that’s its trajectory, from the small and particular and local to an anger that is literally cosmic. I thought, early on, that perhaps Fugard was being a bit ‘literary’ in some of his language choices; the opening speech is arguably a little pleased with its lyricism and could use a little roughing over; there are some (to my mind) clumsy bits of foreshadowing (a story of two mating snakes being destroyed; a memory of a door to sunlight being closed). But actually these are probably moments that just gives the dialogue a bump to get it started, to allow it to grow in scale. Errol’s fascination with geography starts to bring to this intimate real-time scene of two people a sense of geological scale that opens up for us the mental landscape of the play. And the writing remains very elegant while somehow, simultaneously, becoming more and more raw. (This might be a moment to talk about the title. I sort of love the title of this play, because it’s a rather ugly title. The two prepositions - ‘after’ and ‘under’ - make the syntax of it rather tortuous, in a way that feels to me a faint echo of the contortions imposed on everyone under a truly oppressive regime.)

And the emotion of the relationship is beautifully and cleverly structured. The first half of the play is a single, basically realistic scene between Frieda and Errol - the second half is fragments that jump about in time. But Fugard’s brilliance is that the intimate scene with the two lovers together is a scene that drives them apart; there are simmering resentments, even in their intimacy, about Frieda’s white privilege and these tensions flare up; the fear of the scene makes them jumpy and mistrustful. It’s an intimate scene but not one in which one can relax. And then it’s the fragmented half of the play when their yearning for one another reaches out across the spaces between the fragments to express something hugely moving and beautiful. In other words, the scene in which they are together, they are apart; the scenes in which they are apart, they are together.

And this production honours this play. Page’s unflinching, unsentimental focus on the reality of the relationship and the true effect of apartheid on the dignity, emotions, and lives of these two people a fiery hour and a quarter that takes us into the heart of racist darkness. It’s a wonderful production from a director to watch.