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Twenty - Barrault at the Barbican
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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The lights dimmed into total darkness. Then a spot illuminated the great actor, black shirt and black trousers, miming walking up stairs, a routine mime-exercise done with mastery. There was huge applause for the 73-year-old cult hero both of the theatrical profession and all lovers of theatre. Then he began to speak, in French. The surprise should not have been too great, but as he went on and on, rustle and whispers spread as many waited for the performance to begin. But this was it. Now like most of the audience, I suspect, I certainly ‘have to concentrate’ and ‘don't quite get every word’, but he was going on and on, with beautiful gestures, eloquent face and hands part of the language, truly looking 20 years younger than we knew he was, so a good advertisement for part of what he was saying: ‘By now I think I have contracted a religious fervour toward the human body. I don't mean the body limited to the skin and five senses but, let us call it, the integral, the magnetic, perhaps mystical body.’
I take this from a translated extract of a mere 150 words that appeared on a little leaflet on our seats, which was simply the first two minutes of a long lecture: ‘And so I have wanted to compose a show that celebrates the language of the body by running in bird's eye view over the history of mime, of pantomime, both of breathed language and, more generally, of the “magnetic body”.’
He used these exact words from the little leaflet. I make this point partly to convey something of the flavour but also, in view of what subsequently occurred, to make the point that there was a full script. Someone could have provided full programme notes as at a concert. Anyway, after about forty minutes of going on in a French philosophical way about mime being universal language of communication, punctuated or illustrated by two very brief mimes (that of the birds flying and of the man undressing on a stony beach and swimming) just as the paradox of talking about mime so fluently began to dawn on us and just as I was beginning to tire a little—to be honest—at the effort of following a highly abstract discourse in a foreign language, though the sheer delight of watching him and of sharing in this great occasion left me very pleased and quite content, a voice cried out from the gods: ‘ I am veiy angry.
Four - Koestler’s Koestler
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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In 1942 George Orwell wrote about a new breed of writers who were specifically political writers’, men whose best writing was to be found in that aesthetically unfavoured subject matter. Among them he numbered Malraux, Borkenau, Silone, and his new friend Arthur Koestler.
Koestler has been almost as difficult to come to terms with as Orwell, even though, born only two years later, in 1905, he is still very much alive and has written copiously about himself and his ‘career’—he is fond of the word career. Admiration for both men is tinged with uncertainty as to quite what we are admiring; and some, whose wounds still ache from old cuts inflicted by one or the other of them, would deny their merit as writers at all, or call it grossly inflated. Part of the difficulty of appraising Koestler is that he has written so much and in a variety of forms on widely varying subjects, most of which stir strong reactions. A bibliography lists thirty published books.
Now Koestler seems to help us by providing a selection of his own writings. What is it in fact? ‘An omnibus,’ he says, which the Concise Oxford tells him ‘is a volume containing several stories, plays, etc., by an author published at a low price to be within the reach of all.’ That it is, a fine piece of publishing, incidentally, but in one respect it is a curious omnibus, for it is not ‘the best of Koestler,’ a selection of works as a whole, but rather heavily edited abridgements from all the thirty books. He has had to reduce 9000 pages to 700, so to seven and a half per cent of the total, he tells us with mock pedantry, obviously and understandably pleased with his own professional skill with the knife, even on himself.
This book must at least be his own view of his achievement, especially as at first glance it includes something of everything: Zionist, Communist, Anticommunist, philosopher, scientist, pamphleteer, deep pessimist, profound optimist, unsatisfied Yogi and frustrated commissar. Can we now judge whether he is a bourgeois hedgehog or a natural aristocrat of foxes?
Essays on Politics and Literature
- Bernard Crick
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This lively collection of essays gives a non-technical, but profound analysis of the essential relationship between politics and literature.
Foreword by David Daiches
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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What attracts me most in Bernard Crick's essays is the speaking voice. In an age when academics write more and more for fellow specialists in a de-natured professional jargon, it is refreshing to find an academic (even a retired one) using the English language with unostentatious elegance to discuss, present, argue or meditate. These essays show a combination of humane intelligence, wide-ranging curiosity and precise knowledge in a variety of fields. They also show wit and humour and a rather appealing kind of wry egotism which manages to parade the self without glorifying it. And most of all, they show an ability to cross the boundaries set artificially by the rigidities of our academic structure. (I might add, in the Crickean vein of personal interpolation, that we invented a new curriculum-structure at the University of Sussex in 1961 precisely in order to remove those rigidities and make this kind of discourse more possible.)
Professor Crick is of course known as the biographer of George Orwell, and his sympathetic understanding of that remarkable writer shows through in much of his writing on other subjects as well as in the five illuminating essays on Orwell that form a central part of this book. He shares Orwell's feeling for unpretentious lucidity in his use of English as well as his general approach to politics and society. But the tone of reasoned argument is his own. One can disagree with some of the points he makes—as indeed I do—without feeling outraged or bullied, for this is a man voicing considered but sometimes tentative views in a conversational manner, almost tempting us to reply (as F.R. Leavis said one critic's reply to another ought to be, though it was something he never put into practice himself) with a ‘Yes, but—’.
The intelligent general reader, if such a person is not an invention of reviewers, will relish this book. It entertains as well as informs (and provokes). This surely is a primary function of the essay, a literary form which is here given new life.
Ten - On the Difficulties of Writing Biography and of Orwell’s in Particular
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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The word ‘biography’ can create as many different expectations as the word ‘Orwell’. There is ‘Orwell’ as Orwellian—the gloomy prophet-pessimist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, so it is said, though I see the book as Swiftian satire if only marginally more cheerful for that; and there is Orwell as ‘Orwell-like’, the essayist, the humourist, the humanist, the lover of nature and of all small, curious things. The word ‘biography’ can mean a memorial or a panegyric; it can mean a hatchet job, or it can simply mean a good read. Now, of course, the hatchet job, whether literary journalism (stemming from Lytton Strachey) or of political journalism (stemming from W.T. Stead) was itself simply a reaction both to the Moneypenny and Buckle-like monumental ‘good’ lives, in which as among Lutheran pietists all mundane facts are held to be equal and to be equally sacred and all lively facts are suppressed; and also a reaction to the mercifully shorter celebratory lives, exemplary lives, Robert Southey on Nelson or Samuel Smiles on the great explorers and inventors, often published in series well- called ‘Popular Lives’. This tradition has not died out, nor should it. ‘Let us now praise famous men’ and women indeed: ‘There is a time and place for all things’. I notice that Michael Foot now calls his Life of Aneurin Bevan in its paperback edition, ‘a polemical biography’. Perhaps he is reacting to some criticism by pedantic historians that his book was a trifle partial. And so splendidly it was. There is a place in our culture for holding up certain lives as noble examples, whether of Nye Bevan, the Queen Mother or Ms. Onassis, according to the reader's values. I do not wish to say that these are not biography, any more than to deny that their mirrorimage hatchet jobs are. They are precisely what many people still mean by biography. Names are not sacred; only actions are good or bad.
Others, I’ve said, simply see a biography as ‘a good read’ about an actual person, whether praising, knocking or tolerably fair. Wyndham Lewis once said that good biographies are like novels.
Contents
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Seven - Words
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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Against Promiscuity
‘Words, words, words’, answered the Lord Hamlet. ‘The ball seemed in the net, Montgomery1 lifted himself off the ground, somehow he got his fingers to it, a miracle, deflected it off the cross-bar; he was there by some supernatural instinct. Words fail me to describe the scene…!!’ No they blooming well didn’t, or if so, then only for the briefest moment. He was just getting his breath back. Then out flowed the words again. Never at a loss for words, but sometimes perhaps homo sapiens, ludens, the Fallen Angel or the Naked Ape is at a loss for the right words.
So I am not so sanguine (which is a lovely word to look up in the full Oxford English Dictionary) as Marghanita Laski said she was about the coinage of new words. Yes, indeed, it is one of the glories of our double-rooted English language that with it we can so readily make new words and extend the meanings of others. But they had better be good ones. Since we haven't got a French or a Hebrew Academy trying to steer the language, rather as governments try to steer the economy, and since even Sir Ernest Gowers in his great book, Plain Words, was just a little bit up-tight, then it is up to all of us who love the language to be a little sceptical, conservative or preservationist about the coiners and developers. I am wide open to be convinced, but I hate promiscuity with words.
Take just two innocent sounding extensions like ‘extremist’ and ‘dialogue’.
How often is the concept ‘religious extremist’ used when what is really meant is ‘fanatic’ or ‘zealot’, both good old words, someone extreme in his claims or action, but not necessarily the extreme point of a common tendency of the religious. He may be a logical reducio ad absurdsam of orthodoxy or he may be plain idiosyncratic. But with the common phrase ‘student extremist’ the tar-brush of extended meaning is often deliberate. In any precise sense ‘studentextremist’ usually refers to either Revolutionary Socialists or to anarchists: but the phrase carries the naughty implication that the extremist exemplifies what is latent in all students—I mean that they are an extrapolation from a rising curve of homogenous student response.
Two - The Political in Britain’s Two National Theatres
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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The Royal Shakespeare Company, in its theatres at London and Stratford, meets the obligations of a National Theatre as comprehensively as does that national theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. These obligations were formulated in the National Theatre Committee Handbook of 1909:
(i) to keep the plays of Shakespeare in repertoire
(ii) to revive whatever else is vital in English classical drama
(iii) to prevent recent plays of great merit from falling into oblivion
(iv) to produce new plays and to further the development of modern drama
(v) to produce translations of representative works of foreign drama, ancient and modern
(vi) to stimulate the art of acting through the varied opportunities which it will offer to members of the company.
In considering the intricate relationships between drama and society in Britain in the 1970s, we will naturally regard with special interest the ways in which these heavily subsidised national institutions treat political issues.
I write as a political philosopher who happens to be an addicted theatregoer. I have reviewed some of the plays discussed here, but in conditions of relative leisure.1 Unlike newspaper reviewers, therefore, I have always been able to read the text or acting script (after the performance, on principle and also to preserve the basic dramatic joy of surprise). And unlike most literary critics, I shall limit myself here to a discussion of specific productions. The choice of plays may therefore seem rather random, but the procedure has some advantages. It should reveal how our national companies perceive politics in plays in general, rather than in the specifically ‘political’ theatre, or in drama of commitment’. One ofmy main points is that politics is important in plays which do not invite those labels.
Literary critics sometimes worry that drama is debased or simplified by intense political commitments. While this is not necessarily so, I share their worry, since political sincerity is no excuse for bad drama. Indeed I add to it a concern of my own craft: that dramatising politics in some contemporary ways can debase politics. A strident, wholly partisan view of politics expressed in one-sided dialectic is essentially undramatic.
Three - Young Writers of the Thirties
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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The MacSpaunday family album has been opened to the public at the National Portrait Gallery. The actual title of the exhibition is ‘Young Writers of the Thirties’. It's an important exhibition, but it is in fact much narrower and more personal than the title suggests. The director writes in a Foreword to the catalogue:
The last great writers to be celebrated in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery were Pepys and Boswell. Both these exhibitions were on a rather larger scale and offered the visitor a panorama of the life of their respective periods. Our objective on this occasion is quite different, and is more an extension of our aims in the permanent display: to show a number of great writers in relation to each other, and in the context of their literary achievements … We have chosen five writers from that extraordinary generation, four of them poets, and all of them men who had the most profound effect in their contempraries: Auden, Day Lewis, Isherwood, MacNeice and Spender. The varied way in which these five writers-who knew each other well but were no sense a group- responded to the problems of their age, and the effect of their particular preoccupations on the development of their work, is the subject of this exhibition.
As a political writer who is only a common reader of literature (a reversal of roles of most reviewers of this exhibition or of Samual Hynes's recent book, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in the 1930s), I quote at such pedantic length to raise at once the main questions begged by the assumptions of the exhibition makers. If the five are all ‘great writers’, not just distinguished and interesting writers, then the case is ready-made for treating them as the young writers of the thirties, or ‘as representatives’ (says the catalogue) of all the rest,. Even so, however, is part of their greatness having had a ‘profound effect’ on their contemporaries? Or in reflecting so well some of the concerns of what StephenSpender later called “the Divided Generation’?
Index
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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Frontmatter
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One - Literature and Politics
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Originally in The Critical Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2, (Summer 1980) and a revised version was given as the Hannah Arendt Memorial Lecture at the University of Southampton 1983.
If one set a group of good students an essay with this title, one might anticipate any or all of these interpretations: (i) the antipathy of the two concepts; (ii) their necessary interdependence; (iii) the duty of writers to commit themselves; (iv) the duty of writers not to commit themselves; (v) the influence of politics in writers; (vi) the influence of writers on politics; (vii) the clash of censorship and free expression; (viii) the control and use of writers by the state in other countries than our own; (ix) examples of good and bad political writing; (x) a case for the privatisation of public libraries; (xi) a demand for subsidies for unsuccessful writers; and (xii) a demonstration (granted certain theoretical premises) that Literature is a bourgeois concept and that the novel has a special role in maintaining the class system. There could be other angles. There are more than seven types of ambiguity. And as is said of the Irish problem, every time a solution is offered the question is changed. But Professor Flowers comes to help us all; he is general editor of a recent series of short books with the general title ‘Writers and Politics’: J.A. Morris, Writers and Politics in Modern Britain. C.E. Williams, Writers and Politics in Modern Germany. J.E. Flower, Writers and Politics in Modem France. John Gatt-Rutter, Writers and Politics in Modem Italy. Janet Mawby, Writers and Politics in Modem Scandanavia. J. Butt, Writers and Politics in Modern Spain, all published by Hodder and Stoughton, 1977-9.
What the series is not about is at least clear. It is not about the sociology of literature, which is a welcome change. Long before the Frankfurt Schule and the epochal birth of the Hungarian trimmer, George Lukács, even before the coming of Raymond Williams to Cambridge, German students of Shakespeare in the 1900s used to learn all about the social composition of the audience at the Globe, who looked after the horses and when oranges were first sold in English theatres, long before they came to read the texts for themselves, still less to deconstruct them.
Eleven - Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four As Satire
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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Nineteen Eighty-Four has been read with amazingly diverse interpretations. Serious people have seen it as a deterministic prophecy, as a conditional projection, as a humanistic satire of events, as nihilistic misanthrophy, as a libertian socialist satire of power in general, as predominantly an attack on the Soviet Union. At times the reader needs to be reminded that it is a novel and not a monograph or tract. Anthony Burgess has seen it as a comic novel. For a man who cultivated the skills and reputation of plain living, plain thinking and plain writing, this diversity of reception, this propensity to be body-snatched by nearly everyone (except the Communists), is at least curious.
Partly Orwell brought the trouble on himself. The book is indeed a novel, but specifically a satirical novel and it is also the most complex and ambitious work he ever undertook, probably too complex for its own good, both aesthetically considered (compared to Animal Farm, for instance) and in the crowded jostle of its substantive ideas. Orwell appeared to use satire and parody synonymously. In the now well-known press release he issued after reading the first reviews of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he denied that he was saying that ‘something like this will happen,’ but that ‘Allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen Eight-Four could happen.’ And in his letter to an official of the United Automobile Workers, also worried at some of the American reviews, he says: T do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive.’ In the same letter he called it a ‘show-up’ of the ‘perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism.’ And in the letter to his publishers about the ‘blurb,’ he had said that he was ‘parodying… the intellectual implications of totalitarianism,’ which he then links, as in the press release, to the division of the world by the Great Powers; but in the press release he had added the specific dangers to freedom in having to rearm with the new atomic weapons. Strictly speaking, parody mocks a style or the external characteristics of a person,
Five - Hannah Arendt: Hedgehog or Fox?
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We learn that it was not without reason that Elfriede Heidegger, the philosopher's wife, distrusted his relationships with infatuated female students, particularly with the brilliant Jewess Hannah Arendt. She, perhaps his most precocious student, sat at his feet in the mornings, but he lay her in her attic full many an afternoon, all that long time ago in Marburg around 1925. Elfriede Heidegger was not always so perceptive. Once, after a merry housewarming party, singing and drinking around a Teutonic bonfire, she asked a handsome lad, who later became Arendt's first husband, whether he wouldn't like to join the local Nazi youth group. She was put out when he told her that he was Jewish.
Arendt kept this little secret for exactly fifty years, until after her sudden death in 1975 when letters and poems, clung to through flight, imprisonment and exile, revealed the student idyll. Fortunately, she did not follow her disorderly friend W.H. Auden's example and order the destruction of her letters (Auden who, after Arendt's second husband died, had suggested—to her embarrassment and horror—that they should have a companionate marriage); rather, she left her papers in the competent hands of Mary McCarthy, who sensibly commissioned a full-scale scholarly biography.
I must not give any false impression that Elisabeth Young- Bruehl's life of Hannah Arendt is a particularly lively book full of sexual expose—though it is somehow good to discover that an existentialist preacher of humanity could be herself menschlich, allzu menschlich. Here is a philosophical biography of great weight and integrity that concentrates on the life of the mind—which was also, indeed, the title of Arendt's unfinished and posthumously published last work, a work of pure philosophy, returning to her youth as the student of the unhappy Heidegger and then of the noble Jaspers. Young-Bruehl is a former American student of Arendt’s. She writes as a philosopher. The personal life isincidental. But there is enough of the background to make a sad and interesting tale in its own right—a tale of three cultures: the old German universities, Paris and New York.
Eighteen - Polly By Gaslight
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‘There is a young ingenious Quaker in this town who writes verses to his mistress… It gave me a hint that a Quaker pastoral might succeed if our friend Gay could fancy it… pray hear what he says … Or what think you of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and thieves there?’ (Swift to Pope, 1716).
‘There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to morality’ (Johnson, 1775.)
‘I should be very sorry to have the Beggars Opera suppressed; for there is in it so much of real London life.’ (Boswell, 1775).
It was meet, right and proper that so many of the cast of the current ‘smash hit’ revival of Guys and Dolls should be transported from the Olivier into the Lilliputian Cottesloe for the Beggars Opera. though by design as well as good fortune they neither guyed it nor dolled it. For Gay's Beggars Opera is the mother of them all: ballad operas, music dramas, dramas with song and the modem musical. And until the work of Benjamin Britten, it was our truly national ‘opera’, both in the beauty and vitality of the folk melodies and in the satire of obsessive social class. Also, like the modem musical, it was highly speculative economically. Boswell records the Duke of Queensbury saying, when Gay showed him the text: ‘This is a very odd thing, Gay; I am satisfied that it is either a very good thing or a very bad thing.’ Congreve is supposed to have said: ‘it will either take greatly or be damned confoundedly’; and Pope wrote to Swift (as close friends of Gay) that ‘it will make a great noise, but whether of Claps or Hisses I know not’. Swift told Gay, perhaps with friendly exaggeration, that it was as great a satire on mankind as Gulliver.
Colley Cibber, the arbiter of fashion, refused it at Drury Lane, fearing that both its politics and its burlesque of Italian opera would offend the fashionable, but John Rich, a much more dour and down-to-earth character, a self-made businessman, took it for his Theatre Royal in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Fourteen - On the Orwell Trail
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Thank you, Mr Chairman, for your kind words. I'm delighted, I really am, to be making my first visit to Grand Rapids, and, no, lean never tire of talking about Orwell.
God but am I tired and saddlesore. What a year. I just kept on talking through all that media razzmatazz and ideological bodysnatching. For mental self-protection I tried to vary my standard ‘Nineteen Eighty-Fourin 1984’ lecture with an occasional ‘Little Eric and the Bodysnatchers’ or ‘The Other Orwell’; but market forces went for the standard product—thirty-one times in this country alone. And in North America, Grand Rapids, Akron, Chicago, Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Montreal, Boston, New York—all in January. Then back in the spring for Albion, Michigan; Syracuse, New York; Portland, Maine; Rosemont, Pennsylvania; Wake Forest, Guildford, Charlotte, Wilmington Beach, Greenboro, Laurinburg, Chapel Hill, Raleigh—all in North Carolina; Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Grand Junction— all in Colorado. Then the great Library of Congress Orwell experts’ shoot-out in Washington and the Institute of Humanities at NYU to end, not forgetting, or forgetting, as the case may be, half a dozen High Schools along the trail.
Tired and saddlesore. Now there is only one more Orwell conference in Vancouver where I’ll do ‘Orwell's Socialism’, a more academic version of Sheffield Town Hall back in March (the second Marx Memorial Lecture); and one more special lecture, ‘Orwell and Englishness’ at Bangor, North Wales. But the gods punished me only yesterday. A seven-hour train journey from Edinburgh to Cardiff was two hours late, in time to see the last of the Historical Association fading down the lane. And to think that in April I had driven myself through a blizzard across the Rockies from Colorado Springs to get to Grand Junction in time. British Rail is the pits.
I must admit to feeling a little nervous here at Albion College when I see so crowded a hall and so many of you clutching, or pleasantly sharing a text. I feel like that proverbial lion thrown into a den of Daniels.
Nine - Reading The Observer as a Complex Text
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‘I have spent a most dismal day, first in going to church, then in reading the Sunday Times which grows duller and duller… then in reading through the rough draft of my novel which depresses me horribly. I really don't know which is the more stinking, the Sunday Times or the Observer. I go from one to the other like an invalid turing from side to side in bed and getting no comfort whichever way he turns.
(From a letter of Eric Blair written on a Sunday in 1932)In the October 1984 issue of this journal, Hugo Young began this occasional series on newspapers with a most interesting inside account of the internal politics of the Sunday Times, the struggle for control between owner and editor and its changing policies. All this could be done for the Observer, indeed. But I want to essay something simple but rare and difficult, to read the newspaper as a product, to read it closely and externally as an entire and self- contained text. The proof of the pudding is in the eating—as our mothers taught us before the colour supplements’ cookery inserts: just for once to look at the thing in itself and not how it came to be, or what it should be doing. And to look at it in its entirety. Hugo Young created the impression that the Sunday Times is composed of political matter! Did he ever read the whole astonishing artefact?
My quotation from Orwell is a little self-indulgent and external to the text, but it does serve to bring out two basic structural factors. The first is that for most educated, thoughtful, lively and well- informed people, there is only the choice of the one Sunday or the other—or both.1 No wonder that, hunting for the same market, the two rivals look so like each other, embodying the same kind of ‘improving consensus’ as the two main political parties used to do in pre-Thatcher days—and for much the same reason. ‘Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee’, it was often said, which still lookslargely true, by content, make-up and values, apart from the Sunday Times’ lurch to the Thatcher camp in its few political pages.
Sixteen - Horvath’s Tales From the Vienna Woods
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Summary
In a monthly periodical, the theatre critic can either get the best of both worlds or fall between two stools with a thud. If he writes for, as it were, a potential theatre-goer, seeking to influence before the event, then the plays that he can write about are limited to those likely to run for several months, hence to our two national theatres, that's to say, the National itself and the RSC at the Aldwych and in Stratford. So he misses both the excellence of theatre in the provinces (which one hopes the National will bring to London) and the stimulus of much of the short, lively and sometimes alternative in London (which one hopes the National will not kill with kindness, or socialise by offering them licensed happenings on the site). Could the marvellous short frolic that the Bush did just before Christmas, a version of Bill Tidy's Fosdyke Saga, spoofing committed proletarian theatre, have possibly survived the official embrace? (But if you missed it, five volumes have been published, funnier than Clive James so, no need to read The Daily Mirror daily or at all.) But a monthly does have a bit of precious time and space to keep a stern and serious eye on programmes, policies and actual developments of our major theatrical institutions, not just talk up or down a play. One thing the critic can do for an individual play in a monthly, however, is to take time to read the text, obviously a rare luxury for the daily and weekly professionals. And another odd thing he can do is read (a wicked liberty) those other fellows too—before he writes but only after he has been and seen.
Certainly the National's recent production of Odon von Horvath's Tales From the Vienna Woods proved an astonishing trap for and caused havoc among the professionals under pressure. For Horvath has never been performed before on a British stage. This play had its premiere in November 1931 in Berlin, earning some of the last free applause that was to be heard for many years.
In that same year, Carl Zuckmayer had presented Horvath withthe great Kleist Prize, perhaps the most prestigious of German literary awards, already held by Bertolt Brecht and Robert Musil.
Fifteen - Wedekind’s Spring Awakening
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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- Book:
- Essays on Politics and Literature
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 24 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 20 January 2020, pp 225-230
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Summary
WENDLA: Why have you made my dress so long, mother?
FRAU BERGMANN: You’re fourteen today.
WENDLA: I’d rather not have been fourteen, if I’d known you’d make my dress so long.
FRAU BERGMANN: Your dress isn't too long, Wendla.
What next. Can I help it if my child is four inches taller every spring? A grown child can't still go around dressed like a little princess.
If I were Ronald Butt, the good Lord Longford or Mrs Mary Whitehouse, I would be out there picketing the National Theatre Company for staging the first uncut version in English of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening.For it is surely the worst thing that has happened, from their point of view, since the abolition of censorship in the British theatre.
The English Stage Society gave it two Sunday club performances in 1963 in Tom Osborn's translation, and after two years of negotiations the Lord Chamberlain granted it a licence for public performance on condition that ‘there was no kissing, embracing or caressing’ between two schoolboys in the vineyard scene, nor use of the words ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’, and that an alternative was found to a scene of group masturbation in a boys’ reformatory—one wonders that he allowed the girl's death at the hands of an abortionist (but, after all, it was tactfully off-stage and she did die). At that time, in 1965, the National Theatre turned it down—a spokesman is said to have said, ‘all right for some poky experimental theatre in Sloane Square’ (not mentioned in its otherwise totally emancipated programme notes); but now they have made great amends to a great play, and in a new translation by Edward Bond.
By dragging up the ghost of the Lord Chamberlain, I have contrived to mention every superficial aspect of the play which attracts both the censorious and the half-liberated salacious. Infact, the group masturbation scene is perfectly fitting in this work of art when ‘taken as a whole’, as the law on obscenity now sensibly says. But even without these things, it is a play which would upset the three good people I’ve mentioned.
Nineteen - Edgar Catches Jenkins’ Ear at the Barbican
- Bernard Crick, Birkbeck College
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- Book:
- Essays on Politics and Literature
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 24 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 20 January 2020, pp 251-253
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I have tried hard to get away from this self-destructive infatuation, this obsessive love-hate relationship which stops me writing bold, original, serious and interesting things about institutionalised higher education. Next week I promise to turn to another institution, though one equally obsessive and easy to get lost in— North London Polytechnic. What draws me back to the Barbican is not just that David Edgar's huge new play Maydays raises fascinating issues concerning the nature of both theatre and politics, but also an extraordinary issue of responsibility in journalism.
The play has had an exceptionally mixed reception. Mixed both in that some critics have disliked it strongly and others admired it greatly, and in that some have reported a mixed reaction—not merely a good in parts’ reaction but a puzzled, conditional reaction.
For once I am with the mixed economy men and the Social Democrats. I’m in the middle and I can't make up my mind. Go and see it, and make up your own mind; it is very, very good in parts—funny, noble even, with some dramatically effective scenes; and yet some strident, simple, cardboard cut-out and arse- achingly prolonged scenes.
In other words, it is a piece of epic theatre: it is very long (two intervals!), it has many different scenes and it portrays fictional individuals in real historical events in different countries over a long period, from 1945 to 1983 to be precise, from a flag-waving, mock heroic Communist Party victory demonstration to the women on Greenham Common.
It is a study of the extreme Left, or rather of extreme Left groups (the plural is very important, and was missed by some critics whose eyes were blinded by blood and rage). He attributes to them both nobility and folly. So many characters are involved that characterisations become humours, and there is little psychological depth; but recognising so many of the humours as typical, the roles that people have played in my political lifetime, I found some of the scenes both wildly funny and sadly terrible.
Yet one soft-centrist had no mixed response. The political editor of The Guardian, Peter Jenkins, ‘devoted half a page (he has not used that sort of space since the Falklands War) to an extraordinary attack on David Edgar (October 26, 1983):