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Losing Unity |
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Andrew Haydon |
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Michael Arditti's recent novel Unity concerns a group of Cambridge students who take a scurrilous and brilliant May Week show that they have written about Unity Mitford to the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1975 and are picked up by a genius German film director. Sad to report that, were the novel set thirty years later, the fictional film maker would have probably walked out after ten minutes of New Era's similar project. The play presents the basic facts of the relationship between the 1930's society girls, communist Jessica (Decca) Mitford and her Fascist-sympathising sister Unity, albeit in the style of an underpowered stage adaptation of Bridget Jones' Diary (think: 'Met Hitler today, VG.'). The script, written by Hannah Murphy - who also plays Unity, presents an unconvincing vision of the relationship between the two sisters throughout the thirties, as each is seduced by opposing ideologies. There is no attempt to explore the reasons for their extremism and precious little by way of context. Instead we see the sisters played as pleasant, touchy-feely, middle-class women of the modern age ('I just want to be your sister, is all').
In recent times Unity Mitford,
more even her sister Diana, has become a symbol of how close Britain plausibly
came to fascism. Her infatuation and friendship with Hitler and her deep shock
that the two countries went to waron opposing sides gives the lie to the
oft-repeated maxim that fascism could never have taken off in Britain.
However, Losing Unity's simplistic Hitler=Bad, Lefties=Good approach makes no
capital of the fact, and reduces both the politics and the personalities to
bland (chick-lit), leaving the audience not caring about either.
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