In 2007, Once, an indie romantic movie with original soundtrack completed on a shoestring budget and shot almost live on the streets of Dublin, caused a critical sensation, and went on to win the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Audience award, the Dublin International Film Festival’s Audience award, and the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In October 2008, Midsummer (a play with songs), the result of the collaboration between playwright David Greig and singer-songwriter Gordon McIntyre, premiered at the Traverse in Edinburgh, and following a nomination for Best New Play at the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland, went on to tour in Scotland, Ireland, and Canada. It is now being presented in London at the Soho Theatre.

I am coupling Once and Midsummer not only because they are both romantic stories told partly through songs, but most importantly because, while remaining in many ways different artistic works, they share a fundamental quality: they represent an independent, more sincere alternative to the English rom-com, as hijacked, over the last few years, by Hugh Grant on the floppy-haired, unwittingly dashing male protagonist corner, and Bridget Jones on the supposedly true-to-life, dieting, goofy female protagonist corner.  The mainstream English or American (and lately, more often than not, casting combination of the two) rom-com seems to have forgotten how to create new characters, and to have lost all interest in real, rather than handed-down, comedy and romance since, at least, Four Weddings and a Funeral. Once and Midsummer moved the action far from its overexposed traditional scene, London’s most gentrified markets (Notting Hill, Borough) and to, respectively, Dublin and Edinburgh, and they liberated their protagonists from gender-based expectations. Thus, they managed to produce two real, fresh, genuinely moving love stories, without disassembling the genre.

As demanded by the rom-com tradition (explicitly invoked during the evening), Bob and Helena, the protagonists of Midsummer, are superficially different, and belong to separate worlds (yet deep down, you don’t need me to tell you, they are similar). She is a high-flying divorce lawyer, he is a small-time crook who still exudes an aura of eye-liner-wearing, scruffy adolescent. They meet in a bar. She wears ‘an understated but nevertheless elegant black dress’, he is ‘reading a damp paperback copy of Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky - to cheer himself up’. He is involved in a mildly worrying criminal affair, and she is sleeping with a married man. They start talking, they spend the night together, they decide to remain just friends - you can guess where this is going. Yet, in spite of the fact that the genre has its own laws and you cannot help but knowing in advance that these laws will eventually take control, and in spite of the occasional eyebrow-raising episode with deus-ex-machina solutions, the plot breezes through the evening, shining with clear, unexpected light -  not unlike, in fact, summer in Edinburgh.

The relationship between Helena and Bob is natural and spontaneous, without the necessity for power-struggles or staged misunderstandings. They seem to know that it is not strictly necessary to have a tearful fight and wander the streets with their hands deep in their pockets before they can simply enjoy each other’s company. They seem to know, as well, that this is what most real people are usually like in a romantic relationship: neither entirely confined within their gender, nor trying too hard to be wholly estranged from it.

Greig’s dialogue, part of which is third-person narrative, is full of grace and of lighthearted philosophical puns, and while it includes some less-than-happy moments (particularly, an apologia for jogging that cannot help but sound like the ad for an expensive pair of trainers), it picks itself up quickly and proceeds with gusto, following Bob and Helena through a memorable weekend of Japanese rope bondage, lobster dinners and weed, and involving the audience in a deliciously geeky conference that takes place inside Bob’s head (‘The 30th Annual Conference of Bobs’): ‘Disappointment will become our default position’. The songs are there to highlight and accompany the atmosphere, without needing to create it from scratch, and they are pleasant and even catchy. Matthew Pidgeon as Bob is suitably likable, but neither smug nor forcibly adorable; Cora Bissett plays Helena without the intolerable self-awareness and solipsistic emotional drama of so many female characters in romantic plays, movies, and TV series.

In a recent Guardian blog, Brian Logan confessed that his enjoyment of Midsummer made him wish to see more rom-coms in theatre - in spite of how much I am trying to acquire a proper Londoner’s cynicism, I have to confess I share his feeling, as long as he promises they will all be this good.

Till 6 February 2010

From a selection of building blocks scattered around the stage, Martin Zimmerman carefully constructs a makeshift chair. From afar, it looks no different to all the other chairs onstage: a simple, spindly wooden skeleton. Only we know that it can’t function in the same way; that it would not suffer being sat upon. It is a chair in form alone, wholly at odds with those chipped and bow-legged examples that surround it.

This duality hovers over the whole of Öper Öpis, which translates from the Swiss as ‘Something Something’. Its stage is split into two: above the stable floor is a platform raised on a central pivot, which lurches and tilts as performers reconfigure themselves on its surface. The shifting sands of this higher plane seem a fluid realm of ideas, home to a world infused with vibrant colour and circus. The everyday becomes extraordinary; not just actions, but human hydraulics. Performers contort and loop through the air, become weightless, become rigid, become super-human, become ideal. It is an Escheresque city of stretched possibilities and multiple perspectives, always familiar and always fantastic.

Into this, through a trapdoor that lowers onto his head, pops the wiry Zimmerman, as wide-eyed as we are. It is as if he has drifted into his own headspace, where the world and its inhabitants are seen through the rose-tinted glasses of personal insecurity. Everyone is stronger, fitter, faster, better. In short, they are spectacular and Zimmerman must struggle to match them.

Only, of course, he can’t. The individuals are extremes – burly strongmen or elastic contortionists – and Zimmerman is the everyman in their midst. To us, however, with our outsider’s view unburdened by the nit-picking subjectivity of the self, he is entirely their equal. We see a blend of freakishness and idealised beauty, both the strengths and weaknesses to which Zimmerman himself is blind.

However, Öper Öpis is far more than mere confidence-bolstering. It thumps with existential enquiry, begging questions of identity, imperfection and our place within the world. Repeatedly – and often quite literally – human forms become objects and what was inanimate becomes oppositely anthropomorphised. Actions and reactions ripple around the space as if the Butterfly effect were the sole governing principle.

On top of all this is the awe-inspiring scratch score created live onstage by DJ Dimitri de Perrot. Constructed with wit, de Perrot uses an array of techniques, including the graze and scrape of needle on vinyl, sampled LPs that he sends fizzing off into the wings after use and, best of all, looped recordings taken from the onstage action, such that the slap of hefty, sweaty thighs becomes the base beat for a gym work-out sequence. It’s so immediate and synergetic that you begin to question whether the music isn’t dancing to the choreography.

All that said, the actual experience of Öper Öpis is less exuberant than one might expect. As a piece it suffers from being strangely detached and even dispassionate. The rhythm can feel relentless, almost to the point of monotony, where we could use the opportunity to savour its spectacle. There is something almost too cool, too self-satisfied about it, as if each gaspworthy feat is followed by a quick glance in the mirror. That vanity strips Öper Öpis of a vital humanity and prohibits it both from stretching itself towards the tipping point of failure and a wholehearted subscription to the rules of counterbalance that the dual stage requires.

As it turns out, then, the ideas are all there, but the blemished reality is all too often airbrushed out.

Till 16 January 2010. The London International Mime Festival runs at various venues until 31 January 2010.

Reza du Wet’s play is like cling-film: thin, transparent, but not entirely without the potential for perverse enjoyment. That’s not to say that Miracle falls into the so-bad-it’s-good category, rather that, in spite of almost everything (natural laws included), it remains just about watchable on its own terms.

A troupe of travelling actors pitch themselves in a crypt in the home-town of their leading man Abel, preparing to give a performance of the medieval morality play, Everyman. Under the stick-and-carrot leadership of actor-manager Du Pre (Tim Woodward, thesping it up like its 1955), the bickering escalates with the arrival of Abel’s coldly congenial ex-wife. Before long, real life imitates art: death makes its presence and purpose known only for Everyman – I mean, Abel – to escape its claws at the last.

Stephen Stead’s translation more or less strips the original of its South African setting, presumably to imbue the work with universality. However, given that the location remains implicit – outside large dogs howl over a barren landscape – the actual effect is to purge it of real pertinence. The multiplicity behind the troupe of actors – and the power politics therein – targets on a general system of government rather than a specific regime and, in doing so, blurs into triviality.

The real criminal in all this, however, is the space itself, which simply won’t allow for our presence to go unacknowledged. Belle Mundi’s design, serviceable though it is, feels like a museum approximation with its clutter of vague gothic crap and painted on stones.

All of which might not be so problematic were the acting style consistent – both with its surroundings and itself. As it is we get Woodward pulling off playing up while Susannah York, as a vintage ‘dahling’ actress, doesn’t. York is fine when acting herself, but her attempts at reaction are so open-mouthed and wide-eyed that, each time, one fears she may have suffered a stroke. Similarly, as the pregnant Lennie, Kate Colebrook downplays sweetly, where Rowan Schlosberg does so to the extent that he forgets to engage us at all. In fact, as Abel, Schlosberg drips with such melancholy that each line seems the opener to a lament for a lost generation. Only Christopher Dingli as the sizzled Antoine pitches his performance at the right level.

And yet, despite all this and the niggling touch of Scooby Doo about proceedings, its not a frustrating watch. Linnie Reedman keeps the pace snappy and hurtles through the plot with a lightness of touch that circumvents its more awkward clunks. Joe Evans’ dusty accordion soundtrack, though it could do with more than two repeated motifs, manages a neat eeriness without which the melodrama would collapse. Neither can get around the fact that de Wet’s play is a curious relic: more mirage than miracle.

Till 24 January 2010

What’s your story?

This week on CW, Sadhvi Sharma argues in a Battle in Print essay that India’s peculiar form of identity politics is a consequence not of insurmountable differences between religions, castes and ethnicities, but rather the collapse in the past generation of the overarching political narrative that emerged with independence. Sarah Boyes and Dan Schneider review two films set amid political strife but more profoundly about dislocation and loneliness, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step Of The Stork. Mark Carrigan reviews a London exhibition about the perennial human phenomenon of scapegoating, and Giulia Merlo welcomes the German refusal of naturalism to the London stage.

14 January 2010

Last year a Pakistani girl was assaulted in a Bombay shopping mall, by a group of women, for sporting a tattoo that said ‘Thank you, God’ in Urdu on her back. While the police found nothing legally objectionable about the tattoo, they decided to refer it to legal experts nonetheless ‘to see if they could book her for hurting religious sentiments’ since the group that assaulted her were so agitated. The girl had to offer a written apology promising to get the tattoo surgically removed in three days. (1)

Meanwhile, in the coastal city of Mangalore in South India, a group of men stormed a pub, and thrashed and molested the women guests for ‘violating the Indian ethos’. The organisation’s leader claimed they were only protecting Indian culture and its women. Politicians from different quarters, while denouncing the attack said that it was against Indian culture for women to drink and visit pubs. (2)

In the weeks after the terror attacks in Mumbai, a right-wing political group in the city threatened a city shopkeeper with violent agitation if he failed to change the name of his shop called ‘Karachi’—the name of a Pakistani city. The police suggested to the owner of the 100-year-old shop to consider changing its name to pre-empt a ‘problem’ (3).

Incidents such as these are not uncommon in contemporary India, and have in fact become the norm. In an avowedly multicultural society, however, such violent assertions are not intrinsic, but a more recent phenomenon.

Given the diversity within India, in terms of ethnic groups, religions, customs, languages spoken and even race, the most dominant and prevailing narrative from the time of independence to date has been that of ‘Unity in diversity’. This is regurgitated through political rhetoric, the Republic day parade, the national anthem, public interest films and commercials. And yet, political conflicts around religion, caste and regional identities have multiplied in India, and impassioned affirmations of identities and heightened group sensitivities are more conspicuous now than at any time since independence.

What is also evident here is that while the violence is denounced, there is an implicit support for identity-based political demands by the state and authorities, and indeed, in most cases the frontrunners are political parties and groups who are the self styled guardians of particular group interests. Culture, nationality and religion seem to automatically grant the basis for the ‘right’ to be offended or to demand special privileges.

‘Identity’ in contemporary politics has created a new playing field, where the number of competitors is ever increasing. It is also an arena that witnesses heightened emotions, laced with words such as respect, rights, and recognition.

Given that multiculturalism has always been a defining feature of the Indian state, unlike in Britain where it is a more recent phenomenon, it has spared the political elite the dilemma of defining Indianness. ‘Unity in Diversity’ makes for an all encompassing defining narrative of the country. The overarching values of tolerance and secularism have been etched so deep in the Indian ethos that these ideas have now attained an unquestionable status in Indian political rhetoric. And in the last two decades these defining values have mutated to take on amoebic meanings and proportions in the political field.

The decline of the Congress party and a larger loss of ideology in the 1980s created a political vacuum that has come to be filled with attempts to court individual and group affiliations and identities. This, coupled with the process of liberalisation and growth, and a simultaneous expansion of India’s democratic base, have now meant that a new language of representative politics seeks to create an egalitarian polity. Only the language of identity that the political elite take refuge in keeps inequality intact.

At the time of independence, the ideas of secularism and diversity served Nehru’s larger ambition of a planned economy as part of shaping a modern India. These dominant narratives have over the decades mutated from more progressive ideals that were at the heart of nation-formation to fierce identity politics, which serve narrow political gains. At the time of independence, the idea of diversity was about the right to free and open political, linguistic, cultural and religious expression. What stands in its place today is a politics of representation that has made diversity itself become a political right rather than a cultural fact.

Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India’

To understand the ideals of free India, the nationalist project that underpinned it, and the vision that backed what came about as a nation, it is useful to refer to the motivations and visions of independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. This is of consequence for two reasons: first because Nehru was the first to inherit the modern nation state, and the ideas that became the mainstay of India—unity in diversity, tolerance and secularism—now almost chronically clichéd, were central to the process of national integration and Nehru’s ambitions for the country. Second, the Congress, led by Nehru, was for decades before and after independence the only major single party to rule India, uncontested. The initial constitution of the Indian polity was single-handedly written and shaped by this monolithic rule. The subsequent decay of the party that created an organisational and ideological pit can be understood using this as a reference point.

Unity was a very real concern at the time of Independence, given that the colonial inheritance of arbitrary presidencies, provinces, and princely states had to be brought under the new Indian state. As one less than political description of the India as it stood on the map prior to independence calls it ‘porridge of irregular and improbable jigsaw puzzle shapes’ (4). The building of the nation, literally and metaphorically, was a process much deliberated over and posing not just a few complications, protests, and contradictions. What used to be roughly etched out provinces and presidencies of British India, native states and territories, and ‘hereditary demi-empires’ had to be brought together (5).

Nehru was very aware of this, and all his efforts and rhetoric were employed in the task of integration. In an urgent nationalistic spirit, Nehru made liberal use of history, often appropriating history to make multiculturalism and tolerance seem inherent to Indian culture and being. He went far to invent a cultural and historical continuity and imagined narratives of multiculturalism and secularism from ancient civilisations through to the nationalist struggle (6).

Anna Guttman in her reading of the Discovery of India sees Nehru’s seminal work as the first to ‘overtly privilege cultural diversity and tolerance as national values’ arguing that the essence of India for him is its ‘multiculturalism’ (7). However, Nehru, although in his deep nationalistic sentiments, reified these values as inherent to Indian culture he did not promote cultural diversity as a national value. This was merely a fact, a fact that he elevated with great enthusiasm, never however, missing an opportunity to assert his ambitions of painting a future-oriented progressive ideal for India. Nehru made the following observation about India’s diversity, to which he often pragmatically referred to as ‘variety’: ‘The diversity of India is tremendous; it is obvious; it lies on the surface and anybody can see it.’ (8)

Aware of India’s myriad divisions of caste and class, he believed in social change that would focus everyone on a shared future rather than divided pasts. He believed that the forces of social change and economic development would erode the base of the caste system, even acknowledging at one point that modern developments had a tendency to create a uniformity that transcended group identities. 

India’s integration and continued social cohesion was central to the project of planned development for the whole subcontinent. In the year leading up to the independence of India, however, the idea of a separate Pakistan province was beginning to germinate, and a division of India seemed imminent. Nehru’s refusal of the 1946 British cabinet mission proposal to carve out a separate province of Pakistan that would be governed independently was primarily motivated by his desire to have a central plan for India’s development into a leading industrial power. The plans and ambitions of India’s development were already on its way with Nehru, the architect of modern India, at its helm. (9)

A self confessed liberal humanist, Nehru nurtured the ambition of a modern nation where ‘hydroelectric plants’ and ‘factories’ were the ‘temples of our age’. He also introduced scientific research and teaching to Indian universities, institutes of technology and research centres, and believed in promoting industrialisation on a large and balanced scale, increase production, and build dams and reservoirs to create hydroelectric power (10).

Language, too, at the time of independence and the decade after, was a more pragmatic concern, relevant only to the objective of nation building, and subordinate to national unity. The designation of Hindi as the national language or ‘language of the union’ was symbolic. On this issue, Nehru was extremely pragmatic, and was appalled by the passions brought into politics by Hindi zealots. Further, his fight to keep the English language was due to his understanding of the unifying forte of English in India and over and above the intellectual and international advantages which English gave to India (11).

Hindu-Muslim conflict is not a recent phenomenon in India, of course. The bloody partition of India that followed its independence saw hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims killed on either side, creating longstanding hostilities and prejudice. Aware of the looming demands for a Pakistan, Nehru was very conscious of promoting secularism as a national goal. The Congress party had always proclaimed itself as a secular organisation. This was imperative to the freedom movement and gave it strength. That India should be a secular state was an undisputed certainty. However, unlike the Western notion of a separation of state and religion, the Indian state defined secularism as the equal status and protection of all religions. Secularism was one of the defining features and pillars of Nehru’s independent state. This, as Metcalf puts it, ‘encouraged a persisting allegiance to ‘community’ at odds with the individualism of a democratic polity.’ (12)

For nearly two decades, the Congress did not have any significant political opposition and enjoyed the moral status and legitimacy of the party that had won India its independence. After Gandhi, Nehru was the most popular political figure and enjoyed absolute authority. He had the unconditional mandate of the people and unquestioning loyalty of his party members, and he had if not a coherent, but a well articulated ideology—a secular socialist democracy. It was his ambition to direct India’s economic development modeled on Soviet style central planning, and he had the history of a nationalist struggle to afford the party political certainty and legitimacy.

Shaky ideals: the emergence of new political moves

The two decades after independence were characterised by rhetoric of a modern industrialised nation, based on socialist ideals. Only, these didn’t bring the promised prosperity to a nation of millions.

Following the death of Nehru, the period of 1969-1984 spelt decline for the Congress. The 1967 elections failed to revitalise the institution and it was the beginning of the end. Congress majority in the parliament had reduced considerably—from a majority of over 100 to just over twenty seats. This was also the beginning of alliances transcending ideologies. Indira Gandhi, daughter of and successor to Nehru, introduced a shift from the traditional mantle of the nationalist Congress; voters were now courted on the basis of their ethnic and religious affiliations (13).

The secular orientation of Congress was no longer an encoded fact. With the split in the party in 1969, the resulting groups now vied for the same electorate, looking for alternative ways to appeal to the electorate. Indira’s rise to absolute power, and her success in the 1971 elections, in which she employed new populist politics, was concomitant with the organisational decay in Congress. The slogan ‘Indira is India, India is Indira’ captured this personality politics (14). Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s son and heir to the party, did not provide any stimulus to the party either. The Bofors arms scam plagued Rajiv; the party had already lost its reputation of being non-corrupt. The pillar of socialism that Nehru had erected looked shaky, and the party was ideologically bankrupt. The ideal of a secular tolerant India had capsised effectively and rhetorically. As Ashutosh Varshney has noted:

By the late 1980s, there was an organisational and ideological vacuum in Indian politics. Organizationally, the Congress was listless. Ideologically, it was not obvious what it stood for. Professing secularism, its leaders were unafraid to use religion for political purposes. Professing socialism, some of its leaders wholeheartedly embraced the market. (15)

It was in this climate of ideological and political vacuum that the right wing Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gained prominence. At the same time, the issue of caste reservations came to the fore. Both the issues, of religion and caste-based reservations, let loose violent passions and gave rise to a new politics of identity.

Mandir and Mandal: religion and caste in the politics of 1980s

Strategies to appeal to religious identities became embedded in the political system only in the late 1980s, with a void created at the Centre and political groups, especially Congress, unable to fill that void with any tangible nationwide plans. Two significant events during this same period can be attributed with the change in the dynamics of how party politics functioned in India. These are often referred to as Mandir, meaning temple and Mandal, which refers to the commission that recommended the implementation of caste-based reservations (the equivalent of what is understood as affirmative action in the West) for the ‘Other Backward Classes’ or OBCs in addition to the already existing quotas for the ‘Scheduled castes’ and ‘Scheduled tribes’ said to make up the lowest rungs of the caste hierarchy (16).

The new giant but vague category of the so-called OBCs was created by the Centre to extend the benefit of welfare provisions to another category of people who could be materially and socially disadvantaged, but did not belong to the already carved out caste groups. The language, however, was spelt out in terms of communities and castes, creating a new and as it turned out, a problematic group that could now contest shared disadvantage and be classed as victims. In 1980, the Mandal Commission extended the criteria of OBC by defining caste-based backwardness. Carving out a new list, the commission placed a total of 3,248 ‘communities’ in the OBC category, that is, over 50 per cent of the country’s population (17).

Mandir refers to the temple politics of the BJP—their demand to build a temple in place of the existing 100-year-old mosque in the city of Ayodhya in North India, which is considered to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. That these two events took place nearly simultaneously speaks of the considered strategic moves across political groups and the deliberations over the impact of their caste and class affiliations on the share of votes.

These events saw flared sentiments engulf the political stage, but the desire and strategy was for caste and religious groups to get noticed—conflicts around identity politics in India had started the multiplication process. This was also the beginning of the rise of regional parties which professed to represent specific caste and regional groups.

Caste Identities—bargaining for equality

While caste has always been a reality in India, caste politics is a relatively recent arrival. Thrown into the political space first in 1989, caste-based political parties and campaigns have become the mainstay of current Indian politics. In 1989, the then Janata Party government at the Centre led by VP Singh decided to implement the Mandal Commission report, which had lain untouched till then. The move to extend reservations of public sector jobs to include the ‘other backward castes’ brought the total percentage of reservations to 49.5 per cent (18) There followed unprecedented violent and large scale protests across northern India.

Caste now has become a political reality. Demands for reservations in the education sector, in private colleges and in the private employment sector too have appeared on the political scene. From demands for reservations to citing offence by virtue of belonging to a particular group, caste has joined the competition for recognition. More recently, for instance, a Bollywood film was banned as the lyrics of one of its songs was deemed offensive to the dalit community (formerly known as ‘untouchables’). More recently the makers of a film called Billu Barber were forced to remove the word barber from the film’s name as it could be deemed offensive to what is traditionally the ‘barber community’.

New regional parties such as the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party have established themselves as the proponents of specific groups’ interests, the dalits and the OBCs respectively. Similarly, regional parties from individual states have become a force to reckon with and have come to the fore as parties representing specific groups based on peoples’ linguistic identity, their regional and religious identities, bringing these into the political arena.

The trend of reservations unleashed by caste politics as become a popular means of getting noticed, and the competing claims to victimhood are plenty. In Mumbai in the western state of Maharashtra, a political group has demanded that the local Marathi-speaking community be afforded reservations in all educational institutions, in housing and in employment (the fact that the city was officially renamed with its Marathi name, having been known as Bombay, can be seen as part of the same trend). The BJP, on the other hand, has suggested reservations for economically disadvantaged Brahmins (who are officially considered a priveleged group regardless of individual circumstances), while several other groups including Muslims, women, and tribal groups have joined in demanding reservations for their specific groups.

There has been a fundamental shift of political identity away from party ideologies and toward group identities of caste, religion, and region. The language of national equality that had been envisaged at the time of independence is now translated into the language of diversity, and proclaimed community identities seek preference in the name of equality. Narratives based on the personal compete in the political space, while the political classes are unable to create one that can transcend these.

Far from the project of making a modern casteless society, the new brand of politics seeks to create and perpetuate an entrenched view of group identities as absolutes. The dynamism that diversity affords to Indian culture, then, has been supplanted by competing claims that perceive unfair advantages to rival groups. The rhetoric of equality has been reduced to the bargaining power of different groups.

Conservative ideologies: politics on the ‘right’ and the ‘Indian culture’

The BJP had been gaining considerable ground in the northern states of India, using the narrative of Hindu nationalism and the project of restoring the country to its glorious Vedic age. The concentrated campaign around the temple issue culminated in the destruction of the Babri masjid (mosque) and the subsequent communal riots across cities in northern India and in Bombay, otherwise known for its cosmopolitan spirit. What this unleashed is a perceived victimhood on all sides, and a greater religious sensitivity amongst Hindus and Muslims.

The BJP’s conservative ideology of Hindu nationalism has preoccupied itself with a revival of history, rooted in Hindu nationalism, culture, and tradition. With liberalisation and globalisation trends in the 90s, this came to be arbitrarily defined more in relation to what it was not. The BJP’s opposition to the existing government’s economic policies of liberalisation came to be articulated in terms of Western corruption being invited on Indian soil. But the 1990s also saw the beginning and irreversibility of coalition politics, with no single party winning absolute majority. As the dominant partner of a 14-member coalition government, when in rule briefly in 1996 (it survived only 13 days) and later in 1998, the BJP had to distance itself from its overtly traditionalist ideology, in support for continued liberalisation.

Today the conservative ideology has been reduced from the proclaimed ideals of national integration, democracy and ‘value-based politics’ to indiscriminate use of ‘Indian culture and identity’ to register offence and practice violence. The right constructs Indianness only in relation to the ‘Other’. Indian culture is everything that is not Western, and the protection of Indian culture takes the form of protests against everything perceived as western. Indian culture and identity are then defined in such capricious forms, as protests against the celebration of Valentine’s Day, opposition to beauty pageants, and films considered too ‘sexy’.

Democratic strength — the optimum use of identity politics

The growth of community identities and conflicts has coincided with a deinstitutionalisation of the Indian state. Both the normative and organisational pillars of the post-independence Indian state — secularism, socialism and nationalism – had weakened definitively by the late 1980s. The decade of 1989-1999 saw a shift in the manifestation of democracy in India. State specific parties grew in numbers and in strength, gradually commanding a stake in national politics at the Centre. Today with over 400 registered political parties in the country, each claiming to represent specific groups and agendas, a fractured electorate is a reality of Indian politics, and many even consider this to be an irreversible development. Yogendra Yadav sums this new trend as:

The last decade stands out for sudden outburst of some of the maladies inherent in our system: the endemic multiplication in the number of political parties and the fractionalisation of the political space; the rise of regional parties and caste-community based parties that threaten to unleash fissiparous tendencies and a clash of primordial loyalties; end of ideology-based politics and the decline of political morality… to sum up: our politics is one big mess (19).

And yet, it is not an ominous warning of democratic collapse and national disintegration. Fresh cleavages across the country on the one hand, has also meant that an electorate largely left unserviced by the ‘Brahmin-bourgeois’ Congress in the initial decades of post-colonial India have now gained a more dynamic and definitive role to play in the democratic process. With the changes in the 1990s, a previously inconspicuous electorate of lower castes and minorities in India have more control over the composition of the political class.

The base of electoral democracy has expanded to become more inclusive. With the increased size of a multiplying electorate, competition for state-controlled resources has increased, traditional social hierarchies have eroded, and the spirit of democratic competition has spread.

However, as Yogendra Yadav rightly points out, in the current political scenario of electoral representation of individual groups, ‘the voters can choose from a set, but they cannot determine which set to choose from.’ This ‘choice’, he says, is far removed from the ‘act of sovereignty that the fiction of liberal democracy makes it out to be’ (20).

Democratic competition has also created new cleavages along multiple lines creating increasingly fractious domestic political interests. With political parties being answerable to particular states, caste groups, sects, economic groups, religious communities, and peasant class, leaves only a narrative of diversity, where each group makes its own claims, and every claim is accommodated without contest.

Identities are not simple objective realities; these are constructs which most often become a concern for the political elite in the absence of any coherent vision for the electorate and a rising political cynicism that disconnects it from the masses. Besides, an enlarged base of material expectations and aspirations, thanks to economic growth since the early 1990s has created in the place of a centralised political culture, a medley of diverse ethnic, regional, religious, caste, and economic groups and subgroups who now believe that they can most effectively pursue their interests as narrowly defined political entities.

Identity of a group or a nation is not an objective reality. In India, as in much of the world, the 1980s spelt decline in political ideology and a sense of political exhaustion. With the weakening of the organisational pillars of post-independence Indian state — secularism, socialism and nationalism — the political elite found it unable to infuse any new meaning into politics. The language of identities became a tool to make symbolic appeals to different groups.

State policy, institutions, and ideological discourse, Nehru thought, would deepen the nation’s commitment to modernity. Nehru’s vision of modernity is now twisted into mere claims for recognition of customs, language and traditions, which do not have the potential to dislodge the wedge of inequality. So while the nation is economically achieving unprecedented change, identities in the political space assume an unchanging nature, and the electorate makes the best of what is on offer.

1) ‘Pak girl beaten up for sporting tattoo in Urdu’, Mumbai Mirror, 19 January 2009
2) ‘Now MNS goes after ‘Pak’ signboards’, Times of India, 25 January 2009
3) Times of India 23 January 2009
4) Robert D King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
5) Ibid., p. 54.
6) Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
7) Anna Guttman, ‘Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Multicultural Nation-State: Constructing National History in the Discovery of India’, CLIO 32, no. 3 (2003): 1. (accessed 15 January 2009).
8) Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 61.
9) Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 213-214
10) Walter Crocker, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate (Noida: Random House India, 2008).
11) Ibid. p 56
12) Metcalf, op cit
13) Ibid p. 247.
14) Ibid, p. 249.
15) Ashutosh Varshney ‘Contested Meanings: India’s National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety’, in Daedalus 122, 1993. (accessed 15 January 2009).
16) For a detailed account of the political climate within which these events took place, see Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli, eds., Community Conflicts and the State in India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). p. 38-47. 
17) Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India: from the 18th Century to the Modern Age. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). P 295. 
18) Metcalf, Concise History of India, p. 269.
19) Yogendra Yadav, ‘Electoral Politics in the Time of Change: India’s Third Electoral System, 1989-1999’, in Economic and Political Weekly 34, Aug. 21 – Sep. 3, 1999), pp 2-8, (accessed 30 December 2008).
20) Ibid., p.1.

A group of four well-off 1940s Shanghai women sit around a small square table, nails painted, faces powdered. They play mahjong. Hands flit in and out of the centre as counters seem to move of their own accord; mouths move, eyes flit from face to face. The game seems to be reflecting the conversation, or vice versa, distrust beneath a veil of implacable politeness, strategies slowly unfolding, nobody truly knowing their opponents.

This opening scene is the film’s ‘present’, and we spend the rest of the time playing through the past that led up to it. Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution pushes both love and suspicion to the limits in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Following a young Chia Chi (Tang Wei), part of a college drama troupe fiercely loyal to the Chinese resistance, the story unfolds over a leisurely two and a half hours as the group hatch a plot to assassinate Yee (Tony Leung), who has joined the Japanese government and collaborates with the killing of Chinese, in what quickly becomes a long and morally complicated mutual seduction between Chia Chi and Yee. The film plays through a series of tightly structured scenes in an exploration of long buried emotions, hidden intentions and the dictates of an impassive, pulsing loneliness.

Adapting a short story by writer Eileen Chang, Lee follows the precedent he set in Brokeback Mountain (2005), which retold Annie Proux’s eponymous short story, yet has commented he felt no need to reproduce Chinese art’s austere tendency to reveal truths through hiding them. This film thankfully leaves plenty of space to breathe, and makes good sense on its own terms. It is certainly a long time before the mysterious Yee and shy Chia Chi’s disarming gazes give way to their full and graphic passions. And when they do, it is simply how they try to connect and truly trust one another; yet its their formal moments that really brim with both dark and light shades.

In fact, the film was awarded an 18 certificate for its sexual explicitness after premiering at the Venice Film Festival, and comments the graphic passion is necessary to this cinematic re-telling are not misguided; hopes it might make the 18 (N-17) band more respectable perhaps naïve. (It might simply be better to get rid of such ponderous age restrictions.)

Nevertheless, the overarching plot is simple enough, a real gem, both dramatically and cinematically, and familiar enough to allow new embellishments to shine. Yimou Zhang’s more abstracted House of Flying Daggers (2004) sprang to mind, similar in its tale of two lovers from different sides of a bitter war, though there’s no flying ninjas here. The violence is messy and tearful. A murder the troupe commits, first stabbing in the gut, then the back, then shooting, then letting fall down the stairs, the man who finds them out, is a genius scene that captures the amateurish innocence, determination and rawness of these young heroes so set on defending their homeland from the invaders. This is a far cry from the slick martial action of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2003), and just as good in turning portrayal of violence to deeper purpose.

Likewise, when it becomes obvious the innocent Chia Chi must physically seduce her target in the Japanese government to gain his trust, and so should practise her skills, serious discussions have obviously been had about which young man has enough experience with prostitutes to be her guide, and she duly sets about her task armed with puffy eyes and packets of cigarettes. This is cute and well-observed, almost shadowing the moment when the gang march home together tipsy singing a patriotic song. Lingering over these oddly innocent moments of sex, death and nationalism creates an atmosphere of patient observation that allows the more hardened and complex emotions that characterise the second half of the film to emerge. Yet despite appearances, these are ultimately characters who never grow up.

Not quite a set piece about goodies and baddies but not exactly a sympathetic portrait of the political complexities of the 1940s, this film’s maturity lies in its caressing exposition of the illicitness and necessity of love and human closeness - and the importance of self-preservation, secrecy and outward stability. What’s noticeable in fact is the lack of any deep sense of good and bad beyond what personally affects the protagonists (many have lost those close); there are simply ‘sides’ - and ‘people’. Glimpses of queues of destitute waiting for a corner of bread whilst passing in a car (only the very rich can afford petrol, we’re informed by the chauffeur) or a visit to a Geisha house in the Japanese part of the city are only useful background mooring points for the wide, semi-violent zig zags of the pseudo-sado-masochistic relationship that develops between Chia Chi and Yee.

And following them both throughout the city, the peculiar mix of America, China and Japan in this period and place comes across as rich, sumptuous - almost regular. There’s almost something for everybody in the film’s aesthetic: traditional Chinese dress meets upper class flowery bedspreads, rickshaws next to huge black cars, slicked back New York hair whilst kneeling down to take tea Japanese-style.

Much has been had of Ang Lee’s Taiwanese-American identity (his next film is about the tribulations of the founder of the Woodstock festival) but it seems best to follow his own example of understated ambivalence. Here, rich husbands dabble in the black market whilst their wives are smuggling stockings. Indeed, it’s this period of stark political conflict that elevates the personal connection at the heart of this film above the pale or superficially voyeuristic, the sense of social and political transgression giving it warmth, verve and resonance. At times this seems to spill over too far: when Chi goes to see her contact in the resistance and breaks down in a tearily intense rendition of the tortuous emotional power play between her and the arranged target, he shouts at her to shut up and storms out of the room. It seems even professional Communists can’t take it sometimes.

In short there is plenty in this film to appreciate. It seems neither particularly bleak nor particularly hopeful; as with many good directors - and it seems Lee can do little wrong - it’s simply moving and considered. The real pulse of the story though, is the unfulfilled relationship between Chi and the leader of her troupe and instigator of the plot.

It’s he who finds her after she runs away and brings her to the organised Chinese resistance. He also tries, and fails, to protect her from excessive demands; nods encouragingly as she’s passed the pill that can end her life if need be. The confrontation between these two was always going to come too late: ‘Why didn’t you kiss me?’ she asks at one point, bereft, having found a kind of surrogate, darker yet deeper love elsewhere. He is too much of a boy for her. It seems much more the absence of this relationship, and the relatively more stable world it represents, that drives the narrative forward to its by now predictable conclusion. At best, we can only admire and sympathise with these characters for tackling adult realities so soon.

That this film follows in the familiar footsteps of focusing on the hopeful young and their messy, maturing personal connections in times of social and political tumult, rather than taking in and marshalling judgement on the broader sweep of events, is a moot point. This is distilled then stretched out Ang Lee, with all the technical expertise that has become his trademark. Whilst it’s perhaps the prerogative of film to be ambivalent, or to show us what we’ve never seen, it’s maybe not so much the prominence of a ‘truth’ about emotional and sexual closeness, but its dislocation from any broader social or political understanding that characterises this endeavour.

Chi lives, and dies, alone. We never get inside her but simply see as she goes from one place to another. In the end, she saves the man she loves, dooms herself and her lifelong friends to death, shot from behind kneeling above a quarry, passing only a look with the man that never kissed her, whilst Yee sits back home, brooding. Where she was, truly was, and him too, subjectively, in between all of this, we never know, and seem uninvited to speculate. We only watch.

Lust, Caution is a beguiling votive offering at the altar of the intangibility of human experience and redeeming power of love. To expect more, or less, would be maybe to expect too much.

Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos is so great an artist that he can achieve a high level in his art through many assorted means. Having just watched his great 1991 film, The Suspended Step Of The Stork, I am still amazed. He has hit greatness in other films, but this film reaches it by taking ordinary life moments, slightly displacing them from the norm, then stepping back to take in how it all unfolds to build narrative and character in a film almost entirely devoid of facial close-ups. It’s a remarkable achievement, on par with the use of still images in Chris Marker’s La Jetee, and the use of ultra-extended takes in Bela Tarr’s Satantango, because, like those films, it does not lack a narrative, as so many poor critics claim, it simply builds a strong narrative in a totally different way than most film does. This obliquity of moment, to coin a phrase, is used ceaselessly in this film- in fact, more so than in any of Angelopoulos’s other films that I’ve seen.

The story is rather simple: a Greek television reporter (Gregory Karr, aka Gregory Patrikareas) working on a story at the Greek-Albanian border, is befriended by a Greek military officer, a colonel (Ilias Logothetis) who explains to him life on the border, and the dividing line on the bridge that could provoke hostilities, if crossed. The colonel then shows him a nearby town where Albanian refugees (and other nationalities) are kept in one portion of the town. After shooting footage there, back in his Athens studios he sees he has captured the image of an Albanian refugee (Marcello Mastroianni), who sells potatoes at a produce market in town, who looks remarkably like a famous Greek politician, statesman, and social philosopher (also Mastroianni) who disappeared a decade ago.

The upper class reporter (he owns a flat screen television, in 1991!) becomes acquainted with the man, and, convinced he is the politician in hiding, encourages the politician’s French wife (Jeanne Moreau) to come to town to reunite (on camera, of course). At the same time, the reporter falls for the Albanian man’s daughter (Dora Chrysikou), but she is engaged to an Albanian on the other side of the river. When the politician’s wife meets the refugee, she claims it is not her husband; but later facts in the film suggest she may be deliberately lying, or just wrong. This film, made thirty years after Mastroianni and Moreau’s great performances as a troubled married couple in La Notte, takes advantage of that cinematic memory, as we see the same pained looks from Moreau’s face- almost as if Mastroianni’s refugee is not only the politician, but the author husband she was so equivocal about in Antonioni’s film. Yet, Angelopoulos does something quite interesting. He films their meeting from afar, and we never see the two principals in the same shot. We only see Moreau via a video camera’s feed back to the reporter’s and his crew’s truck, and after a few seconds of looking offscreen, in Mastroianni’s direction, she turns directly to the reporter’s camera (not Angelopoulos’s) and denies the man is her husband. The man’s daughter, however, marries her Albanian fiancé in a ceremony held by both participants’ families across the river from each other.

Later, after dancing with the reporter, the daughter admits she is conflicted over her feelings for the reporter. The reporter goes to the bridge, and stands with one leg suspended in mid-air, like a stork, as Albanian guards are at the ready (a replay of what the Greek colonel had earlier shown him), and seemingly poised to see if they’d really shoot him. The film ends with the reporter trying to reveal if the refugee is really the politician, but he escapes back across the river to Albania, and the reporter is left with a mystery only he seems intrigued by.

Yet, if this sounds like a trite Hollywood thriller, that’s only in recap. It’s how Angelopoulos tells the tale, visually, in editing, in outstanding scoring, and in many other features, that determines how well this film moves one’s emotions. Many critics saw the film as an allegory of the then contemporaneous fall of the Soviet Union, but, nearly two decades later, the film’s resonance shows, again, how shortsighted most critics are. Mere politics do not define this film, for it is a transhuman essay on loneliness. Even an extraterrestrial species would likely be able to ‘get’ the most wordless images’ meanings. A good example comes in the de facto ‘love scene’ between the reporter and the refugee’s daughter. It consists of the couple entering his hotel room, a scene filmed in sepia, where the reporter is kissing the girl’s hand, as if a scene from a Renaissance painting, implying some higher power or divinity to the girl or moment, and then cuts to them, post-coitus (presumably), and back in normal color, in the dance hall. It is spare, eloquent, and not too overly artsy, for the sepia scene only lasts a minute or so.

Another hint to the universality of the tale should come from the fact that none of the characters are ever referred to by their names, or simply do not have a name. As example, the lead character, the reporter, is often referred to as Alexander in the film, yet never so in the English subtitles. Granted, there are some stretches of dialogue that go untranslated, but I never heard the word Alexander uttered, either. As in such films as Alain Resnais’s Last Year In Marienbad and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, the device of naming the main character is likely gleaned from a bit of promotional material; but not the art itself.

The Region 2 DVD, put out by New Star, lacks any extra features, but the film looks amazing - virtually flawless. The film is dominated by steel grays and blues, and other earth tones, as it is set in winter, and in the Greek highlands, but it is a visual treat of a part of a country too many Westerners think of as having only aquamarine skies, still seas, and eternal sunshine. The DVD cut is 136 minutes, although other cuts run between 126 and 143 minutes. It has English and French subtitles, in white, and is in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. While there is no dubbed soundtrack in English, it does appear that the characters Mastroianni plays are being dubbed into Greek and Albanian. The fact that the dubbing is likely never going to enter the consciousness of most viewers, due to the lack of close-ups, is testament to just how well structured this film is. In a sense, it is on autopilot, despite its great casting choices.

The screenplay was co-written by Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Thanassis Valtinos, and Petros Markaris, and the stylistic influence of Guerra, as usual, reigns supreme, and fortunately so. The music, by Angelopoulos’ long time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou, is, as usual, superb. While Angelopoulos films do not use music as innovatively as Werner Herzog’s films, nor as pop culturally as Martin Scorsese’s films, few films marry image and emotion with sound and well. That stated. Few filmmakers can use the absence of sound as effectively, either. And, of course, there is the Angelopoulos long take, provided by cinematographers Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos.

Whereas the long takes of an Antonioni are wrought with tension, and those of a Bela Tarr are often elliptical in space and feeling, Angelopoulos’s are purely emotional, and often use symbolism. A good example of this comes in the final scene, after the reporter is done with the refugee, the town, the border, and the colonel. He walks along the river, past telephone workers garbed in yellow raincoats, as they ascend poles. There seem to be a couple dozen of the workers, yet few move. It is as if they are ancient stylites looking out over the rift that they can do nothing to heal. In fact, their very muteness and lack of motion make them even more impotent; as if guidons to some cause that simply is, but cannot affect, or musical notations sans sound. And this is reflected in the very real frustration portrayed by the reporter (and the actor who portrays him, Gregory Karr).

Another scene is a long tracking shot of boxcars where the Albanian refugees live. An accordion plays a folk song, and as the camera tracks it feels as if the hapless people are moving (and the deliberate iconography of the World War Two Nazi railroads to death camps lends a sense of hopelessness to their plight). Except, it is an illusion of motion, as the refugees are stuck in their plights, each boxcar with its own slack-jawed prisoners mutely gazing out at the cosmos. The riverside wedding scene, also done virtually wordlessly, is another example of Angelopoulos’s mastery of cinema, and is a key scene, for similar riverside scenes figure prominently in his earlier Landscape In The Mist and later Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow.

The scenes in these films are so similar that one almost feels they are prefigurations, or connecting devices between the films, as if the Angelopoulos canon is one extended, ongoing film, not separate works of art. The acting, done from a distance, and using the whole body, still conveys powerful emotions, and is lacking any musical score- only the sounds of nature (the wind, river, etc.) abound. I cannot recall any Hollywood film that would do such a thing- cast big name stars like Mastroianni and Moreau, and then not take ‘advantage’ (in the traditional sense) of their ‘star power.’ But it works, nonetheless, for this is a film that is so well wrought that, in essence, any actors could have stepped in and done a good job (recall my claim of being on autopilot; but in the best sense), for the lack of emoting via facial expressions, and the deliberate interchangeability of characters and actors is another element of the film that aids its universality.

But, above all, all of these techniques are simply variations on the obliquity of moment I mentioned earlier. A seemingly familiar scene is set, but then plays out slightly differently than expected. We visually are comforted, but the disjunction between the expected and the result lingers subconsciously, provoking a rewatch of the film, at most, and a desire to understand, minimally. A final example comes in a scene midway through the film, and one that is an astonishing long take. After some ethnic tensions in the town, between refugees, a man’s body is found hanged, dangling from the end of a crane. The colonel shows this to the reporter, and then orders the cadaver lowered to the tracks. As it slowly descends, we see women in babushkas wailing in the background. They run toward the figure, and we think that they are wailing for it. As the body comes to earth, the camera leaves the scene, and follows the reporter, as a train pulls in slightly farther down the tracks. He is there to greet the Greek politician’s wife, before she is to ‘confront’ the Albanian refugee. The camera follows him, turns 180° degrees, then before following him through one side of the train and out the other, we glimpse the pack of babushkas swarming on the corpse. It seems like they are predators on carrion, stripping it of possessions. What we thought was a scene of grief seems to have devolved into a scene of rapacity. But, this is all ‘minor,’ for the camera is more interested in the reporter and his quest. Still, that the camera never breaks away from the reporter, and all this plays out in the background, is a virtuoso achievement in technical, emotional, and narrative terms.

Even the film’s title, The Suspended Step Of The Stork, is oblique. Yes, there is the obvious reference to the way the colonel and reporter both hold their legs up over the border line, but it can also be referring to the suspended life of the Greek politician- a man whose life seemed a thing of beauty and hope for the Greeks, yet is frozen in the diegetic history of the film- or not?, if one believes that the refugee really was the politician. Fortunately, such a freeze does not affect the viewer, for The Suspended Step Of The Stork is a masterpiece of a film. True, many video game style Hollywood action and adventure film addicts will not ‘get it,’ but who really gives a damn what such folk think? They are the unobliqued in life, and this film shows how little such really matters, in the long run or short.

German and British theatre have a history of unresolved differences, which is regularly resurrected when a German play is produced in this country. The well-known generalising assumption at the basis of these differences is that the British like their playwrights better than they like their directors, whereas the Germans take the opposite view. This traditional appropriation of artistic priorities (changing though it might just be starting to be in the United Kingdom, at least for new plays) still results in a certain critical diffidence, which might at least partly explain why Dea Loher’s work is so seldom produced here (and when it is produced, it tends to happen at the Edinburgh Festival), whereas not only she is considered one of the most important contemporary authors in her own country, but her plays are also often part of the annual calendar of many companies and venues throughout the continent - including in a theatrically conservative country like Italy.

And yet recently the wall between Anglophone audience and experimental European-style theatre might have started to crack: Romeo Castellucci’s Dantean trilogy came to the Barbican last spring (albeit to a conflicting reaction from both critics and audience), the Royal Court staged Tim Crouch’s revolutionary The Author only a few months ago, and as a hopeful beginning of the London offer for 2010, the Arcola is offering us the first UK production of Loher’s 2003 play Innocence, in a translation by David Tushingham, and with the direction of Helena Kaut-Howson.

Innocence tells (at least) four different stories, which intertwine with various degrees of proximity. Firstly, there are two young illegal immigrants who watch a woman drowning and do not intervene for fear of being implicated and thrown out of the country;  then, there is an old woman who goes around pretending to be the mother of murderers and serial killers, to apologise for her ‘sons’‘ behaviour; thirdly, there is a young frustrated couple, the husband a recently appointed caretaker, the wife suffocating in serene sadness, sharing a small flat with her caustically diabetic mother who dreams of owning a petrol station so she could create a fantastic explosion with ‘just one cigarette’; and finally there is a woman philosopher (in this production perhaps unwittingly, but still decidedly remindful of Germaine Greer), who has become disenchanted with her old ideals and who has just written a book called The World Is Unreliable. In the course of the (long) evening, some of these characters meet, and some don’t. One of the two young illegal workers finds a bag full of money and falls in love with a blind pole-dancer called Absolute, all in the space of a few minutes while waiting for the bus, and these few minutes represent a pivotal union of several destinies, but a lot is also left to chance - a constant reminder of the arbitrariness of narrative conventions.

The world depicted by Loher is dark, unfriendly, and governed by randomness - occasionally even the characters look at each other as if they were not completely sure they should be sharing the same space. But it is also deeply funny, in a grotesque and disquieting way that rounds the corners of the harsh messages below the surface. Loher touches upon a cornucopia of eternal human questions and philosophical concepts, the wide range of which might be the weakest point of her play - from the most obvious two, sex and death, to motherhood and the female connection with water. There are many long monologues - in fact, at least one character talks with no one else but herself - proving that text-based work is not the exclusive to Anglophone theatre, and that experimental is not equal to silent.

Yet for all its recognisable characteristics, the play still defies naturalism, not out of a manifesto, but as a formal complement to its central idea: namely, that there is no such a thing as control or consequentiality, we cannot foresee or even, in fact, influence the future; cause and effect are artificial categories that can only be applied to events retrospectively, as Loher’s philosopher explains in her book. Strangely, Kaut-Howson has decided to soften this refusal of naturalism by ignoring Loher’s indication that the two black illegal immigrants should be played by white actors.

In the Arcola production, energetic performances from some, but not all, of the cast, keep the central, less effective parts of the play from folding upon themselves, with the three older women outshining all the others: Ann Mitchell is almost frightening in her cynicism, hilarious as Frau Zucker dying of diabetes and surrendering increasing portions of her left leg to it; Maggie Steed lends the philosopher a tremulous and booming voice that brings to mind Carmelo Bene’s transformations of characters; and Ellen Sheean, in an old-fashioned smocked dress and a formless green coat, lets us imagine a psychopathic veneer as a fake mother of killers, before revealing all her vulnerable solitude - and, then again, her detachment when she is finally offered a chance to be a mother to someone, because nothing is as you would expect it to be.

As a bunch of final scenes bring together strands of content which during the second part had seemed to be getting lost, Innocence ends on a high note - perhaps not successfully managing to get to any specific place, but making, mostly, for an interesting ride.

Till 30 January 2010

At a time of rising social tensions, when the far right are on the move and economic uncertainty reigns, the figure of the scapegoat becomes uniquely pertinent. So Scapegoat Society, curated by norn at Sunbury House, holds out promise of being the sort of politically engaged art which can help illuminate and reimagine our increasingly troubled times. It aims to explore the process through which scapegoats are produced and the inevitability of such figures in any society (it is, argue the curators, a ‘fundamental part of the human condition’). The exhibition itself is a multidisciplinary collection of work by nine international artists, arranged within one large room and one small side-room at the gallery.

As might be hoped for given the subject matter, some of the work on display is extremely powerful. ‘The Dissident’ by Jacek Niegoda is a short film of the escalators at a foreign subway station. This initially slow piece comes to life after a minute and a half when an odd figure begins an earnest yet futile upwards ascent of the downwards escalator. Within a couple of minutes dirty looks have transformed into boots and fists, as two youths confront him and block his path up the escalator. The slow motion of the escalator (or perhaps the grinding force of social norms?) along with a few well placed kicks leaves him struggling off at the bottom of the escalator where the youths continue their assault. The visual metaphor is a little crude and the message somewhat confused; after all walking the wrong way up the escalator is a intrinsically pointless endeavour whereas surely dissent is not? Even so the cinematography is admirable and the overall effect is a powerful one. It’s difficult to see this and not be moved by sympathy for the eponymous dissident or anger at the commuters who ignore the assault. The audience is also left uncertain as to whether this was a staged scene or art as social experiment (and if the latter then the ending of the film becomes all the more powerful). The ambiguity almost leaves one feeling complicit in the dissident’s fate.

The most striking work in the exhibition is undoubtedly Rod Dickinson’s recreation of the infamous Milgram experiments. These were originally conducted in 1961, starting as Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem entered its third month. The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram hoped to understand how so many Germans had come to participate in the holocaust. The experiment took the form of a ‘teacher’ and a ‘learner’ situated in separate rooms. The former would ask the latter to perform memory tasks through an intercom, punishing mistakes with electric shocks of ever increasing severity. Or so the teacher believed. In actuality there were no shocks and the experiment was intended to test the willingness of the teacher to continue to administer shocks, as guided by the white-coated psychologist, once s/he had reason to believe that the learner was at risk of injury. This effect was achieved through pre-recorded tapes of groans and screams, as well as references to a heart condition and the learner banging on the wall separating them from the teacher. If the teacher expressed a desire to stop the experiment this was met with a series of scripted responses from the psychologist, ranging from a polite ‘Please continue’ to bluntly telling the teacher that ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’. If they continued to protest after each of these four scripted responses then the experiment would end. Otherwise it would only end when the maximum 450 volt shock had been administered three times in succession, by which point it could have proved genuinely fatal if actually administered.

65% of the original participants reached this point and similar results emerged in later repetitions of the experiment throughout the world. Dickenson painstakingly reenacts the experiment on the basis of the transcripts from the original experiment and the resulting film is immensely moving. It produces a voyeuristic discomfort which grows throughout as we watch a succession of teachers struggling to confront the pain they believe themselves to be inflicting on the learners in the adjoining room. We see the furtive glances towards the white-coated psychologist become outright pleas to stop and, most disturbingly, we see the relief that reassurance from an authority is able to bring as the teachers acquiesce to the psychologist’s requests to continue.

In an odd way however this work detracts from the rest of Scapegoat Society. The slow-burning force with which it unnerves the viewer unfortunately serves to foreground the relative weakness of much of the other art on display. For instance Artur Zmijewski’s film ‘Two Monuments’ charts groups of unemployed Irish and Polish workers in Dublin collaborating to build two monuments. The artist attempts to highlight the tendency to ‘place blame on others’ rather than recognising ‘the malign forces of global capitalism on local labour markets’. Yet too insubstantial to be a standalone documentary and too ponderous to work as an installation, it is simply disappointing, as a potentially engaging concept amounts to little more than a tired articulation of overly-familiar multicultural motifs. This is true of some of the other work on display, for instance Rainer Ganahl’s ‘Homeland Security I-V’ and Silke Wagner’s ‘18.08.70’. The former involves the artist repeating phrases such as ‘I am not a terrorist’ into a camera in 11 different languages while the latter is an aesthetically attractive but politically rather vacuous homage to the civil rights activist Angela Davis.

While some of the work featured in Scapegoat Society may be disappointing, however, the overall intentions of the exhibition are admirable, and it collects an invigorating range of work within a small gallery space. Although the message is at times trite, it is also sensitising to the pervasiveness of the scapegoat and the processes through which such figures are produced. Anyone expecting a sophisticated social psychological thesis will inevitably be disappointed but on balance the exhibition is undoubtedly worthy of attention.

Till 21 February 2010

Remembrance and revolution

CW starts 2010 with two new Battle in Print essays. Ted Harrison reflects on the meaning of poppy day, and suggests changes are needed if the tradition is to serve its original purpose. And Ashley Frawley notes the ubiquity of the carnivalesque in contemporary political protest, and critically examines its true significance. Meanwhile, Sarah Boyes reviews Helen Rappaport’s new biography of Lenin, and suggests her more personal focus reflects a wider contemporary ambivalence about politics and history-making.

Happy new year!

7 January 2010

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile begins with the hanging of Lenin’s older brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov, at Shisselburg in 1887, for leading an amateur bomb plot against Tsar Alexander III. In his final days, Aleksandr, ‘one of the last of a generation of romantic idealists’ and advocates of Russian populism with its distinctive brand of flash-in-the-pan terrorism, asked only for a volume of his favourite poet Heinrich Heine. On the same day the remaining Ulyanov boy, known to his family as the boisterous Volodya, was finishing a maths exam.

The narrative follows through Volodya’s exemplary youth, financially supported by the hard work of his recently deceased father, a ‘humane and conscientious’ public servant involved in raising educational standards. He studies law at university. Here he discovers Karl Marx and develops a distracting enthusiasm for the ideas and real hero of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to be done?. A thoughtful and vivacious Vladamir gets involved in dissident discussion groups until sent on three-year exile to Shushenskoe, the ‘Siberian Italy’, much to the chagrin of his mother. Here he’s joined by teacher, activist and comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya, who becomes his lifelong helpmate and wife.

Fast forward to the stormy consolidation of revolutionary newspaper Iskra (‘the spark’) where a moody Plekhanov demands two votes on the editorial board. Realising the need to break from the old guard, ‘N. Lenin’, after all his years of study and work, can now outline his own position in What is to be Done? (1902). The pamphlet’s modest impact is noted by even the Tsarist secret police - the Okhrana - who snap at the heels of the couple throughout their seventeen year long exile.

Before long, a Dr and Mrs Richter are moving to the ‘stronghold of capitalism’, London, and settle in Holford Square where Nadya’s notoriously bad cooking is tutored by the kindly but bemused landlady Mrs Yeo. 37 Clerkenwell Green’s printing press is engaged, and frequented by the polite Ilyich between visits to the reading room of British Museum in Bloomsbury and weekend turns at Speakers’ Corner. The couple develop a taste for fish and chips, visit local working men’s clubs for discussion and debate. They’re bombarded by loud company eager for news and instruction in their tiny, under-heated kitchen, regularly woken by late night knocks at the door (once from a young Leon Trotsky). And so Rappaport’s narrative takes us on, criss-crossing Europe with a tapestry of tiny detail, until the armoured train at Moscow thirty years from where we began.

The politics of the personal

In the fashion of biographies focusing on the personal life of historical figures, this one gives a thorough airing to Lenin’s personal relationships: with his mother-in-law, wife and ‘mistress’ Inessa, whilst steering mostly clear of the content and influence of his work. Rappaport has previously written about the last days of the Romanovs, the Tsarist royal family with whom the Bolsheviks successfully did away, in the bestselling Ekaterinburg. She describes herself as ‘a woman, a feminist and a non-academic’ and her aim in biographising Lenin is to foster an alternative approach to an old subject. This is done by placing a firm spotlight on his formative years and giving his wife the role she’s due yet scarce afforded by male biographers (1). Both aspects serve the broader aim of countering official Soviet hagiography.

Following the general direction of Francis Wheen’s celebrated 1999 biography of Marx, promoted as the first major book on him since the end of the Cold War, this one similarly and quite sensibly doesn’t force itself in traditional communist or anti-communist camps. Instead, it simply aims to contextualise and reconnect with ‘the man’ lost behind decades of ideological obfuscation on either side. This ultimately involves just as much rejection of Western propaganda from that period as it distrusts Soviet hagiography, though the first is much less obvious. It simply suffices to place a question mark above excessive ‘male-centricism’ common to both, invoking an actually quite watered-down feminism to lend moral authority and motivation to exploring the founder of the USSR afresh.

And it’s absorbing. We learn that Lenin’s headmaster noted down his enjoyment of solitude as a youth, that he enjoyed bike rides and long walks with his wife, made friends with a Jewish shopkeeper in Geneva and bounced his son on his knee, could be moved to tears by classical music, was seen playing chess with the poet Apollinaire on the boulevards of Montparnasse. The effect is to convey Lenin’s wide experience and broad humanity, fuelled by a voracious appetite for new ideas and experiences. Compared with Marx, Engels and Trotsky, Lenin is often seen as the cold fish of Marxism’s founding fathers; here he comes into his own as a lively and compelling companion. This book is a firm nod to the practical man with his hidden wells of passion.

Much of his adult life was spent living under the harsh constraints of konspiratsiya, meaning roughly ‘secrecy’, and Rappaport mentions many fellow political activists led insular and uncertain lives, communicating only when necessary and with a variety of shifting aliases and abodes: the Lenins were poor, and very nearly made a virtue of it. The spells of severe headaches Lenin suffered and Nadya’s thyroid condition interfered with their work, and they rarely had money for medicine. Rappaport well documents the almost school-boyish nature of the Bolsheviks’ codes. The gentle reminder that revolutionary life was often physically brutal and mentally exhausting, filled with time-consuming tasks and still in the process of professionalisation is a helpful counter to the romantic view of a ready-made political dissent in the early twentieth century.

Lenin in disguise

What gradually emerges is a picture of a man who lived solely for his politics. Lenin even considered his body a ‘machine for revolution’ (revealing the enduring influence of Chernyshevsky), was hugely energetic, obsessively punctual, madly hard-working - a real dynamic force. His days were spent writing, reading, in meetings, dictating correspondence, going for a walk, snatching a short sleep. We follow back to London in 1907 for the exhausting Fifth Party Congress in an Islington church; onto Paris with its annoying ‘bourgeois profligacy’ in 1909, where Lenin pawns the watch of sympathetic music hall composer Montéhus, who is later rewarded with a gold watch from the Soviet government; to ‘This Damned Switzerland’ in 1914-16, where the couple’s one luxury is two bars of nut chocolate on a Thursday afternoon. The map at the beginning with its looped dotted line and the quirky picture inserts (including mug-shots and ‘in walking gear’) is a great geeky addition.

The trouble with politics

This is all thoroughly enjoyable and useful in contextualising Lenin as he wrote his various works, manoeuvring and making use of the rich experiences and minds of pre-revolutionary Europe. It provides a rich opening into what often seems a period of history with too contested a legacy to be covered in much depth in the general culture. But who, and what, is this book for? It’s difficult not to notice the ‘post-Ideology’ premise keys into a popular mood that is simply generally suspicious of anything with a whiff of Ideology (capital ‘I’). Instead, it favours finding new meanings in the personal and private (a sort of ideology with a small ‘i’), which shows just how discredited the political animal has become - and across both sides of the traditional political divide.

Indeed, this trend spans much broader than the history of the Soviet Union or even events obviously connected to the historical contestation between capitalism and its detractors. The BBC recently aired a documentary about a bolshie Thatcher on her rise to power, concentrating on the delicate balance she had to strike with her frankly devoted husband; a biography of a sane, solid Leonard Woolf aimed to redress the balance with his better-known though slightly mad and flighty other half. This is history at its most psychological and frequently pathological-seeming, it carefully explores the crossed lines of relationships to their inevitable breaking points, thrilling in its invasion of the intimate and scrupulously dramatic.

It’s as if everything outside the boundaries of the personal (usually equated with the domestic) gets, quite literally, cut off from view. The very idea of trying to affect and interact with society more broadly is understood and judged solely through its effects on those close personally, especially in this period on women, who had little formal equality, less actual equality and often bore the brunt of domestic burdens. This unusual focus is a wonderful dramatic device which shows off the writer’s mastery of form and pathos. But rather than serving to make a broader point about the basic practical and emotional support all people need from somebody or other, (and probably more often in the past with its lack of labour-saving devices), instead, this simply confuses judgements of personal character with the bald fact there’s always boring work to be done.

It also means missing the more subtle point that even though Lenin’s vanguard party offered women more real equality than anywhere else at this time, nevertheless most of its top theoreticians and leaders were men. It may well be true that deeper-rooted and more traditional ideas about the place and talents of women still held sway at this time in the minds, talents and habits of even these progressives. Maybe there’s a deeper point to be made, that saying there’s equality is one thing; having the education, opportunity, experience, recognised authority and perhaps someone like a wife to lean on privately for support is quite another. At very worse this whole approach sells short proper feminism by aligning it with an anti-intellectual rejection of politics with a capital ‘P’, which reflects the malaise of mainstream liberal politics far more any new or particularly female perspective. Indeed, it’s ultimately the failure of socialism that has led to a return, albeit in muted form, to an identity-based brand of gender politics in the first place, which either inflates or misunderstands these more subtle and residual ideals about social role and aims to garner its authority by gorging on them back through the past.

Indeed, what seems buried underneath the broad trend is a sense of disenfranchisement; as if having ideals, aspirations and role models is a childish bad habit the twentieth century should have educated us out of by now. In fact, the contemporary culture seems to militate against ideals altogether, since ideals are exclusive, decisive, discriminating - and bound to be proved false gods later down the line. So there’s strikingly little hint of the achievements of this astounding figure who saw further than any of his generation, whilst his ideas are laid carefully out of bounds. At the same time, an implicit ideal of moral austerity seems to colour the climate. In dislocating Lenin’s life from the content of his work, Rappaport presents him for today’s readers mainly through his flaws, in homage to the best tradition of the tragic heroes of historical theatre. This neatly serves to pull him down from his hagiographic heights and hang him firmly on the same peg as the rest of us.

The broad trend is a sense of disenfranchisement

In this vein the book also presents a more mature Lenin: a remote yet zealous, argumentative and obsessively planning man whose character contrasted with the stable loyalty of the three women who surround him - and to great dramatic effect. Lenin is the driven, ruthless tactician, whilst his wife is frequently described as ‘slovenly’, deferential in her manner and caring little for her appearance. He’s always writing home in the ongoing search for funds, urging Nadya to do the same. Rappaport notes that personally she disliked Lenin’s amorality and ruthlessness, a fact which comes through strongly at times in her writing.

In short, this man harbours a dangerous and arrogant assumption of being above - and in control of - events:

‘For all his undoubted polemical and political gifts Lenin never seemed to appreciate the one essential: that history never runs to any preordained schedules; time and again he would find himself having to improvise and amend his tactics to fit the changing political situation.’ (p121)

It is difficult to see how Lenin’s supposed to get out of this one: if he predicts the turn of events accurately then he’s wrong for believing they’re pre-ordained; if he improvises to accommodate events as they unfold then he’s wrong for compromising his dogmatism by improvising.

It’s ironic that stepping back from understanding his ideas is deemed necessary for understanding the man - which just goes to show how difficult it is to make sense of Lenin without exploring Leninism. It also shows the futility of banging on about Leninism in a climate deeply ambivalent, confused, maybe even a little shy and certainly still working out, its meaning in the present. Of course Lenin was ruthless and in the narrow sense of it amoral: the question is whether you think it was worth it. Trotsky would later claim in Their Morals and Ours, that any action was justified in pursuit of the struggle for socialism. Its historical failure and the rapid ascent of Stalinism in the Soviet Union made this harder for many to swallow; the seemingly impossible future for any alternative to capitalist society casts much murkier light on the matter still.

The trouble with Lenin?

So understandably, the main criticism of Lenin isn’t explicitly about his politics, but more on his ‘moral’ failings: that he had cowardly tendencies and no problems hiding behind others. This is conveyed most strongly in the chapters on Inessa Armand, Lenin and Nadya.

Through her political commitment, companionship and much more besides, Nadya ‘had devoted her life to Lenin and he valued her selflessness’ (p222). But when he met the passionate, cultured and uninhibited Inessa Armand, a new and energetic party activist who was ‘elegant and feminine in an instinctively French way’ (p194), Rappaport says that she presented him for the first time with emotional and sexual challenges. She was given a key role co-organising an important Party conference. He was ‘enchanted’. The three developed an uncomfortable ‘ménage a trois’ and went walking together. Nadya was by all accounts unhappy and offered to leave Lenin in either 1911 or 1913 so he could be with her (p199). She was refused.

An un-posted letter written by Inessa to Lenin in January 1914 is supposed to hint at the extent of their relationship in Paris:  ‘I could get by without your kisses if only just to see you’ (p223). Experts examining a wodge of Lenin’s old physicians reports are as yet undecided whether he actually died from syphilis, which Rappaport suggests other evidence from the time suggests (2). This bid to prove his unfaithfulness is not quite so innocently in pursuit of the pure facts of the matter as it might make out; on the other hand, it’s no doubt wise to take official hagiography with a pinch of salt.

Nevertheless, this theme of unfulfilled love returns as Inessa attempts to develop her own work on the family, marriage and free love and sends her work to be checked by Lenin in 1915:

‘Sexuality was not a Marxist subject and he responded in the only way he could - with dry and dispassionate theory…she was politically incorrect in her interpretation of “free love”; it was a bourgeois concept not a proletarian one.’ (p243)

While this advice makes sense from a political perspective, the juxtaposition of dry intellect and passionate emotion, iron-willed restraint and its equally wilful absence, produces a strong dramatic tension in the text that reveals Inessa in a balmy sensitive haze. At heart, this is a variation on the old story of worldly duties that come between lovers, the tender tug between social pressures and private desires. Only here, instead of resolving tensions through making a suicide pact to ensure mutual destruction (such as in Romeo and Juliet), what we get is social revolution. It’s interesting that it’s one of the most compelling ‘human’ stories, and one of the most dramatic, that comes to the fore when looking at Lenin’s life outside of his role in the making of 1917.

And interestingly, these chapters have strong resonances with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich, which follows Lenin as he prepares in Geneva for what becomes the Russian Revolution of 1917. Written by an exile of the Soviet regime who was born in 1918, fought in the Second World War, was sent to labour camps (fictionalised in Day in the life of Ivan Denosivich) and later moved to the US, the short book starts off inside the head of Lenin as he makes his plans. It tracks the unhappiness of his wife, which she can’t hide from her mother, hints heavily at an affair - if not childish dependence - when it comes to Inessa, and describes a strange incident of a transformative experience of a very self-aware woman on a horse. Lenin is portrayed as putting off making a firm decision, constantly hanging back, afraid to commit himself.  Whatever the political views of Solzhenitsyn, there’s little hint of the revolution betrayed in this text, though its niftiness as a story and humanity are memorable.

Conspirator has its own humanity, but what hangs in the air after it’s gone is a tone of motherly admonishment. In both books, it’s ultimately the less-touched-by-hagiography women who offer a different way into the early history of the Communist world and hence understanding what happened there; their characters like slim ciphers to be decoded and still decided by whoever has the time and inclination. Whilst it’s easy to be sympathetic to the desire to give these women their due (Nadya was in fact recognised for her contribution to Soviet educational policy), the difficult pill to swallow is that this means recognising their contribution to, or even slighting by, Lenin on an explicitly personal level - even when both were committed and highly-disciplined revolutionaries. 

Despite the difficultly always clearly demarcating the personal, especially in a time where there was scarce time for the latter,  this book at least proves that men make history, only not in circumstances of their own choosing.

1) Interview on Me and My Big Mouth
2) A retrospective diagnosis says Lenin had syphilis, New York Times, 22 June 2004

Many commentators have remarked, almost in passing, on the carnivalesque nature of protests in recent years. In fact, during the writing of this piece, it was difficult not to notice the peppering of coverage surrounding actions planned around the Copenhagen climate summit with phrases like, ‘behind the blue face-paint and carnival atmosphere…’ (BBC News, 2009), and ‘the city centre will become a carnival of parades…’ (Independent, 2009). Yet few have considered the particular commonalities shared between carnival and contemporary protests in greater detail or considered the implications that such ritualised displays of dissent may have in terms of representing a dynamic process for social change.

Carnival as ‘Revolution’

In many cases this comparison is not unwarranted, as many groups actively seek to recreate the carnivalesque in their protest actions. For example, one author writes that contemporary forms of ‘direct action’ ‘do-it-yourself’ protest are ‘finally breaking down the barriers between art and protest’ and that, ‘new forms of creative and poetic resistance have finally found their time’ (Jordan, 1998: 129). A broad range of groups, from the ‘Biotic Baking Brigade’ (which uses public ‘pieing’ as their weapon of choice) to Reclaim the Streets, attempt to emulate what they see as the subversive nature of the carnival:

‘From the Middle Ages onward, the carnival has offered glimpses of the world turned upside down… [It] celebrates the temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order; it marks the suspension of hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions’ (BBB, 2004:39; RTS, 2002).

Such groups have described their use of carnival as:

‘an attempt to make Carnival the revolutionary moment. Placing “what could be” in the path of “what is” and celebrating the “here and now” in the road of the rush for “there and later”... It is an expansive desire; for freedom, for creativity; to truly live. This desire, for the present social order, is revolutionary’ (‘Reclaim the Streets!’,1997).

For many practitioners, including those who participated in 1999’s ‘Carnival Against Capital’, carnival’s appeal lies in its being ‘halfway between party and protest’ bringing together the ‘volatile mixture of carnival and revolution, creativity and conflict, using rhythm and music to reclaim space, transform the streets, and inject pleasure into politics’ (Notes from Nowhere, 2003: 174). It is a ‘ludic protest’ offering flexibility, the expression of a diversity of identities, encouraging ‘people to enjoy and imagine other possible worlds’ and ‘solicit contributions to a counterculture fantasia, or a human community garden’ (Bogad, 2006:55).

Even those outside of activist movements have celebrated the growing propensity for demonstrations, regardless of their outcome, to represent expressions of ‘collective joy’ in modern societies which apparently share fewer public rituals (Ehrenreich, 2007: 260). Moreover, unlike many of the sources cited above, not all actions resembling carnival do so with such consciousness of purpose. So common have carnivalesque themes in protest become that it is difficult to imagine an action which does not demonstrate some aspect thereof, from masking, dance, music and street theatre at April’s G20 protests to a lone attendee at an oil refinery strike clad in a grim reaper costume (and to whom a fellow striker had yelled, ‘the placard would have been enough!’ [Black, 2009]).

Indeed, protests may play a similar role in modern social structures as former public rituals like the carnival of feudal times, but whether one is consciously mobilising what one theorist calls ‘tactical carnival’ (Bogad, 2006) or, like the lone grim reaper, merely going through the motions because ‘that’s what one does’, the effect is nonetheless more likely to be the complete opposite of what most practitioners probably have in mind.  As will hopefully become clear momentarily, far from being ‘revolution itself’ as the introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin’s oft-cited volume celebrating the subversive nature of the carnivalesque would have it, it is about as ‘revolutionary’ as a new hair product, and equally anti-capitalist. That is, not only do the vast majority of such demonstrations by and large fail to threaten the existing order, but they are actually both part of and reflective of that order, and further, act as a reaffirmation of existing hierarchies and social structures.

Carnivals Against Capitalism

It should be noted that although this critique might be extended to a broad range of protest, I recognise that not every action has lofty aims of bringing down the existing social order. However, with activists brandishing placards and banners reading, ‘System Change, Not Climate Change’ and ‘Abolish Capitalism Now!’, one wonders how the actual realisation of such goals might be accomplished with anything less than a ‘revolution’ of a very different sort than those involving hairspray and collective displays of public frustration.

In addition, more and more there is a propensity for the ends to be subordinated to a primary concern with the means—to planning actions, responding to a perpetual state of crisis and raising awareness and converts. What precisely a movement hopes to achieve in the long run and how best such a goal might be attained seems a peripheral (and sometimes altogether absent) consideration. As one commentator has pointed out:

‘It seems we have very little idea of what it might actually require to bring down capitalism. As if all it needed was some sort of critical mass of activists occupying offices to be reached and then we’d have a revolution…’  (‘Give up Activism’, 2001)

If those carrying banners proclaiming that, ‘Capitalism isn’t working—another world is possible’ truly believe their own words, the first step is to realise that, personally liberating though it may be, it may actually be little more than a subtle reaffirmation of capitalism in the guide of protest.

Anthropology of Ritual and Protest

Any anthropologist would be keenly aware of Victor Turner’s 1969 thesis concerning the role played by what he termed the ‘liminal’ in social rituals, and the propensity for ritualised public expressions of dissent to reaffirm and sustain the existing social order. In particular, his description of what he calls, ‘rituals of status reversal’ bears a striking resemblance to protest actions and demonstrations of the present day. For Turner, these rituals are characterised by their ‘liminality’: lying at the threshold ‘betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969: 95).

In them, hierarchies are temporarily inverted and normal codes of behaviour suspended. ‘The stronger are made weaker; the weak act as though they were strong’, often engaging in mimicry, masking and public castigation of structural superiors (ibid.: 168). Although such events may be calendrical or cyclical in nature, they can also erupt during times when those superiors are perceived to have so disrupted the ‘balance between society and nature that disturbances in the former have provoked imbalances in the latter’ (ibid.: 184). If this description reveals a number of striking parallels, then it is likely that the two also share many of the same functions. According to this conception, whether calendrical or arising at moments when ‘the whole community is threatened’ due to ‘historical irregularities’ altering the ‘natural balance between what are conceived to be permanent structural categories’, carnivalesque demonstrations of dissent perform the function of ‘bringing social structure and communitas into right mutual relation once again’ (ibid.:178). That is, for all the attempts to rehabilitate the notion of carnival as a subversive practice intrinsically valuable in its representation of resistance and ‘modelling of a different, pleasurable and communal ideal’, its essential problematic remains. Namely, ‘its failure to do away with the official dominant culture, its licensed complicity’ (Stallybrass and White 1986:19).

This would not be so problematic however, if it were not for the fact that demonstrations seem less and less to act as a symbolic tool in a larger repertoire of resistance than a go-to method for a vast array of causes. At the risk of being far too pessimistic, it is important to delineate clearly the limits of this type of activism and to point out that ‘doing’ cannot be a substitute for ‘thinking’. Serious change cannot be effected without action, but ‘aimless hyper-activism’—doing because ‘something must be done’—can actually channel energies away from any seriously progressive project aimed at large-scale social change. Moreover, while many actions have an immediately recognisable carnival-like atmosphere (ie, mask, music, dance, etc.), even those that appear more serious may nonetheless possess many of these aforementioned qualities. In order to draw out some of these parallels, it is necessary to look in more detail at three aspects of carnival that are becoming more and more commonplace in protest today—liminality, the suspension of norms and codes of behaviour and the ritual inversion of hierarchies—and to consider their role in sustaining the existing social order.

1. Liminality

The liminal is defined as the ‘in between’ state set temporarily apart from the normal pace of everyday life. It is an event in the life cycle of a society whose transience arises from the fact that its social purpose is not to actually overthrow existing hierarchies but to therapeutically engage in role play, to act out revolutionary emotions as a form of catharsis, providing a ‘discharge of all the ill-feeling that has accumulated’ (Turner, 1969: 179).

So unreflectively is the term ‘temporary’ used by many protest movements when describing their aims to ‘open up spaces’, or to, in the words of a banner unravelled at a Camden street party/demonstration in 1995, ‘RECLAIM THE STREETS—FREE THE CITY’, that it would be easy to believe that such actions are really, ‘challenging official culture’s claims to authority, stability, sobriety, immutability and immortality by cheekily taking over a main traffic artery’ (Jordan, 1998: 141). However, it is precisely its temporary nature that leads to the exact opposite end.

Interestingly, while Bakhtin was writing his now famous Rabelais book to which so many practitioners trace the roots of their ‘revolutionary’ acts of subversion through carnival, another early Soviet thinker Anatoly Lunacharsky warned that ‘carnival is a safety valve for passions that otherwise might erupt in revolution’, an occasion which allows the lower orders to ‘let off steam in a harmless, temporary event’ (Docker, 1994:171). Indeed, when the liminal phase comes to an end, it is often the case that frustratingly little ground has been gained. When the ‘ludic’ protest disbands, spaces that had been freed up for temporary countercultural demonstrations of resistance are harmoniously handed back to the hustle and bustle of everyday life and commerce.

2. Norms and laws are suspended, public spaces are given over to the common people

During carnival, ordered spaces are given over to disorder and mockery and traditional norms and expectations of behaviour are lifted. The streets are taken over by the festivities and in some places city halls are given to courts of ‘fools’. Women might cut men’s ties or kiss any man that comes their way, and everywhere the rules of modesty and order, both written and unwritten are temporarily suspended. Hierarchical societies dissolve into ‘communitas’ (a transient community of equals formed from an otherwise stratified social structure) and those structurally subordinate are given license, during that liminal sphere of time, to break the rules in an act of ritualised transgression.

Similarly, in many protest activities, the streets are given over to the festivities, to the marchers and demonstrators. Those who would not normally associate often intermix and intermingle in a playing out of communitas and, as in the sanctioned carnival, the ordinary social norms and order are temporarily suspended. Often, participants attempt to make their rule breaking more visible, through risqué dress, costuming, impromptu dance, performance and other art. However, contrary to what many proponents assert, this mobilisation of carnivalesque forms does not, as one author writes, ‘break the rules in order to make them more visible’ and in so doing, ‘open up paradoxical space’ and the ‘opportunity for critique’ (Rhodes, 2002:135), but rather it implicitly strengthens the very rules it hopes to transcend.

It is when rules are broken that their necessity becomes all the more vivid. In our daily lives we usually fail to appreciate the importance of structured narrative in communication until someone breaks the unwritten codes that render that communication coherent. In the same way, when the abandoned placards have been swept up and the first cars and pedestrians are released from the bottleneck to take back the formerly ‘liberated’ streets and town squares, the city seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief as the normal routine resumes unscathed.

The stark contrast between order and disorder serves as a reminder of why the streets aren’t ‘our streets!’ (as protestors at the G-20 shouted while clashing with police) to do with what we like (or, to an outsider, alienated from the display, what ‘they’ like). Moreover, as Zizek (2003) illustrates using The Matrix as a metaphor, like the countercultural heroes of the film, one might think that liberation is being practised through the act of breaking natural laws, but the paradox is that these ‘miracles’ are possible only if we remain within the virtual reality sustained by the Matrix and merely bend or change its rules; our ‘real’ status is still that of slaves’. The question becomes then, whether to perform a ‘postmodern strategy of “resistance”, of endlessly “subverting” or “displacing” the power system, or a more radical attempt at annihilating it’ (Zizek, 2003). However, unlike the film, the breaking of rules and the temporary liberation of space are often described as being ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ in and of themselves, and the larger questions are so subordinated to practice that even asking them has become taboo.

Ritual inversion of hierarchical roles and the castigation of superiors

As previously mentioned, in the liminal space of the traditional carnival, the usual hierarchical roles are reversed. In the Rhineland a woman dressed in black storms the city hall and is given the key to the city by the mayor; elsewhere, a mock king and queen are paraded through the streets or a cast of fools might parody an assembly of their governors. Similarly, in protest activities, these themes may be accomplished in a number of ways, from theatrical performances to costumes, masking and mimicry. A protest in July against the UK’s complicity with Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip, which made its way through Hyde Park, saw some protesters donning anti-semitic dress and acting out ethnic stereotypes, while others, dressed as skeletons and holding plastic severed limbs, engaged in a symbolic dance in front of a blood soaked Israeli flag. At the G20 march protesters dressed as bankers, businessmen and top hatted capitalists. Elsewhere, a group of mock ‘pro-capitalists’ march in suits or gowns and pearls, spraying champagne while holding a giant banner that shouts, ‘Capitalism Rocks!’ accompanied by signs reading, ‘Money is My Life’ and ‘Privatize More Stuff!’

In a description of the aforementioned Gaza Strip protest, one commentator captioned a photo of a portrayal of a particularly taboo anti-semitic sight with the remark that, ‘Protesters were unfazed by this scene’ (Rothschild, 2009). As we have already seen, typical social norms are lifted in the transitory liminal sphere of the protest/carnival. A symbolic realm is created where people are given licence to castigate their superiors, to break taboos, act out revolution and ultimately to discharge the accumulated tensions in a display where all can get their just deserts.

An ethnographer writing in the 1960s describes the Hindu festival of Holi as one in which a highly structured society dissolves into a communitas, and the low are given license to candidly confront and castigate their superiors for their accumulated sins. ‘In front of whose house was a burlesque dirge being sung by a professional ascetic of the village?’ the anthropologist describes, ‘It was the house of a very much alive moneylender, notorious for his punctual collections and his insufficient charities’ (Marriott in Turner, 1969:187). In 1920s Ghana, eight days were given over to a time when ‘the perfect lampooning of liberty was allowed’, scandal placed on a pedestal, and villagers allowed to freely shout the faults of superiors and inferiors alike without the threat of punishment (Bosman in Turner, 1969:178). Paradoxically however, this ‘purifying power of mutual honesty’ has the effect of ‘regenerating the principles of classification and ordering on which social structure rests’, since through levelling, the liminal phase reminds and implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed (Turner, 1969:180). As Turner writes,

...nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox. Emotionally, nothing satisfies as much as extravagent or temporarily permitted elicit behavior. Rituals of status reversal accommodate both aspects. By making the low high and the high low, they reaffirm the hierarchical principle. By making the low mimic (often to the point of caricature) the behavior of the high, and by restraining the initiative of the proud, they underline the reasonableness of everyday culturally predictable behavior between the various estates of society (1969:176).

Furthermore, the use of symbolic objects, masking and other forms of symbolic dress serves as a visual representation of the hierarchical role reversal where the low are temporarily empowered in a ‘world turned upside down’ (but even, it should be noted, this temporary empowerment is illusory since it is ‘licensed or sanctioned by the authorities themselves’ [Sales, 1983:169]). Second, it takes the power out of those objects by identifying with them, since ‘[t]o draw off power from a strong being is to weaken that being’ in our perceptions of it (Turner, 1969:174). This counts not only for our mimicry of our superiors who have become a threat to us, but also for the identification with similarly threatening but unseen objects. So for example, protestors paint their faces blue and mimic a giant blue wave marching through the streets. In turning the threat into a carnival, fears that may act as a driver are dissipated and aggressors are made into harmless caricatures.

Unable to understand our problems and fearful of their consequences, we

‘mobilize affect-loaded symbols of great power. Rituals of status reversal, according to this principle, mask the weak in strength and demand that the strong be passive and patiently endure the symbolic and even real aggression shown against them by structural inferiors’ (ibid.:176).

Through the submission of superiors to levelling mechanisms (think of the police lined up along a parade route, the space given over for the protest) it submits superiors to levelling mechanisms, sustaining the illusion that ‘we’ are the ones who hold the power and ‘they’ are truly accountable to us.

Unequal societies inevitably create tensions, and thus the greater the drift of the very high from the very low, the greater the potential for accumulated tensions to erupt. Thus, the growth in such carnivalesque outbursts are less a measure of the strength of a resistance movement than a measure of the degree of deviation from the foundational ideal of ‘communitas’—the illusion that underneath a hierarchical society everyone is nonetheless equal—and the reality of the hierarchy itself.

Demonstrations are a popular form of protest precisely because they are not revolutionary, because they do not threaten the social order but nonetheless allow for the discharge of tensions, which is allowed and sanctioned because such channelling of grievances make them ‘easier to police in the long term’ (Sales, 1983:169).Thus, in role playing our powerfulness, the roles of ‘citizens’ and ‘representatives’ are reaffirmed through role reversal so that the representatives are subject to the will of the people instead of the other way around. Just as in the examples of non-Western rituals and festivals, structure is ‘cleansed’ of the ‘accumulated sins’ and reborn the day after the festival.

The Discharge of Discontent

These three aspects could be extended to include other elements like the reaffirmation of tradition—wherein demonstrators play out non-violent rituals of protest not because it is the best way to achieve an aim but because it reaffirms the founding myths of Western (capitalist) societies as achieving revolution by peaceful means. However, these three form the core of a striking parallel between carnival and protest demonstrations as functional elements of unequal social structures. Demonstrations form a valuable part of any resistance movement since, as previously mentioned, nothing can be achieved without action. The problem arises when action becomes a substitute for deliberation. In order to solve a problem, the majority of one’s energies should be devoted to understanding it. Should an anti-capitalist movement or a movement to stop a war use the same tactics as one which hopes to raise awareness of breast cancer?

This perfunctory use of public displays reveals both a disorientation with regard to social issues and a paucity of thinking about the future. Many of the valuable elements revealed in contemporary protest movements—the creativity of direct action tactics, the sheer mass of people who care enough to leave their houses, the value and necessity inherent in opposition itself—are ultimately diffused and dispersed through aimless activity that can name no common enemy and thus claim no common goals except to share in collective discontent. Indeed, as the protests surrounding the Copenhagen climate summit attest, participants came from a varied milieu, from climate activists to indigenous peoples, denouncing markets, consumerism, animal cruelty, the power wielded by the global north, and so on (Kanter, The New York Times:2009). Discontent is a valuable driver toward social change, but if people truly want the goals emblazoned on their placards, it is not enough to overturn a social system. Displays of anger and resistance are not ‘revolution itself’; unless channelled toward a rational consideration of the problems that face us, they risk being dispersed in a display that actually upholds the system it is supposed to challenge.

References

BBB (Biotic Baking Brigade) (2004). Pie any means necessary: the Biotic Baking Brigade cookbook. Edinburgh: AK Press.
BBC (2009). ‘Climate change protests ahead of Copenhagen summit’
Black, Tim (2009). ‘This is only the beginning’. spiked, June 24.
Bogad, L. M. (2006). ‘Tactical Carnival: social movements, demonstrations, and dialogical performance’ in A Boal Companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politcs. Eds. Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman. New York: Routledge.
Docker, John (1994). Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history‎. Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2007). Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. London: Granta Books.
‘Give up Activism’ (2001). Do or Die. Issue 9, p. 160-166.
Independent (2009). ‘Copenhagen: the ‘people’s summit’; Countdown to Copenhagen 7 Days to go; It’s not just world leaders who will be gathering in Denmark next week. Environmental activists will be there too’, November 30.
Jordan, John (1998) ‘The art of necessity: the subversive imagination of anti-road protest and Reclaim the Streets’ in DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain. Ed. George McKay. London: Verso.
Kanter, James (2009). ‘Outside Climate Talks, Protesters March on the Hall’. New York Times, December 16.
Notes from Nowhere (2003). We Are Everywhere: The irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London: Verso.
‘Reclaim the Streets!’ (1997). Do or Die. Issue 6, p. 1-10.
Rhodes, Carl (2002). ‘Politics and popular culture: Organizational carnival in the Springfield nuclear power plant’. Management and Organizational Paradoxes. Ed. Stewart R. Clegg. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Rothschild, Nathalie (2009). Creating their own private Gazas. spiked, December 18.
RTS (Reclaim the Streets) (2002). Reclaim the Streets! Carnival! Carnivaaaall….
Sales, R. (1983). English Literature in History 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics. London: Hutchinson.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Victor (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.
Zizek, Slavoj (2003). Ideology Reloaded. In These Times, June 6.

November is a sombre month with long dark evenings that not even the early Christmas lights quite succeed in cheering. No wonder our ancestors associated the time of year with death and dying. For the families of those who have died serving in the armed forces it is a time of sad memories. The sale of poppies and the national rituals of remembrance become a poignant reminder of their own loss and grief.

It is not just aging widows with distant memories of the 1940s who feel this way. Every time a casualty of a current conflict is announced on the news with the line that ‘members of the family have been informed’, a new widow is created, another mother loses a son and more children become fatherless. Or, it might be a young woman – a daughter, wife and mother – whose body is flown home for burial.

Forty years ago, as the veterans of the two world wars dwindled in numbers, many thought that poppy day and the observance of the two-minutes’ silence would quietly fade away. It was a time when it was very rare for a member of the British forces to die in action and honouring the dead of war meant less and less to the peacetime young. But then came the Falklands War and the Gulf Wars and today British troops are engaged in Afghanistan. So veterans wearing berets and medals continue to be a familiar sight as they stand outside supermarkets and in town centres with their collecting tins and trays of poppies. And the sale of poppies, although supported by a national advertising campaign, remains essentially a local effort involving thousands of volunteers and is the British Legion’s core money-raising activity.

The British Legion was set up after the First World War to help the thousands of soldiers, many suffering from horrendous disabilities, who had returned from war to find themselves betrayed by the political classes. They did not find the land fit for heroes that they had supposedly fought for, but one of deprivation and unemployment.

Within 20 years an even greater betrayal became evident. Far from being the war to end all wars, the politicians had so badly handled the peace that a second military conflagration engulfed Europe and spread to the rest of the world.  By 1945 a new cohort of war victims required British Legion help. The income from the sale of poppies enabled the British Legion to carry out this important work.

Sixty years on and the role of the British Legion has changed. While it continues in its charitable role, it has also become the custodian of national remembrance. It organises the poppy appeal; plays a central role at the cenotaph ceremony; members are involved at every local war memorial; and the Legion arranges the annual Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall.

The British Legion, now with the prefix Royal, is a thoroughly establishment body which endorses the view that soldiers are heroes and those who die have sacrificed themselves so that we who are left may enjoy freedom and live in peace. When a small boy presented a poppy at the festivities in the Albert Hall this year he did so, reciting the words he was given to say, ‘to say thank you from children to those who gave their lives so that we can live and be free’.

But this view is a dangerous half-truth. It is part fiction and part propaganda designed to reassure those bereaved, traumatised or wounded in warfare that their ‘sacrifice’ had a noble purpose. While some soldiers have indeed died courageously in battle defending the innocent or protecting colleagues, huge numbers have not. They died because of incompetence, inadequate preparation, disease, and sometimes in pursuit of futile objectives. Many fought because as conscripts they had no choice; or, they joined up through peer pressure; they signed on through immature bravado; or because they had no other chance of work.

Few wars present a clear-cut moral choice. The second Gulf war divided the nation. Wars are fought to defend the economic interests of the powerful and to enable politicians to save face, or bolster their popularity, as much as to defend freedom or maintain the peace. Even well intentioned wars designed as peace-keeping operations can have unintended consequences and lead to greater loss of life than ever intended. It ought to be recalled too that some Britain’s enemies of the last 100 years have believed that they were fighting for freedom and that Britain and its allies were the aggressors.

In recent times one of the best-known soldiers from the First World War has been Private 29295 Harry Patch, whose longevity earned him a special place in national affections. He had been an ordinary Tommy and not a great hero. He had not volunteered to fight in a youthful blaze of jingoistic bravado, but had been conscripted and wore his uniform dutifully, but reluctantly. Interestingly, he considered Remembrance Day ‘just showbusiness’, and war, ‘organised murder, and nothing else’.

His memories of war had little to do with marching bands in the Royal Albert Hall and politicians stealing photo-opportunities outside Westminster Abbey, but were stark and vivid. He lost three close friends in the slaughter of one night. ‘Those chaps are always with me. I can see that damned explosion now’.

The realities of conflict, whether the pointless trench warfare of the First World War, or the ‘collateral damage’ to civilians of aerial bombing, or the bloody and terrifying consequences of a suicide bomb, or the deaths by ‘friendly fire’, bear no resemblance to the sentimental, sanitised and sugar-pilled jingoism of the Albert Hall’s annual Festival of Remembrance.

Harry Patch didn’t live to see Faryl Smith, finalist in Britain’s Got Talent appearing at the Albert Hall in 2009; neither did he see ‘B’ list celebrity Hayley Westenra on the same bill singing, ‘Every day’s a gift from heaven, welcome as a long lost friend’; but he might have watched Katherine Jenkins two years earlier standing in a pool of ethereal blue light with full schmaltzy orchestra giving voice to these words:

‘In fields of sacrifice
Heroes paid the price
Young men who died for old men’s wars
Gone to paradise.’

At one point during the traditional Festival of Remembrance, thousands of poppies flutter down from the roof of the Albert Hall. It is a moment of riveting theatricality as young men and women in their spick and span uniforms stand to attention and let the silent flowers settle on their shoulders and on their heads. Yet, we need to be reminded how the poppy came to be adopted as such a powerful symbol.

It started with a Canadian doctor, John McCrae, back in 1915 looking at the freshly-filled graves of the scores of young men slaughtered in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war and writing the poem ‘In Flanders’ Field’.

‘In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scare heard amid the guns below.’

And the poem concludes with the lines:

‘If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders’ Fields.’

After the war an American, Moina Michael, moved and inspired by the imagery of the poem, began to sell poppies to raise money for the war wounded.

In Britain and several other countries, the poppy icon now dominates all aspects of remembrance. It is not just in the Albert Hall that the poppy is the central symbol. At the cenotaph on the Sunday before 11 November, the Queen and the politicians lay wreaths of poppies. A temporary garden of crosses and poppies is set out at Westminster Abbey. Directives go out to newsreaders and others appearing on television that they should sport a poppy in the lapel. So, by doing all this are we keeping faith with those who died in Flanders’ Field 95 years ago?

What would the message of the victims of the trench warfare be to us today? Do the ghosts sleep of those young men lying in the newly dug graves seen by Dr McCrae? Or do they want to speak out, and if so, what do they wish to say? Do they wish to echo the words of Harry Patch and call war ‘organised murder’? ‘Too many died,’ he once told the BBC,  ‘War isn’t worth one life.’ For the sake of future generations and of peace we must be certain that the blood-red poppy as worn and displayed today serves not to glorify the war dead but to warn against the evils of war.

Sadly an element of glorification is contained in the message being given out by the traditional remembrance-tide ceremonies. The pomp and ceremony, and the showbiz element, can be seen to endorse militarism, giving it a place of honour in our society and suggesting, if only implicitly, that the use of arm force is a respectable and moral option for governments.

However, if the poppy was originally intended to act as a warning against the evils of war, then poppy day is a failure. Young men are still being sent to their deaths by the politicians, who today in Britain do not even give them adequate equipment to fight their wars. The public at large, the mass of people who do not lay down their lives abroad, still support violence as a means to settle scores and secure the nation’s economic interests. As at the time of the Falklands conflict, jingoism lies only just below the surface of the national character.

How might the traditions of remembrance tide be changed to minimise the dangers of glorifying war, while at the same time enabling those who grieve to find comfort and purpose in their sorrow? To abolish poppy day and the other rituals of the year would be a hurtful and ungrateful gesture. Changes however are long overdue. Maybe the following suggestions could be considered:

- The tradition of the party political leaders laying wreathes at the cenotaph should be discontinued. A clear distinction should be made between those whose failures result in wars and those whose duty it is to risk being killed in conflict

- Serving members of the armed forces should not wear ceremonial uniforms, but appear as they have to when performing their duties. Bearskins and scarlet tunics might have a role in attracting tourists, but it is specialist protective combat kit that is worn in Helmand province. This symbolic change would remind onlookers that the bearing of arms may be a necessary profession, but it should not be glamorised. Similarly members of the royal family should be advised not to appear in uniform unless currently serving in the forces.

- There should be no formal marching and wearing of military insignia by the former service men and women who take part. They should be invited to walk solemnly past the cenotaph, not in military formation with their comrades abreast, but in the company of the civilians bereaved by war, widows and families. They might even be encouraged to invite veterans from former enemy countries to accompany them.

- Music played should not be rousing or militaristic, but quiet and sorrowful.

- Two new forms of observance could be introduced. Bell ringers at churches around the country could be asked to ring a half-muffled peal for at least an hour on 11 November. This is a traditional mark of respect for the dead and would be rung in memory of the civilian dead of all wars.

- Secondly, every year a list of perhaps 1000 of those who have died in wars since 1914, should be drawn up. The personal details of each person on the list would be made available on a website and include a photograph together with a brief peacetime and wartime history. The place of their burial would be recorded and the circumstances of death. The list would represent a wide range of men, women and children; soldiers and civilians; heroes of battle, victims of the blitz; British, Americans, Russians, Argentinians, Germans. Furthermore, every poppy sold would have one of the 1000 names printed on the back. And those who buy and wear a poppy would be encouraged to go to the website and learn more about the individual with whom they have been linked.

This would encourage more people to see warfare in terms of individual cost and not in misleading broad-brush generalisations. Indeed, the purpose of the changes taken together would be to refocus remembrance tide, which has become too stuck in an unhelpful rut. It would not dishonour anyone who has died in the service of their country, but would be a timely reminder of the true cost of war and a check against the glorifying, sanitising or sentimentalising of war. It would be a reminder of war’s true cost and a renewed warning to politicians that the use of arms should never be embarked upon lightly.

A massive manuscript lies amidst a heap of books on-stage. Out of this manuscript – ‘Lilly Through the Dark’ - emerge four actors with chiselled white faces and decked in Victorian garb. These four will be our narrators for this puppetry play, which tells the story of young Lilly, who commits suicide (‘from her delicate white wrist, a bright river grew’) and travels into the ‘dead lands’ to reclaim her dead father. Not a puppet-show for the kids, then – but undoubtedly a show for those who like their theatre honest, enveloping and emotional.

River People have created a magical, morphing reality, with its own twisted laws of logic and distinctive aesthetic. Puppet Lilly – goggle-eyed, nimble and perpetually innocent – lies at the centre of this fantasy world, and she makes for an ideal protagonist. Controlled by two actors simultaneously (one for the arms and another for the legs), who manipulate her movements and reflect her emotions, Lilly makes for a powerfully magnified personality. Everything Lilly feels – her fear, anger and determination – is multiplied by three, and it is fascinating to observe that as the production shifts so too do the emotions expressed by this rigid puppet’s face. This ability to animate the inanimate is unique to theatre and is a power that River People keenly wield.

It is when this company sticks with the puppets that their brand of theatre works best: the tangibility of puppet Lilly, the deep complexity of this wooden figure’s personality, is all down to the company’s careful, observational puppetry and sensitive accompanying performances. However, cut loose from the puppet, the actors lose their way a little and the production’s tone slips. The narrators seem to come from different worlds - one narrator, with a forced plum accent, sounds like she’s been plucked straight from Keeping Up Appearances – and their inconsistent personalities and delivery puncture the internal reality of this show.

The confused nature of the narrators is suggestive of a company that hasn’t quite brought its concept into focus. Whilst the actors are brilliant at evoking Lilly’s world and Lilly’s emotions, they seem unsure about the other characters that populate these dead-lands. This is a pity: show’s as wildly imaginative as this need to create some rules of their own, some limits, or everything risks falling apart. This certainly hasn’t happened here – the underlying story is too strong, the puppetry too good – but, should River People stretch themselves further next time and push the narrative into more complicated areas, they will need to define their super-reality a little more closely.

This company also needs to be careful about not overloading its show. Emotional journeys like this do need to be kept simple (but absolutely pulsing with feeling), which isn’t possible if too much is layered over top. There are certainly some inspired and complementary additions: at one point Lilly, poised to talk to the Mother Moon and purveyor of the dead lands, encounters two watchmen. They both stand behind cardboard screens, a noose scrawled across the front with scrawny illustrated bodies hanging below and the actors’ real heads peeping through. They are a brilliant double act – akin to the grumpy grandpas from the muppets – and the incident is well-timed, the comic relief appreciated. But whilst additions like this fit nicely within the show, other elements – the narrators, the supporting roles, the music – do not. The songs in particular are not good or atmospheric enough and break the mood, rather than tightening it.

Quibbles, yes, but only because this company is impressively unfettered and imaginative – and the actors need to make sure these strengths do not become their Achilles’ heel. The trick with these inventive shows is to know when to stop inventing. But River People remain genuine and sensitive collaborators, who have pored their vibrant energy into one little puppet and made it dance, sing, smile and feel.

Run over

Christmastide

We end 2009 on CW with Sean Bell pondering the forces behind the ‘Bully State’, and Kevin Rooney on what is and isn’t progressive in current thinking on education.

And in London theatre, Andrew Haydon is pleasantly surprised by Keira Knightley in The Misanthrope, Matt Trueman enjoys The Stefan Golaszewski Plays at the Bush, Giulia Merlo is charmed by The Rope at the Almeida, and Miriam Gillinson finds Christmas cheer amid Dickensian darkness at the Riverside.

Merry Christmas, and more from us in the new year.

23 December 2009