‘I normally have my breakfast at 8.30 – something’s wrong.’ Too bloody right something’s wrong. I’ve just been ushered into a pitch-black vault by a chalk-faced, glassy eyed, black-suited gentleman, blindfolded and left to fend for myself as strange, hissing creatures brush against my legs. The blindfold is whipped off and I, along with the rest of the scattered audience, wake up to Josef K’s living nightmare, in which an unexpected court summons disrupts his breakfast routine and upends his life. This is the world of Kafka’s The Trial, brought slithering onto the Southwark stage with real menace by Belt Up Theatre Company. 

The Southwark vaults – echoing, endless and with myriad hidden spaces – are a useful location for this claustrophobic tale, and Belt Up Theatre Company use the space well. The scenes melt in and out of the cavernous vault, lit up momentarily by torches, candles, strobe lighting and glinting, frightened eyes. It soon starts to feel like the (exceptionally dark) darkness is concealing endless, startling possibilities.

These vanishing scenes – illuminated one minute, only to disappear the next – chime excellently with the original novel. They encourage us to question our senses and, in doing so, to emphasize with Josef K’s case.  Did I really just see that? Am I starting to hear things? Am I, in fact, going a little bit bonkers? These are the same questions Josef K asks himself, as endures Kafka’s baffling and battering trial. 

Belt Up Theatre Company is careful to maintain and manipulate this connection between the protagonist and his spectators– indeed, generating this kind of sensual empathy between the actors and audience is clearly one of this company’s real strengths. The ensemble cast work carefully, cleverly to continually blur the line between stage and spectator. So, elfin figures scamper restlessly through the audience, cackling and prodding at us as they go. One minute, they’re too close for comfort and the next minute, they’re gone. It is unsettling, dislodging and disorientating – much like Josef’s K’s experience, as he is bashed around by conflicting advice, malicious court-judges and a slew of false leads.

The moments that get closest to Kafka’s original novel – the scenes that really soar - are the ones without words. Whilst these imaginings might be far removed from Kafka’s text, they are set deep inside his world and find much of his enveloping fear and spiralling frustration. The scenes in which Josef K meets the ‘advocate’ – a man who promises his clients freedom but really just extends their misery – are particularly well conceived. The advocate sits somewhere in the sprawling distance, with what looks like a sinking, smoking graveyard hovering between himself and Josef K. He looks a lifetime, a galaxy away. It is a striking, scary and slightly magical image. It is also an insightful one, which underlines the utter hopelessness of Josef K’s case; the impossible and threatening distance that lies between Josef, his advocate and his acquittal. 

Other scenes pack a visual and thematic punch too. At one point, questioning a court official about his case, Josef K is shown a flash of horrors to come. Lit up by strobe lighting, the fate of similar defendants is revealed for an instant: a wooden frame flashes out of the darkness, from which two skeletal girls swing against a great, black nothing. Another flash and the ghostly girls disappear. Again, with the audience hovering only metres behind Josef K (although always, for some reason, keeping a respectful distance), this horrific flash from the future jolts through Josef K and his spectators with equal force. 

These startling scenes are from the show’s opening half and, unfortunately, this volatile, dangerous atmosphere starts to dissipate after a while. Belt Up run out of ways to shake things up and the audience, inevitably, finds its comfort zone. Much of the tension melts away.

The tension is also weakened by an increasing amount of dialogue, as the piece gradually becomes less about evocation and more about explanation. The extended narrative calms things down significantly: everything starts to feel familiar and the potential for surprise is mitigated. The other problem is that Kafka’s words flounder out of context and the dialogue starts to droop. His narrative is a cumulative one – Kafka’s text was not made to stand-alone – and without the throbbing, claustrophobic effect of the surrounding text, his words lose much of their impact. 

This aspect of Kafka’s text – the fact it functions only as a complete and self-contained whole – makes it peculiarly tough to translate or adapt. The meaning is so bound up in the structure and the structure so vital to recreating Kafka’s take on reality, that any adaptation, which plays around with the text, is bound to suffer. This is why the best adaptations often say to hell with the narrative and set about invoking the pervasive mood of Kafka’s world instead. Belt Up Theatre might lose the thread at moments, but they’ve weaved together a genuinely unsettling piece here, which goes some way to recreating the menacing hopelessness of Kafka’s Trial. 

Till 28 November 2009

A suicidal monkey as the salvation of humanity, the proof that God exists and thus that life after death is real. This hero of mankind doesn’t appear tall and muscled with a trademark cape billowing in the wind.  The tiny primate ‘ghost loris’ doesn’t have super powers; it doesn’t even exist.

Yet the monkey with bulging yellow eyes, blue face and black fur acts as the pivot of Gilbert is Dead, an original play by director Robert Wolstenholme and writer Robin French, which is set in the Victorian era. The ghost loris springs to life from the imagination of the then 12 year old Lucille (Kate Burdette), deeply worried about her father Lucius’ (Ronan Vibert) state of mind after the death of her mother. Since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, the existence of God and the afterlife has been doubted by the people. Assigned to the secret mission of finding the ghost loris by Queen Victoria, the fictive explorer Gilbert sets out to find the equally fictive monkey in order to send it to the taxidermist Lucius Trickett for preservation. Lucius is oblivious to the truth, not realizing that Gilbert’s letters are in fact crafted by his own daughter, the mission being a farce.

What gives the monkey such a death-wish? The primate’s whole body is a funny bone; every small movement serves not to generate amusement, but to be a catalyst for agony. Faced with this unbearable fate, the ghost loris chooses to loosen its little fingers gripping the vines in the jungle and crashes to the ground. This is not only a death sentence for the unhappy monkey but also for Darwin’s theory of evolution: Built upon the assumption that all beings crave life, it has no choice but to crumble when faced with a suicidal animal.

That’s what the characters in Gilbert is Dead believe, anyway. This whimsical ‘counterevidence’ can clearly only be taken seriously in a comedy. It seems absurd to an almost tragic extent. However, it’s a means to an end in the play, which is a tragi-comedy, therefore mirroring this ridiculous proof quite fittingly.

For the majority of the play, however, the audience knows nothing about the fictive nature of the ghost loris. The difference remains unrevealed until the very end of the play, when it takes a sudden 180 degree turn from jaunty comedy to tremendous tragedy.

Director Robert Wolstenholme manages to draw the entire audience in, quite an achievement given the range of ages and backgrounds assembled in the small theatre in Hoxton Hall. The audience certainly had a good time, breaking out in laughter several times during the play, not least during a ukulele performance by Queen Victoria and the ridiculous first appearance of the ghost loris. Gilbert’s triumphant call ‘made it!’ when arriving at the black islands even roused a spontaneous applause from the crowd, his enthusiasm clearly resonating with them.

The play uses very simple means to express the events unfolding on the stage, such as actors undulating with cardboard in their hands to convey Gilbert’s struggle to survive after being shipwrecked, or the ghost loris bound to a wooden stick that an actor (in view) dangles over Gilbert’s head. It serves as another source of comedy, drawing soft chuckles from the audience. This kind of humour, however, isn’t everyone’s piece of cake.

The company shiningman produced the play, ‘to celebrate (...) both the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his (...) work On the Origin of Species’. The way in which Creationist ideas are presented throughout the play, certainly does a good job of mocking the belief. They are sold as a mere comfort for troubled people, their only proof born from the imagination of a little girl. However, ridiculing is all the play does. There is no clash of arguments, no debate. This very one-sided handling cannot be seen as a serious exploration of the conflict between evolutionists and creationists.

The play is more effective in telling the personal story of taxidermist Lucius Trickett and his daughter Lucille. The father, riven by grief, desperately hangs onto creationism as a sheet anchor, since only God’s existence promises him a reunion with his dead wife. Lucille is left alone to deal with both her mother’s passing and her dad’s slow but definite descent towards suicide. Since her father’s stories always made her feel better, she reasons that the same would also help him. It’s a child’s naive attempt to make fantasy become reality, to restore her father’s will to live. It’s something a kid should never be forced to do.

It all seems to be working out until the truth comes to light and tragedy unravels. Lucille is crying but her despair doesn’t reach Lucius. He is caught up in his crumbled reality and can only see the betrayal, the goal he craved to reach created and exposed as false by his very daughter. Living Lucille’s fantasy, both unwilling and unable to accept reality, Lucius ends up strangling her as she repeatedly screams out: ‘I am Gilbert! I am Gilbert! I am Gilbert!’

After his distraught departure, she crawls across the floor weeping in agony to reach her father’s arsenic paste and covers her face with it. When Lucius finds her, rigid like his stuffed animals, he finally seems to come to his senses. He gathers the (by now) dead girl up in his arms, and under tears sings the creationist song ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ to her and to himself like a lullaby. Lucius cannot escape. He is a broken man, now faced with the death of both wife and daughter, and can only cling to the conviction that claimed Lucille’s life. It’s his only hope: a reunion in heaven.

Writer Robin French has created a truly absorbing piece. The characters come to life convincingly throughout the performance but it is the agonising last minutes that truly stand out. The sudden turn in the atmosphere and meaning of the play haunts you even after you’ve left the theatre.  Lucius and Lucille transform the stage into a sea of despair, filled to the brink with tragedy. Still, the laughter that earlier on sprung from the delusion still lingers on in the memory.

Till 29 November 2009

Looming over you, Hornsey Town Hall pierces a dark and gloomy dusk sky. For the most part its windows are unlit. From one, a spectacled figure peers down on you, perhaps monitoring your presence, perhaps innocently questioning it. At the main entrance thick-set iron gates lurch half-open, not so much inviting as coercive: the gravitational pull of curiosity overpowering trepidation. Inside your head, a voice – female, calm, headstrong – urges you and your MP3 player forward.

Right from the start, from this initial encounter with the building itself, Hall is soaked in atmosphere. Its cocktail of classical gothic imagery and urban menace sets you on edge and keeps you there. Inside the forsaken municipal shell, dead leaves litter the floors and elongated shadows creep up the walls. Decay and damp have usurped purpose and people. Those that remain, stalking its corridors still, seem civic waifs serving a long gone public. As they pass silently by, you tingle – as much with the excitement of the unseen voyeur as with the chill of goosebumps.

However, simple spookiness is not sustenance enough. Nor does it require much skill. Couch a long-disused, musty building in darkness, send an audience to navigate it alone and the site does the work itself. What matters is how you populate that space: the images concocted, the stories unearthed and the journeys charted.

Sadly, in this respect Hall cannot wholly match the promise of its location. It feels half-baked – not dim-witted, but under-interrogated. Certainly, you can’t accuse 19:29 of lacking ambition – for a company of recent graduates to attempt something on this scale is impressive – but the further into the hour you get the more it looks like foolhardiness. Though there are some vivid images along the way – a banquet festering under layers of mould, a lone pianist in a grand hall – Hall is let down by a dramaturgy as unkempt as the building itself.

Prime among the resultant potholes is that nothing really comes to fruition. Characters encountered seem to have no bearing on one another and often never recur en route. The young, bucolic lovers and the malevolent architect belong to totally distinct worlds without any confirmation of deliberately parallel existences. Then there is the problem of promises left unfulfilled. The prologue (a separate MP3 to be listened to en route to Crouch End) advises buying biscuits, but no opportunity to use them arises. We are asked, at one point, to don black rubber gloves, only for them to be handed back moments later without use. The only discernible thread running through the piece is the rumour of a secret room unmentioned in architectural plans and yet, there is no point of its discovery. Or, at least, if there is it goes unannounced.

Our own presence in the space is treated with similar inconsistency. At times, we are activated – instructed to interact in meetings, dance or play trick on lovers – at others, we are observed but let alone and elsewhere still we seem to acquire invisibility.

Often, it feels as if we are being asked to overlook, to be forgiving. The size of the site and the logistics entailed – getting the timings right and maintaining the conveyor belt of audience members – have clearly derailed the attention to detail, and we are politely requested to turn a blind eye. The audio-guide orders your gaze one way in order that the mechanics of the piece can slip by unnoticed behind you. Only, of course, they don’t.

Hall remains an enjoyable experience, but this is less the result of 19:29’s efforts than the nature of Hornsey Town Hall itself. The pleasure of the content comes largely from its puzzling disparities, which beg questions and demand interpretation. However, the beauty of its mysteries exists only insofar as you are prepared to accept their obscurity as intentional. The deeper into the building one goes, the more the suspicion grows that no linkage actually exists, that the company have thrown together a series of images without shared foundations. When that happens, even the building itself loses its atmospheric power. Approach gently.

Till 26 November. For tickets, visit www.1929.org.uk

Words, food and love

This week on CW, Nicky Charlish reviews Tony Thorne’s Jolly Wicked, Actually, and considers whether our language makes us who we are, or simply reflects how we change over time. And Namit Arora explores the very different cuisines of India and China, marvelling at the malleability of the human palate. Meanwhile Jo Herlihy writes about Bright Star, Jane Campion’s new film about the love life of poet John Keats, and reflects on the very different attitudes to publc and private that prevailed in the early 19th century.

20 November 2009

Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option ten times out of ten.

The only times I ate meat was when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton (goat meat) dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us, holding meat to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s own during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, while battling his own and his society’s traditional dispositions against it.

I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

Most Indians are far less ‘experienced’ than me, owing to dispositions against eating animals that have existed in India since at least the Jains, Buddhists, and some Hindus 2,500 years ago. Such views arose out of the dominant Indian conception of nature, in which man was not a privileged creation of God but an actor in a vast, ceaselessly unfolding divine play (lila), with its countless veils of illusion (maya) that duped us into seeing reality in dualistic terms: mind/body, self/other, good/evil, etc. The natural world was not something apart from us; it was inseparable from us. John Muir expressed this poetically, ‘I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.’ Many Indians saw their moods and passions reflected in the phenomenal world, which came to bear on the deepest concerns of human life, woven as it was into an intricate web of life.

This view was also reflected in the Indian idea of reincarnation, where humans are seen as just one type, albeit a coveted type, of creature that a soul may inhabit as it migrates from life to life. Not surprisingly, then, the Indian approach to nature promoted a kinship with and respect for all life, furthering non-violence and vegetarianism, and making the ancient Indians perhaps the first people from whom animals received a de facto right to life. Of course, even before the spread of Islam, India had many regional and caste-based divergences, and attitudes are even more mixed for modern Hindus in a globalisng India.

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It is no small wonder then, that in neighbouring China things are so different. What mainstream restaurants serve on the other side of the Himalayas would make many a hardy Indian stomach churn. Below are some selections from a typical and popular restaurant I visited in Beijing.

• Traditional Peking style boiled sheep’s head
• Duck blood in a spicy Chongqing style
• Royal duck tongue / Marinated duck head
• Braised donkey meat in superior soup
• Spicy bullfrog
• Braised pork treasures [sic]
• Hot duck viscera w/ sunny egg
• Young frog in bamboo
• Pig bellies with garlic
• Hot tasting chicken feet / Duck web [feet] with mustard
• Stir-fried duck gizzard
• Chicken claw with pepper
• Dry fried ass meat in Xiang style
• Braised pork trotter tendon and sea cucumber

Many Cantonese push the limits even for other Chinese, with their taste for dogs, cats, raccoons, monkeys, lizards, rats, and more, all usually raised as food. In the Guangzhou province in south China, I have walked down a meat market with glistening, skinned dog carcasses hanging on both sides of the street. Chinese cuisine is perhaps the most popular ethnic cuisine in the world but none of this stuff is commonly available outside East Asia. Conversely, international staples like kung-pao and sweet-and-sour chicken are hard to find in China.

In Beijing, I encountered another gastronomical spectacle near the Forbidden City—a fast-food market with some very unusual items, deep-fried on skewers while you wait: scorpions, snakes, silkworms, beetles, centipedes, emu, starfish, eel, octopus, grasshoppers, etc. Though this isn’t everyday food, the locals were chomping it down. Entrails and obscure body parts of farm animals, which are more widely consumed, were also on offer. Foreigners might sample something on a dare, or for bragging rights back home. Reactions vary of course: a haggis eating Scot may hardly flinch; likewise an American eater of warm pig brain in gravy, or an Italian consumer of pig eye balls or testicles, and so on.

I wondered: is it really true that the Chinese will eat any part of just about anything that moves? How did they turn out this way? How can two neighbouring Asian countries have such divergent approaches to what they consider food?

A common explanation is that the Chinese, in times of famine, were forced to seek out alternate sources of nutrition, which later weren’t abandoned. But can this be the primary reason? The Indians have suffered famines too. Also worth considering are environmental constraints, climate, and economic factors, but none of these come close to explaining the differences that arose between India and China. After all, both had sub-tropical agricultural economies, villages on fertile river plains, a full stable of farm animals, and similarly dense urban centers.

More significant to my mind is that unlike in India, the Confucian tradition is humanistic, ie, centred on humans. It is also notably short on speculative wonder about the origin of life and the universe, nature of mind and matter, or death and beyond. According to Confucius, trying to understand the forces of heaven and the realm of the spirits is a waste of time; humans should instead concentrate on themselves and their society—that is, on personal conduct and social harmony, honed via education and character development. Animal welfare seems not to have concerned him at all. Indeed, the average Confucian gent’s obligation to honor and respect his ancestors included rites involving animal sacrifices. The ‘Analects of Confucius’ suggests that the sage himself carried out such sacrifices, attended sacrificial rites, and also ate animals. Mencius, his most notable successor, did advocate kindness towards animals, but he too ate meat and supported animal sacrifices.

Animals therefore remained categorically distinct from and subservient to humans in China, and consequently, readily dispensable for human interests and desires. The moral compass of Confucianism helps explain its dearth of injunctions against treating animals as means to human ends. (Needless to say, the historical Western view of animals is scarcely better, whether Greek, Christian, or Modern, but that, and the morality of eating animals today, are topics for another essay.)

It is true that Chinese Buddhism, and to some extent Taoism, took up the cause of animals, but they were like islands in the vast Confucian ocean. Eight or nine centuries ago, a resurgent Neo-Confucianism marginalised Buddhism—a millennium after its arrival from India—partly under the pretext that it was a ‘foreign faith.’ This reflected their built-in conflicts: despite their shared agnosticism and focus on this world, the Buddhist emphasis on the individual spiritual quest, detachment, and monasticism represented a threat to Confucian ideals. What survived in China was a ‘Confucianised’ Buddhism; most lay Chinese Buddhists are meat eaters; most Japanese Buddhist sects conveniently believe that the Buddha himself ate meat. In modern China, vegetarian diets are associated with poverty, inferior social standing, and Buddhist monks. Many locals have trouble understanding why seemingly prosperous foreigners visiting China should opt for vegetarian food, even though the Chinese still get far fewer calories from meat than their Western counterparts.

It is easy to see that the ‘innate’ revulsion we so often feel towards certain foods that others eat, whether a species or a body part, is simply an acquired taste. Unlike a tiger cub, the human child does not require meat for survival or good health (especially with today’s alternatives), but in the right (wrong?) milieu, isn’t she capable of relishing just about anything her body won’t reject? India and China offer a striking illustration of the vast range and malleability of the human palate, and the power of ideas in shaping it.

What is Englishness? We’re so used to this topic being raised that it’s in danger of becoming a bore. It’s a good old standby for any journalist or writer who wants to show off his or her PC credentials, reminisce about this Sceptre’d Isle’s lost Golden Age or simply needs to fill up a column and doesn’t have anything more interesting to hand. How much light does this latest addition to the discussion shed on the matter?

First, a few words about what this book isn’t. Thorne – the director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London – isn’t giving us a grammar guide in the tradition of Fowler. Nor is it a look at the current state of language in the manner of veteran wordwatchers Philip Howard and Lynne ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ Truss. (Some might say that this is a good thing: the former is knowledgeable but tends to come over as being a bit wary of seeming too critical of linguistic changes, rather like a progressive teacher who wants to show that he is, like, down wiv the kids, whilst Truss, even when upbraiding language usages which are abuses, seems rather shy of saying anything which could be interpreted as upholding the pre-1960s social order.) And it’s not like The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) by Ann Barr and Peter York, the precursor to a raft of style-tribe guidebooks that were a light-hearted exercise in sociology without any of that discipline’s traditional tediousness dressed-up in impenetrable terminology.

Instead, what Thorne does is take a range of words which purport to show the transformation of ‘Old England’ into ‘New Britain’. The former is ‘everything that preceded the free-market, post industrial multi-culti environment of the twenty-first century’, whilst the latter is the ‘Americanised-to-some extent ... service-oriented, unabashed, glossy, confessional, competitive constituency we have become in the have-it-all noughties’. This leads us to suspect that what we have here is a ‘why-oh-why’ job, a lament for a lost (mythical?) English Eden. Is it? What points does Thorne want to make about the period of social upheaval he encompasses?

This brings us to Thorne’s view of the use of words (he puts the ones chosen for discussion in bold, a practice I follow here) and, indeed, to his approach to linguistic development and usage in general. Is he correct when he writes of words that ‘make us English’? Do words - by themselves - make anybody anything? Words and meanings feed off each other in a complicated, unchoreographed dance of usage and association. As he shows with wicked itself, a word can undergo ‘ironic reversal’ whereby it changes its meaning (in this instance, from denoting something evil to, in street slang, something desirable). Surely it would have been more accurate to speak of words which characterise the English as they appear at present and why they do do. What can we say of the collection of words Thorne gives us here?

Some will come as no surprise. Austerity, chum, cuppa and muddle are words which the person on the Clapham omnibus having any familiarity with English life and history would probably have chosen: whether anglosphere or bon viveur (both rather specialised) would have made the list is another matter. Chuddies (underwear) is hardly a common term even though it does demonstrate the entry of Asian terms into English usage. To do that, Thorne’s on safer ground with innit, a word ‘identified especially with black British and later Asian British speech patterns’, although as he himself points-out, the word originates from ‘a London working-class version of “isn’t it?”’

With other words, Thorne half-exposes some of the less appealing aspects of modern Britain, which is OK so far as it goes: the trouble is, that isn’t as much as it could be. For instance, he shows that suspicions aroused by the word clever have more to do with fear of being shown as stupid rather than as a desire to expose erroneous social or political theories disguised with intellectual pretensions; with frump he points-out that this word, meaning a shabby or unstylish woman, has no male equivalent; and Thorne reminds us of the jobsworth, the familiar figure of awkward-minded petty officialdom and the ways he or she might deal with difficult members of the public. But he doesn’t take his examinations further. Why do the English fear cleverness: is it through a desire to avoid socio-political nonsense or because they don’t like the hard work of dealing with the intellectually fleet-of-foot? Do the English have a particular desire to criticise women, or do they feel that unstylishness is all that can be expected of the average male, and, if so, why? And what does the petty official tell us about English standards of leadership - a fish rots from the head downwards, remember - or attitudes to displaying initiative?

Why this lack of rigour? In his introduction, Thorne writes with approval of his mother who was ‘neither common nor posh’. Later, when discussing the period of social change under consideration, after writing of such things as slaggishness and binge drinking he asks – with some seeming expectancy – ‘was all talk of a classless society, of meritocracy, in vain?’ He reminds us that things such as private education and immigration controls are in the ascendant and that there are ‘people on television called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.’ So, whilst disliking snobbishness, he’s probably less enthusiastic about X Factor Britain and happy to see anything which might seem to challenge its ascendancy (seeming to forget that it’s white middle-class males who are responsible for much cultural dumbing-down, such as yoof culture, in the first place and doing very well out of it financially, thanks). You feel that he wants to be tougher on modern Britain in the manner of, say, Corelli Barnett with his The Pride and the Fall series of books about British decline from 1918 to 1956, or Peter Oborne with his more recent analysis of the forces (often contradictory, but united in their opposition to the traditional order) which shape modern Britain in his The Rise of the Political Class, but that Thorne is maybe held back by English reticence. It also raises the question as to whether he should have chosen as his book’s subtitle a phrase which gives the impression that he is trying to distil some sort of unchanging essence of Englishness when what he’s attempting to do is demonstrate England’s change from one sort of society to another (one of many social transformations that have occurred in England since the Reformation).

And Thorne would, perhaps, have a major problem if he was trying to get to the essence of the English: ‘Englishness’ has no real defining characteristic except, arguably, whatever The Establishment chooses to give it at anyone time. For instance, when England was supposedly Protestant, enough Catholics adhered to the old faith make them regarded as a threat to the ruling hierarchy. And in 1997, many English people did not join-in the sobfest of DianaWeek nor regard her as a blameless example of victim hood as most commentators did - (hence the short shrift given to public dissenters from the official view). As Chesterton (who, with his light-hearted love of paradox and plumpness might be said to epitomise a certain sort of Englishness) says of the Britons (by which he means the Scots, the English, the Irish and the Welsh) in his A Short History of England (1917),

‘they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems – “Over the hills and far away”.’

Other nations have their splits - France the religious/secular divisions, the United States’ split between the puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers and the libertarianism of the Founding Fathers- but don’t seem to enjoy picking at the scab of national identity in the way that the English do. Perhaps the English are better at keeping the issue under wraps. Some might say that it’s a displaced anxiety, due to the fact that the English are always afraid that the dominant political and cultural forces in England will come along and impose a new set of values against the will of the people (whatever that may be). Maybe the English constant, almost pleasurable discussion of what makes a divided nation tick is a sign of strength indicating that, like a strong family, they can accommodate difference without too much trouble. Then again, as a Frenchman might remind us, such self-flagellation is only to be expected: masochism is le vice Anglais, after all.

Thorne’s snapshot of modern England is entertaining but a bit blurred. It’s a useful guide for us now for it makes us think about (over?) familiar words, and will be of help to present day lexicographers and grammarians as well as future social historians. It may be seen as being prescient: it was published shortly before Boris Johnson reportedly used the word oik to good effect when rescuing a passer-by from attack by young girls. But a deeper excavation into the multi-layered soil of Englishness is needed.

It is true, as some have pointed out, that Jane Campion’s new film about the romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne lacks some important social context. The story told in Bright Star appears cut off from events in the wider world, such as for example Manchester’s Peterloo massacre in 1819, the year Keats wrote ‘Ode To Autumn’.

The film gives us something different and worth reflecting on, however. It provides a vantage point from which to view another aspect of the social world of the time – the fact that public life took precedence over private emotion. Depressingly, we witness the moral straightjacket of the early 19th century. The oppressive social conventions of the time mean Brawne cannot travel away with her great friend and true love, and must abandon him to his death without her. Keats’ last letters are almost unbearable to read, such is his state of despair and longing to be with Brawne. Brawne (played by Abbie Cornish), is desperate as she know Keats (Ben Whishaw) is to leave, and so she offers herself to him. He declines, as he regards maintaining his public respectability to be more important. In his final letters he seems to have profound regret.

Another advantage of the film’s single-minded focus on the unfolding relationship between Keats and Brawne over a number of years is that we come to appreciate more fully the feeling of not being able to breathe, figuratively and literally, associated with that period of history. The film shows us the fleeting glances, brief touching of hands and ludicrous attempts at intimacy through bedroom walls to illustrate deference to rules of conduct and manners.

But the film doesn’t read history backwards, mixing up how people might react today to what might be perceived to be similar experiences of repressed feeling. For example, there is no assumption made in the film that the experiences of the characters pile up, inevitably resulting in breakdown and collapse. The film shows us Fanny’s internal strength when she keeps her promise to Keats and, without looking back, walks away from the train he’s on that takes him away from her for good. There is also an arresting moment in the film when Brawne collapses in stricken grief on learning of Keats death. This moment is filmed alongside the reactions of her family who were also very fond of Keats. The camera shows us how they seem slightly embarrassed or taken aback by Brawne’s display of grief; suggesting her reaction was not considered normal. One might have assumed that on Brawne’s reaction, the family would have rallied around her and given in to their own feelings held in check. Instead they remained aloof - her mother only going to her after some time. This suggests the romantics largely at odds with the norms of the day.

The film provides us with an opportunity to consider where poetry might sit amid this complex mix of public conduct and private emotion. Whilst some romantic poetry does focus on the intensely private, it is written for public consumption. With the film moving between letters and poems, we begin to appreciate the difference. The poetry of private emotion is given a universal aspect through references to the classics, religion and nature, and is therefore very much part of a humanist tradition where our common humanity becomes evident. The despair of Keats is not in his poetry but in his letters, written privately between himself and his intimate friends.

The poetry of Keats is informed by personal experience but expressed in shared universal language, embodying a positive distinction between public and private. His letters, on the other hand, indicate the profound tensions that existed simultaneously for the individual.

The film is imbued with a dead weight, not just because you know it isn’t going to have a happy ending, but because social codes force the characters to act in ways they feel are morally wrong. So it is true that the film doesn’t give us, as some would like, a working class on the move, or any sense of the social instability of the times, which might help us understand some of the subtleties of Keats’ poetry. Instead, however, we are provided some time and space to consider the question of the split between the public and private. Inevitably the film provokes some reflection on today and what has been gained or lost in the blurring of the sharp distinction that previously existed. As many find this blurring of the distinction today very confusing, I welcome the some of the insights the film brings. Today it appears as if both public and private are either held in disregard or trivialised.

Remember you’re a womble

This week on CW, Patrick West reviews Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete, and considers the importance of the human ability to forget, while Rachel Halliburton argues contemporary classical music has failed to weave itself into our lives like rock music has. And Sam Haddow reflects on the tensions that arise when the arts turn to protest. Meanwhile, Alistair John takes more interest than most of the British media in the birth of the UK’s new Supreme Court.

Sam Peczeck admires Andrea Arnold’s not-especially-grim Fish Tank, while Jo Caird is disappointed by Paul Theroux’s 47th book A Dead Hand, and in London theatre Matt Trueman enjoys the gorgeous, lumpy puppets of Rust, despite its clunky plot. ..And much more below.

13 November 2009

The capacity of organisations to collect, store, retrieve and disseminate information about people has always been a source of concern for civil libertarians. This anxiety has been heightened in an era in which data is no longer retained in analogue status, but in digital format. The all-seeing 20th-century dystopias as imagined in Nineteen-Eighty-Four or The Prisoner seem somewhat quaint now, what with their imagery of spies spending hours scouring reams of audio and video tapes, or laboriously collating information in folders stored in vast vaults.

Now governments and corporations can - and do - easily store, retrieve and contextualise personal data at the click of a button. More often this process is automatic. For instance, your own ‘recommended readings’ on Amazon have not arisen there by chance; they are a projection based on the summation of your past purchases and browsing. Likewise, search engines have mechanically accumulated a personal profile of you. Many have stored when you entered ‘getting married’, ‘buying a house’, when you searched for legal advice or sought self-diagnosis for a perceived illness.

But you will not remember having made all of these searches. Thus in many respects, search engines know more about you than you do yourself. Human beings forget; digital databases do not. You may have forgotten a spiteful email you once sent a friend in a fit of pique, but she still might have it. You might regret being reminded of its existence, and so might she - as she might have forgotten that she forgave you for it. Thus, Mayer-Schönberger suggests, the digital age is becoming an enemy of progress. Forgetting is what make us human. Amnesia is what allows us to move on, develop and mature.

Take the example of the personal diary. ‘If you have ever tried reading an old diary entry of yours from many years ago,’ he writes, ‘you may have felt a strange mixture of familiarity and foreignness, of sensing that you remember some, perhaps most, but never all the text’s original meaning’. The past is often not as we remember it owing to the porous nature of the human mind. Individual memories that we retain are also invariably imperfect, because we re-remember them constantly. Like a piece of paper that is repeatedly Xeroxed, or a message conveyed in a game of ‘Chinese Whispers’, errors are introduced each time the piece of information is transmitted or re-conveyed.

Many sentiments in long-lost diaries appear unfamiliar because our identities are in constant flux (1). I am a slightly different person than I was last month, and a substantially different person to who I was last century.  But the internet is making it more difficult to let go of the past. Think of those sorry souls whose lurid emails, forwarded throughout the world, cost them their jobs and earned them ongoing global notoriety. Or others whose photographic evidence of youthful indiscretions posted on Facebook have landed them in trouble. Or the case of Canadian psychotherapist who was barred entry to the United States in 2006 because a database revealed that he admitted to taking LSD in the 1960s.

Society’s and the state’s increasing reliance on digital information errs in that it perceives ‘the self’ as static and fixed, and it in turn can lead to arrested development. Mayer-Schönberger cites the example of an American internet researcher called Gordon Bell, whose stated aim:

‘is to capture one’s entire life’ digitally. He has ‘scanned and stored on hard disk almost all of his paper notes and notebooks… copies of all emails he sends or receives (more than 120,000 of them) and an image of every web page he visits. He audio-records and digitally stores many conversations he has with others; and the little black box he wears round his neck is… a Microsoft-developed digital camera that takes a snapshot every 30 seconds or whenever someone approaches Bell, all day, every day’.

We all used to laugh in the 1980s at those Japanese tourists who video-recorded their entire holidays, and thus had a perfect visual record of a vacation they didn’t actually experience. While Mr Bell’s behaviour might be excessive, it is only a more extreme version of the popular micro-blog, in which among many there is a likewise inclination to constantly record and chronicle one’s life, and consequently having little time to live it.

This is the psychological fall-out, but Mayer-Schönberger addresses the political price of digitised virtual memory. Transparency means we inhabit a virtual ‘village community’, a confining, claustrophobic realm in which we fear we are being watched, and in which we modify our behaviour accordingly. The digital age is banishing the liberating, anonymous, experimental ethos of an ‘urban’ community. As well as being psychologically regressive, digitised virtual memory can be the enemy of political progress. Those wishing to enter a country with a questionable human rights record, say, or applying for a job at a large corporation, will now more likely pre-censor themselves appropriately. This is the realisation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which reinforces the power discrepancy between the surveyed and the surveillant. Caution and silence will be the price the surveyed will pay. (There are innocuous, if still regrettable, examples of how this is operating. Anecdotally, I know that many people now think twice of innocently making a fool of themselves at a weddings or parties for fear of ending up on Facebook or YouTube. The virtual digital age may also be the enemy of fun.)

Yet the inability to ‘delete’ could have even more sinister consequences. As the author reminds us, in the 1930s the Netherlands enforced a comprehensive population registry containing the name, birth date, address, religion, and other personal information of each citizen. This was obtained by the German occupiers of the 1940s, and perhaps as a consequence Dutch Jews had the lowest survival rate of all Jews in Europe in the Second World War. Even Jewish refugees in the Netherlands fared better than Dutch Jews, because there were no records of them. In a time when the argument ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ is worryingly employed in favour of government databases and ID cards, this raises the question: We might not have anything to hide or fear from this government, but what about the next one?

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s does have some recommended remedies, his most vehement being that information should have expiry dates, but they are not convincing. The fundamental problem is that you can’t un-invent the internet. His diagnosis is intriguing, nonetheless. Delete suggests that the digital age, often championed as humanity’s greatest leap forward since the Industrial Revolution, may ironically herald a great leap back.

1) Take the example of Helena Burton, who, aged 15, wrote in her diary on March 2, 1991: ‘I didn’t get to school in time this morning so I didn’t bother turning up. I really hate my parents. I honestly wish I was an orphan. Maybe I’ll murder them. I want some ice cream.’ From Cringe: Toe-Curlingly Embarrassing Teenage Diaries, by Sarah Brown (Michael O’Mara, 2009); extract from The Times, 23 September 2009

We are living in a changed country. Our Constitution – the Great British Constitution – has been transformed. Parliamentary Sovereignty has been supplanted by the Separation of Powers (1). Did you notice? Can you feel it? Perhaps not. The transition from one system of government to the next passed like the transition from September to October. Quite literally, in fact, for on 1 October, the United Kingdom Supreme Court opened for business. Previously, the country’s highest court, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, sat within the Houses of Parliament, the Law Lords members of the Upper Chamber. Their Lordships now sit in the shadow of Parliament, in a neo-gothic building expensively refurbished for the occasion. The first advocate to address the Court is reported to have told the Justices that theirs had been ‘a short walk across Parliament Square but a giant leap for the judicial system’ (2).

Opinion is divided as to how great a leap. The Supreme Court remains, like its predecessor, the highest domestic appeal court for the UK in respect of civil cases, and for England, Wales and Northern Ireland in respect of criminal cases. Its functions from House of Lords do not substantially differ. When deciding upon the legality or applicability of legislation the Justices of the Supreme Court, like the Law Lords, cannot force the Government to overturn or amend legislation. They can merely shoot powerful, persuasive glances. The great change is that the Justices are no longer members of Parliament, but then the Law Lords were full-time Judges, who did not vote on legislation passed within the chamber.

Therefore reaction to the creation of the Supreme Court has fallen into two different, though not entirely distinct, types. Firstly, there are those who believe that the Supreme Court presents a grotesquely expensive cosmetic change, the short walk across Parliament Square coming in at an estimated cost of at least £58 million (3) (£50,000 of which was spent on designing the new logo (4)). Secondly, in what some may regard as merely cosmetics with bells on, there are those who believe the court’s creation is a symbolic change, representing the last, necessary, act in a long progression towards a fully independent Judiciary. It is a symbolic change as opposed to a simply cosmetic one for the fact that, as Justice Albie Sachs wrote in The Times on the Court’s opening day, ‘symbolism … signifies. It can only be to the good if the concept of the independence of the judiciary is reinforced’ (5).

The question arises, ‘reinforcing the concept of the judicial independence’ – is that it? Can the long-term effects of the change actually be put any higher than that? The only adequate answer to the question is in the form of the warning issued by Lord Neuberger, the one Law Lord who did not take the short walk across Parliament Square (rather, he strolled off in a different direction, to become Master of the Rolls, head of the Civil Justice system), that ‘the danger with a constitution like the British Constitution is that you muck about with it at your peril because you do not know what the consequences of any change will be’ (6).

For while there has been no great change in what the Law Lords do, there has been a change in the way they work. In their previous incarnation, the Judges sat in the cramped conditions of a committee room located somewhere within the labyrinthine corridors of the Houses of Parliament. While proceedings were open to the public, this was by all accounts only in the sense that an uber-fashionable band’s after-show party is open to everyone who was at the gig: first you need to know someone who knows someone who knows the time and place of the barely-advertised happening, and even then you need the confidence that your shoes are pointy and jeans skinny enough to brave the image of the raised eyebrows of this elite club being disturbed by your entrance.

In comparison, if all goes according to plan, hearings in the new Supreme Court will be like art on the forth plinth. Openness, transparency and accessibility to the public are the watch words of the new Court. It will be, in the words of its Chief Executive, ‘there to educate and inspire, as well as to adjudicate’ (7). And so the new Supreme Court building comprises glass walls and wide-open spaces. There is a public café, and an exhibition space; there is a press room, whereas previously the journalists were forced to operate from the Pret a Manger across the street (8). There is even – groundbreaking, this – disabled access at the front. Online, the Court has a new website, which is very snazzy indeed, featuring a wealth of background information about the Court, the building, and the judges (9). And then there is perhaps the single most ground-breaking change: cameras will be permitted within the Court. All proceedings will be filmed, with the potential for the recordings to be broadcast. In all other courts within the UK, recording by film or unsanctioned tape is prohibited.

It perhaps says something that the Court would choose its first appeal with one eye on the faces of the public (10). Her Majesty’s Treasury v. A & Others was, in the words of the human rights organisation Justice, a ‘test case for the rule of law’ (11). The case concerned alleged terrorists, not convicted in Court, whose assets were frozen by the Government by way of an Order in Council, a measure which effectively bypassed debate or vote in Parliament upon the provisions. As the case summary contained on the Court’s website has it, the questions for adjudication were as follows: -

(i) Whether the Terrorism (United Nations Measures) Order 2006 and the Al-Qaida and Taliban (United Nations Measures) Order 2006 are unlawful because they seek to restrict fundamental human rights without the express authorisation of Parliament;
(ii) Whether the restriction of funds pursuant to the Orders interferes with rights pursuant to ECHR Arts 8 & Art 1 of the First Protocol, and in respect of G Art 6;
(iii) Whether the ambit of restrictive measures in the Orders is sufficiently certain;
(iv) Whether the lack of procedural measures to challenge the restrictive measures renders the scheme unlawful. (12)

In his opening address, Tim Owen QC, Counsel for the appellants, told the Court that the appeals raised,

’novel and important points of constitutional law concerning the ability of the Executive to make laws without the need for any form of Parliamentary debate or scrutiny … [and] questions, difficult questions, concerning the proper balance to be struck between the competing demands of national security in the context of the threats posed by terrorism and the respect our society affords to fundamental human rights, rights of procedural fairness and rights of access to the courts.’

But while the Supreme Court’s first-term opened with its most lip smacking, headline grabbing case, the public, who might very well have been interested in what went on, would not have found this constitutional moment covered. The Court had been thwarted.  Even on the 24-news channels, which have proven themselves ready and willing to pad out slow news days with hours of footage of unopening front-doors and empty airport runways, obtaining a glimpse of the proceedings was nigh on impossible. Could it – should it - really be that by the end of the first full working day of our new highest Court, the most substantive piece of coverage on TV or radio had been a three-minute item on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, a third of which focused on an exchange between Baroness Hale, Lord Browne and Geoffrey Robertson QC about the Court’s new microphones not working?

In the end, it turned out we had to go overseas for some proper footage of proceedings. On 5th October, the United States’ C-Span network (C-Span 2, to be precise), broadcast a full half hour excerpt from Owen’s opening address (13). So it was that the historic words, ‘My Lords, may I then turn to open the appeal of AK & M?’ came through an American public service broadcaster to ostensibly American citizens. For the layman, what can be gleamed from the excerpt? Well, first off, we certainly now appear to have a courtroom befitting its stature. The neo-gothic interior has the curious effect of somehow imbuing proceedings with a whiff of Magna Carta. There is something compelling, too, in the juxtaposition of advocates dressed in gowns and horse-hair wigs arguing cases in a room of stone and oak, at desks adorned with flat screen computer monitors; it is almost a mural relaying The Great & Evolving Story of British Liberty.

The room retains the style of the previous committee room, in which advocates and judges sit on the same level, now several feet apart in facing concentric benches, as though attending an absurdly theatrical board meeting.  The architects have described the atmosphere sought – and from the looks of it, attained - as that of a ‘learned seminar’ (14). Indeed, what comes through most clearly is how calm and measured the hearing is. Voices are not raised, questions are politely put. The hearing – at least the 40-minutes of it on show on C-Span - presents a model of how we may wish important and difficult questions within a democracy to be examined, explored and adjudicated upon. Thankfully, while the name Supreme Court has been imported across the Atlantic, the conduct of proceedings has not, the United States Supreme Court’s hearings being bullish, ball swinging affairs in which advocates have scarcely the opportunity to clear their throats to begin before they are mauled by an onslaught of aggressive questioning from the Court. A happy feature of our Court is that time for oral argument is not limited to several hours, but several days. This has the effect that Judges are afforded the time to listen and tease out the threads of argument rather than simply giving them a short, sharp tug as though cleaning a path of weeds.

This approach to proceedings does however help explain why broadcasters have perhaps not been quick to leap upon the footage. Learned seminars do not make for the most rollicking televisual ride, particularly when argument is regularly punctuated by the echo through the chamber of papers shuffled and binders opened as Counsel signals that he now intends to take the Court to a document within, say, volume 4, tab 56 of the Court’s bundle of papers. Such moments are even less compelling when you yourself do not have to hand volume 4, tab 56, nor any knowledge of what exactly it contains. This absence of documents is frustrating to any interested member of the public, and incapacitating for any journalist trying to report upon the case. As the Guardian’s Afua Hirsch complained on an essential resource, the newly created (unofficial) UK Supreme Court blog (15), reporting on a court case without having seen the case papers is like ‘trying to follow a film having missed the first half. Oral argument follows skeleton arguments, key facts and legal points are set out in the statements of case’ (16).

Making such documents available online would be an invaluable, though not necessarily revolutionary, innovation. See, for example, the ongoing inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, the 26 year-old beaten to death while in the custody of British troops in Iraq. Through its website (17), the inquiry provides an exemplar of an open, transparent and accessible tribunal, proffering information on everything from its terms of reference, to whether there are parking facilities for members of the public who wish to attend. Uploaded each day is a full transcript of that day’s proceedings together with PDFs of the key pieces of evidence.

For, like the subject of public inquiries, it is not as though Supreme Court hearings are simply of interest to the nerdiest of law students. The Supreme Court may be devoid of the soap opera drama of a trial, being concerned simply - simply! - with the application of the law on issues of constitutional significance. But then the process by which these decisions are reached is no less compelling than the goings-on within Parliament. The opportunity to pass an eye over a live-feed from Parliament, even if it is only a glance, is invaluable whatever the theoretical underpinning of our constitution. This should be no different with our courts, especially our Supreme Court. While it is unknown how much of the Court’s operating costs are allocated to providing for bandwidth, but it can hardly be too overwhelming a feat to stream proceedings through the Court’s website, as does Parliament (18).

Of course, not all cases will be of interest to the public (as opposed to being in the public interest) - could the name of the upcoming appeal ‘Gray’s Timber Products Limited v. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ moisten anyone’s palate? What matters is that some will be of supreme importance and should be of equal interest.

One such case is that of the former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed. On 16 October two judges in the High Court issued the latest in a series of judgements in proceedings concerning an application for disclosure of documents comprising details of his alleged torture while held captive in Pakistan and Morocco (19). The question before the Court concerned whether several paragraphs in one of their earlier Judgements could be disclosed to the public. The paragraphs contain summaries of classified material that go towards the veracity of Mohamed’s claims. The paragraphs may well provide for the public crucial evidence that Binyam has been tortured. The Foreign Secretary opposes this disclosure for the proposed harm it may cause to our national security through the implications for intelligence sharing with the United States. On Friday, the Judges ruled that the paragraphs be made public.

Doing the rounds of the evening television studios, the Foreign Secretary announced that the Government would appeal the Judgement in the strongest terms. Is it an omen that this happened to be on the same day that the Supreme Court had its state opening? National Security v. Human Rights and Freedom of Information, through the prism of British complicity in torture: if this isn’t a matter of public significance, what is? Were the case to go all the way to the Supreme Court, it would be argued in the full glare of the public and media. By the time it got there, could it be that submissions and preliminary documentation would be available to download, and the argument viewable to anyone with an internet connection? The case, like innumerable future others, would certainly be one to watch. It is the great promise of the Supreme Court that we will be able to do just that.

Notes

1) This is the conclusion of Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Politics & Government at the University of Oxford, and author of The New British Constitution, as expressed on Tristram Hunt’s documentary ‘The Separation of Powers’, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 4 October 2009. 
2) Supreme Success, Standpoint, 2 October 2009
3) Q&A: UK Supreme Court, BBC News, 30 September 2009. Joshua Rozenberg cites the figure £77 million, including the costs of building a replacement Court for those proceedings that otherwise would have been taking place in the building. Britain’s new Supreme Court, TLS, 2 September 2009. As the BBC reports, the Ministry of Justice have estimated annual running costs as £13.5m.
4) Supreme Court emblems cost taxpayer £50k, Law Gazette, 10 September 2009
5) Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were locked up in our court, by Justice Albie Sachs, The Times, 1 October 2009
6) Fear over UK Supreme Court impact, by Joshua Rozenberg, BBC News, 8 September 2009
7) Speech to Legal Week Litigation Forum, by Jenny Rowe, 17 September 2009 (PDF)
8) What will it be like to report on the Supreme Court?, by Afua Hirsch, UKSC blog, 2 October 2009
9) Supreme Court website
10) TV cameras to capture new era for law lord, The Times, 10 September 2009
11) First UK Supreme Court case ‘a test case for the rule of law’, Justice press release (PDF)
12) As enumerated in the case summary available on the Court website.
13) The broadcast was streamed, and is still available at the C-Span website. The footage is introduced by a ten minute interview with Joshua Rozenberg.
14) Five things about the Supreme Court, BBC News, 1 October 2009
15) UK Supreme Court blog
16) What will it be like to report on the Supreme Court?, by Afua Hirsch, UKSC blog, 2 October 2009. In his C-Span interview, Rozenberg commented that in the case of A & Others, obtaining documents from the lawyers had been particularly frustrated by the inclusion in the case-papers of the otherwise anonymous appellant’s identities. The anonymity of appellants is a particular feature of the Court’s first term. Geoffrey Robertson was there at the hearing representing a number of media outlets seeking to lift the anonymity orders in respect of the appellants. ‘The Court’s first term docket,’ he complained to the Justices, ‘reads like alphabet soup’. (One anonymity order was lifted, in respect of an appellant known as ‘G’ – now revealed to be a Mohammed Al-Ghabra. The maintenance of the anonymity orders in respect of the others, A, K, M, Q and HAY, was subject to a hearing scheduled for 22 October, where judgement was reserved.) Following A & Others, the Court was to hear a case concerning B (a child), followed by I (a child), and then (this one takes the biscuit) ‘R (on the application of A) v B’. In total, of the 15 appeals in the Supreme Court’s first term, almost half concern parties whose name the media are banned from reporting.
17) The Baha Mousa Public Inquiry website
18) Also available for streaming: cases before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, and the Supreme Court of Canada. In fact, cases from the final week of the Law Lords’ final sitting in July of this year were made available on the Parliament website, as the committee reverted to the old tradition of sitting in the Lords’ parliamentary chamber.
19) This Judgement, of Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones can be found here (PDF). The first Judgement in the case, setting out a background to the case, can be found here. A report on the latest Judgement, by Richard Norton-Taylor can be found on the Guardian.

A review of any charity event is hamstrung from the start by the conflict between purpose and product. How can a production with such an ostensibly laudable rationale – to ‘honour those men and women who have fallen and to continue the strong tradition of artistic protest against the war’, whilst raising funds for the Mark Wright Project which helps ex-service men and women return to civilian life – be subject to robust critical scrutiny? Surely it would be better to simply heap praise on the people who ‘gave freely of their time’ to create something so worthy?

Well, not quite. Given the political character of the production, the obvious criterion by which to judge each of the various performances of music, poetry and drama that make up the show is its success in promoting the event’s implicit manifesto. Such an inflexible approach, however, neatly means neglecting to scrutinise this manifesto itself, and also ignores the potential of acts which don’t fit snugly with it. Yet, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that individual acts are always performances for both the intentions of the organisers, and the complicity of the audience, who have turned out, one can only assume, to enjoy a re-emphasis of views they already share.

Tickets for Eloquent Protest were eighteen pounds a piece. This was not a production aiming to change anyone’s minds; rather it successfully sold to an audience with the time, money and inclination to ‘come and see’. There is nothing particularly bad about this – the point of a charity event is to raise money, and money was certainly raised. But the driving idea of ‘artistic protest’ becomes problematic when equated with preaching to the choir – is the point simply to tell the audience, as Roy Bailey informed us mid-way through, that we are ‘not alone’?

Indeed, money-wise, the West End is a no brainer for this type of occasion, but wouldn’t artistic protest be better served in a location which attracts more than the liberals of central London? Organised anti-war protests have proliferated in recent decades, and using celebrities to ‘raise awareness’ has proven successful in drumming up financial support. However, for this particular event to really take off – which it certainly has the potential to do – it needs to not fall shy of connecting with broader audiences. If the organisers of Eloquent Protest believe in their own cant, they should confidently aim to reach and involve more than the West End.

For the moment, however.

Ben Griffin provided the first noteworthy act. The celebrated ex-SAS soldier who left the Army citing the illegalities of the Iraq invasion and US/Coalition tactics (though interestingly resisted the name of ‘conscientious objector’) read Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Willful Declaration’ in full. As Tony Benn later intoned, ‘it could very well have been about Iraq.’ The only lesson we learn is that we never learn. History repeats itself. Those who don’t know the past are condemned to… Yes. We know. But nobody was there to have their mind changed.

Griffin’s presence was particularly interesting because of the gag order issued by the law lords in March 2008 preventing him openly discussing his time in the SAS. Griffin was an outspoken critic of the Extreme Rendition programme that arose from the US/UK’s famed Special Relationship and saw, in Griffin’s words, ‘non-combatants… handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured.’ Bizarrely enough, until the gag order was issued, Griffin’s claims were receiving sustained criticism from many corners – the government actually validated his remarks by telling him to shut up.

What the gag order could not prevent was Griffin using the words of others for his own purpose – hence the timely re-enactment of an almost century old protest. Griffin gave an aggressive and erudite performance that, in its relocation of an historical event to an eerily resonant present tense, neatly underscored the necessity of the proceedings as they unfolded. It also highlighted the importance of unfolding them further afield.  More impotently, Janie Dee gave a reading of Dorothy Parker’s 1937 broadcast ‘In Valencia’, a short piece that spins a bitter chuckle out of a German bombing by viewing a dead kitten and broken doll atop some ruins as ‘ruthless enemies to fascism.’ This reading was mildly irritating as it emphasised uncomfortably the hand-wringing accompanying any event whose central premise is ‘War Is Bad.’

Yes. We know. Now what?

Sometimes the performances elicited energetic feelings of potential; which were sadly fleeting, stamped out by the ‘there’s nothing we can do…’ brigade. The organisers did their best to distract us, saying we had ‘added our voices’ to those clamouring for peace, but then – how do you clamour for peace? Universally? We did that, apparently. It didn’t work. If, as the inimitable Johnnie Fiori sang in her magnificent rendition, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, it isn’t going to come through the liberal elite gathering in an expensive West End theatre and saying ‘Ooh – isn’t it dreadful.’

A little later, the performance dabbled in more contentious territory as, after Hazel Roy had given a sidelong tribute to Dr David Kelly with Simon Armitage’s ‘Hand Washing Technique’, the comedy duo Shirley & Shirley came out wearing leotards. They proceeded, in a garish fusion of silent film and grand guignol, to produce foodstuffs of increasingly improbably sizes from their skimpy clothing, finishing their piece when one stuck a knife into the other’s head and ate her brains.

This was the first – and only – ambiguous piece, it was splendidly executed and made the audience – gulp – think, as they tried to key in the macabre antics of the Shirleys with the worthiness of their own intentions. It was a shame we didn’t see the Shirleys again, as their upskittling shenanigans had us laughing, then in true Brecht/Frisch style, asking ‘Why are we laughing at this; and why are we laughing at it here?’ They made us uncomfortable. As they should have. This was an anti-war protest attended by a lot of people – myself included – who had never fought in a war. Shouldn’t we feel uncomfortable? Isn’t that, to some extent, the point?

The most excruciatingly brutal moments came with Jason Isaacs’ readings of the letters of Private Cyrus Thatcher, a rifleman who died in Afghanistan earlier this year. Private Thatcher had, before leaving, written a note to his mother and hidden it in his house, then instructed a friend to inform his family of this should he be killed in action. Isaacs managed, somehow, to completely avoid any inclination towards mawkish sentimentality, and gave an enthusiastic performance that – whilst certainly not an impression of Private Thatcher – was not quite himself. The effect was devastating, of course, as any re-embodiment of what the media refers to as the ‘human cost’ of any conflict should be – the unknowable strangeness of war brought on those lucky enough to have avoided it by dragging the mundanities of their existences into the light and reminding them – us – that this, in fact, is what’s at stake. I challenge anyone who saw it to claim dry eyes. Mine were soaked.

Towards the end, Sam West returned to the stage and managed to excuse his earlier, bizarrely affected and overly eyebrowed performance of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’ with a seething, pressurised rant of Adrian Mitchell’s ‘To Whom It May Concern’. The poem’s structural tick of building the refrain each verse with images of graphic constriction and acquiescence, coupled with West’s expectorated delivery managed to accomplish the nigh impossible feat of making the sympathetic groaners and effusive me-too-ers sitting in the audience shut up and listen. And credit must go to him for that.

Act Two opened with Fiona MacDonald’s truly terrifying performance of Ivor Novello’s ‘Soldier Lad’. The Scottish mezzo-soprano has the unerring ability to command attention by simply standing still and looking angry. Before she’d started exercising her remarkable lungs, her bellicose comportment was enrapturing and when she got going it was like falling off a building – scary as hell, exhilarating, and you didn’t want it to stop. In fact, the second half was dominated by four very different and compelling musicians, including Roy Bailey, who accompanied Tony Benn in a twenty minute interlude of political avuncularity and folk songs.

Benn’s observations focused on Greenham Common, and the farcical nature of the prosecutions against the women involved in the CND protests for working to create a disturbance of the peace. Benn cited an unnamed defendant who argued her peaceful protests hardly compared to the proliferation of nuclear arms , which had the power to ‘destroy the world several times over.’ Here was an instance of eloquent protest, and Benn’s timely reminder of the potential power wielded by those with clear purpose and impetus once again cast our own comfortable West End event in a rather shabby light. Ours was not a protest; it was a celebration of protests – not a bad thing in its own right, but unless it somehow contributed to further similar events that could somehow evince a form of change, it would unfortunately remain an exhibition, a symposium – and this is not, should not be a function that either performance or protest strive towards.

Bailey followed these sentiments with a selection of well chosen and beautifully delivered protest songs, from the ragged and tenacious school of pub carousals and village halls, at one point wondering aloud whether sing alongs were ‘done’ in the Duke of Yorks theatre before shaking it off and enthusing us to join in regardless. His was a sardonic assurance – ‘the person next to you is dying to sing, but they won’t unless you so. So sing!’ Difficult to imagine a better way of saying it, really. We were also treated, during his songs, to the sight of Benn cheerfully banging his knees and singing along from his chair as he recognised and enjoyed the music being played.

Third musician to raise the roof was Reem Kelani, a Manchester-born Palestinian who sang a song based on the words of Mahmoud Darwish, a celebrated Palestinian poet. Coming in straight after Messrs Benn and Bailey, she elicited a laugh of disbelief from the audience when echoing Bailey’s invitation for us to sing along – the fact that she was singing in Arabic aside, this woman could do things with her voice I’d hitherto thought impossible. In contrast to the caged fury we’d got from Fiona MacDonald, Reem Kelani was a dervish, beating her drum, flailing at the air, and screeching and screaming through a beguilingly energetic rendition of what she told us was a ‘celebration of life.’

Fourth, finally, was American Johnnie Fiori, who followed a reading of Dr Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘Time to Break the Silence’ with a barnstorming version of Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’. Despite her breathtaking Aretha-esque delivery, there was an unavoidable irony to her selection: if it comes, if it’s still possible, and if we can ever agree on what the hell it should be, it won’t come through the hand-wringers and the back-slappers, and it sure as hell won’t come in the Duke of Yorks Theatre.

This was an admirable event, brought off with good intentions and impressive performances. Hopefully it’ll go on to have the success it deserves, and maybe eventually we’ll be able to see it somewhere it can be put to good use.

You may well think you’ve had your fill of grimy tower block girls, but fear not; this one is far more interesting. Meet Mia. She may be prolifically profane, sullen and en route to a residential unit, but a few moments in her presence suggests that despite her rough edges (an early spat with another girl is swiftly concluded with a nifty head butt) there lurks lost soul floundering furiously beneath. What might be mistaken for moodiness is more a frustration borne of circumstance; the mouthiness a mechanism borne from abrasive surroundings (and besides, her mother and younger sister are equally antagonistic). Although deemed a troubled teen by those around her, there’s no decisive reason for Mia’s isolation, as when gifted with an opportunity to engage with someone on a more humane level she is clearly (if tentatively) willing to connect on more agreeable terms.

Mia seeks release through dance, which she practises in an empty flat she’s gained sneaky access to. She’s not especially good, but that’s besides the point; it’s a positive, passionate element in what is otherwise a fairly frustrating existence. Her mother seems to have given up on her daughters, even though they’re hardly lost causes. Instead, Mia’s maternal figure concentrates on her own pleasure, which chiefly comes in the form of drinking and men. Communication with the offspring tends to focus on instructing them to either cease talking or leave the house. Later on Mia will be treated to the news that she was almost aborted; an appointment was made, and this unwanted child has been trouble ever since.

Trouble manifests on a more dangerous level when Mother’s new man (Michael Fassbender) arrives on the scene. He first presents himself, taught and topless, to Mia in the kitchen; the camera swooning over his wiry frame. Mia’s own appraisal is chiefly one of curiosity, but the sort best disguised as hostility. Fassbender dances with remarkable grace around a very fine and precarious line between loosely paternal amicability towards Mia and something altogether more adult. Without having to speak, Katie Jarvis conveys pitch perfect responses to the attentions and charms of this older man; when resting her head against his shoulder whilst he carries her to the car after cutting her foot, you can imagine the private bliss she must be feeling. At other times, it’s as simple as the way her eyes follow his movements.

These moments of the artfully unspoken are reminiscent of Samantha Morton’s mesmerising portrayal of the taciturn Morvern Callar. It’s the way that you’re left almost knowing what’s running through her mind, but often left wondering just that little bit — which is perhaps why it’s so easy to become totally absorbed in the life of a girl you’d normally cross the street to avoid; a feat all the more impressive for Javis’ lack of previous acting prowess. This may in part be due to Arnold’s cunning method of shooting chronologically and not revealing the whole script to the actors, leaving them to react as events unfold. This is clearest during the opening two thirds of the film, where the characters really do appear to just exist on the screen, reacting quite naturally to whatever befalls them. It is only during the closing chapters that we feel like we’re watching something with a preconceived plot, which is a shame, but doesn’t damage the earlier material beyond redemption.

My problem with Red Road (2006) was that very little happened for a long time, and then too much plot was crammed in at the end. Although Fish Tank doesn’t unfold in quite the same way, there remains that one turn too far. That aside, the remainder is largely quite naturalistic, as if Arnold has simply placed the characters before us and allowed events to unfold without too much plot to push them around. Along the way there are only one or two very minor snags (yes, those horse interludes) that look a bit contrived, but overall the tone is perfectly unforced in a way that draws you in and holds your attention effortlessly.

Despite the likes of certain critics (such as he from my local newspaper, who cites Mia’s life as ‘unremittingly grim’) Fish Tank is not especially grim at all. Yes, people are overly fond of jagged confrontation, tracksuits and alcohol inspired glee, but these things do not a grim life make. In a Sight and Sound interview, Arnold expresses her disappointment at such glib commentary, explaining how she sees estates as being quite interesting places: ‘They’re full of people, they’re full of life […] People are Cannes kept asking me about the grim estates and I thought, ugh, I don’t mean that. I tried not to mean that.’* And to this end, the cinematography does reflect a somewhat less dreary perspective; the use of light lends an airy feel to Mia’s landscape that plays against the more confining aspects of her life. There’s also the fantastic view to be appreciated from a tower block’s heady heights, the quiet countryside and subdued scrubland; it may not be a tourist board’s dream, but there is a gentle beauty that is hard to overlook.

It is the pleasing photography which distances Arnold from all those Loachian allusions; she is not the next Loach, nor should she aspire to be. Her technique does lend itself to Realism in the immediacy that she translates to the screen; we are drawn right into Mia’s life as events unfold before us. Both Jarvis and Fassbender are supremely convincing in their portrayal, which is what makes the tension between them so palpable and their encounters so uncomfortable to endure. Arnold is a master of unease, and is committed to following her characters right into their transgressive moments; I defy anyone to watch this film without wanting to look away. Squirming would appear to be part of the Arnold experience, but the grit is somewhat pivotal and without such scenes the film would perhaps feel lacking and a bit feeble.

If you’re looking for something that skirts closer to the bleak notion of tower block living, recall, if you can, Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever (2002): his female protagonist inhabits a much gloomier crowd of tower blocks, is abandoned by her mother and shunted off to a dirty bedsit without electricity, food, or money. Too impoverished for the luxury of lager, Lilya’s highs are gleaned from glue fumes, although she is fortunate enough to find a companion amongst the rubble. Prostitution, rape and trafficking follow. (Incidentally, Moodysson claims the film is meant to be about the endurance of human spirit, but the fact that our heroine’s otherwise impressive attempts to escape her unfortunate fate dissipate at the moment of escape undermines this sentiment). Mia, though without the same level of hardship as poor Lilya, has a similar resilient energy, making her an exhilarating force to follow. Even if you don’t feel moved to like her, you’d be hard pressed not to concede some respect for her gusto; she keeps moving, even if not always in the best direction. Push this girl, and she will push, fight and head butt you back.

*Snipped from page 17 of the October 09 issue of Sight & Sound

A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta is Paul Theroux’s 47th book. In it he resurrects material only recently laid to rest following his trilogy of novellas, The Elephanta Suite. Both books focus on Americans in India, looking with a critical eye at the attempts made by travellers and ex-pats to engage with a culture they do not fully respect or understand. The Elephanta Suite was not well-received: Theroux’s take on India was called ‘one-sided’; he was accused of using tired narrative devices to tell his story; and some found the erotic elements of the novellas unpalatable. A Dead Hand unfortunately suffers from many of the same ills.

Our protagonist and narrator (referred to by name only in the jacket blurb), Jerry Delfont, is a travel writer – a magazine journalist, to be exact – facing a mini mid-life crisis. Loitering in Calcutta without a commission, his only labour the occasional lecture for ex-pats organised by a friend at the American embassy, he feels impotent and humiliated, incapable of writing. A hopeless flirtation with a highly eligible young Indian woman only increases his sense of self-loathing. 

It is only the arrival of a letter from the intriguing and beautiful Merrill Unger, a widowed American philanthropist living in Calcutta, that shakes him from his languor. She has a mystery she needs help solving and although Delfont has trouble understanding why he has been chosen for such a task, he agrees to make some enquiries.

What follows is a detective story of moderate excitement value, as Delfont investigates the mysterious appearance of a corpse in the seedy hotel room of a friend of Mrs Unger’s son. The mystery itself is well handled. Theroux fills his novel with inexplicably apoplectic hotel managers, moustachioed police chiefs and clandestine meetings in overgrown cemeteries. Rife with cliché in just the right way, A Dead Hand will please fans of the detective thriller. Its characters are two-dimensional, but with a rollicking story to follow, who cares?

Where it disappoints is in all the material surrounding this plot, which is lazily written, extremely baggy in places and agonisingly repetitive. The novel feels decidedly rushed – unsurprising given the fact that it is his third published work in three years, following Ghost Train to the Eastern Star last year and The Elephanta Suite the year before that – and a vigorous round of editing and perhaps a redraft wouldn’t have gone amiss here. It also smacks of cynicism, one of the clearest examples of which is the appearance of a travel writer named Paul Theroux. Now, Theroux is known for including versions of himself in his novels, so his cameo in A Dead Hand shouldn’t be entirely surprising. But whereas in his other work such autobiographical portraits serve to further the plot in some way, the fictional Paul Theroux in A Dead Hand is merely there to give the real-life writer the opportunity to take part in some literary navel-gazing.

As our protagonist follows up leads his relationship with Mrs Unger develops until his feelings for her become what can only be described as obsessive. ‘Yet she existed within me. She had insinuated herself there, her spirit lived inside me’ (p88). Theroux does very little in terms of character-development with the widow, so we have to take Delfont’s devotion for her mainly on trust. Her most attractive trait – and presumably the one that proves so alluring for Delfont – is her skill at tantric massage. Over the course of the novel we are treated to many pages on the hours she spends ‘interrogating [his] flesh with her fingers’ in the subterranean vault of her decaying Calcutta mansion (p85). These sexually charged scenarios verge on parody. A by-product of her devotion to tantrism, Mrs Unger’s dirty talk comprises of a large number of quasi-spiritual euphemisms that include the brilliant, ‘Pray with your mouth’. Delfont’s responses to such language suggest that Theroux is aware of the absurdity of this dialogue, but when our narrator uses lines like, ‘She used both hands, her clutching fingers, to spread her sex like a flower’ (p162), we are led to the assumption that in fact Theroux’s idea of what makes good erotica is not that far from Mrs Unger’s.

The passages in which India itself features are some of the best in the book, notwithstanding the narrow view that Theroux presents. Architectural decay, wafts of incense, grasping hands and dirty streets dominate the narrative landscape. ‘The tang of spices from the shop next door to the Hastings, the rattle and beep of cars jostling with pedicabs on the back lanes, the babble of human voices, mostly hawkers; the sense of life being lived outdoors, the city exposed’ (p32). Theroux’s India may not be the balanced and multi-faceted one we see in the work of novelists like Salman Rushdie on the one hand, or Vikram Seth on the other, but the effect his writing creates is still highly atmospheric and of value for that reason.

There is no disputing the fact that Theroux is a great writer, but even great writers need to put a little effort – and, one would hope, a little love – into their work. A Dead Hand has the potential to be a thrilling whodunnit-inspired story, a revealing commentary on ex-pat life and an enlightening glimpse into the mind of a world-weary travel writer, but instead it leaves one feeling that Theroux is just knocking them out until he can get to magic number 50.

I’ve spent an awful lot of this year singing. Not because I’ve got pretensions to anything professional – and for this the world should thank me – but because I had a baby in January. Despite the fact that like every other obnoxious middle class parent I’ve played him Bach, he’s no prodigy, so at nine months we’re still in the pre-speech stage of his existence. And music feels like a natural form of communication – using it I can make him laugh, teach him basic patterns, and on the odd blissful occasion settle him down to sleep.

But the singing is not necessary. Feeding him, changing his nappy, keeping him clean – these are all needed for the basic, animal process of keeping him alive, but music is not. Yet it feels like a very fundamental way of reaching out to him – instinctively it feels like the first way I am teaching him to be human. But how and why is, on the surface, unquantifiable.

In his book Musicophilia Oliver Sacks attempts to measure the importance of classical music in people’s lives by mapping its neurological impact. He tells the story of Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon who is struck by lightning while he is talking on a payphone. Previously only interested in rock music, a few weeks after his near-death experience, he starts to crave classical music, especially piano music by Chopin. His round-the-clock obsession with listening to this music, and composing his own doesn’t affect his job, but his marriage disintegrates.

We’re still at a point where neurological explanations seem to tell as much about what we don’t understand about the brain as what we do, but Sacks has an interesting theory. He has encountered other patients who have developed a greater sympathy for classical music in one case following the administration of drugs for brain seizures, and in another case following the diagnosis of a brain tumour. What links these cases, he believes, is a heightened connection between the perceptual part of the brain known as the temporal lobes, and the emotional part known as the limbic system.

So can it be boiled down to this? That those of us who like classical music today have a hotline between our emotional and perceptual equipment that those who like Dizzee Rascal don’t? Could it, perhaps, even be argued that an evolutionary change has occurred slowing the connection between the temporal lobes and the limbic system. And that’s why Chopin is out and Chipmunk is in?

Such biological reductivism is of course absurd. Sacks’ analysis contributes a piece of the jigsaw, but far from all of it. A more significant part is looking at the way we listen to classical music today. At the start of Alex Ross’s fantastic The Rest Is Noise, he talks about the premier of Richard Strauss’ Salome which caused a scandal because of its perceived combination of immorality and cacophony. Normally it would have been performed in Vienna, but this was deemed too controversial, so when it was performed on May 16 1906 it had been transplanted to Graz. In anticipation of the scandal, several members of Europe’s royal families were in attendance. It was, in other words, a news story, an international event, which ended happily for Strauss when it received a ten minute standing ovation. There are many similar moments in classical music’s history when key political figures were in attendance for the opening performance of a new work by a composer. It’s impossible to listen to a Shostakovich symphony without imagining Stalin sitting there – though there were moments like the performance of Symphony 8, where instead of celebrating the Russian progress in war, he emphasised war’s misery – where he too risked causing an international scandal.

Why doesn’t classical music speak for society like this any more? Maybe there are still modern composers, like Philip’s collaborator Thomas Ades, whose new compositions feel like events, but for better or for much much worse it’s not perceived to be of the same level as national interest as a Robbie Williams comeback.  Personally I think two things are responsible for classical music’s sidelining on the national stage. The first is electricity, which – more than anything else has revolutionised the way we listen to music.

When the Russian cosmonaut Gagarin became the first person to orbit the earth in 1961, he famously whistled Shostakovich’s song ‘The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows’. Radio had already made Shostakovich a composer of international importance, and now television was showing him to be a composer of interplanetary importance. There’s no small irony in the fact that the song was composed in 1951, the same year in which a white Cleveland disc-jockey Alan Freed started broadcasting black music to teenagers in a programme which he decided to call ‘Moondog Rock’n’Roll party, thereby naming a phenomenon which would soon eventually upstage classical music on both radio and television. Radio and television ripped formality from the listening experience – it allowed music to be listened to in the bar and the bedroom as much as in the concert hall. And rock music has undoubtedly benefited - most recent listening figures have shown that in the last quarter Radio 1 attracted 11.07 million listeners per week, while Radio 3 attracted 1.99 million. Even Classic FM, described by some as a rock’n’roll channel for classical music, only reaches 5 and a half million listeners per week. Add to this the statistics of iPod downloads, and listening to classical music increasingly seems like as niche a pursuit as collecting teabag covers.

Electricity has also allowed the kind of amplification that sends bolts through the body that even an orchestra playing Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ symphony cannot muster. I’ve tries to convert some people to classical music by taking them to the Proms – and yes, the Royal Albert Hall has dodgy acoustics, but one of the problems has clearly been that they don’t get the kind of Class A hit from the vibrations of a Mozart piano concerto that they do from The Killers. It’s a cliché to say we’re bombarded with sensual stimulation these days, but one result is that – though the emotional and perceptual systems in the brain have not evolved to become more disconnected, as I joked – our ears have been taught that they do need not to work so hard at decoding the emotions in a piece of music. Why listen carefully when sub-sonic technology means that not just your ears, but your whole body will end up vibrating to a song - and is this really a bad thing? Why seek out the sensuality in Messiaen, when you can have your bones well and truly rattled by Led Zeppelin?

I am going to shut up in a second, but before I do, to give my second reason about why modern classical music has been sidelined, I’m going to come full circle and go back to why I sing to my son. The things that bring us comfort early in life go on to become very potent devices later on – such as the story, as countless novelists and politicians have demonstrated, and the game of let’s pretend, as the theatre and film industries can attest. Oliver Sacks declares that ‘We may go to a play to learn about jealousy, betrayal, vengeance, love – but music, instrumental music, can tell us nothing of these.’ But he’s wrong. From those songs sung to us when we’re babies we learn that music plays a fundamental part in the narrative of our lives – and we use it again and again in those central narratives, when we’re falling in love, when we’re unhappy in love, when we’re celebrating, when we’re grieving, when we’re trying to rev ourselves up and when we’re trying to calm down. Yet if we’re falling in love to classical music – and I’m happy to be challenged on this – most of us reach back to another century, maybe to Liszt, possibly to a bit of sex and Chopin.

I believe that most modern composers, by waving goodbye to tonality, may be producing more intellectually stimulating output, but they have unplugged themselves from the songs and harmonies that make us respond most basically, and therefore most powerfully to music. True I feel a shiver go down my spine when I listen to Ligeti, but I’ll never fall in love to him. I’ll applaud Judith Weir’s harmonic experimentalism, but I’ll never have her music played at a loved one’s funeral.  This might sound banal, but it’s felt on a national level too. When the Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago, what was played at the most significant concert held in celebration? Not work by Stockhausen, though he was arguably the country’s most significant contemporary composer at the time, but Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

This debate asks ‘Why Does Listening to Music Matter?’ – and I’m aware that I’ve changed it to ‘Why Doesn’t Listening to Modern Classical Music Matter any more?’ I believe that like every art form, music should continue to provoke and explore different ways of getting under our skin, but though I would hate to have a world without dissonance, I believe that rock music stole classical music’s thunder when it took over the role of providing society’s songs and dances, not least by absorbing the power of electricity to provide the level of energy that an increasingly sex and technology obsessed society needed. For me asking ‘Why Does Listening to Music Matter?’, is another way of asking ‘Why Does Music Make Us Human?’ Personally no-one would cheer louder than I would if modern classical music started to provide that answer again, but until it does, I’m continuing to make my arguments for the richness of classical music with Schubert and Beethoven, and top up my twenty first century requirements with a little bit of Radiohead on the side.

The above was presented by Rachel Halliburton at the Battle of Ideas in London on 31 October 2009, at a debate on A cultured ear: why does listening to music matter?

Alan Ayckbourn is the theatrical equivalent of Green and Blacks chocolate: a guilty (albeit classy) pleasure that most critics enjoy consuming in the dark but few extol in public. I say it’s time to stop scoffing Ayckbourn in secret. He is an excellent playwright who recognises that it is in the tiny details that big characters are found, that it is through precise mechanics that catastrophic farce is constructed and that it is with indirection that the bigger, emotional moments are created. He is also a writer who could not write without the stage and one who uses its particular powers – double vision, vaudeville comedy, heightened realism – to bring his plays bursting and buzzing into life. 

Bedroom Farce, one of Ayckbourn’s earlier works, is constructed with typical precision and panache. We open on a stage that will play host to three bedrooms, four interlinking couples and one chaotic night. The couples in question span the relationship spectrum: Delia and Ernest, celebrating their umpteenth wedding anniversary, Malcolm and Kate, in the first flushes of love having just moved in together, Jan and Nick, stuck in a new but creaking marriage and Susannah and Trevor – young, in love and all over the place. It is the stuff that farcical dreams are made of and, with such a careful and clever structure, all Ayckbourn has to do is light the match (in this case, the spark is set off by an ill-advised kiss between incurable romantic Trevor and his old-flame Jan) and watch the catastrophic comedy blaze through the bedrooms.

As with all good writers of farce, it is when Ayckbourn keeps things small – when he focuses on the details - that his comedy works best. Perhaps this is why the oldest couple on stage, played with pin-point accuracy by Jane Asher and Nicholas Le Prevost, are the star players here. Theirs’ is a life so entrenched in routine that Ayckbourn only has to whisper disorder and their comedy is set spiralling into motion.

So, the play kicks off with a leaking roof that drives Le Prevost’s Ernest to the point of insanity as it seeps into every scene, every conversation and every waking moment of his tightly regimented life. Similarly, the play opens with Ernest and Delia sharing a snack of sardines on toast in bed and tracks its impact as, gradually, this unlikely act of spontaneity takes on epic proportions: ‘I feel as if I’m sleeping on board a herring trawler.’ Time and again, Ayckbourn places a ticking comic time bomb on-stage and lets it off with perfectly timed precision.

It is a pleasure to watch these tiny shifts take over this rigid couple’s life, as initially banal details take on inestimable importance and dwarf everything in sight. This attention to seemingly insignificant details calls to mind Monty Python’s mantra – that the best comedy is about making the huge things tiny and the tiny things, monumental. This is why their ‘Flying Circus’ featured ridiculously long sketches about spam and dead parrots, alongside short skits about death, god and all the ‘big’ stuff. 

This comic philosophy – making the little things big and visa versa - underpins every plot twist and character Ayckbourn devises. Le Prevost’s Ernest is a sublime example of this comic ethos: he is a huge character stuck in a tiny situation. He is also a person that reacts big but thinks little; a retired soldier whose life has become a clockwork existence, but who still has the energy of a man in battle. It is a character rippling with comic clashes – a wonderful mixture of the banal but noble, weak but blusteringly powerful, brash but laughably delicate. All this means Le Prevost can act huge, appear ridiculous and play for the laughs, but still remain true to his character. It means his reaction to being shifted into the spare room, as he screams out indignantly – ‘I shall probably wind up with marsh fever!’ – is bloody funny but also rings true.

The younger characters’ scenes don’t spark quite so well. Their comic scenarios are less organic than Delia and Ernest’s and it starts to feel like the characters are secondary to the comedy. This is certainly the case with ever-so-giddy couple Malcolm and Kate, whose deteriorating domestic bliss is funny but also a little trite. Both actors push their performances too hard: Williams’ good girl Kate comes across as too good to be true and Betts’ transition from beaming lover to scowling husband feels fast and slightly forced. 

Weedy couple Nick and Jan slightly overplay the comedy too and Tony Gardner, in particular, edges his character over into stereotype. Gardner’s bed-ridden Nick is so utterly wimpy that, whilst he might be good for a laugh, he is laughable too - this could’ve been a much more complicated, sympathetic role if played with a little more patience. Rachel Pickup and Orlando Seale are better as the flighty young couple who set off a domino of destruction in their wake but they have any easier job, since their extravagant, dramatic characters don’t develop much throughout the piece. 

Still, Ayckbourn’s play is too cunningly constructed to fall apart because of a few shaky performances. This is an excellently crafted piece, with stellar comic couple Asher and LePrevost showing just how good it can be when played with the right combination of depth, restraint and flair. The recent production of Norman Conquests at the Old Vic contained an even deeper ensemble cast and the result was a razor-sharp, close to the bone comedy, which has proved phenomenally successful. Peter Halls’ slightly overplayed production hasn’t quite hit these heights but, even from the summit below, it still makes for damn good viewing. 

Till 28 November 2009