Coinciding with the theatrical release of Tom DiCillo’s well received documentary, When You’re Strange, Idea Generation and Morrison Hotel Gallery recently showcased the insightful photography of Bobby Klein, Henry Diltz, Joel Brodsky and Ken Regan covering The Doors and their enigmatic lead singer Jim Morrison; from their first, self-titled, album in 1966 until 1970’s Morrison Hotel.

The Doors, formed in 1965, captured the rawness and energy of California’s baby boom generation. The psychedelic movement’s liberal attitude towards sex and drugs quickly caught the attention of the police, rallied by public concern over the ‘corruption of the youth’. This and The Doors’ controversial music and performances saw them targeted; promoters would avoid them and venues declined them, despite their appeal.

Visitors to the exhibition were greeted by Joel Brodsky’s renowned ‘Young Lion’ (1967) photos. Brodsky captures a shirtless, drunken Morrison full of youthful ardour and messianic grandeur. Brodsky and Morrison’s best known picture, featured on the cover of the 1985 The Best of The Doors, defines the cult of Jim Morrison that exploded following his 1971 death. Subsequent merchandising has seen the defining image regularly reproduced.

Jim Morrison, NYC 1967 I, Joel Brodsky

‘There really hasn’t been a major male sex symbol since James Dean died and Marlon Brando got a paunch. Dylan is more of a cerebral heart throb and The Beatles have always been too cute to be deeply sexy. Now comes along Jim Morrison of The Doors. If my antennae are right, he could be the biggest thing to grab the mass libido in a very long time. I have never seen such an animalistic response from so many different kinds of women.’
Howard Smith, Village Voice, 1969

Bobby Klein, The Doors’ first professionally hired photographer, shot the band’s early publicity shots across California. The iconic Bronson Caves, Redwood forests, San Francisco Bay and Venice beach inspire the folk ascetic the band promoted as they and their listeners searched for something new to inspire them.

Life Preservers, 1967, Henry Diltz

‘Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.’
Jim Morrison

Henry Diltz profound photos are a result of his involvement in the psychedelic era that defined 1960s California. As a founding member of the Modern Folk Quartet, Diltz was easily submerged in the world of music and his friendship with The Doors provided intimate candid shots. Despite Diltz lack of formal training his documentary-style photos effectively penetrate the band’s characters as they honestly interact with their surroundings.

The Doors, Los Angeles, CA 1969, Bobby Klein

‘We went into the bar and had a beer and started talking to the local guys. Jim really liked to hear them talk about their life story because he was a writer and a poet and he was very interested in hearing people. I always use the work “bemused”. Jim was bemused. He was quiet; as an observer and a poet, he would drink it all in.’
Henry Diltz

The Doors: When You’re Strange showed well-known and beautiful prints of one of the world’s most iconic bands alongside lesser known archives and previously unseen contact sheets taken over the decade the band were together. Both Diltz and Brodsky capture the band at their most intimate.

Run over

The mountains of words which have been written on Andy Warhol rival the supermarket stacks of the soup cans which, via his paintings of them, catapulted him to fame. It’s a challenge for anyone to add anything to this dazzling display of Warholia. How well does this writer succeed?

Indiana - a NewYork art critic (and novelist, playwright, actor and film historian) – takes us through familiar Warhol territory: the poor boy from Pittsburgh’s childhood sickness and tantrums, exposure to the visual delights of Catholicism and pre-war film stars, the saturday morning drawing classes at the Carnegie Museum. He shows us Warhol as he studied at the School of Fine Arts at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Technical Institute, followed by a successful move to NewYork where the ‘effeminate’ style and content of his work didn’t hinder his rise as a commercial illustrator for magazines such as Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, McCall’s and Vanity Fair.

But Warhol wanted more: success as an artist. However, entry into the upper reaches of the NewYork gallery scene - at that time dominated by Abstract Expressionism – was denied him: the ‘frivolous’ and ‘homoerotic’ content of his non-commercial work saw to that. The nascent Pop Art movement offered a way into the public eye. Warhol experimented with black and white paintings of subjects such as telephone ads and Coke bottles, but it would be his 1962 depictions of Campbell’s soup cans which would be the launch-pad for his fame: and which are the fulcrom of this book. For- when the cans were on display at Ivan Karp’s Ferus Gallery in LosAngeles in that year - a photo of Warhol signing the real thing in a supermarket was picked-up by the Associated Press: wired round the world, it would initiate Warhol’s fame.

So it is to them that Indiana devotes much examination, not only to the mechanics of how Warhol did the paintings, but also the inner meanings behind the artist’s choice of subjectmatter. And this is where Indiana’s examination veers dangerously towards Pseuds’ Corner. After discoursing on the consumerism of 1950s America and the sense that some people both loved and feared it, he regards Warhol’s cans as being ‘impeccably unblemished examples’ of ‘the previous decade’s unbearable conformism, emblems of the social and political heterodoxy spreading through American society’. They ‘transmuted the banality of a specific, familiar object into a wink of nonconformity’. ‘The Soup Can effect was not to rescue American banalities from banality, but to give banality itself value’.

How valid an interpretation of Warhol’s work is this? As Indiana reminds us, Warhol upsetother artists because he wasn’t struggling with inner demons when he produced his work; he painted ordinary things that he happened to like in an easy style. And it’s difficult not to feel that this is why Indiana seems upset by Warhol’s work - and success: any work that doesn’t have a Romantic artist forcing it out of his tortured consciousness is somehow invalid. But whilst Pop Art may have been loaded with varying degrees of well-meant pretentious theory by academics, at heart it is straightforward representational art which gives people something which they understand: and that is what they want to see. This is the key to Warhol’s soup can success.

But such work represents no theory, and that is something which - since the inception of Modernism - critics have been lost without. Lackof theory equals lack of seriousness. And lack of seriousness equals lack of good (that is, art world approved) taste. Perhaps this is why - when discussing Warhol’s later life - Indiana is sniffy about the (undoubtedly) poisonous relationships and atmosphere of Warhol’s Factory (but since when have the majority of artistic groupies’ gatherings been known as centres of love and goodness?), and positively old-maidish about the star-studded bitchiness of Warhol’s Diaries (‘nauseating and almost unbearable’), a view that makes one wonder how Indiana would cope with the infinitely tougher meat on offer in those of Evelyn Waugh and James Lees-Milne. Surely the Diaries have value as they give a picture of celebrity culture where - unlike today – fame was bestowed as a result of either possessing a certain inherited social standing or having achieved it via hard work in the creative/media world.

Indiana regards Warhol as having contributed to the socio-economic transformation of New York in the 1980s which (supposedly) led to a dearth of talent in the city (fans of Lady Gaga - who honed her act there and who has acknowledged her debt to Warhol - might have something to say about that. And glam rockers, punks, new romantics and today’s more extreme street-fashion club kids are arguably - all visible parts of Warhol’s artistic legacy). But, given the state of the city depicted in films such as French Connection (1971) and Taxi Driver (1976) a crackdown on crime and the mean streets which it inhabited was almost inevitable. The resurgence of free-market economics, with its accompanying real-estate growth, would complete the process.

Indiana is valuable in filling-inbackground details of America’s art scene during the Cold War era, givingus an eye-opening view of the 1950s American establishment’s artistic fears and censorship. Works by writers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, and Mickey Spillane were banished from United States Information Agency and armed forces’ libraries. Not everyone shared this repressive outlook. President Eisenhower endorsed a more liberal view of the arts (‘As long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be a healthy controversy and progress in art,’ he declared in 1954). Art could be used as vehicle for promoting American values. Indiana points-out the links between the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)and CIA propaganda work - many MoMA trustees, consultants and committee chairmen were involved – as well as the Agency’s clandestine funding of publications such as Encounter. He also reminds us that two of Warhol’s fellow Pop Artists - Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns- were gay, but discreetly so and didn’t like him, feeling him to be ‘too swish’. (Indiana suggests that closeted gays like Rauschenberg and Johns feared the queeny Warhol would draw attention to their own ‘“umanly” traits’, but one also wonders whether they suffered from the gay scene’s perennial little dirty secret, a misogynistic dislike of effeminacy.)

The motivation for Warhol’s work continues to be a mystery. Was he a success-hungry kid who wanted to escape the poverty of Pittsburgh by making fun of the glamour of American life, or did he simply love his nation’s gaudiness and want to celebrate it? Did his Catholic upbringing - he remained a faithful church-goer until his death - cause him to see art, not as a substitute for religion but rather as a transient toy? Did he use his lack of seriousness - the holy fool was a standard character from the Eastern Europe from which his parents had emigrated – as a way to mock artistic pretentiousness? Part of him liked anonymity, and he probably enjoyed the confusion his work inspired. Famously, Warhol said little about himself to the media. This brings us back to the pivotal point of this book - his soup cans.

Were they a joke, or simply representational? Were they canned laughter, or did they do what they said on the tin, as it were - offer a straightforward form of (artistic) nourishment for the masses? The puzzle of Warhol may never be fully resolved, but Indiana gives us some more material from which we can try and draw our own conclusions - even though they may not be the ones that he has intended.

There comes a certain point in a young woman’s life, probably somewhere in her early to mid-twenties, when the place once occupied by Disney’s princesses is usurped by Hollywood’s sirens. Wide-eyed, white-toothed wholesomeness is no longer satisfactory. Allure takes over. Glamour gains a sexual edge. For the princess is fortunate: her material benefits – ballgowns, tiaras and the like – are bestowed upon her. She is privileged, yes, but she is merely fortunate. The mistress, however, is her own woman. Using her feminine assets, her desirability, as a stranglehold over slack-jawed men, she deserves her fineries of choice: shoes, champagne and such. She earns her keep – and she keeps her earnings long after each admirer departs.

Lorrie Moore’s Other Woman, Charlene – a creature most definitely worthy of capitalisation – remains anonymous and archetypal in Natalie Abrahami’s physical adaptation. She is a dream figure, one that has slipped from the silver screen into the streets of New York, as ethereal and unreal as a reflection in a department store window. Stepping into her (designer) shoes is a moment to be savoured. Taking the role in turn, each of the four female cast members slide slowly into her beige mac, flicking the wrist as it emerges from the sleeve and extending the arm in marvelling self-admiration. In the background, perhaps somewhere in their heads, there is a musical twinkle: the sort that marks the silver stars and magic dust of Cinderella’s transformation.

Abrahami is careful to keep this figure a fantastical fiction. She exists only as enacted by four department store dollies, as does the married man for whom she falls head over high heels. He is a silent, shadowy and unsentimental presence, always cradling her from behind. Sharply turned out, but never showy, his eyes are always hidden beneath the tilt of his trilby. He oozes outward confidence, yet is always gentle with her. He is the epitome of eroticism, a perfect balance of danger and paternalism.

When these two fantasies collide, it’s the man that wins out. The casual nature of his desire outmanoeuvres her capitalisation of it. There is, it would seem, a remnant of the princess beneath the Other Woman. For all the excitement of the dashing cad and the rewards of laconic manipulation, there still exists a little girl longing to be loved, envious of the other Other Women, delicate, brittle and ultimately unsatisfied. She is caught in a paradox of empowerment and submission, left walking a boulevard of broken dreams, staring at her reflection in a rain-soaked department store window.

Perhaps Abrahami – following Moore’s lead, admittedly – comes perilously close to giving up on men altogether, sweeping us under the carpet as uncaring, capricious, lust-led bastards. There is, however, at least an undercurrent against the idealised form presented. That the women play the trilbied chap, always falling short of genuine masculinity, suggests the unrealistic impossibility of the Platonic construct.

At the risk of shattering anyone’s image of my own mysterious masculinity, I rather enjoyed How to be an Other Woman. It has the whimsical comfort factor of romance, the sort that draws you sofa-wards to pass a rainy afternoon in front of a classic film.

To do so, though, one must settle into it. One must overlook a certain lack of snap, because Abrahami’s production is a little reserved and, dare I say it, a bit British. It’s coy rather than sexy and a touch precious where it should be brassy. To borrow from Sex & the City (and further undermine my own masculine credentials), there’s too much Charlotte, not enough Samantha. More problematically, Abrahami replicates a familiar style rather than fully owning it, playing at where she ought to be playing straight or playing with. The instructional nature of Moore’s text remains intact, narrated as if stage directions, but it’s handled with a literalism that reduces it to tell and show stuff.

That’s not to suggest an absence of invention. As it warms up – maybe as we warm to it – the staging becomes more complex, bolder. Beige macs take over to become a walk-in closet and a marital bed; the ensemble knits together, multiplying the populace that surround the Other Woman with echoing gestures. It begins to capture the cyclone of the city and, gradually, the Other Woman seems a windswept little girl lost.

Of the uneven cast, Cath Whitefield demonstrates precisely how to multi-role, capturing the essence of a caricature with a deft precision and, more importantly, genuine commitment. Faye Castelow suits the Other Woman like a glass slipper: gamine, doe-eyed and full of delicate charm.

Enjoyable though it is, Abrahami’s production never really critiques Moore’s perspective. Despite locating the world in a daydream with Samal Blak’s shimmering, sleek design suggesting the a Vogue fashion shoot, Abrahami never punctures the bubble. She permits the material girl her aspirations and, even when the affair turns sour, there’s a nagging sense that the Other Woman ought dust herself down and try again. Perhaps there’s hope in that – the princess still searching for her prince – but there’s also an inevitability of repetition. The magnetism of the enigma remains reward in and of itself. Ensnare the man, become the Other Woman. It aspires to be treated like a princess with or without the happily ever after.

Is that problematic? I’m not sure it’s my place to say.

Till 2 October 2010

Anthony Neilson’s Stitching is a rather sick play. When it was first staged at the Edinburgh festival in 2002, it had members of the audience walking out, and last year the Maltese government banned it on grounds including blasphemy, obscenity and immorality. Built entirely of fragmented scenes between two lovers, Abby and Stu, the play moves around three different phases of their not-too-healthy relationship, and only reveals the correct order of the events at the end of a marathon of cruelty and gruesome details and sexual violence, passing through and touching upon prostitution, abortion, moral blackmail and particularly disturbing porn. From beginning to end, Neilson offers almost no relief from darkness and clenched fists, and even in the rare moments when he does, you are by now only wondering which unspeakable torture will be the price for these seconds of normality.

But having said all of this, Neilson is not simply out on a bloody and disturbing ride. There is most definitely theatrical method in his apparent madness, which makes his play more than just a gratuitous and indulgent exploration of the many ways to shock an audience. At the centre of all this horror is the death of a child, the play at its heart being a more powerful and perhaps less voyeuristic anticipation of the themes in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: guilt and redemption, incapacity for self-sacrifice, society’s changing take on parenthood, the roles we all play in our relationships. And so the difference between Stitching and, say, any episode of the TV series 24, is that the ticking bomb of what we don’t yet dare to imagine is, in this case, meant to do something to us, to force our faces very close to a human apocalypse. Which, though, will only happen if the production does justice to the text.

In the case of the version brought to Edinburgh by theatre company Sell a Door, unfortunately, this aspect of the play is failed in almost every possible direction. Protagonists David Ellis and Ally Thornton are, first of all and as it becomes immediately apparent, too young for these characters: not in the sense that actors of their age couldn’t possibly ever interpret Abby and Stu convincingly, but in the sense that they don’t. Their voices, their gestures, even their clothes speak in a not-yet-adult tongue. Throughout the fragments, the air between them, as well as their tone, their way of negotiating the space of the stage all remain invariably the same: not threatening, and not necessarily angry or desperate, mostly just annoyed, the way you would if the person you live with had misplaced the scissors, rather than if you were worried those scissors could end up in your chest. While the job they’re doing would be competent enough for a regular couple in a regular situation, this text demands a hint of psychosis and a viciousness which don’t seem to transpire here. The result is that we’re never really worried for Abby and Stu, there is never a point where it dawns on us that what could be seen as a normal, if dysfunctional relationship is in fact going to tread right into a black hole.

On top of this, there is the music. I’m sure the music was meant to do something very deliberate when it abruptly started and interrupted fragments of romantic Coldplay and of Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, scattering them among the scenes. Possibly, it was supposed to highlight how daily lives made up of daily details can become cradles of horror and reciprocal exploitation. And yes, the songs do come away from this production with a shade of added creepiness that I had never noticed before. But I remain none the wiser as to what the production should be taking from the songs. When Abby finally reveals the ultimate trick up her sleeve, what should have sent us shaking out of the room can only make us wince, and it’s really hard to even care.

Run over

Belt Up Theatre, resident company at York Theatre Royal, came to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with an ambitious project: taking over the attic of the C soco venue and creating an enchanted forest of many rooms, called The House Above, in which to represent their own immersive versions of several myths, tragedies, poems and classics and fairy tales. A total of nine new shows, to be delivered by sixteen partially overlapping actors. Many of these productions were interactive. At least one show, their ‘Octavia’, was family-friendly. All the plays were staged in elaborate settings, with plenty of design details and a refreshing imaginative energy, and a seeping, hard-to-resist enthusiasm. If there already was a buzz around Belt Up, this venture made it twice as loud. But would this extravaganza be able to become more than just that?

For their version of the Odyssey, written by Dominic J Allen, Belt Up used a small, enclosed room, and had three spirited and wiry actors playing all the roles of what they (de)constructed as a play within a play, staged by the actors and by us for the benefit of an American poet from New York, and set in a dystopian future. Which, put in so many words, wouldn’t appear to have much to do with Homer’s work - but yet it did, to a surprisingly deep extent given the short length of the adaptation (only just one hour) and the fact that it started with a young man in a red bathrobe distributing plastic balls to the audience. We were asked to be part of an intervention, to help this confused, desperate and lost American accept the reality of his situation. We were asked to be accessories to a conspiracy, to help the perhaps torturing, perhaps genuinely concerned couple who was leading the game by holding a gas mask filled with sedative, and hiding it from the protagonist. We were asked to play five of the six heads of the monster Scylla, to be convincingly crawling zombies, and to pour two shots of fake blood in the eyes of the bathrobe-clad guy so he could pretend to be Tiresias.

And while we played this game, the breakneck intensity of it all, the exhilaration and the taking part (always managed comfortably and confidently, so it never felt like a member of the audience had been elbowed on stage), never quite suffocated the meaning. By involving us and pushing us, Belt Up wasn’t after a circus, but an investigation and dismemberment of the original text. Do we like Ulysses or not? Is Ulysses the cunning one and the same with Odysseus the wise? What does it mean to come home, or to want to go home, and is any exile really and utterly involuntary? From Calypso to Circe to Penelope, from the descent to Hades to a nightmarish vision of a war that was any war, Allen consistently showed a fortunate relationship with Homer’s text, a love that managed to walk on the brink of reverence and shy veneration. Those who weren’t familiar with the characters of the poem might have missed out on some of the references, and possibly on certain layers of irony, but were still enabled to capture the spirit of this refreshing take on the main man, our man, ourselves and Ulysses.

In the adjoining room, with Alexander Wright’s version of Sophocles’ classical tragedy Antigone, there was quieter intimacy, but far less participation. In the mellow, excruciatingly nostalgic atmosphere of a wealthy garden, with continuous melancholic toasts being proposed by barefoot kids in cocktail attire, Antigone slowly morphed into a love story with a definite deco, Gatsby-ish touch, a Romeo and Juliet for the beautiful and damned. And like with Romeo and Juliet, Antigone’s decision to give sacred burial to her brother, who had been fighting against their city and had therefore become its official enemy, on top of being her suicide also turns into a conflict between generations, at the heart of which are different moral values, a change in emotional metabolism which makes the ones incomprehensible and hostile to the others. Not necessarily what Sophocles had in mind: Antigone and her siblings are Oedipus’s children, which goes a long way to explain the inescapable faults they carry around on their shoulders, and Wright also did away with the political dimension of the text, if understandably so; but interesting nonetheless.

There were songs, as well, which didn’t always seem necessary, accompanied by a piano and guitar that added to the public school feeling, and having taken away the higher and more culturally rooted reasons for Antigone’s insistence, it was at times hard not to find her slightly self-indulgent in her martyrdom. While we were asked to cover her in our contemporary psychology, we would have needed to recognise her ancient one in order to find her properly tragic, rather than simply unlucky and sad. Nevertheless, again thanks to a passionate cast and to a dedication to detail, the scene of Antigone’s death was cleverly staged and beautiful and touching, and redeemed the occasional superficiality of the adaptation.

Ultimately, Belt Up’s ambitious experiment didn’t turn out to be perfect or always on the mark, but it was remarkably close, and remarkably interesting. It will be even more interesting to see how this Edinburgh act will be followed next year.

Run over

Ilustrado, winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the debut novel by a young Filipino writer, Miguel Syjuco, begins with that most familiar of plot devices: a body in a river. In this case, the corpse is that of Crispin Salvador, a once-celebrated novelist in his native Philippines, who meets his end in the Hudson in New York. His death is most keenly felt by his student, enigmatically also called Miguel Syjuco, who returns to Manila to investigate the cause of Salvador’s death and find his teacher’s missing manuscript, which he hopes will restore Salvador’s reputation.

Despite the premise, Ilustrado is not a literary thriller. Instead, it has wider pretensions in both form and content. Through the narrative of Miguel’s journey home, Syjuco has attempted to write an all-encompassing state-of-the-nation novel. Thus, the travails of the Philippines’ young democracy and its grasping political class form a noisy background to Miguel’s quest. Syjuco’s Philippines is a thrusting, vibrant and populous place, ‘tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live’. It is also one of vast inequality, a country that in living memory has seen both dictatorship and popular revolution, and is struggling with the value that democracy puts on collective, rather than individual, benefit.

Observers will recognise the fluid allegiances of the novel’s politicians, powerful families, the priesthood and the media, where relationships are only as strong as the money behind them. The novel’s (fictional) president, Fernando V Estregan, is a thinly-veiled rendering of a former president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Not only does the timing of their administrations coincide, but like Macapagal Arroyo, Estregan bends the will of the Supreme Court to allow him to serve a second term. Similarly, the wealthy Changco family echo the real-life Lopez dynasty.  Therefore, the world of Ilustrado is an unsettling place to be: both recognisable and yet unmistakably foreign. The novel references everyone from Hans Blix to Paris Hilton, but alongside these are plausible inventions such Vita Nova, a singer and actress embroiled in a presidential sex scandal, and Wigberto Lakandula, a vigilante security guard turned national celebrity. 

Reinforcing this uncertainty is Syjuco’s use of form, which borrows from and modernises the epistolary novels of the 19th century. It consists of a series of short fragments from multiple sources, including extracts from Miguel’s part-written biography of Salvador, blog posts, newspaper editorials and letters, in addition to Miguel’s own first-person narration and an authorial third-person perspective. Traditionally, the advantage of this technique was the chance to offer multiple views on the same event (and thus cast doubt on the reliability on any or all of the characters). Here, Syjuco is making a different point: by frequently interrupting Miguel’s narrative, he is attempting to show the nature of the modern way of absorbing information, where facts come not from a single trusted source, but from everywhere, in real-time and without any guarantee of accuracy or reliability. It’s a technique that works well in such a lively setting as modern metro Manila.

The great problem with Syjuco’s novel is Salvador himself, who fails to become the equal of Miguel’s labours. An introductory essay promises a rumbustious figure, possessed of sufficient moral vigour to expose police brutality, but enough impish humour to pen an essay titled ‘It’s Hard to Love a Feminist’. Who would not want to resurrect a character that dates Belarussian ballerinas, writes satirical travel guides, upsets the literary community and flees to New York, supplementing his income by writing trashy thrillers? Unfortunately, the answer is us, as Salvador never truly comes to life. He is less the writer that ‘set Philippine letters alight and carried its luminescence to the rest of the world’ as Miguel promises, and more a self-indulgent hack-of-all trades. When Salvador is given his chance to speak directly – in fictionalised interviews with The Paris Review – he is intellectually obtuse. Worse, the extracts of his novels, the precious things that so inspire Miguel, are only occasionally diverting, and more often are simply boring.

Ironically, this is not to the detriment of Syjuco as a writer. He is remarkably adept at composing the bad genre novels that Salvador wrote at his lowest ebb, and those torturous interviews with The Paris Review are sufficiently pretentious to be convincing. But he fails to persuade the reader that Salvador was a great writer, leaving the impression that Miguel’s endeavours are misplaced.

Yet despite the failure of the central narrative, Syjuco has written a novel with much to admire. He successfully captures Miguel’s sense of dislocation when he returns to the Philippines from the US (‘I’m like a salmon coming home to spawn, at a point of origin so alien that it feels like my birth certificate was false’), and a scene in which a group of unbearably smug literary critics pull apart Salvador’s work is satire at its most delicious. It also has much to offer in its dissection of the Philippines, a country that is too rarely reported on. But it is also possible that the next corpse to be dragged from the Hudson will have more of a story to tell.

Across the stage of the Old Red Lion, yellow arrows point to a door labelled ‘Stage Right Exit.’ The way out is clearly marked. Whether anyone will use it is another thing altogether.

The same could be said of the city trader stood before us: a sensitive soul in a suit, a lamb in scapegoat’s clothing. In the midst of the big-bucks boom, anyone could have walked away and yet no one did. Why would they? With its £400,000 bonuses, its after-hours magnums, Porsches and girls denying their Essex roots before you’ve even asked, surely the trading floor beats the ‘dead time’ of bank telling or Marks & Spencer tilling, doesn’t it? You don’t even need to understand the economics. Felix Scott’s amicably, doltish self-starter hasn’t the foggiest what those around him mean when they start using ‘words like crash and recession’. That’s no bother, he’s just got to buy in, keep his head down and follow the first rule of trading: don’t lose money.

There’s a lot going on in Nicholas Pierpan’s monologue, which dissects the seduction of the city with surgical precision. He paints a vivid picture of contemporary London, twisting it from utopian moments of sunshine and sweethearts to a droid-filled dystopia inhabited by identikit individuals. No one really likes each other here; no meaningful common ground is shared. Hollow laughter rings out, bloated one-upmanship bounces around. Deloitte becomes ‘a human battery farm’, herding its workforce up to Leicester for a colleague’s funeral. This pack mentality is underpinned by a dog eat dog culture. Just as in the morality tale that provides Pierpan’s title, in which a town goes mad beneath a contagious downpour, the insane lead the insane. To survive, let alone to thrive, the sane must catch the bug. In Pierpan’s eyes, the city is infectious.

That sane man is our eyes on this world. But he only seems sane because of his candour. Thanks to Alison McDowall’s intelligent set, which shows us a backstage area with double doors leading to an office (that budget constraints leave too shabby by half), we know that Scott is not presenting the public face of this anonymous trader. He admits as much; that he laughs along at their jokes; that he bluffs and showboats with the worst of them. Here, however, he is very much a whistleblower.

The thing about whistleblowers is that their revelations lose force with hindsight. Come 1913, any old fool could identify the Titanic’s susceptibility to icebergs. So it is with Pierpan’s text: we already know the ills of greed. (Even the coffee shop used by the traders is called Mammon.) Dominic Savage’s brilliant television drama Freefall told us, Lucy Prebble’s Enron told us, thelondonpaper’s City Boy told us.

That turns the stage into, if not exactly the stocks (Scott’s character is too sympathetically drawn for that), then certainly a public tribunal. There is a touch too much self-pity and self-loathing about Scott, a sheepishness that appears too early. We know that it’s going to burst, Scott can’t afford to. From its outset, The Maddening Rain is an apology. Its tail is firmly between its legs.

However, that shouldn’t take away from Scott’s formidable handling of the narrative itself. Even if he doesn’t feel entirely real, you’re hanging off every word of Pierpan’s well-constructed tale, eager for it to unravel in spite of its archetypes: the wideboys and wizzkids sat side by side, the letches and lost loves, the blue and white collars. Credit must be shared with director Matthew Dunster, who handles a one man show like Nigella Lawson handles puddings. His touch is epicurean and enjoyable. What would be excessive with a larger cast, compliments the sparseness of the monologue form. Muted music, almost as if heard underwater, adds location; the sound of screeching tubes or landing airplanes, increasingly metallic and grating, suggests the impending crash; Emma Chapman’s ever-changing mood lighting, for all its tendency towards being prescriptive and unsubtle, keeps things visually interesting.

With new artistic directors Henry Filloux-Bennett, Stephen Makin and Kellie Spooner – seemingly a young and savvy bunch – replacing Helen Devine at the end of the month, they could do worse than set the bar with The Maddening Rain. It does exactly what Fringe theatre ought to be doing – albeit a bit late.

Till 18 September 2010

In a thought-provoking article in The Global Urbanist, the urban designer Mike Duff discusses How cities can embrace urban agriculture and weaken the grip of ‘big food’.. The issue of urban farming has been attracting much attention recently and Duff makes an appealing argument in favour of this form of agriculture. Duff realises that the main limitation to the growth of urban agriculture from a marginal activity into a significant source of food is its limited scale and therefore urges the loosening of regulation to allow the development of larger, more efficient urban farms capable of competing with large supermarkets. But portraying this important discussion as a David versus Goliath confrontation reveals the romanticised view of the world that drives support for urban farming today. This is no longer a discussion about cities or food but another symptom of our discontent with modernity.

A few months ago, the BBC screened the sublime film Requiem for Detroit? which powerfully captured the decline of the city from a major industrial centre into a post-industrial wasteland. The film provided a snapshot of the extent of land reclaimed by ‘nature’, a staggering area of 40sq miles out of the 139sq mile inner city. Since the national supermarket chains had long abandoned the inner city, thereby cutting off the supply of fresh produce, the locals turned to farming, thus sparking off a large-scale movement. The availability of land naturally facilitated this process.

Duff neatly sums up the issues facing Detroit as a result of the proliferation of urban agriculture. The question of regulation is an important one; the boundaries of what urban farming is are yet to be determined. Loss of taxation and revenue as a result of land reclassification is also a concern for city authorities. And lastly, the low land prices have attracted commercial interests aiming to profit from large scale urban farming operations. This of course has sparked some tensions with the purists among the community farming advocates.

Duff proposes the creation of a hybrid land use designation called ‘urban agricultural uses’ to overcome some of the emerging challenges and encourage the further expansion of urban farming. He’s looking beyond Detroit however and suggests that all cities should embrace this trend. In his view, it’s a ‘powerful tool to get urbanites engaged in shaping their cities’. But his failure to recognise the uniqueness of Detroit’s situation is very revealing of the mindset that drives the enthusiasm for urban farming. The residents of Detroit opted for this solution out of necessity not by choice. ‘Engagement in shaping their city’ is a very glamorous way of describing the retreat to subsistence in one of the largest cities in the US.

I don’t wish to come across as an opponent of urban farming; it’s definitely an enjoyable middle-class pursuit, but so is swinging, for people who like it. As far as I know, no one’s proposing that as a way to encourage citizens to engage in ‘shaping their cities’. Outside of Detroit, not many cities are sitting on large tracts of urban land that is available for urban agriculture. In fact, cities place a premium on land and allocate uses based on value as defined both socially and economically. Given that most developed countries have been consistently reducing the amount of land dedicated for agriculture, it is hard to justify losing valuable urban space to promote urban farming. In a city like London for example, where both Mr Duff and I live, there is a short supply of land available for residential developments, leaving many people in inadequate accommodation. There’s certainly no benefit to introducing further competition for valuable land in pursuit of an agrarian fantasy.

Much of the problem with the urban farming debate stems from the inability to understand the complexity of modern food supply systems and the failure to appreciate the benefits of intensive farming. For example, Duff suggests that it is possible for urban farms to compete with supermarkets because of the savings made in transporting the food. This chimes very well with the local food movement that also promotes the environmental advantages of locally produced food. But as Carnegie Mellon researchers Christopher L Weber and H Scott Matthews have shown, transportation represents only 11% of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer responsible for only 4%. In fact, 80% of food emissions are generated in the production phase. The reason of course is down to the efficiency of intensive farming. A similar logic applies to cost, that is why farmers abroad can produce food cheaper than it costs local suppliers.

In fact, the only way for urban agriculture in developed countries to achieve a significant level of production is through the introduction of subsidies. Even land use designation in urban areas is ultimately a form of subsidy. City authorities will have to offset the loss of earnings as a result of this designation with some services suffering consequently. Needless to say, the EU and the US already subsidise their agricultural sectors heavily, at the expense of farmers in the developing countries. Even with these subsidies in place, most European countries are seeing more and more land being withdrawn from agricultural use annually as production abroad continues to become more economical. The introduction of further subsidies in Western countries will ultimately hurt African farmers and increase real food costs in the West.

Duff contends that urban farming has a number of ‘economic, aesthetic, social, educational, health and open-space related benefits’. I find this argument very curious, much like with cycling, people are no longer capable of enjoying things for themselves, there has to be a host of benefits that could be quantified and assessed. The economic and social benefits are questionable to say the least, in fact some of the arguments I made above show that they would be disadvantageous. The aesthetic and educational benefits are subjective and are in any case satisfied through current arrangements like allotments and gardens. In terms of open space, urban farms actually compete with parks for space, and parks are definitely more valuable for city dwellers. Lastly, on health benefits, an urban farm must be the most expensive way of clearing a headache there is.

All of the above hypothetical benefits are however secondary to what seems to be Duff’s central point: the development of urban agriculture should be seen as a means to counter the influence of ‘big food’, the large supermarket chains and multinationals that supply most of the food in the West. This is not proposed in radical terms however, for Duff understands that ‘big food’ has a role to play in a ‘sustainable food system’. There are several popular contemporary ideas that propose tinkering with capitalism rather than overthrowing the system in favour of a fairer and more dynamic system. Duff’s vision of the role of urban agriculture follows a similar pattern.

It’s worth dwelling on the reasons for this antagonism to big business, and why it’s singled out for critique as if it were independent from the general development of capitalism. Duff argues that ’..we are grateful to ‘big shed’ food retailers for feeding us, and are therefore somewhat comfortable with the likes of Tesco, for example, having the largest property portfolio in the United Kingdom, capable of holding city planning authorities to ransom’. It’s very interesting to observe that in the context of discussing agriculture Duff would focus on Tesco’s property portfolio which is indeed the largest in value. If we look at land ownership by size, however, a different picture emerges.

The largest three estates in the UK are owned by the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster and the Duke of Cornwall. In fact, a third of all land in the UK is still owned by the aristocracy and traditional land gentry. Furthermore, the largest landowners still receive a big share of EU farming subsidies, with the Queen, Prince Charles and the Duke of Westminster among the recipients. The rest of the population is squashed into a small part of the country with no proper access to land: despite all the claims about the disappearing countryside only 9% of the area of the UK is urban. Compared to the large estates monopolising land in the UK, Tesco looks positively progressive!

Is Tesco ‘holding city planning authorities to ransom’? Not the way the UK planning system works. In fact, because of a combination of the specific requirements of the planning system and the state’s reluctance to provide any housing directly, Tesco has ended up as a major housing provider in the country. So in fact, many local councils rely on the likes of Tesco to meet their affordable housing requirements. Of course this is not an ideal situation, but it seems very strange in this context to protect the interests of large landowners and design an agricultural policy that targets some of the bodies that are actually providing houses and employment. Viewed in historic terms, this seems like an aristocratic attack on the bourgeoisie. Think I’m joking? Prince Charles is a big fan of urban agriculture, with good reason. He has large estates that he has every interest in keeping out of the reach of the masses.

Naturally the attempts to deal with such complex issues outside of their historical context are very problematic. Detroit’s plight for instance is that of rapid deindustrialisation and the lack of vision among American politicians who stood by and allowed the city to decline. But here precisely lies the historical paradox: replacing the industrial engine of the city’s economy with small-scale conventional farming is a step back in time. But industry has fallen out of favour in recent decades, and there’s very little appreciation of the value of industrialisation and the benefits of the prosperity that it brought about. Julien Temple, the director of Requiem for Detroit?, criticised ‘the greed-fuelled willingness of the auto barons to siphon up black workers from the American south to man their Metropolis-like assembly lines’. This is precisely the kind of comment that you would expect from an ignoramus with a simplistic understanding of history.

In his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams analysed thoroughly the role that economic factors played in the movement towards the abolition of slavery. Williams’ work complemented Karl Marx’s thesis that capitalism in its later stages had created the conditions for the abolition of slavery. Of course abolition meant that the freed slaves in the American South had been promoted to the ranks of the proletariat to be welcomed into a different form of exploitation, but nevertheless this was a significantly improved position. Industry was responsible for absorbing the freed slaves and their descendants among the ranks of the urban proletariat, a development that would create the conditions for the civil rights movement decades later and another step towards further emancipation.

In this light, Temple’s naivety seems astonishing. Had the black workers not been recruited into the industrial workforce, they would have been consigned to a subsistence existence as agricultural labourers in the South, and crucially denied the possibilities to organise themselves and push for more political rights. Of course the ‘auto barons’ did not recruit them out of the goodness of their hearts, but what capitalist ever did? Temple’s comment reveals an inability to appreciate the progressive potential of capitalism. Not only was it far superior to the systems that had come before, but it also unleashed a huge potential that all of humanity would benefit from. This is the point that Karl Marx drew our attention to: capitalism has showed what is possible, but it still had its limitations and inbuilt injustices. In other words, Karl Marx wanted to go further than capitalism had gone in liberating humanity and allowing it to fulfil its potential.

Instead, we are today offered visions of the future in which the industrial genie is placed firmly back in the bottle while arcadia is reintroduced. Urban agriculture is but one of a multitude of fashionable trends that ultimately mean accepting lower standards of life and squandering the benefits that industry brings about. Seen in the context of Detroit, even the acceptance of urban farms as anything but emergency measures means relegating its citizens to a lower status. It means that they have to accept the consequences of the neglect that the political classes are responsible for and get used to providing for themselves under the most basic of conditions. This is exactly the sort of defeatist attitude that suggested that New Orleans be abandoned after Katrina.

But in both cases this would have meant absolving the political classes of any responsibility and learning to live with diminished expectations. I like to think that the solution to Detroit’s problems is not to be founded in gardening manuals but in bolder political visions. A measure of how successful this will be is when the residents of Detroit are planting their gardens for fun, not out of need.

Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 film, I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) is probably the most divergent film I’ve ever watched in terms of the quality of its constituent parts. It is, as its reputation boasts, visually stunning, imaginative, innovative, and flat out great. But, in terms of its narrative, it is hackneyed, trite, and unimaginatively anti-American in its blatant agitprop, and laughably bad. And I say this fully aware of the Ugly Americanism that has wrought the communist fervour that still grips South America, as well as the Islamic Extremism, because the propagandising in the film has a seriously negative effect on the film, to the point that its labeling as ‘Commie kitsch’ by many of its detractors, and even some of its champions, is dead on.

The film was a joint Soviet-Cuban production, meant as blatant propaganda for the Communist cause, but Kalatozov’s film so rhapsodised Cuban sexuality and reveled so in its visuals, that even its backers as Mosfilms, the Soviet State film company, pulled it after a short distribution period. It was critically denounced both in Cuba and the Soviet Union. It was not until filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Francs Ford Coppola saw and championed it in 1995 that the film got its first taste of critical success in the West. The film was written by Enrique Pineda Barnet and Russian state poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the cinematography by Sergey Urusevsky, as mentioned, deserves all the plaudits it can muster. The acting is passable, at best, and wooden, stilted, and forced, most of the time. The film was shot in black and white, and used using color filters to exaggerate contrast, as well as using wide angle shots in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The film’s music is diegetic and not, but the one aspect of the film that is neither good not bad, overall; although in certain scenes the singing and music are wonderfully evocative of time and place.

The film very sketchily details the Cuban Revolution, under Fidel Castro, and the downfall of Fulgencio Batista, his predecessor. It is told in four tales, spread over the film’s 140 minute running time. While the DVD has nice, easily read golden subtitles, which stand out well against the black and white images, the print of the film, by Image Entertainment, retains the original Cuban narration, as well as the delayed Russian translation (spoken and layered over the Spanish track). Thus one gets an annoying triple whammy! The lone extra feature the DVD boasts is the film’s original theatrical trailer. The first tale follows a black prostitute named Betty, who is the object of affection of the rich American tourist class. One letch, in particular, not only coaxes her into bed, but basically demands he buy her crucifix. She lives in a shanty town with other blacks, and the depiction of Cuban racism is quite jarring. Of course, the Americans are all stereotypes, and even Betty’s boyfriend - a fruit dealer - is really a smuggler or drug dealer.

The second tale deals with an old man named Pedro, who works a cane field for his landlord, who sells out to United Fruit, and tells him to get off the land. In revenge, Pedro torches the field and his shack. The third tale is likely the most hagiographic, and least affecting. It follows young college rebels who seek martyrdom, and who get it via death. One, named Enrique, ponders assassinating a fat, local cop who corruptly has killed some of his friends (and interesting evokes a pose and stance that eerily foretells the assassination of JFK- conspiracy theorists have been slow to jump on this foreshadowing!). But, as the man frolics with his children, he cannot do it, and, naturally, during a march turned riot, is gunned down by the cop. The rabid anti-Americanism reaches its nadir near the start of this section, where a band of American sailors sing songs of the good ol’ USA, with lyrics only a Communist could invent) as they try to rape a girl named Gloria, they harass on the street. They are stopped only by a lone Communist student: Enrique the soon to be martyr.

The last tale follows a mountain farmer named Mariano who refuses to fight with the rebels until a government plane bombs his home and kills one of his four children. It ends with Mariano enthused and triumphant (the only of the four characters to so victor), and meeting up with a rebel soldier he had earlier chided, both of them admitting that they knew he would eventually join up. The film ends with the narrator proclaiming these men would go down in history, and, in one of the few truths the film’s message bears, she is right. Unfortunately, it was not the sort of history to be proud of, as the last five decades plus of Communist rule have left Cuba in a far worse position than it was, as Fidel Castro proved to be more corrupt and murderous than Batista, to the point one could even call Batista an amateur dictator compared to Castro.

It is interesting to compare I Am Cuba to a similarly themed film, made three years later, in Hungary, by Miklós Jancsó, called The Red And The White. While not a great film, that work, at least, shows a balance that lifts it above being blatant propaganda. Both sides, in that film, are shown as doing evil so routinely that, as they battle, the viewer almost forgets which side is which, for they truly become reprehensible mirror images. I Am Cuba’s good guys, on the other hand, are so good and so put upon, and its bad guys, American and Batistan, are so bad, that there is nothing that even lets any tension nor drama come into the film. Another film that compares to this, but far more favorably, is the great Henri-Georges Clouzot film, made about a decade earlier, The Wages Of Fear. That film’s anti-Americanism is far more subtle and artful, plus it has a great narrative, as well as well shot scenes. I Am Cuba is an interesting curio of a bygone era, and one wishes that more films would partake in the sheer visual joy this one exults in (such as the rapid back and forth of the camera during one dance scene, or the Fellini-like use of grotesques), but, for anyone other than a film enthusiast, there is little this film offers. Nonetheless, I am glad to have seen it, flaws and all, for it is a rare work whose historical import is enough to make its hit and miss art worthwhile. Take a hit.

Like James Cagney, Paul Muni was a Broadway star who made it big in Hollywood, during the early sound era. And, like Cagney, his breakthrough role was that of a gangster, in a Warner Brothers film. In Cagney’s case, it was in 1931’s The Public Enemy, and in Muni’s case it was a year later, in the original Scarface (yes, this was the film that the 1980s Al Pacino quasi-comedy was loosely based on). Later, that same year, Muni delivered his second powerhouse performance, in another black and white Warner Brothers social crime drama: I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, directed by Mervyn Leroy, who was coming off the successful Little Caesar, which made Edward G Robinson a star.

Of the stars of the Big Three Gangster films of that era, only Muni totally escaped the shadow of gangster typecasting, but that did not mean he could not do a crime drama about another subject entirely. But, before I move on, let me return to the Cagney comparison, for while their career trajectories toward stardom were fairly similar, they also succeeded because of another similarity: both men were great actors whose styles were far more ‘real’ than the overt acting styles that were carryovers from the silent days, and would not be relinquished until the 1950s, when, first Neo-Realism, then the New Wave, changed film forever. And this was, like Cagney, in large part to being a Broadway and Vaudeville star before hitting film. Another similarity the two actors shared was an ability to dominate the screen. Cagney did so with sheer brute magnetism. He was, despite any roles, always JIMMY CAGNEY! Muni, on the other hand, was a sort of Lon Chaney who could transcend horror genres. Muni’s face was like clay, whether in makeup or not, and one could read his characters’ thoughts just by watching his facial reactions and the glint in his eyes. Simply one of the best actors in film in any era, and a good quarter century ahead of the curve in acting, in terms of realism.

I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang is also a very good film, near-great. The only thing that holds it back from true greatness are a few plot holes and some weak acting from the supporting cast. It’s greatest quality, though, is how relevant and undated a film it is re: race, injustice, evil, society, the so-called ‘justice system,’ etc. The film starts off on a ship returning to America, bringing with it World War One veterans, including James Allen (Muni), a sergeant with dreams of becoming an engineer and ‘doing something’ with his life. Offered his old job back, he refuses it, and strikes out on the road, going through a number of jobs as a montage and map sequence charts his progress over the course of months and miles, from Boston to New Orleans to Wisconsin to the Deep South, where he finally hits a local flophouse in an unnamed state (the fact-based book the film was based on was set in Georgia, but Warner Brothers wanted to avoid conflict by leaving the state unnamed).

A fellow bunker at the flophouse tells him he can mooch a hamburger at a nearby diner, and while there, robs the place, forcing Allen, by gunpoint, to cooperate. The robber is shot dead, and when he sees the cops, Allen stupidly runs, thereby seemingly implicating himself. Here is the first gaping hole in the tale: the diner owner would have witnessed his being coerced and never let the cops arrest him. The real-life case that was based on this was not so clear-cut, but while this aids the drama, and begs for sympathy for Allen, it sacrifices the quality of realism and believability. A dumb ass judge (Berton Churchill, best known as Gatewood the banker, from John Ford’s Stagecoach) sentences him to ten years on a chain gang, and he spends month being brutalised, while plotting escape. Along the way, he makes some friends, such as an old convict named Bomber Wells (Edward Ellis), and the sidestories of a few minor characters come up. After coaxing a black prisoner to help make his ankle cuffs looser, he finally makes his escape, and, in a terrific scene, ends up breathing through a hollow reed in a pond, to fool his pursuers. He then makes his way to a big city, and reconnects with one of the paroled members of his chain gang, Barney Sykes, (Allen Jenkins), a pimp, who lets him stay the night, and offers him a freeby with one of his hookers. What’s notable is that in 1932, films were somewhat more lax about ‘morals’,’ due to the industry’s worries of trying to keep an audience. It wasn’t until 1934 that the Hays Code kicked in, and from then on most gangster and crime films had phony ‘uplifting’ endings.

From there, it’s on to Chicago, where years pass by with the shots of his ever increasing paycheck. The montages in this film are so effectively used it makes one wonder why this technique has gone out of style. The whole of the film is so tight and economical that, in its 92 minutes, it tells far more than most recent films twice its length. He also ends up being blackmailed into marriage by his landlady, Marie (Glenda Farrell) who opens a letter to him, from Allen’s preacher brother, Clint (Hale Hamilton) where he wrote of his chain gang past. She ends up being a spendthrift, boozer, and adulteress. Allen pleasures himself by falling in love with a nice woman, Helen (Helen Vinson), and begs Marie for a divorce, so he can marry Helen. He promises Marie almost all his money, but she refuses, and turns him in to the cops. The state of Chicago refuses to extradite him, though, but when the unnamed state guarantees him a pardon if her serves out 90 more days, he agrees, to put his past behind him. He soon finds out he was lied to. After 90 days his parole is denied, and his brother tells him he will be set free after a year, and then he’ll have the nation on his side, and that their family will work night and day for his release. Allen, at first, says, in a great moment, that it won’t be alright for anyone, and why should they have to work night and day since the authorities are far greater criminals, but then agrees. After a year of good behaviour, his parole is again denied, and this time he and Bomber steal a truck and escape by dynamiting the road and a bridge (a nice irony since Allen built bridges, in his Chicago job), although Bomber is shot dead.

Of course, this whole trope bares another plot hole: why would he go back, knowing how corrupt the chain gang system is? He had firsthand knowledge of how they initially railroaded him. As the old saying goes: screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me. The film then ends with another plot hole. Allen ends up spending a year on the road. If he has escaped, why not go back to Chicago with more tales of the corrupt chain gang system? Illinois officials would not have sent him back, after all, he was not kidnapped back to Georgia - he went voluntarily, and was lied to by public officials- itself a near crime. Also, he would now truly have the whole nation on his side. But, then we would not get the superb and dour ending. Allen makes his way back to Chicago, to visit Helen, and, at night, approaches her car. He is acting paranoid, and tells her he had to see her one last time before they say goodbye forever. She asks where he is going, and if he needs anything and will he write to her? He says no to all. He backs away into the dark of an alley, after he is frightened by a noise, as she asks him how he lives. In one of cinema’s greatest last words, he says, ‘I steal,’ as the words trail off into the night, and the film shows that, just as in 1939’s Warner Brothers’ John Garfield crime drama, They Made Me A Criminal, it really did.

The 92 minute film is shown in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio, and is part of a DVD seven pack of films from Warner Brothers called Controversial Classics. Its extra features include the original theatrical trailer, a musical short film called 20,000 Cheers For The Chain Gang, and an audio commentary on the film, by film historian Richard Jewell. It’s a solid, scene-specific commentary, but it is also a bit awkward for Jewell is never relaxed, and stilted, and sometimes seems like he’s too dependent upon his script. Jewell goes into depth about the real life man the film was based on, Robert Burns, who escaped from a Georgia chain gang, and compares the film to Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables. I would state that it also shares much in common with Cool Hand Luke, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, Orson Welles’ The Trial, and the television classic, The Prisoner.

The film has many good moments, such as when Allen tries to pawn his Medal Of Honor, only to have the shop owner show him many other such medals that no one wants. Another is in a barbershop, after his first escape, when Allen narrowly escapes recognition by a dimwit cop who describes him to the barber, as neither recognise he fits the description. A third is the release of Sykes, who hops a ride on the truck taking the casket of another prisoner for burial. First, one sees the unease with which he walks, as if he needs the chains and shackles to walk normally,. Then one sees him nonchalantly sit on the casket and strike a match to smoke. But, aside from its plot holes, there is some rather rancid acting, especially by Hale Hamilton, as Clint the preacher. Yes, he’s a stiff conservative, but his stiffness is a result of bad acting, not good acting portraying a stiff. Several other of the prisoners and guards are nearly as bad. The script, by Brown Holmes and Howard J Green is quite good - save for the plot holes, and lacks much of the melodrama that many other films of that era indulged in. The cinematography is unspectacular, save for the pre-film noir ending, and the music in the film is mostly diegetic.

But, as in most Cagney films, where he is the major reason to watch the film, for he dominates it, so does Muni dominate I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. It is a pre-Method exhibition of total immersion in the character, and a truly great performance. Yet, he does it in a far subtler, and far more realistic manner than Cagney does in his films. Nonetheless, the film is one of those rare films that is both ‘essential’ cinema viewing and highly political, and succeeds precisely because its politics is subservient to its art. So, even if you are not interested in Muni, old films, crime dramas, political films, nor films that have that noxious claim of a ‘social message,’ go see I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang because it has all that, well done, and yet rises above same. Well done.

Teenage Riot is a magic eye.
It’s a two-tone tie.
It’s a line-drawn bunny that seems like a duck.
It’s a rotating advertisement perfectly stuck.

Teenage Riot is two shows in one. What you see depends entirely on your angle of approach. It’s no surprise, then, that it has split opinion and been both vigorously championed and violently condemned. Look at it one way and you have a crass, confused, aggressive and illogical piece of fierce teenage rhetoric and anti-adult agitprop. Look at it another and you have a poignant expression of the failure and impossibility entailed by the teenage existence and experience. The first sees a tantrum thrown; the second sees a tantrum shown.

What we see is a white box in the middle of an empty stage, into which eight teenagers retreat and shut themselves away. As they enter one by one, each throws us a look that’s half accusatory and half apologetic. It’s a look that seems to say, ‘It’s come to this. Shame’.

The cube functions as a literal den: the sort of teenage bedroom that has ‘Adults F**k Off’ scratched on the door. But it also recalls the absolute insolubility between generations in terms of culture and communication. All that we see of the interior, its contents and inhabitants, is delivered to us in a mediatised form: filmed and project onto the front of the box. The film cleverly welded together such that the divide between live action and pre-recorded events is almost inconspicuous. Sometimes you know, sometimes you can’t be sure, sometimes you’re duped with clever stageplay.

Now, it strikes me that Teenage Riot was (in part, at least) born out of a particular discussion that surrounded Ontroerend Goed’s previous show performed by teenagers, Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, namely that the teenage performers were not speaking for themselves. In other words, the version of adolescence that they were acting out and referring to was actually imposed upon them by the older creative team. To a certain degree, it’s a fair cop: Once and For All… thrives on a certain nostalgia, but, personally, I never felt it a problem. It was a play. It had a process, like many plays. The teenagers were performing it. I recognised my teenage experience within it, as did others, as did – I believe – the cast themselves. I believed in it. They believed in it.

Here, the cast have control of what we see. Quite literally, they control they way in which they project themselves. The staging also serves as a neat device that throws up the mediatisation of the 2.0 world and user-generated content. Early on, one says: ‘We’re going to do whatever we want to’. No one, they insist repeatedly and vociferously, is putting words into their mouths or shaping their actions.  How one responds to Teenage Riot largely depends on whether one accepts that statement or not. The first time I watched Teenage Riot – in a room hot with anticipation and performances that probably rose to meet it – I didn’t buy it.

Mainly, I think, this was because the piece seemed to have forgotten the ambiguity and multiplicity of onstage reality. It seemed to have forgotten our predisposition to doubt. By setting out so consciously and deliberately to be authentic, it only raised the question of its own authenticity. Onstage, ‘This is real’ cannot but become ‘Is this real?’ So, the more Teenage Riot insisted on its veracity, the more I doubted it. Little wonder that when the piece says ‘We’re going to do whatever we want to’ (or, to put it more poetically, ‘I don’t got to do shit’), we become aware of the artificiality of the situation. After all, we know that their actions are preset and rehearsed, that this – live though it is – has been constructed, that it is not solely a product of this moment. We know that the camera has a set path. They can do whatever they want only within the context of a set text. They can show us what they want only insofar as they stick to what they have previously decided to show. We see the presence of an undisclosed process, about which we know nothing. We do not know how this material originated. We have no way of verifying their claim to total authorship. In fact, we start to suspect otherwise. We doubt.

Therefore, when the cast stand onstage and accuse the audience of all manner of sins – incidentally tarring us with a single brush in precisely the way that they reject our singular projection of the archetypal teenager onto each of them – I reacted against it. ‘You are not an example,’ they say, having pelted the images of certain audience members with tomatoes, ‘You are a warning’. ‘It’s not your problem,’ one of them says. ‘How dare they?’ I thought, ‘How dare they assume, not only that I don’t share some of these problems as a 25-year-old, but that I’m actually responsible for them?’ In fact, given my cynicism about the authorship of the piece, it felt to me as if the adults behind the piece were delivering a smug and sanctimonious set of accusations that implied their own superiority. (Rather hotheadly, I tweeted as much immediately afterwards.) ‘We work with teenagers. We make theatre,’ it seemed to say, ‘What do you do?’ I left seething.

After my tweet, I was asked to see the show again by Ontroerend Goed’s director Alexander Devriendt, and to take the teens at their word by accepting that they had control over the piece’s content. Watching in this way second time around, in a calmer auditorium that drew more level-headed performances, Teenage Riot became less about its riot and more about its teenagers. What the teenagers said, shouted and did sat behind the way in which they spoke, shouted and behaved. Rather than heeding their polemic and reacting against it on the basis of its flaws, I began to see its shortcomings as the focal point. In other words, rather than watching the show from or by the teenagers, I was watching the show about them: the tantrum shown, rather than the tantrum thrown.

After all, what hope of constructing a piercing social critique when, as one of the song lyrics runs, ‘I want almost everything’. Besides, as one of the boys says to camera with his back towards us, ‘What comes out of my mouth never seems to be what I think’.

What emerges is a picture of adolescent frustration that rings true. It is not so much what they try to provoke as that they try to provoke; not such much about understanding their inarticulate formation, as appreciating its inarticulacy. Their Teenage Riot is always pitched at the highest volume, it is all taken to excess. They rail against so much – the way in which teenagers are seen; the identities thrust upon them; the world in which they exist with its various pressures of appearance, sex and behaviour; the world that was created before they arrived, over which they had no say; their own state of ‘not a girl, not yet a women’ inadequacy – that their piece of theatre is inevitably toppled by its own scattergun density. It fails to communicate as a result of (to quote soundtrack’s the final song) ‘the fury in your head’. This is not a provocation, but a testimony to the teenage need to provoke and the impossibility of doing so.

Essentially, Belgian collective Ontroerend Goed have done a Duchamp. They have framed a piece of theatre and presented it as a living artefact. Unlike Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, however, the thing presented remains in the same context. There is no signification about its status. Presenting a piece of theatre – warts and all – in a theatre is like showing us a urinal on the wall of the Gents. How are we supposed to know to look differently?

Teenage Riot’s failure comes in not revealing the quotation marks that sit around the whole. There are two frames here. The first exists around the piece made by the teenagers, which, by existing on a stage, can be watched like any other piece of theatre, by seeking meaning in the same way. The second exists around this first frame, and it means that every action on stage carries a second layer of meaning: it matters more as an example of a statement, than as a statement in its own right. However, the outer frame does not enforce its presence and so it’s quite possible to watch Teenage Riot in accordance with the usual rules, the single-frame format, of conventional theatre. To do so, however, is to see Teenage Riot as I did first time around.

This begs a slightly different question of Ontroerend Goed. While it avoids accusations of manipulation, it perhaps raises the question of exploitation. After all, the company is using the actions and words of its teenage cast in a different way than the teenagers intend them. For those words and actions to function, the teenagers must believe that they are genuinely accusing the audience, when in fact they are testifying to themselves and their peers. Everything the cast are driving at seems undermined by its existence in inverted commas.

The picture is not quite as clean cut as all that, however. The boundaries are blurred. After all, the adult members of the company must be quite happy with (some of, if not all) the accusations being made, just as the teenagers must be quite happy to stand as examples of their own frustration. The cast let us know, quite frequently throughout the piece, how hard being a teenager today can be. That difficulty reflects rather badly on the world created by their elders. In those terms, the piece as much an accusation against the adults of Ontroerend Goed as it is the audience. We are all pilloried and vilified, but it is an easy argument to escape and counter. Teenage Riot is as much in the mind as it is outside of their control. The combination is combustible.

Perhaps that’s where the poignancy of their final split exists. After blaming and humiliating us, presenting some of our number onscreen and pelting their images with tomatoes, the teenagers split. Half return to the box, half enter the auditorium. They are each caught for a moment, some more indecisive than others: not wanting to lose the righteousness that senses the problems with the world, but wanting to escape the fury in their heads. As one girl suggests, even as an adult, ‘I’ll stay I’m as angry as a 14-year-old’. The tragedy is that we can’t have a happy medium. Either we exist in the box, struggling with our own frustrations, or we come to accept the wrongs for the sake of a quiet life.

Either we throw a tantrum or else we throw a towel.

Run over

Be careful what you wish for. For a while now, the cry has gone up for interactive theatre that allows true freedom. We have asked for more than a toy world, one with unlimited options where volition doesn’t bash up against perimeter fences. How can theatre that allows us agency avoid mollycoddling us? Can it treat us like unfettered adults?

101, a set of four interactive experiences created by recent graduate company Oneohone, commits to this boundlessness with immense integrity. Outside the performance space, in a room that functions more as briefing room than decompression chamber, we are each given a white sash that signifies our active involvement. Removing it removes one from the experience. Crucially, the performers have the same sashes and the same options. It is, we are told, as much ours to control as theirs and, therefore, the same safety procedures apply to both parties. This is, in no small way, a game between consenting adults.

Push against it and 101 moulds to fit. If you’re game, it says, so are we. Only, before long, it doesn’t feel like a game anymore.

The room into which we file for the encounter nicknamed My Own is a furnace of whooping cheers. It feels hot from the start and the temperature only rises. Stood in an awkward line, almost awaiting instructions, we are hauled out in turn to join two groups. It’s recognisably playground. Each of us co-opted into a team is greeted with ecstatic yells and backslapping cheer. ‘My brother,’ they say, looking earnestly into your eyes. Teams picked, the fire-stoking begins. Mantras are chanted, rituals are undergone. Something rises in your chest: an aggression noticeable when your teeth grit and your chest puffs. It’s far from nuanced – the situation is quickly recognisable and left more or less uninterrogated, serving almost as experiential literary criticism – but it carries you away.

Unless you check it. At a certain stage, the realisation fell that these statements I was shouting – ‘There is no revenge unless you surpass them’ or something to that effect – were ugly and empty. This rivalry, whipped up into a frenzy, was an empty one spun for rivalry’s sake and detached from original offences. We were footsoldiers recruited. Or rather conscripted. And so, sash still around my wrist, I stepped back. A conscientious objector, looking on but refusing to represent. Participating by refusing to participate.

At this point, two problems become clear. First, that moral retreat looks much like discomfort and – safety being very much on the company’s mind – an actor broke ranks to explain the rules of the sash.  Second – and far more problematic – the inauthenticity of the event. For all that I felt moved to intervene, to follow through my objection with a disruptive action, I did not. You are aware that this is not just your experience, but our experience. Who am I to intervene in the experience of other paying participants? They’ve come to see the company, not the heckler.

That means that interactive theatre is caught between two poles. If we play in the real – and 101 very much creeps that way, despite a surface level of fiction – we must be bounded by the status of constructed event. Unless, perhaps, we are lone audience members. If we play along with the fiction, the danger seems greater. Actors and performers come prepared. They have processes to aid commitment and immersion. For us, lacking the rehearsal period, commitment is more slippery and the fiction more fragile. Where it sweeps us away, we are not in control in the same way. We lack the techniques and triggers of the performers, who have built to this point and constructed a method of entry without abandon over time. Thus unprepared, we are either carried away with the fiction or ejected from it. To act is to exist in and embrace a state of liminality. It is to exist on the threshold of two worlds and that is a fine tightrope to tread. To do so requires training. This feels dangerous. Safe as a game constantly monitored, but dangerous beneath the surface, where it exists unchecked.

Run over

Blinded by Juno for his insistence that women fare better in the sexual pleasure stakes, Tiresias is bestowed with foresight by Jupiter. His pronouncement is of a future governed by war. Given Peter Bramley entrenches Ovid’s tales of transformation in the 1940s, Tiresias’s prediction seems somewhat workaday. All around him saunter trimly uniformed servicemen and, overhead, bombs whistle and sirens wail. Like, tell us something we don’t know, Tiresias…

Actually, the concept proves a rather neat fit, drawing attention to the seismic shift the world suffered in the wake of World War Two. The move towards postmodernism becomes a transformation bestowed both as punishment and a new enlightenment. Mainly though, it works because Bramley and his company of recent drama school graduates have fine-combed Ovid’s tales for parallels, the witty application of which frequently elucidates both myth and modern counterpart.

So, Cupid becomes a catapult-wielding evacuee and Narcissus a silver-screen star lost to the caress of the camera. Semele’s bovine transformation is marked with a gasmask, conjuring ideas of cattle packed together and heading towards slaughter. Aviation pioneers Daedalus and Icarus resemble both Biggles and the Wright brothers, all flight goggles and chocks away. This is a spritely and charming revue show, imbued with a ticklish soundtrack that borrows from Coward, Vera Lynn and the Boswell Sisters. Even the musical accompaniment is staged with witty smoothness. Drums are played by disembodied hands and cymbals crashed by casual passers-by.

While it flows efficiently, thanks to diligently executed transitions as four screens slide into positions to create all manner of landscapes, it can still stutter. You’re always aware of the process of application that must, at one point, have asked, ‘OK, how can we stage this?’ A greater sense of the overall and it might slip down smoother. As it is that overall boils down to a style, with which some of the cast seem more confident than others. The clipped voices and stilted etiquette lend a daintiness that occasionally risks it floating away like an untethered Zeppelin. Attempting to anchor, the company shoehorn a final environmental health warning, which fits Ovid’s themes better than it does their style.

Nonetheless, it’s a pleasurable, playful hour that works best when considered from all angles. Their retelling of Theseus and Ariadne, in which he becomes a comatose soldier, hits the spot in that regard, as a chorus of well-choreographed nurses tend to his injuries and dreamily swoon over what lies beneath the bandages. A bright concept is followed right through to satisfying staging with no trace of the token. More of that and Metamorphoses would emerge victorious.

Run over

All together now

This week on CW, Matt Trueman has more from the Edinburgh festivals, with an eclectic mix of narrative theatre and formal experimentation. Austin Williams considers the possibility of audience participation writ large in an investigation of David Cameron’s Big Society concept. Medical student Sabreen Maryam Ali laments the British public’s seeming inability to recognise progress. And Mark Napier reviews Jason Bell’s Englishman in New York exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

26 August 2010

The Big Society is being promoted as the flagship government policy even though no-one seems to have the first idea what it means. Commentator, Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian has described it as ‘incomprehensibly vague’. Government minister, Francis Maude is quoted as saying that it is ‘an idea, not a plan’ (1); while Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute says he isn’t sure if it’ll be a ‘Big Disappointment or a Big Bully’ (2). Whatever it is, it is now the central plank of government policy.

‘The Big Society’ is a bit like the phrase ‘sustainable development’ - nobody can really define it, but we kind of know what it means. The official website says: ‘The Big Society is a society in which we as individuals don’t feel small’ (3). Such weasel descriptions are deemed to be its strength. Co-founder, Nathaniel Wei says ‘For many of us the idea of Big Society can be confusing. This is not necessarily a bad thing’ (4). In essence, the premise (stated as a matter of incontrovertible fact) is that society has fallen apart and therefore we have to rebuild it? Iain Duncan Smith suggests that: ‘Instead of arguing about whether British society is broken, we as politicians should commit to a programme to fix it.’ (5) Back in 2007, David Cameron vowed to ‘fix Britain’s broken society’. It all sounds so reasonable. Social capital has fallen apart and we need a mechanism to mend it. Philip Blond, the self-styled architect of the Big Society, subtitled his book ‘How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It’.

But it is worth reflecting on Colonel Tim Collins’ maxim about Western responsibilities in Iraq: ‘If you break it, you fix it.’ When it comes to Britain’s role in the Middle East, many people can easily recognise that it is a little ironic - if not illegitimate - to argue that one can be instrumental in ‘breaking’ a country and then claim the moral authority to rectify it. Why is it then that so many more people are willing to accept the government’s Big Society agenda? Answer: because the government is purporting to step aside and let us sort it out for ourselves.

As we shall see, the state and its functionaries are still very nervous about it and may not be able to let go of the controls. Whichever way that the Big Society unfolds, it is worth remembering that the devil is not only in the detail, but also in the lack of detail.

The trick has been to suggest that Cameron, in order to maintain credibility in his manifesto commitment to fix Broken Britain is not going to fix it through government mandate, but will roll back the government’s involvement and hand power to the people. Apparently this shows that it is not ‘big government’, but ‘big society’. He wants ordinary people to be ‘your own boss, sack your MP, run your own school, own your own home, veto council tax rises, vote for your police, save your local pub or post office, and see how the government spends your money’. The rhetoric of people-power, local empowerment, double-devolution, etc genuinely sounds more radical when Cameron says it than when the previous Labour government said it. As a result, some left-wing critics have been baffled by it [just as they were confused when Boris Johnson described his bicycle share scheme as ‘a partially Communist experiment.’ (6)]

Motives

Prime Minister Cameron says that the country should be ‘inspired by the Big Society, not crushed by the effects of big government’ (7). He wants us all to ‘join the government of Britain’ (8) [as a point of information, surely that would be a very Big Government]. And he claims to recognise that ‘we need to turn government completely on its head.’ (9)

It is slightly ironic then, that Nat Wei, the founder of the Big Society was almost immediately enobled for his efforts, becoming Baron Wei and taking his seat in the Lords; and that the Minister for Civil Society charged with bringing these policies into effect is Nick Hurd MP, son of Douglas Hurd - also a Baron. Turning top down government on its head isn’t going to begin from the top down, it seems.

Some of the biggest criticism has come from commentators, especially those of the left, who have pointed out that the Big Society is a con. This is because, they say, it is merely an excuse for austerity cuts. This is hardly an earth-shattering criticism, especially since the fact that the Big Society agenda will result in public services on the cheap, hasn’t really been denied, even by the proponents of the policy.

As it happens, much of the Big Society agenda originated in New Labour’s policies on Sustainable Communities in 2002, or Robert Putnam’s much-praised essay on the decline of social capital first drafted in 1995 (10). In fact, Tessa Jowell, shadow Cabinet Office minister said of Cameron’s Big Society speech that it was ‘simply a brass-necked rebranding of programmes already put in place by a Labour government.’ (11) As we can see, the essence of the Big Society predates the recession, and so the driver for the Big Society seems not to have been - predominantly - a cost-cutting measure (although, such penny-pinching will undoubtedly benefit the government’s coffers while making the unemployed suffer). Instead, it seems that this is a mechanism to judge social order. And herein lies the problem.

The rhetorical drive of the Big Society agenda: to engage people, to build a sense of solidarity, to give them a sense of purpose is powerfully appealing and is something that many - on the left and right - have signally failed to do. So the charge of hypocrisy, or con-artistry, is either ‘sour grapes’ or ‘mea culpa’. However, while Cameron, Gove et al are happily rolling back the state from running schools and services, they seem intent on enlarging the state’s self-proclaimed new role ‘as an agitator for social renewal’ (12). To assess the agenda behind the Big Society, it’s worth scratching the surface of what is being presented: differentiating between Form and Content.

Take, for example, typical ‘criticism’ by the Economist that marries its moral contempt for ordinary people, with faux outrage: ‘The vomitous binge-drinking mainly by the young, the drug abuse and teenage pregnancy that are still higher than in most west European countries and the large proportion of single-parent families all tell a tale…(but t)he broken-Britain myth is worse than scaremongering. (13)

So let’s take a look at a couple of the big ideas on offer. Firstly, volunteerism. Cameron’s desire for ‘platoons’ of volunteers - a National Citizen Service for all 16-year-olds to ‘make a difference in their local community’ - harks back to New Labour’s Community Service Volunteers [as well as Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoon we belong to in society’] (14). In 2005, Gordon Brown said: ‘There is such a thing as society… a Britain energised by a million centres of neighbourliness and compassion that together embody that very British idea - civic society.’ (15)

In fact, Britain’s neighbourliness and civic engagement seems to be in rude health with around 500,000 to 900,000 community groups in operation around the UK in 2008 (16). The government prefers to use figures for the numbers employed in the voluntary sector - up from about 730,000 in March 2009 to 778,000 in March 2010 at the same time that employment in the public and private sectors fell by 0.5 per cent and 2.3 per cent respectively over the same period.

This dynamic rise in the volunteering sector, which goes against the grain of the recessionary decline in the public and private sectors was used by Cameron’s government to show how robust and economically beneficial the voluntary sector is, and could, be. But to be ‘employed’ in the voluntary sector makes a bit of a mockery of volunteering. Moreover, it has become easier for the government to blur the distinction between volunteering that is rewarded, and that which is encouraged, coaxed or even compelled.

The official definition of volunteering is of ‘an activity that involves spending time, unpaid, doing something that aims to benefit the environment or individuals or groups other than (or in addition to) close relatives’ (17). This definition noticeably skims over the unpaid army of home carers (that selfless group of people who tend to ill, frail or disabled family members, who have propped up the healthcare service for years), providing an embarrassing snapshot of what the Big Society might look like. ‘The Compact Code of Good Practice on Volunteering’ continues: ‘The key element (of volunteering) that it is freely undertaken’ (my italics). Maybe the government thinks that this simply means ‘done for free’ but in fact it describes an activity ‘willingly, uncoercedly or generously’ given. As such, it is about the rights of the person who gives up his/her time. After all, the act is not done for personal or commercial gain but is done from personal choice and individual free will. By making voluntary engagement into a duty - or a responsibility - rather than an act of free deliberation, they are making volunteering - something that, by definition, has no legal obligation or consideration - into a contract.

Localism: ‘the voice of the citizen’ (18)

Localism tends to atomise the national, collective experience and encourage more isolated, pragmatic, responses to problems. Whatever Prescott thought, here we have the reality of Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 dictum: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’. While this might appear to be empowering, it silos off our social networks and pigeonholes our experiences. As such, there is something profoundly undemocratic about the Big Society agenda.

The Big Society promotes localism; whereby ‘neighbourhoods who are in charge of their destiny who feel as if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them.’ (19) This could only be true if we perceive the ‘world’ to be our immediate locality. We might influence others to be equally concerned about cleaning up our locality, but this is not the same thing as shaping the world. We are creating a nation of mop-keepers; because ‘acting locally’ tells you nothing about the world. If we want to be politically-informed, critical, opinionated, truly engaged, and genuinely active - in the sense that we become subjects rather than objects of history - then we have to move beyond local concerns.

Before I go on, I just want to make clear that my criticism of communities is on a political level. Communities are important building blocks of society. The idea of trust networks - of people working and supporting others is a very valuable thing. Informal relations between people mediated by themselves is the essence of what makes us a humane, civilised civil society. After all, for all the criticisms about the fragmentation of society and the decline in community - there are still around 22 million people doing voluntary and community work. Communities are important things - like families - but in the same way, you might not want to stay in one all of your life. Effectively, people who want to ‘shape the world’ actually want to move out.

So let’s assume that civil society has fragmented to the extent that the government believes: that is a real political problem. But pretending that it can be rebuilt by local action plans and narrow community engagement will exacerbate the very problem that it seeks to resolve. The problem, you see, is the lack of subjectivity within society as a whole and that needs to be addressed on the political level. A comparable example would be the issue of ‘risk aversion’, which is commonly recognised to be an all-pervasive influence within society. As such, official attempts to challenge society’s overcautious approach to risk - by taking away safety nets - actually makes people more nervous. Unless you can convince people that risks are worth taking then everyone will retreat into their shells.

So, in terms of the Big Society, identifying society’s fractiousness is a good starting point but trying to solve it by encouraging localism - a retrenchment into locality - is going to further increase our sense of alienation. Unfortunately, the government is steaming ahead. Eric Pickles MP states: ‘Be in no doubt about our commitment to localism. I know I look like an unlikely revolutionary, but the revolution starts here.’ (20)

But this is not local activism as we know it. This is sanitised localism. The Big Society Network provides us with the model: apparently, we should ‘be there fighting a campaign like saving a park, or a post office’(21). Presumably, this might be one of the parks or post offices closed down by the government’s budget cuts. The community, in this example, is presumably not fighting to save the post office, but rather it is simply meant to revel in its closure as thanks for providing them with an opportunity to bond. Cutbacks and limits thus become transformed from causes of anger or despond, to a source of happiness and activism. The targets of public sector cuts are thus transformed into totems, around which the community can dance.

Vetted to within an inch of its life with all the spontaneity taken out of it, Cameron’s idea of localism, empowers ‘officials’ to identify local residents ‘with a particular aptitude for taking part in Big Society projects’ so that they can ‘receive training to become community organisers, motivating their neighbours to take part in action schemes’ (22). One can only imagine a new breed of state-sanctioned do-gooders and busy-bodies given authority to nag anyone who dares miss a tenants’ meeting or refuses to join Neighbourhood Watch. In the same way that Gordon Brown had planned a ’ national youth community service’ (23), Cameron’s ‘neighbourhood army’ (24) or his ‘communities with oomph’ (25) are euphemisms for ways of ensuring that people’s behaviour is compatible with the community norm. It’s worth remembering JS Mill’s conception of what Liberal values should be: ‘Mankind,’ he said, ‘are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.’ (‘On Liberty’) Unfortunately, non-participation in a Big Lunch - something that could be seen as an actual expression of one’s autonomy and discernment - may result in ostracism.

The government’s belief that we can build trust by simply encouraging people to ‘get involved’ in non-specific activities is not the same thing as genuine engagement in political life. Matthew Taylor enthuses about the possibility of a Big Society portal ‘through which people can join groups, identify local needs and offer help.’ Their suggestion that civil society will flourish as long as you are involved/ engaged/ socially participatory is palpable nonsense. Real communities are much more than people thrown together to run a street party or organise a charity fete.

But as we have seen, there are already many hundreds and thousands of pre-existing community and active citizen groups but these may not meet the strictures of Big Society oomphness. As such, these people - who are regularly involved in organising local events - may be superseded by an officially sanctioned ‘expert organiser and dedicated civil servants to ensure ‘people power’ initiatives get off the ground’ (26). The government wants to (feels it needs to) interfere, because it doesn’t believe that we could possibly be doing the right thing on our own. By such condescending interference Cameron could easily fragment existing well-established trust networks and organisational loyalties that are the very bedrock of the civil society he seeks to create.

REFERENCES:
1) Cited in Polly Toynbee, ‘The ‘big society’ is a big fat lie - just follow the money’, The Guardian, 6 August 2010
2) Eamonn Butler, ‘Dr Eamonn Butler: Big Society sounds better than Big Government - but the Government must not try to direct social activism’, July 22, 2010,
3) ‘We must be the change we want to see in the world’, The Big Society website
4) Nathaniel Wei, ‘Why Big Society can be confusing - and why this is alright’, The Big Society blog, June 18th, 2010
5) Iain Duncan Smith, ‘We will all pay the price for broken Britain’, (also cited in The Daily Telegraph), 6 December 2008
6) Ross Lydall, ‘Boris Johnson’s London bike hire hits the streets’, Evening Standard, 30 July 10
7) Cited in Martyn Brown ‘Brooke Kinsella backs David Cameron as he vows to fix Broken Britain’. Daily Express, Wednesday April 28, 2010 
8) General election 2010: David Cameron says ‘join me and play a part in Britain’s future’, Daily Telegraph, 13 Apr 2010
9) David Cameron, Big Society Speech’, 19 July 2010.
10) Robert Puttnam, ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.’ Journal of Democracy 6:1, pp.65-78
11) Tessa Jowell quoted in Nicholas Watt, ‘Cameron promises power for the ‘man and woman on the street’, Guardian, 19 July 2010
12) David Cameron, ‘This is a radical revolt against the statist approach of Big Government’, Guardian, 18 April 2010
13) ‘How broken is Britain?’ Economist, February 2010
14) Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, Revived Apollo Press (London), 1814
15) Gordon Brown, Brown encourages young volunteers, BBC News, 31 January, 2005
16) The UK Voluntary Sector Almanac, NCVO 2006
17) Volunteering England, ‘The Compact Code of Good Practice on Volunteering’, 2005
18) Paul Twivy, chief executive, Big Society network, Big Society Network launch celebrated at Number 10, 13 July 2010. Number10.gov.uk
19) David Cameron, Big Society Speech, Number 10.gov.uk, 19 July 2010
20) Eric Pickles, MP, The Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Queens Speech Forum, 11 June 2010
21) Nat Wei executive chair of The Big Society Network at the launch on March 31 2010. YouTube video
22) David Cameron, quoted in Rosa Prince, David Cameron launches his Big Society, Daily Telegraph, 18 Jul 2010
23) PM plans to compel community work, BBC News, 12 April 2009
24)Andrew Grice, Cameron reveals how he will fix broken Britain (well, you will…), Independent, 1 April 2010
25) Emma Thelwell, David Cameron launches Big Society scheme, Channel 4, 19 July 2010.
26) Cameron launches Tories’ ‘big society’ plan, BBC News, 19 July 2010