Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, review of Racing Demon by David Hare (National, Cottesloe), Tribune, 16 February 1990

The state of the Church of England, torn apart by faction fighting as its congregations dwindle, might seem a strange subject for a playwright of the left.

But that is what David Hare explores, with mixed results, in his latest play. The focus of Racing Demon is a four-priest team in a poor part of south London. The senior priest, the Reverend Lionel Espy (Oliver Ford Davies), is a sceptical liberal who preaches against government policy to a congregation that includes a cabinet minister. The conservative Bishop of Southwark (Richard Pasco) wants him sacked, but is opposed by two of Lionel’s colleagues, the Reverend Donald “Streaky” Bacon (David Bamber as a cycle-clipped, bespectacled eccentric) and the Reverend Harry Henderson (Michael Bryant as a dignified, Cambridge-educated closet homosexual). The fourth member of the team, the Reverend Tony Ferris (Adam Kotz) turns against Lionel after being “born again” as an evangelical fundamentalist.

Lionel’s fate is sealed after Southwark’s number two, the Bishop of Kingston (Malcolm Sinclair), reneges on a long-standing promise that his job is secure. Finally, to cap everything, Harry’s homosexuality is exposed in a Sunday newspaper and he resigns his post.

The polite civil war in the C of E, with Anglo-Catholic conservatives forging an unlikely affiance with evangelical fundamentalists against liberals and theological revisionists, is well observed: the sense of an institution in terminal decline is inescapable.

Hare’s writing is witty, the acting excellent,and Richard Eyre’s direction supremely competent But Hare never really makes the case for taking his protagonists’ predicaments seriously. If you don’t already care what happens to the Church of England, Racing Demon won’t change your mind: you’ll find it, as I did, rather akin to an elegantly structured and executed dispute about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Paul Anderson, review of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (RSC, Barbican), Tribune, 16 February 1990

Anthony Burgess has made the mistake of turning his satirical novella, A Clockwork Orange, into a stage play, and the Royal Shakespeare Company has made the mistake of putting it on.

It is a third-rate play in a fourth-rate production, which adds a happy ending to Stanley Kubrick’s film version but loses all its shocking power. The ultraviolence of Alex and his droogs is laughable rather than threatening, the brainwashing to which he is subject utterly unconvincing, and the moral of the story – that violence is kids’ stuff – simply crass.

The set is of course very flash, and the cast make the best they can of the miserable material they have been given – but it really isn’t enough. A Clockwork Orange is tedious and wholly lacking in dramatic trension. It ought to go the way of Carrie. It won’t, largely because it is sold out for its entire run on the strength of the cult reputation of Kubrick’s film (not seen in the British cinema since 1972) and the popularity of U2’s music (Bono and The Edge have recycled a few bars from The Joshua Tree as background).

But the powers-that-be at the RSC should be hanging their heads in shame at this puerile dreck.

Paul Anderson, review of Have by Julius Hay (Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican Pit), Tribune, 8 February 1990

The Hungarian dramatist Julius Hay served two stretches as a political prisoner, first in thirties Austria for communist subversion, then in fifties Hungary for his prominent “anti-communist” role in the 1956 revolution.

He started to write Have during his first spell inside. It is a naturalist morality play about poverty, based on the true story of Tiszazug, a Hungarian village where, it, was discovered in – the twenties, generations of peasant women had murdered hus bands and other relatives by administering arsenic.

Have offers a simple Marxist interpretation, in which the women are motivated by material greed. Theirs is an individualist response to severe poverty, when what is really needed is. collective action to secure land reform.

Thus Mari, a poor servant girl made pregnant by Dani, a lowly policeman, marries Neighbour David, the richest local peasant, after she is initiated into the village women’s secret by Mrs Kepes, the midwife.

Mari kills her husband on their wedding night but her consumptive stepdaughter, Zsofi, knows the truth and, fearing disinheritance, resolves to eliminate her.

Mari takes up again with Dani; but, suspecting foul play in Neighbour David’s death and hungry for promotion, starts snooping around. The village women, believing Mari’s over-hasty murder has put them all in danger of discovery, disown her. Isolated, Mari poisons Zsofi. We leave her confessing her crimes to Dani, who prepares to shop her.

The indiciment of greed could not be more stark, but Have is not quite simplistic agitprop. The characters are complex, and the message that collective action is the way to improve the peasant’s lot is never more than implicit.

This production, directed by Janice Honeyman, is well acted, with excellent costumes and a sparse, elegant mud-spattered set. It provides a welcome introduction to a playwright whose work is largely unknown here. More please.

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 2 February 1990

 Lewis Mumford, the American writer on architecture, town planning and technology, who died last week at the age of 94, described himself as a “radical conservative”, but no one who has read any of his books would ever confuse his politics with those of the current British government.

He was an unorthodox man of the humanist libertarian left, a precursor of the sixties new left and, particularly, today’s greens in his consistent criticism of centralised power and capitalism’s inherent alienation and wastefulness. Technics and Civilisation, first published in 1934 and recently reissued by the anarchist Freedom Press, is a history of the machine age that argues for using modern technology to allow us to work less; Culture of Cities (1938) is a sociological study that includes a visceral radical critique of the effects of uncontrolled urban expansion.

In Art and Technics (1951) and The City in History (1961, still available in Penguin paperback), he developed these themes further, and, during the sixties, he was an outspoken critic of the American military-industrial complex and of the war in Vietnam. In Britain, his work has been much praised by planners and architects – the writer Colin Ward is probably the best known of his admirers – but his ideas have rarely been put into practice, especially in recent years.

As anyone who lives in or visits our blighted inner cities will know, the case for the planned, human-scale development advocated by Mumford throughout his life has never been more relevant.

Paul Anderson, review of Boots for the Footless by Brian Behan (Tricycle, Kilburn), Tribune, 26 January 1990

“Tricycle’s play ‘outrages’ audience,” screamed the lead headline in last Friday’s Kilburn Times. The story underneath was less spectacular. “Four members of the audience of Brian Behan’s new play, Boots for the Footless, have written to the leader of Brent Council, Dorman Long, and to the local MP, Ken Livingstone, to demand that the production’s funding be withdrawn,” it read. “Cannel Keeley, of Glastonbury Street, West Hampstead, described the performance as “two hours of psychological torture”.

“Every single stereotype about stupid, drunken, violent Irishmen and sexually contradictory, irrational Irishwomen was dragged out and celebrated . . “

Ms Keeley is, of course, entitled to her opinion, but it is difficult to feel anything but pity for anyone quite so humourless. Boots for the Footless is certainly bawdy, hilariously irreverent and satirical — particularly about Irish Catholicism and republicanism — but racist it is not.

It is a two-act farce, some might say autobiographical, the first part set in a Dublin bedroom in 1950. The central character is Padser, a chronically lazy skiver who is living in bed at his brother’s house, tolerated because he has £5,000 of inheritance money (under the mattress). Padser’s brother, Declan, is a drunk; his nephews, Martin and Lar, are workshy political agitators (Martin republican, Lar communist); the sister-in-law, Maura, is undisputed boss of the household.

To cut a long, complex and immensely funny story short, we reach the interval with only Maize and Declan left in the house. Padser has done a runner with his money to escape the clutches of Bridie, a country girl to whom he has been forced to promise marriage; Martin has been arrested for shooting a policeman; and Lar has decided that there’s more chance of making the revolution in England.

Act two takes us to the Festival of Britain building site in London the following year, where Padser has taken a job after gambling away his fortune. He gets his nephews jobs too (Martin has escaped from Mountjoy prison), and Lar soon becomes shop steward.

Lar attempts to organise the workers to prevent the King and Queen from visiting the site wthout union cards; Martin announces his plan to assassinate them.

Although the pace flags at the very end, this is a tremendously enjoyable anarchic comedy. It’s also superbly written: Behan has an unerring ear for vernacular Irish speech. If this is “psychological torture”; give me some more.

Paul Anderson, review of Letters to an Editor by Mark Fisher (ed) (Carcanet, £14.95), Tribune, 12 January 1990

Carcanet, the Manchester publishing house, has marked its 20th anniversary in a characteristically unusual way, by publishing a selection of letters to Michael Schmidt, its founder and editor. Schmidt’s responses to his correspondents — poets, critics, translators and novelists — are entirely absent. Nevertheless, the collection provides a compelling insight into the workings of an extraordinary publishing venture.

Carcanet began as an Oxford undergraduate magazine, moved into publishing pamphlets of poetry, and has grown to become one of Britain’s most respected serious literary publishers.

Today it has a list that includes contemporary English poets, translations of European writers, neglected modernist texts and a bi-monthly magazine, PN Rewiew. C B Cox rubs shoulders with Stuart Hood; Hans Magnus Enzensburger meets, inter alia, Roger Scruton, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

It is difficult to make sense of such eclectic seriousness — the temptation is simply to celebrate — but there is method in it. The correspondents that dominate this volume are two poets, C H  Sisson and Donald Davie, both, in their own ways, late twentieth-century claimants to the mantle of Ezra Pound. It is their uncompromising elitist high modernism that has been the spark for Carcanet’s book-publishing programme and magazine (the “PN” started out ‘ as “Poetry Nation”).

Carcanet came into being at the end of the sixties, a low dishonest decade of know-nothing populism and declining standards in the eyes of Schmidt and most of his correspondents. “I can’t see that it was that conspicuously awful,” is about the best it gets here.

The task, or so it seemed, was to counter the intellectual hegemony of the Marxist Left, reassert the conservative modernist aesthetic of Pound, T S Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, and fight the appalling cultural collapse that lay behind such diverse phenomena as the New English Bible and rock and roll.

This is the voice of a literary intelligentsia disgusted by social democracy and the fake scientism of literary academia, which, unlike its similarly disgusted continental West European conterparts in the same period, turned right.

If Carcanet and PNR had remained true to these origins, there would be little more to say than that reaction often finds sophisticated literary practitioners. But the tensions in the high modernist project (helped by Schmidt’s sentimental attachment to the idea that the serious publisher has a duty to make available the works of the unjustly ignored) have proved fertile. The Eliotesque laments in PNR on the crisis of Anglicanism (always more literary-aesthetic than theological) are now less frequent than unambiguously humanist polemics against the depravations of Thatcherism.

Why? Most obviously, seriousness about English modernism necessarily means engagement with other modernisms and the abandonment of the narrow concerns of British conservative culture. Faced with Berlin Dada, it is impossible to claim that taking modernism seriously is essentially a matter of complaining about the destruction of the C of E’s poetic heritage under the pernicious influence of leftist vicars.

More important, the departure from conservative Leavisite norms took place in the context of a sea-change in literary culture in Britain. If in 1969 the enemy was the populist barbarians listening to the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, by the late seventies there was a new threat, at the heart of the academy: structuralist criticism and its progeny, denying the very possibility of the author and, thereby, all the critical values of humanist modernism.

Against this new enemy, Schmidt found, almost accidentally, some unusual allies — secular humanist leftists at odds with the old Carcanet project but far more antipathetic to the new and orthodoxy, despite their one-time endorsement of such horrors as communism and sixties populism. The list grew more diverse and PNR more interesting. By the mid-eighties, Schmidt’s reconciliation with his one-time political enemies seemed complete. Recent issues of PNR have been the closest thing we have in Britain to a secular European literary review.

The question that faces Schmidt now is an old one: “What next?” It would be a pity, to say the least, if he decided, out of fear of losing control or because of worries about integration into an academic “establishment”, to draw back from the broad cultural agenda that Carcanet and PNR now address, and to concentrate on “poetry and its milieu” again. But that, I’m told, is what he plans to do. Perhaps somebody should drop him a line.

Paul Anderson, review  of Playing With Trains by Stephen Poliakoff (RSC), Tribune, 8 December 1989

Stephen Poliakoff has a theory about why Britain is in such an economic mess: we’re good at inventing but bad at exploiting the commercial potential of our inventions.

This is a lament that has recurred in British politics since the end of the last century — since the beginning of Britain’s decline as an imperial power, in fact — but to see Playing With Trains you would think that Poliakoff was the first to think of it. The play’s didactic enthusiasm is at first refreshing but after a while becomes irritatingly unsubtle and repetitive.

The plot on which Poliakoff hangs his big idea is a simple one. Bill Galpin (Michael Pennington) is a single-minded engineer/inventor with two children (Lesley Sharp and Simon Russell Beale). We join them in 1967 as they prepare to move house after Bill has made a small fortune for inventing an automatic record player. From then on, it’s rise and fall. Bill first becomes still richer through his inventions, then makes a mark as an outspoken campaigner for industrial and political backing for innovators, then finally is ruined by an unwise libel action.

Bill is no one-dimensional hero, and the domestic angle of his story — progressive estrangement from his offspring as he becomes more and more obsessive provides welcome dramatic relief from his confrontations with bureaucrats and his pubic speeches.
But in the end none of this amounts to much.

Poliakoff dealt with the theme of obsessive genius overlooking domestic commitment far better in his previous play for the RSC, Breaking the Silence (which also had the bonus of an exotic Russian revolutionary setting). And Britain’s economic disaster simply doesn’t have quite as much to do with frustated innovators as Poliakoff believes.

Paul Anderson, review of New Times by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds) (Lawrence and Wishart, £9.95), Tribune, 1 December 1989

The basic thrust of Marxism Today‘s “New Times” thesis – you’ve read the magazine articles and seen the manifesto, now read bits of both in a book – is simple. The organisation of production in the developed west has changed. The era of “Fordism”, of production lines in giant factories turning out standardised products, is over. The revolution in information technology means that small-batch production and small factories, with more flexible specialised labour forces, are increasingly the norm.

In line with, and partly as a result of, these changes in production, other things have changed too. The composition of the working class has changed dramatically: it is now split into an affluent core of securely employed, skilled, full-time workers (disproportionately male and white), and a poor periphery (disproportionate female and black), where part-time and casual work and unemployment are the options.

With the decline in the traditional manual working class and the growth in importance of consumption in everyday life, people see themselves less and less as members of social classes, defining themselves increasingly as individual consumers and citizens, or as members of gender, sexual-preference and ethnic groups. Everything from philosophy to television reflects all this. Homogeneity is out. Diversity is in. The left must adapt by jettisoning most of the baggage acquired during the Fordist era – centralisd nationalisation in economic policy, Leninist “democratic centralism”, class politics, admiration for “actually existing socialism” in the eastern bloc, and hostility to individualism and consumption.

The first thing to be said about all this is that, for all the claims to novelty, there isn’t much that’s very original about it. Borrowings from the Frankfurt school, the French post-modernists, liberal pluralist political theory and anarchism sit uneasily together.

And the heart of the argument – all the stuff about changes in the nature of production meaning the end of the Fordist era of the “mass worker” – is a sanitised version of mid-seventies Italian and French neo-Marxist theories of capitalist restructuring.

According to these thinkers, working-class insurgency was forcing capitalists to discover new ways of ensuring their control of production, by splitting up the workforce through decentralisation, replacing key workers with robots, moving production to Third World countries and so on. Our thoroughly post-modern communists remove the engine of class struggle from this rather interesting old jalopy, give the bodywork a quick respray job, and try to pass off the result as a spanking new model.

But this is by the way. What about the validity or otherwise of the “New Times” thesis? It certainly cannot be dismissed out of hand. The developed west has witnessed dramatic changes in the organisation of production in the past decade, and the era of the Fordist assembly line does seem to be coming to an end – at least in North America, Japan and western Europe. Traditional class identities are weaker than hitherto. Nationalisation and Leninism are dead-ends for the left. Many of the essays in this volume are succinct and serious contributions to our understanding of the world in which we live.

Nevertheless, there are weaknesses in the analysis too. First, it exaggerates the extent of “Post-Fordism” in production. In particular, even if the developed west is seeing the end of the Fordist factory, the rest of the world is not. None of the contributors to New Times, with the exception of Mike Rustin (who contributes a critique of the thesis) has anything to say about the new international division of labour.

Worse still, as Paul Hirst points out, the “New Times” thesis is essentially a crudely economic determinist one which exaggerates the impact in the wider world of changes in production.

Both these lines of criticism point to the conclusion that the changes of the past decade are rather less “epochal” than the “New Times” types would have us believe. Which in turn points to the real problem of the “New Times” thesis: its political function. Its central political argument is that Leninism, centralised nationalisation, class politics and admiration for eastern bloc “socialism” are dead-ends because the Fordist era is over.

That is implicitly to argue that all of them were fine and dandy while Fordism ruled the roost. To me, that seems simply to be a way that the dwindling band of Communist Party members can disown everything the party once stood for without ever subjecting its past to criticism. I suppose that’s emotionally easier than admitting they were wrong all along, but the intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.

Paul Anderson, review of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson (National, Cottesloe), Tribune, 3 November 1989

In his native United States, the black playwright August Wilson is big. From Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the first of his works to be staged here, it’s not hard to see why. Wilson’s ear for the poetry of everyday language is extraordinary, his didactic purpose tempered by the unusual ability to create believable characters whose views are entirely at odds with his own.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is of a genre that British audiences will find familiar enough, a musical drama that uses the experience of black American entertainment stars — in this case, Ma Rainey, “the Mother of the Blues”, and her band, who are recording in a Chicago studio in 1929 — as a means of exploring the whole system of racism in the United States. What sets it apart is its subtlety. Wilson refuses to see his black characters simply as put-upon heroes; all are complex, fully formed characters.

The play begins with the seedy, white recordingstudio owner (Tom Chadbon) and Ma’s white manager (William Hoyland) preparing for the session. The band arrives, without Ma, and makes ready to rehearse In fact, precious little rehearsing happens. The four band-members bicker and joke, and from the start it’s clear that there is tension between Levee (Hugh Quarshie), the flash, young cornet-player who wants a band of his own playing sophisticated dance music for whites, and the others, particularly Toledo (Clarke Peters), the pianist, who’s something of an intellectual and an advocate of black self-reliance.

Eventually, Ma (Carol Woods-Coleman) arrives, and after further delays, the recording session takes place. In the meantime, the tension between Levee and the others mounts inexorably. Toledo’s taunts that he’s just a collaborator with the white man are rebuffed by Levee, who reveals that, as a boy, he was knifed by a gang of whites who were attempting to rape his mother, and that his father was lynched while trying to avenge her.

But any sympathy this generates among his fellows quickly disappears. Levee brags, offends religious sensibilities, loses his temper and rages after another band-member with a knife, plays his cornet too flamboyantly and, worst of all, refuses to accept Ma’s authority. He is fired from the band after the sessions.

He doesn’t care, but then the white studio-owner tells him that he is reneging on his promise of a band. Levee is devastated and, when Toledo treads on his shoe, he loses his temper , again and kills him.

The moral of this story – that blacks are exploited by whites and often, wrongly, turn their anger against their fellow blacks – is clear enough, but Wilson’s script never descends to crude agitprop. With some excellent acting (Hugh Quarshire’s Levee, Clarke Peters’ Toledo and Carol Woods-Coleman’s Ma in particular), some competent music (provided by the actors on stage) and an impressive set, Howard Davies’s production is one of the most refreshing pieces currently on the London stage.