Joyce McMillan goes online…

For the first time, all my writing on theatre and general social/political issues will be available online here.

Most of these pieces are commissioned by, and first appear in, The Scotsman. Ultimate ownership of copyright remains with me, and is asserted here.

Everything on the site appears in date order, below, beginning with the most recent column or review.

If you want to search the site for something specific, type your keyword(s) into the “search” space on the right, and press return.

To come back to this main page at any time, just click on “joyce mcmillan - online” at the very top of the page. Enjoy!

joycemcmillan.co.uk

© Joyce McMillan 2008

Middle Class Fear And The Knife Crime Panic

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 19.7.08
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IT SEEMS LIKE A WHILE AGO now, given the hectic pace of the 21st century news agenda; but some of you may recall that at the beginning of this week, the UK was caught up in what seemed like a massive crisis over teenage knife crime.  It wasn’t only that the incidence of knife crime had risen sharply in some urban areas, although the year-on-year rise across England and Wales as a whole was small.  It was that politicians were being given to understand - by elements of the media, and by their political opponents - that their entire reputation for compassion and competence now depended on their ability to “deal with” this crisis, and to do so immediately.

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, therefore produced some moderately daft off-the-cuff proposals for encouraging young knife-carriers to confront the consequences of their actions, and immediately became mired in a 48-hour frenzy of media accusation about a supposed u-turn on some minor aspect of her non-proposal.  The Conservative front bench, meanwhile,  rolled out some wholly absurd “crackdown” rhetoric about imprisoning every young person who carries a knife “without good reason”.

What neither party did, though, was to challenge the mood of media hysteria over knife crime, to resist the vicious demonisation of a whole generation of kids, or to point out the solid truth that despite localised problems and surges, crime in England and Wales is actually declining, with burglaries and car thefts down by over a third in the past decade, and the murder rate currently 25% lower than it was three years ago.  Instead, as usual, politicians colluded with the media in talking up the  fantasy crime wave that provides so many sensational headlines; and as usual, their behaviour was as depressing and misleading as it was cowardly.

At some level, though, societies get the politicians they deserve; and we should be clear that while some in politics and the media are much to blame for talking up the threat of crime in defiance of the evidence, they do so mainly because the British public are so willing - even eager - to buy into this false account of the society in which we live.  This week, for example, new figures emerged suggesting that British children are now the most over-protected in the world, with nine-year-olds who would once have been allowed to wander and play over a range of half a mile or so from their homes now frequently barely allowed beyond their front gates.

The consequences of these attitudes for child health are, of course, deeply worrying.  From the threat of obesity to poor social development and speech skills, kids who spend their days in front of the playstation are poor, pasty specimens, compared with those who go out building treehouses or playing football in the park; the front-line victims, if you like, of an exaggerated paranoia about others, and about the society around us, which also has millions of perfectly sane women absurdly convinced that they can’t go out in the streets after dark without constant risk of attack.   Yet the statistics showing that child abduction by strangers remains freakishly rare cut no ice with the current generation of parents; nor does the truth, deeply suppressed in our car-dependent culture, that the very vehicles we use to keep ourselves and our children safe from supposed stranger-danger on the streets are the things most likely - by a huge statistical margin - to cause our violent deaths, at any age from six months to sixty-five.

And the tragedy about this pattern of entrenched negative belief about our society is that it tends to become self-fulfilling; if people believe ill of those around them, they become more reclusive, leaving public space increasingly at risk of being taken over by a criminal or rowdy few.  As for answers - well, they increasingly require real, committed psychological resistance to a set of myths and beliefs that damage us all, and bespeak nothing but an old, sour society no longer capable of making rational assessments of its problems, or of sustaining the basic social trust and goodwill necessary to make any society work.  Britain, at the moment, is a nation full of respectable citizens - people who have played by the rules all their lives - who are waking up at night in a sweat of fear over whether they will be able to pay the bills, keep up with the mortgage, and even hang on to their jobs, as recession bites; and it is understandable that they feel frightened, betrayed and angry.

It is, though, neither pleasant nor smart of them to take the right-wing bait which suggests they should focus that anger on a small minority of street-kids who break the rules, rather than on those actually responsible for the current state of the global economy.  And if this pent-up middle-class rage and insecurity lies at the root of the current baseless hysteria about crime, it’s also worth noting that a reluctance to end up like those ordinary, frightened  adults probably motivates much of the juvenile crime we fear.   Make a complete fool of the ordinary hard-working man or woman - and many of us have been made fools of in recent years, in terms of our earnings, our pensions, our whole attempt to build up a little security in our lives - and you provide young people from less-than-privileged backgrounds with a strong economic motive to raise two fingers to conventional morality, and to carve out their own path to status and “respect”.  And in a culture far more likely to lionise a wealthy crook than to provide a decent pension for an ageing white-collar worker, it’s hard to argue that the rest of us are not complicit, to some extent, both in the choices those young people make, and in the sense of despair and disillusionment that leads them there.

ENDS ENDS

She Stoops To Conquer, Fungus The Bogeyman

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, and FUNGUS THE BOGEYMAN at the Byre Theatre, St. Andrews, for Scotsman Review 18.7.08
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She Stoops To Conquer   3 stars ***
Fungus The Bogeyman   4 stars ****

CLASS AND SEX: it’s a fantastic subject for drama, and one under-analysed in British theatre, given our perpetual state of denial about the extent to which class matters in our society.  For the truth is that when you slice a population in two - allocating automatic power, wealth and influence to a privately-educated few, and an unseemly scramble for the leftovers to everyone else - then you set up a strange erotic tension between the two groups.  Women go wild for chaps with that restrained, ruling-class look, or - conversely - for the virile gamekeeper with hair on his chest.  And as for the men - well, set up a social or ethnic division, and some men’s sexual energy seems to home in on it like a heat-seeking missile, excited by the difference in status, and driven to conquer whatever lies on the other side of the boundary.

It’s all this that Oliver Goldsmith observes, in his famous and gorgeous 1773 sex comedy She Stoops To Conquer; and it’s perhaps not surprising that he wrote from the vantage-point not of a born-and-bred Englishman, but from the lower reaches of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.  Subtitled The Mistakes Of A Night, his thoroughly jolly play - now revived in a slightly mannered and musty production at Pitlochry - details the amorous adventures of a young blade called Marlow, who is frightfully shy with women of his own class, but a right lad when it comes to comely wenches from the lower orders.

Sent into the country to woo pretty Miss Kate Hardcastle, the daughter of an old friend of his father’s, Marlow comes across Kate’s oafish step-brother Tony Lumpkin, who informs him - for a joke - that Mr. Hardcastle’s handsome old house is an inn.  Marlow therefore mistakes Kate for a barmaid; and a fine series of  comic misunderstandings unfolds, involving not only Kate and Marlow, but his stalwart chum Hastings, and Kate’s resident cousin, Miss Neville.

Richard Baron’s production at Pitlochry is a conspicuously conventional affair, marrred by such a quantity of strained and mannered vocal work, particularly by the younger actors, that their speech is all but strangulated by the plums (or mangel-wurzels) in their mouths.  The costumes are precisely what any fan of period theatre would expect, Ken Harrison’s set is tasteful to the point of handsomeness, the physical comedy is painfully leaden and unfunny, and the whole production has not an idea to bless itself with; unlike the recent touring production from Birmingham Rep, which at least lent some wit and point to the proceedings by adding  a 21st century Prologue and Epilogue.

In the end, this dusty-looking show is heroically hoisted into the three-star category by the sheer will-power and geniality of the acting company, led by Martyn James, who gives a wonderful, poised performance as old Hardcastle, full of basic theatrical wisdom and fine vocal technique; and by Jacqueline Dutoit, who - script-in-hand, after the sudden illness of another actress - mysteriously produces the comic performance of her life as the exasperated Mrs. Hardcastle.   But it takes more than individual feats by hard-working actors to create a memorable production of a classic as well worn as this.  Directors should love these plays enough to make fresh, living theatre out of them, for modern audiences; or they should leave them alone.

If Goldsmith deals with the tensions and energies created by society’s old class divisions, Raymond Briggs’s 1977 children’s classic Fungus The Bogeyman puts its greasy finger squarely on another great and related psychological divide in our culture - the gulf between filth and cleanliness, or between ever-more-draconian standards of hygiene, and ordinary human muck.  The story’s twin heroes, Fungus and his son Mould, are nice, slimey green nasal bogeys, living in a cheerful underworld where filth and damp are prized, dryness and cleanliness abhorred.  And their adventures begin when, to the dismay of his mum Mildew, Mould accompanies his Dad on a night-time visit to the upper world, makes friends with a human girl called Maxine, and runs away with her, in an effort to escape from her obsessively hygienic mum, Miriam.

Pilot Theatre’s musical stage version of the story - now completing a UK tour with a month-long residency at the Byre in St. Andrews - captures all of these tensions with admirable flair, on a big two-level set superbly designed by Ali Allen to capture the different atospheres of the two worlds, the one full of cheerful dripping slime and rotting metal tunnels, the other all puffy pink armchairs and pristine front lawns.  Ivan Stott’s music takes a while to get going; but once Fungus hauls his guitar on stage, and the live character of the music begins to emerge, there’s no turning back, as director-adaptor Marcus Romer ‘s excellent, punchy six-strong cast hoof their way through a series of catchy song-and-dance numbers.

The story is simple pantomime stuff, about the human quest for balance and wholeness, with plenty of chances for audience participation; and just now and then - looking at all the pretty party-frocks and neat blazers in the audience, and noting the slightly muted response - I wondered whether the little princes and princesses of St. Andrews really conform to the modern stereotype of children as natural anarchists, roaring with delight at the celebration of filth, and at naughty words like “snot”, “bum” and “poo”.  Some of them looked shocked, as if they wouldn’t flick a bogey to save their lives.  In the end, though, Briggs’s Fungus is a pretty benign purveyor of muck; and the show rocks on, to a memorably jolly conclusion.

She Stoops To Conquer in repertoire at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 16 October; Fungus The Bogeyman at the Byre Theatre, St. Andrews, until 9 August.

ENDS ENDS ENDS

The Merry Wives Of Windsor

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR (Illyria at Paxton House, Berwickshire) for The Scotsman 18.7.08
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3 stars ***

ON THE BACK OF MY my ticket for Illyria’s jolly outdoor touring production of The Merry Wives Of Windsor - which appeared briefly at beautiful Paxton House in the Borders this week - I see that I have doodled the shapes of seven highly distinctive hats.  The hats are necessary, because Oliver Gray’s barnstorming production - presented with two planks and a passion, on a small touring platform  - extraordinarily chooses to present a full-length, 3-hour, 20-character version of the play, with a cast of exactly five people.

The plot of Shakespeare’s famous old pot-boiler is mercifully not  too complicated.  Written to delight Elizabethan audiences with further comic appearances by the fat knight Sir John Falstaff,  it details his failed attempts at adulterous love-affairs with two wise and witty Windsor matrons, Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford.  But all the same, the pressure of recounting the tale with so few actors leads to a frantic doubling, trebling, and quintupling of parts, a desperate reliance on hats and funny beards, and a mood of total confusion for the first 20 minutes or so, while the audience try - like a bunch of Telegraph readers confronted with a particularly fierce cryptic crossword - to work out what’s going on.

Things are much clearer, though, towards the middle and end, although the frenzy of hat-changing never allows much variation of pace.  And what’s undeniable in the sheer heroism of the cast.  They rush, dive, prattle, scene-change and cross-dress like the team of total professionals they are, giving the audience a fine time in the process.   And if this is finally a production more about their ingenuity than about the play itself - well, Shakespeare only wrote this play to entertain, on a bright summer’s night; and that’s exactly what it does.

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Politics Confounded By Hopeless Stalemate Over The Role Of Government - Column 12.7.08

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 12.7.08
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IT HAS BEEN ONE OF THOSE WEEKS when the thinking citizen might well have felt, on balance, that a visit to the dentist would be preferable to the trial of watching the television news.  In Japan, the G8 leaders met, ate gourmet dinners, and produced another almost laughable failure to meet the challenge of climate change; back in Britain, Gordon Brown told us all to do our bit for the global food crisis by eating up our leftovers, and not throwing away so much of what we buy.

In Yorkshire, meanwhile, former Tory home affairs spokesman David Davies fought and won his self-imposed by-election on the theme of threatened civil liberties; but seven out of ten of the voters in his constituency ignored the election completely.  And in Edinburgh, the SNP deputy leader, Nicola Sturgeon, received a standing ovation from the British Medical Association in conference for her stout defence of a public sector NHS, free from the private profit motive; but was promptly denounced by many for her “dinosaur”attitude to 21st century healthcare.

On every front, in other words, our political life presented a dispiriting and sometimes frightening picture of stagnation and ineffectiveness, accompanied by a huge amount of fine talk, public nagging,  and pointless bickering.  And in each case, the underlying paralysis seemed related to one of the great unresolved questions of 21st century politics; namely, the question of what we now expect the state to do, in order to deliver the basic elements of a civilised society, and of where we expect it to butt out, and respect our privacy and liberty as free citizens.

To say that public debate on this subject, in Britain, rarely achieves any level of coherence, is to put things politely; indeed it often seems as though members of the public are now actively encouraged to talk like political idiots, as if the responsibilities of government were clearly limitless, whereas its right to levy taxation represented an obvious outrage to freedom.  It is 150 years since James Wilson, the Hawick-born businessman and public servant who became the founder of The Economist magazine, suggested that every good society should be founded on the principle of “free trade under the law.”   Yet ever since the great ideological disruption of the 1980’s, and the end of the postwar consensus, political debate in the English-speaking world has been hopelessly polarised between those who just can’t help seeing the intervention of elected law-makers as a constant threat to freedom; and those, on the other side, who view free trade with suspicion, as a polite phrase for buying cheap, selling dear, and ripping off your fellow-man for private gain.

And the long-term result is the kind of helpess stalemate we have witnessed this week.  Robbed both of basic moral authority and of any real clarity about their role, governments in the west are effectively powerless to act in areas where their intervention is desperately needed - notably over the shocking threat of climate change, which requires a complete and well-organised paradigm shift in the way our economy is powered and structured.  Yet at the micro-political level, governments find themselves increasingly under pressure to niggle, comment, regulate and legislate in areas where no self-respecting adult citizen would permit their intrusion, as well as to deprive us of key privacies and liberties at the behest of a popular media cynically obsessed with crime.  And in traditional areas of public service, notably education and health, politicians often find themselves trapped between competing ideologies, and stuck  with some fudged Blairite compromise designed to placate private interests, while effectively bamboozling sceptical voters.

So what’s the conclusion?  I think it’s that if we are to have any hope of dealing seriously with the colossal problems we now face, then it must be time to call a halt to the generation-long battle against state power begun by the new right in the 1980’s, and to try to reach a new consensus about a balance between law and freedom, government and markets, that will work for the 21st century.  If we want solid, credible and sustainable political solutions to our problems, then we cannot continue to talk as if state power is always to be resisted; we need government we can accept and trust, within reason, and we need a private sector which will - under the law - bow to its authority.

Yet on the other hand, if our societies are to remain free, we need a clear sense of where the boundaries of government lie; we need to mark out areas into which it will not intrude, to be vigilant in defending those areas, and to become wiser about resisting the tendency to make infantile demands that the government fix everything, and do it now.  Back in the age of the Enlightenment, we in Scotland - in the shape of thinkers like Adam Smith and William Robertson -  were massive contributors to the global debate on how government should operate in a good society, and left an indelible mark on the structuring of modern societies across Europe and North America.

And now it seems to me that we need to join that debate again; not because we can expect to dominate it as we did 250 years ago, but because there is now an urgent practical need to start honouring the subtlety and strength of that intellectual history, rather than allowing its great figures to be recruited into today’s petty political battles.  And perhaps also because, in our smaller political community, we can see with great clarity that both security and freedom are necessary; and that the art of good politics is not about bad-mouthing one in order to make space for the other, but about striking the balance that enables human beings to flourish and - in tough circumstances - to survive.

ENDS ENDS ENDS

Peeping At Bosch

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on PEEPING AT BOSCH (Mischief La-Bas at the Tramway, Glasgow) for The Scotsman 12.7.08
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4 stars ****

IN THE ARTS, titles matter; and Peeping At Bosch is altogether too modest a name for Mischief La-Bas’s weird, beautiful and astonishing spectacle, unfolding at the Tramway this weekend.  Presented as a first glimpse of what might eventually be an even more ambitious project, the show is already a dazzling theatrical realisation - part show, part installation, part fairground ride -  of Hieronymus Bosch’s most famous work, the early 16th century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, with its famously surreal representations of Heaven, Hell and Eden.

The audience enters a curtained foyer space in Tramway 1, and is greeted by various religious figures who issue tin hats and tickets for our journey, and invite us to watch a superb film animation of Bosch’s paintings assembling themselves, out of empty landscape.  Then we board a revolving carousel - each section featuring a mediaeval beast on which to ride - and arrive at the first of our three destinations, a haunting  realisation of Eden, in which Adam and Eve perform a dance of awakening, pain and wonder, while the audience lolls on cushions that speak the words of Genesis in our ears.

This is the strongest of the tableaus; but there’s also a delicious and spectacular Heaven, and an almost comical hell, where audience members can exercise their sadistic instincts by operating three spectacular torture machines themselves.  Ian Smith’s great spectacle is perhaps a shade too playful in mood; in a post-religious age, it needs slightly more thought about serious contemporary visions of heaven and hell, to justify its scale.   But Bosch’s painting is one of the great works of western art; and to be invited to walk straight into its world of fabulous fantasy and colour, for an hour on a Glasgow summer evening, is a rare privilege indeed.

ENDS ENDS

Muziektheater Transparant And The Art Of Confronting Everyday Nazism

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on EIF/ MUZIEKTHEATER TRANSPARANT for Scotsman Review 11.7.08
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IN AN UPPER ROOM at a dockside arts centre in Stavanger - heavy wooden beams in the roof, dark sea and gleaming harbour lights beyond the windows - an audience assemble, and take their places on a hundred or so plain wooden chairs, arranged in a rough circle. Some of the chairs are already occupied; and as the lights dim, the men sitting on them suddenly climb up to stand on their seats, and begin to sing Schuebert lieder, with a heart-stopping, tightly-disciplined intensity.

The men are members of the Collegium Vocale of Ghent, widely recognised as Belgium’s finest male voice choir. And they are providing the essential counterpoint - the backdrop and foreground, the balancing element in the argument - to Muziektheater Transparant’s Ruhe, one of the most quietly searching shows about the origin and nature of Nazism ever staged in Europe. As the voices fade, a woman stands up and comes to the centre of the circle, recounting a silly girl’s tale of why she thought it was right, proper and fun to be involved with Hitler’s SS in the 1940’s; later, she is matched by a man, whose vulgar justifications for anti-Semitism and ethnic bigotry start by sounding quite reasonable, and end up turning the stomach.

Sometimes, the man is played by Muziektheater Transparant associate Josse De Pauw, the leading Flemish actor, director, and writer whose brainchild this show is. And although the text is based on a a book published in the 1960’s about the self-justifying testimony of unrepentant former SS members, it has been transformed, through the special genius of the company, into an event that treads delicately along the boundary between theatre and world-class musical performance; and that finally emerges as a challenging and frightening meditation, with elements of new music and visual imagery, on the gulf between the perfect integrity and beauty of Schubert’s music on one hand, and the sheer banality of everyday evil on the other.

“One of the reasons why the book overwhelmed us as it did,” says Josse De Pauw, “is because it challenges one’s assumptions. You start out with the firm belief that fascism has nothing to do with you. But then it soon emerges that these SS volunteers were in fact very ordinary people, who thought pretty much the same way you do; the point of doing the show is to confront that.”

And in all of these respects - from its powerful theatrical purpose, to its subtle, exploratory use of new and existing music in performance - Ruhe is typical of the work of Muziektheater Transparant, who, from their base in Antwerp, are fast emerging as one of the most sought-after companies on the international performance scene. In Stavanger - Norway’s European City of Culture 2008 - they were the first artists-in-residence at the city’s year-long Open Port Festival, directed in inspirational style by the Scotsman’s former music critic Mary Miller. Over an intensive three weeks in February, they presented four challenging productions, two of them involving local children and young people, along with a series of workshops and events on subjects ranging from new forms of music theatre, to the company’s “Institute for the Living Voice”; their relationship with Stavanger is set to continue in the long term.

Their acclaimed latest show, playing now in Flanders, is a giant adult sleep-over-cum-storytelling, with episodes of music, that features a boat ride to a disused warehouse and an overnight stay in a huge dockland dormitory. In Edinburgh in August, at The Hub, they present not only Ruhe, but their virulent 1920’s political cabaret Wolpe, a sequence of blazing socialist torch-songs, delivered by the fabulous Viviane De Muynck - well known to Tramway audiences for her performances with Needcompany - with a ferocity that makes the contemporary work of Brecht and Weill look hopelessly middle-of-the-road. And over the next three years, Edinburgh Festival director Jonathan Mills hopes to develop a continuing relationship with the company, as they explore their new connection with Edinburgh audiences, and begin to feed the dynamics of the Festival into their own creative process, which involves not only two artistic directors, but five young composers-in-residence.

“Certainly, I think we’re at a point where new models of international co-operation in the arts are beginning to take over from straightforward Festival visits,” says the company’s general director and joint artistic director Guy Coolen. “For example, we know that what we do has begun to work well with audiences at home in Belgium. But that’s not necessarily true elsewhere, and it’s very interesting for us to work with different cities and audiences, and to explore what we can contribute over a substantial time.

“And it’s very satisfying for us to come to Scotland and to the UK, and to develop our relationships there. Right back in 1993-94, when our company was formed in Antwerp out of the shell of an old, failing chamber opera group, the very first show we chose to perform was Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs For A Mad King, and he has been our friend and honorary president ever since - we were thrilled to be able to premiere his Mr. Emmet Takes A Walk at the the St. Magnus Festival in 2000.

“For the future - well, we have so many good projects coming up, including a chance to work in Istanbul, City of Culture in 2010, which should be really exciting. And in general, I feel there’s so much energy coming from the underground at the moment, so many different things happening in small venues across various forms of music from rock to classical, with the voice, with performance, with visual arts and so on. We need to be in touch with that, and of course the scene in Scotland and Britain is a very rich one. So we’re looking forward to being in Edinburgh in August; and I’m sure we’ll make some exciting new connections for the future.”

Ruhe at The Hub, Edinburgh, 21-24 August; Wolpe at The Hub, 29-30 August.

ENDS ENDS ENDS

Faustus

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on FAUSTUS (Chimaera at Nicol Edwards Bar, Edinburgh) for The Scotsman 9.7.08
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3 stars ***

THE SETTING IS ALMOST perfect, for this shoestring production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, staged by Alex Pryce’s young Edinburgh-based company Chimaera.  In a dank, dripping vault beneath Nicol Edwards Pub in the Old Town, an audience of thirty or so line the walls on pew-like seats; the atmosphere is instantly mediaeval, with a deep sense of the struggle between flesh and faith that is etched into the history of the city, and a definite whiff of the brimstone underworld from which Faustus’s demons emerge.

The show that unfolds in this compelling space, though, is more mixed blessing than unqualified triumph.  It looks sensational, and adapts Marlowe’s text with real skill, surrounding Gary Quinn’s lonely Faustus with a shape-changing chorus of six female demons - including Rebecca Hale’s frightening Mephistopheles - in ripped fishnets, tartan-punk miniskirts, and scary Goth makeup.  Quinn’s Faustus radiates a powerful if baffled male sexuality, morphing from academic geek in the first act to stylish, lipsticked global playboy in the second; and if the vocal and verbal complexity of Marlowe’s text sometimes defeats him, there’s still a flicker of real star quality in the performance.  Given the structure of the production - which could have been subtitled “Faustus And The Women “ -  Pearce could have mounted a more thorough and less self-consciously showy exploration of the tortured sexual politics of the Faustus story.  But overall, this is a raw, vivid and enjoyably cheeky 90 minutes of theatre, bursting at the seams with theatrical energy and promise.

ENDS ENDS

Andy Murray And The State of Anglo-Scottish Relations - Column 5.7.08

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 5.7.08
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TO LONDON, THIS WEEK, to find the city most entertainingly exercised by the key cultural, political and sporting question of the hour - namely, whether its inhabitants should  support Andy Murray in the Men’s Singles Championship at Wimbledon.  In Scotland, of course, the mirror-image of this debate recurs with a gong-like regularity, every time England qualifies for some world sporting championship that Scotland fails to reach.

In England, though, the argument is being conducted with real intensity for what is perhaps the first time, as the big nation south of the border begins to get its head round the idea that the Scots have not only asked for and got their own domestic parliament, but have now had the cheek to elect an SNP government, bent - at least in theory - on breaking the Union.  If you add the fact that the UK has for 11 years been governed by a UK government in which Scots are strongly represented, that that government is scraping rock-bottom in terms of popularity, and that it is now being led by a dour Scot never popularly elected as Prime Minister, then you have the makings of a perfect storm of anti-Scottish feeling in London - the storm into which Andy Murray walked last week, not as an innocent abroad, but as a smart, cheeky and sometimes charmless young Scot of a generation that has long since ceased to give a damn what middle England thinks, one way or the other.

Cue a hilarious bout of Scot-bashing in some of the London media, with Murray being kicked from here to breakfast-time for his alleged bad manners, surly demeanour, large mouth, ugly gestures, and anti-Engish sentiments - this last suggestion based on a quip about supporting “whoever England is playing” in the 2006 World Cup.  Some thundered about “building Hadrian’s Wall higher”, others talked of boldly chucking Murray’s nasty sweatbands right back at him.  The comedian Mark Steel, by contrast, represented the great tradition of English radicalism with a brilliant tirade in The Independent against the snobbery and cultural arrogance of  Home Counties England, and its alleged distaste for everyone who fails to fit the bill in terms of class, race or culture.   These are the same people, he thundered, who once dismissed the great Fred Perry as a working-class oik whose victory at Wimbledon was hardly to be celebrated;  Murray, he implied, was in good company.

Well, it’s only tennis.   But all the same, this week’s hoo-ha over Andy Murray suggests to me that week by week, and inch by inch, England is gradually beginning to engage, at last, in the debate about the future of the Union that has been a staple of Scottish politics for most of the last century, and which - as Mark Steel suggests - raises profound questions about the future and identity of England itself.  At first, of course, the most vociferous response to Scotland’s new assertiveness comes from the extreme English nationalists, that tiny hard core of people, present in every culture, for whom national identity of an absolute kind matters obsessively.  These people certainly exist around Scottish nationalism; and now their English counterparts are in full cry, besieging the letters editors of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph with a stream of Scotophobic comment.

Then a second and more subtle negative response comes from the Westminster establishment, in both politics and the media, who are visibly irritated by the very existence of the Scottish Parliament, and who still have no consistent plan for recognising and dealing with it.   This week, the jolly Conservative grandee Kenneth Clarke produced his suggestion - from one of David Cameron’s policy committees - about how to answer the West Lothian question, on the apparent injustice of Scottish MP’s voting on English domestic matters when the reverse is no longer possible; and was immediately howled down from all quarters for a half-baked set of ideas involving banning Scots MP’s for voting on the detail of legislation, but allowing them to continue to vote on the broad principle.

All of which suggests just this: that the true West Lothian question is not really about how to correct the imbalances set up by asymmetyrical devolution - in truth, they cannot sensibly be corrected - but about how far the English people really care about them.  And so far, the views of the majority of English people have been almost impossible to discern, through the barrage of yelping and pouting sent up by a few hundred political  obsessives at Westminster and in the media.

The one thing that seems almost bound to corrode the Union further, though, with every day that it drags on, is this unpopular and failing Gordon Brown government, which this week courted English fury at Westminster again by blatantly ensuring that Scotland benefited disproportionately from government patronage, in the ordering of two new British aircraft carriers.  The Union has always depended on a subtle balance of interests between Scotland and England; and it seems increasingly clear that in strong-arming his way to the Premiership, at the fag-end of a New Labour project in which so many Scots had already played such a prominent role, Gordon Brown may have seriously upset that balance, just as Margaret Thatcher did in her day.

The best thing he could do now, in other words - for the Union he loves, and the British identity he cherishes - would be to call a general election, lance the boil of anti-Scottish resentment in London, and let the debate move on briskly to a more constructive phase.  But true to stereotype, he is a stubborn and unbending man; and whatever the cost to the Union, or to the party he has served all his life, it seems that he will see his Premiership through, now, to what may be a bitter end indeed.

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Our House, The Merchant Of Venice

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on OUR HOUSE at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, and THE MERCHANT OF VENICE at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, for Scotsman Review, 4.7.08

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Our House   4 stars ****

The Merchant Of Venice 4 stars ****

IN THE world of theatre, there’s no genre so unpredictable as the much-abused tribute musical.    Some of these shows, it has to be said, are among the real bottom-feeders of the live entertainment scene, cynical cut-and-paste jobs designed to bamboozle some niche-market of fans with an overpriced mixture of weak musical performance and feeble narrative.

But then again, the tribute form can produce the occasional gem, the show that combines a real, loving respect for the music in hand with a true sense of theatre, and a story that reflects and expands the spirit of the music itself; and that, in a lighthearted way, is what has been achieved by writer Tim Firth, director Matthew Warchus, and the rest of the team, in this new touring version of Our House, the 2002 musical based on the work of the North London band Madness.  As their many fans already know, Madness emerged from the mean streets of N.W.1 in the late 1970’s, with a bouncy, complex, ska-influenced sound that flowered into a series of massive hits - including Our House (In The Middle Of Our Street), My Girl’s Mad At Me, and the iconic school’s-out anthem, Baggy Trousers.

What Tim Firth has done, though, is to take the powerful, distinctive English-pop sound of Madness, and spin it out into a story that gives full expression to the values behind the songs, notably that trademark mixture of streetwise cyncism and underlying romanticism.  And so - with bold echoes throughout of Willy Russell’s iconic working-class musical, Blood Brothers - we find ourselves following a brave double narrative, in which our young hero Joe Casey (from Casey Street, N.W.1) faces a decision, on his 16th birthday, that takes him in two different possible directions, both of which we follow.

By the interval, it seems pretty clear that the boy who did the right thing, and tried to play it straight, has made a mug’s choice; he is penniless and in prison, while his morally compromised other half has become a big-time property developer, right-hand man of the local Mr. Big, and is married to his teenage sweetheart, the lovely Sarah. 

But in the second half, fortunes gradually reverse, as the dark underbelly of the property development business begins to shadow the community, and the Joe who kept his hands clean gradually discovers the true meaning of happiness.  It’s schmalzy stuff, towards the end, full of a simple anti-capitalist politics.  But the earthy energy of the songs keeps the show from spilling over the edge of sentimentality, as does Peter Darling’s wittty and often brilliant Madness-inspired choreography.   And a superb young company - led by the quiet-voiced but completely convincing Chris Carswell as Joe, with Steve Brookstein as the guiding spirit of his dead Dad, Miria Parvin as girlfriend Sarah, and a dozen more superbly committed young dancers and actors as friends, schoolmates and chorus - throw themselves into the show with an energy and passion that lifts the heart; and creates a true tribute to a band that once spoke for a whole generation of working-class kids in London and beyond, even as the class they came from was being swept away in a wave of social and economic change.

If Joe’s story suggests, in a fairly straightforward way, that all that glitters is not gold, then Shakespeare’s Merchant Of Venice - the play from which that quote comes - is a far more morally ambiguous piece of work.   To win the lovely Portia, heiress of Belmont, the cash-strapped Venetian gentleman-about-town Bassanio famously has to choose one of three caskets, gold, silver and lead; and as in Joe’s story, the choice that leads to love is the least showy one, the one that asks for sacrifice

In the background, though, lies the story of Bassanio’s melancholy friend Antonio, of his obsessive love for Bassanio, and of his business relationship with Shylock the Jew, a money-lender for whom wealth has become a substitute for the respect and civic equality Venice denies him; and by the bitter end of the play, the sugary Christian moralising over the casket choice seems like fairly thin and decorative stuff.

For much of its length, Gordon Barr’s outdoor production - the first of this year’s Bard In The Botanics season - seems like a fairly conventional approach to the play, set in the 1930’s so far as costume is concerned, but not heavily reinterpreted to fit the moment when anti-Semitism in Europe took on its most lethal and frightening form.

In the second half, though - once the romancing is over, and the logic of the court-case between Antonion and Shylock begins to exert its grip - the production suddenly shifts into much higher gear, with Sarah Chalcroft’s Portia taking on an impressive stature and complexity as she struggles to square her instinctive support for Antonio, her new husband’s friend, with a deep sense that the Jew is suffering some fundamental wrong.  Towards the end, that unease finds expression not only in her increasingly fine performance, but in some marvellous use of Shylock’s discarded skull-cap and prayer-shawl as a symbol of Europe’s Jewish heritage, despised and trampled by some, preserved and honoured by others.   It’s not in the script, of course.  But Barr and his company demonstrate that Shakespeare’s great and troubling play more than bears the interpretation they bring to it; and the result is a final half-hour as strong and satisfying as I have ever seen in a production of the Merchant Of Venice, as the shadows of night creep across the gardens, and - on stage - across our whole continent.

Our House at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, tonight and tomorrow, and at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, next week, 7-12 July.  The Merchant Of Venice at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, until 12 July.

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