Joyce McMillan goes online…

All my writing on theatre and general social/political issues is 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 2009

Hair I Am

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on HAIR I AM at the CCA, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 7.11.09
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2 stars **

HELEN CUINN is one of Glasgow’s growing army of young performance artists; and once, at the Arches, I heard her deliver a monologue that seemed to contain the germ of a serious piece of theatre – something about genetics and belonging, place and identity.  To judge by this latest show, though – created by Cuinn as an invited artist at the Glasgay! Festival – she now urgently needs to move her work on from the ghetto of brief experimental performance, into something more ambitious and outward-looking.

Hair I Am is performed on a stage coloured entirely in shades of orange and red, and strewn with a range of red clothes and shoes; and in this alluringly weird space, Cuinn investigates the cultural meanings attached to red-headedness in our society.  For a short 45 minutes, she  plays around with huge wigs, sings the theme song from Annie, does some red-haired rap.  She also shows film of two fictional street interviews with redheads, in which she niggles away at the resonant question of whether having a physical characteristic like red hair automatically creates a sense of affinity with other redheads.

But that, folks, is about it.  And it’s high time someone encouraged this gifted writer and performer to sit down at her desk, and have a go at writing a two-act play; if only because in mastering that technique, she would earn the right to break up and challenge conventional theatrical forms in much more purposeful ways, and in front of a far wider audience.

ENDS ENDS

The Maw Broon Monologues, 10000 Metres Deep, Antigone

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE MAW BROON MONOLOGUES at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 10,000 METRES DEEP at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and ANTIGONE at the Ramshorn Theatre, Glasgow, for Scotsman Arts, 5.11.09
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The Maw Broon Monologues  4 stars ****
10000 Metres Deep  3 stars ***
Antigone  3 stars ***

FOR A WOMAN who first saw the light of day on 8 March 1936 – and was a lusty 50-year-old even then – the Sunday Post’s great Scottish cartoon matriarch, Maw Broon, is looking in pretty good shape.  She’s not slim, she’s not young, she’s not braw; and as she comes to realise, in the course of this new Glasgay! Commission by Glasgow-born poet and playwright Jackie Kay, she isn’t actually real.

For all her disadvantages, though, Maw Broon – as personified here by fabulous Terry Neason, and black alter ego Suzanne Bonnar – is all woman; and in Kay’s weird, slightly mind-blowing tartan-tinged fantasy, she takes umbrage at Paw Broon’s suspected infidelity, and sets off from her kitsch room-and-kitchen at No. 10 Glebe Street to travel the world of the early 21st century, in search of the personal fulfilment she deserves.

Tartan shopping bag in hand, and headscarf tied firmly in place, she therefore visits a shrink, tries colonic irrigation, pines for a room of her own, wins through to round three of Scotland’s Got Talent (“reality’s no just on TV, ye know”), discusses the possible merits of a gay lifestyle, and generates her own version of the Vagina Monologues.  And meantime, at the piano, the astonishing Tom Urie – in the character of Maw’s unattractive bearded daughter, Daphne Broon – rattles out his own cycle of songs in which Neason and Bonnar celebrate or bewail Maw’s fate, in styles ranging from Scottish country dance to serious blues; while a screen above the fireplace alternaties between a sentimental Highland scene, and captioned texts in which the great philosophers of post-modernity offer their thoughts on the journey of the individual towards self-knowledge.

It has to be said that having set up this brilliant and hilarious scnario, Jackie Kay’s 90-minute script doesn’t quite develop the dramatic momentum of which it might have been capable.  The relationship between the two Maw Broons is not clear; the idea of the black alter ego is not developed, and their conversation often dwindles into daytime television cliche.  The show expresses no legible view about the self-obsessed individualism of our time; and it often slides into the easy comic option of setting up the old tenement stereotype, and then raising cheap laughs by conjuring up incongruities, like Maw Broon serving up sashimi.

But if the show sometimes lacks focus, and often tends to reinforce the stereotypes it sets out to challenge, it’s also one of the most hilariously inventive investigations of Scottish kitsch culture to appear on stage since the 1980’s.  Maggie Kinloch’s production fully exploits the post-modern madness of the material; Neason and Bonnar both sing beautifully, particularly when it comes to the blues.  And Neason in particular sometimes seems like the very embodiment of a certain kind of Scottish womanhood; the hard-working, self-mocking kind for whom being a woman was never a matter of pride or joy, and who therefore needed the liberation brought by the strange, self-centred times we live in, as much as any group on earth.

Ideas of motherhood also loom large in this week’s play in the Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime season; although after the madness of Maw Broon, it’s strange to see a young playwright reverting to such a conventional style.  Laura Lomas’s 10,000 Metres Deep – co-produced with the London-based new writing company Paines Plough – is a slow-moving three-handed drama about a chance encounter between Cathy, a middle-aged woman living alone in a remote coastal cottage, and Claire and Jason, a young couple on the run from their chaotic lives in the city.

Claire is heavily pregnant, a strange girl obsessed with random pub-quiz facts; Jason is a needy boy on a constant knife-edge of rage and violence.  And Cathy is less solid and settled than she looks, still grieving the loss, twenty years ago, of the baby daughter who was her only child.

The curve of the story is both predictable and sentimental; the major plot developments emerge with agonising slowness, and are visible long minutes before Lomas gets round to articulating them.   Yet there’s something about this play that holds the attention, nevertheless.  It’s partly the sheer excellence of the acting, in Tessa Walker’s unshowy production, from Jennifer Black, Gemma McElhinney, and Owen Whitelaw.  But it’s also the intense emotional energy and sadness with which Lomas pursues her image of a society in which the motherly are often left childless, and children and young people often feel utterly, forlornly unmothered.  There’s a profound truth there; and it  promises well for Laura Lomas’s future, as a playwright with the courage to go where the maximum pain and tension is, and to dramatise it, without apology.

The heroine of Sophocles’s mighty tragedy Antigone is also a motherless child, the youngest daughter of the ill-fated incestuous union between Oedipus and Jocasta.  In this play, though – now revived by Strathclyde Theatre Group at the Ramshorn, in Jean Anouilh’s 1940’s version – Antigone represents a timeless image of youthful idealism and loyalty, pitted against the grubby pragmatism of grown-up politics, as practised by her uncle Creon, King of Thebes.

Susan C. Triesman’s production, for a pro-am cast of  eleven, is a straightforward, old-fashioned and steadily-paced affair, with a proscenium-arch feel that matches the wordy bourgeois tone of Anouilh’s version.  But if Strathclyde Theatre Group’s productions often fail to set the Merchant City alight, it would be still be regrettable if  it were to succumb to the latest round of financial threats to its existence.  It’s a theatre with a strong record in providing unique pathways into theatre, particularly for aspiring actors of all ages; and in a world increasingly dominated by the tick-box and the mandatory qualification, its loss would be a blow to the maverick spirit on which artistic creativity thrives.

All shows run until Saturday, 7 November.

ENDS ENDS ENDS

The Dream Of Change Trumps Rational Debate, As Voters Pin Hopes On A Tory Party Whose Policies They Oppose: Column 31.10.08

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 31.10.09
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AS I WRITE, I have no idea whether Tony Blair will emerge as the new President of the European Council, or not; but his prospects are not looking bright.  It’s hardly surprising, after all, that the European leaders gathered in Brussels should think twice about appointing as their new Convenor a former British Prime Minister who squandered most of his political capital on a hapless mission to give unquestioning support to United States foreign policy, come what may.

It’s also worth remembering, though, that just 12 years ago this autumn, the now much-mocked Tony Blair was the UK’s shiny new reforming Prime Minister, at the start of a media and political honeymoon that would last for almost five years.   The hopes of the nation were pinned upon his new administration, which had promised not to reverse the Thatcher revolution of the previous 20 years, but to combine it with a new commitment to fairness and high ethical standards in public life.  And after the scandals of sleaze and alleged incompetence which had surrounded John Major’s dying government, it certainly felt like a new beginning, with a brighter, better government, founded on far stronger moral values.

Well, you may laugh.  But that was the mood of the time; and even as a woman of the centre-left, I remember feeling slightly uneasy about the sheer irrationality with which the London media pack, and a large proportion of the voting public, had somehow convinced themselves that smooth-talking Tony and his project would solve all problems.  For in truth, the contempt with which John Major’s ministers and their policies were treated during those months had nothing to do with serious debate about the relative merit of Conservative and New Labour policies; and everything to do with a kind of playground mobbing of a group who had been labelled as losers, and who were being scapegoated for every problem under the sun.

And now – well, blow me down if we are not going through exactly the same ritual again, with Gordon Brown’s government now the scapegoats, and David Cameron’s Conservatives benefiting from the dangerous tendency to project all the nation’s hopes and dreams onto the most likely alternative government.  All across Britain – although particularly, it seems, in the southern counties – people are happily hounding the Labour government from office, baying for the blood of any government minister who shows ihs or her face in public, and signing up to support squeaky-clean David Cameron and his friends in inaugurating a new age of decent, patriotic government in Britain.

Admittedly, most of these supporters seem to want much more money spent on the armed forces, which will not be possible given the scale of planed Tory spending cuts; most of them are devoted to the cause of retaining rural postal deliveries, which will certainly not be possible when the Cameronians privatise the Royal Mail.  And almost all of the more recent Conservative recruits seem to want a fairer, less divided, and more compassionate Britain, with a more equal distribution of opportunities; yet the attitude to “big government” now adopted by the Cameron Tories has all but precluded any progress towards that goal, as any decent historian of progressive Conservatism could tell them.

What is happening, in other words, is that the debate about who should form the next government of the UK has become almost completely divorced from the question of which party has the best policies to meet our aspirations, and almost entirely focussed on the ad-hominem question of whether the existing government is morally and intellectually fit to rule.  Hence the weird focus, particularly in the Westminster village, on finding some actual physical or mental ailment that can be pinned on the Prime Minister.  Hence the obsession with the expenses scandal, particularly as it bears on Labour ministers.

And hence the near-total failure – very similar to the media’s failure with Blair, after 1997 – to challenge David Cameron on the glaring inconsistencies between the values he says he embraces, and the policies he is beginning to adopt.  For in this dumbed-down, ideology-free and policy-ignorant form of politics, the hard fact is that nobody cares.  Instead, it seems that both the public, and large sections of the media, would rather simply act on the “gut feeling” that everything will somehow be better, once Gordon and Sarah are kicked out of the Downing Street Big Brother house, and David and Samantha are placed there instead.

Now of course, there is a sense in which power corrupts, and a change of government is therefore – all else being equal – a good thing in itself.  But it’s something else for voters to start believing in the brilliance, competence and superior morality of a party with policies they dislike, simply because they are so desperate to get rid of the existing government; and we need to analyse the reasons for this growing hatred of incumbent parties.

It may be that the traditional rhetoric of change employed by national politicians, in an age when national governments have less and less real power, eventually makes frauds and hate-figures of all politicians who use it.  It may be – as the persistent expenses scandal suggests – that governments and parliaments are now so aggressively lobbied by the mighty princes of the commercial world that they genuinely do become corrupted, not least in their assumptions about whose priorities are “normal”, and whose voices should be heard.

Whatever the cause, though, we should be concerned about the effect.   If good government has become impossibly difficult at UK level, then we need to ask ourselves why.  And if good government is still sometimes taking place, but we have lost the capacity to see and value it – well then, we also need to ask ourselves some tough questions about that; before our next shiny new government begins to seem as tarnished as the last, and as quick to lose whatever moral authority it had, on the glad, confident morning of its election.

ENDS ENDS

The Moon Sails Out

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE MOON SAILS OUT at Cumbernauld Theatre, for The Scotsman 31.10.09
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3 stars ***

IN SPAIN, investigators into the hidden history of the Franco regime are about – 73 years on – to begin the excavation of the mass grave near Granada which is thought to contain the remains of the assassinated playwright Federico Garcia Lorca.  This is the fiercely topical backdrop to Ed Robson’s latest ambitious “chamber production” at Cumbernauld Theatre; but despite the intensity of the story, it never quite achieves a convincing focus on Lorca’s special place in European history.

Performed by a cast of three, The Moon Sails Out is a dreamlike 60-minute meditation on Lorca’s short life, focussed almost entirely on his broken relationship with fellow artists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, whom he met during his student years in Madrid.  The matters on which the three disagreed were vital ones, to do with the relationship between tradition and modernity, and with the need to stay in Spain and defend the Republic, as Civil War loomed; and these disputes are certainly mentioned, in the show’s poetic devised script.

At an emotional and dramatic level, though, Robson chooses to portray Lorca not as a gentle but gallant and forceful advocate of his own art and ideas, but rather as a quivering victim of a failed love-affair with Dali, barely able to speak in a voice louder than a whisper.  This impression is reinforced by the decision to have Lorca played by a woman, Imogen Toner, who exudes fragile defiance at best, and hunch-shouldered female victimhood at worst.  The sound and design of this short show – all red backdrops, bedsteads and closets, with a beautiful final image of falling rain – is impressive, and some of the stylised acting is interesting.  But the soaring beauty and moral strength of Lorca’s poetic voice is never heard; and without that, the story loses much of its meaning.

ENDS ENDS

Songbird

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on SONGBIRD (Giant Productions at Platform @ The Bridge, Easterhouse) for The Scotsman 30.10.09
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4 stars ****

THERE’S A TENDENCY for children’s theatre to take a bells-and-whistles approach to the art-form, with performers seeking constant reassurance in the form of obvious audience reactions.  Here’s a show though, that takes an entirely different approach.  It’s serious, moving and dignified; and it treats its audience, aged eight and over, like real junior theatregoers, capable of taking on board some powerful and substantive themes.  And beyond that, this beautiful 45-minute tone poem – written and composed by David Paul Jones, and conceived and directed by Katrina Caldwell – also adds something to the current rapid development of music theatre in Scotland; not least because of the astonishing synthetic languages – one from a beautiful island rainforest, the other a complex amalgam of western city language – in which Jones has written his libretto.

Through eleven distinct and beautiful songs, the story tells of a lovely, vulnerable songbird, exquisitely played and sung by Judith Williams, whose rainforest is destroyed by fire when a towering female figure of western commerce, fabulously embodied by soprano Rachel Hynes, comes to clear the land.  The destroyer finds the bewildered songbird, and captures it for her own; she takes it to a western city, where the songbird is displayed and exploited as an exotic performer, before dying of grief and homesickness, and leaving its owner stricken with a terrible sense of loss.

The metaphor is obvious, and Brian Hartley’s set – of swift-moving, reversible flats, cunningly lit by Sergey Jakovsky -  is as clever and effective as his beautifully-feathered songbird costume.  And with the help of a little comic by-play from David Paul Jones as the pianist, and cellist Robin Mason, the children in the audience are held rapt from beginning to end, and left with plenty of food for thought, discussion, and dreams.

ENDS ENDS

Othello, Top Dog/Underdog, The Elephant Man, Kes

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on OTHELLO and TOP DOG/UNDERDOG at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, KES at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, and THE ELEPHANT MAN at Dundee Rep, for Scotsman Arts, 29.10.09
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Othello   3 stars ***
Top Dog/Underdog   4 stars ****
The Elephant Man   4 stars ****
Kes   4 stars ****

THERE’S TRAGEDY as far as the eye can see, around Scotland’s stages this month; two tragedies of race, one of class, one of extreme physical deformity.  Where they vary, though, is in their power to turn tragic events into a cathartic and meaningful dramatic experience.  Tradition suggests that there should always be a certain dramatic exhilaration in the bringing to light of tragedy and violence, a sense of cleansing, and of possible new beginnings.  The difficulty is that many modern directors and actors find it impossible to follow that conventional curve through violence and despair to resolution and hope; and the result can be a gruelling evening of unredeemed misery.

This, roughly speaking, is the fate of Guy Hollands’s new Citizens’ production of Othello, perhaps the most despairing of all Shakespeare’s tragedies.  In the week of the controversy over the BNP’s first appearance on Question Time, it’s easy to see what Hollands is trying to do with this terrible catastrophe of racial hatred, in which the mighty black general Othello, and his young bride Desdemona, are utterly destroyed by the vicious  spite of his trusted adjutant, Iago.  In the final scene, when Iago’s schemes are exposed, Hollands’s production allows us no sense of moral victory.  Andy Clark’s subtle, chilling, and defiant Iago – part blokish man’s man, part shape-changing devil – never bows his head, never concedes; we can see his racism as a snake in the bosom of our culture, always scotch’d, never killed.  And Pauline Knowles’s heartfelt Emilia is never allowed to blaze into the glowing force for moral truth she should be, at this final crisis; she is just too fragile, physically and vocally, to make that kind of dramatic impact.

On the way to this grim conclusion, Hollands’s production reveals many fine qualities.  There’s an effective stylised grey wall of a set, by Philip Witcomb, that opens to reveal vivid glimpses of the world in which Sarah Howarth’s bright, forceful Desdemona – incongruously dressed like a grungy modern rock-chick – will never live to grow old.  And if Jude Akuwidike’s Othello seems a shade hesitant and under-rehearsed, he still captures the emotional heart of the role.  But the dominant colour of the show is grey, the mood shifts only from foreboding to despair; and the audience plods from the theatre in the kind of depression that only disempowers, as the best theatre never should.

There’s more of a sense of true catharsis in the Cits’ current studio production, Top Dog/Underdog.   Directed with memorable intensity by Citizens’ trainee Leann O’Kasi, and breathtakingly well performed by Tyronne Lewis and Nicholas Pinnock, this Scottish premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-winning 2002 play offers us another tragedy of race in the story of two iconically-named black brothers, Lincoln and Booth, who are sharing a miserable room in 1990’s New York.  There’s some great, rap-style poetic writing here, and some profound insights into the impact of parental abandonment, the legacy of slavery, and the limited repertoire of roles and language available to black men – either craven servant of white society, or street kid  using loud rap and three-card trickery as a macho denial of powerlessness.   And although the conclusion, when it comes, is both inevitable and shocking, there’s a cultural energy and anger in the journey that makes it seem worthwhile.

There’s almost too much gentle catharsis in Bernard Pomerance’s stage version of The Elephant Man, first seen in London in 1977, and now revived at Dundee Rep in a stunningly effective and moving production by the Rep’s new associate, Jemima Levick.  The play has a short story to tell, of the horribly deformed Victorian Englishman Joseph Merrick, of his adoption by Dr. Frederick Treves of the London Hospital, and of the civilised if confined few years he spent there, until his early death; and the text frankly struggles to turn this brief cameo into a full-length play, resorting to irritating dream-sequences to pad out the action.

Lewick’s production, though, plays brilliantly to the text’s meditative strengths.  Alex Lowde’s sensational design, with sound by Jon Beales, holds Merrick in a brilliantly-lit curtained room, surrounded by a towering skeleton structure of staircases and corridors that perfectly evokes the impressive institutional architecture of the age.  As for the Rep Ensemble, they throw off their Scottish voices as if they were currently more of an encumbrance than an asset, and deliver a pitch-perfect account of an impressive rage of Victorian Londoners.  Kevin Lennon is heartbrakingly brilliant as Merrick, conveying his sense of deformity entirely through voice and gesture; Robin Laing is in magnificent form as Treves.  And Irene Macdougall is dazzling as Merrick’s broad-minded actress friend, Mrs. Kendal, who becomes the focus of all his romantic yearnings, and of the tragedy of his unfulfilled life.

Of all this week’s tragedies, though, it’s perhaps the Touring Consortium’s stage version of Kes, currently in Edinburgh, that most perfectly strikes the balance between disaster and hope.  The tone of Barry Hines’s great 1960’s story about young Billy Casper and his kestrel is famously bleak and monochrome.  But the sense of freedom, beauty and purpose Billy finds in his short time with Kes remains in his heart, as a symbol of what human life can be; and all of this is captured with great passion in Nikolai Foster’s dark-toned touring production, which involves both a professional cast and young people from the Liverpool area.  Stefan Butler gives a memorable performance as young Billy, unprepossessing, bullied, but with an almost shocking core of sweetness; and although its detail is often grim, there’s something about this great story of working-class England that breaks free and soars, like the hawk itself, high above the bleak landscape it describes.

Othello and Top Dog/Underdog at the Citizens’ Theatre until 14 November.  The Elephant Man at Dundee Rep and Kes at the King’s, Edinburgh, both until Saturday (31 October).

ENDS ENDS

Arguments For Terrorism

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on ARGUMENTS FOR TERRORISM at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 28.10.09
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4 stars ****

THE GLASGAY! festival is in full swing; so it’s hardly surprising to find another gay couple trying to work things out, in this week’s Play, Pie, and Pint lunchtime show.   George and Tony have been together for a long while, it seems; their love has been very special.  But now, George has lost his big-shot job, Tony keeps taking whispered calls from an old friend called Peter, and George fears that his man is about to switch his affections to the new boss, a charismatic black guy called – yes- Barack.

This is David Ireland’s Arguments For Terrorism, co-produced with Ransom Productions of Belfast, and directed by Ransom’s Rachel O’Riordan; and it’s as well to concede right away that there are a few old-fashioned stereotypes flying around in this show, particularly after Tony Flynn comes on as George and Tony’s gayer-than-gay mate Jose Maria, the former Prime Minister of Spain.

Beneath the easy surface joke, though, there’s a much deeper satirical impulse, directed against the ridiculous locker-room machismo of the world of global leaders, with their simpering wives and regulation children.  And from that impulse flows a glorious avalanche of cheeky political and personal one-liners, with Tony playing the brainy and devious English guy to George’s wise fool, given to pointing out unpalatable truths about their conduct of various wars.

Given the strength-in-depth of Irish acting, it’s perhaps not surprising that O’Riordan’s cast of three give superb, beautifully-timed performances, with Richard Clements simply unforgettable as the charming and slippery Tony.  And if this play looks more like a single, short satirical sketch than a serious forward step in David Ireland’s development as a writer, it still shows a formidable talent for dialogue, and for pointing out the politically ridiculous, in the smoking embers of our world.

ENDS ENDS

A Child Made Of Love/International Order

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on A CHILD MADE OF LOVE at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 26.10.09
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3 stars ***

OF ALL THE THEMES to emerge from gay theatre over the last 25 years, the story of gay men who yearn for fatherhood has been the slowest to surface.  Now, though, many gay couples are facing the familiar dilemmas of parenthood, with the added complications of adoption or surrogacy.

Matthew McVarish’s A Child Made Of Love – commissioned by Glasgay!, and seen at the Tron last week – is a soft-hearted little drama, with a song thrown in, about a loving gay couple and their quest for a son; indeed if Oscar Wilde had been around, he might have called it a play of “more than usually revolting sentimentality”, so shamelessly does it twang our heartstrings.  It’s performed with great heart and skill, though, by Andrew Agnew and Ed Corrie, with superb child actor Kai Ross as the image of their future son; and simple though it is, it signals a whole new era of intense male involvement in the business of parenthood and child-raising.

It’s worth noting, too, that there was a much sharper take on the gay quest for fatherhood in Markus Makevellian’s rap show International Order, at the Arches last week.  Makevellian – aka Drew Taylor – is a performer who comes on in outrageous drag-queen gear, and sets out to shock.  After a while, though, he pulls off his sparkly wig, and emerges as a formidable performance poet; his voice is raw, clever and disturbing, and we will be hearing much more of it, in years to come.

ENDS ENDS

BNP Puts Down Roots As Mainstream Parties Respond With Fear And Fascination – Column 24.10.09

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 24.10.09
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BY SOME STRANGE chance, the week of the hugely controversial Question Time appearance by the British National Party leader Nick Griffin was also a week when two theatres in Edinburgh offered up shows which seek to imagine what evil might look like, if it were made flesh.  At the Royal Lyceum, you can see the young anti-hero of James Hogg’s mighty 19th century novel The Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner being stalked by his demonic familiar spirit Gil-Martin.  And at the Traverse, in the touring show for teenagers The Curse Of The Demeter, you can watch the crew of the ship in which Count Dracula and his vampires made their famous journey to England responding in a telling range of  ways to the evil they begin to sense in their midst; with fear or disbelief, insidious fascination, or brave resistance.

As we all now know, of course, Nick Griffin is not nearly as seductive a devil as either Dracula or Gilmartin; he lacks the brains and the style, although he obviously likes to indulge in a bit of shape-changing.  But there is a kind of evil, no doubt, in the very nature of his political project, which aims to take hold of the deepest economic and social fears of ordinary white Britons, and to turn them against other groups even more vulnerable than themselves, largely identified by race and skin-colour.  It’s a contemptible project, as stupid as it is ugly-minded.  And it’s by our response to that evil that we will be judged, over the next decade.

So how are we doing, two days on from Griffin’s roasting at the hands of a Question Time audience of furious west Londoners?  Not spectacularly well, is the short answer.  Almost all mainstream politicians, of course – and many members of the public – are willing to sound off  in smug and self-righteous terms about their rejection of the BNP’s views; the leader in this field, this week, was perhaps the SNP’s Mike Russell, who indulged in a particularly ill-judged form of political point-scoring by implying – absurdly enough, given the statistics on racist and ethnic attacks in this country – that Scots are somehow immune to the BNP virus.  Dig a little deeper, though, and you find a lot of bluster, some telling silences, and mounting evidence that many mainstream politicians are so frightened of the BNP’s arguments, and so fascinated by their apparent popular appeal, that they can barely produce any coherent response at all.

On the question of the position of women, for example – and of  the reactionary views on gender and homosexuality held by many Muslim communities – no member of Thursday’s Question Time panel offered much of a comment, despite a direct question from the audience.  In fact, it is nonsense for politicians like Griffin to suggest that this problem is peculiar to Islam, particularly in a week when some sections of the Church of England were loudly welcoming the Pope’s offer of a form of communion that would allow them to continue to treat women as spiritual inferiors.  But no member of the panel had either the nous or the nerve to point out that full equality for women is something that tends to happen in defiance of old-time religion, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish; and that it has nothing to do with the intrinsic teachings of the faiths themselves, which in each case are capable of  both reactionary and liberal interpretations.

The argument over the role of women is a sideshow, though, compared with the one on the central issue of migration and employment; for here, the mainstream parties tend to concede 90% of the ground to the BNP before the debate even begins, by never contesting their central and flawed assertion that immigrants somehow cost Britain more than they contribute.    Essentially, what has happened in the British labour market over the last 15 years is that millions of migrants have arrived, eager to work, and that their impact on the economy as a whole has been positive, particularly in terms of unattractive jobs filled, and taxes paid.

The problem, though, is that down in the low-wage badlands of the British economy, where British-born workers are forced to compete with incomers for what are junk jobs even at best, their willingness to work for a relative pittance naturally causes bad feeling, exacerbated by the fact that no mainstream party now dares to suggest reversing the labour market “reforms” which permit this kind of exploitation.  On the contrary, they seem determined to extend them further; just look at “Prince of Darkness” Peter Mandelson and his Tory opposite number siding with the Royal Mail management in their attempt to smash the postal workers’ union, and you will see in a single image – more elegantly satanic than anything Nick Griffin can offer -  the living reason why some voters are turning to the BNP.

The BNP are therefore sadly right when they hint that the ranting of mainstream politicians against racism  has an inauthentic sound.  Racism is a great evil; but it is not more evil than the kind of blatant economic injustice that is now rife in our society, and which our government is apparently both powerless and unwilling to prevent.  And in refusing to confront that central form of injustice, our mainstream politicians are beginning, tragically, to bring into disrepute those struggles for equality which they do embrace.  Look at the history of the 1930’s, if you need a reminder of how quickly economic misery can turn into bitter fascism.  And then consider how the history of that decade might have turned out, if there had been no socialists offering a different kind of working-class politics, on the streets and in parliament.  Because thanks to Peter Mandelson and his generation of politicians, there are precious few socialists around now; only a vast abandoned space on what was once the left of British politics, where Nick Griffin and his boys are beginning to put down roots.

ENDS ENDS