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.

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© Joyce McMillan 2009

Anger, Not Apathy, Keeps Glasgow North-East From The Polls – Column 14.11.09

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 14.11.07
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THERE WERE strange scenes at the Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline on Thursday night, when a lady in the audience took exception to Plan B theatre company’s beautiful but moody post-modern dance show about Glasgow, A Wee Home From Home.  She rose from her seat, she rapped loudly on the edge of the stage, and she took the two performers to task for “making a mockery of Glasgow”, with what she called their arty-farty show.  Glasgow people, she said, were proud of their town; she knew, because she was one of them.

And that, it seems to me, is Glasgow, or at least one very imortant strand of its character.  There’s plenty of poverty, pain and trauma in the city’s history, plenty of half-suppressed grief and rage.  But there’s also glitz and style to burn, a fierce fighting spirit, and a strong disinclination to take what seems like cheek or nonsense from anyone.

Which is why it seems to me that Scotland’s chattering classes should pause, this weekend, before using the word “apathy” too freely to account for the dismally low turnout in Thursday’s Glasgow North-East by-election.  At just over 33%, it was certainly the lowest turnout ever registered at a parliamentary byelection in Scotland.  But to ascribe it to “apathy” is to imply that there was no stronger emotion involved than a lazy disinclination to go out in the rain and vote; whereas it seems to me that this mass boycott of the polls may well reflect a far more epic and interesting range of emotions, including anger, grief, disgust, and something close to political despair.

It’s true that the Labour Party in Scotland can take some comfort from the decision of voters to stick with the devil they know, rather than defecting to the SNP or, for that matter, the much-hyped BNP.  It’s as if they still recognise, in Gordon Brown’s battered Labour ranks, and in a parliamentary party shamed by the expenses scandal, the faint shadow of the party that gave them the NHS, the social security system, the good council housing of the mid-20th century; although in constituencies like Glasgow North-East, this recognition is itself tinged with melancholy regret for a party of the left that has largely been transformed, over the past 15 years, into just another team of men and women in expensive suits, fronting for capitalism in their own uniquely disingenuous way.

Look further down the list of thirteen candidates, though, and you see the traces of anger and despair at every stage of the journey. The SNP, for example – with just 4120 votes – has actually lost support in the area since the Scottish Parliament election of 2007.  The Conservatives, likely to form the next UK government, have even less traction than the nationalists in places like Sprnigburn and Dennistoun; with only 1075 votes, their talented candidate scraped in only just ahead of the BNP.  Despite massive media hype, the BNP won fewer votes than the Tories; although one Scottish newspaper was so excited by its presence that it wrongly reported it in third place rather than fourth.  And the left-of-centre alternative that once created some real excitement in constituencies around Glasgow – Tommy Sheridan’s Scottish Socialist Party – is splattered all over the poll in tiny fragments with strange names, the victim of the long political car-crash that was the Tommy Sheridan court case, with all its divisive and shaming consequences.

What we see here, in other words, is a fierce, harshly-lit snapshot of an electorate which cannot find a party fit to represent its interests, and which – not being light-minded or media-crazed enough simply to vote for famous faces, like the have-a-go Glasgow Airport hero John Smeaton -  therefore chooses not to vote at all.  Of course, the electorate of North-East Glasgow is not in any way typical of voters in Britain, or even in Scotland; with the best will in the world, the constituency still shows a shockingly high incidence of social deprivation, low pay, poverty and ill health.

But in ethical and psychological terms, no constituency is an island; each one speaks to the nation, and to its neighbours.
And what North-East Glasgow has said this week, through the thunderous silence of two-thirds of its voters, is that formal politics in Britain is now fast becoming dangerously irrelevant to those who need it most; irrelevant to those who need strong, confident, efficient, well-run and enabling government, at all levels, to empower them to improve their lives.  A general election run-off between a Labour Party that will cut spending in sorrow to bail out the bankers, and Tory Party who will do the same thing with ideological conviction and glee, is irrelevant to them.  A Scottish Parliament election between all-things-to-all men tartan nationalists and dour, apologetic New Labour unionists is irrelevant to them.  And the lies of the BNP are irrelevant to them.

What they need is a party that is not only committed to delivering social justice and equal opportunity; but is also explicit and articulate in its contempt for, and challenge to, a shallow and heartless bourgeois political culture which pretends that most of us can just carry on indefinitely living with the cold comforts of our material prosperity, while around us others suffer in poverty and despair.  If our society is broken, it is that failure of solidarity, compassion nd justice, in a time of plenty, that has broken it, over a shameful 30 years.  And on the day when the people of North-East Glasgow find a reason to start voting again, we will know that that dark cycle of politics is over; and that electoral politics has once again become a mechanism for making the world a better place, rather than a straw poll through which we choose the faces of those who will spend the next five years explaining to us why the world cannot really be changed at all, in north-east Glasgow, or anywhere else.

ENDS ENDS

Autobahn

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on AUTOBAHN at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 13.11.09
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4 stars ****

IF EVER A new Scottish theatre initiative had the credentials for success, it’s Theatre Jezebel, launched at the Tron this week.  Its co-directors are Kenny Miller, former Citizens’ design chief, and Mary McCluskey, of Scottish Youth Theatre; and their first show – the European premiere of Neil LaBute’s 2004 short-play series Autobahn – has style and elegance to burn, as well as a notable commitment to high-powered Scottish acting.

The writing, though, is very strange stuff, an odd mixture of chilling brilliance, and heavy-handed, unconvincing social criticism.   Each of the six playlets is set in the front seat of a moving car, and performed by a different male/female cast of two, sitting at the front of a line of flickering nightlights; on either side, another pair of actors wait their turn, in their own lane of the highway.  All six plays involve women talking a lot and men talking very little; in two of them, the male partners remain completely silent.  And each of the scenarios is both bitter and bleak.   In Merge, for example, a long-suffering husband slowly works out that his wife has once again got drunk at a conference and had sex with a string of men; in Road Trip, a crazed woman teacher has kidnapped a reluctant boy pupil, sinisterly ruffling his hair as they drive along.

To say that this is depressing is an understatement; much of it is chillingly horrible and faintly misogynistic, and LaBute’s final effort to use the autobahn metaphor to sum up American alienation is staggeringly clumsy.  Still, there’s a streak of dark poetry here; and in a fine range of performances, Sally Reid, Lesley Hart, Angela Darcy and Alison Peebles stand out, as women whose failed or deeply damaged relationships inside the car mirror the coldness and disconnection of the atomised world outside.

ENDS ENDS

We Will Rock You, Rain Man, The Life Of Wiley

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on WE WILL ROCK YOU at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, RAIN MAN at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, and THE LIFE OF WILEY at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for Scotsman Arts, 12.11.09
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We Will Rock You   4 stars ****
Rain Man   4 stars ****
The Life Of Wiley  3 stars ***

IF THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, then We Will Rock You – the spectacular Queen tribute musical scripted by Ben Elton – must be one of the most confusing Christmas show ever to strut its stuff on the vast stage of the Edinburgh Playhouse.  Yet on Monday night, when a crowd of 3000 rose as one to roar out their welcome to Queen guitarist Brian May as he strolled on stage to play the finale, followed in short order by drummer Roger Taylor, it was hard not to feel that this desperately self-conscious and sometimes self-contradictory tribute musical was likely to give tens of thousands of theatregoers more pure pleasure, over the coming Christmas season, than many a show with stronger artistic credentials.

Set 300 years from now, in a miserably dystopian future – when the earth is a ginat mall ruled by the all-powerful Globalsoft corporation, all music is computer-generated, and musical instruments have been destroyed and banned – We Will Rock You presents itself as a rallying cry to reassert the power and spirit of real rock, against the evil commercial forces which, ever since the days of Simon Cowell, have been conspiring to destroy it.

The difficulty is, though, that right from the outset, Elton’s script doesn’t know how seriously to take this quest, led by a geeky 24th-century hero called Galileo Figaro, who hears the sounds of great lost rock classics in his head; his girlfriend, the mouthy goth-styled Scaramouche, constantly mocks his aspirations, even as she helps him along.  Beyond that, the sheer technical spectacle  of the production – with its glitzy pomp-rock style,  beautifully-drilled chorus, massive lightshows, and vast computer-generated images of a 24th-century cyber-world  – inevitably undermines the show’s claims to be all about the basic revolutionary joy of the human voice matched with the electric guitar.  And finally, there are the structural problems raised by the show’s determination to fit more than two dozen Queen songs into the story, so that many of the greatest hits appear only in tantalising fragments.

Somehow, though, despite all of these problems, the sheer glamour and power of Queen’s music simply drives the show on, through a dazzling range of songs from Radio Gaga and Crazy Little Thing Called Love to We Are The Champions and the title song itself.  Michael Falzon, in the leading role as Galileo, sometimes looks a little overwhelmed by the weight of expectation he carries, as the fiftysometing fans roar out their adoration; only Darren Day looks thoroughly at ease, in his role as the villain Khashoggi.  But the atmosphere is genial, the music is great, the dancing is superb, the spectacle is unsurpassed; and the audience emerges into the Edinburgh night walking on air, and grinning from ear to ear.

If We Will Rock You has the narrative shape of a classic fairytale – boy follows his dream, gets his girl, and defeats evil for ever – then Barry Morrow’s Rain Man is an extreme version of another classic genre, the American buddy movie.  In this story – made famous by the award-winning 1988 film starring Dustin Hoffman, and playing this week at the King’s in a powerful new production of Dan Gordon’s stage version – pushy LA car salesman and hustler, Charlie Babbitt, is suddenly thrown into the company of Raymond, the severely autistic but strangely gifted brother he never knew he had, and who has now inherited the whole of the family fortune.

In the course of a few days, Charlie is transformed from a greedy boy holding his own vulnerable brother hostage for cash, to a man who is gradually reconnecting with his lost childhood, and beginning to understand what brotherly love  might be.  But if the arc of the story is simple and sentimental, the detail is both fascinating in itself, and valuable for the insight it offers into the strange and wonderful minds of people with autism; and it’s this detail of the interaction between the two men that is most beautifully captured in Robin Herford fine touring production, which stars a fiercely convincing Oliver Chris as Charlie, and a remarkable, touching, and infinitely watchable Neil Morrissey as Raymond.

The show also boasts some clever, stylish sets in American road movie style, and effective supporting performances.  But the focus is always, and rightly, on the ever-changing interaction between the two brothers; in a story which will touch the heart of anyone who has ever recognised, in anyone they love, that strange mixture of untouchability and vulnerability, distance and brilliant intimacy, that finally makes Raymond so irreplaceable.

The hostage story is another increasingly familiar dramatic genre; and Sean Hardie makes a brave, experimental stab at it in this week’s Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime show, even if the end result is a shade unsatisfactory.  In a dingy basement, a terrorist in combat gear is abusing a prisoner in a white suit and clerical collar, kidnapped in the market place; but it soon becomes clear that all is not what it seems, and that the protagonists are both far more lost than they seem.

Awkwardly poised between reductive comedy and real poignancy, and full of odd explanatory monologues, the play often struggles to hold the attention, even over a brief 45 minutes.  But it creates space for two striking performances from Alan Steele as the hostage, and a brilliant James Young as the would-be terrorist; reminding us that for a project built around new writing, Play, Pie and Pint also has a formidable track-record in showcasing and developing the finest young Glasgow actors on the block.

We Will Rock You at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, until 9 January.  Rain Man at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, and The Life Of Wylie at Oran Mor, Glasgow, both until Saturday, 14 November.

ENDS ENDS

Celebrity Without Pay: MP’s Wives In A Post-Modern Double Bind As Commons Rule Change – Column 7.11.09

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 7.11.09
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AS A PIECE OF PERFECTLY-DESIGNED street pageantry. the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph in London always seems in a class of its own.  The whole event is striking for its beauty, dignity and restraint; for the bright stillness of the November air, the London trees in their autumn colours, the aching magnificence of the music, as the military bands play their way through Elgar’s Nimrod, Purcell’s Dido, the Last Post.  This year, the event will be charged with a whole new dimension of meaning, for a new generation of British servicemen and women, and their families.  And as part of the national pageant, the leaders of our main UK political parties will be there as usual, alongside the royal family and the leaders of the armed services.  They will stand shoulder to shoulder in a male phalanx, the three men who lead the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties; on this occasion, only the Queen will have her family around her.

Yet behind the shoulder of each man, we the public will be able to see, in our minds’ eye, the almost equally familiar face of the woman who shares his life.  We will see Sarah Brown, the high-powered PR woman who gave up her own career to become a classic traditional helpmeet to her husband, and mother to his young sons.  We will see the lovely and aristocratic Samantha Cameron, the woman who works for an upmarket handbag company, as well as dealing gracefully with the pressures of family life and tragedy.  And we will see the glamorous face of  Miriam Durantez, the high-flying Spanish lawyer wife of Nick Clegg, and mother of his three children; less well known than the other two, but probably at least as recognisable as her husband, following the usual round of party conference photo sessions.

For the truth is that in this year 2009, after more than a generation of campaigning for equal opportunities and changed attitudes, the vast majority of politicians are still men, most of those men still have wives, and almost all of them are still judged, at least in part, on their ability to present to the public the kind of happy family image that has become vital in the marketing of candidates.  Sarah Brown, for example, has twice used her media-friendly wifely persona, at party conference time, to try to deflect criticism of her husband.  And when a political wife steps out of line, and refuses to conform to the “helpmeet” model – as Cherie Blair famously did from time to time – she risks a barrage of misogynistic media insult, often combined with blatantly offensive comment on her clothes, weight and appearance.

Which is why I find myself, this weekend, feeling unexpectedly angry on behalf of Britain’s political wives, who have now effectively been told – following the publication of Sir Christopher Kelly’s report into MP’s expenses – that whatever demands their husbands’ public careers may make upon them, in terms of commitment, presentation, loss of family time, invasion of privacy, or sheer hard campaigning work, they can now effectively give up hope of ever being paid a penny for their efforts.  Of course, in theory, we now live in a brave new world where married women are autonomous individuals, with their own careers to run and lives to lead.

But so far as public life is concerned, what has happened in practice is that our growing sense of women as individuals has been trumped and reversed by the steadily increasing demands of a brutal celebrity culture, in which the private lives of well-known people become public property, and in which couples are presented as a package, like Posh and Becks, or Brad and Angelina.  And as a result, the wives of prominent  politicians now find themselves in a miserable double bind.  On one hand, they are expected to be financially and professionally independent of their husbands, for all official and accounting purposes.

Yet on the other, they are still generally expected to be there – smiling, leafletting, answering the telephone and attending the school fete – as if nothing had changed since the 1950’s; particularly if they want to avoid constant rumours that their marriage is on the rocks, and their husband more interested in some bright young thing who is allowed to work with him.   All the Kelly reforms will achieve for many MP’s wives, in other words, is a return to the age when women’s work in support of their husbands was universally taken for granted, undervalued and unpaid; a situation that bears particularly hard on women whose husbands often spend the week at Westminster, leaving them at home to “nurse” the constituency.

And of course, it’s easy enough to see where these reforms will lead.  Well-to-do politicians will be able to shrug off the impact of these changes, keep their wives on the strength, and employ others as well; while many MP’s without private sources of income will find their office arrangements disrupted, their marriages on the line, and their spouses forced out onto a hostile labour market, just to keep the family budget in balance.

What the Kelly reform exposes, in other words, is just how far we still have to go before we achieve the kind of gender equality that would make sense of these proposals, and the kind of wider social equality that would make MP’s of all parties equally resilient to them.  And if there is one thing that is likely to bring home to MP’s just how severely they have damaged themselves, through their long-term failure to reform and modernise the Westminster parliament, it is their self-inflicted powerlessness, now, to prevent this change; a change that will bring genuine unhappiness to many MP’s families, that insults a lifetime of good work by many MPs’ spouses, and that will not – in the real world where we currently live – improve the functioning of democracy in Britain by a single jot.

ENDS ENDS

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.

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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.

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