04.06.1998

Theatre of dissent

Jack Conrad reviews 'Seeing Red - part two', May 26 - June 14, Battersea Arts Centre, directors Lisa Goldman and Deborah Bruce

While it should be stressed that I possess no expertise when it comes to literature, painting, music, sculpture, theatre, etc, as a communist politician I recognise that all forms of genuinely creative art express - be it conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or despairing - humanity’s yearning to be fully human. Art attacks mental complacency, refines our emotions, generalises experience and altogether enriches the inner life.

For its part capitalism both uses and fears art. Each new school or wave of artists begins as rebels. Capitalism flatters, commodifies, incorporates and tames. At the same time it boycotts, horrifies, repels and enrages. Art at its best is therefore a protest against reality and anyone dedicated to changing reality must pay the closest attention to the complex sensitivities and insights of artists, not least when they are addressing political themes.

In reviewing the four short plays making up part two of the Red Room’s ‘Seeing Red’ season, it is necessary to put them in their general historical context. I make no apology for a long detour. They - and the six pieces which preceded and the six which are to follow them - were after all specifically commissioned under the rubric of the 30th anniversary of the May events in Paris and the first anniversary of the election of the Blair government.

Not only bureaucratic socialism collapsed with the end of the Cold War. The triumph of the USA over the USSR also marked capital’s moral victory over its internal oppositions. Many former leftwing or radical artists and intellectuals sold out or changed camps. For their part Noel Gallagher and Eric Hobsbawm, Martin Jacques and Tom Nairn, Ben Elton and David Putnam became apostles or apologists for New Labour. Fierce class struggles there have been. The miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 will never be forgotten. But what is particularly notable about this period of reaction is that it has been imposed in the main peacefully, without terror. There has been a mental cosh, not the iron heel. Richard Branson, not Augusto Pinochet, personifies the zeitgeist.

Margaret Thatcher’s bleak refrain, ‘there is no alternative’, is now accepted as common sense by those below. Workers exist objectively as owners of labour power and comatosed individual consumers. Capital, as an exploitative social relationship, is inconceivable without living labour. But workers are not organised by themselves as a political class. They do not believe in, or envisage, a different, or more humane, version of society. As sellers in the labour market they and their trade unions compete, one against all, all against one. As consumers they and their children are bombarded, conned and manipulated by advertisers who create all manner of false needs. As citizens they vote for the lesser of virtually undifferentiated evils.

No one is suggesting that at some point in the past the majority, let alone all workers, were convinced socialists. There was never a golden age. In Britain Marxism - even in its inverted forms - has always been marginal. Nevertheless - amongst the conscious minority - syndicalism, left reformism and ‘official communism’ functioned as a mass culture that resisted and fought against the effects of capitalism and its never satiated thirst for surplus labour. That dynamic and the associated body of ideas formed the workers into a class, and from Oscar Wilde to David Edgar, inspired one generation of intellectuals after another.

We must distinguish between form and content. ‘Official communism’ and social democracy in terms of outer appearance continue not only to exist, but flourish. May last year saw the Labour Party swept into office with a huge parliamentary majority. On the other side of the Channel the French Communist Party has ministers in the ‘socialist’ government. However, neither in terms of theory nor practice is there any suggestion of using that position or salient of power to replace capitalism with a new, higher social order.

The Labour Party in Britain, like the Socialist Party in France, is openly committed to the success of capitalism. Political debate is now dominated by alternative strategies of best ensuring and sustaining the growth of profit. How to make the country and its people attractive to capital is what passes for political thought nowadays. Labour or SNP, Liberal Democrat or Green, Tory or Plaid Cymru, there is only variation on Mammon’s theme.

There is a positive side. The programmes of ‘official communism’ and social democracy (Labourism) were always illusory, not to say reactionary. Increasing the monstrous power of the state and production for the sake of production were presented as the road to human freedom. With such means the end had to be unfreedom. Moreover these ideologies were formally committed to negating capitalism within the constricting, not to say suffocating, confines of the nation state. In the case of social democracy that meant getting rid of capitalism in name only. Nationalisation and state capitalism were equated with socialism. As for ‘official communism’, it could replace capitalism, but not with anything superior. Bureaucratic socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe was non-capitalism, but also non-socialism.

Not surprisingly then the 1980s saw many radical artists retreat from conscious politics. Thatcher and the Tory vandals wanted to impose a backward-looking culture. Shakespeare was to be iconic, not raw material; heritage, not ammunition. Contemporary politics became viewed by the art establishment as a danger positively to be avoided. The high hopes, carefree experimentation and violent passions of the late 1960s and early 70s have therefore given way to a more sober, darker mood.

Globalisation is capital at its most extreme Fear, irrationality, insecurity and a general sense of powerlessness pervade every layer of society. No person, no party, no class now even pretends to control the uncontrollable system.

Capitalism might for the moment imagine and promote itself as the final point of history. But, as shown by the miserable record of Blair’s government - the attacks on students, single parents and the unemployed; the anti-drugs hypocrisy and the criminalisation of youth; Tory spending limits and the poverty-level minimum wage; the maintenance of anti-trade union laws and the insipid promotion of censorship; the blind ‘education, education, education’ worship of exams and the rat race culture of money - it is a system unworthy of human beings. Fittingly the ‘Full Monty’ is admired as a film by Blair and his philistine cronies, not because of its social criticism, albeit sentimental, mild and limited, but its success in terms of takings at the box office.

Taking all this into consideration artists have a particularly difficult, but crucially important role. The Red Room’s ‘Seeing Red’ season is a brave attempt to meet the challenge by challenging theatre writers. On balance, so far it succeeds. Sixteen, mainly young, writers contributed short pieces. Evidently each comes from a unique direction. There is no one voice. Only a common thread - criticism. That today almost inevitably means a certain introspection and pessimism. But full-blown optimism at such a time is surely out of place. It would not be art, but mere entertainment.

Part one, which ran from May 6-24, had its full share of anger and raw energy. New Labour was unmasked, savaged and mocked by Tony Craze, Aiden Healy and Roddy McDevitt. However, it was the slower rhythm, the more measured pace of the ‘non-political’ plays by Peter Barnes - a 68er - and Judy Upton which lodge in the mind. Both in their very different ways explore alienation. The great worth of these artists lies in their creative ability to lay bare this human condition. Barnes does it with whimsy. Upton does it with biting and brilliantly well observed social comment.

In part two overtly political subject matter comes into its own. That means questions. Within itself art does not contain answers. No matter how outstanding, art cannot substitute for the revolutionary party, let alone social revolution. And it should not be expected to. So the four pieces must not be judged by some narrow set of political criteria, but first and foremost according to the laws of art.

‘On the couch with Enoch’ by Tanika Gupta is an intelligent piece which pits a 30 year-old nurse (Akbar Kurtha) against a dying Enoch Powell (Edmund Dehn). Old Britain comes face to face with New Britain. Instead of a predictable Anti-Nazi League- style exchange between ‘Indian’ victim and ‘racialist’ victimiser, the patrician and xenophobic politics of Powell are explained in terms of a frustrated homosexual encounter during his time with the Imperial Army in India. But there is much more to it than that.

Powell and his purple poetry are used as a metaphor for the collectively imagined relationship between imperialist Britain and its Indian colony. The romantic ‘love’ the master expresses for the slave has nothing mutual, nothing equal about it. India is insultingly demonised as savage on the one hand and demeaned as a child on the other. Moreover the imperialist spurned turns into its spiteful opposite. They went to India as conquerors. The Indians were supposed to be grateful. They were not.

Having been forced to concede independence in 1947, the likes of Powell despised the migrants who came to Britain in the 1950s and 60s as free labourers. Gupta has here sketched the outline of a modern epic.

Helen Kelly’s ‘The big idea’ exposes the sham of communitarianism and the crisis of intellectuals who are forced to prostitute themselves by New Labour to the interests of big business. The thing is well constructed, the acting and direction thought out and skilful but in essence the underpinning ideas are not big enough. In some measure fine character realisation from Peter Marinker, Viv Moore and Lizzie McPhee compensate, but it never quite comes off. The piece lacks real conviction.

‘The Mandelson files’ is not taxing, but it works a treat. It is a timely farce based on a Modern review article by Nick Cohen. Writer Paul Siret uses the absurdist notion of Peter Mandelson as the 1950s love child of Che Guevara and a well meaning British communist, Edith (Viv Moore), to wonderful effect. The career and politics of Mandelson are roller-coastered out, pre- and post-May 1 1997, as a vast Cuban conspiracy designed to undermine the stability of British capitalism and prepare the country for revolution.

You almost believe it. How else it is possible to explain New Labour and its despicable anti-working class agenda?

Director Deborah Bruce adds to the sense of the absurd with all manner of nice touches. David Eastman not only plays a sexually charged Che Guevara, but a half-innocent, half-sinister Peter Mandelson. The short trousers and the two-way headphone complement the splendid turn.

For me though I must confess the highlight of the night was ‘The (bogus) people’s poem’. Kay Adshead has written a genuinely remarkable piece of theatre which director Lisa Goldman handles with imagination and sensitivity.

Moving back and forth between Heathrow immigration control, Campsfield detention centre and Africa, we are given not only a searing indictment of immigration laws, but a heart-rending assertion of the human spirit.

The ‘young woman’ journalist played by Noma Dumezweni flees persecution in her native country in order to find sanctuary in democratic Britain. She finds bureaucratic obstruction, institutional hostility, Group Four guards and concentration camp imprisonment. Dumezweni gives a performance to remember. The play is powerful, unrelenting, but never veers towards histrionics or cheap emotionalism. Above all it is true.

We await the final part of the ‘Seeing Red’ season with expectation.

Jack Conrad

Seeing red A festival of dissent

Part two: May 26-June 14

The Mandelson files by Paul Sirret
The big idea by Helen Kelly
On the couch with Enoch by Tanika Gupta
The ballad of Bony Lairt by Roney Fraser-Munro
The (bogus) people’s poem by Kay Adshead

Part three: June 16-28

Made in England by Parv Bancil
Thanks mum by David Eldridge
Stick stack stock by Dona Daley
Slow drift by Rebecca Prichard
Les événements by James Macdonald

Red Room Conspiracy

An evening of art, entertainment and agit prop hosted by Tam Dean Burn.
Sundays 8pm. Tickets: £4 or £2 (concessions).

Venue: Battersea Art Centre, Lavender Hill, London SW11.

Tuesdays-Saturdays 7.30pm; Sundays 5.30pm and 8pm.