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Remarkable developments are in train at London’s Royal Court Theatre, in the form of a play that is about climate science, but is not Watermelon propaganda. In a guest posting at Bishop Hill, Mr and Mrs Josh (Mr Josh also does the cartoons at Bishop Hill) provide a fascinating and enticing review of The Heretic, a new play by Richard Bean:
Book your tickets now, this play is a must-see comedy.
It has everything – more accurate climate science than a BBC documentary (ok, that’s not exactly hard), brilliantly funny and wonderfully staged.
The drama centres on university climate scientist, Dr Diane Cassell, played superbly by Juliet Stevenson, whose research on sea levels in the Maldives shows no rising trend in sea levels.
This puts her at odds with Professor Kevin Maloney, Head of Dept Earth Sciences, played by James Fleet (sinisterly morphed from Hugo, in the Vicar of Dibley) whose main aim is to attract more funding to the department by toeing the consensus line on Climate Change.
When she publishes her research and expresses her skeptical views, notably on Newsnight to Jeremy Paxman, she becomes the focus of some very direct persecution.
Add in Phoebe, her daughter, and Ben, her carbon-obsessed first-year student, plus an ex-marine security guard and the stage is set. Pure comedy ensues as Ben follows the logic of his beliefs, refusing to keep warm, travel in any petroleum-based transport, and considering suicide since his vegetarian diet causes excessive methane production. Phoebe is ahead of him; severely anorexic she is at real risk of not making it. Both characters are played with worrying fragility that conveys lives overshadowed by fear, battling to understand the issues or find a set of rules to live by. Their plight is all too similar to that of Diane, struggling to work out if the death threats from environmentalists should be taken seriously.
In a feat of Montfordian proportions nearly all the major recent climate change stories are woven into the play: the lack of sea level rise, the politicisation of science by the IPCC, Glaciergate, the logarithmic effect of CO2 (in a way you will never forget), the misanthropy of some environmentalist groups, the ‘one-tree’ hockey stick, and, of course, Climategate. But the issues are put on the table, without arm twisting, encouraging the audience to go out and do their own research.
Maybe I am reading far too much into this, but this sounds like it could be something of a cultural turning point in Britain. For decades now, there has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop shutting out anything but left wing friendly dramas from the live theatre in Britain, or so it has seemed and felt to one of those who has felt shut out. No anti-lefty dramas – e.g. praising Thatcher or heroic entrepreneurs or working class vigilantes, or denouncing bossy social workers or manipulative communists or ridiculous civil servants or psychotic and tyrannical Islamists, or pointing at the state itself as the prime mover in the banking crisis – have made sense to the theatres, because the audience for such things hasn’t been there, and because writers have been disinclined even to bother writing such things. What’s the point? And because there is no non-lefty drama, the audience for such things never comes. It stays at home surfing the net or watching its preferred telly shows and movies. If it is like me, it blogs.
Crucial to the willingness of another audience to show up to see this play is that it can be urged to do so on the internet, despite the major official organs of British theatre publicity, notable the BBC and the Guardian, apparently trying, just as they have tried with Climategate itself, to be very sniffy and dismissive. If a new audience does show up in strength at the Royal Court to see The Heretic, then that could result in Britain’s theatres saying: hey, I wonder if there are other non-lefty-friendly “issues” out there that we haven’t done before, because the BBC and the Guardian haven’t allowed us to?
Never forget that theatre folk love a big row, provided only that the row isn’t too big, as it would be if they took at serious whack at Islam. They love to push the boundaries, not too far, but just that little bit beyond what is entirely safe. They love to make mischief, to get everyone shouting at each other. They love to take the piss out of whoever happens at any particular moment to be the pompous and hypocritical elite, because, potentially, maybe, that will sell tickets, contrive bums on seats. Okay, most British thesps are lefties themselves, but many of those lefties are theatricals first, lefties second, and in quite a few other cases, on the quiet, so I surmise, not actually proper lefties at all, really, even though they dress like lefties and talk like lefties.
A earlier key moment in British theatrical history happened in the late nineteen fifties. British live theatre was then the Conservative Party at play, watching third-rate Noel Coward imitations consisting of brittle, well-dressed upper middle class chat in implausibly opulent living rooms with big floor-to-ceiling French windows at the back, centre stage. That is a caricature but not that much of one. But suddenly, or so it felt, all that was smashed to pieces by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and all that followed from it. Look Back in Anger was also, by the way, first presented at the Royal Court. Perhaps my view of all that is a bit myopic, because the nearest theatre to my home when I was a kid was the Windsor Rep, which, I seem to recall, showed third-rate Noel Coward imitations just about all the time. But I suspect I have it about right, even if those closer to theatrical happenings then had felt in their water that the Angry Young Man upheaval had been coming for some time and thus remember it as a somewhat more gradual thing. I’m not saying that The Heretic is in the same class, as a play or as a culturally explosive event, as Look Back in Anger. I haven’t seen The Heretic yet. But this new play may perhaps, with hindsight, come be seen as one of the bigger paving stones that paved the way for something that is more like Look Back in Anger.
Goodness knows, Britain certainly contains plenty of anger just now.
Conveniently for me, the Royal Court Theatre is in Sloane Square, which is only a longish walk or a short bus or tube ride from where I live. I’m giving a talk on Monday. As soon as that’s out of the way, I will pop around to the Royal Court and fix to see The Heretic for myself.
I am, therefore I’ll think
– John Galt
I’ve heard about this many times, and laughed at what I imagined it to consist of, again and again. But I’ve never actually seen it, until, a few days back, Instapundit linked to it.
“A few days” is a decade in Instatime, so forgive me if I don’t trawl back for half an hour through half a dozen pages of Instapunditry until I spot his posting on the subject, and merely supply anyone besides me who is interested with the link to the thing itself, which I did make a note of.
Here.
I have seen some Sci Fi action scenes in my time, but for sheer, oh-my-god-that’s-incredible-when-can-I-see it? sort of level, this India-made film is extraordinary. Another sign, by the way, of India’s economic prowess, I think.
There are robots, lots of them, and of course, the all-important hot brunette in a tight costume. That’s got your attention, Perry!
(H/T, Boing Boing).
“In the bubbled, hypocritical mind of some in Hollywood, the only reason Gervais crossed a line is because he went after them. Had he been as relentless in ripping apart Sarah Palin, her young children, Jesus Christ, or George W. Bush, today the comedian would be celebrated as “edgy” and “courageous” — because only in Hollywood is throwing red meat to a hard-left crowd considered “edgy” and “courageous.” But Gervais didn’t do that. Instead, he trained his satirical fire on Hollywood Power and today there’s serious talk about whether or not the comedian will be brought back to the Golden Globes next year as host.”
John Nolte, at the Big Hollywood blog.
I think he has a strong point in his praise of Ricky Gervais’s performance, but I have a slight reservation. Imagine if Gervais had said such insulting things about showbiz people that Mr Nolte holds dear, or causes he supports. I doubt we would get such applause. And I also note that in the Daily Mail newspaper yesterday (I quote from reading the print edition), the writer, Quentin Letts, raves on about Gervais’s rudeness as if it was a barnstorming example of high wit. No it wasn’t. I cannot imagine your average Daily Mail reader enjoying say, an attack by an American comedian on the Royal family, for example.
The sad truth is that yes, Hollywood is full of self-regarding jerks who deserve all they get. But that does not make gratuitous rudeness somehow clever, as far as I can see, and I don’t see how we are going to get better movies as a result. And this does all rather cement the idea in American’s minds that many Brits are little more than hooligans. (I’d like to know what Stateside commenters think of how this all comes across.)
Talking of good movies, has anyone yet seen The King’s Speech?
This posting is about politics in the USA. Please realise that it is a simplification, what mathematicians call a first approximation, more true than false, and sufficiently true to be worth saying so that it may perhaps then be modified and qualified towards the actual truth.
I ought also to admit that I have never set foot in the USA, and that I got the notions that follow from the Internet, and before that from watching (as I still now watch) USA television shows (mostly comedy and cop shows). We here in Britain get lots of those. I freely admit that distance, instead of lending clarity to my eye, could merely have lent and be lending bullshit to it. In fact, I do admit it. But the bullshit it has lent includes the kind of bullshit that wins and loses USA elections. First approximation truth about what is being perceived, about what big bullshit picture is being believed in, is often sufficient to win or lose an election. For as we all know, a big part of reality in politics is perception. Voters in the USA get a lot of their ideas about politics in the USA from the Internet and from television shows, or so it says on the Internet and on television.
So here goes.
In political USA now, there are now four important groups of people. There are Democrats, Old School Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Voters. Political outcomes were determined by what the Voters decided about the first two. They are now determined by what the Voters decide about the other three.
Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, they had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.
Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.
Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards.
It still is a dead heat, between Democrats and Old School Republicans, but this is because things are now moving towards Voters thinking that Democrats are bad people with bad ideas, and that Old School Republicans are bad people with bad ideas. Democrats now look like (or are being revealed as always having been) greedy and malevolent bastards with the same old bad ideas as ever. Old School Republicans are the same rich and greedy snobbish bastards they always were, but are now seen to be infected by (or revealed as always having believed in) bad ideas much like those of their opponents.
Enter the Tea Party.
The Tea Partiers started out as people whom the Voters regarded as dubious people with dubious ideas, and are moving towards being people whom the Voters believe to be …
I need some way to emphasise this next bit. Pay careful attention. I know, I’ll put the next five words into the title of this posting.
… good people with good ideas. The Tea Partiers have good ideas, which they sincerely want to apply to all without fear or favour. They are good people who work or worked for their living, will look you in the eye and treat you right, no matter what colour your collar, or anything else about you.
The Tea Partiers thus threaten to destroy both the Democrats and the Old School Republicans. They threaten to destroy the Democrats by destroying them, and to destroy the Old School Republicans by replacing them with different Republicans, Tea Party Republicans.
The Democrats say that the Tea Partiers are “extreme” Republicans, Republicans who are even nastier. They wish. The Tea Partiers are indeed creating a new sort of Republican, but not an even nastier Republican. They are creating nice Republicans. Electorally, the Tea Partiers are cleansing the selfish richness and snobbishness and nastiness out of the Republican brand, leaving the ideas that the Republicans appeared once to believe in untouched, and renewed in strength and quality. If the Republican brand resists too much, the Tea Partiers will destroy it and make another.
The recent financial melt-down is, of course, crucial to all of the above. In a crisis, ideas matter. And the Internet, the new idea spreader, is also crucial. USA citizens need no longer submit to being told what they think about bad times, by the bad people with bad ideas who are to blame for these bad times. Democrats are being revealed as nasty, by the melt-down and the Internet. Old School Republicans are being revealed as stupid, by the melt-down and the Internet. The Tea Partiers are being revealed as being good people with good ideas, by the melt-down and the Internet. No melt-down and no Internet, and you are back to the old dead heat between nice idiot Democrats and sneaky bastard Old School Republicans. And the Tea Party? Without the melt-down and the Internet, there is no Tea Party. (According to television, there is, still, no Tea Party, only criminals.)
No wonder the Democrats and the Old School Republicans hate and fear the Tea Party and are trying anything and everything they can think of to make it seem like bad people with bad ideas. Trouble is, all that the critics of the Tea Party can now think of to say about the Tea Party just adds to the impression that such critics are nasty and stupid bastards.
This is a snapshot of now, not a prophecy about the next century. This is how USA politics is now and the direction that USA politics is moving in now. I don’t say that things will continue this way indefinitely. In particular, how will the Tea Partiers take to being part of the government, to having to grapple face-to-face with the melt-down? The continuing melt-down and the Internet might then turn round and reveal the Tea Partiers to be just another bunch of good idiots or nasty bastards, or just nasty idiots. But, the melt-down and the Internet are not doing that now. They are doing the exact opposite of that.
Health and safety kills off the Lear of a lifetime. Jim White writes in the Telegraph:
Earlier this week, I went with my son to see Derek Jacobi in King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse. We were so close to the action we were almost in it. It was clear that the enthusiasm expressed in Charles Spencer’s review for this paper was not misplaced: the actors delivered the poetry brilliantly, the pace crackled and fizzed.
For 50 minutes, we were entranced. Then: bang. Just as Kent had been sentenced to a spell in the stocks, the lights went out. For a moment, I thought this was a directorial ruse, and that the next scene would find him in some Tarantino-style torture chamber. But no. It was a power cut.
The house lights cranked into action, and for a minute or so, the actors carried on, the scene barely diminished by the reduced visibility. Quite right, too. As this was a show almost spartan in its freedom from special effects, there seemed no reason not to continue. The communication of the verse would have been as powerful in the gloaming.
But then a technician announced that since there had been an outage, the performance was being cancelled, for – you’ve guessed it – health and safety reasons. “Your safety,” he said, “is our number one priority.”
I struggle to know how to respond to this. Could I, perhaps, take a line or two, as suggested in my title for this post, from another of Shakespeare’s plays:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Or could I say, begone, abominations. You are dead things that pretend to live.
Hello, what is this? BBC comedians (Armstrong and Miller, no less) making fun out of the failure of Global Warming to be … warm?
Spotted by the ever-alert Delingpole, who has the video up at his blog. It’s under a minute long and is a must-see, if you’ve not already seen it.
I wonder if it was that earlier viral video, the one in the classroom with the exploding kids, that alerted these guys to the comedic possibilities of this debate? The reaction to this latest piece of (I trust) internet virality will be interesting.
Culture is very important. That is why the government should never be allowed to have a role in it.
– NickM
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian back in July:
The return from a tiny government investment is probably greater in the cultural industries than any other – every £1 the Arts Council England puts in generates another £2 from commercial sources.
The UK Film Council, quoted in the Independent in August:
“But the UKFC doesn’t waste money, it makes it. For every pound it invests, the country gets £5 back.“
Ivan Lewis in the Guardian yesterday:
The National Campaign for the Arts estimates that every £1 of grant given to the arts brings a fifteen-fold return in investment into the county [Somerset].
Ken Loach made a good film in 1969. I gather he has made other films since. A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership, for instance, and something about a Glaswegian alcoholic.
My opinion of Loach as a human being was decided when I read this:
In Kes, probably Loach’s best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.
Loach felt that the ordinary moral rules against causing someone (particularly a child) intense suffering through a cruel deception did not apply so long as his deception was carried out in the service of his art. The old Independent article I linked to above goes on:
Surprise and integrity are thus at the core of Loach’s purpose in life – as well as having a poke at authority whenever the opportunity arises.
His “pokes at authority” seem not to be incompatible with a not-very-surprising yearning to wiggle his way to a bit more power himself, the power, at least, to “do something” about all these people watching what they want instead of what is good for them. And him. And his friends. Here he is in yesterday’s Guardian:
We could start by treating cinemas like we treat theatres. They could be owned, as they are in many cases, by the municipalities, and programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.
It is not quite clear from the article whether Loach is proposing that these municipal cinemas programmed by people who care should wholly replace the commercial cinemas and films that nobody cares about, except the millions who pay to watch them. Since he is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, which describes itself as a revolutionary anti-capitalist party, it is reasonable to assume that would be his ultimate goal. He continues,
Those of us who work in television and film have a role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing, not to be part of the establishment. We need to keep our independence.
Not that having you and your protegés decide what films the taxpayer will have available in the cinema he pays for would make you part of the establishment, or in any way compromise your independence, of course.
The first I heard of it was here, where there was a piece about how this guy had been mocking this guy, guy number two being Tate Galleries boss Nicholas Serota. Serota faces cuts in state funding for The Arts, i.e. for himself and his enthusiasms, and he is not happy. He calls this “blitzkrieg”, clearly having never heard of Godwin’s Law. So, the pips are starting to squeak. Maybe this Cameron chap is not quite as bad as Perry de Havilland says.
The last time I read the Guardian very regularly was in those far off days before the internet, for its cricket coverage. Critics of pieces like Serota’s might be allowed about one or two short letters, next to three or four longer and very supportive ones, or ones claiming that the idiot argument in question wasn’t idiotic enough. How times have changed. What struck me most about this week’s Serotage was the number of commenters who weren’t impressed by his arguments.
Which can be summarised as: The Arts is (a) good, and (b) good in particular for “the economy”. But if The Arts is so good for the economy, why does The Arts seem to depend for its very survival on state subsidy. If the economy loves The Arts so much, why can it not pay for it? Cutting subsidies for The Arts would be a mere pinprick for The Arts if The Arts was economically successful, not a blitzkrieg.
Subsidised art – The Arts – does indeed depend upon a continuing flow of subsidy, but art itself is a far sturdier thing. Many commenters said how much they dislike The Arts of the sort that Serota presides over. Fair enough. I dislike Serotanism not so much because I hate The Arts as because I love art, and think that The Arts gets in the way of art far more than The Arts contributes to art, in much the same kind of way that I think subsidised car companies were bad for the British car industry, or that I think that NASA has got in the way of and continues to get in the way of space exploration. The Arts crowds out art, in other words. Serota thinks that art depends on The Arts. Well, as several of those commenters pointed out, he would, wouldn’t he?
If I understand Mr Cameron’s attitude correctly, he will be rather pleased about this particular squeaking by this particular pip. You see, he will say to the poor, in answer to their squeaks about the cuts they are now facing. Consumers of and practitioners of The Arts are also suffering. We are spreading the pain.
But will Cameron contrive any kind of economic recovery, or merely a softer-than-might-have-been landing into the swamp of permanent economic stagnation, followed by more sinking? Are these cuts really cuts as in less state money, or merely cuts as in not as much of an increase in state money as had been hoped for? My opinion about that being that the first can, for those directly involved, feel a lot like the second, as more people get sucked into the state money business and away from having productive lives. Between them, all these people do go on getting more and more, but for many an individual state money chaser, it may really be a cut. And even dashed hopes must feel a lot like genuine cuts, if you have already spent the money you had hoped to get.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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