(c) Helen Maybanks

I had feared that Trevor Griffiths’ play The Comedians, premiered in 1975 and revived by the Hammersmith Lyric – the run has just closed – might seem as dated as Galsworthy or Priestley, with its exploration of racist and sexist humour and an argot of venues that seems as remote as the Romans. I needn’t have worried.
The underlying tension in the play, between the old pro, Eddie Waters, who’s teaching the aspirant comedians of the play’s title, and the agent Bert Challenor, come to look for new talent, is as live as ever.
Eddie Waters sets out his stall as he warms up his protégés ahead of their performances at a local club in front of Challenor:

WATERS: A joke releases the tension, says the unsayable, any joke pretty well. But a true joke, a comedian’s joke, has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation.

Some of the writing, and the performance, as the play explores this in its first act, amid the pre-set tension, is right at the edge, particularly the apparent improv around the tongue twister, “The traitor distrusts truth”.

Challenor, of course, is having none of it, as he arrives towards the end of the act, to give the comedians a few tips before they go on stage.

CHALLENOR: I’m not looking for philosophers, I’m looking for comics. I’m looking for someone who sees what the people want and knows how to give it to them … Any good comedian can lead an audience by the nose. But only in the direction they’re going. And that direction is, quite simply … escape.

Of course, (mild spoiler alert) the students who pander to Challenor get the contracts. Price has changed his act at the last minute, and is tough, challenging, and perhaps not funny, mystifying agent and the other students alike (but not Eddie Waters). The third act, effectively, plays out between Waters and Price. They’re on the same side of the argument that comedy should ‘change the situation’, but about what comedy is for, but disagree about whether this needs to be done with love and compassion or not.

This makes it sound like a play of ideas, and it is, of course. But it’s also a technical tour de force, an ensemble piece in which all the ensemble are deftly drawn (as my friend Rick pointed out), some clever stagecraft, outstanding writing, and perhaps most satisfying of all, it plays out in real time – the director of the Lyric production, Sean Holmes, emphasised this with a clock in full view of the audience, which could have been risky for a less accomplished play or production.

‘What will you do?’, asks Waters of Price, as he leaves. ‘I’ll wait’, he says.

And with hindsight, he’d probably have done alright, along with the other comedians dismissed by Challenor. 1975 was probably – pre-punk, pre-Jubilee, pre-Thatcher – the highwater mark of the ‘joke telling’ comedian in the Northern clubs. As alternative comedy took off in the early 80s, the political, the angry, and the character comedians all prospered. Perhaps Griffiths had an instinct that the moment was about to turn.

The production photo above is by Helen Maybanks.You can see more of her photographs – many of them utterly charming – at her blog.

Although he’s no longer the Laureate Andrew Motion has marked Remembrance Day this year with a very public poem, ‘An Equal Voice‘, which used ‘found lines’ about shellshock and post traumatic stress to bring this particular (and distinctively distressing) experience to mind, shared to some degree by all survivors of war. As he wrote in the introduction:

This is a “found” poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There’s a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers.

As he acknowledges he has also drawn on Ben Shephard’s history of military psychiatry, A War of Nerves, and the title is taken from a quote from Shephard’s book:

“We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences.”

Oddly, Shephard’s response was that the poem was plagiarism, which surprised me, coming from the author of a fine (and undeservedly out of print) book. It’s not. But perhaps the history of the objet trouvé hasn’t yet collided with the history of the military.

The whole poem is technically quite interesting – 6 fourteen line stanzas. I’ve reproduced the first one here and recommend reading the whole thing, which was published last Saturday in the Guardian Review and builds, memorably, towards a conclusion.

From An Equal Voice

War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.

Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust

reports, blueprints one day and the next –

with the help of a broken-down motor car

and a few gallons of petrol – marching men

with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,

horses straining and plunging at the guns,

little clay-pits opening beneath each step,

and piles of bloody clothes and leggings

outside the canvas door of a field hospital.

At the end of the week there is no telling

whether you spent Tuesday going over

the specifications for a possible laundry

or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile.

The picture is from Canadian Content, and shows soldiers cooking a Xmas goose at the front in 1914. It is used with thanks.

I’m a bit late to mention the 70th anniversary of Topic Records, almost certainly the oldest independent record label in the world. Its catalogue of folk music, particularly English folk music, is unrivalled. I was lucky enough to catch Martin Simpson playing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London as part of the birthday celebrations – with luminaries such as Danny Thompson, Andy Cutting, Jon Boden and B J Cole joining him on stage.

Topic Records was a creature of the 1930s, evolving out of the Workers Music Association, which was founded in 1936, becoming Topic Records in 1939. The secret of its longevity seems to be that it has never set out with the intention of making money, instead recording music it thought worthwhile and keeping it in print.

MD Tony Engle put it like this in an interview:

“The idea is to make records that are, if not instant classics, then records that will be here for as long as we have the medium to make them available. The music industry, by and large, wants to make money. It’s a business, and thinks relatively short term. I always think long term.”

Its statement of aims and objectives – what might be called a ‘mission statement’ these days – which were formulated soon after Topic was formed, is perhaps the best clue to its longevity:

• to present to the people their rich music heritage
• to utilise fully the stimulating power of music to inspire people
• to stimulate the composition of music appropriate to our time
• to foster and further the art of music on the principle that true art can move people to work for the betterment of society.

The picture is of Three Score and Ten, a 7-CD box set (an utterly fabulous collection of music which includes Topic’s very first release, “The Man Who Watered The Workers’ Beer”, by Paddy Ryan, as well as more recent material by Martins Carthy and Simpson, Richard Thompson, assorted Watersons, June Tabor, Ewan MacColl, and a whole body of Scottish and Irish and international (mostly American) music, including Pete Seeger and Paul Robesen – track list and review at Musical Traditions), and a book about the label issued to mark its anniversary. On my Xmas list.

The best song I know about age and ageing is ‘Birches’, by the American folk singer Bill Morrisey, which popped up on my iShuffle the other day.

It is a perfectly encapsulated moment; a three minute short story that Raymond Carver (or his editor) would be proud of, in which a disagreement between an elderly couple over whether to burn oak or birch in the stove becomes an exact metaphor.

There’s a performance by Morrissey on youtube, of course, at the top of this post, although it’s not as good as the version he recorded.  The words are here. There’s more recent work as you go into his current website.

In The Decline of the English Murder, written 60 years ago, George Orwell reflected on how murder reflected the times. The celebrated pre-war murders typically featured respectable men who had got themselves into unrespectable affairs with women, often of a lower social class, who were done away with by poison. The wartime murders which prompted the essay, in contrast, were done by an American Army deserter and his British girlfriend, who seemed to kill their victims – almost existentially – because they could. The randomness of war re-enacted as a celebrated crime.

The thought is prompted by Patrick Forbes’ documentary The Force, shown on Channel 4 this week, about Hampshire Police investigating a body found burned beyond recognition in the village of Dummer. This murder also reflected its times. The victim was Polish, the murderer Bangladeshi, who had worked together in an Ibis hotel in London and had started having an affair. Her mobile phone had been used to delay suspicions about her disappearance; his by the police to piece together his movements around the time of the murder. Fragments of the story were pieced together from CCTV footage, most compellingly when the police traced the film which showed him dragging the suitcase with the woman’s body in it to his car. But the breakthrough came from traditional policing, knocking on doors and handing out photos. And the motive was also traditional: he killed her out of jealousy. As a by the way, some of the housing conditions seen or reported during the film were quite shocking.

I need to declare an interest; I work with Patrick Forbes’ wife, and she had reminded me the programme was on. But – in contrast to most of  the factual programming on British television – the film used the people and the pictures to tell the story. Even the rhythm of the events – with only a small amount of programme-maker’s artifice – provided the cliff-hangers. And what a relief all of that was; no celebrity presenter, no urgent voice-over, and none of those horrible post-ad break intros which now seem compulsory at Channel 4, in which you’re told, again, what the programme is about, which have the unintended aesthetic effect of making every programme seem the same (“I’m Kevin McCloud and I’m on the trail of the 18th century aristocrats who transformed the way Britain thinks about design”. Please).

In other words, it was a proper documentary. It’s repeated late on Friday and there are two more to come, on the next two Tuesdays. [Update: There's a reflective review in The New Statesman.]

The picture at the top of the post is courtesy of Channel 4.

I was leafing through  the Autumn edition of the Poetry Book Society bulletin, admiring the title poem of Don Paterson’s latest collection, Rain (more on this podcast), when I stumbled across a poem by Toeti Heraty, an Indonesian poet, philosopher and campaigner whose work had been – until that moment – completely unknown to me. But then, one of the virtues of magazines is their potential for serendipity.

The poem – in its English translation, courtesy of the Poetry Translation Centre – is about the gap between words and meaning.

Post Scriptum
by Toeti Heraty

I want to write
an erotic poem
in which raw words, unadorned,
become beautiful
where metaphors are unnecessary
and breasts, for instance,
do not become hills
nor a woman’s body a sultry landscape
nor intercourse ‘the most intimate embrace’.

It’s quite clear
this poem is written in the space
between exposure and concealment
between hypocrisy and true feeling.

There are more poems by her at the Poetry Translation Centre. If I find a way to buy the pamphlet this was taken from I’ll add it here.

The picture at the top of the post is Body Landscape No. 2, by Maya Barkai, at the Saatchi Gallery Online.

I followed most of the Ashes, the one-dayers against Australia, and the Champions Trophy games via the ball by ball coverage on cricinfo, so I was amused to read an account of the so-called ’synthetic broadcasts’ constructed by the Australian broadcaster ABC to cover the Ashes in Australia in 1934 and 1938. (I’m indebted to Gideon Haigh’s excellent book Inside Out for this).

A panel of broadcasters convened in the studios in Sydney and reported more or less as live the ball-by-ball information sent by means of coded telegrams by Eric Scholl at the Test match grounds. Sound effects were provided by a pencil and a block of wood; crowd noises came from a gramophone record. The listening public was enthralled, staying up to listen until the small hours of the morning. Employers complained.

And how unlike the coverage on cricinfo, much as I depend on it in the absence of a Sky Sports subscription. Reading between the lines of some of the summer coverage, they have a team of writers based in Melbourne, who watch the television coverage and transcribe it into ball by ball updates. In 70 years we’ve updated the technology but the method seems all but identical. Cricinfo, it should be said, does have a journalist at the ground. He (almost invariably he) feeds colour into the ball-by-ball commentary from time, but his main role is to write the Bulletin, the analysis pieces at the end of each session of play. To describe the action, it doesn’t really matter where you are; to understand it, well, you still have to be there.

There’s still time to catch the last few performances of A New World at the Globe Theatre in London, Trevor Griffiths’ adaptation for stage of his unmade screenplay about the life of one of Britain’s greatest radicals and campaigners, Thomas Paine. Commissioning the stage version to mark the two hundredth anniversary of Paine’s death in 1809 (in obscurity) was a smart piece of scheduling by the Globe.

Griffiths is a fine radical playwright, and this is a ‘big’ play, covering a sweep of history – in three hours – which takes in the American and French revolutions and the turmoil in Britain at the time. But it doesn’t forget the personal as well as the political. And the Globe is a good setting for such a play, with the groundlings’ space acting as an extension of the stage when necessary. This post isn’t a review – I’ll leave that to Michael Billington and Stuart Weir – but for me the play conjured brilliantly the fragility of the events of the revolutions as they unfolded, and the uncertainties of the participants who lived through them from day to day.

It also succeeded in a way that I imagine that Griffiths would wish for; there’s enough of Paine’s own writing – from Common Sense and the Rights of Man – in it to make me realise that I should have read more of it than I have. And enough, too, to make his present relative obscurity puzzling; as if his long-standing career as a member of the awkward squad had carried over into his historical legacy.

‘My country is the world’

As it happens, Verso has just published a new edition of Paine’s writings in their Revolutions series, with a fine introduction by the historian Peter Linebaugh (review via Verso’s blog). I’m just going to share a few notes from that introduction here.

Paine is a puzzle. He left school at 13, and was 37 when he went to the United States, and there was apparently little in his background – save, perhaps, the petition he wrote to Parliament on behalf of fellow exciseman in support of higher wages – to suggest that he would, over the next twenty years, become the most influential political writer of his time. The clues are there, though, in his engagement with local learned societies, his spell as a teacher, his study of science and engineering.

By the time the two parts of the Rights of Man had been published, he was both widely read and widely feared, partly because it had been priced cheaply (Part I cost only 3/-) and sold widely. The language was sharp and also uplifting: “All the monarchical governments are military. War is their trade, plunder and revenue their objects”, contrasted with “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good”. As Peter Linebaugh writes, Part II was dangerous to the British government because of “its forthright translation of equality in economic terms, and its overall tone of democratic confidence”.

‘Where liberty is not’

Linebaugh has a deep knowledge of the 18th century, and he situates Paine’s work at a moment before the commons had been closed off by landowners, when the American revolution had created new ideas of the possible. He makes the analogy to Guevara, and it seems a fair one; a revolutionary who fought (and wrote) in one revolution, was centrally involved in the politics of a second one (he was a deputy to the French National Convention), and was pursued by a government deeply fearful of a third (the full powers of the British state – spies, hired mobs, and lawsuits – were turned on him).

His work was also influential in the United Irishmen movement in the decade in Ireland before Wolfe Tone’s failed rebellion; 10,000 copies of the Rights of Man sold in the country. A British military commander wrote that “The north is certainly inoculated by Paine, who persuades every man to think himself a legislator”.

Paine seems, now, impossibly modern, with his opposition to the death penalty and slavery, and his scepticism about organised religion. He spoke for the rights of the native American nations. His judgment on contemporary events appears astute; he refused to vote for the execution of Louis XVI, because of the harm it would do to the revolutionary cause; he thought Washington, after the revolution, unprincipled (and Washington, in turn, left Paine to languish in a French cell); and called Napoleon a charlatan. He influenced independence struggles in India and Indonesia.

His books – and a biography – were banned from American public libraries in 1949, as part of HUAC’s mission (oh, irony!) to defend “the form of government defended by the Constitution”. His history is entwined with that of American Presidents; Monroe freed him from jail in Paris, Jefferson invited Paine back to the United States. Paine was, it was said, Lincoln’s favourite writer, and also seems to be a favourite of Obama’s, who quoted him without crediting him in his inauguration speech. In short, the exchange which is quoted by Linebaugh at the start of his introduction, between Paine and his sponsor Benjamin Franklin seems apposite:

‘”Where liberty is, there is my country”, declared Benjamin Franklin, to which Thomas Paine replied, “Where is not liberty, there is mine”‘.

The picture at the top of this post shows John Light as Thomas Paine, and Daniel Anthony as Will, in the Globe’s production of A New World.

On Friday I picked up An Apology for Idlers, the Penguin mini-edition (or ‘Great Ideas‘, to use their label) of some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s journalism, prompted in part by a glowing review a while back by Nicholas Lezard. There were other motives as well. I love Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, which conjures, tenderly, a whole pre-electric childhood, and having been partly educated in Scotland Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was inescapable. I’m sure thatI read Treasure Island at some point, of course. But although I’m interested in journalism I’ve never read any of  Stevenson’s.

I’ve only dipped into the title piece over the weekend. It was written in 1877, but there’s a section at the start of it which seems strangely topical:

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.

The text – now out of copyright – can be found online here.

The picture, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, is by the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent.

I thought about writing something here when the journalist and novelist Gordon Burn died, quite young, earlier this summer, but realised that I had nothing to add to the encomia that littered the obituaries pages.  “One of the greatest – and arguably underrated – British writers of his age*, said one, and I don’t really disagree with that. His journalism – for me a former journalist – was exceptional. In a world where there is plainly too much journalism I’d seek his pieces out.

But looking through an old notebook I found recently – which read a bit like a longhand blog – there was a piece on an article by Burn from 2005 that was worth sharing, a meditative reflection on a return home to Newcastle after the death of his father, even if his memory, perhaps appropriately for such a genre, is playing tricks. The whole thing is worth reading, even if you know nothing of Newcastle and care even less, but there’s a striking quote and a striking image.

The image is of some elderly Tynesiders singing songs in a pub in the late afternoon. It turns out that they are tourists, living in Greece now, come back for a nostalgic visit. “They were voluntary exiles, travelling in the opposite direction to the economic migrants from the former eastern bloc and elsewhere for whom they had made space; ex-pats come back to revisit not what was actually there, but what they wanted to see.”

The quote is from the American writer Toni Morrison:

“They straightened up the Mississippi river in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use but in fact it is not flooding, it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that; remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

Towards the end of the article Burn acknowledges that he has only recently “admitted” the claim of Newcastle on him.

“It is a nostalgia prompted by the sense that the entire world is now a space traversed by signals, everything virtual, nothing solid; our employments increasingly having to do with abstract operations, every operation stroked one way or another into the digital network economy. To go “home” was to return for a time to a time where, at the risk of sounding like the bleary-eyed saloon-bar crooner, and to quote the historian Robert Colls, nobody talked of “community” and everybody belonged to one.”