At the Theatre: The Merchant of Venice 1936

A new production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is always an interesting prospect, as the play is so puzzling. It contains some of Shakespeare's most beautiful speeches, including probably the most famous discussion of mercy in the English language, but it tells the story of a man's desire to use the law to take revenge on another man, almost certainly killing him, and of the punishment that is meted out to that man for desiring to do such a thing. The fact that the man in question, Shylock, is Jewish only adds to the difficulties, as the play appears on the face of it to be anti-semitic, even though in Shylock's famous "If you prick us, do we not bleed" speech in Act 3, Shakespeare writes with what seems to be complete empathy for the plight of Jews subjected to anti-Semitism.

Perhaps because it is so difficult, the opportunities to see the play are fairly rare. But in 2023 an actress called Tracy Ann Oberman decided to create her own production, in which she would play Shylock, setting the action against the backdrop of the rise of Oswald Mosley and his followers. Having read too much PG Wodehouse as a child I have always equated Mosley with Sir Roderick Spode and consequently underestimated his dangerous influence. Oberman's grandmother was living in the East End of London at the time of Mosley's activities and took part in the Battle of Cable Street, something I knew nothing about before going to this performance. It was an event that seems to have demonstrated that Mosley was not the idiotic figure of fun I'd assumed, and learning of its existence has made me wonder about whether Wodehouse did everyone a disservice by creating Spode, using absurdity to minimise what was a real danger.  

Having been performed to great acclaim in London, the production is now touring Britain and so when it came to Bath while I was staying in Bristol I took the opportunity to go along (this is beginning to sound faintly like the opening to a visit to Julian and Sandy as spoken by Kenneth Horne). The performance I went to was a sell-out and in front of me were over 100 school children, almost overcome with excitement at being in a theatre.

The performance began in what I presume was Hebrew as some kind of Jewish ritual was presented, with Oberman at its centre. Once that was over we galloped into the play itself. A small cast doubled up playing a variety of parts and they were excellent in all of them. The whole thing is full of gusto and energy and Obermann as Shylock is superb. The fact that the character is played as a woman seemed to me to work very well - somehow a woman's suffering at the hands of bullies struck me as something one could feel more sympathy for than a man's, possibly because a man, possibly unfairly, is expected to fight rather than cry. Oberman's performance persuaded me that the arrogance and scorn Shylock is subjected to is more than enough to goad her into wishing to make the leader of her enemies suffer in his turn.

In what to me at first seemed a very clever twist but I later realised was an inevitable result of transforming Shylock into the play's hero, Portia, who I had always thought of as a heroine, is here presented as a really nasty creature, taking delight in grinding a Jew into the dust. While this was a revelation for me, given the over-reach of many in the modern legal profession, i didnt mind at all having a sense of hostility for a lawyer whipped up in my heart.

At the end, Oberman stepped forward and told of her grandmother's experiences in the Battle of Cable Street and then, together with the whole cast, exhorted the audience to show solidarity with their contemporary Jewish neighbours, while raising her fist over and over, in a gesture that, were Elon Musk to have made it, might have been mistaken for a Nazi salute. This seemed a faint sacrilege but I think Shakespeare survived it.

Overall, I enjoyed the performance. Despite many of the schoolchildren complaining as they left about how long the thing had gone on, the play has actually been admirably streamlined (although purists might argue that cutting out bits of Shakespeare can never be admirable). But there is one glaring flaw in the production - tragically, it is already out of date. The enemy faced by people of Jewish origin is no longer the Mosley mob they encountered in Cable Street. Oberman knows this all too well as since October 7, 2023 she has had to be guarded against attack from pro-Palestinians. 

It would have taken a lot of work but the truth is the production needs to be revamped. In place of Blackshirts, the characters opposing Shylock need to be dressed in those dreadful uniforms Hamas members love to parade in as they release hostages. It is not frustrated white men but Islamists who are bent on doing violence to Jews these days  - and we all need to show solidarity with each other as they will be coming for us next.

Going Backwards

Recently the Financial Times Weekend Magazine published this fascinating and beautifully illustrated story of how an industrial process that replaced skilled craftsmen who made lace by hand is now, in its turn, dying, due to a lack of people with the skills it needs to survive. As newspapers are ephemeral things and thus it becomes very hard to access the fine pieces they sometimes contain, I decided to photograph my copy of the article to preserve it for others to read here. I may be biased as I am very interested in textiles, but it seems to me to be so exceptionally good and interesting that it deserves to be widely seen and read. It is, I think, an unusual story - it describes an instance of industrialisation retreating so that, if lace, the product that machines took over the manufacture of, is still required in future, it will need once more to be made entirely by hand:

 

What I Have Been Reading Lately: The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

I bought my copy of The Transit of Venus from a bookstall by a metro station in an outer suburb of Budapest, where I'd gone to buy a lamp. Who knows how this relatively obscure English language novel ended up in that unlikely setting. If I'd enjoyed the book as much as I expected to, I might have decided that the supernatural was at work and the book was put there especially for me.  

Over and over, for many years - even decades - I'd heard about what a classic The Transit of Venus was, so, when I got the book home and one of my children, seeing it lying on the kitchen table, said, "I didn't know you were fond of Mills & Boon", I became very holier-than-thou. I pointed out that one should not judge a book by its cover, (at last an opportunity to use that cliche) and that in fact Transit of Venus is considered a minor masterpiece. 

Now that I have read it, I think perhaps my daughter's comment was not entirely misplaced.

The book's main preoccupation is a young Australian woman called Caro Bell. She has a sister, Grace, about whom I would have liked to know more - (and eventually she is given a little space within the narrative, although her story, like the brief glimpse we have of Valda, a colleague of Caro's, seems inserted rather untidily into what is really Caro's book) - and a half-sister, Dora, who is a masterpiece, a character whose overbearing self-pity causes great misery for Grace and Caro throughout their lives. 

From almost the first page a young scientist called Ted Tice, who is staying in the same house as Caro, falls permanently in love with her. She instead becomes addicted to a sinister character called Paul, who treats her with a cruelty she finds hard to renounce - the relationship reminded me of Teresa Hawkins and Jonathan Crow in Love Alone, but Love Alone is an infinitely better book. 

Eventually, after years of misery, Caro meets and marries a rich American, with whom she is very happy. He does good works in South America, which enables Hazzard to give the reader a glimpse into the iniquities of South American despots. When this fellow dies, everything is finally resolved. Although the prediction made on one of the novel's first pages that "Tice would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement" is not actually fulfilled within the novel, unless I missed something, which is possible.

One realises from the opening scene, in which we are given a description of a storm spreading across a piece of countryside, that Shirley Hazzard describes landscape very beautifully. This opening rivals the first pages of Return of the Native. She also is extremely clever at evoking a character with only a sentence or two. The young man who is to become Grace's husband is introduced to us thus:

"He did not often go alone to a concert or anything else of the cultural kind. On your own, you were at the mercy of your responses. Accompanied, on the other hand, you remained in control, made assertive sighs and imposed hypothetical requirements. You could also deliver your opinion, seldom quite favourable, while walking home."

Not surprisingly, he turns out to be very disappointing as a human being. Equally useless is The Major, with whom Dora becomes involved. At his first meeting with Caro and Grace, Dora is passing round the photographs he has taken of travels they made together. "I'd have taken more", he explains, "but I'd used up most of the roll on the dog."

Chapter 6 in which we see the two girls and their half-sister living in Sydney after the First World War gives an absolutely vivid and fascinating picture of what it was like in that city at the time - rather unpleasant, apparently, which may explain the hopes Caro has about what England will contain and the subsequent bitter disappointment she feels when she discovers the English are not all heroic. 

I suspected while reading the book that Caro was a cypher for Hazzard herself, but her life story, as presented by Wikipedia, does not appear to include much time in England, which means I must take my hat off to her for her perceptive lack of illusion about the inhabitants of the British Isles. Judging by her fictional portrayals of them, she particularly despised English academics: both Professor Thrale with whom Caro is staying at the start and Professor Wadding, right at the end of the novel, are treated with considerable scorn by the book's narrator. Professor Wadding, for instance, is given this ridiculous remark:

"My task, as I see it, is to adumbrate the sources of his entelechy". 

The England we read about in Transit of Venus is very much seen through the perspective of Australian eyes. There is the sheer amazement at the verdant nature of the place that most Australians feel on arriving in Europe generally, "the full prestige of green" as Hazzard puts it. There are insights into how English society works, that possibly are more readily recognisable to those coming to Britain from outside and from the New World than they are to the natives. For example, "In England, class distrust might destroy even the best, by distracting their energies", Caro thinks at one point. Later her cruel lover, who is not an Australian, but is a kind of outsider, says: "I loathe the undernourishment of this country, the grievance, the censoriousness, the reluctance to try anything else. The going through to the bitter end with all the wrong things." That character also claims that "Saturday afternoon in England is a rehearsal for the end of the world."

My problem with the book is that it is essentially just a story of Caro Bell's love affairs. I am not persuaded, as I was by Stead in Love Alone, that I am learning anything more about human existence from this romantic retelling. Additionally, Hazzard often indulges a taste for the overblown and portentous. For instance, when she describes a scene at a meal in the dining room of Grace's future husband's family thus:

  

"Everything had the threat and the promise of meaning. Later on, there would be more and more memories, less and less memorable. It would take a bombshell, later, to clear the mental space for such a scene as this. Experience was banked up around the room, a huge wave about to break",

I feel that the passage - most especially the last line - is just too much.

Again, when Caro is in bed with her lover, Hazzard tells us that Caro leaves her breast "gravely revealed, like a confession", which, for my taste, is an over the top bit of phrasing, as is Hazzard's observation about Caro that "Love had become her greatest, or sole, distinction". Perhaps this is just a question of taste, perhaps for others phrases such as these are beautiful. Other readers may admire sentences such as "Her mind shifted on silence, like a ship on the disc of ocean that represents the globe" and "The deed of death has no hypothetical existence - or, having its hypothesis in everyone, must be enacted to achieve meaning". For me, they are excessive, full of a self-conscious grandeur that I find strangely jarring. 

In short, despite many excellent images and insights, (some Hazzard seems to think so good she uses them twice, for example telling us in Chapter 12 that "nothing creates such untruth as the wish to please or to be spared something" and then reminding us in Chapter 26 that "Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please"), by the end of the book I was becoming appalled by her pomposity and, above all, her lack of humour, (which I think may be the element that I dislike in the overblown phrases I've quoted above). I don't regret reading the book but in the end I can't help thinking that it is a shame that Hazzard had such skill with words but not much skill as a novelist. She never persuaded me why I should love Caro so much as to spend an entire novel with her and so in the end I felt unsatisfied. Having oscillated between stunned admiration at some stretches of writing and annoyance at much else, I finished by wondering if I would have preferred the book if it had been told from Ted Tice's point of view instead.  

What I Have Been Reading Lately: The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is a narrative centred on a weekend during which three elderly women clear out the beach house of a friend who has died. The friend is called Sylvie and she seems to have left the beach house to a person called Gail, who never appears and about whom we are told almost nothing. 

The three women are called Wendy, Jude and Adele. Wendy is an academic, very slightly in the Germaine Greer mode, except she has - or had - a husband and children. Her children don’t like her because she was too absorbed in her work to pay them much attention when they were little. Her husband is dead. She has an incontinent half-blind extremely old dog, a present, as a puppy, from Sylvie at the time of Wendy’s husband’s death. Jude has made a career as a manager of very expensive restaurants and is very keen on order and keeping a tight control on everything she can. She is short-tempered and intolerant of mess. She has been mistress to a wealthy married man for decades and that relationship is the one joy of her life. Adele was once a successful actress but is no longer. She is fairly self-indulgent and has just discovered that she is being kicked out by her lover. She has no money, no prospects and nowhere to go, but she isn’t enormously troubled by any of this. These women have all been friends for a very long time, but their friendships have been thrown out of balance by the death of Sylvie, who, in a way that is never explained, made everything work smoothly.

Who Sylvie was remains a mystery throughout the book, and the reason the women feel they need to do this chore for Gael is never made clear. The house is built on a slope and has a peculiar outdoor lift arrangement on which the characters spend a lot of time travelling up and down. I suspect the author had some real place in mind as this is such an odd and unusual detail and required such a lot of explaining to help the reader imagine it. I think it would have been better left out as each time it was mentioned one was distracted by questions of why one had never seen one anywhere and whether such a thing would actually be permitted given the prevalent concerns about safety one encounters in Australia generally. So far as I could tell it didn’t serve any point or further the plot in any way. 

Inasmuch as there is a plot: I got mildly excited when Wendy takes an object described as unusually heavy out of a cupboard that she is clearing. The object, we are told, is contained within a black cover. Wendy finds she cannot open the black cover and hesitates. Then, after a moment, she chucks the mysterious thing into a black bin bag, along with the rest of the rubbish. Having had my attention drawn to this object so emphatically, I assumed it might turn out to be something important that would need recovering later in the book. However, it is never mentioned again - and no other line of plot comes up to create any kind of concern on the part of the reader about what happens next. 

Wood is excellent at creating a world on a page and extremely unusual in taking elderly women as her subjects. I imagine her intention in this novel is to meditate on friendship. Unfortunately, there was not one single line of it that leapt out at me and made me thing, “Oh what an insight”. It is vivid and well-written, but it is, I suspect unintentionally, very unsettling in its portrayal of three entirely self-absorbed, spiritually empty lives. Although the theme is friendship, there was little that could be called comforting or generous in these friendships - more a clinging to each other, faut de mieux, than anything involving love and care. Perhaps that is often the truth of human relationships, but it is a bleak one all the same. Perhaps this is realism and I ought not to object. Perhaps my Catholicism is getting in the way

Small Miracles

 I came across this observation from GK Chesterton recently: 

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. We should always endeavour to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake and wonder more at the earth. What was wonderful about childhood is that any thing in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”

Shortly afterwards, I found that one of the small pots of unidentified bulbs I had bought some weeks earlier had burst into flower:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen glossier examples of crocus. I was amazed. 

But, while they could hardly be classified as the permanent thing Chesterton urges us to wonder at, they could not really be called the exception either, given crocus are ubiquitous in late winter and early spring, (one proof of this is the fact that James Marriott also mentioned crocus this week: he spotted one flowering in the wild - and the incident reminded him that Geoffrey Hill wrote a poem about crocus). 

Whichever category Chesterton would have put crocus in - permanent or exception - I think he would have agreed that mine at least - so richly purple, so radiant - are miracles in his “world full of miracles”.

For a time, the other pot I’d bought remained harder to feel any wonder at - while its companion offered a storm of shining flowers, all it could manage was this unpromising set of stalks:

But then one morning I discovered those stalks had transformed themselves into these exquisite flowers:

Can Bad People Do Good Work

Today at a second-hand bookstall I found a collection of articles by Clement Freud. I bought it and began to read it and so far have found it hilarious. 

The book was published in 2009. In 2016, after Freud's death, two women revealed Freud had molested them when they were in their early teens. One was raped by him. 

Is it wrong to continue to find someone's work hilarious, once they have been revealed to be wicked? It was easy to forego the creative output of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris as neither of them ever created anything I was interested in. I think most of Wagner sounds like the score for Ben-Hur so his association with Nazism has never meant I've had to think about depriving myself of his music, as I wouldn't choose to listen to it anyway.

The dilemma comes when one likes the work, but not the person who created it. Caravaggio was a murderer but his Taking of Christ is still marvellous. Bill Cosby's monologues would probably still make me laugh - and Kramer in Seinfeld certainly does.

Does it achieve anything to refuse to be amused by Clement Freud's anecdotes? Is laughing along with what he writes a way of being complicit in his actions?

I suppose there's the whole performance of reading someone's work in the light of ghastly posthumous revelations. That seems to be a tactic for Alice Munro fans. In both instances - Munro and Freud - I rather wish that particular light thrown on their work had remained dimmed

Unintended Consequences

There are many consequences of being asked to accept that men who believe themselves to be women are women. The one that is little discussed is the difficulty now faced by women who are women but look a little bit like men - or at least like men who believe themselves to be women and dress up as if they were.

Once upon a time this suspicion wasn't really likely to come up because there wasn't an identity game being played with the public where, if a man says he's a woman, he is recorded across all forms of media as a woman, with no trace remaining of any transition being made. As a result of this new practice, if a woman's bone structure is somewhat masculine, many people these days start to wonder whether she might in fact be a man passing himself off as a sex into which he was not born. 

It was an article in The Times recently that started me thinking about this. Apparently there is a successful writer who has the pen name Freida McFadden but is actually called something else. These are pictures of Freida McFadden. Judging by McFadden's advice to other writers, gender is a complicated issue in this writer's mind. The killer apparently can be a he and be a mother and a daughter.