Vale Queen Elizabeth the Second

The Queen's son chose a beautiful line from Hamlet to farewell his mother. Although it is undoubtedly very lovely, to me, coming as it does from a speech spoken over the coffin of Hamlet, whose life and comportment could not in any way to be said to be similar to that of Charles's mother's, it seemed a not entirely apposite choice.

Instead, the words of Shakespeare that sprang to my mind as the public mourning drew to a close and the "wand of office" was broken were these from The Tempest, among the most beautiful ever written:

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

From The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1

Deceived by the Stars

The Theatre Royal Bath is an enchanting little place. When I saw that a play called The Doctor was being performed there and that it was adapted from a work by the Viennese playwright Schnitzler and told the story of what happens when a doctor refuses to let a Catholic priest give a dying teenager the last rites, I was excited - Vienna, Catholicism, an old and pretty theatre, these are a few of my favourite things. 

I looked up the reviews of the production, which started out in London at the Almeida theatre. Without exception, it had been awarded five stars.  

Once I'd discovered this fact, I found it surprisingly easy to persuade my husband to come along. What an error. He already wasn't as keen on live theatre as I am, but his suspicion about any suggestions of theatre outings has increased tenfold following our experience of The Doctor.

It wasn't that the play was badly acted or didn't at first look good. The opening sequence was dramatic, with the cast crowding onto the stage, lining up at its edge and staring boldly out at the audience, and then picking up their costumes from the floor and putting them on, as they strode into their positions. The plot unfolded. An intriguing situation was put in place.

But then things got strange. The play, now set in a hospital in an English-speaking country in the twenty-first century, seems originally to have had anti-semitism in late nineteenth or early twentieth century Vienna as its central theme. In that historical context, anti-semitism was a very real and pervasive phenomenon - but it is no longer. These days, in Austria and Germany and in most parts of the English-speaking world, being Jewish is not something that influences whether or not you are successful professionally. 

Despite this shift in attitudes, rather than change the axis of the play, so that instead of anti-semitism it would have at its centre the two conflicts that have dominated life over these last pandemic years and that would seem especially relevant in the context of a twenty-first century hospital where a priest has been barred from plying his trade - the conflict between those who believe in "the science" and those who put other elements of existence above "the science" and the conflict between elites and the populations upon whom they impose their certainties (are these two conflicts actually one and the same?) - the play's adapter retains all the original play's arguments about anti-semitism, even though they are clearly particular to Vienna at the time Schnitzler lived. While retaining the theme of anti-semitism, the adapter then adds the wider spectrum of identity politics into the mix. Finally, presumably with the intention of challenging all claims about the importance or relevance of identity in any shape or form, the production has been blind cast for both colour and gender. Far from being five star quality, the result is a total muddle.

In the original drama, the main character was a man, but in this new adaptation she is a woman. She is also played by a woman, so that isn't too confusing. Her main opponent however, is a man, as he was in the original work, but he is played by a female person of colour. It happens that this man, played by a female person of colour, is a Catholic - and that the main character, the female, played by a female, is Jewish. 

Meanwhile, the female doctor's defender is played by an Obama-like, tall, handsome man who appears to be of partly African descent, but whose character, we eventually learn, is white and Jewish, like her. Another male doctor, a hospital board member, is played by a woman who is probably either entirely or partly of African descent. Her character at one point says, "I can claim to be African because I was born in Kenya" and it comes as a surprise when she is told in reply, "That doesn't count, given that your face is completely white." As her face isn't completely white, this is confusing, but I suppose it is racist to notice that someone who is a person of colour is having her racial origin denied, (while simultaneously purporting to be a man when she is a woman). 

A third, less senior, doctor is played by a white man who never turns out to be female but does suddenly, an hour and a quarter into proceedings, turn out to be black - you discover this when another character says to him, "You're black". The character of hospital PR woman is played by a well-built woman - or possibly by a cross-dressing man. A young doctor, played by a female whose parents may have originated from Japan, China or Korea, at some point during the play turns out to be male and white.

Most startlingly, the Catholic priest who is refused access to a dying patient and is played by a tall, thin man who speaks with an Irish accent and has Celtic colouring turns out to be black. We discover this about an hour in, when it is revealed that one of the reasons the character feels especially offended by the doctor's refusal to let him minister to her patient is his sense that he has been racially discriminated against as someone with black skin. 

This is theatre as medicine. Presumably if we as an audience notice whether a character is being played by a woman or a man, or whether their skin is black or white, we have a problem. These things don't matter, is, (I guess), the message? If you are sophisticated enough you don't see these things?  If so, are we also supposed to think that when a character complains that they are being discriminated against because they are black, we should think the complaint is nonsensical, because we have all agreed that we can't see the difference between skin colours? Aren't we somewhere in here demeaning the victims of genuine racism by pretending that a white actor is convincing as a black character who has suffered discrimination? Does this make sense? Does this work? Does this deserve five stars? 

Anyway, leaving aside these baffling aspects, the whole thing got increasingly shouty. I'm not convinced by the brilliance of Juliet Stevenson as an actor but I had to hand it to her when she was required to deliver the most banal line I think I've ever heard in theatre: "Life is complicated".

I don't know why I am surprised by the confusing casting. In December 2021 the theatre reviewer in The Times wrote excitedly about "how colour-blind casting has taken off in this country": 

What he did not explain is what makes blind casting such an unquestionably marvellous thing. 

Recent Reading - Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Seeking distraction from the clamour of apocalyptic propaganda about "heatwaves" and "droughts" in August (when, surprise, surprise, it was, for once, hot and dry), I bought a secondhand paperback copy of Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes for 20p. At that price, I wasn't worried about losing money if it turned out to be pot-boiling rubbish. To my delight, it turned out in fact to be a diverting and enjoyable read. I was still in a world dominated by doom sayers but at least I was being entertained. 

The novel is told in the first person and concerns a quest, which the narrator is asked to fulfil at the start of the book by Damian, a dying ex-friend. The two have not seen one another since a couple of years after they were both part of the already declining party season to bring young women out into English society. The two men's relationship was ruined by a dinner party in the late 1960s at which something supposedly dreadful happened (although, when the reader finally discovers what that actually was, it turns out not to have been as dreadful as all that). 

Damien, a parvenu introduced into the world of debutantes by the narrator, has since become very, very rich. Realising that he is dying and having received an anonymous letter that indicates he has a child somewhere, born as the result of a liaison at that earlier time in his life, he asks the narrator to track down the various women who might be the child's mother, to find out whether they gave birth to a child that is his. He hopes that a child belonging to him will be found so that he can leave his fortune to his own flesh and blood.

This sounds far-fetched put so baldly, but Julian Fellowes is a skilful writer and his gifted tale-telling persuades the reader to keep going, if not necessarily to suspend credibility completely. The plot, although a reasonably enthralling one, is really only the framework for a detailed recollection of a way of life that no longer exists. 

From the book's opening passage you know what you are getting - an elegy to youth and a vanished world: 

"London is a haunted city for me now and I am the ghost that haunts it. As I go about my business every street or square or avenue seems to whisper of an earlier, different era in my history. The shortest trip round Chelsea or Kensington takes me by some door where once I was welcome but where today I am a stranger. I see myself issue forth, young again and dressed for some long forgotten frolic, tricked out in what looks like the national dress of a war-torn Balkan country. Those flapping flares, those frilly shirts with their footballers' collars - what were we thinking of? And as I watch, beside that wraith of a younger, slimmer me walk the shades of the departed, parents, aunts and grandmothers, great-uncles and cousins, friends and girlfriends, gone now from this world entirely, or at least from what is left of my own life."

I was born in Kensington and spent a lot of my childhood in Chelsea; like the narrator, for me there are doors in the neighbourhood where "once I was welcome but where today I am a stranger", because those I knew have long gone, replaced by members of the new super rich who have sent the prices in the area skyrocketing out of the reach of the merely comfortable. These factors made the book particularly appealing for me as a form of nostalgia. However, even when the action of the book moved away from London and events began to take place mostly around the home counties, with a brief detour to Los Angeles, I still remained glued. 

The sense that lies beneath Fellowes's best known work, Downton Abbey - that, for all its flaws, beauty was intrinsic to the old order of English society, what one might call "the establishment"  - is everywhere evident in this book.  While Fellowes doesn't say that things ought to have stayed exactly as they were and does recognise the many unpleasant aspects of what has been swept away, he also mourns the lost grace contained in earlier social traditions. Even if the rituals of the past were designed to some extent to be exclusive, he suggests they had value. While making no attempt to disguise the fact that most of the people who made up what was then society were unexciting bores or boors, he raises the possibility that the structure itself was somehow valuable. It imposed exacting standards and insisted on manners and, given the decline in manners and the rise in violence since, he seems to wonder whether it is possible that it might have been worth preserving, if only until we worked out how to replace it with something better, rather than something more shabby. 

That new shabbiness is conjured up well by Fellowes some way into the book, when he has his narrator come across a now not unusually Hogarthian scene in the same part of London in which he had enjoyed his scenes of gilded youth:

"I had just turned off Gloucester Road into Hereford Square when there was a scream, then laughter, then shouting, then the sound of someone being sick. I wish I could write that I was astonished to hear what sounded like a large Indian takeaway being splashily deposited onto the pavement, but these days it would require a Martian, and one only recently arrived from outer space, to be surprised at these charming goings-on. A group of young men and women in their early twenties, I would guess, were loitering on the corner of the square, perhaps recent refugees from the Hereford Arms on the other side of the road, but perhaps not. One woman, in a short leather skirt and trainers, was throwing up and another was tending to her. The rest just stood around, waiting for the next act in their evening's entertainment."  

As the narrator goes on to observe:

"Until as little as ten years ago being drunk was a mistake, a regrettable by-product of making merry, a miscalculation which, the next day, required an apology. Now it's the point...At times it is hard not to feel that as a culture we are lost, in permanent denial and spinning in the void."

This concern I think is the author's real reason for writing the book. Fellowes has a wonderful turn of phrase and a good deal of wisdom when looking at his fellow creatures, but at heart he is preoccupied by questions about progress and where change is taking us and whether perpetual social revolution is destructive or not.

Thus, on learning that the father of an old friend decided he was gay as he reached the age of retirement, he asks himself (and the reader) whether such apparent liberation has actually improved anything, including the man's life:

"I was struck, for the millionth time, by the personal convolutions required by our new century. Would it have occurred to Jeff Vitkov, nice, boring, old Jeff, the brilliant entrepreneur and family man, to question his sexuality when he had got well into his fifties in any other period but our own? If he had been born even twenty years earlier, he would just have taken up golf, seen a bit more of the chaps at the club and not given the matter another thought. Would he have been any worse off?"

I am making the novel sound like a boring social treatise, but nothing could be further from the truth. Fellowes is funny and writes well, evoking scenes in the reader's mind's eye with ease. When he describes one character as having "one of those flat faces, like a carnival mask that had been dropped in the road and run over by a heavy lorry" and goes on to sum him up as a man who "had been defeated by our 'interesting times'", for whom a "hand-to-mouth existence lay ahead, of inheriting a cottage from a cousin and trying to rent it out, of hoping he would be remembered when the last aunt bit the dust, of wondering if his children might manage a little something for him on a regular basis", he makes it almost impossible not to imagine the fellow.  

He is also astute. When a female character pours out her soul to the narrator, she finishes by apologetically commenting, "I don't know why I told you all that".  "Because I was interested", Fellowes has the narrator reply, before explaining to the reader:

"Actually, this is quite true. Especially in England. Very few Englishmen ever ask women anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbours on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements."

The one thing Fellowes omits in these observatons is that above all topics the rural upper middle class Englishman likes to lecture dinner companions on the state of his boiler, but never mind, he gets so much else right, providing, for example, the perceptive observation that "There is a tyranny that forces people of a certain class to insist they are only happy in the country". He is wonderfully against the nanny-state, pointing out that "to encourage the surrender of freedom in order to avoid danger is the hallmark of a tyranny and always a poor exchange."

Following the very recent death of the Queen, the narrator's thoughts on Her Majesty and the younger members of her family seem especially apposite:

While the younger members of the Royal Family talk about mental health and their views on whatever comes into their heads, "only Her Majesty", he says, "by never being interviewed, by never revealing an opinion, has retained a genuine mystery."

The book is tremendously enjoyable and very intelligent. For me the modern mystery is why literature that is easy to read and pleasurable is scorned and sneered at, as if it were easy to write such stuff and wrong to be delighted, when you ought to be made to work. I suppose the Roundheads never really went away.