Wednesday 6 March 2019

Farce - French versus English

There is a new production of Moliere’s Tartuffe at London’s National Theatre and, while in London the other day, we went along. Tartuffe is usually described as a satire but this production played it mainly as a farce, and we enjoyed it a lot, (for more detail, look here).

A couple of days after seeing Tartuffe, we went to Bateman's, Rudyard Kipling’s house in Sussex and enjoyed another, more English form of farce.

Bateman's is a National Trust property, and when we arrived we were asked if we were Trust members. When we said we weren't, the woman at the ticket office reacted with such astonishment, she might have been in a pantomime - can she really never have encountered others of our ilk?

Perhaps it was her amazement that led her to forget to mention that, although we were paying a lot of money to go in, we would not in fact be getting very good value, because of the time of year. Anyway, she did neglect to tell us this, so we made our way down through the walled kitchen garden, where little was growing, although someone had planted a stick to which was fixed a laminated piece of paper, announcing that Ernest Shackleton had once been a visitor to the house.

We entered the house itself through a large shop, selling soaps and coffee cups and fudge and scented drawer envelopes and picnic rugs and all sorts of other things unrelated to Rudyard Kipling. We were asked to gather in what looked like the former scullery, to wait for our tour to begin. A group of people was already in there when we turned up, watched over by two women in puffer jackets, who turned out to be our guides.

After a bit of discussion between these two women about whether anyone else was coming, we set off. We were led through a short narrow corridor- a route that we were told was a special privilege not given to many visitors- and into a dark room, which we were informed was the front hall. There we peered at the vague outline of what one woman announced was the National Trust's oldest working clock, (British made and keeping much, much better time than the one facing it, a newer device, made in the Netherlands, so yah boo sucks, Europe).

I took this information on trust as it wasn't easy to make out the object and anyway we were moving on - into to yet another ill-lit room. This, apparently, was the Kiplings' sitting room. The blinds were down, as they had been in the first room, and, while one of our guides explained what the various objects that loomed out of the darkness were, the other held up a torch with a rather faint beam. We all peered in whichever direction was indicated, but I don't believe any of us made out more than vague outlines. At a certain point scratchy music burst upon us, as one of the women had managed to get a wind-up gramophone to operate. Then she picked up something woolen and shoved it somewhere in the shadows and the sound was muffled. There was no volume control on old record players, she explained, as she did this, and so you had to put a sock in the broadcasting horn to moderate the noise - hence the phrase, "put a sock in it".

We passed through more rooms, all in semi-darkness. We were not allowed into Kipling’s writing room, because of something to do with the floor. Instead we were invited to take turns at putting one eye to the door jamb, through which we each got a glimpse of a room in which all the furniture appeared to be piled up in a corner (conservation) and, once again, the blinds were down, obscuring the view that, we were told, sustained and inspired Kipling in his day.

Everyone accepted the conditions meekly, except my husband, who is Australian and not trained in "mustn't grumble" manners. When we reached the upstairs bedroom, which was plunged in semi-obscurity like the rest of the place, his patience gave out. What about pulling up the blinds, he suggested, to make things a little easier to see?

Our guides seemed mildly hurt by this suggestion and for the rest of the tour kept returning to their justifications, which boiled down to rules and the importance of observing them, without anything so impertinent as a questioning spirit. We were experiencing the National Trust's winter arrangements, apparently . They were ever so sorry, but t hey were prohibited from pulling up the blinds until the summer system, known as "free flow" came into force. Once that happened, the world would be our oyster, we would be able to come and go as we pleased, windows would be uncovered and everything would be illuminated.

Not being English, my husband wanted to know why we couldn't have the blinds up and do all these things now. Silly man, I thought, he doesn't understand the fundamentals of English farce - I mean life: rules, the more pointless the better, strictly adhered to, uncontestable, and rigidly applied.
The one area where extreme efficiency occurs in British existence is in the application of rules. 

We trailed on through the house, but the mood was ruined. The wind had gone out of the two women's sails. They continued their pointless descriptions of things that could not be seen (they seemed not to understand that a torch held to a glass cabinet does not illuminate the objects inside but merely creates a bright reflection that bounces back and hurts the observer's eyes), but kept returning to the issue of "free flow" and their justifications, (which had no substance, if you didn't accept that a rule is a rule is a rule, however idiotic) for the window blinds being kept closed.

Since then we have visited more National Trust properties. We have even been sufficiently tamed to buy ourselves a membership of the organisation. What I have realised is that it is a quintessentially British organisation, staffed voluntarily by an army of people who love enforcing rules. Which is possibly the pastime enjoyed more than any other by inhabitants of the British isles.

Mind you, not everyone who volunteers is English. A couple of days after going to Bateman's, we went to have a look at Petworth, and there I witnessed a young female volunteer of Spanish origin, come rushing out into the courtyard to chastise someone for standing two feet within the gateway with a dog on a lead. The gusto with which she enforced regulations was a triumph of the local culture, her natural Latin laissez faire instincts clearly completely eclipsed by immersion in her new environment. It made me proud to be British.

But it also started me thinking. Many British who chose to vote to leave the European Union did so because they were sick of all its rules and regulations, but what if in fact that proliferation of rules and regulations turns out to have been the result of British membership? What if, with the United Kingdom gone, the massed ranks of bureaucrats in Brussels will breathe a sigh of relief and say to themselves, "Thank heavens they've disappeared; now we won't have to make up any more new rules to make life difficult for everyone." How embarrassing that would turn out to be.

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