Review of Cyprus Avenue (Play by David Ireland at Royal Court, watched online)

As part of lockdown we watched Cyprus Avenue last night, recorded at the Royal Court Theatre in London, though with some intercut scenes that looked like they were actually shot in Belfast. It was a a very effective and absorbing play, well acted, and cleverly arranged and adapted for broadcast. Stephen Rea is a great actor and he could probably read the telephone directory (er, do those even still exist?) and make it absorbing.

But there was something about the play's underlying message that I found disturbing. It's essentially an assault on the Ulster Protestant identity, arguing that it's a false identification with Britishness and an assertion of not-Irishness, and not much else. The main character, Eric, is both aware and afraid of this, and deals with it by increasingly aggressive and then dark assertions of that identity, and by a laughably stupid critique of Irishness that encourages us, the audience, to laugh at him and his ridiculous identity.

I'm not on safe territory here, but I think that characterising identities as felt as either 'real' or 'faux' is not going to work out well. There are lots groups of people who have identities based on the fact that they came from somewhere else - as immigrants, as refugees, as slaves and as settlers. In progressive circles we tend to celebrate the first three and denigrate the fourth - because settlers are somehow related to the agency of a colonial state. But the boundaries between these kinds of group are not clear and firm - what about indentured labourers who never go home, as in Guyana and Malaysia? What about people who came as migrants because of opportunities opened up by a state, but not through its agency - like the millions of Europeans who migrated to America in the nineteenth century?

The flip side of this is the idea of indigeneity - some people were there ab origine, and are felt to be part of the 'natural' landscape and living in harmony with nature, and some are settlers and therefore necessarily inharmonious. Which rather begs the question, when is the cut-off date? The Maoris turned up in New Zealand a little while before the Europeans, and more or less exterminated the aborigines there - and sent some of the native fauna into extinction. Same with the megafauna of North America.

Back to Northern Ireland - is it really helpful to seek to build an all-Ireland identity on the basis of lampooning one side of the sectarian divide, and assuming that your side's identity is inclusive? Or is it time to recognise that Republicanism, as currently constituted, is also a sectarian ideology, even when it's shorn of its mystical and Catholic dimensions?

Something similar occasionally happened in Israel/Palestine - rogue currents in Zionism (even Ben Gurion, sometimes) wanted to teach the Palestinian Arabs Hebrew and turn them into Israelis of the Muslim persuasion, and some Arab Nationalists have been willing to admit 'Arab Jews' as Arabs. It has come to nothing. Surely an opportunity to learn about going beyond nationalism and sectarianism in creating post-national identities?

"Into the Unknown" at the Barbiican

I went to this exhibition. Some of the exhibits were a bit dull - some old books in glass cases. And quite a lot were editions that I'd actually owned at some point. Displays of old futures, on cigarette cards and advertisements and posters...the sort of thing that would be 'retro-futurist', except that at the time it was made it was just...futurist; it has to be knowing to be retro-futurist, doesn't it?

There were some physical objects...models of Jules Verne things like a Nautilus and a balloon, some maquettes and props from films, none of which really grabbed me, though I rather liked some of the things from eXistenZ, which I've always though was rather under-rated.

The best bit was really the screens displaying clips from films...the mainstream ones like 'Close Encounters' and 'Back to the Future' and 'The Day after Tomorrow', but also some that I'd never heard of, like Afronauts, and Pumzi, the Invisible Cities series...and High Rise and Dark City...and Astro Black. All of these looked really interesting, and some are short and available on YouTube or somewhere else online.

The last item in the exhibition is a showing of 'In the Future they ate from the finest porcelain'. This was striking, but left me feeling uncomfortable. It's a film by a Palestinian woman about archaeology and politics. It doesn't mention Israel or Palestine or Zionism, but it's clearly about the way that Israel uses archaeology as part of an ideological justification for the its version of essentialist Jewish nationalism. It's cleverly made, and beautiful to watch and listen to. But it does explicitly argue that the people it refers to as 'our rulers' have invented their own historic connection to the land, so as to deny that of the suffering indigenous people. There is a school of thought in Palestinian nationalism, and sometimes its supporters, that really does deny that there ever was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and so on.

And I think that's unnecessary, and offensive. I'm not an expert on the status of the archaeological evidence one way or another, but it strikes me as a stupid and destructive line of argument, like the dreary debates I remember as to whether Jews constituted a nation - in which Stalin's definition usually cropped up.

I'm quite sympathetic to Shlomo Sand's arguments that the 'Jewish People' and 'The Land of Israel' are historical constructions, as long it's understood that the Jewish people is 'invented' in the same sense that other peoples are. Similarly, it's one thing to refer to the Holocaust as part of the founding 'myth' of the State of Israel, and another to suggest that the Holocaust is a myth in the sense of not being part of actual history. The concept of 'fake news', somehow counterposed to 'real news', belongs here too.

There is a bigger issue here, which someone else is probably thinking about even now. Liberal and progressive intellectuals have spent years picking away at what we might think of as 'realist' epistemology, pointing out the way that all kinds of knowledge - science, history, medicine - are not simply revealed but are constructed. And we've ended up not with a population that engages critically and wisely with knowledge, but with Trump and Farage and Gove, and the climate change deniers...and the Moon landing deniers...Where does this go? It's not sustainable to say that non-realist epistemology is only for us clever people, and the rest have to just trust in the experts.

More to follow about this, I think.

Womad 2016

Womad 2016 was lovely, and mainly erased the memory of all the rain-soaked misery of last year. Among the fabulous things and bands we saw were:

• The Iyatra Quartet, who played on the bandstand and also at an open mike night at the rather lovely Coyote Moon dome tent, which was both a cafe and an unofficial venue
• The Fallout Marching Band, who played on the bandstand and in the carnival procession
• My personal favourite of the whole festival - the wonderful trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf
• Asian Dub Foundation - politically very sound, but maybe I'm getting too old for that much noise
• The Hot 8 Brass Band
• Otava Yo, a really funny Russian band
• Kachupa, from Italy with a super Bulgarian woman doing the lead vocals
• The Hackney Colliery Band, which turned out to be much more art-Jazz than I was expecting
• Hanoi Masters, playing traditional instruments from Vietnam that were weirder than you could have imagined
• Stroud's very own Mighty John Street Ska Orchestra
• The Kate Bush-like 'The Anchoress', who swore and cursed through her set
• Heartbeat, a joint Israeli-Palestinian young people band brought into being by NGO Peace Direct, who were more impressive as a political and cultural fact than as a musical phenomenon
• Les Amazones d'Afrique, nine African women who were amazing

We actually did a dance workshop led by Mariana Pinho, who was so pregnant she looked like she might give birth at any moment; this was billed as samba but turned out to be quadrilla, which was probably all for the best as far as I was concerned...quadrilla turns out to be an easy country dance sort of thing.

We went to the Big Green Chat Show on Saturday morning, led by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. Guests included: Dale Vince of Ecotricity, who was really very impressive and talked about the company's plans for green gas based on bio-digestion of grass (much better than poo, apparently); The One Show reporter Lucy Siegle (also of The Guardian); and head of sustainability at IKEA Joanna Yarrow - both also much more impressive than I was expecting.

One other thing we liked - the Paguro upcycled bags and wallets, made from old inner tubes and so on. May buy some when it's present-time.

Review of Copenhagen performed by students at Kings College London

I really enjoyed this, even though I'd recently seen the TV production. It's a brilliant play and the students really did it justice. Especially hard for Freddie Fullerton, who is young but has to play an older, avuncular character but I think he pulled it off rather well. The script is great, of course, but so was the acting - the actors' mannerisms really conveyed the characters they were playing.

Who would have thought you could do so much with such a minimal set (though a rather good room for it with appropriate fittings and fixtures) and three actors?

And why isn't Michael Frayn as recognised as he ought to be? The way that this play addresses both the scientific and the moral issues is little short of genius. The fact that the answers to the latter aren't cut and dried, as they would be in Howard Brenton or David Hare, just adds to the brilliance.

It is still on for one more night - tonight (16th March). Go and see it if you can.

Edward Bond's Bingo

Last night we went to see Bingo by Edward Bond.

We were all pretty fed up with it, and bored at the absence of character or plot development.

I've since had the chance to think about it, and I sort of understand it better now.

Edward Bond is a avowedly Marxist playwright. He thinks he's the English Brecht. He's not writing entertainment – the point of the play is to drive home a point. In this case (as so often) it is that the process of capitalist development involves brutality and cruelty, which is graphically depicted on the stage and described off it. The point is introduced early on the play – Shakespeare meets the nasty Coombs character, who explains that his plans to enclose the common will hurt the poor but benefit the town in the long term. In a short speech he manages to articulate the main principles of capitalist economics – the self-regulation of the market through the price mechanism, the re-allocation of resources to more productive uses, and so on.

The rest of the play is just driving this home. There isn't really a plot, we just see the full implications of this being played out. The poor do suffer, the vagrant girl is hanged, violent disorder and protest is crushed with greater violence. The Shakespeare character is perhaps a proxy for the middle class audience that Bond expects to be seeing the play. He is unhappy about the suffering but is concerned about his own financial security, and so refuses to act. Most of the play shows him not acting, and meditating on the fact that he hasn't. 

Unsurprisingly, this is not very enjoyable to watch. If there is another theme, it is that the family – particularly relations between parents and children, but also between husband and wife – are based on deceit and disrespect, not love. Both of the families depicted are unhappy, though the wife in the servant family is at least kind to her mad partner, while the wealthier Shakespeare is not kind to his mad wife.

So no plot really – just a long speech about the misery of capitalist accumulation, in period dress and with Shakespeare as a character because it's a play.

Here is the link to the good Wikipedia article about the play http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo_%28play%29

By the way, the other playwright in the tavern is Ben Johnson – Christopher Marlowe was dead by 1593, and the play is set later, around 1615, when Shakespeare is old.

Life After Armageddon.

Watched 'Life After Armageddon', a US dram-doc, on Channel Five the other night. It depicts a society brought to collapse by an outbreak of flu, which has such a devastating effect because the country is so interdependent; once enough people stay home because they are ill, or to avoid becoming ill, everything fails, including water, power, law and order, and food distribution.

The program was a bit crass and repetitive, despite talking head slots from some of my favourite collapse theorists, but the scenario it depicts didn't seem particularly far-fetched. It seems worthy of comment that many of the tools which we are embracing to deal with the prospect of climate change -- such as more efficient transport networks, smarter power grids, and more reliance on the internet for work, shopping, and control systems generally -- actually make our civilisation less resilient to shocks. I don't know whether the internet would really stop working, in the way it does in the movie, once the workers in the server farms stop coming in to work, but it does bear thinking about.

I suppose the upshot of this is that there is more to sustainability than reducing power consumption; it's important to think about resilience, and reversibility. Of course we need to reduce our carbon emissions, but we ought to be aiming to do it in a way that doesn't create new systemic weaknesses and threats.

Nine things I liked at the Design Museum

1. Dieter Rams' ten principles for good design
2. The story of stuff
3. The Kyoto Box solar stove
4. It's Nice, That design blog
5. The Plastiki boat, built out of plastic bottles
6. Changing Habbits, a way to visualise carbon footprints
7. The Carbon Ration Book from The Ministry of Trying to Do Something About It
8. Grow your own greenhouse by Jochem Faudet
9. Sustainability Issues Mapping and Database - A420

Aaronovitch on conspiracy theories

At the Latitude Festival last weekend, I listened to David Aaronovitch talking about conspiracy theories, to promote his book Voodoo Histories. I haven't read the book, so I'm just reviewing his talk. I didn't like it at all. He began by introducing the audience to the history of the Protocols, and about how it was shown to be a forgery; then he segued into post-9/11 conspiracy theories, and then on to the death of Diana. There was a bit of good-natured joshing at Dan Brown (particularly since half the audience admitted to having read The Da Vinci Code), and Brown's "source" Henry Lincoln.

As I said, I haven't read the book, so I don't know to what extent Aaronovitch engages with the preceding academic literature on this subject - for example, Norman Cohn's book on the Protocols, "Warrant for Genocide", or Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". In the talk, though, he warmed to his main themes - having a good laugh at the stupidity of people who believe the wilder conspiracy theories (like David Icke's theory that the world's elites, including the British royal family, are really giant blood-drinking lizards), and offering psychological explanations as to why people believe in conspiracies.

For me, the worst part of the talk was that Aaronovitch did not address the main reason that people believe this stuff -- because it's enough like the way the real world works. For example: Henry Lincoln's idea that the French royal family are the lineal descendants of Jesus, who escaped to the South of France and had children, and that most of the history of the Church is about how this has been covered up, does not stand up to much examination by an informed critical reader. But the Church has engaged in forgeries and cover-ups over much of its history. Consider the 'donation of Constantine', for example - a forged document which purported to show that the Roman emperor had transferred authority to the Pope. Or the forging of a paragraph in the writings of Josephus, which the Church claimed as a contemporary account of Jesus' life - subsequently shown to have been inserted by a later Christian writer. Lincoln's and even Brown's work has caught the imagination because it draws attention to something that many people suspect to be true but do not have the time or the resources to investigate for themselves - that theologians and the inner circles of the Church know that the ideas that they foist on others are not true.

The same might be said about the more contemporary and political conspiracy theories. Aaronovitch went on at some length about the (fictional) TV series Edge of Darkness, and about the widespread belief that the anti-nuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell had been murdered by the security services.

Aaronovitch laughed at the way conspiracy theorists believe both governments and corporations carry out secret medical experiments on unwilling subjects; but there are lots of well documented cases of them doing just that - experiments on British servicemen at Porton Down, mustard gas experiments on Indian soldiers at Rawalpindi, the CIA's K-ULTRA program of mind control experiments using drugs and hypnosis. The fact that this stuff has happened before, and that it was indeed widely denied and covered up, makes claims that other similar stuff is happening and is being covered up seem eminently plausible.

Similarly with the big claims about secret political arrangements, or government organisation of terrorism. Think about the way that Britain and France colluded with Israel in the Suez campaign, pretending to intervene "to separate combatants" in a war that they had themselves sponsored and arranged. Aaronovitch's claim that the real world is not as complicated at the conspiracy theorists make it out to be sits ill with the realities of the Iran-Contra affair, in which the CIA sold missiles to Iran and used the proceeds to fund the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. The weapon sales were secret and illegal, the Israelis were involved in shipping the missiles, the Nicaraguan rebels were known to be using the weapons runs to ship drugs into the US - could you make this up?

In argument against the conspiracy theorists, Aaronovitch says that real conspiracies are less effective than the theorists would have us believe - it's not possible to cover up anything big and important for very long because too many people would have to be involved. But surely this is just the equally implausible obverse of the argument style of the conspiracy theorists, who faced with apparent evidence that their theories are wrong, say that this in fact proves that they are right. Aaronovitch is claiming that because we know that cover-ups have been exposed in the past, they must all have been exposed - there can't have been any successful cover-ups.

And this points to the real problem, both with Aaronovitch's account and with those of other meta-theorists of conspiracy theorists; they don't offer any way of distinguishing between a 'conspiracy theory' and a genuine expose of a conspiracy or a cover-up. This is made worse by the fact that, as with other kinds of 'rejected knowledge', the people who espouse are often a bit special - only people like that are prepared to carry on in the face of widespread hostility. The old joke about intellectual presumption goes: "They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Einstein, and they laughed at Punch and Judy." Being rejected doesn't mean that you are a genius, just because some other geniuses were at some stage rejected.

But it's important to remind ourselves that science, are inherently and necessarily conservative most of the time. It's useful to hold on to an existing paradigm and continue to work out its ramifications and puzzles; we can't afford to have scientific revolutions every time a bit of contradictory evidence turns up. As with science, so with political and social discourse. On the one hand, we can't pay equal attention to every nutter who walks through the door claiming to have evidence that the moon landings were faked; on the other hand, it's equally important to realise someone's claims to have uncovered a government or corporate cover-up aren't necessarily invalid because they have an unfortunate manner or smelly beard.

What I liked least about Aaronovitch's talk, then, was that it seemed to be essentially a plug for the conventional wisdom and the establishment view. Everything is what it seems to be. People who question this are all nutters. If an idea about events or political realities seems implausible, then it is.

Aaronovitch is a good writer who also talks well. Yet he is heading towards Melanie Phillips-land as a professional ex-leftist (this week he is on Radio Four talking about how Joseph McCarthy's fears of Soviet infiltration of the US were justified). Really, he ought to pull himself together and think about whether his obvious talents should be aimed at helping the weak and poor, or whether he'd rather be a tame clown who exposes the foibles of radicals for the amusement of the rich and powerful.

Kastner on TV

A couple of weeks ago I watched the Storyville programme about Kastner (entitled “The Jew who talked to the Nazis”), and it stirred me up a lot. Few people who read the broadsheet newspapers (or the Jewish Chronicle) can have missed the row over Joe Allen’s play “Perdition” a few years ago; so the suggestion that some Zionists were involved in some dealings with the Nazis is not exactly news. And though everyone who writes about this feels compelled to act as if they are personally revealing something that has long been hidden, in fact there is a long and detailed account of Kastner and others’ roles in Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial.

For years the subject was also used as a stick by the Zionist right to beat Labour Zionists – as represented, for example, in Ben Hecht’s book “Perfidy”; more recently Lenni Brenner has written several books which meticulously document the involvements of the Zionist Right (especially Lehi) with attempts to do a deal with the Nazis. Proper historians, including Jewish and Zionists ones, know all about what happened, and the indignation of the Jewish community about the Allen play was either fake or ignorant. There is a debate to be had about how we should interpret and even judge these episodes, and what we can learn from the; but it shouldn’t be based on denial of the facts.

Nevertheless, the Storyville film not only told the story rather well, but did manage to tell me a lot that I didn’t know. I knew that Kastner had been assassinated after a Pyrhrric victory in his libel action, but had always assumed it was the work of crazed individual. The film not only show that the assassin had been part of an underground rightwing group (which had also attempted to blow up the Soviet embassy in Israel) but also that the group had been penetrated by the Shin Bet, and that there seems good reason to suspect that the Israeli authorities knew about the planned assassination but chose not to prevent it.

Why? Perhaps because Kastner had been giving witness statements on behalf of Nazis at their trials after the war – and that he had been doing this so that they would reveal the whereabouts of money looted from holocaust victims. The money was then transferred to the Israeli state, though not to descendants of the victims or other survivors. Evidence of Kastner’s statements for the various Nazis had emerged at the libel trial and had very much influenced the judge’s attitude towards him, yet Kastner had not given an explanation as to why he appeared to be helping these odious men when there were no longer any Jews to save. The film suggests that the assassins were allowed to go ahead with their plans because Kastner knew too much; it also shows that the murderers served relatively short sentences. Curiously, the actual assassin, who is still alive and was interviewed for the film, is one of the most sympathetic characters in it.

Also interesting in the film is the close collaboration between Uri Avnery and the right-wing lawyer (a Herut leader) for the defendant in the libel trial. We’re used to seeing Avnery as a peacenik, but his political career is much more chequered than that. He started out on the right, and obviously maintained links there in the muck-raking days of Haolam Hazeh.

The film also shows the way that the Jews rescued by Kastner were made to feel like they were the wrong sort of survivor. I suspect many survivors in Israel felt like that. The fact that the Kastner episode happened in Hungary, and that at least some Zionists seem to have had scant regard for the assimilated Hungarian Jews, may also have played a part.

Why I hate Channel 4's 'Rock School'

Rock School (Channel 4, Fridays at 9.30pm) is undoubtedly one of the worst things I have seen on TV for a very long time. Why is it so bad? Let me count the ways.

It pretends that Gene Simmons, the exhumed rock star personality who is the centre of the show, is a musician and a teacher when he really isn’t either. He has no interest in teaching anything, or in managing any sort of learning. It’s almost as if he remembered the bad bits of the classroom situation (teacher favouritism, boring lessons that go nowhere) and consciously decided to recreate them.

More seriously, he isn’t much of a musician, as is evidenced by the pathetic showing he puts up when he tries to play solo to a small audience of local community worthies – my fourteen year-old would really have done a lot better.

The show also pretends that Kiss, in which Simmons plays, is a great rock band, when it knows that Kiss are at best also-rans. If Kiss were really any good, why doesn’t the show play any of their songs? Instead it’s punctuated with lots of good tracks by David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, and Hendrix. For this we must be grateful, but it makes it plain that the producers, like everyone else, know that Kiss are crap.

The show is set in Christ’s Hospital school, just about the only secondary school in the country where it stands a chance of presenting rock music as some sort of subversive influence. The school has all sorts of bizarre Hogwarts-like touches, including the long blue coats that the students wear as uniforms. This lends some shred of credibility to the show’s main premise – that rock is going to provide some ‘real life’ to a conservative backwater.

Even so, it’s pretty obvious that it both staff and students are actually quite open to rock music – the headmistress pops in every so often to see how Simmons’ lessons are going, though some of her occasional remarks suggest that she, too, knows that there are better rock bands than Kiss. The kids are actually much better musicians, and much more rounded in their perspective on music, than the show’s star.

Simmons, and the programme, imply that rock is about rebellion – even though most grown-ups understand that it is a very mainstream part of the entertainment industry. Simmons is rebellious only in the sense that not tidying your bedroom is a protest against authority. When the ‘stultifying atmosphere’ of the school and its community become too claustrophobic for him, he escapes – not to go to a music club, or to hang out with real musicians, but to go to a lap-dancing club. Perhaps next week we’ll see him buying a wank-mag too, to underline just how much of a dangerous rebel he really is.