Philobiblon

This post started out as a response to a commenter on the post below about the play The Exonerated, who questioned if the people featured were in fact innocent. As a theatre critic I reviewed the play, and wasn’t terribly impressed, but it is worth, I think, stating that I entirely agree with its politics.

I can’t debate all of the cases in detail, but I heard Sunny Jacobs in person interviewed on Radio 4 and her story certainly seemed to hang together – plus there’s the fact that the real killer confessed several times, and that when he testified against Sunny and her partner the jury were not told this was part of a plea bargain that allowed him to avoid the death penalty himself. I can’t see how any jury could make a fair determination without knowing that essential fact. (There’s a Guardian account here.)

And (responding to my commenter) a statement from a person in shock, who has just been at a scene of violence – as remember and written down later by a probably equally shocked policeman – doesn’t strike me as compelling evidence.

In some ways anyway the detailed facts of these cases doesn’t particularly matter. DNA has conclusively acquitted people on death row in the US – innocent people who could easily have been killed by the state. That, and the fact that those facing the death penalty are overwhelmingly poor and non-white, indicate this is a profoundly unfair system. I don’t believe in the death penalty under any circumstances, but when its application is this biased and arbitrary, I can’t understand how anyone could support it.

There are several ways of getting a political message across in a stage production. You can go for the worthy, straight approach, such as is seen now in The Exonerated, or you can make it an exciting, entertaining evening so delightful that the audience swallows the polemical medicine with glee and sits begging for more.

The latter is the approach taken in David Farr’s production of The Odyssey: A Trip Based on Homer’s Epic at the Lyric Hammersmith. This is a magic realist Odyssey, set in part in the present day — the gods deliver the great king Odysseus into the not-so-tender hands of a British immigration detention centre. There, to justify himself and his seeking asylum (although really all he wants is to go home), he has to tell his tale, which takes us on a cheerful romp through ancient myth and theatrical tradition, from the hippie island of the Lotus-Eaters, to the Indonesian shadow puppet-style of the seductress Circe, to the Dr Who style encounter with the lumbering giant Cyclops.

The word “trip” in the title is no accident, for this is a seductively psychedelic production. Sometimes this is direct: the intoxicating lotus flower produces in the immigration centre such gems as “the strip lights, they are wicked, man”, but often this is wrapped into the insanity of everyday life. The inhabitants of the centre sing increasingly tall tales of the disasters that brought them there, such as “a giant fish took my sister away”, before explaining the sad hyperbole, still in song, “no one believes me whatever I say…”

It is easy to keep piling on the adjectives of praise; for an evening of pure entertainment — with added thought — in London tonight, I can’t think of anything to better it. The acting, the staging, the profusion of ideas and images, the changes of mood and balance of ideas, all come together in near-perfection. READ MORE

It is so easy to keep reporting bad news on the environment, but I also look out for the good, like an entire village going green …

In gently rolling countryside, not far from a tranquil lake, Chew Magna is the quintessential Somerset village. It has a well-kept cricket pitch, tidy gardens, three churches, two pubs and a row of quaint shops. A picturesque stream meanders by ancient houses – some of them mentioned in The Domesday Book – and a down-at-heel watermill. You could be forgiven for believing that Chew Magna was just another quiet corner of conservative rural England. But a flier stuck to a telegraph pole tells a different story. “Find out everything you’ve always wanted to know about domestic solar water-heating,” it says, advertising a village talk. “Invest in energy-saving home improvements, save more money and significantly reduce your carbon dioxide emissions”. The meeting is the latest in a string of discussions, proposals and projects that are rapidly turning Chew Magna into one of the greenest places in the UK.

And travel guides will carry warnings about “casual flying”. There is an obvious contradiction there, but still it is a step in the right direction. And it is obviously impossible, and undesirable, to stop all air travel, which does let – at its best – people learn about other cultures, communicate with each other, and develop and grow.

Finally, peers might today cut the guts out of the government’s ID scheme, by breaking the link with passports.

… expected to vote today to reject the Government’s proposals obliging everyone renewing their passports to register on the database that will underpin the ID card scheme. …
Most Tories and many crossbench peers are expected to support a move by Lord Phillips of Sudbury, a Liberal Democrat peer, to defeat the passport plan.
Lord Phillips said: “The ID cards scheme is grandiose and potentially dangerous. It has not been thought through and has not been properly costed.
“If it becomes compulsory for everyone obtaining or renewing a passport to join the ID cards register, it will further break down trust between the citizen and the state.”

As I’ve said before, the world is becoming a funny place when you have to depend on Tories to defend civil liberties against an authoritarian Labour government. The Left/Right classification really has become meaningless.

Deciding I needed a change of scene, I hopped on the bicycle today for 25 miles around Hertfordshire (with central London CTC) – starting from New Barnet and heading for Shenley, among other parts. Just out of town we passed through the site of the old Barnet Fair, a traditional horse fair (although now only an annual fun fair), for which we can thank a bit of traditional cockney slang. Barnet Fair = Hair = name for a haircut.

Not having been on the bike recently I was a bit worried about keeping up but I needn’t have been; it was a very slow 25 miles, and that wasn’t due to me. But I did enjoy the new experience of bridle path riding; luckily, due to the astonishingly dry winter it wasn’t THAT muddy, but I’ve still got a satisfying spatter all over the bike, and managed a few frantic wheelspins along the way.

Another of the party had a puncture (I really must buy a kit for such occasions) so I had a useful lesson in “how to fix a puncture” that I’ll probably need some time.

Consequently we reached the pub at 2.02, and they’d stopped serving the full menu at 2. That was 2.00, precisely. You’ve got to love English ideas of service – still I had the Stilton’s ploughman’s that was quite respectable.

Among the highlights were the birds – a field full of curlews (at least I think they were curlews) and many waterbirds navigating around the ice on the gravel-pit lakes.

And a little more history – the rather nice little South Mimms church …

and its old rectory, which I’d date to late 16th-century … (although I might be wrong).

As you can see, it was a gorgeous day to be out on a bicycle, and I’m sure my thigh muscles will recover eventually …

I would really like to be able to recommend The Exonerated, a new production of which has just opened at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London. Its politics are exemplary, the stories — told in their own words — of the six Americans who spent between two and 20 years on death row for crimes they were subsequently proven not to have committed, are appropriately harrowing and uplifting. As an evening of politics, it can’t be faulted.

As an evening at the theatre, however, it has a number of problems. Chief among these is the fact that here in Britain, this is a production that will cater chiefly to the already converted. Few if any of the audience members are like to be in favour of the use of the death penalty; few will be unaware that large parts of the American legal system are corrupt, racist and utterly untrustworthy. It has little new to tell them.

Particularly egregious examples of abuses — the account of the man who has just found his parents murdered, their throats slit, being forced to look at graphic photos of their bodies, or of the obviously intellectually limited 18-year-old black man browbeaten into confessing to taking part in an armed robbery that led to the death of a policeman, on the expectation of then being allowed to go home — might produce gasps from the audience, but this is a story that anyone who reads British quality newspapers is entirely familiar with.

The actors present a script derived entirely from interviews with the victims of the US “justice” system and from legal transcripts. Supporting this format, they are apparently reading their lines, or at least flicking over the pages, an action that is both distracting and annoying. The sound effects – slamming prison doors, buzzing electric chairs – are also heavy- handed and unsubtle. If we are hearing transcripts of words, they also make little sense.

While this method of “writing” has been used to good effect in several recent productions, here it runs into a serious obstacle. The convicted innocents are — inevitably in a system that relies heavily on money to determine guilt or innocence — the very poor, the ill-educated and those of limited intelligence. They do not always make their own best advocates. READ MORE

My retroblogger, Miss Williams Wynn, is today heading back firmly into the Gothic with the Ricketts ghost story.

It has all of the usualy elements – an evil butler (of course the butler “dun it”) and a bit of aristocratic incest, resulting in a baby disposed of in a grisly manner, and a child scared for life by hearing the tale while hiding behind a curtain to eavesdrop on adult conversation.

While it was written down earlier, it is interesting that Victorians – albeit early Victorians – were so ready to print the gorier events of the tale, and with little attempt to disguise what is going on.

This doesn’t seem to be on the web elsewhere, although perhaps that’s not surprising since by the time Miss Williams Wynn is writing it down the house has been demolished. (It is said to be “between Alton and Alresford”, which are in Hampshire, I believe. Today you can cycle between them.)