Philobiblon

In a production of Shakepeare that gets the delivery right, the language itself is magical, fantasmagorical. As a member of the audience you can just sit and let the flow of words reach deep inside, to tug at the core of your being.

That’s what you expect when you go to see a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and that’s what you get with Trade, one of the plays of its “New Work” season, which has just arrived at the Soho Theatre in London. It is just that the topic — women sex tourists — might be not quite what you are expecting.

This is the dialogue of a rap song, turned to blank verse. The characters pick up each others’ words and bounce them off each other in a rapid-fire song that is music without tune. The writer, Debbie Tucker Green, will definitely be someone to watch.

The scene is a stretch of perfect white sand – just like the brochures – and it opens with three bored women – the kind of “massage, hair-breading, jewelry-sellers” you’ve seen on beaches from Vietnam to The Gambia. Jets roar overhead, money jingles, but none of it is going to them. READ MORE

Tony Blair is looking more frazzled and fragile by the day, but it is Sir Ian, who really, surely can’t last much longer. The Metropolitan Police Commission is now facing questioning under caution over the shooting by his officers of the Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent electrician who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Si Ian reacted at the time as though this was a minor unfortunate incident, as though the two-year-old hadn’t made it to the pottie on time. Since then he’s demonstrated further his sheer cloddishness (comments on the Soham murders) and, again, his total disrespect – indeed seemingly lack of awareness of the existence of – basic human rights, such as privacy, by secretly taping conversations with his superiors.

But this might, hopefully, be the final straw to get rid of a dangerously incompetent man: he has two defences – he didn’t know what was going on in his own force, or he lied about it. Good choice.

BTW: for non-British readers, these Blairs aren’t related, even though it sometimes looks like they are.
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Try to always find some good news, and today’s is a campaign against forced marriages.

THE actress and writer Meera Syal attacked forced marriages yesterday and told parents to stop sacrificing their children’s lives. Syal, star of The Kumars at No 42, joined a government campaign that warns parents that they face prosecution if they force their children into marriage.
Television commercials and press advertisements will spearhead a drive to educate them about the difference between arranged and forced marriages. They will feature two hands wearing wedding rings chained together.

My 19th-century “blogger”, Frances Williams Wynn, is today spreading some gossip about French royalty and their hangers-on, and one in particular:

A Miss W., who some fifty years ago was an admired singer on the English stage, made a conquest of a Mr. A., a man of large property, who married her. Whether the lady’s character was not immaculate, or whether, the march of intellect not having begun, actresses of the best character were not yet reckoned fit society for ladies, does not appear; certain it is that, finding she could not get any society in England, the A.’s went to establish themselves at Versailles, where they took a fine house, gave fetes, &c. &c. His wealth gave splendour; her beauty, her singing, her dancing, gave charm.

The Polignacs came to her fetes, and afterwards introduced her to the little society, to the intimate reunions, of which Marie Antoinette was a constant member. When adversity befell this object of admiration, of almost idolatry, Mrs. A. devoted herself, her talents and (better than all) her purse to her service. It was chiefly during the Queen’s melancholy abode in the Temple that Mrs. A. most exerted herself. In bribes, in various means employed for the relief of the poor Queen, she expended between 30,000 and 40,000 sterling.

This of course was taken under the name of a loan, and soon after the Restoration Mrs. A. made a demand upon Louis XVIII.: every item of her account was discussed and most allowed, till they came to a very large bribe given to the minister of police, one to the gaoler, and bribes to various persons, to manage the escape of the Dauphin and the substitution of a dying child in his place.

Louis XVIII. Would not agree to this article, and insisted upon its being erased from the account as the condition upon which he would order the gradual liquidation of the rest of the debt. To this condition Mrs. A. would not accede: Louis XVIII. died: the accounts were again brought forward. Charles X. was just going to give the order for
paying the debt by instalments when the revolution came, and Mrs. A. seems now further than ever from obtaining any part of her money.

Don’t suppose anyone has any idea of who Mrs. A might be?

French royalty is one subject that I’ve never really got into, although Miss Williams Wynn’s words today do remind me of that delightful, whimsical little Steinbeck novel, The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Quite unlike his other work, but good fun.

A book to look out for, The Long March by Sun Shuyun:

The day her period came, a few weeks later, “I felt as if a millstone had been lifted from my neck. I promptly climbed up a mulberry tree and got a wad of leaves. Standing there, I wanted to shout to the world, ‘I’m not pregnant! I’m not pregnant!'” The women, she said, “dreaded pregnancy more than the plague”.
Recalling those times, Wang, now 91, still had a look of pain on her gentle face, when I tracked her down at the start of my journey retracing the Long March. …
Wang saw one woman go into labour while marching, with the baby’s head dangling out. Another had a difficult birth with Chiang’s troops in hot pursuit, and bombs dropping like rain. As if afraid of the violent world, the baby refused to come out. A whole regiment of the rearguard was ordered to put up a fierce fight for more than two hours and lost a dozen men. After all their pain, however, the women were not allowed to keep their babies. It was the rule with the First Army: a crying baby could endanger the troops. The tiny boy whose arrival cost a dozen soldiers’s lives was left on a bed of straw in the abandoned house where he was born.

And if you’re not going to find time to read the book, at least check out the article; it is a wonderful example of oral history.
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Who’d have thought it, Anatole Kaletsky, very well-informed, but right-wing economist, is effectively: advocating a boycott of the supermarkets.

As one of the prosperous burghers of Central London, I sorely miss the freshly baked bread, high-quality charcuterie and organic smoked salmon that used to be available in my local grocer’s and do not appreciate Tesco’s alternative “offer” of a dozen varieties of cheap washing powder, tinned tuna and sliced bread. I therefore yield to no one in my dislike of Tesco’s bullying tactics and its philistinism towards food.

The problem with bad news on climate change is that it just keeps stacking up and up, and the media, inevitably, gets bored with what seems to be “more of the same”. This is probably why the Arctic ice pack story hasn’t got anything like the attention it deserved this week.

Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter…
The greatest fear is that an environmental “positive feedback” has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice….
Although sea levels are not affected by melting sea ice – which floats on the ocean – the Arctic ice cover is thought to be a key moderator of the northern hemisphere’s climate. It helps to stabilise the massive land glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland which have the capacity to raise sea levels dramatically.

If that isn’t scary enough for you, the killer line is on the end of the article – that this outcome is predicted by climate change models, but under those models it was not supposed to happen for “a few decades yet”.

I’ve joined the Green Party, got involved in other small ways with environmental work, with the thought that I was doing my bit to prevent catastrophe after I was dead. After reading and thinking about this story, however, I had a flash of a serious thought, for the first time, whether I should buy 10 acres in some carefully calculated spot (somewhere high up, but not likely to get too hot), build a bloody great wall around it, and learn how to get self-sufficient, fast.

I’ve read a bit around the fall of the Roman Empire. They didn’t believe it could happen either – at least not in their lifetimes.

But hey, I have had one tiny success. I’m often at the British Library, where they supply thick, clear plastic bags for people to carry supplies into the reading rooms, which can be easily checked by staff. Every evening, there are stacks of these scattered around the locker room and cloak room, where readers have dumped them. Many of these same readers come back the next day and pick up a pristine new one, although I’ve found by experience they can easily last for months.

So I left a comment in the appropriate box and yesterday got back an email:

Your suggestion of a notice encouraging readers to re-use their clear plastic bags, when using the Library, is very much appreciated. Your comments have been forwarded to the relevant section requesting a notice be placed in the cloak room. It is hoped that this will soon be in place.

Might have saved about one cube of ice there; a “drop in the ocean” is the phrase that comes to mind.

If, to form a relationship with a play, you demand to be wooed with perfect red roses, entertained by fireworks, and seduced by the image of a perfect life, then The Leningrad Siege is not for you. Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s creation, making its English-language debut at Wilton’s Music Hall, instead sidles up to you, laughs crazily, wobbles, then drifts around in a haze, penetrating yet indeterminate, like an old lady’s lavender water.

Yet if you relax, hold out your hand, and allow yourself to be led into this story of two old ladies living out a confused, often fantastical, “reality” in an old theatre that’s falling apart around them – you’ll find you’re exploring the whole of 20th-century European history from an intelligent, if oddly tilted, perspective.

On one level this is a familiar tale. Natalia (Dierdra Morris) was the ditzy blonde star actress, the mistress of the Great Nestor, the theatre’s director, who died — centre-stage, as he’d lived — in a mysterious fall. (Or at least the women think it was mysterious; they wonder if it was murder.) Priscilla (Rosemary McHale) was the faithful but frustrated wife of the firebrand, who though he was aging had continued to proclaim, with all of the familiar formulae, the cause of the Revolution. READ MORE