Sport is in so many ways the last bastion of Neanderthal attitudes towards women (and I probably should apologies to Neanderthals for slandering them by the comparison), but the latest Australian incident really takes the biscuit.

Netballer Janine Illitch will be allowed to express breastmilk in the Commonwealth Games village, despite reports team officials opposed the plan.
Netball Australia chief executive Lindsay Cane today said issues remained as the association had not yet seen the Games Village facilities, but coaches, support staff and players were united in supporting Illitch.
… Netball coach Norma Plummer yesterday created controversy when she said it was a “delicate issue” and she didn’t know whether there would be the facilities for Illitch to express milk for her six-month-old baby Heath.

What is the issue?

There needs to be a fridge and washing-up facilities? Well, yes, but I rather suspect that somewhere within the vicinity of a lot of athletes there’ll be a few fridges and washing-up facilities. Probably even a power point, I’d hazard a guess, should you wish to plug in a steriliser.

So what’s the problem? Could it just be that dinosaur officials – even female officials – just can’t cope with the fact that a woman can be both a mother AND an athlete? Or perhaps they just can’t cope with the thought that breasts have a purpose other than decorating oh-so-tasteful, not-quite-nude calendars? A – shock, horror – non-sexual purpose.

The Greeks liked to finish off a day of tragedy with a cleansing comedy; the medieval mystery play had little concern for stage trickery, content to have its characters emerge with their moral message from a quotidian frame; the early moderns liked to combine those moral absolutes with the more shaded themes of ancient Greece. It is the combination of these disparate statements about theatre that has inspired a joint bill of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is An Ass at the White Bear Theatre.

The former needs little introduction, but you could be excused for never having heard of the latter. It sat on library shelves between 1616 and 1972, and has been dusted off only once more since that date. If you can imagine a 1920s drawing room farce, crossed with a classic Jacobean city comedy, that pretty well sums it up – a convoluted plot and plenty of laughs, if you’d like the non-academic version.

Together, these make an interesting evening, a window on to overlapping frames of theatre history. And much of the production – and particularly the quality of the acting – is high-class. There are, however, a couple of irritating flaws.

First, the highlights: Richard Keightley makes a fine, tormented but human Faustus, see-sawing between high hopes and fear, while Matt Robinson is a broken-voiced, nearly shattered, impressive Mephastophilis. The clowning too is often well done: Andrew Shepherd, as Wagner, Faustus’s servant, might owe something to Black Adder’s Baldrick but is only the more fun for that recognition. Charlie Palmer as Robin, the peasant fool who is the mirror of Faustus – he steals one of the doctor’s books and thus manages to summon an irritated Mephastophilis from Constantinople, milks the laughs nicely, well backed by his companion in foolish adventure, Rafe (Richard Keynes).

And for a play so long on the shelf, The Devil Is An Ass, provided you don’t give yourself a devil of a headache by trying to actually make sense of the plot, is fun. It is even mildly feminist (although I doubt Johnson meant it that way) in exposing the vulnerability of Frances Fitz-dottrel to the financial ineptitude of her foppish, foolish husband. We meet him showing off his gaudy new cloak, the prize for allowing Wittipol (Robert Wilson) an hour of conversation with his wife. He thinks he’s found the way to do this without risk — his wife is not allowed to speak — but like all exercises of Fitz-dottrel “cleverness” this is soon overturned by his opponent and, it seems, he’s soon destined to wear the cuckhold’s horns. READ MORE

… or at least she is writing on one of the Guardian’s. Who’d have thought it?

And she makes a very good point: if women rush out of being nursing aides and into plumbing, who is going to do the nursing? A lot of the answer has to be more than a simple rebalancing; rather it has to be the allocation of a lot more money.

But the elephant is this: women are lower paid than men because the work they do is undervalued. Why should the valuable work a woman does caring for small children in a nursery or looking after the bedridden in a nursing home be rewarded at a far lower rate than, say, a lorry driver? Pay rates are set by pure tradition and prejudice, nothing to do with skill and certainly not social value.
If women all do as they are instructed, retrain and move “upwards” to higher paid work, then who will clean the hospital floors, take classroom assistant jobs and serve in restaurants? Presumably yet another wave of new immigrants, destined to be just as poor, and probably mainly women too in these service sector jobs. It is no answer to gross inequality. The only answer is to pay people fairly.

It is pleasing to see that the report about women’s pay deficit – still 17 per cent below men’s, which is costing the country £23bn a year has been getting a lot of attention.
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Elsewhere, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin which I recall as being spectacularly wonderful when I visited some 15 years ago, is to get a major revamp:

The neoclassical museum will gain a new wing during the overhaul, which will cost a maximum of €351m (£240m) and be financed by the federal government….
The new fourth wing, which will be built across the entrance to the museum’s massive courtyard, “will allow us to show all major cultures on a single level,” Klaus Dieter Lehmann, the head of Berlin’s Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, told a press conference yesterday. “You will then have, on one level, everything from Mesopotamia, through Egypt, Greece, Rome and classical antiquity up to the Islamic era.”

I can feel a trip to Berlin coming on …

To the Institute for Historical Research last week for a seminar,’The Worst of All Her Afflictions’: Experiencing Breast Cancer in Early Modern England’, presented by Marjo Kaartinen. It almost took me back to my agricultural science days in its goriness – horrible surgical implements and blood-soaked descriptions – one of the younger participants was turning distinctly green as she listened to Fanny Burney’s description of her masectomy (carried out of course without anaesthetic) and the picture of a breast dissected by an 18th-century surgeon circulated remarkably quickly …

Nonetheless it wasn’t all gore. There was also an interesting debate on the likely incidence of the disease then compared to now. Of course it will never be possible to get statistics, but it might be possible to get an impression from contemporary accounts, and particularly women’s level of fear of the disease (given all of the other deadly dangers around). And the impression was that it was quite high, particularly given that the number of women over 40 in the population was low.

But very few records survive in women’s own words. There are a couple of reasons for that. Due to – understandable – fear of the operation, women usually did not approach surgeons, or decide to have it, until the disease was very far advanced (although surgeons did understand that it was important to operate early). So they didn’t survive long afterward – usually only a few months. (If, of course, the operation didn’t kill them.)

Also some facts (that you might not want to know) about breast cancer. Untreated breast cancer presents as black growth and produces dark, evil-smelling liquid; in 60 per cent of cases it ulcerates. This was a smell that early modern physicians and surgeons recognised. They understood that the disease tended to spread into the lymph nodes (which they would check while performing a masectomy, but metastising was not yet understood). Untreated, the disease usually killed in about three years.

In the early modern era some thought it came from environmental factors, some thought sex life or lack of it – it was well known that nuns were prone to it. Some thought sour milk to blame, others lack of exercise, melancholy, green sickness. Breast-feeding was thought by some to be a cause, and this was one reason for the use of wet-nurses.

“Treatments included all of the usual herbal remedies, usually applied topically, and often caustics, which must have been hugely painful. Books of medicine often contained receipts for “canker in women’s breast”.

But women victims often seem to have kept their condition secret until it was utterly impossible to hide. By that time, often, surgeons would not operate. The traditional Hippocratic view was that if the cancer did not move – was attached, presumably to the breast bone or ribs? the patient would only die faster if operated on. This may have been the reason why the Machioness of Northhampton, a waiting lady in Elizabeth (I’m not sure which one), went to Antwerp to consult doctors there.

There’s one final irony: Fanny Burney survived many years after the operation, so it is likely that her illness was not cancer, and the operation was unnecessary.

The artistic form of choice to express the horrors of the First World War was poetry. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke brought home the misery, terror and boredom of life in the trenches, and the recurring nightmares it induced. We have not, as yet, seen an emergence of a literary oeuvre of what history may well call the Iraq wars, but no doubt time will cure that. Could it be theatre? I’d like to think so.

Christmas is Miles Away, now at The Bush Theatre, will then have a place, albeit, I’m afraid, a small place, as an early attempt to tell – if only from the perspective of the home front – of the effects of the first Gulf War on one young squaddie, a young man, still a boy really, who was messed up enough even before he arrived at the war.

But that’s not how Chloe Moss’s third play, which debuted at the Royal Exchange, Manchester last year, starts out. We are in the middle of what seems like a classic coming of age story. Christie (David Judge) and Luke (Paul Stocker) are ill-matched “best friends”; the former the teachers undoubtedly call “the smart one”; the words they use about Luke are probably unprintable.

He’s your classic inarticulate, angry, bottled-up teen – not that, in his company, Christie is much better. They communicate through grunts, shrugs and monosyllables: “nothin'”, “what?”, “yeah”. But Moss, and the actors, do a good job of ensuring that the audience still finds this perfectly clear.

Into this rather volatile, conflict-ridden relationship comes the inevitable problem, a girl, Julie (Georgia Taylor), who’s winningly naive, nervously adventurous, and well-intentioned. Inevitably, however, her presence means problems, particularly when a drunk Luke, thrown out of his own house, wants to hang out at Christie’s at 4am. READ MORE

Does anyone know of a book/article with a list of initials used by pamphlet writers in late Elizabethan/early Jacobean London? I’m looking for an S.P. in 1594, and it is hard to know where to start!