Monthly Archives: April 2006

Theatre

Fear prowls in Zimbabwe

April 14, 2006 – 7:36 pm

Fear is on the prowl in Zimbabwe – in, sadly, the real Zimbabwe, and in the Zimbabwe of Fraser Grace’s Breakfast with Mugabe, the RSC New Work production now at the Soho Theatre. The beast first unleashed, perhaps, when a group of Australopithicenes turned first on a sabre-toothed tiger and made themselves not prey but predator, the beast of revenge, of the anger born of suffering, is here. It was reined-in, controlled, soothed, managed – so miraculously – in South Africa by Nelson Mandela, but not in Zimbabwe.

So it is appropriate that Grace should build his play around a psychiatrist – a white, liberal psychiatrist who’s spent his life studying the intersection of western thought on the brain and African spirituality – called in to treat the problems of President Robert Mugabe (Christopher Obi), who’s being tormented by a ngozi, the angry spirit of a former comrade-in-arms. The psychiatrist, Andrew Perric (David Rintoul) – in appearance and voice all bluff, red-faced classic settler type – is patently aware of the dangers of his position, but determined to turn the President into “Robert”, the patient. Although his motives might just extend beyond a doctor’s desire to heal.

The lighter relief – this is always dark comedy, but there is no shortage of laughs – come chiefly through Grace Mugabe (Noma Dumezwemi). She is brittle, smart and grasping, with no illusions about the way modern Zimbabwe functions. Grace doesn’t fear ghosts, but has a healthy horror or her husband’s mental instability. Her scene with the strong-arm bodyguard Gabriel (Christopher Obi) – no angel he – conducted entirely in Shona, except for two key words, “Mercedes” and “Coupe”, is a tiny comic masterpiece of writing and acting. READ MORE

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Feminism

Women freed and women trapped

April 14, 2006 – 11:52 am

Given all the concern about mental health, some interesting figures are out indicating the UK suicide rate is the lowest since records began in 1910. Partly this is due to measures that have reduced the availability of methods of suicide, the experts say, but there is another factor:

One of the most dramatic falls in suicide rates is among 45- to 75-year-old women, which are down to a third of the level of the 1960s.

The Telegraph, given its ideology and audience, struggles to deal with this, saying:

Women aged 45 to 75 are also apparently happier these days despite – or perhaps because of – soaring divorce rates, leading to a reduction in suicides among older females.

I’d say it is definitely “because of”. Something to think about when you next here a commentator thundering on about “family values”. That was where “family values” got you.
***
And to point to the proponents of faith schools. Polly Tonybee has a lovely thundering piece about them this morning, wondering why the government is so in favour of them when 64 per cent of voters are opposed to them.

Ask most Labour MPs and they abhor the devious abuse of religious schools and the segregation they cause. It’s not “choice”, since most parents would never choose faith schools if they were not the flag for assembling the better pupils locally. Baroness Morgan, until last year a close Blair ally as No 10’s director of government relations, spoke out boldly against religious schools in the Lords. (Note how everyone leaving No 10 suddenly speaks their mind – and it is rarely the mind of their leader.) ICM polling shows that 64% of voters think “the government should not be funding faith schools of any kind” – a surprisingly strong position. So what on earth is a Labour government up to – and why don’t Labour MPs refuse to let this happen?

She’s barred, of course, from the Guardian’s pro-Labour position from answering that question – perhaps the fact that the Prime Minister and the Education Secretary are religious fanatics has something to do with it?
***
My mail box has been full lately of accounts of the latest “honour killing” horror, this time in Germany, involving a Kurdish family of Turkish background.

Forced to marry a cousin in Turkey as a young girl, Ms Surucu later broke with her Turkish-Kurdish family in Berlin and was living independently with her five-year-old son, to the intense disapproval of her relatives, prosecutors said.
Ayhan Surucu, 20, who confessed to pulling the trigger, was sentenced to nine years and three months, close to the 10-year maximum allowable as he was a minor, aged 18, at the time of the killing.

Such crimes seem to come around, all too sadly, in regular cycles, but I’ve been musing about how many cases there must be that don’t get to this point – all of the girls and women who must be terrorised into submission, into submitting to rape by their “husbands”, behind the cases that hit the headlines. And how many suicides there must be…

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Feminism History

What the Romans did TO us (i.e. women)

April 13, 2006 – 7:57 pm

A recent popular history television series ran along the lines of What the Romans Did For Us – with lists of all the usual “civilising influences” – “concrete, fast food to frescos and lighthouses to loos”.

Yet having just finished Boudicca’s Heirs, by Dorothy Watts, I also know what the Romans did to “us” – if you count the (roughly, very roughly in their case) half of the population that is female as “us”. Watts work is subtitled “Women in Early Britain” and is an up-to-date (2005) account of what the archaeological record reveals (with also notes of how this matches the historical record).

The overwhelming, almost shattering, fact is that while in the preceding Iron Age numbers of men and women were pretty much matched, soon after the Romans arrived there is a suddenly shift in the nation’s graveyards – the number of women drops significantly. The only explanation, Watts concludes, is that the Romans brought with them, with all their “civilising” influences, the previously unknown practice of female infanticide – and female infanticide to the level of the worst of India or China today, that saw up to seven per cent of the women “lost”.

read more »

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Early modern history History Theatre

A women’s story through male eyes

April 13, 2006 – 2:45 pm

The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller’s powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s version – its first Miller production – has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you’d expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding “glorification of terrorism” coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.

The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who’ve used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.

The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold – just – the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without. READ MORE

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Politics

How the “other half” live

April 13, 2006 – 1:41 pm

Living on a council estate, you get occasional, sometimes shocking, insights, into how the “other half” live. I just had pushed through my door as junk mail a “refinancing offer” from a finance company, offering rates of 15.3 per cent on secured loans on a property, and 8.1 per cent on secured mortgages (both of those would be “average” figures).

Pretty bad, although I suppose fairly par for the course for people with bad credit records, County Court judgements etc. But then reading the fine print, I found that “there will be a fee for mortgage advice … normally 3% of the mortgage balance”. Three percent of what is probably near the total value of a home, for organising the mortgage! (And nothing specifies if this is still applied even if no loan results.)

This is the underbelly, the dark side, of Thatcher’s “right to buy” revolution, and indeed London’s property revolution, on which Anatole Kaletsky is writing today. Some “right to buy” people have done very well out of it, but some have been left with crippling maintenance and general debts, and end up with no equity, and no home.

Kaletsky concludes that London’s property market has largely been decoupled from British economic performance, because the city’s economy is so dependent on the global economy, but that it reconnects through people selling their homes here and moving out to the rest of the UK. Fine if you’ve got enough equity to do it.

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History Politics

The non-religious Settlement

April 13, 2006 – 11:35 am

Interesting comment piece in the Guardian this morning, which suggests that the post-Civil War settlement between the Church of England and the government and society involve a tacit agreement:

Safe though he was, the nice country vicar in effect inoculated vast swaths of the English against Christianity. A religion of hospital visiting and flower arranging, with a side offering of heritage conservation, replaced the risk-all faith of a man who asked his adherents to take up their cross and follow him. The nice country vicar represented a very English modus vivendi between the sacred and the secular, with the sacred, in swallowing many of its convictions, paying by far the heaviest price for the deal.
In exchange for a walk-on part during major family occasions and the opportunity to be custodian of the country’s most impressive collection of buildings, the vicar promised discretion in all things pertaining to faith: he agreed to treat God as a private matter. In a country exhausted by wars about religion, the creation of the nonreligious priest was a masterstroke of English inventiveness. And once the priest had been cut off from the source of his fire and reassigned to judge marrows at the village fete, his transformation from figure of fear to figure of fun was complete.

I tend to broadly agree with that, although not with his next step – he wants to restore the fiery religion, I’d like to take this historical progression to its logical conclusion – get rid of the religion altogether, run the church as a community centre and choose a community worker to do the visiting, tea drinker and marrow-judging.

While I’m talking history, if you’re a history blogger, watch out. The UK glorification of terrorism act comes into effect today. Be careful what you write about those Vandals….

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