Restoring One's Faith

Yesterday, in a small way, restored a little of my faith in England. Over the past almost 40 years I have watched increasingly horrified at what we as a nation have become since the time when Margaret Thatcher  first put her venomous stamp on the politics, culture and society of what Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt called “this sceptered isle”.  

Britain 2018 is, it seems to me, a desperately divided land where each week we wake up to another crisis, another sad commentary on our national and daily life, another low in the country’s expectations of public and national life: Brexit, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal, the various crises in our basic public services, scandals of every hue, inequality at its highest and on a more widespread level than  at any time in the past,  cynical distrust in our leaders, a race to the bottom media, and an increasingly widespread  distrust - even hatred - of our fellow humans – especially if they have the misfortune to be of a different language, colour or belief.............. all this, and more, dents my national pride and tries any faith that I might have in my place of birth. Increasingly obsessed with our own “brave and good little Englander” mentality, we still want to display our inherent aggressive nature by espousing at every opportunity our “victories” over “Johnny Foreigner” with endless replays of war movies.  The despicable Daily Mail plumbed new depths on that by this weekend by running a “celebratory” edition of the  famed World War II Dambuster Raid. The only possible reason for the Mail's action can be to reinforce the notion of we doughty Brits overcoming the evil foreigner - or to put it another way to reinforce our prejudices of our own inherent "rightness" and "strength" and the "weakness" and inherent "evil" of those not fortunate enough to be born white English (and I use that last word carefully - I did not use "British", for to the Mail an dits readers anyone who is not English is by definition of lesser worth be they Welsh, Scottish, French, German, or any other nation or creed on God's planet).

We, have become an increasingly embattled little island at odds with ourselves and with much of the rest of the world; a nation that knows the cost of everything, but in reality, the value of nothing. French novelist Victor Hugo once commented that “You can resist an invading army but you cannot resist an idea whose time has come”  As a nation we increasingly try to disprove Hugo’s commentary believing that on our little island, and behind our metaphorical  castle wall, we can bury our heads in the past and deny all awareness of the rest of mankind and at the same time vilify his ideas, his aspirations, his hopes, his fears. If one wants any proof of that look no further than the last 40 years and the Tory party view of Europe and the Europeans; think of the awful Nigel Farage of UKIP or the equally unpleasant Jacob Rees Mogg - a possible contender for the leadership of his party. Since Margaret Thatcher smashed her jackboot into a better England and told us that “there is no such thing as society” we have fast become a “sceptic and septic isle” increasingly unloved by our neighbours and, I believe, unwelcome in the world with little to bring to mankind other than our own bigoted views, espoused mainly through the Tory party and its media organs - the Daily mail and the Daily Telegraph. We are no longer John of Gaunt's "sceptered isle".

It was not always thus and yesterday, in a very small way, my faith was just a little restored.

Sophie with Hamlet

We sat, my daughter Kate, her husband Andrew, Pat my wife and our two teenage granddaughters Sophie & Ellie with hundreds (maybe  thousands ) enjoying the summer sunshine on the glorious expanse of grass outside the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. We were there to watch Shakespeare’s great and terrible tragedy Macbeth. A picnic in the sun followed by an afternoon spent in what to me is one of the hallowed places of “this sceptered isle” – the RSC theatre. Sophie is studying Macbeth as part of her exam syllabus and so we thought it a good opportunity for her to see the play at the home of Shakespeare – and we were not disappointed. I am no Shakespeare aficionado, I do not have the words or knowledge to proclaim what is a “good” or “bad” rendering of a Shakespeare’s play but as I sat there listening to the glorious and terrible words, watching the wonderful acting by all the characters I thought, as I always do when I sit in that wonderful and humbling place, how fortunate I am to be able to be there and to be a tiny part of a country that gave the world this magnificent language.

Each time I visit continental Europe I am always delighted to see how our neighbours celebrate their various cultural histories: the magnificence of ancient and Renaissance Italy, the wonderful music of Germany and Austria, the pride of the French in their political and cultural past. Even the smallest French town, it seems, has a Rue Victor Hugo or a Boulevard Pasteur; the Germans talk of Goethe or Schiller in almost reverential terms; the Dutch flock to their galleries to see their Rembrandts and Vermeers; or the Austrians take every opportunity to celebrate Mozart, Hayden or Mahler.

Ellie and dad with prince Hal

These nations erect statues to their great and good, they name roads after them, they celebrate them through festivals and stand tall when their names are mentioned. Rarely so the English. When we erect statues they tend to be of leaders mostly of questionable status  but with a common link  -  that of the bulldog spirit: Nelson or the Duke of Wellington who won great battles, Thatcher the vicious woman who trampled on all in her way but seemed to hold talismanic status for much of the population keen to impose their will on those less fortunate, Churchill, his cigar aggressively stuck in his mouth was portrayed as  the epitome of the British bulldog,  Bomber Harris who inflicted death and destruction on thousands in the raids on Germany in the second world war....and so the list goes on. When we  celebrate our musical culture via the season of Promenade Concerts we sadly ensure that the last night is a celebration  of pomp and jingoism where we sing Rule Britannia  and wave flags to show our national "spirit".  We in England define leadership all too often in military or political terms  - rarely in cultural, literary or artistic measure. And yet, in the end these are the aspects of any society that define it and for which men and women through the ages have been prepared to die – for their “culture” however one describes it.

Each time I walk into the RSC I am humbled, I get a lump in my throat, a rush of expectation; in short it makes me proud to be English. It does not, however, make me proud to be English when I read of us gloatingly celebrating victories in a long past war by continually rerunning old war films or continually disparaging and demeaning our nearest neighbours; it does not make me “stand a tip toe” (to quote Shakespeare) to learn how we humiliate those who are most vulnerable in our society or of a different colour or culture; it does not make me want to sing the national anthem and loudly proclaim “God Save the Queen” when I know that that Queen, whose life and position we plead to “save”, rules over one of the richest nations ever known to mankind and yet allows to exist the most unequal society this nation has ever experienced and where many visit food banks,  work on zero hours contracts or are classed as “key workers” such as nurses and yet  cannot afford their own home; and it does not make me want to wave the Union flag when I know that England 2018 is in many ways a sham democracy where although the right to vote is generally won there is no reality of the equality implicit in the word democracy where one person’s vote counts as much as  the next.

Ready for Macbeth

In 1939 Sir Cyril Norwood, ex-head teacher of Harrow Public school and  charged with drawing up plans for a reformed English educational system at the end of the war said “It is impossible to resist the argument that a State which draws its leaders in overwhelming proportions from a class so limited [from public schools] as this is not a democracy, but is a pluto-democracy and it is impossible  to hope that the classes of this country will ever be united in spirit unless their members cease to be educated in two separate systems of school one of which is  counted as definitely superior to the other”. At the same time as Norwood was publishing his research Thomas Cuthbert Worsley was writing  his book  Flannelled Fool recounting his experiences as a master at one of the great public schools, Wellington College. Worsley was himself the product of the public school system and wrote bitterly  of the  role of the public school in the life of the nation and especially of the various “disasters” that overtook Britain in the early part of the 20^th century  from the leadership of the First World War, to the aftermath and resulting in the ravages of economic and social chaos of the Great Depression, to the desperate times and rise of fascism visited on much of the population  in the 1930s and finally the slide by the British government into war in 1939. Worsley was unstinting in his criticism saying:  “We are where we are owing largely to the privileged education which the ruling class have received.... If the public schools are national assets because of their leadership training  qualities, what are we to think of those qualities  when we survey the mess into which their leadership has brought us.”  Norwood and Worsley  would, I am sure, turn in their  graves to know that now, some 80 years after they wrote their words, that the British government of Theresa May has a higher proportion of public school educated members than that of their  time; in 1945 Clement Attlee’s cabinet had 25% of its members from the great public schools, in 2017 Theresa May’s cabinet had 34%. Currently only about 7% of the population attend public schools and yet they comprise over a third of the most powerful political positions in the nation. That makes a  mockery of the notion of democracy – as Norwood commented 80 years ago – it is a pluto-democarcy and if one thinks about it at all seriously there is little to be proud of in that.

Interval ice creams!

But yesterday there was much to enjoy and be proud of – to see so many people enjoying picnics in the sun at one of the world’s great cultural icons – the birthplace of William Shakespeare.  And then to take our granddaughters (it was their first visit to Stratford) to stand before Shakespeare’s statue  surrounded by figures from his many great plays. The girls, and we, sat mesmerised as the actors – so close on occasions we could touch them - played their parts and recited their lines.  I (and I think to the girls) sat in awe as the play progressed through its terrible tale and as I sat there I remembered, as I always do on such occasions, the first time that I saw Shakespeare.

I was almost 20 before I saw a Shakespeare play. I was at Blackpool Technical College studying for A Levels  and hoping to become a teacher. The College’s dramatic society each year performed a Shakespeare work and in 1964 they performed Othello,  in the round, at the Blackpool Tower Circus ring. When I went, alone, to that performance I had absolutely no idea what I would see or indeed what it was all about.  I had never read any Shakespeare or been exposed to it at school. After my college lessons had finished for the day I bought some fish and chips for my tea and sat on a bench eating them on a windy and dark Blackpool  sea front. I was the Tower Circus when the doors first opened – not through great keenness  since I didn’t know what I was going to see - but rather to get inside from the cold. But when the play started I was transfixed. I didn’t understand a word in all honesty but I knew with absolute certainty, as I sat there,  that what I was watching something a very special. It was the start of my love of Shakespeare. Little did I think that winter's night in Blackpool in 1964 that I would one day sit, as I have now done many times, in the RSC in Shakespeare’s birthplace or see his great words spoken in a variety of other places.  

So, when I walk across that lovely grass approach to the theatre, when I see Shakespeare’s statue and the figures from his plays surrounding him, when I see the engraved names of great actors or photographs of the giants who have trod the stage at the RSC and who have declaimed  the Bard's words in their wonderful spoken English – John Gielgud, Judie Dench, Peggy Ashcroft, Lawrence Olivier, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Kenneth Branagh, Maggie Smith, Vanessa  Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Simon Russell Beale.......and a thousand others who came before and thousands who are still to come I am proud to be English. And when I hear the words written by Shakespeare and watch how each actor  and character interprets them I never cease to be both amazed and humbled. How could anyone write such stuff as this? How could anyone learn and speak such stuff as this without becoming a crumbling wreck on the stage? When the three witches hauntingly began Macbeth yesterday, when Christopher Eccleston as Macbeth and Niamh Cusack as Lady Macbeth slowly but horrifyingly descended into their respective demented murderous states, when the Porter slowly but oh! so deliberately tallied the death toll on the wall behind him and the rest of the cast played their wonderful but terrible parts in ramping up the fear I sat both in  both awe and in terror. I’m no expert but this was a production to remember and to reflect upon – maybe, I thought as I left the theatre, a reminder to us all of how easily mankind can slip into a world of hate and revenge, where evil becomes easy and in the minds of some the norm - perhaps, I thought, a metaphor for Tory, Daily Mail, Brexit England.

Those spooky witches!

But as the actors took their final bows, we all looked at each other and said “Wow” – and we threaded our way out into the bright late afternoon sunshine knowing that we had been lucky indeed to be a small part of  the afternoon’s events – to be  a small part of the story of Shakespeare and have something to take with us into our futures. These are good things of which to be rightly proud – not bombing people, or waving a patriotic flag and declaring my country right or wrong. Not preaching democracy but in the same breath denying it by ensuring  that only a small proportion of the populace effectively have any say in how the country is run. Not demeaning or belittling  people who are different from us. Not pursuing economic, social and political policies that manifestly and intentionally work against the majority in order that a few increasingly profit. I could go on – I will not.

So yesterday, was a good day. I felt pride in that little part of England and especially so on this occasion. We had taken our granddaughters to this place hoping that it might just help in the passing of exams but infinitely  more important to me was and is that just maybe, just possibly, in many years time when the girls  are both  themselves grandparents, they might look back and remember and say to their grandchildren “I remember the first time I went to Stratford upon Avon and saw a Shakespeare play.....it was Macbeth and I went with my Granny and Grampy ....and I’ve loved all Shakespeare ever since.