DAVID. If this was a play, it would be clearer when it had started.
The lights would go down.
I wouldn’t have to introduce Danni our stage manager.
Because there’d be a programme.
And if it was a play by me, there’d probably be warnings. Which is often a issue between playwrights and management.
And although I’ve had smoke and flashing lights and nudity in my plays, involving people of both sexes, you’ll be relieved to hear not this one, my big problem’s been with armaments. So when the RSC did my play Pentecost – which is about a fresco in an East European church, which is taken over by asylum seekers – there was a big debate about whether we should warn about gunfire.
And there were two things. One is that if you draw attention to upcoming gunfire, as soon as anything vaguely cylindrical appears on the stage, people start wincing and sucking their teeth. But the other thing is that, in Pentecost, if you know there’s gunfire then there comes a point when you know how the play is going to end.
So we negotiated. And we thought about kind of obscuring what was going to happen, either by generalisation (‘Pentecost includes effects’),
equivocation (‘Pentecost may contain gunfire’),
or camouflage (‘Pentecost contains some but not all of the following…’).
But then something struck me. Maybe we’re looking at this thing the wrong way round. Far from warning too much, might we be warning too little?
Aren’t there things people have a right to know about, beyond smoke and bangs?
‘This production has at least one catastrophic piece of miscasting.’
‘There is a significant longeur towards the beginning of Act Two.’
‘The management knows about the lighting.’
So. You may be invited to answer challenging and potentially revealing questions.
The actor has not acted since he played Captain Bligh in a university production of The Mutiny on the Bounty.
He hasn’t even learnt his lines, and is thus reliant on potentially hostile technology. But in very capable hands.
Slight pause.
There will be elements of self-exposure.
Things remembered may be things imagined.
If this was a play, or a certain sort of play, its written text would start with a stage direction.
Scene Two: Room
A projection: the Birmingham skyline.
DAVID. An old man in a room at the top of his house. The window looks out over what might seem a contradiction in terms: a breathtaking view of the Birmingham skyline.
In front of the window is a desk, with a pair of filing cabinets at right angles to one side, and a green-baize-topped card table on the other, forming a kind of console, which surrounds him as he sits on his orthopaedic chair.
He wheels the chair to the centre.
On the desk, there is the remnant of a cigarette burn which dates the desk from at least before the 28th of March 1984.
But the most striking thing about the room is that it’s full of paper, mostly but not all in ring files, box files, and cardboard boxes, in which are large manilla envelopes, stuffed with cuttings. And for papers which haven’t quite yet found a home, or are between homes, piles.
The man is seventy. And the cardboard box he visits most now – both to add to it and to consult it – was marked Euro Pop-Right and was then marked Euro Pop-Right Brexit and now Euro Pop-Right Brexit Trump. And while these phenomena are generally worrying they are particularly so for someone who was twenty in 1968, fifty years ago, the annus mirabilis of the international student revolutionary left.
On the day that Hitler came to power, Goebbels said: ‘the year 1789’ – the year of the French Revolution – ‘is hereby eradicated from history.’You could say that the political project of Euro Pop-Right Brexit Trump is to do the same to 1968.
And there’s a particular irony in this. The year he was elected, Donald Trump was seventy.
Scene Three: First Survey
DAVID opens a filing cabinet and takes out a clipboard.
DAVID. Can I ask you some questions?
House lights up.
How many people in this room vote the same way as at least one of their parents? Show of hands.
Danni, could we have it a bit brighter?
House lights up further.
How many people have voted for more than one party?
How many people have ever voted Conservative?
How many people voted Brexit?
Well, that’s it. A completely representative sample. That’s if you are all telling the truth, which of course you are.
Now. Here’s a list of six characteristics of voters in the 2016 EU referendum.
What I want to know is which of these characteristics would make someone least likely to vote Brexit, and which one most.
He reads out a list, which is projected on the set.
One: Having a household income under twenty thousand pounds.
Two: Having voted Labour in 2015.
Three: Being sixty-five or over.
Four: Having a degree.
Five: Being in paid work.
Six: Thinking capitallism is a force for ill.
That’s capitalism with one L.
So what was the factor that made people least likely to vote Leave?
He takes suggestions from the audience.
Voting Labour in 2015.
Lest we forget, Labour delivered two-thirds of its vote to Remain, whereas nearly sixty per cent of Tory voters defied the advice of their party leader.
And what did people think was the most likely factor to make people vote Leave?
He takes suggestions from the audience.
Being sixty-five or over.
Leavers were not by and large working-class Labour voters from the north of England.
What they were was old. And old people are less likely than young people to be have a degree. They’re poorer. And more likely to support bringing back blue passport covers and the death penalty.
Nearly sixty per cent of sixty-five-plussers were between fifteen and twenty-five in 1968.
He puts the clipboard back in the filing cabinet and kicks it shut.
So, what happened to the Sergeant Pepper generation?
Why, fifty years on, does it seem to him that the political gains of that generation are going to be reversed, and the people who’re reversing them are the people that he thought those gains were for?
Scene Four: Backgrounds
DAVID. And so he sets to, to discover. He does what he always does. He reads books, watches documentaries, goes through files of newspaper cuttings and conducts interviews, largely with people who, like him, came of age between ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Let It Be’.
He asks about the kinds of backgrounds the people came from, and how that had influenced their politics. This is Martin Jacques, who went on to edit the journal Marxism Today.
Projections of the interviewees appear on the set.
MARTIN JACQUES. Well, both my parents worked during the war at Armstrong Siddeley, which was an aircraft factory in Coventry. And they joined the Communist Party in that period.
DAVID. And this is David Aaronovitch, of The Times, also from a Communist family:
DAVID AARONOVITCH. Some of the people we had coming into the house were delightful people. But it was always really the Russians. I was on the side of the Russians. I knew every kind of aeroplane flown in the second world war.
DAVID. Paul Mason the economist, he’s a bit younger.
PAUL MASON. Well, my family background is unusual because half of them are miners and weavers from Lancashire and half of them are Jewish tailors who went from somewhere in Russia via New York City and came to Liverpool.
DAVID. Sue Clegg, who’s a lecturer in Leeds.
SUE CLEGG. All my dad’s side was all miners… So there’s no doubt about working-class consciousness, is what I’m saying. And I knew I had to get out, cos I knew in those communities what happened to girls was, you got trapped.
DAVID. And Brian Goodwin and Jill Ambler, two friends from Birmingham.
BRIAN GOODWIN. My father – and obviously my mother – were involved in the general strike.
JILL AMBLER. My father was the fourth son of a Baptist Minister, of a Strict and Particular Baptist Minister.
DAVID. And Hilary Wainwright’s father was a Liberal MP.
HILARY WAINWRIGHT. But I could see there that the radicalism of my father – because he was quite a radical Liberal – was not consistent with capitalism and therefore it was like a dead-end to remain in the Liberal Party.
DAVID. 1968 revolutionary leader Tariq Ali, who was brought up in Pakistan:
TARIQ ALI. I grew up in a strange atmosphere, which was largely meeting Communist intellectuals, trade unionists, peasant leaders, and occasionally meeting people from a completely different background who were in some shape or form running the country.
DAVID. And I asked them whether their politics arose out of their personal experience.
PAUL MASON. So I went to a Catholic grammar school, and almost, you know, if you want to decipher the subtext of a what a Catholic grammar school, it’s just two lessons: don’t have sex and don’t become a Marxist.
DAVID. And whether there was a ‘road to Damascus’ moment, when they thought: ‘Hey, I’ve become a revolutionary.’
DAVID AARONOVITCH. I never didn’t think that I would… This was what you did politically, this was where I stood, emotionally and politically.
DAVID. Not any more
DAVID AARONOVITCH. There comes a point when you have to say to yourself, ‘No, I don’t actually think that the Russian system is superior.’
DAVID. While, for Brian…
BRIAN GOODWIN. So I cajoled and bullied… So we went on strike, for half a day, for an afternoon, we all walked out. It was brilliant.
DAVID. Another factory in Coventry. And he became a member of the International Socialists. Like Sue Clegg.
SUE CLEGG. I did actually feel I was becoming a revolutionary.
DAVID. And there were many feminists. Sarah Braun, in Bristol.
SARAH BRAUN. My mother’s mother was a suffragette. So I was ready for the women’s movement.
DAVID. And Anna Coote, who was a student journalist and then went on to the Observer.
ANNA COOTE. I would have been about maybe twenty. And we had to go and look for things in the library which was in another part of the building.
DAVID. And to get there she had to walk through the compositors’ room, which was full of big burly blokes operating the machines.
ANNA COOTE. And what they did, when I appeared at one end of the room, was to set up a whistle. And then they would all take it up, until when you got to the other end of the room, everyone was whistling at me. I found this profoundly embarrassing. Absolutely paralysing embarrassing.
DAVID. And he spoke to people – politics students, at Warwick University, who are twenty today. And one of them said something that could have been said any time in the last fifty years:
‘To use an age-old phrase of the left’, he said, ‘I would just like to look back and feel like I was on the right side of history. Not being correct per se. I was out there for good reason. I was fighting for a good cause.’
He turns to the projections. The photographs of the interviewees now mix into photographs of them in their twenties. He turns back.
But it strikes him that there’s one person he hasn’t interviewed, because he can’t.
Scene Five: Self-Portraiture
DAVID. When you look at classical self-portraits, you’re warned against reading these paintings as a psychological study by the painter of himself. In fact, in the seventeenth century, the purpose of self-portraiture was essentially technical; it was to try out poses, gestures, expressions, costumes on a model you didn’t have to pay. To see this as an autobiographical project, so the argument runs, is to impose a contemporary consciousness on the past.
Well, I have my doubts about this theory.
Twenty years ago, I am in a room in the Louvre, in front of two Rembrandt self-portraits, both of which were painted in 1633, when he was twenty-seven.
The two portraits are projected.
In the first of these pictures Rembrandt is wearing a hat with a thin gold chain around the brim, with a more elaborate gold chain slung jauntily around his neck. His expression is alert, faintly superior; his moustache perky. The second portrait is hatless, the brow furrowed, in a more defensive pose; the shoulder is turned agains the viewer, the chain is hung straighter, less flamboyantly, perhaps more securely. It’s anxious, but openly so. Going back to the first one, I notice something else. In shadow, just at the bottom, a hand is gripping the chain. And in fact, the eyes don’t look directly at you. Then back to the second portrait. Its gaze is even more direct, no-nonsense, unambiguous. Now the first portrait looks really shifty. As if the second portrait has seen through the first. What is he clutching? Is it his gold chain? Who’s he trying to kid? What is he trying on?
The Rembrandts disappear. Now we see a mute clip of DAVID, aged thirty-one, talking on ‘Nickleby & Co.’, a South Bank Show special.
The old man in the attic room sometimes thinks that a young man might be downstairs, wondering what his portrait would look like now.
He turns and sees the image of himself.
This the earliest bit of videotape available of him in adulthood. It’s from an interview about his 1980 RSC adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, which is going to be his biggest commercial success. Which of course he doesn’t know yet.
During this, he goes and looks at the clip on the stage manager’s laptop.
DAVID (on The South Bank Show). So that’s a daunting prospect. But what I’ve got to be very careful of is not to go into every scene and ask, ‘How can I make this shorter?’, not for that to be the kind of dominating thing, looking at any chapter, saying, ‘How can I make this a quarter of the length?’
DAVID watches himself. The sound fades, as he speaks.
Because that would end up with, would actually end up with something which is very, that would lose the magic of the book. The great problem with Dickens is that all one’s instincts…
DAVID. He pushes his glasses up his nose a lot. He pushes my glasses up his nose a lot. I push my glasses up my nose a lot.
He’s the YOUNGER DAVID.
Scene Six: Damascus
DAVID takes a frock coat from a clothes hook.
DAVID. And so, in 1966, I am eighteen. And much to my father’s irritation, I grow my hair and buy a Victorian frock coat, three wing collars, two cravats, and a cravat pin.
He puts on the coat.
It is in this Wildean persona that I intend to take the University of Manchester by storm.
I come to the attention of the student newspaper. I raise eyebrows at my hall of residence, and I’m asked by a fellow drama student if I’m for real. It’s a good question.
He takes off the coat.
Eighteen months later, I’m editor of the student newspaper, and campaigning for the reinstatement of two students who have been expelled for shouting down the Secretary of State for Education. Although the two students are members of the revolutionary International Socialists, later to become the Socialist Workers’ Party – not to be confused with the International Marxist Group or the Socialist Labour League or the University Socialist Society – I don’t support them for that reason. I see this as an issue of the right to protest.
It must be the first week of April, 1968. I think it’s in the Student Union cafeteria, with its long formica-topped tables. A student I know is sitting there.
MARTIN JACQUES. Dave Clark? Do you remember Dave Clark? Interesting guy. Breath of fresh air. Didn’t have that sort of tribalism of the left.
A clip from World in Action. DAVE CLARK heads a demonstration in Manchester. Elsewhere on the set, we see footage from the Grovesnor Square demonstration of 17th March 1968.
DAVE CLARK (speaking on a bus going to the demonstration). So I think the time has come for all of us – or for the many of us who feel like me – to unite and bring about a radical social change, then if violence is a part of it, violence is a part of it.
DAVID. He was on the 17th March 1968 Vietnam demo, the one that ended with pitched battles between demonstrators and the police, in Grovesnor Square. He was, I wasn’t.
He calls me over to his table, to congratulate me on a speech I made in the Students’ Union in support of the two expelled students. But he has something else to say.
Isn’t it time that I got serious and joined the revolution?
And I think I stutter about violence and the dictatorship of the proletariat and means not justifying ends. I say I’m for peace in Vietnam, not necessarily for the other side, not for the Communists to win.
And I imagine but I don’t remember him putting a picture on the table.
He takes a number of identical cards from a filing cabinet. The cards show Eddie Adams’ picture of the shooting of a Viet Cong guerrilla in the streets of Saigon, on 1st February, 1968. Behind him, the photograph is projected on the set.
He asks me: ‘What are you looking at?’
During this, he throws down copies of the photograph. At the same time, the projected photograph zooms in, becoming larger and larger.
I’ll tell you what you think you’re looking at. A man shot dead at point-blank range, in the streets of Saigon.
Now let me tell you three things. First, the guy doing the shooting is a general, the Chief of the South Vietnamese police. So it’s a man shot dead by a cop at point-blank range.
The second thing is the man isn’t posing any kind of threat. His hands are tied. It’s a public street.
It’s a man shot dead by a cop in cold blood at point-blank range.
He’s unarmed.
So, he’s an innocent man shot dead by a cop in cold blood at point-blank range.
How could anyone commit such a ghastly act of criminal brutality?
Except that isn’t what’s happening. The guy being shot is an officer in the National Liberation Front. The Viet Cong. The Communists. His squad has been killing people all day. Earlier, they broke into the compound of the US Embassy.
So the question that this picture asks you isn’t, how could somebody behave so brutally and heartlessly and blah blah blah. It’s how could a peasant army of little yellow people in black pyjamas invade the headquarters of the most powerful military machine on earth.
The answer? They have the overwhelming support of the Vietnamese masses.
That’s what you’re looking at. The unstoppable force of the heroic Vietnamese.
He throws down the last copy. The last zoom in on the projection.
‘Come on, Uncle, let’s get serious.’
He calls me ‘Uncle’.
Scene Seven: Heroes
DAVID. And it’s just a few days later when Martin Luther King is assassinated and cities across America erupt in flames. In May, the Paris student uprising which provokes a general strike. In October, two American sprinters on the Mexico Olympic medal podium raise their black-gloved fists in protest against racism.
A projection of Tommy Smith and John Carlos, holding up their fists on the Mexico City podium, in October 1968. DAVID picks up a black glove and looks at it. Then.
And Dave moves in. And we print the Socialist Society – or Soc Soc – magazine on an ancient Roneo duplicator in our bathroom.
And then, in February 1969, Soc Soc is mounting a campaign for the reform – well, abolition – of the examination system. And there’s a ballot for a student boycott of all classes if our demands aren’t met. In the last three days of the campaign for yes, we produce a daily leaflet.
He takes copies of the leaflets from cardboard boxes and piles them round the set.
The last one, on the actual ballot day, will go to every student in the university, under doors of rooms in every hall of residence, handed out outside every lecture theatre or department building or laboratory.
The ‘shhhh shhhh’ of the duplicator.
There’s ten thousand students, and the leaflet’s two sides with two colours on each side.
He pulls out a clothing line with used stencils hanging on it.
Splattered like bloody bandages with red correcting fluid – which can give you a slight high – stencils hang on washing lines as we change the colour drum. An hour into the duplicating process the electrical element in our third-hand Roneo gives up.
The ‘shhh shhh’ stops.
We’re faced with nearly forty thousand manual turns of the duplicator’s handle.
The ‘shhh shhh’ starts again.
The blokes do it in twenty-minute shifts while the girls make coffee and pass cooling hands across our brows.
At 6 a.m., when the distributors arrive to collect the leaflets, we’re finished.
He looks at the glove.
It is among the happiest nights of my life.
He puts on the glove.
I’ve tried it on. It fits.
Scene Eight: Armour
DAVID tentatively raises his black-gloved fist in salute.
DAVID. We lose the ballot. But that kind of proves the point. Revolutionaries always lose referenda.
He keeps his gloved hand in the air.
But I have doubts about myself.
At a meeting I grandly call for ‘the fire, next time.’ Where do I think I am? What do I think I am?
And when I face up to real risk, I bottle it.
There’s a minor occupation of the office of the Registrar. And someone has to sit down at his desk, and confront him when he comes in and demands that we all leave. And by now I’m chair of the Socialist Society. But I don’t want to do it.
Because I’m fearful that if he told me to get out, I would.
And if I can’t do that – sit in someone’s chair and not vacate it – what kind of revolutionary am I?
He lowers his fist, and slowly takes off the glove.
My parents weren’t involved in the general strike. They weren’t miners or from Jewish tailoring stock. They weren’t strict or particular. The house wasn’t full of Marxist intellectuals.
My grandmother wasn’t a suffragette. I wasn’t wolf-whistled at. For me, it was never all about the Russians.
My parents first took me to theatre when I was three and three quarters. When I was ten, my dad built a theatre in our garden where me and my friends put on plays.
In February 1969, the same month as the ballot and the Roneo, I am twenty-one. And my parents arrange a dinner in a paneled private room at The Berrow Court Hotel. It’s a black tie affair. Mushroom vol-au-vent. Roast duckling. My uncle gives a witty speech. I’d like to say I agreed to go for my parents.
He takes off the glove and looks at it.
And so, what do you do? You realise you have to build a suit of armour to stop you selling out.
He picks up an ancient cassette player. He inserts a cassette.
Commitment, to the working class. Faith, in the ultimate victory of socialism. The certainty, that you hold the key to human history. And the belief that anything that can actually be achieved, in the here and now, is a kind of betrayal of the radiant, post-revolutionary future.
And so you have to join a revolutionary party.
He presses start on the cassette recorder.
DAVID goes to the microphone. He is now the OLDER DAVID. The YOUNGER DAVID’s voice comes out of the cassette recorder.
OLDER. Remind me why you didn’t?
YOUNGER. What, join?
OLDER. Yes, join.
YOUNGER. I move to Bradford, and become the writer for a small, Left-wing agitprop theatre group, performing Marxist plays to workers in struggle. Like, I’ve made my theory my practice.
OLDER. Bradford.
DAVID. Yes. Bradford: which, for reasons best known to itself has won the north of England franchise for the late-sixties counter-culture, and which plays host to a veritable garden of exotic theatrical flowers during the two immensively successful Bradford Festivals of l970 and l97l.
He goes and opens cardboard boxes and drawers of filing cabinets, from which red balloons on ribbons ascend.
So successful are they, by the by, with so many people having such an obviously wonderful time, that the city authorities refuse to finance a third festival, on the grounds that giving so many people so much unambiguous pleasure is clearly a gross abuse of public funds.
Performance artists careering around the city on pink bicycles ridden in aeronautic display formation. Howard Brenton’s play about Scott of the Antarctic being performed in the city’s ice rink, with myself essaying the small but nonetheless significant role of God. A pagan child’s naming ceremony – with fire-eaters and real goats – in the city’s Wool Exchange.
While a small, stern Marxist theatre troupe, called The General Will, is presenting the first of a series of agitational plays which will chart what was effectively a mass uprising by the industrial working class against the 1970 to 1974 Conservative government, led by Edward Heath. The plays have heavily ironical titles like The National Interest and The Dunkirk Spirit. The last play opens as the government imposes a three-day working week on all of British industry, to try and defeat the second miners’ strike in two years.
The Prime Minister calls a General Election, on the question of ‘Who governs Britain?’
He loses by a whisker.
And we think: if he’d won, what would the government, the police, the army, have actually had to do, to defeat the miners and their allies?
OLDER uses the mic. YOUNGER still comes from the cassette player.
OLDER. And you’re producing plays.
YOUNGER. We’re producing agitprop drama for working-class audiences.
OLDER. And the form?
YOUNGER. Form?
OLDER. I guess, you’d say, cartoon documentary?
YOUNGER. Oh, form. The group favours the documentary approach because so much information is not presented at all in the overground media. For instance, the number of factory sit-ins and occupations which have occurred since 1971. We list sixty in State of Emergency.
OLDER. So it’s not about the art.
YOUNGER. No, we’re more concerned with what the shows say than with the aesthetics of how they say it.
OLDER. And what they say isn’t about how the personal relates to the political. Or prefiguring how a better world might be. Or even –
YOUNGER. Look. The Vietnam War’s raging. And guess what, here, faced with the most determined assault on its rights since the general strike, the working class appears to be behaving just like Marx and Lenin said it would. So, no, this actually isn’t the time for prefiguring a better future. Or crawling over audiences with no clothes on. Or for that matter rapping on about whether there’s such a thing as a vaginal orgasm. It’s for supporting the vanguard of the proletariat in what looks increasingly like a battle for state power.
OLDER. And you don’t think all this sounds a teeny bit self-righteous? From someone who, of course, might become a successful professional playwright? Oh, and who thinks women’s liberation is a distraction from the real struggle?
YOUNGER. I think it’s a distraction now.
OLDER. And that The General Will will be taken over by a faction of its membership, in what you’ll call a gay putsch.
DAVID. And, forty-two years later, I’ll go back to Bradford to find out how a dispute within a tiny theatre group in the north of England was actually a microcosm of a struggle which was to tear the Left apart: whether the politics of the personal – feminism, gay rights – were indeed a distraction from the real struggle, or the most important thing that was going on.
DUSTY RHODES. So this is the story of your life, is it?
DAVID. Dusty Rhodes. Who summarised my version of the break-up of The General Will as follows:
Film of DUSTY RHODES and BOBBY WEAVER is projected on the set.
DUSTY RHODES. There was a sense of, what you put out, ‘I’d built a perfectly reasonably company, we were addressing the important issues of the day, and then suddenly the hippies turned up and it all went to pot, and then the gays took over,’ and I thought that was completely dismissive and didn’t make sense in terms of what had actually happened.
DAVID. Dusty and Bobby Weaver, members of The General Will.
And Dusty tells me about the last performance of The Dunkirk Spirit, which was actually at a fundraiser for the Bradford International Socialists. And how Noël Greig, one of the actors, later co-founder of Gay Sweatshop, had interrupted the performance.
DUSTY RHODES. The show opened and within a few minutes we got to a point when Noël stepped out on stage dressed up as a captain and he whipped out his Equity card and said: ‘As the only Equity card-carrying member of The General Will I’m going on strike, because I’m being oppressed by my heterosexual colleagues.’
DAVID. Presenting these demands:
VOICE. We demand: the dissolution of the present General Will theatre company and its reconstitution as a Gay Community Theatre Company.
DAVID. Which itself provoked protest, from the Bradford Women’s Group. Which included Carole Moss and Margaret Robson, also members of The General Will.
Film of MARGARET ROBSON and CAROLE MOSS is projected on the set.
MARGARET ROBSON. Hang on a minute? Why is it going to be a gay company? Why isn’t it a feminist company?
DAVID. But the important thing, which I hadn’t known about at all, was that neither of these things happened. What did happen was that The General Will issued a call to the alternative arts community of Bradford:
DUSTY RHODES. If you have anything to say that you would like to say through theatre and community arts, come to The General Will.
CAROLE MOSS. There were a lot of Bradford-based gay people, a lot of working-class gay men and women, who became involved, and it was astonishing to see them getting involved in theatre.
DAVID. Which led to no less than seven shows being performed by community groups under The General Will banner in one year.
CAROLE MOSS. The Will was trying to follow the debates and struggles that were happening in the world.
DAVID. And I knew nothing about this.
DUSTY RHODES. What actually happened was, the working class took over The General Will. We didn’t expect they would be lesbians.
DAVID. But it felt different to the people who were pushed out.
CAROLE MOSS. I was just angry. My feelings about what happened were coloured by anger all the way through. BOBBY WEAVER. Yes, it was a bit personally threatening to people, certain people were issuing threats.
MARGARET ROBSON. We were to be trashed, really, and the language was aggressive, they were going to smash the van…
DUSTY RHODES. Do I believe that people were threatened? I daresay that was the case.
DAVID. But it was part of something that was happening all over.
OLDER. Even, eventually, to me.
MARGARET ROBSON. I think what happened was that, you know, people involved in the socialist struggle also started to get involved in those waves of feminism, anti-racism, you know, gay politics, which all started to influence and change what people understood to be socialism.
DAVID. And then the Arts Council took The General Will’s grant away.
So they dressed up in carnival costumes with teddy bears and they went down to the Arts Council offices in London, and did a show in the canteen and a protest in the boardroom…
Like they’d done in their protests against the National Front. Costumes and teddy bears and all.
Which had driven the fascists out of Bradford.
Scene Ten: Destiny
OLDER at the microphone, YOUNGER coming from the cassette recorder:
YOUNGER. And what will I be doing?
OLDER. Writing a play, about the National Front.
YOUNGER. For The General Will?
OLDER. For the Nottingham Playhouse.
YOUNGER. Far out. And what happens?
OLDER. They turn it down.
YOUNGER. That’s a pisser.
OLDER. And then you’ll rewrite it for the Birmingham Rep, and they’ll turn it down.
YOUNGER. Fuckers.
OLDER. And you send it round the country and everybody turns it down, until the Royal Shakespeare Company has second thoughts…
YOUNGER. And?
OLDER.…and it goes on at The Other Place at Stratford.
YOUNGER. Which is –
OLDER. A small tin hut in rural Warwickshire.
OLDER. And then they find they have an open slot at the company’s West End theatre, the Aldwych.
YOUNGER. So what’s this west end play saying?
OLDER. That for all of its claims to the contrary, the National Front was led by, and was a front for, actual Nazis.
YOUNGER. But, hey, doesn’t everyone / think that –
OLDER. Which was by no means the prevailing wisdom at the time. And the play is picketed by an offshoot of the National Front who attack the audience with Union Jacks.
And then it goes on television, and it’s excellently reviewed by Dennis Potter.
YOUNGER. And speaking of ‘the time’…
OLDER. And it makes your – my – our career.
He picks up the cassette player.
YOUNGER. And so you’re – I’m – we’re, what – in our sixties?
Slight pause.
OLDER. Seventy.
YOUNGER. Wow. Still smoking?
OLDER. No.
YOUNGER. But cooler glasses.
OLDER. More expensive glasses.
YOUNGER. So are you thinking what I’m thinking?
OLDER. Well, that’s the question.
Slight pause.
Because by now you’ve decided that your future was with a different audience, not workers in struggle, but the people that were actually coming to your plays.
And you – I – have understood what I should have learnt at Bradford, that politics is wider than Marx and Lenin thought it was, that it expands outward to the planet and inward to the person, and his or her identity.
Film of ANNA COOTE is projected on the set.
ANNA COOTE. And I wrote, with a friend called Tess Gill, a book called Women’s Rights: A Practical Guide, that was published by Penguin. And we were looking at all the ways, all the rights that women did and didn’t have. So what have we got, and what do we need?
DAVID. And Anna finds that when the second edition of the book was published, they had to almost completely rewrite it, because so many rights had been won.
ANNA COOTE. The Sex Discrimination Act,
OLDER. Tick.
ANNA COOTE. Changes in the law that enabled women to get mortgages in their own right,
OLDER. Tick.
ANNA COOTE. to sit on juries in their own right,
OLDER. Tick.
ANNA COOTE. to have pensions,
OLDER. Tick.
ANNA COOTE. women’s right to have an income of their own.
OLDER. Tick.
ANNA COOTE. And with all those legal advances that we made, there was the Abortion Act that gave women the right to choose.
OLDER puts down the cassette player.
OLDER. Tick. In other words, real achievements, in the here and now.
TARIQ ALI. I mean, why was the women’s movement called the Women’s Liberation Movement, clearly linked to the struggle of the third world against the empire? The Gay Liberation Movement, the Black Liberation Movement, the Black Panthers – all these grew up in the late sixties and most of the seventies and they have left their mark.
YOUNGER. But, hey, I’m writing plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
OLDER. But. You’ll also write a column on the far-right press for Searchlight, which is the leading anti-fascist investigative journal. You’ll be a founder member of the Anti-Nazi League. You’ll do meetings up and down the country, arguing that the National Front is a Nazi Front. You’ll be the most politically active you’ll ever be. And the truth is, probably, most of this would not have happened if you hadn’t moved into the mainstream.
YOUNGER. Please don’t tell me I go into movies.
OLDER. Not yet.
YOUNGER. Move to London?
OLDER. Not on the bucket list so far.
YOUNGER. I don’t get a fucking MBE.
OLDER. You don’t get a fucking MBE.
YOUNGER. For services to selling out.
OLDER. For services to anything.
YOUNGER. So what’s a bucket list?
OLDER. On 3rd May 1979, you’ll be in New York, listening to a live relay of the Radio 4 coverage of the General Election result, and the psephologist will refer to the – collapsing – National Front vote as ‘the fascist vote’. And you’ll feel we’ve won.
YOUNGER. Far out. And have we?
OLDER. We’ve won that. But we haven’t seen – we haven’t understood – what else is happening.
YOUNGER. What am I doing in New York?
OLDER. You’re doing what anybody does in a foreign country. You’re discovering your own.
Scene Eleven: America
DAVID picks up his American journal.
DAVID. In 1976, the bicentennial year of the United States, the British government decides to bestow gifts on a grateful American people. Among them is a scheme to send twenty-five British artists to the States for a year, to do pretty much what they like, perhaps in revenge for the Boston Tea Party. I arrive in November 1978, connect myself to the Manhattan Theatre Club, and spend much of the subsequent twelve months challenging the prevailing myths about the land of the free.
Myth one. Americans don’t like queuing. Bollocks. In fact, they all queue all the time. Particularly in banks. You can wait an hour to cash some money or buy travellers cheques. In Britain, there’d be riots.
Myth two. Americans drive big cars fast. Bullshit. They drive big cars incredibly slowly. I’m in America at the height of the late-seventies gas crisis, when the maximum driving speed – this isn’t Manhattan, this is on the interstate highway system – is reduced to fifty-five miles an hour and everybody sticks to it and nobody seems to mind.
Myth three. Americans are straight talkers. Baloney. They have a talent for obfuscation, circumlocution and euphemism which would render them the envy of the imperial court of Byzantium.
It is after all in America where I first see the sign: ‘Thank you for not smoking.’
An order posing as a courtesy.
‘Which major credit card will you be using?’: a rule posing as an enquiry.
‘Your cooperation is much appreciated’: an instruction posing as a prediction implying a threat.
All of which I write down in my journal. Along with witty aphorisms like: ‘America, the only country in the world to pass from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilisation.’
And I read it now and I think what a patronising pompous prick I was.
Particularly as the journal lists the people who showered me with friendship, help and hospitality, in New York and Boston, and Los Angeles and San Francisco, and as I travelled all across America.
People of the Left who I want to engage with about what had happened in the sixties.
But also people of the other side, from traditional Republicans to disillusioned working-class Democrats to born-again Christians, who appear to be forming an alarmingly effective coalition to bring the right to power.
The most surprising element of which is to be found in New York, among a group of literary intellectuals, collectively dubbed the Neo-Conservatives, who like to describe themselves as ‘liberals mugged by reality’.
DAVID. The godfather of this movement is Irving Kristol, editor of a sober quarterly called The Public Interest, and author of a book significantly titled Two Cheers for Capitalism. Kristol identifies a new class of university-educated, public-sector employees, which seeks power over American business, in alliance with its clients among the classes – and indeed races – most dependent on welfare.
While neo-con Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, sees feminism and homosexuality as plagues.
But the reason I go and interview these people is not because of their opinions but their history.
Growing up in poverty in New York City.
Fighting their way to college.
Becoming Communists and radicals.
A photo of IRVING KRISTOL is projected on the set.
IRVING KRISTOL. I suppose the only decision was what kind of socialist I would be.
DAVID. Outraged by the suffering endured by the victims of the great depression.
Inspired by the heroism of the fighters for the Spanish Republic.
But then…
IRVING KRISTOL. Radical socialism is a version of political romanticism.
DAVID. Disillusioned by Stalin.
IRVING KRISTOL. All romanticism is vulnerable to reality intervening in a shattering way…
DAVID. Disgusted by apologists for the Soviet Union.
Appalled by the counter-culture of the late sixties.
Moving to the right.
IRVING KRISTOL. I just grew out of political romanticism.
DAVID. And so they would support and vote for Ronald Reagan, as their British equivalents – Alfred Sherman, Paul Johnson, Kingsley Amis – would support and vote for Margaret Thatcher.
And as I pack up to come home, I realise what the next play has to be about.
He puts the journal down.
Scene Thirteen: The Fear
DAVID. But I’m not sure anyone has understood what’s happening. I think we think, ‘This is our time.’ That as the economy goes into freefall, everything will fall apart, and true socialism will emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. After the deluge, us. So we don’t spot the forging of this new alliance of the so-called producers of society, for aspiration and ambition but also discipline and authority. The most lethal cocktail of them all. Which is exactly what it will prove to be.
OLDER on the microphone, YOUNGER on tape.
YOUNGER. What do you mean?
OLDER. What do I mean, / what?
YOUNGER. What it proved to be? Is that ‘cocktail’ not inherently / unstable –
OLDER. Unstable, certainly.
YOUNGER. Not to mention / contradictory –
YOUNGER. Trying to appeal to authoritarians and libertarians / at once –
OLDER. At once.
YOUNGER. Get the state out of the boardroom, keep it in / the bedroom –
OLDER. The bedroom, absolutely.
YOUNGER. Rapping on about individual freedom, when for the vast majority of Tory voters, and Republicans, the problem isn’t too little freedom, but / too much.
OLDER. Too much.
YOUNGER. And surely, if they get / elected –
OLDER. Elected, sure, people will / think –
YOUNGER. Think, it’ll be like last time, like with / Heath –
OLDER. Heath.
YOUNGER. And the miners will –
OLDER. Come riding to the / rescue.
YOUNGER. Rescue.
OLDER. Like the US / Cavalry –
YOUNGER. Cavalry, and what makes you / think –
OLDER. Think, what makes me / think –
YOUNGER. Think, that it won’t happen this time?
OLDER. Because I know it won’t. Because however contradictory it seems in theory, the cocktail will make perfect sense in practice. Particularly to people who lived through the strikes of 1978 to 9, the winter of discontent, and who, presented with this cocktail, decide there is no feasible alternative.
YOUNGER. And you thought that?
OLDER. No of course I didn’t think that.
YOUNGER. Well, fab –
OLDER. But I might have felt it. Just a little bit.
Like you did.
Scene Fourteen: Workers’ Councils
DAVID takes a bottle of beer from a filing cabinet and knocks off its cap.
DAVID. It’s early 1979. I am sitting in a bar in New York City. I’m talking to a journalist from the London Times. He is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. He is talking wittily and eruditely of the political situation. I’ve had a few.
DAVID sits on a cardboard box with his beer.
I ask him a question. It’s just something that’s been bothering me. I know of course that Marx didn’t give a blueprint of the new society, that the struggle would throw up the new social forms, that it was the height of petit-bourgeois romanticism to try and speculate about how a post-revolutionary democratic international socialist society would work. But between ourselves. Just in broad outline. How does you think you could actually run a United Socialist States of Europe on the basis of workers’ councils?
He embarks on a brilliant analysis of the shortcomings of social-democracy, of the essentially undemocratic character of top-down nationalisation, of the craven failure of the post-war Labour government.
Brilliant, I say. That’s really clear, and completely persuasive. But, accepting that the social-democratic alternative is a chimera, nonetheless, in broad outline, how would you, realistically, run a United Socialist States of Europe on the basis on workers’ councils?
To which he responds with a stunning dissection of the incompetence and dogmatism of the East European so-called workers’ states, and indeed the inevitability of both, once the decision had been taken to embark on the inherently doomed attempt to build socialism in one country.
Well, of course I knew that. But I’d never heard it expressed so forcefully and so unanswerably. How could anyone think otherwise. But. Notwithstanding. Just for laughs. Not as a blueprint. But just an example of how it might be feasible to run a United Socialist States of Europe on the basis of workers’ councils?
To which he answers: I have no idea.
OLDER on the microphone, YOUNGER on tape.
OLDER. Well, is that serious?
YOUNGER. What do you mean, serious?
OLDER. Is that a serious position to hold?
YOUNGER. So how’s it going?
OLDER. How’s what going?
YOUNGER. This play you’re writing about political defection. Is it working?
OLDER. What do you mean, is it working?
YOUNGER. I mean, I assume you’re writing this because you’re scared that it might happen to you.
Isn’t that right? Uncle?
Clips from World in Action. We see DAVE CLARK on the 1968 demonstration as we hear his voice, twenty years later.
DAVE CLARK. I think I was very idealistic, I was quite naive. I think I was missing out on the good life, and not achieving very much in so doing.
I think anyone who isn’t a socialist at twenty doesn’t have much of a heart. If you’re still one at forty there’s something wrong with your head.
QUESTIONER. Are you attracted to Thatcherism?
DAVE CLARK. Yes I am. Yes, I think the country has turned around.
OLDER. And if that can happen to Dave Clark…
All over. Game’s up. Thatcher’s won.
For the first time, he sits in the swivel chair.
Scene Fifteen: Fighting Back
Film of PAUL MASON is projected on the set.
PAUL MASON. I never saw a red flag until I went to university. I never heard a socialist slogan in this working-class town until I went to university, but as I’m in university, there’s a guy being killed, there’s a mass strike, and then Thatcher’s in power and there it comes, the target is us, what are we going to do other than fight back.
DAVID stands and goes to one of the red balloons.
OLDER. And she emasculates the trade unions and sells off council houses and Labour goes down to its worst electoral defeat since 1918.
He bursts the balloon.
The first of three. Women set up the peace camp at Greenham Common.
ANNA COOTE. I think it was about women doing what they felt like they needed to do. Whether it was campaigning against cruise missiles, or…
SARAH BRAUN. Going to Greenham once a year, coachloads of women, that was a terrific high.
OLDER. And the UK still has a stockpile of over a hundred operational nuclear warheads and four Trident submarines.
And the US can still deploy its nuclear weapons from British soil wherever it wants to. The Left takes over the Greater London Council.
He bursts a balloon.
HILARY WAINWRIGHT. Well, firstly we were the industry employment group, and we said that fundamental to our work must be a close relationship with the workers of London and the communities of London… It was a shared power really, it was very much like ’68 in office.
YOUNGER. So Greenham. The GLC. The miners. All around you, struggle going on.
It’s just not you doing the struggling.
OLDER. And Mrs Thatcher abolishes the GLC in 1984.
He bursts the penultimate balloon.
YOUNGER. Christ I hope I don’t end up being you.
OLDER switches off the tape.
OLDER. Sorry.
Pause.
DAVID. And the miners do come riding to the rescue. Their strike against pit closures begins in March 1984. And they go down to defeat a year later.
He is about to burst the last balloon, but changes his mind.
And yet. Groups of miners fan out across the country to build support for the strike, particularly in the cities. Meetings, fundraising, food collections. Gays for the Miners. Hindus for the Miners. Children’s parties, pantomimes. The evil Scratcher, trying to abolish Christmas. We take two miners’ daughters on our Cornish holiday. Infant-school support groups.
Bringing the most homogenous, as well as the most heroic sector of the proletariat together with the multicultural urban Left, so they could both learn from each other. And you don’t judge the impact of something by its outcome.
HILARY WAINWRIGHT. So we didn’t last long enough to put lot of these things into practice… So my approach is more, what can be learnt from the failure or the difficulties, rather than ‘it can’t be done.’
Scene Sixteen: Arcadia
DAVID turns to the audience.
DAVID. The structural principle of Shakespeare’s arcadian comedies – As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Winter’s Tale, The Tempest – is much akin to that of the Northern Line, of the London underground.
You live in the city, usually the court, proceeding gently and predictably upward on life’s journey, when, suddenly, you face a crisis and a choice. Marriage or love. Imprisonment or flight. Submission or revolt. You can continue on the course mapped out for you or, through choice or circumstance, you turn another way.
Bohemia. The Green World. Magic islands. Mischief, mystery and madness. Things not what they seem. A forest outside Athens. Girls dressed as boys, and even vice versa. Trying It On.
In The Tempest, an elderly courtier called Gonzalo, in the false Duke’s entourage, stranded on a magic island, suddenly outlines a vision of a social and political utopia. A municipality, on the south bank of the Thames. A peace camp, outside Greenham.
If this was such a play, then its arcadias would be Manchester and Bradford and America.
And then the lines converge and your life joins up again. And you go back inside, to the court, or city. And perhaps you marry, or regain your rightful place, or maybe you become the king.
But maybe, also – this is Shakespeare’s point – as you face life’s further choices… you remember what happened in the forest or on the island.
And your life will never be the same again.
In 1984 I’m thirty-six.
Scene Seventeen: Settlement
DAVID opens a drawer of a filing cabinet and takes out a bucket. It is full of pieces of paper.
DAVID. And, yes, I am pursuing different aims, with different ambitions, and my life takes a different course.
He takes out pieces of paper, screws them up, and tosses them towards the audience.
Get married.
Buy a house.
Take out a mortgage.
Possess a tagine.
Have a West End hit.
Lay down a little wine.
Have a Broadway hit.
Write a film even if it’s not a hit. Lady Jane. Don’t look it up.
Grow a beard, give up smoking, read all of George Eliot, even Romola.
Write the lyrics for the B-side of a hit single.
Actually, do look it up. It’s Helena Bonham Carter’s first film. There’s many good things. It’s just a bit slow.
Sue Clegg became a lecturer at Leeds Met, and an expert on higher education. She left the Socialist Workers’ Party in the 1990s, but remains a socialist.
Projection of SUE CLEGG on the set.
SUE CLEGG. I think we made a difference. And I don’t think we would have been in a position to make such a difference were it not for the fact that we were also organised.
DAVID. She’s also very knowledgable about contemporary opera.
Go to contemporary opera.
Make my own sushi.
Do an interview with Sebastian Coe, for Marxism Today.
Actually, write quite a lot for Marxism Today. Articles on Thatcherism, racism, even Marx. A piece on Live Aid.
Don’t go the Edinburgh Festival ever again.
Projections of BRIAN GOODWIN and JILL AMBLER on the set.
Brian Goodwin was forced out of his factory as a troublemaker, and won a place at the University of Warwick. Where he met Jill Ambler.
JILL AMBLER. I mean, we were very much against the nuclear family. I lived in a commune, for goodness’ sake.
DAVID. They moved to Birmingham, became teachers, and joined the Labour Party.
Join the Labour Party.
Run a committee room in five local elections.
See my wife Eve elected as the first ever councillor for our ward.
Projection of SARAH BRAUN on the set.
Sarah Braun stopped being active in the women’s movement in the early 1980s.
SARAH BRAUN. I went to the women’s centre one day and a very young woman who was there, we got into conversation. And she said, ‘You’re telling me you’ve got sons, you’re married, you live with a man, you ought to leave them all… You’re a traitor to the cause.’ And that was the last time I was involved.
DAVID. Sarah still makes banners for trade unions and left-wing causes. I interviewed both her and her husband Ted, former Professor of Drama at Bristol, four days before he died.
Found a postgraduate course in playwriting.
Become a professor.
Write for the London Review of Books.
Visit Budapest, Warsaw, Auschwitz. Berlin.
So when it happens, you’ve been there.
Footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall is projected on the set.
So many plays are written about the fall of Eastern European Communism that it’s rumoured Bucharest Airport is opening a special British Playwrights’ Lounge.
I write three such plays. Noticing how much of 1989 is an echo of 1968.
Protestors planting flowers behind the shields of the riot police. Chanting ‘We Are Your Children’ and ‘The Whole World Is Watching’. Prague’s Lennon wall – Lennon not Lenin. Imagine.
A generation which believes in freedom, justice and emancipation.
And that Margaret Thatcher deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
And for the new millennium:
Get invited on to Desert Island Discs.
Start drawing up your list immediately. ‘Street Fighting Man’. ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. ‘Imagine’.
Debate at the Oxford Union.
Pause.
Dining in college.
Mastering watercolour.
Living in a cathedral close.
Or Umbria.
Or in Cornwall, by the sea.
Delete ‘Street Fighting Man’. Insert ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’.
Maybe keep ‘Imagine’.
In July 1997 my wife Eve is diagnosed with lung cancer. She dies the following March. She told her sons – now my sons – Sean and Nigel she wanted me to find someone else, as indeed I do. And Steph’s a playwright, and we write two plays together, one of them a community play for Dorchester. And she was on the women’s demonstration against Trump, and she’s angrier than I am, and you could argue that she lives her politics more than I do now, or perhaps I ever have.
Don’t buy from Amazon.
Don’t eat anything with a face.
Or anywhere that is, or is owned by, McDonald’s.
No plastic in the house.
And talking of things you can actually do…
He takes a document from the bucket. We don’t know what it is. The ‘ticks’ are projected on the set.
Tick.
Fuel allowance for pensioners.
Tick.
Minister for Women.
Tick.
More support for victims of rape.
Tick.
Remove discrimination against homosexuals.
Tick.
Introduce a Scottish Assembly.
Tick.
Establish a devolved administration in Northern Ireland.
Tick.
Establish a Ministry of Overseas Development.
Tick.
Increase overseas aid to nought-point-seven per cent.
Tick.
Introduce a Freedom of Information Bill.
Tick.
Abolish hunting with dogs.
Tick.
He looks at the front of the document.
Oh. The Labour Party Manifesto, 1983. The proverbial longest suicide note in history. Economic policies: wealth tax, rent freeze, national investment bank: cross cross cross. But women’s rights, tick. Gay rights, tick. International aid, devolution, freedom of information, tick tick tick tick tick tick. The exemplar of rampant Left impossibilism. Crashing to historic electoral defeat. Now the common sense of the age. The red lines of the culture war. The war we won.
Scene Eighteen: Revolution
DAVID. A month after Eve is diagnosed, we’re turning out of the car park of a hotel in Oxford, where we’d stayed the night. We turn on the car radio and hear someone talking sepulchrally about what was obviously a dead royal. Ah, we think, that’s the Queen Mother.
A week later, Eve’s sister and her family are visiting, but I still insist on watching Diana’s funeral.
The Royal Family, not knowing what the fuck had hit them.
Hyde Park, full of a rainbow nation. Old-young, black-white, gay-straight. The victors in the culture war.
The way the applause after Earl Spencer’s speech rolled into Westminster Abbey, like thunder, from the streets.
A floral revolution, like Greenham, like Prague in 1989, like San Francisco in 1967.
And thinking about other funerals that became acts of rebellion and defiance. Steve Biko in South Africa. The night-time funerals in Gaza.
And actually, that strange alliance between jet-set celebrity and the wretched of the earth which gave us Live Aid?
Which my son Sean attends. And it’s far out. And although this is not a universally accepted truth, for me, it is actually a celebration of collective action, of people working together for the good of others, in however small a way, for all mankind, like the Free Mandela concert would be, an affirmation, actually, of the importance of charity, because, actually, that’s where you start, with the charitable impulse, isn’t it? Even if that isn’t where / you end –
DANNI. I’m sorry, I – I’m sorry, I just can’t.
DAVID doesn’t know what’s happening. He tries to restart.
DAVID. Um. Steve Biko, in South Africa –
DANNI. I mean, for Christ’s sake, Mandela.
DAVID. Is everything okay?
DANNI. Is everything okay?
DANNI shuts the show laptop, disabling the tech. DAVID can’t say anything.
And Steve Biko is the same as, like, Diana? Princess Diana? Wasn’t she the woman who spent twenty-five grand a year on fucking underwear? And wasn’t Live Aid actually thirty multi-millionnaires in the greatest act of virtue-signaling in history? And actually, yes, Bob, they do know it’s Christmas, most Africans are Christians. So, no Bob, and actually, Bob, Muslim kids die too. So I just can’t. And I mean I’m sorry, you’ve all paid money, but I can’t, you just can’t say ‘little yellow people’ or girls passing hands across men’s brows, or ‘mankind’, for fuck’s sake, however much it’s all in quote marks, and you always say, like it’s quote marks, they’ll get it’s quote marks. And have I got this right, the National Front was defeated by your play?
DAVID. No, I’m obviously –
DANNI. And I’m sorry, I know how important this is for you, I know you’ve done like important shit and it’s what you’ve always wanted, but still – day after day. And you’re saying, it’s the cynical, and pessimistic, oh, we did it all and no one else has a right to be active or be angry because it was all done in the sixties and we’re like living in your fucking wake.
DAVID. Of course I don’t / think –
DANNI. And tell me, ‘feminism was a distraction’, are we supposed, I mean, do you want a fucking medal for not thinking that any more? That’s if you don’t? And ‘we won the culture war’. Well let’s just unpick ‘we’. And ‘won’. And what about the war you lost? Or like not bothered fighting?
DAVID. What / war –
DANNI. The one waged against me? Hashtag theworkingclassinfuckingstruggle? I don’t need charity, I need a rent freeze.
DAVID. But the next / thing I –
DANNI. But ooh you’re a baby boomer and you’re sitting on a million quid’s worth of prime real estate and whoo-hoo you won gay rights. And if this is a play, then who’s it for?
DAVID is devastated.
Because please, please not ‘Imagine’. No possessions. Really? You? So are we discussing property? So I’m sorry. Fuck. End of thing. Exit. Sorry.
DANNI goes out. The autocue has been disabled: DAVID doesn’t know what to do. He goes to DANNI’s desk. He looks hopelessly at the laptop. He presses a button. Incomprehensible hieroglyphs appear on the set. He has no idea at all.
Scene Nineteen: Winning the War
DAVID picks up the prompt book in its big, heavy ring file. He turns to the audience and delivers his next speech.
DAVID (finding his place). Um… So. Diana’s funeral. And we won the culture war.
But while it was being won, yes, we lost the other war, the war against what had first been called monetarism, then Thatcherism, then Neo-liberalism, and now austerity.
He realises he has to read out a clip.
And Martin Jacques says: ‘In a way, I think Thatcher saw it as her final victory, that the Labour Party capitulated to neo-liberalism.’
And I say: ‘And of course abandoning the people who had the right to think that someone would stand up for them.’
And then suddenly, against all our expectations, there was the crash.
There was a sound effect here, which he has to find a way of doing. He drops the bucket on the floor.
And for the next ten years, real income would decline, and debt would climb, particularly for people in their twenties and their thirties.
And yes of course there were the anti-globalisation protesters, and in 2011 Occupy Wall Street, and the Day x protestors against student fees, and Occupy tent city outside Paul’s Cathedral… and that summer there were the riots, and the Spanish Indignados and the Greek uprising and that spring, the Arab Spring.
But actually, for eight years, there was no serious force in mainstream politics putting forward an alternative. And Paul Mason says:
‘And in the end, if you don’t put forward an alternative, somebody else will.’
Then he realises the problem with the next section.
Survey.
DAVID gets a thick magic marker from DANNI’s desk. He gets the survey clipboard out of its filing cabinet.
DAVID. Now. Imagine. You’re a graduate, working in the public sector or the creative industries, a teacher or a local-government employee. Perhaps a student. Maybe the sort of person who likes to go to the theatre of an evening. Do you agree or disagree with the following propositions?
As he speaks, he writes a list on the set: ‘CIVIL LIBS, FREE MARKET, IMM, LESS TAX’. Then he’ll put ticks on one side and crosses on the other. He solicits answers from the audience.
Immigration is a benefit not a burden to society. People like you, for heaven’s sake. (Yes.)
The freer the market, the freer the people. (No.)
Civil liberties are just as important as national security. (Yes.)
Corporations and rich people should pay less tax. (No.)
Now imagine you’re a dotcom billionaire or a Hollywood mogul or star.
He puts ticks down one side.
Immigration is a benefit not a burden. All those Hungarian film editors. (Yes.)
Free market, free people. If you’re honest. (Yes.)
Civil liberties are just as important as national security. (Yes.)
Corporations and rich people should pay less tax. (Yes.)
Re-enter DANNI.
Now you’re a fifty-five-year-old unemployed white plumber in Burnley.
He puts crosses down the other side.
Immigration is a benefit. (No.)
Free market, free people. (No.)
Civil liberties are just as important as national security. (No.)
Corporations and rich people should pay less tax. Than you. (No.)
He draws a thick black line between Hollywood and Burnley.
A new fault line, with economic and social liberalism on one side, and social conservatism and economic intervention on the other.
Which is why, from Warsaw to Wisconsin, right-wing populist parties moved their economic programmes to the left, from Poland’s Law and Justice Party, suddenly embracing welfare, to Donald Trump promising the biggest programme of public works since the 1930s.
And why the majority of my generation voted Brexit. Because the California dreaming of the 1960s turned out to be just that. Because they felt let down and left behind. By a magical mystery tour which never arrived. And so the generation that came of age in the 1960s tried to turn the clock back to their childhoods.
DANNI. And of course you know all about what Burnley plumbers think of tax and immigration.
Pause.
DAVID. No, the point is –
DANNI. I know the point.
Slight pause.
DAVID. So, you’re…
DANNI. I’m not standing here saying sorry.
DAVID. No.
Pause. Then DANNI goes to DAVID and takes the book from him.
DANNI. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me that. You can’t even learn it.
She sees her magic marker, picks it up and takes that and the book back to her desk.
And you’ve written all over the set.
She sits, looks at the script.
Where are you?
DAVID. ‘Re-enter the Stage Manager.’
DANNI’s about to restart the autocue. Then she changes her mind.
DANNI. So. Diana died when I was two. What have you been doing in my lifetime?
DAVID. Well –
DANNI. Apart from brushing up the watercolour.
DAVID. Well, I’ve kept on writing the plays.
DANNI. About?
DAVID. Conflict resolution, multiculturalism, Nazi Germany, the English Bible –
DANNI. And no doubt some book reviews.
DAVID. Yes, and articles, I’ve spoken, actually quite a lot, at meetings –
DANNI. Stop the war.
DAVID. Stop the war, and anti-racism, and I’ve done some good stuff for the union –
DANNI. Whoo-hoo.
DAVID. Well, yes, whoo-hoo, and defending playwrights from the idea that what we do is inherently undemocratic and hierarchical and authoritarian –
DANNI. Author. Authority.
DAVID. Well, that’s how they put it, certainly. And I actually / run a charity –
DANNI. And your friends have kept the faith and they think their young self would be proud of them.
DAVID. Hilary Wainwright thinks her younger self would be appalled that she joined the Labour Party. And moved to London.
DANNI. And?
DAVID. And Martin Jacques thinks that Marxism Today should have done more on racism and equality. And that the most important events of the last century were the Chinese revolution and decolonisation, which are transforming the world.
DANNI. Yet you still think you haven’t done enough to bring about the change that you believe in.
DAVID. No.
DANNI. But the thing you’re really frightened of, is you haven’t done enough to stop the things you don’t believe in.
DAVID. Yes.
DANNI. Euro pop-right Brexit.
DAVID. Trump. And, as a result, we may lose all the gains we’ve made.
DANNI. So what do I think?
DAVID. What do you think?
DANNI. Thanks for asking. I think it was a night in June last year, and we had a cardboard cutout of this old bloke, and three bottles of prosecco. One for each million extra votes he won. With a radical economic manifesto. Loads working-class. Most young. What’s the sixties slogan about age?
DAVID. ‘Don’t trust anybody over thirty.’
DANNI. Well, now most people don’t vote Tory till they’re forty-seven. And if I was – (Gesture at cassette player.) him, and I knew what you know now, I’d ask you this. If none of this had happened. If Lehman Brothers had done a risk assessment. If David Milliband was Prime Minister. If it was still economics nil and culture fab and cool and far out and right on. If your generation’s legacy was only sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Deep Down. Would you really mind?
DAVID. Okay. Could you…?
Scene Twenty-One: The V&A
DANNI reactivates the tech, including the autocue. DAVID to the audience.
DAVID. It’s the 16th of February 2017. In preparation for writing this show, I go to the Victoria and Albert museum to see an exhibition about the sixties called ‘You Say You Want a Revolution?, which is of course the first line of ‘Revolution 1’ the first track on side four of the Beatles’ White Album, recorded on 30th May 1968.
They point out that the contraceptive pill wasn’t available to single women before 1968.
But LSD was legal.
There’s a bit about the Panthers. There’s a lot about the Beatles.
And the exhibition draws a direct line from all of that to Steve Jobs and the Mac computer. From Swinging London to Silicon Valley. Apple to Apple.
Apparently he said that the Whole Earth Catalog was ‘sort of like Google in paperback form’.
The thesis: the only thing the sixties did for us was individual freedom. Its enduring legacy not socialism but a renewal of capitalism.
‘I’d like to buy the world a fucking Coke.’
Oh, yes. Yes. I really mind.
Scene Twenty-Two: 70/20 Survey
Suddenly, DANNI goes to the audience.
DANNI. Alright. Who’s over forty-seven?
They vote.
Okay, then. You. Hands up who believed the following at twenty:
Marriage should be abolished as a legal status.
No industries should be privately owned for profit.
There should be no restrictions on immigration.
Which of you believes all of those things now? At least one of them?
Now, all those under forty-seven. Hands up those who believe these things now.
Everyone should have the right to choose their gender and act on that decision.
All companies should be coops owned and run by their workers.
There should be no border controls between countries.
Who thinks they’ll still believe all of these things at seventy? At least one of them?
(To DAVID.) See? (Or:) Fine.
She goes and gets a pile of cards from a filing cabinet.
Now imagine. It’s 2048. He’s a hundred. I’m fifty-three. Almost everybody’s over forty-seven.
Who can bear to think that any of the following might still not have been achieved?
She hands DAVID a pile of cards.
Scene Twenty-Three: Final Audit
The first card reads: ‘MANIFESTO OF THE LABOUR PARTY, 2017.’
DAVID. Abolition of university tuition fees.
Banning of zero-hours contracts.
DANNI hands piles of programmes to the audience.
DANNI. Can you pass these round, please? It’s the programme.
DAVID drops the first card, revealing the next card: ‘JOHN LENNON: ‘IMAGINE’, 1988.’
DAVID. Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.
‘MANIFESTO OF THE LABOUR PARTY, 1983.’
The ending of all forms of academic selection.
DANNI. Please don’t read the programme now.
DAVID. Cancellation of Trident.
‘PROGRAMME OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, 1966.’
We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.
(Prompts DANNI.) We want Education –
DANNI. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History and Our Role In The Present-Day Society.
‘UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, 1948.’
DAVID. Slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
DANNI. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence.
‘EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT, 1943.’
DAVID. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
DANNI. Still not ratified.
‘COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1848.’
DAVID. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
DANNI. National bank with exclusive monopoly.
‘ACT II, SCENE I, THE TEMPEST, 1611.’
DAVID. I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Riches, poverty,
And use of service, none.
‘ST MATTHEW’S GOSPEL, WILLIAM TYNDALE NEW TESTAMENT, 1526.’
DANNI. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
DAVID drops the last card.
DAVID. To bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.
DANNI. Contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
DAVID. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions.
DANNI. No sovereignty;
DAVID. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
DANNI. Prohibit unauthorised surveillance.
DAVID gets the only unburst balloon.
We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.
DAVID. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
DAVID hands DANNI the balloon and leaves the stage.
DANNI. But nature should bring forth
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
We Want Land, Bread, Housing. Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.
If this is a play, This is the ending.