​The example of a saintly left-wing activist who, at heart worshipped Stalin
 
As a biographer of the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey I cannot help thinking how similar in many ways he was to the present leader of the Labour Party. O'Casey was described by his publisher and lifelong friend Harold Macmillan as a saintly kind of man, who thought "everyone ought to be equal out of kindness". He was a very strong Irish Republican, who engaged in the 1917 uprising, the subject of which formed some of his best plays, and subsequently he settled in England, and was a close friend and supporter of Bernard Shaw.
 
Nevertheless, while maintaining his style of dressing always in rollneck sweaters and skullcaps he maintained relations with the highest in the land, and presented himself as a lover of mankind who took to heart the aspirations of poor and needy, and was against any kind of capitalist exploitation. Now you might have thought from reading his wonderful early plays Juno and the Peacock and Shadow of a Gunmen, and his outpourings of love and compassion to mankind and his three children, that he could never end up believing and supporting mass terror and extreme totalitarian repression.
 
In my next post I refer to  a particular case which I feel should strongly be related to that of Jeremy Corbyn and wielding power over the minds and hearts of his Labour supporters in our society.

For Part 2 look out for my weekly posting.
 

I wrote this review in December 1966 for the Financial Times and it is fascinating that only now is there a translation into English by Ralph Manheim which is opening at the Young Vic on 16 July:

"Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1966) is an outstanding work celebrating the life, and mourning the death, of Patrice Lumumba. It achieves a balance which is all too rare between left-wing idealism, and the depiction of colonial villainy. The reason for this that the form Césaire has chosen is near to the medieval morality plan. Lumumba is a mixture of Christ and Everyman, the Belgians are the stock buffoon agents of Satanic power (Satan himself is Uncle Sam). Battle is waged between innocence and evil, knowledge, truth and expediency, until the martyrdom of Lumumba is sealed. It manages to avoid the pitfalls of the documentary plan, too heavy an insistence on facts with a corresponding lifelessness of character and, even more impressively, it avoids the platform aspect which converts the playwright’s material to propagandist ends.

From the first moment we see Lumumba being savagely beaten by a pair of Belgian guards, we know whose side Césaire wants us to be on. But he never harangues us. He leaves his characters alone to get on with it, and human qualities emerge instead of doctrinal points. Compassion for the struggling ignorance of the Third World is all the more effective and thought-provoking to watch, because it is instinctive and not in any way clouded with remedies.

Césaire’s poetic gifts come to the fore in his underlining of his hero’s individual qualities, for Lumumba’s greatest gift is his deep imaginative grasp of the soul of his people. He wants to Congo to be Congolese, lackey of neither East nor West, freed from the suffocating machinations of international finance, freed from its own sense of inferiority. Lumumba tries to bring self-esteem to his people, wrench out of them a sense of dignity. The betrayal of Congolese independence by the great powers, the terrible decline from the exhalation of a new liberty to sordid massacres, and the furious spoil of civil war, have a decisive and controlled inevitability.

But the greatest pleasure and strength of Une Saison au Congo  remains in the writing, which ranges from simple direct satire in the political scenes, through the most extraordinary flights of brilliant rhetoric, to witty and poetic evocations of the Congo. It conjures up jungle and shanty-town, the majestic river itself:

                Père Congo,
                tu charries des fleurs, des fles.
                Qu’est-ce qui gonfle ton cœur gris
                et de hoquets te brise? …

As well as tawdry nationalism, there is cynical political manoeuvring, and splendid passionate confrontations between black Congolese, Belgians, and Dag Hammarskjöld.

A couple of weeks ago I went to People by Alan Bennett at the National Theatre: dutifully full with an audience averaging seventy: nothing wrong in that of course, except that it was quite a surprise to see the  National Theatre usurping or taking over from the old West End of the fifties and sixties.

Here is William Douglas-Home of the liberal left, in a barely disguised Lloyd George Knew My Father kind of play, demoted from Home counties and building a motorway through  the family estate to North Yorkshire, to a dispute between sisters as to whether  the decaying ancient pile should go to the National Trust or a private entrepreneur as a conference centre; it was a very mediocre star vehicle for Francis de La Tour. Hardly a new joke or a new situation in whole evening : resoundingly ‘droll’.

Went this Tuesday to the centenary celebration of the Critics’ Circle at the Barbican when life achievement accolades were handed out to each choice of the various sections of the Circle, mine being the Drama Section. The honoured luminaries included Danny Boyle, for Film (surely not Trance, his latest, I hope). Peter Wright (for Dance), the late Colin Davis for Music and Max Stafford- Clarke for Theatre, who said he was surprised to be there as he wasn’t either Trevor Nunn or Howard Davies—as all awards automatically went to them!

    Janet Suzman presided and I had a conversation with her prior to her mounting the rostrum about her Antony and Cleopatra production last year at Liverpool, and at later its revival at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Both of us much preferred it at Liverpool, confined behind the proscenium and much more intimate and in contact with its audience. Kim Cattrall, I felt, as Cleopatra was so much better  at Liverpool, on her home ground and found it harder to project in the Tyrone Guthrie round auditorium. Her earlier performance was sharper. She was good on the passion, but short on projecting the wily, manipulative trickster (a surprise, you’d have thought, after Sex and the City). On that occasion of the Liverpool first night, at the party afterwards, Ken Dodd, well over eighty, held forth in non-stop stand–up form for over an hour, and did amazing imitations of my father (who was a big Liverpool favourite in his day) singing ‘I’ll take you home Kathleen’ and ‘I’m only a strolling vagabond, so good night pretty maiden, good night!’.

     Janet in her introduction to the awards amusingly recounted how a stage door keeper couldn’t pronounce the name of the legendary Michel Saint-Denis, then a director at Stratford, when calling up a taxi. My first ever theatre job was as Saint-Denis’s assistant at Stratford. Danny Boyle got a boost to his career at the Royal Court when Max Stafford-Clarke was running it, while I gave Max a part on and off-stage as  ‘stage manager’   at the Traverse in my production of Six Characters in Search of an Author performed with just five actors— which led to him, when I left, running the theatre.

      Strange how over time these critic-artist encounters reverberate. Max regaled us with his account of how after a terrible critical panning at the start of his directing career he carried Harold Hobson up and down the stairs of the Theatre Upstairs(‘his tweed jacket chafing my cheek’), this earning his first unconditional, ecstatic review from Hobson, saying the theatre had to be filled every night. Not too difficult –it was the Theatre Upstairs. But now he himself had ended up a ‘raspberry’ like Harold (rhyming slang, ie ‘raspberry ripple- cripple’)—he had a stroke in 2007. There was no sign at all of this, except for a walking  stick: Max was on scintillating form and cheerfully defined how the relationship between critics and artist should be ‘constantly  renegotiable,’ which means if you get a lousy review you don’t  straight away go and stick your head in the gas oven.