Number Seventy News

It’s been nearly 47 years since I did Jane Austen’s Mans­field Park for A-Level and I’ve always felt I hadn’t been fair in my memory of it, see­ing how much I like Emma, Pride and Pre­ju­dice, Per­sua­sion etc.  I re-read it with grow­ing enthu­si­asm — the utter pre­ci­sion of her use of lan­guage, the cal­cu­lated under­state­ment, the mag­ni­fi­cent cre­ation of Mrs Nor­ris.  And whereas when I was 18 I wanted to shake Fanny Price for being such a drip, I now see how del­ic­ately Jane Aus­ten brings her on to be a young woman with firm opin­ions which she will at length utter.  I still find the por­trayal of Maria and Julia rather thin — I never really get a pic­ture of who they are — and the visit to Ports­mouth ends up being nearly as tedi­ous and excess­ively long drawn out to the reader as it is to Fanny. Jane Aus­ten, prac­ti­tioner of “the medium is the mes­sage.”  So, it’s worth rehab­il­it­at­ing, all those of you for whom study­ing “Mans­field Park” at A level was an exper­i­ence you weren’t ready for.

North­ern Broad­sides pro­duc­tions are usu­ally good, some­times excel­lent, and occa­sion­ally out­stand­ing.  Love’s Labours Lost rose to “good” after a slow start, which was as much Will Shakespeare’s fault as the company’s.  It’s  a pretty static first half, and the bit of the plot which is all about wit and lan­guage slows up the action as they move through courtly clev­erness and on even­tu­ally to Holofernes excru­ci­at­ing lat­in­iz­ing to even­tu­ally the Act V recog­ni­tion of the need for plain speak­ing.  It was good though, to see the rela­tion­ship between Berowne and Ros­aline treated as a spar­ring match between two equals who are attrac­ted to each other from the start. They were so clearly enjoy­ing play­ing with words, the flir­ta­tion of two people who know where it will end.  And Ros­aline and Berowne are clearly the most intel­li­gent people there, or per­haps the ones who are most free to cut across pro­tocol and con­ven­tion and dir­ect the action.  Beau­ti­fully played by  Cath­er­ine Kin­sella and Matt Con­nor. But it’s not Shakespeare’s best play.

A sweet French film of the sort they do so well  star­ring  the delight­fully (still)  gam­ine Audrey Tau­tou and the bulky but amus­ing Fran­cois Dami­ens  who fall in love most implaus­ibly. There is a pan­to­mime vil­lain too and Paris, as so often, is best sup­port­ing actress.

Actu­ally, this isn’t about North Korea at all, except to the extent that a re-reading of George Orwell’s “1984” makes me think of that coun­try, about which we knew noth­ing at all when I first read it (1966) and not a lot more now, but what we do know sounds a lot like the soci­ety Orwell depicts.  Not that we don’t have sig­ni­fic­ant ele­ments of it here:  the falsi­fic­a­tion of news by gov­ern­ments, the dis­tor­tions of lan­guage, the pover­ti­fic­a­tion of the masses due to the fight­ing of dis­tant wars, the sur­veil­lance soci­ety etc etc.   As with most things I read in 1966 which weren’t on an exam syl­labus, I’d for­got­ten an awful lot but as a descrip­tion of the destruc­tion of indi­vidu­al­ity in the interests of the state, and the jus­ti­fic­a­tion any state might make for that, it remains incred­ibly power­ful.  North Korea seems to have Little Brother instead of Big — but oth­er­wise the place seems to have taken “1984” as a sort of blue­print, if we can trust what we are being told by our own media and politicians.

For all that Edward Thomas’ poems were was widely cited as an influ­ence by Auden, Hughes, Lar­kin and C Day Lewis, and were men­tioned by no less a crit­ical heavy­weight than F R Leavis, his endur­ing poetic memorial is “Adlestrop”, which is a lovely poem, but there is more to Thomas than that.  Mat­thew Hol­lis’ bio­graphy, cov­er­ing Thomas’ last years before he was killed near Arras in 1917, is a use­ful reminder of how pro­lific a poet he was over an incred­ibly short period.  It’s fas­cin­at­ing tale, not least because of all the major and minor poets of the era whom Thomas knew, Robert Frost chief among them.  But for all Hol­lis asser­tions that Thomas had a fine ear and a mas­tery of rhythm I find a num­ber of his poems pro­saic, as opposed to poetic, and am slightly depressed to dis­cover yet another writer who seems to have needed to be thor­oughly unpleas­ant to his wife and fam­ily in order to come up with the writ­ten word.  In spite of the slightly too starry-eyed and breath­less tone in parts, well worth reading.