I APOLOGISE to readers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but I wanted to focus this week on plays about England. This is not for nationalist reasons, but because I’ve recently seen, on successive nights, two works that deal with one part of our disunited kingdom.
One is a revival of Mike Bartlett’s Albion at the Almeida (closing this weekend but with plans for a TV broadcast). The other is the bluntly titled Death of England by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer at the Dorfman. Both are extraordinary plays; both reveal the mix of love and loathing, admiration and anger, that dramatists display when they address the state of our nation.
You can see that ambivalence in the most famous of all speeches about England: the one by John of Gaunt in Richard II. How often one has heard politicians, looking for a bit of morale-boosting rhetoric, quote the lines about ‘This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise’.
They conveniently forget, however, that the speech is a fierce attack on Richard’s governance of the realm and concludes: ‘That England that was wont to conquer others/ Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’ The last time I heard those lines spoken on a public stage, as Parliamentarians grappled with the 2016 Referendum result, people broke into spontaneous applause.
Where Shakespeare led, others followed. I’ve noticed how often dramatists are caught in two minds when they address the subject of England. J. B. Priestley’s fine play, The Linden Tree (1947), offers both a vigorous defence of the post-war Attlee government and an attack on the ‘grey, chilly hollowness’ of the trade unions and the civil service.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766â68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artistâs first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
