NT Live: Skylight

David Hare’s play Skylight was first performed in 1995 at the National Theatre in London. It transferred to the West End and later Broadway and returned to the West End in 1997. To put Skylight in the context of contemporary British politics, there had been a succession of Tory administrations from 1979, firstly under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major, which would end with the election of Tony Blair in May 1997. The play has now been revived again in the West End for a three-month run under the direction of Stephen Daldry. Under the auspices of National Theatre Live, the performance on 17 July was transmitted for live projection in cinemas all-round the UK.

There are only three characters in Skylight: Tom Sergeant, a successful restaurateur and businessman, played, as in 1997, by Bill Nighy; Bill’s son, Edward (Matthew Beard); and Kyra Hollis (Carey Mulligan, who was in the film, Inside Llewyn Davis). Tom, recently a widower, arrives in Kyra’s cold, run-down flat, seeking to rekindle a relationship with the woman who had been both his employee and his lover. She has chosen to teach and live in tough areas of London, he has moved to Wimbledon. The play is a clash of personalities and attitudes, but between a man and woman who have loved, and still have something, for each other. In some ways, Skylight has dated in 20 years. The references to “Yellow Pages” seem archaic until you remember that “Google” didn’t become a registered domain until 1997. And state education in the poorer parts of London is now regarded as much improved – ironically it’s now the rural and seaside areas of England (Kyra’s hometown was one of the latter) which are falling behind.

Nonetheless the play remains engrossing with its enduring major themes of the tension between free market capitalism, embodied by Tom although he hates bankers, and Kyra’s self-sacrificing social responsibility, and of the eternal one of unfulfilled and probably unfulfillable love. The subtle structure of the play – the opening and closing scenes between Kyra and Edward counterpoint Tom and Kyra’s encounter –the sharpness of the dialogue - as when Tom says scathingly of a management guru, “He's one of those people who's been told he's good with people” – and the quality of the acting by all three of the cast were most impressive. And so much better than Hare’s recent BBC TV drama series with Nighy: Page  Eight, and its two sequels, together forming The Worricker Trilogy.

This was the first time I’d seen a play live as a cinema projection. It is an experience in itself and not the same as being in the theatre where a member of the audience has a fixed viewpoint, so might see something like this:

and be aware throughout of the three-dimensional nature of Bob Crowley’s clever set and the actors moving within it. For the live cinema there were, I believe, four cameras available so extensive use could be made of cinematic devices like close-ups:

In the case of a glass of wine held by Kyra which gave Tom a chance to touch her hand, perhaps it was too close-up, and over-emphasised an action which would have been less conspicuous to the theatre audience. A screening is a different experience than actual theatre, and not necessarily worse or better, although it has to be recognised that the quality of the cinema’s projection and sound systems  is an extra complication – I’m not sure the one I was in would have coped well with live opera. Not that the acoustics or seating arrangements of London theatres are perfect.

Something which was unique to the NTLive experience was the interview David Hare gave to Emma Freud during the interval. Hare said that he had made it a condition of this revival that it would be made available widely in this way, and anyone who consequently had the chance to see Skylight should feel grateful. The last Hare play I was able to see in a theatre was Pravda, many years ago, and I would very much like to have had the chance to see some of his more recent theatre work, for example, South Downs.

Anyone who wanted to see Skylight in this way and couldn’t get a seat should look out for forthcoming Encore showings on the National Theatre Live website. There will be an international screening on 23 October.

Setting Hampstead Ablaze

Checking a link for a recent post about the Iraq Inquiry, I read again the story in the Observer on 16 October which had predicted the Inquiry’s report being postponed to summer 2012. It also said:

Intriguingly, Chilcot is known over the summer to have attended a performance of Loyalty, a play about the build-up to the Iraq war that was performed at the Hampstead Theatre. Written by journalist and author Sarah Helm, the wife of Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, the play provided a rare insight into the psychology of those involved.
Some scenes, including a phone call from Rupert Murdoch to Blair on the eve of the war and another suggesting British officials harboured doubts about the sources behind claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, are close to the truth, say Whitehall insiders.
Private Eye magazine reported that Chilcot had demanded to review some of the evidence presented to his inquiry after attending the play.

Loyalty ran from 14 July to 13 August, so some time had elapsed before Private Eye ran its story (see below) in the 14 October issue. The Hampstead Theatre seats about 325 and there were, it seems, 30 performances including matinees, so only about 9750 people at most saw the play. By comparison in September BBC2’s Page Eight (MI5 as envisaged by David Hare) was watched by nearly four million (high for that channel, but ITV’s hit Downton Abbey series was getting about 11 million). I wasn’t one of the 9750, so I decided to buy a copy of the text, published by Oberon Books, and read it.

It doesn’t take long for the main challenge presented by Helm’s play to emerge: not so much one of loyalty as of veracity. On the cover Loyalty is described as “A fictionalised memoir”, and, on page 7, a Note states: “This play is a work of fiction”. The Foreword, written by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (who has appeared in this blog before), sets out to clarify this:

Sarah Helm's remarkable play …
… documents real events of great historical importance. Of course, it is a play, it is fiction. Yet it is also a roman à clef in which we all know that Laura is really Sarah Helm, Nick is her partner Jonathan Powell (Tony Blair's Chief of Staff), Tony is Tony, Alastair is Alastair (Campbell), and Jack is Jack (Straw), and so on.
So in one, and perhaps the most important sense, it is an upclose, insider's, account of what it felt like to be living with the daily agonies of deciding to invade Iraq, and then finding out that the original justification for the war - that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction - did not exist, and had been based on false intelligence.
… Even if the plot is not literally true, the characterisation is authentic - alarmingly so.

and closes with:

The first and last question most people will ask about Loyalty will be 'Is it true?' Only Sarah Helm herself can answer this. But my guess is that Loyalty must be at once true, and not true, and somewhere in-between. Not everything in it can be literally true - it is not a documentary - though many or most of the details are remarkably accurate. Paradoxically, however, it uses fiction to get at some much deeper truths, about the reality of the Iraq war, and about how human beings relate to each other.

One could well imagine some of the assessments of Saddam’s WMD capabilities as having been equally categorical.

As for the play itself, the reviews seem a bit lukewarm on the whole (aggregated at the Omnivore, and ongo.com ). In any case, reading the text is a poor basis for judging how it might have seemed on the stage. The first Act is set in LAURA and NICK’s home (like the text, I will put Characters names in capitals) in early 2003, and reminded me of the domestic scenes in BBC R4’s Clare in the Community, as if scripted by Hare. Most of the second Act is set in 10 Downing Street in September 2004. Although no-one should expect cinematic realism on a stage, after a while that feeling of observing a parallel universe set in, often induced by Hare or Stephen Poliakoff dramas. The anomalies eventually undermine the required suspension of incredulity. For example, the RAF has no decoration called a “DFO” (page 80). The PM’s Outer Office has “a vast TV screen showing Sky News” (page 79) whereas Jonathan Powell, no less, describes it as having several (The New Machiavelli, page 48). In the civil service the job title “Clerk” doesn’t always involve clerical duties (or Secretary, secretarial ones, come to that).

But rather more disconcerting is when, in Act 1 Scene 3, LAURA tells us:

At one point a BBC reporter, called Andrew Gilligan, thought he’d got a scoop on the intelligence but instead he botched it up; and there were tragic consequences (page 46)

PETE, “an unidentified government figure”, announces on page 47/48 that “Andrew Gilligan”’s source, “Kelly”, was “A junior official” and “Too junior to have known anything”. Why this “Andrew Gilligan” and “Kelly” are brought in at all in March 2003 is unclear. Curiously for a roman à clef, there are no clues as to the identity of PETE, but he can’t be ALASTAIR, the Press Secretary.

Later, in Act 2 Scene 8, DAVID (C), the "Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)", says “Look I told the inquiry all this” (page 99), perhaps referring to Lord Hutton’s [Report of the] Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly C.M.G. Dr Kelly died in late July 2003. Or was he referring to Lord Butler’s 2004 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction? In the real world the Chief of SIS gave evidence to both. Then on page 100, C says “It wasn’t me who wrote that dossier”, which the reader has to conclude must be the September Dossier of 2002, never mentioned by the omniscient LAURA (in whose world there seems to be no Joint Intelligence Committee).

Also in Act 1 there was no end of business with “the Brent”, NICK’s special secure phone (“very antiquated in appearance”), forever being unpacked and put away. In fact, it’s Laura’s listening-in on the phone’s second earpiece which makes her so well-informed about affairs of state. But something odd happens in Scene 4 when Nick and Laura listen in to a conversation between PM TONY and RUPERT, “a newspaper proprietor”. On page 50, at the beginning LAURA “sits up next to [NICK] and hears on the ordinary landline. We hear the conversation with TONY is already underway”. At the end, NICK “Puts the phone down. NICK starts putting it back in its box.” So was RUPERT on “the Brent” or not? And if so, where was he, having been “speaking today to Rumsfeld”?

In the end, the MacGuffin is not “the Brent” but an intelligence source with the codename Daisy. Sarah Helm is the author of A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE, published in 2005 (and LAURA, of course, had been working on something similar, page 36). One can’t help thinking that Daisy sounds more like one of SOE's codenames than, say, Curveball.

But is there any point in spending time on these or other minor, or not so minor, details and discrepancies? Well, many of the Hampstead theatre-goers, and most of us who will ever read the play, inevitably find themselves lost in a no man’s land between Cowper-Coles’ “not literally true” and his “many or most of the details [which] are remarkably accurate”. We are hardly helped by him also telling us:

Naturally the details of the play's plot are fiction, and have to be, not least for legal reasons.

so we are left to our own devices in trying to make any sense of it all.

There is an unprecedented amount of official and other documentation in the public domain about the Blair government and Iraq to pore over, even before Sir John Chilcot’s report next year. Not only is Powell’s own book available (and several of LAURA’s narrations align with incidents he describes less dramatically), but Lord Hutton’s Report can easily be downloaded, and similarly Lord Butler’s Review (and, of course, evidence to the Iraq Inquiry). Lastly, Gordon Corera’s well-regarded, The Art of Betrayal: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, might provide rather more insight into what went on than Loyalty, which, come to think of it, is the opposite of Betrayal – shame Pinter got there first.

Alongside this welter of information, Loyalty may be doomed to fail as a roman à clef because it tries hard to get close, but inevitably ends up being tangential. In the end it’s neither documentary nor metaphor. Adam Lang, the subject of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, is Blair-like, but in neither his book nor Polanski’s film are we left in any doubt that we are engaging with a fictional thriller, from which we can draw wider moral lessons about the nature of modern politics if inclined to do so.

If forced to draw conclusions, I would be reluctant to accept that Jonathan Powell habitually breached the rules for custodianship of official secrets like Nick Beeching did. I’m also uncertain as to how much credence to give the Observer and Private Eye stories about the effect on the progress of Chilcot’s inquiry of a play which clearly declares itself to be a work of fiction. On the other hand, Powell in The New Machiavelli mentions “my future brother-in-law, the journalist Toby Helm” (page 68) who may be the same Toby Helm as the Political Editor of the Observer – if so, things become even less clear. To be honest, like I suspect nearly everyone else, I’m in the same position as Alexander Armstrong’s Geordie window cleaner, the one who always concludes his monologues with "but what do I know?":



PRIVATE EYE 14 October 2011 (Issue 1299, page 5)

When Sarah Helm’s play Loyalty opened at the Hampstead Theatre this summer much was made of the fact that she is married to Tony Blair's former chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Since the drama featured Downing Street discussions before the invasion of Iraq, as the Observer noted*, “the question that will be asked in Whitehall is to what extent the play is art mirroring life”.
Sir John Chilcot seems to have asked himself the same question when he saw the play in August. Certain scenes - such as a conversation between Tony Blair and MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove - included details that hadn't been mentioned by Dearlove himself when he gave his testimony (in private) to Chilcot's Iraq War inquiry. After his night at the theatre Sir John asked Whitehall to supply him with more secret files, even though Dearlove and co had supposedly already handed everything over in a spirit of full cooperation.
Chilcot has now obtained the new files - and they confirm what Helm revealed in Loyalty. Although the play was billed as fiction for legal reasons, it appears to have been rather: more informative than some of the evidence from the spooks!

*“as the Observer noted” is a reference to an article on 15 May written in advance of the staging of Loyalty.

Replacing Glenda

After the 2010 election, the Westminster MP with the smallest majority was Sinn Fein’s Michelle Gildernew, member for Fermanagh & S Tyrone, who had two more votes than the Social Democratic and Labour candidate. On the mainland, the smallest majority was in London's Hampstead and Kilburn where the results were:

Glenda Jackson was well-known as an actress from the 1960s to the 1990s when she entered politics. In June this year she announced (not as yet on her website) that she will stand down at the next election – in 2015 she will be 79. On 22 July Richard Kay had a story in the Daily Mail, ‘Will Fiona Millar be MP for Labour's luvvieland?’.  Ms Millar is the partner of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former Director of Communications and Strategy, who has previously been the subject of posts here.

Mother-of-three Fiona, 53 … is in line to replace the double Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson as Labour’s next candidate for the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency. And unlike Glenda … Fiona has the happy distinction of already living close to hand. The fashionable North London constituency, which is home to dozens of rich Labour luvvies, is the second most marginal seat in the country.
…
One figure key to Ms Millar’s ambitions is Melissa Benn, feminist daughter of veteran Left-wing firebrand Tony and the woman who is expected to run Fiona’s election campaign when Glenda retires in four years’ time. The two women share a passion for education — they are in favour of comprehensives and against academies, grammar and public schools. A one-time journalist, Ms Millar founded the Local Schools Network to promote state education and is said to have cold-shouldered friends who have sent their children to be educated privately.

Shortly afterwards, Ms Millar told a local newspaper that “I haven’t got any plans to stand”, a well-known form of words for a non-denial, not being equivalent to “I will never stand”. But this was understandable, given that the Boundary Commission for England had embarked on its 2013 review.  This review is intended to produce parliamentary constituencies with no more than 5% below or above 76641 electors (based on the December 2010 registers) and will lead to a reduction from 533 to 502 constituencies in England. The Commission has now produced its initial proposals under which London would lose five of its current 73 constituencies, with only four being unaffected. The proposals include:

45. In Camden, we noted that the existing Hampstead and Kilburn constituency, which contains wards from the boroughs of both Brent and Camden, had an electorate within 5% of the electoral quota. However, with the inclusion of the Fortune Green ward in the Finchley and Golders Green constituency, it was necessary to alter the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency. We propose that it should contain only two Brent wards (Kilburn and Queens Park) and eight wards from Camden, including three (Gospel Oak, Highgate, and Kentish Town) from the existing Holborn and St Pancras constituency. The seven remaining Camden wards, including one (Belsize) from the existing Hampstead and Kilburn constituency, form a Camden and Regent’s Park constituency, together with four wards from the north east of Westminster.

Some heroic number-crunching by the Guardian Datastore has attempted to analyse the impact of the changes, with the caveat that their work is “Based on a crude analysis of the composition of the new constituencies, using the 2010 election results in old ones. Assumes uniform vote across old constituencies”.

This analysis seems to suggest that Hampstead and Kilburn would become a less marginal Labour seat in future, and that for a Labour candidate adoption would be a prize worth having. Apart from those lucky enough to have London seats, most Labour MPs have to travel some distance to their constituencies which tend to be concentrated in South Wales, North East and North West England and Scotland.

However, even if at the next election Ms Millar were elected in Hampstead and Kilburn, her victory might be Pyrrhic. If the boundary changes are implemented, Labour will need a bigger lead over the Conservatives than in the past to form a government (UK Polling Report assessment). However, as Daniel Finkelstein pointed out in The Times (£) on 14 September:

One way in which this [fewer seats, especially safe ones] all might play itself out is simply that MPs band together to prevent the new boundaries being put in place. There are serious figures in Downing Street who think that the review will never be implemented because it is too radical.

Even assuming that there is a Labour government in 2015, Ms Millar may face another problem in recasting the educational system to be more comprehensive. This would be the consequence of another Commission, one to address the ‘West Lothian question’. As the FT reported on 9 September:

Ministers are to ask a commission of independent experts to address one of the toughest questions thrown up by devolution: should Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh MPs be allowed to vote on legislation that affects only England?
The so-called “West Lothian Question” – named after the constituency of Tam Dalyell, the former Labour MP who first raised the issue – has led to growing calls for “English votes for English laws”, since Scotland and Wales were granted devolution in the late 1990s.
English MPs are not allowed to vote on many matters that are now devolved to other UK assemblies and there has been a long-running debate on whether equivalent restrictions should apply to Scottish and Welsh MPs.

Education and health are the two major devolved issues. If Labour MPs from Wales and Scotland were to cease to vote on English educational matters, a Labour government might well not have enough English MPs to carry votes on major changes such as placing academies and free schools under local education authority control.

Before becoming an MP, Ms Millar would have to be selected as prospective candidate. Her partner is not exactly popular in, to use Richard Kay’s words, the ‘fashionable North London constituency, which is home to dozens of rich Labour luvvies’. One elite Hampstead resident’s views of Campbell might not be unrepresentative:

"a Burnley-crazed apparatchik churning out propaganda for a dead political regime – one whose own name is a byword for bullying and mendacity"

So said playwright Sir David Hare, according to the Sunday Times (£) in 2008, after Campbell had referred in his diaries to Tony Blair “looking like a prat” in a Nicole Farhi sweater. Nicole Farhi is Lady Hare – of course, the Hares may or may not be Labour party members with a say in the choice of candidate.

Ms Millar might, in the end, look for adoption in the other Camden constituency, Holborn and St Pancras, currently held by Frank Dobson, who will be 75 in 2015, or, if the boundary changes are implemented, in the new Islington North constituency. Both are safe Labour seats according to Guardian Datastore:

Meanwhile, if David Cameron manages to pull off both the boundary changes and the removal of Welsh and Scottish MPs from English parliamentary business, he will probably have done more for the Conservative party’s influence than any of his predecessors since Joseph Chamberlain.

ADDENDUM 18 SEPTEMBER

The above may have underestimated David Cameron. According to the Guardian on 15 September, a government white paper published in the summer is proposing the introduction before the 2015 election of individual electoral registration rather than household registration.

The policy has been described by Jenny Russell, the chair of the electoral commission, as the biggest change to voting since the introduction of the universal franchise. … Russell warned: "It is logical to suggest that those that do not vote in elections will not see the point of registering to vote and it is possible that the register may therefore go from a 90%completeness that we currently have to 60-65%."
…
Tristam Hunt, a Labour [political and constitutional reform select] committee member, said: "These plans show how little this government really cares about democracy or fairness. If they get away with it, the effect on the 2020 general election will make the chaotic boundary review published this week look minor. This is designed to wipe the poor and the young off the political map. "We are moving from a notion of registering as part as a civic duty to something akin to personal choice like a Nectar card or BA miles."
…
Roger Mortimore from pollsters Ipsos Mori warned: "It is a very dramatic change and I am opposed to it. So far there is a political effect, it is most likely to disadvantage Labour", because "people that are least engaged in politics — the poor, the young and the ethnic minorities and all those groups, when they do vote at all are more likely to vote Labour".

British Writers and British Art

On 28 August BBC2 screened the thriller, Page Eight, written and directed by the eminent British playwright and screenwriter, Sir David Hare. The film’s central character, Johnny Warricker (played by Bill Nighy), is a senior MI5 officer (a deputy to the Director General apparently). To gain any insight into the real work of the security services, it would be better to accept that Hare’s work is set in a different Realm from Christopher Andrew’s, and listen to the last three of this year’s BBC Reith Lectures. But in the film, not only does Warricker have a daughter, (Felicity Jones) described by Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent as:

an artist who paints graphic and harrowing images of Guantanamo Bay-like torture victims. (Ironically, some of her work has found its way into the Government's art collection. One of her paintings hangs in the MI5 boardroom.)

but he has an extensive art collection in his flat. This serves to demonstrate the taste and values of the last-century English patriot that Hare has in mind. Two artists get a mention: by the end of the film Warricker has given away a painting by Mark Gertler and sold another, by Christopher Wood, to an art dealer in Saffron Walden for £60,000 in cash. The dealer kept the money in an antique-looking safe at the back of her shop and Warricker takes it away in a Waitrose carrier bag. He also discovers that his daughter is pregnant after a one-week affair with a Conceptual artist (pun intended, presumably) – not exactly Warricker’s taste in art.

The film’s art department and set decorator did a good job with Warricker’s collection. (The Christopher Wood looked a bit like The Card Players from Lord and Lady Attenborough’s collection as sold by Sotheby’s in 2009 for about twice as much as Warricker could raise.) Hare, as the screenwriter, must have had his reasons for lighting on Gertler (1891-1939) and Wood (1901-1930).  

Gertler was a contemporary of Stanley Spencer at the Slade. Wood, who had trained in Paris, was in St Ives when Ben Nicholson encountered Alfred Wallis. Both died young and by suicide, in Wood’s case under a train at Salisbury station in a state of opium-induced paranoia. I did wonder how even a senior public servant, particularly with several divorces behind him, could afford so many pictures,. A Gertler might be more attainable, one of his late works, The Barn, surprisingly fetching only about £5000 last year at Bonhams.

It reminded me of Ian McEwan’s novel, Solar, published in 2010. The main character, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is about the same age as Warricker (and Hare, McEwan and Nighy) and has also had costly troubles with a succession of women. His latest is Melissa:

She owned a string - if three was a string - of shops across north London selling dance clothes.
…
Like many slobs, Beard was appreciative of the order that others created without effort, or any that he noticed. In Melissa's flat, which was spread over two floors, he was particularly happy. She lived such an uncluttered life at home. There were open perspectives untroubled by furniture. The foot-wide beeswaxed floorboards recovered from a Gascony chateau shone with dull perfection. There were no loose objects, all the books were on the shelves in the right order, at least until he visited, and the art on the walls was sparse lithographs, mostly of dancers. There was a single statue, a Henry Moore maquette.

Very nice too, but a work of that type by Moore, Maquette for Reclining Figure, went for about £25000 in Bonhams in June this year.

Obviously Melissa and Warricker were being depicted as people of taste, and their creators didn’t intend them to be case studies for amateur financial advisers. But I can’t help thinking that Henry Moore maquettes and Christopher Wood oils are more likely to be found in the handsome houses of successful writers like Hare and McEwan (in London’s Hampstead and Fitzrovia, respectively) than in the humbler dwellings of civil servants and minor retailers.

ADDENDUM 4 OCTOBER

Visiting Bristol Museum and Art Gallery recently I took the opportunity to see Eric Ravilious’ tempera triptych Tennis.

The panels were commissioned to decorate the door of Sir Geoffrey Fry’s music room in London. Notwithstanding my remark above, Fry was a civil servant and a distinguished patron of the arts. He served as Private Secretary to Stanley Baldwin when the latter was Prime Minister. Fry, however, came from a wealthy Bristol family, and he and Lady Fry donated Tennis to the Museum in 1945.