So art changes as the social environment changes.  But the artist also helps to create that environment by conceptualising aspects of culture in images and structures.  So art is a medium to help people gain insight and understanding of their culture as expressed through the expressive perspective of one individual.  

Of course, the creation of the artist says as much if not more about them as it does about the culture (though they are still a representative of the culture).   Successful artists can be and often are self centred to the point of obsession; you might say they have to be.  And in a narcissistic age,  some art has self indulgent to the point of boredom.  Do we really want to know so much about Tracey’s soiled bed, used condoms or how many men she fucked in her tent?  Are we interested in the relationship with Louise Bourgeois’ father and her governess?   In as much as it informs us about aspects of culture and psychology we are.  Louis Bourgeois depicted a whole psychoanalysis in her art.  Joseph Beuys went one stage further; he invented a fantastic personal narrative through his art;  catapulted from his crippled Stuka when it crashed in deep snow in Crimea in 1944, he claims to have been rescued by Tartar tribesman, who kept him alive by wrapping his broken body in felt and animal fat and feeding him milk.  His art reflects aspects of that incident as well the boundary between fantasy and reality.   

Other artists use their experience to express something wider, more general, while maintaining the  template of their formative life experience to fashion a recognisable identity-in-style.  Henry Moore drew large female figures with holes in them to represent his fixation on the beloved, though at times distant mother; there were gaps in their relationship. . 

Some artists are more blatently commercial in their adherence to culture; they generate shapes, ideas that people want.  Anish Kapoor creates large reflecting surfaces, bulges, wax installations, that people enjoy.  ‘Art is not meant to be controversial’, he recently declared.  He likes to be liked.       

 Art doesn’t so much create the object, it creates the environment, the mental space through which the rest of us can think about their own existence.  In doing so, it both represents the culture and helps to create it.  The process can be transformative, but for some artists it can become iterative and hermetic, the unending scratching, etching of an itch until something changes to change the focus; war, famine, love.  

Some art will travel; either because it expresses a universal theme, like love, or because its meaning is so meaningfully abstract, so that people from different cultures bring their own meaning to it.   Shakespeare travels and so does Turner.   Is this what makes art great?   Is this the function of art; to create the space for the thoughts of others to enter.  In our instant, media culture, people are often considered clever because they say what everybody else is thinking and wish they had said it.  They re clever because they make everybody feel clever.   Is that what artists do; set down a challenge that makes the rest of us feel clever by gaining insight?  If so, they don’t necessarily do it deliberately.  

‘They tell me it’s great art.  To me, it was just another scribble’

It’s always good to talk to my brother; he is an artist and gets me to think out of the box!

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The pivotal moment in Emma and Jerry’s seven year long affair occurred just two years into it.   Emma was sitting on the bed in the Kilburn flat they had bought together, excited to see him again, when wistfully, nonchalantly but not so, she said.  ‘Are we going to change our lives?’  There was a pause.  Then Jerry replied, ‘we can’t’.  That was it; the start of the illness from which the relationship succumbed.    

They were both in their thirties, married, their children were still young; they had their obligations.   The time was crucial.  For Emma and Jerry, thirty plus represented a loss of freedom, the acquisition of responsibility.  No longer, it seemed, would life hold that frisson of possibility; it now stretched ahead, that slow decline of disillusion.   

In the affairs of men and women, time is of the essence. It both offers the opportunity and then snatches it away. That chance meeting, the inventive creation of space, free afternoons, rendezvous snatched between appointments; at the time, it seems their love could last forever; feeling expands time.  But in real time,  such intensity of passion is ephemeral. 

Falling in love is predicated on hope, and hope cannot be sustained forever.  If the affair goes on too long without a resolution, then hope dies.  The fulcrum of reality is followed by the inevitable winding down of the clock to when time together, like the flat Emma and Jerry rented, becomes empty and meaningless.  If an affair doesn’t go anywhere, if it doesn’t change the lives of the participants, it will die and something in them will die too.

The happily married never need consider these issues.  As the philosopher and psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, comments, for them the future is the same as the past.  ‘Outwitting time and change, they construct a monument to continuity among the promiscuous ruins.  Valuing a relationship because it lasts, they live as if time proves something.’  

It was a poignant and clever device for Pinter to write the play backwards; time running in reverse.  The end of an affair is always there right at the start.  They both knew it was impossible that first time they kissed at the party; that’s what made it so risky and exciting.   They couldn’t!   But why not?  They were in love.  And love skews perception, makes the impossible seem plausible.   

Except it’s not.  Life is not make-believe, however much we may try to make it so.  There are incompatibilities; the taken-for-granted and the precarious, the tedious routine and the impossible risk – the thing that couldn’t be done.  There is safety and danger, habit and passion, love and lust, attachment and desire, marriage and affairs.  Of course we want to have our cake and eat it.  Why not, we protest, we are integrated beings. Isn’t our body but a representation of our meaningful soul and isn’t our mind the way we think about it?  Why can’t we be more honest?  

But in the affairs of men and women, honesty and kindness are at odds with each other, Phillips asserts.  ‘We lie because we can’t admit our desire and we don’t wish to hurt or be hurt. We lie in order to keep our options open, but also to find out what our options are.  The successful lie creates a fragile freedom.  It shows us that it is possible for no one to know what we are doing, even ourselves.  The poor lie – the wish to be found out – reveals our fear about what we can do with words.  Fear of infidelity is fear of language.’  

Monogamy is reassurance. It’s like believing in God.  Not everyone believes, but most live as though they do.  Erotic life, Phillips writes, is political, disruptive; ‘it rearranges the world, it makes a difference to the ways we and other people organise their lives.  Every infidelity creates the need for an election; every separation divides the party.  Friends may share, cooperate and be honest.  Lovers have to do something else. Lovers cannot be virtuous.’  

Rules by which we govern our lives are ways of imagining what to do.  ‘Our personal infidelity rituals – the choreography of our affairs – are parallel texts of our marriages’.   Successful affairs reproduce the loneliness of marriage.   Unsuccessful ones intensify it.  Serial monogamy, it could be argued, keeps us moving on, maintaining the hope, restoring meaning and renewing life.     

Adam Phillips would claim that ‘guilt, by reminding us what we mustn’t do, shows us what we may want.  It shows us our moral sense, the difference between what we want and what we want to want.  Without the possibility of a double life, there is no morality.  Because we are always being sexually faithful to somebody, every preference is a betrayal.’  

He continues, ‘what is coupledom, but a sustained resistance to the intrusion of third parties.  The couple needs to sustain the third parties in order to go on resisting them.  The faithful keep an eye on the enemy, eye them up.  After all, what would they do together if no one else was there.  How would they know what to do?  Two’s company; three’s a couple.  Everyone feels jealous or guilty and suffers the anguish of their choices.  No one has ever been excluded from feeling left out.’ 

Betrayal by Harold Pinter is currently playing at the Comedy Theatre,  London. Kristin Scott Thomas is  wonderful as Emma; she was sexy, playful and very attractive; how could Jerry ever resist her.    The programme included  notes from Adam Phillips Book, Monogamy (Faber and Faber, 1996).

(please don’t read this as a moral statement, more an attempt at analysis)Two’s company

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                     Christopher Marlow (The Jew of Malta)

What made people like Guy  Burgess or Anthony Blunt rebel against their society, betray their  country and spy for the soviet union?  Was it a reaction against the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism, or was it the rejection of a brutal class system?   Did their experience of having to hide their homosexuality from a bigoted society cause them to turn against the very establishment they were supposed to be members of?   I blame the father.  ‘Another Country’  highlights the projection of the strict father to be found in the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school.  Guy Burgess was at Eton.  The school was run not by the Masters, but by the Gods, the only boys who were allowed to wear coloured waistcoats.  And Guy, the aesthete, aspired to be elected to the Pantheon (if only to display the waistcoat).   

Miranda Carter, in her biography of Anthony Blunt, claims that his miserable time at public school, fostered a subversive but also superior attitude toward British society. This potent combination – insecurity and moral superiority – fed into a belief that this chosen elite had the right to be exempt from mere conventional morality for the good of the masses.

The regime of the Gods was repressive, militaristic and essentially corrupt, a system designed to create the rulers of Empire.  Guy was beautiful, louche, artistic and openly homosexual. He was confident enough to love whom he wanted;  after all several of the Gods had been his lovers.  And he was clever enough to be feared.  But when Martineau is discovered in flagrante in the boiler room and hangs himself in shame, the Gods clamp down on homosexuality in order to contain the threat of scandal.  Guy at first escapes public humiliation by threatening to expose his lovers.  But as desperate as he is to become a God, he is also desperately in love with James.  And this love leads him to indiscretion and exposure.  So he shields James him from possible expulsion, accepts the blame and the punishment and is customarily debarred from elevation to the Pantheon. 

So, was it his humiliation at school that that made Guy Burgess turn against the English class system and betray state secrets to the Russians?   Was it rejection by a system he secretly admired and aspired to?  Was it envy, revenge, the feeling of the outsider?   Was it then, on the verge of his adult life,  that he realized how much the British class system relied on outward appearance and how devastating being openly gay was for a diplomatic career?  Was that the point that he allowed himself to become radicalised by his best friend Tommy Judd – an intellectually committed Communist?

Or was it in part his betrayal by his adored mother?   In a tender moment with James at night in a punt on the river, he discloses how he had to release his mother, trapped in bed after his father collapsed and died while making love to her.  Quite soon afterwards, she married an army officer. 

Another Country portrays the road to betrayal as a personal, emotional crisis, rather than an intellectual identification.  As a young man, Guy was portrayed as mischievous, sensitive, intelligent, in love, but tragically crushed by the juggernaut of the English class system? He was being bred to inflict rule and punishment in the real world by playing at Gods at school. And against this inhumanity he rebelled.

The theme was composed, as with all of us, early in Burgess’s life, and had to be worked through.  Always an outsider, he ended his life, a broken, isolated, embittered man, living in a seedy apartment in Moscow with only the faded sepia prints of Eton hanging on his walls to remind him of the turning point.     

‘Another Country’ made me think of my time at Taunton School.  In the early sixties, the ancien regime of the English public schools still held sway; Taunton was still attempting to produce young men to run the Empire, even though that institution was all but dismantled.   They still had a combined cadet force; they still do, I think.   Sport, an essential component of the school curriculum,  encouraged teamwork, loyalty and identification with the system.  The establishment still didn’t foster original thinking and expression; it indoctrinated.  At the time, I had a strong sense of duty.  My parents admired that system and I felt bound by obligation to uphold it, but I never felt that emotional sense of belonging that many of my friends of that time still do.  My life has been patterned by ambivalence.   

For one of my school friends, Maurice, Taunton school fostered a deep sense of entitlement and rebellion.  What he did at school could be contained. Now, fifty years on, he is pitted against the Justice system, the General Medical Council and the House of Lords all at the same time.  But for every one damaged by the system, there were nine created by it.  Sir Peter Westmacott, one time our ambassador in Paris, was one of our contemporaries at school. 

‘Another Country’, starred Rupert Everett as Guy and a younger Colin Firth as Tommy Judd.  It was  directed by Marek Kanievska in 1984.

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The King’s Speech, which was released on Saturday and stars Colin Firth as King George and Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, is a moving and humorous account of Bertie’s relationship with his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who helps him overcome his fears and deliver wartime speeches that rally the nation. 

The Royal Family have always been conscious of their role and their distance from the rest of society.   Some of the best bits of the film show how the King struggles to deal with Lionel Logue’s down to earth familiarity.  He is propelled to an apoplectic eloquence by the sight of Lionel lounging in the Coronation chair in the Abbey. 

Bertie is stuck between his instinctive desire for human affection and contact and his overwhelming sense of duty and obligation.  He is a fully paid up member of the firm, but he is also a loving father and husband and  needs Lionel as a friend as well as a therapist.  During the war, he had a close and understanding relationship with Churchill, who had also suffered with a speech impediment when he was younger and was also frightened of his father. 

Bertie, like many Royals, was brought up, not by his parents, who were always on duty, but by a nurse.  But the nurse preferred his older brother and was callous and cruel to Bertie, pinching him and depriving him of food so he lost weight.  David also used to tease him and his father,  King George V, had no patience with his stammering.  Queen Mary, his mother was stiff and distant, embarrassed by expressions of intimacy.  So Bertie, despite being second in line to the throne, had a lonely and abusive childhood.   

Bertie was also naturally left handed, but compelled to use his right hand.  This experience is not uncommon in people who stammer.    He had knock knees and suffered the pain of splints for years. 

The film revealed how stammering is not so much a fixed mechanical defect of speech but more an emotional disorder; the overwhelming effect of fear, fear of humiliation and with the loss of an effective means of communication with other human beings, of loneliness.

Bertie did not stammer if he sang the words, or when music was played into his ears at the same time.  When Lionel encouraged him to swear, utter the rudest words he could think of,  it threw Bertie into conflict; he was brought up to repress any expression that was improper.  But once he had permission,  he swore with gusto and no hesitation.  All these techniques facilitated emotional expression and eliminated his self consciousness.  He could communicate with his wife and daughters quite confidently,  but his brother, David and his father could readily reduce him to a state of paralysis.       

Lionel and Bertie remained friends for the rest of the latter’s life.  He was there to inspire confidence during all the King’s wartime speeches.  This was the Royal Family’s finest hour.  The audible and visible presence of the King and Queen in London during the blitz, their refusal to emigrate to Canada, the  bombing of Buckingham Palace, the young Princess Elizabeth driving ambulances endeared them to the British people.   But the King’s nervousness caught up with him.  Always needing cigarettes to relax him, the King died of bronchial carcinoma in 1952.

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Oh My God!   Or as Mrs ‘Odge might say,  ‘Well, ‘eres a pretty pickle.’     

So why isn’t it easy?    Why shouldn’t people be free to love whom they like when they like?  Why do people get hurt?   Why do they feel guilty?  Why does it always turn bad?

Gilda is one of those delightful women, beautiful, intelligent, impulsive; a loving and free spirit with a real zest for life.  Otto and Leo are two sensitive and sensuous young men, who are both enjoying the  exhilaration of success.   Otto is a painter;  Leo an up and coming playwright.   They are young, and in love.   Gilda first chooses Otto and they live in a romantic garret in Paris.  Then Leo returns after a successful run in New York and she abandons Otto to live with Leo in London.  Then a year or so later, Otto returns and after a steamy night, she leaves them both and the next we know she has married the older, safer and rather tedious Ernest and become established as a New York socialite and art dealer.  Meanwhile, Otto and Leo get drunk, realise how much they love each other and go off round the world on a sequence of slow boats.  Two years later, they turn up in Ernest and Gilda’s apartment in New York, whereupon Gilda decides to leave Ernest and live with Otto and Leo in a ménage a trois.  

It is all so wonderfully romantic and amusing – so Noel Coward!   But is this so much a design for living as a strategy for loving?   And will it ever work?   One feels that it’s alright for Gilda.  She has the attentions of two handsome, successful young men who both adore her, but how will she cope with their love for each other?   It may be so exciting for the moment, but what will she do when they both get a bit fed up with her attention seeking and want a bit of basic male bonding?   Go off to Ernest again?   And can you imagine all three of them in bed together; the competitiveness, the jealousies?    Which of the men will go first and where?  How will she hold them together?  How will she satisfy two enormous egos?   For this to work, it would mean them all being terribly responsible and level headed.  When has Gilda ever been level headed?    

It’s not so much that it’s morally wrong.   It is, of course, but morality is a social construct;  there to protect us, not just an edict to be ignored.   Any one of us can love more than one person deeply,  but it is impossible to maintain an intimate relationship with two people for very long without resorting to a whole complicated web of secrecy and deception.  

When people fall in love, they expose the most vulnerable aspects of themselves.  It’s a courageous act of absolute trust and it risks nothing less than devastation of the personality through destruction of meaning.   Gilda and Leo and Otto may think they may have acquired sufficient experience and wisdom to maintain a stable triangle, but it takes enough time for any of us to sort out a relationship with one other person; how much more effort would it take to sort out a three-way intimacy?  And how long would it last without resorting to the rot of deception.    And finally, would it be worth it?  Some of the recent literature to come out of the middle east, illustrates the complex  jealousies of polygamy.  I can’t see polyandry being any better.    

Still, it’s wonderful entertainment and any good art; it makes you think. 

Design for Living by Noel Coward is currently playing at The Old Vic.  Lisa Dillon is delicious and delightful as Gilda (and that dress!),  though it was clear who was in charge.  The actors who played Otto and Leo were less credible.  And one had to feel some sympathy for Ernest, though his marriage to Gilda seemed less a meeting of minds and souls than a business arrangement, a mutual exploitation.  It was originally banned from performance on the London Stage.    

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Dance is the physical expression of romantic love.  Every week, we witness transformation in dance.    Under the guidance of their professional partners,  C list celebrities; rugby players, singers, actors, even politicians, who have never before trod the fantastic light,  develop the confidence and attitude to dance.   And as they improve, the relationship between the couples gets closer until they almost seem to merge and move together as one.  It’s like watching people fall in love.   The women all lose weight and glow with passion; the men perform like Gods.   Urged on by the comperes and the judges, week by week they take more risk.    We fear the crash – but at the same time desire it.  This is compulsive viewing.      

Pamela Stephenson,  psychotherapist and one time comedienne, now one of the contestants,  described it like this.  ‘ Suddenly you’re in this hot bed of emotion,  locking loins, arguing, fighting, making up, hugging.   The professionals are very attractive, very intimate, very attentive, very emotional.  It’s very hard not to fall in love a bit and that for some,  can be very confusing.’ 

Contestants may enjoy the sensation of having their heads in the clouds but they have to keep their feet on the ground.  Nabokov once defined fame as a stranger caught in their own snapshot, but  they mustn’t let themselves believe in it.  Celebrities are commodities for projection.  We, the voyeurs, enjoy the frisson with desire and dread.      

Love is not for the faint hearted.   It’s a dangerous business; full of conflict and ambivalence.   Dance, like courtship displays in birds and mammals,  expresses the desire, the fear, the aggression, the affection.   

If you truly love somebody,  all meaning is invested in that person.  Even the most mundane aspects of life are enhanced by the most intense colours, textures and tones.  But if that love fails, that intensity suddenly evaporates and life loses its meaning.  It’s all or nothing, life or death.  So the dreadful danger of love is the disillusion and devastatation;  the death of the spirit that ensues from a catastrophic loss of meaning.   The professionals understand this;  they never really lose themselves in the dance, they have the technique to act ‘as if’. 

But how precarious for those learning to dance for the first time;  they stand on the edge,  make to go and then hold back, and their body can expresses the ambivalence and spoil the performance.  They lack the technique that experience provides, to make it up.  They have to dance with their heart or not at all.  That’s why the judges, especially the effusive Bruno Tonioli, are all the while exhorting contestants to let go.  Love can make any of us dance perfectly!      

But it can be  so difficult to trust.  If we give ourselves to another person, then we lose our autonomy.  We may crave the freedom of love, but we fear the dependence,  because therein lies self deception and delusion.   People don’t fall in love with another person; they fall in love with themselves or more accurately,  the enhanced image of themselves they see in their lover’s eyes?   

Fear of solitude and nothingness encourages us to take refuge in love, but fear of entrapment  may cause us to flee it.  Dance is the enactment of the ambivalent;  cynicism; the elevated eyebrow of fear? 

But let’s be positive. Love is such wonderful make believe.  Even by proxy,  it has the potential to create such poignant joy.   How dull life would be without that dangerous hope?      

So take care but not that much.  And keeeeeep  dancing!   

The same applies to the bland,  self satisfied conviction, the  hand-me-down intimation of bliss that is spiritual love.  Do you really need to relinquish your soul in the service of your God?   Spiritual leaders grow fat on the respect and adoration of their disciples.   And the faithful thrive on the illusion of righteousness.   But human beings never got anywhere by sitting on a mountain contemplating nirvana just because they don’t dare to express their own thoughts and desires.  Religions have always been based on fear.  

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Some time later, they meet again in Paris.  Jules and Catherine invite Jim to their mill on the Seine.   Jim tells Catherine he is going marry Gilberta.  Catherine produces a revolver and threatens to shoot him.  He wrestles the revolver off her and escapes through the window.  Some time later she calls him.  They all go for a picnic by the river.  Catherine invites Jim to go for a drive with her; she has something to tell him and she invites Jules to watch them.  She then drives the car off a broken bridge into the river, killing them both.  Jules is destroyed.   

So what kind of person is Catherine?  They say she is La Reine.  She has to be obeyed.  Impulsive, controlling, charismatic and sexually provocative, she is the sort of free spirit that has men in her thrall.  Although they might be able to possess  her sexually, they can’t tie her down.  She will always find someone else who is more interesting, more exciting.  What is the point of life if it is not exciting?  Catherine falls in love at the drop of a eyelid, but she cannot love.  She cannot tolerate the day to day living, the routine of it, the struggles. She is too hedonistic, too easily dissatisfied.  She has to have drama.  Like a spoilt child, she needs  attention; it’s her life’s blood.  But if she doesn’t get it, look out, there will be trouble; she will betray, abandon, and is even prepared to kill.   She has a split personality.  She can be delightful and entertaining when it suits her, but she also has a dark, murderous side with  little empathy and no sense of guilt or shame.  She will manipulate and exploit men to achieve power and excitement, but never quite realises how she hurts them.  She never thinks how her behaviour affects Jules or her daughter.  She can’t help it.  It’s the way she is.  Her men either have to worship her or be destroyed.  Jim refuses to play the game and is sacrificed.  Jules has to suffer – forever.

Jeanne Moreau plays Catherine in Truffaut’s 1962 masterpiece of French cinema.

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The governess is both an unreliable and uninformed narrator and as such gives the tale its edgy somewhat hysterical character.   She has been employed by their uncle to look after Flora and Miles’, in effect to become their parent.  We assume their real parents have died.  On the day of her departure for Bly, the large country house, where they live, she is given a letter saying that Miles has been expelled from school for some undisclosed misdemeanour. 

She meets the children and is instantly charmed.  They are polite, intelligent and kind, but there is something a little too knowing about them.  She leans from the housekeeper,  Miss Grose, that both Miss Jessel, her predecessor and Peter Quint the butler, died shortly after leaving Bly,  but she sees what Miss Grose identifies as apparitions of them in the grounds and the house.  Jessel and Quint  seem to have some malign hold over the children, and the governess fears for their safety.  What on earth has been going on?  There are dark hints of sexual abuse.  The apparitions increase and the children appear to collude in the deception but by the end we begin to wonder whether they are just creations of the governess’s overheated imagination.  Flora is taken away for her own safety by Miss Grose.  Miles remains with the governess but dies in her arms while she is trying to prevent him from looking at Quint.

The Victorians were very interested in ghosts and long exposures required to take contemporary  photographic images reated ‘evidence’ of all kinds of ephemera and phantasms; lost objects.  The children, we assume, had already experienced loss, first of their parents, then of their uncle and the servants he employed to look after them.  The governess, we learn,  has also experienced loss and perhaps her neediness creates strong attachments first with the absent uncle and with the children,  but does she also create ghosts?  Are not only Peter Quint and Miss Jessel but also Ms Grose and even the children projections of her fearful imagination? 

If what happens cannot be processed (with the aid of a parental figure), then they become very frightening.  Is this fear what the governess experiences and transfers to the children?   Benjamin  Britten, who wrote an opera of the same name, had a deep empathy with the character, Miles.  He was sent away by his beloved mother to boarding school where he was abused.  But did he later abuse his choir boys, as suggested by Alan Bennett’s new play, A Habit of Art? 

The richness of James’s story lies in the gaps, which create space for the authors interpretations.  There are links with mourning and melancholia, for example.  Mourning is a process of working through memories until they wear away, but in melancholia, the aggrieved identifies with the lost object (the ghost) and blames himself.  ‘The shadow of the object falls on the ego’.  The tendency for the melancholic to identify with the person who has let them down is known in psychoanalytical terminology as projective identification.  This process defends against the realities of separation by assuming the absent identity; in other words, becoming the ghost.  We sense the horror of this in the two innocents. 

 Melancholia may be thought of as a condition of too much empathy, too much forgiveness.  It’s a disease of therapists; too much ruth; ruthful instead of ruthless.   The one who is lost remains as a ghost inside us and because we can’t evict them, we have to suffer.  Natasha Kampusch was kidnapped as a child and held in a cellar for 8 years but felt protective towards her kidnapper and guilty about escaping and telling.  Children often think its their fault when parents split up.  Lovers frequently blame themselves when they are rejected because they can’t bear to lose their beloved.

Ghosts in the Nursery was an event organised by the Harry Guntrip Psychotherapy Trust on October 9^th to coincide with a performance of Britten’s ‘A Turn of the Screw’ by Opera North. 

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But there were stirrings; people were restless, the intellectuals and lawyers met in the cafes and talked of revolution.  he American War of Independence had shown them that it was possible for a people to rise up against their European masters and succeed.   It just needed the spark.  A volcano erupts in Iceland,  the climate cools, the wheat crop fails and Paris explodes.  Starvation on top of everything else; it was too much.   

From its instigation in 1789, events gathered momentum like red hot lava.  The Estates General  was abolished and replaced by a more representative National Assembly, but the members were locked out of their meeting house.  The mob stormed the Bastille, the peasants refused to work on the estates, the monasteries were suppressed, wars of conquest were renounced,  the nobility was abolished.  The Government  changed every few months.  The National Assembly was replaced by an inexperienced Legislative Assemply.  This in turn was dissolved to be replaced by a revolutionary commune, which appointed its own tribunal. The King was forced to abdicated and was then  beheaded.  The country disintegrated into chaos, a  reign of terror.  Nobody was safe.  Anybody who looked rich or who has intellectual pretensions was executed.  Even the architects of the revolution, Marat, Danton and the incorruptible Robespierre were despatched by the guillotine.

The French Revolution terrifies me.  How is it possible to live through such anarchy with any sense of integrity and humanity?  .How could a civilised country disintegrate into such chaos?  Could the mob be released here?  Have you ever stood in the Kop?   

So could it happen again?  Could it happen here?  Now?   Yes, if things got bad enough.  George Osborne is swinging his machete with reactionary zeal.  His cuts are going deeper and more quickly than most of us anticipated.  His assertion that people are making a life style choice in claiming benefits is so provocative.  It surely emanates from someone out of touch with real world of the electorate. It will anger many and may well provoke violence.    

I suspect we are in for a very difficult winter and I am not sure the government will survive it. ‘This is no time for novices’, Gordon Brown said.  It is beginning to look like he was right.  Osborne seems carried away by enthusiasm, intoxicated by a delusion of self importance. Is there nobody who can express a note of caution?  Does the government know something that we don’t?  They need to come clean, to demonstrate in terms that are clear to all, the depth of our plight, to offer leadership and guidance as to how to survive it.  Otherwise people will just view the cuts as the desperate acts of an incompetent and insecure government.  They will take to the streets; the mob whipped up by the media, will be released.  It could happen!  The firemen and postal workers are already threatening strikes.  The TUC has urged civil disobedience.   And against the background, the government is also planning cuts in the military and the police.   

My fears were inspired by the performance of Danton’s Death at the National; such is the role of theatre.  Toby Stephens and Eliot Levey were so powerful,  the set so  dramatic, the direction by Michael Grandage so terrifying. Do not see it if you are a nervous disposition.  Just collect any bits of wood, boxes, broken down cars, anything and start building.    

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It is the autumn of 1913 and strange things have begun to happen in the village.  First it is the doctor’s ‘accident’.   His horse trips on a wire stretched across the gate to his house, throwing him heavily,  the end of his collarbone sticking out through the skin of his shoulder.  Next the farmer’s wife falls  through the rotten floor of the baron’s sawmill and is killed instantly.  In revenge and anger with his father, who refuses to claim compensation or grievance,  their  eldest son destroys the baron’s field of cabbages and is instantly dismissed, committing the family to starvation.  Then Sigi, the Baron’s son is kidnapped, flayed and found in the middle of the night hanging by his ankles in the barn in a state of severe shock.   Then the steward’s baby son is left exposed to the freezing cold.  Finally Karli, the midwife’s son, who has Down’s syndrome is attacked and nearly blinded.  The culprits are never discovered though a sinister group of children always seem to materialise offering to help after each an atrocity is committed.  It might appear that, led by Klara, the pastors eldest daughter, they are  taking their revenge for the cruel repression they had endured at the hands of their fathers, but we never quite know for sure.   

When Klara and Martin arrive late for supper, the pastor forces  them to wear white ribbons as a sign that they have not learnt to be responsible.   Martin is further humiliated by having his hands tied to the sides of his bed to stop him masturbating while Klara collapses while being severely and unjustly reprimanded by her father in front of the whole class.   

And then there is the doctor,  who, not just content for abusing his housekeeper, is also forcing his attentions on Anni, his fourteen year old daughter.  And the steward, who thrashes his son within an inch of his life for taking Sigi’s whistle from him and throwing him in the pond.   This is a highly dysfunctional village that seems to thrive on malice. 

And Eva, who is unfairly dismissed by the Baron and then prevented by her father from marrying her sweetheart,  who teaches at the village school. 

It is the schoolteacher who finds out what has happened,  but when he confronts Klara and Martin, they lie; they know only too well the penalties for being honest.  Their father, the parson, grows angry and accuses him of spreading calumny on innocent children and threatens to report him to the school board.  

The note attached to Karli notes that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children.  It would seem that Klara and her gang become avenging angels.  Klara even kills her father’s pet bird, though her youngest brother poignantly offers to replace it with the bbird he has rescued because his father is so sad. 

The film ends with the news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the imminence of war.  We are left with the sense that in some way the children have brought about the horror that was the first world war.  They didn’t, but the narrator, who is the schoolteacher as an old man, says that the events in Eichvald in 1913/14 might clarify what was eventually going to happen in Germany.  Theirs was the generation who became Nazis and perpetrated their own cruel repression on the Jews.      

White Ribbon was directed by Martin Hanneke and released in 2009,  being awarded ’ La Palme d’Or’ in Nice.   It is a powerful and disturbing film.  It is the children are the  stars of the film; they act their parts with such convincing realism while the cimetography with its long gothic shots of the snowbound village and its protestant inhabitants reinforces the dark repression.    

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