Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why do we admire some people?   Why do some people make us uncomfortable?  Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher?   Are they suitable objects for our projections?  

Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

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‘She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?  

Most pretty women do.  But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.  Perhaps Mrs Chevely’s past is merely a slightly décolleté one, but they are extremely popular nowadays.’    

So is she a clever but dangerous woman who lacks any scruples to get what she wants, an adventurer, a dangerous seductress, a victim?  

‘Oh I should fancy Mrs Chevely is one of those very modern women who find a new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the park every afternoon at five-thirty.’ 

Bored, frustrated and manipulative, her intelligence and sexuality are but instruments in a game of power and influence.  She seems so far into it that she has forgotten how to feel. 

‘She wore far too much rouge last night, and not enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman.’  

She blackmails Sir Robert Chiltern into protecting her investments by threatening to expose him.  She has in her possession a letter proving that His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary kick started his career by selling secret government plans to a speculator. 

‘I think that in life, in practical life, there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous; something about ambition that is always unscrupulous.’   

But Sir Robert’s young wife, as beautiful as she is uncompromising, has put her husband on the fourth plinth, making it perfectly clear that her love for him is purely a projective identification of one with perfect morality. 

‘I remember having read somewhere that when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’

In so doing, her principles damage Sir Robert far more then the bribery and manipulation of Mrs Chevely could ever do.  

‘And is Lady Chiltern as perfect as all that?  What a pity!’

Sir Robert cannot face telling his wife the truth.  He knows it would destroy their marriage. Mrs Chevely knows this and is prepared to destroy both his career and his marriage.    

The fact is we all have our dark sides, the things we are ashamed of.  It never does to have such high principles (one wonders what is being defended). 

‘Well, the English can’t stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them.’

Lord Goring is the catalyst in Oscar Wilde’s wittily observed play (The Ideal Husband).  He’s rather like Falstaff or the wise court jester, but in this case it is the dandy philosopher, brilliantly played by Eliot Cowan.   He enters as a louche and dissolute character, but he understands the flaws of human nature; everybody is capable of doing wrong. 

‘Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing.  Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.’

Idealisation is a very fragile basis for marriage.  Acceptance and forgiveness are more important.  As Sir Robert complains:  

‘Why can’t you women love us, faults and all?  Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?  We all have feet of clay; men as well as women, but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more for that reason. It the imperfect, not the perfect who have need of love.’

But is it that gender specific? 

An Ideal Husband, probably Oscar Wilde’s best play, is currently at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand and stars Samantha Bond, Rachel Stirling and Eliot Cowan.  It doesn’t deserve a half empty house.  

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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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Shocking, intense and bleak, the poem is a minutely observed encounter between two middle-aged one-time lovers.  She is bright, kind and sensitive, but she can afford to be.  She has moved on, married a successful author, she has made something of her life.  He has not.  In the fifteen years since they last met, his soul has been corroded by disappointment and bitterness.  He remembers their affair with a desperate longing, but he is too vulnerable to show it.  Instead he affects a vacant sarcasm, pretends he doesn’t care and gets drunk.  He can’t bear to engage with the ghost.  She understands and reaches out to help him and there is a moment when you imagine they will leave and go to bed. No, that would be too much to bear.  He looks away, stares at the waitress’s bottom and drinks more wine.  He tries to pour some for her but she places her hand over her glass.  

You wonder why he wrote suggesting they meet for lunch, why she accepted, why they met here of all places.  Was it just that he wanted to rekindle a spark of life in the ashes of his existence, to rediscover the meaning he had lost?   Did she want to witness his capitulation, his final degradation? 

He gets up to go to the toilet but falls asleep on the roof.  She pays and goes.  But later as he leaves the empty restaurant, he sees a tired old man eating alone in the corner.   Massimo, the owner, one-time life and soul of an everlasting party, promoter of dreams, is now just a grey shadow. 

The Song of Lunch was broadcast on BBC 2 at 9pm on October 8th.

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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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 A woman had to be sharp to survive,  she had to be adaptable, use all her skills and wiles to gain advantage of her sexuality and the susceptibility of men to it in order to survive.   There was a lot of pretence.  Men feared this.  Seductive women were often accused of witchcraft.  In 1620, King James issued instruction to his clergy to ‘inveigh vehemently against the insolence of our women’.   

Thomas Middleton was a contemporary of Shakespeare.  His play ‘Women Beware Women’ explored this fear of women.  So when Bianca is raped by the Duke, she quickly sees advantage in this and abandons Leantia, who allows himself to be Livia’s toy boy and is richly rewarded for it.  And Isabella quickly learns to pander to the lusts of the fool she is betrothed to while all the time continuing her passion for her uncle, Hippolyta.  And Livia pulls the strings.  It is she who convinces Isabella that she is not really related to her uncle and removes the restrictions on her passion.  It is she who invites, she invites Leantia’s mother and her daughter in law, the newly-wed Bianca to her house, where she is taken by Guardino and shown erotic sculptures before being locked in and raped by the Duke.  It is not for nothing that Leantio’s mother, playing chess,  observes that Livia is cunning at the game. She finds it exciting and is favoured by the Duke.     

Accused of lust by his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke tells Hippolyta that his sister has been dishonoured by Leantia, who must be killed, freeing Bianca for marriage.  In her grief, Livia reveals Isabella and Hippolyta’s incest.  In a grotesque masked ball to celebrate the Duke’s marriage, Isabella is raped and dies, Hippolyta is murdered.  The Duke drinks the poison meant for his brother, the Cardinal.  Bianca drains the cup and dies.   The Cardinal is the only one left standing.  Good prevails in the end and the Cardinal inherits the throne. 

 Sexual politics in the seventeenth century is more about lust and greed, compromise and corruption.  Love doesn’t come into it, but fear does; the fear of condemnation by the people and excommunication from the church.  The moral of the play is simple.  Greed and lust never work, even if you are a Duke.   Even today, those with power and money, cannot get away with everything they want.  John Terry found this out.  So did Tiger Woods. 

‘I convinced myself that normal rules did not apply.  I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted.  I felt I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me.  I felt I was entitled.  Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them’. 

Linda Davies, a former investment banker, draws parallels with the financial crisis.  The Bankers were able to exploit their investors’ greed and lust for power to create an illusory wealth and politicians, reluctant to kill the golden goose, turned a blind eye.  The result; disaster on a global scale.

Women Beware Women is currently playing at The National Theatre.   

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Alan Bennett’s latest work, The Habit of Art is currently playing at The National.  The overworked metaphor of Russian Dolls comes to mind.  It is a play within a play.   It is about creating a production about the relationship between  Wystan (WH) Auden and Benjamin Britten.  Set in a rehearsal space, which has been designed to resemble Auden’s grace and favour flat at the Brewhouse in Oxford, where he lived for the last year of his life, it deals with the artifice of creating a play.  This explains and fills out a plot that never was, allowing Bennett to explore the chaos of creativity, the competing voices, the author, the absent director, the stage manager who fills in, the biographer,   the vanities and fragilities of the actors.  Bennett argues that the actors are the foot soldiers; they have to go over the top every night; it’s  important they understand their roles. So queries about the text could be put into the mouths of the actors.   It’s a clever device; too clever by half, one feels. Maybe Bennett has become unassailable.    

Actors bring their own experience to a play.  For a few, it’s a job of work, but for most, the role is  something they have involved in, to live.   Some contemporary directors, Robert Goode, for example, lets the actors determine the way the play turns out.  Art, laziness, bad habit?; one senses Bennett has sympathy with this attitude. 

 So Fitz, exasperated, asks, ‘Why is it all about dicks?  Why so little poetry?’   Maybe homosexuality still has the ability to generate tension.  But isn’t Bennett exploring his own attitudes to being gay. Doesn’t he identify with Britten, who was always somewhat reticent and ashamed of his homosexuality?   Britten was the boy who never grew up; his operas were all on the theme of innocence corrupted,  Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, even Death in Venice, but who was being corrupted, was it the Professor or the boy, or was in more a collaboration?   Isn’t there something of this in The History Boys and in the relationship between Wystan and Stuart?     

Britten’s pleaded for constraint as far as sexuality was concerned.  Maybe Bennett feels the same. He feels the abolition of censorship in the theatre takes away the tension of the plot.  

Auden was much more open and more cynical; he would pay his rent boys and was very matter of fact about what he wanted them to do.  He didn’t seem to care what people thought of him; he just wanted his poetry to be noticed.  Both Britten and Auden had lost the meaning of what they were doing; it had become a habit; the habit of art, in much the same way as their sexuality. Neither could deny their art or their nature.  Auden became a pedagogue and a bore towards the end of his life.  He tended to repeat himself.  It was said that you could never tell Wystan anything, just remind him of it.  Britten and Pears were notorious for their defensiveness, for cutting people out of their lives.  Real artists are not nice people.  All their best stuff goes into their art. 

Bennett has become a National Treasure.  People love his whimsical imaginings, his cosy reminiscences;  his diaries, ‘The Lady in the Van, ‘The Uncommon Reader’, ‘The History Boys’.  In this bitter sweet play, Bennett brings out his dark side.  For all his self deprecation, he has an acerbic wit; he can be bitchy and cutting.  There is more than a bit of Wystan in him, as well as Britten.  The dark stuff of destruction and corruption is never far away. 

The Habit of Art is currently playing at the National Theatre with Richard Griffiths as Fitz playing Auden and Alex Jennings as Henry playing Britten.

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Richard Eyre summed up the qualities of good actors.  They must be conscious of themselves but not self conscious.  They must be narcissistic on stage, but humble off it, they must live the role but then forget it.  They must have a perfect balance of good sense and warmth, rationalism and emotion.  They must captivate their audience, but then become anonymous. They must create empathy in people’s minds and leave.  They should feel the part, but never try to go beyond the feeling.

Courage is essential to a good actor, death to a bad one.  Actors must present a buoyancy of spirit even though their heart may be breaking.  Eyre described finding Ralph Richardson looking glum after rehearsal. He asked him why. He replied ‘Oh dear boy, I just learnt today that my brother has burnt to death, but’, he added thoughtfully, ‘there’s one consolation; it can’t happen again.’ 

Actors must learn to contain their emotions, avoid being too worried about their performance, work as a team and but never imagine they are the play. It’s a route that runs close to madness. The psychotic actor, seduced by celebrity and fame, can imagine that they are the stage, upon which others play out their emotions.   

It seems to me that acting is not too different to psychotherapy.  The effective  psychotherapist enters the clients world sufficiently to set up a confident and trusting therapeutic relationship  They have to understand, empathise and be compassionate, yet maintain a detachment. It’s a delicate balance that cannot be prescribed, only felt. The quality of any therapy depends on the quality of that engagement. Like the actor in relationship with the character, the therapist must maintain an observing, intelligent mind. They must not descend into their client’s abyss, they must remain on the brink, in communication, connected, yet able to see the possibilities of freedom. There is no redemption, no rescue, if both get lost.

But doesn’t the same principle apply to all relationships?  We are, after all, social creatures. We need to engage with other people but we must not become them. The joy of human relationships is that we bring our independent selves to any relationship, creating the possibility of insight, growth and the joy of discovery. Merger may seem like stability, security, but it’s stagnation.  We mustn’t seek to confine others with bonds of obligation and dependancy. 

But what of falling in love; that wonderful delusion of discovering ourselves in the other?  Therein lies a madness; a suspension of reality in the service of the dreadful seduction of the feeling.  People can fall in love with falling in love and often do. They can be completely lost in the abyss unless they maintain the observing eye of the director that can see how the play could work out. But what would happen if they fell in love with the director?     

And what about actors who play the same character for years on the radio or in television soap operas?  Norman Painter, who played Phil Archer, died last week aged 86. Three days previously, he had recorded an episode for November. He had said he wanted to die in the role. So had he become Phil Archer?. Therapy too can go on forever. The patient may get out of the abyss into the therapist’s safe house, only to find herself unable to leave. Many couples persuade themselves and others that they are in love forever. So why can this seem so boring?  Have I just become an old cynic?      

Afterwards, finding Sir Richard alone with a glass of wine, I explored the idea that  directors combine the characteristics of therapists and actors.  They work with the company as well as the play, coaxing the correcting nuance out of the actors, calming their insecurities, interpreting plot and character.  In this God-like status, I added, warming to my argument, was there not a danger that they could become the stage, upon which others play out their emotions, like the charismatic conductor of a symphony orchestra?  Perhaps I had gone too far. Eyre looked alarmed. He replied, somewhat huffily, that he never analysed what he was doing; it was intuitive.  In any case, the director is not the stage. The plays the stage.  A-ah!  I could have pursued this, but at that point, some ‘lovies’ came to the rescue and I departed, stage left!

Sir Thomas Beecham was immensely narcissistic, but he recognized the knowledge and talent of his musicians and did not attempted to impose his will  on the orchestra, merely guide it.

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The talk over the long breakfast table at 22 York Street was about other wars; Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe; brutal, unwinnable, neverending wars.  There have been 250 major wars since the end of the second world war and over 23 million people have been killed. But why? Who really understands why we are fighting in Afghanistan or why we really went to war in Iraq?  Bush’s war against terrorism is a tautology. War against terrorism is like war against war!  It doesn’t make any sense.  And there are no winners in this war. It’s war for the sake of war; completely futile. Nobody gains the moral high ground. We were shocked by the atrocities committed by our boys (and girls) at Abu Graib prison, but why? Of course our troops would commit atrocities as much as the enemy.  It has always been so.  Frightened people do the most awful things.  And war degrades humanity; murder, theft, rape and destruction becomes a way of life.  Soldiers become inured to feeling. It’s dog eat dog.  When the Duke of Wellington inspected his troops in the Peninsular War, he was heard to comment,  ‘I don’t know what they do to the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.  But it’s not only the enemy that is injured, mutilated and killed, it’s innocent civilians as well.  And there are always people like Mother Courage, ready to make a quick buck out of it all.    

The attendant at Anish Kapoor’s exhibition, a young man from Bosnia, said that many people had been offended.  Every twenty seconds, a cannot shoots a pellet of soft red wax across the room through an archway to splatter against the war of the next room.  Kapoor claims not to have any preconception of the meaning of his work, but you really don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to understand how it uses sexual metaphor to explore he brutality of war.  The large erect penis shooting its bloody  ejaculate through the doorway, stains the virgin-pure white walls of the Royal Academy, leaving a large crimson mark, that resembles brutalized female genitalia. Blood stained labia enclose the gaping wound like a scream, and the matter that slithers from that gruesome gash forms a mound, which winds like a crimson glacier, from the dead, white, empty womb. It is a shocking, yet compelling image.  The twenty minute beat of the cannon will continue until January.  By that time the Academy will be awash with blood. 

Fiona Shaw is brilliant as the feisty, calculating, yet  indomitable Mother Courage; a woman with balls!   The play, like war itself, is unrelenting in its dark brutality, the music by Duke Special and his band, a thumping accompaniment.  It is wonderful performance that shocks and disturbs.  Anish Kapoor’s exhibition is at The Royal Academy until January.  It is art on a big scale, shocking and impressive.  22 York Street is in Alastair Sawday’s book.  It provides an interesting and enjoyable stay just off Baker Street and within easy access to the west end. The long curved breakfast table with abundant coffee and a variety of fruits, cereals, croissants, pastries and preserves, is conducive to conversation.  By yourself in London?  What a good way to start the day, even if all the talk is about war!

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Phedre can no longer contain her passion.  She encounters Hippolytus ever day and the thought of him propels her into a torment of lust and guilt.  She hides herself away from the all revealing God of the sun, she becomes ill, tries to take her own life; anything to get Hippolytus out of her mind. 

Then news from Athens announces that Theseus is  dead.  Phedre was suddenly free to express her desires, claim her prize.  But Hippolytus recoils in shock;  he is already in love with Aricia, but  just as Phedre reveals the full extent of her lust, Theseus arrives, very much alive.   

Terrified of Theseus wrath, Phedre allows her husband to believe that Hippolytus has raped her.  Theseus is furious; he evokes the assistance of Neptune to destroy his son.

Neptune does his bidding.  Hippolytus is attacked by a sea monster on the beach as he races to marry Aricia.  His chariot is destroyed and he is trampled by his own horses.  Aricia drags the sack containing the bloodied corpse into Theseus’ presence, who is stricken by grief.  Phedre appears, having swallowed a lethal dose of poison.  She admits Hippolytus’ innocence and dies.   

It’s another night of entertainment and adventure at the Odeon.  Life in a giant tub of popcorn!

Falling in love is the most dangerous thing any of us can ever do.  The power of lust makes us so vulnerable to annihilation through exposure, exploitation and abandonment.   Fearful lovers protect themselves from the appalling risks in many ways; denial, deception, disregard, infidelity and rejection.   Pretending not to care, flirting with others to evoke jealousy, playing hard to get are all games lovers play to stay in control of their passions.   Phedre just took it to lethal proportions.  Terrified of her husband’s rage, she was prepared to sacrifice her lover and his son. 

Great passion is a game of life and death. The Gods understood it and were not averse to a little interference.  Hormones, the chemicals that mediate emotional responses in the body, are named from the Greek word eremonos, meaning messengers from the Gods.

Phedre, starring Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper,  is currently playing at the National Theatre, but on June 25^th it went global and was beamed by satellite from the South Bank to cinemas around the country and across the world.

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