On Desert Island Discs, that musical Who's Who of the British ruling classes, last week's guest was the veteran Establishment antiestablishmentarian, Tariq Ali. In a charming programme Ali - now in his early sixties - rebutted the idea that he was anything other than a dangerous dissident. He had been fighting for things to get better for 40 years or more, but added that, in his view, they had got much worse.
This being a polite show, he wasn't asked the obvious next question - why had he been such a failure? But it was put to him that his decision to give up activist politics and go into writing for already converted minorities had been something of a surrender. Not at all, he replied, the circulation of the London Review of Books (one of his regular forums) had risen. Given the great speeches involving arming the working class, it was, in the original sense of the word, a pathetic reply.
The next day, Monday, March 17, was both the 40th anniversary of the battle of Grosvenor Square, in which Tariq-inspired anti-Vietnam war protesters attempted to break into the US Embassy, and the first preview night at the National Theatre of Never So Good, the latest play by Howard Brenton, a sometime collaborator with Ali in the production of satires. One of these, early in Tony Blair's premiership, featured as characters Tony-boy, Cherry-pop, Gordon Macduff and the spin doctors, Polly Mendacity and Charlie Farrago. Another took aim at the Kosovo War, and a third at the treatment by Blair of Ken Livingstone. The authors, said one critic, “luxuriate in their dislike of new Labour”.
Arguing that “we need new forms of resistance”, Ali and Brenton, with the actor-writer Andy de la Tour, established an informal group, which they called Stigma, whose job it would be to “challenge the insolence, the stupidity, the clichés and cadences of contemporary politics”. Adding, in classic pre-emption: “If more than a few critics ever like our work, we will be duty-bound to ask ourselves where we went wrong.”
Brenton, once described by an American newspaper as “raging, singing, embracing, mocking what is shoddy in the world around him”, was already best known by the cliché-ridden world as something of a “firebrand”. His 1980 play, The Romans in Britain, an allegory of Britain's treatment of Ireland, became famous because of Mary Whitehouse's unsuccessful legal reaction to a scene of male rape. Pravda, his anti-Rupert Murdoch play, in which Anthony Hopkins preshadowed his Hannibal Lecter while playing a colonial tycoon, was regarded by the Left as a brilliant depiction of the decline of journalistic values in the “Gotcha!” era.
Since one of Brenton's obvious objectives at this stage was to try to change things very radically, it was something of a double-edged compliment when his collaborator and fellow playwright David Hare said of him that he was “one of the most genuinely genial, pleasant, funny, relaxed people you could ever hope to meet” and that therefore it was stupid for anyone to write that Brenton was out to destroy society.
So, here we have the left-wing firebrand Brenton, and here we have Never So Good. And who is its hero? Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. This is, to say the least, an unlikely period of British history in which to situate a drama - the middle of the anti-heroic interregnum between Attlee and Thatcher, which is largely forgotten, save as a long moment of decline. Resurrecting Macmillan - who is being played here by Jeremy Irons - is even more unlikely than reviving Harold Wilson. For a “firebrand” to do it is extraordinary. For him to make it a sympathetic biography is - on the face of it - so unexpected, it is worth celebrating.
In a small room at the National Theatre Brenton, tall, substantial, red-cheeked and smiley, occupied the small couch and told me how Never So Good had come about. “It began with the idea that I must write about the Tory Party. I'd done so many scruffy satires over the years being rude about the Labour Party. I thought I must find a way of writing about the Right.” So he began to look at the career of Macmillan, who entered Downing Street as Brenton entered adolescence. “When I was young, Macmillan was everything that was terrible about the country; old, out of date, complacent, Etonian, upper-class - everything we loathed. I began it quite aggressively.”
But Brenton then read Macmillan's unpublished hand-written diaries in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and he changed his mind. “I got seduced by him really, I began to really admire him - his perseverance, his endurance, and he was moral.” Macmillan became “a beloved enemy”.
There is one way of explaining the paradox of the leftwinger who finds himself liking Macmillan. Supermac was a patrician, onenation Tory. “He had a social-democratic edge,” Brenton said. In the interwar period Macmillan had wanted the Stock Exchange abolished and National Investment Boards set up, “almost like the Soviet Union!” Later on, as Lord Stockton, Macmillan accused Margaret Thatcher of “selling the family silver” through privatisation.
In that sense Macmillan can represent the prelapsarian world before globalisation and deregulation, a world mourned in its departure by Alan Bennett's hugely successful History Boys. It is a place where it is possible for the old Left to be as nostalgic as the old Right for what it has lost, and for them to jointly mourn the depradations of Thatcher, Blair, Clinton and Bush.
But if this is partly true, it contains a terrible irony for those whose politics were formed in the Ali-ite and Brenton-ite late 1960s. The world of Macmillan was precisely the world that they wished to destroy, and in their agitation they arguably helped to usher in the worse world some of them now believe they inhabit. This point is made in Brenton's new play when Macmillan begins to realise the gravity of the Profumo scandal and believes that prurient fascination in the lives of individuals will render the country ungovernable. “He couldn't deal with new mores,” Brenton said.
Yet it was hard not to see Brenton as a man who - unlike Ali - has made another journey. This isn't quite the classic one of moving rightwards, as self-described by the American playwright David Mamet last month. Brenton's 1976 play Weapons of Happiness, about a victim of Stalinism, was, he now says, “a warning to the Left, that we must face what is going on in Czechoslovakia, what was happening in the Soviet Union, and back then the Left wasn't facing it”. At the time he was criticised by many comrades. “Why bring up all the bad? It's a mind-set we all get into - there's something horrendously tribal about politics sometimes. It ends up with people trying to kill people and imprisoning them.” Now the heirs to those who criticised Brenton try to deflect criticism of President Ahmadinejad or Hamas, just as some formerly did for the attacks on the Soviet Union. “Our” real enemy, of course, being George Bush and the neocons.
“It became a history play,” Brenton told me. “Saying how does this work? How do they perceive the world? It's not a satire. Satire is an unfair thing, deliberately so. It's really there to encourage the troops. I've had fun doing that, doing late-night squibs with Tariq Ali and doing Pravda with David [Hare]. Satires simplify in a cartoon-like way and can” - this is a long and doubtful “can” - “cut into some issues. But a history play gets into what things are actually like. In fact,” he laughed, “writing this play has probably stopped me writing satires for ever. I think I've done my bit, being rude on the barricades.”
He reflected. “You become 65, you begin to think about first and last things more and Macmillan's career was killed, he wanted to die of cancer, but he didn't. It was that bad. Do you understand what I'm talking about, that someone comes to power and they can't do anything?”
I certainly understand that it is an odd thing for an anti-Establishment writer to worry about, and that Brenton has become something else. Something more interesting. It is the character of Macmillan himself, his predicament - and that of the age - which has captured Brenton. Macmillan had, in Brenton's view, “an almost metaphysical grasp of the fragility of human affairs”.
And this has given Brenton an insight into the nature of democratic politicians and leaders. “You think they're ironclad in there, but they're not; they're near panic a lot of the time. And you ask yourself: ‘Do you get a better age than this? Do you get better people than this?'”
Ali would, I guess, say a resounding yes, and might even point at Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Instead, Howard Brenton, who once wrote an anti-Thatcher satire provisionally entitled Ditch the Bitch, ended our interview by telling me that Never So Good, far from being a biting attack on the British ruling classes and their disastrous mismanagement of a nation, “is like an apology from my generation, who spat upon this, one of the greatest Prime Ministers we've ever had.”
Blimey.
Never So Good is at the National Theatre (020-7452 3000; www.nationaltheatre.org.uk)
Whatever the left-right differences of the late 1950s/early 1960s, by the mid-1970s Thatcherite rightists who would become dominant for some years, were scathing about Macmillan and his works, seeing in him the personification of what went wrong. Their intensification of deindustrialisation, whereas he had respected working class concerns since WW1, and also privatisation on a scale that he described as "like selling the family silver", by the mid-1980s had many genuine leftwingers respecting Macmillan. He was no cultural philistine either, quite something in the 1980s.
So you can see all this as ironical, but life and politics are thick with ironies and contradictions, and all sorts of people and events are interpreted, reinterpreted, and get reinterpreted yet again according to changing times and the balance of forces. Not to be confused with turncoating.
Anyway, this play is interesting, well performed, enjoyable and will have people thinking.
Pete, NW London,
All too often writers and artists just re-present their own prejudices and preconcieved notions. Although on the face of it Brenton appears to be questioning his own assumptions it does not follow that he has actually "seen" anything of real significance. Lack of enquiry and mental indolence are the hallmarks of art today. At least David Mamet has has come face to face with himself and realised he has been fooling himself all these years.
Bob, Faversham, UK
Having invited Tariq Ali onto the prgramnme, I wonder if the BBC will now feature Nick Griffin of the British National Party on "Desert Island Discs ?"
Or do they only invite hypocritical extremists who share their own far-left views and privileged backgrounds ?
Peter West, Orihuela, Spain