by The culture wars are dead. At least, that’s what Lisa Nandy thinks. In her first speech as our new Culture Secretary, delivered to staff at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Nandy declared that “Britons have found many ways to separate ourselves”, and that she planned to serve the country three together “to celebrate and promote the diversity and rich heritage of our communities and the people in them”.
This speech is hardly getting on with someone who is now responsible for repairing a broken sector of the British economy, and who would do better to prove his worth with some sensible proposals, such as arranging visas for UK artists and return arts subjects to the heart of Ireland. the National Curriculum. Most cultural practitioners already lean on the Left, and would have endorsed the above words long before she said them, so there is little hollowness.
Nandy, however, is too optimistic about the culture wars. Last week, it was reported in The Stage that Restoration comedy would no longer be on the curriculum at Rada; despite being a vital part of our “rich heritage”, it seems to me that the people of Britain’s most famous drama school have given it no more than a brief description. A 2020 student proposal document, for example, describes Restoration comedy as “a particularly conservative (very bright, very period) form” – and while the bit in parentheses is obviously true, it’s I think these young barbers are wrong about his conservatives. nature.
Restoration comedy is certainly difficult. The language may seem funny, the plots overly cheesy, and the humor simply unfunny. That’s also true of some of Shakespeare’s comedies, of course, and I don’t see anyone trying to dismiss Much Ado About Nothing. I sometimes feel that the problem with works like The Country Wife (William Wycherley) and The Way of the World (William Congreve) is that people are obsessed with the history of acting from the mid to late 20th century, which I often say. suffer like a child: theses fruit-voice confronting the audience as if we understand every innovation of humor, and without properly considering the psychology of the story.
But Restoration humor is interesting. Unlike one of those Magic Eye posters that adorned the walls of student halls in the 1990s, you have to look hard to appreciate it, but the process can be very rewarding.
A brilliant production such as Nicholas Hytner’s take on George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, staged at the National Theater in 2007 with Rory Kinnear and Nancy Carroll, played the narcissism and masculinity of the play to devastating effect. Indeed, although misogyny is almost always rampant in the plays of this period, the playwrights never seem to have forgotten to give women humor or strength. Congreve is particularly good: characters such as the heiress Millamant in The Way of the World rise above dubious plot lines with understanding and intelligence.
There is a tendency to assume that Restoration humor is creaky, preserved in aspic, and therefore difficult to recast for any age other than its own. This is also wrong: the genre has been extremely appropriate for the past 60 years. The sexual honesty and adultery of women in works such as The Country Wife struck a chord with those who embraced the permissiveness of the 1960s – it was why the Victorians sought to produce such plays, if they had eager to play them at all – and during the 1980s, it was great fun. He appeared in plays such as Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, which spoke to the decade’s unapologetic acceptance of greed and excess, and no doubt gave left-wing directors the opportunity to stick the boot in Margaret’s free-market economy. Thatcher.
Today, the humor of the Reformation speaks to us again, as we try to find our way through this new era of uncertainty. Britain was a brutal place in the 18th century, full of destructive gossip. As our chief theater critic Dominic Cavendish pointed out last week in his review of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Richard B Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, the play is “immersed inside a bubble society bent on rumours” still to be felt closely.
Because the CSI still sees the value in a work like The School for Scandal, it makes me wonder if Rada’s decision to stop the Restoration comedy is in keeping with our times, rather than a symptom. While the shutters come down among the politically disaffected few, there are signs that others are beginning to tighten their grip on using our literary heritage as some sort of ideological weapon.
Indeed, the arrival of Slave Play in London’s West End is an indication of how the tide may be turning. This 2018 American drama, by Jeremy O Harris, combines a love interest with America’s troubled legacy of slavery. It arrived here with a fair amount of hysteria, often described as the most controversial play of the year. But there is still a strong reaction from British audiences – when this newspaper spoke to punters on the first night, their reaction ranged from vague anger to mild indifference – and many tickets remain unsold. Harris’s play may be less important in the UK anyway, but I suspect it’s also a sign that we’re less willing to engage in polarizing debate.
As for Restoration comics, Rada needs to understand that these plays are in the canon because they are good; they are not included on reading lists to reduce modern teenagers to hot angry tears. But still the young people rage. Lisa Nandy seems to have her work cut out for her.
