From this northern fastness, it's easy
to miss goings-on in the rest of the world. During previous
Edinburgh festival seasons, I almost failed to notice the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the attempted Soviet coup the following
year. I might have remained oblivious to the arrest of two dozen
alleged would-be plane-bombers this month had I not been due to travel
by air that day. Obviously it verges on the ridiculous that such
major events might fail to penetrate our Festival goldfish bowl.
Any reviewer worth his salt has to be aware of the wider world, and
where required to judge a work against that background. But when
is it required, and conversely when might it be counter-productive to
introduce it?
Quentin Letts’ review of
The Last
Five Years is surprising and in many ways admirable. From
someone who more usually inveighs against what he sees as modish and
politically correct contemporary political and/or social
considerations, it comes as a bolt from the blue to read a piece
opining that at a time when so many serious events are happening in the
world it simply feels inappropriate to be watching an American
relationship musical.
Integration
This works, I think, because Quentin makes no bones about his
subjectivity. He seldom does, but he is more tentative here than
usual. He is feeling out a relationship between theatre reviewing
and the contents of the rest of the paper, which is normally taken for
granted: for most papers, there is no sense of integration or
obligation whatever, whereas in the
Daily
Mail it can often feel as if Quentin’s reviews (unlike his
predecessors’) are prosecuting the paper’s main British political
agenda by other means. But there are occasions when comment is
called for by a work’s position within the social or political vista.
I don’t think this is such an occasion, to be honest. I think
The Last Five Years can be faulted
on its own terms in a number of ways: its characters, and by
implication its audience, are drawn from a particular New York cultural
milieu (the sort that relishes lyrics such as "I left Columbia and
don't regreddit/I wrote a book and Sonny Mehta read it", Mehta being
editor-in-chief of Alfred A Knopf and a NY cultural icon) which does
not translate well to London, never mind in the context of Middle
Eastern tensions and so on. It’s a self-regarding, culturally
introspective piece of work in absolute terms, not simply relative to
the headlines of the moment. I think the first duty of a reviewer
is to try to pin a work down on its own terms. Those terms will
include social and historical contexts which it explicitly or
consciously links with, not necessarily contexts foisted upon it by
events. After all, escapism is always permissible to a certain
degree. The point isn’t that the escapism of
The Last Five Years is made
culpable by current events, it’s that it is successful only to a
limited degree even at the best of times. Once you’ve sorted that
out, you can then go on to note that this is probably not the best of
times.
Connections
Nevertheless, it is as I say a pleasant surprise to find such
connections being made in the
Mail of
all papers. Now, I wonder whether in the next issue we’ll be
carrying a review of
Medea in
the light of the abolition of the Child Support Agency?
Written for Theatre
Record.