What major historical events do you remember?
I have always been interested in what is going on in the world. Actually, let me qualify that. I am no longer interested in what is going on in the world because the world is such a depressing place at the moment. As a child, however, I was taught that it was vital to keep up to date.
I do remember one event from 1971 with a large amount of clarity, Decimalisation came into effect on February 15, which was called Decimal Day. That was when the UK switched from Pounds Shillings and Pence (20 shillings to the pound and 12 pence to the shilling meaning we could calculate in a base of 240) to Pounds and New Pence (with 100 pence in the pound, a much easier base for calculation). There was a programme called Decimal Five which introduced the concept. I loved the theme tune, and recalled it instantly when I heard it again, which was not unusual for me at the time as I was starting to get used to TV, but I was also interested in the content because it was going to affect my pocket money! At school we were taught to use both systems so we were ahead of the game in a sense.
I was watching the adult news fairly regularly from the age of about 7 and not long after that John Craven’s Newsround started. It’s first programme went out on April 4 1972, and I hardly ever missed a bulletin as I was growing up. The way that the news was communicated to us was straightforward, serious but completely accessible. At times John would explain that although things seemed bad we shouldn’t worry unduly about these frightening events. The contrast between the sensationalist, deliberately confrontational and shallow adult news of today and this jewel in the crown of British TV could not be greater. Today’s journalists should be made to watch old episodes to remind them what their jobs are actually about!
One of the most significant backdrops to the early 1970s were the Troubles in Northern Ireland involving the IRA. They were scary times, but whenever an attack took place Newsround explained the context and the effects in instantly accessible terms, removing the confusion we often felt and reducing our worries. It was public service television at its greatest and I genuinely believe that John Craven’s Newsround is the most important programme ever produced for children. Here is a great example of the programme from December 6 1973. Listen to the brilliant language use that made this so easy to understand.
A final memory comes from 1974, the year of two elections. In February, a month before my 9th birthday, we had an election in the UK called by Ted Heath’s Conservative Party (a vastly different organisation from today’s party) and my school St Andrew’s had a mock election with candidates, manifestos and a hustings where the candidates for each party put forward their positions on a range of issues and answered questions from other pupils. It totally fascinated me and when the election was held, ending in minority government by Harold Wilson’s Labour Party with support from Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal Party I was already a political animal! As an aside, the Conservative Party won the St Andrew’s mock election by a landslide, perhaps unsurprisingly in a private school where many of the parents were quite rich! Here is a very good review of the events from Politicoteacher
What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to?
The premise of this prompt seems to be that you will just dive into a situation and have no real plan or idea, just hope for the best. The approach needed is the one my wife has taken throughout our time together. You need to calculate all the possibilities and look at whether you can recover if your risk doesn’t work out.
The perfect example is my decision to quit full time work, which I have posted about frequently on here. I never thought it would be possible, and I was worried that it would be too big a risk. Janet sat down and calculated both best case and worst case scenarios. She put all of the calculations on paper, and she looks at the calculations every month or so to ensure that things are still on track. The result has been that I have been able to do something that seems to be very risky, particularly to some on the outside, but which is absolutely right for my physical and mental health. If Janet had said at any point that I would not be able to give up year round work then that would have been that.
Our entire married life has worked on that basis with me suggesting ‘big picture’ ideas and Janet analysing them. We spent 3 years in Japan with small children. I did a degree in Australia and Janet calculated the amount of money it would cost. It was just possible so I did it but that was definitely a big financial risk right there. We had to look at whether it would pay off down the track, which it did to some extent, but to take into account the precarious nature of EFL and EAP teaching which proved to be very useful.
At every point we knew what we would have to give up to make things work. I had to give up drinking alcohol and we had to give up going out for evenings together in order to keep the finances under control for about 7 years in total. Always know what you are going to have to give up to make something work, otherwise a risk could end up being a disaster.
So, take those risks but never fail to calculate them and be sensible about which of them you can actually embark on in the knowledge that you are cushioned from the worst effects of the risk back firing.
The Marylebone Theatre
The first thing to say about Saturday’s visit to the theatre was how fantastic the whole space was. The Marylebone Theatre is just a few minutes from Baker Street station, as long as you don’t walk in the wrong direction as we did! (Give me a paper map anytime!) It is very intimate with just over 200 seats, which have decent legroom and are very comfortable, especially compared to some of the older theatres made for shorter people back in the day! There’s even a lovely and very tempting bookshop in the same building which I highly recommend. It is the type of theatre that really deserves the support of the play going public, especially when it puts on plays like this.
The Play
The Wanderers is written by Anna Ziegler, the creator of Photograph 51 which my wife and I saw on the strength of Nicole Kidman’s presence. For those who don’t follow my theatre reviews, I have mentioned before that we tend to choose plays based on who is in them, because that way you get a far more varied and surprising range of theatre to enjoy. After this play, I will also be looking for anything by Anna Ziegler as she is a modern day great of the theatre in my opinion. She wrote this play as two plays originally, neither of which really satisfied her, but when she found a way to combine the two she was able to create a fascinating, multi-layered piece of theatre that requires the audience to engage on a deep level. The story revolves around Abe, a novelist who is trying to navigate his identity both online and offline. He is a person who both rejects and is shaped by his religious upbringing. His partner, Sophie, is dealing with her own issues of navigating her role as a mother and a professional within a culture that says you can have it all but doesn’t really explain how. Abe seems to some extent oblivious to her problems, and in this you see the first connection with his father, Schmuli, whose relationship with his wife Esther takes place in a very traditional religious community, which has very clear ideas of what roles a husband and wife must take. It is the relationship, that Abe is writing as the subject of his next book, perhaps as a novel rather than a biography, allowing for artistic licence and Abe’s requirement for keeping a distance between himself and his past. That’s how I saw it, and the beauty of this play is that each person will take something different from it in terms of the story or the meaning. Into this quartet of restricted, if not trapped, people comes Julia, an actress who sat in the front row of Abe’s recent reading, and whose correspondence with him after that drives his thoughts, his actions and his relationship with Sophie. The fact that the play was written in 2016 and features an email correspondence is very important because it means that both sides have that distance that allows initially for mild flirtation, but which also encourages the increasingly deep connection and increasingly risky reflections Abe shares with Julia regarding his relationship with Sophie. Will Abe pull back from the thoughts he is having before it starts risking his family’s happiness? Ziegler’s writing does not seek or encourage easy answers and the audience is challenged at every turn to think about what is happening, what it means and what they might do in that situation.
The Cast
Alex Forsyth plays Abe, the novelist at the centre of the web of connections that define this play. It is a performance that constantly wrongfoots the audience. On occasions you feel real sympathy for his plight, at other times you are irritated by his cavalier approach to those closest to him. The performance allows you to feel both, but to never settle on a particular point of view. It is a subtle portrayal of someone who could come across as self obsessed and unlikeable. Through Forsyth’s portrayal, Abe is someone who escapes that pigeonhole, but he is never a person you fully root for.
Eddie Toll as Schmuli, Abe’s father, navigates an even trickier role with real skill. In other hands Schmuli would be the play’s villain, an apparently fanatical and unyielding follower of his religion and its edicts, but Toll brings out the moments of confusion, despair and real tenderness with subtlety and beauty. He is trapped like many others of his time, and indeed nowadays, by a very powerful hierarchy that simplifies life by reducing it to a series of unbendable rules. The turning point of the relationship, where his wife Esther openly questions her role as simply a child bearer, sets in motion a chain of events that are shocking and which show a side of Schmuli that is just as shocking as the events themselves. That you don’t entirely lose sympathy for him is a testament to a multi layered performance.
Esther is played by Katerina Tannenbaum. If you have ignored the critics, which you really should, and watched ‘And Just Like That’ , you may recognise her as Carrie’s downstairs neighbour Lisette. Let me rephrase that. You may recognise the name and connect it to the programme but you will definitely not connect Lisette to Esther at any level. Esther is first seen as the nervous bride of Schmuli, trying to elicit a human reaction from him on the day of their marriage. It is a deeply sad scene that lays the path for the problems ahead. On the face of it, Esther is the only truly sympathetic character in the play. However, Tannenbaum does not shy away from showing her darker motives and her lack of understanding for Schmuli’s predicament. Her coldness towards him in one of the later scenes verges on the brutal. Although we may sympathise with Esther, the audience are left feeling very uncomfortable when she sits their ignoring, or perhaps even secretly enjoying, her husband’s tears.
Sophie played by Paksie Vernon is similar to Esther in that she is unhappy with the restrictions that are put upon her by a society that seems to make things so easy for her partner. She is waspish, sarcastic at times and clearly deeply discontented. Initially she seems to be the most easily understood, or at least the least complex character, but her role in the play’s twist makes you completely reconsider her and her motives. The excellence of the performance is that you are not left questioning where that twist came from, but you mentally work back and realise that it was in relatively plain sight all along. It turns out that Sophie is the person with the most to unpack in terms of her relationship with her upbringing, her history and her partner. The narrative around Sophie is turned on its head and she ends up being the most complex and unknowable character in the play.
Julia, played by Anna Popplewell, is a hugely successful actress who acts as the sounding board to Abe as he tries to search for meaning and explanations as well as solutions to his often self-imposed troubles. It was Anna Popplewell’s presence in the cast that encouraged me to book tickets knowing nothing about the play. Appropriately enough, therefore, her performance glows with star quality both as her character and in terms of her portrayal. She is at once attainable and unattainable, knowable and unknowable, a character that is both words in an email and absolutely a flesh and blood person. Popplewell made you really care about this disruptive presence in Abe’s life, but also made you question why she chose to sit in the front row at a small reading. Was it to entice him? Was it to develop a public persona of intellectual ability? Was it that she simply enjoyed the book? Her waspish wit and her ability to draw out Abe gave her the air of someone who knew Abe before the reading and wanted to get to know him better. The character could have been played as a straightforward Hollywood star, but Anna Popplewell skilfully dug beneath that facade to bring the audience into her world and to sympathise with her problems, cushioned as they were by money.
Final Thoughts
This is the best play I have seen this year. The writing was superb, the performances outstanding, the theatre marvellous and the staging innovative. As well as following the story with its interconnecting narratives, the audience are asked to consider the issues raised deeply in real time. I felt like a participant in the play at times due to the intimacy of the theatre and I had to reflect upon my own reactions at almost every point. It was cerebral theatre of a kind that is rare but very much needed these days. I cannot recommend The Wanderers highly enough.
What are you most proud of in your life?
Rather like ‘lazy days’ the broadly Christian ethos I was brought up in, which covered home, family and society, had more than a few things to say about pride. One of them, much to my surprise is a misquoute. As children in the 1970s we were often told that ‘Pride goes before a fall’ as an admonition. The actual quote is
Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. (Proverbs 16:18)
Despite the omission of the middle part, the basis of the message is pretty much as the original writer intended. You should not take pride in things because it will make you arrogant. Other phrases like ‘blowing your own trumpet’ were similar warnings to people who might take pride in their achievements. In the Services, the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal was routinely referred to as ‘x years of undetected crime’! This was designed to stop recipients getting too boastful. The OBE was also referred to as ‘Other Buggers Efforts’!
So, as you can imagine, the inclination that any child had to take pride in their achievements was frowned upon. I was told, ‘self pride is no recommendation’. The effect is that to this day I avoid feeling too proud of anything I may have achieved, and to look for things I did wrong or could have done better instead. When people are proud of raising their families, which on the face of it seems reasonable, I just think how little influence you actually have on them. If you are proud of their positive achievements and credit your role in that, does it mean that when they do things that are bad that you should then feel ashamed? It is after all the logical conclusion.
So, there you have it. I am instantly suspicious of overt displays of pride from other people, a reason I distrust politicians and managers, and much more likely to react positively to finding out about someone’s achievements. The same goes for me, because for me to take any other position would be hypocritical.
What have you been working on?
My current WIP is focused on the first half of my Blogmas posts. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it’s where you write 24 Christmas themed posts from December 1 to December 24. I did 48 new posts across 2022 and 2023 and linked back to the best of them last year as I was in Australia for half of the period. This year, the blog posts will be based around magazines from 1896 through to 2025. I will be looking at Christmas Magazines as both reflectors and shapers of the British Christmas over the last 130 years.
Currently, I am working through all the magazines and noting everything that appears in the magazine with any details and the page numbers. I am about halfway through the process and when it has finished I will look at all of my notes and start highlighting common themes and changes in those themes across the years.
Some of the magazines are big enough to require 5 pages of notes, and others just 2, but this is a vital part of the process. Until I can identify commonalities and contrasts throughout those years I can’t start to structure the posts properly and I can’t analyse them effectively. It’s a fascinating project and I think it will make a fascinating set of posts.
I hope you will find the series interesting from a number of perspectives, personal and social.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 