Close the Coalhouse Door

There's a tunnel being dug from the past to the present, and a condemned house is restored to life for two and a half hours. This is to give away just one of the conceits in Lee Hall's revision of Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow's Sid Chaplin-inspired musical Close the Coalhouse Door, first staged in 1968, and now again playing in Newcastle, at Northern Stage and produced by Northern Stage and Live Theatre. Director Samuel West has assembled a cast of all-rounders who can all, in the idiom of the period of the play's birth, hold down a chord. West himself emerged on to the stage at the play's opening to introduce himself and musical supervisor Sam Kenyon as joint understudies for Tarek Merchant, unable to take on the role of the Expert as he is recovering from the removal of his appendix.

In 1968 the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham were facing uncertainty as the Labour government's rationalisation policy cut a swathe through the collieries; the industry looked likely to be burned away in the white heat of technology, but the coal itself was to remain underground. Song and story relate a hundred and thirty years of history as foundation myth, as prophetic figures such as Thomas Hepburn and Martin Jude point the way towards a present where the pitmen finally share the fruits of their labour; but Utopia is a doubtful achievement, and the celebration of the past is a dubious festivity if it offers no way of taking tradition and effort forward. It's a very twenty-first century comment to make, and most of the characters would have no truck with psychobabble, but Close the Coalhouse Door presents a culture sustained by communities held together and held captive by generations of abuse. The escape offered to the youngest generation of pitmen, represented by brothers John and Frank, by feminist sociology postgraduate Ruth (a compelling performance by Louisa Farrant) leaves one chill given the fate of many of the factories of Teesside and Consett steelworks.

This production still needs some work; the second act needs tightening and the final array of songs could do with breaking up and some disentangling 1968 and 2012. However, on the evidence of tonight's performance this is easily within the competence of everyone involved, and with the rounds of pit closures still uncomfortably within living memory, Newcastle offers an audience who know they are inside the joke. In a period when the pitmen have all but gone from Westminster, and when Britain too often thinks of heavy industry in terms of grassed-over slag heaps, the foundations of our society in the blood and bone behind the coalhouse door deserve this invocation as a reminder of the lives worked and lived and often lost underground, too wretchedly honoured (if one might excuse this reviewer's sentimentality) by the union leaders and politicians of recent decades alike.

Notes from Missing Believed Wiped 2011: 2 - The Mumford Puppets

One of the many attractions of an event such as Missing Believed Wiped is the likelihood that it will draw the viewers' attention to a career and a genre or sub-genre of which they were previously unaware. The first such case this year was that of Frank Mumford. Now 94, he and his late wife Maisie were in great demand as marionette designers and performers during the 1950s and 1960s. Documentary-maker Richard Butchins is currently raising funding for a film about the Mumfords, their puppets, and Frank Mumford's collection of archive film, often from the puppets' television appearances: more details of the project and the archive can be found at An Attic Full of Puppets.

The BFI screening included four short pieces, the first two being advertisements and the second two sequences shot to accompany Burl Ives songs. The two adverts were the most striking: the first, a reminder of a time not so long ago when the British were most likely to consume the exotic alcohol that was wine if its foreignness was mediated through the importer's brand, so a glamorous puppet (Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward's aspirational  middle-class first cousin, three or four times removed) extols the virtues of 'VP wines'. Much of the film can be seen in the video embedded in this post; I make a brief appearance at the front of the BFI audience, a minute and a second in. The second advert showed an elderly male pianist marionette being revived during a performance by the placing of an Empire brand cigarette in his mouth. So near in time to the audience, and (as with Emergency - Ward 9) so far from what is currently socially acceptable.

The remaining two pieces were devised to accompany the playing of Burl Ives records on television. The Doughnut Song, in which the 'old man' puppet becomes a doughnut seller, is the one which lingered longest in the mind, and in the absence of a video of the Mumford Doughnut Song sequence to embed, it is best to leave it to the imagination.

Notes from Missing Believed Wiped 2011: 1 - Emergency - Ward 9

Written by Dennis Potter
Directed by Gareth Davies
BBC 1,  tx 11 April 1966
BFI Southbank, NFT 1, 11 December 2011

It was difficult not to approach Thirty-Minute Theatre: Emergency - Ward 9 without crossing off the Dennis Potter checklist. Hospitals? Nostalgia for and revulsion from a lost social order? Old popular music? Fascinated disgust with physical frailty? All present and correct; and the Potter experts will no doubt be able to both qualify and extend that list.

Dennis Potter's script was placed in the directorial hands of Gareth Davies, who had brought the two Nigel Barton plays to screen; but Emergency - Ward 9 lacked their claustrophobic sense of personal apocalypse. For a play broadcast 'Live from Studio 7', as the narration over the Thirty-Minute Theatre title sequence said, it managed several changes of tone which were reminders that the path to great work doesn't necessarily lie through the editing suite. The path of the Free Church lay preacher Padstow takes him from professedly openhearted Christian to a man hiding behind closed eyes and folded hands, frantically praying as his ears are assailed by profanities issuing from Hell. The audience is left unsettled - having been introduced to them as a figure of reassurance, Padstow ends up unanchored and adrift amidst bored medical personnel of varying levels of enthusiasm, devotion to duty, competence and humanity, his belief in his own skills at navigating the oceans of sociability and society undermined. The title tilts at the romantic heroism of ATV's soap opera Emergency - Ward Ten; in Potter's world the best we can do is to fall a whole number short of our ideals.

Kenith Trodd, story editor of Thirty-Minute Theatre at the time and producer of much of Potter's later television work, introduced the BFI screening with the warning that the audience might experience 'psychic shock', and recalled that at the time the play was broadcast The Black and White Minstrel Show was considered unexceptionable family entertainment for viewers of BBC1, the same channel which broadcast Thirty-Minute Theatre. There were gasps and nervous laughter at the racist opinions, assumptions and language of the overtalkative and undereducated Flanders, performed with appallingly compelling pathos by Terence de Marnay, and at the use of recordings of old popular songs supposedly representing the lives of African-Americans - 'nigger music'. These emphasised the way the presence of prosperous black businessman Adzola (Dan Jackson) disturbed the ward; this is interpreted primarily through the colour prejudice which the play depicts as endemic among the majority population.

Potter is interested in a broad spectrum of postwar social anxiety. The elements of Padstow could probably be found among the preachers of Potter's Forest of Dean childhood, as could Flanders; but in that context Adzola would only be understood as the beneficiary of missionary charity and evangelism. Flanders's belief that Adzola, an immigrant, is stealing the National Health Service which he fought for is depressingly familiar to the viewers of forty-five years later. The aftermath of the scalding of Flanders by Adzola, in response to Flanders addressing him as Sambo ("I thought all niggers was called Sambo..." Flanders weeps, recalling the reassuring picture books about children of the world he was shown at school), sees Padstow attempt to apologise on behalf of Flanders, but this expression of compassion is itself based upon social assumptions which are outdated - Adzola is a successful businessman, proud of his achievements, and utterly contemptuous of the ignorant 'working man' epitomised for him by Flanders. Padstow's faith has survived a death on the ward - the nearest the 'Old Man' gets to last rites are impertinent comments from Flanders, and routine bodywash from a disinterested nurse - but it is visibly rocked here. Tenniel Evans's Padstow was lost and confused in the face of this rejection of his compassion; in the end Padstow and Flanders might not be reconciled, but they recognise each other as familiar types in a changed world.

Thanks to The Television Plays and Serials of Dennis Potter.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - seven years on

Last week saw the seventh anniversary of the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and also the publication of a further online update featuring entries on 106 individuals new to the dictionary and three new reference groups which help readers navigate between subjects who were members of groups or involved in particular historical junctures. Lawrence Goldman, editor of the ODNB, has as usual added a new preface highlighting some of the new entries. Despite my credit as associate research editor I've not been involved with this release beyond a few minor corrections to older articles. Early favourites among the new entries (and currently available free online) include the architect Warren Chalk (1927-1987) whose proposals included a plan for an underwater city in 1964 and who with his colleagues published one issue of their magazine Archigram in comic strip form; James Maxwell (1838-1893) and Charles Tuke (1843-1893), whose firm designed the Blackpool Tower; actors Sabu (1924-1963) and Nina McKinney (1912-1967); Joseph Barnes (1549/50-1618), printer to the University of Oxford (and thus a leading subject of another research project with which I'm connected, The History of Oxford University Press); and two mediaeval women of high status and dynastic influence, though five centuries apart: Eadgyth (c.911-946), daughter of Edward the Elder and queen of the East Franks; and Jacquetta de Luxembourg (c.1416-1472), a French noblewoman who became aunt by marriage to Henry VI of England, and then mother-in-law to Edward IV.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has participated in and influenced the growing interest in using the personalities of individuals or groups to illuminate the history of locations or pivotal incidents and through those individual lives place them in wider social contexts. Friends who recently visited Belsay Hall and Castle in Northumberland spoke enthusiastically of the personality of Sir Charles Monck (1779-1867) [ODNB article available to subscribers only, including most public libraries in the UK and Ireland], who designed and built the present hall, which pleased me given that Monck was one of my own additions to the dictionary, and his profile has increased at Belsay in recent years. Likewise archaeological investigations at Wallington Hall, a National Trust property a short distance from Belsay, established the connection between the present house and the home of the Fenwick family, the last of whom to live there was the Restoration courtier Sir John Fenwick (c.1644-1697) [ODNB article available to subscribers only, as above], beheaded for his role in the Assassination plot against William III. Fenwick's career in the service of the House of Stuart and the ultimately overwhelming encroachments made on his inherited property by the mercantile Blackett dynasty illustrate the dynamics of national politics and regional economics in seventeenth-century north-east England.

Living still

It's been a very long time since I posted here. I am still busy writing two chapters for the History of Oxford University Press, as well as having other assignments, but intend to return with book reviews shortly.

In the meantime, I have written something about the actress Elisabeth Sladen (1946-2011) for the Doctor Who fanzine Panic Moon, which can be ordered from its site.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: September 2010 update

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is six years old, and has today published its eighteenth online update. Over a hundred new subjects include a special focus on 'black Britons, 1700-2000' such as prominent London gang-member Ann Duck (bap. 1717 d. 1744), slavery abolitionist and magician Henry Brown (b.c.1815 d. in or after 1878) and nightclub proprietor Ola Dosunmu (1914-1991?) . There are also eight new reference group articles, part of an online series designed to help readers find their way around the dictionary. These include my own contribution on the Foxite whigs, the political followers of Charles James Fox (1749-1806) who were generally more glamorous and notorious than those of Fox's great rival William Pitt the Younger. Other new subjects include Yvonne Fletcher, killed during the protest at the Libyan people's bureau in London in 1984; Jewish scholar Israel Abrahams (1858-1925); eighteenth-century grocer and neglected London policing pioneer Saunders Welch (1711-1784); and Nica de Koenigswarter (1913-1988), patron of the jazz musician Thelonious Monk. There's also a king, Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho (d. 1996). Robert Fabian (1901-1978), Scotland Yard's real life 'ace detective' of the 1930s and 1940s turned television personality in the 1950s series Fabian of the Yard is also added.

Editor Lawrence Goldman's online preface can be read here. Some of the new content is available to read for free, but most of it is behind a paywall; however, most of those in the UK reading this should be able to access the online dictionary through their public library's subscription and remote access service.

The Learned Press

I spent the last two days amidst fellow-contributors to The History of Oxford University Press at Keble College, Oxford. This event was described most determinedly by general editor Simon Eliot as 'not a conference', although the intention - and effect - was that we should confer with each other in formal and informal ways. As a relatively recent recruit, compared to most, I lacked the benefits of long-term exposure to the various channels of communication the project has set up, but left able to put more faces to names and with more of the pathways within and between volumes explored. Multi-authored scholarly work in the humanities faces the challenge of overcoming the often necessary solitude of research and composition, but this meeting reminded us that bridges had been put in place which we contributors could cross. The attendees who thronged Keble's JCR and Pusey Room came from overlapping theatres of academic expertise and varieties of personal and professional histories with OUP. There is still some distance to travel before the four volumes are available on shelves (we had the opportunity to consider what the books might actually look like) but (to extend yet another metaphor) maps have been compared and features common to adjoining territories of printing, bookselling, publishing and educational history surveyed, and (to cross further into contrivance) we know better the contents of each other's backpacks.