The Big Lie, By Mr Criticulous

Okay, cards on the table time. I don’t believe in the Financial Crisis. Economic theory is like natural selection: I am sure it happens but I can’t explain it. I get my political information from the News In Briefs column in The Sun, and I am not going to trust Sam from Shoreditch, 25, when she tells that David Cameron’s understanding of the Big Society reminds her of Plato’s myth of Er.

I did do some Latin once upon a time and remember one phrase: cui bono? It’s the only question to ask and translates as – what bastard gains from this bullshit? The Financial Crisis seems to be plenty bueno for politicians who fancy making cuts to the arts and benefits, or privatising education. So forgive me my cynicism. The FC is BS.

The way that this Big Lie impacts on me is that theatre companies and visual artists are shitting their pants. Artistic types are prone to melodrama and holidays in other people’s misery: there’s plenty of otherwise creative, intelligent types who still think gritty is a synonym for realism.

Now, I love the arts, and I am prone to a spot of melodrama myself. I’ve dedicated the past five years to it, throwing away a promising career in boring school-children to make an eclectic radio show that celebrates music, dance and culture. But there have been moments – like that month of zero income and I hadn’t eaten for three days, and went to see a show that used hunger as a metaphor for social insecurity – when I want to eat the actor.

My gripe about artists aside, let’s get back to the pant-shitting. The catch-phrase of the artist is that the cuts we are seeing now in state funding are only the start. “Mark my words,” they say, and grimly rub their hands together. “This is only the start.” They are, at least, socially conscious enough to acknowledge that the parallel cuts in the Health Service are worse.

However, as a Platonist and a critic, I am fascinated by the power of illusion. If I wanted to convince the world that there was indeed a sudden shortage of money, I’d start off by cutting the funding of the arts, quickly followed by education. My cursory knowledge of Shelley dredges up something about artists as the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, an idea that I have clung to as my career ship in criticism has sunk below the waves of debt. I reason that art is so important that the writer, in their role of companion, advocator and supportive critic, is part of a cycle that contributes to human development. The artists help to shape the world. In my fantasy, where I am trying to make the world believe that there is no money left for them after I bought my second house in the Scottish Highlands, I’d take all the money away from the artists and make them struggle. I know enough about artists to know their art reflects their life.

And so it works a treat. Plays are written about the economic downtown. Conceptualists grapple with intellectual poverty. Of course, it doesn’t translate into mass panic – too few people really engage with the arts – but the people who do fancy a nice night out at the theatre or an opening at The Market Gallery are plunged into the creative expression of financial despair. If these are the people who make TV shows, participate in democracy, hold together management structures: well, it’s enough to have them worry. They then pass that worry on, through their work, at their dinner parties.

Pretty soon, we’ll all start to believe it. But a democratic government would never deliberately do something like that, would it? Never slash state funding of the arts simply to ensure an intellectual pessimism that would be eloquently expressed by those who dedicate their lives to creativity and communication? And there aren’t loads of plays about how bad the world is, are there?

Kirk Attacks Vile: Dunsinane II

Gareth K Vile’s review of Dunsinane might be agreeable in the dramatic specifics – good performances, well written, a mixture of grand tragedy and comic interludes – but his regionalist sympathies have blinded him to the political meaning of David Greig’s sequel to Macbeth. For all the humanist sympathy for the English squaddies, who kill and die for a cause they barely understand, the relationship between England and Scotland is repeatedly shown as unequal and abusive.

Above all, England is clearly an invader: it is English troops that ravage the countryside, and an English leader who worries about an unstable Scotland. The brutality of the second act – children are killed and quartered, entire villagers are massacred – is precipitated by the thwarted passions and good intentions of the English commander. When the Scottish clans respond with a medieval version of suicide bombing, which stresses the link between past English adventures and modern jaunts into the Middle East, it is the desperate violence of the dispossessed. Greig, a visitor to Palestine, is not unaware of the parallels and pressures that lead to extremism.

Scotland is depicted as both geographically and culturally different to England. The soldiers’ descriptions of the landscape, poetic and precise, contrast the mountains and snow with the flat and warmth of England. Their desire to integrate – seduce local girls -  is thwarted by a language barrier. The English commander Siwald, a warrior who looks for peace, is disgusted by King Malcolm because he does not understand the nuance of clan rivalry.  What appears to him as decadence is merely a way to avoid violence. Malcolm’s strategy, of being too ineffectual to attract envy or threat, is familiar to anyone who has caught the 38 bus across Glasgow on a Saturday night. The relentless English insistence on honesty and reason leads to the resumption of a civil war. The message is clear: the two nations do things differently, and England’s presence is a disaster.

Greig is quite obviously more sympathetic to the moderate, and dishonest, characters. Malcolm, and Siward’s assistant, have different moral compasses, and this allows them to survive in the chaos. Like heroes from a Grahame Green novel, they lack the sort of intensity that makes them tragic, yet they do less harm. When Greig moves Siwald and Lady Macbeth to their dramatic finale, the echoes of Greek tragedy insist on the consistent message of Sophocles: it is better to small than great.

If Macbeth is an obvious source, Greig is dealing with more ancient plays: the tragic ending brilliantly recalls Virgil’s Aeneid IV, as Lady Macbeth’s appeal to future generations echoes Dido’s curse on Aeneas. For Virgil, this explained the violent enmity between the Carthaginians and the Romans: here, Greig mythologizes the Anglo-Scottish bitterness. And like Virgil, Greig recognises the importance of the poet in defining a nation.

That Greig avoids the obvious – Malcolm is no English stooge, and Lady Macbeth is not stripped of her malevolent majesty – and pictures a complex nation, prone to self-harm and proud. Not naive enough to see nationhood as simple, nor willing to relinquish a common humanist compassion, Greig rescues nationalism from the politicians that Gareth K Vile despises.