'Promises, Promises', Soho Theatre

Promises Promises left me gasping for breath this week.  In the dark, tiny confines of the Soho Theatre Miss Jean Brodie, recently retired in disgrace from a Scottish school, delivers an intimate monologue from her temporary supply classroom. 

A full cast of characters comes to life during her tale, from a young headteacher jollying his staff along, to a small mute girl newly arrived from Somalia with a team of community workers trailing behind her.  They're determined to exorcise her demons and make her vocal again - in full view of her young classmates - and Miss Brodie appears to be the child's only defender.  It ends in a bloody drama far removed from my own supply teaching experience, where my most uncomfortable moment was being asked by a 16 year old schoolboy to perform an inappropriate act on him in a South London schoolground.

The play could have been titled Snip Snip, so vivid was the cutting imagery threaded throughout.  The threat of something sinister and unnamed is present from the beginning, with a marvellously realistic primary classroom setpiece enveloped in the shadowy darkness of the theatre.   As the play races towards its dramatic climax, figurative cuts both past and present - severed relationships with a sister and a best friend, stolen tailoring scissors to deny a father his fearsome power, alienation from the colleagues around her - become literal gashes.   

As Miss Brodie reflects on the promises broken by others in her life, she tries to keep her promise to her new student that she is safe in her classroom.  Her voice intensifies and sharpens as the young girl's self-imposed silence is revealed to be a reaction to a primitive, dangerous, but all too common slicing inflicted by older womenfolk to preserve the purity of their daughters.  

Miss Brodie has been a broken woman for most of her life, and the most poignant scene for me was not the confession of molestation by her father, the revelation of her alcoholism, or even her discovery of the abuse of the child.  It was instead the utter abandonment she feels when her best friend from her early teaching years runs off with a man. 

This friend's words were "straight out of the dressing up box"; she was a woman who took the words and ideas of others and cut, shaped, and sewed them until they fit her like a glove, much like the home-made outfits she wore.  Miss Brodie longs to be like her, but failing as a seamstress she instead seeks to uphold her friend's mantra that a teacher makes a promise to to keep her students safe and teach them all they need to know.

At the end of the play, the lecherous male community elder finally suffers a similar fate to that of the young girl, at the hands of Miss Brodie and her stolen tailoring scissors.  It is with terrible sadness though that we realise she does not protect the child out of love, but rather in an attempt to avenge older, more personal wounds.

The National Theatre: The Power of Yes

Last night, I took male friend M to see David Hare's play The Power of Yes.  The central figure in this 'story' is the playwright David Hare, who rather gratingly tells us that it's not a play and he's not a character.   And he is right in a way: it felt as though a Louis Theroux or Michael Moore documentary was being played out on stage, wherein the subjects are unwittingly exposed as fools and we all laugh at their expense. 

As our bumbling Hare unravels the meaning of 'options' and 'fiscal stimulus' and 'sub-prime', the banking world unravels on the stage behind him.  Halfway through, exhausted by the pace at which the banking system is collapsing, I lean in to M and lament the lack of interval.  It seems our man Hare shares my pain, suddenly collapsing into a chair and confessing he's overwhelmed too.  

The story raises questions but draws only one conclusion...the fall of the banking system and capitalism represents The Death of the Idea.  The Idea, robustly championed by the 'experts'* from Harvard, being that the markets are wise and that risk can be calculated out of them.  The Idea may grandly be declared dead, but outside The National Theatre the market carries on regardless, if the evidence from my two trader acquaintances can be relied upon.   

There were some interesting moments during the evening, the standouts being:

• An industrialist declaring that a bank goes bust for no other reason than that it runs out of money;
• A cheap dig at Damian Hirst as a man of luck rather than talent, whose fortunes have declined along with that of our reviled bankers; 
• The revelation that in Latin, the word 'credit' means 'trust', which sparked a moment of speculation by myself as to where trust lay in the transaction between banks and the people (banks trusting people to take on realistic debt?; people trusting the banks' judgement?) and then a further reflection concerning whether my life would be richer if I had been afforded a classic education and didn't need to check my Latin on google.

Upon the denouement, I personally felt as though I had been played; much like the pre-2008 markets which responded as the traders expected them to. Hare's comic timing was targeted perfectly at a middle-class left leaning liberal such as myself.

It was an enjoyable night, but I wonder if telling your audience what they already (if only vaguely) know and confirming their judgement of the situation is a little lax.  Shouldn't art challenge us to think and feel more rigorously?

* Emphasis I imagine the playwright himself may have included in the script