Jerusalem - Ten Years On

Agreed. He truly tapped into "something" about English identity which is chaotic and singular. Not entirely British, but in some ways totally English. Obviously, I doubt the majority of Brexiteers are theatre nerds. But Butterworth drew from a well of identity just as politicians have done successfully but to different ends.

I didn't see Rylance, but I read the play and for the first time ever reading a play got the impression that this was theatre "not for me", it was speaking to people with a different experience and knowledge of life. (I am a first generation Australian, neither of my parents are native English speakers, my father was a child refugee who had a very complex relationship to standing for 'God Save The Queen' as a teenager in the 1960s.)

I saw a local semi-professional production in Sydney some years later, and dodgy English accents aside, it transferred Rooster's attitudes and surroundings into a depiction of larrikanism, an Australian quality I totally despise. Interestingly, none of the professional theatre companies had touched it and they usually fight each other for everything Royal Court.

I get you but I've met a few Roosteresque men over the years and they closely match MR's portrayal. I'd never thought about it in terms of their lifestyle but they were in amazingly good shape, wiry and muscled but somehow also a bit ravaged. Plus MR came across as less 'clean' than he looks in pics. All these things combined to convey a sense of this soiled yet powerful latent presence in 'Englishness'.

There's a rather vague piece from Suzanne Moore in yesterday's Guardian website on 'the Left' and Brexit which actually uses a photo of Rylance in Jerusalem as a header. There's a good Guardian pick comment underneath - better than the piece, I think - discussing the dewy-eyed stuff some have been coming out with about that 2012 ceremony being a golden age. TBH I wouldn't particularly characterise most of the London media/theatre/culture set as the Left anyway: a couple of generations ago I think they'd have been Liberals and, though they reshaped Labour into something that worked more for them under Blair they are now going back to their natural habitat (in the 2010 election the Guardian leader column came out for the Lib Dems rather than Brown's Labour).

The article itself is just a seemingly long nursed grievance against something or other and a ragbag of examples that don't add up to anything.

Having said that, the question itself is deserving of more serious contemplation.

My own background being that of a working class upbringing (like Moore) and an education system that allowed me to transcend that (like Moore), leads me to a very different place. She surely knows about the way that the arts after the second world war were important in terms of narrowing the class division (various regional arts centres that still thrive and serve people of all backgrounds etc.). Seemingly her own experience has become narrowed and metropolitan, given how she tries to contort and twist that around (she really seems to have no idea about either the arts around the country or the working class as they now exist). The culture now being created is similar but not as visible through not being exploited in anything like as powerful a manner as in that golden post war period.

If the arts and culture had remained similarly paternalistic up to the present day the minds of low information voters (alias the working class) would not have become blind to the benefits and power of liberal democracy. The wartime generation of my grandparents understood this and lived its message, the baby boomers who came after took the benefit without questioning its provenance or, indeed, the need to continue and expand it (Harold Wilson’s Open University may well have been its final flowering), maybe that is where/when the rot starts. Moore suggests that these creatives ‘despise’ the working class but, instead, it is benign negligence that is the issue, leading to others filling that gap who have had much less honourable aspirations. That Moore then lists how good the work of a number of artists who have done the opposite of what she said is just confusing, it’s the lack of exploitation of art for all that should really be her target.

Which leads me to the subject of a 'war', yes there is but it is not a 'culture war' Instead it is a war to weaponise (that word again) media, whether that be mass or social, in order to have low information voters in a democracy act against their own interests. That is the war that is taking place and one that centrists and the left have, for too long, left unacknowledged and unfought. Generations of politicians have vacated the field that the populist right then took over and it has camped on it for decades (the seventies onwards I would suggest, kickstarted by the likes of Murdoch, still at play in his success with Brexit).

The fear of being seen as patronising and of the need to promote liberal values disappeared. Instead the press barons and their lackeys (now much more visible through 24 hour news) have poisoned the well. Hence the rising level of bigotry, of people now feeling free to say what should be silenced, of our shockingly low level of understanding of complex issues and how they benefit us being replaced with a battle over who can provide the simplest, most readily digestible, kneejerkingly emotional solutions (rule of thumb, if someone says that there is a simple answer to a difficult problem, they are a liar).

So it is a ‘war’ and one which has forced liberal democracy to retreat but how do you turn that around? Major powers around the world are in a similar place (China never got as far as democracy, Russia has destroyed it and America looks hell-bent on wanting to be next, all fuelled by populist resentments). Brexit (ah, yes, back to that) is maybe the first necessary skirmish that can turn the tide. It has, maybe surprisingly, mobilised people of all classes (and this is probably lost to many but there is little class divide on Brexit, just that the C2DE segment of society has a larger percentage of don’t knows, hence low information voters). People will baulk at the idea but a proper, now better informed, discussion followed by a vote would be a start. Face the populists down at the ballot box. If that fails, then the options become much darker and concerning but, hopefully, we won’t need to go there. Revoke would be, maybe rightly, seen as incendiary and I fear that the populists are trying to force that choice onto MPs who would probably, in extremis, have to revoke in the immediate face of no deal.

On Crowblack’s mention of Liberals/Lib Dems, there is no truly powerful coalition for liberal democracy without them; the same as needing one nation Tories, Blairites and all of the others whose complacency has ceded the message to right (and left) wing populism. Far left and far right populists are the common enemy here (that there are ex-Marxists in the Brexit party should have made that patently clear).

This got quite long, sorry.

In parting, have I mentioned recently that I was in the crowd at the Olympic stadium for Super Saturday in 2012? No? I must be slacking.