Why trail across the Channel on the train to Brussels in early September, only to then hang around waiting at empty stations for a connection to Genk?  My depression was compounded by a lovely September day in London being replaced by mist, low grey clouds, cold and rain. Everyone had said that Genk has very lovely buildings.  They were mistaken; the destination was not Ghent, but Genk.

Leaving the train at the end of the line, I was slightly surprised to be accompanied by some North African families, probably now a common sight through most of Western Europe. But my surprise was further increased when descending to the bus station; it was as if I had arrived in London. All the students and kids getting on and off of buses were the same ethnic and cultural mix found in any London college. This was certainly not my image of Belgium and particularly not of Flanders.

In early August an adulatory review of an exhibition being hosted in a mining town in Eastern Belgium, had galvanised me to take a look. Manifesta is a biennial European wide contemporary art exhibition, which locates in different parts of Europe with different themes every two years. This year was coal mining and appropriately it was housed in an old coal-mine building in Limburg, closed 20 years ago.

The exhibition was in an exceptionally fine listed building, a large and very imposing Art Deco building, (looking more like a mill), which has been entirely stripped inside. On entering, the very first exhibit seen was a large carpet laid out across the empty space. It is composed of the loaned prayer mats from the local Muslim population – miners or their families. Who were these particular miners, here in eastern Belgium?

But adding to my surprise or confusion, the town itself was no old mining town, but a new town. No terraced housing, no bleak recreation grounds, no slag heaps. Gradually as I pieced together this population and this town, it became clear that this was a very different mining community from those found in Britain, and probably most of Europe. In the mid 20s a French man invested in the area and opened the mine but the local Flemish population would not work for him.  Miners came from other parts of Europe; France, Italy, Poland, Greece, Turkey and North Africa, and these were the original workers who came and stayed. Genk has grown from the village of around 450 farmers and agricultural workers to a new planned town of 65,000 miners, housed in semidetached dwellings with gardens, following the model of the Letchworth Garden City.

The exhibition was in no way celebrating nostalgia, any sort of sanitised collective memory nor an anaesthetising experience. It was a wonderful mixture of displays, paintings and installations laid out on the spacious empty floors of the disused and gutted mine building. The first stages were finely selected exhibits from the local mine itself: the prayer mats, original small models of complex geological structures used by the engineers to teach new miners the ways to shore up roofs and passage ways, a display of the original work books of the miners, an exhibit of the 1966 strike when in the face of possible closure the miners occupied the mine and the police brutally attacked, killing two miners and wounding many.

The floors above were areas where the curators had obtained paintings and drawings of coal and mines from many areas of Europe, with a large collection from the UK.  But it was also the areas where contemporary art pieces were displayed, artists having been commissioned or asked to loan pieces in response to the overall theme of coal mining and its industrial processes. It ranged from the homage to Marcel Duchamps’ Coal Sacks Ceiling (1200 coal sacks that he had hung from the ceiling of the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme in 1938 Paris) with a huge number of hanging coal sacks in a dark area of the space, to ways that coal had affected the landscape. There were paintings and documents identifying pollution or the impact of industrial processes with Stakhanovite posters from the Soviet Union.  The film by Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis of the battle of Orgreave and a television film of Tony Harrison reading V, the poem in which he responds to the graffiti on his parents’ grave in Leeds with his recognition of Thatcher’s attack on the miners and the organised working class, and skilled work itself. One of the most stunning pieces is that by a Chinese artist Ni Haifeng, Para-Production. In a space, almost the size of a chapel, there is a mini mountain of fabric off cuts, about 15 or more sewing machines to the side and at the back a huge sewn tapestry made from similar waste.  Production, commodities, and recreation?

In its statement Manifesta stated that it was always keen to ‘witness its own transformation, testing different forms of processes, artistic practices and curatorial approaches’, while obsessively looking for the new. ‘The Deep of the Modern’, the title of this exhibition, makes reference to the modernistic capacity to go back to a time before its starting point, intending to reinvigorate or renovate itself. This mixture of art works and objects from various periods and various places within the site of an empty mine building, and from which you can see the newly painted white pit head standing straddling other mine buildings, is a constant questioning about what coal is in this place, not just what has happened in Genk but in other places within Europe, and what will replace this type of production and under what circumstances – questions which are important and timely.

www.catalog.manifesta9.org

The origins of Afghanistan as a state with fixed boundaries go back to the 19th century power struggle between Russia and Britain for control over the trade routes and military advantages of this strategic heartland.

As Russia conquered the territories of Bokhara and Tashkent close to the northern border of Afghanistan in the early 19th century, the British became concerned that further gains could jeopardise their hold over India. The ‘First Anglo-Afghan War’ saw a British force depose the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammed, after he sought to strengthen his ties with Russia. In his place they installed the deeply unpopular and ruthlessly brutal former Amir, Shah Shujah, a loyal British ally.

Two years later, when the British cabinet made savings by cutting the bribes it paid to the southern Pashtun tribes for their support, British forces in Kabul faced a large and well organised rebellion. They were routed in one of the British army’s worst defeats. A column of 4,500 British troops and 12,000 civilians attempted in vain to make their escape in the harsh January winter. Only one man out of the original 16,500, Dr Brydon, reached Jalalabad alive. Shujah had also been killed. Retribution was immediate. Much of Kabul was destroyed in the process. Shujah’s son was made Amir. But by the time the British had retreated one month later, the new Amir was killed and Dost returned.

Thirty-seven years later, in 1878, when again it appeared to the British that the Afghan ruler (Dost’s successor, Amir Shir Ali) was becoming too close to the Russians, the British government sent a 35,000-strong invasion force. Shir Ali died of natural causes during the invasion, and, with British troops occupying most of the country, his son, Mohammed Yakub Khan, was forced to sign a peace treaty ceding large areas of territory and relinquishing control of Afghan foreign affairs to the British. This treaty imposed by the British, the Treaty of Gandamark, formally established Afghanistan as a state.

After another brief insurrection in 1880, in which the British suffered a notable defeat in the battle of Maiwand, Afghanistan became a client state of Britain, who installed Amir Abdur Rahman as ruler and provided him with weapons. Known as the ‘Iron Amir’, he governed with great brutality, executing large numbers of opponents, making conversion to Islam mandatory and forcibly transplanting entire hostile tribes.

In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand, the British India foreign minister insisted on dividing Afghanistan and what was then British India across a border that bore little relation to demographic realities. Waziristan – the Pashtun homeland – was split between what is today south-eastern Afghanistan and the North West Frontier provinces of Pakistan. The Durrand Line, as it became known, was meant to establish Afghanistan as a ‘buffer state’ between India and the Russian empire, while annexing strategically significant high ground to India.

In 1919, the progressive liberal reformer, Amanullah, became king. He was influenced by the emerging nationalist and modernist movements of the time. A strong influence on his thinking was Mahmud Tarzi, his father in law, who believed in a progressive Islam and like Amanullah wanted to overcome the backwardness of Aghanistan, which they both believed to be in part a consequence of British control. Tarzi became Amanullah’s foreign minister. They demanded unconditional independence from Britain. A short war followed – the Third Afghan War – ending with Britain capitulating to full Afghan independence. Inspired by radical developments occurring throughout the Middle East, Amanullah wanted to build a proper infrastructure, found a mass educational system and a postal network, and tried to enshrine social rights for women in the country’s first constitution.

Meanwhile, the British continued to destabilise the newly independent Afghan state by providing material support to the southern tribes who opposed Amanullah’s radical reforms – which also included forcing tribal leaders to wear suits and cut off their beards. In 1928, after yet another insurrection, Amanullah was forced into exile, leaving Afghanistan to undergo half a century of lacklustre rule by three successive generations of the Durrani family dynasty.

Part 2: 1979-1996. Communism, the mujahideen and the Taliban

The first 20 years or so of the cold war were a period of relative stability – and the years when Afghanistan became a destination on the hippy trail. The competing big powers used aid to extend their influence.

In 1973, the Durrani dynasty ended. Amir Zahir Shah was overthrown by his cousin, Mohammed Daud, with the support of the small domestic Communist Party. Afghanistan became a republic. While many welcomed the modernising direction of the new republic, parts of the population remained extremely conservative, and a small Islamist movement began to gain influence led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud. Under pressure from the government these Islamists moved to Pakistan and forged alliances with Islamist organisations there, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1978, Iranian followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini moved into Herat. Marxist army officers used this as an opportunity to overthrew Daud and installed a communist regime, which immediately moved to speed up the process of modernisation, demanding secular co-education and land reform. As part of the cold war strategy to weaken the Soviet Union, Jimmy Carter’s administration began covertly funding the Islamic opposition with the help of the Pakistani secret services, the ISI.

The government requested military support from the Soviets, and in December 1979 100,000 troops crossed the River Oxus from Russia into Afghanistan. Pakistan immediately received enormous US and Saudi aid to support the mujahideen. In border camps, the ISI trained more than 35,000 foreign and Afghan Islamic militants in insurgency warfare and terror. Those supported in this way included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. William Casey, then head of the CIA, described the policy as attacking ‘the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union’.

By the time Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, the war had claimed 1.5 million Afghan lives and displaced two million refugees – half of the world’s refugees at this point were Afghans. The Soviets are estimated to have lost as many as 75,000 soldiers.

Contrary to promises made during the 1988 Geneva Convention, the US continued to fund the mujahideen and the Pakistani ISI. The latter’s power became almost equivalent to a shadow state. The training that it supervised was designed to inflict maximum terror and cause complete social breakdown, turning Pakistan into the world centre of jihadism for the next two decades and very likely sowing the seeds of Al Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden was among the young fighters supported by the US in this way.

The Soviets, meanwhile, backed the government of new president, Najibullah. This support soon dried up, however, when the USSR collapsed in 1989, leaving the army demoralised, poorly equipped and under constant attack. Six of Afghanistan’s 31 provinces quickly fell to the mujahideen.

Ethnic differences undermined any possibility of unity between the mujahideen warlords. Throughout 1991, they fought to expand their areas of power, and Afghanistan became a major source of world heroin supply as they facilitated poppy production and smuggling to fund their militias.

In April 1992, the rebel commander General Dostum and his Uzbek militias entered Kabul and arrested Najibullah. Rabbani was installed as president, with Ahmed Shah Massoud as defence minister. Alliances between the warlords fractured and a brutal civil war ensued. Pashtuns, under Hekmatyar, fought against an alliance of Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara warlords under Shah Massoud. Kabul became the scene of a series of massive battles in which 20,000 were killed, and the country was split into small pockets, each under the control of a different warlord. Battles between the factions were incessant and devastating, creating more than five million refugees.

Then, in November 1994, a hitherto unknown force called the Taliban captured Kandahar.

Adherents to a strict and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, they were a highly political movement aiming to transform Afghanistan into an Islamic state. Well armed with weapons remaining from the Soviet conflict, and using Japanese pickup trucks to mount lightning attacks, they were an efficient fighting force. In the next three months they took 12 more provinces.

For many Afghans, influenced by elements of Sufism, the Taliban’s intolerant interpretation of Islam was unwelcome. But as the Taliban began to instill order and stability after 16 years of banditry and crushing exploitation by the warlord barons, they won popular support. This stability came at a heavy cost to individual freedoms, however. Women were removed from public life, losing all jobs, education and most health care. Traditional pastimes, such as playing marbles and flying kites, were no longer allowed. Music and dancing were prohibited, televisions were removed, cigarettes were banned, and works of art were destroyed.

For the next two years, the Taliban fought the warlords, eventually emerging as victors in 1996. Massoud retreated north with the Tajik section of the Northern Alliance, whilst Dostum and the Uzbeks remained secure in Mazar. Hekmatyar sought refuge in Iran.

Part 3: 1996-2009. Enduring Freedom

The Taliban’s relationship with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden – who had arrived in Kabul in 1996 – became of increasing international concern. In 2000, the UN security council passed a resolution instituting sanctions. Pakistan, however, remained loyal to Kabul, and continued to provide fuel and supplies.

The Taliban continued to pound the Northern Alliance, and instigated a campaign of savage internal repression against Afghanistan’s Shia Hazara minority. Meanwhile, a nationwide drought killed 70 per cent of the country’s livestock and ruined 50 per cent of its agricultural land. Again, vast numbers were displaced, yet the UN was unable to raise the $221 million required for humanitarian aid.

In 1989 the US withdrew from direct involvement in Afghanistan. Within ten days of 9/11, however, Bush announced ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’: 110 CIA officers and 316 special forces operatives were given $1 billion to fund the anti-Taliban militias of the Northern Alliance. The assumption was that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Al Qaeda located in Afghanistan. US air support decimated the Taliban, and by November the Northern Alliance had retaken Herat and Kabul. Thousands of Taliban prisoners were massacred in the aftermath.

With victory seemingly assured, the Bonn Agreement was signed in December 2001, and Mohammad Karzai, a former lobbyist for Unocal from an old Pashtun family, was chosen as interim leader.

Despite foreign troops flooding into the country, real power remained with the warlords and their militias. Extortion, kidnappings and killings were rife, and poppy production – which had declined under the Taliban – exploded as the warlords used drug revenues to fund an arms race. The death toll continued to mount over the next two years as they battled for control of territory, yet the world’s media was mostly distracted by events in Iraq. Another devastating drought caused widespread starvation and disease, and Dostum’s militias in the north carried out numerous atrocities against the local Pashtun population. Enormous social upheaval ensued. The number of civilian deaths during this period remains unknown.

In June 2002 an interim government was established. Seventeen top level cabinet posts were given to the victorious warlords of the Northern Alliance, including principal positions in the defence, interior, intelligence and foreign affairs ministries. Pashtuns held 11 seats, Tajiks eight, Hazaras five and Uzbeks three. The interim government remained weak and ineffectual compared to the warlords, however, and reconstruction efforts were impeded by a budget deficit. Offers of foreign aid did not match the resultant inflow of funds. A US think-tank, the Rand Corporation, estimated that $167 per head was required to stabilise Afghanistan. By 2003 the country had received a mere $57 per head.

Unemployment and poverty were endemic. Migration from the countryside increased, and the cities swelled with makeshift shanty towns. Kabul’s population had risen from an estimated 400,000 in the 1970s to 3.5 million. By June 2003, the US had donated $1.9 billion in ‘aid’, but this brought about little improvement. Reconstruction contracts were mostly given to US firms, which frequently overcharged for grossly inefficient work. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams established to operate outside Kabul were frequently subject to interference from the local warlords on whose authorisation and protection they were reliant. Government and NGO corruption was endemic. There was limited success in educational reform. In Kabul, 45 per cent of girls were receiving some form of education, but in the rest of the country the situation remained largely unchanged.

From August 2003, Nato expanded the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) mission, assuming responsibility for nationwide security (previously their operations were confined to Kabul). Ostensibly a peace-keeping force, around 40 countries donated troops. Security continued to worsen, however, and in Helmand and Zabul, the Taliban opened up a major new offensive. The Red Cross and other NGOs pulled out of the southern provinces, and the UN suspended travel for all its employees. By the winter of 2003, the Taliban had recaptured 80 per cent of Zabul province.

The Afghan defence minister pressed donor governments to fund an army of 200,000 soldiers. He received funds for just 37,000. Many recruits were illiterate, and desertion rates were high. Efforts to rebuild the police force were also hampered by similar issues of illiteracy and inadequate funding, training and equipment.

A total of 10.3 million people were registered to vote in the October 2004 elections, 40 per cent of whom were women. Karzai retained the presidency with 55 per cent of the vote. Despite political developments, however, life continued to get worse for the majority. A small government elite grew enormously wealthy through corruption and outright theft – vice president Zia Masoud, for example, was apprehended in a Dubai airport with a million dollars in cash – while development indicators continued to fall. According to the 2007 UN Human Development Report, life expectancy was 43 years, adult literacy ran at just 28 per cent, only 39 per cent of Afghans had access to clean water, and more than one in four children would die before they reached five years of age. This showed a marked decline, even from 2003.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan was deteriorating into a narco-state. Warlords paid by the coalition to curb opium production instead pocketed the money while yields increased. With the economy in ruins, poppy cultivation became the only reliable source of income for farmers. Efforts to eradicate these crops, therefore, make the fragile government yet more unpopular, and fuel support for the insurgency. By 2007, Afghanistan was producing 8,200 tons of raw opium a year – 93 per cent of total world production, an increase of around 4,600 tons from 2003.

Since 2006, the Taliban and their allies have made significant gains on the other side of the Durrand line in Pakistan. At the same time, coalition air strikes and raids against insurgents in Afghanistan’s predominantly Pashtun south have caused large numbers of civilian casualties, further bolstering support for the resistance, which, in turn, was mounting successful attacks on coalition forces with greater frequency.

Counter-insurgency is now overshadowing nation building. Development projects are forced to rely on links with occupying forces, creating dangers for the Afghans involved. Little progress is being made. Karzai’s government remains dependent on the ISAF, and Northern Alliance warlords continue to occupy key cabinet positions.

Insurgents have captured large swathes of Pakistan’s northern provinces, and are engaged in heavy fighting with Pakistani troops, while coalition forces currently control just 30 per cent of Afghanistan. William Dalrymple gives a vivid glimpse of the consequences:

‘Meanwhile, tens of thousands of ordinary people from the surrounding hills of the semi-autonomous tribal belt that runs along the Afghan border have fled from the conflict zones, blasted by missiles from the unmanned American Predator drones and strafed by Pakistani helicopter gunships, to the tent camps now ringing Peshawar. The tribal areas have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have now been radicalised as never before. The rain of armaments from the US drones and Pakistani ground forces, which have caused extensive civilian casualties, daily add a steady stream of angry foot soldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-western religious and political extremism continues to flourish, and there are signs that the instability is now spreading from the Frontier Province to the relatively settled confines of Lahore and the Punjab.’ (Guardian, 4 April 2009)

With 25,000 more American troops awaiting deployment in the coming months, the conflict, and its consequences for civilians and for the stability of the region, only look set to get worse.

This history is based on the original programme notes for The Great Game at the Tricycle Theatre. The programme, with the full version of the three-part history of Afghanistan, is available from www.tricycle.co.uk or 020 7328 1000 for £6 inc p&p

‘In response to your piece on the poet laureate

[Andrew Motion] I offer my unjubilee poem.

Adrian Mitchell (shadow poet laureate)’

We wanted to let Red Pepper readers know what had prompted this short deadly shot across the bows of the incumbent poet laureate, Andrew Motion.

An interview ensued (see ‘Contra verses from the shadow’, Red Pepper, April 2002). It was, as ever, a joy. Adrian was sharp and quick and funny, and always honest and critical.

Adrian always considered himself an anarchist, rejecting many aspects of the state, and particularly the ways that monarchs and the powerful were puffed up and stroked by the sycophants in all their courtly garb. He was appalled that titles were so easily offered and accepted – and with such gross solemnity and pomposity; he often said of the royals that they were just humans! When, however, a man whom he regarded as a great poet had accepted the mantle, Adrian did not feel the urge to puncture. Ted Hughes had been a royalist and yet was a great poet. But Andrew Motion was no Ted Hughes.

For Adrian such masquerades were intended to gloss over the real world. In those worlds injustice was never recognised and therefore never tackled. Wars maybe could happen to other people but somehow we would be inured or absolved. And the poet laureate could continue to offer the veneer of poetic forms to celebrate a monarch or her spouse, or their grandsons’ army exploits, and nothing new or questioning or uncomfortable would ever be introduced.

He knew he was in the tradition of particular poets – those who had seen and spoken out in the face of great tyranny and horror, such as Byron, Blake or Whitman. And for Adrian, poetry was about speaking to the powerful. Sometimes with great sorrow, sometimes with humour.

Last September when the present incumbent announced that he would be standing down, I wrote to Adrian saying, ‘We’ve been sitting around talking about the bleating of the PL and how his well springs are drying up and who would be the replacement. We thought there ought to be a critical debate about the archaic nature of the position and the need to remove it entirely or to ensure the whole bended-knee nature of the post must be made central … so that anyone accepting it would realise its pathetic nature and poets will say “never no more”. Shouldn’t there be a wonderful, wild, loud, popular, funny challenge to this remnant of the era of Lord Chamberlains?’

Adrian replied that he’d done his bit by declaring himself shadow laureate. ‘I think anyone who disapproves of the post should also declare themselves shadow poet laureates. Maybe there should be an election for the Worst Poet in Britain, who would then get the poet laureateship. That could be fun!’

Jane Shallice

————————————–

Adrian was – and remains – the tallest man I can imagine. When I picture him with his long face, I see a campanile of voices, rhyming, joking, teasing, lamenting, and showing losers how to be tall. Wherever he went, he carried all he had ever heard and observed, everything piled up like plates, inside him. (Infuriated by an injustice, he could throw plates.) When he was young – he wrote songs, dirges, slapstick during half a century – he was already old, and when he was old he was still like a kid. A skylight not a cellar man.

Doctor rat explains

this experiment proves

that the meaning of Money can be taught

to the majority of human beings

His poems are often like ladders. Listening to them or reading them, you climb rung by rung and as you mount, you see further and further into the distance. At the top you have no choice but to jump and like Mercury you find you have wings on your heels. Mercury the god of messengers and crooks.
Adrian loved tall stories because he loathed every form of putting down and keeping in place. Also because tall stories are generous and he didn’t have a speck or smudge of meanness in him.

Poet, playwright and window cleaner. He had large hands. Methodical hands. Whilst cleaning he joked. Joke after joke. Yet when he moved his ladder on to the next window what you saw through yours was painfully sharp.

What men fear in women

is as obvious

as the shining photographs

and cross-section diagrams

in a brochure provided,

with a smile, by a car salesman

What he didn’t know about politics wasn’t worth knowing. But he never fell into the conceit and deceit of knowing the answers.

He could persuade words to stop and to create a special silence, a silence which encouraged listeners to say things together under their breath. Under their breath but with confirmed confidence.

When he himself was reading out loud he could whisper like a kid at the back of the class, and, a moment later, he could assume the immense breathing of a crowd in the streets demanding their rights.

The first two lines in his very first book of poems were:

Good-bye

He breathed in air, he breathed out light.

Charlie Parker was my delight

The doctors say Adrian died of pneumonia. But the campanile remains.

John Berger

———————————————

A children’s tale

In 1997, shortly after I became artistic director of the Unicorn Theatre for Children, Adrian Mitchell invited me to meet at his house. Long a hero of mine – artist-rebel, anti-Vietnam war poet and translator of Peter Brook’s Marat-Sade – I could hardly contain my excitement. After shooing his beloved dog Daisy out of the sitting-room, he proposed that the Unicorn produce a musical trilogy based on his stage adaptations of Beatrix Potter’s tales.

I must have raised an eyebrow. Adrian enthused that it would be like The Ring Cycle, only for juniors. When I told him I’d never read Potter he stared at me in astonishment. But, he protested, she’s one of our greatest writers. He put a stash of her beguiling little books in my hands and sent me on my way. Adrian’s version of Tom Kitten And His Friends had already been a Unicorn favourite. So we started to work on Jemima Puddle-Duck and Her Friends.

Composer Steve McNeff and I thought the text was a little slim dramatically. I approached Adrian to see if he’d consider fleshing it out. Again he stared at me dumbfounded. What on earth for?

I suggested that nothing much seems to happen in The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. Adrian replied that if I’d almost been eaten by an enormous trout I might see it differently. In the end, Adrian’s lyrical economy, especially in the songs, proved a perfect match with Potter’s exquisite sense of wonder and precision. And his love of words, animals and children sang through each note and line.

He was a standard-bearer for the Unicorn, where he was writer-in-residence in the 1980s. He went on to complete the Potter cycle with Peter Rabbit and His Friends, which we produced for Peter’s centenary. But it was that daffy duck Jemima that proved to be our Götterdämmerung. We staged it three times over ten years and with each tiny detailed modification it grew into something special.

I think that Adrian enjoyed theatre for children as much as anything else in his rich, prodigious life. He would sit surrounded by our lively, curious young audiences and laugh and weep and beam with pleasure (and then give me countless notes about how things could be improved). He wanted to share the books and poems and music that had affected him so deeply as a child. Was there anything he liked as much as inspiring children to draw their own pictures, write their own poems, tell their own tales?

Tony Graham

——————————————————

The dog of peace

When he was about 25, Adrian came to read some of his poems to a group of students in Oxford. I can see him clearly. I’m surprised when I try to think about him now how few concrete memories I have, considering the hole I feel in my life now he’s no longer there. We’d run into each other at a meeting, demonstration, reading, play, over 50 years, and I took for granted his being there, a warm, like-minded, inspiring colleague. The last time I saw him he was walking on Hampstead Heath, as always with the dog of peace. Small vivid images linked by strong feeling, rather as you get in a poem.

Caryl Churchill

—————————————————————–

How is it a man dies?

I’ve known Adrian and his wife of 47 years, Celia, for a long time, and in one of those twists of life that make some think beyond coincidence to meaning and fate we’d had much more than usual to do with each other in the weeks leading up to his death before Christmas. Celia and I had been engaged in wrapping up the Medical Aid for Iraq charity, of which we have been officers since the first Gulf War. And I had been trying to get Adrian to pick up his journalistic pen again (his writing career began in journalism), specifically to write about David Tennant’s Hamlet as he’d seen all the great Hamlets of the past half-century.

As it happened, Tennant injured his back, so he wasn’t playing the part at the press night. Adrian said he was too ill to write anyway; he spent the next day in hospital and was ‘desperately trying to rest’ – a notion that barely entered the vocabulary of a man who felt an almost moral imperative to fulfil every request to appear, no matter how remote the venue or small the audience. His unwillingness to rest, his reluctance to miss a reading almost certainly delayed the diagnosis and exacerbated the consequences of the pneumonia he developed last autumn. And as if his writing, his performance and his other work was not enough, he remained a tireless campaigner in the cause of peace.

In his last email to me, a week before his death, he wrote of ‘trying to get Ian Hislop to set his hounds on the New Statesman for regularly printing full page colour adverts for BAE Systems and asking his investigators to trace the effect of the ads on the editorial side of the Statesman’. I had made Adrian poetry editor of the NS when I edited the magazine in the 1990s, and his was an important influence on my editorship well beyond poetry. From Benjamin Zephaniah to Brian Patten, and from Alex Comfort to Paul McCartney, Adrian’s pages – like the man himself – sparkled with enthusiasm, commitment and verve. I’m glad that in what I never dreamed would turn out to be my final email to him, I took the time to tell him how those pages were among my proudest achievements at the Statesman.
Among the many fine poems that Adrian published during our time working together was one that Robert Graves wrote in his seventies, which appeared as part of a ‘Poetry Extra‘ in the NS in 1994. It seems absolutely fitting to Adrian’s memory:

How is it a man dies?

How is it a man dies

Before his natural death?

He dies from telling lies

To those who trusted him.

He dies from telling lies -

With closed ears and shut eyes.

Or what prolongs men’s lives

Beyond their natural death?

It is their truth survives

Treading remembered streets

Rallying frightened hearts

In hordes of fugitives.

Steve Platt

I can recall the excitement that I felt when Roland arrived in Bristol in the early 1960s. ‘I’d always been a natural show off, written plays at school, been influenced by the Goon Show and the anarchy and surreality of everything – and being a Monsieur Hulot,’ he says. This 20-year-old, larger than life ‘post bohemian’ moved from a building site in Bristol to the Old Vic theatre school. ‘They didn’t want me as an actor but accepted me on a technicians’ course.’

He had an appetite for performance with wit and quickness of thought and a patter that grabbed you and made you want to engage with him immediately – or quickly escape. Working on the sites he’d become political and was part of the first strike in a drama school,. He, however, remembers being influenced at this time by a grotesque production of Ubu Roi; the anarchy and brilliance of Pere Ubu found a living model in Roland Muldoon.

Claire arrived in Bristol from Bradford at the same time. She too was working class, leaving school at 14 and working as a teleprinter operator. Her performing background had been ballet and tap: ‘I couldn’t afford to do both, so I sat in on the tap and learnt that way!’

Unity Theatre

After his stint at drama school Roland went to London to another building site and joined the Communist-run Unity Theatre, where he became company stage manager. ‘It was a wonderful thing to be part of that working class theatre but they were completely rigid about everything. They’d got a letter from Sean O’Casey or his estate saying that he wouldn’t have anything to do with them and they were stunned that he wouldn’t have anything to do with the one true church.’

Claire followed: ‘I was sort of with Roland but wasn’t and I wanted somewhere to live so stayed with him.’ Ironically, she says that she’d given up ‘a good career in the City’ to go to ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) in a building shared by the Pan African Congress, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, the Connolly Association and the Caribbean Workers Association.

At Unity Roland became the sacrificial goat when the party discovered dissent. He was expelled, being labelled a ‘Freudian Trotskyist’. In search of a centre, Roland enrolled as a teacher at the Working Men’s College in Camden Town, and a small group of us enrolled as his class. ‘They’d thought we were going to be doing Ibsen; instead we were improvising and building the groundwork for our style,’ he says.

Our influences were rock and roll, and the immediacy of advertising images (much as we hated them), and plays were being developed through improvisation, choreographed and filmically cut and edited. All centred on a Muggins figure. ‘We’d developed a style, and what was being formed was forming us as well,’ says Claire.

CAST

CAST’s first play was John D Muggins, a young GI in Vietnam, which began with a small group of actors racing towards the audience pointing and shouting, ‘John D Muggins is dead. For what reason did he die?’ ‘We had three chairs and you jumped up and did it in 20 minutes,’ says Roland. ‘Our publicity was we could play anywhere; we could play in a telephone box!’ The rehearsing was in any spaces possible: church halls, the basement of the Architects Association and photographers’ studios. We had no money and would get on the bus to go to performances carrying red flags, ladders and props.

For CAST the 1960s meant struggles for national liberation, the civil rights movements in the US and Vietnam. We were young, committed and immensely energetic. There was constant intense discussion and argument – none of us knew much but there was an enormous appetite and once we’d shaped a play there was an urgency to perform. ‘It was art which was the magic ingredient,’ Roland emphasises. ‘We were thinking art and politics. They said you couldn’t talk about religion and politics, which made you want to talk about them. Similarly with art and politics. We made it work. When you were on stage you were about your free expression of yourself in the discipline of the play, the way a jazz musician in a jazz band was expected to fill their moment. We were artists. We loved the French film, Les Enfants du Paradis, where the mime artist was freed from the restriction of the writer.’

A series of plays followed John D, such as Mr Oligarchy’s Circus and Muggins Awakening, performed in pubs, trade union branches, student meetings, and even in the Roundhouse. They were not stories but dialectical presentations of arguments and ideas, using juxtaposed archetypical images. Roland was always critical of middle class people entering the theatre thinking they were bringing socialism to the working class: ‘We’d come out of this post-war working class generation. When we played to striking miners they were smoking pot and were all rock and roll.’ His maxim was ‘If you eat a Wall’s pork sausage you know what capitalism is!’

In the 1970s CAST split. One half went with Red Saunders and helped to develop Rock against Racism and Kartoon Klowns, who brilliantly forced the rock and roll world to look at itself and its relation to the National Front. CAST rebuilt itself, got an Arts Council grant, extended its touring, including in 1981 to New York where Roland was awarded an Obie (Off-Broadway theatre award) for Confessions of a Socialist. By this time Roland and Clair had two daughters, Laura and Alison.

With Thatcher in power they and other radical theatres lost their grants. The 7:84 company (the name comes from a statistic about 7 per cent of the people having 84 per cent of the wealth) went to Scotland. Belt and Braces gave up. CAST decided they were going into comedy. They’d already found the Arts Council regime restricting. ‘We cheated and twisted but they imposed an agenda,’ says Roland. ‘We never stopped being rude about the system and the last one we did was Sedition 81 where we cut the queen’s head off, assassinated everybody and gave out free joints to the audience as a tax rebate. We knew they were after us and the only way to go was to keep throwing stones at them’.

New Variety

New Variety was developing and was better suited to the period. For Roland, ‘You can say anything to real audiences, it’s more dynamic than plays. I wanted something I’d not heard before, and the only place was in stand-up. It carries the baton for popular theatre.’ Popular theatre in Britain had meant music hall: British, imperialist and reactionary.

CAST wanted a popular theatre about politics and art, provoking you to laugh while recognising the horror. It was not to be documentary, nor carrying tablets of stone; it needed to express the chaos that we were in.

CAST had the equipment, organised a circuit and with the GLC arts funding at the time of the miners’ strike, they became popular. Paul Merton, Billy Bragg, French and Saunders, Julian Clary, Benjamin Zephaniah and acts like Linda Smith, Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel came in and CAST transported itself to become CAST Presentations, touring their panto Reds under the Bed with the stand-up acts. Traditionally variety had been reactionary; from the late 1970s it began to express a left popular culture. Homophobia was out, racism out, sexist acts out.

CAST was a collective but they were organising individual acts where each person paid their own stamp. This was a crucial change economically. Roland emphasises: ‘Ben Elton has become much maligned but he was there on Friday Night Live attacking the system. They were getting onto telly: Harry Enfield and Loadsa Money, a great satirical character summing up the horror that Thatcher was inventing.’

But its popularity meant the money-makers came in and took over. ‘We weren’t shocked by it,’ Claire says with a laugh. ‘You come from the working class, you don’t expect anything but hard work. You failed your 11-plus; you were already out!’

The Hackney Empire

In demolishing the GLC, with its generous arts budgets, Thatcher again ensured that CAST’s money was ending and they had to reassess their position. ‘Tom Jones, our administrator at the time, rang Mecca and asked if they had anywhere and they said, “You can have the Hackney Empire!” Thirteen hundred seats! I always thought taking it over was like workers control. Anarchists always wanted a printing press. We’d have a theatre. If we could make a popular venue outside the scheme of things, in Hackney, it would be an Aladdin’s cave.’

The opening up of the Empire in the dark days of 1986, when there was no money and everything was being pared back, was electric. Suddenly there was a magnificent building, and whatever its run-down state, it became a venue in the centre of Hackney, one of the poorest boroughs, for new variety, ballet, touring theatres, opera, orchestras, and pantomime. They put on popular entertainment and for Roland one of his proudest successes was finding Slava Polunin, the Russian clown, who transformed clowning.

For Claire the whole experience at the Empire ‘was exciting but there was always difficulty about money. The Barbican gets millions each year and we had to manage on £60,000. But we were identified with the black theatre and audiences for it were massive. The refurbishment was hard work but friends, now celebs, came back to support us. But the difficult thing was fighting the administrative caste taking over the arts.’

In the late 1990s they got a grant through the Arts Council and the Lottery for the refurbishment with a requirement to get matching funding, involving sums outside the scope of fundraising on the left. The Empire had to attract City money. In allocating funds, the Lottery imposed a new wave of people, one of whom, weirdly enough the last chief executive of Barings bank, became the chair. The board was meek in the face of the authorities, and the process led to the marginalisation of Roland and Claire. Their last years at the Empire were therefore hard.

Claire wanted out when she heard in 2004 they were introducing yet another management consultant – the sixth in all – as soon as they’d reopened. ‘I was insulted. The day they got this Barings man I knew that I wouldn’t go through their hoops. They’d no idea of the particular nature of CAST and our past. We had been administrators, technicians, developing a group and we were also performers. We weren’t middle class – we didn’t make notes at meetings – and for them working class people shouldn’t be running things like this!’ The Arts Council insisted on appointing marketing people and ‘once we had lost the power of the marketing we’d lost the theatre’.

‘The Arts Council wouldn’t subsidise black theatre. We were putting on popular black farces with huge audiences where black working class people came and paid £22 to see home-grown Caribbean farce, for which not a penny of the Arts Council money was available and is still not.’ Roland sums it up: ‘Although we’re a living legend in Hackney the board were pleased to see the back of us. We know in those circumstances you cannot win. What we achieved is great but we lost the battle.’

The Cock in Kilburn

Having now taken over the Cock in Kilburn, they’ll have to sell the beer to make it pay. ‘We want to provide a base freed of the Jongleur/ McDonaldisation pressure of conformity of stand -up comedy,’ says Roland. ‘Here comedy can be free from the move towards laddish, sexist forms. We can link up with other little places and independent venues through Britain, and keep the genre alive.’

Roland finishes with questions: ‘Can we support and fund a genre that we are fascinated by? Could we, with our daughter Laura, with us since she was tearing tickets at the age of nine, make it work? Can we become performers again?’

In the present circumstances, without subsidies, he feels it’s back to the old penny gaff and the music hall, where the arts were supported by sales of alcohol. ‘The irony is that it isn’t reactionary. At Unity I saw a play about Captain Swing – in the penny gaffs of the 1830s there was sedition in the popular culture!’

The new venture of The Cock could be great. Monday night will be Gramsci Night, ‘where poor intellectuals are let in free’. Arthur Smith will compere comedy on some Fridays. Other evenings will run with live music and new acts. Support is coming from Omid Djalili, Jo Brand and Felix Dexter, among others.

Roland and Claire identify themselves as part of the generation of Bob Dylan and John Lennon. ‘People criticised Dylan because he wasn’t consistently left wing but he was a poet, and part of our success as CAST was that we are catholic in our taste,’ Roland says.

‘If the socialist revolution ever came we would depend on the engineers and the teachers and the energy of people who make things happen and are not motivated by making money. Younger people are alienated and the left has to change. There’s nothing that shows the alternative. Against orthodox left positions, I say – let a thousand weeds bloom!’

Coming soon at the Cock Tavern Gramsci Club: Whither the counter culture or is it whithering? www.cocktavern.com