Another voice
The sweet and sour
Auberon Waugh
Perhaps it will be considered cheap and tendentious to treat the National Theatre, as Denys Lasdun's hideous edifice on the South Bank is called, as if it were indeed just that, the microcosm of our national drama. Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of Leyland? Or may we cram within this concrete 0 the casques that did affright the air at William Tyndale Comprehensive School?
Even at the best of times, when the scenes are shifting and washbasins being repaired like clockwork, Lasdun's National Theatre is a mildly ridiculous conception, somehow inviting the sort of criticism which it drew from a furious Quentin Crewe last year, that there were inadequate facilities provided for those attending in wheelchairs who wished to eat or to go to the lavatory in the course of their visit. Any enterprise for which the Government is responsible must plainly be equipped with Senior Citizens' Retiring Rooms, creches, special nurseries for thalidomide victims and refuges for wives battered by their infuriated husbands during the interval. Preferably, there should also be a Pregnancy Advisory Service for teenage girls in the audience who feel they might have conceived during the first act, a cervical smear test centre for those who are, suddenly visited by anxieties about cancer and a member of the Community Relations Commission on constant duty to ensure that coloured visitors are well looked after and understand what is going on.
But it is not the original conception of the National Theatre which invites us to treat it as a reflection in miniature of the state of the nation. It is what has happened to the wretched enterprise since, and it is here that one may be accused of partiality. After all, some things still work reasonably well in Britain: cows are milked, trains run, the post is collected from time to time. But I think that last week's drama of the National Theatre is in an important sense the drama of the nation, in that it illustrates exactly the state of the class war on the outcome of which, as I never stop pointing out on this page, the future of the nation depends. Since I seem to be alone in my perception of this war — that, having been declared, it must be engaged rather than ignored, and fought with the intention of winning rather than surrendered by default — perhaps I should recapitulate the story of the recent strike within the context of the class struggle.
This is essentially, as I see it, a struggle against the educated, intelligent, wellfavoured part of the community by the uneducated, unintelligent and ill-favoured part, newly and somewhat belatedly aware of the inconvenience it can cause by withdrawing its services. Or perhaps the only new development is the comparative impunity which which this inconvenience can be caused. It is to this second point that we must plainly address ourselves eventually but for the moment let us concentrate on the first, and follow the recent history of Mr Ralph Cooper, plumber and Hero of British Labour.
MrRalph Cooper is reported as earning a basic wage of £4,500 a year which includes ten hours a week guaranteed overtime, but actors in the company tell me that with extra overtime a backstage scene shifter or technician can usually gross double the earnings of an actor. Be that as it may, Mr Cooper was asked by the management to mend two washbasins in a ladies' lavatory and took so long on the job that after two statutory warnings he was sacked. Whereupon the entire backstage, led by a Trotskyist agitator, went on strike, closing down all three theatres, one of which happened to be showing State of Revolution, Robert Bolt's deeply sensitive new play about Lenin and Trotsky. The management immediately (or very soon) offered to reinstate the hero Cooper on full pay pending arbitration, but the strikers insisted that his reinstatement should be unconditional and remained on strike for a few days until eventually (and this, I suggest, is the important point, or one of the important points) they caved in, having been repudiated by their union after a sustained campaign of ridicule in the press.
A Marxist class analysis of this episode would emphasise that the press is owned and controlled by capital, but I suggest that the Marxist would be boring and wrong. Far more important, I would argue, is the fact that newspapers are written and editorially produced (against all evidence to the contrary) by members of the educated, intellig ent and well-favoured part of the community — that is, by Us. And although the revolutionaries and unreconstructed proletarians in our midst (two separate groups) are prepared to stand out against Our ridicule, the powerful, institutionalised union movement is not yet quite prepared to cock a snook at Us, who arc public opinion.
But this, of course, is a passing phase. Now let us examine the actual inconvenience threatened by Mr Ralph Cooper and his backstage comrades. Of the 16,000 actors who are out of work at any given time, I should estimate that between 40 and 60 per cent would have been able to repair the two washbasins and undertake any other job within Mr Cooper's area of responsibility. Of that number, I should expect that a majority would have been delighted to do it for half the money earned by Mr Cooper. The same is true of all the rudimentary skills possessed by stagehands, electricians and back-stage workers, and when one adds to the number of unemployed actors willing and able to perform these tasks the enormous army of unemployed teachers, university and school leavers, not to mention qualified nurses and middle-class housewives looking for parttime work of a vaguely cultural or communal nature, one can see that there is not the slightest need for the National Theatre to employ a single member of the illfavoured, who are bound to be provoked into orgies of resentment by working in such proximity to the educated and enthusiastic.
The new class animosity is not excited by economic considerations — in the National Theatre, economic considerations largely favour the Coopers. What infuriates the illfavoured is any suggestion of their own inferiority—which is why, if any pattern is to be discerned from . the model we are studying, the lesson is surely that the two nations of which I wrote a few weeks ago must learn to live apart, and it is sheer ineptitude on the part of the National Theatre's management not to recognise this fact.
On a more serious level, the same pattern may be discerned in the National Health Service, where seven hospitals in the East End of London are threatened by closure as I write because of strikes by cleaners and 'ancillary workers'. Many of these cleaners and ancillary workers now earn more than nurses, while laboratory technicians earn more than doctors, registrars and even junior consultants. If there were more nurses and junior doctors, they could do the work of these people in half the time with much better grace. The lesson is the same.
But the final lesson is surely that there is now a vocal section of the unionised working class which is quite simply not prepared to work at all except on its own terms, and those terms are not such as to make its employment worth while. The present economic climate, which makes wholesale redundancy inevitable, is an excellent opportunity to confront it with the true consequences of such an attitude.
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