An Everyday Story Of Virtue Signalling

by Les May

I FIND it difficult to have much sympathy with Maxine Peake and Rebecca Long-Bailey.  Both seem to have been keen to be seen to be ‘on the side of the angels’ with regard to the murder of George Floyd and it has backfired spectacularly.  It must have come as an especially big surprise to Long-Bailey who in February of this year declared herself to be a ‘Zionist’

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2020/02/will-they-never-learn.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2020/02/tail-succeeds-in-wagging-dog.html

Peake may have had to admit that her assumptions were wrong about where Minneapolis police force learned their brutal tactics, but it interesting to pose the question of whether there would have been this much fuss had she claimed that it was the South African or Chinese police who acted as mentors.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/maxine-peake-interview-labour-corbyn-keir-starmer-black-lives-matter-a9583206.html

I think not!

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Review: The Northern Light Falls on Us

 'NORTHERNESS is an elusive thing to define' so says the playwrite Simon Stephens in the programme to his play 'Light Falls' at the Manchester Royal Exchange.  He says this as the current
Artistic Director at the Royal Exchange is about to step down to go down the London and become Director of the prestigious drama school LAMDA (London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art).  

Ms. Sarah Frankcom caused a bit of a stir in October 2013, when she said that she was ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ on the issue of female casting by choosing Maxine Peake to play Hamlet, and 'There is now a generation of women who are not going to put up with it anymore'.

She was reacting to research conducted by The Guardian in collaboration with Elizabeth Freestone, Artistic Director of Pentabus Theatre, Ludlow.  It seems that in contrast to the situation on stage, figures from Ipsos Mori revealed that on average 68% of theatre audiences are women.  But that when it comes to producing the works of Shakespeare there is an inherent gender imbalance due to the original male only casts, with 155 female characters compared to 826 male characters across the Bard’s plays.

Her experiment using Maxine as Hamlet worked a treat but her more recent production of a female dominated version of Macbeth bewilderingly confusion as did other who came with me and I saw it twice.

Maxine Peake is from Westhoughton, Bolton, and she has been pressed to drop her northern accent for some roles.   

One comment responded to Ms. Frankcom's feminist 'Hamlet' thus:
'That is ridiculous man!  How arrogant of Sarah Frankcom to feel qualified to re-write the work of a genius. Perhaps she should re-pen Beethoven's 9th while she's at it.  It is such a rare treat and luxury to see a Shakespeare play, and I'm sick and tired of the likes of Frankcom trying to give herself a name at the expense of what is a truly genius piece of literature.  Perhaps she'd like to paint the Mona Lisa as a man too.  What a load of self indulgent pseudo-feminist crap. Just give us the art as it was intended.  It really is that simple.  If you don't like it, write your own bloody play!'

But I think the play's writer Simon Stephens is a man.   When he asked people in his research for this play if they considered themselves northern, he said they all did.  When asked how they defined 'northerness', they seemed to hestitate and then suggest it was their capacity to deal with the rain or cold and deal with it with humour:  'We don't like umbrellas, up here.  We just put our hoods up.'

Mr. Stephens, who now lives in London, He claims:  'I think something has happened with kindness in this country.  It seems that suspicion and mockery are the default position in this county.  Kindness has, in a way that has taken me completely by suprise, become a politically default position.' 

 The current play shifts around the North from the high streets of Doncaster and Blackpool, and the farms of Ulverston and the shut-down shops and pubs of Warrington and Durham to Cheshire Plains and the foothills of the Lake Districts and the Yorkshire Dales.  Warrington and Durham he writes:  'shops and bars heaving under the weight of half a decade of austerity.'


Bill Bryson commenting in 'The Road to Little Dribbling' wrote about a Council's lack of funds to afford it to maintain a shrub planter and made a curious comparison with Durham Cathedral:  'Now I'm no expert on the matter, but I am pretty sure that we are a lot richer today than we were in the eleventh century, and yet back then they could find the resources to build something as splendid and eternal as Durham Cathedral an today we can't afford to keep six shrubs in a planter.'

Today we are better at tearing things down than in maintaining things. As when during the time of the last Labour government he had a mad scheme to set up the Pathfinder Initiative to tear down 400,000 homes, mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, in the north of England - see Bryson.

Bill Bryson can see this decline acutely because he can view it in relief and observe the changes after coming in from the States after being abroad.  Stephen Simon can come back to the North from London and spot 'the seen but unnoticed' features of what's going on in the North. 

The play struggles with the hyper-aspects of everyday life: a middle aged woman has a stroke and dies reaching for a bottle of vodka in a supermarket; a married man attempts to accomplish a three-some; a insecure student tries to please hie older boyfriend; a single mum tussles with the father of her baby.  The roundhouse stage struggles to fit-in these competing elements, and it just about manages to encompass the performances.

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HYMN to the NORTH

by Jarvis Cocker

Our Father who art down in the pub

Our Mother doing the washing up

Well that was then, an this is now

So you better listen up

Factories lia empty

Manuafacting emptiness

Life still needs to be filled none the less

So go and find something to love

But just promise me this one thing, yes

Please stay in sight of the mainland

I always know you've got to go

I don't want you to go

So before you go, there's just one thing you ought to know, yeah

there's just one thing you ought to know

there's just one thing you ought to know

there's just one thing

just one thing

You can fill your life with love

You can fill your life with hope

You can fill you life with food and drink or whatever floats your boat

I'll be be singing you this song 

There's a million things in store for you just beyond the horizon

But please stay in sight of the mainland

So stay in sight of the mainland

You're wiser than I'll ever be

You're beautiful smart, so funny

You fill my heart, you fill my dreams 

And my only hope is you succeed

my only hope is you succeed

 my only hope is you succeed

you're my only hope

you're my only hope 

 you're my only hope

So please 

Please
Please
Please
Please

Trust and believe

In you and me

Northern lights will guide you home

Northern lives just like you're own

Northern rain turning into a flood 

But Don't forget your northern blood

Do never forget your northern blood

And please stay in sight of the mainland

Yeah please stay in sight of the mainland

Pease stay in touch with me

In this contactless society

Anywhere that you may be

The northern star leads back to me
Yeah the northern star leads back to me

 Yeah the northern star leads back to me

 Yeah the northern star leads back to me

You're my northern star

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QUEENS OF THE COAL AGE - ‘Nor, a cross word!’

Maxine Peake

LAST week Anne Scargill told the director of the play ‘Queens of the Coal Age’, Maxine Peake, now showing at the Manchester Royal Exchange, that the women who occupied Parkside Pit in 1993 as part of the campaign ‘Women Against Pit Closures’ endured their experience cheerfully.  During a public interview at the Salford Art Gallery, Anne told Ms. Peake:  ‘Nor, a cross word passed between us!’
Singing on the Tannoy to the miners down the pit, playing I-Spy, shuffling packs of cards, even sharing talcum powder and chocolates sent in by the miner’s wives.  
The pit bosses were less amused, but when the lasses threatened to take them to the Court of Human Rights, a supply of mineral water was sent down.  
Yet the play, written by Maxine Peake and based on the former radio drama for BBC Radio Four, soon demonstrated the there was much more friction between the participants in pit floor direct action than Anne Scargill had previously claimed in her Salford interview.  
At one stage one of the women was mocked for not having kids.  Anne herself was later challenged for doing the protest only to promote herself and satisfy her own ego.  She admitted this claiming that she was sick of always living in Arthur’s shadow.  
Dot Kelly, one of the participants, has said elsewhere in an interview in the show’s program:  ‘They portrayed us as someone at the kitchen sink all the time – I mean, I went through three strikes. ‘72, ‘74 and ‘84.  Even if there weren’t a strike, that was me;...’
But there was a feistiness about the play which I feel was brought about by the dialogue introduced by Maxine Peake.  One of the women is presented as being ultra-randy in the sense that she was actually turned-on by the erotic concept of the sweaty grubby miner as a phenomena.  It has been suggested to me that Ms. Peake herself may have a taste for the down-to-earth spirit.  
This lack of the Mrs. Grundy syndrome is refreshing and now seems to belong to another age, yet it was not just in the dialogue produced by Madam Peake, that set me thinking about this.  The story doesn’t have the muckiness of Zola’s ‘Germinal’ yet it does seem to snub the snottiness of the fashionable vogue for political correctness.  We get a flavour of this in the show’s program, which indulges us with with an account of the journalist Triana Holden’s book ‘QUEEN COAL: WOMEN OF THE MINERS’ STRIKE’, in which she gives an account of the scene at Orgreave Colliery in 1984:

‘I was standing to the side in between the volatile miners and the equally aggressive police …  The pickets started shouting “get yer tits out for the lads”.  I was horrified and began to run away from the chanting or face a lifetime of embarrassment about having a famous bosom.  I must have resembled a scared rabbit as some of the men chased me; suddenly I was grabbed from behind and carried off.  I was furious when I was plonked down in a muddy field, denting my pride, ruining my broadcast but worse still destroying my lovely boots.  It turned out that my abductor was a sergeant from the Metropolitan police who was putting me out of harm’s way.  I shouted blue fury at him but he just laughed and said, “Is that the thanks I get for saving your neck?  Typical woman!”’
How very English!  
What we get here at Orgreave Colliery, is an English Bobbie, a few cheeky pickets, some muddy boots and dented female pride; tame-stuff! compared to Zola’s uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s, in which a local money-lender had one woman tear his testicles off.
This play itself dwells upon the curious clostrophobia of everday life in a setting in which the ordinary is made extraordinary by introducing the disrupive element of four women.  Maxine Peake herself has just spent the best part of a month performing as Winnie by sitting on top Willie in a heap on sand in Samuel Beckett's play 'Happy Days' at Manchester's Royal Exchange, and in 2016, she played the role of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ masterwork, 'A Streetcar Named Desire', who invades her sister’s marriage and ignites a dark and violent conflict finishing-up in tears.  There's something rather earthy about Maxine Peake which she seems to get away with, while all the time she's snapping at the heels of all those dreadful modern day Mrs Grundy's and half-baked puritans.

Now Sara Rowbotham backs Tony Lloyd!

IN what looks like a panic move Rochdale Labour Councillor Sara Rowbotham, who was played by Maxine Peake in the BBC docu-drama 'Three Girls', has gone on record saying she has given her full support to Tony Lloyd, the Rochdale Labour Party candidate in the 2017 general election next month.

Sara, a sexual health worker who played a vital role in getting abused girls’ voices heard by persistently reporting cases of child abuse as a sexual health worker, has told ROCHDALE ONLINE that Mr Lloyd has her '100% support'.

Sara told Rochdale Online: "Tony Lloyd has my 100% support as Labour's candidate for Rochdale.

Curiously, this follows on the heels of a tweet by Maggie Oliver, another key figure in exposure of the story of the 'Three Girls' docu-drama, who over the weekend circulated a message attacking Tony Lloyd as unhelpful:

Sara Rowbotham said of prospective Labour parliamentary candidate Tony Lloyd:
'He has lots of experience and ability and will make a first class MP for the town.  Tony is just what Rochdale needs.  During his time as Greater Manchester's Interim Mayor he worked very closely with lots of community organisations.  He is well known throughout town.  Tony will work with everyone to build what is best about Rochdale and its people.'

Sara added:
'Tony will fight the disastrous Tory cuts to our local schools which will mean bigger class sizes and teachers facing the sack. Tony will be the strong and experienced voice Rochdale needs right now.'

Where have we heard that before?   Labour councillors like Sara Rowbotham have been fighting Tory cuts for years while implementing Tory cuts at the same time.  Meanwhile, didn't Sara vote against the
proposed increase in councillors' allowances on the 14th, December last year..  As ROCHDALE ONLINE reported at the time:
'The proposal to increase councillors' allowances by a massive 34%, and Council Leader Richard Farnell's allowances by a whopping 51%, has been met with public outrage and a protest has been organised outside the Town Hall....'

Despite all the crocodile tears about 'Tory cuts' talked about by Labour Party councillors like Sara Rowbotham she was loyal to the Labour whip imposed by her council leader, Richard Farnell. 

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