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I HAVE never been a follower of soap operas.
Who shot JR (Ewing) in Dallas has never raised an interrogative
connection in my mind’s circuitry. I would not watch East Enders, let
alone invite people like the often less than salubrious cast to tea and
the saccharinal depiction of Australia’s manners and mores in
Neighbours, leaves a yawning gulf between me and it.
I feel no dramatic deprivation. I have seen the curtain-up and
descent on real-life dramas that kept me from the chimney corner and the
four-ale bar in an ecstasy of interest while newspapers, radio and TV
swept the populace in a blizzard of revelatory material. Thus, I have
enjoyed the latest London production, A Very Un
British Resignation, with a polished cast that included urbane
civil servants, enterprising and inaccurate journalists, spin doctors as
whirling as dancing Dervishes and an embattled minister, of Teflon
non-stick characteristics.
The plot is Machiavellian and Kafka-esque, riddled with Byzantine
conspiracy, about as complicated as a labyrinthine intelligence test for
rats and features a will-o’ -the-wisp Department of Transport, Local
Government and the Regions e-mail about not burying bad news along with
Princes Margaret, underhand dealings in overdrive, back stabbings, lies,
half-truths and a sinister government smear machine continually clanking
out high-grade, refined innuendo and hostile briefings.
There are also astonishing revelations about the DTLR, a
government satrapy apparently run roughly on the lines of the Greek
homicidal tragedies of antiquity, full of fine cadences and,
metaphorical corpses, intrigue and illusion, disclosures, general and
particular which included a scissor-tongued, tormented and tormenting,
crash-helmeted, bike-riding, bad-news-burying dominatrix.
I thought the show’s pace was impressive and the mystery about
whether the pallid, Hamlet-like Martin Sixsmith, the former BBC
television correspondent and former DTLR communications director, had
resigned or merely resigned himself to resigning, was tossed about with
the vigorous grace of children playing with a balloon.
For me, the show was marred by an episode, shocking in its
intensity and risible in its detachment from the Augustan refinements of
civil service life. I refer to the scene in which Sir Richard Mottram,
whose fiefdom includes the DTLR, uttered a torrent of comment about the
phantom Sixsmith resignation, using the "f" word no less five times - a
labial fricative delivery of doom that would have soured the
departmental sherry in the crystalline decanter of Yes Minister’s Sir
Humphrey.
Flipping heck; we are expected to believe that a grand mandarin,
at the height of his intellectual and communicative powers, would
descend, through his finely-chiselled, bureaucratic teeth, to the
language of a pirate’s parrot.
I have known many civil servants, ranging from those who spent
their departmental days compiling statistics about white fish landings
at Rockall to others who were big in collating figures about the
denaturing of wheat in the Hebrides as well as, by office telephone,
researching the latest Test match scores, and to a man, their oral
decorum, beyond the occasional discreet sibilance, was impeccable. To be
cleanly-impartial in thought, word and deed is part of their
triplicatory conduct code.
Still, there were some distinguished dramatic performances, not
least of which was that of Stephen Byers in the part of the DTLR
minister: a demon king popping up through the pantomime floor to petrify
any presumptuous principal boy and squawking, subversive chorus, a
Dracula, slipping out of his sarcophagus to frighten the merrymaking
peasants of journalists plotting to drive a stake through his ambitions,
a ministerial Caligula with a hint of Dr Crippen: cripes, angels and
ministers of grace defend us. Be thou a spirit of health or goblin
damned? He was all these and more.
The role of Sixsmith, whose flaccid performance ranged from the
flummoxed to the furtive, could have been developed, but the boy has
potential and we shall hear more of him. The great enigma in this robust
and riveting production was Jo Moore, former special adviser to Byers
and bad news burier, whose own political interment - "not a drum was
heard, not a funeral note as her corse to the back door we hurried" -
was revealed.
What is to become of her? I have grave reservations about her
fade-out. She could return as a rollicking revenant, spiritedly exerting
her influence in another new Labour farce. Could there be the ghost of a
chance? |
