“I am the government of your country…: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need.”
Andrew Undershaft from G B Shaw’s Major Barbara
So finally saw Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet at the NT, well half of it to be exact as other commitments called. And what to say? It was a good half - solid, energetic, competent. Kinnear’s performance far outshone the mania of Tennent and the langours of Law, more controlled than the former and more precise than the latter. There were traces of Brannagh in the emoting RSC clipped quality, and a couple of self-conscious adoptions of Larry Olivier’s legs; betighted, angular and much admired by Tynan despite, or probably because of, their looking like an eroticised faux-naïf pigeon.
“France, you know, is a bad bourgeois novel.” I could see how far he was right: the modes of dramatisation, of fictionalisation, which are active as social and cultural conventions, as ways not only of seeing but of organising reality, are as he said: a bourgeois novel: its human types still fixed but losing some of their conviction; its human actions it struggles for property and possession, for careers and careering relationships, still as limited as ever, but still bitterly holding the field, in an interactive public reality and public consciousness. ‘Well, yes.’ I said politely, ‘England’s a bad bourgeois novel too. And New York is a bad metropolitan novel. But there’s one difficulty, at least I find it a difficulty. You can’t send them back to the library. You’re stuck with them. You have to read them over and over.
‘But critically’, he said, with an engaging alertness. ‘Still reading them’. I said.
From his essay Drama in a Dramatised society.
