Are you from the real world – or not?

Are you real? Do you live in the real world? In order that we might all be able to judge – what paper do you read?

I’m only asking because, on 7 May, just after the various elections across England, Scotland and Wales, I found myself deep in Twitterworld.

There, one (on the surface) quite coherent contributor was asking why, in the Hartlepool by-election, Labour had “put up a Remainer in a Brexit town?”

 

That was a coherent question and I was drawn in – more fool me, perhaps.

 

But then they continued: “Did they do that deliberately so Starmer could pin the blame for any defeat on the candidate rather than him? It was a gross error of judgement. But the fact is that the Lab party only represent Guardian readers, not real people.”

 

Oh dear. To which I responded by positing the obvious question (if you have a brain): “What are ‘real people’?”

 

Since I read the Guardian, does that make me ‘unreal’ – or is such ‘unrealness’ balanced out by my not only reading the Guardian, but a wide variety of other media too? After all, I still sometimes look at the Telegraph culture sections for the opera!

 

“If there is such a concept [as real people] and it isn’t ALL people, then what are ‘unreal people’?” I asked. “What would that actually mean?”

 

But then I found myself getting rather engaged. So I mused that it would be fun to try the concept “based on newspaper readership: what paper would the most ‘real people’ read ...? The Times? The Sun? The Mail? The Mirror? What newspaper makes you most ‘real’?

“What about FT readers? How real or unreal would they be? And as for the Express ...”

 

I have a subscription for Private Eye – where does that put me on the spectrum of real to unreal? Honestly, I’m wondering if I and Ian Hislop are about to fade away into unrealness.

 

The poster in question has still not responded.

 

The thing is, this all sounds like a bit of a laugh. But it isn’t. Earlier today, I looked back at the account that had tweeted this nonsense and discovered that it is currently lauding anti-lockdown demonstrators and similar idiots.

 

Such phrases have become a regular riposte from people with no actual argument. I’ll go further: it is almost a boast that they have no logical argument – and let’s face it, to have a proper argument would risk making them a “girly swot” and we know where that doesn’t get you.

 

At the most basic level, it ‘others’: it says that some people are not “real”. It promotes a sense that, if some people don’t share the same views as you do, then they are not as good as you. And it is widespread in social media.

 

It’s all part of – or at least connected to – a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-fact, anti-democratic and anti-free speech conspiracy culture. 

 

It’s also no distance from the similar comment heard for years of: ‘in the real world’.

 

Let’s ask the same questions: if there is a ‘real world’, then what is ‘the unreal world’?

 

Does ‘the real world’ include a favella in Brazil? Does it include astronauts in outer space? Does it include Trump’s gold lift? Does it include children scouring waste dumps for things to salvage and sell to survive? Does it include those with the dosh to live on board luxury private ships all year round, cruising the globe? Does it include people trying to flee persecution for whatever reason? Does it include the nurse using a food bank to help feed her children?

 

Of course, we all know what it means: select from the following word salad – ‘metropolitan, liberal, lefty, artsy, luvvie, elite’.

 

Whatevs.

 

But let’s take just one – that ‘luvvies’ tag. Actors and performers, who seem to be mostly quite politically/socially progressive – possibly because the trade actually demands an ability to empathise/put yourself in someone else’s shoes, though are rarely anywhere near as far left as, say, Vanessa Redgrave – come in for huge stick. And they are most certainly not of the ‘real world’.

 

One assumes that those in ‘the real world’ never watch any sort of thing that involves dodgy presenters – that’s Match of the Day out, then, given Gary ‘woke’ Lineker, but obviously not Top Gear, given the general views of petrolhead star and conservative media columnist Jeremy Clarkson – or almost all films and TV drama and sit-coms.

 

But then again, consistency has nothing to do with this.

 

In the last year of his life, I remember my father ranting that he couldn’t ‘respect anyone who doesn’t have the same beliefs I do!’

 

Having no knowledge at that stage of how it’s best to simply agree with those with dementia, I bridled and rasped back: “So, you don’t respect me, then?”

 

That confused him. Somehow, it’s different with family. Yet of course, that excludes logic, which goes down the toilet – victim to simplistic gammon-faced ranting.

 

The simplistic gammon-faced ranting wouldn’t be important – except that in recent years it has had, and continues to have – a massive influence over the public and political life of this country: across the UK as a whole, but particularly in England, where it seems to be endemic.

 

My parents, Brexit voters both, were not uneducated. My father in particular achieved way more than most of those with whom he grew up with in a tiny, rural Cornish outpost. Little more than a Cornish peasant, he became an ordained Methodist minister and spent his working life moving around England – an incredible achievement.

 

But as with my mother, who came from far less humble a background in east Lancashire, his education was very England-centric. And both maintained a lack of enquiry into anything outside the UK as a whole.

 

I recall, in my late thirties, my mother seeing me reading a book and asking what it was. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I replied. My father had never heard of it – my mother seemed almost to blanch in fear.

 

After my father retired, they travelled a little on the Continent – and actually enjoyed it, though it often, in their reports, seemed to have been a revelation that, for instance, Germany was so clean and the Germans so ... friendly.

 

The first time they went was just after my father retired. It was a retirement present from his congregations, a trip to see the 2000 the Oberammergau Passion Play. He was almost terrified beforehand – it was, after all, the land of “the Nazis”.

 

They were neither stupid nor uneducated – but they were ill-served by a very limited and limiting education that severely constrained their horizons. They could list kings and queens of England, but knew almost nothing of the world outside the UK, except where that involved the wonderfulness of the British (English) Empire. And note – that was the what they could cling to as the ‘good bits’.

 

I strongly suspect that, in terms of Brexit and where we are now on a wider scale, this is a situation that was not limited to two people, on an individual level, growing up and being educated at almost opposite ends of England and in quite different socio-economic situations.

 

The English, with their long-term distrust of ‘intellectualism’, have allowed a culture to grow where we now ‘have no more need of experts’. Add to that a sense among (largely) older generations of not knowing what their identity is in a context of devolution and the end of empire, and you have fertile ground for opportunists, nationalists and populists.

‘The real world’ is simply a psychologically monochrome world view, where everyone ‘real’ is a mental mirror image of oneself.

It cannot, therefore, allow for free speech, political plurality and democracy, and any kind of diversity.

 

And that is why ‘real people’ and ‘the real world’ are not simply jokes, but are symptomatic of the problems we face in the UK as a whole – and most particularly in England – and why they need challenging at every turn.

Hold my pint: Mentioning the 'B' word

It has been strictly avoided. A bit like the plague. Or COVID-19 (fingers crossed, until now at least, on a personal level). But there comes a time when the word must be spoken, when the reality must be faced. And that word is ... Brexit.

That’s right, people. Brexit. BREXIT. The absolute bloody clusterfuck that is Brexit.

 

‘Why now?’ you ask – perhaps warily, if you yourself are familiar with the shambles, and are aware that I have avoided it on this blog, choosing indeed to tread lightly because of the divisiveness of the issue.

I made no mention of it at the beginning of this year. I have not said a word here about the UK government having screwed UK fishing communities – and now preparing to screw UK farming communities (and the irony that both these are traditional parts of the constituency of the Conservative Party).

 

That avoidance has been five years in the making – not least because I have also spent a lot of that time trying to understand it through the prism of my Brexit-voting parents (who then died in 2017 and 2018, without hanging around to see the godawful mess that their votes had helped to create) and finding that my attempts to understand them (and myself) is still, even now, largely bound up in trying to understand Brexit and English exceptionalism.

 

So why now ... why today?

 

Because Tim ‘Not-Very-Nice-But-Definitely-Very-Dim’ Martin has decided that, in spite of having been one of businesses’ few high priests for the cult that is Brexit, he now needs EU economic migrants to pull the pints in Wetherspoons, the chain of pubs that he founded, and wants regulations ‘liberalised’ in order to allow that.

 

To be fair, he has a BA in law from the University of Nottingham and qualified as a barrister in 1979 (though has never practiced) so is clearly a Brain of Britain candidate.

 

Not.

 

In 2018, on Brexit, he said that his pubs would stop selling EU-sourced products ... because, well ... The EU! Nose, spite, fucking face.

 

But honestly, this is from an individual who was reported in The Guardian on 30 March this year as having recommitted to a massive, 10-year expansion of ’Spoons, including 75 projects, made up of 18 new pubs and 57 major extensions to existing venues, creating 20,000 jobs.

Oops ... what if you can't fill those jobs, Mr Martin?

 

So it’s hardly difficult to see why he’s suddenly had a change of heart about immigration – okay, less a “change of heart” and more an ‘OMG! My personal pocket!’ religious conversion.

 

And this, girls and boys, is just part of why Brexit is a clusterfuck – because it has been guided by imbeciles and private profiteers who aren’t even intelligent and/or self-aware enough to recognise the impact on their own businesses and profits. Never mind on anyone else. They can't even managed enlightened self interest!.

This is not written from a position ofsnobbery. ’Spoons often do really good cooked breakfasts at a really great price (I’ve enjoyed them before a match in Manchester more than once and in Cardiff during Millennium Magic). And the beer they sell isn’t just dross, such as that 'brewed' by Interbrew.

 

But Martin’s comments illustrate that, while Wetherspoons is essentially a (socially) working class brand, he doesn’t give a toss about that group of people (however you would categorise the working class) and only about his own pocket.

As is clear, given that this is an employer who refuses to pay his own staff extra for working on bank holidays or allow them to have a soft drink while working on really hot days (like today).

 

Brexit in a fucking nutshell.

Sign a petition too get Wetherspoons to pay its workforce for bank holidays

 

Praising grown-up Germany in the age of Brexit

Why the Germans Do it Better

John Kampfner

 

Atlantic Books

 

If you wanted to create a more provocative title, then it’s hard to see how you could better than that for this volume, which was published late last year.

 

It will inflame hardcore, Brexit-loving exceptionalists (never a bad thing), but it also won't be particularly popular with most Germans.

The latter group does not generally want to view its country in such terms: where the past lies so heavy, nationalistic bragging is out of the question for the majority.

Rather, there is continued reflection and concern – a situation not seen in the UK, where a loud minority feels free to howl some sort of superiority and, as Iain Duncan Smith did in January, at the end of the Brexit transition period, to hail the opportunity for Britain to “dominate” the world once more.

How Christ-like can you be? And I only ask the question, since IDS is supposedly a Christian.

So the history of the UK remains largely unfaced, to be seen only as one long, glorious victory. Raising the issues of statues to slavers is, for the right-wing elements of the press, 'woke’ and, of course 'cancel culture’.

But for author John Kampfner, it has, since the end of WWII, punched above its weight morally and ethically – and therefore, it’s not difficult to see why this is a legitimate suggestion.

 

It’s actually worth stepping back a bit to start with, noting that Kampfner is the son of a Jewish father who escaped eastwards from the Nazis, where he met the author’s English Protestant mother, who was a nurse in Singapore, where he himself was born.

 

Kampfner’s own CV is seriously impressive: he has worked as a journalist for Reuters, The Telegraph (initially in East Berlin), the FT, the BBC, and has been the editor of the New Statesman and current affairs editor of the British Society of Magazine Editors.

 

In other words, we can fairly approach this work without assuming an impinging and overriding personal/political ideology.

 

It is a fascinating book, combining elements of memoir, interview, data, history and lots more.

 

From a personal perspective and as a Germanophile myself, I am probably far better read on German history than the overwhelming majority of my compatriots. Indeed, I was whooping out loud when Kampfner described the lack of German history beyond 1933-1945 being represented in most British bookshops.

 

For a couple of decades now, that has been a way in which I judge a bookshop. I am not alone.

 

However, butting into this, I would take issue with Kampfner’s simplistic comparison of Prussia with Nazism. If you want to read more on that, then I can never recommend Christopher Clark’s superb Iron Kingdom highly enough. To be fair, I'd say read it anyway – it's the best history I've read.

I would suggest that he equally wrong on the green movement in Germany – in terms of timing. As Günter Grass’s 1986 novel The Rat illustrates, Germans were first spurred into action on the environment by realising that their forests were dying because of acid rain. And for Germans, forests are a massively important issue – as Kampfner does point out fleetingly.

He also stresses that, in Germany, free issues are not just the preserve of the political left. The environment has brought many together, including conservatives – hence the electoral success of the German greens. 

However, for all my pickiness, this is a brilliant volume in so many ways. If you sit anywhere to the left of centre – and frankly, I think that many of those on the right of centre would feel the same – this is actually a clarion call for conservatism. Note the small ‘c’. And it's not a bad vision or, in Germany, reality.

 

There are many things I recognised – as well as many that were new to me – and also many that I found myself longing for.

 

Kampfner is very good on the social market and, while it’s briefer in terms of pages, he’s even better on Germany’s verein – the clubs. Apparently, Germany expects all citizens to be part of community organisations. Reading this section, I found myself longing for such a sense of community in the UK.

 

I recall a boat trip around Lübeck on a Sunday morning and seeing all the local boating clubs active. And other individuals out waking and running and running and more.

 

Nothing since has suggested to me that Germans have it, in essence, wrong – and this book provides the facts to back this up.

Kampfner is not simply rosy-tinted about his subject – he see its faults and sets them down clearly. But even while admitting to being “more of a child of Thatcher” than he would have imagined, in his impatience with the German way of doing things economically, he now points to how the country has largely stuck to its beliefs on the social market – even as many other countries now start to make at least noises about the importance of community etc.

It’s clear that Germany is aided in being more ‘grown up’ by having none of the distrust and dislike of intellectual activity that is particularly rife in English life. He describes how Angela Merkel loves to discuss high culture – and contrasts that to David Cameron, who was embarrassed to admit, at a dinner with the Kanzellor, that he just watched telly when off duty.

As Kampfner goes on, it’s a perfect was to illustrate how a liking for high culture is generally disparaged in the UK as elitist etc – where the situation in Germany is quite different (the number of small towns in Germany with opera houses is a succinct illustration of this).

But then again, German conservatism is ‘girly swot’ Merkel and here, it’s Boris Johnson and his rabble of an untalented Cabinet that happily trashes ‘experts’ at the first opportunity.

In the age of Brexit and Johnson, Kampfner’s book is an important read and corrective.

A plague on all our houses

Bruised and battered,

Brought low by its own benighted will,

Perfidious Albion crawls toward its golden dawn.

 

The high priests of Brexit now

Preach that, just as

Plucky little Blighty

Won in ’45,

So We Have Won Again.

 

This time the prize

Will not be having played an honourable part

In a defeat of fascism,

But blue passports for all and

Unicorns that frolic on the sunlit uplands.

 

Plague Island

As it has become,

Is governed by clueless clowns;

Corrupt and cronyistic,

Liars every one.

 

A tousle-haired buffoon,

A Ghost of Years Gone West;

A gurning schoolboy who proclaims

This country is ‘the best!’

Let’s not forget the bully,

Who loves being smirkingly cruel,

And all their colleagues who believe

Poor children should feast on gruel.

 

Don’t forget the one who claimed expenses for his stable

Or he who dished out housing deals

To those around his table.

Recall the dolt who didn’t know

That Calais is rather near!

And the cheesy one whose trade deal claims

Bring forth an embarrassed tear.

 

Who voted for this bunch of goons,

Fiddling while the country burns?

 

It wasn’t me.

But have I done enough

To counter all their lies and obfuscation?

Or am I some sort of Vichyite,

Happy to go with the flow,

Avoiding complication?

 

I really don’t have a crib sheet,

I don’t really know what it means.

But I do know we need to be sharper

To think logically and

Not just to dream.

 

For dreams will not bring us progress;

And dreams will not combat the lies.

So put shoulder to the wheel

And hope we might learn to be wise.

                                                                            December 2020

Of Brexit and a tin-pot Mussolini

This week has seen two election communications land on our door mat. One arrived from one of the country’s two main political parties, unaddressed. The other was specifically addressed to The Other Half. Lucky him.

It was a folded leaflet for The Brexit Party, Nigel Farage’s latest political project.

After failing to persuade more than a few dozen people to march (part of the way) to London in support of Brexit (without him, himself), Farage has somehow found the money needed to launch such a publicity campaign.

Not that he’s saying where that cash has come from – or at least, not the one big donation that has (apparently) been received, even though election rules say such things must be revealed. Maybe he'll let on later. But not now.

The rest is all from individual supporters, all paying small enough amounts that these do not need to be declared. You can’t join The Brexit Party – you can only “register as a supporter”. This is not, in other words, a democratic political organisation. There is no mechanism for any internal democracy to elect any official within it or to decide any policy.

But then again, when you only have one policy, who needs discussion and debate?

And given that situation, what on earth do you fill an expensive election communication with?

The main meat, if you will, is a statement from Farage, dramatically headlined “We must leave the EU”. The key reason given is that, in “June 2016, 17.m voted to leave the EU – the biggest democratic mandate in British history”.

This is arrant nonsense. It would only be the “biggest democratic mandate in British history” if the margin had been the biggest margin in British history. It was not a massive margin. It was a very, very slender margin.

Indeed, it was precisely the margin that, a short while before the referendum, Farage himself told the Mirror that, were the vote to be 52% to 48% in favour of remaining in the EU, he would start campaigning for a re-run.

Not that I'm suggesting that Farage is a hypocrite. Obviously not.

There is familiar stuff in the leaflet about how MPs “have betrayed Brexit”. Apparently, “our great nation” is now being “humiliated” and we must “fight back against our failing MPs who have defied 17.4m of us”.

Unlike Farage, I can only speak for myself. But personally, I don’t feel “humiliated”. Don’t get me wrong, there are moments when I feel myself to be in a permanent state of face-palm frustration and bemusement – and possibly even some embarrassment – but I haven’t spotted any personal sense of “humiliation” yet.

Farage also seems not to have noticed that, among the MPs per se that he condemns in the leaflet, there are quite a number that support Brexit – and in several cases, they fancy the harder Brexit the better. That group would include former Trotskyist Unionist Kate Hoey, who did a Titanic routine with Farage himself on a boat on Thames and appeared with him at the start of the Great Brexit March.

Or, more to the point, Farage has condemned an entire group because the people he is trying to appeal to will swallow the simplest messages and not bother with the facts.

It’s all rhetoric – empty rhetoric. The rest of this leaflet is no better. Candidates for our region are quoted as saying that “we need to keep our democracy intact for future generations”. Joel Chilaka – medical student. What does that even mean?

“We must take our waters back and restore our costal communities.” June Mummery – “fishing industry”. One wonders if she’s asked Farage why he attended so few meetings of the EU fisheries committee, when he could have actually done some work on this very issue.

“Left-wing democrats should vote to deliver the referendum result” – this from ‘former’ Trotskyist Claire Fox, the individual who still believes that IRA bombings were okay and (allegedly) that viewing images of paedophile abuse should not be illegal. She’s on the ticket locally because, presumably, any leftie will automatically be convinced to vote for her like.

“I do deals for a living. Taking ‘no deal’ off the table is bonkers.” Ben Habib – boss of First Property PLC, who clearly doesn’t actually understand what ‘no deal’ would do to the country or doesn’t care.

“Our country deserves better leadership.” This is Richard James Sunley Tice: private school educated ‘man of the people’. Oh – and Brexit Party chairman.

“The Conservative Party has failed to deliver Brexit and damaged trust in our democracy.” And so declares Annunziata Rees-Mogg – journalist and intellectual prodigy, who claims to have joined the Conservative Party at the age of five and, three years later, been out “canvassing, proudly wearing my rosette.”

“I fought for our country. I’m not prepared to see it humiliated.” James Glancy CGC – decorated Royal Marine.

Dear Christ. My mother only sent me out delivering Christian Aid and NCH (as it was then) envelopes shortly before I was in my teens. Should I have to bow before Annunziata's genius? Or indeed, is she really such a genius – or just an entitled brat?

Any meat on the bones? Any policies? Nope. Not a one.

But there is more.

“83% of Labour MPs back a second referendum.”

Because the democracy they’re whinging about being under threat or broken would be further underminded by, err, voting.

“92% of Brexit voters feel betrayed.” This apparently appeared in the Sun, which is hardly a trustworthy organ. However, since polling in recent months has increasingly suggested that support for Brexit is no longer a (small) majority position, this could mean that those Brexit voters feel ‘betrayed’ when realising how many lies they were fed by Farage and others.

“498 MPs promised to honour the result.”

We live in a representative democracy. It is not the job of MPs to push ahead with policies that will damage their constituents and the wider country. Jobs have already been lost as a consequence of the vote – even before we leave the EU. The cost of living has gone up as sterling has gone down – again, as a direct consequence of the vote itself and then as a result of the prime minister setting in motion Article 50.

But of course: “Politics is broken. Let’s change it for good.”

Yes – our political situation is a mess: our political (and public) discourse is a mess. Neither have been helped by liars and spivs like Farage and his fellow Brexit high priests – or David Cameron.

But change it for who’s “good”? For what “good”? Indeed, does “good” here mean ‘permanently’ – potentially then suggesting something anti-democratic – or for ‘better’?

And there you have it. Brexit is Brexit is Brexit. There is only one Brexit (actually, there are probably as many Brexits as people who voted for it). Nothing else matters. There is no degree of Brexit. Only Brexit.

It’s just a case of ‘get Brexit done – whatevs!’

Farage and Tice give no indication of how leaving the EU will benefit the majority of ordinary working people.

That’s because neither of them care about British working people, per se.

They are on the economic right – and harness the social right to support it. They are disaster capitalists who believe that profit has no downsides and that those on the receiving end of profiteering corporates are acceptable collateral damage.

It’s worth remembering that Rees-Mogg’s dad wrote the text book on disaster capitalism.

The Brexit Party is an organisation that nobody can join, that has no manifesto, no policies, no internal democracy and no transparency about where it gets its money from.

It is facile and wrong to label all those who voted for Brexit as intellectually challenged. But if The Brexit Party’s empty election literature convinces you that it is the answer to anything, then you really are probably too foolish to have understood the question.

A very, very, very dark – but funny – matter

Copenhagen, the 19th century: Danish celebrity author Hans Christian Anderson is regaling an audience with his latest fairy tale, The Little Mermaid.

There are celebratory fireworks and showers of admiration for the writer, but there are also ghostly figures.

And when Anderson returns home, climbing to the attic of his house, it is to discuss these ghosts with Marjory, a disabled Congolese pygmy, who he keeps in a box and who writes the stories for him.

But why doesn’t she try to escape; is she and her situation unique and what does Charles Dickens have to do with it all?

Martin McDonagh’s latest play, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is going to upset people. Though to be strictly accurate, it’s still previewing until 24 October and it’s already provoked Indignant of Islington and Vexed of Vauxhall to express their horror online.

One can imagine this work will trigger an orgy of offence.

Taken at the most simple face value, the play laughs at colonialism and thumbs its nose at the crimes of empires. And because McDonagh has written a funny play, the audience laughs along and, therefore, becomes complicit.

Except that this is not supposed to be taken at face value, and only a monumental naïf or someone utterly dedicated to a peacock-like display of their social justice warrior credentials would not understand or would pretend not to understand what McDonagh is doing.

And incidentally, if you push that idea that he’s genuinely laughing at the crimes of imperialism, then you’re saying that the black cast members are Uncle Toms, and I would suggest people don’t go down that route.

There isn’t much of a plot, as such. Like Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, this is more of a meditation on a number of themes.

Not least among these is the trivialising of the treatment of the crimes of colonialism – an attitude that has reared its head again in recent years, with continuing exceptionalism and the concomitant belief of some Brexiteers that, once free from the EU, the UK can build Empire II and indeed, the rest of the world is ready to rush into our arms to give us the bestest ever trade deals with only five minutes discussion needed. Because we’re Britain, doncha know.

Of course, the same can be said of the Trump-era US too, with the crude and fact-free racism of the MAGA crowd, convincing itself that ‘true America’ is WASP America.

Such attitudes never went away, but increased nationalism elsewhere around the globe means they’re re-emerging. And therefore, it is important to remind people of just what nationalism and colonialism means in reality.

McDonagh – a writer in whom the Irish gothic tradition meets London-Irish experience, with punk mixed in (as Fintan O’Toole’s excellent programme essay notes) – is ideally suited to push boundaries so that, while A Very Very Very Dark Matter is very funny, it isn’t what you’d describe as ‘comfortable’.

In concentrating on Belgian imperialism – and the genocide in what was the Congo – the play raises what will, for many, be history that they are not familiar with. In pointing up the rape of the region for resources, he even manages a sideswipe at environmentally-holier-than-thou cyclists, noting that while Leopold II’s publicly-stated intention (as with other countries) was to ‘civilise’ and Christianise, the less public one was the desire for ivory and rubber – here, with the latter used for bicycle tires.

A Very Very Very Dark Matter is probably not for the faint-hearted or those who get upset by ‘bad language’ – it’s gloriously sweary in a very Irish way.

It’s short – 90 minutes with no interval – angry and funny at the same time, and defies easy labels.

Director Matthew Dunster has done an excellent job and Anna Fleische’s design is superb.

As Marjory, Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles, on her debut, is simply outstanding and more than holds her own with her massively experienced co-star.

Jim Broadbent as Anderson is a delight as the bumbling, eccentric and crass writer, living off Marjory’s talent and, all the while, pleading with her that *his* colonial crimes aren’t as bad as those of others. And his swearing is a glory.

Phil Daniels as “Charles FUCKING DICKENS!” is a hoot too, and getting Tom Waits to record the role of narrator adds both to the fairy-tale aspect of the piece, as well as the sinister and eerie nature of it.

Bloody brilliant.

• A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is at London’s bridgetheatre.co.uk until 6 January 2019.