I'll be honest, I didn't know anything about this apart from the fact it had Charles Edwards in. Thankfully he is (Downton Abbey notwithstanding), as good a cultural kitemark as any.
Waste was written, and is set in, the 1920s as a Conservative government sweeps to power. Interestingly, the action starts with the impressive and machiavellian Julia Farrant at her country house, where she, as the wife of safely-seated MP George, plots to engage the maverick independent Henry Trebell (Edwards) in pushing forward the long-overdue church reform bill. She sees Henry as a great political talent - but also a deniable asset, and a man she would prefer to have inside the tent rather than out.
Henry has been invited for the weekend, and Julia also invites the languorous Amy O'Connell, socialite and separated wife to an agitating Irish republican (an almost unrecognizably flighty Olivia Williams). A purely physical (for Henry, at the least) attraction develops between the two, with an intriguing but confusing scene where Henry attempts to woo Amy, in an openly formulaic and unfeeling manner - he has no romantic soul, and will say any words she thinks she needs to hear, as long as he doesn't have to mean them. It is only in this early scene where Charles Edwards doesn't seem to hit the mark in an otherwise wonderful realisation of a complex character - Henry is an incredibly decent and principled man, but with very little humanity or empathy. In this first episode he seems malicious, rather than unthinking - and as such it takes time to warm to his peculiar brand of coldness.
Moving forwards, we see Henry accepting the challenge of church reform, with an ambitious and laudable proposal for disestablishment; he will unshackle the Church of England from the state, transforming it from an inflexible collection of ceremonies and landed parsons into the first state education system, putting those Oxbridge-educated clerics to work in improving the minds of the future. Henry gains support from many corners, including the staunchly Christian Lord Cantilupe. Their discussions on the finer points of the bill, including a wonderful passage where Henry (a staunch atheist) explains his evangelical belief in the good the church can do, is intoxicating in its swirl of ideas and power; and, in what is an incredibly cynical and sad play about a timelessly pathetic political class, is a rare and uplifting insight into what it must be to be a great man, with the power to do great things, and to change the country for the better.
We then come to the crux of the play - Amy reveals that she is pregnant with Henry's child, and, as a married woman, they both face disgrace. Amy wishes to 'deal with' the pregnancy, a practice Henry's conscience will not accept. They argue and she leaves, and the frenetically busy Henry cannot find her again to continue their conversation. He rejoins the whirlwind of arrangements and Westminster confidences, whilst Amy seeks her own solution to the unwanted child with a backstreet abortionist. Sadly, in a play with a number of sparkling female characters, this scene (and Amy's subsequent death at the botched procedure) occur off-stage, and from being a witty and intelligent sparring partner, Amy becomes a sad victim, and the play turns from the world of women (including Henry's long suffering and devoted sister) to a world of men, with smoky club dining rooms and iron fists hidden in velvet gloves.
The question turns to whether Henry can be 'saved' from disgrace, and the Tory cabinet endeavour to organise a hush-up of the 'bad business'. For Henry, harrowed by the events that have unfolded around and because of him, forgiveness is not something he can give himself. However the thought of completing the bill, his bill, offers a light in the darkness. As Henry goes through the ringer, the career politicians add this new bartering chip to their political calculations, and finally get to their perfect zero-sum - changing nothing, and maintaining their own petty power - at the expense of a flawed man and his dream of change. The play is savage in it's skewering of these charming, heartless men - and good on the National for a pointed political staging that casts it's evil politicians as humans, just as craven and grasping as the rest of us, rather than as boo-hiss villains or top-hatted mannequins.
The play must have been written about the same time as Parade's End, which also features a cerebral, cold central character, who is both gifted but unequipped to deal with modern society. Unlike Christopher Tietjens, Henry Trebbell is not by any means a goodie - he knows what his indiscretions with Amy could mean for both her and him, and he fails to care for anyone, particularly Amy, when they need him most. However he is a fascinating and recognizable character, and, like Parade's End, Waste uses a man-out-of-time to tell a wonderfully progressive story, which still seems shocking in much of it's content today - ninety years since it must have been breaking open taboos around sex and abortion, and indicting the politicians of the day.
Superbly acted throughout, this play made me proud that we have a National Theatre - I can't think of anywhere else that I could have seen a tricky, challenging play about the finer points of government policy, gender politics and human fallibility, and had such a good time doing so.
I am ashamed to say I had never heard of this multi-multi-million selling book, nor the Taylor-Swift-cameoing 2014 film based upon it. I came to it from the (increasingly godsend-y) Goodreads - where it tops the list for Soft Science Fiction.
I should explain for those unfamiliar with that term (and are now wondering if this blog is a fetish-y thing involving not completely nude photos of Dr Crusher from Star Trek), that Soft Sci-Fi is the term for science fiction that focuses on the societal or psychological, by means of some sci-fi conceit. Good examples include the peerless Ursula Le Guin, imagining a world without gender in The Left Hand of Darkness, asking "what would the world be like if men weren't constantly being prats", through to the recent (and excellent) Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh, which imagines a Tinder-to-its-natural-conclusion future where everyone has an official score out of 10, can matchmake with unbelievable precision, and pay for live subvocal flirt-coaching, with, naturally, the course of true love still not running very smoothly at all.
This is a good fit for me as a genre as it's both geeky and pretentious, plus I can sometimes pretend that quite sweeping, soppy romances (like both those above) are 'raising interesting ideas about the human psyche'. The genre really comes alive when it allows you, by way of the transmuted setting and technology, to take a fresh look at part of life that you've never scrutinised before, and so to rewire your brain a little (hopefully for the better).
It was with this optimism that I approached The Giver. Here the conceit is an incredibly safe, uniform, planned society has developed in the near future. The protagonist, Jonas, is coming up to his 12th birthday, where he will be assigned his life's vocation, chosen for him by the Community Elders based on his personality and skills. This could be, like his father, a neonatal doctor who tends for the Community's babies, until they are released to their (always adoptive) parents after their first year of life, or as a manual labourer or a bicycle repairman (the only mode of travel, for there is no leaving the Community). The society is, quite literally, blind to divisions of race, religion or disability (there are no differences), and woman are treated exactly as men, with the exception of the special 'Birthmother' profession, where women are inseminated to pop out 4 children in 3 years and then take up a role as a labourer for the rest of their adult lives. Everyone is content, polite, contributing and, very, very docile.
The book is superb at gradually unveiling this fascist utopia, a kind of Albert Speer designed Hebden Bridge, and holds no judgements as the reader suffers a creeping, cold dislocation between Jonas and his family's jovial equanimity and the disturbingly structured nature of their lives.
The book turns on Jonas' graduation, where he is given an incredibly special and prestigious job, that of the community memory keeper, taking over from the eponymous 'Giver'. Here the premise becomes more parable-esque (god I wish that was a real word), and we find that The Giver holds the communities ancestral memories, including all of humanity's experience of culture, love, victory and bravery; but also all of the pain, war, hunger and helplessness. Jonas takes on the burden of the clan's humanity, and with it comes an angry contempt towards the placidity of his old friends and family, who couldn't be angry or contemptuous if they tried, leading to a desperate break for freedom.
Sadly, this is where I started to lose my interest in Jonas and his emotional awakening; once the story clearly lays out its pieces as a battle between Freedom and Fascism, the pace snowballs (quite literally at one point) and the novel becomes much more simplistic in its arguments. Having spent so much of the novel humanising the members of the community, Jonas breaks out, Flatland-style into the only 3D character in a world of cardboard cut-outs.
I rather think that my hopes for a brain-changer were unfair on The Giver. The novel is aimed at teenagers, and Lowry's work generally is pitched at younger children - and this is clear in the ending, which evokes that very incessant, page-turning sense of escape that you see in classics like The Silver Sword. This means that some of the allegory can become heavy handed, in a Lord of the Flies sense, compared to the more engaging and coherent logic of a book with similar themes, aimed at a similar age group, like Flowers for Algernon. Lowry does a great job of making clear how 'normal' life feels for the members of the Community, and it's wonderful to see how important the book has been, particularly in the US, at allowing children to explore the perils of 'my safety is more important than my freedom' approach.
If you can forgive a moment of self-regard, I think there is a more interesting book trapped within The Giver - where Jonas doesn't break free. As the new memory-keeper, Jonas has power and prestige in the community - he can't be questioned, punished or harmed, and he is the only man who empathises, who angers, who lusts, who loves. What would the community do with him? If you were part of the machine, if you quite literally couldn't conceive of a different set of values, of responses, of emotions to those you have been taught to feel, and with you walked someone who saw the world in bright technicolor - what would you do? Maybe their is some rewiring to be had after all.
