Through a Glass Lightly

For Tony and Angie and everyone else on the Broo editorial team.

I enjoy writing for BrooWaha.  The Wikipedia article describes it as an “online citizen’s newspaper with a focus on local news.”  That seems rather odd to me.  After all, what is ‘local news’ in the age of the internet?  The briefest of glances will show you that the ‘news’ it reports (actually most of the articles are not news at all) is from here, there and everywhere. Perhaps the world itself is now local.  Our neighbours are all on the moon!   

My own articles cover just about anything that engages my interest.  I’ve been contributing for over a year now, usually three times a week, and in that period I’ve had over a hundred and fifty articles published, the latest another bash at scientology in my regular Tuesday Letters from Ana column (Scientology Child, 10 July).  There is some overlap with Ana the Imp, when I feel it is appropriate, but a goodly number have not been published here or anywhere else.

It’s been an interesting experience for me, an amateur virtual journalist.  Actually my contributions are less journalism, in the sense of hot reports, and more opinion pieces, features and reflections, the kind of thing I specialise in, often with an acidy angle.  Hey, it’s my speciality, a piquant prose sauce! 

I do try to pick up fresh news items, the sort of thing that the BrooWaha audience might not have come across elsewhere in the mainstream media.    A recent report of mine on a live worm being removed from the eye of an Indian pensioner has proved particularly popular, popular enough to have reached the number one spot in the Most Read Articles.  (Worm Found Live in an Eye, 1 July) 

I think I have a feel now for the audience and the sort of thing that is likely to appeal.  Most readers and contributors, though not all, are from the Anglo-Saxon sphere, and of that sphere my assumption is that most are North Americans.  Any decent writer has to reach out their audience, to understand what is likely to swim and what is just as likely to sink. 

I now know that I cannot make my pieces too local or too weighty.  Still, the audience can be unpredictable.  Articles that I thought might only carry a minority interest have climbed high in the readership stakes.  The thing is never to talk down or condescend to people.  I always treat my readers with the same respect, my style not varying at all from the light-hearted to the serious.  I believe I could write with equal ease for the Sun or the Telegraph.  I make no assumption and do I take things for granted; explanation is offered where explanation is needed.  All that matters is clarity.  Good prose is like a window pane, George Orwell wrote, something that I always have in mind.  

I’ve Been Visiting Illegal Websites!

Actually, I’ve not but I do have a warning for you.  Not so long ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek reflection on a putative zombie apocalypse.  Now I want to alert people to a genuine contagion, a potential threat to all computer users.  I can speak personally about this because it hit me recently, causing an hour or two of anxiety.  My remarks are specifically addressed to people outside Europe, where the threat, I believe, has not yet appeared.  North America looks likely to be the next target.  

Anyway, it’s a virus that came to England from the Continent, where it first appeared in Germany, affecting Windows users.  It purports to be a notice from the police, appearing right across your screen, saying that because you have been detected visiting illegal sites your computer has been locked.  And, my goodness, it has; all files and icons have disappeared.  Even ctrl alt delete does not work.  The notice proceeds with a warning that unless one pays £100 fine ($130) within twenty four hours then one’s computer will be wiped clean. 

Mine supposedly came from London’s Metropolitan Police Force.  I now know that the scam (other forces are mentioned also) is called the Metropolitan Police Ukash virus.  I was worried but not at all phased. For one thing, I don’t visit illegal or pornographic sites, and for another, this is little more than demanding money with menaces, a practice clearly at variance with all legal and police procedure.  Apart from that the wording and grammar is atrocious! 

However, I understand that a lot of people, visiting porno sites or not, have been seriously unsettled by this, the very idea that the police had such power.  In fact it’s a just a parcel of creepy cyber crooks.  The police themselves are aware of this.  The Met issued its own warning, advising people not to reveal details of their bank accounts. 

As I say, my PC was infected by this Trojan.  Fortunately I also have a lap top and was able to carry out a spot of research.  I linked up with some other users who had been similarly affected, managing to find a solution suited to my own particular problem, once I worked my way through a lot of technical jargon!  The solution seems to be different in each case.  I have Windows7 and for me at least it was relatively simple, though I note that other users seemed to be in deeper crisis. 

I should add that the Trojan managed to get round my existing anti-virus protection, which is a slight concern.  The bigger one is over exactly where this nuisance came from.  I’m always careful.  In future I shall be even more so.   Criminals are imaginative.  It’s up to us to be even more imaginative and not be scared by the unexpected.  Take care out there!  

My Name was William Kidd

I published this piece last year on another website.  I called it to mind recently, so it might as well be here also! 

It’s over three hundred years since Captain William Kidd was hanged.  He was by reputation one of the most notorious pirates who ever lived, of the Caribbean or any other of the seven seas.  Taken to Execution Dock in Wapping, he was hanged on 23 May, 1701, a particularly brutal event.  Twice the rope around his neck broke; the third time it held.

Afterwards, according to Admiralty custom, he was tied to a stake on the Thames Estuary to allow three tides to wash over him.  Not content with that, his bloated body was then dipped in tar and squeezed into an iron frame at Tilbury, there hanged anew as a warning to all future pirates.

The problem is William Kidd, for all the notoriety subsequently attached to his name, was not a pirate at all but a privateer, acting under licence at a time when Britain was at war with France.  That is to say, he was an ‘official’ pirate, whose plundering of enemy merchants had the sanction of the authorities, themselves party to a contract that promised a lucrative return in loot.  In the end he was betrayed in a shabby act of duplicity by the very people who had sent him out in the first place.

My interest in the subject was whetted by an article written by Angus Konstan in the BBC History Magazine (The Sacrifice of Captain Kidd).  Taking this as my cue I did a spot of further research, coming up with some rather intriguing material. There was even a suggestion in one report I read that he was deliberately framed by William III, the ruling monarch, because he was Scottish!

Kidd was certainly born in Scotland, though I can’t be certain where.  According to some accounts it was the neighbourhood of Dundee, while others say it was Greenock, places at opposite ends of the country.  Scottish he may have been by birth but he moved to the colony of New York when he was five years old; so by the time of his trial, when he was in his mid-forties, he was more American than anything else.

Kidd, who made a career as a professional seaman, caught the attention – unfortunately for him – of Richard Coot, earl of Bellomont, colonial governor of New York, as the man best able to intercept French pirates and merchantmen.  Bellomont joined with a number of other aristocratic backers to fund the venture, all members of the ruling Whig establishment.

King William himself was involved, signing a letter of manqué, which reserved ten per cent of the proceeds for the crown.  There is also a suggestion that he put up some of the venture capital, though the evidence here is far from certain.  Unusually, and perhaps fatally in the outcome, the Admiralty was not promised a share; in fact the Admiralty, as a branch of government, seems to have been duped in a manner that would now be considered fraudulent, duped by none other than Admiral Edward Russell, its own First Lord, one of Bellomont’s clique.  No, this was privateering at its purest; and at its purest the borders with piracy are particularly fine.

Armed with this dubious mandate, “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” sailed from Deptford on the purpose-built Adventure Galley in September 1696.  This was voyage to be as ill-omened as that of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.  His first misfortune came when he encountered a convoy of East Indiamen, escorted by Commodore Warren of the Royal Navy.  With Warren threatening to impress some of Kidd’s crew, the Adventure Galley sailed off under cover of night.

Warren, in a fit of pique, immediately wrote to the Admiralty in London, denouncing Kidd as a pirate, though so far he had yet to board a single ship.  The slander went round the world, repeated in India by the agents of the East India Company, which meant that all ports under its control were closed to Kidd.  Unable to make land, his crew became mutinous.  During a confrontation on 30 October 1697 Kidd threw a bucket at William Moore, his chief gunner, which hit him on the head, fracturing his skull.  He died the next day of concussion.

Later when Kidd was brought to trial, on civil and not Admiralty law, in addition to the accusations of piracy he was charged and convicted of the premeditated murder of Moore.  I find it difficulty to believe that there can be a more unusual case than this, one where the murderer’s weapon of choice was a wooden bucket!

After the bucket-wielding captain had suppressed the mutiny his luck changed, or appeared to change.  In November he captured the Rouparelle, whose captain carried a pass promising him the protection of the French crown.  In January he found an even greater prize, the Quedagh Merchant, the captain armed with a similar pass.  He also happened to be an Englishman by the name of Wright.  Though Kidd tried to persuade his crew to hand the vessel back, the pass notwithstanding, they refused.  Now his reputation as a pirate was cemented.

The Quedagh Merchant, which carried goods to the value of £75,000, a huge sum for the day, more than justified the voyage of the Adventure Galley.  Still denied the ports controlled by the East India Company, Kidd sailed for New York to meet Bellomont.  On the way he buried part of his treasure for safety in an island in Long Island Sound.  Though long since recovered it has done nothing to stop people looking for his pirate hoard ever since.

Bellomont, concerned by his business associations with a man now generally perceived as a pirate, greeted his protégé coldly, almost immediately having him arrested, later shipping him to England to stand trail.  First he had to appear before the House of Commons, there to face questions from the Tory opposition, anxious to determine to what extent the ministry was involved in his alleged acts of piracy.  He was finally called before the bar of the House in March 1701, by which time the French passes, the main basis for his defence, had conveniently disappeared.  They were not rediscovered until 1910.

Much had changed since Kidd first arrived in London.  The Tories were now in power.  Here was his moment, his chance to implicate his backers in what might have turned into a political trial.  But he simply held to one defence: that he was innocent and his sponsors had encouraged no wrong doing.  Disappointed, Parliament consigned him to a process where the matter had already been prejudged.

Kidd was a victim.  The victim of the king, who had to be seen as tough on piracy and tough on the causes of piracy, while hypocritically benefiting from the proceeds; the victim of the Admiralty, which refused to see the death of Moore as a consequence of mutiny; the victim of Bellomont and his shady Whig clique, anxious to cover the fact that they had diverted funds from the Admiralty for their own private profit.  He was the victim, as Konstan says in his article, of the manipulation of evidence, of perjury, of rumour-mongering and of deal-making.  He was the victim, above all, of political expediency.

The story has an interesting postscript.  In the summer of 2009, acting on the findings of researchers in America, the Fraternity of Masters and Seamen in Dundee decided to look into the facts, with a view to presenting a case before the Criminal Cases Review Commission.  The matter was subsequently taken up in the Scottish Parliament, aptly enough, by one William Kidd!  Mr Kidd, urging his fellow members to support the bid to clear the Captain’s name, said;

I don’t expect that there’s going to be a mass campaign on the streets for something that happened three hundred years ago but I do expect that people are going to be worried about the fact that someone can be used and abused in that way by the state, whatever time in history.

Apparently people are not worried enough, because I’ve been unable to discover any further developments.  Captain Kidd still remains a convicted pirate.

I do have a certain sympathy with the view put forward by the MSP, that there should be no limit on justice, that wrongs, no matter how distant in the past, are still wrongs.  Captain Kidd, when all is considered, was subject to a serious miscarriage of justice, bordering on outright conspiracy.

But does it really matter?  His final adventure was disappointing, tragic, mundane and fatal.  Innocent or not, he is dead beyond recovery.  Would he not have been better pleased by his re-emergence in fiction as a dark and abiding legend?  He continues to live in Washington Irvine’s The Devil and Tom Walker, in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  What better posterity, what better legacy.

My name was William Kidd, As I sailed, as I sailed,
My name was William Kidd, When I sailed,
My name was William Kidd; God’s laws I did forbid,
And so wickedly I did, As I sailed.

The Masque of Mugabe

Let me take you back to seventeenth century England.  Here we are, in the year 1647, to be exact.  The Civil War between King and Parliament is over, with a victory for the latter, except that it was a victory that was no victory.  The laws of the land have been flattened, the constitution wrecked.  We are in a political vacuum into which all sorts of ideas are drawn.  One idea is universal manhood suffrage.

Now we are in Putney, the headquarters of the New Model Army, rapidly turning into the power brokers of the nation. These are the men who defeated the king in battle.  Now some of them, the most radical, want a political reward for their efforts.  A series of debates are held concerning the future shape of the constitution. 

The grandees, headed by Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, his son-in-law, are shocked by a one man one vote suggestion.  So far as Ireton is concerned this is not next door to anarchy; it is anarchy.  No man, as he put it, has a right to a share in disposing of the affairs of the kingdom if he does not have a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom.  That is to say, if he does not have any property.  Voting, in such circumstances, would lead to chaos. 

Where do I stand in the debate?  To begin with, as a woman, I don’t count.  Even the most radical of the Levellers did not consider the prospect of universal suffrage.  But notwithstanding this, and taking on a manly guise, I am on the side of Ireton.  A rapid extension of the suffrage at this stage in England’s history would have been disastrous.  It would indeed have resulted in anarchy, urged on by the demagoguery of the age. 

Now we are back in the present day.  To suggest that democracy might equal anarchy is a rarefied and heterodox opinion.  There is no place now for the likes of Henry Ireton.  But he was quite right: in certain circumstances mass suffrage is disastrous; mass suffrage can lead to the destruction of a nation, given into the hands of ruthless demagogues.  Mass suffrage turned the Eden of Rhodesia into the Hades of Zimbabwe.

Now I’m in really dangerous territory.  Racist, fascist, imperialist, the cry rises.  How could anyone suggest that a white minority government was better than black majority rule?  But the suggestion has been made, and not just by me.  “It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come”, said one man, “It was better under Rhodesia.  Then we could get jobs.  Things were cheaper in stores.  Now we have no money, no food.”

Oh, an unregenerate old white racist, you might conclude, nostalgic for a vanished past.  Nostalgic, certainly, but this ‘racist’ happens to be black, one of many yearning for a nation competently managed by a tiny white elite rather than destroyed and oppressed by a tiny black elite.  For years now the modern Levellers have been at work, levelling Zimbabwe to the dust. 

My thoughts here were brought on by a piece in Taki’s Magazine (Thanks, Calvin!)  Headed One Man, One Vote, One Catastrophe, it’s by Hannes Wessels, born a white Rhodesian and transformed into a displaced Zimbabwean.  For some that will be enough to discount what he has to say, those who are generally blind to uncomfortable facts.  I’m guessing that these will be white liberals in the main, rather than the ordinary people of Zimbabwe, like the man quoted above, suffering under black ‘majority’ rule.  Actually, and paradoxically, the real racists are those who weigh such questions in terms of colour.  It’s alright to be oppressed just so long as the oppressors have the same complexion as the oppressed.

Wessels points out that Ian Smith, the one and only prime minister of independent Rhodesia, tried to tell the world that universal suffrage at that stage in the country’s history was the door to disaster.  Instead he called, like a modern Henry Ireton, for a qualified franchise based on merit not race.  Democracy could not be rushed in a place with no concept of the practice, where the majority had no understanding of the complexities involved.  Political maturity takes time. 

But the world would not listen.  Urged on by one brutal black dictator after another, with no sense of the irony involved, the world condemned Rhodesia and Smith; the BBC condemned him in its uniquely unreflective way.  Unable to withstand the pressure, Smith gave way.  The result was the flawed 1980 election, which brought Robert Mugabe and a coterie of criminal gangsters, masquerading as ‘freedom fighters,’ to power.  They have been there ever since, displacing whites and brutalising blacks.  Rhodesia died but so, too, did Zimbabwe, a protracted and painful process.

Wessels article is not simply a reflection on past disasters.  It contains a warning;

Now many Americans and Europeans are having to confront the same paradigm. As the demographic winds of change blow stronger, the number of illiterates and itinerants grows at an alarming rate. Those that contribute the least to the common good seem set to seize and retain power at the expense of the minority that contributes the most. All this is thanks to the seemingly sacrosanct principle of “one man, one vote.” But just as in Rhodesia, that minority dares not voice its displeasure at this development for fear of being condemned to the special dungeons reserved for those committing the cardinal sin of “racism.” And they can be sure of this punishment because of the mainstream media, which so cunningly manipulates the minds of the millions of simpletons who have the vote and therefore the power to elect those who will serve their destructive purpose.

Let me bring Henry Ireton back to life.  There he is, looking over the sad wreckage of Zimbabwe, looking at the anarchy brought on by ‘democracy.’  There he is, sadly nodding, seeing his past fears given present form.  He might very well meet murder on the way; he wears a masque like Mugabe.  

The Idiocy of the BBC

In my most recent blog on the continuing story of the euro crisis one contributor, disputing some of my facts, referred me, as she or he put it, to the “real data” as given by the BBC.  I shot back, straight from the hip;

The BBC? Well, yes, an impeccable source of truth, justice and the Marxist way!

It’s easy to criticise the BBC, our great national church, funded by a compulsory tithe, because they make it easy.  It may have been at one time an impeccable source of unbiased news gathering, respected across the world, but not any longer.  I never watch Auntie’s news broadcasts now because I have come to anticipate some built-in left wing bias, whether it is there or not; I have come to expect audience manipulation, not objectivity.

Quite frankly the Beeb’s reporting over so many areas is a complete disgrace.  I have in mind the organisation’s one-sided treatment of the Arab Spring, specifically over the ongoing violence in Syria.  I have no desire at all to see any virtue in the Assad regime but there is always more than one dimension to any story. Not according to the BBC, which sees all evil on the side of Assad and all good on the side of the rebels.  The reality is quite different; the reality is infinitely more complex. 

I wrote before, drawing attention to the plight of Syria’s ancient Christian community;

Most of you will be aware of Hilary Clinton’s attempt to have a UN resolution passed, condemning the government of Bashar al-Assad for the violent assault of the Syrian army on the rebel-held city of Homs. What you may not be aware of is that Islamists in the city have carried out a ‘religious cleansing’, forcing 50,000 Christians to flee from their homes in terror…It’s not an isolated event. Christians in other Syrian cities have come under attack. Bishop Antonine Audo of Aleppo, where a car bomb was exploded in the Christian quarter last month, says that the people are very afraid – “The Christians don’t know what their future will hold.”

Trying to find any mention of this inconvenient truth on the BBC is like trying to find snow on a summer’s day.  I get so frustrated, all too often speaking in a vacuum, all too often trying to raise issues and facts that are ignored elsewhere.  I get frustrated that our own government, acting on the ignorant prejudices of William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, who is turning out to an ineffably silly little man, may give active support to rebel factions it knows nothing about.  The Americans, guided by the equally silly Hilary Clinton, are already there. 

Is anyone out there; is anyone listening?  Yes, thank goodness: Rod Liddle is listening!  I took comfort from his most recent article in the Spectator, several arrows fired in the direction of Broadcasting House (At the BBC, the Arab Spring has only just ended).  I’m wrong it would seem: the BBC has not completely ignored the plight of Syria’s Christians.  There was a brief report in April on the community, fearing that it ‘might be caught in the middle’ of the fighting.  Aye, there’s the rub.  Rod cuts to the chase;

…in much the same way, I suppose, that Bosnian Muslims were somehow ‘caught in the middle’ between the Serbs and, er, themselves.

He goes on to say that there has been nothing at all, not a cheep, about Christians being ordered out of the town of Qusair recently by the local Islamist rebel commander, not a cheep about those fleeing in terror to Damascus or Lebanon, nothing at all about the people who are being shot while their churches are destroyed. 

These facts simply do not fit the BBC’s agenda, the rebels being all white and the government all black.  There is nothing in the middle, nothing to disturb this complacent and lying picture.  Seemingly Helen Boaden, the corporation’s head of news, did admit recently that its coverage of the Arab Spring might have been a bit “over excited”, before going on to say that it had been “generally impartial.” 

No, it has not.  This stupid woman is deluding herself and, what is worse, she is deluding the people of this country.  I might argue that the BBC is guilty of the cynical manipulation of the news along the lines of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.  But there is no cynicism here, just an enthusiasm that is wide-eyed to some facts and blind to others.  The shocking thing is that the British people have no choice but to pay for the BBC’s banal student journalism, whether they watch its news broadcasts or not; simply having a telly is enough. 

As Liddle says, the problem with the BBC is much less a case of political bias than a sort of journalistic imbecility.  And that’s what we pay for, that’s what the public are fed night after night, the simplistic meanderings of a lot of polytechnic Marxists. 

Rich and Thick

I rarely take any interest at all in celebrity marriages, separations and divorces; they are just too, too boring.  So far as Hello and other celebrity fanzines are concerned I’m a hopeless cause.  However I’ve made an exception for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, whose bust up is bursting out all over our national press.  I’ve made an exception because the rift is over Cruise’s scientology fad. 

People are strange but one would really have to be strange indeed to embrace this bizarre mishmash of bogus belief, to embrace a cult that is allowed to masquerade in the States as a religion.  In writing about scientology previously I said that I found out an awful lot about the movement from;

…watching South Park…an episode called Trapped in the Closet, which featured Tom Cruise, an aficionado of the cult. The actual beliefs of scientologists were touched on, accompanied by an onscreen caption saying “This is what Scientologists actually believe”. And, my goodness, it’s weird. It’s beyond me how any normal and reasonably intelligent person could be taken in by this claptrap…even Tom Cruise. 

Yes, even Tom Cruise!  But the occasion for his failing marriage is really not all that amusing, demonstrating, at least so far as I am concerned, the kind of moral depravity that these cults induce in their aficionados. 

Holmes is said to be divorcing Cruise because she believes that he was planning to send their six-year-old daughter Suri to a centre run by Sea Organisation or Sea Org, described in the reports I have read as scientology’s ‘hard core elite’, a cult within a cult which demands that followers sign up for (cue the drum roll)...a billion years.  Hey, that’s some contract, Tom.  I think you must be as loopy as, well, Poor Tom from King Lear. 

The base of this organisation in California gives the impression of being run like a kind of concentration camp.  Here a form of brainwashing is at work, with children as young as Suri being bombarded with over one hundred intrusive questions.  While they are answering they hold something referred to as an ‘e-meter’, a contraption which supposedly acts as a lie detector. 

Sea Org is clearly the scientology equivalent of the Jesuits.  Members are subjected to the strictest standards of discipline. One former ‘brother’ claims that he was locked for eighteen hours a day with no food in a punishment block called ‘the Hole.’  Beatings, apparently, are commonplace. 

The centre itself, known as Gold Base, some ninety miles from Los Angeles, has the kind of security that one might have found around Hitler’s Bunker, with razor-wire fences and what looks like a camouflaged sniper’s nest.  Yes, a real home from home, just the sort of place where one wants one’s daughter to be schooled.   

Details of the brutal regime were revealed by, amongst others, Paul Haggis, the movie director and himself a former cult member.  In an interview with the New Yorker he compares the billion year pledge made by children as young as ten to the treatment of child slaves in Haiti.  Haiti, that’s clearly a pertinent parallel in more ways than one, as scientology seems to me to be a form of voodou and the members, like Cruise, little better than zombies. 

Alas, Poor Tom, except he is not poor Tom, is he?  No, he is rich Tom, rich and thick, the real cream of Hollywood.  

In Blood Stepped in so Far

I love Shakespeare for his words, his poetry and his great theatrical dramas, high and low, tragic and comic.  He may have been a poor player but he did not strut and fret his hour upon the stage and then was heard no more.  He has been heard down the ages; he will be heard through time, for as long as English is spoken and the theatre exists.  That’s the other reason why I love Shakespeare – his abiding relevance. 

His plays can be read on so many levels, read in such a way that they bring out novel and dynamic interpretations.  Last year, in his directorial debut, Ralph Fiennes created a striking Coriolanus.  The setting is Rome and not Rome; the setting is a war-torn world which could easily be Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Chechnya or even Serbia, where it was shot on location. 

Incidentally, to go off at a slight tangent, that same play once caused a riot in Paris!  It was even banned for a time.  Yes, that’s right.  In February 1934 the government of Eduard Daladier, reacting to an anti-parliamentary interpretation that had been placed on a new production of the play by the right-wing pressure group, Action Française, banned further performances. In the growing heat engendered by the Stavisky Affair, a scandal that exposed extensive political and financial corruption, members of the group had appeared in the theatre in force, cheering on the play's denunciations of political leaders.

In Action Française, the movement's newspaper, praise of Coriolanus was used as an excuse to attack French democracy; to hurl accusations of corruption and villainy against the republic and its institutions in the light of every fresh revelation about Alexandre Stavisky, a Jewish financier and embezzler. Circulation shot up as Action Française urged people to come and protest in large numbers at the Chamber of Deputies, the first time in history, so far as I am aware, that Shakespeare contributed towards a major political riot - and a French one at that!

Anyway, let me get back to my theme, which is the abiding topicality of Shakespeare’s work.  I watched a performance of Macbeth last week on BBC iPlayer, and what a performance it was, the Scottish Play as I’ve never seen it before.  Directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart (think Star Trek!) in the title role, it brought out so many nuances.  The play’s central themes of ambition, treachery and guilt are all there, but there was something more – a brilliant dissertation on the nature of tyranny and the moral corruption it engenders.

The setting, and the costumes, as well as some old news footage of goose-stepping soldiers, make it clear that Stalinist Russia has become Stalinist Scotland!  Macbeth has been transformed from the courageous soldier, whose reputation travels ahead of him, to a bloody dictator.  The growing body count seems to merge into one great purge.  People live in fear and fear engenders suspicion. 

The whole atmosphere is suffused with menace, as the terror takes deeper hold.  Even Shakespeare’s own words take on added meaning.  I’m thinking here of the lines in Act Four, Scene Two, where the earl of Ross speaks to Lady Macduff, whose husband has not long fled the country;

I dare not speak much further;

But cruel are the times when we are traitors

And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour

From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,

But float upon a wild and violent sea

Each way and none.

Cruel indeed are the times when we are traitors and do not know ourselves.  Macbeth’s hired assassins come like an NKVD death squad.  Lady Macduff and all her children are butchered.  Earlier we see Banquo being murdered by means of a lethal injection and Ross being interrogated in what could easily be a cell in the Lubyanka. 

The lead performances were excellent, Kate Fleetwood’s depiction of Lady Macbeth as good as that of Patrick Stewart as the king, dammed by delusion and equivocation.  Even the lesser roles I’ve never seen performed more brilliantly.  How wonderfully sinister the three witches were, the three weird sisters who appeared as just that – sisters, hospital sisters to be exact.  My goodness, these are no angels of mercy!  

The setting itself is kind of hospital come hell’s kitchen come hotel come lunatic asylum which serves as Macbeth’s castle.  The atmosphere is intensely claustrophobic.  As the play enters into the dénouement we are no longer in Stalin’s Russia but in Hitler’s bunker.  Yes, the references to Downfall are obvious!  There were other movie references I recognised.  At the very end, an end after the end, in a nice little touch by Goold that I feel sure Shakespeare himself would have admired, we see the Macbeths, holding up their bloody hands in an old-fashioned caged elevator.  It's on its way down.  This is Angel Heart; this is the descent into hell. 

It will be on iPlayer until 4 July if you are able to get it.  Incidentally, in the programme notes it says that the play is set in an “undefined and threatening central European world.”  I assumed this meant that all of Shakespeare’s geographical references had been removed, but no, Scotland still stands where it did…even if it is part of an undefined and threatening central European world!