The best guide to the behaviour of modern politicians is found in the plays of Pirandello
Britain’s stages have, since the fateful 9/11, been full of ‘political plays’. Even more so than usual, in a country which is thought, reasonably enough, not to be much interested in politics. We might not be much interested, but our playwrights and theatre directors are.
Political plays tell us about politics, at least to their authors’ satisfaction. But hardly any of our playwrights of the 20th and, so far, 21st centuries tell us much about politicians. British politics is going through a phase, which started with Margaret Thatcher’s fall, in which the playwright who is the best guide to politicians is not one of our roaring leftists, but Pirandello (1867–1936), whose Right You Are if You Think You Are (1916) and As You Desire Me (1930) have recently enjoyed West End revivals.
Pirandello’s gist is that we can never be sure who anyone is: one of the reasons is that people can change who they are. It might be thought that people change themselves in order to stand out. But in Pirandello, subtly, they often change themselves in order to conform to any changes going on around them. There perhaps lies the explanation of the average contemporary politician.
Less than a year ago, Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne helped devise a Conservative election campaign which gave lower taxes a high priority. Now they seem to favour more or less the opposite; lower taxes being not as high a priority as ‘matching’ Labour’s welfare spending. Even after the general election Mr Osborne — Mr Howard having made him shadow Chancellor — set up a study of the flat-rate tax and seemed to look favourably on the idea. He went so far as to visit a country which had such a tax, Estonia.
Now the Tory apparat swears that Mr Osborne was never committed to the policy. He just wanted it studied. Then what was he doing in Estonia? Perhaps he thought he was in Etonia: a country founded for emancipated Etonians just as Liberia was founded for emancipated slaves. Mr Osborne, though not an Etonian himself, is widely assumed to be; certainly, he works with several. He must have baffled his Estonian hosts.
‘And what would you like to see in our country, Mr Osborne?’ ‘Well, I’d always wanted to see your wall game.’ ‘Our ball game is the same as yours: football. But we have more chance of winning the World Cup. Ha, ha, ha. Er, only joking.’ ‘No, Mr Finance Minister, I said wall game.’ ‘But no one’s been put up against a wall here since the Russians left.’ ‘Then I’d like to meet Boris. He actually went to the school after which your country is named. I’m sure that, knowing I’d be here, he’s visiting.’ ‘We haven’t anyone named Boris in our government. We hate the Russians.’ Today Mr Osborne never mentions the flat-rate tax or Estonia. He was never in favour of that tax and, as far as he is concerned, he never set foot in the country. Pirandello would have made a whole play from the episode, generally translated as Right You Are if You Think I Never Really Was. We can also be sure that Mr Cameron, by the time he arrived in the cast of a Pirandello play, would never have been rightwing on immigration and bogus asylum-seekers, despite that last election manifesto, in which he had a hand. That was a previous Mr Cameron. Not that we know who the previous one was either.
The unsubtle would argue that, whatever the policies, these young politicians remain the same, being just apparatchiks pursuing a career. They acquire and discard policies according to their utility or modishness, just as they acquire or discard cars, clothes or advisers. That is how they would be depicted in the political works of, say, Ken Loach. Perhaps that is the correct explanation. But Pirandello’s makes better theatre.
Gordon Brown would also have made a Pirandello character. For nine years he has depicted himself as the practical man ensuring our steady prosperity. Now, perhaps anx ious to remind us that he has the breadth to become prime minister, he makes a series of speeches in which he is the global philosopher. He also shows himself the loyalist, defending those widely unpopular ID cards. We needed ID cards because terrorists could steal our identity, he told Today. He then made a most Pirandello-esque observation: ‘My identity could be stolen.’ American Airlines pilot radioing ahead to the anti-terrorist people at JFK: ‘We suspect we’ve got about 20 Gordon Browns on board.’ Anti-terrorist man at JFK: ‘Pretty routine flight, then. No problem.’ Meanwhile, the real Gordon Brown would be in his Treasury office. But is he the real one? Tony Blair has always thought there was something unreal about him.
Two weeks ago, celebrating the indispensability of crime and detective fiction to our entertainment, I wrote about two television detectives, Foyle and Lewis. I had not realised that Foyle would be succeeded, as he was two Sundays ago, by a new series of Agatha Christie’s Marple. My case is now even stronger.
These Miss Marple stories were adapted for the screen from the novels, as they have been often. But Foyle and, in his present incarnation, Lewis, have been created by television. Television is devising its works of detection just as the printed page and then the cinema did; all the more reason for us not to forget television’s greatest detective-creation, as brilliant a creation as any detective in any medium since Holmes: Lieutenant Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Dept.
With Peter Falk wonderfully acting the lieutenant, Columbo episodes were made from the early 1970s until as recently as 2003. Columbo is now reduced to daytime television. Delight awaits anyone newly discovering him. The formula is always the same: we see someone rich, famous or powerful commit the ‘perfect’ murder. The shambling, deceptively plebeian Columbo solves it.
The coming of professional or expert detectives, and therefore detective stories, coincides with that of mass democracy. Before, when inexpert militias dealt with crime, Columbo’s murderers would have used their wealth and power to escape justice. The belief that wealth confers power is deeply American. But so are the institutions which destroy ill-used power, such as the detective.
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