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A new Dacre take on morality

from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

A new Dacre take on morality

Michael Coveney in Edinburgh sees a famous name make a controversial directorial debut

Michael Coveney
Sunday August 15, 2004

The Observer

So many plays, so much degradation. If someone at the Edinburgh Festival fringe presented a revival of Noddy in Toyland it would turn out to be a catalogue of sexual perversity and police brutality.

So a contemporary drama presented by Cambridge University students which features 'unsparing visions of everyday hell using characters from heaven' in a regular litany of masturbation, swearing, blasphemy and authoritarian violence really is nothing special at all.

Except that, in this case, it is. For the director of Torben Betts's Five Visions of the Faithful at the C Venue (that might as well be the C-word Venue) is the talented young son of Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, unequivocal spokesman of the moral majority and scourge of the trendy, the debauched and all artistic self-indulgence.

James Dacre, 19 and tall and strongly built like his dad, welcomed me to the den of iniquity on Chambers Street as though I was a supportive junior fellow in his Cambridge college - Jesus, as it happens - where, wait for it, he is reading theology.

His parents have not yet visited the show. While I cannot imagine that my former editor (I was Daily Mail theatre critic until being invited to leave last March) would get much out of the Five Visions, I am sure that his wife, Kathy, a drama teacher and staunch admirer of Harold Pinter, one of her husband's bêtes noires, will find a great deal to enjoy.

For the play, while strongly worded and relentlessly depressing, is an imaginative and ironic series of scenes which have the odd effect of reinforcing the value of religion at the expense of its officers and icons.

Two angels dressed as prison guards express their disappointment in life. A prisoner dressed in the orange boiler suit of a Guantanamo Bay detainee is ripped apart from his wife and daughter - 'it's a socialist utopia, innit?' - and a decrepit Virgin Mary who has been 'rogered' by the Holy Spirit begs for pity.

The final scene, a lesson in arbitration, shows Pilate weighing up the popular appeal of Jesus and Barabbas as a contest between the King of the Jews and the king of comedy.

The play - first seen to critical acclaim at the White Bear in Kennington, south London, four years ago - owes much to such atheist, po-faced and uncompromising visionary playwrights as Edward Bond and Howard Barker. But I think Betts has more humanity and contra diction about him. He is certainly well served by Dacre's production, which is one of the best acted student shows I have seen in a very long time.

Dacre's play is taking a different path to the moral certainties sometimes evident in his father's newspaper, but in a curious way the destination is much the same. This world is indeed a very ugly place, defined by the sort of hypocrisy and immorality that both newspapers and the theatre delight in exposing and exploiting simultaneously.

Maybe old Etonian James will bring his father round to seeing the value of theatre that is radical, critical, foul-mouthed and rude. Paul Dacre cannot really see the connection between, for instance, genius and madness. When Spike Milligan died the Mail editor said that there was something sick about him (indeed there was). But that sickness disqualified Milligan, in Dacre's view, from being genuinely funny.

Meanwhile, I strongly recommend his son's production to him. James is, after all, only continuing a Dacre tradition; Paul's father was a distinguished showbusiness journalist, and his wife - whom he met when they were both at Leeds University and enthusiastically left-wing - is still very much in the theatrical swim of things.

Whatever happens, the Mail is unlikely to be running an attack on fringe theatre for as long as James is around to show us the virtues of theatrical vice.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

(posted 7166 days ago)

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