The RSC production of Love’s Labours Lost has received lavish, if not quite ecstatic praise – four stars rather than five in our brave new Trip Advisor world of criticism. We saw it the other night via the live broadcast from Stratford and judging from the conversation around us emerged almost alone in our reservations.

The play itself has plenty of flaws. Four men falling in love with four women at the same moment is a contrivance made necessary by limited time, but a contrivance nonetheless. Their being deceived by the donning of masks might be a comment on the limits of male constancy but still stretches belief to breaking point. And so on. These plots should never be taken too seriously – the language is what most of us come for; but the joins show, the mechanisms creak on the modern stage.

That brings me to the figure of Don Armado, although I blame the production more than the playwright for his portrayal. To an Elizabethan audience the Spanish were enemies, Love’s Labours being written only a few years after the Armada. Ridicule is a handy weapon against oppressors – witness the lampooning of Hitler. We have fewer excuses, however and poking fun at someone’s funny accent (whose own language most of us could not be bothered to learn) is the limpest, laziest trope of English humour, superiority and inferiority complexes rolled into one. ‘Piss’ for ‘Peace’, ‘Arse’ for ‘Arts’: is that really the best we can do?

Something similar can be said with regard to class, there being occurrences in many Shakespeare plays of toffs laughing at or patronising the hoi polloi. I often find this uncomfortable but try not to apply my prejudices retrospectively. These days, and particularly in the current climate a well-spoken, hereditary élite poking fun at the lower classes is much harder to take. The decision to place the action in Charlecote, a citadel of more recent wealth and privilege increases my discomfort. The aim is to show that era on the verge of collapse, and a contrast in fortunes may well be evident in this production’s companion piece Love’s Labours Won which I have yet to see. But as inequalities widen to Edwardian levels and tax-dodging plutocrats loot our public services it is hard not to take offence.

In short, a self-congratulatory spirit informs this production. It is Shakespeare for les satisfaits: the old, well-heeled or (judging by the younger faces picked out by the cameras) privately-educated. But now there is a wider audience to be catered for. Live screenings by the RSC, the National Theatre and other companies have opened up access like never before – a boon for people like us who live in the sticks and a fabulous revenue stream. But enlarging the catchment area means responding to more mainstream tastes, and there were two signs of this yesterday. The introductory interviews with members of the cast brought well-intentioned but patronising messages about not understanding all of the speeches and letting the whole thing ‘wash over’ us, the modern-day Costards and Dulls. More significantly there seemed to be a distinct drift towards musical theatre which has done well for the RSC in recent years and has virtually replaced serious drama in many places. Several characters, Moth most noticeably burst into song at regular intervals and although these may be in the text is there any need to turn them into big production numbers? If this is dumbing down it brings echoes of Tom Stoppard’s play The Hard Question – also coming soon to a cinema near you. He has already made changes to accommodate customer bemusement at the subject matter and complained at the declining intellectual range of playgoers. What price a further concession along the RSC’s lines? Stand by for Consciousness: the Musical.

A postscript to my blogs about Lady Chatterley after which I shall write about something else. Promise.

What has prompted me to return to the subject is a desire to explore the role of the wood in the novel. To Sir Clifford it is a piece of old England that must be preserved at all costs. It represents tradition, a key component of which is the primacy of the class to which he belongs, central to that being the question of ownership. Never much interested in sex, and now hors de combat with his wartime wound, he nonetheless craves an heir to whom possession and custody of the sacred groves can be passed on. In this respect we might think of him as embodying the Apollian virtues of power, order and control. His enthusiasm for industry, superseding an earlier quest for literary success, enforces that message. The clang of metal is his music, the hiss of steam; the bodies and wills of men must bend to his command; he dreams of harnessing natural forces, not yielding to their flow.

Yet the wood itself is an alien environment. When he attempts to penetrate it in his wheelchair the ground proves ungovernable and Mellors has to rescue him. It is the gamekeeper who has made it his home, who understands the place and the creatures that dwell within its shade. And it is here that Connie, Sir Clifford’s own wife, discovers the true nature of sexual appetite and fulfilment. The unbridled nature of her lovemaking with Mellors, the running naked through the trees, the twining of daisies in their pubic hair all speak of ecstatic ritual. The wood is revealed as Dionysian in nature given over to wildness and revelation. It is a Nottinghamshire version of Arden, the forest where lovers become deranged with strange desires and even Bottom dreams of ravishment.

In that sense the move indoors to the gamekeeper’s cottage, while ostensibly a sign of seriousness and permanence in the relationship, heralds a waning of headiness and abandon. The floor of the hut or of the wood itself has limited appeal as a place to lay one’s pelvis. One day the weather will turn and there will be a child to consider. Common sense warrants a degree of comfort and with it the distractions of domesticity, the politics of the hearth. It is quite commonplace now to write sequels to famous novels – what Elizabeth Bennett was like in bed and so on. Looking into the future of Mr and Mrs Mellors (having arranged for both parties to divorce) I see a more institutionalised kind of ardour, the odd faked orgasm, companionship sometimes outvoting desire. I see an ordered household, discussions over the finances, the renunciation on grounds of practicality if not decorum of al fresco coupling. I see Dionysus kicking his heels in the woods while Apollo warms his boots by the fire.

My previous comments on Lady Chatterley achieved some kind of record by making little or no reference to sex. It was the latter, supposedly that outraged polite society and prevented its publication in full for thirty years. I have some doubts on that score but more on those later.

Lawrence’s offence consisted, first of sprinkling his text with four-letter words. Piss, shit, arse, fuck, cunt: they are all there. Well, not quite all. We read of Mellors’ penis in various stages of engorgement and flaccidity, while the Greek phallos is invoked to dress Connie’s infatuation in a tunic rather than a shawl. But its vernacular designations are shied away from, as if Lawrence could not bring himself to be less than reverential. Instead it capers as John Thomas to Connie’s Lady Jane, pet names that imbue the two organs with their owners’ difference in class.

But rude words are only incidental to the book’s purpose, whose main theme is the gelding of modern Man. Due to money-lust, morality or the enslavement of the working class all sections of society had lost sight of their animal nature. The species had become either effete or crippled by work. In other men this vision incited a desire for revolution and Soviet Russia was entering its most fashionable phase among English intellectuals. But Lawrence saw Bolshevism as guilty of the same enslavement to materialism and the machine: indeed he coined it as a term for the industrial age in all its forms. And rather than feeling sympathy for the miners, from whom he himself had sprung, his alter ego Mellors embraces them in a kind of universal disgust.

Instead, using current parlance, the author’s panacea for these all-pervading ills might be thought of as ecological: faith in nature, the rejection of mass-production, acceptance of a simpler life. It is in this regard that a kind of rehabilitation might be accomplished. D. H. Lawrence, Friend of the Earth. The trouble is it remains difficult to see beyond the original cause of the book’s notoriety, not least because there remains a whiff of the crackpot about his ideas. In particular he places the entire weight of modern man’s salvation on the orgasm, a burden it might find difficult to bear. More specifically, all the ills he complains of would be solved if men and women succeeded in ‘coming off’ together. The best one can say about this as a means of achieving a better world is that it beats reading Das Kapital.

To substantiate this proposition the book delves into the lovers’ sexual history. Mellors finds his early conquests too grudging in their surrender and marries the more willing Bertha Coutts (a name with odd connotations for a working class woman). But the relationship turns sour and she reverts to withholding her climax or ‘crisis’ (another word worth psychoanalysing) which deprives her husband of the mutual crescendo he craves. In the event she leaves him to live with another man, adding the stigma of cuckold to his wounded pride. Not surprisingly, perhaps the story opens with him resentful of women and hopeful of having done with ‘all that’.

As for Connie her initiation is with a young German before the First World War with whom she practises a Bertha-like continence, waiting for him to finish before getting started herself. The description of this technique, in which the exhausted man is made to persevere while she moves against him, is coldly anatomical, sex as a striving for personal pleasure with no deeper connection. Lawrence’s fixation with timing suggests something pathological in his own experience. Did he suffer from premature ejaculation, and is the entire book a displacement activity that shifts the blame onto women and makes of the confluence he found difficult to attain a kind of grail? How typical of a man to generalise from his own inadequacy and turn a private dissatisfaction into a system of thought.
Poor Connie. Marriage to Clifford Chatterley leads to more disappointment in bed, the physical act regarded by him as a distasteful anachronism, something civilised people are evolving away from. The impotence inflicted on him by injury in the war is almost a blessing, apart from the inconvenience of begetting an heir which he is quite prepared for his wife to manage separately as long as it is handled with discretion. Clifford’s seeking of literary renown is thus identified with lack of manliness – one in the eye for the cultural establishment which Lawrence himself never found favour with – just as his subsequent enthusiasm for industry represents a different kind of barrenness, a mechanical obsession devoid of human warmth. Connie seeks consolation in the arms of the aspiring writer Michaelis, but the old business of incompatible needs intrudes once again. This is sex as basketball, one end under attack and then the other.

That Lady Chatterley has form when it comes to men is one of the surprises that rewards finally reading the book rather than relying on the pass notes of common knowledge. And it serves a dual purpose, making her adultery with Mellors seem less far-fetched and ensuring that both of them come to the event with a history of disenchantment. The description of what passes between them is graphic even by modern standards – but then the image has superseded the word just has pornography has trumped the erotic. Even here, however Lawrence’s gift for telling the truth prevents their satisfaction from seeming immediate or complete. A sense is conveyed of two bodies getting to know each other and it takes a few goes before the ultimate aim of ‘coming off’ together is achieved. Except that this turns out not to be the ultimate aim. There is a further stage of abandonment, on the eve of Connie’s departure for Venice, the true nature of which is left uncharacteristically vague. A clue is provided by Mrs Mellors who, on being frustrated in her attempts at reconciliation with the gamekeeper, blabs about his preferences in bed, one of which involved intercourse ‘in the Italian manner’.

A book could be written on the slandering of nationalities by association with practices of which people disapprove: French letters, Hunnish practices, the English disease. In this case the reference is to anal sex, a final frontier in female willingness to oblige; and here we approach the question at the heart of Lawrence’s philosophy. It can be argued that unfettered sexuality of the kind he advocates is always a male agenda. A recent novel, The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis proposes that the mores of the 1960s, themselves owing much to Lady Chatterley’s exoneration, were in effect a device for getting girls into bed. And the same suspicion attends the outlook suffusing Lawrence’s work. Does the unleashing of Connie’s libido represent an awakening of the spirit as well as the body; or is it a different means to the same old end of subordination to a man’s control and desires? The evidence is divided. Her girlish thrill at his complimenting her arse smacks of the most demeaning stereotypes. And Sir Malcolm gloats over the proof of his daughter’s passionate nature (‘I knew she’d be good going…’), male solidarity outweighing the taboo of class. On the other hand she is not above taking the lead when it comes to casting off inhibition, running naked through the woods and inciting him to follow; while her title and position temper the physical imbalance, lust doffing its cap when naked otherwise. In other words the book is capable of a deep reading along feminist lines, but as written and intended by Lawrence involves a subtler interplay of initiative and imitation, of dominance and disadvantage.

In part, perhaps Lawrence has fallen victim to the debasement of his message, not least for commercial gain. The perversion of boys’ attitude to girls through over-exposure to pornography now pulses on the radar of social policy. But this is far from the vision that Mellors and his creator had of untrammelled coupling. ‘Tenderness’ is what the gamekeeper craves for in the act; ‘warm-heartedness’ in everything, including sex. Whether the total elision of need is possible, let alone to be recommended remains uncertain. In this respect Connie seems the more down to earth, hating him one moment, devouring him the next. But the contrast with alternative modes of sexual conduct leaves little doubt where our sympathies should lie, be it the brutish rutting of the lower orders or the tepid spasms of the ruling elite. Indeed, one of the most shocking images in the novel involves Sir Clifford Chatterley and his housekeeper Mrs Bolton. The latter hates him on account of her husband’s death in the mine but relishes the intimacy his dependence allows, bathing him all over like a child and even kissing him ‘anywhere’, a dumb show of lovemaking without sex, a satire on the impotence of a discredited class. Returning to the point alluded to at the start, I suspect it was this rather than offence at the obscenity which scandalised the government. Her ladyship shagging a servant might be allowed – after all the men had been doing it for centuries. But ridiculing the social order: that was treason.

The first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was printed in Florence before being smuggled into England and, less successfully America where Customs and public moralists were more vigilant. It found its way to bookshops in London in one of which worked my father. Then a young man new to the trade, in later life he recalled selling the book ‘under the counter’, an incident I am researching for my family history which has now got as far as his life.

My own copy of Lady C is from the 1961 Penguin edition with an introduction by Richard Hoggart. It was produced after the collapse of the obscenity trial brought against the publisher, a landmark in cultural history that exposed philistinism and hypocrisy in high places and helped pave the way for the Great Unbuttoning that followed. The paperback is in pretty good condition – or was until I started reading it. Lawrence’s final, most scandalous novel is one of those works which more people know about than have experienced directly – a category containing myself until a few days ago. The trouble is, coming to it now feels far less consequential than at any time in the book’s history. This change in fortune began in the 1970s with the pasting it received from feminists. Latterly academic opinion has also turned, Lawrence dropping from University syllabuses like a file from Recent Documents; and his message of sexual frankness has been left standing by internet porn.

The first thing that strikes me is how poor the writing is. The sentences have no rhythm and words are repeated, not for effect or out of disdain for Elegant Variation but with a clumsy, graceless kind of negligence. Worst of all, his argument (make that Argument) muscles in on everything, hectoring rather than earnestly didactic, intruding on descriptions of people and places, playing gooseberry in the infamous bouts of dirty talking and sex. The plot also suffers, the set-up taking forever while the narrator vents his spleen, a story struggling to emerge from the invective.

What cannot be doubted or begrudged, however is the violent energy of the performance. Lawrence was a dying man which would explain his desire not to compromise, his stylistically disastrous emphasis on message at the expense of everything else. In terms of major fiction at least this was his last testament and like a candle flaring before it expires he burns with an indelible brightness and force of will. That alone is remarkable, salutary, poignant even.

And in the character of Mellors he provides a valedictory portrait of himself. Not only are the views largely his own (the hatred of class, of money, of the disfiguring effects of industry) but there are biographical overlaps. The high-born Connie is an echo of Frieda Wheatley, the socially superior professor’s wife whom Lawrence wooed from her husband and made into his muse. The gamekeeper has pneumonia, a weakness and a cough invoking the author’s own tuberculosis. And both men are outcasts, divorced from the people they rose from and the class which success bade them join. Mellors, like Lawrence, navigates between the dialect of his birth and the King’s English of the educated. Perhaps his creator shared the sense of power such code-switching confers, and the loneliness of belonging nowhere.

Finally, the gamekeeper projects some of the author’s own testiness: a bitter, opinionated man he is hard to like most of the time. Indeed there is more than a hint of browbeating in his dealings with Connie which predicts psychological and even physical cruelty in the longer term, the sort of simmering anger which scalds when it overflows. Does she realise this, or in imagining release from inhibition is she signing up for victimhood? This has implications not only for Lawrence’s view of the world but also for the novel’s credibility. At times her seduction, a stretch even before you consider the difference in class, does read a little like male working class wish fulfilment. But elsewhere the tension between their backgrounds intrudes to add some depth to the relationship. Lust has to overcome the differences that separate them, or perhaps be sparked by the force of their collision; and she remains prey to surges of disgust at how commonly he behaves.

It is this tension between the polemicist and the artist in Lawrence on which the case for liking the novel turns. That being so the second half of the book is more rewarding. Once Connie and Mellors have consummated their secret woodland marriage the dramatic possibilities begin to multiply. The inevitability of being found out; the uncertainty regarding whether their love will survive; the subterfuge of the trip to Venice and the surrogate father for the gamekeeper’s child; the bouleversement of Mrs Mellor’s reappearance; even the mechanisms of spiriting Connie away and reuniting the lovers in London. What seemed like a single wheel turning to static effect becomes a more artful contraption with several moving parts and a sense of forward motion. And in the process Lawrence’s message, whatever you think of its merits, drives his plot and his characters instead of weighing them both down.

Attending the Edinburgh Fringe is like entering a bubble that insulates you from the rest of the world. The exhaustion of trailing from one event to the next; the crowds you struggle through or sit among; the constant demand – sometimes assault – on your imagination: it is unreal, culture and entertainment the purpose of life, not a distraction; or hyper-real with its sense of being more vividly, if exactingly alive. This year, however, the drag on my attention of events outside the bubble has been stronger, a change in me perhaps or a sign of the times. The amount of comedy on offer does what never seemed possible, feel excessive. I craved seriousness or humour that was less shallow and disposable. Likewise engagement with the referendum campaign, but performers fought shy of the subject, taboo-flouters nervous about misreading the mood. And I read reports concerning the Islamic state; compared its murderous puritanism with the festival of the human spirit happening around me; and wondered if freedom of expression would necessarily triumph over its many foes.

The stand-up we attended varied in quality and style. Andy Zaltzman disappointed slightly, always likeable but relying on audience input for his satire, not all of which worked. Glen Wool’s poster made him look like Woody Guthrie but he turned out to be foul-mouthed for the sake of it, as if that were transgressive any more. And Michael Mittermeier traded too heavily on national stereotypes, even if one of them was his own. Only Simon Munnery flew the flag with any originality: surreal, intelligent, bewildering at times, incurably daft.
Drama with laughs proved more consistently satisfying. Shakespeare for Breakfast never fails, pantomime silliness that is both innocent and inventive. A revival of Mark Ravenhill’s Product, ably performed by Olivia Poulet, raised some laughs at Hollywood’s expense, although as a target this was far too easy. The film business vacuous and amoral: who knew? Harold Pinter’s radio play, A Slight Ache, translated well to the stage, despite the smallness of the venue and the youth of its cast. And John B. Keane’s comedy, The Matchmaker, was a delight, the script having been turned into an epistolary two-hander. The language was funny and true, the performances winning if not quite word-perfect, the insights into Irish rural life both specific and universal, that trick great art somehow manages to perform.

Imagination, quirkiness, the unexpected: that is what one remembers most vividly – along, strangely, with things that fall flat. They have in common an endearing courage, not to say self-delusion, that induces people to hire a venue and expose themselves (sometimes literally) on a makeshift stage. Now We Are Pope was an attempt to dramatise the last hours of Frederick Rolfe, a monologue with too much back story and not enough presence in the acting. A poky, out-of-the-way room, a tiny audience, and afterwards a stumble, head-scratching, into the light: this is classic Fringe, as indispensible to one’s experience of the event as any five-star triumph. Picnic in the Cemetery was a Macao-based trio in an even smaller venue before an even smaller crowd playing music with the busy surface and melodic meandering of Michael Nyman or Philip Glass. Judgement clouded, perhaps, by our own fondness for that part of the world we bought the CD. And then there was Naomi Paul, talking and singing songs about being Jewish, living in Birmingham, saving libraries and escaping from the Moonies: brave, gentle, subtle, wry and curiously inspiring.
Private Peaceful, our one entirely serious drama, which has been adapted from a Michael Murpurgo story, caused disappointment bordering on offence. Not the subject matter – a young Tommy’s last night before being shot for cowardice in WW1; nor the performance by Andy Daniel, which was whole-hearted and deeply-felt; but the depressing conventionality of language and form. The two world wars produced convulsions in the arts, more keenly to express the depths of horror that had been plumbed. This version of war’s tragedy belonged to the BBC’s Sunday evening schedule: inoffensive, platitudinous, middle-of-the-road.

In contrast our highlight of this year’s festival was Title and Deed by Will Eno, featuring the incomparable Conor Lovett. His performance of Beckett’s First Love was the highlight of a previous Fringe; the company he is attached to specialises in the great man’s work; and Eno is heir to that bleak, funny, absurdist tradition. A recent arrival in an unspecified place, the single, anonymous character reminisces about the bizarre traditions of his native land, reflects on the difficulties of adjusting to his adopted home and attempts to interact with his new compatriots, sitting before him in the dark. Lovett’s use of facial expression, gesture and ambiguous silence presented, almost more than the words, a man out of kilter with the world, a life spent groping for affection, meaning and significance. This draws on Beckett’s vision of what it means to be alive, in its own way as uncompromising as Islamism but more useful to those of us living in a world drained of belief. As I watched, and for some time afterwards, I thought of those genocidal zealots in Syria and Iraq, who make al-Qaeda seem reasonable. The contrast might, on the face of it, seem far-fetched but concerns nothing less than the future of mankind. Can muddling through, laughable but laughing and groping towards one’s own sense of what is real, prevail against the absolutism of certainty in its numerous impostures? Or, to put it another way, can the priests be defeated by the artists and the clowns?

It goes without saying that Robert Macfarlane’s book is a substantial and significant achievement. Its accounts of treks undertaken at home and abroad urge us to look anew at familiar landscapes and open our eyes to places we would not have thought, or dared, to venture. The pathfinders and path keepers we meet in the process inspire admiration, self-reproach at our own laziness and wonder at their obsessive, sometimes courageous dedication. And these individual stories, fascinating in themselves, swell to an impassioned celebration of the beauty, consolations and wisdom that are made available by the act of walking.

You may think, after such an opening, that a ‘but’ is sure to follow. You may even, having read The Old Ways and been enslaved by Macfarlane’s message and prose, be wondering what reservations there could possibly be. Well, I have two but they are more queries than cavils and it is no criticism of any book that it sets the reader thinking.

Firstly, he says it himself: the paths he sets out to follow have been pounded by countless feet into the bare, impressionable earth, whereas the footslogging of city dwellers leaves no trace on tarmac or concrete. Yet we have become an urban race and those man-made surfaces are what the vast majority of us tramp for most of our lives. That in no way devalues the ancestral tracks or the attention he pays to them. However, there is a tendency in English culture (although it may be universal) to seek meaning and identity in rural settings rather than in the places where most of us actually live. The very first walk in the book is a quiet popping out into the surrounding fields. By making this sound both unplanned and unexceptional he sets the tone for what follows: these places are accessible to all of us, along with the experience they provide of mental space, dwarfing of the self and connectivity with nature and the past. But having these splendours a short stroll away is denied to most people. Compare Macfarlane with someone like Ian Sinclair who steps out of his front door to patrol the cityscape of Hackney and adjacent parts of London. This is a man-made world that offers not ancient states of being and timeless truths but restless change and contested meanings. 

Don’t get me wrong. I live in the country, after even our small, attractive town became too noisy and congested, and I feel as strongly as anyone the pull of wild places. But I am also aware that the countryside, especially in England, is no less a product of human interference than the town, even while we praise it for being natural, and that the major challenge facing the planet is not the integrity of hedgerows or the fate of rural post offices but how to feed, govern and power conurbations. This brings me to my second, nagging thought about The Old Ways. Although never stated explicitly, there is an implied assumption that we can learn from the past – not in grand, conceptual ways (the inevitability of change, the limited shelf-life of certainties) but directly from those who lived in that far off land. And this raises a question about how we should view our history: as a place where things of value were mislaid or as a primitive precursor to our own advancement. I consider myself an agnostic on this point, inclined if anything to the second proposition. There are numerous reasons to learn about the peoples who traipsed and trampled the chalk uplands of southern England or the rocky fastnesses of the Hebrides, among them inherent interest, practical tips on survival, nostalgia for simpler times and the exercise of empathy. But going too far down this route implies a mistrust of modernity which, however tempting, has dubious political and cultural associations.