Just a few months ago, Gregory Prest held Soulpepper Theatre Company audiences rapt as a blustering, flatulent buffoon in David Hirson’s La Bete – a role that required the energy and comedic agility to carry nearly the entire first act on his shoulders. Now he’s back at the Young Centre with another acting tour-de-force, playing ten-odd characters in Mark Crawford’s Bed and Breakfast, which opened in Toronto on Thursday night.
The adjectives that come to mind watching this entertaining two-hander – Prest is partnered with the impressive Paolo Santalucia, who also plays multiple roles – fall under the rom-com variety: Funny, touching and sweet. There’s a whiff of the formulaic in story and structure, too. A young gay couple inherit a house in the country, leave their Toronto condo to set up a bed and breakfast and face the predictable challenges of trying to fit into a small community. Do Brett (Prest) and Drew (Santalucia) cower in the face of adversity and retreat back to the frenzied familiarity of urban life? Of course not. They discover that appearances are not always what they seem, that people – and their histories – have more depth than meets the eye, and that everyone is capable of occasional small-mindedness. Including, it turns out, themselves.
Two things save the play from feeling mechanical or too saccharine. The first is the detail and intelligence of Crawford’s writing. The play is full of satisfying zingers that go some way in capturing the sensibilities of our time. (A memorable example: Brett defends the design aesthetic of the B&B as “post-jail Martha.”) But Crawford is most impressive in the way he sketches full characters with just a few lines and, in so doing, swiftly constructs a world that seems to have existed long before the house lights dim.
None of this would work if it weren’t for Prest and Santalucia’s theatrical gymnastics, turning on a dime from character to character with commitment and grace. They transform into grandparents, children and sexually confused teens, relying on little more than shifts in voice and physicality – though there are tiny costume cues (designed by Ken MacKenzie) to magnify the transitions. One of production’s chief pleasures is appreciating how easily this conceit could fall apart, how clumsy and amateurish the multiple-hats effect could look, with less nimble performers. The nuts and bolts of make-believe become the language of the story – that fine line between order and chaos is where this play’s spirit thrives – and director Ann-Marie Kerr finds clarity without sacrificing the thrilling sense of an actor-driven funfair in which anything goes.
That said, the characters are not all entirely convincing. The actors play two real-estate agents who tilt towards caricature: Prest’s is a flamboyant, city-dwelling gay man; Santalucia’s is a middle-aged valley girl whose affected speech is difficult to buy. But then both actors have roles that soar with humour and pathos. Santalucia is hilarious as Brett’s bro-ey and guileless nephew Cody, who answers every question with a defensive “I don’t know.” Prest is equally good as a closeted teenage boy obsessed with baking. The actors are charming and flirtatious as a lesbian couple who live near the B&B and become Brett and Drew’s closest friends. In fact, there turns out to be a lot of gay love in this seemingly traditional community and the passion of these other romances form concentric circles around the one at its heart.
The attractive set (designed by Alexandra Lord) is split into two levels. A gabled Victorian pediment hangs over an elegant bedroom with an exposed brick wall that forms an expansive backdrop; beneath that, there’s open space that transforms into a kitchen, lawn and the local café. Beautiful effects are rendered with simple sounds and lights. This is a Bed & Breakfast that appeals to all the senses.
And yet, it’s in this feeling of nonthreatening appeal – an underlying desire to please without risking offence or even interpretive ambiguity – that the play falls short. Conflicts and tensions are wrapped up neatly, themes of otherness and prejudice are tidily resolved. It’s not surprising to learn that Crawford wrote Bed and Breakfast with regional and summer theatres as intended venues – you’ll enjoy your stay and some fine performances, then get back on the road and carry on.
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In attacking Oxbridge for its apparent elitism, Labour is diverting attention away from the true sources of inequality in British education
New Labour came to power with a hostile idée fixe about Oxbridge - the Oxford half in particular. There was the strange "MIT affair", when Gordon Brown, having deprived the Oxford colleges of several millions a year, suddenly thrust tens of millions of UK public money into MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in order that it might form some sort of joint institution with Cambridge University, the purpose of which was to encourage the energetic commercial exploitation of the UK's academic scientific discoveries (something which was already going rather well, in fact, unaided).
Then came a series of ministerial speeches attacking the survival of privilege in the UK (all down to Oxbridge); the attacks appeared gratuitous, under-informed and uniformly vindictive.
But it was the issue of Oxbridge undergraduate admissions that provided the animus for the complaining, and which, in May 2000, caught the political tide. The issue was highlighted by the chancellor of the exchequer's intervention, made at a TUC gathering, about the case of a young woman who had happened - six months earlier - not to have been selected for a place at an Oxford college. The row it detonated rumbled on for over a year.
So many of New Labour's aspirations can be seen glimmering through the Laura Spence affair, as well as much of its inability to handle issues of class, and to cope with questions of "excellence" and "elitism". New Labour's approach to change is illuminated by the affair - its automatic belief that anyone not toeing the line must be malign or incompetent. More worrying is its recourse to goading and humiliating people when a trend does not appear to be moving in the direction the government desires.
Political discourse, especially the statements of senior ministers, is usually conducted in generalisations. When, therefore, Gordon Brown, in May 2000, startlingly opened up a jihad against "elitism" in the UK by singling out one named failed applicant to a single Oxford college, and proclaimed this failure to be proof of the socially biased selection procedures of the college, and of Oxford as a whole, widespread indignation was inevitable. It was an attempt to insult and outrage. And it did not fail.
Had someone from the chancellor's staff asked for the facts it would not have taken more than a few minutes to correct his various misapprehensions. His "facts" about Laura Spence had simply been lifted from the tabloids. His assertion that the college was biased against women, ethnic communities and state schools could easily have been corrected. The students we had taken in our tiny annual permitted intake of medics, plus others we helped to find places in other colleges, were also largely female, largely from the ethnic communities and from state schools. The selection procedures had been conscientious and impeccable, the results precisely of the kind that New Labour claimed it wanted to see.
The applicants had been interviewed, not in daunting versions of 19th-century men's clubs (as Mr Brown had sneeringly averred), but in professional mode, by understanding adults who shared a passionate concern for social equality. We had five places available. We chose five young people and got two more equally good applicants into other colleges. Miss Spence did not happen to be close enough to the top of the list, very good though she is. The places are given in competition, and all the competitors have very high academic achievements. Of the five we took, one has gone on to come first in the university year group, another has come second and the other three are in the top 20.
It is very hard for facts to fight their way through when the storytelling emanates from a source of high prestige. It took many weeks of media grind before we felt that the record had been straightened out. But, even now, people refer in the press to the Laura Spence Affair, as if it stood for Oxbridge bias against state school students. What an examination of the facts reveals is rather different: it shows the almost obsessive concern with finding suitable candidates from state schools who might go on to win places to Oxbridge in open competition.
The "affair" had served to conceal from public view the actual condition of the schools in the state sector whose students Oxbridge colleges attempt to persuade to compete for college places. It focused the debate on the admissions practices of Oxford colleges - and away from the harshly unequal distribution of actual academic achievement among schoolchildren in this country.
One-third of all the children who achieve three A grades in the Advanced Level examinations have been educated at private schools, even though these schools cater for only 7% of the total school population. If you look further into this statistic you discern an even gloomier situation. Strip out all those whose A grades were in the less respected subjects (ie general studies, media studies, business studies), which the more demanding universities look upon as useful "extras", rather than as evidences of high level educability, and you see this bias more starkly. In physics, 40% of all the A grades go to children at private schools, while in chemistry, the figure is 45%.
Educational provision is grossly unequally distributed between rich and poor in the UK. It is generally thought that about one-third of the UK's schoolchildren live in the poorer areas of the country; yet, if you look at the entire cohort of UK children who get into the top universities, you find that only 6% of them come from these poorer areas. The "elite" universities recruit their students mainly from relatively well-to-do families and the more upmarket neighbourhoods (whether the students were sent to state or private schools). Of all the children who achieve five GCSE passes at grades A, B and C, only one- fifth have parents who are unskilled manual workers. So the children who have in fact been to state schools, and who have managed to reach the high grades expected by the elite universities, mainly have parents whose occupations and lifestyles are very similar to those who sent their children to private schools.
There is a further and more sinister way in which the Laura Spence affair drew attention away from the really telling issues. Government is unwilling to criticise the people whose unreconstructed attitudes, whose belief system, causes the lack of educational aspiration among many of the able young. Brown hit out at the two ancient universities for not "taking" enough state schoolchildren, but was silent in respect of the schools, the families and the whole ideological infrastructure, which deliberately inhibits young people from reaching out for the highest they might achieve.
There is also a delicate question of ethnic politics to be faced. Middle-class parents of ethnic origin appear to be more inclined to send their children to fee-paying schools than are other middle-class parents of similar financial means. Why should a middle-class, white pupil at a local state school be considered more virtuous than, for example, a brown pupil at a local private school? What we appear not to be able to acknowledge in this country is that aspiration is the sine qua non of excellence. There are many possible variants and manifestations of such aspiration, though, and it is not really the business of politicians to allocate degrees of virtue among them.
The affair also naturally increased the concentration paid by the Oxbridge colleges to all their admissions issues. My own college now invests considerably more energy in the whole process, and considerably more cash, too. We are currently spending nearly £2,000 per student chosen, but the proportion of state school students who are admitted rises only very slowly indeed. The percentage of state schoolchildren admitted to the university remains roughly in the same proportion as among the applicants. The state school numbers are indeed rising - unevenly year by year - but never far from the proportion of the total applying from state schools.
There is no point in applying political pressure on Oxford and Cambridge to "take" more, in the name of social justice. The young people must first apply and then win their places, and no one, least of all the would-be Oxbridge students, would have it otherwise. One should remember that only 30 years ago the proportion coming from state schools to Oxbridge was much higher, close to 70%. The proportion came down as soon as the grammar schools disappeared - the schools that positively encouraged their products to have a shot at Oxford, and prepared them properly for the attempt. It is neither snobbery nor social discrimination that has reduced this proportion in the years since 1970 - it is the quality of schooling and the increased level of social discouragement.
Universities are being presented with the task of creating social change at a moment when other levers of egalitarianism have largely been abandoned as ineffective or undesirable. Governments of right and left have seen universities as the means to create a nation that is motivated in some beneficial direction or other. As a result, we have lost sight of the role of the university as a learned and learning community - indeed as a model of a community. The new political terminology is subverting the whole nature of universities, at the same time as governments are saying they want at least half of the entire population to have the chance of a university education.
The only way in which universities can satisfy the new political demands is gradually to abandon education in favour of training. Governments must somehow be made to understand that goading and harassing will never achieve their highly laudable aims. If the majority of the population is to be educated into and beyond adulthood, it is necessary to proceed slowly and with every form of encouragement that government can supply. That means more than just money.
Fiddling about with Oxbridge admissions procedures will do little more than, perhaps, getting a few middle-class children from state schools to replace a few middle-class children from private schools. Very able working-class children will come forward in larger numbers when the level of encouragement provided by family and school improves. Educational deficiency has much more to do with family than with school, and begins before the children even reach school. So, improve the cities and streets where children live, ensure that their fathers have jobs and reduce the huge disparities of income in the UK. All that would help to transform our universities.
· This is an edited version of a longer article that first appeared in Education! Education! Education! edited by Stephen Prickett & Patricia Erskine-Hill (Imprint Academic, £14.95)
Mein Kampf, the book Hitler wrote in prison before he rose to power in 1933, has become a bestseller in Turkey, provoking consternation.
The dreams of creating a master race are being snapped up by young Turks. Its publishers believe that more than 100,000 copies have been sold in the past two months.
Its sudden appeal has alarmed Turkey's Jewish community and is causing concern in the EU. A German diplomat said its success "might not give the right signals" to Europeans in advance of Turkey's opening accession talks in October.
"Obviously we're very concerned," Ivo Molinas, one of Turkey's 25,000 Jews, said in Istanbul. "This is a democratic country and the book can't be banned, but it would be good if the Turkish government openly said they don't like it being sold. Unfortunately, there has been no such approach."
Although Jews have been assured by booksellers and the publishers that their motives are "purely commercial and not ideological", Jewish officials say the book's popularity has coincided with a wave of anti-semitic articles in the press.
Mr Molinas, a columnist in the weekly Shalom, said: "There has been a big increase in articles attacking us in the fundamentalist and national ist press, because of what is happening in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian problem and the war in Iraq.
"That has affected readers, and I think boosted sales of Mein Kampf." Analysts believe the book's popularity is related to a rise in nationalism and anti-US sentiment since the invasion of Iraq. A survey last month by the Metropoll Strategic and Social Studies Centre showed that half Turkey's 70 million people were convinced the country was surrounded by enemies.
Many Turks fear that joining the EU will expose their country to permissiveness and force them to give up treasured traditions.
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