Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		23 -29 May 2002 Issue No.587 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Recommend this page

Plain Talk
By Mursi saad El-Din

Watching the wanton destruction in Palestine, the heartless decimation of people's lives and the widespread destruction of their homes, I recalled my arrival in London in 1945. I arrived just after the end of the war.
I shall never forget the sight of the rubble and the gaping holes left in the fabric of the city following the blitz. And amid the many stories I heard of heroism and sacrifice, there were, too, amazing accounts of how culture and the arts had not only survived but had flourished.
Before the war began, and in anticipation of it, most people in Britain expected a massive bombing campaign by Germany.
The British Museum and the Victoria and Albert sent huge quantities of their most important treasures to be housed deep in a quarry near Bath while the National Gallery sent more than 3,000 of its most important pictures to North Wales.
Once the war was underway organisations such as ENSA (Entertainment National Service Association) and CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) implemented policies intended to make of the arts and entertainment a focus for building morale, opening up forms to the masses that had been the prerogative of the privileged few.
Performances of music, drama and ballet were given in air raid shelters, centres for the homeless, in the crypt of St Martin's in the Fields, the basement of department stores and improvised underground refuges.
During the war many theatres in the West End were bombed, including the Old Vic which transferred its headquarters to Burnley, in Lancashire, where it presented an eight-week season of opera, drama and ballet. Many of the most important troupes based in the capital also instigated major provincial tours.
At a lecture on British theatre at the Egyptian Institute in London the Observer's drama critic, Ivor Brown, described the people who filled the theatre in Burnley to see Macbeth during the war as "counterparts of Shakespeare's audience."
Lewis Casson and his wife Sybil Thorndike performed Macbeth in colliery villages in Lancashire and South Wales with minimal sets and costumes. Following the season's tour they reported: "We've never played to such an audience. None of them move a muscle while we play, but at the end they go wild and lift the roof with their clapping. This is the theatre that we like best -- getting right amongst the people."
Commenting on wartime cultural activities Stephen Spender said that the arts had revived under duress. The revival, he wrote, "arose spontaneously and simply because people felt that music, ballet, poetry and painting were concerned with the seriousness of living and dying with which they themselves had suddenly been confronted. A little island of civilisation surrounded by burning churches -- that was how the arts seemed in England during the war."
Out of the ashes of the war and austerity the Arts Council of Great Britain rose like a phoenix -- the first state intervention in the realm of the arts. While some writers and critics welcomed it, others attacked the very idea, fearing government control of the arts. In 1944, John Cowper Powys and Gilbert Frankau commented that "people are putting up with regimentation at the present time, because they appreciate the necessity of it, but as soon as the war is over compulsion and restriction will have to go. Hang it all, we're fighting this war for freedom, and we're not going to be dictated to by a bunch of civil servants."
The fear of its detractors was baseless, however, since the Arts Council's remit was simply to aid the best that had already developed in London and the regions. It recognised that within the national culture there were dozens of separate cultures operating at different levels within a common society. Hence its eventual splitting into three separate councils for England, Wales and Scotland.
Will war bring a comparable artistic renaissance to Palestine?

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