TODAY I watched Mark Rylance’s extraordinary award-winning performance, in Jerusalem at the Apollo theatre, London, as Rooster Byron. A ‘has been’ pikey, living in a clapped out caravan somewhere in Wiltshire, earning his living like a demented Pied Piper dealing drugs to the local youth, anaesthetising his sense of failure with fantasies and any substance he could lay his hands on. He made the audience laugh but it was a bleak and hollow picture of modern Britain.
Some might see in the charismatic performance a hero of our time, strutting with two fingers up to the system, but I just felt sad. Sad the economic gloom ahead might lead more people towards disappointed drug and alcohol quenched lives, frustrated they’re not getting what they think they deserve, justifying criminality as a response to lack of opportunity. A fair reaction to ‘us and them’ – like the looters in the London riots.
But a ten minute walk from Shaftesbury Avenue to a new gallery space on the Thames’ embankment at 2 Temple Place, currently showing an exhibition of William Morris, showed things can be different. Manned by volunteers, the ‘arts and crafts’ house, base of The Bulldog Trust, welcomes visitors free to its extraordinary interiors: modern philanthropy, in a cynical world, where we have come to be suspicious that everyone is on the make. Bulldog encourages ‘the spirit of resourceful giving’. It could be a throwback to the 19th century world of Great Expectations currently enjoying a revival on BBC1. A time when it was believed those with money had a duty to be benefactors to those who didn’t.
In our ‘best of times, worst of times’ Dickens bicentenary year, I am reminded that many of those in older generations report, curiously, that the tough times of war provided the happiest years of their lives, fostering friendships across class. People united by common purpose and humanity; the old adage true that only in adversity do you discover someone’s real spirit.
No-one can dispute that the year ahead, with the spectre of rising unemployment and cuts in living standards, is going to be easy. But how we react to it, is up to us. We can choose whether to continue blaming others or we can take responsibility. We can choose whether to give up, drop out, and drown our sorrows or stand and fight. Not by hurling bricks through windows or swearing at people or cheating the system but by quietly reclaiming our territory.
Those in the middle, the predominantly hard-working, reasonably law-abiding lot, might rightly feel resentful they’ve been paying for the greed shown by the extremes of our societies, from bankers’ excesses to benefit frauds, but I’m optimistic. Let’s hope in 2012, the moderate and mild-mannered mainstream finally finds its voice. As Dickens wrote in David Copperfield, “The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying, ‘I will’.” Time, me thinks, for New Year resolutions.
