Revisiting my own alma mater recently, I was struck by its galloping modernity and insatiable appetite for theatre but Mitchell persuades us that the pre-war public schools were the ultimate source of the sexual double-standards and political duplicity that for so long defined the British ruling-class. Jeremy Herrin's production, moving swiftly and easily from library to dorm to cricket pitch and bookended by Hymns Ancient & Modern, accurately captures the mixture of politicking and piety that characterises public-school life and gets good supporting performances from James Parris as a boy who plays by the rules and from Julian Wadham as a fruity Bloomsburyite guest. As Judd, Will Attenborough provides the perfect contrast in that he is stocky, single-minded and scholarly while plausibly suggesting a friendship between the two boys. The plot may not be very clear at first, but it will lead the reader to experience Sonny’s world as they figure out why he turned to drugs in the first place. But what Mitchell shows, with great skill, is how Bennett and Judd's rejection of pretence and exclusion from the hierarchical power structures of public-school life determines their destinies.īennett is undeniably the showier character and Rob Callender endows him with exactly the right carefree charm and languid cunning. In the story Sonny’s Blues, written by James Baldwin, the narrator must deal with his confused feelings towards Sonny, his brother, when he is arrested for drug use. party the menu from the book t here was music from my neighbor s house. gatsby study guide has everything you need to ace quizzes. Even though both characters had real-life prototypes in the shape of Guy Burgess and John Cornford, you wish that Mitchell occasionally allowed them to escape from a single dominating characteristic: Bennett is always pursuing a fancied junior, while Judd is never seen without his copy of Das Kapital. James Farmer, Jr : Resolved: Civil disobedience is a moral weapon in the fight for justice summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the sparknotes the great. But Mitchell's focus is on two particular outsiders: Bennett, who, in contrast to his hypocritical sixth-form peers, is openly gay and Judd, who, unlike his conformist contemporaries, is a devout communist. What Mitchell has grasped is that English public schools are a hotbed of politics: inter-house rivalries, prefectorial preferment and private societies confirm the observation of one boy that "life is ladders, that's all". Even if Mitchell's play takes its time, it still strikes me as uncannily perceptive on the subject of the seeds of betrayal.
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After a double bill of David Hare's South Downs and Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version we now have a revival of Julian Mitchell's 1981 play about the way the public-school ethos of the 1930s shaped the generation of so-called "Cambridge spies". S chool plays seem to have a magnetic attraction for the Minerva.