By Bob Catterall
As urban tragedies continue, as part of a long historical process, to play out across our world, is it possible that the arts could help us to see and feel what is at stake, and even the need for action? The US TV series (available on DVD) The Wire does, but does the National Theatre’s production of Hamlet? Does its apparent discovery of a hitherto unknown version by Agatha Christie and JM Barrie present us with a hero who is a goof and a tragedy that, far from illuminating our times, is a dead duck?
“…it has become more and more clear that our world, the world of hands-on blue-collar workers, is shrinking…in many places in America it is almost nonexistent, leaving a void…It is this loss of life and the life and ethic it engendered that has prompted me to write this book. If there is a tragedy here, and I think that there is, it lies in the fact that it did not have to happen…” (Reg Theriault, The Unmaking of the American Working Class) ([1. Theriault, R., The Unmaking of the American Working Class. New York: The New Press 2003])
It is common to suppose that hands-on blue-collar work is coming to an inevitable end in a necessarily globalising world. Only a romantic who has never engaged in hard labour, it is said, could regret the passing of that world. If there is a price, it is the price of progress. And yet Reg Theriault, a ‘fruit-tramp’ (a highly mobile fruit-picker) who went to Berkeley, gave up on university, returned to fruit-tramping, and then became a longshoreman, “spending a third of a century on the San Francisco waterfront”, does not agree. He finds much for (not unqualified) celebration in that work, for “the life and ethic it engendered”. He sees a loss, a void, a tragedy that “did not have to happen.”
Theriault sees a tragedy. Can others, well-informed observers of such a world, come to the same conclusion? If so, what exactly did/does this mourned world consist of, amount to? What/who caused the tragedy? If it has been covered up, in what places and ways has it occurred and is still occurring? What action is and could be taken against such a state of affairs? Is there a case for the restoration of manual work?
Some provisional answers are set out here, starting from Theriault’s memoir, making use of Season Two, based on a factive investigation of Baltimore’s port, of The Wire (following our two-part feature on the whole five-season TV series). The notion of goofing, goofiness is explored in relation to one character in the Season. In a brief coda it is traced, in a current production of Hamlet (The National Theatre >>) as an apparently reassuring sign of the times.
The potential liberator in a tragedy is often seen as a hero. In this exploration of work and action some light on the possible nature of such figures is sought through some play with the notion of a goof and of goofing (in their British and North American usage): a stupid or awkward person, a simpleton, a fool, a blunderer: someone who messes around, “wastes time, behaves idly, especially when one should be working“.([2. This discussion is based mainly on Chambers Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers, 2003.]) We find, then, a figure who refuses necessary or heroic action by refusing to work or to work at it. In our coda we turn to an author or director who undermines an apparently heroic figure by fooling around with him and/or her and their context.
The Prince of Goofs
‘[Series two is a] meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class …’ (David Simon, [3. Busfield, S. and Owen, P. (Eds) (2009) The Wire Re-Up. London: Guardianbooks, 2009.])
‘Season Two of The Wire was about the last days of being able to follow in your old man’s footsteps to make a living.’ (Rafael Alvarez, The Wire: Truth be Told, p. 123; [4. Simon, D. Prologue to Alvarez, R., The Wire: Truth be Told. Edinburgh: Canongate (paperback edition), 2010, p. 4.])
The story seems clear enough. Work has died, killed by a betrayal. With that death goes the loss of male continuities.
Rafael Alvarez, the editor and primary author of The Wire: Truth be Told and a writer for the first three series, has lived that history. His grandfather, an immigrant from the Galician region of Spain, had been a shipyard worker. His father had been a tugboat man. The port, though, has changed:
‘Machines, including robots in some foreign ports, have replaced thick arms and strong backs on the waterfront, moving more cargo more cheaply, yet at great cost in jobs.’ (p. 126)
There is no doubt, returning to Theriault’s memoir, of the physical cost of that work, when it involves moving, for example, cotton bales or steel drums designed with no thought of ordinary human capacities but nor is he in doubt about the importance of work that involves skills, camaraderie, shared relaxation and play at the end of the working day with fellow workers and family. There are patterns here that reflect collective victories, through unionised struggles, that limit the extent of exploitation.
But, returning to The Wire, these patterns are undermined and increasingly reversed by a new economy that includes among its abundance of goods and cargoes an ‘underground’ dimension of drugs, prostitution and organised violence.
While continuing the narrative from Season One of the mainly African-American trade in drugs and its policing. Season Two turns to the Polish community, to the struggles of a union leader Frank Sobotka to sustain his union and community by taking on a role within the underground economy, to the involvement of his family, particularly his son, Ziggy, and his nephew, Nick, and to the attempt of a high and unscrupulously ambitious Polish police officer, Major Stan Valchek, to destroy Sobotka for personal reasons. Controlling the underground economy there is another (apparently?) ethnic group, the Greeks, who seem to represent both the totally unscrupulous and destructive power of global capital and the similarly arbitrary and devastating side of the gods of Greek mythology.
This dual narrative is analysed in a paper by Stephen Lucasi on “networks of affiliation” in Potter and Marshall’s The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television ([5. Potter, T. and Marshall, C. W. (eds) The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, London/New York: Continuum, 2009.]) in which he concludes that “Mirroring much of the dominant American discourse of globalization, Season Two seems to present the progress of globalization as an inevitable force against which localities and families have little or no hope of surviving …” (p. 146). Is there anything to contradict Lucasi’s conclusion?
Frank Sobotka, the union leader, meets one dimension of his fate when he is arrested by Valchek (below) and another when, as a threat to their empire, he is executed by the Greeks. He is a tragic figure, a fallen would-be hero destroyed by the nature of the means he has adopted to advance his cause.
Frank’s son, Ziggy, has played the fool throughout Season Two. In one notable incident he brings his newly acquired duck to the bar (top and below) and allows it to drink alcohol, to everyone’s amusement until the bird dies. A contributor to the Guardian Guide, The Wire: Re-Up ‘McNulty Wire’, sees Ziggy’s storyline as an exploration of
“family within the Polish blue collar culture in failing industry in a failing city … Ziggy (ADHD ([6. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.]) and all) searching for some place in all this but never quite finds it. The best he can do is flash his dick in public, draw attention to himself with a duck and fail to get respect when he does pull off a decent scam (the car thefts).” (p.117)
We have, then a goof. Simon knew, or knew of, the actual person on whom the character was based. Alvarez, in a chapter ‘Ziggy Sobotka: Angry Prince of Goofs’, that includes discussion with the actor who plays the part, ‘P.J.’ Ransone, ‘local boy’, finds some local explanations: “how hard it is to live in Baltimore. It’s a town of extremely talented and eccentric people who wind up doing nothing” (p.154).
We have a goof, possible explanations, psychological and social, for his goofiness but we have not come across the act of betrayal to which David Simon refers. A brief discussion of a case that is in some ways similar, despite massive differences in time and space, gives further insight into goofiness and possible contexts. It serves here as a coda, an irreverent reading of our times, one that is to be expanded.
Hamlet as a Prince of Goofs? ([7. A full version of this review will be posted in the City website (www.cityjournal.online) in February to coincide with the tour of this production. All the press reviews of the production are in Theatre Record. Vol. xxx. Issue 20, pp. 1128-1134. They are largely unanimous in their praise of the production.])
‘“Denmark is a prison”, Hamlet declares early on, and, if you consider this in terms of contemporary culture, the bars of the cage are defined by advertising, by all the hectic distinctions, brand names, announcements and ads that crowd our waking hours.’ (Michael Almereyda, p.xi; [8. Almereyda, M., Hamlet, New York: Faber and Faber.])
Hamlet, the uncertain hero of Shakespeare’s play, appears to some to be mad or at least to feign madness. But perhaps he was just a goof, or just goofing? This light-hearted notion emerges from Nicholas Hytner’s drab but well-received production National Theatre production of 2010.
Hamlet has little doubt that his usurping uncle is a villain, so he chalks ‘villain’ on the panels on the interior walls of the palace, has some ‘villain’ teashirts made, and then delivers soliloquies garbed in them (below). This is thought to be very worrying for villains.
Despite this, Hytner’s Hamlet is a psychogical thriller with clues that can now be revealed. Ophelia is really a combined lounge lizard and teeny-bopper (below left) but a dangerous one. Ophelia’s drowning was in fact murder. Queen Gertrude was in on the murder. Gertrude’s beautiful speech about her floating down the river was not poetry but a con.
In fact this play is wrongly attributed to Shakespeare rather than to Agatha Christie. The fact that the play within the play is called ‘The Mousetrap’, as is her long-running play, is a clue.
There is another clue that shows that she did not work alone. Hamlet retires to his study-playroom and goofs around in his bed and his trunk (below right). Beside him is what might be an appropriate window offering him the way back to Never-Never-Land. J.M. Barrie is Agatha Christie’s collaborator. Hamlet is, in fact, Peter Pan.
Somewhere in the background the betrayal to which David Simon referred has taken place. Hands-on labour is now permitted only by grave-diggers. But no need to worry. This could only have happened long ago in Eastern Europe, not in a contemporary Western city.([9. Michael Almereyda in his film of Hamlet (2000) shows how the play can be sensitively and dynamically presented in a contemporary city (in this case, New York).]) Let’s play Villains. Goofiness is all you need!
