His other most famous play is A Nightingale Sang, which is based on “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” I think it’s such a gifted play because entirely through dialogue it evokes the British experience of World War II, the excitement and the desolation of a certain lower-middle-class family. He is interested in people who lead what would be called normal lives in the midst of a crisis. But there’s also an examination of the proprietorial farmland-owning class, which he presents as degenerate, as actually destroying itself. In most of the plays I’ve read by him, that’s where he immerses himself. It was very important to him, and it figures quite a lot in Good, not just in the background of the Shoah but also in the snide remarks about Freudian Jewish culture. He was interested in Glasgow’s Gorbals Jewish district and indeed wrote a play about it. He was from Glasgow, and for most of his life he worked in the northeast of England, where he played a key role in a major cultural renaissance. He was a real contributor to what in England the Conservative government refers to as “leveling up,” which is the idea that social, economic, and cultural advantage should not simply be the property of the London middle classes (an empty promise in the Conservatives’ case). And I think he would see that as a compliment, because he believed in aberrant vision-in not being in the mainstream, in having a greater ability to see and understand by being unprivileged and outside. Jacqueline Rose: I think that’s a brilliant description of him. Sam Needleman: In Good, Halder suggests that Nazism is the fault of the Jews for pushing Germany toward a “Jewish, moralistic, humanistic, Marxist total fuckup.” This, you write, is “as good a formula as any for how C. Last month we spoke via Zoom about three of her abiding preoccupations: fascism, Zionism, and psychoanalysis. She codirects the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London. Rose was educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne, and the University of London, where she earned her doctorate under Frank Kermode. Her essay on Simone Weil has now been collected in her new book, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times,out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August. ![]() Rose has in recent years written regularly for The New York Review, on subjects ranging from Boris Johnson and Donald Trump (“All the detritus of racial capitalism, trailing without inhibition its paltry, intimidating boast while the world burns”) to Jia Tolentino (“Her entire diagnosis of the ills of the world would be invalid if she pretended, like a bad psychoanalyst, to be immune to what she describes”). (Good will always triumph, as in the well-worn and discredited cliché.)” ![]() ![]() “However drawn to Nazism,” Rose writes, Halder “will surely manage to make a last-minute escape. The main character, Halder, is a professor of literature in 1930s Germany whose slow acquiescence to Hitler forms the play’s central drama. Taylor that was staged at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London last winter. “It is blind acquiescence to collective madness, the twisted appeal to the common good, that propels citizens into fascism,” writes Jacqueline Rose in the May 11 issue of the Review.
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