The Open University was one of Jennie Lee’s crowning achievements and a triumph of her will to advance equality. It ties together many of the strands of ‘Tomorrow is a New Day’, writes Warren Greig.
This Knights Theatre-produced play about the political powerhouse Jennie Lee wears its iconography like the characters do their outfits. Sober industrial grey reflects the mines, working-class landscapes, and interior of the Temperance Hotel where Jennie grew up with her family. Yet when the same hotel lights up as a theatre, it hosts travelling performers and political actors alike, and hints at the colourful world that Jennie came to travel and inhabit.
The formidable former first Minister of the Arts herself is given colour and voice by two actors playing younger (Kit Laveri) and older (Trish Mullin) Jennie, often simultaneously – the elder self admonishes the younger for looking to the past, and beckons her to the future. The backdrop is clear: two World Wars and the tumult of the 20th Century unfold as Jennie becomes a young student leader, then MP, the first Minister for the Arts, and eventually a member of the Lords. Both actors capture Jennie’s voice, her iron will and determination, but also her vulnerabilities. Laveri captures her fierce intelligence and political passions, Mullin her wisdom gained from a life of ups-and-downs. The double-casting gives us a dynamic character, as George Docherty plays male characters of various dimensions of flatness or menace.
The switch between seriousness and merriment is sometimes jarring, but the cycle between prose and song does shake the audience’s complacency. The play is meticulous in its historical detail, drawing on records of an Independent Labour Party meeting in Cowdenbeath addressed by Keir Hardie following 1914’s wartime Defence of the Realm Act, and passages from Jennie’s flamboyant Hansard speeches, including her famous spat with Winston Churchill (which won his grudging respect). A more cartoonish tone is cast by the frequent appearance of the Devil of Fleet Street who flirts with Jennie as a story of interest. Jennie is also humanised: the loss of her first love, Labour MP Frank Wise, threatens to break her, but she finds love again in the figure of Nye Bevan. He courts her against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, and the impetus of the story is captured with an artful turn of phrase: “You can only dance with a broken heart”. Later a despondent Jennie, following Nye’s loss to cancer, asks whether an idea continues to live on even when its protagonist no longer does. Her affirmative answer moves her and the story on to her second spell in parliament, the House of Lords and to the many other successes.
The work is both a paean to the arts and a plea to maintain their importance: a prescient call, given funding for the arts has undergone historic cuts in recent years. Jennie was the UK’s first Minister for the Arts. Her achievements and friendships with artists like Laurence Olivier, and her winning of hearts and minds at parties – both political and social – are all part of her forte as she knowingly quaffs the champagne that she’s offered. The founding of The Open University, very much Jennie’s project and part of her ministerial remit, is not only one of her crowning achievements, but ties together many of the strands underlying the play – the value of the arts broadly construed, the role of influential actors, and the sheer will to attain equality in the face of resistance. Jennie Lee’s name and legacy live on embodied in the buildings and plaques bearing her name, and in the ideas she brought about as the ‘midwife of the Open University’ – ideas which live on and develop new life in the minds of the many students who study there.
The OU has always been critiqued across the political spectrum. Characterisations from the left suggested it catered to ‘middle-class women in hobby education’, while from the right it was described as ‘blithering nonsense’ or ‘a bogus institution’. Jennie, caustically and artfully, addressed these dual concerns, observing that the working class didn’t need to be ‘insulted by being given a working-class university’ and that ‘only the best would be good enough’. Today still the largest university by student numbers in the UK, the OU attracts students of many kinds – full- and part-time students working and living alongside their studies. The student body is not easily characterised. Some are professionals who already have degrees and are studying for interest or a career change. Others are presently unemployed and looking to improve their prospects. Some are retired, and others are under the age of 18. Some are professional mathematicians wanting to enrol on graduate courses in medicine. Some are prisoners wanting to know themselves and others better, and to prove themselves to themselves and the world.The play is thus a play of many voices. Against the male voices around her – Churchill, Wilson, antagonistic ministers from the treasury – Lee’s enduring intellectual and political legacy lives on in her voice and those empowered by it. 55 vears later the OU is still here. 120 years after her birth Jennie’s voice is still being heard. It echoed the voices of many before her – the two Jennies embody the voices and memories of not just an individual, but of a collective striving. In one hallucinatory scene, a canary in a cage appears to Jennie when she is on the verge of giving up – a symbol not only of Jennie herself, bu oft the voice of the miners and her father before her, as well as a signal of the dark times facing her and needing her voice. Here is the lesson to us all, that we should fight to be true to our ideals in a world that wants to crush them, and find our voice as artful individuals and collectives. As democracy is giving way to darkness, the message calls us to draw on collective ideals, to work to keep the light on, and to make the sound of our voices loud and true. The play’s poignant final act solemnly sets the free-range rhythm of the play into a metronomic, march-like lament that manages to be both upbeat and sombre, as a rendition of Bread and Roses gives audience and cast alike their well-intentioned marching orders.
Warren Greig works at the Open University.