Jim Allen's One-dimensional

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Jim Allen has established himself as one of the finest socialist playwrights active today. But Mary-Ann Todd argues that his new play presents a cardboard image of women.

wife" tney get around 4U, losing Stupid woman who their looks fast, down hill doesn't soak the wall paper now all the way, caught up enough before stripping it in a minefield fight every the woman as castrator - ward to is becoming as the only breadwinner grannies or the ubiquitous or too eager and rampant in mother-in-law.

This latter is Lil, the were shown in the play publican' wife, going stank - just like the around the bar in her low- revolting. seaside post- their violence, and their you for a gold clock."

ue Lightnin' song stood out from all the ground. THE track pilati recor JIM ALLEN'S play achieved what I think it aimed to do. It gave us a glimpse of the barrenness, emotional and spiritual poverty and the tedium of sexual relationships structured within capitalism.

This was done by taking a group of working class men and showing how they matched up to their male stereotypes. The image they aspired to was that of the sharp dresser, cool seducer, in perfect control, puffing on his slim line Panatella, with his thick wallet bulging, foot loose and fancy free.

Grim, grey

Against this we were shown their grim, grey reality.

They were approaching middle age, hanging around the 1950s shopping precinct, balding, fat bellied, bored, bigoted and broken.

Unemployment lay as the background to the sexual fears of male middle age -not only past it in bed but past it in getting a job too.

'It's like a needle in a haystack finding a job. I've been scratching for two years... • they wal it driver, 25 with 20 y ears experience."

pride Unemployment was seen to strip men of their virility - but what really emasculates and strips all masculine pride from the ünemployed male (so much so that he's reduced to a snivelling, crying, begging wretch at closing time), is the fact that his wife works!

This indeed was shown as the real misery of unemployment.

first time I heard Lightnin' Hopkins was on a blues com›n album of tracks ied in the fifties Lightnin' Hopkins 'I feel like a dead fish rotting from the head down. No job, no money, me and her sleeping back to back every night. Goes right against the grain. Your wife out working keeping you. It goes right against the grain.

This is indeed seen as the degrading reality for many men. But what is the corresponding reality for working class women?

Their 'reality' - what they actually face and feel ie novar in any wou nar- 1o level m auy way puitrayed or developed in the play.

There is no glimpse of how they feel unemployed or under pressure to give up their job, or trapped in their total emotional and financial dependenee of their men...

They are referred to or written in through a whole series of cardboard cut-out characters as standard stereotyped images of women.

These bear looking at. There is a continuous, blatant use of sexist caricaturing: We see a 'bird dying to be pulled, asking for it'; a nagging "biggobbed" wife who was also asking for it (this time to be "stiffened" by her husband for bawling him out in public in front of his mates): and early sixties. Lightnin' was in high class company - Muddy Water: , Elmore James, BB King Howlin' Wolf and others - but his 'What you do in the house is one thing. You can lock the door and turn the key, but in a pub...

There was the boring old cow - the "dragon" insisting on her Sunday night out, to sit lifeless, as her husband complains to his mates:

'It's murder, absolute murder sat there trying to think of something to say"

• We hear of the muddled inefficiency of women who bung everything on top of the wardrahe and when he WALL TAULUNY MIL TAEL LIE "feels like it, has to get up on a chair rooting about for her cap and the baby starts crying"

Stupidity is their most notable characteristic. Stupid women, so easily duped and flattered with a box of chocolates like a dumb animal. 'What have you got there?" "Bag of hay and a bucket of water for the horse - for the love nest professionally!

Then of course there is her sexuality. song stood others.

That song, 'Leave Jike Mary Alone" was typical Lightnin' Hopkins. It is a brief narrative, not very detailed, but particular enough to convey a sense of something deeply personal without the passionate, declamatory, often aggressive tone of many blues songs.

In place of the highly generalised, highly stylised statements that make up many blues - sometimes a song will be nothing but a few of such traditional verses strung together - Lightnin' Hopkins blues were frequently sharply original in their themes and their imagery and quite irregular in their structure.

His repertoire included folk ballads, reworkings of the songs of blues musicians of the twenties and thirties as well as over 150 of his own compositions on themes ranging from love songs, songs of complaint and • sorrow to topical, humourous and political songs.

Even the most stylised themes are handled with startling originality. 'Little and Low is a love song:

She's little and she's low. She's right down on the cut dress dropping the hint to every male that her husband is off for the weekend golfing.

One of the cruellest images of women consistently shown was of the woman past 40' ... with only her husband and home, desperate to keep him chained up.

• old women when 21. -All they have to look forThe way the women ground.

She's little and she's low. She's right down on the ground.

Well, the way she acts Would make a rabbit of a hound.

She's mine, she's mine, she's mine, she's mine. She's mine, but she' crippled And the poor child's bline Another song address to his love, says:

I wished I could do something To change that woman's mind I wished I could do something Oh yes, to change that woman's mind.

You know I hate to see her twisted Would up like a ball of twine.

If Sam "Lightnin' Hopkins' work was full of originality, his life-story reads like a copy-book blues biography.

Born in 1912 at Centreville in Leon County, Texas, Hopkins was one of six children of a farmermusician. Two of his brothers, Joel and John Henry, were also blues singers, and three of his many cousins - the much older Texas Alexander and the younger Frankie Lee Sims and Albert Collins -were celebrated musicians. card images of them or Andy Capp cartoons stink.

Ah, you may reply, that's because they, like the play, are highlighting reality, and reality stinks.

Well, yes it does; but in a different way. Seaside postcards, music hall jokes and the thousand other means by which women are portrayed in exactly these ways don't attempt to provide an insight into reality or a glimmer of hope for women's liberation.

On the contrary, the continuously reinforce and buttress sexist ways of looking at them and treating them.

To compare Jim Allen's writing to society's nastier portrayals of women is pretty damning - especialAs a boy he sur As a boy he sung in the baptist church choir; at the age of eight he made his first guitar out of a cigar box; soon dropped out of junior school and hoboed; played with Texas Alexander some of the time and farmed the rest; served time in Houston County Prison Farm; worked the streets, dives, parties and buses for tips.

First recorded - with pianist - Thunder' Smith, hence "Lightnin' " Hopkins - in 1946; recorded on small labels in the Houston area, making local hits; "disappeared" (from the view of white folklorists, that is) for a decade: "rediscovered" in abject poverty, his guitar having been pawned; success on the newly opened up college curcuit, appearance on stage at blues/folk festivals; many records and two Buicks later, in February 1982, he dies, his music largely unchanged from the recordings of the forties and fifties...

In his book, The Rural Blues, Sam Charters described the impact on those white audiences of the campus and coffee house scene of Lightnin' Hopkins' country blues.

"Lightnin' was a little bewildering to most people ly when he is a leading socialist playwright. I'm sure it'll be argued it's unfair, I've missed the point entirely, that he was only trying to show women from the working class male's point of view.

But women do not resemble the distorted, bigoted, chauvinistic images Jim Allen continually presented.

They do not exist in one fixed dimension as stupid, nagging battle axes: nor as pretty, sweet, loyal, dedicated little wives.

Jim Allen's play sickened me.

The men were portrayed developed, so you could try and understand their pathetic fears, worries, the frustrations thav lav hehind Andrew Hornung describes of Lightnin' Hopkins accompanying himself on an unamplified guitar. There was no piano, no drums, no bass. He was one of the first blues singers to work without a group in ten years.

'His singing was very free, almost disorganised. Some verses were twelve measures long, some were thirteen and a half, some were ten. Lightnin' sang in the same unmeasured, harsh style that lemon Jefferson and Texas Alexander had recorded twenty years before.

•'The guitar trailed along, echoing the words, droning in a rhythmic drumming on a lower string then ringing above the voice between the lines...

This blues was a primitive Texan blues, a mixture of the hard chopping style of a number of south Texas players, Africanstyle drones and raglike fast-finger picking. The players who influenced Lightnin' were all from the Texas-Louisiana area • -from that area of America lying inland off the Gulf coast between Houston and New Orleans.

That is an area where black music has two basic styles - blues and zydeco

need to dominate and be emotionally supported in the desolate bleak life that our class society has to offer.

The family and marriage was shown as a dead end jail not based on the romantic dream of love and tenderness and a supportive partnership, that we are brought up on.

''Hands up them that love their wives."

'Nowt to do with love.' "If they were to pass a law saying wife and kids would be looked after it'd be the biggest jailbreak in history.

"So long suckers, stop rattling your cages.

But in the end it's shown that it's better for all men to stick by the missus your good and faithful wife.

Indulging in anything outside of the security of the home is a risky business - for all its cracked up tobe.

It can result in - horror of all horrors - humiliation.

Secret It's all right for women continuously be seen as a source of contempt ridicule, but perish the thought for our hero.

''What' the matter with you?" asks Lil, bitter and frustrated with secret fears it might be her spare tyre that has turned him off.

'When it comes to it you are all mouth and no shout. First time ever I step over the traces and end up with a bummer like you."

But don't have too many fears for our hero. He can always go back and wake up his property, his "little treasure" , to check he is still functioning: "Bernie, are you awake? Are you alright? There's mv eirl wouldn't swan MITTYAN 0-• or cajun. And Lightnin' played both styles: the overwhelming majority of his work was blues with guitar accompaniment, but he also recorded zydeco music accompanying himselt on organ.

Unlike the best-known blues artists - people like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf - he never travelled North. His country roots were unbroken, unchanged even by the urban styles emanating from post-war Houston.

The death of Lightnin' Hopkins means the snapping of one of the last threads of what until recently was a strong cord, the cord connecting the primitive country blues with the present. Lightnin' Hopkins made that connection not as a vestige of the past, a curiosity in the museum of music, but as a constantly creative musician rooted in the culture of the black rural South.

Of course, he lives on in the music of others as well as his own recordings: blues artists as varied as Robert Pete Williams nd Buddy guy • openly announce their debt to him. But blues music has lost one of its most creative. most powerful and most deeply reflective performers.

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Leyland Vehicles: how could the workers have won? Dear We invite readers to send us their letters, up to a usual maximum length of 400 words.

Send to Socialist Organiser, c/o 28, Middle Lane, London N8.

io from the car plants.

This effectively walled up the struggle in North Lancashire and Bathgate.

Indeed one CP member said to me, rather apologetically, "You've got to understand that Jack Adams (the CP convenor at Longbridge) is in a delicate position at Longbridge. A conference of BL stewards at this time could de-stabilise the situation. ", In short, the Communist Party, integrated as it is in the lower echelons of trade union officialdom was feeling the pressure from Boyd and Duffy to leave Leyland Vehicles well alone.

Obviously, therefore, because the CP places great store at capturing official positions to the exclusion of base in the working class -significantly neither the national secretary nor national organiser of the IMG have had any employment in or substantive experience of working class organisations, indeed the turn was motivated in such a way that "this would not be necessary for them" - led to the Wholesale sending of lower middle class people into factory jobs.

The result has been a fragmentation of experience, an increasing federalisation of branches and political adapatation -in the case of Leyland Vehicles towards the CP. Now it is quite a natural and normal thing that the comrades should adjust their style and intervention to the peculiarities

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who heard him. He was LISTEN, MATE, SHE 'APPENS TO BE A WOMAN, NOTA DOG - SNAP YER FINGERS!