Start the Week
06/12/2010
Andrew Marr talks to the choreographer Matthew Bourne about his vision for Cinderella, while the dance critic, Jennifer Homans sounds the death knell for ballet in her history of the art form. David Aaronovitch also asks whether Freud has had his heyday, in his examination of the continuing significance of the father of psycho-analysis, while the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, celebrates the enduring appeal and relevance of Proust.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
- Duration:
- 40m
- Broadcast on:
- 06 Dec 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, it's the time of year for storytelling. Tales in the darkness are not only religious ones either. Later on, we're going to be talking about two of the most influential storytellers of the past century, one still fashionable, the other decidedly not. Jane Haines is a psychotherapist who's explaining what's so great about "proost". And David Aronovich is the Times writer who's been investigating the rise and fall in the reputation of Sigmund Freud for Radio 4. First, though, we're going to be talking about dance. We're well into Nutcracker Madness now, of course, but Jennifer Homan's "A Dancer" herself has written a huge and gripping history of ballet, from the early dancing kings to Soviet propaganda and right up to today. But we're going to start with one of our best-known choreographers, who's Nutcracker made it to mainstream telly and whose male version of Swan Lake made him famous. Matthew Bourne's production of Prokofiev's Cinderella now at Sadler's Wells is set in the London Blitz of 1940. It's a deliberately dark and indeed gory setting for a ballet most people think of as a slightly sugary fable. It's true, yes. Prokofiev wrote this piece as a fairytale ballet, I guess, in the style of Tchaikovsky, when he wrote it, this is his guideline. And that's the way it's usually performed. And when I approach anything that I do, I have to find a way of approaching it that is different, I guess, because I don't come from the classical ballet background. So I have to find my way of doing it. And with this score, which I fell in love with, watching the Ashton version actually at Covent Garden, I loved the score and I thought, I read when I read that it was written during the Second World War in my research, I thought, I wonder if that's in the music, I wonder if that feeling is there. And I listened to it with those ears. And I really felt it was, it started to sound like a film score of the time, it started to, I could almost hear the bonds dropping, I could hear the idea of escapism within the music, but it has got its darker edge as Prokofiev was does, he can't help it. Yeah, and thanks to Jennifer's book, which we'll be talking about later on, we know that not only was it written in perm during the war, but actually it was performed as a sort of Stalinist fable, where Cinderella is the Soviet state or the Red Army confronting and taking over the evil sisters, the who are the ugly sisters who are sort of capitalism and fascism, I suppose. You present it in a very filmic way, if you're sitting in Sadler's Wells watching this production, you see film, the title sequence comes up, and it's almost as if you have to show ballet through film. Well, I guess I'm very conscious of audiences that I'm, that my company is performing to these days and the kind of what they're used to. And I don't know, I think I've always felt that way, I started off loving movies, and then I got into dance very late. So I feel that I'm very conscious of audiences sitting there and giving them as much knowledge as possible, because I feel there's a lot of people who come to dance, or my productions anyway, who are giving it a chance. It's not normally what they would go and see. And I feel they need a lot of context, and I also feel that I need to explain a lot. And talking about the sound in Prokofiev score, it's not a live orchestra, you're like, it's, and why is that? Because some people are slightly offended by that, I think. Well, some people will be, there's a reflex action, I think, generally, and I understand that. And this is an artistic decision, in a way, to create a filmic sound, like as if you were going to see a big blockbuster movie. It's sort of, it's a round sound, it has sound effects built into it. Some people hearing this might be sort of horrified by the thought of it, but come and give it a go, because I think it really works. I'm thrilled that it's working as well as it is. The central moment, as it were, in the opera is a very famous massacre at the Cafe de Paris, which is still open as a nightclub, and actually still recognisable. It's interesting, you can go there, lots of kids go there and dance the night away, even now. But 1940, there's a band there, it's full of people, and it gets directed. Yes, and that was the central story from the blitz that I felt would work for Cinderella, because it's a dance hall, it's a ball, in a sense. And we actually depict this incident, the second act, which is the ball scene, starts with a bombed ballroom, that kind of comes back to life, so it's a little ghostly feeling to it. And I thought that was wonderful, there's a wonderful, wonderful image to work with for this piece, and also worked for Pacofia as well, I felt. The music is very muscular, and at times grating and hard, and a side-acid edge to it. And in this production, you have, I think, the nastiest family, or can a group of people. I've ever seen so genuinely creepy and offensive people, who we had to be said a shoe fetishist, who appear in the middle of all of this. It's not sugary, is it? No. Well, I decided to expand the family. She has three step brothers and two ugly sisters, two step sisters, so there's a lot of them. Yeah, they're vile. But also, it's good for them in a way. They represent a family, they're doing nothing for the war effort, and they're there. You can bring all those elements into the story as well, there's a sort of conscientious objector, and there's a sort of, as you said, shoe fetishist, who lives in pajamas most of the time. It's fun to play with those characters and types. And what is the relationship between this, which I think of as a ballet, really? I mean, I come along, I think I've been to the ballet, and yet it's not on point, it's not classical ballet, it's dance differently. So what's your relationship to classical ballet? Well, my personal relationship is that I didn't really discover ballet at all, or dance even, probably what you would call contemporary dance or ballet, until I was 19. I grew up loving movies and MGM movies and Fred Astaire and the 60s musicals and things. That's what I knew of dance. And very naively, when I was left school, I thought I need to get into a bit of self-education and go and see a few things that I'd never seen before. And I tried an opera and I tried reading this, that and the other one. One of the things I tried was ballet, and I thought I should go and see something that's famous. I'll go and see Swan Lake. And I kind of fell in love with it on first viewing, but not for the reasons that most people would have thought. I wasn't thinking, "Oh, isn't it beautiful? Isn't it amazing?" And technically, I thought it was eccentric. I thought it was a piece of history preserved, which I loved. I felt that it was glamorous. It was lots of things that appealed to me. And the idea of telling a story through movement suddenly clicked with me as well. But I was a fan before I was a practitioner. Yeah. Didn't start dancing until I was 22. Jennifer, we're going to, since you are now a resident expert on what is and what is not ballet as a result of many, many hundreds of pages of research, would you regard this as ballet? I would say that Matthew's work falls very much within the mainstream of ballet, but in a slightly different way. Throughout the history of ballet, there's been a tradition of people who come at things from an angle, who sort of strike ballet, the operatic opera house tradition of ballet, at an angle, and take sometimes a satirical view, the boulevard theaters, stretching way back to Moliere. So I think Matthew falls into that category where there's a kind of commentary on ballet happening within a work that I certainly can't think of anybody else who people say, "I'm going to see the new Matthew Bourne," as it were. I mean, they don't see the new Cinderella or whatever. What are the rest of us making, the other one of it? I mean, certainly it's balletic. I mean, if we understand a term called balletic, then you'd have to say it was balletic. I mean, leaving aside that you've now given away this plop of this wonderful production, I'm going to see you next week with the fan. Sorry, fan. No, don't worry. It justifies, yet again, trying to see it. The imagination and the challenging nature of what Matthew has done. I mean, the last thing almost that my father did before he died was take us to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. So it held a very kind of particular place for me in my memory and been back to see it since then. And of course, it's a popularization in the sense that you are going to get new people along to what seems sometimes like a dusty, sorry-genified dusty art form will discover why it's not. But it is, in the real kind of sense, it seems to me in the tradition. Not much of Proust's great work, which we'll be discussing later on, is about ballet. But he did call it shifting and confused gusts of memory at one point. And Proust was an enthusiast with dance, wasn't he? Well, Proust was also very, very much. His focus was on the idea of the embodied self, embodied memory. And of course, bad ballet is an embodiment. And what I particularly responded to in Matthew's ballet and a kind of narrative sense, I guess, is the many levels it worked on. And being a psychologist, I'm obviously always interested in psychology. And that with the Grimm's fairy tales, in a sense, you transpose the cruelty, and there is real, real cruelty in Grimm's fairy tales. And we're not here to discuss what the impact is on children. But you kind of took up the idea of ECT electric and vase of therapy being given to... One of the characters. One of the characters. It is genuine. It's Grimm was a double M, isn't it? Yes. And of course, that was what happened. And in 1945 to 1955, people had ECT without an aesthetic. And today, I mean, unfortunately, that has carried through the cultural imagination. And today, ECT is given very differently. But again, again, with the shoe, with the traumatized Prince Charming, I mean, there's that terrible moment in the streets when you can either think he has got some awful Freudian perversion about shoes and genitalia, or he genuinely has this remnant of his love. But he's treated as though, by the people along the South Bank, because they've got a hypoglycemic low, he's treated as though he's drunk. And this is the kind of thing you see in tubes. And then you have this amazing scene in the tube. But I just love the way within ballet you brought in all these different elements to make us think. I know the other thing that strikes me about the Cinderella is that you're working very much in the tradition of pantomime. And this is another part of classical ballet, very much so, in where you're trying to tell a story through gesture, through movements that grow out of gesture, and through a kind of vocabulary that develops from pantomime. Well, I've always felt very free in what I do in the sense that I can, because I don't come from any kind of tradition, I can use any form of dance and any form of storytelling, including pantomime, and sometimes just pure acting. It's not even mine as such. And we should turn to the origins of ballet, in your book Apollo's Angels, Jennifer. It's comedy adult art. There are street elements to it. But it starts very much, ballet as we think of it, as an aristocratic business. It's about status and how you present yourself in order. I mean, ballet goes back to it really begins as a court dance in the European courts, and it's an idea of nobility. The symmetry, the order, the sense of grace and beauty in the body, comportment. In fact, it was actually an etiquette as much as it was an art in the beginning. So when you think of a reverents or a bow that dancers do, today, still every day at the end of a class, those are the same bows that were done to King Louis XIV. And one of the many extraordinary stories in your book is Louis XIV. So he is an absolute monarch. He is the son of King. So what does he do? He dances. He's a ballet dancer most of the time. And he dances for hours and hours and hours at a time. That's right. He was an avid dancer and performed and practiced, especially in his youth extensively. And this was not just a matter of amusement or entertainment. I think he really understood that these spectacles were a way of presenting his own power, his control. He moved with a kind of grandeur and authority. And he'd get himself up as a polo? One of the great moments is in 1653 after the disturbances of the frond. And he returns to Paris. And he stars, basically, in a 13-hour long production that begins the night and plays all the way through the night, in which he confronts obstacles and nightmares and difficulties. And then, at dawn, as the sun is rising, he appears as a polo, the sun king, dressed in gold with diamonds. And the message is clear. And so this business of dancing as part of sort of status and aristocracy and indeed autocracy eventually passes to Russia. I mean, I'm hopping over lots and lots of history here. But there's another equally stunning moment when Peter Vergrave introduce his ballet, but for his soldiers. That's right. Well, you know, the connections between the military arts and classical ballet are actually very close. You know, noblemen had three main occupations, writing, fighting, and dancing. And, you know, the training that if you look at moves from fencing, you'll see that there's actually quite a lot of crossover into ballet itself. And, you know, when ballet passes to Russia, it passes there as part of the Russian admiration for the French court. And it's its desire to remake the east in the image of the west. Now, you mentioned dueling there. And we know about the music. We know about Louis the 14s, and indeed, classical Russian music, because it's written down in notation. We are actually even no dueling moves because they're drawn, and you can follow them. Lots of attempts to produce a notation to preserve ballet, but it doesn't really work. So we don't absolutely know what they were doing, do we? No, that's right. I mean, there were attempts across the history to invent a notation, but none, in fact, really took hold in a way that, you know, if a dancer today learns a ballet, he or she has not given a score and said, you know, this is the ballet you will be performing. Ballet is passed on and always has been as an oral tradition, person to person, person to person, body to body. You know, ballets are not stored in libraries or in books. They're stored in the bodies of dancers. So when we read about the first production of Swan Lake or whatever it might be, or even the Nutcracker in Moscow, we don't know, we don't know actually what it looked like. We don't, it looked like physically, we don't know what happened. Well, you know, there are ways to, we know and we don't know. There's a lot that's probably changed, but there are also very strict rituals and practices within the ballet tradition that do give you a certain clarity as you go forward. You know, when a ballet is transmitted from one dancer to another, there's a really an ethic and code of obedience and of absolute, you know, acceptance. And this is something that Ballet is often criticized for, you know, an acceptance of the authority of the older dancer to the younger dancer, at least at that moment. It might be questioned later, but the, you know, both parties know that those steps are sacred in a way and they are going to be passed along with a kind of care and attention to detail. It's interesting, it's pedagogy. It's not, it's not express yourself, Ballet. It's, it's, it's follow these steps and learn this way and it's tough and pedagogy. Oh, it is a rule-driven. Yes, it is very much rule-driven. And so I'm jumping further ahead again, but how does it happen that this aristocratic art for very rich people to go and watch becomes the art of the patriotic Soviet Union? I mean, the, the last thing you'd expect is that communists end up in 222. Yeah, this is one of the most interesting transformations of the art form in its history. And what really happens is, I mean, you know, when come the revolution, classical ballet is, is under attack because it's a court art and it is done by the aristocracy and the idea is, you know, get rid of it. And the theater was, in fact, ransacked and the royal insignia were the imperial insignia were torn away. Lenin was very skeptical. But by the time you get Stalin in power, classical ballet is, is becoming a pillar of the Soviet state. Now, what happened? She's a conservative old servant. Well, that's part of it. Yeah, that's part of it. You're quite, I mean, in a way, and, and I'm sorry to interval, but what you, what you're going to ask is how did something which is structurally authoritarian, which is rules based, which is passed on by the, by the cada to the younger. How did that manage the transition from czarism to Stalinism? And the answer would seem to be in all its components. Well, that would be fairly easy. Yeah, well, there is that. I mean, there is the conservative element in the, in the Stalinist court, if you will. But there's also another aspect that I think is quite interesting, which is that is that the, the idea behind ballet, even in its most aristocratic forms is that it's an elevation, it's an aspiration to a kind of ideal man, an ideal man, exactly. So the, the, the transition to a, a Soviet ideology is actually not that hard to make. I mean, you're moving towards a paradise. You're trying to build a paradise on earth, Jack, the, the movie of the late fifties with Peter Sellers, where he plays a bossy shop steward. He talks about Russia and he says, all them cornfields and ballet in the evening. Yeah. That was the aspiration that ballet would be good enough for the working classes, it would be for the working classes, and therefore taken over. I found what you said fascinating. And just before we sort of, we're fully up, one, one further hot, we should say Prokofiev actually got the Stalin prize. I learned from your book. First class. First class, and, and, and Stalin loved it. But Britain or England, in particular, has its ballet moment very strongly after the Second World War, doesn't it, with Frederick Ashton? When suddenly, you know, perhaps against all expectations, you know, battered old bomb hit London becomes the global center for ballet. Yes, that's right. And, you know, this is one of the reasons I was very moved by the, the scenes and the blitz in, in Matthew Cinderella, because the war, in fact, was a crucial turning point for the history of ballet in Britain. You know, the, the, the Sadler's Wells Company at the time momentarily disbanded, but then came together in a kind of ragtag company, and they performed through the bombs, stuck their ground in London. Fontaine was a kind of heroic figure, and there was, you know, on the, at the base of the theater, there was a sign at the footlights that said, you know, air raid warning, and then it would say, you know, alert over, and they would light it up at each point, but the dancers just kept going. They didn't take cover, you know, and so you get this sort of the image of Fontaine as this, this figure who's, who's holding together everything that's great about British character at the time. But now you would say, very sadly, it's a dying art. Well, what I would say is that we're in a moment of some uncertainty and crisis, you know, at the heart of this art form, I think people don't quite know whether there's a place in our culture today, you know, for an art form that is, that values, symmetry, order, comportment, manners, and I wanted to say to you, Jennifer, because I very much agree with you in your book about the focus on Apollo, but it occurs to me, and I did look in your index, and there's nothing about Dionysus, and of course, Dionysus was also, he wasn't the god of dance, but his maynides, they certainly knew how to dance in frenzied form, and of course, I think that's one of the thing about Matthew's construct on Bali, that there is a sense of Dionysus, and for me, you know, Bali worked best, I'm afraid, with Nureve and Burishnikov, because they were on the edge, they were elevated, they were flying, they were amazing to look at, but there was something dangerous, and when we shut Dionysus out of our lives or out of our cultural forms, we are in danger of repression and dying, and so I was interested that you didn't bring Dionysus into your... You know, I don't think Dionysus is missing, perhaps in name, yes, but you know, the idea really, behind Bali, is that in order to get to Dionysus, you have to go through Apollo, you have to have the forms and the rigor and the training that allow you, then, to have freedom, to have tremendous freedom, tend to be on the edge, you know. The Dionysic dance is about yourself, it's about freeing yourself and going to a different place, whereas classical ballet is a performance for other people, you know, you are presenting something to... And you want to let Matthew answer, like Matthew's eyes, right? Well, sorry, what was the question? The Dionysiac. I'm going to leave the question, to be honest with you, I think I think we're going to leave it hanging there for a moment, and we're going to move on to Jane Haynes and Proust, because there are so many connections here. Proust, we're talking about Diagilef and one of your eye-f and the tradition that goes back to Bali-Rus, who are, I suppose, the most Dionysiac dancers in the modern world, and one of the people who was obsessed by them was Marcel Proust, the great French novelist who sat there and loved the Bali and wrote about the Bali in his book, his great book, and you're discussing with Margaret Dravel and others later on this week what's so great about Proust. Now Proust is very, very much loved by some people, difficult but enormous figure in the history of the novel. Why would somebody who's a psychotherapist turned to Proust though? Well I never expected I was going to turn to Proust and I think one of the responsibilities of being a psychotherapist is never quite knowing where you're going to turn to next. You need to always be, Diagilef said to cock to astonish me and I think one of the things a psychotherapist needs to do is be constantly astonished by human behaviour. So I didn't expect to find myself reading Proust and in fact when the Royal Society of Literature said, would you come and talk about why Proust is, and this isn't linked up with the European Union this event, why is Proust still so incredibly important? I was taken aback because I know he's very important in literary and university circles but amongst my own friends I don't hear people talking about Proust, he's often a conversation stopper and for many, many years I actually thought there was this ghastly club sort of the club of the Madeline which belonged to a lot of rather dreary boring men who would get into corners and discuss. I'm almost defined a member I think, but I hope you're not jury or foreigner. They're standing corners and discuss the introduction in which edition to read and I just didn't want to know about that. I was very, very lucky to be introduced to the New Penguin edition which is edited by Christopher Proust and has every book is written by a different interpreter, a translator. It's very good actually. It's wonderful, absolutely and Ian Paterson who actually wrote the translated volume six is speaking at the Royal Society of Literature. Why is Proust important to me? Well I think it's extraordinary, you know he was born in 1878, died in 1922 I think. If you think that Freud published the interpretation of dreams in 1900, Jung was also writing, there is no indication that Proust and Proust is very generous, unlike Freud and Jung, who never tell us where their references come from and to invariably borrow like mad, you know Haslett was writing about the unconscious, Coleridge was writing about the unconscious montane. They weren't calling it the ego, the super ego and the id and again relating to David, you know I'm amazed today if you ask people you know if I happen even though I'm not a Freudian to use a word like super ego to a patient, they look at me blankly, they don't know, people don't know anymore what the super ego is, it doesn't hang on. Is it simply that Proust spent so much of his life thinking about the state of being alive, what it meant to have consciousness and observing himself and his own reactions and his own way of thinking and looking as intently into a kind of mental mirror as it's possible to look. I think that's absolutely true and I think as a therapist it's very important because he used many different prisms, he sawed self, he was very modern in that sense, I'd say he was more modern than either, well Freud certainly, I mean Jung did have that much greater sense of self but for Proust there is no one self, there are these confessions of the flesh, there are these constant slippages where someone who thinks they are somebody discovers themselves doing something else and he was very much influenced by the Arabian Knights which is the most astonishing compendium of human sexuality, human clay, human aberrations and Proust you know, he's constantly finding himself thinking that he's thinking about something and then realising he's made a mistake, I mean again we will talk about a Freudian slip later on, or Freudianism later on but there's something deep in Proust which is about those constant mistakes. Constant mistakes and he says you know at the end in volume six which is the most extraordinary book but he says don't worry if you can't remember, first of all everyone reads me in their own way, you read to your own subjectivity which is a very modern idea, you read to yourself, you're not reading me and then he says people complain that I'm using a microscope, that I'm always dissecting, I'm always analysing which of course is what we as therapists you know we conduct these autopsies on the self but he's a wonderful kind of supervisor because he's saying no I don't just use a microscope, I also use a telescope, I'm looking through perspectives and he's fascinated by perspectives, perspectives of time, perspectives of vision, horizons of the sea, the way the the larks fly and you know he opens up things rather than shutting them down. I love this sense that every time he understands that every time you read his book you're reading a different book. Yes and I find that wonderful because you know although as a therapist I have to use a very precise memory and in some ways the kind of memory I use in the consulting room is like the notation of dance because patients get very upset if you don't remember but as far as my patients go I'm doing something much more pristine, I'm saying it really doesn't matter if you remember things correctly, there is no correct memory, your memory has become embodied. So to be precise about this reading prussed you believe helps you cure or help. I don't like the word cure, I know, I knew you at the minute I said it she said I do, it's not like the word cure, help, aid, whatever you do people, does it? And I don't know what it is that I do, I have a conversation with people which very much comes from Adam Phillips if I've been influenced by anything, I mean I've been influenced by many many things, that sounds very modest and deeply by prussed but I feel that people come to me to have a conversation, a particular conversation they actually couldn't have anywhere else. To get all these books he says how pruss can change your life you know 100, 100 ways in which you can crucify yourself which is not I think most people's idea of. As a therapist pruss can change your life and make it much more enjoyable. Which is quite interesting isn't it because the word prussed is perilously close to the word priest and if you kind of imagine that it holds some kind of secret way of unlocking your life and so on and of course the great thing about it is the kind of minutiae, it is the idea that in small things which you might decide not to consider actually lie quite a lot of the answers to the way in which we feel about things and the way in which memory even if it's unreliable tells you something about the things that you feel. Absolutely, things greater are less contained and you can go back again to the ballet that we saw and when you come in you're confronted with this a huge blow up of a most beautiful shoe and I don't know if I can pronounce because I've never said it little and looked at issues but Manolo Blahic. It's a very good blow up to me too is easier to say but Matthew's shoe it's straightaway strikes you I don't think you've seen have you seen the production? I haven't yet. No but this shoe is not a fairy tale slipper it is very much an object which if we were using a Freudian prism with which to look at it we might say yes it contains female genitals but it could also contain all sorts of other mysteries and different kinds of things and I think that's one of the very interesting things in your program David that you have presented is the idea that is symbolism not meaningful now if we actually see everything you know upfront? We might as well move straight on to Freud because the conversation is taking us that way anyway and you've called your radio programs Freudian Slippage and you're looking at Freud I mean we've been talking about Proust as a crucial figure in the 20th century still very influential. 50 years ago everyone who said Freud is one of the great historic figures who is going to change his changing civilization changing the way we all think and the fall in his reputation has been extraordinarily fast. It's quite interesting I mean what the pregnancy really about is Freud as fashion and it is absolutely true to say that there was a period of Freudian fashion when the notion of Freud whether or not they directly came from him or whether they were if you like a kind of vulgarization of what Freud was was on everybody's lips and it was kind of used it was used as Jennifer's book suggests in ballet it was used in theatre it was used in film it was used in advertising it was used by government and so on and that moment passed it is no longer there and it is no longer true. Now that doesn't mean to say of course that some of the concepts that Freud was most famous for haven't entered into the culture in a very big way. He's moved from being this fantastic sort of 20th century guru to being an adjective. Yeah absolutely I mean and that's not to say that we sort of disavow notions of the unconscious wherever they originally came from they are very important but there were these several kind of moments and I think the point was made and it's true that during a period where you weren't allowed to directly attack notions of sexuality well actually I'll have to depict sex let's be clear about this an awful lot of symbolism was used in culture which was meant to represent if you like the repressed unconscious which was a significant part of Freud's idea and therefore you would attach the notion of Freud Freud to it in order to give it a kind of scientific quality an order to kind of explore things that by the time you got through the 60s and 70s you no longer needed to explore because in some ways because you depicted them directly you get this very funny situation in women in love the movie Ken Russell movie where you both get the symbolism in other words the squelchy mad and the people kind of running through the forest etc this is being at one with nature actually D.H. Lawrence's notion of the Dionysian which he would have opposed exactly to which was Apollonian wouldn't they and it seems terribly naive now it's terribly naive but in the same film you can see everything and this marks the kind of crossover point where you no longer need if you like the symbols because you've got the thing then you'd love the the fig eating scene I mean I mean it would be a loss for that not to be there it would in women in love with it sure it would but that gives you that that reminds you that one of the things actually that you still can't easily depict in movies is canilingus so the fig eating thing still stands in for something that you can no longer actually see thank goodness thank goodness we'll say but but but just just going back to where we started one of the areas where we don't we don't discuss Freud's influence but I think Freud's influence must have been there would be ballet I mean particularly after the Second World absolutely a lot of choreographers were very interested in in trying to express feelings that that and often it did mean sex you know that were not expressed before and so you you know you got especially in the work for example of a of Anthony Tudor you know but a ballets I'm thinking in particular of a ballet called lilac garden in which you have a a party of a of a couple that's getting married and at the party are the former lovers of each of the couple and the idea is to to he wants to sort of show you what the the unconscious feelings of this couple are in the context of this party not through acting or you know some kind of pantomime demonstration but through a kind of almost subliminal expression of the unconscious what what I felt very strongly listening to David's programs was that there was a generational aspect to this too that Freud was used by a whole bunch of people in the 50s and 60s as a way of sort of pointing a finger at the previous generation saying we understand you better than you understand yourselves you you think you're the authority we are we we know what's really going on well yes I mean it was a kind of it was it was the kind of notion of repression there was a famous film in 1945 called the seventh veil in which you get her but larm as this sort of mysterious but rather wonderful central European doctor figure who discovers through hypnosis exactly what is wrong with this woman patient and in so doing discovers the thing that she really wants the person she really wants to go to which in this case happens to be her guardian James Mason and is this kind of aspect of of magic we now see something we now have the capacity to see something and unlock something that you would have repressed before now this is also very important because we also we know obviously now with hindsight that this completely corresponds to the change in sexual mores and indeed a bit gender power relations that is going on in that period it's the necessary necessary opening up in that period so Freudism in a way is used it's not just used in film there's there's advertising as well I mean the whole fashion for the use of Freud in advertising the notion of unlocking people's secret desires for them and and as a consequence they'll sell them products that's one of the terrible things and you focus on English advertising and of course it was Freud's nephew or cousin Bernays who went to America and if we take up Madman which has become a kind of cultural icon and all these women are smoking in their bed they're smoking over their babies they're breastfeeding this is absolutely as a result of the unconscious kind of idea that in order to empower women make them feel phallic and the research that Bernays did and that of course is a very negative use in the sense of unconscious manipulation but one of the fascinating things I think about Madman in relation to what you've just been saying is that and again you know Proust says looking at things won't help us we have to look into things we have to look beyond things so even when we're given a very direct sexual scene that may not really tell us about human sexuality and with Don Draper I find it much more fascinating although he's not my kind of man actually too macho but I find it fascinating no he undoes his death and you never see what's going to come out all right I'm not quite sure where we go from there over to you do not you know I think the other well the other thing I did want to ask you about the reputation of Freud a few years ago there was an attempt to kind of re-establish Karl Marx not and say okay well he thought he was a sort of economic scientist he thought he was refashioning the world actually we should think about him more as a great Victorian novelist he's a storyteller and the same things going on with Freud isn't it I mean Freud Freud who thought of himself as some kind of scientist is now being redefined as an artist of some kind no absolutely I mean as it's gradually understood that we can't provide if you like a kind of scientific way of testing whether or not the unconscious really is split into the ego the superego in the year how would you actually do that so these concepts that were thought to be scientific no longer are and neuroscience is moving in he was treading your role which is one of the points that that Jonathan Miller would be keen to would be keen to make is that as we as we become much more sophisticated neuroscience and we actually begin to locate the areas of the brain responsible for this that and the other it's a work in progress we may discover relations we might actually be able to test some of these theories in a way that we haven't been up until now so your point Andrew about if you like the kind of description of a story the construction of a series of stories about ourselves which seem to be useful but sometimes seem to be more useful than they are at other times just like Marx just like Marx in the context if you like of the 2008 collapse or in the context of Marx's analysis of the incredible dynamism of capitalism I think is right so I think if Freud had published an interpretation of dreams not the interpretation of dreams it would be very different yeah all right I think we have run out of time finally thank you to all my guests Jane Haynes who was just hearing there is going to be taking part in the discussion what's so great about Proust at the Royal Society of Literature in London on Thursday night Freudian slippage presented by David O'Ronovich starts on radio for next Monday Jennifer Holman's Apollo's Angels a History of Ballet is out now and Matthew Bourne's Cinderella is on at the Sadler's Wells Theatre next week we have opera, we have physics, we have the baby Jesus, we have Samyon Bischkoff, Mark Medovik, Nick I can't say it, Medovnik, Tony Jordan and Susan Hill whose name I certainly can pronounce but for now thank you for listening and goodbye
Andrew Marr talks to the choreographer Matthew Bourne about his vision for Cinderella, while the dance critic, Jennifer Homans sounds the death knell for ballet in her history of the art form. David Aaronovitch also asks whether Freud has had his heyday, in his examination of the continuing significance of the father of psycho-analysis, while the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, celebrates the enduring appeal and relevance of Proust.
Producer: Katy Hickman.