Equality

Last week was extremely interesting. On Wednesday I went to see the film “Suffragette” – an incredibly moving performance by Carey Mulligan. Thursday I saw “Platonov”, part of the Young Chekov season at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Finally on Saturday morning I attended a breakfast talk by Chris Lubbe, a bodyguard to the late President Nelson Mandela. Wow, after this incredible feast of sights and sounds I’m a little shell shocked. All three performances provided massive food for thought but I realised that they all had a common thread – the wilful abuse of certain groups of people. In “Suffragette”, Carey Mulligan plays a character that encompasses all working class women of the early part of the 20th century who had the audacity to fight for emancipation. In doing so she lost her job, home, husband and young son – a dreadful price to pay. Platonov is an archetypal misogynist who claims to love women but uses them for his own gratification casting them aside like old clothes and destroying the lives of his wife, son and best friend at the same time blind to his own flaws. Chris Lubbe spoke of his time as an activist fighting to end the horrendous apartheid regime in South Africa and the oppression of all non-whites. On Saturday afternoon a local community choir sang beautiful Gospel music in our library. They ranged in age, race and gender and I was moved to see a performance that would have been impossible to stage in South Africa during apartheid or in this country one hundred years ago, or Chekov’s Russia when women required their husband’s permission to set foot outside their own front door! Whatever we may feel about Britain in the 21st century we could be so much worse off.