Winstanley and Wayne

party to lead the working class. DOWN WITH DE GAULLE E * THE HYING! CROMWELL'S Revolution broke once and for all the power of the King and the state and prepared the way for the victory of the bourgeoisie and the future development of capitalism.

It was the first successful bourgeois revolution: power changed hands: a new class emergea.

But the revolution aroused not only the bourgeoisie, but many sections of the oppressed masses, who saw in Cromwell's struggle a new future for themselves.

Revolutionary conflict released torrent of hopes, ideas and dreams for the new millenium.

Only ultimately did the true class nature of the revolution reveal itself and the hopes of the masses dwindle into apathy or be ruthlessly put down by Among the many popular movements were the Diggers, led by Gerard Winstanley, a remarkable revolutionary thinker for his time, who set up a communistic rural colony in Surrey in 1649, soon after the execution of Charles I.

Winstanley and the Diggers alone represented the interests of the propertyless agricultural labourer.

Although in some senses backward-looking, for he clung to the idea of the village community, which capitalism was beginning to disrupt and disintegrate, Winstanley understood that the root of social conflict flowed from the ownership of private property.

What he saw in the defeat of the King and the aristocracy was the property divisions. The land must now belong to all the people.

"The poorest man hath as much right to the land as the richest man, he declared.

'This is the bondage the poor complain of, that they are kept poor by their brethren in a land where there is so much plenty for everyone' Of course such demands were far in excess of anything the new ruling class had in mind.

They met them in the way they knew best — with force and the military.

The Diggers were brutally dispersed.

Winstanley and the Diggers are the subject of John McGrath's new stage play "Comrade Jacob', based on the novel by David Caute, which opened at a new theatre in Brighton, the Gardner Centre for the Arts.

McGrath's Winstanley is a cut down by Republicans.

The Royal Oake of Brittayne. Anonymous engraving, 1649. The oak, representing Charles I, is being 9.10 10.10 10.40 11.35 12.15 12.30 visionary, a man of conviction, clearsightedness and passion, who believes wholeheartedly not only in the rightness of his ideas, but in the inevitability that they will be understood and practised.

He is a man of profound faith; religious, moral; a belever in the sanctity of human life, convinced that the revolution has ended the barbarism of Esau and that the age of Jacob, gentle and rational, is about to be declared.

The poor shall inherit the earth.

He set about building the commune matter - of - factly. Jerusalem will be built.

'How shall we do it?' ask his fellow Diggers.

'Dig,' he replies.

He sets off to negotiate the purchase of seed and equipment, confident and unperturbed, and it is here that he meets the arousing hostility of the local lord of the manor and the land-owning parson Platt.

Inevitably their hostility grows, for they see in Winstanley's ideas the total undermining of the status quo. Platt complains to Fairfax, the urbane commander of the army, and Winstanley is summoned before him.

Dignified and direct Winstanley can see no problem. He aims to harm no one; why should anyone harm him.

And it is this unshakeable belief in the reasonableness of men that blinds Winstanley. He is fearless because he is convinced that right is upon his side.

His pacifist views can be of no threat to anyone, yet it is in response to his ideas that the real class interests emerge.

There can be no coexistence for the bourgeoisie with his communist views. They retaliate with the force of the new state. clarication of the class nature The Ghost and Mrs Muir. This Is Your Life.

HARLECH: 4.18 p.m. It's Time For Me. 4.25 High Living. 6.01 Report. 6.20 of the revolution and t inadequacy of Winstanles idealism, particularly his no violence, when in collisir with the ruling class.

'Must there be then anoth bloody revolution?' Winstan].

asks himself at the end of t play when the Diggers ha been defeated.

He is answered by his cor rade, Haydon, whose opp sition to the pacifism of t leader has grown as the tr nature of the violence of t oppression is revealed.

'Freedom is the man th will turn the world upsi down, therefore no wonder:

hath enemies.

A NEW SLANDERER PAGE THREE 'Comrade Jacob' is an important dramatic contribution

SAMADE John McGrath (left) and David Caute. to the exploration of the revolutionary struggles of British It insists on both the continuity and the necessary lessons that must be drawn from it.

Equally it insists that class forces predominate.

As such it represents a whole new turn by a writer who is now preoccupying himself with such questions and is a distinct break from the conventional themes of drama.

To break from the traditional idealism of British intellectuals and turn towards Marxism is an important step.

Obviously a play cannot raise all questions of historical analysis, for it must remain predominantly a work of dramatic expression.

But it must be remem-

bered that the Diggers represented the first, in some senses premature, signs of struggle of an oppressed propertyless class of labourers, for communism, which only a mature and politically-conscious working class can take up the fight for and carry through.

Winstanley expresses an early form of Utopian socialism, taken up later by Robert: Owen.

But the vibrancy and originality of his ideas are given dramatic expression in 'Comrade Jacob' as well as their limitations.

The period of the English revolution provides us with rich and important experiences and lessons. It is also a rich vein for the dramatist.

McGrath has made real contribution both to drama and the present-day revolutionary goodie from the baddie-in the last resort he is quicker on the draw.

CINEMA

THE WESTERN must go down as one of Hollywood's great contributions to cinema.

It is a form absolutely consistent with the idealism and individualism of American pioneering history.

At its best the Western has all the confidence, assertion and simplicity of the American dream. In wild, untamed settings man's struggle for survival and law and order, while anarchic Cal C highlighted.

It is only through the agency of a gun that these two contradictions are resolved, in a rough and ready approximation of what is 'right'.

Usually right is assisted by professional skill.

It is this that separates the *TEE спітнія cadenie Підіті Collia Fatted for Slaughter.

John Wayne is the apotheosis of Western hero, lantern jawed, curt, direct, not much of a womanizer (women are either singers in black stockings and garters, or gusty pioneers who load guns, cook stews, and sew up wounds, when the chips are down) tough, stoical, not given to sentiment, an unanswerable right arm, and above all indestructible.

The more 'homely' aspects of US imperialism are to be found dramatized.

Watching 'True Grit' inis (directed Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne) just two days after the news of Pinkville, the connection between celluloid mythbrutalization abundantly clear.

At one point in the film, Wayne, older he's ever looked, with black patch over his eye, points his gun at a rat that is eating scraps on the kitchen floor.

I'm serving notice on you rat, he draws, then fires.

There follows some philosophising about criminals who too are rats and should be treated in the same way.

Actors often complain that they have to believe in their parts, but there could been no grumble from the man who thinks Ronald Reagan is too left wing.

Performer and person unite.

'True Grit' curious marriage of two Hollywood conventions, John Wayne meets National Velvet. For into his brutish life comes a young girl demanding that her father's murderer be brought to justice.

She is very much the pushy American heroine, but more, she is the juvenile spokesman for a new of property owner, officious, backed by her lawyer, hard commercial bargainer, with a ruthless eye to economy and finance.

She is also 15 years old They set off in search of the killer, assisted by Texican and the usual girl-boy arguments take place. ride? Is she tough enough? Can she stand blood?

When they finally meet up with the murderer, the film takes a turn towards farce and becomes rapid parody predictable suspense situations that have appeared in every film since the Perils of Pauline.

The closing sequence reaffirms the unity between the property-owning girl and her thug.

Yet there is a curious quality to this film, an ambiguity that is not exactly tongue in cheek, but leaves the options open.

For there is a grotesqueness about Wayne, something prehistoric that won't die.

The world of the western is irrelevant game. charade, a tired Hathaway the director doesn't seem certain.

Is it a glamourization of Wayne preparing him for a new political image, or is it a send up?

In Hollywood that's what's know as doing a professional job and Hathaway is an old hand at it. Don't reveal your hand.

But in the week of Pinkville there's no place for ambiguity.