All those years...

What has political activism in the last 50 years achieved? In Trying it On, written and performed by David Edgar, his 20-year-old, student-activist self challenges his comfortable, successful 70-year-old self about what he (and the rest of us) have really changed. Up for critique were all those flyers we duplicated and distributed, all those marches, all those chants. I'm not very far behind him in age so there was a lot I recognised - that pink fluid for correcting typos on stencils, the optimism, the dashed hopes, the restarts, then the things that really did change that we tend to take for granted. The play included several video interviews with activists from the 'Sergeant Pepper Generation' including Tariq Ali and Anna Coote whose 1982 book (with Beatrix Campbell), Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women's Liberation, was not really updateable for a second edition because enough of the demands had been met that it meant it would have needed a major rewrite.

He talked about the way many people's attitudes change as they age and acquire - the 'Sergeant Pepper Generation' voted very much more for Brexit than young people - and the selling out of several famous erstwhile lefties (one of whom, much more radical than me back then and much less so now, I sat next to in history lectures at the same university that David Edgar had been to a few years earlier). 

I was fascinated by his straw polls of the audience and his three-way comparison of us, the super-rich and the segments of the population who voted for Brexit on attitudes to immigration, the free market, civil liberties and tax levels (see the cardboard boxes behind his head during the after-show discussion).

It was almost a one-person-play but, crucially, not quite. The angry interruption towards the end by the young stage manager/technical manager about the urgency of the environmental crisis threw into perspective the responsibility that the 70-year-olds have right now to the 20-year-olds. 

What are we all, each of us, doing about it?