The grammar fightback is here – it is led by an unlikely source
The purpose of theatre, we are told, is to push boundaries. But when it comes to musical theatre, it seems that almost no subject is too strange. In 2001, the multiple Tony Awardwinning Urinetown (2001) was a scathing satire on private/public lavatory provision; while in 2017, the Donmar Warehouse staged Committee!, a musical based on the findings of a 2015 select committee that examined the collapse of the charity Kids Company.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise to learn of two recent musicals based on the arid-seeming theme of grammar. The Connector
opened off-broadway last month, taking as inspiration the story of a copy-editor at a venerable New York magazine with fastidious editorial standards.
As The Connector’s run
ended, The Angry Grammarian opened at Theatre Exile in South Philadelphia. With a nod in the programme acknowledgements to Lynne Truss’s larky-but-rigorous guide to punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003), The Angry Grammarian
addresses those fraught topics, the misplaced apostrophe and the Oxford comma. The subtext of both The Connector and The Angry Grammarian is the vexed relationship between language and truth, and the equally troubled role of correct expression as the route to success.
This latter subject was on the mind of Michael Gove when, as education secretary a decade ago, he prioritised the teaching of grammar and punctuation in primary schools. There followed a passionate debate about the very existence of such a thing as “standard” English and, if it existed, the most effective way of teaching it.
My own observations were formed during a period helping university students with their academic writing. There I encountered bright students, who often spoke multiple languages but had not been taught at school how to frame a sentence, still less an essay. For them, the outmoded principles of grammar proved a superpower: not a grim restriction of creative thought, but a conduit to an exuberant flowering of self-expression.
Viewed from that perspective, the notion of a rousing power ballad about fact-checking suddenly seems perfectly plausible.
In an acerbic review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a New Yorker critic remarked that “an Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces”.
Touché! At any rate, the impregnable French self-confidence in its native cuisine shows no sign of wavering when it comes to Anglo-saxon cooking. Figures from the latest annual survey of tourist experiences found the UK ranked at a respectable 18th place of 60 countries for food – except by the French, who placed us last.
It is hard to see this as anything other than Gallic sour grapes. Half a century ago, post-war Britain was a byword for dismal food, but times have changed. French gastronomy may be on Unesco’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, but these days, French obesity rates are rising and la malbouffe ( junk food) is as much of a scourge there as here.
Meanwhile, the UK has developed an adventurous mastery of cuisine from across the world (including France), while chefs such as Stephen Harris of The Sportsman, in Kent, explore the prized Gallic concept of “terroir”, or characteristic local flavours. Time, perhaps, for a British cultural delegation to lecture to the French on our indigenous gastronomic riches.