The stage is where history lives

I share Peter Hitchens’s serious nostalgia for the times of his youth.

Of course, the riposte is that ‘every generation says this’, but Mr Hitchens is correct that, in true Orwellian style, the past is being deliberately consigned to the dustbin by those who wish to change us without our permission.

And it’s the younger generation they are really interested in getting at, those people who know little or nothing about the past.

So, what to do? With respect, we can’t rely on the media, nor social media. I can think only of live theatre as a solution.

We should put on plays from the past – Rattigan, the Aldwych farces – that reflect their historical period without being overtly political.

But how long, I wonder, before a dystopian version of the Lord Chamberlain would act to censor these once-innocent plays as being harmful to young people’s education? Would we be repeating history from medieval times, performing from the back of carts and scattering whenever the bishop’s men came to arrest us and put us on the bonfire?

John Drewry, Beckenham