IMG Notes Trade Union Commission Saturday 26 March tam. a Natona Genre. national workine womens MG International School nore date for keping tree. Watch abour Focus on Eastern Europe': The MG has purchased a bulk order of this e sent to tional Health Fracti March. runner cetals Fraction Saturday 16 Details of venue to follow.
[mingham. one 01-278 9526 Union Commission. Saturday 26 11am. At National Centre letion or the Fit the section munist Party ice the fall of Saigon. Details, phone 01-2789526.
tuescavizz March Details, phone 01-278 952 weenesde ietnam since the fall of Saigon.
Morning struggle American imCultural Joray something and a Workers Party lecture on the 1931 crisis.
cum-political documentary give further substantial taining manner selfthe fastest buck can be made and razamatazz ol the Twenties', the march - or rather trudge -WOrKCIS DIOLCOULE consignment to Skid Row.
MacDonald, Government. "Now', says he, Wing' and solve the crisis.
ARRESTED tomato rom a box aboute ference, cleverly CIrCUS. MacDonald 1s Jimmy Maxton. are al surene on the pound. panic in Threadneedle That cut the dole GIVEN the combined talents of Roger Smith and Tom Kempinski, one would have thought their latest would produce better than a cross between 'Oh, What a Lovely War' Revolutionary However, their musical comedySell Out, recently shown at the Library Theatre in Manchester, does not do so, despite is serous errort to present socialist ideas in an enteraction begins in 1929, 'boom time'. as the opening song calls it. We see the machinations of the Wall Street whizz-kids, whose guiding light leads them to where Starkly, against the bright lights *roaring 'hungry Thirties' - onto the stage in the shape of a group of about their arrives to rescue them from their plight? None other than Ramsay proclaiming formation of a minority Labour ine ume to put aside party bicker Outside the storm clouds gather. A worker is arrested for stealing a dumped to 'keep prices up'. Macdepicted as cast as and fake left IllS act, is a ventriloquist talking out of both sides of his mouth a once'. MacDonald makes a passionate appeal for unity and wins RAMSAY MacDONALD the day thanks to Maxton's fainthearted withdrawal of a critical cuts will cause Unemployment rises. MacDon- results ald helps capitalism. There is a run After hilarious Street, America forks out, on condition be wrong?
spending is axed.
MacDonald's pals don't want to heavily • or ineir own Inroats WRP play pathise with him revolution. misery of cuts and the Means Test That's the story-line. It is funny, the songs and music are lively, the actors perform well. So what can playwrights have leaned on Brecht, the famous mands' German socialist playwright and show.
But, almost makes the audience symlacks in sublety, it makes up in in one so. Thi deepend ly hear record tire casan in one scene, intentional humour, a group men and women singing: "We are "helpless' men, we are men, for our class' and 'we are men, we tunately, are men who will win our e- rises to TS to fill gaps. Also it portrayed the Workers as TODO-lIKe. SOUr SECECU types, their words almost torn from a vulgar Marxist phrasebook and lacking a semblance of reality.
Brecht's workers were never niki these wooden caricatures. In contrast, MacDonald is endowed with such vivacity that the audienc almost sympathise with him - at least he's a bit of a character.
Despite the pretence, the class struggle never enters except as a superimposition.
corners, if the workers box at all. For all the WRP's endless babbling about "philosophy", the opposites never get near enough to be i conflict.
SIDELINES The bourgeoisie, MacDonald workers are all self-contained and detached. The more the play evolves, the more the workers end up on the sidelines, only being introduced to stir the conscience of the audience Worse still, the WRP's Third Period Stalinist is The worker who has just torn up his union card - hardly a paragon of class consciousness is one of those who will fight for his cassi demands. Through what agency, comrades Smith and Kempinski? He's got no organisatio So how will he win his demands? Sponta neously perhaps?
The play aims at drawing para tells betweer 1931 and today Detweel MacDonald and Calla ghan. We do have a crisis, unem ployment and cuts now as then central factor strength of the working class - is different. The labour movement has suffered no defeats remotely like 1926 or 1931, defeats from which the mass of the class did not recover for over a decade.
CARDBOARD Today's workers are on 2-E06 move against the Social Contract cuts and wage controls. The para of some imminent repetition of 1931 - as Healy has been doing almost daily since 1964 - does not stand up.
To have been more than antiplay the richness life, not the "militant' cardboard who will fight cut-outs dished up here. Unfor propaganda never level of art. Not recommended' says the TV advert message applies well to Sell
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meetings will behend in ay 21 March,