On bourgeois audiences missing the point of 40 Years On  15992

… And there are as many and as open sexual innuendoes as in Hair.

Yet for all that, the very targets of these ferocious blows love it, and will go on loving it: simply because the joy of seeing a public school portrayed with such verisimilitude on the stage, the pleasure of basking in their own nostalgia, far outweighs, indeed, obliterates, any suspicion of the author’s rude and violent intention. It is a phenomenon which is familiar enough. Remember, Oh What A Lovely War! made a mint of money by pulling in the multitudes who came to shed a tear over ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and never noticed that those well-loved songs were in fact being attacked as murderous, sentimental trash: and event Brecht’s Threepenny Opera was adored by the very same fat burghers whom it portrayed as pimps, cut-throats and thugs.

Forty Years On is milder than these two famous examples of the bourgeois’ ability to turn a blind eye to insults and even to relish them …

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