Freedom Day

Yesterday was “Freedom Day” in England. (They do it differently in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland so their administrations can feel free.)

But freedom is a concept not a reality. Some years ago I saw a LAMDA production of Cagebirds, a 1971 play by David Crampton. It is an allegory with a female cast and set in a giant bird cage. There were so many feathers there was an asthma warning outside the auditorium. This is the gist.

“Cagebirds concerns itself with the strange situation, never entirely explained, of six women (or birds, or very birdlike women, or very womanlike birds) who live in a cage, watched over by their Mistress – who holds the power and the keys.  The action takes off when the Mistress decides to introduce a new member to the flock, a Wild One who quickly shatters the others’ quiet and comfortable cage-dwelling existence.” (Edinburgh Fringe review, 2012)

I’m not sure who the Mistress and the Wild One are but I can think of a few candidates: maybe Boris Johnson and Jonathan Sumption. Yesterday she opened the cage door and, in the play, the birds do not want freedom; in England some do not or are nervous.

The Mistress is self-isolating at Chequers; a friend cannot come to the opera with me as she is self-isolating after a visit to the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence last week; my club has closed its kitchen for ten days after a member of staff tested Covid positive over the weekend; Micheal Martin has cancelled a visit to London today.  More broadly some of us have become inured to captivity and are scared to spread our wings. Life is not back to business as usual – but after the last eighteen months it’s an improvement. Will we be put back in the bird cage again? Probably; some of us will not have left it.