Made in Dagenham - A Review

This musical should do very well. It's funny: with big block-busting-ear-worm songs, a huge cast, a story people know, amusing choreography and a star in Gemma Arterton that people have heard of.

The Long Suffering Husband works for Ford and the company had several free preview tickets, which they asked their employees to enter a ballot to win. He won.  We sat with other Ford Employees in the dress circle in the Adelphi theatre marvelling at our luck. Several people had checked the real price of their tickets and been amazed that they were mid-price tickets, rather than the cheapest. I'm not a huge fan of the Adelphi theatre. I think that unless you are in the front of the stalls the angle is odd and I think some of the sound gets lost. I saw Chicago there and hated it. I didn't hate Made in Dagenham, so it must have lots going for it.

This musical played with my emotions. 

The first thing it did was make me laugh. It is intentionally funny. They have made caricatures of the characters. Harold Wilson is turned into a bumbling fool, who can't take his coat off or find his way out of a room and every single one of his dances had me crossing my legs with laughter. The American boss of Ford is turned into a gun-toting bully, who sings like Springsteen and arrives on an army helicopter/truck and Germans were seen doing Nazi salutes.  It was all quite Panto.

By the interval, though I was feeling quite upset. I wasn't the only one. I overheard a woman at the bar in the interval saying to her husband, "I'm just so emotional at the moment.....I don't know......it's difficult....I just feel like crying." She wasn't being over-emotional. This is difficult subject content for women. To know that the Equal Pay act was only put into place in 1975 and that some of the issues raised are still issues today (such as work that women do being undervalued) is hard to deal with. The misogynistic jokes that were allowed because they showed how women were seen at the time were still uncomfortable. I found hearing Harold Wilson say, "Women? Why are women working? The war is over!" distressing and just a little bit unfair. The Wilson government spent more on Education than on defence, which had the effect of allowing more women to go to University, they brought in maternity pay and had more women in the cabinet than the current government's last cabinet. One of the characters made the whole female audience gasp when she said, "the reason that women don't have equality is that they put their children first."

This musical also caused me some confusion for me. There are huge letters that appear on the stage from time to time.  I was hoping that all would become clear at the end and the letters would spell out something profound but that never happened. They also missed a huge trick.  The LSH pointed out that when the tea lady wheeled a giant C across the stage it would have been so much funnier if it had been a T. We liked the tea lady character a lot and think that Kath Duggan may be someone to watch.

The music in this show is really good.  The band are just amazing.  The LSH said that the flute had been really good when we were travelling home and although I'd misheard him and he was talking about our lunch I completely agreed with him.  Gemma Arterton can sing.  She's no Idina Menzel or Ruthie Henshaw but her voice was really appropriate to the character and there were some stunning vocal performances. Adrian Der Gregorian (Eddy) had a lovely sweet tone in his middle register and Sophie Louise Dann (Barbara Castle) was just amazing.  I was particularly impressed with Emma Lindars (Pauline) and in such a huge cast to notice just one supporting actress for her singing must mean that she is really something special.  I have one small criticism that some of the female cast sang slightly sharp and some of the male cast were a little weak, leaving some of the chords sounding like slightly scrunchy open fifths.  I say that it's a small criticism because in some ways it enhanced the performance.  At moments when the plot line was uncomfortable an uncomfortable chord just added atmosphere.

It was an interesting experience to watch this musical surrounded by Ford employees.  In general I would say that they were not too impressed with the characterisation of the company they work for.  Ford America as a gun-toting bully didn't fit with their experience of working for this company.  I was sat next to a female engineer who thought that far from being discriminated against was given many more opportunities than friends she graduated with who worked for other companies. There was also a palpable bristle when the storyline suggested that Ford bullied the government by saying they would move operations to Belgium.  At the end the LSH explained that this was because Ford has recently decided to close it's Belgium plant and they all knew loads of people who were losing their jobs there. They were all very amused with the set design, which seemed to imply that making a car was rather like putting together an airfix model.

I ended up feeling guilty.  Guilty that I wasn't standing up for equality more, guilty that I didn't stand up during the Stand Up song and guilty that I had some criticisms of it, when I want it to do really well and I want everyone to think about the subject matter.

What you should do, though, is go and see it yourself and make up your own mind.

Mother's Day

Something you never see on Father's Day is men updating their Facebook status, "I feel so spoilt, so lucky for the bag of peanuts and box of nails the children bought me and the cup of tea in bed."  Maybe that's because they don't get those things and that Mother's Day is more celebrated than Father's Day but I suspect that Daddies don't have to be demure, they are allowed to demand a cup of tea in bed and a bag of peanuts from their children once a year.

Don't get me wrong I love my children and am grateful for their gifts, my daughter sent me the best Mother's Day Card I've ever seen, my son bought flowers, chocolate and a book token and I appreciate the effort the Long Suffering Husband went to when they were small to make sure that I felt special for one day. However, it does feel as though there is a double standard at play here.

This Mother's Day I am watching Made in Dagenham with my son.  I told him that it is every feminist's duty to make their sons watch this film, so they understand some history.  His shocked reply, "Are you a feminist?" was swiftly followed by, "Not one of those nutty ones though?"  I told him that I was one of those nutty ones, so he asked the definition of a feminist and when I told him that it was someone who wanted equality for men and women he said, "Well then I'm a feminist too!"  I am so proud of him.  The women of Ford Motor Company in 1968 were astoundingly brave and started something that all women should be grateful for but that is only the beginning of the story.  Without them there would have been no Equal Pay Act of 1970 but they didn't win equal pay for themselves.  Their work was still allowed to be classed as unskilled and therefore their renumeration be lower than for other semi-skilled workers.  If a man had joined the machinists then he couldn't be paid more but that was a slim victory and it took until 1984 and another strike until they were graded fairly and given working conditions that the men would consider working in.

Barbara Castle and the Dagenham Ford women workers

Yesterday morning a news programme was discussing a new book called Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, who is an executive at Facebook.  The vitriol for this woman from other women was terrifying.  What had she done wrong?  Her book is due to be published in the States tomorrow and I was really surprised at the hatred of her when I read about some of her ideas.  She wants to push the glass ceiling, she wants women to be allowed to run companies, she wants equality.  She says, "I believe the world would be a better place if half the companies and half the countries were run by women and half the homes were run by men."  When she worked for Google she demanded priority parking for pregnant women (and got it!)  The women on the news programme were saying things like, "It's alright for her, with all her money and privilege."  Although, I will not be able to get a copy of the book for some time I did manage to find some really good reviews on the internet.  This link was particularly useful if you want to read more for yourself.

http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2013/03/08/lean-in-read-on-21-perspectives-on-sheryl-sandbergs-book/

It does worry me that women are damned, whatever choices they make.  If they choose not to have children they are hard, unfeeling, unnatural.  If they have children and no career they are wasting their education, intelligence, life.  If they try to do both, they are either neglecting their children or their work.  And it's often women who are making these judgements. One of the articles in the above link talks about a study where students were given a real life case study of a woman called Heidi, who became a successful venture capitalist by using her "outgoing personality and vast personal and professional network."  Half of the students were given the case study with Heidi's name changed to Howard.  They all agreed that Heidi and Howard were equally capable but they really didn't like Heidi.  A woman who is successful is unlikable.  Isn't that sad?

When I was listening to the BBC news programme I was struck by the description of how Sheryl Sandberg wasn't a workaholic of how she left work at 5.30 to spend time with her children.  Of course, she started working again as soon as they were in bed.  She also didn't get into the office until 8am.  Then they said that she could only do that because she was relying on everyone else.  Her personal assistant gets into the office at 4am.   

Am I the only person who thinks that nobody should be working that much?  No one should get to work at 4am.  If people need to work those kind of hours then the company needs to employ more people to do the job.  I wonder if this rise in work hours may be the fault of women trying to push their way to the top.  Sheryl Sandberg encourages women not to take their foot off the brake before they have children.  She tells them to push to get as high as they can before they have a family.  I felt guilty as I read this.  I didn't take all the opportunities that were available to climb the career ladder partly because I knew I wanted to have children.  Mind you, I also hated the jobs I had and wasn't interested in the career paths being offered.  The woman in LSH's office (and yes I believe she might be the only one) works longer hours than any of the male engineers.  I wonder if she feels as though she still has to be better or work harder than any of the men to make progress in her career and she might be right.

It is true that women are still penalised for having children.  They might have  very successful careers but taking time off to have children changes everything. I know women who have been made redundant when they became pregnant and although some won tribunals for unfair dismissal it certainly changed their career path.  Others were not brave enough to fight and some gained a reputation as a trouble maker.  I know other women who choose to return to work part-time or at a job with a lower salary and less pressure while their children are small, who find that when their children are old enough and they apply for jobs at their old level of responsibility  they are passed over for younger, cheaper or less female people.  It is always impossible to argue that they have been unfairly treated but, well we all know they have, don't we?  

What I like about Sheryl Sandberg is that she recognises that there are different women.  She suggests that women should become authentic at work.  They should cry at work if they need to and they should say what they think.  I agree with her.  Not every woman wants to run a country or a company.  

This could be a radical idea but maybe we should stop celebrating Mother's or Father's Day and make every day parent's day.  Maybe it's time to recognise that looking after your own children is a worthwhile and rewarding thing to do, that it should be taken into account by employers when interviewing women who would like to work again, post-childbirth.   Then maybe, there would be a better balance in the workplace.  Men would also feel they could take time to look after their children.  Wouldn't it be nice if there really was equality?