Museum Hours

Two recent plays  Albion  and  What Shadows  have probed away at the vexed question of contemporary Englishness.  The conclusion that emerges is that Englishness is now: - an almost entirely backward looking exercise in often self destructive nostalgia and reactionary attitudes towards perceived loss; which is accompanied by - an intransigent FU attitude towards the world as a whole. We used to be bigger and more important than you and now we're not so we'll just shout and stamp our feet and the rest of you can lump it. It goes without saying that both are deeply unhelpful to attempts to navigate creatively a place for this country in the 21st century.  Englishness now feels much like a negative exercise in nostalgia because: - the 'positive' ties that used to bind - primarily Empire and religion - are gone; and that - economic insecurity for many makes a sense of a shared, positive future feel like a pipe dream; and that - few polit