Some further thoughts about producing Girlfriends

Girlfriends was written under Thatcher. This may seem an odd detail to start with but it is germane, since Thatcher was Britain’s first female prime minister and also one of its most belligerent. This led many of us who were not natural allies of her political stance to wonder whether the easy assumptions we had grown up with - for example, that women are less warlike than men - were in fact out of date and not particularly helpful. I wanted to examine this a little further by looking at the role of women in quasi front-line positions in WW2 to see what might be learned from that experience, and in reading the research material discovered that - as one might expect, the picture was a confused one, with many women torn between the damage they were undoubtedly inflicting upon other women and their families in other countries, and their duty to stand up against a bloody tyrant who had thrown away the morality rule-book. They were aware that a pacifist or appeasement stance would have meant the occupation of Britain. Unlike their counterparts in France, a country which then as now was extremely reluctant to put up a fight and consequently accepted a humiliating (and ultimately pointless) deal with the Nazis, the women of Britain were able to witness and judge for themselves what that moral choice would have entailed.

In France ordinary people imagined that fighting the Germans again would have been a re-run of the First World War and decided that nothing was worth repeating that for (France lost over one million men in the first war). Very soon they discovered in the appalling aftermath of their defeat that maybe fighting would have been better than what followed, but they weren't to know this at the time they made their pact with Hitler. The British had seen what occupation was doing, not just in France but all over Europe, and were horrified at what it meant in reality (deportations, slave labour, pillage, torture, endemic cruelty, rape, separation and dispersal of families, impoverishment, deprivation and widespread human rights abuses). Because of this, many people who before the war had held pacifist opinions revised them in the light of events; there are many insightful and moving accounts of, for example, religious teachers who had campaigned vehemently against military intervention before the war who went on to write extraordinary testimonies declaring that the evil being faced was so great and so unprecedented that they believed it was acceptable to suspend their previously-held moral positions.

Their moral dilemmas were acute, and I was immensely impressed and humbled by the intelligence and integrity with which they faced them. I wanted to reflect the multitude of feelings and moral positions that co-existed amongst people fighting for the Allies in that war, to get beyond the - undeniably compelling - moral certainties of the Churchill speeches.

What was unique about these women is that 6 weeks before they were ordinary folk who suddenly, with almost no training, preparation or build-up, found themselves at the front line of history's most frightening, industrialised and barbaric confrontation. These were not trained military personnel who had had months of brainwashing, nor were they modern people who could see TV reports, surf the net or read detailed & balanced news journalism before they arrived on an airbase. They were relatively innocent and open-minded, and yet they rose to the challenge of the enormous contradictions and difficulties they faced with stoicism and inner strength.

It is essential to understand that for the whole 1941 period of the action of Girlfriends, most people in Britain inwardly believed they were outgunned and outnumbered and that they were heading for a crushing defeat. And so it was their mental attitude, alongside their military courage and improvisation, that must have pulled them through as much as anything else. What they thought about what they were doing was therefore of critical interest. So whilst I felt it imperative to put Jasmine's traumatised perspective in, powerfully so as it happens, I also felt it was unfair to the historical context if her view ultimately prevailed. The view that did prevail was that the execution of the war was grim but the lesser of two evils: unlike some of the men in the forces, I came away from the research believing that almost none of the women - if any - had actually enjoyed the mechanics and 'thrill' of the battle. At the same time, I was obviously keen to let a modern audience view these events through the prism of their own experience, which included the desperate civil battles of the miner's strike, the Greenham Common protests, the Falklands War, the sinking of the Belgrano and the bombing of Tripoli by UK-based US bombers.

The circumstances of that period (the 1980s) are not the circumstances we live in now, and the messages that different characters convey in Girlfriends will also sound and feel different when performed now. In the great history plays of William Shakespeare, he takes as his settings the events and characters of, say, the Roman occupation of Egypt, the Battle of Agincourt, the Wars of the Roses, but really he is talking about Elizabethan England. However, I have never felt as a member of the audience at one of these plays that Shakespeare has already made up his mind with what or with whom we are supposed to agree. He presents the exercise of power as a series of moral human dilemmas, the solutions to which are multifarious and often contradictory. He makes us see that all leaders, like all of us, are flawed and that even a good intention can lead to a bad outcome. He asks us to imagine what we would do given the same circumstances or problems, he doesn't tell us whether one route is better than the other. This is how ideally I would like an audience at a performance of Girlfriends to be treated.

Prospective directors and performers of Girlfriends might like to read H.E.Bates' superb wartime novel Fair Stood the wind for France, which tells of an RAF bomber crew's experiences after being forced to crash land in Occupied France. Bates himself served as an RAF Squadron Leader during the war. Another fascinating source is the 1993 Vincent Ward movie A Map of the Human Heart about a Canadian Inuit who becomes a pilot in WW2. It's long and episodic and wasn't a big hit (whatever that means!) but there are some stunning, haunting images in it that are relevant to Girlfriends. One of these is a scene with some WAAFs and a barrage balloon, another where our hero makes love to his sweetheart inside the dome of the Royal Albert Hall whilst an orchestra rehearses on stage far below and an air raid threatens above, and the most powerful and shocking scene when he takes part in the bombing of Dresden (and gets shot down into the inferno).

The destruction of Dresden is the single most contentious issue of the Second World War for British people; Dresden, in 1940 the most beautiful Baroque city in Europe, was of no military or strategic significance to the Allies and was full to the brim of refugees fleeing the Eastern front. There is some evidence that the Dresden attack was a British initiative about which their American allies were skeptical. The fact that it was pulverised to rubble has always been seen as something approaching a war crime by opponents of the bombing campaign, and a statue of 'Bomber' Harris, the man who masterminded that campaign for the RAF, which was unveiled about 10 years ago by the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was thought by many to be in the worst possible taste.

In 2002 I was in Dresden making a documentary about Wagner and was struck by the fact that the city authorities are open in their condemnation, even now, of what they describe as the 'totally unnecessary' Allied action. When I visited the Kreuzkirche there I was quite taken aback to see a large sign outside saying that it had been destroyed by 'senseless' British bombers. However, at the end of hostilities, Dresden twinned itself with the city of Coventry (demolished by the Luftwaffe in '41) and attitudes are certainly shifting now it is no longer part of the former DDR. Then I did a little calculation in my head. Dresden was bombed two weeks after British troops, vomiting and weeping, liberated Bergen-Belsen. I assume that when the newsreels started filtering back home of the newly-discovered camps, it was dawning on them that this was no ordinary enemy. A demonic and vast abyss was opening up in front of their eyes, the confronting of which was going to take a gigantic force of whatever kind could be mustered to subdue it. The scale of the Nazi terror was unlike anything anyone could have imagined: and the scale of it meant that the whole German population were in varying degrees complicit. There were 10,000 camps in the territory of the Third Reich. No German civilian was geographically further away than 15 miles from a camp of some sort. There were 800 camps on the perimeter of Berlin itself (of which Bergen-Belsen is one). This was not a madman leading a nation of courageous innocents - it was mass violence and hysteria, mass barbarism that had got quite spectacularly out of control. Anger, rage, desperation - all these emotions might well have played a part in the smashing of Germany's cultural jewels, like Dresden. It is as if the Allies were saying, "what do we have to do to make you surrender?"

On that same trip we did a day's filming at Buchenwald. I stood in front of the gas ovens in the crematorium building. These are the gates of hell. And then I remembered the sign outside the Dresden Kreuzkirche, blaming the Allies for the architectural damage done to their fine ancient city. And thought they had a bloody cheek. Picasso's Guernica should hang outside that church instead, as a memorial to all the civilian victims of aerial bombardment - the first examples of which were perpetrated by German squadrons in the Spanish Civil War, on Madrid, Barcelona and of course Gernika-Luma, where a defenceless non-strategic civilian centre, full of refugees, and the iconic home of Basque national aspirations, was razed to the ground in broad daylight.

It is true, with hindsight, that the bombing of German cities probably didn't do much to win the war and that what the Allies were trying to do was send a signal to Russia, which was engaged in a massive battle on the Eastern Front, that they would do what they could, however small, to distract the Nazis in the West. Jasmine and Guy do not know about the concentration camps, of course, nor even Dresden, and they think they are arguing about a more conventional war than that which was actually taking place. But we, as modern spectators, can't do anything but view their debate through the filter of our own retrospective knowledge of that conflict. Both sides of their argument are motivated by fear.

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Extremely helpful and illuminating web links relating to Girlfriends can be found here.