Cat and Mouse (Sheep) is a 1995 theatre play by British playwright Gregory Motton. It satirises both the left and right in British society. It was premiered at the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, Paris and then shown briefly in Britain at the Gate Theatre.It has subsequently only been performed outside Britain. It is published by Oberon Books.Oberon Books Motton Plays Three, Cat and Mouse (sheep), In Praise Of Progress, A little Satire, A Monologue, Introduction by Simon Usher In the play, Conservative, capitalist and contemporary left wing politics are merged and discredited, identified as middle-class in their nature and origin and hostile to working class interests.
The play's emphasis on working class interests as being distinct from left wing politics as defined by the middle classes, a phenomenon now broadly discussed and to some degree acknowledged including within the Labour Party,"Things Don't Only Get Better – Why The Working classes Fell Out Of Love with Labour" New Statesman November 2016. Labour peer Glasman says;We are experiencing a crisis in our relationship with working people, the descendants of those who built the party and the movement"Labour now third most popular party among working-class voters, poll finds" The Independent 13 February 2017"What Drove Labour's Success"The New Statesman June 2017. Labour is getting more middle-class We already knew that Labour's membership skews middle-class (ABC1) and graduate, and its voter base is moving the same way"New Electoral Map For Britain" The Guardian 11 June 2017 Britain's class politics has been turned completely upside down in 2017. Labour, founded as the party of the working class, and focused on redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, gained the most ground in 2017 in seats with the largest concentrations of middle-class professionals and the rich. The Conservatives, long the party of capital and the middle class, made their largest gains in the poorest seats of England and Wales. Even more remarkably, after years of austerity, the Conservatives' advance on 2015 was largest in the seats where average incomes fell most over the past five years, while the party gained no ground at all in the seats where average incomes rose most was strongly at odds with opinion amongst British theatre practitioners at a time when left wing consensus centred around the emerging middle class leadership"Jeremy Corbyn has consolidated a bourgeois capture of the party begun by Tony Blair". New Statesman, June 2016 of the Labour Party whose success was to dominate the political scene for the next decade.BBC Politics August 2010 "The Rise And Fall Of New Labour" The Labour party won a 179-seat majority - the biggest in its history on a manifesto which not only promised no income tax rises, but also a pledge to stick to Conservative spending plans Cat and Mouse (Sheep) marked the end of Motton's initial popularity with British theatres; The play was not accepted by any theatre managements when it was written in 1992, and has never been produced in Britain. Until that time Motton's major plays had been produced at either the Royal Court or Riverside Studios, Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, within eighteen months of being written. Cat and Mouse (Sheep) had to wait four years before being seen in Britain for six performances in a foreign production.
First Production Cat and Mouse (Sheep) was directed at the Théâtre De L'Europe à L'Odeon, Paris by Gregory Motton and Ramin Gray with actors Kevin McMonagle, Tony Rohr, Penelope Dimond and Patrick Bridgeman, in English. It was later directed by the same directors with a French cast at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Paris, run by the Marxist director Bernard Sobel. The same Odeon production was later taken to the Gate Theatre for six performances Notting Hill, Kevin McMonagle was not available for these performances and the part of Gengis was played by actress Rudi Davies.
Context and Significance Cat and Mouse (Sheep) is notable for its 'plague on both your houses' stance at a time when, in literary and arts organisations in general and the British theatre establishment in particular, a conventional, by then middle class, version of left-wingism was more or less taken for granted"Where Are The Right Wing Voices?" The Guardian 11 November 2007. Jonathan Church, artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre, puts it in brutal economic terms. 'There's a particular link with state subsidy in the kind of theatre we're talking about, and that in itself promotes a left-wing culture"Political Theatre's Final Curtain" The Independent 28 December 2011 This is therapy for the middle classesThe Guardian 11 November 2007 Julian Fellows;'after the Second World War the avant garde became the establishment. That meant that no one was poking fun at the establishment any more because they approved of it.' It's just become impossible not to be a socialist within the artistic community these days.' Any reasonably free society must allow for a range of views, and we don't have that' and expressed though the choices made by the theatre and other managements The Guardian 11 November 2007]. For decades, British theatre has been dominated by playwrights sympathetic to a liberal consensus"Where Are The Right Wing Voices?" The Guardian 11 November 2007. The most honest statement comes from Jonathan Church at Chichester. Through his work at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Church has been associated with strident left-wing political theatre. At Birmingham in the early years of this decade. 'I'd probably put on a play that talked about an issue that I'm passionate about even if it wasn't brilliant,' he says. 'A right-wing play would have to be superb to overcome my prejudices.'"Where Are The Right Wing Voices?" The Guardian 11 November 2007. Famously, Ian Curteis became a victim of what was described at the time as the liberal-left establishment when his television play about the Falklands War was dropped by the BBC in the Eighties because his portrait of Margaret Thatcher was deemed to be too positive Motton's new work was now as unpopular with managements(Patrick Marmion, Whats on.5 May 1993) Motton stands aside from the mainstream orthodoxy...now managements are afraid what he is going to say as it had previously been with critics alike and the play was only able to be shown in Britain as part of a programme of "foreign" plays in a production financed by French money."Cat And Mouse (Sheep) and Services at The Gate" The Independent 13 February 1996 The choice of Gregory Motton to represent Britain in the season of "the most exciting European playwrights writing at the moment" sets the tone for the next two months at the Gatehttp://gregorymotton.com/AboutCatAndMouseSheep.html When it was over they found they hadn't spent all the budget, and with gallic generosity the Odéon allowed Ducks and Geese to use the remainder to take the production over to England. David Farr was at the Gate Theatre and being an old or ex Motton-enthusiast from his Oxford days, gave them a week in his theatre. Motton's was an early and isolated dissident voice,The Full Room, the A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting Methuen Drama Motton is the Tony Benn or Dennis Skinner of playwrighting but one of limited effectiveness due to his marginalisation,"Whatever Happened To Edward Bond" The Independent 2 November 2010 In my imagination there's a strange hinterland, an empty multi-storey car park standing at a point equidistant from both the Royal Court and the National Theatres, where the shades of once-celebrated playwrights such as Arnold Wesker, John Arden, Howard Barker and Gregory Motton wander up and down. in the nascent debate within the left over the direction of the movement. Cat and Mouse (Sheep) was written while the middle class leadership established control of the Labour Party and five years before it formed the centre-left government under Tony Blair"1997 Election Archive – Centre Left Centre Stage" New Statesman May 2017 of 1997, and precedes by a decade and a half the last stage of the conflict within Labour over control and direction of the movement, surrounding the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, which Motton, along with others, was later to describe in articles as the end of the same process."Labour is now the party of the middle classes", by Ed West The Spectator June 2017 "Labour The Third Most Popular Party For Labour Voters" The Independent 13 February 2017"Labour Slumps To Third Place Amongst Working Class Voters" Spectator February 2017"How Britain Voted In The General Election" yougov.co 13 June 2017"Jeremy Corbyn's Party Posher Than Blairs"The Daily Telegraph 21 January 2016. Labour has historically claimed to represent working people, but its analysis shows that the party - under Jeremy Corbyn - is failing to do that. Families "who have to budget to make ends meet" are under-represented in the party, comprising 4 per cent of membership, whereas they make up 8.7 per cent of the population. Parties regularly fight over who speak ups best for "hardworking families", but Labour's research shows that they are not rushing to join the party.Lord Watts former leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party "My advice to my own party leadership is that they should take less notice of the London-centric hard left political class who sit around in their £1 million mansions eating their croissants at breakfast and seeking to lay the foundations for a socialist revolution." Daily Telegraph 21 January 2016
Cat and Mouse (Sheep) was the first of four satires by that author using the same characters. The others are Gengis Amongst The Pygmies,Oberon Books Gengis Amongst the Pygmies A Holiday In The SunOberon Books A Holiday In The Sun and The Rape Of EuropeLevellers Press
The play and the subsequent three plays in the series, are useful as a register of opinion that was left wing but nevertheless unpopular with the left wing establishment, concentrating as those plays did on the plight of the lowest stratas of the poor,"Political Renewal and the Future of Labour" Maurice Glasman Labour peer speech to the Labour Together conference 2016 It would be wise for us to think seriously about how to heal our ruptured relationship with the working classWhats On And Where To Go 23 April 1996, Roger Foss, Theatre Can Never Be The Same After This At first sight you are confronted with a no-hope scenario that includes everything from sex abuse to the housing crisis and education, although at its heart there is a strong thread of humanity that constantly pulls Motton's writing from the grunge of despair. both in Britain and abroad, and eschewing, or even ridiculing the more popular issues of gender and race politics that appealed to middle class voters,"The Class Issues In The UK Snap Election"World Socialist Website 22 May 2017 A key element in determining Labour's social composition is its embrace of identity and lifestyle politics, with affirmations of race, gender and sexual orientation providing the mechanism for a self-centred petty-bourgeois layer to secure special privileges in education and employment – and to theatre audiences and managements. The plays also tended to adopt an accusing tone towards middle class consumers especially, charging them with hypocrisy and complicity in the exploitation of cheap labour in the Far East. These plays have never been produced in Britain despite some prominent French Productions.