Brighton Fringe 2023

There’s Another Country

Martin Nichols

Festival: Brighton Fringe, Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Though a slow, cumulative film, intensely personal and keeping to that, there are sudden sidesteps out – as with Newbury’s nurse, Freud, the Lear sequence – that pattern the message in lateral sidelight that tells. A slowly magnificent odyssey.

Directed, edited, and shot in 8mm by Martin Nichols, with Richard Jacobs.

Russell Floyd – Lear/Nichols Sr

Paddy O’Keeffe – Gloucester (and also God in a sequence that never made it to the final cut)

Kitty Rose Newbury – the nurse

David Samson – Nichols Sr as a soldier in 1940

Ricky Egan – his Liverpudlian mate in the same scene

Roger Dalrymple – Freud

David Sanderson – Herrs Gruber & Bauer

Future showings tba.

Review

Henry Vaughan wrote ecstatically in about 1650 ‘My soul, there is a country/far beyond the stars’ which ultimately rhymes with ‘wars’, civil war. That’s inherent in Martin Nichols’ There’s Another Country, a nation at war with itself, or, rather the rich declaring class war on the poor.

Nichols takes his title from the Holst hymn, with its democratic elision. Holst, a socialist, haunts the soundtrack through the idealistic upsurge of his 1918 Planets Suite, particularly the central section of Jupiter, requisitioned as ‘I vow to thee my country’, taken wrongly as a nationalist paean. But Holst avers there’s another country, far beyond the slurs.

Counterpointing with intent, Nichols – who wrote, filmed, edited and directed the 141 minutes of steadily accumulating anger – moves steadily backwards. Mapping a world his father literally fought for and his family inhabited, he traces the damages and rages.

Most unusually too he shoots the whole film on 8mm. This in itself gave rise to a Herculean labour of splice and edit. The filmic quality, the sheer integration though, is mesmeric. The sound is digitally good.

It’s an almost soundless damage inflicted on his family and as the war film titles it ‘millions like us’, Nicholas maps a Welfare State’s sudden birth and slow decline, so celebrate here in the storylines of council house history and purchase, the seeds of capitalist clawback, working-class resistance and retreat.

He also dramatizes very small segments, notably a young nurse taking of how she survived the Pandemic, in Kitty Rose Newbury’s blistering quietness, retailing the deaths through neglect, almost conspiracy, how even during the pandemic, government cronyism and choices frankly murdered many as friends were awarded contracts to manufacture PPI inadequately, whilst professional firms were ignored, and instead sold to the EU.

There’s nothing less in this lexicon of accusation than to call such people traitors, the kind who in 1940 were very happy to deal with Nazi Germany. There’s a cast of witnesses. And there’s a terrible pay-off as we’ll discover, an echo from history, underscoring the mindsets that cause pandemics and other manslaughter – I’d call it casualised murder – on vast numbers of people.

Nichols credits Richard Jacobs as co-creator. Jacobs who guided the film in all its mosaic variation ‘strongly and sensitively to its final form’ also briefly played Ezra Pound here.

There’s also strong work from Russell Floyd – momentarily as Lear, though mostly as Nichols’ Dad, slowly disintegrating from many things, but essentially, as Nichols diagnoses, alienation and – no better term – working mans’ attrition, as he is slowly pushed to irrelevance.

Paddy O’Keeffe memorably spars with Floyd’s Lear as Gloucester, as elements of King Lear flicker provocatively throughout. David Samson – plays the older Nichols as a 22-year-old soldier in 1940, with Ricky Egan his Liverpudlian mate in the same scene.

But there are some remarkable sidesteps too. Hence Roger Dalrymple in a mimicked documentary 1930s-style orates as Freud, and David Sanderson as Herrs Gruber and Bauer in an offbeat outtake on nationalism. Children of Nichols’ friends also feature in a couple of ensemble sequences.

It’s quite a cast, this continual shuffle of time, ever arching back to an earlier time, and hunched forward in the elder Nichols’ narrative (inflected with the younger Nichols at university in some period stills) which tragically is one of premature decline, alienation after a good marriage, despair.

But there’s a terrible traversal to be undergone, 100 minutes in, so covering the last 40. Literally broken ground. Though Nichols’ father was born in 1918, he grew up in a town shattered not by the First World War, but something far worse just before it: class war.

The Senghenydd colliery disaster, also known as the Senghenydd explosion (Welsh: Tanchwa Senghennydd), occurred at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, near Caerphilly, Glamorgan, Wales, on 14 October 1913. The explosion, which killed 439 miners and a rescuer, is the worst ever industrial accident in the United Kingdom. There’d been warnings and another fatal disaster in 1901 which killed 81 miners, only forgotten now because of the later tragedy’s scale.

Nichols narrates the tread of this disaster, caused by the deliberate negligence of the coalpit owner, refusing to shore up and make safe his mines, first as catastrophe, then in enumerating, just on the street his father lived, the people who died, from each house. The litany is stupefying.

Sir William Lewis, who owned the mine and didn’t undertake safety improvements, wasn’t even reprimanded. The company was fined just £10, the colliery manager Edward Shaw, £24. This despite a French disaster in 1906 killing over 1,000 leading to the 1911 Coal Mines Act, after a Royal Commission report. None of its requirements were implemented.

Nichols never pauses unduly, but takes his time to let the footage sink in, the sheer names attached to street numbers seep into horror.

The oppression of working-class people then and now couldn’t be more starkly outlined. Pandemic and mining disaster, history repeating itself: first catastrophe, then the farce of Johnson, the killer clown.

The cast list is worth appending below.