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Fickle fortune

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Tulips in Winter (BBC Radio 3); Soul and Skin (BBC Radio 4)

‘I couldn’t understand most of it. I mean I could understand each word but not when they were put together,’ says one of the characters in Tulips in Winter on Radio Three on Sunday night. I knew immediately what he meant. There was something wonderful going on in Michelene Wandor’s play word for word, but I’m not quite sure I caught it all in just one sitting.

Wandor, a prizewinning playwright with a passion for radio, has been inspired by Rembrandt’s paintings and Spinoza’s works of philosophy to create a drama about the Jews of Amsterdam in the 1650s who were caught up in the trading battles between the Dutch, the English and the Portuguese. This was the Golden Age of Holland; when Amsterdam and The Hague were at the centre of the universe, trading exotic spices and ideas between East and West. Wandor’s characters are involved in wily negotiations about cardamon and coffee as the other European powers struggle to infiltrate Holland’s hugely wealthy network of trade. Cromwell, through his spies from Whitehall, hopes to gain influence by befriending the Jews of Amsterdam, including Spinoza, the young Portuguese-born Jew who has abandoned trade for philosophy. Spinoza annoys everyone by asserting defiantly that there are no angels, there is no soul. The Jews excommunicate him; Amsterdam falls prey to its trading predators.

It was rather a lot for just one play and the confusion of characters, between whom it was not always easy to distinguish, meant that it did not make for easy listening. But still, the effort required to follow what was going on was rewarded by some fascinating bits of dialogue about what it means to believe, and the corruption that ensues when religion gets mixed up with politics. The production, too (directed by Jane Morgan), stretched our aural imaginations to the limit as we were taken inside Spinoza’s mind and out again into the world as he struggled with his conscience, reflected back at him through the voice of his guardian angel, played brilliantly by Angela Pleasence. Incidentally, too, there were riches in the detail, as we savoured Dutch pancakes (unusually flavoured with cloves and cinnamon, bacon and apple), drank bitter coffee in London, and were led to imagine how Rembrandt (played rather surprisingly by Timothy Spall as a scruffy, shuffling ragamuffin) created his paintings.

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