★★★★☆
Four Stars

I’ll not deny that I was worried before I set out to the Master’s Garden of St Peter’s to see a preview of that epitome of nostalgic childhood memo­ries, The Wind in the Willows. What if the charac­ters weren’t up to scratch? What if the costumes fell below the standard of my beautifully ornate book-version? What if the Weasel just wasn’t frightening enough? I needn’t have worried. This new adaptation of a classic, performed in the pic­turesque and sunny college gardens is enough to delight any theatrical cynic and establish firm faith in the good old plot-driven adventure.

From the very beginning, as Toad, (Chris Con­nell) bounces onto the stage in red-checked trousers, delightfully camp and with a voice to match even the most flamboyant moments of a Michael McIntyre stand-up, I settled back in my seat, prepared for an enjoyable few scenes. All of the cast were highly competent; but the next animal to really shine was Badger, (Dom Wood), who, complete with waistcoat, watch chain, pipe and a fascinatingly animated beard, encapsulat­ed all that is great and quirky in the stereotypical Oxford don.

Even better, whilst playing the Judge much later in the play, Dom Wood enacts a totally dif­ferent physicality, so that although his costume remains identical throughout we have no trou­ble confusing him with his earlier role. In fact, all of the cast retain their utterly individual characteristics which mark out their personal­ity and remind us of their animal form. Mole twitches and quivers in permanent indecision, Toad gambols about playfully, and the seductive and untrustworthy Fox shimmies on stage with what looks horribly like a dead animal around his neck, twirling an umbrella in a successfully Dickensian way.

A play performed outside is clearly a challenge, but director Stephen Hyde assures me that the natural fading light of the evening coincides helpfully with the seasons of the play; the dark wintery scenes will no doubt be atmospheric. In order to reproduce the many vehicles required in the plot, ranging from motor cars to caravans to trains, someone has come up with a whole host of ideas involving wheel barrows, painted cardboard and deckchairs. They aren’t yet in ac­tion two weeks before the show but are sure to be impressive if they come to fruition.

Even if the finer prop details are not yet totally sorted, I was surprised by how remarkably pol­ished this show is, given the length of time still left to them. There are a few niggles to be worked out: the cast don’t have microphones, so I would advise sitting near the front to catch the odd witty aside, and the audience chairs aren’t raised so any of the more vertically challenged specta­tors should perhaps get there early and/or bring a cushion. But overall, keep your eyes peeled for when tickets go on sale for what promises to be a roaring success.

“What kind of word is ‘gotten’? It makes me shudder.”This isn’t ‘Disgruntled, Tunbridge Wells’ but Julie Marrs, Warrington, lamenting the state of Americanised English in BBC Magazine. She was only one amongst a flood of responses mocking the American use of the English language as brainless, formless or artless. This is bullshit.

Serious criticism of language is an important and potentially dangerous business. It should be carried out with the utmost care and precision by linguists and assorted academic types. However, the majority of the objections raised in the BBC Magazine were thought up by a crowd of jumped-up rent-a-grumps, the sort of bargain-bin David Mitchell that probably sleeps with their copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

In fact one of the most commonly demonised ‘Americanisms’, the humble suffix ‘–ize’, has its origins in English usage, and is even recommended by Henry Watson Fowler, the guardian of so-called proper English. The Times Literary Supplement is also complicit in the use of the offensive suffix. If it’s good enough for the TLS, it’s hard to see how it could be the object of such self-righteous hatred for so many pompous pedants. And sadly for Julie Marrs, ‘gotten’ is a Middle English word whose usage in English dates back further than ‘got’.

The justification for this kind of thing actually lies in something far deeper and more widespread – a hatred and fear of American culture. It’s a common complaint amongst both bellicose conservatives and anti-imperialist lefties – “we’re all so Americanised”. Our culture is no longer our own; it is dominated by the dollar, it responds to the inexorable gravity of Hollywood, it succumbs to the empty hubris of MTV, and it debases itself before the idols of McDonalds, Jersey Shore and News Corp. British culture has been subsumed by a great tidal wave of all that is crass, all that is flashy and all that is American. Such apocalyptic imagery may be laughable, but it is no exaggeration to say that many feel that a culture that is distinctively British has been destroyed and replaced with something that is distinctively American.

Again – bullshit. Recent years have seen both a reawakening of traditional British identity and an opening up to international cultural influences. British culture is now represented both in its slightly twee and clichéd forms (Mumford and Sons, Downton Abbey and other such gentrified stuff) and more genuinely modern forms (Laura Marling, the films of Ben Wheatley, the novels of Julian Barnes etc). However, when it comes to what we actually consume, it’s no longer the case that we are all plugged into the unholy machine that is Hollywood. American culture is but one course in the smorgasbord of culture from which we now take our pick.

Our literary fiction comes from everywhere from Beijing to Abuja, our crime fiction is Swedish, our favourite TV shows are Danish, we eat everything from falafel and humus, to sushi or burritos and our music can be anything from K-pop to Grime. Our culture has been opened up to outside influences. This doesn’t amount to a loss of our own culture – it means that we are able to sample things we would not have been able to try in an isolated Britain. It’s analogous to the idea of gains from trade in economics. Anyone who feels that they couldn’t possibly experience ‘British’ culture in this world betrays either a lack of confidence in that culture (the option is still open, so they would clearly rather do something else) or a kind of overbearing prescriptivism (demanding that everyone adhere to your version of culture is a trait that infuriating Tories and infuriating hipsters share).

The identification of America as the ‘big bad’ which has perpetrated cultural demolition on a global scale is, as we can see, manifestly false. It is, however, the duty of any imperial superpower to take upon itself the hatred and moralistic demagoguery of the rest of the world. Perhaps those in the US who bemoan their falling stature in the world should take comfort in the fact that their nation can still inspire such vehement hatred in otherwise reasonable arenas.

 “You know, I really don’t care if I’m not mak­ing as much money.” Michael Morpurgo delivers this sentence with a warm sincerity that charac­terises much of our conversation at the Oxford Union, and his talk on his trip to Gaza with Save the Children. We’ve settled on the topic of librar­ies, and I ask him how he feels about fellow children’s author Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame), who recently said that our belief that children have an enti­tlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, is outdated and unjust.

Unsurprisingly, Morpurgo doesn’t agree. “I mean, it’s not accurate: eve­ry time a book of mine is taken out of the library, I get a little bit of money. So the writer is rewarded. But that argument misses the the point. The point is, from the start, if you favour those who have money against those who don’t have money (that is to say, those that do have money can access literature because they can go and buy a book, and the others can’t), well, that seems to me to be a society I don’t wish to belong to.

“Like so much of these wonderful things that were done all these years ago by Carnegie and people, the es­tablishment of these institutions was done to make us a more civilised and equitable society, and what are we doing? We are now the fourth or fifth richest economy in the world and we can’t have libraries? Excuse me.”

You don’t need to spend long talk­ing to Morpurgo to realise how em­phatically he believes in the possibil­ity of creating a fairer, and kinder, society; and, as a former primary school teacher, he grounds much of this belief in the “proper” education of children. I ask him how much he thinks his books can help to create this “more civilised and equitable society” — aren’t they, essentially, for fun?

“Of course it’s entertaining, oth­erwise they’re not going to turn the page. That’s really important. But the crucial thing is that when they turn the page they’re gaining all the time in knowledge and understand­ing. That’s the whole point of read­ing. That’s the whole point of going to the theatre. It’s broadening the scope of our imagination.

“The most important thing I think you get from reading when you’re young — and it’s a cornerstone of our existence — is you learn empathy. You learn about other people. So if you’re a boy, and you are reading a story which is told from a girl’s point of view, you really do gain something. If you are white, and you’re reading a story about a black community… all that is really very important, be­cause we’re now in this world where everyone is moving closer and closer together all the time.”

Morpurgo resolutely believes in this idea of the proximity of differ­ent communities and often speaks of a desire to see conflict and barri­ers between cultures demolished. His pacifism is at the forefront of almost all of his numerous works: Billy the Kid, The Butterfly Lion, Private Peaceful, and War Horse, to name just a few, are all “books about — it seems like war — but actually about recon­ciliation and peace”.

It’s a theme that has run through Morpurgo’s life since a very young age.

“We’re all a product of our child­hoods, and as I grew up, and in my teenage years, there was a wall being built across Eu­rope, in Berlin, which played a big part in everyone’s growing up, be­cause this seemed to be a wall that would be there forever. It was simply part of our geogra­phy.

“And then this miraculous thing happened. Almost out of nowhere people climbed on top of the wall and started knocking it down. And it did seem that everything was go­ing to be possible in this new world, without walls. People were coming together. It was a miraculous time. I never thought the world could be this wonderful.

“It wasn’t many years later when I noticed, and we all noticed, walls being built across another land: this time between Israelis and Palestinians. Walls between peoples. Set­ting up physical bar­riers between peoples as a way of separating cultures. I decided, and I think a lot of people felt the same, that the only way that knot of mistrust and hatred could ever, ever be undone was through the children. And so I thought I’d try and write a fable about how — and I believe this — the only way you can resolve difficul­ties is through education. Through new genera­tions who can find common ground when both sides are exhausted by the struggle, or realise the futility of it.”

This “fable” was 2010’s The Kites are Flying, a story about two children — one Palestin­ian, one Israeli — who are able to communicate with each other by flying kites with messages over the wall. It’s a touching, but undeniably romanticised, read.

Morpurgo is acutely aware of his own optimism, peppering many of his theories for social progression with “He says, idealistically” or, “I know some people think this is non­sense”. Is he just being naïve?

“I do know children very well. I do know how positive they are. It does work when you give children the chance. When you speak to chil­dren in Gaza, they say, ‘We don’t hate Israeli children, we hate Israeli soldiers.’ There is a lot of hope and understanding between those two groups. So I thought, write a story about that hope.”

Before he’s rushed off, Morpurgo has a chance to bring the conversa­tion round again to education closer to home. “Mr Gove is going on about the teaching of history lately, and the rigour and the importance of it. Now, there’s something in what he says but he’s missing the point. Because the really important thing with kids is to get them enjoying it quickly. The stories in history are totally wonderful: the people who made it, their stories. And if you get the telling of it, that’s where you can really make a difference.

“So if you have a hotline to Mr Gove, would you please tell him: it’s the story, stupid.”