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Doug Lucie's class-conflict drama captures a style-obsessed, politically
polarised early 1980s - specifically Brixton, Spring 1981, a time when one
section of urban British youth preened and indulged itself (this was the age of
the New Romantics) while another engaged in street battles with the police,
prompted by the apparently indiscriminate arrests of black youths in the
Metropolitan Police's notorious Operation Swamp.
Well received in its original stage incarnation (opening at Oxford Playhouse
in November 1982), 'Hard Feelings' got a cooler reaction when it reappeared in
the BBC's waning Play for Today (1970-84) some 16 months later, with the events
that serve as its background already fading into history. Viewed today, though,
the play seems a flawed but fascinating time capsule, evoking not just the urban
unrest of early 'Thatcher's Britain' but the superficial provocations of early 1980s
fashion.
'Hard Feelings' gives us a houseful of privileged Oxford graduates overseen
by the neurotic, capricious Viv (de facto leader by virtue of her parents'
owning the house): dim but spiteful would-be artist and model Annie; her
boyfriend Rusty, in his imagination a style icon and pop rebel, in reality the
sponging son of a tabloid proprietor; and determined fence-sitter Baz, who alone
of this clique tempers his self-obsession with self-knowledge; on the periphery
of the group is Jane, a trainee solicitor whose studiousness is at odds with the
others' drink- and drug-fuelled hedonism.
From the outset, the Jewish Jane is the victim of Annie's bitchy
antisemitism, but her persecution escalates with the arrival of her new
boyfriend, Tone. A working-class journalist and left-wing agitator, Tone is
contemptuous of Viv's bourgeois aspirations and of her parasitic followers.
Wounded by Tone's attacks, Viv leads a vendetta against Jane, which reaches its
peak with the unveiling of a "really forties" (the "next big thing", according
to Annie) montage of Hitler which Annie hangs in the living room, and which even
the more level-headed Baz (secretly in love with Jane) commends as
"very interesting".
'Hard Feelings' is in some ways a counterpart to Trevor Griffiths' Oi for
England (ITV, tx. 17/4/1982), which also used urban unrest (the July 1981 Moss
Side riots) as an off-screen backdrop to its characters' private battles.
But it's hard to resist comparison with the equally brattish housemates of the
alternative comedy sitcom The Young Ones (BBC, 1982-84), which first aired a few
days after 'Hard Feelings' had its stage premiere.
Mark Duguid
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1. I only live here (3:30)
