The reaction of most of America to the verdict was summed up by a headline in an Ohio newspaper: “Mississippi Jungle Law Frees Slayers of Child”.The Till murder was a huge embarrassment to the Eisenhower administration. Its shame deepened when the killers, protected by the double-jeopardy rule, sold to a magazine their story of the murder night and their plea for exculpation. They had only intended, they said, to pistol-whip Emmett a bit, to teach him a lesson But he kept saying: “I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are.” “Well,” said Milam, “what else could we do?”Mamie Till expressed the view of many blacks when she said she had thought that the way blacks were treated had nothing to do with her. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.” The “sacrificial lamb of the Civil Rights movement”, as Emmett was later called, was said to have provided the blood from which the movement sprang. Only two months after the verdict, the campaign of non-violent resistance began when Rosa Parks, ordered by the driver to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white man, said no, and sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, led by Martin Luther King.Baldwin was hardly the only writer to be affected by the case.

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi”, in which Carolyn Bryant, watching her husband slap their own child for being naughty, imagines an imprint of blood on its cheek. Bob Dylan wrote, in the ballad “The Death of Emmett Till”: “If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust/ Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust.” The singer Phil Ochs alluded to the murder in his ironically titled “Here’s to the State of Mississippi”. “If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find/ The calendar is lying when it reads the present time”.The Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver, reading about the case in prison, where he was serving time for possession of marijuana, said he suffered a minor nervous breakdown, from which he emerged with the conviction, as he later wrote in Soul on Ice (1968), that, “as a matter of principle, it was of paramount importance for me to have an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women.. I became a rapist… As its repeating bass-line grinds inexorably forward (seemingly rooted in the grey realities of the everyday), the soloist still dares to hope for a radiant future. Take the magnificent passacaglia slow movement of the First Violin Concerto. Other creative musicians witnessed worse atrocities: Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein perished in Hitler’s camps.
What matters is that Shostakovich had the opportunity and talent to renew an older tradition of what some still choose to call absolute music.

More than any other 20th-century composer, Shostakovich wrote music with the Aesopian qualities of irony and ambiguity. In his preface, Solomon Volkov writes: “If you don’t count the mythic Greek singer Orpheus, probably no one suffered more for his music than the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich.” It isn’t a good start. Music, though, is the art form that springs to mind when you sit through this work, which feels more like a recital than a play – and a laboured recital at that.. Before that, though, the charge between the characters remains obstinately feeble because of the incommunicative format.The situation, despite all its latent black comedy, is desperately low on laughs, though the monologues themselves are almost risibly overwritten. Nightingale refers to “the wild, broken music of that stench” in the wards at Scutari. Synaesthesia seems a rather fancy figure of speech to use to evoke a retch-making reek. Happiest when writing monologues of dense lyricism and rhetorical reminiscence, Sebastian Barry constructs a scenario that plays to his perceived strengths but renders the occasion dramatically inert, a fact that Robert Delamere’s sensitively shaded production cannot disguise.

The author imagines a limbo-like situation where the transvestite doctor finds herself in the ornate waiting room of a spectral railway station (the grand, eerie design is by Simon Higlett). She is so wrapped up in her recriminations that she can’t perceive the other presence in the building: an ancient Florence Nightingale, whose ladylike asperity and vulnerability are beautifully captured by Claire Bloom.You know that these opposed types will eventually discover much in common and end in an awkwardly touching embrace. The reforms she advocated in hygiene and sanitation pre-dated those of Florence Nightingale by some 30 years.She rose to high rank but never felt that she was given her due and died embittered, the truth about her gender revealed by the Irish charwoman who washed her corpse and found the stretch-marks that were testimony to the stillborn baby that had resulted from her affair with the governor of the Cape.The raw material is fascinating. She then joined the army as a surgeon, serving in various outposts of empire where, according to the play, her secret ambiguous status – male-female, colonised Irish-colonial English – gave her an affinity for outcasts: the insane, lepers, prisoners. It was Kathryn Hunter’s childhood dream to play King Lear, an ambition she achieved at the age of 40. The tiny, sprite-like actress has also given us her Richard III and the Old Shepherd in A Winters Tale. These assumptions of masculine identity were, however, voluntary and temporary and therefore very different from the prolonged male impersonation imposed by cultural constraints on the historical character that Hunter brings to compellingly clear, if excessively mannered, life in Sebastian Barry’s new play Whistling Psyche.
Doctor James Barry (1795-1865) survived an impoverished Irish-Catholic girlhood, moved to England and was possibly advised by one of her painter-uncle’s patrons to disguise herself as a man to take a medical degree at Edinburgh University.