3am, Tuesday 21 August, 2012 I wasn't
going to write this festival. I haven't taken a single note. Tonight
I was supposed to see The Shit at Summerhall. Instead I sat down at
the computer at 8.30pm and typed. Six and a half hours later, I'm
jangling. All weekend I've been snappish with the kids, nauseous with
frustration. I now know why. Oh god the exhilaration of writing.
7.13am Computer back on. Two minutes
later the kids tumble in: they can't believe I've woken before them.
It takes another two hours of editing, linking, music searching, for
Edinburgh day one to go live. My right arm, wrist, fingers, are
clenched with RSI. It's totally worth it.
10am A round table on theatre
criticism, organised by Tom Martin of Fringebiscuit,
with Tom, James Fritz and the 10 Fringebiscuiters, Matt Trueman,
Andrew Haydon and me. For the first time ever, I experience the
agonising realisation that I'm old enough to be the mother of the
majority of the people around me. A fairly young mother, but that's
beside the point. Worse still, when Andrew and I talk about how we
started writing about theatre, we are reflecting on an alien world: a
world pre-internet, pre-blogging. We sound so old, I tell him. We
sound so fucking old.
Key notes from the discussion: the
National
Student Drama Festival is an exceptionally good
place to start writing about theatre. Even though it often feels
otherwise, you don't have to see everything, or write about
everything you see. People scouting for new writers aren't looking
for people who can copy the newspaper review format: they're looking
for striking thought and precise articulation. Writing about theatre
is the easy bit: getting paid for it damn near impossible.
11.30am The Price of Everything,
Northern Stage at St Stephen's. Arriving at this show in a taxi feels
so wrong.
It feels wrong because it's a show
about money and value, about the things we are willing to pay for and
the things we aren't. Are we willing to pay for the arts? Of course I
say yes – but for 15 years now I've been blagging my way into
theatre and gigs and the last time I bought a CD with cash money was
several months ago. When I do pay for these things they are allowable
expenses that I use to reduce my tax payments. I haven't even paid to
see this show. My moral standing is non-existent. Is it enough to
support the arts with love, and time? Certainly I value both more
than money, but tell that to the artist struggling to pay their rent.
It's lovely to see Daniel
Bye on stage having met him at D&D and been
persuaded by him to join twitter. There is an awkwardness, a sort of
gawkiness, to his performance that I really like. Some of the
material comparing attitudes to the arts and the NHS feels a bit
repetitive, some of the satire feels unnecessarily emphatic. And as
someone quietly grateful to Thatcher for ending perhaps the greatest
misery of primary school, the necessity of drinking too-warm
milk lumpy with cream each day, I have mixed feelings about the
gimmick at the heart of the show, in which Dan pours out a third of a
pint of milk for every member of the audience – the equivalent in
price of an adult's weekly contribution through taxes to the arts.
Love it as multilayered protest, regretful that I actually have to
drink it. (Not to would be a waste: I don't do waste. Thank goodness
it's homogenised.)
Being a gullible fool, I believe every
word of Dan's outlandish stories about selling preposterous stuff on
ebay: the air guitar played in Bill
and Ted's Excellent Adventure; an invisible
friend. Does everyone else? I'm not sure if the piece quite works if
they don't. It works for me, because in the second half of the show,
when Dan spins a lengthy tale that starts with a few small acts of
kindness, most of which go unappreciated or are viewed with disdain,
and ends with the establishment of a free milk bar in the centre of
Nottingham (maybe: I have no memory for place names other than
London) (sorry), I want to believe it all but can't. So when Dan
excoriates us for finding it easier to credit that people would
behave like idiots than with generosity and humanity towards others,
I feel horribly chastened.
X
1pm A homeless woman sits huddled
outside Starbucks. Two people are giving her coffee, talking to her.
I wonder if they've seen The Price of Everything too.
1.20pm Paradigm, Collective Gallery.
X Paradigm's maker, BS
Johnson. Albert Angelo and the terrifically
disturbing House Mother Normal are on my shelf of novels I will
aspire to if I'm ever grown up enough to write novels. I'm saving
Christie Malry and The Unfortunates: as with Richard
Brautigan, I (idiotically) want to feel there
is always more to read.
Paradigm is like the prose: schematic,
inventive, funny, compelling, unnerving. Its five scenes, each little
more than a minute long, show a writer progressing from youth to age,
speaking a language of his own devising that is unintelligible yet
strangely comprehensible. In his 20s he is radiant with confidence:
naked, enthusiastic, words pouring out, and only the slightest
hesitation, when he momentarily repeats himself: “chup chup chup
chup chup”. He shakes it off, embarrassed; he beams and expounds
again. With every passing decade he wears more and speaks less. In
his 30s he is abominably smug: he has found a style, a manner, an
argument. By his 40s, those “chup chup chups” have become
unbearable: he is beginning to face the prospect that he has nothing
new to say. In his 50s, he struggles to say anything. In his 60s, he
may as well be a corpse. By his 60th birthday, Johnson himself had
been dead 20 years.
The whole thing is abysmally,
brilliantly acute. I start watching again, this time gripped by the
use of eye contact. In youth, the writer eagerly meets our gaze; the
older he gets, the more he avoids it. The 60-year-old is hunched,
shabby, neglected, a shell of his former self. When he finally raises
his eyes, the despair in them is gut-wrenching. Walking out,
I wanted to call every writer I know and tell them to see it.
1.55pm
I'm standing at the corner of the
Meadows waiting for the green man and every breath is full of the
smell of cut grass and I'm alone and I'm in Edinburgh and I'm high on
crazy no-sleep adrenaline and I'm actually, helplessly, dancing.
2pm Flaneurs, Summerhall. I already
have a badge for this: Matt
Trueman gave it me. Sure enough, Jenna
Watts' thesis is one I would gladly identify
with: that we can be crushed by our surroundings, by every moment of
violence embedded in the paving stones, by the fear of being mugged
or attacked or raped that stops us walking down certain streets at
certain times of day – or we can remake positive, re-map the city
we live in by colouring every street with a memory of happiness and
kindness. I love the idea of becoming a secret army of alt-flaneurs,
people who wander the city not detached from its inhabitants, but embracing the idea of community as a human imperative, and the
responsibility that engenders for others, especially others feeling
vulnerable, needing help. I'm totally with the argument. But it's an
argument I would happily have read on a blog. There is lovely stuff
in the staging: the use of maps and projections, the little giraffe
standing in for Jenna's friend, the absorbing interviews with people
talking about being attacked. And I still wonder why I'm seeing it in
a theatre. I suspect this has as much to do with the theatre space as
anything else: Summerhall's Demonstration Room – the demonstrations
involved dissection; it feels clinical yet dirty in here; the
dust-streaked walls seem stained with blood – is gruesomely
atmospheric but staggeringly uncomfortable, with vertiginously raked
wooden benches so high my feet barely reach the floor and so tightly
cramped that even crossing short legs is tricky. Forget re-mapping
the city: let's reconfigure this seating.
3.15pm Mess, Traverse. I wasn't going
to see this. I was going to see Curious
Directive's After
the Rainfall like everyone else. But then Lyn
Gardner happened to mention in one of her Edinburgh
blogs that she had encountered a gender divide
in audience reactions – men mostly pro, women (including herself)
mostly anti – and that kind of thing is a gauntlet to me. So here I
am.
It's the smile that finishes me off.
That unnatural rictus grin, stretching Caroline
Horton's mouth so wide, each lip might split.
“If you smile like this, it releases chemicals in your face, and
the chemicals help you relax.” Like fuck. That isn't a smile, it's
a mask. False and rigid. Like any mask, it doesn't conceal the eyes.
Desperate, terrified eyes that say: I am a lost and broken thing. And
part of me hopes you will never, ever know.
Mess is that rictus grin stretched
across the Traverse stage. It's designed (by Fiammetta Horvat) to
look cheerful and bright: there is a princess tower topped with a
pink umbrella, and a flowing carpet of fluffy white bathmat, and a
glitzy music corner, and the mood is silly and playful and fu... No,
not fun. Painful. The white bathmat is shabby grey and no matter how
far it reaches, it can't cover the cracks where sadness seeps
through. Horton's character, Josephine, is a recovering anorexic. Not
recovered: you never fully recover. Her friend Boris is her witness,
because what else can he do? The tears of the clown are a cliche, but
one that Horton and Hannah Boyde (and their director, Alex Swift) use
effectively: the more gung-ho jolly they are, the sharper the
poignancy.
It's probably worth saying here that
I've never been anorexic, but feel a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god
lurch about it. I'm sure a big reason I find Mess so affecting is an
awareness of its truth. Its truth for Horton, who was
anorexic herself, and the truth of everything her description of
anorexia crystallises: the anxiety, the longing for control, the
desire for self-oblivion. Order within the mess of life. Listening to
Boris tell Josephine that “seventy percent of life is going to be
average and pretty good really, fifteen percent will be excellent and
maybe fifteen percent is going to be an awful nightmare” was like
listening to my (pessimist-realist, rarely depressed, almost never
ecstatic) husband trying to prise me from a gloom. It doesn't work.
What I've always clung to is the possibility of a sense of grace, the
sense of grace Josephine achieves at the end of Mess, the grace in
the very existence of this show. The grace that makes it possible to
carry on.
I leave Mess feeling unexpectedly
wobbly and with a sharp need to talk to my daughter, my bright and
funny little girl who already displays terrifying signs of emotional
hyper-sensitivity. On the phone she doesn't sound like my child at
all, just a generic little girl. We talk about her new haircut and
the animals in the National Museum of Scotland and my heart quakes
with the knowledge that it's down to me to protect her. I walk across
the Meadows to Summerhall, one foot after the other, trying not to
think. Inside, I fall apart.
5pm Red Like Our Room Used To Feel,
Summerhall. I'm standing outside the door with Ryan
van Winkle who is giving the most absurdly
over-extended explanation for how his show operates and it is exactly
what I need: a stream of information so banal it's soothing. Ever
since booking the ticket for this show I've had a song in my head,
Pink River by Retsin:
“I can feel blue in my blue room.” So already at the back of my
mind I'm in a slightly romantic place: in Louisville, Kentucky, a
time of travel and aloneness, with people who seemed like the right
people but whom I haven't seen in a long time. Entering the room
feels like walking into that lost world: the details don't quite
match but the aesthetic is perfect. Open shelves cluttered with books
and bric-a-brac. A bed, crumpled. On the wall there's a scratchy
drawing, and it's just like the drawings made by Tara Jane of Retsin,
the woman I then most wanted to be. Ryan pours me port in a glass
yoghurt pot and I slump on the bed between a teddy and yesterday's
shirt, eat stale biscuits, wince over the port, and listen.
He's reading me poems, but I'm not
hearing the words exactly, more the timbre of his voice. Which I
don't hear so much as feel, like drizzle on a slate-grey Edinburgh
day, or the electric charge of winter shifting into spring. I find
myself drifting, to the night with Jason when we lay on my bed and I
read him The
Waste Land, to the heart-breaking night when
David left London for Glasgow and he told me stories of Derek Jarman
and read to me from Mark Doty. Any
small thing can save you. By the time Ryan is
reading his third poem, a small part of me wishes he'd lean over and
kiss me.
He leaves and I look more closely at
the room. A bag of almonds, poems by Fernando Pessoa, twinkling red
lights, a hard-backed suitcase, a typewriter with hair where the ink
should be. The details don't match. The spell is broken. Outside, the
brightness makes me blink. I see Ryan on the patio and we chat about
writing and Paradigm and Forest and Paper Stages. I decide not to
tell him what I really thought of his piece.
5.45pm Amusements, Summerhall. The room
is dark and everyone in it is listening to a woman's voice through
headphones. Her voice is a little bit sultry, a little bit
accusatory. The sound flicks from left to right. Any minute now, I
think, Amusements
is going to do something brilliant. Except it doesn't.
As I say, I took no notes, so this is
what I have failed to forget. It's loud, too loud, irritatingly loud,
but there's no way of turning it down. The woman standing before us
wears a suggestive red dress and has her knickers round her ankles.
She talks about sex, and rollercoasters, and how we think we're so
powerful as an audience, sitting there gazing at her. She laughs at
us. She can read our minds, right? She looks straight at me: you're
thinking about putting your hand up my dress. Actually, I'm not. What
I'm thinking is: why are your knickers round your ankles? Why is this
so loud? Am I just too old for this? Am I more prurient than I
realised? Do I even like performance art? Can I leave now? Please?
7pm The Hunt and Darton cafe is quiet
tonight. I tuck myself at an unobtrusive side table and carve a
sculpture out of pineapple, ticking off my first half hour towards a
second Paper Stages book. It feels like cheating: mostly this is an
excuse to eat some fruit. Before long my tongue is scorched with acid
burn. I can't hear what's playing but it sounds like swing. I'd want
to dance if I were less depleted. I love it here.
X
10pm I've been slowly crashing since
Mess and hit the bottom around now. X I read
back over what I wrote about Beats and realise how much I forgot to
mention: the ricochet of the word beats across the text – the beat
of the music, the beat of the policeman's truncheon, the pulsing beat
of each character's heart. How much I wanted to hurl myself on to the stage and dance and dance. Nothing is ever good enough. I was going to
see Beats again tonight; instead, I work on Dialogue projects. The
grace of looking forward.
1.30am Resolutions for tomorrow: read
Gemma Brockis' Paper Stages play at Hunt and Darton, and find someone
to read Kieran Hurley's play, intended for Arthur's Seat, with me. A
stranger on the Meadows, I think. Even if it's cheating.
[An aside: like most resolutions, none
of that happened. In the end, it was Saturday 15 September when I
read Kieran's piece, sitting on a bench outside BAC with my beloved
friend Eliska, to whom I gave the second copy of Paper Stages. And it
was delicious: I played A, she played B, and the whole thing might
have been written for us. The street outside BAC, with cars drifting past and the light slowly fading and the glass building opposite glimmering and
the billboard glaring down at us, felt like an appropriately
cinematic location. A good sense of drama is very me. She was tagging
along, when maybe I wanted solitude. I had a dark secret
and actually, yes, it was good to have company. We held hands. We
thought about being stoned teenagers. It was beautiful.]
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