attended six plays, one film, one art
exhibition and three panel discussions;
written two album reviews, five posts
for two different blogs, published a long post on another blog that
I'd been working on for some weeks, and written/co-delivered a
presentation at a panel discussion;
hosted two Theatre Clubs;
done a job interview while sitting in a
stationary cupboard;
got the job (a writing gig for
December, nice);
danced at two practices with the
Actionettes;
(and spent time reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, both inspiring, in different ways);
(and finally encountered the brilliance of Borgen);
(and done the school runs, and organised childcare, and cooked dinners);
(I think I've just realised why I'm always so tired);
and I honestly think in all of that the
thing I'm most proud of doing is making a really nice pomegranate
cake on Sunday morning. A few weeks ago I had a glut of pomegranates
and the usual recipe books (Claudia Roden, Sophie Grigson,
Nigel'n'Nigella) weren't offering any inspiration, so I sent my magic
friend Samantha a text asking for suggestions and she offered: a
trifle made of lemon cake layered with cherries stewed in sherry,
orange flower water and pomegranate molasses and Greek yoghurt mixed
with more orange flower water, then drizzled with pomegranate
molasses and pistachios; a pavlova with rosewater in the meringue and
the cream and pomegranates on top; a sponge cake with them in the
cream and on top; and Nigella's pomegranate cake. See why she's
magic? I made a less complicated version of the trifle and very good
it was too.
On Sunday I had another glut and this
time turned to the Nigella recipe. And, as usual, decided to mess
around with it. Instead of just putting the pomegranates/syrup on top
at the end, I turned it into a caramelised upside-down pomegranate
cake, which was just as well because on removing it from the oven I
dropped it face-down on the oven door, and it would have been ruined
if the topping hadn't been on the bottom. So this is my recipe, and
not for the first time it's dedicated to Sam, with love and mutual
heritage:
Upside-down pomegranate cake
4 eggs, separated
150g caster sugar
100g ground almonds
50g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
half tsp mixed spice
half tsp almond essence
for the topping:
75g brown sugar
20g butter
1 tblsp pomegranate molasses
seeds of 2 pomegranates
the oven was at roughly 170C for this,
and I cook it in a round 19cm springform cake tin lined with baking
parchment
Get the seeds out of the pomegranates
first.
Put the sugar into a saucepan on the
lowest possible heat to melt. While doing the
beating/whisking/folding jobs that follow, keep an eye on the sugar
so it doesn't burn, and when about a third of it is melted add the
pomegranate molasses and butter. It needs stirring to stop it from
sticking. Or turning into a lump.
Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until
they're pale and thick, then fold in the almonds, flour, baking
powder, mixed spice and almond essence – I ended up being fairly
vigorous with it, because it gets pretty stiff. Whisk the egg whites
until you can turn the bowl upside-down without them falling out,
stir as much of them as is required into the rest of the mixture to
loosen it, then fold in the rest.
Pour the caramel into the cake tin and
swirl it around to cover the bottom of the tin. Tip all the
pomegranate seeds on top, then spoon the cake mixture on top of that.
Bake for about 45/50 minutes until a tester comes out clean. The
caramel oozes into the cake mixture, the sponge is really light
because it hasn't got any butter, the almond essence makes it taste a
bit like macaroons and the mixed spice got me ready for Christmas.
Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.
Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
In the Mini Grey book Egg
Drop, an impatient egg decides to fly by leaping from the top of
a very tall tower, 583 steps high. A double spread of illustrated
polaroids depicts the many futile attempts to put him back together
again. They try string, sticky tape, tomato soup, chewing gum.
“Nothing really worked”, says the narrator, mournfully, “and
shells don't heal.”
I
went to see Dirty Market's Oxbow Lakes hoping it would fix me. There
was a pertinence to its marketing – “Oxbow Lakes dramatises a
child's experience of his parents' conflicted feelings towards him
and themselves,” no less – that made me think this play would
KNOW. That it was coming from a place of knowing, because Dirty
Market's directors, Georgina Sowerby and Jon Lee, are a couple, and
have children. In the event, the play felt like the string and sticky
tape, tomato soup and chewing gum that prove so ineffective in
healing shells, because I saw it when so broken by a trip to London
Zoo – can I just pause here for a diatribe against London Zoo? What
a fucking nightmare of capitalist extortion. As soon as you walk in –
and even getting through the gates costs enough to fill a fridge and
food cupboard – it's trying to prise money from you. Take the kids
to the toilet and there's the shop, taunting them. Just past the
entrance are face-painting and a bouncy castle and fairground rides,
all at extra cost. And then everywhere you go there are merchandise
stalls, so there's no escape from objects of obscure desire that
attract your children ineluctably, far more than the animals, most of
whom are asleep anyway. I HATE IT. And the most recent visit was so
traumatic that a) I never want to go back, not even to see again how
beautiful giraffes' eyelashes are and how much otters love to lick
each other's genitals, and b) I arrived at Oxbow Lakes drowning in my
unfitness as a mother.
Oxbow
Lakes starts with a party, an attempt at a party, poisoned by the
child refusing to fall asleep for fear of the shadowy figures lurking
in the dark, and the husband and wife (played by Jon and Georgina)
arguing over their responsibility in voices choked by the frustration
that cloaks guilt: the guilt of regret, of longing, of feeling
inadequate to the task of raising another human. The guilt of knowing
that a child is supposed to expand your horizons and perspective, yet
feeling instead a narrowing of self and existence. How appropriate
that this first scene plays out on an impossibly skinny rectangle of
stage, the child a black shadow on a white curtain, casting a pall on
everything the adults attempt to do.
But
what starts as gruesome kitchen-sink realism (there's even a Look
Back in Anger ironing board) transforms into grotesque fairy tale
when we're moved behind the curtain to the kitsch horror landscape of
Oxbow Lakes. The child has fallen into a bedtime story and
disappeared into the night; his parents chase after him, mother
frantic, Dad inept, both thwarted by a constabulary that would
control them and creepy snobbish locals whose nefarious motives are
obscure. There was menace here, but also comedy: characters styled as
though in a John Waters film, all quiffs and kookiness, those played
by Benedict Hopper in particular dry as dead leaves and daffy as
panto. The deeper the parents sink into this murky, cartoon world –
and again, the set is really considered, a series of painted flats in
a magnified Victorian toy theatre – the more estranged they become,
until one of them literally no longer recognises the other. Are they
really searching for the child? Or a notion of happiness that might
not even exist?
There
was something problematic about the transition to the final space: a
clumsiness in the handling of the audience, who were left behind then
admonished for not following sooner; it slowed us down and
interrupted the tension. The space we move into is the most menacing
yet; I recall plastic sheeting, looming witches, lights swinging, a
ribbon rope our only protection, a huge sheela-na-gig icon with
gaping, lairy mouth – was it threatening to eat the parents?
Destroy them at least. It is their last chance to recognise the
distance between the real life they have come to think of as a
nightmare, and this place of horror and fear; and because this is a
kind fairy story, they do. They rediscover their love for each other,
and for their child; they cry out, with relief, with hope, with
expressions of love. My broken heart trembled, and longed to feel a
similar redemption.
I
don't know Georgina or Jon, but we twitter-spoke the next day, after
which I sent Georgina an email, a tribute to her bravery I guess; I
wanted to confess that I'd seen my darkest soul splayed across the
piece, and ask if making it had helped her find a state of grace. She
admitted in return that in some respects it worsened the strain,
consuming both her and Jon through the summer, as they wrote and
rehearsed and built the set and cleaned the venue, leaving scant
space for their seething children (who, it transpires, are the same
age as mine). For all that it felt like an ensemble work –
particularly in the middle section, where a looseness in the text
conveyed the multiple collaborative voices engaged in its creation –
Oxbow Lakes felt acutely personal, too: a slightly jumbled,
self-conscious, but willingly truthful portrait of the struggle to
accept that parenting is a difficult, messy business, a concatenation
of tiny defeats that puncture the spirits, intermingled with a joy so
extreme it turns you to jelly. Strawberry jelly, that the kids
consume whole. My life met theirs in that performance space; at
points I'd glance around the younger people in the audience,
wondering: do you have children? Do you want them? What does this
story mean to you? Are you reading this as lived experience? As a
cautionary tale?
*
From
the oily murk of Oxbow Lakes to the white soil of Albemarle. Two
weeks of October were spent in a rehearsal room with Chris Goode and
Company, watching a new phase of research and development into this
big strange illogical re-creation of a dream. And immediately I
think: no, stop now, don't pin it down in writing, don't define it
when – like a child – it still has so much growing to do. But
this is just a snapshot of Albemarle in its infancy, taken not to
forget. And Albemarle is so like a child at the moment, so like my
four-year-old son: curious, and open, and full of love for the
individuals who nurture it; unafraid to be naked, or to speak its
mind and heart truthfully, without coding or restraint.
There
were times in the rehearsal room when I found that truthfulness
unbearable. On Monday when I watched H take off her
clothes and mark with black biro every aspect of her body that has
caused her anxiety, tracing its lingering scars of uneasy existence,
evidence of brutality against herself, and inflicted on her by a
capitalist, competitive society. On the same day, J talked
about the battle to avoid invasive surgery when transitioning from
male to female, the lack of care or respect demonstrated by doctors
whose only concern is to fix a body within rigid conservative notions
of gender. These events were coloured by a piece of text Chris had
written, which he read out on a day when I wasn't in the room,
detailing one by one the childhood experiences that had estranged him
from his body, and filled him with shame. The unbearable became
two-fold: there is so much pain in so many people, and so much noise
in my own head that I find hard to block out. As ever, I took refuge
in music, and for most of the fortnight I had this song in my head:
And
when Lou Reed died, at the end of the fortnight, it was quietly
replaced with this song:
And
yet, the body was also the site of immense joy in the rehearsal room.
There was the shared pleasure of dancing, dancing like no one is
watching, dancing to discover freedom. (In the dream that he's
re-creating, Chris is directing a dance show – something he's
always wanted, but been too afraid, to do.) There was the
brain-testing delight of watching J speak in sign language,
each moment of comprehension a happy surprise. (J plays Chris'
neighbour, Simon Pegg – it's a dream, OK? – and is integral to
the utopia Chris is creating within the piece, in which ethnicity,
gender, disability, sexuality, are not crushed by iron hierarchical
structures that promote primarily the white middle-class heterosexual
able-bodied “normal” male, but co-exist in more fluid, generous
social arrangements.) There was, for J – who plays Chris' mum (in
the dream no longer dead) – and Chris, a shared experience of
taking control of the body's representation, inspiring to witness.
J, I sense from her blog, is engaged in a long slow process of
stripping away the carapace she built around herself in unhappy
decades of living as a man; on a day when I wasn't in the room, she
did this literally, flinging off her clothes in a fervour of relief
at feeling accepted, admired, for the complicated, transgender being
that she is. On a day when I was in the room, I saw Chris –
fleetingly, in glimpses, because I was busy swirling around like a
gush of water – move in a way I've never seen him move before: he's
usually so tip-toey and timid, but here he ran and leapt and
frolicked like a foal discovering the power of its feet. Afterwards
we sat as a group and talked about this transformation, and he looked
suddenly years younger, luminous.
We
talked about healing, too, and self-indulgence. This was an indulgent
room. Many days began with a massage, with taking the time to care
for someone quietly, physically, listening to their body's needs. How
is that work? All these cries from the soul: isn't that what therapy
is for? At the end of the fortnight, Albemarle travelled to Leeds for
a further stage of R&D, this time with the dancers; one of them,
J, also works in construction, and quickly demonstrated his
impatience with the touchy-feely London room. When do builders, or
supermarket workers, or train drivers, get the space to sift through
crushing experiences of scorn and betrayal, of bullying and shame?
It's
easy to condemn artists for abysmal narcissism. It's much harder to
attempt to answer why capitalist structures foster scorn, betrayal,
bullying and shame – and what kind of society could we build in
which people no longer cause or feel this pain? A society in which
consideration is more important than competition? We carry within
ourselves what we need to make utopia, Chris suggested on that
luminous day, but it's beaten down by violence, brutality and fear.
While
working with Chris, I read a book by American writer and queer
activist Sarah Schulman that was like having my eyes scoured with
brillo pads: I saw the world around me, and myself, differently, more
clearly, afterwards. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a
Lost Imagination looks at the impact of Aids on the queer, trans,
immigrant, artist and in myriad ways other communities of New York in
the 1980s, its acceleration of a two-fold process of gentrification:
the same physical gentrification that I've been witnessing across
London in my lifetime, whereby areas once home to huddle-muddle
social groups become colonised by white moneyed middle-classes,
squeezing and pricing everyone else either out of the area or into
isolation and inferiority; and a mental gentrification no less
recognisable, whereby what she scathingly describes as “supremacy
ideology” promotes a homogenised culture in which corporate,
non-individual, non-antagonistic expression are given social
dominance while radicalism or dissent are either punitively
restricted or, once the mind is successfully gentrified, not
attempted at all. It's an uncomfortable read, because it demands
accountability, and because it cherishes discomfort:
“Gentrified
happiness is often available to us in return for collusion with
injustice. We go along with it, usually, because of the privilege of
dominance, which is the privilege not to notice how our way of living
affects less powerful people. … Depending on our caste and context,
opportunities are regularly presented that enable us to achieve more
safety by exploiting unjust systems. … We get to feel better
precisely because someone else doesn't have what they need.
“Conveniently
there is a billion-dollar self-help industry that tells us to treat
the very skewed frame as if it were neutral: Accept it. Be grateful
for it. Do not resist. … If you are the demographic that the frame
was designed to inflate, accepting it will help you maximise its
privileges. But if you are the demographic that the frame was
designed to defeat or marginalise, accepting it makes it more
effective for its intended beneficiaries. …
“We
live with an idea of happiness that is based in other people's
diminishment. But we do not address this because we hold an idea of
happiness that … excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying
things that are true but which might make us and others
uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be
uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the
revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy.”
The
Gentrification of the Mind, p166-7
For
Schulman, people have “an unquestionable responsibility” to take
care of others, “even if it makes you uncomfortable”. People have
a right to individuated expression. People need to recognise that the
perceptions of the privileged, prioritised in most cultural activity,
are not the only reality. She speaks throughout from personal
experience, subjective anecdote, painful memory. And yet, there is
nothing indulgent about this book. It is a book that names and
exposes the homogenising social frameworks that deny difference,
disobedience, diversity, and begins to argue a path (back) towards
utopia. Reading this book, I saw another glimpse of Albemarle.
*
Indulgence
is a ticklish word within Chris Goode and Co. I wasn't involved in
the rehearsal process for Scottee's show The Worst of Scottee earlier
this year, which Chris directed, but understand that it came up a lot
in that room, too. In The Worst, Scottee looks at four key
experiences in his life, times when he lied, stole, took advantage of
people, and did something in shy innocence with such cataclysmic
negative effect that he's still living with the damage. Now and then,
during the show, we see a filmed interview with someone Scottee knew
during that time; the videos feel pointless, because all these people
have long since moved on – but that, of course, is the point. No
one bears as much ill-will towards Scottee as Scottee himself.
I
thought The Worst was extraordinary. I know Scottee a little bit –
I interviewed
him
early last year for the Guardian, about his brilliant beauty pageant
(Ham)Burger Queen, and he surprised me: the minuscule awareness I had
of his work had given me the now-incomprehensible impression that
he'd be arrogant, aggressive, mocking; in fact he was friendly and
thoughtful, if a touch businesslike, and admirably cogent in his
argument for a live-art-meets-light-entertainment brand of
performance that reaches out to people like his mum and his
neighbours on the council estate where he lives – but I don't think
knowing him much affected my response to The Worst, except perhaps in
making me worry for his health while he's touring it. Part of what
makes it extraordinary is its lacerating honesty; that, and the frame
Scottee (and Chris) have created for its articulation. Scottee
performs almost the entire thing in a mock-up photobooth, the kind of
place teenagers used to go to take selfies before smartphones changed
everything. He talks not directly to us but to the camera, to himself
and to an anonymous world, a remove that allows impossible truths to
be voiced aloud. He could be taking confession, except the only place
absolution is going to come from is himself. Until now, what he's
given himself instead is metamorphosis, from the fucked-up teenager
with an eating disorder finding oblivion in alcohol and drugs to
outrageously glam femme-chub Scottee; The Worst opens with him decked
out in a piss-take funeral suit and black face paint, obstreperously
singing Cry Me a River while fake tears soak his ruffled shirt. By
the end, he has stripped away clothes, paint, skin, and his
vulnerability is shocking.
“Time
is a healer,” Matt Trueman wrote in his
review
of The Worst, “and it’s here that the show sidesteps any
suggestion of self-indulgence.” I found this interesting, not least
because Matt is one of three people who described Chris' show
God/Head as self-indulgent, and he used the same word privately to me
as an indictment of Wuthering Heights, which we saw on the same night
at Battersea Arts Centre, almost at the end of my Albemarle
fortnight. How curious, I thought. Wuthering Heights wasn't
indulgent. It was healing.
Wuthering
Heights made me laugh and flinch and ache and cry. I want to try and
remember it moment by moment, because none of the reviews I've read
(with the exception of Catherine
Love's)
quite captures its richness, but I didn't take notes, so what follows
is a jumble. It starts with a horse (Nick Anderson) whinnying as it
gallops around the perimeter of the space, acknowledging and
accepting its entrapment, while three men spruce themselves up in
early-Victorian suits. The horse is monogamous, proud yet caring,
with great respect for his ancestors who lived outwith captivity (how
I love the cadence of that phrase). This, it's clear, is Heathcliff's
horse: a measure of the man. But this is not – so Peter McMaster,
who performs in and directed the piece, acknowledges in his
introduction – a straightforward adaptation of Heathcliff's story.
Peter realises this will trouble some people, but hopes they
understand that this performance is being given to them with love.
We
know these men love us because they recognise that Wuthering Heights,
for a lot of people, means Kate Bush's batshriek wail just as much as
Emily Bronte's novel, and within five minutes of the show starting
it's blaring through the sound system and they're dancing:
Because
I'm quite stupid, it wasn't until I read the reviews that I realised
they were re-creating that video; in any case, I was too busy wanting
to have sex with all of them right there to think about postmodern
cultural cut-and-paste. I think this scene does something remarkable:
it's light and it's funny and it's adorable, and in being so it shows
you everything that is potentially attractive about self-possessed,
confident, cheeky, preening, smarmy, lascivious masculinity. The
masculinity that doesn't know its own privilege because it never
needs to question it. Big, bold, butter-wouldn't-melt masculinity
that gets away with murder, the murder of people and planet enacted
day after day in the name of patriarchal society, because it's so
seductive.
It's
a masculinity the four men carry inside them: another early scene has
them coughing as though drilling to the depths of their torsos to
dislodge it. One morning in the Albemarle rehearsal room, Jamie Wood
talked diffidently of his inner caveman, whose savage existence
troubles him sometimes, but protects him, too. What is lost in the
rejection of traditional, “natural” masculinity? What is gained?
There
are two relays: in the first, the four men each describe an incident
that contributed to shaping their ideas of masculinity. I remember
Thom Scullion's: he recalled walking hand-in-hand with his father,
aged about seven, and his father saying to him, “One day you won't
want to do this any more.” Was his father preparing his son for
manly isolationism, or preparing himself for inevitable rejection?
Thom's story reminded me of a man I spoke to when taking part in
Rosana Cade's brilliant Walking:Holding in August at Forest Fringe,
a man in his 60s who had spent decades not holding hands with people,
not even his wife, because when he was a child his father had told
him men don't do such things.
In
the second, the four take turns to comment on each other as though
delivering a form sheet on a race horse: height, weight, key
characteristics. He's in an 11-year relationship – wooh! Yeah! Slap
him on the arse! He's a fan of masturbation – louder cheers!
Champion pose! Slap him on the arse! In this sequence they are
footballers scoring hard-fought goals, Usain Bolt on winning gold at
the Olympics: self-aggrandising, swaggering, playing down weakness.
The arse-slapping was perfectly judged: it is the bodily contact that
alpha males find acceptable, anything else being gay and therefore
abhorrent.
There
is a slender thread running through all of this: a longing to father
and be fathered. Another brief diversion: the word fathering
inevitably makes me think of this song:
Hand-in-hand
with that, this song:
Why
Mark Mulcahy never became as famous as Jeff Buckley defeats me.
What
next? Other masculine archetypes emerge: Thom stands in the centre of
the circle, stiff-backed, authoritarian, a monolithic, unemotional
figure who starts out generic, an industrialist, a grandfather, a
begetter of individuals and so of society, but slowly transmogrifies
into the no less authoritarian or monolithic Heathcliff, doomed both
to perpetuate this figure and measure himself against it. The horse
talks about Heathcliff and himself, in doing so emphasising that the
field boundaries that contain his existence are replicated in his
master's life. Heathcliff's ancestors may have lived outwith
captivity, but Heathcliff is enclosed within a patriarchy that is
slowly adapting to prudish Victorian morality and the slow rise of
capitalism.
The
irony is that to Cathy, Heathcliff represents a freedom, one she
can't have. In one of the few sections that feel close to the novel,
Cathy and Nelly – played by (I think) Murray Wason and Peter,
dressed in long silken dresses that gape at the back, zips stuck
beneath shoulder blades – Cathy and Nelly commune by candlelight:
Cathy tells Nelly that she has agreed to marry Linton, but she's
afraid, because she loves Heathcliff. She sinks to the floor, howling
with the wildness and transformational potential of that love: “I
love him because he's more me than I am myself.” I love him because
with him I could reject or take on the world. I love him because he
fills the air with extra oxygen. I love him even though he's trouble,
because he's trouble, because I want to make trouble. I love him
because we make each other better, stronger, braver people. There
isn't enough of that kind of love in the world.
What
else? Cathy's death, in Heathcliff's arms, him begging, desperate,
wanting – but it's too late, because his pride murdered her, and
his social position, and his jealousy, and his wildness, and his
freedom. Her body is laid out in the centre of the circle and, in
recognition of that dreary violence, the other three sing a murder
ballad, Down in the Willow Garden, as though recanting a liturgy:
Another
diversion: it's a source of some regret to me how much I love murder
ballads. I have a sickening catalogue in my head of women strangled,
stabbed, slashed at the neck, shot, left in a ravine, dumped in a
lake, hidden beneath bracken, abandoned, decomposing, pecked at by
birds of prey, sometimes because they had the temerity to look at or
kiss or fuck another man, sometimes for no reason at all. I hate
their violence, their misogyny, their jealous black emotion – and
yet, there is a magnetic pull to their lurching rhythms and bleak
chords that turns my head and makes me almost giddy. Songs in which
the perpetrator is a woman are rare but I secretly, savagely relish
them; these are two of my favourites:
It's
after the murder ballad, I think, that Wuthering Heights fractures.
Peter, still dressed as Nelly, walks up to Heathcliff, stands maybe a
foot away from him, and begins to ask a series of questions, calmly
at first, gradually becoming agitated, enraged, convulsed by pain.
It's important that he's both male and female now, himself and a
character; the questions could be spoken by Nelly to Heathcliff, by
women or by men, by an individual or by society as a whole:
Are
you feeling alone?
Do
you like yourself?
Do
you think you are a good person?
Do
you see yourself in nature?
Do
you get scared?
What
do you think about sex?
What
do you really think about sex?
What
makes you feel aggressive?
Do
you value women?
You
know the things that happen in the night to women in parks or other
dark places – do you think you could ever be the person who does
that?
Are
you homophobic?
Have
you ever fantasized over a man?
Do
you believe men and women are different?
Do
you enjoy having power?
Do
you know how to manipulate people?
When
are you at your most vulnerable?
What
will you never mention out loud?
What
do you care about?
Are
you trapped?
Does
it make you sick?
Deflated?
Proud?
Anxious?
Horny?
Angry?
Ashamed?
Sorry?
Will
it change?
Is
it changing?
How
long will it be like this?
How
long?
There
is something still to do isn’t there?
What
is it?
That's
maybe a quarter of the text; Peter reads it from sheets of paper, his
voice growing hoarse as anger and anguish rip through his chest.
Thom/Heathcliff stands motionless in the face of this hurricane,
features barely flinching, but every word is like a dagger, and at
just the moment when you think, surely he can't take any more, you
realise that Cathy has risen and is standing behind him, her arms
wrapped around his chest, not quite protecting him, or even forgiving
him, but supporting him, reassuring him that this needs to be faced.
One body holding another, beginning a process of healing. Creating a
new framework of existence in which care is key.
What
happens next? The scene is so excoriating, a prolonged electric
shock, I don't quite remember. Soon Peter and Murray put their suits
back on and there's a sequence in which Heathcliff searches for
Cathy. Murray, or was it Thom, stands in the centre, the other three
at corners of the room, and directs them in an outward-facing scream
of longing: you're looking for her with hope, frustration,
embarrassment, the agony of lost hope, the burning memory of someone
you once loved, shame. Each time he adds a set of instructions to
characterise their cries, one of them stops screaming and quietly
watches him, knowing that he risks revealing more and more of
himself. There is confusion here, and pain, and nothing in the way of
answers, only a knowing that if we – not just men – don't name
all these feelings, all the frustration, hope, embarrassment, agony,
burning memories, shame, nothing can change.
Somewhere
here I think they talk about what they want for the future. As men.
As fathers. And the final words belong to the horse, still calm,
still proud, understanding and accepting that his freedom from
captivity will come with age, and death. For men, for us, it has to
happen before then.
So
no, Wuthering Heights isn't an adaptation: it's a multi-authored
autobiography, a social study, an inquiry, an exorcism, a challenge,
a howl of pain. And yes, I know Peter McMaster: we met a year ago by
chance, when Dialogue was resident at BAC, and now I bring into his
work an ongoing conversation with him that is sometimes
light-hearted, sometimes intense, sometimes political, sometimes
personal, always full of respect, admiration and trust. One strand of
that conversation deals with his belief that there is a masculine
responsibility not to rely on feminism to fix the modern world, which
in effect places women in an impossible position, but for men to work
together to address the malignity of masculinity, break it down, and
find new ways of being, and being together, that are more
androgynous, spiritual, conscious, that will wreak less havoc and
injury. I caught echoes of those conversations in Wuthering Heights –
but also sensed the private soul-searching conversations that had
taken place between its performers, quiet admissions to each other
that burnish the work, giving it a complexity of texture: distress
and tenderness, rage and sympathy.
It
wasn't Peter but the horse, Nick Anderson, who told me later that
their Wuthering Heights is only possible because the four of them
check in and out each day: sit together and ask each other how they
are, confess emotional baggage rather than attempt to conceal it,
sharing these burdens rather than expecting individuals to deal with
them alone. The check-in/-out is central to Chris Goode and Co's
work, too: it creates within Chris's rehearsal rooms and theatre
places of understanding, listening, not-judging, that cherish
openness, honesty, truth. These places make change possible. Healing
possible.
*
The
more I think about theatre as a place of healing, the more I realise
that almost everything I've seen over the past year fits into this
narrative. Perhaps it's the central narrative of all theatre. But
I've already been writing this post for what feels like weeks: it has
to end somewhere. Over that time, I saw two more stories of healing
that felt different in some essential way to the ones mentioned
above. Oxbow, Albemarle, The Worst and Wuthering Heights all wrench
open the self to attempt a healing from the gut and the heart:
Landscape II and The Events are more cerebral, journeys wrought by an
omniscient author, that trace the arc of a character's progress from
trauma towards healing. My response to both was less personal, more
intellectual.
Appropriately
enough, it took two goes at Landscape II for me to grasp it. Partly
that's down to the subtlety of the work: it's a mark of how intricate
and barely perceptible its gestures are that Melanie Wilson
acknowledges her audience's presence, our active role in the room, by
walking through the auditorium to the stage, then giving us a wisp of
a smile and a five-degree nod of the head. Yet another aside: the
further I get from the experience of sitting in the same room as
her/this work, the more I connect Wilson with PJ Harvey – it's
something to do with the way Landscape and Let England Shake are
constructed with a painstaking attention to minute detail conveyed
with the lightest of touch.
Partly
my responses were conditioned by the circumstances of watching. The
first time I was at the Lighthouse in Poole, with a small in number,
slightly older audience, many of whom fidgeted throughout. I felt
that discomfort, that boredom, that distance from the story, and to a
degree shared it, because Wilson's delivery is slow, acoustically
resonant but not emotionally so, soft and flat and requiring absolute
focus and investment just to stay awake, let alone absorb and
comprehend what she's saying. But I also resisted, because the story
fascinated me. Wilson portrays a war photographer called Vivian,
holed up in an isolated barnhouse in the North Devon moors, slowly
encountering her great-great grandmother Beatrice (who stayed in the
same house some 100 years previously) through a stash of brown
crinkly diary-letters discovered in an upstairs room, and resisting
the memory of another woman, Mina, whom she befriended in an unnamed
country in a war zone in the Middle East, whose story she once had a
responsibility to tell – a responsibility she feels she failed.
It's a complicated tale, and Wilson recounts it with a soporific
patience, shifting between landscapes, slipping between sheets of
time, using a computer and a mixing desk to trigger her meticulous
score and backdrop images, multiplying distractions. The sound design
alone is extraordinary: a fascinating mixture of abstract and
representational, the snarl of fox folding into the crackle of paper
and the creak of wooden beams, the mulch of leaves, the static stab
of memory, and always the electric buzz of atoms vibrating in the
air. And the film – by Will Duke, incorporating images from the Beaford Old Archive – is gorgeous: sharp blue skies,
wide expanses of land, intricately detailed photographs of plants,
spider webs, rocks, the veins on hands, looked at with the curious
intensity of a child. In Poole, it was too much: as when watching
opera, I couldn't simultaneously take in the words, the visuals and
the audio. (How brilliant that Wilson is working on an opera next:
she's perfect for it.)
My
second go was at the Lakeside in Colchester, with a bigger and more
engaged audience, mostly comprising students, whose thrillingly mixed
response I'm going to write about on the Fuel/New Theatre in YourNeighbourhood blog if I EVER get this stupid post finished. Their
focus improved mine – but also I was better placed to focus: having
already seen the visuals, I could hear the words more clearly. I even
took notes, but I've since lost the scrap of paper they're written
on: apologies to Melanie if I'm misquoting. I was particularly struck
by the theory of photography: Vivian takes photographs to hear voices
better, which seems so contrary, but then it's clear, later in the
piece, that she's forcibly being silenced when her camera is removed
from her. Vivian takes photographs to make those voices audible to a
wider world: to bring women out of isolated communities and ensure
that their existence is at the very least recorded (you only need to
read the first paragraph of this
report,
by Unicef, to recognise how important that is). Photography here
potentially stands in for all art: certainly I understood it as
representing Wilson's own task in making Landscape II, her sense of
duty towards other women, towards all humanity, when creating
theatre. What is the difference between reading about Mina, the woman
in the Middle East, in a newspaper, and encountering her in the
theatre? How much more does her story resonate? What possibilities
are created for feeling a sense of connection with her?
What
Wilson does, with the delicacy of a spider spinning its web, is draw
the lines of connection between Mina, Vivian, Vivian's
great-great-grandmother Beatrice – and from them to herself and her
audience. In one of the diary-letters, Vivian discovers an
instruction from Beatrice's mother: the time Beatrice is spending in
North Devon is her last moment of self-determination before she is to
take up her role as a woman, as a wife and mother. A century later,
Mina tells Vivian that she must have children, because children bring
a woman her truest happiness, her truest role in life, and her truest
hope for the future. Mina and Beatrice occupy the same cultural space
in which women's lives are circumscribed and defined by their genetic
procreativity. Vivian occupies a new cultural space, in which women
have the freedom to choose non-gendered creativity instead. If Vivian
falters when asked whether women have equality in her country, it's
because she is aware how much work there is left to do, not least in
questioning what we mean by equality and what value judgments are
being utilised to measure that equality. Photography, art, theatre
create spaces in which to ask those questions.
I
took lots of forgotten notes about solitude, too: what it means to be
alone, to isolate oneself. Beatrice's retreat from family,
expectations, responsibilities, to the isolation of the moors is a
gift; for Vivian, it's an escape from failure. Beatrice becomes an
adventurer, an explorer of nature, takes long wild walks, scratches
her initials into a wooden beam of the house – a modest mark to
make on the world, but a mark none the less. Vivian timidly follows
in her footsteps, spending long hours gazing out to sea, feeling
rootless and lost. But it's through communing with the ghost of
Beatrice, facing up to her memories of Mina, and nursing a wounded
fox – the animal symbol of her wounded self – that Vivian finds
equilibrium again, and finds her way back to the world. I completely
missed the first time around the import of the final letter Vivian
reads, an invitation to take on a new job. Her receptiveness to it is
our signal that she has healed.
DavidGreig's The Events follows a similar trauma-to-healing trajectory.
The woman, Claire, is a victim, and her victim-hood isolates her from
society as effectively as if she had been the perpetrator of
violence. It estranges her from her girlfriend, makes her bullying
and impatient, prevents her relating to people, makes her contemplate
suicide and murder. Her soul has left her: she felt it fly away, when
a gun was pointed at herself and another woman and they were asked to
choose who should be shot. More prosaically, she has lost all
connection with the world.
Matt
Trueman's review – so rigorous and penetrating I had to read it
twice to comprehend it – has rendered most other commentary
superfluous, even if you don't agree with his argument (I agree with
92% of it). But what's a blog for if not indulging superfluities.
Like Matt, I'm caught by the conflict of art and violence in The
Events, and to the possibility that the perpetrator of violence, The
Boy, represents a majority view. I'd assumed he's quite young, but that's because I'm rubbish at history:
By
the time he was my age Jesus had founded a world religion.
By
the time he was my age Bob Geldof had saved Africa.
By
the time he was my age Gavrilo Princip had fired the shot that
started world war one.
If
I'm going to make a mark on the world I have to do it now.
The
only means I have are art or violence.
And
I was never any good at drawing.
Princip
was almost 20, Jesus was (probably) late-20s, Geldof at the time of
Band Aid was 33, Live Aid 34. So let's say The Boy is 34. January 5,
2010, age 34, I woke up at 7am to the shattering realisation that
everything I'd wanted to do for the past 10 years (minimum) still
hadn't been done. The writing. The making. The staking a meaningful
place in the world. What's interesting about The Boy – and this is
particularly because Rudi Dharmalingam's performance is astonishing,
casual yet hypnotic – is that he represents anything you might want
to throw at him: he is every white supremacist who espouses fascism
and every Islamist who follows al-Qaida/equivalent supremacist
organisations, he is the Boston bombers and the killers of Lee Rigby
and the men firing guns in a shopping mall in Kenya, he is the people
who pick up rifles and shoot children, co-workers, strangers, in
schools and workplaces and public spaces across the world. Within the
specific world of the play he is, for Claire, The Boy's father, the
politician whose ideology he shared, the journalist who popularised
him, plus her psychiatrist, her partner, a man who stops her throwing
herself off a cliff – Dharmalingam plays them all, modulating his
voice and gestures minutely each time. The Boy is Everyman –
Everyhuman. And that includes, potentially, us.
On
the one hand, that's about art. I defy anyone who makes art in any
capacity to say that they're not trying to leave a mark on the world.
We're so embarrassed by ambition, by ego, most of all by the fear of
being caught out, that we pull a curtain of self-deprecation over
everything we do – but the ambition and ego are there all the same.
The arrogance and self-belief, that others, even one other person,
should pay attention to the things we write or make or draw or dance.
It's a wonder more art doesn't get called self-indulgent.
On
the other, that's about violence. The first time he speaks, The Boy
tells a story about an “aboriginal boy” seeing three ships
approach his land from England, carrying “class and religion and
disease and a multitude of other instruments of objectification and
violence, all of which are about to be unleashed upon his people”.
The Boy thinks the people on the ships should all be killed. Claire
sees the positive side: isn't it just possible, she muses, that the
aboriginal boy might think, “Thank fuck something interesting has
finally happened round here.” Well, yes, that's possible. But who
is more persuasive in their thinking: Claire? Or The Boy?
Greig
underscores the terrifying notion that we all carry The Boy – or at
least, an incomprehensible “thing of darkness” – within us when
Claire uses exactly the same words at the end of The Events to
address the audience as she used to greet The Boy at the beginning,
to welcome him to the community choir that she runs in her tiny
parish church in a nowhere corner of Scotland, and invite him to join
in. It wasn't until talking to the as ever brilliant Young Vic/TwoBoroughs Theatre Club discussion group that I was able to articulate the levels of fiction and reality I'd seen in The Events. Claire and The Boy occupy a fictional space; the
community choir sharing the stage with them are the mirror of the
audience in the real world; in the bridging space between are the
stage manager and the repetiteur. Claire's healing journey takes her
from a place of isolation within the fictional space – at the
beginning she stands on the side, truculent and cold, separated from
the choir and from the audience, unable to make eye contact with
anyone – across the bridge into the real world that we occupy with
the choir, a gap now closed by their movement forward until they
might shake hands with the front row. What heals her is the
understanding that she will never comprehend violence in other people
– but she can reject it within herself. To act with compassion is
the best we can do.
I
saw The Events twice, too: in Edinburgh with (I think) the Soweto
Melodic Voices choir (the Soweto bit of that is right, even if
nothing else is) and at the Young Vic with the Greenwich Soul Choir.
I preferred it the first time, for the simple reason that the choir
all had black skin and different accents to the actors; in London
most of them were white and talked as though presenting the Today
programme. It makes a difference to the play's advocacy of
multiculturalism, of multiple tribes living side by side, when
Dharmalingam isn't the darkest-skinned person on stage. Both times, I
felt invigorated by the argument, excited, alarmed, impressed – but
it wasn't until the very last moments that something emotional in me
moved. “And we're all here,” the choir sing, locking eyes with
their audience, “we're all in here.” I know it's not real, the
togetherness: it's transitory, a fiction almost. But I believe in its
potential – to articulate hard truths, create the possibility of
change, to heal. And I find that tremblingly beautiful.
*
“It's
weirdly passive to commit gentrification, even though the consequence
is brutal. It feels safe to be like others, and frightening to be
one's self – because that requires knowing what one's true self is
– and not in a New Agey sense where anything one “feels” (a
euphemism for wants) is right. But in a truthful sense, to see one's
dark side and conflicts and in that way, realise one's self as human.
Not as an excuse to not change, but as a starting point for change.”
Sarah
Shulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, p177-8
