Another year, another summer made
fractious by the Edinburgh fringe. Even opening the programme this
year made me feel queasy: I marked performances, turned the corners
of its pages, feeling like I was wading through the Argos catalogue,
consuming consuming consuming. And although I was careful and made
sure I had lots of space for conversations and walking and a balanced
diet of cake and fruit, and although I took almost no risks and so
almost everything I saw felt meaningful, smart, exhilarating
sometimes, nourishing other times, I still ended up glutted and sick.
So since then I haven't been going to the theatre. I haven't even
been able to look at theatre listings. Instead I've had stillness.
Other doings and beings. And before I re-enter the fray – despite
all misgivings, a sense of superfluity, and the fear that writing
about theatre is no longer the thing I love – a celebration: of
things I've been able to do because I haven't been witnessing in the
dark...
1: Most of the recipes involve 150ml of
double cream. Most of the recipes display an astonishing lack of
concern about the environmental impact of eating so much meat. Most
of the recipes involve tablespoons of chilli and ginger and spice
concoctions that I haven't been able to use since starting to cook
family meals five years ago. But Nigel Slater's Eat is the most
inspiring, I-want-to-make-that-inhale-that-savour-that cookbook I've
read in aeons. And not just because it's the only cookbook I've read
in aeons. Snip-snap sentences. Unctuous language that sizzles and
simmers and glistens on the page. The first thing I cooked from it
was a chicken and farro recipe that I sold to the children as an
Italian version of chocolate rice and they ate it and didn't whinge
once. Result.
2: In my list of top 10 albums of all
time and ever that is at least 500 albums long, Father John Misty's
Fear Fun is, it's emerged, somewhere in the elastic top two. I keep
posting Now I'm Learning To Love the War on here, but there's also
this one
and this one
and this one
And still I'm startled by its country
twang, but I grew up on Dolly and Willie and Kris, and took myself
deeper backwoods, through the dark mysteries of the Appalachians, and
country feels like home. In any case, it's not the style but the
voice, so plangent, a deep seam of disappointment in which he mines
still for hope:
Before the star of the morning comes looking for me
I would like to abuse my lungs
Smoke everything in sight with every
girl I've ever loved
Ride around the wreckage on a horse knee-deep in blood
I listen to that voice and I swoon.
3: I've been getting a lot of emailing
done, sitting at the table beside my husband on the sofa watching TV,
and I haven't quite followed The Honourable Woman but Orange Is the
New Black has lesbian sex – romantic, playful, teasing, functional,
aggressive, tender lesbian sex – and it's proving very distracting.
I'm not always convinced by the glossiness of its surface, but
there's enough feminist nous and queer abrasion beneath to make me
want to down tools and just watch.
4a: I read Donald Barthelme's The School in an anthology of short stories 19 years ago and every
synapse shivered. I ran off a dozen photocopies and used it as a
secret handshake; last week I sent the link to Churlish Meg and
realised I still think of it as a soul gift. Originally it was
published in a collection called Amateurs, which I bought in the days
of scouring secondhand bookshelves for Brautigan and Barthelme and
names that don't begin with B, but only got around to reading in
August; The School remains my favourite story ever written, and
Rebecca might turn out to be the second.
4b: From the days when the chimneys of
Battersea Power Station, those crumbling columns that puncture the
sky as the children and I walk to and from school, still reconfigured
the clouds with smoke; from the days of open racism and closed
abortion and communities of women laughing in the soapsuds of
laundries; from the days when warehouses weren't apartments for the
wealthy but factories employing the poor; from that moment of transition,
between the demolition of slums and the rise of estates, Nell Dunn's
Up the Junction emerges so vivid, so raw, that reading it made me
gasp. London has moved on from there but how far I'm not sure. The
tale of the Tally Man captures an exploitation of poverty that
abusively persists; the desperation of teenagers, for a fuck, for an
approximation of freedom, that doesn't change. Dunn writes
elliptically, mostly in dialogue, rough jottings scrawled on the
hoof, in the dark; it's social realism, but compressed, made poetic,
edited with lapidarian skill. Reading her and Barthelme has not only
made me want to write again, but rethink how.
4c: Page after page of D.I.Y, the
manual for theatre-makers edited by Robert Daniels, inspires and
soothes with its generosity and common-sense. It's reminded me why I
keep saying yes to theatre instead of doing the writing that requires
me to sit on my own at a computer hour after hour. It's reminded me
to listen to the Mountain Goats more. It's reminded me to treasure my
shift away from being a “professional”, why it's important to
keep struggling in the unknown. Above all, it's reminded me that:
We are humans. We have feelings, we
have souls. Don't beat yourself up about your practice. Ever. It is
the self-loathing and doubt that delays EVERYTHING. Imagine
yourself as a baby, if you keep being mean to a baby, it will hate
you and poop out all sorts of nonsense to punish you. Take care of
yourself. Be kind. Give yourself time, chocolate, holidays and a
fucking break. Negativity breeds contempt. Happy artists make good
art.
Not for the first time this year,
reading that makes me want to give Bryony Kimmings a great big kiss.
5: This doesn't count because we went
in the daytime but the Doll Museum in Dunster is one of the strangest
places I've ever been. Arguably I write about theatre now because of
a B&B in Scarborough whose eerie parlour was crowded with dolls:
tiny dolls, foreign dolls, dolls to my thighs that lined the stairs
as if waiting to trip me up or push me down. The Doll Museum in Dunster was that room to a factor of three, all staring eyes and
twisted limbs and fraying national costume. A repository of white
colonial thinking on history, class and race. But at the same time, a
really fun place to take my daughter. Weird.
6a: And OK, there were two nights at
the theatre. The first was the Benedict Andrews/Gillian Anderson
Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, which bored me to itchiness.
I couldn't unthink the Secret Theatre's version: the musicality of
its European accents; the sensual melt of ice-cream, the crack of
watermelons, the ice spill of water; Leo Bill's humble, bumbling
Mitch, with his bad jumpers and stuttering desire; the rejection of
every lurid colour that Andrews and Anderson made garish again. The
day after seeing it I hosted the Young Vic Two Boroughs Project
Theatre Club on it with Lily Einhorn and we talked for well over an
hour about how the play sits in Williams' oeuvre and how it relates
to his biography; how the play isn't misogynist but an indictment, a
really aggressive and scathing indictment, of patriarchal culture,
not just the old patriarchy of America's old south but the bullying,
entitled patriarchy of the emerging new south; women, age and
feminism; how familiar aspects of the play felt to those of us in the
group from ethnic backgrounds (including, on that particular night,
Nigerian, Spanish, Indian and my own Cypriot); witnessed accounts of
alcoholism, bipolar disorder, domestic violence; and on and on, a
rich and involved and really smart discussion that was far more
engrossing than the production itself.
6b: The second was Itai Erdal's How To Disappear Completely at BAC, seen on a night of such precarious,
panic-streaked instability that even walking into the theatre was
like punching myself in the brain. Oh well. Erdal is a lighting
designer by training and his demeanour is scuffed and gauche, in a
likeable way. He introduces his mother, his step-father, his
furiously intelligent sister and gawky best friend, the way he might
if we were sat around a pub table with him, making friends. One
story, of an overexcited dugong, made me cry with laughter; but its
overarching story just made me cry, because it traced his mother's
demise, from cancer that spread through her body with
relentless purpose, taking them all by surprise. Erdal speaks with
the dangerous honesty of a child who hasn't yet learned to self-edit,
the kind of honesty that provokes alternately alarm, disapproval and relief. And
because he is a lighting designer, he makes us think about how
stories are told in theatre, how emotions are manipulated through
luminosity. I keep talking to people about this show,
because its bravery startled me, and because its argument for
assisted suicide has a clarity that makes it unimpeachable. But I
also keep talking about it because Erdal's mother believed something
about motherhood that I emphatically reject. She told both her
children that it was vital for them to reproduce, because it's
through their children that individual humans perpetuate their
existence in the world. Such thinking is inimical to me, egotistical,
and damaging in the ways intimated by Virginia Woolf, in a book I
haven't read yet, quoted by Jacqueline Rose in a terrific essay on motherhood published in the LRB:
“In The Years, written on the eve of
fascism, Virginia Woolf [comments] on the dire consequences of
parental exclusivity, on the damage it does to the social fabric –
which was on the point of being rent beyond repair – to think it
right to put your child, your family, before everyone else. She is
also suggesting that, while England takes pride in its difference
from Nazi Germany, there might even so be a link between the
overweening egoism of the bourgeois family and the autocracy of
statehood.... At a family gathering in the mid-1930s … North, the
now grown-up grandson of Colonel Pargiter, watches as people inquire
after each other’s children:
My boy – my girl … they were
saying. But they’re not interested in other people’s children, he
observed. Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and
blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the
primeval swamp, he thought … how then can we be civilised?”
Woolf, Rose concludes, is describing
how “the intricacy and breadth of human possibility can be
sidelined or quashed before it has even begun”. Yes, they're my
children. But they are their own people. The least I
can do is respect that. No, that's not true. The least I can do is
not resent how, having made them, they eat up time and energy,
leaving only scraps of both with which to make anything else.
7: Speaking of which:
A month of being home to tuck them
in.
Reading bedtime stories.
Learning the times tables together.
(Never quite mastered the 7s or 9s).
Sitting at the computer with earphones
on listening to Father John Misty so loudly that I can't hear their
voices.
Talking about how I could be a better
mother.
Her ideas include creative mealtimes
inspired by typical menus in different historical periods, a
designated painting space that doesn't always need tidying, and taking
her to the theatre in the night-time.
A month of being present. And sometimes
not coping with what that means.
8: Escaping not into the dark of the
theatre but the light of the kitchen. One night I made chocolate
cookies using an ounce of black treacle instead of golden syrup; they
were fudgy, smoky, much more grown-up than I'd intended when adding
most of a packet of white chocolate chips. Another night I made
pastry with 20g cocoa, 100g flour, and 60g cold butter, rubbing them
into crumbs as usual then blending in a tablespoon of golden syrup,
pouring the crumbs into a loose-bottomed, buttered, 28cm tart tin and
pressing them into the base and edges. That went into the fridge for
15 minutes then – covered with baking parchment and copper coins –
into a preheated gas 4/180C oven for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile in a
bowl 110g softened butter, 110g light muscovado, 110g ground almonds and
one egg, beaten with a fork until amalgamated. Out comes the
pastry, off come the coins and parchment; over the chocolate base
four or so tablespoons of apricot jam, spread almost but not quite to
the edges, and over that the frangipane mix, smoothing its surface to
cover not blend with the jam. That baked in the same oven for about 35
minutes, so when it came out it was still squodgy; in retrospect,
another 10 minutes wouldn't have hurt it. Still, the bitter crumble
of the chocolate crust and sweet melt of fruit and frangipane was
heavenly. And even better the next day.
9: The mother in the Dardennes
brothers' film Two Days, One Night makes a tart, too, a really
crisp-looking fruit tart that the family share after takeaway pizzas.
And then she sobs that she's invisible, irrelevant, I can't remember
the exact words but that's because approximations of them had been
ringing through my head all that day. And the day before that. And
before that. It's not an easy film to watch, and not just because she
keeps having anxiety attacks and crying and snapping at her husband
when he expresses concern at her taking Xanax. She spends a weekend traipsing around the houses and haunts of all her
co-workers, trying to persuade them to take her back at the factory
where they earn so little that many of these people need to take on
secret second jobs to get by, trying to do this knowing that if they
take her back they won't each get a thousand-euro bonus that might
relieve the pressure in their own lives. Sometimes on train journeys
through London's suburbs I feel stifled by the number of houses,
people, stories in this city; Two Days, One Night enters those
houses, talks to those people, listens to their stories, and
sympathises. And even where it doesn't sympathise, it attempts to
respect. This made it not an enjoyable film so much as a sternly
moral film whose politics I share.
10: I'm speedwriting now because it's getting late. And because I'd like to write about Cate Le Bon
and the gig at Koko (a stronger performance than the one I saw in February, but I missed being close to the stage), about the wild magic of her voice and the
angular jolt of her guitar, and how she makes me wish I could sing,
about standing on the balcony of Koko between two of my oldest
friends, the same people I've been sharing angular jolting guitars
and wild magic voices with for over 20 years now, and all the history
between us, the honesty and safety, but I've been writing this
listening obsessively to Perfume Genius, all three albums, and now
his voice is all I know of music. He was a surprise guest at Koko and
for those few minutes when he sang I thought I was levitating. I
can't get a handle on his albums: they're so intimate, and yet
something in them resists intimacy. I think
it's a problem of timing: they'll make more sense
alone in the dark. I should have been writing about the new one tonight
instead of writing this. I should have been doing all sorts of things all day instead of writing this. Seduced by the wrong words again.
