thoughts from the first pandemic autumn

this is the last of the slow fade posts that i'm moving here. the original (and actually terrible - what was i thinking??) title was Three anchors and the Gate, and it was published on 9 October 2020. (the new title i've given it isn't much better but for now i'm sticking with simplicity)

 

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Back in the before times I used to play a game of my own devising with a cumbersome title that changed according to mood. Usually it was See All the Art and Definitely the Art by Friends But Especially the Art that Will Feel Like Fresh Air; sometimes it was See as Much Art as Possible While Not Erasing Time for Other Human Things; and in a bad month it became Try To See All the Art Even Though It’s Impossible Without Becoming Totally Exhausted and Losing Heart or Mind. The picture is of a typical game card. On one side is a list of possible dates: evenings that weren’t already booked up with other theatre, or work, or dance practice, or occasional obligatory family time. On the other side is a list of things I was trying to squeeze in: theatre, films, a discussion event. This was the game card I was working on earlier this year, as February shook hands with March, and Covid-19 sidled through the country. I’d spent a maddening number of hours matching and re-matching these dates and events and if I’m honest, there was an element of relief in all that possibility just vanishing.

The shame-carrying part of me is wriggling in discomfort at the clang of complaint: of course it is a privilege of affluence to be able to see as much art as I’d like to. I’m starting with this confession to try and work through a different feeling. Early in the year I was overwhelmed and disillusioned by constantly diving into the high tide of all the art that London has to offer. And then it stopped. Theatres, galleries, cinemas closed. The waters stilled, leaving me adrift, unanchored.

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The last play I saw before the theatres closed was The High Table at the Bush on Friday 13 March. Already it was being deemed irresponsible to gather in crowded public places, and on such an inauspicious date? Defiance abutted by doubt. I enjoyed the play a lot: it’s a love story about two women who want to marry, their relationship rocked by homophobia, and the subject of fractious debate among the Nigerian ancestors of one of the women, who speak of the clamp of colonialism, and long to rebuild their older culture, in which sexuality was less regimented, gender more fluid. I wanted to see it because I admire its writer, Temi Wilkey, but the Bush is a 40-minute journey via two sardine-tin tube trains from my house, and I might more readily have skipped it were it not for Theatre Club.

For those who don’t know, Theatre Club is like a book group for performances, a discussion space that anyone can join to chat about a show we’ve all seen. The conversation about The High Table – which happened online once I stopped sulking that we couldn’t share biscuits together – was typical of why I love Theatre Club so much: lots of disagreement, all of it agreeable, lots of consideration (the questioning kind, and the caring kind) given to the style and structure and argument of the play, and one person who loved it outright, who eventually spoke of the personal connection she felt with the story, its resonance with her own experience as a bisexual woman constantly being challenged for who she happened to love. They are always a gift, these moments of candour, of glimpsing the full life that a human brings to the art they encounter.

Theatre Club has been a beacon in these Covid times, a continuance of community and connection with strangers and the possibility inherent in what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitanism”: openness to difference. As the motley, ever-shifting group has continued to meet over the summer, we’ve been able to talk in less usual ways: not about the new shows that rush at you in high tide, but the plays that linger long in memory, and why we think theatre matters, and the venues we most like to watch theatre in, be they real or of our dreams.

The first of these wide-ranging conversations was dedicated to theatre that has inspired “ways to think differently about how people live, and live together” or “felt really meaningful in a small-p political way”. And it was glorious, a tapestry of recollection taking in a production of The Crucible at the National Theatre in the 1990s, which exposed with unaccustomed clarity the inability of people in power to admit that they are wrong; a work by New Zealand performer James Nokise radically exposing the unthinking racism of white liberal arts lovers; the pleasure of watching complex Muslim characters, not at all caricatured, in Danusia Samal’s play Out of Sorts; and ending with a flurry of love for Emma Rice, reaching across several Kneehigh performances plus her work at the Globe. As the invitation itself was unpicked and respun, more and more what was discussed was not what the shows were about, but the feeling of being in the audience for them: of all responding at once – to a song, a speech, a moment of dance – and exulting in that collective response.

This, I realised, was the anchor I was searching for in the absence of theatre: not the work itself so much as the architecture around the work. The being-in-audience, the feeling-in-community, and these occasional evenings of vigorous dialogue, talking within and across difference of opinion.

*

The loneliness of lockdown has been chipping away at my wariness of audio work. Disembodied voices quite often unnerve me, but lately I’m feeling grateful for the company, especially when it’s a voice I know in real life. Jo Bannon’s Absent Tense leant against the kitchen counter, chatty and graceful, snaffling discs of carrot while I cooked dinner: it’s a set of 12 meditations on absences, personal and philosophical, taking in Catholic saints, memory games, her shielding father, and – the segment that has stayed with me most vividly – the absence of a word for the colour blue from most languages until about the eighth century. Last year I read the Odyssey to my son, in Emily Wilson’s subtle translation, and the wine-darkness of the sea became a running joke between us; we didn’t think there might be wider implications.

Caridad Svich’s Day for Night mixes a drink while the soup bubbles: she reads out poetry, essays, portions of plays, in a voice that is road tar in the gloaming, lick of flame in the wood stove. I especially recommend episode 33, mostly dedicated to a bracing essay by Tim Crouch called Darling, You Were Marvellous, calling for more genuine criticality in the conversation around theatre. I winced a bit when listening, because I know the kind of criticism I’ve been writing for a few years now, focused on feeling, reserving criticism for the social and particularly economic conditions in which theatre is made, can skate over the kind of rigour Tim demands. I winced significantly more – almost folded in half with the stab of it – listening to Nice White Parents: what a painful exercise in recognition that is, not only of the systems I’ve taken advantage of in getting my own children to the secondary school of my choice, but the assumptions and biases expressed in that choice.

The work that has assuaged loneliness most tenderly is Letters at the Gate. Its premise is simple: pairs of performers have written letters for each other during lockdown, and they are opened and read out on Zoom, between a series of playful tasks – getting dressed up (Nina Bowers as Prince was a particular delight), drawing each other in chalk, dancing amid confetti at the end. It opens to the buoyant rhythm of Ray Charles’ Mess Around, and it’s true that there is a deliberately messy, makeshift feel to it, but none of the performances I’ve seen has felt frivolous. Writing about the first Letters in Exeunt, Lily Levinson struggled with a sense of banality, but for me that’s been one of the strengths. These letters hold the humdrum of life hand in hand with its complexity, the tedium of days when you can’t be bothered to cook with the sharp poignancy of remembering a friend on the anniversary of their death. Lately I’ve been reading Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write and her brief thought on lightness captures exactly the delicacy of Letters’ relationship with the mundane:

“A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor. Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness. A reckoning with the humble and the small and the invisible.”

That’s a deft description of Annie Siddons’ letter, a generous and lyrical meander through her worries about her father in a care home, her crush on the local DPD driver, and the relationship between poetry and time. Reading it out, Joseph Akubeze’s emotions rippled at the surface: there were phrases that caught in his throat, and phrases that had him effervescing laughter. And this is another anchor I’ve been reaching for, what draws me always back to theatre: those luminous moments of people being real, saying – and listening to – something true.

The texts move gently through time, the first letters dated early in lockdown, uncertainty and a sense of suspension solidifying with the impact of the murder of George Floyd, politics expressed partly in the letters themselves but mostly through the choice of poems the performers give each other to read, by Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Hannah Drake. The severity of recent (and deep-rooted) politics brought out the stickiness potential in even the playful exercises. Between letter and poem the performers are invited simultaneously to complete a sentence starting with the words “I want”. In what at first felt like an uncomfortable disparity, Chris Thorpe’s card read, I want to give you a massive fucking hug, while beside him, Kayla Meikle had written: I want to end systemic racism. It happened again with Annie and Joseph – neither of whom, I realised, had watched any one else’s performances, enabling their own to be more genuinely unplanned and live – where Joseph wished for another month of sun while Annie wrote a list of justice-related desires starting with social housing for everyone who needs it. Both times the hilarity, the reassurance, in the meeting of these wants – the meeting of the consequential and the light – has created a feeling not just humble but kind.

Being with people, navigating our differences, reconciling the inequitable conditions we live within, is all hard. I find it easier in audience, for every kind of art form, but particularly theatre: I am always in company, always in discourse, permitted – encouraged – to be quiet in the shadows, to be introverted, to be witness. Being in audience is like having an assigned role and does much to temper the awkwardness of being in society (so does being host, as in Theatre Club). In these months of enforced physical distancing I’ve felt my awkwardness intensify, insecurity calcifying with prolonged interiority. So of course I loved that first performance of Letters so much I went back another three times. Brief and messy as it is, it invites you to be in intimate companionship with people as they put a frame around this tricky business of being alive.

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The first post of this new blog started with me being disillusioned as well, although more specifically with the entrenched ableism of the theatre industry, among its many contributions to social injustice. One of the things I’ve suggested in a conversation about possible futures for theatre has been that all buildings that aren’t accessible to wheelchairs are permanently closed. So that would include the Gate then. If these Covid times have blessings, maybe the transformation of the Gate into an online venue (which has its own problems with accessibility for sure) could be one of them. Before Letters they programmed an invigorating conversation about possible futures for theatre, a Town Hall discussion inviting international perspectives, including from Jumatatu Poe, a choreographer/performer and co-author of the document Creating New Futures, a communal publication rethinking the power balance in organisation-artist relationships. Jumatatu began with a healing touch ritual, quoted liberally from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy, spoke of rethinking the structures of conversation as a necessary first step in opening space to reimagine organisational, political, educational structures, and by the time they name-checked artist Amara Tabor-Smith, who works as “a death doula for the patriarchy”, my crush-o-meter had tipped off the scale.

Better still, the Gate have hosted an online installation by Rosie Elnile called Prayer that placed into my hands, firmly and thoughtfully, the third anchor I’ve been yearning for in these months without theatre: its very particular interaction with, embodiment of, ideas. Embedded in the etymology of rehearse, Rosie notes in the text of Prayer, is the image of raking over soil, making it ready for planting: “to make a fertile space for ideas”. Prayer is an argument for rethinking how these fertile spaces of theatre are used: not to reproduce conditions of injustice, imperialism, climate crisis, but “to engender collective acts of imagination” that might, with time, and work, shift these present realities.

Rosie is a performance designer and speaks from that perspective, questioning how design is taught, how “often design works towards a reassertion of white middle-class aesthetics as the default”, how design impacts environment local and global, and how designers might reject the notion of theatre as an “empty space” and instead work with the specific conditions around them: the history of the building, its relationship to colonialism, the composition of its local community. To think all this through she creates a kind of kitchen garden online, with not only her own texts but images of plants, work by other visual artists, poems and excerpts from various other essays, occasionally with an accompanying comment or qualification, but mostly inviting the participant to wander through its winding paths, tending meaning for themselves. Throughout Rosie is alert to the contradictions she is unearthing: she advocates “deep and careful thought about the communities that live in direct proximity to theatre buildings” even as said communities are absent from Prayer; she acknowledges that ideas of nature and the natural have been used as tools of oppression but so too has the idea that humans are beyond nature. Prayer is positioned within these complexities.

The very name Prayer is an admission that active change requires not only work but faith: a belief that the work will come to fruition, however far in the future. In her book All About Love, bell hooks thinks about the relationship between fear and faith; “Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience,” she writes, while: “Faith enables us to move past fear.” Prayer ends with a set of images of model boxes Rosie has made, indoor gardens likely impossible to grow in a theatre without some abuse of natural resources. Looking at one of these images, in which boulders float tantalisingly in mid-air, I remembered seeing a realised design similar to this before, in the exploded island of Uninvited Guests’ This Last Tempest – another work that beautifully, profoundly, opened space for its performers to be real and speak true, not least about a world beyond extractive, exploitative capitalism. Theatre is my anchor because it is, in its ideal state, the place where I get to glimpse social and political change in action, however compromised, however fleeting.

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But there’s another problem. Space for contemplation, let alone action, is often missing when swimming in the high tide of London’s arts scene. As Rosie says: “The pace of theatre-making rarely allows for complicated thoughts around process, and I think that is in part why it is so hard to make change.” I think about this from the position of audience too: that theatre might be a distraction from the slow and patient work of organising for change. In the stillness of theatre’s relative absence I’ve found more space to talk with people who are doing that organising: with a mutual aid group interested in setting up neighbourhood food co-ops, modelled on the work of Cooperation Town; and a group advocating for universal basic income as a version of redistributive economy; and a group building up a new cultural workers branch of the union United Voices of the World. (Confession: in the many hours, days even, it’s taken to write this, I’ve done no work supporting those groups at all.) What all these groups are preoccupied with is people having basic human rights: access to food as a priority, but also access to the time that gets freed up when life isn’t dominated by low-paid work. At the very, very least, access to the modified inequality described by Ha-Joon Chang, in his excellent and unexpectedly entertaining book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism: “an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education and healthcare”.

In Covid times I’ve also hosted a few change-focused conversations myself, inviting theatre-y people to think about how we might work differently together: with each other, with organisations, with other people. Theatre is where I glimpse social and political change in action and also where I see most closely and infuriatingly how resistant structures are to change. As artist Adam York Gregory notes in an excoriating tweet: “If you want to understand how difficult systemic change is, look at the arts. We've been talking about fairness, transparency and equality for decades, yet still struggle with the basics.” The more I work with dialogue, but in particular the more attentive I am to how artists such as Lois Weaver and Rajni Shah and Selina Thompson, the more I understand why talking isn’t enough: the dialogue itself has to model, in its very construction, fairness, transparency and equality, and indeed to question what equality means, how it is being defined, and by whom. None of this is easy. Not least when it requires so many people (I include myself here) to give up power, step aside, listen rather than speak. For the people having the dialogue and shaping it to change too.

And the pull of what is known is strong: tidal, gravitational. In her spoken text in Prayer, Rosie quotes a thought of director Anthony Sampson-Pike: “We are living through a crisis of imagination.” Theatre is a space in which imagination can wander, stretch out, test, play; but in its frenetic pace – and look at how the word pace pushes at the edges even of the word space – theatre can also restrict its possibility, trapping what could be within the confines of what is. As I rewrite and rework these final thoughts, getting tangled in nets of metaphor and contradiction (mostly, I hope, now deleted), I notice what I’m talking about here is two things: theatre as human activity and theatre as industry. Inspired by Prayer I’m now reading Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind: the pre-colonial Kenyan theatre he describes is not a forceful wave of isolated events, but “part and parcel of the rhythm of daily and seasonal life of the community[,] an activity among other activities, often drawing its energy from those other activities.” Community artist Rosie Priest describes something similar in this blog on the language of transformation so often employed in the arts: where she grew up, a tiny village in Cumbria, “the opportunity to explore art wasn’t considered an alternative activity, it was just what you did”. 

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These anchors of theatre I’ve been thinking about are really just one (and yes, I do find the tenacity of Christian tropes unsettling). I hold it in my hands: how heavy it is, how solid. Fear and faith balanced within it. I think about what it might mean to fragment it, shatter and share the pieces more fairly. How the language of “viable business” shatters it another way. I hold it and look across the water, this strange and challenging pool of time, and think about starting to swim.

 

some things that got me through the early days of pandemic

this is another post from slow fade that i'm transferring here. as the new title says, it's a list of things that gave me joy in the first few weeks of pandemic, those days of being penned in and trying not to panic. it was first published 31 March 2020 with the title in search of delight

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January was its usual brittle mess; February I swept up the shards and read two self-help books simultaneously, swapping from one to the other every few pages, like feet moving forward, right left right left. I’d tried to read John Paul Flintoff’s How To Change the World before, in 2017, but was defeated at page 28 when he insisted I ask myself impossible questions like “Who am I?” and “Why am I doing this?” before I continue. This time around I found more kindness towards myself, and I’m going to credit Flintoff, along with my friend Selina, for the fact that I’m now involved in local Mutual Aid work, checking in with a smattering of neighbours and diffidently waiting for someone to need me.

Selina also pointed me in the direction of Beth Pickens’ Your Art Will Save Your Life. Written in the immediate aftermath of the Trump election, it calls itself a love letter to artists but really it’s a set of tools and strategies offered with a plea: to keep making work, to understand art as a survival mechanism, not just for the artist but for any mysterious stranger who might need it. I’ve been trying to hold tight to Pickens in these first days of lockdown, returning again to her admonishment: “You and I both know that you need to make your work in order to be alive.” Some days I believe her and write a few more sentences; some days all motivation drains from me and I’m back to asking, “Why am I doing this?” – again with no answer.

It’s not that there isn’t time to write; in this weird dilation time washes in waves. But I drift in it unanchored by a sense of purpose; it’s hard to write in this glassy state. Thankfully – and I know I’m blessed to be able to say this – one thing I can still do is read.

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Jenny Offill, Weather, p107

There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt them for food, not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head: “It’s because they panic when penned.”

*

Books have minds of their own. I’ve had books literally slide out of my hands after five or six pages if I picked them up before they felt it was time for me to read them. They know when I need them, and then they come calling. On Friday 20 March, the day the schools closed, the book that came calling was Delight, by JB Priestley.

Published in 1949, when Priestley – yes, him of An Inspector Calls – was in his mid-50s, Delight is a list of 114 things that, just like the title says, give him a feeling of particular enchantment. Some relate to his life as a playwright: the fantasy casting of a play, before brutish reality takes hold; that moment mid-rehearsals when “the play is more alive than it ever will be again for you”; the exquisite promise of the theatre just before the curtain rises, when “nothing stirs for a second except our imagination”. Several detail his love of smoking good tobacco, preferably in the bath, or when other people think he’s hard at work. There’s a twinkling, often naughty humour in a lot of this writing, and a joy in play: playing music (however badly), playing charades, rough-and-tumble games he played when a child, nonsense playing with his own children, tricks you can pull on other adults. He has a teasing eye for others’ foibles, but also his own; the entry on being recognised, he admits cheerfully, is “contemptible”.

The pages sing when he describes the landscapes he most loves, the gold mist of dawn, the way his soul responds to the sight of pine and fir. He declares Shakespeare the curse and ruin of the English theatre, reveres a forgotten music-hall magician, and wonders whether any art is higher than the sublime joy of a Marx brothers movie. A fascinating chapter on making writing simple discusses the gulf between younger critics/writers and those of his own generation: between their taste for “cleverness and solemnity” and his desire to write in a way that might connect with “the people in the the nearest factories, shops and pubs”. The whole book glows with generosity: a true and abiding care for those who might be overlooked or hurt by society, written by someone who grew up witnessing “the deep cancer of injustice”.

The tone of the writing is cheerful, in an unforced and genuine way, but a glimpse of the tumult he’s lived through is never far away. A chapter called “sound of a football” thinks back to the boys he played with as a youth, and in passing but devastating parenthesis mentions that most of them “never reached their middle twenties but died among the shell holes and barbed wire on July 1st 1916”. In a chapter on the stereoscope (and what a weird contraption that was), “several years of bombed London” hover like a dust mote. Solving crimes in detective novels is “easy and sensible compared with the problem of remaining a sane citizen in the middle of the 20th century”.

But it’s clear from his list of delights that he sees the problem of the modern world not just in the violence of war but in capitalist-industrialist progress, in the tick of the clock and the turn of the record player that distance humans from the best in themselves. He writes as a declared Socialist Intellectual, one with “a streak of the jeering anarchist, who parts company even with his friends when they have succeeded to power”, somehow reconciling this with his repeated grumbles at the monstrousness of income tax. “The society of split seconds is also the society of split minds,” he mourns. When he imagines civilisation in ruins, “no more radio, no more electricity”, he gives every impression of finding this quite a good thing. Even in the late 1940s he was reading urgent books warning of “soil erosion and dwindling water supplies and mounting hungry populations, until you see nothing in the future but wars, famine and death”. Who wouldn’t dream of a future different to, better than, that.

But this book didn’t jump off the shelf to taunt me with foreknowledge. It came to me because in these wild and strange and frightening times, I crave delight, and that’s what its pages gave me. More than that: it gifted me a sense of connection, not just across time, but across writing.

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This started out as a title, “little bits of joy”, and a list of four or five things. Small things, sweet things, things unrelated to theatre that I wanted to share with friends but felt shy to write and do so directly. Every night I’ve written this, I’ve not written emails. On nights when I’ve not written this, I’ve not written emails either, just sunk deeper into stupor. I’m trying to let go of the pressure to be productive, to get things done; it’s part of trying to recognise my participation in what writer Cassie Marketos – in another text shared with me by Selina – calls “emotional capitalism”:

‘It seems that the complete shutdown of functioning society has, perversely, created a gap in the wall of what I will call “emotional” capitalism. That is, the constant, overpowering pressure to shape even our most private lives according to metrics of tangible output and efficiency. We “spend” time or we “waste” time. We have to do things right, “feel” them correctly, have only good friends, write when we're not working, read when we brush our teeth, catch up on podcasts, know what everybody else seems to be knowing. We all know this is exhausting. Until COVID, though, none of us had a gigantic, collective psychological permission slip to refuse it. Doing “nothing,” these days, is all that most of us can do. In fact, doing nothing has become our shared moral imperative.’

Every day, a little planting in the garden. Every day, making a lunch and a dinner for four people. Every day phoning my mum to check she’s OK. Every day checking five different Mutual Aid whatsapp groups, fascinated and sometimes alarmed by the social dynamics, beguiled by each glimpse of generosity. These things are only nothing in the warped value system of capitalism. A value system that lives in my body like a virus for which I have no cure.

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I’m steering clear of theatre online. To quote Durga Chew-Bose: ‘Too much and not the mood.’ For sure I’m a little envious of David Jays and his brilliant idea to set up a #lockdowntheatreclub on twitter, but even that is watching theatre-related films rather than filmed performance. If anyone asks, I shrug and tell them the bottom has fallen out of my life, and that’s just how it is for now. Nothing makes sense. Except for the occasional blog post or open letter demanding a radical change to the exploitative conditions under which theatre/all art is made. Thank you Harry Josephine Giles, Alexandrina Hemsley, the authors of the challenge to the Arts Council to reconsider their typically dismissive attitude to independent artists, from a different field Susan Jones, also Francois Matarasso: thank you for your eloquence and inspiration.

By comparison I’m writing about fripperies here. But if there’s one thing John Paul Flintoff and Beth Pickens agree on, it’s the necessity of joy and the inter-relationship between fun and social-justice work. ‘There are two ways to change the world,’ writes Flintoff: ‘to decrease suffering or increase pleasure.’ Either way, writes Pickens, doing it in a joy-filled way is more sustainable.

And so, a small list of little things that have delighted me since the theatres, and then the schools, were closed. It won’t change the world. It’s required me to be selfish to get it written. But I offer it in hope that someone else might find something here delightful too.

Playing Out by the Crayonettes

One week into lockdown and I feel a lot like I did when my youngest was a baby and the elder not yet three: all that freedom I’d slowly discovered with just one child suddenly yanked away from me, replaced by the plate-spinning panic of one or other of them always needing something and those needs never being the same or in sync. This album was released towards the end of the worst of that time, in autumn 2010, and carried us into the first few years of primary school. It’s the work of two musicians – Kathryn Williams and Anna Spencer – who are also parents, and has the sophistication of the very best Pixar movies, plaiting emotion and humour and a love of pop music to create a series of perfect partnerships: an electropop tune about the disco-bright properties of toothpaste; a song about the spooky way home burping and bleeping with strange hoots and squelches; a bouncy chalk-scratch chant about playing hopscotch. I hadn’t listened to it for years when I put it on again last week, wanting to remind my youngest, now 11, of the dry-toned instructions of Illegal – don’t climb those shelves, don’t put lemonade in the fish bowl, don’t drink the dog’s water – set to a dirty low funk pulse, like a spy cop card shark pulling an ace from their sleeve. But it’s an album that lives inside me, time immaterial: any time I see a sweet on the floor, the song Sweet on the Floor will unspool in my head, a yearning lament for what is wanted but cannot be, as painful as any unrequited or broken love. 

@lesbianpulpbot on twitter

A bot that tweets, thrice a day, the cover of a lesbian pulp fiction book from the mid-20th century. Some of them are clearly trash (‘men wanted her luscious body … yet she was a woman driven to the sadistic pleasures of inverted love’), some are hilarious (‘Lesbian Web of Evil’ is quite some title), and occasionally there’s one that sings true: Vin Packer, author of Spring Fire (‘A story once told in whispers now frankly, honestly written’), was the pseudonym of Marijane Meaker, who wrote about lesbian love from her own heart. The illustrated covers are glorious, a frenzy of stockings and loosened cleavage, tousled hair and gazes turned inwards, one woman to another, not giving a damn who can see.

Weather, by Jenny Offill

There’s a moment in Weather when the narrator, Lizzie, realises how extraordinary it is that she keeps not bumping into the annoying school-gate mum she’s constantly avoiding – so extraordinary, in fact, that it can’t be her skill alone that keeps them apart, but the other mum actively avoiding her too. She works in a library and notes: “My book-ordering history is definitely going to get me flagged by some evil government algorithm.” She meets someone new but remembers that her husband “is used to my all talk, no action ways”, that it “took a long time to bank all that goodwill”. Now and then a line reminded me of that bit in the National’s Demons, where Matt Berninger sings “I stay down, with my demons”, and the note drops on the word “demons”, and the fall is too easy, too manipulative an emotional trick. Mostly, though, Weather is as concise and pellucid as Dept of Speculation, and a little steadier too. Which is just as well because Weather is a novel about a small person trying to live with the enormity of climate change, environmental catastrophe even, and shitty right-wing politics, and so many people dependent on the overpowering love you have for them; it was too much to read now, in the heart of disaster, and also the perfect reminder that the disaster was always there, we’re just looking at it through a different lens.

(The link embedded into the title is to a website Offill created, also on changing the world, and who wants to read it along with me?)

A new fish pie

Sometimes I get stuck in my ways with cooking: I’m so often in a rush, trying to finish before racing out to the theatre, and my main imperative is pleasing the kids, who change their food likes frequently and arbitrarily and rarely seem to like a vegetable in common. Being home all the time has opened up a space in which I can be slower: it’s like I’m actually cooking every day rather than hustling a meal together. A couple of disasters have emerged from this, not least my daughter’s birthday cake, my second attempt at following a Felicity Cloake recipe and definitely my last. But there has also been a triumph: a new fish pie, made with smoked mackerel, leeks, capers and a bechamel sauce seasoned with sherry, topped with potato and breadcrumbs, a sophisticated step up from the fish pie I used to make, at least until one of the kids goes off mackerel, or leeks, or both.

Magnolias in bloom

I mean, they were when I first made notes for this post: mostly the magnolia petals are wilting now, pushed aside by unfurling leaves. They are my first sign of spring amassing, that I’ll be able to unhunch my shoulders soon. Now I’m noticing other signs: gaudy crowds of hyacinths chattering in the livelier flower beds; electric blue ceanothus throwing up sparks; drift of blossom, pink and white. I’m so grateful for every tulip I pass on the regulation daily walk, for the new leaves spiking from lavender, eruptions of daisies in revitalised grass. I can’t think about next week, or next month, or next year, without plunging into panic: the spring flowers help to hold me in now, to take pleasure in everything small that surrounds me, getting on with growing, getting on with being.

Blue skies

But also, it dawned on me this morning: no aeroplanes. Remember when the volcano in Iceland erupted and planes were grounded for a few days? I didn’t notice. I live on a Heathrow flight path so the sky above me is always crowded, slashed with contrails; this time I want to appreciate the clear and the quiet. Mum, says my youngest, have you noticed that ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ are made of the same letters? One day pouring into another, an expanse of emptiest blue.

Rhiannon’s slow gifs

I have to be careful watching plot-heavy movies, thrillers or adventures, the tension of them messes with my breathing, induces the mildest of asthma attacks. Lately the anxiety of coronavirus has triggered the mildest of panic attacks; invisible hands squeeze tight beneath my ribs, my diaphragm heavy as iron. My wonderful friend Rhiannon Armstrong, for whom illness isn’t a sudden catastrophe but a lived, daily experience, has made a set of slow gifs that encourage steadier breathing, kaleidoscope whorls, inhale as they emerge, exhale as they retreat. She’s also made poems from shreds of paper, which slowly tick like the ponderous pendulum of a grandfather clock too old now to keep modern time. My favourite is a gif of two bubbles falling to a wooden floor and bursting, played in reverse so it seems that the bubbles are rising from its dust. 

The local Mutual Aid movement

The blessed kindness of strangers. Organising shopping for each other. Popping to the pharmacy. Offering reassurance. Dispensing advice. Every few days another call: thank you for your flyer, I’m OK, I don’t need help, but thank you. I’m so glad you’re well, I’m so glad you’re safe. Figuring out how to get through this together.

2020 thoughts in a 2018 space

a brief explanation:

in 2020 i started a new blog, slow fade, and wrote five things for it, then Chris Goode died, and then i struggled to write anything at all. as i slowly move towards being able to publish the text about working with him that i've been writing, i'm also rethinking where i publish what online, and in particular rethinking what slow fade might be as a space: or rather, how it might genuinely be the new space, for me, free of Chris, that i wanted it to be. so i'm moving a few posts that i published on slow fade here, which feels more their natural home actually. 

this post actually features two posts in one. the first was called open for business, and was first published on 28 January 2020. the second was called scattered thoughts of a busy fortnight and was originally published on 28 February 2020.

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open for business

“Academics, activists, artists, and cartoon characters have long been on a quest to articulate an alternative vision of life, love, and labor and to put such a vision into practice. Through the use of manifestoes, a range of political tactics, and new technologies of representation, radical utopians continue to search for different ways of being in the world and being in relation to one another than those already prescribed for the liberal and consumer subject.” J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Add to the first list, people who write about theatre.

Add to the second, theatre blogs.

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I’ve read 17 reviews of Athena Stevens’ play Scrounger and a lot of them describe it as an uncomfortable experience. This is how [my] excellent, astute [friend] Rosemary Waugh unpacks that discomfort, in her review for Time Out: 

“The brilliance of Stevens’s work is that it directly angles its comments about how disabled people are routinely treated at those lovely, left-leaning, Guardian-reading, petition-signing people most likely to be sitting in the audience (*waves*). It doesn’t, in other words, allow the ‘nice’ people to feel good about themselves by placing the blame on the Tories, the Daily Mail or outdated attitudes. It asks if your well-meaning bullshit is precisely that: bullshit.

And that’s something so little of the theatre that’s on stage is doing right now. Instead of preaching to the converted and inviting everyone inside for an intellectual circle jerk, it sinks its teeth into the hypocrisies of people who tell themselves they’re doing good without actually doing anything. It’s theatre that’s designed to make you feel properly uncomfortable, and then to do something about that.”

What follows is in no way a dig at Rosemary, it’s an open question about the purpose of theatre criticism, and the ways in which it might be “doing something”.

I found Scrounger a desperately uncomfortable experience, for two reasons:

1. On walking into the auditorium the usher said in a peremptory tone that the benches seat five people. The benches in the Finborough Theatre do not fit five adult humans. They fit 4.5. I know because I was the 0.5 barely lodged, like the thin end of a wedge, in the middle of a row. Any fat person attempting to sit in one of these benches will be made to feel like shit – which is no different from any other public space, but that doesn’t mean it should pass without comment.

2. After watching Stevens, who has athetoid cerebral palsy, being supported by her co-performer to leave the room, I checked the Finborough’s accessibility policy. In a classic pass of the buck, it says: “We regret that the Pub no longer provides disabled toilet facilities.” It does not, apparently, regret that: “There are 23 steps to the theatre (including a turn in the stairs).”

Precisely two of the reviews I read thought to comment on this.

“What an indication of the shit so many disabled people have to deal with day in, day out,” marvels Simon Gwynn in Exeunt (a review that made me proud to write for them, tbh). “Perhaps the reassessment of privilege and re-evaluation of conflict avoidance that it instigates will reach the pub downstairs, which has turned its disabled toilet into a kitchen,” suggests Cindy Marcolina in Broadway World.

Perhaps. But not if there’s no outcry about it. Or, as Andrew Curtis puts it in his review for London Pub Theatres Magazine: “The main target of Stevens’ ire are the people around her, who are seen as complicit with the bureaucratic forces she is fighting. This extends to the audience. Goodwill alone is not enough, the important thing is to take a stand. But who present is going to do that?”

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One of my favourite pieces of work I did last year was an essay for the Bruntwood Prize Write a Play blog about the well-made play – why people continue to write them, and why people who don’t write them struggle for oxygen in the UK’s deeply conservative and risk-averse theatre industry. Scrounger is not a well-made play, in ways I find appealing. It’s a one-woman roar at social injustice with a second performer sketching in the world around her: selfish best friend, boyfriend put to the test, evasive bureaucracy, subsidiary characters including Uber driver and human rights campaigner, both depicted with an unnecessary grotesquerie. But Scrounger also reminded me of a pertinent question raised by Vicky Featherstone, artistic director at the Royal Court, when I interviewed her for that piece: “What’s the difference that turns something into a piece of theatre, that could be told better in a documentary or a really good news article?”

Stevens, her co-performer Leigh Quinn, her director Lily McLeish, the rest of the design team, everyone involved in this production works hard at making that difference. The fact that Scrounger is on at the Finborough means that a lot of new people – me included – will have found out about this based-on-true-events story of the typical neglect experienced by people who are disabled by their environment, by the lack of thought around access that typifies social design. But if the Finborough itself isn’t accessible – if it isn’t possible for someone who uses a wheelchair to see this show and think yes, that is something I recognise, there on that stage – isn’t the very fact that Scrounger is performed there exacerbating typical neglect? What if the programming of this play, and its reception, aren’t part of the solution, but part of the problem?

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I didn’t use to think about any of this. Then I saw Jess Thom, aka Tourettes Hero, perform Backstage in Biscuit Land, and everything that had been invisible to me – including my own unconscious discrimination – was suddenly pressingly present. The number of theatres in London (let alone the UK) that exclude wheelchair users. The miniscule proportion of performances that are relaxed. Wanting to support Jess, I’ve written a few times about the necessity of making theatre more accessible, most recently for Exeunt, a piece also partly inspired by Kirsty Sedgman’s vigorously argued book The Reasonable Audience, particularly this bit (which I’ve had to lift from the Exeunt piece while her book practises its invisibility trick):

“If only one disabled person is excluded from theatre, that is still a fundamental failure of social morality.” After all, “how can a place claim to be ‘public space’ if only certain subjectivities are afforded equitable access?” Theatre, Sedgman says, might transform “individuals” into “publics”, but: “what good is a public if not actually representative of the public?”

Neil McPherson, artistic director at the Finborough, does seem to have given these questions some thought. In an interview with the i paper, who contacted him for a news report with the headline “A disabled actor has to crawl up the theatre's stairs so she can perform her play” (and why isn’t that observation in any of the reviews?), McPherson says:

“We recently spent a great deal of time and not a little expense to source the only stair lift that would be practical within the confines of our 152 year old building, and made a funding application to have it installed. We are a registered charity but do not receive any public funding of any kind. Sadly, our application for a stair lift was turned down flat with no reason given by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.”

The thing is, it’s really easy to say that these things are someone else’s fault. We all do it – I do it. The problem I’m railing against is a collective one, that might be summarised as: “oh well, we tried, change is hard, so let’s carry on with business as usual”.

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I am tired of business as usual.

In 2011 I started blogging from a place of quiet hopefulness: that I might be able to write about work or people that were being ignored, looking from a different angle, shining a different light. That blog emerged with my own emergence, from a four-year period of disenchantment in which I saw almost no theatre, during which I felt that pretty much everything I was seeing was lying to me. By which I mean, lying about the way in which theatre brings people together to tell them something important about the world and humanity and this fraught fucking business of being alive.

This blog is different. It begins with me back in that place of disillusion, a bleak mood exacerbated by where we are politically, by terror and disgust at society shaped by fascist-leaning Conservatism, intractable racism and rising transphobia, but also by fury at the theatre industry specifically, its obstinate refusal to address systemic issues that define what is seen and by whom. And of course I know that there are individuals out there working hard to address these things: whether artistic directors like Annabel Turpin, community directors like Naomi Alexander, producers like Louise Blackwell, artists like Selina Thompson, critics like Bridget Minamore, independents like Lily Einhorn and Rajni Shah, or belligerents like Alan Lane (yes, that title is deliberate and intended to amuse). If these people were running the industry – running the world – we’d all be better off.

Despite their commitment and extraordinary work, the big overarching picture remains roughly the same. The past decade has seen incremental shifts for sure, with people like Jess Thom finding a national platform to campaign for change – but what I hear those voices saying time and again is: this is not enough. The changes are too slow and too timid and too small to make a meaningful dent in the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal power structures of British theatre.

I don’t say any of this like I’m not complicit. I am. There are small ways in which I try to make change (Theatre Club – email me if you don’t know what this is – is one of them), but there are much bigger ways in which I don’t bother. This is what complicity looks like in my case, how it plays out in my work and interactions with others: a lack of commitment that comes from not caring enough, a lack of compassion that comes from self-absorption, and a lack of rigour that results in intellectual dishonesty.

A new blog is so not the answer. And yet, as 2020 dawned I speed-read Megan Vaughan’s book Theatre Blogging and felt briefly, giddily enthused. In her introduction she writes: “I am not here to proclaim blogging the saviour of theatre. With its high prices, limited audience capacities, and concentration in a handful of wealthy Western cities, it is very possible that theatre cannot be saved. And any partial redemption will surely require a sea change in the way work is commissioned, funded and cast, plus mass resignations in its major venues and drama schools.” What she does argue, however, is that theatre blogging has “established the conditions in which new voices and perspectives could be heard, outmoded practices could be questioned, and fresh ideas and initiatives championed”.

So here I am. Cross and heart-sore but with sleeves rolled up, ready to try again.


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PS/update: Athena Stevens has written a response to this post ontwitter, which I haven’t been permitted to reprint in full here but please do read it. You can add to the list above of ways in which I’m complicit in the inertia that allows structural injustice to continue unimpeded “a lack of vigour that makes my work substantial as confetti that melts in water” - Athena’s phrase and, I think we can all agree, an exquisite one.

Athena’s thread mentions four articles lobbying the theatre industry to get its shit together on access, linking to this one in the Stage; the inews one is linked above, another is in the Guardian. There’s also this piece by Lyn Gardner talking about access with Jess Thom. Bring on the changes: they can't come soon enough.

 

 

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scattered thoughts of a busy fortnight 

 

In the fortnight after publishing the first post on here, I –

1.

held a class in theatre criticism with five students on an MA programme, looking at reviews of Scrounger, waiting until the end to tell them who the writers were or where they were published. It’s a super interesting way of thinking about criticism, because it quickly exposes the similarities in length, style and tone across newspaper, journal and online criticism: a surprising level of conformity. (The group thought six of the 11 reviews I gave them to read were published in newspapers; in fact it was only two.) We talked a lot about one review that took umbrage at there not being captions for Scrounger, how the writer probably thought they were standing up for access needs, but in fact came across as appallingly insensitive, criticising the disabled performer rather than the need for captioning across theatre. All of my insides squirmed, because Athena Stevens, creator and star of Scrounger, had called me out on twitter for making exactly the same mistake.

She was right to do so. There’s a lack of diligence in the argument I made in that first post: I’d intended to question the purpose of theatre criticism, and instead questioned the right of a theatre-maker to choose where to position their work for maximum impact; I’d intended to challenge theatre as an industry for perpetuating ableist architecture, but instead criticised a single theatre for programming work by a disabled artist; I’d intended to write about my own apathy, but in doing so diminished another’s vital act of protest. I’m grateful to Athena for taking the time to respond and to challenge the flaws and lapses of judgement in that writing, which opened up this space for me to reconsider.

At the same time, I note in Athena’s twitter thread her disdain for my “review”: her quote marks, intentionally scathing. It amuses me, because I wasn’t writing a review: I was writing about the social/cultural context around her work. The conformity of criticism across online and printed media alike narrows perceptions among readers of what a response to a piece of theatre should or could look like, a bias I’m committed to challenging and changing, same as Athena is committed to challenging and changing what finds a home on stage – the two endeavours intertwined.

2.

went to Devoted & Disgruntled, a big annual theatre gathering that I was going to miss this year on account of everything I wrote in that first post about being worse than disgruntled: disenchanted and disillusioned. (“Theatre-weary”, as one of the MA students put it.) In the garish orange book about parenting, therapist Philippa Perry advises people to “feel with not deal with”: to listen to problems, feel with them, but not attempt to compliment or hush them away. A D&D conversation led by producer Jo Mackie, on whether she could effect more positive change in the world by leaving theatre altogether, did exactly that “feeling with” my own theatre heart-ache, so tenderly I wanted to do a little cry. And when wonderful theatre-maker Aleasha Chaunte joined the discussion, and described the Humanise Community Film Club she’s set up in Liverpool, offering a film, a meal and a conversation to refugee groups (and general audiences who pay to attend), I actually did a big cry, overwhelmed with admiration and hope and a sense of connection. 

As I moved between conversations – and it really was an excellent D&D year, with discussions on fighting fascism and posh crisps as a symbol of the gentrification of theatre, both led by director Anna Himali Howard; on theatre that challenges oppression led by tiata fahodzi’s Nathalie Ibu; and on responses to climate change led by sustainability specialist Nina Klose – I started thinking about this blog, and my hopes for it. How I want it to be attentive to questions of accessibility and who is in the room (not just in the audience or on stage but across the entire team making the work); how I want to interrogate what I’m choosing to write about and how; and how I might be more transparent, whether about finances, troublesome biases, or where I’ve gone wrong.

I talked this through a bit with Lyn Gardner, particularly a nagging difficulty: that it’s hard to hold oneself to account without it becoming a judgement on others’ choices too. As an example: I think the theatre industry generally is not doing enough to ensure it’s fully accessible; I think I as a writer am not doing enough to demand that theatre is fully accessible – can I leave it at that, without turning that statement into an indictment on other writers? On recent evidence, apparently not. And maybe that’s fine: I’m a distant admirer of Sara Ahmed’s principle of feminist killjoy and being actively difficult. But it’s not like I’m some authority on social ethics, and any method of holding myself to account has to also account for the fact that I still have much to learn.

Last year I was interviewed by Verity Healey for this essay on theatre criticism, and she asked me whether I thought critics could sign up to a manifesto similar to that created by Milo Rau for NT Gent, an idea I found disorienting: me and Dominic Cavendish signing up to the same manifesto? I don’t think so. But maybe there’s another way. At D&D I started thinking that I could follow in the footsteps of theatre companies Action Hero and Sleep Dogs, and write an ethical policy or code or promise or pledge for this blog. Something to encourage me to think more deeply about the systems within which I’m complicit; something I can use to shape how this blog might be – in Slung Low’s excellent phrase – kind and useful in the ways it seeks change. It’ll take me a while to put together; this stands as a promise to make sure it gets done.

3.

wrote a rapturous review for Exeunt that almost says what I wanted to say but not quite. I wanted to think about the ways in which dancer/choreographers Louise Ahl and Julie Cunningham claim the (mostly white male) canon of classical ballet music for themselves, appropriating a status otherwise denied them. I wanted to say that Cunningham’s version of The Fire Bird felt huge, and in its hugeness oddly elusive to me. There’s a brilliant tweet by performance-maker Rachel Mars that gets much closer to its expansiveness than I could: “it’s proper dance,” she wrote, “with proper orchestral music and it’s also Freddie Mercury & queers posturing in smoking areas & gaykids trying to get out of forests & winky apple eating & then suddenly we’re all airborne”. A whole queer life and community and culture threaded in its steps.

And I wanted to say that Louise Ahl’s Lite Metle gave me eerie delighted flashbacks to a show I’d seen the week before at the Barbican, Child by Peeping Tom. It’s the third part in a trilogy by Peeping Tom also seen at the Barbican over the past couple of years, preceded by Father, my least favourite, a dour comedy set in an old people’s home; and Mother, which lives in my memory as a set of uncanny images: an art gallery that is also a morgue that is also a hospital, a recording studio glowing blood-spatter red, a naked statue that moves and breathes, a security guard who slurps through the wall, a body that drowns in the sound of water, a love affair with a coffee machine… altogether, a work of startling mystery and beauty.

Child didn’t quite inspire the giddy amazement of Mother but came close. The set is enormous, forest on one side, craggy rock on the other, and in between a grown-up pretending to be a child, initially in that slightly annoying way adults have of gurning and curving their shoulders and rucking a skirt to convey untidy smallness. She cycles on a too-small bike in the open space of the forest encountering scenes of unsettling, surrealist disturbance: a forest ranger who shoots a tourist at close range; a spiky deer with skittery stilettoed limbs who loses her head; a woman who pulls up a baby tree by its roots and feeds its tangled branches from her breast. At one point a crack in the rock bursts open and a series of pink-hued spiders pour out: naked humans scuttling crab-like, stomachs up and shoulders twist-jointed and rubber masks over their skulls repositioning faces at the backs of their heads. Gradually the child becomes overwhelmed by emotion – triggered not by shooting the tourist herself, again and sickeningly again, his body flipping like in a video game with every bullet, a sight she takes gruesome pleasure in; what actually triggers her is jealousy at the sight of another child with its caring parents – and she starts to wail: only in Peeping Tom’s heightened universe, the sound of tantrum is operatic, as in actually sung by a mezzo-soprano. An equation of exactitude.

At the end I bumped into Daniel Pitt, director of Chisenhale Dance Space, and we agreed that artists in the UK just don’t get the resources – of money or space or time – to make work at that kind of scale. Watching Louise Ahl, I thought about how there’s another resource denied to artists working here: belief that their work is ambitious or expansive enough to merit that material investment. It’s such a pernicious, diminishing assumption, and so much potential is thwarted by it.

A work can be small and still huge, holding within its span a whole queer world like Cunningham, or wild imagined new worlds like Ahl. It’s vital to appreciate that too. But what I wouldn’t give to see Ahl unleashed across a stage as big as the Barbican’s main theatre, her imagination unbound.

4.

went to Brighton for a bit of the New Queers on the Block weekender, to see Oozing Gloop’s Glooptopia and host a Theatre Club afterwards. New Queers on the Block are fantastic: based at the Marlborough Theatre in Brighton, they put proper funding into supporting queer artists to make new work, big work, brave work, and then supporting audiences to come see it, talk about it, and talk beyond it too.

This was the first time I’ve seen Oozing Gloop, self-styled “world’s leading green autistic drag queen”, and to be honest I was a bit apprehensive: all their promotion photos are loud and garish and make me feel very old and very normative. But within a few minutes of Glooptopia starting I was charmed and beaming. The utopia Gloop envisages – outlined on stage and in a ferociously yellow fanzine handed out during the show – is the commucratic revolution: commucracy to differentiate it from dictatorial Soviet-style communism and capitalist democracy alike. I mean, I have a few issues with details of process and vision, but sign me up basically. The thesis and concept are presented on stage through a lo-fi presentation of long words on big white sheets of card, like a craftivist powerpoint presentation, which could have been dry as fuck, only Gloop has their face painted green, wears an ornate hat marked M on one side and F the other, and runs through flamboyant costume changes with more panache than Cher performing at Wembley Arena (see the link: I know whereof I speak). It’s equal parts silliness and scouring social critique and sent me bouncing into Theatre Club with all the energy of a shaken bottle of lemonade threatening to pop its own lid off.

In the best possible way, the people who gathered for Theatre Club calmed my enthusiasm with a set of rigorous critiques that invited me to see the place of privilege from which I’d watched the show. For instance, one young woman described jolting at a phrase early in the work that conveyed a particular white carelessness towards people of colour; and an older woman, in the process of being diagnosed as autistic, talked about the speed of Gloop’s delivery and how difficult it was to process such an overwhelm of information at that pace. We talked about satire, the difference between satire that genuinely deconstructs and satire that unconsciously replicates, and about theatre as a space in which – to borrow the thinking of excellent artist Rajni Shah – ideas and difficult questions can be “laid before” an audience, who gather to listen without the imperative to speak or take action. If I hadn’t had to zoom for the late train back to London, we could have kept going til midnight.

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And now another fortnight has passed and this still isn’t posted and even though I had intended to keep the posts on here SHORT I’ll just add on another little bit, about Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, because I read it this week and am reeling. It’s one of those books I’d heard a lot about, thanks to people often name-checking it, but not heard anything specific about it, so roughly every three pages I boggled at the turn of narrative events. It’s told by Marian Leatherby, 92, toothless, with a gallant grey beard, unable to hear anything below a bellow until she’s gifted a hearing trumpet – a horn that welcomes sound in – by her similarly aged and seemingly decrepit friend Carmella. On sight Marian recognises the “infinite possibilities” of the horn, and while at first what she hears is the ordinary violence and selfishness of humanity, through it she slowly accesses another world, of magic and goddesses and furious anarchic politics. I sort of want to retype half the book, marvelling over individual phrases, the language is so exuberant and vivid and funny and the ideas so inventive and sly, but I’m going to limit myself to this slip of conversation between Marian and Carmella, towards the end of the story:

“It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves ‘Government!’ The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.”

“It has been going on for years,” I said. “And it only occurred to relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.”

“Men are very difficult to understand,” said Carmella. “Let’s hope they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would have to think for themselves, instead of always being told what to do and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen and parliaments.”

The whole book is written in this tone of butter-wouldn’t-melt innocence and eyebrow-raised perspicacity. It’s also whirlingly, waftingly poetic: to quote another favourite, bewildering line, to read it is like basking in “a mist of white ginger perfume which issued from the beak of an embalmed cuckoo”. Time collapses along with the structures of Western society, and the alternative Carrington offers, co-inhabited by crones and werewolves and swarming bees, is at once absurd, profoundly earnest, and infinitely preferable to how we live now. I think of The Hearing Trumpet as a manual for the future, to be consulted as oracle, bible, instructions for insurrection, and guide to survival as the environmental catastrophe unfolds.