states of deliquescence

how you do this is up to you

2012-02-27T23:36:00.004Z

[As you will probably work out when reading it, this post has taken me over a month to write. Add the fact that Open House – which was part of the first Transform season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse – happened in June 2011, and this is horrifyingly overdue. Apologies to Chris Goode: I really didn't expect it to take so long! And the deepest, truest thanks to Chris, Jonny, Theron, Tom and James for the welcome, the acceptance, the trust.]

Open House happened so many months ago that part of me questions the value in writing about it now, especially as Chris Goode did so, more eloquently and insightfully than I can, both in anticipation and retrospectively, over on Thompson's. But I've come to accept that it's a characteristic of this blog to be straggling along behind everybody else, even to enjoy the freedom I feel from the inexorable propulsion of theatre criticism, where the expectation is that you'll react to a show immediately then speed on to the next. My thoughts as I move from show to show are meandering and receptive to diversion, as themes and arguments are shared between them, or reflected in the films I'm watching or the books I'm reading or the art I'm seeing. It makes thinking about theatre a much less stuttery experience than it was when I was reviewing regularly. In any case, the second round of adventures with Chris Goode and Co is starting soon, and I wouldn't feel right embarking on that if I hadn't fully processed everything from round one.

So: my first impressions of arriving at Open House, West Yorkshire Playhouse, on Wednesday June 15, 2011, as I remember them in the cold glare of February, 2012. A weave of stairs and corridors to get to the rehearsal room. The resistant bulk of the door. Inside, a surprising brightness: the weather was stormy, the sky outside a burdensome grey, yet the rehearsal room felt spacious and light. Sheets of paper tacked haphazardly to the walls. Some quiet, absorbed activity close to a microphone: I can't remember how big the group was, but I think it was gathered around James Lewis, who was demonstrating how to fold, tuck, fold, turn, fold, open out, origami houses. Chairs, several. Small heaps of unmemorable clutter. Across the room, a low tent constructed from big sheets of white paper, two feet protruding from one side. (I later discovered they belonged to Theron Schmidt.) The tantalising sensation that the room, and everyone and everything in it, was waiting, for the minutes to tick, tick past, for a call to action. And, coursing through my veins, the excited but faintly neurotic feeling I've had when house-hunting, when you walk across a stranger's threshold and look at the rooms and the windows and the books on the walls and ask yourself: could I live here? Where might my stuff go? What do I need to do to insinuate myself into these rooms? Do I fit in?

I arrived at about 6pm, shortly before the first public showing of the company's work so far. The core team – Chris, Theron, James, Jonny Liron and Tom Frankland – had been there since Monday; the doors had been open to all throughout that time, but this was their first attempt at, not staging exactly, but re-creating something of their activity for seated spectators. Already the team had expanded to absorb visitor-performers; intriguingly, all of them were women. To my mild amusement, if no one else's, the core players appeared entirely wrong-footed by the audience beginning to pour into the room unannounced on the dot of 6.57pm, so they could be seated in time for a 7pm start. Such is the stuff of conventional theatre, concerned with rules and customs and established patterns of behaviour for performers and audiences: stuff that wasn't quite appropriate here.

I found the showing a little befuddling at first: enjoyable, but enigmatic. So much seemed to be happening with so few signposts. Possibly that says more about my residual love of narrative than it does about the showing itself, which was – and I'm not sure to what degree I appreciated this on the day, and to what degree I understand this in retrospect – clearly organised, neatly patterned with visibly demarcated threads of activity or thought. Storytelling coloured one set of threads: in particular, some of the joiners-in were given space to recount their impressions of the room. Theresa, who has been coming to see shows at WYP for years, is retired, and will take any excuse to get out of the house, said she felt out of her depth on arriving on Monday, and a bit scared to come back. But she had come back, promptly, every day since. She was critical, a little acerbic, but also admiring; I loved the way she said, faintly combatively: “I've come for the ideas.” All I remember about Kylie is that she was younger; from her speech I scribbled down these notes: “when walked into room shocked by how silent it was / intimidated – but friendly – can come in, join in with own stuff”.

More stories in the Blue Peter Badge strand: someone – James, or perhaps Tom – had genuinely earned a Blue Peter badge in their youth, and so the company whipped up several copies and distributed them, whether to random audience members or people who had been in the rehearsal room, I forget. Intermittently through the show, people stepped up to tell us about the special skill or remarkable deed for which they had/would have been awarded their badge. “For waving not drowning,” said one, delightfully.

Harder to grasp immediately was the poetry, partly because its delivery was less concerned with making the words audible and more with communicating sensation: confrontational, romantic, melancholy. For one piece, Chris invited us to listen while lying down; I lay on my stomach, so when – as prompted by the text – I should have been gazing up at imaginary stars, instead I was counting the dust motes on the floor, which, I fear, reveals more about me than I would care to admit.

For all that it perplexed me, I found the poetry very moving – and the final section of the showing even more so. It began with a song: the audience clustered together, peering over shoulders to see the lyrics, Chris apologising that he hadn't thought to write out more copies, because he hadn't anticipated a crowd. As instructed, we flexed our happy-face muscles and sang, an exuberant chorus. When it ended, we drifted back to our seats and, just briefly, felt a little lost, forlorn at our separation. But then Pauline, who had arrived in the rehearsal room that morning, started dancing: a simple, repetitive dance, a few steps, flittering fingers, a turn, no more. Members of the core group started dancing. Someone I didn't recognise started dancing. Theresa took a stranger's hand and beckoned him to join in. Theron stopped doing this dance and started doing other moves. Pauline and Jonny broke out, then slotted back in to the rhythm. I couldn't tell who had been in the rehearsal room earlier in the day or week and who had only just arrived to watch, who was audience and who was performer – because if such a division had even existed, it had just been eradicated.

The showing ended in a blur: Theron hurtling around the room, displacing people's bags and coats, before pushing the piano violently across the floor; Tom ripping posters from the wall and hurling them up elsewhere. A transformation was happening, but of/from what, to what? I didn't understand, didn't know how all the pieces fit together, what the connections were between the strands. But what I did understand, adore, was the generosity of the invitation to others, however long they had been in the room, to perform, with all the instilling of confidence and rejection of obstacles inherent in that invitation; the variety of voices – not just oral but physical – giving those performances; the electrifying sense that anything was possible and the tangible energy this generated. I felt part of a community, not of spectators watching makers, but a united group of theatre-lovers working together to make something happen, even if we didn't necessarily know what that something might be.

I spent a long time fretting that I had approached Open House back-to-front: I should have started with the rehearsal and ended with the showing. But again, that's custom, conditioning; the pervasive but spurious notion that it's a final product – let's call it the show unveiled on press night – that counts, not the journey to get there (let alone the journey a show might continue to take long after it's been reviewed). Halfway through the rehearsal on Thursday, I scribbled this in my notebook: “seeing retrospectively how the showing is a representation of what happened in the room – not so much a created thing as an agglomeration of movements and multiple creations”. To think of the showing as a final product is to approach Open House in the wrong spirit entirely.

A more useful thought is this: Open House was designed to be alive to chance. We want theatre to be alive – but anything living is constantly changing, so how do you allow for that mutability on stage? As in, night after night, so that the show is never a fixed entity but changes in accordance with the weather and the news and the people who walk through the door? (Coincidentally, I write this having just seen Uninvited Guests' extraordinary Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, which asks similar questions and finds astoundingly effective routes to an answer.) And how do you rehearse that liveness, that receptivity to chance and change? What are you doing in the room?

In a sense, Thursday was the perfect day to be in the rehearsal room, because the Wednesday showing had surpassed Chris and co's expectations – and now they had to repeat it. Or not. There was a tension in the room all day, between, as Theron explained to Pauline, “starting from scratch and showing something completely different, or being lazy and showing the same thing”. Much of that tension came from a place of tiredness, a muscle-ache of frustration with what Theron, again, described to Louisa, as they lay together on the floor, intimate as lovers, as “quite a demand – burden – in rehearsal to create SOMETHING”. It was assuaged with a lot of quiet, recuperative mooching and mulling. For minutes on end, nothing happened. Time passed and passed and passed. And then someone would move, and that would inspire someone else to move, and suddenly, breathtakingly, everything would happen.

For me, this was the most palpable tension in the room: the spine-tingling awareness that, any minute, the merest wisp of a thought might trigger an explosion of activity. It made me (and, I'm sure, other visitors) reluctant to walk out, even for a few minutes, for fear of missing anything. In my memory, music inspired a lot of that activity, be it Tom strumming aimlessly on a guitar or Theron putting on Sigur Ros and proceeding to read-rap lines from that day's paper as an accompaniment. (And – for someone who also writes about pop music – there was something particularly engrossing about Chris's later attempts to find the right piece of music to communicate with and draw out each action, witnessing for myself the changes in mood he achieved, for instance with Pauline's dance, by shifting the soundtrack from a jaunty but level pop song by the Coral to a more pulsing, quivering, soaring track by Orbital. There was a cherishable moment when he told the assembled group that he thought the Wedding Present were exactly what was needed for a proposed sequence of hurling across the floor on kneepads, and I was the only person nodding frantically in agreement, because I too have an indie-schmindie past – who am I kidding when I say past? – and I knew instantly he was right.)

The most mesmerising, exhilarating sequence of the day began with Jonny dancing, a jittery, tempestuous dance, to Bowie's Modern Love played at heart-pounding volume. As the music faded, James quietly narrated one of the pieces of text pinned to the wall (I think the one titled The Lover and the Revolutionary), while Theron, who had earlier divested himself of his jeans, transformed his trousers into a sculpture on the floor, folding and arranging them as though this, too, were origami. And then Theron held Jonny. They wrapped their limbs around each other so tightly, it was difficult to tell where each tangled body ended and began. Tom read from Thornton Wilder's Our Town (it was one of the inspiration pieces for Open House), finishing with the words: “You need to pass this on.” And then a word poem began, Jonny and Theron taking turns to contribute a single word: “blue-heart-like-blossom-in-spring-soft-as-a-fire-sky-like-grinning-heather”. It was strange, jagged, nonsensical, absorbing, beautiful. Tom transcribed their words, folded the piece of paper into an origami house, and James read out from it, the word-poem reconfigured into a new, random order. And on, and on, until they ran out of ideas, or their energy fizzled out, as though someone had pulled a plug.

Watching all this, it struck me that the core team shared a mindset, a thought process, that was, not private exactly, but particular to them, from which visitors – no matter how welcomed, how empowered to contribute – remained excluded. But the team rarely gave this difference open expression, and if they did it was when alone, checking in with each other after the showing, or before visitors arrived for the day's rehearsal. The rough notes I have about this weren't written at the time of speaking but of sudden remembering several hours later: “participation – but on our terms // something Tom talked about – still difficult, getting people to come into their world”. Their world was naked, mercurial, impetuous, rigorous, uninhibited, abandoned. Visitors were clearly comfortable creating their own work, trying out their own ideas; as the core team, one by one, left for lunch and returned, they marvelled at how the room seemed to have an energy of its own, such that they could walk away and things would still be created. Visitors had confidence, then, but only so much; by comparison with the core team they were diffident, cautious, contained. It's worth emphasising that this was simply something I noticed, and not something voiced in the room. What the core team did articulate, sweetly, with a perceptible note of awe, was admiration and supportive interest – particularly for Pauline's dance exercises, impulses and routines. And if that “participation – but on our terms” thought was spoken aloud in any way, it was probably like this: in another of my favourite sequences of the day, Theron buzzed hither and thither, impish and preoccupied, taping pieces of paper to the floor, to the wall, pushing the piano below the central beam so he could climb up to stick the last pieces there. Written on them was a message, communicated piecemeal, to be understood by anyone curious enough to follow their higgledy path: “How you do this is up to you.”

That curiously mobile piano became emblematic for me of another key feature of Open House: the fluidity of the space. Posters went up, fell down, were moved around; chairs were pushed against the wall, then tugged into a circle in the middle of the room. By the time Chris returned from lunch, the room had been reconfigured, redecorated. Individual personalities betrayed themselves in their interactions with the space, whether it was Theresa's incessant tidying, taking lunch plates back to the cafe and, more finically, moving posters back to what she felt to be their original positions, or Jonny throwing off his underpants, neglecting to put them back on when getting dressed again, and forgetting to pick them up for several hours. All small things, but all subtly affecting the perception of the people who entered there. And how vital, how heartening, that such extremes of personal approach could be simultaneously accommodated, that there was space for conservatism, even if it was, arguably, antithetical to the spirit of the room.

And me, what difference did I make being there, curled up like a small animal or squashed beneath chairs, failing always to melt into invisibility? It was piercingly odd, being still and silent in that room: I felt inimical. Not to the people: such was the atmosphere of gentle inclusivity, it was perfectly fine for visitors to sit and watch and not participate at all. It was the energy of the room I was denying, the tendrils of change and effect with a force of their own, which kept reaching out to me to take part, and which I kept pushing away. It wasn't until the end of my day, shortly before I had to leave for the train back home, that I got up and joined in, with a run-through of the dance that had whisked so many people to their feet the night before. The sense of relief and release in doing so was immense. Apart from that, my sole contribution was when Tom unexpectedly asked me to give him three words, words that had previously been spoken aloud in the room. What came immediately to my head were: “blue” (colour or mood?), “project” (noun or verb?) and “mystify”. As he skipped off to make something of them, I felt as though I had unconsciously exposed myself.

There was another time Tom came and sat with me, just for a chat, when he asked me what I was thinking. I told him the truth: I was wondering, for the umpteenth time that day, how someone would feel walking in for the first time. He asked what had prompted this thought: I suspected he assumed it was watching Jonny take off his clothes and stand naked, crushed, trembling, clutching his jeans to his face. But it wasn't that. That was action, demonstration, externalised thought. As Kylie had intimated the day before, it was the lengthy periods of quiet, of calm and self-absorption, when everyone in the room seemed to be reflecting, or recharging, or simply resting, that were really intimidating. This is how I'd written the thought in my notebook much earlier in the day:

how would someone feel walking in here for the first time?

Tom playing guitar

Theron quavery singing

Pauline making tape outlines on the floor

Jonny at the piano

baffling

strange

inconsequential

Theron locking Jonny into chairs

You couldn't slip into that scene without feeling like an intruder, feeling faintly voyeuristic. No, that's not it: you couldn't slip into that scene without having to encounter yourself. You could hear your heartbeat in that quiet, feel each thought shiver across your brain. With nothing to watch, no complicated action to absorb, you inevitably turn inwards. As mentioned in an earlier CG&C post, I thought a lot about courage while I was in Leeds: the courage it takes to let someone build a cage of chairs around you; to strip yourself of all the carapaces you grow to shield you from the world; to try out ideas knowing they might fail; to reveal yourself – I mean mentally, more than physically – in the company of strangers; to accept an invitation; to decide that something is not for you, however much you long for it to be. The periods of silence demanded more of that courage, because they gave you nowhere to hide.

Although the rehearsal felt largely chaotic, as with the showing, that chaos wasn't wholly unstructured (although Theron, I think, would have been happier if it the showing especially were more free-form – the phrase he used, delightfully, was along the lines of “in a constant state of jam”). Intermittently through the day, Chris held check-in sessions, to find out how everyone was feeling, what they wanted to explore or achieve. Each time there was an emphasis on liveness: a desire to create in the moment, so that what audiences saw could only have happened at that minute on that day in that room. There was conflict: over how to position the chairs, what risks were being taken by stepping in front of the audience, how noisy and obstreperous they should be and how much they should be holding the audience's hands. But it was the conflict of competing theatrical ideologies that I can't pretend to have comprehended sufficiently to represent here. In any case, what impressed itself upon me more wasn't disunity but the harmony made possible by the selflessness of all participants. Strikingly, in the later check-in sessions, when the group discussed ideas and actions that had emerged in the past few hours, no one spoke of their own work but passionately of everybody else's: Tom described how Theron had done this, Jonny related how James had done that. In the simplest, directest way it underscored how nothing in this piece was individual, everything was collective. The final check-in was devoted to sorting out a kind of set-list for that evening's showing. I had to leave for London an hour before it started, so didn't get to see how it played out, but Chris assured me later it was absolutely terrible.

Each day ended with the core group alone, without any of the new participants, decompressing, checking out. I was at the Wednesday check-out, and what I talked to the group about then is what I keep coming back to here. That incredible sense of community. That idea that anyone, at any point, could join in, could break away, could participate, could observe, and that every one of those decisions could be made autonomously, but with the profound understanding that it would affect the atmosphere and affect the group. How rare this is in the theatre. And the more I dwell on it, the more rare it seems outside of it, too.

I mean something quite particular by that. The final line in the song Chris wrote for us to sing went like this: “We all live every day in an open house.” I can't say the words made much of an impression at the time: they were cheerful but, you know, pretty anodyne. But the more I read through my notebook from those 24 hours, preparing to write this, the more those words reached out to me. To live in an open house. To reject competition, selfishness, secrecy, all the back-stabbing and hidden corruption of our world. To think more widely than the nuclear family, or indeed the extended family. To think about the implications of our actions within the home on the planet (my husband works in climate change, and has coherent and terrifying arguments for why behaviour within the home needs to change if human life is to be sustainable). To think about our responsibility for each other. Not occasionally, but every single day. The final moments of Open House made me cry, and it's taken a lot of digging to figure out what made them so emotional for me. It wasn't just the feeling of community, but the implication of what you can achieve with community. Change.

On my desk I have a (fake) Blue Peter badge. I got it for being part of Open House.

my head's in a haze

2012-01-26T22:21:00.005Z

You'd think I'd have Shrew out of my system by now, but apparently not. I wrote the last post much too quickly, hurling it out before moving on to the next thing, so it's super-scrappy and missed out whole strands of argument, many of which emerged in the comments on the piece in G2. The one that has particularly bugged me is the idea that Petruchio does Katherine a favour: he shows her that to treat people violently, to thrash out at others not necessarily indiscriminately, but as an externalised expression of your own self-loathing, is unacceptable and merely reinforces your own unhappiness. It's one thing for her to tie up her sister's hands and clout her: that's what siblings are for (spoken like a true older sister). But Kate also smashes a lute over Hortensio's head, is unable to express herself other than rudely, demands respect from her father while showing none. Lisa Dillon was good on this: she thinks what Katherine achieves with Petruchio is “a growth and a maturity. She's disgracefully immature to begin with. Most of the time she deserves what she gets [ie the epithets of shrew and mad], because she's fuelling it all the time. But she finds a place of balance, for the first time ever in her life, because of this man.”

Approach the play with this understanding and you can read Petruchio's violence completely differently: as a show, designed to make Katherine rethink her own behaviour. Nichola McAuliffe suggests (and I think she's right, that it's there, if subtly, in the text) that Petruchio's servants are bewildered by his erratic, pugnacious behaviour: he doesn't usually treat them this way, and the point of him doing so is to reflect Katherine back at herself. And it works: Katherine, in standing up for the servants, begins to appreciate the value of respect. She finds in herself calm, and patience, and a kind of gratitude: she realises how much in life she has taken for granted before now. If Petruchio has killed something in her, it's her toxic rage at the world – and only kindness could assuage that. There was something lovely Kathryn Hunter said: Katherine's story is “the journey of a person who's learned how to play again”. To begin with, “she's rebelling against the kind of constraints that are expected of her, to get married and to conform, she's hitting against that and is angry with everyone, to the extent that she's lost her sense of humour. I think something happens in their relationship, it suddenly clicks and she gets it back, and then she's able to love him and say, 'So you want me to play that game? OK, I'll play it.' She finds a freedom within constraints. She finds freedom.” It's the freedom of happiness and security; OK, it's the freedom of a traditionally structured marriage, where Petruchio is her “keeper”, but 400-odd years ago, that was pretty much the best a woman could hope for.

I'm starting to feel like Shrew is an itch that will never sufficiently be scratched. So I'm going to stop – although first, there was something else that came out of the piece that has troubled me a lot. The day it was published I had an email from Tim Crouch, querying the assumptions projected by my throwaway comment that Bailey's production is the third from the RSC in a decade, fourth if you count his adaptation for young people. We had both agreed, while chatting on the phone, that it was really sad that only Dominic Cavendish had reviewed his production, and that this was symptomatic of the lack of value placed on work for children and teenagers. And the way I'd phrased myself, it looked as though I was collaborating in the same devaluation that I usually bemoan. I've been feeling entirely ashamed of myself: I knew I was being glib even as I wrote it, and Tim was absolutely right to call me on it.

Believe it or not, I've been thinking about stuff other than Shrew over the past week. I've been mulling on L'Immediat, which I saw at the Barbican with Lyn Gardner, and probably really annoyed her with all my fidgeting. I found the show exhausting, really draining to watch. The first sequence – Matt Trueman made a point similar to this – is like the entirety of Michael Frayn's Noises Off condensed into 10 minutes of stomach-churning chaos. When one of the performers started scrambling up a tower of cardboard boxes that I hadn't even noticed, despite it reaching up to the lighting rig, I instinctively pushed myself right back into my chair to brace myself against its inevitable collapse. Where I disagree with Matt is in finding the rest of the show a deflation of that first sequence. What follows is quieter, but all the more desperate for it. There is an extraordinary, devastating scene when the cast attempt to re-set the stage, and someone's arm emerges from the rubble. It's as though we're seeing the survivor of an earthquake, or a bomb, reaching out for help, praying to be saved – but instead of pulling the person out, the rest of the cast merely shrug and pile furniture above the trapped body, higher and higher, until what they've created is a pyre (let's burn humanity at the stake!), a tower of landfill (see the detritus of materialism!), a curiously hopeful – because it is secure, this structure, it's architecturally sound – sculpture constructed from the flotsam and jetsam of our lives (not dissimilar to the exhilarating, and themselves farcical, creations of Phyllida Barlow). With newspapers full of images of the Costa Concordia lying on its side in the sea, it was hard to watch the tilting sequence – slowly, deliberately, everything on stage, furniture and bodies and black satin curtains and lights and props, is tilted to the same 30-degree angle – and not think of sinking ships. The agonising, funny in a toe-curling way, sketch of people fighting to reach a plastic bottle, struggling against their own refractory bodies, competing and losing and yet never allowing themselves to be defeated, had the clang of Beckett about it: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” For all its humanity, it's an oddly inhumane piece, furiously demanding of its performers, so precisely choreographed that you're loathe to blink in case you miss a detail, even if that detail exposes the fragility of the timing, the vulnerability of the enterprise. My exhaustion was that of undivided attention; I found it draining because, for all the laughter, it is a relentlessly sorrowful work.

It's been a good week for extracurricular activities, too. I've made an infinitesimally small leap – more of a nudge, really – towards finally fulfilling some sewing projects, with progress on the all-new basic pattern block, designed to fit perfectly my all-new, still surprising, occasionally demoralising, post-childbearing shape. I've tried out another basic, this one from the awe-inspiring Pattern Magic books, and my Mum, who is herself a magician with patterns, from a combination of experience and formidable instinct, gave me a hand with the fitting over Christmas. There is such quick, calm efficiency about her as she folds and creases the paper to shift the darts and eliminate excess fabric; the process is as delicate, transparent, yet mystifying, as origami. On Tuesday I cut out a toile from the edited pattern; if it fits then I'll be all set for the 40s/50s dress-making class that starts next term.

Tap class, which started three weeks ago, is unspeakably brilliant. I spend the entire time there giddy and grinning and glowing fuchsia-pink, partly because it's bloody hard and I'm always getting the steps wrong (I have no instant aptitude for intricate, particularly repetitive, body movements; I had the same problem trying to play guitar when I was a teenager, although back then I had no patience for practice, either: at least I've now acquired that), partly because it's surprisingly good exercise. My route home takes me past Crazy for You, which I saw in December: it was so adorable, cheerful and spirited and depression-defying (the narrative itself is, plus I had only just left the Actionettes), that I left feeling almost effervescent and started looking for tap classes the next day. Somewhat unfortunately, the route also takes me past the Delauney; I sidled in yesterday and am relieved to report that the coconut and pineapple dacquoise didn't taste quite as good as it looked: the pineapple puree was too sweet, and made the bottom layer of coconut macaroon soggy where it should have been crisp. There's still the cheesecake and the sachertorte to try before I dismiss the place outright, but chances are moderate that it won't become a weekly compulsion, which would be ruinous in more ways than one. It's bad enough that I can't go within 200 paces of Maison Bertaux without popping in for a macaroon. I did, however, exceedingly enjoy eating the dacquoise while waiting for the bus, licking every smudge of cream from my fingers, standing outside Boots, directly in front of a large advertisement for half-price weight-watching products. It's the little things in life …

Lots of musical activity this week, too. I finally listened to the new Andrew Bird and it's exquisite, so here's a song from that:

and the Laura Gibson album, La Grande: she's not someone I've paid much attention to before, but this song is brilliant, all shooting stars and Amazon queens and wild animals prowling through the undergrowth:

After a lot of avoiding him, because on first listen (several months ago) he honestly just seemed scary, I suddenly clicked with DM Stith, and had an especially heady moment with Fire of Birds, so here's that:

A breakthrough, too, with Wilco's The Whole Love, which I'd shaken hands with a couple of times last year, but hadn't taken the time to chat to: I don't think it will ever be a close friend like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Summerteeth, but we'll keep in touch.

Honestly, no wonder I was accused this week of knowing nothing about Motown. It's in the comments below my review of Martha Reeves, a show I really tried to be positive about, but failed. I suspected disaster might be afoot when I went to the toilets before the show began and there were leopard-print tiles on the walls. One unexpected consequence of reading How To Be a Woman is that I now have a disquieting desire for a leopard-print coat (page 215, number one on the list of fashion rules: Leopardskin is a neutral. Oh, the power of suggestion). I thought it was a vague fancy that could be easily silenced, but then I met up with the magical Betty Clarke and wore hers (vintage, an ebay buy, calf-length, very luxurious, but the fur was the softest, palest grey colour – I'd ruin it within minutes) and the desire became all-consuming. Of course, when a thought like that enters your brain, you become weirdly possessed (OK, maybe it's just me): now it seems everywhere I go I spot another one. Mostly they are too short, too straight, too modern-looking, so clearly I'm going to have to make my own. The picture I have in my mind is knee-length, fitted to the waist but flaring out, with a big, sweeping collar. I've sewn with leopard-print fake fur before, making a cave-woman frock for an Actionettes show in Benidorm (a multitude of don't asks), and it's blessedly easy, primarily because it doesn't fray. Knowing me, the coat will be ready just in time for summer in 2016.

Anyway, it was fine seeing leopard-print coats everywhere, but the minute I saw these leopard-print tiles I remembered that hilarious, terrifying riff in Mark O'Rowe's coruscating Howie the Rookie, about the – was it American Indian? South American? - people who believe that your death will be presaged by some vision that will inexorably present itself to you once, twice, thrice, its import unknown until death deals its fatal blow. Like I say, I'm susceptible – and the leopard-print tiles made me pause, and shiver, just slightly.

I won't repeat what I thought of Martha's singing, there's no need. Still, one good thing did come of that show. When she played Heatwave, it was all I could do to stop myself leaping out of my chair and doing what's affectionately known in the Actionettes' camp as the Brucie; when she started demonstrating the pony and the swim and the mashed potato and the funky chicken, my heart began to ache and wouldn't stop. The truth is, the past two months of not being an Actionette have been miserable, and they haven't even been doing that much. So, I've rejoined. Yay! In celebration, here is a completely ridiculous video of go-go girls: it's from a Greek film, whose name translates, splendidly, as Ah That's My Wife.

vanity project 5: the taming of the shrew

2012-01-18T00:09:00.002Z

Even at interview stage, I knew my piece for G2 on The Taming of the Shrew was going to strain at the limits of its word count and demand extra space here. There were so many contradictions to wade through and attempt to resolve; even people who seemed essentially to agree didn't agree in quite the same way. It's not a play I've seen in a major production, and although I'm sure I reviewed it on the fringe once for Time Out, I don't remember anything about that show. I re-read it a few days before starting to interview and initially struggled to see why it's considered such a problem, at least in terms of the characteristics deemed problematic: I couldn't see the brutality, the disgusting misogyny. The way Baptista favours one daughter over another is obviously repulsive, but that's about bad parenting, not the sanctity of the male hegemony. As I read on, however, lines kept snagging me: I simply didn't know which way to take them. Petruchio's capricious behaviour on his wedding day felt incomprehensible, as did his sleep/food deprivation plan. When Katherine tells him she will henceforth call the sun the moon, or any blessed thing he might choose, I couldn't tell if the voice I heard in my head was wry and amused or weary and resigned. And her final speech, reminding wives that they owe their husbands a duty of “love, fair looks and true obedience”, made me shiver. When I got married, the ceremony text was perfunctory and words such as obey were significantly absent. Katherine's speech may celebrate mutual respect, but it's a respect founded on, in Petruchio's words, a sense of the “awful rule and right supremacy” that put men at the head of the family and women at their feet.

Talking to people who have staged the play and played the roles exploded my idea of it wide open. I found myself in total sympathy with those who understand Shrew as a love story: an uneasy, inscrutable, passionate depiction of what it is to link your hand to someone else's and, no matter how much life buffets you, never let go. Something I wanted to get into the piece, but had to edit out at writing stage, was how even people who have performed in violent productions that present Petruchio as a misogynist felt unconvinced by that interpretation. Michelle Gomez, talking about Conall Morrison's contentious 2008 production for the RSC, said his reading “made sense to me academically and intellectually”, but also felt too emphatic in its relentless violence. “There has to be some humour injected into that dynamic between Kate and Petruchio and we worked very hard to take it out,” she said. “I think we were working against it – I think it's in there.”

Her words echoed what Tim Crouch (lovely, lovely Tim Crouch, whom I didn't even manage to fit into the finished piece) and David Farr said. Talking about that tricky sun and moon exchange, Tim said: “She decides to play with him, so they play together. I don't think she acquiesces: she joins in and that feels like they find an equality.” And on Kate's final speech: “To ironise it, or to deliver it as an act of coercion seems to go against the quality of the words.” Farr, too, felt: “If you go for the ending that is purely punitive and pessimistic, I think you're fighting an inherent spirit in the writing. If you just play the negative, ie she is now just a bullied subservient housewife figure, that may work intellectually but it's not what's actually happening emotionally.”

But what is actually happening? The fascinating thing is that, beyond the consensus that it's a love story, there is no proper consensus – and if some of the misogyny camp suspect they're bending the play one way, some of the love people confess they're bending it another. There was something Lucy Bailey said, when talking about how Petruchio dominates the second half, and Kate is constantly in reaction, that struck me: “If you played it just as it was on the page, the play would tip very quickly into all the difficult areas that people struggle with.” Edward Hall said much the same thing: if you play it as it is written, you get violence and you get misogyny and you get searing irony at the end; you do get love, too, but it's a Stockholm Syndrome love. My suspicion (and really, what the hell do I know?) is that what you don't get is any character growth, only stasis (Petruchio) and reduction (Katherine). Maybe we love-readers are just hopeless romantics, or maybe we think there's more to Shakespeare's characters than that.

For me, Tim Crouch summed up the problem with the misogyny-because-it's-on-the-page reading perfectly. He once played Petruchio himself, in America, in a production set in the Wild West; he was a man-with-no-name figure, the kind of shoot-a-guy-soon-as-look-at-him outsider that makes cowboy movies so compulsive. His treatment of Kate was “an act of subjugation” and her final speech was delivered through tears. What didn't work for him about this was that “the final speech got fixed absolutely, and I felt it lost its ambiguity. Everything became one note, and the note is subjugation, male supremacy and domination.” In the love reading, those notes are still played – but the music is more complicated, and much more intriguing.

Anyway, enough preamble. This is the piece I wrote, before I edited it to fit the word count, which was before the Guardian edited it to fit the page. It's a bit messy and no doubt benefited from the trim but at this stage there doesn't seem much point in trying to be a fraction less verbose. As an aside, another fantastic thing that came of writing this piece was locating the original “personal is political” essay from 1969 on the interweb, a thrilling essay that I should have looked up years ago.

A man acquires a rich but headstrong woman for his bride. At the wedding he punches the priest; afterwards he refuses to attend the family party. He drags his bewildered wife through mud to his country house, where he starves her, deprives her of sleep and contradicts every word she says. By the time they return to her father's home, the woman's spirit has been quashed: she is meek and submissive, ready to put her hand beneath her husband's foot.

When you strip The Taming of the Shrew of its comic sub-plot, in which a bevy of disguised lovers woo a charming social beauty, and focus on the bare bones of the story of wild-cat Katherine and her “tamer”, Petruchio, Shakespeare's early play looks like a nasty piece of work. Indeed, critics and academics have spent much of the past century denouncing it as barbarous, offensive and misogynistic. Yet Shrew is remarkably popular with audiences: the production opening in Stratford-upon-Avon this week is the Royal Shakespeare Company's third (fourth, if you count last year's adaptation for young audiences) in less than a decade. Either theatregoers are secret sadists, who like nothing better of an evening than to witness a spot of wife-bashing, or there's more to The Taming of the Shrew than meets the eye.

Over the past two decades, productions of the play have divided fairly neatly into two camps. On one side are the performances that emphasise the brutality of Kate and Petruchio's relationship. In this interpretation, The Taming of the Shrew can be considered, in director Edward Hall's words, “theatre of cruelty”. His all-male production in 2007 “followed the text through to its bitterest conclusion. Look at what Shakespeare has written: Kate is starved of sleep, beaten, refused food.” Too often, he argues, this abuse is played for laughs, when what should be being communicated is the extent of Katherine's suffering.

What exonerates the play for Hall is that he doesn't think Shakespeare was himself being misogynistic in his portrayal of female subjugation, but questioning the values of his patriarchal society. “He's challenging an audience's expectations of how a woman is supposed to behave. What if, as a human being, she doesn't want to roll over and do what the man wants, as was expected in Shakespeare's day? I actually think he's championing the woman's rights. He reminds us that we need to treat each other with respect.”

The other, less stomach-churning interpretation of Kate and Petruchio's relationship is that theirs is a deeply felt, curiously misunderstood love story. Lucy Bailey, who is directing the new RSC production, believes the attraction between the pair is instant, and what unfolds is “all foreplay to one event, which is to get these two people together into bed”. For this reading to work, Bailey says, it's vital that Petruchio never appears to be superior to Katherine. “In rehearsals the play quickly becomes odd if Petruchio starts to lecture, becomes the educator, or takes any moral position. It becomes punitive, and you start to think: 'This is dead and ghastly.' It is a fantastic battle of the sexes, in which Katherine must always win as well as Petruchio – and it's because they won't allow each other to win that the game continues.”

The trouble with the love-at-first-sight version is that it's even harder to understand why Petruchio should mistreat Katherine so. Gregory Doran, who directed the play for the RSC in 2003, suggests that Petruchio doesn't know how to handle their relationship, because he is as much of an outcast as Katherine is. He points out that both characters are frequently described as mad by the people around them: “Madness is a way that society can label you and put you in a bin. That's what Kate and Petruchio are struggling against – but they find somebody else in their bin. I don't think it's describing an ideal relationship, but it is a real relationship.”

Like Doran, director David Farr, who staged the play in 2002, shifting the setting to 1950s America, believes that Shakespeare offers a key to Petruchio's mental imbalance by telling us that his father has recently died. “Here is a man in grief,” says Farr, “who takes out his disaffection and anger with the world on other people almost as an experiment.” That idea of experimenting is crucial to David Caves, who is playing Petruchio in Bailey's production. He finds the classic characterisation of Petruchio as an innate bully abhorrent; he prefers to see Petruchio as a man whose pride is piqued by encountering a woman capable of outwitting him. “If he dishes something out to her, she dishes it back to him twice as bad. He's constantly having to improvise.”

Nichola McAuliffe, who has played Katherine twice and hopes to direct the play herself one day, believes we misread Petruchio's actions, because we don't understand his references to falconry. She points to Petruchio's key speech in which he relates how he will “kill a wife with kindness”, by depriving Katherine of sleep and food. It is, she argues, “a falconer's speech”: it describes how falcons and other birds of prey are socialised. “If you know anything about falconry, you would know that you have to go through this with the bird: if it's cruel, it's cruel to yourself, too.” Sure enough, Shakespeare gives the impression that it is Petruchio himself keeping Katherine awake – and when she doesn't eat, he doesn't either.

There remains a difficulty in these “torture” scenes: Katharine barely speaks, whereas Petruchio never shuts up. According to Lisa Dillon, who plays Katherine in Bailey's production, this is what makes sense of Katherine's long final speech, in which she advises wives to be gentle towards their husbands. “If you look at the language she uses, all the way into the second half, it's odd,” says Dillon. “The verse is staccato, there's lots of saying 'what?' and 'why?' to people. You get the feeling that nobody ever listens to her. But Petruchio gives her the power of speech and language: he gives her proper freedom to speak. That is not a woman being crushed.”

What's so appealing about the love interpretation is that Shrew becomes, not a sappy romance, but a more complex critique of society and attitudes to women, which were changing in Shakespeare's time and have continued to change ever since. Bailey and Dillon argue that Katherine is rescued by Petruchio: so censured was her unfeminine boldness that if she didn't marry him, says Dillon, “she would go from shrew to witch and end her days as a madwoman. He saves her from herself, and from a structured society in which she's never going to change.”

Kathryn Hunter, who played Katherine at the Globe in 2003, says what rankled about the character was that “her father was going to marry her off after a single interview”. For McAuliffe, too, it is the bartering of daughters that looks really misogynistic in the play. Katherine's sister, Bianca, is so popular that their father, Baptista, is able to pit her suitors against each other, promising her hand to the man who has most to offer financially. And, as a portrait of womanhood, spirited Katherine is far preferable to flirty, wily Bianca. As Michelle Gomez, who played Katherine for the RSC in 2008, puts it: “Bianca is the manipulative, backstabbing, awful version of what women are, fluttering her eyelids to get what she wants. She gives women a very bad name.”

One of the abiding tenets of 20th-century feminism was that the personal is political. Perhaps what's so difficult for modern feminist audiences of The Taming of the Shrew is remembering that, in this play, the personal is just personal. Katherine's final speech, says Bailey, “is a love gift. It's so clarifying: out of the chaos and small-mindedness of this town that suffocates both of them, Kate and Petruchio invent a way forward that's entirely for themselves. She's not talking about other people, she wouldn't behave like this if she were married to anyone else. She behaves like this at this moment with him. That's why it's wrong to mix it up with a weird sexual political statement: it's a personal statement.”

Not only that, says McAuliffe, but it's a recognisable statement. “When she says, I'll put my hand under your foot, that's basically what I say to my husband: I will put my hand under your foot if you want – but I trust you not to ask me to.” Shrew, she says, is a warts-and-all portrait of how a marriage works: “You make room for each other, you fit their holes and they fit yours. Yes, they drive you potty – but that's between you two, you are a united front. That's what Kate and Petruchio learn. They are one person by the end, like a falconer with his bird.”

child's play

2012-01-11T22:02:00.002Z

I've had a glimmer of a crush on Joe Penhall for years now; I can't remember what started it, but it certainly flared when I commissioned him to interview Sam Shepard in 2006. Which was just as well, because he also infuriated me over that piece: in an outrageous display of egoism he insisted on being put up in the Chelsea Hotel (as far as I could tell, a budget hotel only by the reckoning of those who cheerfully smash guitars worth several hundred pounds night after night), possibly even on flying above economy class, making his expense claim insane. But it was worth it, because the piece itself was perfection, whip-sharp, passionate and illuminating.

The embers of that crush glow whenever I hear Giddy Stratospheres by the Long Blondes (conversations about work with Penhall invariably veered to music at some point; the Chelsea Hotel incident heightened my suspicion that there's a frustrated rock star locked inside that man), and they were fanned again when I saw Haunted Child listed in the Royal Court's winter season. I have vivid snapshots in my head of Blue/Orange and particularly Some Voices, which I caught up with in the beautiful revival that was at the Young Vic in 2004, so had high hopes for this new one, hopes I started dismantling once the middling reviews came out.

I finally saw Haunted Child a few nights ago, and have mixed feelings about it myself. On the one hand, I thought whole swathes of it were ridiculous. There's far too much exposition, hammering home a point that is abundantly clear throughout: that Douglas, the errant father who returns to his family home bedraggled and missing his four front teeth, has been brainwashed by a freakish quasi-religious cult. The acting was weirdly uneven: Sophie Okonedo as the abandoned wife and Ben Daniels as the deluded evangelist were exhilaratingly good together, her thrumming with tension, him brightly intense, but with the child actor frequently slipped off-key. And I was never quite sure what was happening with the child, whether he was really as disturbed as his mother, Julie, kept telling us.

But on the other hand, I was undeniably gripped by it. The line that sank a hook into me came almost at the beginning: when the child, Thomas, says to his mother he wouldn't mind dying to be with his (presumed dead) father, because: “if we're just going to die anyway, what's the point?” It's every parent's terror, surely, to have your child confront you with that question. Would I even know how to answer it? Julie, I note, doesn't answer it: she brushes it away, smothers it in a cuddle. What a terrible abdication of responsibility on her part.

What interests me about the play is that, on the surface, Julie's rationalism, pragmatism, acceptance that life is a muddle and sometimes the best you can do is simply get by, seems like the “right” way to live. But while it allows her to puncture Douglas's fevered and increasingly ridiculous visions of a more spiritual future with delicious wit, her approach to life never comes across as altogether satisfactory, either. Why should we just get on with the way things are? Why shouldn't we strain and fight for something other than a job in an office and fixing up the house? Shouldn't there be more to life? What, exactly, is the point?

As Matt Trueman identifies in his review, it's not so much an existential crisis that engorges this couple as a political one: they're trapped in a (capitalist, selfish, materialistic, aggressive, Conservative) society, which has built up over decades, centuries, perhaps (as my husband would argue) since man evolved, yet is neither healthy nor beneficial, except perhaps for the very few. Something else needs to be built, and I don't think Penhall believes for a moment that spirituality provides either succour or solutions: religion, or at least Christianity, has always tolerated, created excuses for, materialism and the consequent social inequality. The picture of spirituality Penhall offers us might be deliberately extreme to the point of appearing stupid, but to a non-believer, how far is it really from the tenets of more conventional and accepted religions? Over Christmas in Cyprus with my parents, my Mum (who believes in something, a force in the universe, but not the God described in the Bible) related with some disgust the intricate rules about what Greek Orthodox followers are allowed to eat in the several weeks before Christmas and Easter: meat on these days, fish on these days, abstinence of this and that on those days. From that to drinking a bucket of salt water to purify the soul, as indoctrinated Douglas does, isn't such a great leap, if you ask me.

It's not spirituality Penhall thinks we need, but an alternative social order – the trouble is, the present modus operandi is so embedded in the collective psyche, even thinking up a plausible alternative seems impossible, let alone instituting one. Just before Christmas, I saw Mike Bartlett's 13 at the National, a production far more buzzy and electrified and current than Haunted Child, but equally less involving: there was too much of the perennial student about scruffy prophet John for his popularity to be convincing, and the entire second half felt like a university debate. As John, Trystan Gravelle was magnetic, so still and soft and reasonable you felt inexorably drawn to him, mesmerised by him, but nothing his character said persuaded nearly as much as the fiercely eloquent key speech from the Tory prime minister, about why – despite her liberal core – she joined forces with the Conservatives. Annoyingly, I deleted the copy of the script from my inbox, so can't quote it verbatim, but at the root of it was a belief in hard work, in human ambition, in our ability to change lives, our own and others'. In retrospect, it reminded me of a piece Philip Pullman wrote in the Guardian in 2005 (and I'll bet rather a lot that Bartlett, avid Guardian reader that he is, either clipped it out and kept it on file or, like me, has it tattooed on his memory) about the conservative-with-a-small-c social values he longed to see championed by a government, any government, even a Tory government. Much as John, and through him Bartlett, seemed to be advocating “belief” in this play, ultimately what Bartlett most effectively communicates is that we should be putting our faith not in some spurious numinous spiritual force but in the possibility of creating a new way of living that doesn't feel toxic, even if it is, to some degree, the old way of living.

Preoccupied to the point of unhealthy fixation with these questions that have no answers as I am, I glimpse hope where I can. On the weekend I read my daughter a book we picked up in the library called Three by the Sea, by the astoundingly brilliant author/illustrator Mini Grey. It's about a dog, a cat and a mouse who live in splendid isolation in a beach hut, where dog does the gardening (bones protrude from the ground), cat does the housework (a quick zip round the house followed by a nice long nap) and mouse is in charge of the cooking (cheese fondue for everyone!). They're perfectly happy, until a stranger from the Winds of Change Trading Company blows in, and through a series of insinuations poisons the trio with discontent. He's a crafty fox, and before long manages to steal their boat, but that's, rather wonderfully, by the by. What fox makes the three realise is that if they thought a little more about each other, shared their toil, co-operated more, their lives could be richer and happier. It's the pared-back, child-pure version of that philanthropic, humanist vision Pullman conjured up: how much better life would be, if only we were all a bit less bloody selfish.

sometimes it's hard to be a woman

2012-01-02T22:58:00.003Z

When I saw Jumpy (April De Angelis, Royal Court), early in November, I fully intended to write about it here, but – as ever – time and deadlines and small children and myriad tedious minutiae intervened. Instead I had a good rant about it with a friend who shared my misgivings and thought I might leave it at that. But then, unexpectedly and in passing, I had a conversation about it with another friend just before Christmas, and was fired up all over again. She loved the play, in a feel-good, Saturday-night-show kind of way, but the thing she said about it that made my heart go cold was this: “It made me worry about my neck.”

Jumpy revolves around a woman called Hilary, a committed feminist who cherishes memories of protesting at Greenham Common and works in adult literacy; a worthy, idealistic, liberal sort who is pushed to the edge by the stresses of turning 50 and the belligerent, capricious behaviour of her obnoxious teenage daughter. On the plus side: Hilary was played by Tamsin Greig. Swoon! On the down side, to be brutally honest, was just about everything else.

No, let's be fair. While the audience around me rocked with laughter, I watched Jumpy through a fog of depression: my daughter is only four, but I already have to deal with the same arguments about clothes, the same fierce desire for independence, the same tantrums and stubbornness and flouncing and refusal to listen to reason that Hilary encounters from her daughter, Tilly, and Tilly is 15. Do I want to fight this war for another decade and more? De Angelis's acute portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship makes my future look relentlessly grim.

It took a day or two for that gloom to clear, and that was when I started asking questions about the play. Why is Hilary so ineffectual? Why is she so timorous regarding abortion? Why are the other adult female characters polarised caricatures of sexual voracity and frigidity? Why are we presented with a smart, inquiring, politicised woman, only to see her become obsessed with her own sexual attractiveness, mind-addled by empty flattery? Where's the feminism in all this?

Perhaps – like Caroline McGinn, whose Time Out review is impeccably judged – I freighted Jumpy with too much expectation. As it happened, in the week that I saw the play I was in a particularly uncompromising mindset, sharpened by reading two feminist books simultaneously: Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (I'm taking this one slowly, savouring it) and Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman. I had problems with the latter: Caitlin says in the acknowledgements that she wrote it in “an urgent, five-month blur”, and it really shows. The book is catalogued as humour first, feminism second, so maybe it's unfair to expect crisp and rigorous argument from her, but a lot of her reasoning – particularly in what might have been key chapters, on fat/body issues, and why it's OK not to have children, and how to deal with sexism – is sloppy, unresolved and curiously unconvincing. It's frustrating, partly because I didn't have the compensating pleasure of finding her jokes funny (good God that sounds bitchy), partly because when her breezy, sardonic prose is ignited by deep-in-the-gut anger, particularly at the abhorrent influence of porn on women's body image and the idiocy of pubic waxing, she comes across as pretty sage. I read most of it thinking: I'm too old for this – which was weird, as she and I are almost exactly the same age. What I mean is that it feels mostly like a first primer in feminism for girls: already I'm planning to put my copy on my daughter's bedside table when she's, I don't know, 10 or 11, if only so she can discover what a waste of time and resources boys and Brazilian waxes and fashion magazines are from someone other than me. I might, however, have to score out the sentence: “Childbirth gives a woman a gigantic set of balls.” I thought the line was mildly absurd, but a friend (who doesn't have children) found it positively offensive: women without children are not deficient in boldness or bravery, and what woman wants a gigantic set of balls, anyway?

If Caitlin's book is like a three-hour gossip on the phone between teenagers, Adrienne Rich's is a calm, generous lecture from a wise-woman to her disciples. Her prose, plain yet teeming like a handful of fresh earth, pulses with knowledge: knowledge she gleans from nature, her own body, the shifting mysteries of the moon (it's a very 1970s book); and from evidently scrupulous but lightly worn research. Reading it makes me feel serene, because she has felt some of what I feel, asked some of the same questions about ignominious social forces and found out some possible answers; and furious at the centuries of degradation of women's experience, intelligence, feelings and abilities that she details. Here she is, clear-eyed and judicious, slicing through the sentimental mush that swathes the very idea of motherhood:

The physical and psychic weight of responsibility on the woman with children is by far the heaviest of social burdens. It cannot be compared with slavery of sweated labor because the emotional bonds between a woman and her children make her vulnerable in ways which the forced laborer does not know; he can hate and fear his boss or master, loathe the toil; dream of revolt or of becoming a boss; the woman with children is a prey to far more complicated, subversive feelings. Love and anger can exist concurrently; anger at the conditions of motherhood can become translated into anger at the child, along with the fear that we are not “loving”; grief at all we cannot do for our children in a society so inadequate to meet human needs becomes translated into guilt and self-laceration. This “powerless responsibility” … is a heavier burden even than providing a living – which so many mothers have done, and do, simultaneously with mothering – because it is recognised in some quarters, at least, that economic forces, political oppression, lie behind poverty and unemployment; but the mother's very character, her status as a woman, are in question if she has “failed” her children.

It's the generosity of Rich's thought, her consideration of the experience not just of white middle-class women but women of different nationalities and ethnicities and social classes and periods of history, that make this book so vital. I feel challenged by her scepticism of socialism and other patriarchal utopian ideals, inspired by her commitment to the goal of social change despite the centuries of conditioning that must first be overturned. She makes me think, think hard, about the ways I might contribute to effecting that change.

De Angelis' Hilary has spent her life trying to make those contributions, too: De Angelis signals as much in the character's wistful references to Greenham, in her choice of work, in her even-handed attempts to bring up her daughter Tilly as a thinking, conscientious, self-respecting woman. Tilly is at once the apotheosis and the antithesis of feminist hope: she has freedom of choice, but most of the choices we witness her making – the ridiculous heels in which she can't actually walk, the ogling of footballers, the easy censure of perfectly normal female bodies – suggest dispiritingly that capitalist media have won where her mother and, by extension, old-fashioned feminism have failed.

Is De Angelis dramatising the arguments that surround feminism, the fear/criticism that the various movements of the past several decades haven't achieved enough, haven't inspired genuine change? Or is she voicing that criticism herself? It's hard to tell, because the play – like Hilary – lacks the courage of its convictions either way. Hilary says all sorts of right-on things: she denounces plastic surgery as a death-trap, life without the pill as medieval, burlesque as middle-class stripping (what a po-faced attitude that one is). But when it seems her daughter is pregnant, she organises a “conference”, attended by Tilly's single-teenage-mum best friend, ostensibly to help Tilly to decide what to do, yet shows no ability to guide her daughter or, importantly, to talk about abortion openly and fearlessly. And faced with emotional crisis, Hilary does the dramatically conventional thing: she rejects her husband, snogs her daughter's boyfriend's father, then has sex with her daughter's next boyfriend. It's not so much that the plot is beneath her, but beneath me: this is the stuff of trashy magazines, magazines I gave up reading years ago.

My friend David asked a pertinent question when, fug clearing, I told him about the play: does it show the trap, or is it the trap? Does it demonstrate what capitalism, the media, institutional patriarchy do to vulnerable women, or does it do those things itself? I would argue the latter. Caitlin Moran, in one of her more common-sense moments in How To Be a Woman, makes a useful suggestion: when uncertain whether something constitutes sexism, one should ask, are the men doing it too? Hilary's crisis is matched, indeed fuelled, by that of Tilly's boyfriend's father – but when they kiss, it's because he makes it happen, and when she doesn't see him for weeks, it's because he discovers Buddhism and achieves a modicum of dignity and empathy. Hilary's crisis is also mirrored by that of her (childless) friend Frances, who deals with it in forthright fashion: by creating and performing an amateur burlesque routine. The rest of the audience found it hilarious, but to me, this scene was excruciating: the way it's staged, Frances loses all dignity. She has no self-awareness, no idea just how foolish she appears.

The text simply says the routine is challenging and unfinished, and, as ever, I find it impossible to distinguish between what De Angelis intended by it and what was projected by the direction and performance. But the scene on stage encapsulated everything that irritated me about Jumpy. Rather than stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its female characters, the play diminishes and trivialises them. It niggles at ageing women and refuses them the grace of self-acceptance. Writing about it, I make it sound as though it's stripping the veneer of confidence and bravery from modern women, but I didn't get the impression that that was what it was doing when watching it. It felt as though De Angelis was simply doing what most other modern media do: making women feel inadequate. We already have adverts, newspaper articles, celebrity photographers, fashion designers, high street shops, and on and on, making women worry about their necks. Do we really want theatre doing it, too?

I've been tinkering away on the above for the past fortnight, and it feels like a horribly curmudgeonly way to bring in the new year. Progress was hampered by the making of umpteen mince pies, finally seeing – and being totally mesmerised by – The Red Shoes, and also by an idiotic accident a week ago, when I nearly sliced off a fingertip while trying to cut into a recalcitrant pomegranate. Even though I know in my own soul how strong a hold the Orthodox religion has on Cypriot identity, I was still startled to see gold-leaf icons on the walls in the A&E room in the new hospital outside Limassol. I had another, happier kitchen accident with a jar of mincemeat that my Auntie Tina left in Cyprus last year: instead of turning it into yet more pies, I experimented with using it as the foundation for a cake. Thankfully, I baked it in a loaf tin, because as a cake it was a bit odd, but as less sticky sort-of malt loaf toasted and generously buttered it made an exceedingly good breakfast. So here's the recipe: a small offering that doesn't quite excuse all the sniping above, but at least starts the year on a less antagonistic note.

Mincemeat loaf

500g mincemeat

250g plain flour

3 tsp baking powder

4 eggs, separated

I started out assuming that there would be enough fat and sweetness in the mincemeat so more wouldn't be required; in the event the finished loaf was a bit dry, so possibly some melted butter could be added at the beginning, too. But that's what I didn't do. What I did do was beat the egg yolks into the mincemeat, then stir in the flour and baking powder. Then I whisked the egg whites to firm peaks, loosened the mincemeat mixture with two big tablespoons of the egg white, then folded the rest of the whites in gently. I then tipped it all into a 2lb loaf tin that I'd lined with baking parchment and baked it at gas 4/180 for maybe 50 minutes or an hour. After it had cooled I kept it well wrapped in a couple of tea-towels (but would have used tupperware if all Mum's boxes hadn't been full of Christmas leftovers) and it was still toasting deliciously five days later.

long after tonight is all over

2011-12-16T23:31:00.004Z

Jimmy Stewart, an anthropologist from Mars, analyses love and happiness in humans (and rabbits). Who could resist a title like that? OK, maybe if you don't know who Jimmy Stewart is: I met two people at BAC last night who hadn't a clue, which made me feel horribly old. Jimmy Stewart! It's a Wonderful Life: he's so disillusioned, so tired of life's burdens, he considers suicide, so an angel called Clarence comes to earth and shows him how the world would look if he actually went ahead with it, makes him appreciate all the big and tiny differences he makes to people's lives (it's a romance, so Stewart's character is humbled and awed, rather than crushed by the weight of responsibility). The Philadelphia Story: he's the soft-nosed newspaper reporter who wants to be a novelist, caught between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who has a drunken fling with the rich girl and almost misses out on his own true love. Harvey: he's a bumbling alcoholic whose best friend is a six-foot-tall rabbit that no one else can see, whose every waking act radiates his firm belief in the value of kindness, politeness and generosity. The Shop Around the Corner: an obscurer one this, and one of my favourite films ever, a love story set in Budapest, exquisitely directed by Ernst Lubitsch, about two shop assistants who snipe at each other constantly, unaware that each one is the anonymous pen friend to whom they write idealistic, intellectual, courtly love letters. And that's just the fluff (relatively speaking). Vertigo, Rear Window, Anatomy of a Murder, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – perfect in every one.

Tassos Stevens isn't much like Jimmy Stewart to look at: he's big and beardy, like a friendly bear (Addis Berner Bear, maybe). He has a hat like one Stewart might have worn, though: more on that later. He's also spent considerably longer dissecting what makes Stewart brilliant than I have: I've always been too preoccupied by adoring him to form any more high-minded thoughts. All this is slightly by the by, because while Tassos is sort of playing Jimmy Stewart in this show, he isn't really: he's riffing on Stewart's “everyman” reputation, considering what it is to reflect society while at the same time seeming somewhat apart from it, mysterious and remote. His Stewart is from Mars – because that's where men are from, aren't they? And if he can't find his way home, he needs to find a way to settle on Earth. How do humans settle? How do we find our place in the world? For most of us – or is it just for the super-lucky? - it happens through love.

By happy coincidence, I saw Jimmy Stewart... in the same week that I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about The Taming of the Shrew. The multiplicity of perspectives on this play is daunting: is it inherently misogynistic, or is that an interpretation imposed on the text? Is the relationship between Kate and Petruchio abusive or transformative, sadistic/masochistic or mutually supportive? Is their love damaged, or just different? It is impossible to know, or understand, because their relationship – like all relationships – is unique, and comprehensible only from within.

Tassos's Jimmy Stewart, however, wants to understand. He's listened to pop songs and begun to recognise the difference between “love” and “in love” (oh I've had trouble with that one in my time – and listening to pop songs, particularly from the 1950s and 60s, was instructional and ruinous in roughly equal measure). He talks to rabbits and people in bars and discovers that love's meaning isn't general or universal but singular, personal, individual. He pulls out of his hat – no, silly, not a rabbit – a pile of index cards on which we and people who have seen the show before us have defined, if only briefly, what love means. Some describe romantic incidents, and some mention love for their children. Some quote from pop songs, and some sound confused. Their words are luminous, fiery, acute. The poignancy of this sharing with strangers is immense.

This is such a magical show: tender, questioning, hopeful and sad. I was quiet watching it, because there were just three of us with Tassos, nestled round a wood stove in a drawing room at BAC (a room that, in my other life, I know as a buggy park from when I take my kids to the Bee's Knees playspace), and although I was spellbound from first word to last, I felt slightly too self-conscious to react too visibly. But in the hours since seeing it I've been laughing (the faintly autistic measurement of love in units of Chaka is unspeakably genius), marvelling, shivering slightly, most of all thinking: of the times I have felt, and still feel, “in love”, of the intensity of my love for my children, and how I would never actually define “love” as love for them, but love for my husband, of the ebb and flow of that love, its fragility and durability. And I know, know absolutely, that every time I hear You Always Hurt the One You Love (Taming of the Shrew again!) or Roy Orbison sing In Dreams, or Chaka Khan's I Feel For You, I'll be transported right back to BAC and Tassos's side.

And for those who don't know, the title comes from this song by Irma Thomas, one of the most romantic expressions of explosive falling-in-love as shooting-for-Mars that pop music has ever produced:

scratching at the surface of ontroerend goed

2011-12-09T09:40:00.003Z

Note for anyone who hasn't seen Audience and is planning to attend the run at Soho: please be aware that I give away heaps about the show, so if you want to go in completely fresh, don't read this until after you've seen it. Thanks!

What a slippery bunch of people Ontroerend Goed are. Before I met up with their artistic director, Alexander Devriendt, I was warned to beware: he's an arch seducer, who would fix me with his soulful brown eyes and hypnotise me. I left the interview secure in the knowledge that I was immune to his charms, and wondering idly whether his eyes perhaps weren't brown but hazel-green.

I haven't seen all of their work, for two reasons: they arrived in the UK while I was distracted by pregnancy and the implacable demands of small children; plus their shows required a level of audience participation that made me shrink. I'm mostly too fearful a theatre-goer (and, more consistently, too much of a control freak) to submit to being bound, blindfolded and steered around in a wheelchair, as you are in The Smile Off Your Face, too gullible to risk the sweet-talk of Internal.

So it wasn't until 2010, and the run of Teenage Riot in Edinburgh, that I caught up with, if not OG, at least Devriendt. And I hated Teenage Riot, so much so that I wrote a post-script to Lyn Gardner's review detailing everything I felt to be wrong with the show. What infuriated and saddened me was the sexism, the MTV-fuelled vision of women as semi-clad playthings and anorexics, and the teenagers' willingness to promote that vision. Even when they spat in the face of the audience for “creating” this sexualised adult culture, or appeared to be rejecting it, they did so in a fashion that merely underscored their acceptance. When two of the girls started to give earnest advice on how not to gain weight, I thought of all the teenagers watching who might go home and put their tips into action, and wanted to scream. This was the gender status quo masquerading as audacious subversion, and I wanted nothing to do with it. (Recently I unearthed Matt Trueman's typically penetrating review of the show on Carousel of Fantasies and began to see the shortcomings in my bridling response, but that's another story.)

It was that disappointment, more than apprehension, that disinclined me to engage with OG until the second incarnation of BAC's One-on-One festivals earlier this year. What persuaded me was word-of-mouth at the first One-on-One: anyone who took part in A Game of You talked about it with a huge grin on their face, and declared it the hit of the night. Perhaps inevitably, part of me was disappointed again when I finally joined in – although less by the show itself than my involvement in it. I didn't give myself to it; I was reserved, reluctant to speak.

Some of that was down to mental discomfort: throughout I felt watched and judged. You enter and sit in a cramped and stifling curtained space, facing an empty glass jug and an oversized mirror that – I intuitively knew – conceals people sitting behind it. When a man came in and began talking to me, I barely said a word. If I remember rightly, in the next room I had to watch and discuss a recording of myself in front of the mirror. My response to each question was evasive: I didn't want anything I said to be used against me, so I kept as much as I could to myself. Further along, I watched another performer impersonate me while I sat behind the mirror of the first room, and the incompleteness of the taciturn character I saw made me feel oddly wistful.

At the heart of all this naval-gazing is another room, possibly the most interesting and excruciating of the whole scenario. Here I watched a recording of another audience member sitting in the first room. The performer who sat with me asked what I thought she did for a living, about her personal life, what I thought her house was like. Answering the questions, I felt painfully divided. On the one hand, how could I possibly know anything about this woman? All I could do was construct wayward surmises from her appearance, which seemed an absurd, even malicious thing to do. On the other hand, something about her sleek hair, mousy but with blonde highlights, her enviably nice, smart-casual brown dress, subtly detailed around the neckline, her generally neat appearance, her soft face, her failure to notice that the jug was empty until she tried to pour a drink, gave me the irresistible impression that she was utterly ditzy, that she worked in admin but frequently made mistakes, and that her personal life was a concatenation of failed relationships. I was appalled by the belittling thoughts in my head: under no circumstances could I voice them, even in the privacy of that little room. So I hedged and I fudged and still managed to sound pretty nasty and judgmental, chiefly because she had sleek, mousy-blonde hair.

Fast-forward to the final bit of the show, and I'm handed a CD: on it is written “About you”. My stomach lurched as I guessed that this was a recording of someone else talking about me in that treacherous enclosed space. And that I, too, had been recorded. And that the sleek-haired woman would be handed her own CD, and would hear all the demeaning things I'd said. Part of me was horrified: no one wants to hear themselves being put down. And part of me was thrilled by the transgression: there would be no retribution, because she would never know that the speaker was me.

For months afterwards, my CD sat on my desk: I couldn't bring myself to listen. But in the week before travelling to Edinburgh for the festival I finally plucked up the courage, and was startled. The woman talking about me was adorable. She guessed that I write, that I'm a perfectionist, that I have a controlling streak, that I am far more vain than I would admit to being; she guessed that I was putting off children for the sake of work (which is how my life would be if I had been left to my own devices); that I live in a house without junk or clutter (although that's only true because my husband makes me tidy up). There was such kindness and generosity in her portrait of me: a kindness and generosity I had failed to demonstrate or even locate within myself.

The more I mused on the unknown woman who had talked about me, the unknown woman about whom I had talked, the various images of myself, both self-generated and generated by others, the more I appreciated what Ontroerend Goed had achieved. A Game of You made me completely rethink, then rethink again and again, over the course of several months, how I present myself, how people understand that presentation, how I understand other people's projections of self, and how entire social structures are built from those projections. And it does so without even seeming to – by playing a cheeky little game that lasts barely 20 minutes. What an extraordinary, subtle piece of work.

It was with all this in my head that I arrived at Audience, OG's new show in Edinburgh. That, and the crackling of a furore already surrounding the show following early performances, most of which I'd managed to block out, although not enough that I didn't feel horribly apprehensive about taking part. I find traverse theatre intimidating enough (perhaps it's sheer egoism that makes me fear I'm being watched at all times), let alone being filmed and seeing my image projected in remorseless close-up. And yet, as the camera began its slow sweep across the room, what struck me wasn't the aggression of its attention but the gentleness. It picked up the flare of a sleeve, the mottled pink-and-white skin of tensely clenched fingers, the flickering of a nervous mouth trying not to smile: tiny details, so insignificant, but made beautiful by the camera's concentrated caress.

And then comes the ugliness: the moment of division. The camera is trained on a young woman sitting near the front, someone radiant yet unobtrusive – unlike the raucous women sitting at the other end of her row, pretty but brash, noisily laughing – and one of the performers begins verbally abusing her. It's astonishingly uncomfortable, but electrifying too, at least on the night I saw it, because barely had the abuse begun when a man sitting behind me stood up and hurled a boot at the performer, with an aim almost true. As others in the audience began to clamour for the performer to stop, part of me felt annoyed: I wanted to see where OG were going. As it happened, where they were going was a place I found utterly repulsive, and I was relieved when the OG performers moved the show on – despite the audience's obstreperous desire to continue arguing over this scene.

Even as I watched, I had a sense that what had needed to happen had happened: that someone had reacted, strongly, but that the show wasn't about that reaction any more than it was about that provocation. What followed was an interrogation of intervention, of what we will stand up for and against, individually and as a group, in a variety of contexts. As the audience continued to grumble, I wondered how many of the people in the room had sat in, I don't know, the Royal Court, and watched silently as a woman was raped or abused. How many had witnessed couples arguing in the street, women crying as men raged at them, and walked on by. As a spin-doctored political debate was staged by the performers, as music blared and we were encouraged to stand up and dance, as the images of the audience melted into archive film of rallies and dissent and dictators and liberal leaders, I wondered how we choose to behave the way we do, whether we behave the same regardless of context, whether we're aware of influence and wholly able to resist it. I thought about the rioters who had torn through London just a few nights before: who was leading, who was following? Why was it so difficult to maintain a clear personal response to their actions? How can one maintain a sense of self within society? What is that self anyway?

By the end of the show I felt as though I was vibrating – it's the first time in ages, really ages, when I haven't just earwigged other people's conversations in the foyer afterwards but asked them what they thought. What I discovered was that I was very much in a minority in loving the show. What most people said to me – comments echoed by Lyn Gardner when I spoke to her a couple of days later – was that they thought the political content was naff, that the real meat of the show was in that attack on the girl and everything that followed was heavy-handed and sentimental. Immediately I worried: had I just not been smart enough to see the show's weaknesses? That nervousness is yet to leave me (another thing I hate about myself), although I felt a lot better after reading Joyce McMillan's positive review and finding I wasn't totally alone.

Since talking to Ontroerend Goed, I've wondered whether the naivety those audience members reacted against doesn't generate directly from Devriendt. We were, admittedly, both performing in the interview, and there is, of course, the strong possibility that I was unwittingly mesmerised by him, but even so, there seemed to be something disarmingly ingenuous about him, a softness that I hadn't expected. Some things he said that have stayed with me: he is the accident child of a painter (father) and a businesswoman; Joeri Smet, his best friend and collaborator in OG, describes him as a weird combination of their artistic and commercial natures. He is genuinely, deeply affected by reviews, taking every criticism to heart. Talking about the attack on the girl in Audience, he told me about the night his girlfriend was similarly abused by a comedian: he wanted to react, “but if I would have I would be the laughing stock because it would seem I was not getting the joke. And I hated that feeling, I felt so unmanly: I didn't protect my girlfriend. My girlfriend said, 'Hey, I can handle it.' I was like, yes, but my cavalier feeling, my white knight, I couldn't be. I wanted to have the opportunity for an audience to be a white knight, I wanted to give that freedom.” I've put what he said more or less verbatim, for one because it seemed so extraordinary to me, both absurd from a feminist point of view, and curiously romantic in its fairy-tale sense of manhood; and because it's clear to me that this is exactly what that scene in Audience is about: inviting a man to behave like a white knight, to throw a boot at the performer and save the pretty girl. No wonder the women around me were so infuriated when they weren't allowed space to speak; come to that, why wasn't I? The gendering is retrograde and ridiculous. Contrarily, I like Maria Dafneros' point of view: she resisted the scene during rehearsals, performs her disapproval during the course of the show, and wonders whether, “These guys that get up and say, 'stop it, leave her alone', I don't know if they realise that they take her choice away. One girl actually said afterwards, 'What if I wanted to spread my legs? Let me do that.' But they were not busy with that, they were busy with another issue, whatever it was.”

Another thing Devriendt said, or at least intimated, that continues to play on my mind is that he feels a sense of guilt about Internal, troubled that so many people felt betrayed by the show. A Game of You, he said, was specifically designed in response to those adverse reactions: “I'm really protective of you,” he says of audiences in A Game of You, “I don't break the trust of audience there – and I found a way to be more confronting because nobody will have seen that you didn't give enough, nobody knows what you have experienced there.” In the moment of him talking about this, I agreed with him absolutely; then walking home from the interview I thought of the girl I had talked about morosely listening to her CD and felt duped. Again, reading Matt Trueman on A Game of You was usefully clarifying: he argues that it isn't individual personalities being scrutinised but the act of judgment. But then his response came straight from his response to Internal, and it's not one that I, in all my guilt and tendency to self-criticism, feel wholly able to share.

A question hangs over Ontroerend Goed, raised by Ian Shuttleworth in the comments below Lyn's brief piece on Audience published during the festival: are they actually in control of what they do? Do they realise the extent to which they affect people? Lyn is convinced that they are, that Devriendt is an arch manipulator who knows exactly what he's doing. Reading Matt on Teenage Riot – which Devriendt essentially forced him to see again, to watch through his own (ie Devriendt's imposed) perspective – inclines me to agree with her. And yet, when Devriendt talked about protecting people in A Game of You, there was no sense of him accounting for those CDs at the end – a lot of people, Lyn tells me, never pluck up the courage to listen to theirs. When he talked about people feeling betrayed by Internal, he said: “I should have seen that one coming.” His tone was properly rueful: he felt bamboozled, and stupid, and disappointed in himself. When I asked him whether Audience wasn't perhaps compromised by the fact that so many people were coming in knowing what to expect, and intending to intervene, he confessed he had been caught out by that, too.

Something else that has stayed with me, although we didn't talk about it, was a line I read in another interview with Devriendt: “Joeri wanted to live in Berlin [when they were in their very early 20s] and I begged him not to go, because I felt I needed him to create amazing work. He stayed.” Whereas Devriendt struck me as open and genuine, Joeri Smet seemed contained, a little bit intimidating, someone to be approached with caution. Perhaps I felt this because of his role in Audience: he's the performer whose political speech, bland at first, increasingly firebrand, ends in a Nazi salute. There was something Smet said about Internal, when we had finished talking but the recorder was still running, that intrigues me: “It made me love people more.” Had he not loved them very much before?

In his way, Devriendt is as inscrutable as Smet. The work they make together demands that you take long, hard looks at yourself, yet offers no respite if you don't like what you see. Before the interview, one of my key questions, the one I was most looking forward to asking, was what their shows have taught them about themselves. I spoke to four people from the company – Devriendt, Smet, Dafneros and Tiemen Van Haver, coincidentally the person who guided me around A Game of You (and who told me that when he's appeared in that show as an audience member, filling in gaps, three people have described him as gay, teaching him once and for all to take the things people say about him with a big handful of salt) – and not one of them answered me straight. Smet came closest: “If it works, people really want to share things with you. You hear life stories or choices that people are struggling with you that reflect on you as well, because you have the same question or struggle. Then after a while you, I, ask the questions that really interest me, so I get a lot of answers to that same question.” What those questions or struggles were, though, he didn't say. Otherwise, what they all talked about was what they had learned about other cultures, about group mechanisms around the world. Always, always, this tension between the group and the individual, the impersonal and the personal, the predictable and unpredictable.

I wanted to write this because there wasn't space in the short piece I wrote for G2 to ask or answer all the questions I have about this company. It was supposed to be clarifying; instead, my thoughts feel more tangled than ever. But that, I suppose, is what makes OG so fascinating. Their idealism is laced with cunning; they put audiences under a microscope while remaining elusive themselves. Perhaps if I had seen more of their work I'd have a better handle on who they are, what they do, how they do it. But somehow, I doubt it.

goodbye to the dancing queens

2011-12-04T23:42:00.001Z

I've been thinking about leaving the Actionettes for a while now, and in my drama-queen way it's always felt like contemplating sawing off one of my own limbs using a rusty bread knife. Apart from anything else, performing with them has long been my single atonement for the sins of criticism, my meagre attempt to give something back to the world. But last week it finally happened. For a few days afterwards I felt a bit like I did after a big car accident several years ago: fine, perhaps relieved, quite possibly numb with shock, replaying the events over and over in my head as though to confirm their reality. I still remember the song I was singing to myself when I had the accident: Nosferatu Man by Slint (how's that for ridiculous melodrama?). The song that came up on my mp3 player, moments before I realised I had finally decided to say goodbye, scouring my mind to clarity, was this one:

“You won't find it by yourself, you're gonna need some help, and you won't fail with me around, come on let's go.” Oh, Trish Keenan. I've idolised her for so long; I'm still mourning her death earlier this year. Based on nothing more than listening to her songs, I always felt there was something brave and uncompromising about her: she lived by her own truth, and made/makes me want to live by mine.

So there was that in my head that fateful (drama queen!!) Thursday morning, and there was this: a shard of Hal Hartley's 1991 short Ambition.

Dwell on uncomplicated beauty: the landscape, the sun on your face. Nothing touches you. Keep the image of your death cheerfully before you at all times. Gain perspective. Seek to clarify and comfort, not to obscure or mystify. Your aspirations are pointless; your ambitions come to nothing.

I've carried these words in my head for half my life: they were a teenage mantra, although I realise now my fallible memory conveniently let slip that final, trenchant line. And I know, I know: written out plain, in this context, the words clang with hyperbole. No wonder the adolescent me clung to them. But within the film itself – which, by the glorious power of youtube, I've just watched for the first time in maybe a decade, revelling in its note-perfect oddity, the violence of its choreography, its concision and starkness of expression – these words radiate a kind of hope. Instead of the selfish pursuit of personal aggrandizement, choose friendship, kindness, humanity. Instead of money or fame, seek truth and beauty. As a teenager, I felt there were words of warning here; as a thirtysomething – and this film is so the work of someone starting out on their 30s, shaking off the gung-ho confidence of their 20s (a confidence you don't even know you have) and struggling to figure out what meaning can be achieved – I find solace. I know I'm being laughed at a little bit, but I can hear Hartley laughing at himself, too. He asks the same questions I ask, and to hear him do so both pains and assuages me. I'm pretty sure I'll never gain perspective – but, in a funny way, leaving the Actionettes has been one way of trying to.

we bake cake! and nothing's the matter!

2011-11-08T00:02:00.002Z

I've known my friend Sam for a quarter of a century, longer than anyone in my life apart from my family. Long enough for her to feel like my favourite cousin, a sensation amplified by the fact that our backgrounds are so similar, despite their surface differences. Her family is Iraqi, mine Cypriot; hers Jewish, mine Greek Orthodox: we grew up under the shared shadow of patriarchal cultures that paradoxically revere the matriarch yet restrict the exercise of her power to the confines of the kitchen, prioritise the young male over the young female in infuriating and detrimental ways, and reinforce gender inequality through the exercise of myriad religious hypocrisies. It's largely through talking to her, I think, that I've come to realise how close Cyprus is to the Middle East, and not just geographically.

We bonded on a school trip in our early teens, when I revealed that I superstitiously wore an evil eye at all times to ward off bad luck (an absurdity I maintained until the trinket's ineffectiveness became evident even to me), and she countered that admission with something I found yet more preposterous: that in moments of fear or stress she would carry a few grains of salt on her person, also to keep evil at bay. The rest of our teens were spent swapping stories of one or another ridiculous edict imposed by our overbearing, overprotective parents, people out of step with their place and their times, their constrictive attitudes locked in a lost past and a distant country and a culture that I – I won't speak for Sam here – refused to acknowledge as my own. By some miracle, they allowed us to leave home to go to university; a cousin of mine was not so lucky.

While I spent most of that time at university floundering and wishing I were elsewhere (usually I was, on trains to London, or at gigs, escaping rather than finding myself), Sam seized the opportunity to discover who she could be and make herself so. She began to write plays, and direct them, too; and she's still writing plays today. I don't often see her work, because I'm shamefully lazy, and I don't often read it, either, because she hasn't shown me any of her work for something like a decade, not since I dismissed one of her characters as too autobiographical and prone not only to spout nonsense but to assume she was funny when doing so. (I was particularly riled by a long speech in which this character declared broccoli non-kosher because bugs could nestle unseen among the flower heads; I was duly chastened when, in performance, this speech prompted much laughter from the audience and, several years later, I failed to wash my broccoli properly and discovered the corpse of a caterpillar floating in the saucepan. I hope I've become a more thoughtful critic since then.)

I finally made the effort recently to read Cling To Me Like Ivy, which toured the UK last year, and I'm so glad I did, because it's exhilarating. It's set in the kitchen of a rabbi, in the fortnight before his daughter marries a man she has never even touched, because to do so would contravene Orthodox rulings. The kitchen is, inevitably, governed by the rabbi's indomitable mother, whose every other utterance is a firecracker; and further enlivened by the daughter's Hindu friend, who evades her own family's restrictive rulings by lying through her teeth. Oh, so familiar... But what I most loved about it was how alien much of the experience of the play felt: not only the minute but absorbing discussion of Jewish law (the scene in which the rabbi and the fiance pore over books and internet sites, trying to figure out whether the daughter is allowed to wear the wig that has been custom-made for her wedding, is exquisite in its pacing, vitality, wisdom, humour and heart), but its depiction of fully engaged political protest. It pains me that the play never reached London: for the selfish reason that I want to see it, and for the suspicion it supports that the capital's new-writing theatres are more enthralled by their own brands than they are by plays themselves.

Apart from theatre, and books, and feminism, and ingrained superstition, what Sam and I chiefly bond over is food. For a brief period we had a kind of supper club, in celebration of our mothers and their unconventional backgrounds, along with the children of an Egyptian Jew and (I think) an Iraqi/Assyrian Christian. Much halloumi was consumed. I think we both feel a certain identification with the line, “We bake cake! And nothing's the matter!”, from Maurice Sendak's boundlessly brilliant children's book In the Night Kitchen, which Sam gave to my daughter and which cheers me every time I read it. A couple of years ago I mentioned to Sam that I was working on a cake that involved dried figs, orange and almond; these ingredients being among her favourites (along with aubergines and lemons), she made me promise to give her the recipe if I ever managed to get it right. So this is for Sam, with much admiration and love:

Fig, orange and almond cake

250g dried figs – 25ml cointreau – 1 tbsp orange flower water

125g butter – 125g light muscovado sugar – 4 eggs

125g plain flour – 125g ground almonds – 2tsp baking powder

1 tbsp cointreau – 1tsp almond essence

Slightly stupidly, I didn't write down the method for this, only the ingredients, but I'm pretty sure this is how I did it: put about 250ml water and 25ml or so cointreau into a saucepan and bring it to the boil. Meanwhile cut the dried figs into eighths and when the liquid is boiling add the figs along with the orange flower water, which is entirely optional and just something I happened to have around on the day. Simmer for a good 15 minutes, then leave to cool for a bit.

Cream the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs one by one. Fold in the flour, ground almonds and baking powder, followed by the tbsp of cointreau and the almond essence, and the drained figs.

Line a cake tin with greaseproof paper, pour in the batter and bake in a 180/gas 4 oven for about 50 minutes, bearing in mind that I'm making that time up in the moment of writing, so it could take an extra 10 or so minutes for a knife inserted in the cake to come out clean.

the end of the world, or else the beginning

2011-10-21T21:34:00.002+01:00

[I should have posted this weeks ago. Huge apologies to Chris Goode for the delay, and even bigger thanks to everyone involved in this project for having me along for the ride.]

Let's play a game. You're a child and the time is December, a little before Christmas, in those unthinkable days before Amazon. Your mother needs to buy presents for your cousins. You go with her to the toy shop, but you're not allowed to touch anything, only trail after her and look, look, look. You know you're going to get presents yourself, and as you watch your mother fill her basket you try to guess what those gifts might be, how your Christmas might take shape. Imagine the excitement, the impatience, the moments of boredom, the shivers of wonder...

… and before you know it, you'll have daydreamed yourself into Chris Goode's rehearsal room for the Cendrars project.

A form of this toyshop analogy blurted from me on my first day in the room, sitting in a circle with Chris and the three performers – Jamie Wood, Gemma Brockis, Clive Mendus – for the morning check-in. Every day working with Chris starts like this: you sit together and ask, how are you? You can answer that blandly: I'm OK, everything's fine. But really Chris is inviting us to pause and acknowledge the baggage we're bringing in from the outside world, how it's affecting us and how it might colour our thinking during the day. Within that is a silent invitation, for each of us to take up a little of everyone else's baggage and help to shift it to the side of the room. It's a way of putting down guards, opening arms, entering each other's orbit.

What I brought into the room that day was more than a little apprehension and an effervescing curiosity. As if I didn't feel enough like a child already, one of Chris's first actions on my arrival was to pass me a lump of sticky red goo and a thick plastic straw and challenge me to blow up a balloon. There's quite a lot of goo in the writings of Blaise Cendrars: “the sun drools” in The End of the World; an exquisite line in The Eubage runs, “Life effectively, manifestly, and formally is space and time, sublimated, molten, perfumed. Honey.” Even so, why I might be sitting in the basement beneath Camden People's Theatre inflating an approximation of a sheep's stomach lining felt faintly mysterious to me.

I hadn't heard of Cendrars before Chris emailed about the project; I get the impression I'm not the only one. There was homework to do before joining rehearsals: biographical material and key texts to read, assorted musics to respond to. The biography is fascinating: as his pseudonym suggests, Cendrars took a phoenix approach to the living and telling of his life, torching his existence, rewriting with the ashes, torching them anew. I could easily imagine someone staging these multiple stories, but not Chris somehow.

There were tantalising hints of narrative in the music Chris collated: I'll Read You a Story by Colleen sounded gloopy and glassy, secretive and ominous, and filled my head with twinkling stars; Messiaen's Jardin du Sommeil d'Amour scans those stars romantically, savouring their mystery. The second movement of Ligeti's Violin Concerto conjured up alien voices that became unnerving and cacophonous in Giles Swayne's Void-Light-Darkness. Honegger's Pacific 231 is more menacing still, exploding and spiralling as though trapped in a war of the worlds.

When I started reading Cendrars himself (The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame; The Eubage, or At the Antipodes of Unity; and two translations of The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France), all the ideas and images suggested by the music were there in print, in his queasily strange, headily beautiful grapplings with science, the galaxy, molecules, God; with the radiance, the horror, the incomprehensibility of being. I could see the connections, yet – that childishness again – couldn't fathom what they might mean, what Chris might be planning to put on stage.

The texts, of course. As a hint of how defiantly unstageable they are, here is section 39 of The End of the World:

It rains. It rains. The water rises. The needles of the conifers ramify, their tips flatten, they open out into umbels. Fungi grow on all the branches, floating with the current. Algae, yeasts, black sponges. Debris of all kinds accumulate at the bottom of the lakes. Plesiosauria in decomposition.

And here's a little of The Eubage:

In the river of Time which flows in Space, lazy trout can be glimpsed among the luxuriant grasses. The water is clear, the current limpid. At the bottom, among the ultraviolet and infrared rays of decomposed light, we can see the foaming of the odomagnetic gems that make up the aeroliths. Metals, rocks and roots, grasses and all the leaves are rich with their own life. The vegetation is audacious.

The task Chris set himself with this project was to create a theatre as evocative, multi-textured, elemental, tactile, as Cendrars' writing: a theatre, as he described it in the rehearsal room, of materials – light, colour, sound, even smell – to which human activity plays a supporting role. Audacious, indeed.

But possible, thanks in part to an enticing bit of Heath Robinson gadgetry idling in a corner of the rehearsal room. The invention of puppeteer and theatre-maker Mervyn Millar, it has an aged Singer sewing-machine table for its base; on top of that a turntable; above that are suspended two perspex sheets; finally a light source and video camera trained on the lot. Mervyn uses this contraption to create live projected animation, both moving images (of objects placed on the whirring turntable) and multi-layered still images (objects placed on the perspex sheets), which also shift beneath his hands. Mervyn, then, could show us “jumbled constellations” and “the enormous hybrid butterfly of the Summit of the Hours whose wings are isochronal”; he could make “all the cities in the world rise on the horizon” and “the mountains of Mexico stumble in the light”. The materials he used were simple enough: a bitter gourd and a scotch egg, star confetti and fake fur, turmeric and a tube of honey. But in performance, the light, the projecting and Mervyn's absorbed manipulations transformed them into eerie visions, glowing and alive.

Watching Mervyn rustle up these animations, you could see how easy it might be to film Cendrars' texts: indeed, The End of the World is written as though describing a film, one that spools crazily through disaster, then rewinds breathlessly to an oblivious yet racked calm. But, Chris argues, cinema is too escapist and flatly fictional for Cendrars: what he wants to achieve with this piece is a complex dance of different realities, different fictions, the presence and immediacy of live physical performance layered with the out-of-time otherworldliness of Cendrars' imagery, layered too with the audience's own perceptions of those fictions and realities.

The actors' task becomes two-fold: to navigate the layers themselves, and guide the audience through them. And this was the part of the process that most fascinated me: how the actors would transform Cendrars' teeming, fervid text into action. Chris was very specific about where this might happen: tacked to a wall in the rehearsal room was a long strip of brown paper, with each minute of the show marked on it, blocked into sections devoted to each text, and sections that would and wouldn't be populated by performers. The opening passage, from The Eubage, would play with light and sound; the next, from The End of the World, would open with the person of God but then focus on imagery. In the middle would be an edited reading of The Prose of the Trans-Siberian, with Gemma as the young Cendrars and Jamie as little Jeanne, spiralling through time, war, nostalgia and love. Following that, Mervyn's global destruction (dubbed the noon cadenza), and another scene with God melting into an embodiment of the horoscope, before a final sweep of light to close.

Day two of rehearsals was spent plucking phrases from The End of the World and The Eubage to use as jumping-off points: from the beginning, Chris's intention was to avoid flights of fantasy, to achieve specificity in performance by rooting all activity in the text. Arriving on day four, I looked over the postcards on which the quartet had written their choices and was struck by the level of duplication: working individually, they had instinctively been drawn to the same bits of text. “God the father has set himself up on Mars, the barnum of religions”; “He sends a coded message to the angel of Notre Dame”; “The disk of the sun grows a notch larger and its light weakens”; “Spectacle of war unleashed”; “An obscure eye closes on all that has been”.

Watching Clive, Gemma and Jamie devise snippety scenes from these fragments of text was extraordinary. The process is thrillingly mysterious to me: they would sit quietly, and the air around them would thrum with thought and possibility, and it would be impossible to know what might happen when they started to move. The afternoon on which they joined forces to give shape and character to God, I marvelled as ideas fired silently between them, igniting each other's imaginations. Sometimes, this mystery of making felt impenetrably opaque to me. On another afternoon, Jamie and Gemma, working from The Eubage, decided to sit either side of another sewing machine table, taking competitive bites from an apple that they passed to each other by means of a simple string pulley. I have raked and raked The Eubage, trying to figure out what provoked this action, and remain utterly perplexed. But it was so immediately, brilliantly evocative, even I knew that it had to go on stage.

The more of a feel I gained for what would and wouldn't be used in the final performance, the more discomforted I felt by my presence in the room. There is something so vulnerable about people experimenting with ideas: as the outsider, I didn't want to seem a prying, judgmental eye. More discombobulating still was the gradual realisation that Chris himself was vulnerable and searching and uncertain of what he was creating; the tension of this was unbearable to me. It broke, as a storm breaks, bringing brightness and a wash of clarity, one afternoon when he confessed to the room that all the tools he had once used as a director seemed neither useful nor desirable here. Instead he wanted to embrace the “creeping organicness” of the actors' work: appropriately enough, given the organic fervour of Cendrars' writing.

Chris's admission was a useful reminder that self-consciousness has little value in a rehearsal room. What he wants is a room in which people feel easy enough to, for instance, have a little nap if they need to, as Gemma did, to Chris's immense delight, one afternoon while the rest of us watched an episode of Buck Rogers. There was a lovely, unembarrassed calm in that nap of hers, a calm I didn't feel myself until I spent a giggly, breathless morning with Gemma, Jamie and Clive messing around with the charleston (Gemma is terribly good at it), for a dance sequence in the Trans-Siberian section. On the last day I sat with Jamie, helping him to stuff broccoli florets into a pink balloon (I can't even begin to explain that one), and talking about the difference my being there might or might not have made: he gently reminded me that theatre-makers are almost permanently being criticised, which makes the rehearsal room something of a haven. Gratifyingly, all felt I'd respected that.

By the day of the performance, I felt I had finally been absorbed by the group, which raised a question for me: how might that complicity affect the way in which I watched the piece? As the solo audience of the multiple runs-through, I couldn't tell. The almost-finished show felt incredible to me, utterly brilliant and beyond comprehension, abstract and unnaturalistic, spinning theatre on its axis into a strange new world. But I also felt privileged with knowledge and understanding: of the text beneath the images, of the arc of the show. I particularly enjoyed watching Chris: I hadn't yet seen him in his role as sound designer and he, too, was like a child, scampishly playing not just with a laptop crammed with effects and music but an array of toys and gadgets that cluttered his desk, from a mechanical bird in a cage to a Snoopy siren, clockwork teeth and a squeaky chipmunk. The richness of this piece – the plethora of sounds; Mervyn's swirl of images; all the odd props magicked up the designer, James Lewis (including a bit of a Rolls Royce's engine that he just happened to have stashed away at home); the multiple roles of the actors – was overwhelming.

I had to leave during the afternoon's dress rehearsal; entering the theatre three hours later with the rest of the audience I was struck by the peculiar feeling that I was no longer part of the group making the show. I was part of a new group now: the audience. What astonished me, watching the show in this new context, was how susceptible I was to that new group's responses. It was as though I, like everyone else, was watching the piece in a state of innocence. I shared their amusement, their wonder, their bewilderment: all that privileged knowledge melted away and I felt as unanchored as everyone else. I've never before felt so strenuously challenged to assess what it means to sit in an auditorium, how much I have to invest in a piece of theatre not only to appreciate it myself but to help others appreciate it.

What the Cendrars piece raised above all – and this issue dominated the company's post-show discussion the following morning – is a question about the extent to which audiences expect to “understand” a piece of theatre. I've spent some of the time since the Cendrars' show listening to Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest, an album that passed me by on its release and whose popularity was initially incomprehensible to me. (I had a breakthrough on the day I played it on the decent stereo when alone in the house: turns out you can appreciate music much more when kids aren't in the room and when you're not in a car. Who knew?) That incomprehension had nothing to do with not understanding the songs on Veckatimest and everything to do with not feeling moved by them, not finding them beautiful. Music is something I experience emotionally and sensually: that isn't to say that it can't also be intellectually satisfying, but the demand I place on it is different.

Chris's Cendrars piece invites us to experience theatre emotionally and sensually, too: to accept that we might not understand what we're watching at any given moment, but that there is a rigorous thinking behind it and, having made that intellectual peace, allow ourselves to revel in the beauty of what we see. Not just that: allow ourselves to be swept along by it, absorbed by it, to feel as much within as without this disorienting yet magical world. I had joined Chris's world in the rehearsal room but once within the audience I felt I could join it only as far as those around me did.

This was just a 25-minute show – as Chris put it, an EP taster for the album to (it's hoped) come – and what emerged from the performance was that many in the audience wanted more anchoring, more information to guide them. What might this involve? Perhaps making the character of Cendrars clearer, or clarifying the relationships between the sound, image, light and performance desks. Perhaps a shift in the use of text: although the piece is packed with text, in this incarnation it was all recorded, and perhaps live spoken dialogue would allow the audience to feel more connected with the piece.

But perhaps audiences need to work on themselves a little, too. They need to arrive knowing that it's OK not to understand this piece of theatre in conventional terms, that it's OK simply to enjoy the spaces that open up between what they see and hear and think. Cendrars plunges us into the deepest mysteries of the world: to present that mystery with too much clarity might well defeat the point.

vanity project 4: mike bartlett

2011-10-21T21:28:00.001+01:00

Every play Mike Bartlett writes is powered by the same question: “What is the nature of this event? Because these days,” says the 30-year-old, “it can be anything. You should open the door of the theatre and you should say: what is this?”

That's how audiences of My Child, his 2007 debut at the Royal Court, felt when they entered a scaled-up model of a London Underground train carriage, and witnessed a vicious tug-of-war between a father, his ex-wife and her boyfriend over a heartless nine-year-old boy. Two years later came Cock, an excoriating examination of a gay relationship under stress, staged within a cock-fighting ring. Earthquakes in London, his debut for the National Theatre last year, was more radical still: the entire Cottesloe was gutted and filled by an acid-orange catwalk, across which Bartlett's ambitious story, which dealt with the impact of climate change, snaked from 1965 to 2525.

The scene directions for his new play for the National, 13, indicate that it should be “performed with a circle”. Bartlett's meaning is both literal – the Olivier's stage is round – and metaphorical: the play is a ritual (his word), exploring religious belief and moral structures, and how they inform our decision-making day-to-day. He started writing it in January, as he began a year-long residency at the National, hoping to answer another question: “How do you put a properly contemporary play about late-2011 on the Olivier stage, considering it's normally programmed long in advance?” An extended rehearsal period has allowed him to respond to the news happening around him – including the riots over the summer, which, he says, not only affected his own writing but will colour his audiences' responses. In one scene, he depicts a pensioner smashing a bank window: “When you've watched the riots,” he argues, “that image changes from a moment of outrageous magical realism to being something we saw last week on the telly.”

Not that Bartlett has a problem with putting magic or fantasy on stage. “We have been constrained by social realism, the worry that in order to tackle a subject seriously the form has to be realistic. But our life is full of weirdness and imagination.” Where Earthquakes spiralled into a crystalline future, the plot of 13 is built upon coincidences and bad dreams, finding equal inspiration in the films of David Lynch and the more surreal passages of the Bible.

He takes issue with the suggestion that the National has brought out the old-fashioned state-of-the-nation playwright in him. “That implies my only focus is to dissect the state of us politically and socially. But state of my emotions, or state of my psychology, are as important to me.” He feels more concerned with investigating, at a personal level, “the play between modern morals and traditional morals, and one generation versus another, and lessons of the past, how relevant they are now and whether they still apply”.

Love Love Love, which toured the UK earlier this year, embodied that conflict within a single family – and found both generations equally at fault in their thoughtless dealings with each other. Bartlett doesn't favour one-sided argument in his plays: instead he presents a clash of extremes and the murky areas between them. The last thing he wants is to bolster the cliched idea that “all new writers at the National Theatre are going to be slightly woolly lefties. Increasingly subjects are more complicated than being left and right anyway.”

So he works hard to inhabit opposing points of view – and frequently ends up questioning his own beliefs. “In the process of writing 13, friends were asking if I was OK, because I was saying things about religion, or about intervening in other countries militarily, that I wouldn't normally spout over dinner,” he says. “In the moment of writing the play I genuinely changed what I thought.”

It helps that he's had a lifelong training in assessing how other people think. His father worked as a psychologist, “so I grew up with him saying: 'Look how that person's behaving. Do you think there's a reason behind that?' So as a five-year-old you think: 'Oh, OK, people have brains and they make decisions and their decisions are affected partly by genetics and partly by...'.” Add the instruction of his “very moral” mother, a teacher and the daughter of a minister, and it's not surprising that Bartlett was “a bit right-on” in his university days. He says he's since learned not to take himself so seriously.

Whereas his earlier plays honed their argument with devastating precision, Bartlett's recent plays can feel messy – as reviewers of Earthquakes in London were quick to point out. The play is touring this autumn, and Bartlett took the opportunity to revisit his script. He's tweaked the final act to make it less convoluted: in the original production, one character fell into a coma, woke up in the future then returned to the past to die, resulting, Bartlett accepts, in “too many twists and turns”. But, he says, “I haven't made it shorter, I haven't tidied it up, because the gesture of the play was always 'too much'.” In other words, Earthquakes surveys the excess of our times by being excessive itself – and if it feels flawed as a result, Bartlett doesn't mind. “I don't want it to be the best version of a play,” he reasons. “I want it to be itself, and not to lose its distinctiveness.”

His great goal in the theatre is to achieve a “coherence of gesture”, whereby “the writing fits with the design, which fits with what the actors are doing. The play is just a starting point for collaboration.” He spent his teenage years in Abingdon, near Oxford (he describes it as “an old market town that's very nearly beautiful, only there's always something ruining it”), not writing but directing. At Leeds University, where he took a degree in English literature and theatre studies, he focused on devising, making “all sorts of weird shit theatre”. Is that weird-shit theatre, or weird, shit theatre? “Both, but mainly shit,” says Bartlett cheerfully. “We used lots of puppets and gauze and paint and the Smiths.” What it gave him, he says, was an invaluable knowledge not only of how a stage works, but of the possibilities of theatre – possibilities he continues to explore and expand today.

After graduating in 2002, he attempted to make his way as a director, but came unstuck while interviewing to join new writing companies including Out of Joint and Paines Plough. “You have to come in with a huge amount of charisma, which I didn't have,” he says. (It's a fair point: Bartlett is smart, forthright and friendly, but not exactly suave.) So he transferred his energy to writing – and with his first proper play, Not Talking, the same new writing companies suddenly found him an exciting prospect. The Royal Court invited him to join its young writer's programme, by the end of which Bartlett had three new pieces: a “social-realistic play about a kid in a school doing terrorist acts”, and “a magical-realist fantasy set on the island of Iona featuring Prince William”, both of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were rejected by the theatre. The last, My Child, was staged – and Bartlett hasn't looked back.

He worries about being seen to be climbing a ladder: from the Royal Court's studio space to its main house, up to the Cottesloe and now the big one, the Olivier. “I'm not interested in that, and I don't want to feel like that's how it works,” he says. “I don't care more about 13 because it's in the Olivier than I did with Cock in a 100-seat studio. They both matter because it's still a person sat there watching your play. And the play has to be good enough, because there are a hundred other plays and writers out there who deserve to have their play on instead.”

vanity project 3: conor mcpherson

2011-10-21T21:26:00.000+01:00

To say that playwright Conor McPherson is fascinated by the supernatural is something of an understatement. He's best known for his 1997 play The Weir, whose characters narrate a string of spooky stories featuring fairies, a ouija board and a mother haunted by her dead child. Before that he taunted reviewers with St Nicholas, about a debauched theatre critic who falls under the spell of vampires. No less a creature than the devil stalked the stage in his last play in London, 2006's The Seafarer. Since then he has made a film, The Eclipse, in which a widower who fears he's seeing ghosts falls in love with a writer of – you guessed it – ghost stories.

His latest play, The Veil, which he is directing at the National Theatre, pulses with paranormal activity: one character hears disembodied voices, another talks dreamily of meeting “a man who had mirrors where his eyes should be”, and a third unleashes chaos by conducting a séance. So far, so McPherson – except in most other respects, The Veil is unlike anything he has written before. For a start, it has five female characters, which is practically more than you'll find in the rest of his work for the stage put together. Plus it's a period piece, set in 1822, opening very precisely on the evening of Wednesday May 15 and ending in the afternoon on Friday 7 June.

An internet search on those dates doesn't bring up much information – which is why McPherson chose them. “I'm not a historical playwright, so I had stick it in somewhere, and I could get in there without any baggage,” he says, apologetically. “Also, it's just before photography, so we sort of know what it looks like, but not exactly. And you can argue with someone about what happened 100 years ago, but 200 years ago?”

It wasn't just canniness motivating this decision: it was a lack of confidence. When I last met McPherson, five years ago, he likened himself to a “nuclear reactor of anxiety”, and, at least where work is concerned, little seems to have changed on that score. He has been writing The Veil since 2008; in the year since the National committed to staging it, he hasn't stopped tweaking it. “It's a different time, a different way of speaking,” he explains. “It made me very wary.”

In his 20s, he thinks, he had a lot more bravado – but he was also prone to drown self-doubt in alcohol, refusing to accept that he had a problem until he was hospitalised with pancreatitis and almost died. That was 10 years ago; these days, he feels a greater sense of responsibility, and not just for himself. “As I get older – I turned 40 this year – I care so much more about the audience,” he says. “I really want them to have a positive experience.”

There was another compelling reason for setting The Veil in the 1820s: “Apparently it was very similar to now, in that there was a big economic crash following the Napoleonic wars,” says McPherson. “So a place like Ireland, which was very poor, was just on the floor.” Still resident in Dublin, where he was born and brought up, he was particularly sensitive to this modern resonance. “When I look at what's happened to Ireland in the past few years, I kind of think: where did this awful dysfunction in our psyche come from that we've destroyed our own country?” he rails. “On one level you can say it's just post-colonial corruption and mismanagement – but on another level it's like an echo of a long, violent trauma. For hundreds of years, to be Irish and Catholic meant your life was just shit. You were not allowed to go to school, you were not allowed to own land, you didn't have any rights. If people suddenly get that power back, of course they fuck it up.”

Witnessing his country's fall from economic grace has politicised McPherson – and made him rethink his own identity. “Before that I'd say: I was born in Ireland, but I'm not an Irish writer – I'm a writer. Now I realise, of course I'm an Irish writer.” He senses the same struggle in the work of James Joyce. “Joyce left Ireland, he wanted to have nothing to do with it. He wanted to become a citizen of the world, and to an extent he really achieved that – but he always just wrote about Dublin.” Even Beckett, he adds, who didn't set his work anywhere, still comes across as Irish. And if they couldn't escape their background, McPherson sighs, nobody can.

Joyce had a direct influence on the writing of The Veil, particularly his novel Finnegan's Wake, widely considered one of the least comprehensible ever written. “The premise of the book is that it's a family asleep and dreaming,” says McPherson. What appealed to him was Joyce's representation of “the timelessness of dreaming: years can go by in a dream, all time is eternity. I wanted to create a play in which time was somehow crashing in on itself, so that what people might think is an echo of the past is in fact a premonition of the future.”

McPherson found yet more inspiration in the German transcendental philosophy of the early 19th century. “It's so out there,” he beams. “The idea that people think that human beings are the part of God that is awakening and coming to know that he is God, it's crazy stuff. I knew I couldn't put it in a play because nobody would want to go and see it and it would be impossible to understand.” What he has done, however, is create one character who has published a book of transcendental philosophy – and another who wonders acidly why philosophers bother inventing these unreal worlds for themselves.

Although McPherson studied philosophy at university, his interests 20 years ago were “very dry, very logical”, and focused on ethics. These days, he's more inclined towards the mystical. Although he abandoned Catholicism as a teenager, he retains its appreciation for the mysteries of existence. Writers such as Richard Dawkins infuriate him: not because he doesn't agree with the idea that there's no religious God, or that religions cannot be proved, but because this argument extends to a lack of belief in the supernatural. “We don't know anything,” counters McPherson. “We're just tiny little mice trying to survive in an unknowable universe. We don't understand the nature of time or space, and the more science finds out about all of that, it only reveals more questions.” This is partly why he loves ghost stories: “They remind us of the limits of our rationality and our reason.”

There is mysticism, too, in McPherson's discussion of his future plans. The past few years have been mapped out with a variety of projects (filming The Eclipse; directing revivals of The Seafarer; writing and directing an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds in Dublin), and The Veil marks the end of that busy period. A lot of that time was also spent attempting to adopt a child with his wife of eight years, painter and composer Fionnuala Ni Chiosain: four months ago they were finally successful, and the couple now have a 20-month-old daughter from India. “I have a feeling that what's coming next is very different and I don't know what it is,” says McPherson. “It's the right time to move on.” In what way? “I don't know: to go into something else, deep into somewhere else,” comes the cryptic reply.

Alarm bells ring when he repeats: “It could be something entirely different.” Could The Veil be the last we see of McPherson on stage? Is the lure of studying obscure German philosophical theory too great? Time will tell. For now, McPherson is preoccupied by the demands of directing The Veil, and a desire to make the production the best it possibly can be, not just for his audience's sake, but because it's taking him away from his new daughter. “I want to be able to say: that was good, that was worth it. Now let's get on with our lives.”

vanity project 2: emily browning

2011-10-21T21:24:00.000+01:00

Emily Browning spent the spring of 2011 ricocheting from one controversy to another. Sucker Punch, a hyperactive video game-influenced fantasia in which she starred as the scantily-clad Baby Doll, was released at the end of March to a barrage of dreadful reviews deriding its “rancid lubrications” (the Observer), “chaotic and nonsensical” plot (the Independent) and “pervasive ugliness” (the New York Times). Then in May, she went to Cannes for the premiere of Sleeping Beauty, to hear a ruffled audience greet the film with as many boos as muted cheers. Reviews were similarly divided, between those who thought its stately depiction of fetishistic prostitution amounted to “psychosexual twaddle” (the Hollywood Reporter), and those who found it a “strange, ensnaring achievement” (the Telegraph).

At least in the case of Sleeping Beauty, the response was much as the 22-year-old Australian expected. “I knew there was no way everyone was going to like it, and I'm OK with that,” she says. “I'd rather make an interesting film that gets people talking, that maybe some people hate, than make the kind of 'entertaining' film that everyone feels ambivalent about.”

The scorn in her voice as she says “entertaining” is acidic. She spent much of her childhood appearing in easy-going Australian telemovies, soaps and kids' programmes, and with her innocent doe eyes and rosebud mouth, she could quietly charm the world for years yet. But a tattoo under her arm reading “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching”, a quote from choreographer Martha Graham's manifesto for alternative artists, indicates where her heart lies: in “fearless work that challenges me”.

The challenge that made Sucker Punch appealing to her was physical: as someone who has “never been a particularly physical person”, she was hooked the moment director Zack Snyder told her she would have to do martial arts training. But she also liked the premise of the film: that Baby Doll, locked in an asylum by her abusive stepfather, dreams up an alternate reality in which she and her girl gang kick a whole lot of ass. Although she was disappointed by accusations that the film, far from communicating a feminist agenda, titillates its audience by slavering over a female cast dressed in skimpy Playboy outfits, she understood where they were coming from. The problem, she suggests carefully, lay in the difference between the script and the final edit: “Maybe because of interference from the studios, the female empowerment message that I was hoping to send got muddled up.”

There was less chance of being misled by the script for Sleeping Beauty: Julia Leigh, who wrote and directed it, is also a novelist, and Browning says her debut screenplay was not only beautifully written but extremely detailed. Which is just as well, because Browning's character, Lucy, spends a lot of the film naked, and a goodly portion drugged into a stupor while elderly men do with her body what they will, on the understanding that there will be “no penetration”. Even reading the script, says Browning, “made me uncomfortable. I read the first scene and had a panic attack – I had to leave it for an hour to catch my breath.”

It's easy to assume that it was the prostitution scenes that unsettled her, but Browning shrugs: “Nudity doesn't bother me. Mainstream media and society seem so frightened by sex, but it's really not that scary.” Apart from requesting that the set be closed while she was naked, she didn't seek to tone anything down: if anything, Sucker Punch left her feeling “so confident, so strong and mentally stable” that she felt able to make her encounters with the men even more intense, by remaining eerily still while they manipulated her body.

What really distressed her was penetration of a different kind. Lucy also earns money as a medical research guinea pig: we see her in an intimidating white lab having a probe pushed down her throat into her innards. “I'm really squeamish, and I did say if this tube has to be in my chest I might faint.” So a bit of trickery was used in the scene, although the gagging noises Browning makes, including a rather fruity burp, are real.

Other than that, she requested just one change to the script: that the bikini wax administered to Lucy left her with “some semblance of coverage”. In fact, this is one of her favourite scenes in the film: “I love that Lucy starts laughing, because the idea of getting a bikini wax is ridiculous. What we do to ourselves to look a certain way is crazy.”

It's these little details, Lucy's defiant self-possession, her disregard for the absurd trappings of female sexuality, that give the film a feminist undertone – and for Browning this was another of its attractions. She herself is a feminist, in favour of sex work and rights for sex workers, and argues that the sleeping beauty scenes are more concerned with “the sexuality of older people, which isn't visible in society” than with the exploitation of young women. To her mind, Lucy isn't exploited at all: “Obviously the fact that she's asleep means that she's objectified to some degree, but she is completely willing to submit control to others and see what happens. I don't think it's a healthy attitude for someone to have, but the film isn't about portraying a character who's going to be a role model for young girls. It's about the choices we make as humans, and the battle to find control while living in a society that wants to objectify you and commodify you.”

Control over her life is something Browning sought from a young age. Growing up just outside Melbourne, she was bullied at two primary schools before her parents moved her to a parent-run co-operative, where the 40 pupils spent their time not learning maths and English, but painting, going on nature camps and putting on plays. It was here that another parent, an actor, spotted her on stage and suggested that she audition for an upcoming telemovie, The Echo of Thunder. She was eight at the time, and says: “My parents were a bit freaked out – they're as far from stage parents as you could possibly get.” They're not even involved in the arts: her father is a computer systems analyst, and her mother owns and runs a cafe. Browning insisted they let her audition, and continued to insist. At 10, she wouldn't even allow her parents to accompany her on set.

She spent the next few years happily combining school and filming, until she won the part of Violet Baudelaire in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Adventures. She had to move to Los Angeles for nine months and: “I hated it. I was 15 and thought I was punk and that Hollywood was crap. I wanted to be back at school – I actually missed homework, which was weird – and be with my friends and do normal things.” When the film ended, she stopped acting for three years so that she could finish school in Australia.

Her return to work was tentative, so much so that she turned down the lead role in the Twilight movies, and it wasn't until Sucker Punch – the filming of which, at least, she thoroughly enjoyed – that she decided to commit to acting as a career. Chiefly what puts her off is the idea of fame, particularly the scrutiny of gossip media. Her ideal for the future is to “work pretty steadily, without ever getting to the point where I'm super-famous, but just to the point where I can make a film every two years and write and cook the rest of the time”. She's already writing, working on a couple of screenplays, but she finds it nerve-racking, and insists: “It will be 15 years before anyone sees them. And if I ever do get to the point where I make my first film, I definitely won't be in it.”

Sucker Punch transformed her life in other ways: it was while she was in LA doing press for the film that she met her boyfriend, Max Irons (son of Jeremy), and ended up moving to London. Although happy here, she exists “in a permanent state of homesickness”. She frets about her two teenage brothers, sending them lengthy emails instructing them not to follow other people but forge their own paths, and knows that deep down her parents wish “I was home doing a normal job”.

Her father is under strict instruction not to see Sleeping Beauty; her mother, aunts and grandmother all went to the premiere in Australia, however. What on earth did they make of it? Browning giggles: “Mum was hilarious. She said: 'I thought it was great, but I really don't want to see your tits again for a few years.'”

vanity project 1: this isle is full of noises

2011-10-21T20:55:00.002+01:00

As an experiment, the next four posts will be the full versions of pieces I've written for the Guardian recently that had to be cut to fit the print page. Truth be told, I'm slightly appalled by my own vanity in republishing them here, but then, the whole concept of blogging still strikes me as impossibly vain, so what the hey. But it's not as simple as that: I don't labour under any illusions of being a great writer – and if I ever do get ideas above my station, the comments my work mostly attracts, that I sound as if I'm shacked up with the person I'm writing about, or that I make them sound staggeringly annoying, or that I've failed to take them to task, or that I've written a “puff piece”, are pretty effective at knocking that ego back down to size. Nor do I have the slightest belief that people would comment any differently if the longer versions of my pieces were published: more words just means more to criticise. What I do feel is that there's something depressingly arbitrary about the necessity to fit pieces around adverts: sometimes the axe is wielded, sometimes it isn't, and you never know when you're going to feel the blade. And since I'm here, in unlimited space, I might as well put these pieces out with limbs intact.

First up: the bonkers Nick-of-Franz-Ferdinand Tempest, which I never got around to seeing, because I got into a domestic muddle (I managed to miss Handspring's Woyzeck at the same time, what a ditz)...

As rehearsals for The Tempest go, the scene in Sausage Studios in east London is a little peculiar. There's hardly room to move between the amplifiers and stringed instruments – 15 guitars, a bouzouki and a double bass – that line one wall, and the keyboards stacked in towers two or three high along the other. Shakespeare specifies that Prospero's island is “full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs”, but there isn't much sweet airiness about the indie-rock caterwaul being conjured up by the two performers.

But this is no ordinary Tempest, something that's reflected in its mouthful of a title. The Isle Is Full of Noises: The Tempest Puppet Music Show is a collaboration between German puppeteer Philipp Pleßmann and his old friend Nick McCarthy – guitarist with Franz Ferdinand. The pair met two decades ago in Bad Aibling, in Bavaria, where McCarthy grew up. “We did everything together: a lot of drugs, playing music, all those teenage experiences,” says McCarthy. An air of teenage mischief still clings to the pair: any time they mention Miranda's speech “I do not know one of my sex”, the word sex sets them sniggering.

It was Pleßmann's idea to turn The Tempest into a solo puppet show. While studying at the Ernst Busch drama school in Berlin seven years ago, he wrote an essay detailing how he planned to do it, although, he says: “When I read it now it's very funny, because I didn't do any of those things.” When he finally staged the first act of the play three years later, as part of his diploma course, he realised he wanted to set Shakespeare's text to music. So he travelled to Glasgow and spent five days with McCarthy working on a soundtrack.

Or rather, five nights – at the time, McCarthy was recording Franz Ferdinand's third album, 2009's Tonight. Listening to the plangent setting of Ariel's song Full Fathom Five, the clattering guitars backing Miranda's sex speech, and the propulsive keyboard riff behind Iris's call to the nymphs in the wedding scene, you can hear how Franz Ferdinand fed into the Tempest soundtrack. But the influence wasn't only one-sided: McCarthy was so pleased with the music he wrote for Caliban's “the isle is full of noises” speech that he played it to his band-mates and – with Pleßmann's approval and a tweaked lyric – the track became a song on Tonight, Dream Again.

Since then, McCarthy has been too preoccupied with other work to return to The Tempest. He spent two years touring Tonight with Franz Ferdinand; when the band went on hiatus for a year, he started focusing on the second album from Box Codax, the band he started with his wife, Manuela, and another friend from Germany, poet Alexander Ragnew. After meeting the artist Martin Creed through a mutual friend, he ended up producing an album for Creed, scheduled for release in the new year. “I've never produced anything else before but it worked out really well,” McCarthy says. “His music is really simple, just one note going up and then back down again, so that's the way you have to record it.” It's not just restlessness that drives him: it's also a recognition that Franz Ferdinand need external stimuli to remain fresh. “There's only a certain amount four people can do until it's just empty,” he says. “Then you need something else to come in.”

It was up to Pleßmann to flesh out the Tempest show, working with designer Hank Schmidt-in-der-Beek, who has created projected images for every corner of Prospero's island, and director Kalma Struen (who is also Pleßmann's partner). The trio have given several festival performances across continental Europe, but the showings at Wilton's Music Hall in London next week will be the first with McCarthy performing the music alongside Pleßmann. McCarthy will rove the stage, swapping between guitars, keyboards and drums (which he still can't play, more than a decade after telling Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos that he would be the fledgling band's drummer). “Right from the beginning I said I don't want to be that theatre musician standing in the corner doing sound effects,” says McCarthy. “I hate that. I hate hiding behind my instrument, the way so many musicians do.”

Mccarthy admits the show is exposing. “We can improvise a bit, but with just the two of us doing it, if there's one wrong note you can really hear it.” Even so, the mood of the pair is light-hearted, especially as regards Shakespeare. “We didn't grow up here, so we didn't get that whole Shakespeare stuff at school, which must really mess a lot of people up,” he says. “We got it with the German writers.”

“Faust,” chips in Pleßmann. “Every German student hates Faust.”

“We wanted to make The Tempest quite easily understandable,” continues McCarthy. “We're using Shakespeare and if we want to change it, we change it. We have no respect for it, I suppose.”

Everything about the show registers that lack of reverence. Sly in-jokes run through Pleßmann's text: his Prospero is adamant that German modernisations of Shakespeare are preferable to the original; at one point, the character Ferdinand nods to McCarthy's band's name. Musically, McCarthy says his reference points were big 1970s shows like Jesus Christ Superstar or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As for the combination of music and puppets, Pleßmann says: “You see it in The Muppet Show – it works so good!”

In some respects, Pleßmann's puppets are just like the Muppets: their faces are slashed from ear to ear to create gaping mouths. But they are otherwise realistically human, with textured skin and googly eyes, which makes them look eerie to the point of terrifying. His main puppet, Prospero, has no body: Pleßmann can hold the head to one side and engage it in dialogue, or place it in front of his own face for one of Prospero's monologues. “It's like a very flexible mask,” he says. “It's much more interesting when the puppet can be free.”

He laughs uproariously when McCarthy tells him that one Glasgow newspaper has reported that the pair are working on a children's show: Pleßmann works primarily in adult theatre and doesn't find this suspicion of the form in Germany. McCarthy's tastes in puppetry are definitely adult: a few months ago he saw Complicite's Shun-kin at the Barbican and found it mesmerising. “The puppet in that was unbelievable: she was sado-masochistic so there were really weird sex scenes. I had bad dreams that night. But I think it's fascinating, that you can go that far with a puppet. You can show more with puppets than you can with actual actors.”

time for you to put yourself on

2011-10-14T14:01:00.005+01:00

I've spent an unusual amount of time this past month at Sadler's Wells, which is a bit dangerous with an Actionettes show coming up (Night of the Shimmying Dead, October 29 at the Buffalo Bar – come!): I'm prone to feel frustrated by our myriad shortcomings as an amateur group anyway, and watching dance fills me with a painful yearning to over-reach my meagre capacities and push my body to do the unexpected and transcendent. I interviewed Emily Browning recently and tattooed under her arm are some words by Martha Graham, “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching”, culled from this stern yet tremblingly beautiful letter to Agnes de Mille. I'd never encountered the letter before, but oh God do I recognise the unrest, and I don't usually find it that blessed, either.

One of my favourite things about watching dance is trying to figure out what emotion or story is being communicated: I'm too much of a cheapskate to buy programmes, and maybe I prefer the thrill of the interpretative chase. At Tezuka, the impossibly sweet new piece by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, all the exposition you'd find in a programme was delivered from the stage: potted histories of Japan and the atomic fallout, of Osamu Tezuka's youth and politics, of the radicalism of manga and the philosophical import of his characters. For reviewers, most of whom were a bit sniffy about the show, this was one of its umpteen drawbacks, but I loved the earnest, burbling quality of these verbal interpolations, the fanboy flood of information. I loved, too, the way it shifted constantly: one moment it was childish, showing us a boy rolling around with excitement reading his manga book, or a paper robot-monster stomping up the stage; then darkly, erotically adult, especially in the grappling duet between a priest and a half-naked gamin; or serenely abstract, with groups of dancers weaving and curling in exquisite physicalisations of the Japanese script.

If Tezuka was all about inviting you to share an obsession, the Sylvie Guillem show 6000 Miles Away kept its audience somewhat at a distance. Or maybe I just needed to read the programme to understand the thinking behind the knife-sharp, cracklingly tense moves of the first piece, Rearray: without it, the duet felt impressive technically but emotionally cold. I preferred the other piece, Bye, which has Guillem bursting through a white doorway dressed like a frowzy 1950s librarian (one of my favourite looks), escaping to dance and enjoy herself while members of the family arrive one by one to peer at her quizzically. If I'd grasped that the piece is about the daily tug-of-war between self-fulfilment and social responsibility, between art and family commitments, I probably would have watched it through a blur of tears. As is was, I was more gently amused and moved.

The same struggle is explored in Quarantine's Entitled, an absorbingly odd show, playful yet painful. What it deals with, as Lyn points out in her brilliant review, is the chasm between what we think we want out of life and how we feel about what we have. We watch technicians set the stage up and dismantle it again without the “show” ever really happening. Because what is the show? What is it that makes all the humdrum architectural, organisational activity that life requires – the endless cooking of meals and washing of dishes, brushing of teeth and buttoning of coats, paying of bills and dealing with emails – feel worthwhile? There is an extraordinary moment when one of the dancers, Fiona Wright, steps forward and asks us directly: if I haven't had children, is my life worthwhile? I wanted to tell her that “children” are not a simplistic solution to doubt and anxiety and confusion, but a terrifyingly complicated amplification of that doubt and anxiety and confusion. But someone's mobile phone went off and broke the spell. And anyway, I had already done my bit of participation: I'd jumped on stage and tried to learn Sonia Hughes' brilliant routine to Jump to the Beat so I could teach it to the Ettes, once again failing to realise that what my mind wants and what my body can do are not the same thing.

For me, the answer to that worth question is making stuff, although I'm constantly frustrated by my inability to settle on what to make. In that sense, I felt a wistful twinge of jealousy of Akram Khan: if I could devote myself to one thing long enough to make something even a fraction as beautiful as Desh I'd be ecstatic. The piece deals with ethnicity, how we come to terms with who we are and what made us. In an early scene, Khan itches and quivers across the stage, tearing at his skin, trying to remove something embedded there. This is probably a misinterpretation – judging by reviews, he's attempting to negotiate the hustle and bustle of Dhaka – but it looked to me as though Khan was buffeted by and struggling against the Bangladesh that's lodged in his own body. We don't want our parents' country (in my case, Cyprus) itching at our bones; we don't want to deal with this other culture and language and folklore and national pride, all of which seem so alien to us. But that other homeland has been given to us in our genes and one day or another it will assert itself, seeping through our blood to erupt from our mouths and claim our fingers.

Scenes in which Khan argued with his father (whom Khan embodies, adorably, by painting eyes and mouth on to his own bald pate and balancing his forehead on his arm as a chin), then struggled to interest his own daughter in her heritage, felt so familiar to me. As a child I refused to learn Greek; since having children, I hear Greek words spilling out of me – far more with my son than with my daughter, which is frightening, as Cypriot women are dangerously soppy about their sons. Like my parents before me, I want my children to feel this foreignness inside them. I want to fill their heads with other words, with stories of Persephone and Demeter, Orpheus and Narcissus, Aphrodite and Arachne. There is an unspeakably beautiful sequence in Desh in which Khan, narrating a folk tale to his daughter, begins to inhabit it, digital images surrounding him with a forest of bristling trees and fluttering fireflies. If we have to turn into our parents, at least let's do it in a way that feels magical.

Most of the making I do, inevitably, happens in the kitchen, and it's here, too, that I connect most with my heritage. I can't communicate with my grandmother but I can cook like her: fasoulia, koubebkia, magarounia, kofte. A few years ago at my auntie's house in Greece, I tasted her home-made baklava for the first time and it was a revelation: crunchy, sticky, sweet but not sickly. I finally prised the recipe out of her and the two times I've made it myself it's been a small triumph. So here's my auntie Era's recipe, with a few wee tweaks of my own.

Auntie Era's baklava

I use a Pyrex dish, 30x22x5, for this: you take a knife to it, which is why I don't use a metal tin. Pre-heat the oven to 160 or thereabouts – it wants an hour in the oven to become golden, so use whatever temperature will allow it that length of cooking time

filo pastry – I use Jus-Rol, because it's all I can find in Sainsbury's and I'm not yet insane enough to make my own, and need about a packet and a half

butter – roughly 50g – melted

400g nuts – I use 200g pistachios and 200g almonds – roughly chopped

to which you add: 1tsp ground cinnamon; half tsp ground cloves; 2 level tbsp sugar; 1 tbsp dry breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs (I crush up two cream crackers, which seems to do the trick)

Brush some melted butter over the tin, then start layering the filo, brushing butter between each layer – I use about six sheets here. Sprinkle over half of the nuts mixture, then do another four filo-butter layers, sprinkle over the other half of the nuts mixture, then do another six or so filo-butter layers.

Now you have to cut the baklava diagonally, first in one direction, then the other, to make bite-sized diamond-shaped pieces – make sure the knife goes all the way to the bottom of the tin. Push a whole clove into each piece to hold the pastry in place. Sprinkle it all over with water, then bake it for an hour until golden brown.

15 minutes before it comes out of the oven, make the syrup: you need a glass (approx 250ml) of water, and the same glass of sugar, which you put in a saucepan with a stick of cinnamon, three cloves, the rind of half a lemon and a squeeze of lemon juice. Put it on a medium heat, stir it to dissolve the sugar then boil for at least five but more like 10 minutes.

The very second you pull the baklava out of the oven, pour the syrup over and listen to it sizzle. Leave the syrup to soak in for at least half an hour before tucking in. It will keep for a few days just with a tea-towel to cover it.

Incidentally, as long as you have suitable breadcrumbs/crackers, you can make this vegan by substituting the butter for Stork margarine – I've tried it and couldn't tell the difference.

all the beautiful things in the world

2011-09-22T23:38:00.002+01:00

I went to the Edinburgh festival this year buoyant with good intentions to post here every day with little reflections on what I was seeing: Mission Drift, Audience, The Table, I Hope My Heart Goes First, Your Last Breath, Future Proof, Alma Mater, Steal Compass, 2401 Objects... And of course it didn't happen; why did I even think it would? The one piece I started trying to write – about The Frequency D'Ici's Free Time Radical, a show so gentle I didn't register its impact until several hours later, when I was suddenly engulfed by sorrow for the two male characters – refused to formulate itself, and after that I became too caught up in the excitement of haring about town and the guilt of spending hardly any time with the family. And then there was holiday and then a lengthy visit from my mum and suddenly I have a glut of deadlines and not enough hours in the day to write the real work, let alone effervesce about Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Tezuka or the new Baxter Dury album or the new Jens Lekman EP or Kneehigh's The Wild Bride. I've only managed to write this because I sat down to transcribe an interview I'd done with Simon Stephens (oh I do adore him), but discovered that I'd plugged the phone cord into the earphone socket of the recorder, rather than the microphone, so all I could hear of him was a ghostly murmur. That's kind of how life is at the moment. On the plus side, I spent a large chunk of Saturday re-creating a white chocolate cheesecake and raspberry tart from Ottolenghi, with which I'm somewhat unhealthily obsessed, and baking vegan baklava, both of which went a bit too well, recipes to come if I ever get any time. And I'm having a melty teenage moment with Caged Animals, particularly their song Teflon Heart, whose chorus makes my veins itch and will not budge from my head. So here it is...

i can't tell you where we're going

2011-08-12T20:50:00.002+01:00

As someone unashamed to call herself a feminist (and I know a lot of people who wouldn't dream of doing such a thing), I'm often dismayed by my failure to register the subtle diminishments of women in the culture around me. Spending time with Miss Velvelette Actionette is invigorating, because her feminism is forthright and astute where mine is meek and woolly. She glares at the things I glaze over, interrogating and challenging assumptions about women that I, not entirely consciously (at least, I hope not), accept, even uphold.

It's surprisingly rare that a work of art should fire up the feminist in me, let alone that it should happen three times in the past three weeks. Things began mildly, with Belarus Free Theatre at the Almeida. I've wanted to see this company since Mark Ravenhill wrote about them in G2 but, in that infuriatingly haphazard way that I have, didn't get around to it before now. Unfortunately, Eurepica. Challenge didn't feel like the place to start. Among its scattershot collection of 12 short vignettes was one rivetingly visceral piece, in which a student protester is interrogated by the authorities: what made it so effective was that the student was represented by a watermelon, which sat, mutely pathetic, as the interrogator showered it with abuse. Its decimation was no less shocking for being inevitable: the sight of its head being sliced off made me squirm, and when the interrogator stuck her hand inside and pulled out its juicy red innards my stomach churned. It reminded me of a production of Pere Ubu I saw years and years ago, I think at the Young Vic, in which all the deaths were devastatingly enacted by a lugubrious chap at a table using cheese graters and tomatoes and other innocuous foods and kitchen tools, a warped appropriation of foley effects that remains one of the best pieces of theatre I've ever seen.

The rest drifted between intermittently involving and drearily awful. I liked the unsettling use of foot puppets to depict child drug addicts in Turkey and the incongruity of a Latvian immigrant rapping his letters home from Ireland. The argument between a Romanian playwright hoping to craft something free and true about his country, and the theatre agent interested only in perpetuating violent cliches, demonstrated a dry, if not exactly subtle, humour, as did the tale of a Swedish woman harassing a beggar on the underground for failing to consider the environmental impact of photocopied leaflets. But as the evening wore on – and it is wearing, watching one satire after another not quite come off – my general disappointment was sharpened by a specific annoyance at the quantity of bare female flesh on stage. The nadir came with a shrill piece from Poland about a priest and a prostitute – and that alone tells you how old-fashioned some of the work was – that never allowed the woman to be more than a squawking object.

The group are already fighting for so much, I feel mean criticising them at all, let alone criticising them for lapses in their representation of women. But it rankled, and left me in an unforgiving frame of mind just as I caught up with The Social Network on DVD. For every positive female figure in the film – Zuckerberg's self-possessed ex-girlfriend, the attorney working with his estranged best friend, the plain-talking junior lawyer – there's a scene of nauseating female subjugation. There's the frat-boy parties, where female students strip off and cavort to animal cheers. There's the two women who throw themselves at Zuckerberg and his best friend, one of whom disappears from the film without trace, the other of whom is revealed as an intolerable jealous hysteric. There's the Facebook celebration party where – and this was the final gratuitous straw – people snort cocaine from a teenage woman's bare stomach. Yes, the dialogue is whip-sharp; yes, the competing legal shenanigans make for entertaining drama; yes, it's brilliant that the characters are so complex, remaining sympathetic no matter how reprehensible they appear. But the casualness of the sexism appalled me so much, I couldn't truly enjoy the film.

A few days later, feminist-me was taxed again by The Village Bike at the Royal Court. I dithered about seeing this play, because I want nothing more to do with any of the writers who contributed to the unnatural disaster that was Greenland at the National, with the possible exception of Moira Buffini, whom I've worshipped for so long that I can't stop now. Penelope Skinner went some way to redeeming herself: The Village Bike is lemon-sharp in some places, quietly moving in others. I laughed when Becky – pregnant, furious at the negation of her self that the invisible foetus has already inflicted on her, desperate for sex – rages at her well-meaning, decent-thinking, infuriatingly self-righteous sap of a husband that their child is in her womb, not her vagina. I gasped when John rails at Becky for shopping at Tesco, expecting him to demand to know why she bought condoms: instead, what shocks him is the appearance of contraband brie on the receipt. I cried when Becky's neighbour Jenny, the beleaguered mother of two young boys, cracks with desperation at her husband's absence, his easy ability to leave the family home for more “worthwhile” endeavour in developing countries, the expectation that she will be kind and supportive and calm even as her children infuriate and insult her. “I'm just stupid old Mummy,” she rails, and my heart bled for her.

And yet. I have serious problems with a play that purports to explore women's sexuality but steadfastly punishes women for indulging that sexuality. Rejected by her husband, Becky starts an affair with a neighbour widely deemed eccentric: together they play out pornographic fantasies in which Becky likes to think she's in control, but never is. She allows herself to be hurt and abused and still comes begging for more. And when she's rejected by this man, she throws herself at the local plumber (a neat pornography in-joke) and feels like a prostitute. By the end, Becky finds the very thought of sex revolting: in a stage direction, Skinner emphasises that she lies on her bed and “stays very very still. As though, if she moves, something will break.”

Here and there, Skinner raises properly interesting questions: about the effect getting married, having children, has not only on a woman's sense of self but on her sense of self-determination, the extent to which motherhood erodes a woman's sense of freedom to act as she chooses and put her own desires first. (And yes, these are questions I face every day.) About the myriad tiny ways in which men, husbands, take advantage of their wives. About the relative ease with which men can enjoy their sexuality and the near impossibility for women of doing the same. But Skinner ruins it all by humiliating Becky, punishing her for wanting sex, having sex, using sex for something other than procreation. What could have been an engaging and provocative feminist argument feels instead as primly cautionary as a Victorian morality tale.

The result of all this infuriation is that, after finishing the biography of Mrs Beeton – whom Kathryn Hughes, persuasively and winningly, depicts not only working alongside her husband as an equal at just the moment in time when those prim Victorians were shunting middle-class women into the confines of the household, but working to reassure the women newly trapped at home that their endeavour there could be worthwhile, as long as they applied themselves to mathematics and science and appreciated the skill required to run a household, not least financially, smoothly and efficiently – I've been drawn back to Adrienne Rich's book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. I tried reading it a few months ago, but stopped when I realised that the introduction had washed over me: clearly I wasn't ready to engage with such scrupulous feminist thought. Reading that introduction properly now, part of me feels exhilarated at the parallels between Rich's thinking and my own, but another part of me is pained by how little appears to have changed since she wrote the book in 1976 and revisited it a decade later. At heart, her feminism is anti-capitalist humanism, as captured in this paragraph about the fight for abortion and birth rights in the 1970s:

A movement narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth which does not ask questions and demand answers about the lives of children, the priorities of government; a movement in which individual families rely on consumerism and educational privilege to supply their own children with good nutrition, schooling, health care can, while perceiving itself as progressive or alternative, exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose children grow up in poverty and which places its highest priority on the technology of war.

I read this travelling home from David Hoyle's spirit-lifting show at Soho on Monday night, knowing that nearby Brixton and Battersea had been attacked by looters, half-expecting any minute to walk into a riot. It was exactly what I needed: a wise, calm voice reminding me that the root of any problem lies deep and must be excavated if real and lasting change is to be effected. Hoyle was brilliant on the subject of the riots, slyly suggesting that we all pop down to Bond St after the show and “have a fun time” helping ourselves to designer goods, provocatively arguing that the looters are simply doing their bit to bring us to a state of communist bliss, in which we wake each day to pick only as many apples from the tree as we need. Add his assurance that today's children would be much improved by being injected with acid at school, that when you're depressed doing something avant-garde instantly makes you feel better, and his astonishing cover of New Order's True Faith that shone a dazzling new light on the song, and yes, it did feel worth risking the riots to be there.

My own thinking on the riots is an inchoate tangle of fury and sadness and bleak optimism (my husband has read that the gangs who live around us crossed territories and forgot enmities to smash up Brixton and Battersea together, proving that some sort of ceasefire is possible), and rather than attempt to unravel it here I'll just direct you to Chris Goode's post on the subject, which is more powerfully articulate and brave than I'm ready to be.

What links Chris, Adrienne Rich and David Hoyle is otherness and a celebration of otherness, not least the potential for otherness to reject capitalism and forge new social models. As opposed to the old social models that Sam Holcroft, in her scintillating contribution to Double Feature at the National, Edgar and Annabel, craftily argues that we adhere to, script our lives by, almost despite ourselves. Holcroft places Edgar and Annabel in a repressive police state that doesn't quite hold up, but it doesn't matter, because the surveillance under which the couple exist functions brilliantly as a metaphor for the way we survey ourselves: we self-censor and rein ourselves in, controlling impulses and extinguishing desires, not simply respecting but maintaining conservative notions of normalcy and pernicious financial systems, no matter how inimical these things seem to us in theory. Holcroft's characters feel constrained by the roles allotted to them by society, but to break free would be to risk their lives. How different is that from Penelope Skinner's Becky, trapped in a genteel village in nice, safe, democratic England, condemned to play a role that doesn't suit her? Becky isn't a firebrand revolutionary, she's not constructing bombs, she's not rioting. But she is trying to escape the boundaries of her existence, and for that her spirit is broken. Another protest silenced by the forces of conservatism.

if i could just focus on one thing long enough to...

2011-08-07T00:43:00.004+01:00

Among the plots and plans that clatter incessantly in my head is a long-cherished dream of writing a cookbook, almost certainly focusing on cake recipes, almost inevitably modelled on How To Be a Domestic Goddess (despite my deep-seated antipathy to Nigella Lawson, it's one of my favourites) but more indie-punk in spirit: How To Be a Domestic Riot Grrrl, perhaps. I doubt it will have much appeal beyond people like me who find it essentially impossible to follow a recipe without tweaking it in some way, who use them not as lists of instructions but starting points, sources of inspiration. I've just finished reading Kathryn Hughes' biography of Isabella Beeton, which is absorbing, enlightening and infuriating in roughly equal measure; in one of my favourite chapters, she describes how Mrs B fought against the snobbery implicit in much of the cookery-writing of her day, by setting out her recipes clearly, precisely and methodically, thus making them equally accessible to practised chefs and those who didn't know a skillet from a griddle. It's not that I can't see the usefulness of being prescriptive in this way, more that I personally chafe against it.

There is a cheering suggestion of egalitarianism in Hughes' Beeton, something you don't get from, for instance, this opening line in the “Essential information: the golden rules of baking” section of Julie Duff's book Cakes, which makes me fume whenever I read it: “Baking is something to enjoy, but unlike a lot of cookery, it cannot be stressed enough how important it is to follow the recipe.” No it's not! What a pernicious attitude this is. It assumes that only one kind of cake – the kind guaranteed to win awards at competitions run by village fetes – is worth making. It suggests that baking is a daunting, rigorous scientific process (not that I have anything against rigorous scientific processes) to be approached in a spirit of caution. And it's preposterously egotistical, denying other people the opportunity to be creative with their baking, giving the impression that a cake will taste good only if you endeavour to replicate the divine writer's cooking, when in fact – as my friend David is so good at reminding me when I have my occasional baking flaps – it's quite hard for something containing vast quantities of butter and sugar not to taste good, however you go about boshing it together.

I frequently feel a sort of amazement at being friends with David: he's the kind of person I'm more used to worshipping from afar. He's a staggeringly good writer; for a long stretch of time he wasn't well enough to write, so it's thrilling that he's started working again, for The Quietus. He's dazzlingly smart: pretty much every time we're together I learn something from him about music or books or pop or queer culture. He also has a magic ability to befriend people who make the art that he likes: what I find remarkable about this isn't that they should adore him, because on top of everything he's funny and kind and intensely interested in the brilliant things people do, but just that he should have the confidence to form those relationships (I don't, hence my awe). A few months ago I opened up an email from him that he was sending to his nearest and dearest, and when I realised that my name was nestled alongside Mark Eitzel's and John Grant's I nearly fell off my chair.

As well as having impeccable taste in all things music and literature, David has the sweetest of tooths. He's a dab hand at whipping up a cake or jam himself: I savour memories of his iced lemon and pistachio cake, his tangerine and brown sugar marmalade, and the thimbleful of his elderberry jam I hid from the rest of the family, which ranks among the most exquisite confections I've ever eaten. A while ago, he told me about a cake he had eaten at the best deli in Glasgow: a lemon, olive oil and rosemary cake that had been unspeakably good. Since then, we've set about trying to make our own version, using recipes from the internet as rough guides. His was delicious, but the Glasgow one had been quite dense and crunchy and his was more spongy, which made him wonder if it ought to have polenta in it (he had used only flour). I made one for an Actionettes tea party in May that was also good but not quite rosemary enough. I've been meaning to post up the recipe ever since, but – typically – didn't write it down. So I made it up all over again the other weekend, put in too much baking powder and ended up with a sunken cake. None the less, it was yummy: dense but moist, good crumb, crunchy from a bit of demerara sugar I mixed in on a whim, fragrant with rosemary. And this time I remembered to write it down, correcting the baking powder quantity as I did so. So here it is, for David, with love.

Lemon, olive oil and rosemary cake

150ml olive oil

3 eggs

150ml sour cream

juice and rind of two lemons

125g caster sugar

50g demerara sugar

30cm stick of rosemary, leaves stripped off and cut into tiny pieces

100g flour

150g polenta

2 tsp baking powder

half tsp bicarb of soda

There are two ways of doing this. Method one: put all the wet stuff in a bowl with the two sugars and beat them together until they're amalgamated in a luscious, sweet and runny mayonnaise, stir in the lemon rind and rosemary, then fold in the flour, polenta and raising agents. Method two: separate the eggs, put the yolks in a bowl with the lemon juice, olive oil, sugars and sour cream and beat until luscious, stir in the lemon rind and rosemary, fold in the flour, polenta and raising agents, then in a separate bowl whisk the egg whites until they form sturdy peaks and fold those in. I've tried both ways, both come out well, but I probably have a preference for the second method, even though (and possibly because) it's more work. Either way, pour the batter into a 18-20cm round cake tin (I lined mine with greaseproof) and bake at 180-190 (again, I've done both, depending on what else was in the oven, with equally good results) for 45 or so minutes. It's good with lemon icing, either the kind the sits crisply on top or the kind that melts into the cake; it's even better with lemon sorbet on the side. Oh, and don't forget the raspberries.

A coda: I gave up using Julie Duff's book when none of the recipes – and for once I did make an effort to follow them to the letter – had good results. Her dough for raspberry buns was a sticky disaster, whereas when I followed the Mrs Beeton recipe (at least, the recipe in my beloved 1960 edition of the Book of Household Management) they were, as they ought to be, very fine indeed. So there.

excuses, excuses

2011-07-18T22:04:00.012+01:00

My head is swimming with stuff I want to write about here: Chris Goode and Co, obviously; the Hofesh Shechter show I saw at Sadlers on Saturday night; the lemon/rosemary/olive oil cake recipe I'm tinkering with; my slow surrender to Deerhunter (Halcyon Digest plays as I write). Especially where Chris is concerned, I feel rather guilty for not buckling down, but all available time, and even a lot of unavailable time, has been consumed for the past few weeks by two things: preparing for the Actionettes' gig at Vintage on Saturday 30th July and the art course I've been doing at Morley.

Actionettes first: we're making new frocks for the occasion and so far mine is going disastrously. Tonight I cut out my third attempt at the lining: thank the stars I didn't go straight in with the actual fabric (spangly black paisley – looks better than it sounds) because I'd have run out by now. I just can't seem to get a bodice pattern right any more; or, as my husband gently pointed out, I've simply become fussier about fit since doing a pattern-cutting course earlier this year. We're also learning a new dance, the brilliant work of Miss Silhouette, to this song:

So that's all busy busy. And then there's Morley. I've been aching to start painting again for years and finally hit a point of such agonised frustration that I signed up for their pre-foundation in art course. Essentially it's a portfolio builder/introduction to the basic disciplines: I went thinking I might get stuck back in with oil paints, but instead have been wrestling with chicken wire and discovering what effects you can achieve by mixing charcoal with PVA. It's been exhilarating, infuriating, challenging and absorbing; I haven't much liked anything I've made, but it hasn't mattered because – cliche alert – I've loved the process, passionately.

The final two weeks of the course are going to be spent preparing for and mounting our debut exhibition, open from July 29-August 4, in Morley's Landing Gallery, which sounds almost grand until you visit the space itself: two corridors separated by a flight of stairs, in the characterless depths of the building, with no space for 3D work and a sterile glare to the lighting. Still, we all have to start somewhere. Not that I know what I'm starting, or where I'm going. Until my smallest small person is a bit less small, I don't feel I can carry on with the studying; I have grand plans to continue making work at home, but fear that without the imposition of structured deadlines it might fall by the wayside. Ot maybe it's the validation that the course provides that I need. One thing I do know is that I don't want to feel that agonized itching in my heart any more. Starting to write here calmed it a little; Morley has soothed it a little more.

Before I go, here's something lovely from Deerhunter:

you say you want a revolution, well, you know...

2011-06-30T20:49:00.003+01:00

I've wanted to see Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup with Barley for years; that the chance should finally come after a period of immersion in Clifford Odets felt apposite. If Odets' Group Theatre plays are songs of a certain socialist innocence, Wesker transposes those songs to a key of experience. One of Wesker's characters, Ada, finds the place that Odets longs for in Golden Boy – where poverty is no shame, where there's no war in the streets – but she finds it in a rural isolation with her husband. Pained, even poisoned, by a sense of betrayal, Ada's disillusionment with socialist endeavour makes her vitriolic: she decries the girls she works with as “lipsticked, giggling morons”, and the “splendid and heroic working class” men that her husband fought alongside in the Spanish civil war and second world war as animals with no sense of social conscience. She just doesn't care for them any more. Everyone in the theatre laughed at Ada's barbed fury, but I can't think why, unless it's only me who frequently shares such feelings of misanthropy.

Where Odets calls for free and equal love between two people, Wesker is interested in that care we can share more widely. Ada denounces her mother Sarah's “stupendous, egotistical audacity” for thinking she can care for society at large. But it's Sarah who is the most sympathetic character in the play: indomitable, enthusiastic, faintly annoying Sarah, always bustling and fussing, needling and nagging. Her final speeches in the play are extraordinary: I could feel her hand gripping my wrist and dragging me into kindness, conscientiousness and solicitude.

So I'm still a communist! Shoot me then! I'm a communist! I've always been one – since the time when all the world was a communist. … But it's different now. Now the people have forgotten. I sometimes think they're not worth fighting for because they forget so easily. You give them a few shillings in the bank and they can buy a television so they think it's all over, there's nothing more to be got, they don't have to think any more! Is that what you want? A world where people don't think any more?

Dominic Cooke's production at the Royal Court is odd, and not just because it didn't live up to that five star review from Michael Billington (I had the same problem catching up with Clybourne Park in the West End). A scene will be electrifying in its liveness – and then suddenly the plug gets pulled and it becomes inert, every word, every gesture, leaden with contrivance. The first instance of this came early for me: the opening scene, when the characters prepare to march against Mosley's blackshirts, was so vivid and exciting I wanted to climb on stage and grab a flag myself. But something goes wrong when the characters start naming comrades killed in Spain: it ought to be desperately moving, but the moment of contemplation and sorrow is so deliberate, forced even, that I ended up squirming at the staginess of it. The awful, awful, there-for-the-sake-of-argument scene later in the play between Sarah and Monty, now a greengrocer in Manchester doing very-well-for-himself-thank-you, was redeemed only by the fantasticness of Bessie's 1950s catalogue-girl outfit: from the top, ruffled curls and slick-backed ponytail; red lips; mint-green jumper; flared skirt with, naturally, poodles frolicking across it; patent leather heels. Sigh. (Secretly, of course, the thing I love most about seeing plays set in the early mid-20th century is the chance they give me for ogling frocks. I spent a lot of time at Rocket to the Moon trying to work out the construction of Belle's dresses with a view to copying them at home. Sarah isn't nearly so glamorous, but even her dour yellow jumper/brown tweed skirt combo from the first scene was covetable to me.)

I saw Chicken Soup on Tuesday and woke up on Wednesday with a hankering to listen to Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump for the first time in ages. It wasn't until I heard myself yelling along to the chorus of The Crystal Lake – “I've got to get out of here, I've got to get out of here and find my place again, I've lost my place again” – that I knew why. It's an entire album about feeling out of kilter with the world and your times, searching for an alternative but not being sure that the alternative is a solution, feeling disappointed with people but horribly lonely without them. There are, of course, no answers. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep on fighting, keep on searching.

As a postscript: I appreciate that there is some irony in the fact that I've written this on a day when people across the country are striking in protest not only at specific Conservative policies but the very repugnance of Conservatism. I should be out there joining in; instead I'm at home, being self-indulgent. I'm doing what is in my heart, but is that enough?

one from the heart

2011-06-25T23:29:00.003+01:00

Every birthday I ever had I sat around. Now'sa time for standing. Poppa, I have to tell you – I don't like myself, past, present and future. Do you know there are men who have wonderful things from life? … You don't know what it means to sit around here and watch the months go ticking by! Do you think that's a life for a boy my age? Tomorrow's my birthday! I change my life! [Golden Boy]

I was in my early 20s when I saw my first Clifford Odets: just a bit older than Joe Bonaparte, the angry young hero of Golden Boy. I fell a little in love with Joe – how could I not? He's a prototype Jimmy Dean, a jazz-age juvenile delinquent. “You could build a city with his ambition to be somebody,” says the girl who silently adores him. “No,” replies his father, morosely: “burn down.”

Golden Boy is film noir transposed to the stage, populated by gangsters and philosophising Italians, girls who feel dead inside and men clinging to their last shred of hope. At the heart of it is Joe, the poor, bullied son of an immigrant, desperate to achieve something amid the arrogant skyscrapers and exhibitionist cars of New York. He's a musician, but “music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries”, as Mr Bonaparte puts it, and so has become symptomatic for Joe of the spiritual weakness he senses in himself but can't articulate and doesn't know how to redress. “If music shot bullets I'd like it better,” he tells Lorna, his only solace. “Artists and people like that are freaks today. The world moves fast and they sit around like forgotten dopes.”

In the memorably ambitious fringe production I saw, Golden Boy was gut-wrenching to watch: Joe makes a string of wrong choices, glories in them, and in the most violent of circumstances discovers the magnitude of his mistakes. “I've been running around in circles,” he says, in a stunned moment of regret. The people who “conquer the world” are the ones who can stand tall and say: “I have myself; I am what I want to be!” His realisation leads to that moment that, I'm learning, eventually comes in all of Odets' 1930s/Group Theatre plays, when Odets' own romantic-idealist-socialist manifesto is voiced in a passionate blaze:

Somewhere there must be happy boys and girls who can teach us the way of life! We'll find some city where poverty's no shame – where music is no crime! – where there's no war in the streets – where a man is glad to be himself, to live and make his woman herself!

Outbursts like this look so sentimental on the page, but that's romantic, idealistic socialism for you: set against the impersonal, mechanistic, pragmatic brutality of capitalism it has a tendency to appear somewhat wan. Not to me, though: Odets envisages life as I want to live it, seeks a world I want my children to enter in the future. And his dreams aren't necessarily the stuff of fairy tales, something made clear in Rocket to the Moon. Look at the character names: Belle, Stark, Prince. Rocket, it struck me when watching it at the National recently, is a deliberate, feminist deconstruction of fairy-tale promises. In Odets' fable, Belle marries not a beast but a man called Stark, stark reality, and they could be happy together, if he only had more courage, the self-belief that Joe Bonaparte looks for. And his self-moulding heroine, Cleo Singer (once again, the centrality of art to Odets' vision), rejects the advances of Mr Prince, with his peacock armour and hollow promises of wealth and ease, in a fervent declaration:

If there's roads, I'll take them. I'll go up all those roads till I find what I want. I want a love that uses me, that needs me. Don't you think there's a world of joyful men and women? Must all men live afraid to laugh and sing? Can't we sing at work and love our work? It's getting late to play at life; I want to live it.

Love, love, love. No one can do anything alone. The American Dream is for the pioneer, the lonely hunter, the self-aggrandizing man. Odets rejects that: he argues that men and women must work together; that men cannot truly be themselves, cannot hope to realise their fullest potential, without women; that the strongest society has its foundations not in money but the bonds of love. There is a wonderful moment in Rocket when Frenchy wonders whether capitalism, the selfishness it engenders, the disparity it demands, makes that kind of love impossible:

Love is a beginning, a jumping-off place. It's like what heat is at the forge – makes the metal easy to handle and shape. But love and the grace to use it! To develop, expand it, variate it! … Who can do that today? … the free exercise of love, I figure, gets harder every day.

Rocket is unflinching in its examination of the difficulties of marriage: for all his idealism, Odets expects nothing to be easy. His portrait of a marriage in Awake and Sing! is excoriating: Bessie, nerves frayed, snapping constantly at everyone around her, undermining them, leeching their spirits; Myron shrivelled and ineffectual, offering no support to his wife, no guidance to his children; the two of them shrivelled not so much by poverty but by Bessie's insidious, destructive desire to keep up with the neighbours and maintain a facade of conventional respectability. We never see Cleo's mother in Rocket to the Moon, but I bet she's just like Bessie:

My mother's always trying to hold me back, not to have all the experiences I can. Those people think you can live on good advice. Don't you think life is to live all you can and experience everything? Isn't that the only way you can develop to be a real human being?

It takes a death for Bessie's children to find the courage to seize at life, to allow themselves not to feel guilty about going up their own roads; just as it takes a death for Joe to learn what he really wanted from the world. And this, maybe, is what I love most about Odets: his plays show you broken people in moments of shattering (but potentially transforming) self-discovery, so you can learn their lessons, change your life, without breaking too. Reading through the Methuen collected edition recently (not Paradise Lost, though: I'm patiently saving that thrill of discovery for when it must and shall be staged), one speech shone out at me. It's old Jacob, Bessie's beleaguered, kindly father in Awake and Sing!, taking the youth of Depression-strangled America by the scruff of the neck and giving them a shake:

Look on this failure and see for seventy years he talked, with good ideas, but only in the head. … This is why I tell you – DO! Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution.

I'm tattooing those words on my own heart, so I never, ever forget.

come on, chemicals

2011-06-16T23:27:00.004+01:00

I feel nervous going into a rehearsal room. I can't bear for anyone to read two words of an album-review-in-progress; how then can I impose myself on a group of performers as they dredge their minds for words and gestures and struggle to sculpt them into meaningful shapes? Yet for the past few years I've taken every possible opportunity to witness theatre-pieces-in-progress, my curiosity and fascination with the work required to create a living, breathing, truth-full performance increasing each time. It's made me realise how little I know or understand about how theatre is made, and how much of that making is down to some mysterious and unfathomable force (I've called it alchemy before), both beyond and binding the individual personalities involved. The fact that I review theatre, comprehending so little, appals me.

My goal in a rehearsal room is to be as unobtrusive as possible: not easy, because, as more than one director has pointed out, I alter the temperature just by opening the door. I am the audience to come, even if my purpose is only to absorb, not to assess, certainly not to criticise. I'm quietly pleased when something happens regardless of my presence: when an actor picks up a guitar during the break and starts bashing out an indie song, or sinks into a nap while the director delivers their notes. It means the air has settled around me. I've melted into the wall.

There are, of course, theatre writers who are also makers (my admiration for Brian Logan is great), and I have, of course, of course, toyed with the idea of making something myself, but goodness knows where I'd find the confidence. Which brings me (back) to Chris Goode. Both in conversation with me and recently in his blog, he's puzzled over the following: almost everyone does something creative, whether it's writing the odd poem or baking cakes, painting or gardening, but almost no one makes a bit of theatre unless they're doing it professionally. Why is that? (As it happens, he's not the first person to raise this with me. A few years ago, when I was contemplating abandoning newspapers and trying to work in the theatre [the words frying pan and fire were muttered], I had a series of strange and wonderful conversations with directors and literary managers and writers I had encountered through work, and the piece of advice that struck me most was: make something in your kitchen. Invite a few friends. It will be a piece of theatre that wouldn't otherwise have existed and it will be yours.)

The reason Chris mentioned this to me wasn't because he wanted to encourage me to abandon all fear, but because he had a proposition. Would I like to spend five weeks in the rehearsal room with him, observing as he worked on three very different, very experimental projects and launched his new company? During a Devoted and Disgruntled session last year, I had talked at length about how spending a month with Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National had transformed my appreciation of the show: had made me more conscious of its myriad tiny details and inflections, more sympathetic to the compromises demanded by lack of time or money or resources; above all had deepened my understanding of what is a very difficult piece. It was an amazing experience, an immense privilege. And Chris, bless him, not only remembered my impassioned outburst on the subject but felt that this experience shouldn't be unique but general, that all the joy and playfulness and questioning and wrestling that happens in a rehearsal room shouldn't be hidden behind a locked door.

So here I am, on a train to Leeds for Open House, the five-day project he's doing at West Yorkshire Playhouse, where the rehearsal room is open not just to me but to anyone at all. The closer I get, the more astonished I am that he's doing this, the more humbled I am by the selflessness, the unselfconsciousness, of Chris and his cast. They're not just sharing a way of making work with people, a process. They're sharing a way of being open, honest, generous, trusting, fearless, in work and in relationships and in life.

Open House is the last of the three projects I've been watching; I'm still trying to fathom everything I've seen and thought and felt during the first two. I'll be writing more (much, much more) about the Cendrars piece, as it was genuinely extraordinary, a mind-expanding three weeks not only in terms of the kind of theatre Chris was setting out to make – a theatre of materials, textures and ideas – but in the way it made me reconsider my role as a member of the audience, my complicity with that audience, the minute ways in which I radiate a response to a piece and absorb the responses around me. Gradually, over the days I spent in the rehearsal room, I felt myself colluding with the company making the show; the moment I entered the theatre with the rest of the spectators, a new collusion began.

In between Cendrars and Leeds, I spent a few days at the National Theatre Studio watching Chris play around with a verbatim piece he hopes to make, based on interviews conducted by Karl James of The Dialogue Project with a group of primary-school-age children. I can't say I was immediately convinced by the thesis behind the piece: that we don't hear children, that adults smother children's voices in a treacle of sentimentality and cuteness. You want to come round my house, I thought, and see how possible it is to be unsentimental about children, how impossible it is to escape their voices. But I'd missed the point. Chris was really asking a question: what if we listened to children as though they were grown-ups? What would happen if we placed their words into the mouths of adults – adults not pretending to be children but retaining their adult voices? How would that affect the quality of our listening? What would we hear?

What I heard astonished me. The actors were sitting down, around a blank, conference-room-style table, the first time I listened to a read-through of the script, so there was nothing to distract from the words – a few character types that, in the time I wasn't in the room, the group had imposed on individual bits of dialogue, but no gestures. Although edited down, the texts had been transcribed with absolute fidelity from the original recordings of Karl's interviews with seven and nine-year-olds. I recognised in their speech a lot of uncomfortable, challenging things about myself, about adults, about children, particularly about the way adults bring up their children, the ideas we feed them and expectations we have of them and all the small and awful ways in which we fail to support them, fail to appreciate their courage. Here are some of the things I wrote in my notebook, during that initial read-through and the showing at the end of the week [explanations or expansions written today I've put in square brackets]:

we are all the child we were, it never goes away

patterns of behaviour start here [the girl who, when pissed off, goes upstairs and eats some sweets to feel better]

same dreams... [this relates not just to dreams/nightmares described by the children, but to a sensation that some of the incidents they describe, eg being lost, will linger in the subconscious and feed the language of dreaming in the future. In fact, another of my notes was, in far fewer words: everything that's being said could be spoken by an adult describing a dream]

moments when we feel like a child: intimidating work situations; with new friends/people we have a crush on

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS... how crippling

difficulty finding the right word

IMPOSSIBILITY DEALING WITH EMOTIONS [fear, anger, sadness]

looking for escape – the secret bar etc [in the opening speech, a girl wishes there were somewhere she could go to sit and think other than the park, which is always busy because too many people know it's there]

fear makes us children again

flirting as a playground game

how crushing it is being an adult

all the impositions on children// what messages we give them, eg about money// responsibilities they assume themselves [this relates to two things: a chunk of text in which a group of children give their impressions of what financial responsibilities are entailed in being an adult, the need to earn money and hold down a job and support a family, and also to a conversation about a great-grandmother, how the child wanted to see more of her before she died but wasn't in a position to choose when that could happen, which struck me as appalling – they have the same feeling, but not the same freedom]

children playing adults – we don't allow them gravity //– extent to which we [adults] have to assume these things [responsibility, articulacy, selflessness, courage]

I have a fear of when my parents die

That last line is a direct quote from the script. But it might as well be me talking about my parents, or even my dad talking about his mum. There were a few more lines that I copied down, because they made me cry whenever they were spoken:

When you're a child, you don't really think... cos you like to live like a child.

Doesn't really seem you're just going to be an adult

like time flies by and you just want... to, like, stay as a child,

but you just enjoy things, the way it goes

*

Oh, I do have one question.

How does it feel like, being an adult, just in general?

Thoughts like these are very alive to me as I struggle to bring up two children, to comprehend myself as a parent, to not behave as or more childishly than them; as I remember the person I was (and thought I was) when I was 6, 16, 26; as I anticipate my children becoming adults; as I look at the future and feel choked by fear.

Something Chris and the actors discovered while putting the piece together, which Chris flagged up in his introduction to the showing, was how easy it is for actors to perform a child, and how it's almost harder to play adults. Maybe the dressing-up games, the pretending, doesn't stop for any of us – it's just that the stakes get higher, the consequences more frightening, and life stops feeling like a game. Many of Chris's original questions for the children dealt with courage: moments when they had to be brave, had to deal with loss, when they felt small, or guilt, or shame. Listening to the children talk about these things, I wasn't sure that courage is something that we learn that then remains constant in us: maybe it fluctuates, and flies away when we need it most.

I've been thinking about courage a lot while I've been in Leeds (I'm home now): the courage it takes to walk through a door, to join a party, to participate, to walk away. Open House was overwhelming; walking home beneath a copper sulphate sky my heart and brain were still effervescing from it. It's going to take me a while to digest it all, so for now, I'd like to end with another recipe. This is for sponge cake, Open House-style: I'm going to have to work very, very hard to find a better way to convey the flavour of the room. Oh, and here's a soundtrack for it, too.

Ingredients (serves 4):

1 line from an open letter variation

1 sung song

1 movement from the big dance

Stages of a smile

A microphone

2 medium performers

Some laughter or a touch

Jazz hands

Instructions:

1: Preheat a space to gas mark 6.

2: Place the line from an open letter variation and the sung song into a mixing bowl. Beat until smooth and creamy.

3: Beat the performers in a basin or cup and add the mixture a little at a time, with the movement from the big dance, keeping the same smooth and creamy consistency.

4: Add the stages of a smile and a microphone, mix for a few minutes.

5: Divide into two sponge tins, put into a moderately hot space and bake for 2-25 minutes (it is important that the space is well heated).

6: Put on a chair to cool.

7: When cool, put one upside down on a plate spread with a touch, you can also put fresh laughter in at this stage, put the other piece on top and dust with jazz hands.

i bury my head in the browny-red earth

2011-06-02T11:08:00.004+01:00

A while back I interviewed Fiona Shaw about playing Mother Courage, for a little something accompanying an essay by Tony Kushner in the Guardian. It was one of the more entertaining experiences of my working life, but also a troubling one, because she talked about Britain being at war in a matter-of-fact way that made me realise how little I thought about living in a country at war, if at all. I'm politically naive at the worst of times, but my casual ability to ignore Britain's military manoeuvrings suddenly mortified me, my thoughtlessness tantamount to a support of aggression, because it contained no protest against it.

I found myself thinking through this again on Sunday, somewhat unexpectedly in the midst of a Kitchen Revolution-style cooking session putting together a tray of moussaka, a plum crumble tart, two quiche bases, some caramelized onions, and three meals' worth of pasta sauce for the freezer, feats of domestic goddessry undermined by my failures as a parent that morning and, indeed, through the course of the long weekend. My soundtrack, on repeat, was PJ Harvey's Let England Shake. Harvey is one of those singers I've always admired, but at a slight remove: I have several of her albums, but never listen to them, not even Stories From the City, which I loved when reviewing. Let England Shake isn't nearly as friendly or accessible as I remember Stories being, but it's the album that has taken up residence beside the kitchen CD player, that compels me to play it again and again.

I'm slowly appreciating what makes it so fascinating to me: it's a folk album, its rhythms and language hewn from traditional English music, but it's a folk album that sounds absolutely of our times. Much of its modernity lies in the crafty way that Harvey weaves in quotations and samples from other songs. The most obvious – and the line I find myself unable to stop singing – is her twist on that mock-desperate line from Summertime Blues in The Words That Maketh Murder: “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?”, which she sings at first with wry, eyes-narrowed irony, becoming more furious with every repetition. But there are so many others: on Sunday, for the first time, I caught Blood and Fire coursing through Written on the Forehead, and was startled not to have noticed it before. But this is subtle music, muted and ambiguous. I uncover something new in it each time I put it on, which is exactly what you want from an album.

What I particularly discovered on Sunday morning is that Let England Shake makes me feel like I live in a country at war, almost permanently at war; a country belligerent to its core. Harvey does this not by singing about new wars or modern wars, but by singing about wars fallen from living memory in a way that makes them fiercely present: much as Brecht did with Mother Courage. Harvey's imagery is devastating in its simplicity: she sings of “England and the grey, damp filthiness of ages”, of the country “weighted down with silent dead”, of how “our land is ploughed by tanks and marching feet”, and each line fills me with the horror of recognition. This has happened and it is happening and it will happen. On and on and on.

All that killing

Ancient history

Modern history

Vortex

Shipwreck

Even that of the Titanic I read about in the paper

So many associations images I can't get into my poem

Because I'm still such a really bad poet

Because the universe rushes over me

And I didn't bother to insure myself against train wreck

Because I don't know how to take it all the way

And I'm scared.

[Blaise Cendrars, from The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jeanne of France]

I admire Harvey, but I'm also intimidated by her. She released her first album when I was in my teens and struggling to shape my identity, using music as my mould. Riot grrrl emerged at the same time and was inspiring and confusing and absorbing to me. Harvey's refusal to associate herself with riot grrrl struck me as bizarre. Where was her sympathy, her solidarity, her feminist spirit? I didn't understand. Now I have more appreciation of her formidable self-possession. She was only a few years older than me, but she already knew how to take it all the way. Nearly two decades on, I still don't.

I was that 17-year-old riot grrrl again later that evening, watching the Drew Barrymore film Whip It. Along with Miss Velvelette Actionette, I've been a bit obsessed with roller derby ever since the 'Ettes performed a benefit gig with the London Rollergirls: we'd both love to join, but we're a bit, erm, wussy to subject ourselves to all that bruising (the unlikelihood of my even remaining upright in rollerskates is a moot point). It's not a great film – the plotting is fairly conventional and predictable – but the 17-year-old in me adored it. And there were a few scenes that made the grown-up me silently cheer: seeing a rollergirl with her son; that delicious slap that Bliss gives her errant ex-boyfriend; Babe Ruthless coming in second to Iron Maven; most of all, the exquisite moment when Bliss guesses that Juliette Lewis's character is 27 and Lewis's face softens before she snaps, “I'm 36.” Drew Barrymore, I salute you.

As for the plum crumble tart, you might have thought that a crumble with a pastry base might be overkill, but you'd be wrong. The pastry was crisp and plain, the crumble soft, with a hint of ground almond and cinnamon, the plums sour-sweet, and it all got eaten far too quickly. Thank goodness the Actionettes are dancing at Duckie this Saturday: all that go-going needs fuel, you know.

hark the damesel, for she swooneth

2011-05-23T22:20:00.002+01:00

I'm in the honeymoon phase with the new Wild Beasts album, that exquisite, slightly giddy period of feeling so consumed by a piece of music that I listen to it three or four times a day (despite everything else that clamours to be heard: just now that means the Seasick Steve album I'm reviewing; the Lia Ices album I'm befriending; the new Okkervil River; most particularly White Denim's D, which is so literally riveting that I had to lock it away after two listens, simply to be able to get on with my life). Even when Smother isn't playing, I feel the throb of its rhythms in my pulse, the seep of its melodies in my veins. On the morning I started writing this, I was snapped out of a dream by my daughter, and as I stumbled jangling into the day I realised that the dream's narrative and colours and torrid emotions all drew from the soundtrack still echoing in my head: End Come Too Soon.

Smother is an almost shockingly sensual album, its gossamer caresses insinuating their way from earlobe to collarbone, the crook of the arm, the small of the back. But it's a sensuality so searing, and so melancholy, that each time I listen I feel more bereft, skin prickling with an awareness of solitude.

So much of modern pop flaunts a brazen sexuality: Smother is clandestine. Some of what I wrote about Limbo, Panto on its release stands true for me now: there is a baroque wantonness to it, that makes me think of bodies heaving beneath the lacing of corsets, eyes flickering behind elaborate masques. But there is more subtlety here, a quality shadowy and private. Something of the geisha houses described in Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, in which women painted their lips green and teeth black, the more perfectly to be immersed in the dark. Something of Cavafy's erotic visions, “when night comes with its own counsel”. Not for timid bodies, the lust of this heat.

Much as I loved Limbo, Panto, Smother is the album I've been waiting for Wild Beasts to make: the album in which they're in control of what they do, and not vice versa. Limbo, Panto is an obstreperous child: growling like a beast because it can, flaunting and theatrical, relishing its difference, the unleashing of strangeness. That exultant opening howl of Vigil for a Fuddy Duddy haunts me still. Such is the rawness and carnality that mesmerises the heroine in Angela Carter's story The Tiger's Bride.

And then there's Tom Fleming. I feel almost guilty admitting that most of my favourite Wild Beasts songs are those in which his voice is prominent.

But that isn't to say that the two voices are in opposition for me (as they are, say, to Alexis P, at least in his review of Two Dancers). One of the great fascinations of Wild Beasts as they've grown across the three albums is the increasingly fluid way that those apparently opposed voices are woven together, so that now, in Smother, one merges into the other, limbs entangling, hearts dissolving.

Despite the corporeal theatricality of Wild Beasts, I find it hard to think of the band as actual people. I avoid seeing photos of them, and when I do I feel faintly horrified by the sight of plaid shirts, polo-necks and oh, the indignity, beards and moustaches. (One of the Logan brothers summed it up for me, too, when he said: No beards.)

This is the one thing that consoles me for the fact that I'm yet to see them play live. All sorts of mishaps have prevented me: pregnancy, work, forgetfulness. I was in Cyprus when they played at Wilton's Music Hall recently, and cried with frustrated disappointment when those shows were announced, mere days after I'd booked the flights. And so I wait patiently for my relationship with them to be consummated. My eyes will be closed when it is.

you should see how many bodies are hidden under there...

2011-05-17T19:33:00.003+01:00

I've been trying to write this post for over two weeks, but things keep getting in the way: this piece about playing Shylock; the enticing peculiarity of the new Felice Brothers album; the course I've started at Morley College; the background reading I want to do for a new, terribly exciting project inspired by the writer/adventurer/surrealist/oddball Cendrars, with which I'm imminently very peripherally to be involved; the not inconsiderable anxiety (unfounded, as it turned out) of preparing to take my kids on my own on the nine-hour journey to my parents' house in Cyprus; the Douglas Sirks in my mum's DVD collection (oh, the wonder of Magnificent Obsession). I should just let it slide and get on with enthusing about Wild Beasts or the National's production of Rocket to the Moon. But I can't, because I've been too discombobulated by Andrew Haydon's review of the new Simon Stephens, Wastwater. I couldn't sleep after reading it, for re-examining the play and my response to it, and fretting over my impressionability, the difficulty I have maintaining my own opinions in the face of contradiction. Andrew's subtle evaluation of the play almost persuaded me that Wastwater is a work of genius, and stupid me for not realising it at the time of watching. But only almost.

I thought the first section, depicting a tender, awkward, fragile mother-son-or-are-they relationship, was staggeringly good, its poignancy delicately conveyed in Linda Bassett and Tom Sturridge's open-hearted performances. But the two sections after that, in which a policewoman reveals herself to an art teacher and a child trafficker delivers an Asian girl to a middle-aged man, I found much less involving or believable. This didn't trouble me overmuch, until I read Andrew's review. He described a lot of the thoughts that went through my head while watching the play: is this relationship about this? No, it's about that. Are we looking at this unpalatable truth? No, we're looking at that. But whereas I cheerfully dismissed a lot of them, Andrew located in their provocation and odiousness much of the play's complexity, slipperiness and brilliance.

That thesis, Andrew's appreciation of the tautness and scope of text and Katie Mitchell's production, his microscopic attention to every detail, are thrilling in their clarity and exactitude. I no less clearly recall finding Wastwater unsatisfying, and everything I've read and seen since has thrown up its ha'penny explanation why. To start with, there's the book I was reading on the tube that week, a collection of essays by Flannery O'Connor called Mystery and Manners. Her focus is prose-writing, specifically short stories, but what she says about the revelation of character – and it really sank in, because when O'Connor makes a key point, she makes it fiercely and repeatedly – feels salient.

“I often ask myself [this is O'Connor in 1962] what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. … It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.”

O'Connor was Catholic, so the mystery she refers to relates chiefly to our relationship with God. But I lost God somewhere on the Brixton Road years ago, and so, at the risk of missing her point, what absorbs me here is the possibility for reflecting upon the profoundly bewildering mysteries of human relationships, with other humans, with time, with the culture we have made, with this planet we inhabit. These are precisely the mysteries with which Stephens is concerned – but he didn't quite engage me with his choice of gestures. The policewoman fills the hotel room with noise: TV, radio, a porn film on the internet. The art teacher slaps her around the face. The child trafficker pretends to shoot her customer. The man stares helplessly at the child he has bought. There is a coldness to all this, an iciness to Stephens' characters. Except in the first section, and that was the bit I most enjoyed.

Tangled up in this is a realisation that variations of these gestures are made in Dan Rebellato's Chekhov in Hell, which I watched the night after seeing Wastwater, and liked much more – except for the opening 30 minutes, which felt rather forced. Rebellato's reawakened Chekhov immerses himself in all the media noise, the violence and horror, of the modern world. And there are two key moments in the play, moments that made me shiver. In the first, a female TV producer recalls “every little compromise” she's made, the decisions – to quote Stephens – that stay with you, as though the consequences of them stay in your bones. She is talking faster and faster, uncontrollably revealing herself, and suddenly describes being in a stranger's flat at three in the morning, begging them to come on her face, because she feels that lost and that worthless that this seems the only way left to make anyone happy. In the second, Chekhov asks a young woman who works as a prostitute – trafficked from Ukraine – what went wrong with the world. Her reply is emotionless, chilling, almost incomprehensible because it's delivered in Russian. One phrase is repeated so often that its meaning becomes unmistakable. “Milliony smertyei”: millions die. Beneath the still surface of Wastwater lie countless lost bodies. The mud of the earth is mixed with blood.

It fascinates me that these plays are so convergent, for all their dissimilarity. And I wonder whether the key difference is that the characters making these gestures in Rebellato's play are simply more sympathetic: warm somehow, despite their brittle surfaces.

I thought I would write more here: about the passage in Dominic Dromgoole's book The Full Room, in which he compares the hope underscoring Chekhov's plays with the glib despair he sees in much modern theatre; about this assessment from another Flannery O'Connor essay, that a writer “may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by”. But this post is already too long, and something I encountered earlier tonight suddenly made me recognise where my real discomfort lies. Without having met him, I like Simon Stephens enormously, and have a lot of respect for him – even more after reading this. I wanted so much from Wastwater: everything Andrew Haydon found in it. And no amount of time or tangled thinking seems adequately to explain why I felt let down.

some glorious

2011-04-28T16:25:00.004+01:00

I've been obsessed with Chris Goode for some years now, ever since seeing him perform Kiss of Life at the Edinburgh festival in – according to people who are better with dates than I am – 2002. Here was someone only a bit older than myself, on stage alone, shy and a bit bumbling, slowly weaving this beautiful, achingly sad story of a boy trying to commit suicide and the boy who saves him, how they fall in love and fall apart, using breath and the elements of the air as silver threads through the story, the whole thing homespun and gentle but intricately smart in its depiction of the fragility of human relationships, of the human mind, wearing its intelligence so lightly, so quietly moving it made me tremble.

In the years that followed I watched him dress up as a Morris dancer, lie on the floor in a friend's flat and outline his body in salt, deliver passages of internet gibberish with as much heartfelt emotion as sheets of poetry, and scatter jelly babies over my front garden, marvelling each time. The show of his I've seen most recently, The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley, had me in tears for a lot of its running time: Wound Man is the embodiment of a medieval illustration of a man embedded with daggers and swords; Shirley his sidekick, a lost teenager grieving for the older brother he worshipped, doggedly in love with the most handsome boy in school; together they seek out scenes of danger and disaster, arriving too late to “save” anyone, helping people by drawing out their pain and sorrow, because when hurt and frightened people gaze at Wound Man, they see someone who looks exactly how they feel.

Chris's blog is excellent, too: I would hazard a guess that a lot of it is written after midnight; there is that quality of while-the-city-dreams to his writing, a moonlit exuberance. In ways that might possibly embarrass him, I get a lot of sustenance from it: his New Year's Eve post felt like a call to arms – to link arms, that is; a manifesto for a new theatre but also much more than that, a new way of living with each other, talking to each other, reshaping the world together. “What would it feel like to not be afraid any more?” he asked. I've been trying ever since to find out.

Lately I've started using his blog as an arts guide. I bought Jill Johnston's book Admission Accomplished after reading about it in that NYE post, and had one of those moments when an elusive mental jigsaw piece slots into place, when you finally meet someone for whom you've been waiting for years. Words tumble from her apparently in free-form torrents, but always with an intention and purpose that are absolute, politically exhilarating (she was a lesbian feminist writing in the 1970s, how couldn't she be), and inspiring: my burgeoning intention to return to fanzine-writing, albeit for the interweb age, couldn't remain a daydream after that. What he wrote about the folk singer Sam Amidon in the same post so intrigued me that I scoured the music listings week after week until finally getting to see his gig at the Vortex, which was extraordinary: I reviewed it, and barely scratched the surface of what made him so fascinating to watch. Here's a random taster:

I don't remember – and haven't been able to find the post in which she was mentioned – what he wrote about the theatre-maker Rajni Shah, but the idea of her stayed in my memory persistently enough for me to book a ticket for Glorious at the Spill festival last week. For the first 30 minutes of the show, I was disappointed: Chris and I don't always see eye-to-eye (for me, our divergence is characterised by the fact that he loved Ontroerend Goed's Teenage Riot, which I loathed, and hates Little Bulb, whom I adore), and I thought we might not agree here, either. Glorious opens with Shah, encased in a stiff grey tube dress that spreads around her like a black sea (think Ursula the witch's outfit in The Little Mermaid, but less becoming), sombrely intoning songs about people and life and relationships, between text written and spoken by locals she met on Whitecross St a few months before. The texts were intermittently involving, the songs occasionally gleamed, but mostly it seemed humdrum, banal. Seats emptied during the interval and were not refilled.

But something magical happens in the second part. The stories are repeated, perhaps with a little more detail, perhaps continuing to a new chapter. And the songs are repeated, but this time with an orchestral backing, and Shah's voice no longer flat but warm, elegant, glowing. Her dress becomes a kind of Louise Bourgeois sculpture of moulded plastic and wrought metal and twisting fairy lights. Banality, the basic matter of our everyday lives – the breakfast parties, the arguments with our children, the shops on our streets, the political anxieties, the houses we've lived in for years, the cemeteries in which we'll end – is transformed and transcended. And in the third part text and songs are repeated again, slightly changed again, the register again shifted, the mood soft, gentle, soothing. One by one, everyone on the stage drifts off, and when it is empty we, the audience, are invited on. Those lives we were glimpsing? They were our lives. Those parties and arguments and anxieties and houses are ours.

There is a poem by William Blake – Auguries of Innocence – that I know of because, for reasons unfathomable to me now (a charity shop find of my mum's, I suppose), I had a copy of its first verse illuminated and framed and hanging on my bedroom wall when I was quite small. Looking at it now, I realise I've never read the whole thing. But I've carried its opening verse around with me for most of my life:

To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

It came back to me watching Glorious, because that is what Shah shows us, and that is the gift she offers us. Don't be frightened of life, she reminds us. It's all we have.

mind that scalpel

2011-04-24T09:32:00.002+01:00

Another of the theatre pieces I've seen in recent weeks that, in its surreptitious way, made me want to get started here was Honest by DC Moore. I'd been kicking myself for not seeing The Empire while it was at the Royal Court, more so after seeing this. Honest is excoriating, from start to finish: in its attack on the inefficiency of most civil servants (which had my husband, a civil servant, squirming with laughter); in its desperation at the schisms in society, of class and upbringing and education; most of all, in its portrayal of Dave, exquisitely played by Trystan Gravelle, as a man generally secure in his own sense of, at the very least, equanimity, but momentarily shattered by the overwhelming and incalculable horror of our world.

There was one bit in particular that I keep coming back to, and that's his description of Stockwell and Clapham. I live between the two, and Moore's evaluation of the area is faultless. It's late, and Dave is running along Clapham Road from Stockwell station:

A bit coz I'm mad but also because it's Stockwell and really quite scary.

I'd forgotten that.

And after what seems like eight years of horrible estates on my right and lovely Victorian houses on my left, I get to Clapham.

Clapham High Street.

It's...

It's like.

Every vaguely posh graduate that you ever thought was the biggest prick you'd ever met in your life and they've all had a meeting – an AGM – and decided to live in the same area.

On the rare occasions when I find myself on Clapham High Street after children's bedtime, and sometimes even in the daytime, that's exactly how I feel. Although, as my mum so kindly pointed out, I live here, so that must make me one of them. How shallow the foundations for our sense of superiority.

As an aside, last night I randomly put on the new album by the Leisure Society and had a bit of a moment with this song:

everything's great when you're downtown

2011-04-20T23:29:00.001+01:00

Thursday was one of those secret gifts of a day when the children are at nursery and I don't have a strict deadline, so I get to look at some art without distractions. To be fair, they're fairly accommodating: earlier in the week I dragged them to the Nancy Spero show at the Serpentine: tricky in terms of defining war and existentialism to a child, but a thrilling visual accompaniment to the Tune-Yards songs playing in my head. And last month we had a lot of fun together at the Pioneers of the Downtown Scene in the Barbican, where they took up camp in Gordon Matta-Clark's Open House, which, from their perspective, is like an overgrown and correctly scruffy doll's house, and an excellent venue for hide-and-seek.

One visit to the Downtown Scene isn't enough: not if you're as disorganised as me, and keep arriving just as Trisha Brown's dance piece Floor of the Forest is finishing. The re-created pieces that I have managed to see are quietly incredible: demanding yet playful, cleverly skewing perspectives, making the simplest human movement strange. For Walking on the Walls, the dancers stride along two walls in the gallery, leaping over the corner, carefully negotiating the crossing of paths, their ease and complicity with each other giving the whole thing a wonderful ordinariness, as though it were entirely normal to walk perpendicular to the rest of the world. Planes is even better: three dancers arrange themselves across a vertical board, on which images of New York taken from the air are projected. They look like people falling from a plane in the moments before pulling the parachute chord, suicides in freefall and splayed on the ground, astronauts calmly surveying the madness of earth; more abstractly, they reminded me of the geometric shapes formed in a kaleidoscope as it turns and turns.

What this show gives me most of all is an exhilarating sense of possibility: walking around it, I feel as though I could do anything. I love Laurie Anderson's subtly fierce, retaliatory photographs of men who catcalled her in the street, and the way Trisha Brown made the whole of New York, its streets and rooftops, even the outer walls of vertiginous apartment blocks, her dance floor. I love how they carved a space for themselves in the mire of downtown, how Gordon Matta-Clark made a restaurant which served just one meal at dinners, and photographed graffiti, and used an air rifle to shoot out the windows of a gallery in protest at the dire waste of the city's property. Were time unlimited, I would go to this show once a week, to absorb, to daydream, to refuel.

I did a bit of literal refuelling during the second visit, illicitly nibbling at a slice of cheesecake from a French patissier stationed in the market on nearby Whitecross St. I've become a bit obsessed with cheesecake of late, although this slice, exquisite as it was, reminded me why it's taken me years to overcome a prejudice against the stuff: it was so smooth and cloying, it was almost sickly. Over the past few weeks I've done a bit of experimenting with recipes, and have realised that the more cream cheese it contains, the smoother and more cloying it's going to be. As in so many things, Claudia Roden proves the doyenne of cheesecake: her recipe, in The Book of Jewish Food, is perfect, not least because it contains no cream cheese at all. As I'm constitutionally incapable of following recipes precisely, I tweaked it a bit when I made it, so here's my version. She says it's to serve 10-12, but I'm sure I could eat the whole thing on my own across three or four days if I really set my mind to it.

The perfect cheesecake

For the pastry base: 200g plain flour; 75g sugar; 100g butter, cut into pieces; one egg, lightly beaten. Mix sugar and flour, rub in butter, gently mix in the egg until it comes together in a soft dough. Wrap it and pop it in the fridge for 30 mins. Grease a 26cm springform tin, then line it with the pastry by pressing it in – it won't roll. Bake at 180/gas 4 for 30 minutes then leave to cool.

For the topping: 450g curd cheese; 200ml sour cream; 5 eggs, separated; 175g caster sugar; zest of one lemon; juice of half a lemon; splash of vanilla extract. Beat all the ingredients except the egg whites together until smooth. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold into the cheese mixture. Pour if over the cold pastry shell and bake at 150/gas 2 for an hour and a half. Leave it to cool in the oven with the door open. It sinks, like a souffle, but has a lovely, light, fluffy texture, and slips down much too easily.

on peut toujours ecrire

2011-04-11T22:45:00.005+01:00

And so, to business, and the primary purpose of this blog; that is, aside from the very important rendering of recipes (lemon/olive oil/rosemary cake on its way) and general wittering of nonsense. I was, for a spell, almost a theatre critic; I'm still a member of the theatre section of the Critics' Circle, and the large chunk of me that daily fears being painted as the fraud I really am expects to be kicked out any minute now, due to my general lack of published reviews. For months and months I've had no problem with this state of affairs: writing theatre reviews is an agonising business, fraught with responsibility. Instead, I've kept myself busy previewing work, interviewing theatre-makers, now and then sneaking into rehearsal rooms to wonder at the alchemical processes occurring there.

And then came The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the Kneehigh production. I saw it in preview at the Curve in Leicester, in the run-up to writing this feature, and loved it. LOVED IT. I was fully prepared not to, as the film has been embedded in my heart for over a decade, and the snatch of it I heard on Front Row sounded awful, slaughtered by the two leads' bright but fake Broadway voices. But within minutes of the industrial curtain rising over a neon-lit Cherbourg of dolls' houses, wrought iron and 1950s kitsch, I was in tears, and remained so to the bittersweet end.

Knowing the film so well, I felt sharply tuned to Emma Rice's changes, the subtle interpretations she brought to bear on the story. I'd never thought of Mme Emery feeling love for Roland Cassard other than as a rich and cultured husband for her daughter; here, the very sight of him sweeps her off her feet. Conversely, Rice's fidelity to some of the more absurd sequences in the film is lovely, notably when a distraught Genevieve is told to eat some fruit and someone throws her a Granny Smith. And there are so many dinky things in the staging, from the toy car driving through Cherbourg in the opening scene to the embroidered tea-towels used to mark the passage of time, gently underscoring what a small and everyday story this is.

I knew the show wasn't perfect. Sheldon Harnick's English translation, written in the 1970s for a New York production that bombed, sounds prosaic in the wrong way: the whole point of Jacques Demy's script is that the language is mundane, and perhaps to French ears the original dialogue sounds flat and humdrum, but Harnick's translation slumps where a stage demands that it soar. Sometimes the singers were drowned by the band; sometimes the acoustic musicians were drowned by the synthesisers. An entire scene between Mme Emery and Cassard was undermined by the exhibitionism of a chintz armchair. Unlike a lot of reviewers, I had no problem with Aunt Elise being played by a man; it was unfortunate, however, that at one point scenery requirements forced the actor out of her wheelchair and nimbly down a flight of stairs.

But these felt like mere quibbles in the face of the overwhelming, heart-wrenching loveliness and pain and purity of the story. It's so simple: Guy and Genevieve adore each other, external events force them apart, they meet other people, learn a different love, less carefree, more mature. Romance gives way to disillusionment, and then to feelings that are quieter, sensible, tender rather than explosive. Watching it, I fall apart. Not because I'm a hopeless romantic, because this is a story that tells us romance is a game played by children not yet grown. It's because it so unflinchingly shows us the banality of life and everything that is demanded of us to see the course: patience, compromise, stillness, acceptance.

It's a mystery to me how anyone could not love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in any incarnation, but enough critics have slammed the stage show that its early closure, on May 21, has already been announced. (As an aside, three cheers for the West End Whingers and Webcowgirl for loving it too.) I know writing about it here won't make the blindest difference. But it did remind me how much I adore the theatre. And that if you want something, there's no point in waiting for other people's permission to get it. Or, as Mme Emery so sagely shrieks, on peut toujour ecrire, no matter what.

nothing but a woman's reason

2011-04-08T15:38:00.004+01:00

Right now I'm supposed to be writing a review, of the brilliant Sam Amidon. In less than an hour, I have to collect the smalls from nursery. A copy of the new tune-yards album is glaring at me from the wreckage of my desk. Downstairs there is a pile of fabric waiting to be cut and patterns clamouring to be corrected. The laundry is spilling out of the basket. Emails are jostling for attention. I don't know what I'm cooking for dinner tonight. Big things, small things. Outside the sun is shining, it's one of those achingly beautiful spring days, when London beams, when the back streets are full of magnolias and the scent of mock orange, when you convince yourself that you won't see another grey sky until October, even as that infernal pessimist in your head grumbles that this is probably the only summer we'll get and you ought to make the most of it and not trap yourself behind the computer another moment longer. Reasons for writing a blog, right now, don't seem especially compelling. The days grow longer, time feels shorter. And here I am. The name, incidentally, came from this song by the Chills:

Silence boiling over, indeed.