Another year, another summer made
fractious by the Edinburgh fringe. Even opening the programme this
year made me feel queasy: I marked performances, turned the corners
of its pages, feeling like I was wading through the Argos catalogue,
consuming consuming consuming. And although I was careful and made
sure I had lots of space for conversations and walking and a balanced
diet of cake and fruit, and although I took almost no risks and so
almost everything I saw felt meaningful, smart, exhilarating
sometimes, nourishing other times, I still ended up glutted and sick.
So since then I haven't been going to the theatre. I haven't even
been able to look at theatre listings. Instead I've had stillness.
Other doings and beings. And before I re-enter the fray – despite
all misgivings, a sense of superfluity, and the fear that writing
about theatre is no longer the thing I love – a celebration: of
things I've been able to do because I haven't been witnessing in the
dark...
1: Most of the recipes involve 150ml of
double cream. Most of the recipes display an astonishing lack of
concern about the environmental impact of eating so much meat. Most
of the recipes involve tablespoons of chilli and ginger and spice
concoctions that I haven't been able to use since starting to cook
family meals five years ago. But Nigel Slater's Eat is the most
inspiring, I-want-to-make-that-inhale-that-savour-that cookbook I've
read in aeons. And not just because it's the only cookbook I've read
in aeons. Snip-snap sentences. Unctuous language that sizzles and
simmers and glistens on the page. The first thing I cooked from it
was a chicken and farro recipe that I sold to the children as an
Italian version of chocolate rice and they ate it and didn't whinge
once. Result.
2: In my list of top 10 albums of all
time and ever that is at least 500 albums long, Father John Misty's
Fear Fun is, it's emerged, somewhere in the elastic top two. I keep
posting Now I'm Learning To Love the War on here, but there's also
this one
and this one
and this one
And still I'm startled by its country
twang, but I grew up on Dolly and Willie and Kris, and took myself
deeper backwoods, through the dark mysteries of the Appalachians, and
country feels like home. In any case, it's not the style but the
voice, so plangent, a deep seam of disappointment in which he mines
still for hope:
Before the star of the morning comes looking for me
I would like to abuse my lungs
Smoke everything in sight with every
girl I've ever loved
Ride around the wreckage on a horse knee-deep in blood
I listen to that voice and I swoon.
3: I've been getting a lot of emailing
done, sitting at the table beside my husband on the sofa watching TV,
and I haven't quite followed The Honourable Woman but Orange Is the
New Black has lesbian sex – romantic, playful, teasing, functional,
aggressive, tender lesbian sex – and it's proving very distracting.
I'm not always convinced by the glossiness of its surface, but
there's enough feminist nous and queer abrasion beneath to make me
want to down tools and just watch.
4a: I read Donald Barthelme's The School in an anthology of short stories 19 years ago and every
synapse shivered. I ran off a dozen photocopies and used it as a
secret handshake; last week I sent the link to Churlish Meg and
realised I still think of it as a soul gift. Originally it was
published in a collection called Amateurs, which I bought in the days
of scouring secondhand bookshelves for Brautigan and Barthelme and
names that don't begin with B, but only got around to reading in
August; The School remains my favourite story ever written, and
Rebecca might turn out to be the second.
4b: From the days when the chimneys of
Battersea Power Station, those crumbling columns that puncture the
sky as the children and I walk to and from school, still reconfigured
the clouds with smoke; from the days of open racism and closed
abortion and communities of women laughing in the soapsuds of
laundries; from the days when warehouses weren't apartments for the
wealthy but factories employing the poor; from that moment of transition,
between the demolition of slums and the rise of estates, Nell Dunn's
Up the Junction emerges so vivid, so raw, that reading it made me
gasp. London has moved on from there but how far I'm not sure. The
tale of the Tally Man captures an exploitation of poverty that
abusively persists; the desperation of teenagers, for a fuck, for an
approximation of freedom, that doesn't change. Dunn writes
elliptically, mostly in dialogue, rough jottings scrawled on the
hoof, in the dark; it's social realism, but compressed, made poetic,
edited with lapidarian skill. Reading her and Barthelme has not only
made me want to write again, but rethink how.
4c: Page after page of D.I.Y, the
manual for theatre-makers edited by Robert Daniels, inspires and
soothes with its generosity and common-sense. It's reminded me why I
keep saying yes to theatre instead of doing the writing that requires
me to sit on my own at a computer hour after hour. It's reminded me
to listen to the Mountain Goats more. It's reminded me to treasure my
shift away from being a “professional”, why it's important to
keep struggling in the unknown. Above all, it's reminded me that:
We are humans. We have feelings, we
have souls. Don't beat yourself up about your practice. Ever. It is
the self-loathing and doubt that delays EVERYTHING. Imagine
yourself as a baby, if you keep being mean to a baby, it will hate
you and poop out all sorts of nonsense to punish you. Take care of
yourself. Be kind. Give yourself time, chocolate, holidays and a
fucking break. Negativity breeds contempt. Happy artists make good
art.
Not for the first time this year,
reading that makes me want to give Bryony Kimmings a great big kiss.
5: This doesn't count because we went
in the daytime but the Doll Museum in Dunster is one of the strangest
places I've ever been. Arguably I write about theatre now because of
a B&B in Scarborough whose eerie parlour was crowded with dolls:
tiny dolls, foreign dolls, dolls to my thighs that lined the stairs
as if waiting to trip me up or push me down. The Doll Museum in Dunster was that room to a factor of three, all staring eyes and
twisted limbs and fraying national costume. A repository of white
colonial thinking on history, class and race. But at the same time, a
really fun place to take my daughter. Weird.
6a: And OK, there were two nights at
the theatre. The first was the Benedict Andrews/Gillian Anderson
Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, which bored me to itchiness.
I couldn't unthink the Secret Theatre's version: the musicality of
its European accents; the sensual melt of ice-cream, the crack of
watermelons, the ice spill of water; Leo Bill's humble, bumbling
Mitch, with his bad jumpers and stuttering desire; the rejection of
every lurid colour that Andrews and Anderson made garish again. The
day after seeing it I hosted the Young Vic Two Boroughs Project
Theatre Club on it with Lily Einhorn and we talked for well over an
hour about how the play sits in Williams' oeuvre and how it relates
to his biography; how the play isn't misogynist but an indictment, a
really aggressive and scathing indictment, of patriarchal culture,
not just the old patriarchy of America's old south but the bullying,
entitled patriarchy of the emerging new south; women, age and
feminism; how familiar aspects of the play felt to those of us in the
group from ethnic backgrounds (including, on that particular night,
Nigerian, Spanish, Indian and my own Cypriot); witnessed accounts of
alcoholism, bipolar disorder, domestic violence; and on and on, a
rich and involved and really smart discussion that was far more
engrossing than the production itself.
6b: The second was Itai Erdal's How To Disappear Completely at BAC, seen on a night of such precarious,
panic-streaked instability that even walking into the theatre was
like punching myself in the brain. Oh well. Erdal is a lighting
designer by training and his demeanour is scuffed and gauche, in a
likeable way. He introduces his mother, his step-father, his
furiously intelligent sister and gawky best friend, the way he might
if we were sat around a pub table with him, making friends. One
story, of an overexcited dugong, made me cry with laughter; but its
overarching story just made me cry, because it traced his mother's
demise, from cancer that spread through her body with
relentless purpose, taking them all by surprise. Erdal speaks with
the dangerous honesty of a child who hasn't yet learned to self-edit,
the kind of honesty that provokes alternately alarm, disapproval and relief. And
because he is a lighting designer, he makes us think about how
stories are told in theatre, how emotions are manipulated through
luminosity. I keep talking to people about this show,
because its bravery startled me, and because its argument for
assisted suicide has a clarity that makes it unimpeachable. But I
also keep talking about it because Erdal's mother believed something
about motherhood that I emphatically reject. She told both her
children that it was vital for them to reproduce, because it's
through their children that individual humans perpetuate their
existence in the world. Such thinking is inimical to me, egotistical,
and damaging in the ways intimated by Virginia Woolf, in a book I
haven't read yet, quoted by Jacqueline Rose in a terrific essay on motherhood published in the LRB:
“In The Years, written on the eve of
fascism, Virginia Woolf [comments] on the dire consequences of
parental exclusivity, on the damage it does to the social fabric –
which was on the point of being rent beyond repair – to think it
right to put your child, your family, before everyone else. She is
also suggesting that, while England takes pride in its difference
from Nazi Germany, there might even so be a link between the
overweening egoism of the bourgeois family and the autocracy of
statehood.... At a family gathering in the mid-1930s … North, the
now grown-up grandson of Colonel Pargiter, watches as people inquire
after each other’s children:
My boy – my girl … they were
saying. But they’re not interested in other people’s children, he
observed. Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and
blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the
primeval swamp, he thought … how then can we be civilised?”
Woolf, Rose concludes, is describing
how “the intricacy and breadth of human possibility can be
sidelined or quashed before it has even begun”. Yes, they're my
children. But they are their own people. The least I
can do is respect that. No, that's not true. The least I can do is
not resent how, having made them, they eat up time and energy,
leaving only scraps of both with which to make anything else.
7: Speaking of which:
A month of being home to tuck them
in.
Reading bedtime stories.
Learning the times tables together.
(Never quite mastered the 7s or 9s).
Sitting at the computer with earphones
on listening to Father John Misty so loudly that I can't hear their
voices.
Talking about how I could be a better
mother.
Her ideas include creative mealtimes
inspired by typical menus in different historical periods, a
designated painting space that doesn't always need tidying, and taking
her to the theatre in the night-time.
A month of being present. And sometimes
not coping with what that means.
8: Escaping not into the dark of the
theatre but the light of the kitchen. One night I made chocolate
cookies using an ounce of black treacle instead of golden syrup; they
were fudgy, smoky, much more grown-up than I'd intended when adding
most of a packet of white chocolate chips. Another night I made
pastry with 20g cocoa, 100g flour, and 60g cold butter, rubbing them
into crumbs as usual then blending in a tablespoon of golden syrup,
pouring the crumbs into a loose-bottomed, buttered, 28cm tart tin and
pressing them into the base and edges. That went into the fridge for
15 minutes then – covered with baking parchment and copper coins –
into a preheated gas 4/180C oven for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile in a
bowl 110g softened butter, 110g light muscovado, 110g ground almonds and
one egg, beaten with a fork until amalgamated. Out comes the
pastry, off come the coins and parchment; over the chocolate base
four or so tablespoons of apricot jam, spread almost but not quite to
the edges, and over that the frangipane mix, smoothing its surface to
cover not blend with the jam. That baked in the same oven for about 35
minutes, so when it came out it was still squodgy; in retrospect,
another 10 minutes wouldn't have hurt it. Still, the bitter crumble
of the chocolate crust and sweet melt of fruit and frangipane was
heavenly. And even better the next day.
9: The mother in the Dardennes
brothers' film Two Days, One Night makes a tart, too, a really
crisp-looking fruit tart that the family share after takeaway pizzas.
And then she sobs that she's invisible, irrelevant, I can't remember
the exact words but that's because approximations of them had been
ringing through my head all that day. And the day before that. And
before that. It's not an easy film to watch, and not just because she
keeps having anxiety attacks and crying and snapping at her husband
when he expresses concern at her taking Xanax. She spends a weekend traipsing around the houses and haunts of all her
co-workers, trying to persuade them to take her back at the factory
where they earn so little that many of these people need to take on
secret second jobs to get by, trying to do this knowing that if they
take her back they won't each get a thousand-euro bonus that might
relieve the pressure in their own lives. Sometimes on train journeys
through London's suburbs I feel stifled by the number of houses,
people, stories in this city; Two Days, One Night enters those
houses, talks to those people, listens to their stories, and
sympathises. And even where it doesn't sympathise, it attempts to
respect. This made it not an enjoyable film so much as a sternly
moral film whose politics I share.
10: I'm speedwriting now because it's getting late. And because I'd like to write about Cate Le Bon
and the gig at Koko (a stronger performance than the one I saw in February, but I missed being close to the stage), about the wild magic of her voice and the
angular jolt of her guitar, and how she makes me wish I could sing,
about standing on the balcony of Koko between two of my oldest
friends, the same people I've been sharing angular jolting guitars
and wild magic voices with for over 20 years now, and all the history
between us, the honesty and safety, but I've been writing this
listening obsessively to Perfume Genius, all three albums, and now
his voice is all I know of music. He was a surprise guest at Koko and
for those few minutes when he sang I thought I was levitating. I
can't get a handle on his albums: they're so intimate, and yet
something in them resists intimacy. I think
it's a problem of timing: they'll make more sense
alone in the dark. I should have been writing about the new one tonight
instead of writing this. I should have been doing all sorts of things all day instead of writing this. Seduced by the wrong words again.
Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.
Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
It's Thursday 24 July and for the third
night this week a man is stood below my sitting-room window, singing.
Once upon a time I dreamed of being serenaded like this, by some
floppy-haired indie-boy-prince of my dreams, but reality is crueller
than fancy. What this stranger calls singing is obstreperous,
grinding, brutally unintelligible; a noise steadfast and oppressive
as the roar of machinery. On the first two nights I think about
calling the police, and then I remember the treatment that someone
who might be homeless and might be alcoholic and might be mentally
unstable is likely to get at the hands of the Met and berate myself
for my lack of patience or understanding. I think about going
downstairs and trying to talk to him but shrink in fear of what power
a man who has apparently lost all sense of spacial or social
awareness might be able to wield over me. On the third night I give
up trying to work to this enervating soundtrack and stand by the
window and watch him. He wears a black leather jacket and carries a
violin case over his shoulder and mostly his hair is grey. Sometimes
he sits on the stoop directly below, swaying and stamping an unruly
punctuation. Sometimes he follows other men across the road, kicks at
the bins, wanders into the distance, the volume barely decreasing.
For a few glorious minutes he is quiet, and I discover it's because
the young homeless man with the gentle smile is rolling him a
cigarette and talking calmly with him, a gesture of fathomless
generosity. (Later, when I ask the young homeless man about this
encounter, he has no idea who I'm talking about. The men who speak to
him are interchangeable.)
When the ranting begins again, I do my
best to tune in my hearing, dialling through the static until I hit
the man's frequency. What emerges, on repeat, is a word,
“misunderstood”, and a question: “Why won't they just let me
be?” In a flash, I'm reminded of Dave, the drunk homeless character
in Stella Duffy's The Room of Lost Things, once married and a
businessman, now accustomed to the simple routine of living in a
lager-fuelled haze on a moulding sofa dumped on a backstreet. Dave
has found, if not contentment, at least a dull calm. But this man is
neither content nor calm. He is the embodiment of fury, of the sheer
fucking insult that it is to be human and alive.
The following day, Friday 25 July, the
man isn't on the street below my window. He's on stage at the Royal
Court instead.
*
This Royal Court preview is my second
encounter with Men in the Cities and I still can't hold this bit of
text in my head. I was there for the first read-through in the
rehearsal room, a small expectant group of us huddled round a table,
Chris anxious and placatory of voice, his director, Wendy Hubbard,
frowning as she annotates her script. I don't look at the script: I
just listen. But I can't find the frequency for this specific torrent
of words, unleashed by a bereaved father in the general direction of
a 6-foot-9 gay black man who sings transcendentally on the glittering
streets of Christmas. A torrent of words directed at patriarchy and
capitalism and whatever that is up in the sky (God or the stars or
maybe just satellites), defiant yet desperate for redemption. When
Chris unleashes it he raises his voice and I'm instantly reminded of
the preacher segment of God/Head, failing to notice the difference in
register. In the rehearsal room, this feels like the least effective
bit of text. But in the Royal Court, it feels electric.
I visited this rehearsal room only
twice, seeing Chris work with text and intonation but not with
movement or setting. Which means much of what I see on stage is a
surprise. Intermittently I regret being part of the company, because
it makes me unable to watch this preview for myself: instead I'm
distracted by the rest of the audience. I note their laughter, the
moments of frisson, and where their attention begins to wander. I
note how nervous Chris sounds, not just at the beginning but
throughout. I note the exactitude of Katharine Williams' lighting:
the soft peach that envelops the young gay lovers, the harsher white
cast on grit-hard Graham; I note how each click of the bulbs
economically transforms the mood and the scene, making it distinct to
each character. I note that I feel emotionally disconnected, and not
fully convinced that the text is working.
But then Chris unleashes that
torrential rant, and the way he twists his body around it is
astonishing. As he shouts he clutches at the air, as if trying to
prise answers from its atoms. Initially he leans into the microphone,
then gradually pulls away, still ranting, but staggering now,
flailing, stamping and swaying, bent over with the weight of anger
and resentment and unbearable sorrow, drunk on the indignity of being
human and alive. And the transcendent singing stops but the rant goes
on, as steadfast and oppressive as the roar of machinery. My father
and his father and his father. Misunderstood. Misunderstood.
Misunderstood.
Later, as we walk down the stairs to
the tube, my husband tells me he found this bit awkward, and thought
that was because it wasn't working, but then he realised the
awkwardness was his own, because the rant is abominably raw, and he
wanted to protect himself from it.
Later still, in bed, staring into the
dark, I remembered that I'd seen the staggering man another time. He
was in a basement room in Shoreditch Town Hall. And this man didn't
survive.
*
This latest bout of whatever it is –
depression? Suffocating sadness? Desire to just fucking stop and live
in a limbo of quiet, feeling nothing? – began to seep through me a
few days before seeing Leo Kay's It's Like He's Knocking, on Friday
11 July. Sometimes the show feels like a dangerous place to be. It
starts in a darkened bar, Kay raising a toast to “telling it like
it is, even if you don't know how it was”. We each drink a shot but
he drinks at least four, and there is something so careless in this
action that the basement room in Shoreditch Town Hall begins to hum
with worry for him. We move to another room, fitted up like a meagre
bedsit, and anxiety grows. Alcohol ran through the blood of his
forefathers, and depression, and loneliness, and uncertainty. My
father and his father and his father, Kay cries, not in words so
much as the pulse of the heart. This is a story of wild coincidences
and wilder adventure, and the overwhelming fear that, however damaged
your ancestors, you will never, never live up to them. It's a story
of choosing to live and choosing to die: and if you chose the latter,
how would you do it? With a noose in the toilet or jumping off a tall
building? Or the way Kay's grandfather chose, alone in a bedsit in
the centre of London, with the door and windows sealed and the gas of
the oven filling the room?
It's a dangerous place to be, but Kay
offers a measure of care. He fills our eyes with beautiful images:
the light that beams through a makeshift porthole on the ship that
carried his grandfather to America; the descriptions of the women his
grandfather loved; the glow of a beach in Israel. He fills our ears
with gorgeous sounds: a charged exchange between tambourine and
accordion; the growl of Leadbelly, the wash of the sea. Kay's own
voice, the amber of whiskey, the keen of viola. On one wall he's
pinned a note that reads, very roughly: depression grows in the gap
between the story you tell about yourself and the truth. Like there's
a truth. Kay's honesty feels like a gift: by now, in his early 40s,
he'd thought he would be a father himself. And he didn't expect his
father to have died. The show becomes a eulogy, for complicated
relationships with difficult men, whose absence creates a void in the
soul. A void Kay fills with this performance, dedicated to his father
and his father, fragile and tender and spare.
But every time Kay reaches for a
bottle, a shiver runs through the audience. There is relief in the
fact of this work being a collaboration, with the audience who
willingly engage in a wager (in a sense, to save him), and with a
Brazilian musician whose thrumming soundtrack heightens the
impression of extended ritual – a ritual that culminates in the
summoning of a spirit, as Kay, now dressed in a suit, hair slicked
back, throat burning with booze, re-creates with swaggering gestures
an 8mm film in which his grandfather imitates Charlie Chaplin. Strobe
lights flicker like the shake of the movie, and Kay – or his
grandfather – stamps and sways and barely stays upright. And even
if this is meant to be a happy film, I don't read joy in these
flailing movements. Kay's grandfather is twisted or bent over with
the weight of anger and resentment and unbearable sorrow. He is drunk
with the indignity of being human and alive.
*
And now it's Thursday 14 August and I'm
wondering if Chris has been really fucking irresponsible in detailing
with such precision another way to die.
And I start thinking about Dead Line,
by Jo Bannon: a show made to create space for people to face up to
the inevitability of death. To talk about that with someone whose
professional life puts them in close contact with death, and then
think about it in solitude. I sat in its final room, bathed in light,
gazing through the window at the milky sky and the distant activity
of a public square, and wondered how long I've been frightened, not
of death, but of living. Maybe I'm not thinking of the show itself
but the conversation I had with Jo on the street after, in which she
told me why she'd made this work, and I told her how I'd responded to
it, together making a space for each other to talk about death openly
and honestly, exactly as Dead Line had intended.
And I think back to the night before,
Wednesday 13 August, when, on the insistence of my friend David, I
went to see Scott Capurro. It's a complicated experience: part of me
feels guilty for laughing at anything so relentlessly offensive, part
of me relishes the scabrous insult and outrageous performance of it,
part of me wishes that he were as inventive (or perhaps loving) with
his misogyny as he is with his racism. But mostly I'm fascinated by
the unexpected resonances with Men in the Cities. I hear it in the
moment when Scott praises the audience for careful listening,
because: “Listening is the most radical thing we can do.” And
again in two startling, abrupt shifts in tone, the first fleeting,
the second sustained. The show overruns because Scott, with absolute
sincerity, gets carried away telling us about the final days of his
mother's life, and the absurd events of her funeral. But when he
talks about his mother, you can tell that his thoughts are also with
Robin Williams, who died two days before. And those thoughts erupt
mid-set, when Scott leans into the microphone and demands: “If
you're funny and rich and successful and [I can't remember the fourth
thing], and even you can't make it, what hope have the rest of us
got?”
*
I see Men in the Cities on my own on
Sunday 10 August and cry repeatedly and with a sense of release.
Chris isn't nervous any more and I'm less distracted by the rest of
the audience and I feel the play swell through me and I know that it
works. It really fucking works.
I'm anxious about most things at the
moment so it's no surprise that the thought of writing about Men in
the Cities from the midst of indeterminate sadness or maybe
depression and certainly a desire to sink into nothingness has been
making me anxious. Chris is directly addressing a crisis among men,
of mental illness leading to suicide, and much in the experience and
perspective of his characters is specific to masculinity and distant
from me. Me, whose experience of depressionorwhatever corresponds
altogether too frequently to my menstrual cycle, which basically
makes me a running joke. (Although my – male – GP told me last
year that menstrual-depression is particularly hard to address so,
y'know, fuck you with your snides and eye-rolls.) A few days after
seeing Chris at the Royal Court I'm listening to Parquet Courts
(brief aside: I fucking love Parquet Courts, and this piece from Rolling Stone is just perfect in its articulation of how idiotic and
resplendent that feels), and more than once they narrate the same
specificity and distance. Especially in this song:
so caustic in its delineation of the
meagre opportunities afforded young men. Chris is talking about the
violence wreaked on men, of all ages, by patriarchal structures of
masculinity. I don't want my female/feminist self getting in the way.
On the face of it, Men in the Cities
seems grievously non-feminist: there are almost no female characters
– a dead wife is mentioned, and a divorced wife, plus two girls on
scooters and a group of women doing yoga, mocked as fat and
ridiculous, and that's pretty much it. But Chris isn't dealing with
the face of things. He's digging much deeper than that, taking a
scalpel to Conservative society to cut through the lie of its
blustering surface, revealing everything broken and crushed beneath.
The young man who commits suicide despite being in a loving
relationship and the widowed ex-serviceman who no longer sees a world
he believes in and the boy in primary school who cries in the
bathroom because he has no idea how to be. The first time I
encountered that boy, Rufus, in the rehearsal room, I thought he was
repulsive. Absolutely fucking terrifying. He watches hardcore porn
and attacks other boys in the school toilets and teases older men and
treats pretty much everything – school, parents, bike – with
contempt. But the moment Chris put him on stage, Rufus became...
adorable. A little scared boy trying to be a man, and utterly
confused about what that means. The scene from which the play takes
its title, when Rufus stands before a work of art and feels himself
welling up as he recognises its obstreperous, grinding, brutal
humanity, is extraordinary. In Chris' words, each of the men in this
work are “drawn contorted in a different way, in his own way,
flailing. As though falling, or fallen, or twisted somehow or bent.”
Exactly the same words could be used to describe each of the men in
his play. Especially flailing: every single one of them is flailing,
in a sea of what might be called depression or suffocating sadness,
or simply loneliness. Loneliness oozes from these lives like slow
poison. A loneliness heavy with anger and resentment and unbearable
sorrow and the indignity of being alive.
The one balm Chris has to offer is
feminism: a radical politics of empathic humanity that seeks to
dismantle those repressive patriarchal structures and build more
equitable, communal, supportive ways of living instead. “Can we not
just put it all down,” Chris asks, except he's not really asking,
because there's no question mark there, in the text or his delivery.
Put down the competition and the aggression and the attitudes of
destruction, and pick up compassion instead.
*
It's lunchtime on Thursday 14 August
and my friend Jake tells me that if I want to stop writing about
theatre then I should stop already. That's the thing about
depressionorwhatever: the insecurity it brings on is just fucking
boring. Later I fall while running, jolting the shoulder I broke in
April, giving physical form to this pathetic inner fragility. Later I
see Will Eno's Title and Deed, and it's basically a rehash of Will
Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing), which is to say breathtakingly
exquisite. I'm not exaggerating: there are several moments when my
chest hurts from not being able to breathe. Maybe it's when the
character – a man in middle age, flailing, lonely, twisted somehow,
suffocating – says: “I don't want to paint too dreary a picture
of my misery. I have laughed. … Don't pity me, is all I'm saying.”
Or when he says: “I had occasion – this is embarrassing – to
question my existence. Not in big ways.” Or when he says: “Time,
place, happiness. It's only three words. I should have been able to
figure it out.” Or when he says: “Women care more about the
world. It's bigger for them. That's why it's sadder when they die.”
Or when he says: “Don't get lost for too long. They stop looking
eventually.” No matter how pitch-perfect Conor Lovett's performance
– and really, the cadence of it, the fall of every comma and the
breath of every pause, is just so – there's something off-key about
Eno spoken in an Irish accent. My brain seems to perform a
simultaneous translation into American. And another simultaneous
translation into me.
Don't get lost for too long. They stop
looking eventually.
*
And now I'm home and the children are
still the children and the hours are still the hours and the
confusion is still suffocating and the sadness is still heavy. I am
human and I am alive and I am flailing. I read another terrific blogpost by Katherine Mitchell, on her experience of depression. And then
I retreat to the kitchen and I bake. Recently I realised that
whenever I make something particularly chocolatey and particularly
unhealthy I want to share it with Chris, which is pretty fucking
perverse considering he has diabetes. So as I baked on Saturday night
I thought of Chris and this is the recipe I made and it's dedicated
to him.
I've made this twice now, differently
each time, and it's basically an off-the-top-of-my-head adaptation of
a brownie recipe in the first Ottolenghi cookbook. Very roughly it
involves putting a lot of chocolate (let's say 175g) and a lot of
butter (also 175g) in a saucepan with a wodge of molasses sugar (125g
or so) and heating it gently, stirring to melt the sugar. Very
roughly it involves beating two eggs gently with a fork, stirring in
75g or so of light muscovado sugar, then stirring in maybe 100g of
flour, or maybe 80g flour and 20g cocoa powder. Very roughly it
involves lining an 18-20cm square baking tin with paper or foil and
tipping half a jar of apricot jam in, preferably jam that has been
lying around in the cupboard for over a year so you feel almost
virtuous for using it up. Very roughly it involves stirring the
chocolate-butter-sugar mixture into the egg-sugar-flour mixture,
adding a few drops of vanilla or a shake of cinnamon or mixed spice
if you want, or not bothering, as I did; then very roughly pouring
the chocolate mixture over the jam and baking this in an oven heated
to gas 3 or about 165 degrees for something like 25 minutes. What
comes out – and you have to leave it in the tin for a bit before
taking it out, otherwise the jam spills everywhere – is essentially
a slapdash and graceless Sachertorte, and self-pity eating of the
very highest order.
attended six plays, one film, one art
exhibition and three panel discussions;
written two album reviews, five posts
for two different blogs, published a long post on another blog that
I'd been working on for some weeks, and written/co-delivered a
presentation at a panel discussion;
hosted two Theatre Clubs;
done a job interview while sitting in a
stationary cupboard;
got the job (a writing gig for
December, nice);
danced at two practices with the
Actionettes;
(and spent time reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, both inspiring, in different ways);
(and finally encountered the brilliance of Borgen);
(and done the school runs, and organised childcare, and cooked dinners);
(I think I've just realised why I'm always so tired);
and I honestly think in all of that the
thing I'm most proud of doing is making a really nice pomegranate
cake on Sunday morning. A few weeks ago I had a glut of pomegranates
and the usual recipe books (Claudia Roden, Sophie Grigson,
Nigel'n'Nigella) weren't offering any inspiration, so I sent my magic
friend Samantha a text asking for suggestions and she offered: a
trifle made of lemon cake layered with cherries stewed in sherry,
orange flower water and pomegranate molasses and Greek yoghurt mixed
with more orange flower water, then drizzled with pomegranate
molasses and pistachios; a pavlova with rosewater in the meringue and
the cream and pomegranates on top; a sponge cake with them in the
cream and on top; and Nigella's pomegranate cake. See why she's
magic? I made a less complicated version of the trifle and very good
it was too.
On Sunday I had another glut and this
time turned to the Nigella recipe. And, as usual, decided to mess
around with it. Instead of just putting the pomegranates/syrup on top
at the end, I turned it into a caramelised upside-down pomegranate
cake, which was just as well because on removing it from the oven I
dropped it face-down on the oven door, and it would have been ruined
if the topping hadn't been on the bottom. So this is my recipe, and
not for the first time it's dedicated to Sam, with love and mutual
heritage:
Upside-down pomegranate cake
4 eggs, separated
150g caster sugar
100g ground almonds
50g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
half tsp mixed spice
half tsp almond essence
for the topping:
75g brown sugar
20g butter
1 tblsp pomegranate molasses
seeds of 2 pomegranates
the oven was at roughly 170C for this,
and I cook it in a round 19cm springform cake tin lined with baking
parchment
Get the seeds out of the pomegranates
first.
Put the sugar into a saucepan on the
lowest possible heat to melt. While doing the
beating/whisking/folding jobs that follow, keep an eye on the sugar
so it doesn't burn, and when about a third of it is melted add the
pomegranate molasses and butter. It needs stirring to stop it from
sticking. Or turning into a lump.
Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until
they're pale and thick, then fold in the almonds, flour, baking
powder, mixed spice and almond essence – I ended up being fairly
vigorous with it, because it gets pretty stiff. Whisk the egg whites
until you can turn the bowl upside-down without them falling out,
stir as much of them as is required into the rest of the mixture to
loosen it, then fold in the rest.
Pour the caramel into the cake tin and
swirl it around to cover the bottom of the tin. Tip all the
pomegranate seeds on top, then spoon the cake mixture on top of that.
Bake for about 45/50 minutes until a tester comes out clean. The
caramel oozes into the cake mixture, the sponge is really light
because it hasn't got any butter, the almond essence makes it taste a
bit like macaroons and the mixed spice got me ready for Christmas.
I've
been writing this for most of this year already, which is a
ridiculous state of affairs. I've tried to abandon it but it keeps
needling away at me, like the children when they want things. What
does this post, this blog, want from me? At the moment, I think, it
just wants me to remember that writing about theatre isn't a WHOLLY
POINTLESS WASTE of fucking time and thought and passion and energy
and TIME. I had quite the slump of faith following this year's
Devoted and Disgruntled, irritated by the smallness of most people's
concerns (mine included), disappointed by the lack of care across
theatre, depressed by the wide-spread belief that Lyn Gardner
single-handedly keeps the industry alive (I don't dispute that, but
I'd like to raise the profile of the generation in her slipstream),
flabbergasted that so many people are in thrall to the West End model
of existence, despite the fact that it works in the West End for
particular reasons that make it unsuitable elsewhere...
Somewhere
in the midst of that petulant sulk, I became haunted by this:
It
was David Peschek who persuaded me to give Father John Misty a listen
(I approach Bella Union with
caution),
and for six months Fear Fun's lilting twists on country music cheered
me whenever I put it on. But then Dorian
Lynskey
tweeted that “Now I'm Learning To Love the War contains one of the
best arguments for creating art I've heard” (I paraphrase), and I
realised that I'd hardly listened to the lyrics because I'd been too
intoxicated by Tillman's voice. He doesn't sing so much as let sound
waft from his body, the way fumes rise from a perfectly aged single
malt. Now I've started paying attention, Fear Fun feels a lot more
complicated, abrasive and brain-joltingly smart. Particularly the
ethical argument underpinning Now I'm Learning To Love the War, directly
linking the politics of oil to art/everyday existence X.
There
is a fragility to Tillman's expression of internal conflict and
attempt at consolation in this song that I find terribly moving. But
what makes it so specifically acute is his recognition of the egoism
involved in any act of creation:
Let's
just call this what it is
The
gentler side of mankind's death wish
When
it's my time to go
Gonna
leave behind things that won't decompose
I'll
just call this what it is
My
vanity gone wild with my crisis
One
day this all will repeat
I
sure hope they make something useful out of me
The
desire to do something meaningful; the frustration of knowing that
it's not so much one's own actions but their reception that counts;
the desolation of insignificance; the abysmal conceit: all expressed
in two succinct choruses. No wonder the song wouldn't leave me be.
That's
where I was when I abandoned this again, to go to Bristol for In
Between Time, four intoxicating days of impeccably curated
performance and art and theatre and live art where I was the
writer-in-residence who hardly wrote a thing, and when I did it was
in the old mould, the broadsheet review (albeit longer). So that was
another gloom of failure in which this didn't get written. A week
later I snuck off to the cinema to see Django
Unchained
and OH THE RAPTURE of Quentin Tarantino, idiosyncratic and
scurrilous; of fearlessness in storytelling, myth-stealing, narrative
pace, characterisation, political attack: the kind of devil-may-care
brashness that says yes, in this story of America in 1858 I will give
my lead character a brushed suede jacket and round sunglasses that
make him look like a character from Superfly, and yes, in this
soundtrack homage to 1960s spaghetti westerns I will inject blasts of
rap. Unfortunately, I've just wasted about 30 minutes failing to
track down various tweets I vaguely recall reading, along the lines
of: I wish more theatre were like this. Which made me think: theatre
IS like this – maybe you're just watching the wrong theatre. Or
watching it in the wrong way. I watched Django Unchained in a huge
room in Brixton Ritzy with maybe 30 other people; in the theatre,
that sort of low attendance would trouble
me, but here I didn't care. There is such self-consciousness, such
insecurity, such a need for validation in theatre; I'm as guilty of
it as anyone else. Let's not waste time justifying ourselves: let's
use it to be courageous, fierce, and brilliant.
None
of which is what I set out to say here. This started life as a post
about Martin Crimp and Polly Stenham and the London international
mime festival, by way of Nick Cave, Patti Smith and chocolate cake.
Now it's spiralled out of control, tugging me into its vortex. Why
don't I just bin it? Why do I bother? My cynical side says I'm just
suffocatingly beholden to the people who have given me free tickets
for stuff. X Last night on the
tube, after watching Laura Mugridge's Watery Journey of Nereus Pike,
a joyful piece of romantic storytelling and child-like playing in
which the audience get to participate in the most delightful of ways
– for happy instance, using glowsticks to create the effect of
bioluminscent fish in the depths of the ocean, to a pounding
soundtrack that made me wish I'd not been scared to go to raves as a
teenager – I finished reading John Berger's And Our Faces, My
Heart, Brief As Photos, and had a little moment with this passage
about poetry:
Poetry's
impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make
comparisons (all comparisons are hierarchical) or to diminish the
particularity of any event; it is to discover those correspondences
of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of
existence.
I'm
no poet, but I recognise that impulse as my own. So hey ho, let's go:
In
the republic...
Just
as I'd decided not to bother writing about In the Republic of
Happiness, I belatedly caught up with Dan
Rebellato's astute account
of it, and recalled that no one seems to have seen it in quite the
way I did. So I came back to this, only to read, three days later,
Catherine
Love's meticulous review,
which is not only formidably good but says almost everything I'd
intended to say, only better. Since then, I've just been dithering.
Still, mustn't succumb to wounded pride. Plus, there are at least
three minute details in which I differ from Catherine. And I've done
a lot of complaining on Deliq about the Royal Court: the least I can
do in return for the tickets they give me is write about the shows I
love.
And
I did love the Crimp, passionately – the more so because I felt
awful going in. The crowd in the bar and the auditorium seemed
gallingly well-bred and I just didn't fit. I listened to Nick Cave's
No More Shall We Part when the new one came out and was reminded by
the line in Darker With the Day – “The streets groan with little
Caesars, Napoleons and cunts” – of David P's work-of-genius Mojo
review of the album: “There speaks a man who lives in west London.”
THAT'S how it felt in the Royal Court: everyone around me privileged
and proud. And then Martin Crimp took a skewer to them. Repeatedly.
So
yes, this is a reductive reading, but I see the three republics of
the title as family, celebrity and online. See is the key word there,
not reading: the interpretation is primarily a response to Miriam
Buether's set designs (which Andrew
Haydon
has dismissed as not her best, so that's another confidence-booster).
I
saw Republic a few days after The Architects, and because thoughts on
one show inevitably infect another, Family felt like another
articulation of the argument I saw in Shunt's piece, interrogating
what we think we're worth, what we think we deserve. There are two
daughters in this family, both teenagers; Debbie is pregnant, and –
to the fury of her sister Hazel – the parents have bought her a car
and diamond earrings for Christmas. Does she need them? But of
course: a pregnant woman needs to be reassured of her own value –
and surely can't be expected to use public transport. (We're not told
where they live, but the implication is that it's not a lack of buses
that's the problem, but Debbie's inflated self-importance.) You'd
assume from the gifts that the family is wealthy, but Crimp implies
that they're struggling financially: Dad rations their use of
electric bulbs, not because he's concerned about climate change, but
to save money: “electricity's got so expensive”. This is partly
why the grandmother's confession to a love of taxis (or, in another
bit of David P brilliance, “slipping into something more
comfortable”) has such a frisson about it: she keeps it a secret
because the family can't afford it.
Remember
the Squeezed Middle? This is them: not rich enough to feel
comfortable, not poor enough to merit sympathy, grasping at luxuries
they cannot afford. Priorities skewed, the parents are raising their
daughters to be spoiled, demanding and self-regarding, care-less
women for whom the height of ambition is to marry for money: “I'll
make him pay for my meals/ I'll strut and fuck him in heels.” When
Mum's errant brother Bob and his wife Madeleine materialise and begin
puncturing the family's vanity and complacency, it's exhilarating –
because every word feels like an assault on the audience, too, on
their own nothing-is-too-good-for-my-children attitudes that keep
inequality unchecked. No wonder the claret walls of the set cave in.
We
shift to what looks like a bland grey TV studio, the highway to
21st-century celebrity. The particularity of this celebrity is
two-fold: it's more intimately connected with the promise of money
and luxury than the light-entertainment competitions of the past (or
is that simplistically nostalgic?); it's also, with the dominance of
trash media and its predatory impetus, more intimately connected with
self-exposure. (I talk about this like I'm not part of the problem:
recently I interviewed Rebecca Lenkiewicz knowing full well that the
work itself – an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw which I didn't
even make time to see – was a flimsy excuse to probe into a life
that fascinates me. Fans of Crimp won't be surprised to hear that
when I interviewed him for the National revival
of Attempts,
he was not only resistant to any questions about his family life but
perplexed that I should even ask.)
Celebrity
confession now happens in a context of increased awareness of pop
psychology, a lucrative self-help industry, and the dominance of me
journalism, in blogs and broadsheet media alike. This is the
landscape of Crimp's second republic, and he dissects it with
microscopic precision. Again, what makes this section so piercing is
that every word feels as though it's addressed at you, yes you,
sitting in the auditorium demanding space for your voice to be heard
in the cacophony of the world. You with your mitherings about
what-life-is and how-it-should-be, you convinced that you're
different –
I
am the one – yes – writing the script.
… Nobody
looks like me. Nobody speaks the way I do now. Nobody can imitate
this way of speaking.
No
way.
No
way can anyone speak like I do. I make myself what I am: I'm free –
okay? – to invent myself as I go along.
… I've
got my own voice: I don't repeat what other people say.
– and
that what you say is worth hearing. As Sylvia Plath noted on twitter
(ha!) while I was writing this: We all like to think we are important
enough to need psychiatrists.
On
the page, the final part opens with a quotation from Dante's
Paradiso: “Thou are not upon earth, as thou believest” (thanks,
google translate). For a lot of people, that encouraged an
interpretation of the three republics as hell/purgatory/heaven; for
me, it confirmed what I thought when watching it: that Miriam Buether
situates Bob and Madeleine inside a computer. The backdrop – nine
panes of glass opening out to a flat vague wash of green and blue –
looks like a pun on Windows Vista. The gleaming white of the room is
like the pearlescent white of an Apple laptop. The fetishism of
thinness that you get in new-technology adverts: it's there in
Madeleine's language when she describes the world she and Bob will
inhabit as “Hard. Clear. Sharp. Clean” and “thin … as a pane
of glass”.
Online,
we transcend earth, and in doing so enter a realm where all the mess
of human existence can be avoided if we wish. Mulling over the Crimp
took me back to a TED
talk by Sherry Turkle,
in which she mourns the effect of social media on our ability to
communicate with each other, to engage with argument or criticism, to
respond to deep feeling. Or, as Bob sings in the 100% Happy song:
It's
a new kind of world
and
it doesn't come cheap
and
you'll only survive
if
you don't go deep
It
made me think about the way I/we use twitter, the way I/we use blogs,
our disorienting oscillations between snippish little aphorisms and
monolithic monologues; the way both allow us to impose ourselves on
people we've never met, even as we fail to talk meaningfully to
friends we've known for years. A few days after I saw Republic the
Suzanne Moore storm raged through social and traditional media and it
felt like the new world in action: on the plus side, I learned that
there is a generation of feminist thinking I want to catch up on, in
which I'm cisgendered and there's a word (intersectionality) for that
awareness you try to keep as a white western university-educated
working middle-class heterosexual feminist, that individuals are
oppressed in multiple ways – but for a couple of days I felt
terrified by all the anger and emotion and verbal abuse and all but
withdrew. It's the attraction to leadership in that world that Crimp
interrogates, the inanity in the spaces between the intellectual
arguments that he satirises. Click on my smiling face and you can
install a version of this song/ that has no words at all.
I
talked about that Sherry Turkle thesis with a friend after seeing
David Parkin's Good
Friday at BAC: she contested it, and told me about another TED
talk, on choice and its concomitant regrets. In turn I told her about
the quiver in the heart I felt reading this in Berger's And Our
Faces:
… death
was [once] thought of as the companion of life, as the precondition
for that which came into Being from Non-being; one was not possible
without the other. As a result, death was qualified by that which it
could not destroy or by that which would return.
That
life is brief was continually lamented. Time was death's agent and
one of life's constituents. But the timeless – that which death
could not destroy – was another. All cyclic views of time held
these two constituents together: the wheel turning and the ground on
which it turned.
The
mainstream of modern thought has removed time from this unity and
transformed it into a single, all-powerful and active force. In so
doing it has transferred the spectral character of death to the
notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all. …
Man
now becomes condemned to time, which is no longer a condition of life
and therefore something sacred, but the inhuman principle which
spares nothing. Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment.
And
yes, she and I are all about the big life crises, so we talk about
this stuff anyway – but Parkin's show shifts the context, by saying
one possible subtext out loud. Parkin barely discusses the roots of
the depression that led him to attempt suicide in a lay-by in Croydon
in 2009: little more specific than a brief reference to a broken
heart. It's a smart move: without the imposition of personal
biography, his experience communicates more widely. You think that
sounds bland (and calculating), but in a moment of transition within
the show, from the viscous murk of self-hatred to the tentative
brightness of recovery, Parkin asks a question of the audience: who
has, or knows someone, with depression? Almost all hands go up. I
felt the same choke in my throat seeing them raised that I feel on
train journeys through the outskirts of London, gazing through
mud-splattered windows at the dense network of suburban streets,
house after house after house: so many people, so many stories, not
waving but drowning. Parkin doesn't tell us if what we drown in is
affluenza or the inevitable by-product of capitalism or the anguish
of souls wrenched from communion with the earth: he just clears the
path to a place where we can think these things through ourselves.
Rather
than causes, Good Friday is concerned with one individual effect.
Essentially, it's a gig, in which Parkin performs beginning to end
the concept album he wrote while teaching himself to play piano in
the aftermath of the suicide attempt. It's is a funny little show,
because for all its craft – the exquisite undertow of cello, the
rhythmic tick of an antique clock, the allure of velvety shadows –
it feels artless. It wasn't until Parkin contacted me on twitter that
I realised he had experience as a theatre-maker (15 years with
metro-boulot-dodo): he comes across like an earnest big kid, doing
his best for his parents – although perhaps that's partly because
his parents were watching the same night as me.
That
gawkiness infuses his songwriting, too, which is why if Good Friday
actually were an album, I don't think I'd like it much. Running
through the decades, the mood it conveys has generally found me here:
here:
here:
and,
dear god hold me and don't let go, here:
Although
it did occur to me watching John Grant play Pale Green Ghosts live
last night that he and Parkin share songwriting DNA (autobiography,
lacerating honesty, colloquial turns of phrase), a connection most
apparent in this song:
It
wasn't the music but the performance of Good Friday that absorbed me:
its careful expression of emotion, its solicitude towards the
audience, its understated bravery. And one line in particular will
stay with me, the way a paraphrased reflection of Jenny Diski's has
stayed with me, that people who commit suicide are paradoxically
consumed by hope, the hope that everything will be better on the
other side of death. Parkin's was the sober observation that we all
go out and do battle with the world – but people who are depressed
come home and do battle with themselves.
...of
happiness...
When
I was a kid I thought I'd never grow out of going on the swings.
See-saws, merry-go-rounds, even slides I could give or take, but not
the swings. The discovery a few years ago that I'd grown out of them
to such a degree that going on them gave me motion sickness was a
melancholy one. And then the kids were born and pretty soon it seemed
wrong to go on the swings, or roll down a grassy hill, or do any
childish thing. Somehow, I let myself stop playing.
And
then last autumn, in a moment of topsy-turvy, transcendental
happiness, I reclaimed the playground. I would deliberately get to
school too early so I could clamber with my son on the climbing frame
and listen to him laugh as I swung with my feet stretched high and my
head tipped low. Giddy times.
That
was the rapture I felt watching Ockham's Razor's Not
Until We Are Lost in the London international mime festival. The
five performers scamper across the scaffolding set like an Enid
Blyton gang, scrabbling up hills and swinging in caverns. The show is
full of dares and double-dares: when one of them is unhappy, two
others rally round, tipping her, swinging her, nudging her off
balance, until her smile is no longer begrudging but wide and real.
There's romance, too, particularly when the performance moves to a
tall perspex box in which a man is trapped, and an impish, playful
woman climbs up to lead him out. And so much beauty: in the opening
scene, with a woman in the perspex box alone, surrounded by tissue
paper, pulling it down around her like a bridal veil; in the use of a
choir, a large group of local singers who emerge from the audience as
though we too could fill our lungs and join in; and, throughout, the
elegant glimmering sound of a harp.
It
wasn't until I read the company's notes in the programme that I
appreciated what a big thing it was for them that this show was
promenade: I enjoyed the proximity to the performers, seeing the curl
of their feet around scaffolding poles, the stretch of their muscles
as they swung – but proximity is a habitual thing for me. It was a
useful reminder of the importance of seeing things on the makers'
terms, not only your own: a central tenet of the Dialogue project,
and something I failed to honour in writing about our September
residency at BAC, as pointed out by Caroline Williams (writer,
director and illustrator of Puffball) when she emailed to say that
I'd misapprehended
a crucial aspect of her work. In the same 24-hour period as receiving
that email I made this year's marmalade, which took several hours,
required ignoring my son for most of a day and left one of the pans
burned. It's now so solid you can't spread it. A day of flailing, in
which once again it seemed necessary to reassess every single choice
I make in my haphazard life. What made everything better that time
was cake: specifically, making a decent chocolate porridge cake. The
idea came from my son: he loves chocolate, he loves porridge, so in
his imagination this is manna. For Ben:
Chocolate
porridge cake
150g
butter
50g
dark chocolate
100g
milk chocolate
3
eggs
150g
light muscovado sugar
75g
fine ground oatmeal
50g
plain flour
2
tsp baking powder
1-2
tsp vanilla extract
Melt
the butter and two chocolates; meanwhile beat the egg yolks with the
sugar, then stir through the melted stuff. Add the rest of the
ingredients – not the egg whites – and beat it all together. Then
whisk the three egg whites until stiff and fold them through. Bake it
in a square 20cm tin, lined, for about an hour at 180/gas 4. It comes
out like a chocolate-flavoured parkin, chewy and slightly nutty.
I
spend most of my life convinced I'm making the wrong decisions X. One of my favourite shows at In Between
Time – that's a stupid construction, nearly everything I saw there
was a favourite show – was Sylvia Rimat's If You Decide To Stay,
because it recognised and took blessedly seriously this constant
sense of dilemma. What intrigues Sylvia isn't just the why of
choosing but the how: she talks to a neuroscientist about what
happens in the brain during decision-making, a mathematician about
probability, a therapist about the tangle of childhood experiences
that might have influenced her path through life. There are moments
of awe at the fathomless power of luck in people's lives (Sylvia
wouldn't exist if her grandparents, as intended, had boarded a cruise
ship that later sank); and moments of playfulness, when she attempts
to disrupt the audience's own decision-making, or influence it
through the power of suggestion. Watching it, I felt very moved by
its attempt to see choice as cause for celebration rather than
self-reproach and regret; later I appreciated something else, a
subtle contribution to feminist argument in a note from the
neuroscientist. Emotion and cognition, he said, are intimately
entwined, so it doesn't make sense to talk about them in separate
terms. We imagine that decisions are made in the cognitive part of
the brain, but emotion is involved, too – and mood is integral to
our ability to make good decisions. What interests me about this is
the case it makes for instinct, emotional response, as a valid basis
for decision-making: so often denigrated compared with the cool,
rational reasoning prioritised in a patriarchal culture.
...and
the radiance of the imagination
Since
having kids, I've been consumed by the anxiety of choice: whatever
I'm doing, I'm sure I should be doing something else. I want to give
them everything money can't buy: stories and escapades and the wild
beauty of autumn and spring. Instead I spend most of our time yelling
at them to stop fighting, use a fork, get a tissue, go to the toilet,
a tedium so unrelenting, demoralising and exhausting I haven't the
energy for the fun stuff. This is partly what drew me into Polly
Stenham's No Quarter: in the relationship between Robin and his
mother Lily, Stenham depicts a different kind of motherhood, a
romantic version in which childhood is an adventure. The argument
that the mother's eccentricity damages the child, makes him incapable
of functioning within society,
is strong. And I understand why people would find Robin unbearable:
“a pretentious, pompous, self-regarding, colossal prick”,
to quote Dan
Rebellato.
Possibly I'd think Robin were all those things too, except that he
was played by Tom Sturridge, and I'm not sure I could find anyone
played by Tom Sturridge unbearable.
Truthfully,
I've found it difficult to remember what I liked so much about No
Quarter since reading Dan's review: he objects to it with irrefutable
authority. I remember thinking that Stenham's writing was like a
fireworks display: a plain black expanse disrupted, with variable
frequency, by lines that glittered and sparked. I remember thinking
that much of the political argument between Robin and his older
brother Oliver felt schematic, but that the secrecy surrounding their
mother's suicide, the assumptions cherished by each sibling, the
complicated ethics, the impossible question of whether lies within a
family protect or corrode, was more involving. That said, I remember
being struck by one accusation Robin hurls at his brother: “It's a
twisting irony that after so many years of people trying to ferret
their way up the socio-economic scale, you would like nothing more
than to slither all the way down it.” Around the same time as I saw
No Quarter, Alex
Andreou
began an extraordinary conversation
on twitter
about poverty, and I felt ridiculous taking part in it because I was
mostly protected from my parents' experience of poverty, and because
even to talk about it makes me sound as though I'm engaging in that
slithering Robin speaks of so scornfully. But just as the
psychotherapist Sylvia Rimat interviewed argued that everything in
Sylvia's life today can be traced back to a childhood experience, I'm
sure my life has been shaped by my family's hand-to-mouth existence
in a flat in Hackney with an electricity meter my parents
occasionally couldn't feed, from which we were evicted when I was
about nine; the brief period in which we were homeless and refused to
stay in a Bayswater hotel, instead filling the crevices of my
granny's flat; and the two years spent in short-term council
accommodation. It made my already ambitious mother bloody-minded in
her pursuit of middle-class security – and has given me a deference
for that security that I can't control.
But
there was something else I sympathised with in No Quarter, which I
might have read differently or as negatively as Dan Reb were it not
for the coincidence of finishing Patti Smith's Just Kids that week.
I'd been working up to Just Kids for a while, wary of being
disappointed out of my adulation of Patti Smith, reluctant because I
have a reflex antipathy to the entire genre of autobiography – yes,
I do wince at the irony. A fair bit of Just Kids confirmed that
prejudice: much as I love Patti, I'm not that interested in her
cheese-sandwich dinners, no matter how shrewdly she punctures the
romantic-poetic image of poverty; similarly, there's a part of me
that reads her encounters with this or that famous person as little
more than name-dropping. But mostly it was everything I'd want a book
by Patti Smith to be: electric with strength of character, inspiring
in its politics, a manifesto for the life to which I aspire. The
brief description of her relationship with Sam Shepard alone made it
worth reading:
“I
can't do this,” I said. “I don't know what to say.”
“Say
anything,” he said. “You can't make a mistake when you
improvise.”
“What
if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”
“You
can't,” he said. “It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you
create another.”
That,
and a tiny phrase at the very beginning, where she describes her
burgeoning appreciation of language, in the form of prayer, as: “my
entrance into the radiance of the imagination”. Looking at the
whole of that passage again in Just Kids, I realise how close it is
to a note by Berger on language and poetry in And Our Faces: “One
can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to
us than any silence or god. Yet its very openness can signify
indifference. (The indifference of language is continually solicited
and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiques, files.) Poetry
addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and
incite a caring.”
Where
Just Kids connects with No Quarter is in Patti's cogent argument for
rejecting the conventional mores of society while embracing the
social responsibility that makes art worthwhile. She waited until she
was 28 to sign her record deal (offers before that “came, I felt,
too easy”), because she wanted the music she made to be reverent
and relevant. When the time eventually came to record Horses, she
walked into the vocal booth thinking intently of:
The
gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult
adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I
gleaned in taking responsibility for one's actions.
Of
her band, she says:
We
imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve,
protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We
feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of
spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we
feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a
mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would
call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the
American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms.
We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric
guitar and the microphone.
Stenham's
Robin is a musician, too, a pianist, but in rejecting conventional
society he also rejects human responsibility. Oliver is a politician
with an overweening appreciation of his own social engagement.
Stenham – and I bet Dan Reb would scorn this – attempts to steer
the middle path with No Quarter: celebrating the value of words, or
art, for themselves while using them to articulate our shared
responsibility for the planet and the future. Even if she didn't pull
it off, that's
what made me like it.
So
this is now 5500 words long: anyone who has made it this far, I don't
know whether to kiss you or pity you. This postscript is for David
Peschek, who called me today and read me the introduction to a
biography of Elizabeth Smart by Rosemary
Sullivan, with emphasis on the lines, “she knew how the role
assigned the mother emptied the writer's ego”, and: “she had a
rage of will: she bashed on regardless”. That, too, is why I'm
still here.
