Eleven kinds of loneliness (for Annie Siddons, with love)

The loneliness of professional envy

Theatre is such a gift for the socially incompetent. You get to spend entire evenings in the company of fascinating, talented people, without having to worry about making a fool of yourself the moment you open your mouth. I’m most usually alone when I see work, but somehow I knew that Annie Siddons’ How (Not) To Live in Suburbia would be a show I’d want to share. And not with just anyone: with my two closest female, mum, struggling with the whole being middle-aged and married thing, friends, both of whom live in London's sprawling suburbia and have variegated feelings about it. It was February 2017 when we saw it, in Soho’s Upstairs Theatre, and as I sit down to write this I’m wondering what exactly I remember of it. Beyond the sensation of wanting to hide how I cried, even from these people I love so, surreptitiously cupping my chin to catch the tears before they spilled on my clothes.

And of course I wanted to write about the show straight away, but I saw it at the end of another fucking school holiday (my god they roll around so frequently) and had an impossible accumulation of other work to do. At least, that's the story I told myself. The real problem was that I could still – can still now – hear in my head what Megan Vaughan had written when she saw the show in January 2016. The way she described the sunset in London that night, the flagrant colours of the sky. The way she wrote about what London means to her, the decision to leave everyone she knew and had grown up with to live here, the ways in which my birth city has made her grow different. Her description of the northern line as her black aorta. I couldn't remember what aorta meant and when I looked it up I felt like such an imbecile.

The loneliness of the engaged tone

About a month ago Meg interviewed me as part of her PhD on theatre fan-writing/criticism and asked me if I feel part of a community doing this work. And I was surprised by how quickly and vehemently I replied that I don't. It's so many things: feeling older, and unaffiliated, and unable to keep pace either with the performance schedule or other writers or the juggle of different strands of work that also serve to sever, but most of all feeling recurrently disappointed by how hard it is to maintain a sense of connection and sorority in a city as frantic as this, that breathes in ambition and breathes out individualism. I keep trying to collaborate with others, to be social, to open up pockets of space in which people, a community, might meet. But it's a struggle, and mostly I feel like I fail.

The loneliness of worrying that you never get to the point, because you spend so much time mithering, and perhaps haven't really a point to make

Shall I tell you something about Annie Siddons?

Yes, that would be nice.

The loneliness of living in suburbia when urbia isn't just what you're used to but defines your very being

Annie Siddons lives in suburbia. Twickenham Home of Rugby, to be precise. She says it like that, with a twinkle, every time – except when she abbreviates it to THoR, which is somehow even more deflating, a cartoon swipe at rugby's deification of masculinity. Intermittently rugby fans descend on Twickenham in a deluge for a few hours of rumbustious drinking, and then the rugby leaves and Twickenham exhales and returns to its more placid state, as a leafy, prim, somewhat conservative kind of place, where the schools are good, the people are friendly...

What Siddons does is pick at that surface, to show that a place like Twickenham isn't quite as accommodating as it might be. As far as THoR's concerned she's an outsider – not just a newcomer, or an urbanite, but a woman of Greek/Egyptian background, which still (I suspect, having said goodbye to suburbia almost 20 years ago) matters. Plus she's a single mother, and we all know how kindly they've been looked on in the wider Tory culture over the past seven years. So while people make advances – there's the married neighbour who makes a pass at her, for instance – they do so in a way that makes clear her otherness as an exotic creature who works in The Arts. When you can't even join the local book group because you've been deemed too different, something is clearly up.

The loneliness of choosing to sacrifice what you want for the sake of your kids but refusing to let yourself define it as sacrifice because come off it with the language of martyrdom already

Siddons lives in suburbia because she moved there with her husband and two daughters and when they divorced she decided to stay because London is neither heaving with trustworthy schools nor affordable for a single parent, let alone a freelance theatre-maker with a career gap for motherhood. And anyway, all the divorce manuals (I'm told) say that when children are experiencing the destabilisation of the relationship they've taken for granted since birth, the blow can be marginally softened by at least maintaining stability in their physical environment.

Without going into detail, Siddons reveals that one of her daughters has a chronic health condition acute enough that intermittently she needs hospitalisation; meaning that among the concatenation of stressful and isolating events detailed in the show is another bout of child illness, which Siddons has to support and bear alone. The impression me and my friends get is that this is one of the reasons underlying the divorce; meaning that in an earlier version of this post, I wrote some violently rude things about her former husband. which I said I wouldn't apologise for but now wish I could. Our assumption is that he left her, but we're wrong; I'm not sure what this says about the baggage we brought into that theatre, the feelings we bear towards husbands, men, generally. Except I do, of course. They're equivocal.  

The loneliness of feeling so crowded by others' needs and demands that you don't have space to think

Now I've started writing about it the whole show is unfolding before me again – not specific quotes, much as I'd like them to, but the shape and measure and timbre of it: the steady way Siddons details her accruing isolation; the tragicomic films in which every attempt to reach for the starriness of London only leads back to the gutter outside her front garden; nips of laughter as she makes lists of promise then all too soon crumples them into balls of regret. The carefully planned birthday that goes awry, with Siddons alone on the razzle in Soho, screaming at her friends down the phone. The repeated attempts to write, to write, but nothing working out how she wants it to. The bodies of the Walrus of Loneliness and, later, his twin Seal of Shame pressing closer and closer to her, not just metaphors but physical manifestations of the feelings tightening her veins, squeezing her lungs until she can't breathe. She holds it all with such lightness, uses her body double (the brilliant Nicky Hobday) to give herself enough distance to be wry, but I remember now what it was that made me cry so much, the clay-clag sadness at the heart of it all.

The loneliness so deep-rooted, lived with so long, that it's not even recognisable, except that it is

I might have told these stories before on here; if so apologies for doing it again. When I was 12, after maybe three years of moving from flat to flat, my mum got in her car and started driving north from Dalston, looking for a house cheap enough to buy. She tried and failed in Tottenham, Edmonton, Enfield, before finally landing at a place called Waltham Cross, where the A10 running arrow straight from Liverpool Street into Hertfordshire intersects with London's orbital, the M25. We spent the next 10 years in suburbia and never felt at home. Back then we were about as ethnic as our street got; there was one Sunday morning when my dad, grown so exasper-infuriated by the neighbours' barely concealed racism, opened the front door, pulled one of the stereo speakers into the front garden, put a Greek album on the turntable and turned the volume to full. “They want to talk about us, I'll give them something to fucking talk about,” he fumed.

I figured out how to neck a boy in suburbia, but not how to make friends: I was still going to school in London, and didn't fancy joining in with the speed gang my brother was part of up the road. The one female friend I almost made stole my vinyl copy of Madonna's True Blue album and never spoke to me again. I realise as I'm writing this why someone said to me recently that I sound like I was lonely as a young person. I'd never thought of my teen years that way and didn't know what to say.

“I've never thought of myself as lonely before. But I think that's it. I think that's what I've been feeling.”

That's – as exactly as I remember it – what my friend {a} said as we walked out of Soho theatre and meandered down to the Curzon for a drink. {a} and I met in my Waltham Cross years, wholly by chance: we'd caught eyes at a couple of shoegazey gigs, but at the second one I got distracted by a boy, who happened to go to her brother's school, so when she spotted me at a third gig she came and said hello and we've been devoted to each other ever since. We've supported each other through university, and meeting the people who became our husbands, and becoming mothers to older daughters and younger sons; through the struggle to find work, and to feel fulfilled in our work, and to balance our work with the demands of parenting, and to balance our work with our husbands' work which, because the pay is higher and the hours more solid, always takes precedence; through frustration and boredom and, it turns out, loneliness.

I love that response she had to the show, because I love the ways in which theatre reaches into the deepest part of the self and pulls open the door you've been keeping not just shut but barricaded with furniture and flotsam, and in shining a light on those feelings – the light of shared experience – makes them, for a moment, easier to bear.

I didn't say any of that to her on the night, though. Somehow I couldn't find the words.

The loneliness of feeling like you don’t know how to talk, even to the people you love most

So that was one of the friends who came to the show with me; the other was my beloved friend [z], who I met when already married, and her daughter and mine were at the same nursery, although she's since been priced out of the area and now lives in Crystal Palace – making the same move as my mum but south instead of north. From the outside, I'd say that there are clear advantages to her life in a suburban cul-de-sac over mine: her kids can and frequently do disappear unaccompanied to the neighbours' houses, there's always someone ready to recommend a local plumber, she's often telling me about community events she's been involved in. But the truth is, I wouldn't swap with her for a minute: when I walked out of Waltham Cross for the last time, with my bag balanced on a skateboard that refused to balance me, I made a promise to myself never again to live outside of zone 2. (The advantage of being this old is that I am old enough for this to have been possible.) And [z] would be back in Stockwell in a heartbeat if she could. She's another one for whom urbia defines her very being: the hustle of it (she's one of my more pro-capitalism friends), the vibrancy of it, particularly the abundance of it, all the theatre and art and food and music and life.

Unlike {a}, [z] didn't recognise, or at least feel personally, the emotion palette of loneliness in the show. Depression, yes; disappointment and anger regarding husbands, yes; but not the loneliness, that was alien. We sat at the Curzon and [z] and {a}, who hadn't met before, bonded over alcohol and shared frustrations, while I quietly busied myself with barricading that door again. Two weeks later [z] told me she had decided to divorce. Everything that has happened to her since has encouraged me to be considerably more careful with my marriage.

The loneliness of lying in a hotel room with the people you made and the person you made them with, sobbing, but silently, because they were arguing for something like an hour before they slept and waking them by accident would be a disaster

The middle-class heteronormative summer holiday is a fucking abomination, isn't it? At least, so it seemed as we trudged up an urban slope in Naples, sticky with heatwave sweat and the accumulated grime of a long-neglected dirt-encrusted city, nine days of arguing behind the four of us and three more to go. It's our fault, I guess, for swapping city for sprawling, mismanaged, brutally inequitable city instead of beach: but then we even managed to argue on seaside days, hurling insults at each other more stinging than the salt, grittier than the sand. We're not very good as a family at giving each other space or solitude. When we got back home I unpacked the suitcases, packed the kids into bed, sat down at the computer and didn't get up again until 2.30am. An aloneness that is the very opposite of loneliness.

On one of those days in Naples I tried to start reading Maggie Nelson's Bluets. But it's a book that needs space, and solitude, not just in the external environment but internally, in the mind, and after five pages I gave up and moved on to one of my daughter's books instead. It's called Wonder, by RJ Pallacio, and {a} had recommended it to me just before the holidays: she loves it because she recognises in it an extreme version of her own experience. {a} has scars that run from her chin all the way down her neck, scars that I stopped seeing so many years ago it surprised me when she mentioned them again; and August, the boy at the centre of Wonder, was born with a genetic mutation that particularly affects his face. So she knows what it is to have people stare at you, and be freaked out by you, and want to know if you were burned in a fire, as happens to August. Those scars have so much to do with the loneliness that {a}, for most of her life, has felt as depression and insecurity.

Before I had to abandon Bluets, I came across this paragraph:

I admit I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke – take your pick – an apprehension of the divine.

Instead of going to beaches in Rome and Naples, we took the children to churches. Dozens of them, florid affairs, with painted ceilings and marble floors and art commissioned from the leading artists of the time: sculptures by Bernini, paintings by Caravaggio, technically flawless, ravishing.

Those Caravaggios were my salvation, my access to solitude amid the divine.

The loneliness of aching to go home only to return home and realise that home is a thing of the past, you watched it being dismantled piece by piece and did nothing to save or protect it and now you can never go home any more

In that 12 days' absence from London an abomination has occurred on my local high street. New hoardings next door to the library – I library I know we're lucky still to have – announce the imminent arrival of a branch of Metro Bank, convoy to the branch less than two miles away. Although it’s an American bank, the hoarding is a distinctly Thatcherite shade of blue. Running along the bottom of it, in letters the red of fresh blood, is the recurring slogan LIVE THE REVOLUTION.

And I don't know what's worse. Is it that nothing in this city, this city swarmed by bankers and estate agents, property investors and tax evaders and Home Counties trust funds, is sacred any more? Or is it the ease with which meaning is cleaved from kind words, leaving the language degraded?

The loneliness of trying to do your best but knowing your best isn’t good enough

Maggie Nelson is one of the two writers I'm most obsessed with, by which I mean want to write like, at the moment; the other is Claudia Rankine. Each of them identifies as poet but what I've read is poetic prose; a prose lapidarian and gimlet, compacted to the point of becoming diamond while still with the nourishing softness of earth. Neither gives sway to unnecessary words: that's the quality I most want to learn from them. Focus and precision.

Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely is devastating: a fragile torch held up against the appalling darkness of this world, a darkness that expands in every direction, untrammelled. A darkness in which people are deprived of medications because money, or prescribed medications because money, or rendered invisible because money, or treated as less than human, in fact precisely not-human, because money. There is power in this illumination but fragility too, because hope is precarious and humanity's capacity to invent new methods of exploitation and control is terrifying and incalculable. Because to live in this darkness at all seems impossible, and yet we do, and keep doing.

At her most clipped Rankine writes:

Define loneliness.

Yes.

It's what we can't do for each other.

What do we mean to each other?

What does a life mean?

Why are we here if not for each other?

In those three questions is all the struggle of my relationship with – well, everyone, but above all my children, and at the deepest myself. I realise as I'm writing this why someone said to me recently that I sound like I am lonely now. Only I haven't been thinking of it as loneliness. I've been thinking of it as shame.

The loneliness of fretting in the late hours and the overstretched hours and the indolent dilatory hours whether writing about theatre is the right thing to be doing, and whether it's the writing bit or the theatre bit that's the problem

The last two paragraphs, each isolated within their own page, of Don't Let Me Be Lonely read:

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem – is how Rosemary Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that – Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.

Or one meaning of here is “In this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody – Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognises and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.

Isn't this precisely what happens in theatre – the best theatre – the theatre that engages its audience in dialogue even when presented as a monologue from the stage, the dialogue whose extents and limitations I am constantly questioning and seeking? In that moment of my friend {a} recognising her own loneliness in Siddons' loneliness, hearing its name, I see a hand extended and a hand receiving. I see a conflation of two same presences, and I see how theatre – and the act of talking and writing about it – has everything, everything, to do with being alive.

But that apprehension, too, can produce a lonely kind of feeling.

Demolition plot (slight return)

Back when I was reading Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, there was a passage about the Zapatistas that shone so suggestive a light on Dead Centre's show Chekhov's First Play that it sparked me into writing about it (this is a postscript to that text). In a chapter on revolution, especially the social revolutions that have taken place in South America over the past few decades, Solnit talks about carnival and the idea of jubilee, a Biblical notion of social renewal whereby once every 50 years liberty from work, ownership and exploitation is proclaimed “throughout all the land” (now that's a religious tenet I can stand behind). It leads her to celebrating the Zapatistas, and to a discussion about their literary figurehead, Subcomandante Marcos. She reports how, in response to journalists' speculation as to his identity, Marcos wrote:

“Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany … a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at 10pm, a celebrant of the zocalo, a campesino without land, an unemployed worker … and of course a Zapatista in the mountains of southeastern Mexico.” This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan 'Todos somos Marcos' ('We are all Marcos')...

So much of Chekhov's First Play is concerned with the possibility of social revolution: of smashing down hierarchies and all the structures that (up)hold them, of replacing the cult and the claim of the individual with the selfless anonymity of the collective. When the wrecking ball falls, the stage picture shatters with carnival energy, and at the centre of that chaos is Platonov. Plucked from the audience, Platonov could be anybody – in the same way that Marcos could be anybody.

In his confusion, his hesitant movements, his inability to keep up with the action, the manifold ways in which he doesn't fit, Platonov radiates the imposed powerlessness of the outsider, no matter how much the characters on stage are magnetised by his presence. And again, that not-fitting makes him one with the ostracised whose identity Marcos so joyfully adopts, whose presence is a problem to authority, and yet who can, through persistence, through simply continuing to be, challenge their surroundings and even change the script. The slogan that Platonov inspires, the line that every character repeats in turn, is: “You made me nobody.” Once they've said that, they fall silent: the final vestige of hierarchy – language – demolished as surely as the country-house set.

That's pretty much what I intended to say when writing about Chekhov's First Play the first time, but it wasn't the only thing, and somehow in the (general indulgence of the) writing I forgot to say it at all. And I might have carried on forgetting, except that I'm now reading another Solnit book, Hope in the Dark, and again there's a bit of writing about the Zapatistas that reminded me of Dead Centre. There's a beautiful line, also quoting from Marcos, on facing the future with bravery and expectation of change: “With our struggle, we are reading the future which has already been sown yesterday, which is being cultivated today, and which can only be reaped if one fights, if, that is, one dreams.”

Solnit picks up on this because it supports her reasonable and reassuring thesis that political despair is a drain on human resources; that while fatigue is understandable, and temporary loss of faith a natural response to disappointment, the defeatism of long-term despair is unacceptable: “even an indulgence if you look at the power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone”. Despair rejects the slow, patient and repetitive work required to bring about social change, and replaces it with inactivity and maudlin doom-mongering. It's necessary, she argues, to believe in other possibilities; even, quoting F Scott Fitzgerald, “to see things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise”.

This argument for an embrace of the unknown is exactly what she illuminates in Chekhov's First Play. Despair in the play is figured in the character of the “director”, who seems perky enough at first, but gradually reveals his self-doubt and crushing sense of failure. He shoots himself out of proceedings, only to return at the end, still “tormented, without anything to believe in”, but now aware of the need for hope: for “courage … to keep on living”. What might happen in the future he doesn't know: he just has to continue – and do so reaching outwards. When he speaks his final word, hello, he's no longer the “director” but a single being with Platonov, their identities merging just as “todos somos Marcos”.

Our relationship with the unknown was a central concern in another work by Dead Centre, Lippy – but there they undermined their own proposition, maintaining a sense of visual mystery in the staging while chipping away at narrative ambiguity in the text. Chekhov's First Play similarly (but with less self-contradiction) shapes its dream of the future even as it professes uncertainty: the other slogan repeated by each character in turn, just before the “You made me nobody” sequence, is: “Is this mine? I can't imagine owning anything.” This is the politics of anti-capitalism, of the Zapatistan maxim quoted by Solnit: “Todo para todos, nada para nosotros” – “everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves”. And the word “imagine” is crucial: it suggests not a physical shift, but a mental one, the same as Solnit advocates in her book. All the social and political transformations we've witnessed in the past century and that are yet to come have one thing in common, she says: “they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. … To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.”

Dead Centre plucked Chekhov's First Play from the past, tore it and transformed it into a commitment to imaginative hope. No wonder I'm still thinking about it.

And here are my holiday snaps*

*title a wave hello to Selina Thompson, who sent me an email at exactly the moment I needed a voice from home brimming gossip and love and a knowledge of my other self

Hadestown

It turns out that a full-scale theatre detox – an entire month of seeing next to nothing – is simultaneously healthy prep for the annual Edinburgh fringe binge and a major mistake: within 24 hours of seeing work again my brain was fizzing from the excess of stimulation and I couldn't talk only gabble delirium. The thing that stood next to nothing was Hadestown, a show I've wanted to see for a good five years, ever since I interviewed Anais Mitchell and added her to my pantheon of living-by-their-own-truth role-model women. For the not yet obsessed: Mitchell is a folk singer who created a wonky, sawdust-strewn rewrite of Orpheus and Eurydice to be performed as a community opera with her neighbours in semi-rural Vermont; later she released the songs as an album featuring Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) (be still my heart); and now she's worked with the Team's director, Rachel Chavkin, to transform it into an off-Broadway musical. I love the Hadestown album to distraction. I paid $99 to see the production at the New York Theater Workshop, more than I've spent on a single piece of theatre in years. I went girded for disappointment. But oh. OH.

In an ideal world I'd have seen this with Vernon singing, or at the very least Taylor Mac, who joined Chavkin for R&D work on the show. But it didn't matter that this isn't an ideal world, because Hadestown is a thing of such perfection that it transcends its performers: lyrically, musically, but also narratively and politically. I say this with authority, having witnessed Martin Carthy sing the role of Hades for a gig performance at Union Chapel apparently drunk, missing his cues and forgetting the words. And anyway, Chavkin's performers were pretty much phenomenal. Plus, Mitchell herself worked with Chavkin (and dramaturg Ken Cerniglia) on the additional material, and her composer collaborator Michael Chorney is a vital presence in the theatre band, so hyper-sensitivity to stage change had its balms.

The bare bones of the story are this: Hadestown opens with pragmatic Eurydice grilling her poet-musician boyfriend about how exactly they might survive if they got married. He spins her a golden yarn about nature providing, as though they were hunter-gatherers in a time of Eden; but the fact is, they live in (Depression-era) America, where “times are hard and getting harder all the time”. When she hears the lonesome whistle of the underground train to Hadestown blow, she's lethally tempted: its tycoon despot offers work, money, warmth and security in place of harsh precarity. Orpheus, recognising that she's lost her soul (and, it's implied, her body) to capitalist exploitation, attempts to save her – but Hades, altogether too cognisant of the weakness of humans, inevitably thwarts them.

That's the skeleton: what makes Hadestown exquisite are the feathers and jewels with which Mitchell, Chorney and now Chavkin adorn it. In some ways that's the wrong metaphor, as attested by Chavkin's rough-hewn aesthetic: working with designer Rachel Huack, she stripped the theatre back to a wooden floor, installed a homestead amphitheatre of mismatched wooden chairs (a smart nod to the pioneers and Puritans of America's past, and its constitutional commitment to rugged individualism), and set the action in an open circle overshadowed by the gnarled branches of a single, wintry tree. The sparseness brightened the gleam of Mitchell's peripheral characters: bold and swaggering Persephone (exquisitely played by TEAM regular Amber Grey, crackling as she twisted her body into jagged origami); the glittering chorus of Fates, watchful, teasing, never judgemental; and Hermes, gossamer on record but in Chris Sullivan's performance stomping and robust, a railroad man with a touch of Charon in his crepuscular gaze. Like Chorney's orchestration, a tapestry of American sounds weaving jazz, country and more, Michael Krass's costumes criss-crossed the decades: 1950s bobby sox and dirndl for Eurydice, a 1930s embroidered slip for Persephone, patchwork silks and leathers for the Fates. Everything on stage felt thrown together yet intimately cohesive, simple in a way that belied its complexity.

For Orpheus, love is simple, and so is life; he's a sentimental romantic, but he's also, as Hermes so tenderly puts it, an artist who “sees the world as it could be, not how it is”. Mitchell and Chavkin are unsparing in puncturing that romanticism while committing absolutely to its promise: Hadestown really is hell, overheated, overlit, over-policed and over-provided, and while Mitchell had plenty of gated communities to draw on when she conceived the notion of a workforce committed to constructing the wall that separates its own wealth from its fear of the poverty and jealous need beyond, that imagery has all the more bite with Trump's Mexico manifesto (and, on our side, the appalling Calais action) poisoning the air. Any hint of a middle-class or left-wing sneer at the “stupid” working classes (the criticism levied as much at Brexit voters as Trump enthusiasts) who unthinkingly follow-the-leader is quashed by Mitchell's clear differentiation between people and structures. People are moulded by the context that contains them: Hades himself is built by the system he builds, his humanity and happiness compromised by it. In Eurydice's shoes, the Fates demand, what might we all do the same? When Orpheus looks back, Mitchell and Chavkin open the possibility that it's not an innate emotional weakness at fault but some trick of structural oppression that ensures even the most strenuous of opponents will ultimately be crushed. This is what makes Hadestown emotionally devastating: not the fact that Orpheus loses Eurydice, as the myth declares he must, but the deeper loss of the collective human soul to capitalist inequality, from which – no matter how hard we might try to stride into a different future – there seems to be no escape.

But there is. Orpheus is still singing, and dreaming of a better future. We know this, because Mitchell wrote Hadestown.

Warpand Weft

Laura Veirs shares the left-wing politics of Anais Mitchell, and her earnestness of expression, too; but whereas Mitchell's solo work is more straightforwardly me-and-my-guitar folk, Veirs' collaborations with producer Tucker Martine pack the musical references of Hadestown into erudite pop songs. It took me a while to click with her, but since 2010's July Flame I've been a devoted fan. We played Warp and Weft as we drove across Indiana, and it reminded me of listening to PJ Harvey's Let England Shake while driving through the Cotswolds, those placid rolling hills suddenly muddied and seething with the ghosts of dead soldiers, insurrectionists, men. Indiana is basically flat; I'd guess it's desolate in winter, but it's verdant in early August, field after field of thriving maize. Veirs' circumspect songs made that landscape churn with alarm at what America has become and what it's built on:

How can it be so cold out here in America

Everybody is packing heat in America

Training their barrels on the city streets in America

Every bad man finds his peace in America

In America

No shootings were reported while we were in the country, but I did read of the Black Lives Matter action shutting down the M4 back home and glowed with admiration and a sense of possibility. Ever since Theresa May glided into her premiership that's what I've wanted to do: just sit in the middle of roads, bringing cities to a standstill. Instead I sat in our hired car for hour upon hour, contemplating the spray contraption that looms over so many field, maybe distributing a fine mist of water but more likely showers of pesticide, noting how many billboards advertise litigation lawyers, wondering how houses that don't have garden fences around them can suggest so much hostility towards the unknown stranger. Laura Veirs sang and her words ploughed the land, churning to the surface its lack of care.

Later we played Anna Meredith's Varmints and I thought again that it's my favourite album released so far this year.

A Lotof Sorrow

I'm honestly embarrassed by how much I love the National. Looking at them in the film of A Lot of Sorrow, installed at the Art Institute of Chicago, I was overwhelmed again by shame, that these middle-aged white guys, with their suits and wedding rings and thinning hair, are so capable of turning me to putty. And yes, I'm ashamed of my superficiality in judging them by appearance: me, a middle-aged white woman, with my own wedding ring, constantly reminded by the queer and feminist art with which I align myself of how essentially straight I am; ashamed, too, of the craven lingering adolescent desire to be different, other, strange. My embarrassment at loving the National is a nugget of a more general shame I feel just being me.

But maybe the National are embarrassed in a similar way; or rather, my feeling is that its members, especially Aaron and Bryce Dessner, use this middle-of-the-road rock behemoth to finance all the different, other, strange art they want to make. (Thus Orpheus entered Hadestown, proud even in his submission.) A Lot of Sorrow is a fascinating intersection of those two impulses: a continuous performance of the song Sorrow, from their 2010 album High Violet, over and over, non-stop, for six hours, in a white-walled room in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. I saw at most 16 minutes of it on film, and not even consecutively, but it was enough to get my pulse racing at the intricacy of detail: the jitter of exhausted fingers, the crack of voice, the decision to switch to playing guitar with a violin bow, the pause to gather resources, the slipped note, the brow that furrows with effort, the snatched snacks for sustenance. Their bodies are entirely at the mercy of the song: it plays over them, through them, and so plays through me; for days after its words spill out of me unbidden, no matter that they're sunk in cliche.

Those few stolen minutes in front of it are every night I've huddled in the dark listening to the same song(s) over and over: listening to Cat Power so obsessively that the person I was staying with told me I'd ruined What Would the Community Think? for them forever, listening to Godspeed as though they could realign the stars, listening to Interpol's NYC, a song that haunted me this holiday (“got to be some more change in my life”), listening to that National album I was reviewing for the Guardian stupefied by how out of sorts it left me. On all those nights I was alone, but watching A Lot of Sorrow in Chicago I was with my son – my funny little boy who likes his music gentle and melancholy, has a penchant for Debussy, and was as mesmerised by the film as me. I twined my arms around him, grateful for this lifebuoy of love.

JohnOliver

The friend we stayed with in Chicago is a fascinating combination of socially Democrat (that's how she votes, too) but economically Republican (a committed believer in success rewarding hard work, adherent to the American Dream). She's white Scottish, her husband black Chicagoan, and their political engagement – both donated to the Bernie Sanders campaign – gifted plenty of lively conversation in their house about disappointment in Obama's leadership, lack of belief in Sanders' revolutionary agenda, and the dire prospects of the upcoming election. The thing that took me by surprise was their admission that they get at least half of their political news from watching the plethora of satirical programmes that screen in the US. It's not a healthy state of affairs, they said, because what's needed is cultural balance, a space in which people can actually speak across the political divide, rather than hurling snark at each other. But the thing is, I can't remember the last time I engaged with any news-related programming on the BBC without wanting to punch people for allowing so much inanity so much airspace. If we're going to ape American programming, can we at least import the acute with the vapid.

We spent an evening watching John Oliver programmes, and one in particular landed a horrible punch. It's a programme about drones, in which Oliver shows a clip of a young teenager from Pakistan, talking about the sky: grey days are good, he says, because that's when his head feels clear of anxiety. Blue skies, by contrast, fill him with fear. And people wonder how Muslim children might become “radicalised”.

Lightat the edge of land

Peter McMaster's blog was my holiday firefly, bringing flashes of natural wonder to a fortnight of preying architecture and obsidious concrete. I harbour a deep and quiet love for Peter and his work, and the attempt at a different way of living, thinking, making art and opening up to the world represented by Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides reminds me how much and why. The work takes the form of a two-week cycle tour, marking in gold leaf upon land's edge a line to which, at a conservative estimate, it's anticipated water will rise as human-accelerated climate change affects sea levels. The gold is ostentatious but the action anything but: it's a humble attempt to reckon with environmental destruction, a lament for what might soon not be, a movement towards a different sense of value. It's art made for no money or purpose other than to notice, to acknowledge, to witness – not what's before us, but what's unseen.

There's a beautiful thing Peggy Phelan says in her forward to the Tim Etchells book Certain Fragments, identifying “the essential nature of witnessing itself: to continue a conversation that without your intervention would cease”. Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides continues a conversation between human and land, one Peter still dominates (painting rock with gold is “an unsympathetic defacing”), but in a way that's diametric to the domination humans generally exert, plundering earth's resources without care. His journey coincided exactly with mine to the US, a piquant synchronicity: while he cycled, camped, measured and gilded, I visited the Natural History museum in Manhattan, Prospect Park zoo and the aquarium in Chicago, and in each place fretted at the ethics of human-animal relations, the cruelty required to give children a glimpse of wild nature, and the extent to which cities diminish and even eliminate opportunity for children to commune with a greater outdoors.

Peter's blog posts continue another conversation: with the unseen audience. When Phelan writes of the witness, she's thinking of course of the audience, and I value that sentence so much for its suggestiveness regarding criticism or writing about theatre. To me it presents a set of open questions: is it enough to be a silent witness? Is documentation essential if the conversation is to continue? Is it possible to engage in the conversation as critic/critical writer/whatever without overbearing? I don't know. But there was a warmth for me in reading Peter's posts and recognising in the scenario an echo of when I first met him, at Battersea Arts Centre, when he was thinking similarly but in a different context about masculinity, privilege, and solitude, environment and the spiritual possibilities of a closer connection to nature. There is a longevity and depth to our conversation, but also a scarcity, privately as well as professionally: I rarely see him; I've seen much more of his work than I've written about. And so how might it register if I stopped being witness, if the conversation ceased? Would it matter?

It was such an unexpected gift, a few days after I got home from Chicago, to bump into Peter at Forest Fringe, where he was performing another variation on the Gold Piece strand, a one-on-one called CommitmentCards. The work is exquisite in its shape and generosity: Peter begins by offering tea, then asks what you're yet to say no to. Gently he guides the conversation to an invitation to commit to something, with him as witness. Work like this galvanises but also disquiets me: it's so open that it inspires openness, and how much must the artist then absorb of human anxiety or insecurity as participants unburden? Megan Vaughan, writing about her interaction with Commitment Cards, describes Peter as “a reassuring therapist”, and Peter himself says in his blog post about the evening that he's “not afraid of the idea of art-work being therapeutic” or “to embrace the sensation of therapeutic experience”. I worry because he doesn't have a therapist's training or safety mechanisms; that these things aren't required for one human to give their ear to another is a useful and inspiring thing to remember. As Peter says in the blog: “I was moved by witnessing someone open up for the benefit of both of us, for the creation of a bigger idea of self-expression and compassionate communication being allowed to exist in the world.”

I've participated in one other Gold Piece with Peter and cherish it precisely for its compassionate communication, achieved without speaking at all. Based on the Japanese practice of kintsugi, the root Gold Piece invites its participant to mend a piece of broken china, gluing the pieces together then painting the cracks with gold dust. As I did so, I felt Peter was silently forgiving me for every stupid or thoughtless or mistaken thing I'd ever done. Kintsugi is a philosophy as much as a practical art: it values the imperfect, honours its scars. There's another thing I want to write about it (especially since my brilliant friend Anna spotted a reference to kintsugi in Beyonce's Lemonade) so I'll shut up now, but this strand of Peter's work feels so important to have in the world – not just in spite of its minimal reach, but because of it.

WandaJackson

The Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is so bizarre: a small-town museum in everything but pretensions, closer in spirit to those ramshackle rooms devoted to dolls (Dunster), shells (Margate) or fishing paraphernalia (Hastings) than the more grandiose cultural houses that its architecture evokes. I loved it, the more so for being ridiculous. Highlights: the Elvis display, which I wanted to bring home to my mum; the drawings by Jimi Hendrix; the absurd attempt to claim Cleveland as the epicentre of the pop universe; the fact that the area devoted to the history of hip-hop is only slightly bigger than the area devoted to outfits worn by Beyonce. Best of all are the listening booths that people – locals, I'm guessing – have claimed for karaoke, each one packed with friends singing at the tops of their voices, not caring for the lack of closed doors. I didn't buy any memorabilia because I'm going to make it instead: my own version of a dress worn by Wanda Jackson, with a panel of gold sequins down the front and red fringing down the sides, something to fill a dance floor with flames.

Abrief history of humankind

There are things generally known, at least by the people I surround myself with. It's known, for instance, that humans are humans, regardless of what country they're from or what colour skin they have. It's known that humans have affected and accelerated ecological devastation. It's known that story is vital to human culture and existence. Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind repeats these known things, but places them in a depth of field (as he puts it, scanning “millennia rather than centuries”) in ways that are surprising and transformative. I'm prone to hyperbole I know, nothing I say can be trusted, but I'm only two-fifths through and already I'm changed by it. Or rather, he's brought to light and forced me to acknowledge a whole lot of weak thinking in my brain and challenged it in necessary ways.

It's an incredibly depressing book, because page after page asserts the same argument: that it's actually impossible to change the culture in which we live, because the story of it is too tenacious, too embedded. In no way is he saying that we are by nature neo-liberal acolytes of the free market, but that all societies coalesce through story, and the stories that dominate now have been in place for thousands of years. This bit in particular is devastating: he's talking about how difficult it would be to shift inter-subjective imagined orders (the examples he gives are “the dollar, human rights and the United States of America”) because to do so would require “simultaneously chang[ing] the consciousness of billions of people”, and to do that would require creating “an alternative imagined order” even more powerful than the one you're attempting to change. And so, he concludes: “There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.” The book is full of statements like that and every one stings.

But. BUT. He's affirmed my belief in feminism as the story with the most potential to create change. His chapter on the patriarchal structure is brilliant, because it comes right out and says that its “universality and stability” is bewildering. He presents all the key arguments for masculine supremacy and steadfastly exposes them as arrant nonsense. There's a glorious butter-wouldn't-melt tone to this writing: a swallowed amusement that no one will admit that the real reason men dominate over women is that, in general, they are selfish shitbags who chanced to seize an opportunity for power and never let go. The feminist story struggles because it is disparate and scratchy with argument and riddled with its own damaging hierarchies, but there is hope in its tenacity, its adaptability, its ongoing refusals, its compassionate communication (such a useful phrase). It is the story in which I have most faith, and which gives me the most strength.

He's also made me feel better about the idea of living in a bubble. If the imagined order at the macro scale is so impossible to change, why not collectively imagine a new order on a micro scale and live within that instead? At some level that's the ultimate in white middle-class privilege, of course – the same line of argument that builds walls and gated communities – but I don't, I hope, mean it that way. My alternative world is populated by makers of story, theatre, art, music and more, by feminists and activists, by people who don't retreat from the bigger world but comment on it, rewrite it, work against it. Each fuelling the other, giving each other purpose and sustenance, and making life in that bigger system possible.

Scandinavian pain

We went back, me and my funny little son, to A Lot of Sorrow, because – and, dozy as I am, I had to go to Chicago to find this out – the film was also screening in London over the summer, as part of the Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition at the Barbican. And then I had to go back a third time, because there were chunks of the exhibition deemed unsuitable for children (translation: he missed out on seeing a hilarious film of a dog running round and round a swimming pool as a woman swam lengths because it was next to a video of a couple having sex), and because he was tired by the time we reached the Visitors room and two minutes in there was 58 not enough.

I realised something, watching A Lot of Sorrow that third time, laughing as Kjartansson brought out burgers to the band, ribs crushing and convulsing every time Matt Berninger rumbled the opening line. There's a National lyric that's key to the whole exhibition, but it's not from Sorrow, it's from Pink Rabbits, an absolute humdinger in a song full of them:

You didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park

You didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was a television version of a person with a broken heart

A television version of a person with a broken heart. Just writing it gives me shivers.

Kjartansson is fascinated by the interface of performance and personal, the effects of external culture on internal emotions, the ways in which people make stories which inform human behaviour, the Mobius strip of mirror and mirrored. In the accompanying text for the multi-video installation Scenes From Western Culture, he talks about the pervasiveness of certain atmospheres, certain settings and moods, wanting to jolt the brain into seeing them and maybe even resisting them. By using repetition, he invites audiences to look harder, give better attention: to seek out the difference between the television version and the person.

But it's the broken-hearted bit he's particularly incisive with. My son had zero tolerance for God, in which Kjartansson dresses up as a Rat Pack crooner and, accompanied by a cruise-liner swing band in a pink-satin room, warbles the words “sorrow conquers happiness” on repeat, and to be honest I didn't bother returning: the minute I saw felt off-kilter compared with the fine balancing act of A Lot of Sorrow and in particular The Visitors. There's such subtlety to the permutations of melancholy in both of those: the performers wallow in it, luxuriate in it, step away from it so easily that one person I know complained on twitter that he “smelt the faint whiff of vacuous”, saw only “irony on loop”; but there's also a fine and solicitous appreciation of how intense and real and consuming melancholy can be, how weird and jolting it is to feel like shit and yet sometimes be capable of laughing or noticing beauty, how excruciating it is to know somewhere deep down that the melancholy that is so overwhelming might also be something you're performing (a question Selina – waving hello again – asks of herself in Salt). Nothing about A Lot of Sorrow, or The Visitors, or Take Me Here by the Dishwasher felt ironic to me: there's a grain of playfulness in them, even in Dishwaster a dash of cheerful stupidity (in this one, Kjartansson has isolated three minutes of a soft-focus Mills & Boon movie romance, in which a woman in a pink maribou dressing gown has a tryst in the kitchen with a man in plumber's uniform, and projects it on a wall while young male musicians loll about the partially decorated gallery space strumming at guitars and droning the dialogue from the film on repeat). But the questions these works ask about how we see or feel or differentiate between the real, the imagined, the fantasised, the performed, and how our ability to do so is affected or conditioned by the art, film, theatre, music, TV and books we consume, are serious and rigorous and give Kjartansson's work its vitality.

Growing Old With You

Before I saw Search Party's Growing Old With You at Forest Fringe, Andy Field texted a warning: “your heart is going to BREAK”. I braced so strenuously that for most of it I was steel. But then Pete lay down on a table and Jodie began to cover his body in salt. And that was it. Snap.

Search Party are just about my favourite theatre-makers in Britain (inevitably that's a long list in which everyone is joint first). I love them for Save Me, the semaphore show, in which they stand at opposite ends of a public thoroughfare and communicate messages given by passers-by to each other; with patience and grace and infinite charm it makes visible the fragility of communication and the ways in which people speak their truest selves to strangers. I especially love them for My Son & Heir, the parenting show, in which they speak so honestly of the strains and anxieties and competitiveness and compromises and horrible absurdities of bringing up children that I wept almost non-stop through it. And now I love them for Growing Old With You, the all-of-our-lives show that they're going to make new versions of every 10 years. At Forest they performed the first instalment, and because it's already a few years old, it feels like an act of nostalgia as much as documentation and assessment. The scene in which Jodie covers Pete in salt felt, in the moment of watching, overwhelming in its romance and longing: for youth to be preserved, for the intensity and joy of falling in love and getting married to never be lost. But on reflection, its complexity is unfurling. I see the futility of that attempt to control time, and also the limitation of it: where's the room for growth or change? I see Pete lying still on the table like a corpse: that time is already gone, fleeting as the life of a butterfly, and nothing can ever bring it back. Above all, I see that while you can't argue with perfect being, maybe you can't live a full life either.

Dept. of Speculation

There's a great paragraph in a Guardian interview with Jenny Offill from last year in which she talks about her admiration for visual artists who “take an everyday thing and somehow make it, by accumulation, into something much bigger”, and in particular her delight that British reviewers of the book understood its humour, “all these moments which are really meant to be kind of a joke about what it’s like to be depressed”, which tells me she's probably a big fan of Kjartansson. I'm finding her novel Dept. of Speculation painful to read, because it's like she's poking needles into my brain. I had to put it down for two days after this line: “Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.” The paragraph in which the narrator, a woman of “crooked heart”, describes her happiest time as “a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love” made me choke. I feel exposed by it, the more so because I so desperately wish I were smart and brave and gifted enough to have written it and it's lacerating to reminded page after page that I'm not.

The thing is, I never make room for other kinds of writing in my life, because I'm always writing about what other people make. Holding up a mirror to the mirror, an endless loop, shoring fragments of feeling and experience against my ruins.

Hair and skin and heart and bones

Somewhere in the midst of Race Cards, Selina Thompson's probing, overwhelming, cumulatively extraordinary set of questions about race in the 21st century, she asks: Do you see whiteness? It's a difficult question for me to answer, which is why – following her printed invitation – I tried to answer it. But I didn't do so with complete honesty. If I had, I'd have confessed that, in relation to myself, no: that is, I do what white privilege – white supremacy, let's call it – makes absolutely possible, and think about how I exist in the world as some kind of default, or normal. My brown, bobbed, variably curly hair, for instance, is normal hair, just like it says on the shampoo bottle.

What I did answer, because it was easier, is that normality for me involves living alongside a microcosmic representation of the global population. I spent my childhood in Hackney, on the north side of London; I've lived almost my whole adulthood in the vicinity of Brixton, to the south: on London's streets, on public transport, in shops, and now at my kids' school, I hear and have always heard languages from across the world; I see every possible skin colour, in the faces of immigrants and the children of mixed parentage. So when I travel outside the capital, to towns where there is either a kind of segregation or people of colour are absent altogether, I see whiteness starkly. That concentrated whiteness troubles me.

And yet, I experience it most nights I go to the theatre in London. I could blame the institutions for not presenting enough work by people of colour, but that would be to elide the problem of my own, white-centric, choices. I mean, how many shows have I seen by Talawa, or Tara, or Tamasha, or Yellow Earth? And that's just to name the obvious companies. There are pitiably few occasions I can think of when I've shared a theatre auditorium with the same people with whom I share the supermarket and streets: Elmina's Kitchen and a couple of others at the National, Scottsboro Boys and Feast at the Young Vic, nights at Theatre Royal Stratford East. Not nearly enough.

At the final London performance of Dark and Lovely, Selina's show about hair – and, through that lens, about being black, British and female – I'm surrounded by black women. Dark-skinned, light-skinned, with large round faces and thin chiselled faces, some older, some younger, with shaved heads, natural hair, extensions, braids, locks, you name it. And that's the first brilliant thing about Dark and Lovely. It's a show made for black women, that holds out its arms to black women, wants to wrap them in an embrace that says, “I know, I know”, without excluding women – or men – of any other colour, background, ethnicity. There is a level at which hair is something that binds all of us as humans, as mammals: fibres made of keratin, growing from follicles. But there is also a level at which black women's hair is a fiercely contested political construct. And that's the space that Dark and Lovely occupies.

The personal being political, Selina delineates that space immediately through a quick-fire sequence of anecdotes that challenge one white woman's criticism of an earlier version of the show that “hair is just hair”: nothing to get so worked up about. Anecdotes about children being belittled for the kind of hair they have; adults being made to feel like they'll never measure up to the standards of desirability policed by the fashion industry, media and Hollywood; more than that, facing insinuations about their private lives because of the kind of hair they have; the astonishing facts of how much money is earned by beauty companies out of exploiting not only the resulting insecurities but the specific hair-care requirements of black women. With each anecdote, at least one, usually more, woman in the crowd nods or vocalises her recognition, asserts her shared experience. And that's the second brilliant thing about Dark and Lovely: the way Selina packs it with detail, vignettes that might describe scenes from the lives of people actually in the room, with which they can connect directly [1]. She talks about gasping with joy at recent movies and TV shows featuring black female characters in which something particular, distinctive, has happened relating to their hair. The electric thrill that inspires, of seeing yourself, your banal reality, acknowledged in public culture, is one her show provides its black female audience over and over again.

This is such a friendly show: Selina beams as she tells these anecdotes, stands at a hostess trolley (!!!) (sorry, I have a thing for hostess trolleys) mixing up fruit and rum punches for us to share, interrupts the script with sparky bits of improvisation. Instead of distancing herself on a stage, she's built a hut – she calls it her “tumbleweave” – from chicken wire and hair extensions, laid it out with a flowered carpet so comically redolent of the 1970s I half expected it to have its own avocado bathroom suite, and performs bits of the show poking her head through its windows and snuggled inside with as many of us can squeeze in (I couldn't, but it was fine: I still felt connected). Her cheerfulness almost – almost – belies the anger glowing beneath. But it's part of the rhythm of the show that Selina is like a pot on a slow heat: sometimes she's just simmering, but it doesn't take much for her to bubble up with fury. It's a fury that directs inwards to herself, and outwards to society, but never at the black women in the room. And this is the third brilliant thing: throughout, Selina makes clear that the feelings she has about her own hair should in no way be construed as a criticism of what other black women feel or choose to do with theirs. There are enough people in the world passing judgement like that.

The feelings Selina has are complicated, and inevitably shaped by those judgements – particularly as expressed by her own family and friends. Dreadlocks, for instance, are deemed unacceptable by her mum and nan, and when, as a 17-year-old, she shaved her hair off (she had strong high cheekbones then, she tells us, and looked beautiful; there's a photo of her inside the tumbleweave, and it's true, she did), her father didn't speak to her for a month. She thought she was emulating Skin from Skunk Anansie; friends just thought she was pulling a Britney. It's heartbreaking, because in these stories can be read the beginnings of a troubled relationship not just with hair but self: self-confidence, self-belief, self-care, self-acceptance.

That might suggest this is a selfish story, but it isn't: throughout, Selina weaves, or plaits, her own story with strands from others, collected during an extensive research period in Chapeltown, a predominately black area of Leeds. A woman who does people's hair in their living rooms tells stories of women having their hair permanently damaged, their scalps burned and scarred, by careless hairdressers. In a beauty emporium Selina encounters a woman who lost her hair to chemotherapy, then discovered that it's impossible to buy an Afro except in novelty colours, because no one in the wig industry thinks black women get cancer. In a barbershop frequented by old men and teenagers, she meets one youngster routinely teased by his friends for getting his grandmother to do his cornrows: he can do it himself in a fraction of the time, it transpires, but doesn't to make sure that someone is seeing his granny on a regular basis. Listening, we're pushed and pulled with emotion, ebb and flow with horror and love.

Chapeltown isn't where Selina lives, incidentally; she was commissioned to make a work that reflected the lives of the community there – a community assumed to be her own, even though she lives on the other side of Leeds. She's as honest about the mixed feelings this provokes as she is about her hair and her family: the sense of fraudulence, almost, tapping into a deep vein of anxiety that she is as friends have described her, “a coconut”, not black enough, too absorbed in white culture, white thinking. There's a whole set of questions in Race Cards – also difficult – about the position of black artists in a fundamentally white arts industry; questions about power, assumption, cultural appropriation. Selina doesn't address them directly in Dark and Lovely, but they're there, at the periphery, livid. Standing on a ladder at the centre of the tumbleweave, so that she seems to be wearing a huge, unwieldy, Disney-princess ballgown, she switches on a sequence of hairdryers and talks about the prospect of becoming, through this commission, an “angry black woman”: the difficulty of inhabiting that cliche, the desire to smash it. This is as noisy as the show gets, and it's telling that she uses the noise to create static, disruption, a facsimile, I feel, of what it sounds like in her own brain, as thoughts about race and responsibility churn through it, unresolved.

I'm fascinated by the way that Selina's softness operates in this show as a way of holding its audience in difficulty X. (There's a wonderful bit of thinking about niceness in Rajni Shah's most recently blog posts, too, in which she talks about the vital importance of “those spaces that are both difficult and nice”.) Because she really is furious, Selina, properly fucking apoplectic at the casual racism and sexism that persist in the world; and it's a contested thing, in feminism, the ease with which women who are angry get typecast as strident and unappealing, so I could be falling into a trap saying this, but to me it's a positive – the fourth brilliant thing – that the mood of Dark and Lovely is kind rather than aggressive. There's a fascinating moment when Selina falls prey to a similar bit of typecasting: she talks about the extensions she wore over the winter, heavy plaits that reached to her waist, and describes them as “womanly”. That word, its binary coding of femininity and attractiveness, makes me flinch.

I think the gentleness allows Selina to dig deeper, cut closer to the bone: particularly in the final section, when she uses a very direct metaphor, sitting outside the tumbleweave pulling clotted mats of soapy hair from a concealed plughole, for the dredging of her own soul. She talks about Toni Morrison's book The Bluest Eye, and then Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks: about the deep-rooted desire perhaps not to be black, or not to carry the weight of being black, the internalisation of colonial thinking that black men are inferior to white men, and black women lesser still. There are two rasping sounds in this section of the show: one in Buffalo's excellent, subtle soundtrack, which is the rasp of a comb through (I'm assuming) Selina's own hair; the other when Selina is talking about The Bluest Eye, and about being a child who wore a towel over her head to pretend she had blonde hair long enough to chew, and she pauses to take a particular breath. In the rasp of that breath I recognise the sounds of panic and of holding inside tears: in that single moment I understand just how much she pushes herself to perform this show.

As a white person in the room, I inevitably represent the white gaze, and by extension the colonial gaze, and all the racism closely knitted into the fabric of modern society. As the child of immigrants from a former British colony, I also reject the simplicity of that construction. And this is the fifth brilliant thing about Dark and Lovely: it is interested in those complexities. Selina has made it for black women, to nod their assent, hear their selves and their stories, their complicated, torn desires, their deepest pains. But its willingness not to exclude means that, across the 90 minutes, it has the potential to bring up a medley of memories and associations for anyone in the room. These are some of mine: a story about a little boy with a white mum and an Asian dad, who tells his mum he doesn't want to have dark skin any more, reminds me of my own little boy, standing beside me at the mirror when he was five, and saying that he wants to dye his sandy hair dark brown, to look more like the rest of the family. The smell of coconut oil in a hair treatment that gets passed around the tumbleweave is the smell of the busy streets of my childhood: along with fresh cut grass and laundrettes, one of my favourites. When Selina removes her wig to reveal little-girl braids, she unexpectedly reminds me of Janice, my best friend at primary school. Talk of the barbershop reminds me how much I loved the TV programme Desmond's; the plughole scene brings up my genuine phobia of hairballs, developed when living with my friend Gemma at university, whose pre-Raphaelite auburn hair became a monster in the shower. I remember being at secondary school and freaking out when my friends – all blonde, for some reason – ganged up on me to chant that my hair was the colour of shit; and my mother laughing when I said I wanted to dye my hair black; and hating my dead-straight hair for not being spirally like my dad's. And then when it curled I remember talking to my Iraqi friend Sam about her hard-to-control ringlets, and sharing kirby-grip tips with my friend Alan, who shaved his off until in his 30s. Amid this mostly cheerful nostalgia, I remember the black women my mum worked with when I was a child, telling her stories of brothers, cousins, uncles, fathers, being taken in to the local police station and beaten, brutalised; that's if they emerged to tell of it. Hair isn't just hair: it's a lifetime of stories. I'm startled by how many.

There was another question in Race Cards, so difficult it still makes my chest feel tight when I think of it: what did Adrienne Rich get out of her friendship with Audre Lorde? I don't know enough about either of them to hazard an answer; yet it frightens me that Adrienne might have used Audre, as a tool to re-educate herself, to make a political point. It's about 14 months now since Selina has been in my life: we met when I organised a conversation with her and Louise Orwin in Edinburgh about body image; since then we've had two more long, exhilarating conversations about race, feminism and performance and another over email, which I quote almost any time anyone uses the word intersectionality. In each and in the weeks following, I've felt encouraged and supported by her in being absolutely honest, challenged by her to notice how I speak and think, invited to register the influence of growing up white to parents who worked hard to make me middle-class. I hope I've given her the same encouragement, support, challenge and invitation. But at the same time it terrifies me, the vastness of the possibility that, if not already, I will one day say something to Selina that makes her shoulders drop with disappointment, that demonstrates my failure to see whiteness, my internalisation of its privileges and its racisms. She makes me question the words I use and try harder, want to try harder, to use better ones. Is that what Adrienne got out of her relationship with Audre? Would Audre recognise that, or agree?

It was while walking to Ovalhouse to see Dark and Lovely that I caught myself thinking of my hair as normal. Before Selina, I wouldn't have noticed. In the best possible way she gives me pause, and I cherish her, love her, for it.

[1] I wanted to come back to this (so you don't have to scroll back up, it's the bit where I say that the second brilliant thing about Dark and Lovely is the way Selina packs it with detail, vignettes that might describe scenes from the lives of people actually in the room) because it directly contradicts the response of Stephanie Phillips, who reviewed Dark and Lovely for Media Diversified. And that troubles me, because Stephanie is a black woman and I represent precisely the white gaze that she thinks Selina is giving too much consideration. Here's what she says:

My only question to Thompson would be to ask, who was the performance developed for? The detail in which she described aspects of black life for the audience felt like she was not speaking fully to black women instead breaking from her story to bring white people up to speed.

Understandably a performance on black women's hair without any explanations could be confusing for anyone who is not a black woman but perhaps sometimes it is better to follow in the footsteps of legendary writers such as Junot Diaz and Toni Morrison. They both strongly believed that when writing about your own community you need to speak directly to them, especially when they are rarely acknowledged in wider society.

Black women need their own space, room and or tumbleweave where they can be accepted and told that they matter.

The difference in our opinion fascinates me – especially as I've been besotted with Junot Diaz since encountering Drown 18 years ago; the voice and pace and music of his writing are endlessly intoxicating and inspiring – because I don't think there's any way of reconciling them. To me, the details are a way of acknowledging a community in wider society. To me, Selina is constantly telling the black women in the audience that they matter. But, as a white woman with a white gaze, I don't know how much that thinking can be trusted; or rather, how much Stephanie herself would trust that thinking. I feel safer quoting Selina, who responded to this critique at some length on twitter, not to silence Stephanie, but to engage with and open the debate:

making a performance for/centred around the white gaze is one I wrestled with a lot while making the show. She says that it's the detail with which I recount things that breaks the story up - but for me recounting things in detail is not about making it easier for white people: a) black life is not a monolith, what is black life for one is not black life for all. B) when people shared stories with me, the stories that make the show – it is the details over which we bond, that bring memories to life. C) I don't think Junot or Toni omit detail in speaking to their community – rather they are unafraid to critique their community. … For me, being exacting, trying to pack the show with every little thing is about creating a show that is overwhelming, that heaves with information and significance – because for me, that is how you unlock and unpick the statement hair is just hair.

[2] While I've been writing this, there's been a bit of my mind turning over and over an interesting and unexpected critique of my own work by the brilliant Andrew Latimer. It cropped up in his series Writing as Hope, which mostly passed me by until earlier this week: the problem with trying to wean yourself off social media (as I have been doing, partly to get more books read because so help me I keep buying them, partly because, at the ripe old age of 40, I apparently haven't yet developed the strength of fucking character not to see twitter as a fucking popularity contest) is that you miss out on the excellent essays that excellent people direct you towards. The series as a whole posits writing as a way of thinking in public, but as I'm still digesting it, I'll let Andrew explain it himself: “the core principle of this way of writing is that vulnerability and exposure are not only precious stages in the composition of a thought – and writing is a process which gives us the space to explore that thought – but that writing as hope is an inherently interventionist practice, allowing us to challenge how honest we are with ourselves and our readers, to mine our privilege and prejudice, and to collectively confront our discipline, the art we consume and the fissures in our lives”.

Within the fourth essay, Andrew describes me as a: “writer whose words often dance as if they were set to music”, which is not a lovely thing to say, it does that perspicacious thing the best criticism is supposed to do, articulating my own work back to me in a formulation I recognise but hadn't managed to pinpoint myself. On the rare occasions I run anything approximating a writing workshop, or mentor a younger writer, I always talk about the primacy of rhythm, so clearly I know this is a thing for me, but I don't think I'd connected it to dance the way Andrew does here. Amazing. He goes on to say: “It’s possible that, were it not for her gorgeous style, the points she makes would stumble and wither.” And I'm troubled by that, not because I can't take any kind of criticism (although actually, basically, I can't), but because it feeds directly into an anxiety I've had lately, that the intellectual and theoretical high ground in British theatre writing is primarily occupied by (young, white) men. Stewart Pringle. Tim Bano. This Andrew and Andrew Haydon. Catherine Love used to be more present but these days she's mostly preoccupied with the intellectual and theoretical high ground of a PhD; Megan Vaughan has the clout – and a working knowledge of Kant to make me cry – but chooses not to; so, in a sense, do I. Which makes it basically ridiculous that I'm even worried about this.

Somewhere in the brain mulch provoked by those words stumble and wither is a question about the primacy of intellectualism over emotion (which Andrew himself is questioning in the essays), and how it's possible for men to be angry in ways that women can't without being dismissed as irrational, and how easy it is to slam down anti-capitalist discourse as woolly and impractical because the world it imagines is not yet real. Basically, I'm piqued and challenged, in ways I haven't yet figured out. But it seemed right, and in the spirit of Andrew's argument – an argument for naked vulnerability, and a stripping back of natural defences, and (I particularly love this) for “actively reinventing the interactions and meanings in our lives through the process of writing” – that I should begin trying to work it out here.

[3] On getting home from Dark and Lovely, I put on Blood Orange's Cupid Deluxe for the first time in a while, and I've had this song humming in the background while I've been writing this, too. I have a bad habit of taking pop choruses far too seriously, but there's something about the lines “time will tell if you can figure this and work it out/ no one's waiting for you anyway so don't get stressed out” that speaks to the questions that haunt me from Race Cards, and from Andrew's blog, in a warm and reassuring way.