on a road to nowhere (come on inside)

Nowhere

Andrew Schneider's Youarenowhere is a sex and drugs show: euphoric, pulse-quickening, a thing of abandonment – not his, he's steely with self-control, but mine, of any other thought than what strange new joy is this, now this, now ////. A nerves responding from reflex not thought show, an eyes resisting the urge to blink show, a blissful transcendence of all knowing beyond the moment of its happening. It doesn't yield its pleasures instantly; there is a tantalising foreplay of strobe-effect action, Schneider flitting about the stage, body illuminated then plunged into ////////, no connection between these movements beyond their intended effect: the accumulative tingle of surprise and excitement. There is a lecture, of sorts, on quantum physics and perception, but Schneider speaks not only of but at the speed of a moving train: his words blur as they hurtle past, clarifying only when they're gone. I have a vague sense of irritation that all this energy is being expended to talk of un/likely im/possible love, but then something happens so unexpected, so astonishing, that all rational thought is consumed in jangling awe.

I don't know anything for true about drugs but I've had some sex and while each time it's basically the same there are nights that linger. Not all positive: there is the sex of feeling nothing, or feeling chafed, or torn, or used. But then there's the sex of feeling drunk when stone-cold sober, the sex of floating weightless, the sex of ////// /////// and enchanting strangeness and can this be forever please. Each time is individual, if not in essence different, and there's no guarantee of feeling the same thing twice.

Now here

Sometimes I think I'm addicted to theatre, sometimes it's just that I married it. Each time it's basically the same, and yet... Sometimes I try to feel the same thing twice, but seeing something a second time changes how I watch: the quality of attention might be more deliberate or more yielding, more focused or more forgiving. And inevitably that changes the feeling.

But theatre being ephemeral, one shot is usually what I get. And how much I remember of a work depends on its impact.

The impact of Robert Lepage's The Far Side of the Moon was seismic. I'm not sure I'd seen anything like it before: I was barely 26 and had been watching theatre seriously for less than five years. When I read Lyn Gardner's review of it from 2001 I'm aware I remember almost nothing she describes. Only the moment when the window of a washing machine door became the porthole of a rocket looking towards earth from space. ///////// //// ////.

What remains instead is the feeling of astonishment. “The entire evening is a marvel,” Lyn wrote, “like discovering that the party conjurer is actually a real magician.” That's what I remember: shiver after shiver as story and staging shifted and stirred. There was an esoteric quality to its sequence of wild coincidences and brain-sparking connections, but also an emotional tenderness. Most of all there was wonder. All the wonder of the universe, and of humanity, there on the stage, more vital and real than my own skin, which might as well have melted away.

I've seen other Lepage shows since, and mostly felt disappointed, no matter how adroit they were. Seeing Needles and Opium at the Barbican in June I felt more hopeful than usual, knowing it's an earlier work, and more rewarded: staged in a suspended, rotating cube, it had the flexibility of a gymnast, stretching and somersaulting as it moved between the story of a heart-broken actor holed up in a Paris hotel room, the same hotel room once inhabited by Miles Davis and his lover Juliette Greco; the story of that thwarted love, Juliette ravishing in period film clips, Miles played by a silent actor, who leans from the cube as defiant of custom and conventional gravity as the music he played; and the dry wit and playful texts of Jean Cocteau, spoken as his body floated among stars. But I never reached full hypnosis, and I wondered if maybe I've seen too much theatre now, and know too well of its tricks.

Nowhere

Sorry if I've said all this before, but every time I choose to go to the theatre, I'm choosing not to be with my kids: not to help them with homework or play games or run their bath or tuck them in for the night. Generally I'm quite scathing of the concept of family, at least extended family: if I wouldn't choose a person as my friend, why devote time to them because of an accident of birth? There's something in Slavoj Zizek's provocation regarding the violence of love – a text Schneider delivers in the early part of Youarenowhere, at speed again, choppily, constantly interrupted by static – that appeals to me in this regard. “Love, for me, is an extremely violent act,” he ruminates. “Love is not 'I love you all.' Love means I pick out something, and it’s, again, this structure of imbalance.” I'll happily reject that structure of imbalance when it comes to cousins, uncles, even // ///////. But I can't inflict that on my children.

Except by going to the theatre. Each time I go it is a specific rejection of their longings and demand: sometimes I leave with the seven-year-old shouting through the door for me to come back. What am I sloughing off each time I do this? What world or self am I trying to reach? What oblivion do I seek?

Now here

I left Youarenowhere thinking that it was like nothing I'd ever seen before with the possible exception of two things: The Far Side of the Moon, and a work-in-progress by Andy Field called, if my email headers can be trusted (um...), This Show Was Born at the End of the World, which played at Battersea Arts Centre for two nights in 2010. It started as a kind of game, a let's pretend we're sitting in a building called Battersea Arts Centre, and that we're an audience, and let's pretend the apocalypse has struck, but somewhere in the middle it made a couple of shifts, one of them physical, bringing two sets of audience together, the other mental, from (according to my email) “fantastical to real”. And this is the half I remember and cherish, because it was unwonted and beguiling, and that other audience was so near so far, and there was a moment – so simple, but I don't think I'd seen it before – when they were instructed to hold up their illuminated mobile phones to shape a new constellation. It flashed in my mind in the hours after seeing Youarenowhere like the face of a person I once met on holiday // ////// / //// //// ///, and it struck me again how bizarre it is, to feel so close to a thing so ephemeral, so intangible, that lives on only in the mind.

Nowhere

It's funny, reading back on the email conversation I had with Andy about that work, because one thing he specifically wanted to avoid in it was “a cheap bit of sleight of hand”, and in the aftermath of Youarenowhere, that's all I could think about: sleight of hand, the magic that Lyn named. Flash the lights and suddenly there's /// // Schneider; flash the lights and suddenly he's not talking but dancing – to Robyn, of all things, Call Your Girlfriend. Flash the lights and it's as though he's slashed a subtle knife through the technicolor curtain concealing the parallel universe from this one; flash the lights and we're teetering at the edge of / ///// ////. Every so often when I take the kids to the theatre there'll be a bit of stage business that they can't get their heads round and they'll say to me: how did that happen? And my reply is always: because theatre. It annoys the shit out of them. Youarenowhere was the first time in a long time that I couldn't get out of my seat at the end, because I was trying to figure out: how the fuck did he do that? WHAT JUST HAPPENED? And though to some extent I could work it out, for the most part the answer that contented my brain was: because theatre. Theatre made that happen.

Now here

There's no technical wizardry in Stacy Makishi's Vesper Time; at least, no technology beyond the humble projector screen and a pair of plastic boots. But I got the same buzz of bedazzlement from it as I did from Youarenowhere, because Makishi is expert in theatre's other wizardry: the ability to unite people, however temporarily, into an idea of community. She is stealthy in her movements: in a typical dramatic arc, she first introduces herself as Hawaiian, and then teaches us a few phrases from her homeland – aloha, obviously; ai-ya, “I belong” apparently (apologies to Stacy if I haven't used the same phonetic spelling) – and later happens to mention, in a self-deprecating way, how much she likes the Tracey Chapman song FastCar, and eventually persuades us to cast off inhibition and sing along with her the chorus: “I, I had a feeling that I belonged, I, I had a feeling I could be someone.” My god the abandonment of that moment in the room, the joy unleashed by it, the eye-watering hilarity of realising we'd been tricked, that the “I, I” of Chapman was the same “ai-ya” of Hawaiian phraseology, that she was making a point about human connection with equal parts pathos and bathos, that she had transformed the song into a mantra for lost souls everywhere, encouraging a sense of belonging by creating one for us.

I've been questioning lately this marriage to theatre, and whether it's time for a period of separation. I want my commitment to it to be more than addiction, or the quest for a certain kind of dazzle or buzz; I want to feel there's genuine purpose in writing about it, while being aware of the self-centredness of that desire. In another glorious rainbow of Vesper Time, Makishi talks about her father, who left the family when she was young, and a figure called (something like) Uncle John, who for a few years held that place surrogate; and how, as an adult, she wondered whether she should get in touch with Uncle John and let him know that she still thinks of him fondly and that he meant a great deal to her, but decided not to, because he wouldn't remember insignificant little her. And then it's too late, she hears that he died, and she realises her mistake: to tell him these things would have been an act of generosity, a communication not of her own importance but of his. And it seems to me that this might be the purpose of this writing: to tell the people who make this work, that makes me feel so much, torn sometimes, used sometimes, but also drunk or weightless or enchanted sometimes, tell them that they meant something to someone, and that matters, they matter.

Nowhere

/////'/ / /// / want to write, //// / //// ///'/ //// ///. //'/ // // //// /// other song that appears in Youarenowhere, Ricky Nelson's Lonesome Town, in particular this ache of a verse:

In the town of broken dreams

The streets are filled with regret

Maybe down in Lonesome Town

I can learn to forget

And I want to say something about /////// ///// // //////// ////: the place I go to forget. /// ////// /// //////: that oblivion I mentioned before. But it's a disjointed thought, not least in its relationship with the actual lyrics, too fanciful perfectly to fit. I've tried to delete it, believe me, but something is resistant. Maybe it's the memory of the show, an entity in its own right now, not wanting me to edit but striving to shape itself instead.

[Quick note of double thanks to Andrew Haydon, for including the Zizek video in his review of Youarenowhere as I had no idea myself where that text was from, and for the trick at the end of this review, which influenced me here.]

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.

Demolition plot (extended play)

There was a time when I wrote a diary. Not every day; intermittently, for about four years. I stopped when I realised that a) I was only writing it when I was miserable, b) I was repeating myself, c) writing it changed nothing.

There was a time when I thought Chekhov, if not the most boring playwright in the history of theatre, certainly in the top 10.

I'm sorry if you've read these things before here.

Remember that last sharp day of winter we had? At least, it was the last sharp day London had: Tuesday 26 April, 2016. I stood at the kitchen window and tried to work out if those slushy white flakes were hail or snow. A few days later I stood in the same place and realised I was looking at the first sharp day of spring: green leaves so defined against a bright blue sky they seemed extra-dimensional. And I had a thought I'd never had before: this means nothing to me. The spring, the brightness, the green, the blue. Time turning, age grinding, unremarkable repetition, and a slow, inexorable deadening.

This is the emotional voice in my head that listened to Chekhov's First Play and heard its echo.

But we won't start with either of those.

Let's start with Dominic Dromgoole.

In 2000 he published an “A-Z of contemporary playwrights”, The Full Room, written with such irascible passion that with every dip I come away scalded. On Phyllis Nagy: “I'm sure she's terrific, but for me it always sounds like someone being a writer, rather than someone writing about being.” On Lee Hall: “Somehow he manages to keep many thousands of hungry mouths happy with a few loaves of a talent.” That the witticisms emerge from a forensic scrutiny of the actual plays gives everything he writes an air of justice, despite his protestations in the introduction that he's not here to judge, and regardless of whether or not I agree. But if he's ruthless in exposing flaws or inconsistencies, he's also intemperate with admiration: in the heat and light of his praise, his subjects glow.

He also writes with a strong moral compass, whose true north is Chekhov. In the entry on Anthony Neilson, he notes approvingly: “As Chekhov could dream of a better world in time to come, without providing some glib programme of improvement, so Neilson looks four-square into the heart of our sexual darkness, and allows himself to dream of a better world.” And in the entry on Patrick Marber – “a brilliant boulevard entertainer” – he looks in vain for “a real wish for good. With a Chekhov, with a Brecht, with a Beckett,” he explains, “you see a brilliantly realised and brutally honest vision, behind which there hovers the ghost of a better, fairer, more beautiful world. With Marber … beyond what we see is a chaos filled with violence, sexual desire and sexual disgust, and endless mutual loathing.”

I think about this chapter on Marber a lot, in particular for what Dromgoole says in the final paragraph:

“Chekhov wrote volumes of work, built schools, opened hospitals, interviewed ten thousand prisoners on Sakhalin island, kept his family, kept his patients alive, held hundreds as they died, spent fifteen years coughing his own life away, and still managed to keep hope in balance with despair, still managed to love life and its mad optimism.”

The leaves, drunk on chlorophyll, radiant and meaningless.

*

The “director” of Chekhov's First Play (warning: a frenzy of spoilers lies ahead) has read a biography of Chekhov; he knows these facts and knows that, by comparison, he himself is failing. I put “director” in quote marks to differentiate him from Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, who co-directed Dead Centre's production, not because they didn't genuinely read the biography, but because I left the Mayfest performance stupefied by an adolescent crush on Moukarzel, who also wrote the adaptation and plays the “director” on stage, that heard everything he said as soul-dredging confession. I need the quotation marks to remind me that this is a character, that the voice that is speaking is a performed voice, that when the “director” begins berating himself as “a fraud”, when he says “I don't know what I'm doing” or that “I haven't been feeling myself lately. And by lately, I mean ever”, what I'm hearing is a fabrication. Never mind if it's the words I hear in my head all the time.

But let's avoid that voice a little longer.

It's hard to avoid the “director's” voice in this production. Once he's delivered his pitch-perfect introduction – light as a meringue and yet ominous, not just because he wields a gun, but because he makes visible something I (and likely others in the room) had never contemplated before: the audience member's temporary legal ownership of their theatre seat, its status as “private property” – he retreats to the wings and talks around, across and over his actors, commenting on their performances, his own choices, the themes and subtexts of the play. Of course, some of his own text has a subtext: when he says, close to the beginning, “I love real life. The detail”, there is an underlying irony that is quickly exposed when he begins to berate the actors for moving in the wrong way and forgetting their lines, in other words being real people, but also an undertow of pathos whose emotional pull operates more slowly.

What he particularly wants to draw our attention to is the reflection – no, continuation – of Chekhov's world in our own. Some of that is to do with unchanging human nature: as he notes in his introduction, all Chekhov's plays “ask the big questions: who am I? What kind of a society do I want to live in? What do I want?” But some of it is to do with the ways in which Chekhov thought about “the kind of society” that surrounded him, his attitudes towards privilege and work, property and debt, social stagnation and the possibility or imminence of change. These attitudes, compassionate, socialist and challenging of orthodoxy, have a pliability that the best directors (and playwright-adapters) seize as gleefully as children do playdoh.

I didn't think any of this until I watched Benedict Andrews' production of Three Sisters (Young Vic, 2012): it spoke so precisely to the frustrations of my own life, and to the stuckness I've been able to name since reading the Ann Cvetkovich book on depression, that I heard more vividly the play's address to society at large. I felt the same wonder and excitement watching Katie Mitchell's production of The Cherry Orchard (Young Vic, 2014): as adapted by Simon Stephens, it wasn't a play about privileged (albeit poor) people for whom I felt no sympathy, but the complex relationship between class, capitalism and environmental devastation. Robert Icke's Uncle Vanya (Almeida, 2016) was the least convincing of the three, in that a lot of the staging choices were fucking annoying even if they did make intellectual sense, but as a portrait of people damaged by the basic condition of being alive, holding down the lid on their hopes, desires, frustrations and anger before inevitably boiling over, it was exemplary.

I'd seen all of these plays before, sometimes in pretty good productions, but my general idea of Chekhov was sealed early on by a Cherry Orchard played in a wealthy suburb of London, by actors with plummy accents wearing white lace and linen suits, that left me wanting to punch every person on stage, for their entitlement, apathy and mediocrity. This was the problem of Chekhov's First Play for me: when the curtain rises, it looks like just such a traditional, tedious production. And that's a lie. The directors, Kidd and Moukarzel, know that it's a lie: they know they're working within a “German theatre” aesthetic, but they pretend not to be for dramatic and comic effect. To be fair, it works: the jokes teasing conservative theatre, in which the “director” complains about the actors and lets slip the sexual shenanigans going on behind the scenes, easily win the laughs they chase. OK, I sound like a miserabilist. But Chekhov's First Play does something incredibly powerful politically, and for me that could have been more potent still if Dead Centre hadn't settled on the chocolate-box image of a sprawling country house as the site for that action: an image that distances more than it implicates.

In other ways, Chekhov's First Play is rigorous in implicating. It makes explicit reference to Ireland's recent history, first with jokes about its flaccid economy, but gradually becoming more serious about the spiritual effect of debt. (Something about the way it compacted gravity and sickly unease into comedy reminded me of John McDonagh's film Calvary.) It talks about the central character of Platonov as someone “over-educated but useless, unnecessary”, typical of a generation who have “let go of ideals”: people who know that there is social inequality, rising poverty, ecological catastrophe taking place, but are comfortable enough themselves never to do anything more serious to challenge it than mouthing off on social media. (I'm very much describing myself here.) It spends its entire first half insistently arguing that we can't wait for someone else to save us. And then. And then.

Two months on, I still feel giddy and breathless just thinking about it. Because the hinge point of Chekhov's First Play unleashed all my wildest fantasies of what I'd like to do in the political world. It drops a wrecking ball from the flies and proceeds to demolish everything: the physical set, but also the metaphysical structures that hold the characters – and us, the audience – in place. That wrecking ball smashes at property, at family, at propriety and expectation. When it falls, the women stop talking in a vaguely dissatisfied way about lacking a sense of purpose and start naming their specific hatred of “my marriage and capitalism and my student loan and how the modern consumer society separates us from ourselves … normality and monogamy and gender normative privilege”. Being idealistic about wanting these things to change isn't enough. You have to get out there and actively fight them. You have to live the difference you want to see.

To do that takes courage and verve. It takes a willingness to make mistakes, look awkward, feel out-of-step with everyone else. It takes quick thinking and attentive listening. And Chekhov's First Play shows us how. It pulls someone out of the audience, someone prepared enough in advance to be wearing a particular red denim jacket but no more, and gets them to play Platonov. I've since read the playtext (THANK YOU OBERON for replacing the copy I stupidly lost) and understand a lot more about what happened in this half of the production, but I'm going to be truthful about the experience of watching and say that there was much that I didn't hear or that didn't feel clear in this section. It didn't matter: chaos was part of the point, the necessary correlative of destruction.

Through most of this, the “director's” voice is absent: he's silent because he shot himself, unable to bear the disparity between what he wanted the production to be and what he had actually made. Implicit in his adaptation is a question – what does it take to be extraordinary, and actually change the world? – and a recognition that it's the wrong question, playing into patriarchal notions of singularity and genius. Far better to be a nobody: but a nobody genuinely dedicated to the cause of helping other nobodies, enabling them to escape the bonds that tie them, enabling them to cast off the pressures of keeping up with life as shaped by neoliberalism. Platonov is that nobody: he's just a stranger, plucked from the auditorium. It could have been any one of us. And because of that, it's all of us.

Such was my intense sense of identification with this Platonov that I felt quite upset when the staging required him to point a gun at his own head. It felt wrong, an unethical ask. Reading back over the text, I wonder what it means to have a character repeatedly described as useless and unnecessary, and then have him played by a member of the audience. I worry that if I pick at the wrong thread of Moukarzel's adaptation, the whole thing will unravel.

What holds it all together for me, allows me to live in its contradictions, is that voice, the “director's” voice, which is also Platonov's, and mine. That voice caught between idealism and pessimism, hope and depression, knowledge of the work that needs doing and terror of actually doing it. The “director” seems so confident when Chekhov's First Play starts, but it's all bluff. He lacks faith not only in himself but in theatre as a medium: “It's so aimless,” he mourns, as his characters sing People Ain't No Good in Russian. The song returns in the final scene, when the “director” returns, head bandaged, for a speech that devastated me:

“This gun. At least let me explain one thing right. Chekhov's first play had a gun in it and his second, and all the rest had guns in them in one way or another, until in his last play … it was gone. It's like he got over it. He wrote away the gun.

He realised his characters have to do something even harder than dying. They have to go on living.”

I've lost count of the number of times I've thought those last two sentences in the past few years. The accuracy with which they echoed my inner voice – the inner voice that the “director” explicitly acknowledges in his opening speech – meant that the words that followed reduced me to a puddle. “I don't know who I am, what it is I want, why I'm alive. But I need to have courage,” his voice, my voice, said. “I wonder will this voice ever stop? … This commentary, commenting on everything. Will it ever go away?” Not just my inner voice but the voice I hear speaking to a counsellor, a weirdly out-of-body experience. “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say...?” These are the questions that consume me at night, lying awake in my too-hard bed. And as I sat in my theatre seat – my own private property, which holds me in place, in which I always behave with absolute decorum, just as I do in the world outside – I knew exactly what was coming next, but still felt an intense sense of gratification when Platonov's final word is: hello.

*

For such a basic word, hello is really hard to say.

On Friday 1 July, I visited the South-East London Sisters Uncut occupation of a disused shop in Peckham. I'd planned to get there early and sit with my laptop, writing about the room, but also maybe writing this, or about Ria Hartley's work, or maybe about what it was to grow up in Thatcher's Britain as a way of reflecting on the terror and anxiety but also weird sense of euphoria I felt in the first week post-referendum, when it still seemed vaguely possible that there might be a left-wing resurgence (excuse me while I wring my hands with despair). Instead, I found all sorts of excuses to delay leaving home. There wasn't going to be wifi in the building. I had some scraps of food in the house that I ought to cook for my lunch. And so it was 1.30pm by the time I arrived, giving me barely an hour in the space before the school run.

The people on the door were immediately friendly but the usual shyness consumed me so I rejected the offer of a tour and had a look round on my own. The main room was welcoming, warm and light, despite having few windows and no carpet on the concrete floor. It was the warmth and light of generosity and political fervour. The occupation was staged to draw attention to the lack of provision for women living in Southwark who experience domestic violence, particularly black and minority ethnic women following austerity cuts. Along one wall was a huge banner bearing the group's slogan: how can she leave if there's nowhere to go? Along another, lively posters detailed previous Sisters Uncut actions, in photographs and clips from less than sympathetic media. There were sofas and a large children's play space with toys and a wendy house and drawing materials, and a stack of food with an invitation to all-comers to help themselves. Scattered around were copies of the excellently thoughtful safe space policy, and reminders that the space was open only to people who identify as female or non-binary. It was beautiful.

Looking around gave me the courage to go back to the people at the door and say hello. This is how I met Sita X. When a friend of Sita's arrived I continued the conversation with Becca, asking about how the occupation was going, and about Sisters Uncut generally. When I had to leave, I felt like an idiot: I hadn't had enough time. I wished I'd been there all day.

I asked Becca why Southwark in particular and she patiently told me about its appalling record of failing women who come to the council seeking help in escaping abuse situations. We talked about the council's bristly, patronising response to the occupation, that “statistics don't tell the whole story”, and the blog Sisters Uncut planned to publish in reply. I asked how they managed to get into the building, and Becca told me about laws related to squatting and the mechanics of the occupation, how everyone involved was taking time off from work or study to be there. I've always been terrified of this kind of direct action – and there was a moment when the Sisters gathered at the door, worried that an aggressive man might be seeking entry, that reminded me why – but talking to Becca and Sita, it felt possible. More than that: necessary.

I can't imagine not writing about theatre but nor can I carry on as I am, advocating in the abstract for social change without doing physical work to bring it about. In the time it's taken me to write this post, I've been reading Here We Stand, a glorious, invigorating book of interviews with and texts by female activists, that is nourishing me and encouraging me and giving me a way forward. There's one woman in particular, Mary Sharkey, that I'm clinging to because she was in her early 40s before she became politically active: what a relief to encounter her, and recognise that there's no point berating myself for wasting time and not doing this sooner (that voice again, commenting on everything) because – as she says in the final line of her interview – it's never too late to start. She has an excellent motto, too: “Behold the turtle, who makes progress when she sticks her neck out.” Perfect.

So I've been inhaling that, and also Kimya Dawson's album Thunder Thighs, which I deeply regret missing on first release, if only because it would have done me much good to hear her sing “now I'm 37 and I'm glad that I'm alive” when I was 37 and really not. There are so many best-friend songs on this album: Same Shit/Complicated, which trumps me for ultra-earnest expression; Utopian Futures, which to the letter describes the place I want to live; Zero or a Zillion, a piquant fuck you to the art accountants out there. But I think my favourite is Miami Advice, in particular the chorus that closes it:

You think I'm preaching to the choir

But I am not

I'm singing with the choir

This is such a key point made by the women of Here We Stand (a book, it's worth noting, that was recommended to me by Mary Paterson, with whom I've been working for a couple of years and in that time has taught me so much about collaboration and political engagement): the real goal isn't individual action but collective. “What we create are ripples,” says Liz Crow, “where the work of many peoples combines to make change.” And collectivity starts with saying hello.

*

Five years ago, I started writing a diary again. It's going OK: I'm doing better at turning to it in different moods, and trying hard not to repeat myself. I still know it doesn't change anything, not materially. But it does something my old diary never did. It says hello. I know this because you're reading it now.

 

songs for the women with rage in their hearts

Every work I've seen by Melanie Wilson – Autobiographer, Landscape II and now Opera for the Unknown Woman – has been a fight against falling asleep. Each one is also high up in the list of the most galvanising things I've ever encountered. That sounds like a ludicrous contradiction I know, but in my head both are direct responses to the meticulous quality of her work. Slow, deliberate, patient, it acts on me like a mesmeric charm, and what it inculcates within that mood of hypnosis is an increasingly radical feminist politic. Any frustration I feel as my brain begins to lull and drift is with my own difficulty calibrating to her work in the room, my own failure to meet its demand. Within the general culture this failure would be framed as Melanie's alone, because demanding work is seen as anathema to the accessibility, entertainment and instant gratification deemed necessary to attract and placate audiences. But I resist that, and so does she, committing herself instead to sculpting new forms for performance, and creating space for different stories about women.

Watching Opera for the Unknown Woman at the Wales Millennium Centre (and I guess someone will want me to disclose that I was there on the invitation of Fuel, Melanie's producers), I felt the usual somnolence, but also more than usual excitement. There is a sense of urgency to it, if not in pace then in theme, that I haven't felt from Melanie before: I'd name it a call to arms except the libretto itself argues against the militarism implied by that phrase. It's certainly a song for action, though, for global feminism to unify against the patriarchal structures that are relentlessly destroying life on earth. That destruction registers individually and socially, in poverty, military aggression, and xenophobia in all its fear-of-the-other guises; and it registers ecologically, in the depletion of resources and degradation of land and atmosphere. You know this, I know this, there's nothing new being argued here, but to quote Audre Lorde – which Melanie does in her libretto, too – “There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.”

*

Lorde is one of those writers I might have read years ago, if only I'd been less white-centric in my approach to the feminist library. I feel I'd be a better person if I had. There's quite a lot of repetition in Sister Outsider – a collection of essays first published in small-press periodicals and speeches first delivered at academic and feminist conferences across the US, events so distant in geography that in each instance her message was probably received fresh – but it's a repetition I find useful, because everything she argues for is fundamental and yet as rare to encounter as it was when she was active, in the 1970s and 80s. On 24 February 2016 I was reading “Learning from the 60s”, a talk delivered at Harvard University in February 1982, and feeling nauseous at how similar the world she described is to our own:

“We are Black people living in a time when the consciousness of our intended slaughter is all around us. People of Color are increasingly expendable, our government's policy both here and abroad. We are functioning under a government ready to repeat in El Salvador and Nicaragua the tragedy of Vietnam, a government which stands on the wrong side of every single battle for liberation taking place upon this globe; a government which has invaded and conquered (as I edit this piece) the fifty-three square mile sovereign state of Grenada, under the pretext that her 110,000 people pose a threat to the US. … Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.”

I can date the reading because I was on my way to the Royal Court to see Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone, and Lorde's words shifted my entire sense of the show. Escaped Alone is another meticulous and hypnotic work that had me struggling against lethargy yet sent me out electrified, and I scoured reviews to find someone who had the same reaction to it as me but no one did. To recap: Churchill sets the play in an elderly woman's “backyard”; in this production she is white and English and her garden a microcosm of a green and pleasant land, lawn neat and borders maturing beneath a bright blue sky. Three women gather within its high wooden fences and a fourth, eavesdropping as she passes by with her shopping, is invited in to join them. Their conversations are elliptical, words flitting through them like butterflies, most sentences starting in the middle and halting before the end, but accumulatively they make a rough kind of sense: one day they talk about their children and grandchildren, another about a TV series they're all watching; they get exercised about the disappearance of local shops and the relative merits of visiting the doctor or the hairdresser, and gradually, surreptitiously, they plumb their deepest secrets: the depression that keeps one slumped indoors, the phobia of cats that has another scurrying about the house enacting obsessive-compulsive rituals to make sure none has snuck in, the six-year prison sentence served by a third for manslaughter. Their afternoons didn't make much sense to me at the time of watching; it was like looking at the back of a piece of needlework and seeing only loose threads and random knots. It was only on turning the text over since it ended that I've been able to see the intricacy of the stitches, not one of them out of place.

Interspersed with these seemingly placid scenes are speeches delivered off-set by the interloper of the group, Mrs Jarrett, the only one of the four to bear a husband's name and speak about him regularly, too. I say that still not knowing what its import might be. Those off-set speeches – delivered in James MacDonald's staging just outside a framed rectangle of sizzling copper light, the size of a cinema screen – have a flavour of Hollywood apocalypse about them, disease and destruction and death coursing through them like poison. They seem far-fetched and yet each contains a sentence so blandly familiar that Mrs J could be describing our immediate tomorrow:

Water was deliberately wasted in a campaign to punish the thirsty.

Gas masks were available on the NHS with a three-month waiting time and privately in a range of colours.

Commuters watched breakfast on iPlayer on their way to work.

Buildings migrated from London to Lahore, Kyoto to Kansas City, and survivors were interned for having no travel documents.

Watching Escaped Alone through the lens of “Learning from the 60s”, it felt clear to me that the sense of global political and ecological catastrophe that Churchill anticipates in these speeches from Mrs Jarrett isn't new, that this anxiety reaches back decades, and always it has been a legitimate response to the same thing: the abusive power of men, whether presidents of countries or companies, leaders of armies or representatives of religion, to twist shared resources (human or natural) to personal advantage. The three women Mrs J encounters in that back garden – I'd argue – are in their own way damaged by the attempt to live within even a supposedly “developed” society because it remains conservatively patriarchal.

Where Churchill tightens the radical-feminist screw is in the closing moments of the play. Everyone except Mrs Jarrett has had a moment in the spotlight in the back garden (a bit of staging I didn't especially like) in which the air seemed to chill momentarily as their thoughts unspooled, and when she has hers this happens: she sits on her chair and repeats the words “terrible rage”, just that, 25 times in the printed text, the voice of the actor (Linda Bassett, exceptional in her anorak of mundanity) thickening like a storm cloud with each repetition, growing in force and crackling energy as though it were attached to a dimmer switch and the voltage were being inexorably increased. My god it was fucking extraordinary; by approximately repetition 19 I was simultaneously nauseous, in tears and ready to stand on my chair shouting along in solidarity. This, this is what simmers beneath the surface of women, what courses through Audre Lorde's writing, what historically has been dismissed as hysteria; this terrible rage, poured down the sink with the dirty dishwater and wiped away with the shit from a baby's bum. There's so little time or space for that rage once you're a mother or a grandmother; motherliness is synonymous with fondness, nurture, shelter, protection. At any age rage is deemed unfeminine, an unacceptable form of expression for a woman, because expressed that rage inevitably challenges the status quo.

“Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.”

Lorde knew a thing or two about anger; that quote is from a keynote speech delivered at the National Women's Studies Association conference in 1981 called “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Among her uses of anger is a challenge to each woman to “see her heelprint upon another woman's face”, to comprehend the complexities of intersectionality and that anyone who benefits from the status quo in a “developed” western society does so at the expense and exploitation of invisibly poorer women in the same society and elsewhere. There is nothing of that in the idle chitter-chatter of the women in Churchill's backyard, hardly anything you'd recognise as an overt feminist articulation: their rallying cry is a (glorious) close-harmony rendition of a 1960s girl-group popsong. And yet there is this rage – and there is a recollection of its use. The woman imprisoned for manslaughter killed her husband, in their kitchen: it was accidental, she says, “kitchen knife happened to be in my hand”, but the owner of the backyard has her suspicions, that the retaliation (“when I hit back”) wasn't instinctive self-defence but revenge unleashed against sustained domestic abuse. Watching Escaped Alone through Lorde's exquisite anger, I saw that accidental stabbing as a microcosm of feminism's relationship to patriarchal structures: is Churchill putting forward – mildly, affably – the possibility that feminism as a movement might one day find itself, knife in hand, finally snapping at so many centuries of injustice, slicing into the arteries of how-things-are, severing the tendons of history?

*

On the train to Cardiff to see Opera for the Unknown Woman I passed the Daily Mail building and, not for the first time, wanted to throw a bomb at it. The idea of insurgency terrifies me, I know I wouldn't want to live it in reality, but the romance of it is strangely alluring. With her habitual clear-eyed composure, Melanie Wilson offers protest, collaborative reasoning and the occupation of space as better courses of action. Her Opera itself enacts an occupation, of a codified and elitist art form historically the province of male composers; in a brilliant column for the Guardian she wrote: “Opera can challenge its sexist evolution, once diverted from being used as the mouthpiece of a male narrative, which has driven so many of its best-known examples in the past. The goal now is to repurpose the tool for our needs, making the journey from a female voice that suffers to a female voice that speaks up and out.”

There are 11 female voices speaking up and out in Melanie's Opera, with very little instrumentation – a pulse and patter of percussion, a satin ribbon of cello – to distract from them. The music instead is made from their voices: gorgeous ululations in Arabic, multi-vocal refrains, and the aural texture found in the variety of accent and intonation of the performers, each from a different culture and country, drawn from every continent. The set-up for this global gathering is simple: it's 2316 and humanity is exhaling its final gasp, as carbon dioxide begins to overwhelm the atmosphere, surging seas drown coastlines and forest fires rage inland. An outer-galaxy committee convenes a taskforce of women in 2016 and entrusts them with averting this destruction. The sci-fi landscape is established in the first three minutes of the libretto and understood from then on (Alistair McDowell, with your clunky exposition in X, please take note). What's less clear is the action the women should take, or even what they should seek to save. Their discussion, sometimes tense and argumentative, doesn't just campaign for collaborative reasoning: it embodies it.

As if having 11 women on stage weren't panoply enough, Melanie includes other female voices too: some of them silent but expressive, in photographs of women finding solidarity with each other during the Arab Spring uprisings; some of them in the form of quotes, from Kathleen Hanna, Christine de Pizan, and of course Audre Lorde (other inspirational women are credited in the programme, including VandanaShiva, Wei Tingting, Shelley Jackson, Doris Lessing, Minna Salami, Nina Simone, Valentina Tereshkova and Malala Yousafzai, and I want to see the Opera again for a multitude of reasons, but mostly to listen more closely to the libretto in case I can hear their words woven into it). Lorde's line is repeated twice; taken from a paper delivered as part of a “lesbian and literature” panel in 1977 called The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, it states: “Your silence will not protect you.”

It's so, so easy to be like the women in Churchill's play, wittering away in one's own backyard. Lorde demands more than that, and so does Melanie's libretto. There was a bit of me astonished by its blatant, unapologetic articulation of feminist and left-wing politics: where was the BBC-mandated counterbalance of climate-change scepticism? Where was the toning down for people who don't want to feel preached at? She is invigoratingly forthright in this piece: environmental catastrophe is real and it's here and we don't have time to wait for someone else to deal with it. That sense of urgency can be a source of fear on the one hand, depression on the other, but there's a wonderful line in the libretto that says (quoting roughly): saving humanity is the work of a generation. The hope in that line is heartening.

Lorde's essay speaks directly of opposing silence in the face of racism, and there's a bit of me anxious at the expedience of a white feminist appropriation of her words: Melanie's in the libretto, mine in writing about it. Similarly, I felt ruffled watching the Opera by the decision to have one of the black women raise the possibility of violent action against government/military/capitalist cartels: the other women reject this as perpetuating masculine aggression, and I felt uncomfortable watching them disagree so vehemently with the black woman, would have felt better if the suggestion had come from one of the white characters. 

But the discussion across difference in Melanie's libretto feels both vital and true to Lorde's spirit. In another speech, from 1979, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”, specifically taking women in academia to task for their lack of “consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women”, Lorde speaks about difference as essential to creative political thinking: “As women we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist.” Melanie's opera forges community, both within the group on stage and with the real-life women who inspired the work. The voices of those women resound across centuries – Christine de Pizan was writing 600 years ago – and remind us that our history as feminists is long and nourishing. What is being called for here – the slogan on the badges handed out at the end – is “affinity and resistance”: and that's what Lorde was looking for, too. I love the openness with which she says, in “The Transformation of Silence...”, that “I am myself – a Black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?”, because she doesn't specify what she thinks your work should be: are you working against racism, capitalism, ecological disaster? It's all good.

And it's all connected. This, for me, is the correlative of intersectionality: a recognition that all the different oppressions have systemic exploitation as their root cause. Earlier this year, a man in Stockholm told me that we don't have time to fight against capitalism: the urgent crisis is eco-catastrophe, and we have to focus all energy on that. I found I wasn't able to answer him, and it was the silence of non-comprehension: I couldn't understand how he doesn't see that eco-catastrophe is the result of capitalist exploitation, just as racism is, just as poverty is, and so on and so on, and that battling one requires battling the other. Opera for the Unknown Woman attempts exactly that cohesion of battle, idealistically but so valiantly, and is all the more inspiring for it.

*

Shortly after I wrote that bit about my dream-theory of feminism stabbing the patriarchy built into Escaped Alone and wanting to bomb the Daily Mail building, the news emerged of the murder of MP Jo Cox, by a white man who, it's been emerging, had consorted with neo-Nazis. My own words have gnawed at me since. I say the romance of insurgency is strangely alluring, but – like any romance – that's so naive, and ignores the truth of violence. I've been reflecting since on how my entire existence, as a white middle-class woman, is one of allowing myself to ignore the truth of violence, whether at the extremes of experience (refugees struggling to leave a war zone) or on my doorstep (endemic racism in British society). This week, with the shooting in Orlando closely followed by Cox's murder, that truth has been impossible to ignore, and amid the tumult of things I'm feeling is a volcanic sense of rage. Terrible rage that our “democratic” choice has been distilled to different flavours of conservatism. Terrible rage that people voting to leave the EU are also in the majority climate-change sceptics. Terrible rage at the powerlessness of the left. Terrible rage at my ineffectuality and unforgivable privileges. Terrible rage terrible rage terrible rage.

What to do with it? Lorde's counsel, in "The Transformation of Silence", is clear: “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for all of us, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.” I look at my writing and want to erase from it the language of violence. I listen assiduously to voices both known (Harry Giles and Selina Thompson, people of such wisdom and empathy that knowing them makes me want to work much much harder) and unknown (among them Ash Sarkar, Chimene Suleyman, Robert Somynne and Sam Ambreen), and begin to share them. I work to transform silence, knowing that Lorde was, remains, right: silence will not protect us. I acknowledge that the work is also not to sink into the hopelessness of thinking nothing will.