I've wanted to see Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup with Barley for years; that the chance should finally come after a period of immersion in Clifford Odets felt apposite. If Odets' Group Theatre plays are songs of a certain socialist innocence, Wesker transposes those songs to a key of experience. One of Wesker's characters, Ada, finds the place that Odets longs for in Golden Boy – where poverty is no shame, where there's no war in the streets – but she finds it in a rural isolation with her husband. Pained, even poisoned, by a sense of betrayal, Ada's disillusionment with socialist endeavour makes her vitriolic: she decries the girls she works with as “lipsticked, giggling morons”, and the “splendid and heroic working class” men that her husband fought alongside in the Spanish civil war and second world war as animals with no sense of social conscience. She just doesn't care for them any more. Everyone in the theatre laughed at Ada's barbed fury, but I can't think why, unless it's only me who frequently shares such feelings of misanthropy.
Where Odets calls for free and equal love between two people, Wesker is interested in that care we can share more widely. Ada denounces her mother Sarah's “stupendous, egotistical audacity” for thinking she can care for society at large. But it's Sarah who is the most sympathetic character in the play: indomitable, enthusiastic, faintly annoying Sarah, always bustling and fussing, needling and nagging. Her final speeches in the play are extraordinary: I could feel her hand gripping my wrist and dragging me into kindness, conscientiousness and solicitude.
So I'm still a communist! Shoot me then! I'm a communist! I've always been one – since the time when all the world was a communist. … But it's different now. Now the people have forgotten. I sometimes think they're not worth fighting for because they forget so easily. You give them a few shillings in the bank and they can buy a television so they think it's all over, there's nothing more to be got, they don't have to think any more! Is that what you want? A world where people don't think any more?
Dominic Cooke's production at the Royal Court is odd, and not just because it didn't live up to that five star review from Michael Billington (I had the same problem catching up with Clybourne Park in the West End). A scene will be electrifying in its liveness – and then suddenly the plug gets pulled and it becomes inert, every word, every gesture, leaden with contrivance. The first instance of this came early for me: the opening scene, when the characters prepare to march against Mosley's blackshirts, was so vivid and exciting I wanted to climb on stage and grab a flag myself. But something goes wrong when the characters start naming comrades killed in Spain: it ought to be desperately moving, but the moment of contemplation and sorrow is so deliberate, forced even, that I ended up squirming at the staginess of it. The awful, awful, there-for-the-sake-of-argument scene later in the play between Sarah and Monty, now a greengrocer in Manchester doing very-well-for-himself-thank-you, was redeemed only by the fantasticness of Bessie's 1950s catalogue-girl outfit: from the top, ruffled curls and slick-backed ponytail; red lips; mint-green jumper; flared skirt with, naturally, poodles frolicking across it; patent leather heels. Sigh. (Secretly, of course, the thing I love most about seeing plays set in the early mid-20th century is the chance they give me for ogling frocks. I spent a lot of time at Rocket to the Moon trying to work out the construction of Belle's dresses with a view to copying them at home. Sarah isn't nearly so glamorous, but even her dour yellow jumper/brown tweed skirt combo from the first scene was covetable to me.)
I saw Chicken Soup on Tuesday and woke up on Wednesday with a hankering to listen to Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump for the first time in ages. It wasn't until I heard myself yelling along to the chorus of The Crystal Lake – “I've got to get out of here, I've got to get out of here and find my place again, I've lost my place again” – that I knew why. It's an entire album about feeling out of kilter with the world and your times, searching for an alternative but not being sure that the alternative is a solution, feeling disappointed with people but horribly lonely without them. There are, of course, no answers. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep on fighting, keep on searching.
As a postscript: I appreciate that there is some irony in the fact that I've written this on a day when people across the country are striking in protest not only at specific Conservative policies but the very repugnance of Conservatism. I should be out there joining in; instead I'm at home, being self-indulgent. I'm doing what is in my heart, but is that enough?
Every birthday I ever had I sat around. Now'sa time for standing. Poppa, I have to tell you – I don't like myself, past, present and future. Do you know there are men who have wonderful things from life? … You don't know what it means to sit around here and watch the months go ticking by! Do you think that's a life for a boy my age? Tomorrow's my birthday! I change my life! [Golden Boy]
I was in my early 20s when I saw my first Clifford Odets: just a bit older than Joe Bonaparte, the angry young hero of Golden Boy. I fell a little in love with Joe – how could I not? He's a prototype Jimmy Dean, a jazz-age juvenile delinquent. “You could build a city with his ambition to be somebody,” says the girl who silently adores him. “No,” replies his father, morosely: “burn down.”
Golden Boy is film noir transposed to the stage, populated by gangsters and philosophising Italians, girls who feel dead inside and men clinging to their last shred of hope. At the heart of it is Joe, the poor, bullied son of an immigrant, desperate to achieve something amid the arrogant skyscrapers and exhibitionist cars of New York. He's a musician, but “music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries”, as Mr Bonaparte puts it, and so has become symptomatic for Joe of the spiritual weakness he senses in himself but can't articulate and doesn't know how to redress. “If music shot bullets I'd like it better,” he tells Lorna, his only solace. “Artists and people like that are freaks today. The world moves fast and they sit around like forgotten dopes.”
In the memorably ambitious fringe production I saw, Golden Boy was gut-wrenching to watch: Joe makes a string of wrong choices, glories in them, and in the most violent of circumstances discovers the magnitude of his mistakes. “I've been running around in circles,” he says, in a stunned moment of regret. The people who “conquer the world” are the ones who can stand tall and say: “I have myself; I am what I want to be!” His realisation leads to that moment that, I'm learning, eventually comes in all of Odets' 1930s/Group Theatre plays, when Odets' own romantic-idealist-socialist manifesto is voiced in a passionate blaze:
Somewhere there must be happy boys and girls who can teach us the way of life! We'll find some city where poverty's no shame – where music is no crime! – where there's no war in the streets – where a man is glad to be himself, to live and make his woman herself!
Outbursts like this look so sentimental on the page, but that's romantic, idealistic socialism for you: set against the impersonal, mechanistic, pragmatic brutality of capitalism it has a tendency to appear somewhat wan. Not to me, though: Odets envisages life as I want to live it, seeks a world I want my children to enter in the future. And his dreams aren't necessarily the stuff of fairy tales, something made clear in Rocket to the Moon. Look at the character names: Belle, Stark, Prince. Rocket, it struck me when watching it at the National recently, is a deliberate, feminist deconstruction of fairy-tale promises. In Odets' fable, Belle marries not a beast but a man called Stark, stark reality, and they could be happy together, if he only had more courage, the self-belief that Joe Bonaparte looks for. And his self-moulding heroine, Cleo Singer (once again, the centrality of art to Odets' vision), rejects the advances of Mr Prince, with his peacock armour and hollow promises of wealth and ease, in a fervent declaration:
If there's roads, I'll take them. I'll go up all those roads till I find what I want. I want a love that uses me, that needs me. Don't you think there's a world of joyful men and women? Must all men live afraid to laugh and sing? Can't we sing at work and love our work? It's getting late to play at life; I want to live it.
Love, love, love. No one can do anything alone. The American Dream is for the pioneer, the lonely hunter, the self-aggrandizing man. Odets rejects that: he argues that men and women must work together; that men cannot truly be themselves, cannot hope to realise their fullest potential, without women; that the strongest society has its foundations not in money but the bonds of love. There is a wonderful moment in Rocket when Frenchy wonders whether capitalism, the selfishness it engenders, the disparity it demands, makes that kind of love impossible:
Love is a beginning, a jumping-off place. It's like what heat is at the forge – makes the metal easy to handle and shape. But love and the grace to use it! To develop, expand it, variate it! … Who can do that today? … the free exercise of love, I figure, gets harder every day.
Rocket is unflinching in its examination of the difficulties of marriage: for all his idealism, Odets expects nothing to be easy. His portrait of a marriage in Awake and Sing! is excoriating: Bessie, nerves frayed, snapping constantly at everyone around her, undermining them, leeching their spirits; Myron shrivelled and ineffectual, offering no support to his wife, no guidance to his children; the two of them shrivelled not so much by poverty but by Bessie's insidious, destructive desire to keep up with the neighbours and maintain a facade of conventional respectability. We never see Cleo's mother in Rocket to the Moon, but I bet she's just like Bessie:
My mother's always trying to hold me back, not to have all the experiences I can. Those people think you can live on good advice. Don't you think life is to live all you can and experience everything? Isn't that the only way you can develop to be a real human being?
It takes a death for Bessie's children to find the courage to seize at life, to allow themselves not to feel guilty about going up their own roads; just as it takes a death for Joe to learn what he really wanted from the world. And this, maybe, is what I love most about Odets: his plays show you broken people in moments of shattering (but potentially transforming) self-discovery, so you can learn their lessons, change your life, without breaking too. Reading through the Methuen collected edition recently (not Paradise Lost, though: I'm patiently saving that thrill of discovery for when it must and shall be staged), one speech shone out at me. It's old Jacob, Bessie's beleaguered, kindly father in Awake and Sing!, taking the youth of Depression-strangled America by the scruff of the neck and giving them a shake:
Look on this failure and see for seventy years he talked, with good ideas, but only in the head. … This is why I tell you – DO! Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution.
I'm tattooing those words on my own heart, so I never, ever forget.
Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse,
I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused,
for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him,
fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who
criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it
softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.
Further
note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an
extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who
appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven
years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share
publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
I feel nervous going into a rehearsal room. I can't bear for anyone to read two words of an album-review-in-progress; how then can I impose myself on a group of performers as they dredge their minds for words and gestures and struggle to sculpt them into meaningful shapes? Yet for the past few years I've taken everypossibleopportunity to witness theatre-pieces-in-progress, my curiosity and fascination with the work required to create a living, breathing, truth-full performance increasing each time. It's made me realise how little I know or understand about how theatre is made, and how much of that making is down to some mysterious and unfathomable force (I've called it alchemy before), both beyond and binding the individual personalities involved. The fact that I review theatre, comprehending so little, appals me.
My goal in a rehearsal room is to be as unobtrusive as possible: not easy, because, as more than one director has pointed out, I alter the temperature just by opening the door. I am the audience to come, even if my purpose is only to absorb, not to assess, certainly not to criticise. I'm quietly pleased when something happens regardless of my presence: when an actor picks up a guitar during the break and starts bashing out an indie song, or sinks into a nap while the director delivers their notes. It means the air has settled around me. I've melted into the wall.
There are, of course, theatre writers who are also makers (my admiration for Brian Logan is great), and I have, of course, of course, toyed with the idea of making something myself, but goodness knows where I'd find the confidence. Which brings me (back) to Chris Goode. Both in conversation with me and recently in his blog, he's puzzled over the following: almost everyone does something creative, whether it's writing the odd poem or baking cakes, painting or gardening, but almost no one makes a bit of theatre unless they're doing it professionally. Why is that? (As it happens, he's not the first person to raise this with me. A few years ago, when I was contemplating abandoning newspapers and trying to work in the theatre [the words frying pan and fire were muttered], I had a series of strange and wonderful conversations with directors and literary managers and writers I had encountered through work, and the piece of advice that struck me most was: make something in your kitchen. Invite a few friends. It will be a piece of theatre that wouldn't otherwise have existed and it will be yours.)
The reason Chris mentioned this to me wasn't because he wanted to encourage me to abandon all fear, but because he had a proposition. Would I like to spend five weeks in the rehearsal room with him, observing as he worked on three very different, very experimental projects and launched his new company? During a Devoted and Disgruntled session last year, I had talked at length about how spending a month with Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National had transformed my appreciation of the show: had made me more conscious of its myriad tiny details and inflections, more sympathetic to the compromises demanded by lack of time or money or resources; above all had deepened my understanding of what is a very difficult piece. It was an amazing experience, an immense privilege. And Chris, bless him, not only remembered my impassioned outburst on the subject but felt that this experience shouldn't be unique but general, that all the joy and playfulness and questioning and wrestling that happens in a rehearsal room shouldn't be hidden behind a locked door.
So here I am, on a train to Leeds for Open House, the five-day project he's doing at West Yorkshire Playhouse, where the rehearsal room is open not just to me but to anyone at all. The closer I get, the more astonished I am that he's doing this, the more humbled I am by the selflessness, the unselfconsciousness, of Chris and his cast. They're not just sharing a way of making work with people, a process. They're sharing a way of being open, honest, generous, trusting, fearless, in work and in relationships and in life.
Open House is the last of the three projects I've been watching; I'm still trying to fathom everything I've seen and thought and felt during the first two. I'll be writing more (much, much more) about the Cendrars piece, as it was genuinely extraordinary, a mind-expanding three weeks not only in terms of the kind of theatre Chris was setting out to make – a theatre of materials, textures and ideas – but in the way it made me reconsider my role as a member of the audience, my complicity with that audience, the minute ways in which I radiate a response to a piece and absorb the responses around me. Gradually, over the days I spent in the rehearsal room, I felt myself colluding with the company making the show; the moment I entered the theatre with the rest of the spectators, a new collusion began.
In between Cendrars and Leeds, I spent a few days at the National Theatre Studio watching Chris play around with a verbatim piece he hopes to make, based on interviews conducted by Karl James of The Dialogue Project with a group of primary-school-age children. I can't say I was immediately convinced by the thesis behind the piece: that we don't hear children, that adults smother children's voices in a treacle of sentimentality and cuteness. You want to come round my house, I thought, and see how possible it is to be unsentimental about children, how impossible it is to escape their voices. But I'd missed the point. Chris was really asking a question: what if we listened to children as though they were grown-ups? What would happen if we placed their words into the mouths of adults – adults not pretending to be children but retaining their adult voices? How would that affect the quality of our listening? What would we hear?
What I heard astonished me. The actors were sitting down, around a blank, conference-room-style table, the first time I listened to a read-through of the script, so there was nothing to distract from the words – a few character types that, in the time I wasn't in the room, the group had imposed on individual bits of dialogue, but no gestures. Although edited down, the texts had been transcribed with absolute fidelity from the original recordings of Karl's interviews with seven and nine-year-olds. I recognised in their speech a lot of uncomfortable, challenging things about myself, about adults, about children, particularly about the way adults bring up their children, the ideas we feed them and expectations we have of them and all the small and awful ways in which we fail to support them, fail to appreciate their courage. Here are some of the things I wrote in my notebook, during that initial read-through and the showing at the end of the week [explanations or expansions written today I've put in square brackets]:
we are all the child we were, it never goes away
patterns of behaviour start here [the girl who, when pissed off, goes upstairs and eats some sweets to feel better]
same dreams... [this relates not just to dreams/nightmares described by the children, but to a sensation that some of the incidents they describe, eg being lost, will linger in the subconscious and feed the language of dreaming in the future. In fact, another of my notes was, in far fewer words: everything that's being said could be spoken by an adult describing a dream]
moments when we feel like a child: intimidating work situations; with new friends/people we have a crush on
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS... how crippling
difficulty finding the right word
IMPOSSIBILITY DEALING WITH EMOTIONS [fear, anger, sadness]
looking for escape – the secret bar etc [in the opening speech, a girl wishes there were somewhere she could go to sit and think other than the park, which is always busy because too many people know it's there]
fear makes us children again
flirting as a playground game
how crushing it is being an adult
all the impositions on children// what messages we give them, eg about money// responsibilities they assume themselves [this relates to two things: a chunk of text in which a group of children give their impressions of what financial responsibilities are entailed in being an adult, the need to earn money and hold down a job and support a family, and also to a conversation about a great-grandmother, how the child wanted to see more of her before she died but wasn't in a position to choose when that could happen, which struck me as appalling – they have the same feeling, but not the same freedom]
children playing adults – we don't allow them gravity //– extent to which we [adults] have to assume these things [responsibility, articulacy, selflessness, courage]
I have a fear of when my parents die
That last line is a direct quote from the script. But it might as well be me talking about my parents, or even my dad talking about his mum. There were a few more lines that I copied down, because they made me cry whenever they were spoken:
When you're a child, you don't really think... cos you like to live like a child.
Doesn't really seem you're just going to be an adult
like time flies by and you just want... to, like, stay as a child,
but you just enjoy things, the way it goes
*
Oh, I do have one question.
How does it feel like, being an adult, just in general?
Thoughts like these are very alive to me as I struggle to bring up two children, to comprehend myself as a parent, to not behave as or more childishly than them; as I remember the person I was (and thought I was) when I was 6, 16, 26; as I anticipate my children becoming adults; as I look at the future and feel choked by fear.
Something Chris and the actors discovered while putting the piece together, which Chris flagged up in his introduction to the showing, was how easy it is for actors to perform a child, and how it's almost harder to play adults. Maybe the dressing-up games, the pretending, doesn't stop for any of us – it's just that the stakes get higher, the consequences more frightening, and life stops feeling like a game. Many of Chris's original questions for the children dealt with courage: moments when they had to be brave, had to deal with loss, when they felt small, or guilt, or shame. Listening to the children talk about these things, I wasn't sure that courage is something that we learn that then remains constant in us: maybe it fluctuates, and flies away when we need it most.
I've been thinking about courage a lot while I've been in Leeds (I'm home now): the courage it takes to walk through a door, to join a party, to participate, to walk away. Open House was overwhelming; walking home beneath a copper sulphate sky my heart and brain were still effervescing from it. It's going to take me a while to digest it all, so for now, I'd like to end with another recipe. This is for sponge cake, Open House-style: I'm going to have to work very, very hard to find a better way to convey the flavour of the room. Oh, and here's a soundtrack for it, too.
Ingredients (serves 4):
1 line from an open letter variation
1 sung song
1 movement from the big dance
Stages of a smile
A microphone
2 medium performers
Some laughter or a touch
Jazz hands
Instructions:
1: Preheat a space to gas mark 6.
2: Place the line from an open letter variation and the sung song into a mixing bowl. Beat until smooth and creamy.
3: Beat the performers in a basin or cup and add the mixture a little at a time, with the movement from the big dance, keeping the same smooth and creamy consistency.
4: Add the stages of a smile and a microphone, mix for a few minutes.
5: Divide into two sponge tins, put into a moderately hot space and bake for 2-25 minutes (it is important that the space is well heated).
6: Put on a chair to cool.
7: When cool, put one upside down on a plate spread with a touch, you can also put fresh laughter in at this stage, put the other piece on top and dust with jazz hands.
A while back I interviewed Fiona Shaw about playing Mother Courage, for a little something accompanying an essay by Tony Kushner in the Guardian. It was one of the more entertaining experiences of my working life, but also a troubling one, because she talked about Britain being at war in a matter-of-fact way that made me realise how little I thought about living in a country at war, if at all. I'm politically naive at the worst of times, but my casual ability to ignore Britain's military manoeuvrings suddenly mortified me, my thoughtlessness tantamount to a support of aggression, because it contained no protest against it.
I found myself thinking through this again on Sunday, somewhat unexpectedly in the midst of a Kitchen Revolution-style cooking session putting together a tray of moussaka, a plum crumble tart, two quiche bases, some caramelized onions, and three meals' worth of pasta sauce for the freezer, feats of domestic goddessry undermined by my failures as a parent that morning and, indeed, through the course of the long weekend. My soundtrack, on repeat, was PJ Harvey's Let England Shake. Harvey is one of those singers I've always admired, but at a slight remove: I have several of her albums, but never listen to them, not even Stories From the City, which I loved when reviewing. Let England Shake isn't nearly as friendly or accessible as I remember Stories being, but it's the album that has taken up residence beside the kitchen CD player, that compels me to play it again and again.
I'm slowly appreciating what makes it so fascinating to me: it's a folk album, its rhythms and language hewn from traditional English music, but it's a folk album that sounds absolutely of our times. Much of its modernity lies in the crafty way that Harvey weaves in quotations and samples from other songs. The most obvious – and the line I find myself unable to stop singing – is her twist on that mock-desperate line from Summertime Blues in The Words That Maketh Murder: “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?”, which she sings at first with wry, eyes-narrowed irony, becoming more furious with every repetition. But there are so many others: on Sunday, for the first time, I caught Blood and Fire coursing through Written on the Forehead, and was startled not to have noticed it before. But this is subtle music, muted and ambiguous. I uncover something new in it each time I put it on, which is exactly what you want from an album.
What I particularly discovered on Sunday morning is that Let England Shake makes me feel like I live in a country at war, almost permanently at war; a country belligerent to its core. Harvey does this not by singing about new wars or modern wars, but by singing about wars fallen from living memory in a way that makes them fiercely present: much as Brecht did with Mother Courage. Harvey's imagery is devastating in its simplicity: she sings of “England and the grey, damp filthiness of ages”, of the country “weighted down with silent dead”, of how “our land is ploughed by tanks and marching feet”, and each line fills me with the horror of recognition. This has happened and it is happening and it will happen. On and on and on.
All that killing
Ancient history
Modern history
Vortex
Shipwreck
Even that of the Titanic I read about in the paper
So many associations images I can't get into my poem
Because I'm still such a really bad poet
Because the universe rushes over me
And I didn't bother to insure myself against train wreck
I admire Harvey, but I'm also intimidated by her. She released her first album when I was in my teens and struggling to shape my identity, using music as my mould. Riot grrrl emerged at the same time and was inspiring and confusing and absorbing to me. Harvey's refusal to associate herself with riot grrrl struck me as bizarre. Where was her sympathy, her solidarity, her feminist spirit? I didn't understand. Now I have more appreciation of her formidable self-possession. She was only a few years older than me, but she already knew how to take it all the way. Nearly two decades on, I still don't.
I was that 17-year-old riot grrrl again later that evening, watching the Drew Barrymore film Whip It. Along with Miss Velvelette Actionette, I've been a bit obsessed with roller derby ever since the 'Ettes performed a benefit gig with the London Rollergirls: we'd both love to join, but we're a bit, erm, wussy to subject ourselves to all that bruising (the unlikelihood of my even remaining upright in rollerskates is a moot point). It's not a great film – the plotting is fairly conventional and predictable – but the 17-year-old in me adored it. And there were a few scenes that made the grown-up me silently cheer: seeing a rollergirl with her son; that delicious slap that Bliss gives her errant ex-boyfriend; Babe Ruthless coming in second to Iron Maven; most of all, the exquisite moment when Bliss guesses that Juliette Lewis's character is 27 and Lewis's face softens before she snaps, “I'm 36.” Drew Barrymore, I salute you.
As for the plum crumble tart, you might have thought that a crumble with a pastry base might be overkill, but you'd be wrong. The pastry was crisp and plain, the crumble soft, with a hint of ground almond and cinnamon, the plums sour-sweet, and it all got eaten far too quickly. Thank goodness the Actionettes are dancing at Duckie this Saturday: all that go-going needs fuel, you know.
I'm in the honeymoon phase with the new Wild Beasts album, that exquisite, slightly giddy period of feeling so consumed by a piece of music that I listen to it three or four times a day (despite everything else that clamours to be heard: just now that means the Seasick Steve album I'm reviewing; the Lia Ices album I'm befriending; the new Okkervil River; most particularly White Denim's D, which is so literally riveting that I had to lock it away after two listens, simply to be able to get on with my life). Even when Smother isn't playing, I feel the throb of its rhythms in my pulse, the seep of its melodies in my veins. On the morning I started writing this, I was snapped out of a dream by my daughter, and as I stumbled jangling into the day I realised that the dream's narrative and colours and torrid emotions all drew from the soundtrack still echoing in my head: End Come Too Soon.
Smother is an almost shockingly sensual album, its gossamer caresses insinuating their way from earlobe to collarbone, the crook of the arm, the small of the back. But it's a sensuality so searing, and so melancholy, that each time I listen I feel more bereft, skin prickling with an awareness of solitude.
So much of modern pop flaunts a brazen sexuality: Smother is clandestine. Some of what I wrote about Limbo, Panto on its release stands true for me now: there is a baroque wantonness to it, that makes me think of bodies heaving beneath the lacing of corsets, eyes flickering behind elaborate masques. But there is more subtlety here, a quality shadowy and private. Something of the geisha houses described in Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, in which women painted their lips green and teeth black, the more perfectly to be immersed in the dark. Something of Cavafy's erotic visions, “when night comes with its own counsel”. Not for timid bodies, the lust of this heat.
Much as I loved Limbo, Panto, Smother is the album I've been waiting for Wild Beasts to make: the album in which they're in control of what they do, and not vice versa. Limbo, Panto is an obstreperous child: growling like a beast because it can, flaunting and theatrical, relishing its difference, the unleashing of strangeness. That exultant opening howl of Vigil for a Fuddy Duddy haunts me still. Such is the rawness and carnality that mesmerises the heroine in Angela Carter's story The Tiger's Bride.
And then there's Tom Fleming. I feel almost guilty admitting that most of my favourite Wild Beasts songs are those in which his voice is prominent.
But that isn't to say that the two voices are in opposition for me (as they are, say, to Alexis P, at least in his review of Two Dancers). One of the great fascinations of Wild Beasts as they've grown across the three albums is the increasingly fluid way that those apparently opposed voices are woven together, so that now, in Smother, one merges into the other, limbs entangling, hearts dissolving.
Despite the corporeal theatricality of Wild Beasts, I find it hard to think of the band as actual people. I avoid seeing photos of them, and when I do I feel faintly horrified by the sight of plaid shirts, polo-necks and oh, the indignity, beards and moustaches. (One of the Logan brothers summed it up for me, too, when he said: No beards.)
This is the one thing that consoles me for the fact that I'm yet to see them play live. All sorts of mishaps have prevented me: pregnancy, work, forgetfulness. I was in Cyprus when they played at Wilton's Music Hall recently, and cried with frustrated disappointment when those shows were announced, mere days after I'd booked the flights. And so I wait patiently for my relationship with them to be consummated. My eyes will be closed when it is.
I've been trying to write this post for over two weeks, but things keep getting in the way: this piece about playing Shylock; the enticing peculiarity of the new Felice Brothers album; the course I've started at Morley College; the background reading I want to do for a new, terribly exciting project inspired by the writer/adventurer/surrealist/oddball Cendrars, with which I'm imminently very peripherally to be involved; the not inconsiderable anxiety (unfounded, as it turned out) of preparing to take my kids on my own on the nine-hour journey to my parents' house in Cyprus; the Douglas Sirks in my mum's DVD collection (oh, the wonder of Magnificent Obsession). I should just let it slide and get on with enthusing about Wild Beasts or the National's production of Rocket to the Moon. But I can't, because I've been too discombobulated by Andrew Haydon's review of the new Simon Stephens, Wastwater. I couldn't sleep after reading it, for re-examining the play and my response to it, and fretting over my impressionability, the difficulty I have maintaining my own opinions in the face of contradiction. Andrew's subtle evaluation of the play almost persuaded me that Wastwater is a work of genius, and stupid me for not realising it at the time of watching. But only almost.
I thought the first section, depicting a tender, awkward, fragile mother-son-or-are-they relationship, was staggeringly good, its poignancy delicately conveyed in Linda Bassett and Tom Sturridge's open-hearted performances. But the two sections after that, in which a policewoman reveals herself to an art teacher and a child trafficker delivers an Asian girl to a middle-aged man, I found much less involving or believable. This didn't trouble me overmuch, until I read Andrew's review. He described a lot of the thoughts that went through my head while watching the play: is this relationship about this? No, it's about that. Are we looking at this unpalatable truth? No, we're looking at that. But whereas I cheerfully dismissed a lot of them, Andrew located in their provocation and odiousness much of the play's complexity, slipperiness and brilliance.
That thesis, Andrew's appreciation of the tautness and scope of text and Katie Mitchell's production, his microscopic attention to every detail, are thrilling in their clarity and exactitude. I no less clearly recall finding Wastwater unsatisfying, and everything I've read and seen since has thrown up its ha'penny explanation why. To start with, there's the book I was reading on the tube that week, a collection of essays by Flannery O'Connor called Mystery and Manners. Her focus is prose-writing, specifically short stories, but what she says about the revelation of character – and it really sank in, because when O'Connor makes a key point, she makes it fiercely and repeatedly – feels salient.
“I often ask myself [this is O'Connor in 1962] what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. … It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.”
O'Connor was Catholic, so the mystery she refers to relates chiefly to our relationship with God. But I lost God somewhere on the Brixton Road years ago, and so, at the risk of missing her point, what absorbs me here is the possibility for reflecting upon the profoundly bewildering mysteries of human relationships, with other humans, with time, with the culture we have made, with this planet we inhabit. These are precisely the mysteries with which Stephens is concerned – but he didn't quite engage me with his choice of gestures. The policewoman fills the hotel room with noise: TV, radio, a porn film on the internet. The art teacher slaps her around the face. The child trafficker pretends to shoot her customer. The man stares helplessly at the child he has bought. There is a coldness to all this, an iciness to Stephens' characters. Except in the first section, and that was the bit I most enjoyed.
Tangled up in this is a realisation that variations of these gestures are made in Dan Rebellato's Chekhov in Hell, which I watched the night after seeing Wastwater, and liked much more – except for the opening 30 minutes, which felt rather forced. Rebellato's reawakened Chekhov immerses himself in all the media noise, the violence and horror, of the modern world. And there are two key moments in the play, moments that made me shiver. In the first, a female TV producer recalls “every little compromise” she's made, the decisions – to quote Stephens – that stay with you, as though the consequences of them stay in your bones. She is talking faster and faster, uncontrollably revealing herself, and suddenly describes being in a stranger's flat at three in the morning, begging them to come on her face, because she feels that lost and that worthless that this seems the only way left to make anyone happy. In the second, Chekhov asks a young woman who works as a prostitute – trafficked from Ukraine – what went wrong with the world. Her reply is emotionless, chilling, almost incomprehensible because it's delivered in Russian. One phrase is repeated so often that its meaning becomes unmistakable. “Milliony smertyei”: millions die. Beneath the still surface of Wastwater lie countless lost bodies. The mud of the earth is mixed with blood.
It fascinates me that these plays are so convergent, for all their dissimilarity. And I wonder whether the key difference is that the characters making these gestures in Rebellato's play are simply more sympathetic: warm somehow, despite their brittle surfaces.
I thought I would write more here: about the passage in Dominic Dromgoole's book The Full Room, in which he compares the hope underscoring Chekhov's plays with the glib despair he sees in much modern theatre; about this assessment from another Flannery O'Connor essay, that a writer “may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by”. But this post is already too long, and something I encountered earlier tonight suddenly made me recognise where my real discomfort lies. Without having met him, I like Simon Stephens enormously, and have a lot of respect for him – even more after reading this. I wanted so much from Wastwater: everything Andrew Haydon found in it. And no amount of time or tangled thinking seems adequately to explain why I felt let down.
Note added 9 July 2021: following thediscovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse,
I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did
with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is
detailed inthis post from December that year,
in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he
caused,
for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him,
fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who
criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in
softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more
detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young
men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these
harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work
on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that
information in mind.
Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
I've been obsessed with Chris Goode for some years now, ever since seeing him perform Kiss of Life at the Edinburgh festival in – according to people who are better with dates than I am – 2002. Here was someone only a bit older than myself, on stage alone, shy and a bit bumbling, slowly weaving this beautiful, achingly sad story of a boy trying to commit suicide and the boy who saves him, how they fall in love and fall apart, using breath and the elements of the air as silver threads through the story, the whole thing homespun and gentle but intricately smart in its depiction of the fragility of human relationships, of the human mind, wearing its intelligence so lightly, so quietly moving it made me tremble.
In the years that followed I watched him dress up as a Morris dancer, lie on the floor in a friend's flat and outline his body in salt, deliver passages of internet gibberish with as much heartfelt emotion as sheets of poetry, and scatter jelly babies over my front garden, marvelling each time. The show of his I've seen most recently, The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley, had me in tears for a lot of its running time: Wound Man is the embodiment of a medieval illustration of a man embedded with daggers and swords; Shirley his sidekick, a lost teenager grieving for the older brother he worshipped, doggedly in love with the most handsome boy in school; together they seek out scenes of danger and disaster, arriving too late to “save” anyone, helping people by drawing out their pain and sorrow, because when hurt and frightened people gaze at Wound Man, they see someone who looks exactly how they feel.
Chris's blog is excellent, too: I would hazard a guess that a lot of it is written after midnight; there is that quality of while-the-city-dreams to his writing, a moonlit exuberance. In ways that might possibly embarrass him, I get a lot of sustenance from it: his New Year's Eve post felt like a call to arms – to link arms, that is; a manifesto for a new theatre but also much more than that, a new way of living with each other, talking to each other, reshaping the world together. “What would it feel like to not be afraid any more?” he asked. I've been trying ever since to find out.
Lately I've started using his blog as an arts guide. I bought Jill Johnston's book Admission Accomplished after reading about it in that NYE post, and had one of those moments when an elusive mental jigsaw piece slots into place, when you finally meet someone for whom you've been waiting for years. Words tumble from her apparently in free-form torrents, but always with an intention and purpose that are absolute, politically exhilarating (she was a lesbian feminist writing in the 1970s, how couldn't she be), and inspiring: my burgeoning intention to return to fanzine-writing, albeit for the interweb age, couldn't remain a daydream after that. What he wrote about the folk singer Sam Amidon in the same post so intrigued me that I scoured the music listings week after week until finally getting to see his gig at the Vortex, which was extraordinary: I reviewed it, and barely scratched the surface of what made him so fascinating to watch. Here's a random taster:
I don't remember – and haven't been able to find the post in which she was mentioned – what he wrote about the theatre-maker Rajni Shah, but the idea of her stayed in my memory persistently enough for me to book a ticket for Glorious at the Spill festival last week. For the first 30 minutes of the show, I was disappointed: Chris and I don't always see eye-to-eye (for me, our divergence is characterised by the fact that he loved Ontroerend Goed's Teenage Riot, which I loathed, and hates Little Bulb, whom I adore), and I thought we might not agree here, either. Glorious opens with Shah, encased in a stiff grey tube dress that spreads around her like a black sea (think Ursula the witch's outfit in The Little Mermaid, but less becoming), sombrely intoning songs about people and life and relationships, between text written and spoken by locals she met on Whitecross St a few months before. The texts were intermittently involving, the songs occasionally gleamed, but mostly it seemed humdrum, banal. Seats emptied during the interval and were not refilled.
But something magical happens in the second part. The stories are repeated, perhaps with a little more detail, perhaps continuing to a new chapter. And the songs are repeated, but this time with an orchestral backing, and Shah's voice no longer flat but warm, elegant, glowing. Her dress becomes a kind of Louise Bourgeois sculpture of moulded plastic and wrought metal and twisting fairy lights. Banality, the basic matter of our everyday lives – the breakfast parties, the arguments with our children, the shops on our streets, the political anxieties, the houses we've lived in for years, the cemeteries in which we'll end – is transformed and transcended. And in the third part text and songs are repeated again, slightly changed again, the register again shifted, the mood soft, gentle, soothing. One by one, everyone on the stage drifts off, and when it is empty we, the audience, are invited on. Those lives we were glimpsing? They were our lives. Those parties and arguments and anxieties and houses are ours.
There is a poem by William Blake – Auguries of Innocence – that I know of because, for reasons unfathomable to me now (a charity shop find of my mum's, I suppose), I had a copy of its first verse illuminated and framed and hanging on my bedroom wall when I was quite small. Looking at it now, I realise I've never read the whole thing. But I've carried its opening verse around with me for most of my life:
To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.
It came back to me watching Glorious, because that is what Shah shows us, and that is the gift she offers us. Don't be frightened of life, she reminds us. It's all we have.
Another of the theatre pieces I've seen in recent weeks that, in its surreptitious way, made me want to get started here was Honest by DC Moore. I'd been kicking myself for not seeing The Empire while it was at the Royal Court, more so after seeing this. Honest is excoriating, from start to finish: in its attack on the inefficiency of most civil servants (which had my husband, a civil servant, squirming with laughter); in its desperation at the schisms in society, of class and upbringing and education; most of all, in its portrayal of Dave, exquisitely played by Trystan Gravelle, as a man generally secure in his own sense of, at the very least, equanimity, but momentarily shattered by the overwhelming and incalculable horror of our world.
There was one bit in particular that I keep coming back to, and that's his description of Stockwell and Clapham. I live between the two, and Moore's evaluation of the area is faultless. It's late, and Dave is running along Clapham Road from Stockwell station:
A bit coz I'm mad but also because it's Stockwell and really quite scary.
I'd forgotten that.
And after what seems like eight years of horrible estates on my right and lovely Victorian houses on my left, I get to Clapham.
Clapham High Street.
It's...
It's like.
Every vaguely posh graduate that you ever thought was the biggest prick you'd ever met in your life and they've all had a meeting – an AGM – and decided to live in the same area.
On the rare occasions when I find myself on Clapham High Street after children's bedtime, and sometimes even in the daytime, that's exactly how I feel. Although, as my mum so kindly pointed out, I live here, so that must make me one of them. How shallow the foundations for our sense of superiority.
As an aside, last night I randomly put on the new album by the Leisure Society and had a bit of a moment with this song:
Thursday was one of those secret gifts of a day when the children are at nursery and I don't have a strict deadline, so I get to look at some art without distractions. To be fair, they're fairly accommodating: earlier in the week I dragged them to the Nancy Spero show at the Serpentine: tricky in terms of defining war and existentialism to a child, but a thrilling visual accompaniment to the Tune-Yards songs playing in my head. And last month we had a lot of fun together at the Pioneers of the Downtown Scene in the Barbican, where they took up camp in Gordon Matta-Clark's Open House, which, from their perspective, is like an overgrown and correctly scruffy doll's house, and an excellent venue for hide-and-seek.
One visit to the Downtown Scene isn't enough: not if you're as disorganised as me, and keep arriving just as Trisha Brown's dance piece Floor of the Forest is finishing. The re-created pieces that I have managed to see are quietly incredible: demanding yet playful, cleverly skewing perspectives, making the simplest human movement strange. For Walking on the Walls, the dancers stride along two walls in the gallery, leaping over the corner, carefully negotiating the crossing of paths, their ease and complicity with each other giving the whole thing a wonderful ordinariness, as though it were entirely normal to walk perpendicular to the rest of the world. Planes is even better: three dancers arrange themselves across a vertical board, on which images of New York taken from the air are projected. They look like people falling from a plane in the moments before pulling the parachute chord, suicides in freefall and splayed on the ground, astronauts calmly surveying the madness of earth; more abstractly, they reminded me of the geometric shapes formed in a kaleidoscope as it turns and turns.
What this show gives me most of all is an exhilarating sense of possibility: walking around it, I feel as though I could do anything. I love Laurie Anderson's subtly fierce, retaliatory photographs of men who catcalled her in the street, and the way Trisha Brown made the whole of New York, its streets and rooftops, even the outer walls of vertiginous apartment blocks, her dance floor. I love how they carved a space for themselves in the mire of downtown, how Gordon Matta-Clark made a restaurant which served just one meal at dinners, and photographed graffiti, and used an air rifle to shoot out the windows of a gallery in protest at the dire waste of the city's property. Were time unlimited, I would go to this show once a week, to absorb, to daydream, to refuel.
I did a bit of literal refuelling during the second visit, illicitly nibbling at a slice of cheesecake from a French patissier stationed in the market on nearby Whitecross St. I've become a bit obsessed with cheesecake of late, although this slice, exquisite as it was, reminded me why it's taken me years to overcome a prejudice against the stuff: it was so smooth and cloying, it was almost sickly. Over the past few weeks I've done a bit of experimenting with recipes, and have realised that the more cream cheese it contains, the smoother and more cloying it's going to be. As in so many things, Claudia Roden proves the doyenne of cheesecake: her recipe, in The Book of Jewish Food, is perfect, not least because it contains no cream cheese at all. As I'm constitutionally incapable of following recipes precisely, I tweaked it a bit when I made it, so here's my version. She says it's to serve 10-12, but I'm sure I could eat the whole thing on my own across three or four days if I really set my mind to it.
The perfect cheesecake
For the pastry base: 200g plain flour; 75g sugar; 100g butter, cut into pieces; one egg, lightly beaten. Mix sugar and flour, rub in butter, gently mix in the egg until it comes together in a soft dough. Wrap it and pop it in the fridge for 30 mins. Grease a 26cm springform tin, then line it with the pastry by pressing it in – it won't roll. Bake at 180/gas 4 for 30 minutes then leave to cool.
For the topping: 450g curd cheese; 200ml sour cream; 5 eggs, separated; 175g caster sugar; zest of one lemon; juice of half a lemon; splash of vanilla extract. Beat all the ingredients except the egg whites together until smooth. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold into the cheese mixture. Pour if over the cold pastry shell and bake at 150/gas 2 for an hour and a half. Leave it to cool in the oven with the door open. It sinks, like a souffle, but has a lovely, light, fluffy texture, and slips down much too easily.
And so, to business, and the primary purpose of this blog; that is, aside from the very important rendering of recipes (lemon/olive oil/rosemary cake on its way) and general wittering of nonsense. I was, for a spell, almost a theatre critic; I'm still a member of the theatre section of the Critics' Circle, and the large chunk of me that daily fears being painted as the fraud I really am expects to be kicked out any minute now, due to my general lack of published reviews. For months and months I've had no problem with this state of affairs: writing theatre reviews is an agonising business, fraught with responsibility. Instead, I've kept myself busy previewing work, interviewing theatre-makers, now and then sneaking into rehearsal rooms to wonder at the alchemical processes occurring there.
And then came The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the Kneehigh production. I saw it in preview at the Curve in Leicester, in the run-up to writing this feature, and loved it. LOVED IT. I was fully prepared not to, as the film has been embedded in my heart for over a decade, and the snatch of it I heard on Front Row sounded awful, slaughtered by the two leads' bright but fake Broadway voices. But within minutes of the industrial curtain rising over a neon-lit Cherbourg of dolls' houses, wrought iron and 1950s kitsch, I was in tears, and remained so to the bittersweet end.
Knowing the film so well, I felt sharply tuned to Emma Rice's changes, the subtle interpretations she brought to bear on the story. I'd never thought of Mme Emery feeling love for Roland Cassard other than as a rich and cultured husband for her daughter; here, the very sight of him sweeps her off her feet. Conversely, Rice's fidelity to some of the more absurd sequences in the film is lovely, notably when a distraught Genevieve is told to eat some fruit and someone throws her a Granny Smith. And there are so many dinky things in the staging, from the toy car driving through Cherbourg in the opening scene to the embroidered tea-towels used to mark the passage of time, gently underscoring what a small and everyday story this is.
I knew the show wasn't perfect. Sheldon Harnick's English translation, written in the 1970s for a New York production that bombed, sounds prosaic in the wrong way: the whole point of Jacques Demy's script is that the language is mundane, and perhaps to French ears the original dialogue sounds flat and humdrum, but Harnick's translation slumps where a stage demands that it soar. Sometimes the singers were drowned by the band; sometimes the acoustic musicians were drowned by the synthesisers. An entire scene between Mme Emery and Cassard was undermined by the exhibitionism of a chintz armchair. Unlike a lot of reviewers, I had no problem with Aunt Elise being played by a man; it was unfortunate, however, that at one point scenery requirements forced the actor out of her wheelchair and nimbly down a flight of stairs.
But these felt like mere quibbles in the face of the overwhelming, heart-wrenching loveliness and pain and purity of the story. It's so simple: Guy and Genevieve adore each other, external events force them apart, they meet other people, learn a different love, less carefree, more mature. Romance gives way to disillusionment, and then to feelings that are quieter, sensible, tender rather than explosive. Watching it, I fall apart. Not because I'm a hopeless romantic, because this is a story that tells us romance is a game played by children not yet grown. It's because it so unflinchingly shows us the banality of life and everything that is demanded of us to see the course: patience, compromise, stillness, acceptance.
It's a mystery to me how anyone could not love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in any incarnation, but enough critics have slammed the stage show that its early closure, on May 21, has already been announced. (As an aside, three cheers for the West End Whingers and Webcowgirl for loving it too.) I know writing about it here won't make the blindest difference. But it did remind me how much I adore the theatre. And that if you want something, there's no point in waiting for other people's permission to get it. Or, as Mme Emery so sagely shrieks, on peut toujour ecrire, no matter what.
