all the beautiful things in the world

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

i can't tell you where we're going

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lemon, olive oil and rosemary cake

150ml olive oil

3 eggs

150ml sour cream

juice and rind of two lemons

125g caster sugar

50g demerara sugar

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

100g flour

150g polenta

2 tsp baking powder

half tsp bicarb of soda

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

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

excuses, excuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

one from the heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

come on, chemicals

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.

i bury my head in the browny-red earth

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

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

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

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

All that killing

Ancient history

Modern history

Vortex

Shipwreck

Even that of the Titanic I read about in the paper

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

Because I'm still such a really bad poet

Because the universe rushes over me

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

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

And I'm scared.

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

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

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

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

hark the damesel, for she swooneth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.