Deliq.

Thursday, 22 March 2012

one from the heart for the essex boy

It was the title, I think, that took me there. Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness. In my head it was the first play by David Eldridge I ever saw but, as ever, facts prove me wrong: I must have seen Festen at the Almeida first. Festen was terrific, but I saw that for Rufus Norris. Incomplete I saw because I wanted to make friends with Eldridge. Watching it, I did more than make friends: I became a little bit obsessed.

Incomplete is one of the plays that has defined my sense of what I want to see and feel in the theatre. It is a strange and tricky play, restless and slippery. The central character, Joey, has watched his mother die, is at odds with his father (has been all his life?); he's facing up to the commitment of marriage, battling a sense of worthlessness with volunteer work. And then Trevor, the teenage boy he is mentoring/reading with, dies, stabbed by some other children, bullies who wanted his camera. Senseless, pointless, materialistic violence. And Joey, who has been teetering on the edge, finally falls apart. But we aren't really told any of this. Eldridge weaves it into the torn and shredded fabric of the play. Joey is on stage all the time; other characters flash in and out of view, but it's hard to tell what's “real”, what's troubled, damaged memory. At any point, Trevor could be alive or dead. I can still feel the shivering excitement of watching all this unfold, the electric rush of piecing Joey together. Eldridge didn't just tell us about someone having a mental breakdown: he created that breakdown on stage, absorbing us in the experience.

Since then I've tried to see everything of Eldridge's that I can. But nothing ever matched the wonder and exhilaration of that “first” time. I'm more usually like this with bands, Pavement being the archetype: Slanted and Enchanted was everything to me, and it took about a decade before I would allow myself even to think that its follow-up, Crooked Rain, contained some lovely songs; anything beyond that, I find too upsettingly conventional to listen to. I'm not so extreme about Eldridge, but it's a similar thought process. Incomplete feels like the anomaly in his discography, the one great experiment. Of course, that's not at all fair: Under the Blue Sky, which I caught up with when it played, beautifully if a little glossily, in the West End in 2008, is brilliantly clever in structure, and who else would write a musical about Essex market boys, white van and all, for the main stage at the National? But nothing has held the challenge of Incomplete, the brain-fizzing demand.

I interviewed David in 2006, in the run-up to Market Boy, and have just raked through the transcript looking for something that I now realise he must have said off-tape: I remember telling him how much I'd loved Incomplete, and I'm sure he told me that it was a rather bruising experience, because the reviews were only middling (I've just found an extremely positive one, though, by Charlie Spencer: as ever, his empathy for the damaged runs deep). Did it put him off writing in such an oblique and elliptical way? I don't know, but when I watched The Knot of the Heart I found myself wondering if Eldridge and I were reaching a parting of the ways. My immense respect for Charlie Spencer's judgment in matters of addiction – he thought Knot was terrific – makes me question my response to this play, but I watched it in a knot of fury and frustration. Where Incomplete showed, Knot tells; rather than embedding its audience in a mental and emotional experience, Knot allows us to sit back and watch. When the nice middle-class audience around me tittered complacently at the joke about the nice middle-class mother scoring drugs for her daughter in a cafe in Islington, the play lost me completely. Knot is a well-crafted piece of writing, I'm sure, but the characters felt emphatically contrived to me, not felt, not true. Knot came from a place of art, not heart, and that's what I hated about it.

Although the good reviews (from reputable sources) got me excited, I felt nervous walking into In Basildon: on top of my problems with Knot, I've had mixed feelings about most of the shows I've seen on the Royal Court main stage in the past year. Sure enough, I found the gimmicky staging infuriating: the RC website gave no indication that my £20 seats would be in any way restricted in view, and yet huge chunks of the action were hidden from my husband, sitting at the end of aisle B. But the play! Oh, what an exquisite delight this play is. When the lights went up for the interval I was shocked: but it's only been playing for 20 minutes! In fact an hour had passed, whizzed by in a joy of perfectly formed characters, terrible jokes (“we used to call her Kronenbourg: she looks 16 from the back and 64 from the front”: SHOCKING!!! But funny), intense and contradictory emotion. There is a blip in the second half, when Tom, the middle-class boy with a private education, tries to take his girlfriend's family to task for their conservatism and self-interest, and it feels like a Today programme debate, but I even forgave it that, because every other word was so alive and real. Thinking back on it in the days afterwards, I realised it was quite a lot like The Slap – I don't normally read books on the bestseller list (you bet I'm too snobbish), but I'm really glad I read this, because it was provocative in just the right way. And the best thing about The Slap is that it's an intensely political novel, not because it tub-thumps, but because Christos Tsiolkas embeds his arguments about Australian identity and the education system and modern parenting and liberalism and masculinity and multiculturalism and the riven heart of the immigrant into the passing thoughts and everyday speech of his characters. The personal is political, profoundly so. That Tory v Labour debate instigated by Tom is the least satisfying bit of In Basildon because it feels staged, whereas the arguments about housing, work, social responsibility, charity, that emerge elsewhere in the play do so in the course of general family chat. They're not imposed on the characters: they come from within.

Just as form mirrored content in Incomplete, the disintegration of the mind reflected in the disintegration of the play's structure, so form satisfyingly mirrors content in Basildon. The play is conventional because its characters are; its four acts are as monolithic as the two feuding sisters, Maureen and Doreen, and the ancient grudge between them. I adored those two women: for their selfishness, their craftiness, their immensity. How I wish we could see more women like them on stage, in the cinema, anywhere in the media, presented with such care, so little judgment. And of course, of course, they reminded me so much of my own mum, in their fierceness and protectiveness – and their weakness. She did a lot of her growing up in Romford, too. I really, really want this play to transfer to the West End, if only so I can take my mum to see it next time she visits. I can't remember the last time I thought of a play, “My mum would love this”, and it felt like such a good and happy thing.

So many family resonances. My mum doesn't speak to her eldest and younger sisters, hasn't for years; it wasn't only money that poisoned those relationships, but it played its part. And how inexorable the enmity of family: I've tried to stop that bitterness souring my relationships with my cousins, but my feeble resistance has been mostly futile. So much friction, too, between me and my brother: I went to university, he didn't; I got all the opportunities to move up from the working class to the middle class, he didn't. At least, that's how he sees it. When Barry's wife Jackie lays into Shelley – and while I'm not precisely Shelley, there are definitely similarities – I couldn't stop myself squirming. My sister-in-law hasn't yet told me that I'm a stuck-up cunt, waltzing about the place like my shit don't stink, but it's there, an unspoken tension, between us. And when fists started flying, I was reminded, deliciously (because it is rather delicious, now it's more than two decades in the past) of the spate of family weddings in the 1980s that ended in punch-ups. God only knows what was happening there. (And no, I didn't love Basildon more than Knot because it reminded me of my own family: we've got the drugs and maternal self-delusion, too.)

In Basildon has made me besotted with David Eldridge again. For years, I've realised, I've been waiting for him to repeat Incomplete. I've let that foolishness go now. Instead, I've reminded myself how lucky I am: to be his contemporary, to be able to travel these roads at the same time as him. A bumpy ride, but a thrilling one.

Friday, 9 March 2012

a devotional

Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.

Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.

New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.

In the six years since I started going to Devoted and Disgruntled, my life has totally changed. Turned upside-down. In January 2006, I was working 11- or 12-hour days as deputy arts editor for the Guardian. I was having fascinating conversations with playwrights and other theatre-makers, smart and passionate and fierce people who wrote smart and passionate and stimulating copy, from whom I learned how to be a better editor and writer. What I wasn't doing, because when you work those hours you don't have a lot of time to yourself, was seeing much theatre, or doing much writing, either about theatre or anything else.

The prospect of D&D1 was exciting but daunting: would I fit in? As I've mentioned elsewhere, I nearly didn't go: if it hadn't been for my husband's cajolement, I would gladly have wasted the ticket price not to have my insecurities taxed. But D&D1 was brilliant. The discussions taking place – on women in theatre, working-class theatre, the role of critics, audiences, the Arts Council – were lively and inquiring. And although, as a critic, I was in a tiny minority, I didn't feel out of place, not least because several people told me directly how important it felt to them that someone from the mainstream media was present, interested and involved.

Seven months after D&D1, I left the Guardian desk job and became one of their writers. Seven months after that, I had my first child. Simultaneously, I was faced with two monumental questions: what kind of writer do I want to be? And what kind of mother do I want to be? (In case I haven't said this before, motherhood, or, to be more specific, the raising of children, hasn't come “naturally” to me. It requires constant attention, self-interrogation and searching, and is staggeringly hard work.) Unfortunately, child-bearing had such a devastating effect on my mental capacity – I have two kids, and with each one I could feel the brain cells dying away – that discovering answers to these questions, which, from a political standpoint at least, are proving to be not dissimilar, has been an agonisingly slow process.

My experiences at D&D are part of that process. There were years when I didn't go, or left early, because I didn't feel I could be away from the family for that long. After D&Ds 2 and 4, I felt anxious that the same discussions were happening year on year, the same paths of argument were being followed, only to end at the same brick walls. I had to remind myself that new people were coming to D&D each year, and change takes a long time to happen. Not least within myself.

This year, D&D7, is the first year I sensed genuine, exciting change. Some of that was evident in the room itself, primarily in the presence of children. Babies being breastfed. Babies in pushchairs. Children clustered in a makeshift creche, drawing, reading, passing the time. It has never once occurred to me to bring either of my children along. Admittedly, I haven't wanted to: I like to delude myself that it's possible, even preferable, to keep my work self and my mother self separate. But I wonder if I might have felt differently if babies and children had always been so present.

The difficulty of integrating motherhood and theatre work came up, as it always does, in the Women on Top session, this year called by producer Vicky Graham. Two positive examples were cited: Vicky Featherstone, who runs National Theatre of Scotland, temporarily moved her kids to a school in the Orkneys when she had to work there for three weeks. And Stella Duffy has adopted Open Space practice in her rehearsal rooms, creating an atmosphere of flexibility in which children are welcome, not shunned. Only two examples – but what brilliant examples. Over the years, I've heard more: the woman who now runs the BFI once told me that she would take her babies to meetings with her, because she was a single mum and had no choice; two decades on, you look at her executive team at the BFI and it's split 50/50 male/female. Earlier tonight I read this lovely piece by Third Angel's Hilary Foster on how the company integrated parenthood and theatre; Sam Butler of Fevered Sleep told me a similar story when I interviewed them for the acutely pitched On Ageing. Occasionally I'll even admit to creating my own examples: I've taken one baby or other with me to interviews, done various bits of Guardian writing with them playing beside my desk. Year after year at D&D, women have fretted and mourned that the biggest problem they face is in continuing work after becoming mothers. But it's happening, we're making it work, we're building new models. Maybe I'm just naive, but the gradual accruing of evidence for that fills me with hope.

I've been calling myself a feminist for almost 20 years now, and yet – like so many women? – I remain my own worst enemy. What troubles me is the ease with which my self-criticism/self-deprecation translates into a belief that I'm stupid/incapable/unworthy and so forth; and my tendency to expend energy in conforming to society, rather than the infinitely more difficult task of forging the new. At the D&D session, I found a route towards addressing that enemy within.

What set me off was Rebecca Atkinson-Lord of Ovalhouse saying: “I don't want to be a woman director, I just want to be a director.” Time and again I've heard women say that they don't want to be described as, appreciated as, women: not “woman writer” but simply “writer”; not “woman artist” but simply “artist”. As a teenager, assimilating the punk feminism of riot grrrl, I remember feeling really flummoxed by this paradox: on the one hand I wholly sympathised with the bold and strong and challenging women, like PJ Harvey or Kim Deal, who found the idea of talking about “women in rock”, and the imposition upon them of a feminine identity, both tedious and pointless; on the other, this felt to me like an unspoken rejection of feminism and by implication women, one I found not entirely comprehensible. As a music writer, I still grapple with this: when reviewing the Warpaint album, it irritated me that every single review called attention to the fact that they were all women, and I determined that I wouldn't, because I couldn't see what difference it made (when I saw them live, the difference became exhilaratingly clear to me, but to explain that would require reference to Helene Cixous, which makes me feel a bit fretty).

But when Rebecca said, “I don't want to be a woman director”, something in me went snap. Why not? Why shouldn't I want my female identity acknowledged? Why should women effectively desire to be ungendered? Why don't we want to shout about our difference from masculinity, from masculine norms? I know why: because embedded in that phrase “woman xxx” is a silent (only a). She's only a woman writer: she's not as good as a man, not as good as a writer who doesn't have to think about his gender, because it is the dominant one. She writes only about what is relevant to women, not to people. She can reveal to us only the female condition, not speak of and for the whole of humanity.

A few years ago, when researching a piece about black theatre in Britain, I went to a discussion hosted by Talawa at the Young Vic. Kwame Kwei-Armah was on the panel and used a phrase that struck me then and now as both useful and brilliant: as a writer, he said, I see the world “through my cultural lens”. I remember being utterly appalled when David Lan, who was chairing the panel, said that to write through a cultural lens was not to write universally. Surely no one has a “universal” viewpoint? Michael Frayn, in the introduction to his first collection of plays, expresses this point perfectly. Semi-apologising that his plays have the same dilemma as their central theme, he writes that it is: “the theme of philosophy, the central puzzle at the heart of all our speculations upon epistemology and perception, upon free will and determinism, upon the value-system in ethics and aesthetics, upon the nature of mathematics and God and language; it is the central puzzle of life. The dilemma is this: the world plainly exists independently of us – and yet it equally plainly exists only through our consciousness of it. We are circumstantial specks, insignificant local anomalies, amidst the vast structured fabric of the objective universe. And yet that universe has vastness only in relation to ourselves and the things around us – has structure only in so far as we give it expression in our perception and language – has objective form only in so far as we conceive it from our single standpoint in space and time.”

There is no such thing as a “universal” view of life: only a multitude of cultural lenses through which human existence is viewed. And if women keep stripping the female element from their cultural lens, refusing to emphasise and celebrate its woman-ness, I'm not sure that silent (only a) will ever be deleted.

There is a small irony that my thinking on this rests on the arguments of a black male, and a white male whose working-class father smoothed his son's passage to the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. So let's have some nurturing words from Adrienne Rich to redress the balance: “The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities. … For centuries daughters have been strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers [or: spirit-sisters], who have combined a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement towards further horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried strengths. It is this that has allowed us to survive...”

The Women on Top discussion took place on Saturday afternoon, but I sensed before then a change itching in my bones. I woke up that morning knowing, for the first time, that if I didn't call a session I wouldn't forgive myself. Even so, it took me 20 squirming minutes to find the courage to enter the circle. Even so, it took me five protracted minutes to find the courage to write the name of my session on a piece of paper. Its title, I guess, was my incitement to further horizons: What new dialogue can we set up between people who write about theatre and people who make it?

At every D&D so far, I've attended a session on the subject of theatre critics, agonising over star ratings, the homogeneous pool of critics, the lack of adventure in mainstream theatre coverage. These have all been important conversations, allowing people to share grievances and imagine the critical landscape they would like to inhabit, but they have also been impossible conversations, because they have demanded a change in mainstream media culture that no one attending D&D is in a position to effect. Setting up my session, I wrote its title on one sheet of paper, and on another wrote a list of subjects we would not be talking about: star ratings, Michael Billington, Twitter. I chose the words “people who write about theatre” deliberately: although I do review theatre for the Guardian occasionally, I don't consider myself a critic. I write mostly from the other side of press night, interviewing people and, when I'm extremely lucky, getting a glimpse of their rehearsal process. Increasingly, I feel my job is one of elucidating how theatre is made, and perhaps, when possible, what it means for it to be made that way.

It's one thing to do that for the Guardian. It's another thing to do that on my own terms, as I've discovered through working with Chris Goode. I can't even begin to express the magnitude of the gift Chris has given me. When he first opened the doors of his rehearsal process to me, in May last year, I thought I was simply walking into a room in which theatre was made. But I've come to appreciate that, rather like in one of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books, there is another landscape that overlaps, exists simultaneously with, the physical room: a place invisible, metaphysical, pulsing with love and danger and challenge. The writing I do as an explorer in that second landscape is different from anything I've done before. It has demanded everything of me. It was while sitting at the heart of that landscape, trying to articulate everything I saw and thought and felt in my 24 hours at Open House, that I discovered the need to talk with others about theatre writing, what new kinds of theatre writing we could make.

Chris is so receptive to dialogue between himself and theatre-writers, it didn't occur to me that anyone would receive this idea with suspicion. So I was taken aback by the fierceness with which some of the makers at the session supported the traditional barriers or distances that separate makers and writers. It reminded me again of what Jamie Wood said to me during Chris's Cendrars project: from the moment a piece of theatre enters the performance space, it is being appraised and judged and criticised. The rehearsal room is the only safe haven that theatre-makers have. The necessity of being respectful of and sympathetic towards that is absolute. But it's not just about that: there is a very deep feeling that a critic must remain impartial, by having limited contact with the makers of any given show, if they are to be able to critique it without being, as Lyn Gardner put it, compromised.

My notes from the session are here, so I won't give a blow-by-blow account for the rest. As I said there, it was a session full of questions, with no easy answers, which is just as it should be. Looking the notes up for the link, I was vaguely troubled that a piece I wrote about D&D2 prompted Karen Fricker to address some of those questions, and this was back in 2007. Once again, behind the times.

One of the questions raised was aimed directly at me: Jamie Wood wondered what I can contribute to the understanding of Chris's work, bearing in mind that – at least while he was blogging on Thompson's – he is a thorough and enviably eloquent articulator of his own processes, politics and purposes. Part of me wants to respond to this question by squeezing my eyes shut, clamping my hands over my ears, shaking my head and saying, “I don't know, I don't know”, over and over again. But being put on the spot in a public place was good for me. Instead I talked more generally about elucidating a view of the process that differs from the maker's and so might have the potential to widen their understanding of their own work; making connections between their work/processes and those of other theatre companies of whom they might not have direct experience; creating a record of how the show was made from an outside perspective, that might be more useful to “general” audiences (as opposed to other makers), especially those faced with abstruse or opaque or experimental work. What I didn't say, and I'm still thinking this through, is that maybe the theatre that is intensely personal – the kind of theatre that Chris makes – is short-changed by mainstream theatre criticism, where the perceived goal is an objectivity that eschews vulnerability and rejects emotional bias. What I write about Chris is as intensely personal as what he makes; like him, I strive to do that from a place of generosity, not arrogance.

I have three abiding regrets about D&D7. One is that a young Asian woman called Amardeep, making her way as a critic, convened a session called “widening the pool of theatre critics”, which clashed with mine. Our groups ended up merging, which must have been horribly frustrating for her, because the discussion she wanted to have was precisely the discussion I didn't want. This was her first D&D, and I hate the idea that she might feel that there is no space there for her. So this is a heartfelt public apology. As I said to her on the day, the pool of theatre critics widens every time someone who isn't white+male+middle-class jumps in. What's problematic is the desire to be a big fish in the pool. (I forgot to say that bit.)

My second regret is that I spent so long chatting with Jake Orr that I missed Rajni Shah's session on the value of doubt, reflection and uncertainty. Meeting Rajni was one of the great joys of D&D, and reading her notes on the session makes me wish I had been there.

Another session I missed, because it clashed with mine, was Tassos Stevens's A Surprise. I adore Tassos and would have loved to be there, and having read his description of it feel both awful and enormously grateful that anyone came to my session at all (it's a mark, I hope, of how passionately we felt about that potential dialogue). We clashed because I was avoiding another clash, with Jamie Wood's social media session, so it's nice to report that something positive came out of that. Daniel Bye came along and was so enthusiastic and persuasive about the benefits of Twitter that I joined up the next day. I've spent the past year and more having conversations with people about Twitter: the argument I had settled on was that I already had too much noise in my life, what with the incessant chatter of the children, and I couldn't bear to introduce any more. But as I checked Twitter in the playground, while sitting next to my son as he played with his train set, as I stood in the queue at Sainsbury's, and it led me to one thoughtful and grown-up piece of writing after another, I realised how wrong I'd been. All this time I thought it would tip me over the edge: in fact, it might have been my salvation.

Monday, 27 February 2012

how you do this is up to you

[As you will probably work out when reading it, this post has taken me over a month to write. Add the fact that Open House – which was part of the first Transform season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse – happened in June 2011, and this is horrifyingly overdue. Apologies to Chris Goode: I really didn't expect it to take so long! And the deepest, truest thanks to Chris, J, T, T and J for the welcome, the acceptance, the trust.]

Open House happened so many months ago that part of me questions the value in writing about it now, especially as Chris Goode did so, more eloquently and insightfully than I can, both in anticipation and retrospectively, over on Thompson's. But I've come to accept that it's a characteristic of this blog to be straggling along behind everybody else, even to enjoy the freedom I feel from the inexorable propulsion of theatre criticism, where the expectation is that you'll react to a show immediately then speed on to the next. My thoughts as I move from show to show are meandering and receptive to diversion, as themes and arguments are shared between them, or reflected in the films I'm watching or the books I'm reading or the art I'm seeing. It makes thinking about theatre a much less stuttery experience than it was when I was reviewing regularly. In any case, the second round of adventures with Chris Goode and Co is starting soon, and I wouldn't feel right embarking on that if I hadn't fully processed everything from round one.

So: my first impressions of arriving at Open House, West Yorkshire Playhouse, on Wednesday June 15, 2011, as I remember them in the cold glare of February, 2012. A weave of stairs and corridors to get to the rehearsal room. The resistant bulk of the door. Inside, a surprising brightness: the weather was stormy, the sky outside a burdensome grey, yet the rehearsal room felt spacious and light. Sheets of paper tacked haphazardly to the walls. Some quiet, absorbed activity close to a microphone: I can't remember how big the group was, but I think it was gathered around J, who was demonstrating how to fold, tuck, fold, turn, fold, open out, origami houses. Chairs, several. Small heaps of unmemorable clutter. Across the room, a low tent constructed from big sheets of white paper, two feet protruding from one side. (I later discovered they belonged to T.) The tantalising sensation that the room, and everyone and everything in it, was waiting, for the minutes to tick, tick past, for a call to action. And, coursing through my veins, the excited but faintly neurotic feeling I've had when house-hunting, when you walk across a stranger's threshold and look at the rooms and the windows and the books on the walls and ask yourself: could I live here? Where might my stuff go? What do I need to do to insinuate myself into these rooms? Do I fit in?

I arrived at about 6pm, shortly before the first public showing of the company's work so far. The core team – Chris, T, J, J and T – had been there since Monday; the doors had been open to all throughout that time, but this was their first attempt at, not staging exactly, but re-creating something of their activity for seated spectators. Already the team had expanded to absorb visitor-performers; intriguingly, all of them were women. To my mild amusement, if no one else's, the core players appeared entirely wrong-footed by the audience beginning to pour into the room unannounced on the dot of 6.57pm, so they could be seated in time for a 7pm start. Such is the stuff of conventional theatre, concerned with rules and customs and established patterns of behaviour for performers and audiences: stuff that wasn't quite appropriate here.

I found the showing a little befuddling at first: enjoyable, but enigmatic. So much seemed to be happening with so few signposts. Possibly that says more about my residual love of narrative than it does about the showing itself, which was – and I'm not sure to what degree I appreciated this on the day, and to what degree I understand this in retrospect – clearly organised, neatly patterned with visibly demarcated threads of activity or thought. Storytelling coloured one set of threads: in particular, some of the joiners-in were given space to recount their impressions of the room. Theresa, who has been coming to see shows at WYP for years, is retired, and will take any excuse to get out of the house, said she felt out of her depth on arriving on Monday, and a bit scared to come back. But she had come back, promptly, every day since. She was critical, a little acerbic, but also admiring; I loved the way she said, faintly combatively: “I've come for the ideas.” All I remember about Kylie is that she was younger; from her speech I scribbled down these notes: “when walked into room shocked by how silent it was / intimidated – but friendly – can come in, join in with own stuff”.

More stories in the Blue Peter Badge strand: someone – J, or perhaps T – had genuinely earned a Blue Peter badge in their youth, and so the company whipped up several copies and distributed them, whether to random audience members or people who had been in the rehearsal room, I forget. Intermittently through the show, people stepped up to tell us about the special skill or remarkable deed for which they had/would have been awarded their badge. “For waving not drowning,” said one, delightfully.

Harder to grasp immediately was the poetry, partly because its delivery was less concerned with making the words audible and more with communicating sensation: confrontational, romantic, melancholy. For one piece, Chris invited us to listen while lying down; I lay on my stomach, so when – as prompted by the text – I should have been gazing up at imaginary stars, instead I was counting the dust motes on the floor, which, I fear, reveals more about me than I would care to admit.

For all that it perplexed me, I found the poetry very moving – and the final section of the showing even more so. It began with a song: the audience clustered together, peering over shoulders to see the lyrics, Chris apologising that he hadn't thought to write out more copies, because he hadn't anticipated a crowd. As instructed, we flexed our happy-face muscles and sang, an exuberant chorus. When it ended, we drifted back to our seats and, just briefly, felt a little lost, forlorn at our separation. But then Pauline, who had arrived in the rehearsal room that morning, started dancing: a simple, repetitive dance, a few steps, flittering fingers, a turn, no more. Members of the core group started dancing. Someone I didn't recognise started dancing. Theresa took a stranger's hand and beckoned him to join in. T stopped doing this dance and started doing other moves. Pauline and J broke out, then slotted back in to the rhythm. I couldn't tell who had been in the rehearsal room earlier in the day or week and who had only just arrived to watch, who was audience and who was performer – because if such a division had even existed, it had just been eradicated.

The showing ended in a blur: T hurtling around the room, displacing people's bags and coats, before pushing the piano violently across the floor; T ripping posters from the wall and hurling them up elsewhere. A transformation was happening, but of/from what, to what? I didn't understand, didn't know how all the pieces fit together, what the connections were between the strands. But what I did understand, adore, was the generosity of the invitation to others, however long they had been in the room, to perform, with all the instilling of confidence and rejection of obstacles inherent in that invitation; the variety of voices – not just oral but physical – giving those performances; the electrifying sense that anything was possible and the tangible energy this generated. I felt part of a community, not of spectators watching makers, but a united group of theatre-lovers working together to make something happen, even if we didn't necessarily know what that something might be.

I spent a long time fretting that I had approached Open House back-to-front: I should have started with the rehearsal and ended with the showing. But again, that's custom, conditioning; the pervasive but spurious notion that it's a final product – let's call it the show unveiled on press night – that counts, not the journey to get there (let alone the journey a show might continue to take long after it's been reviewed). Halfway through the rehearsal on Thursday, I scribbled this in my notebook: “seeing retrospectively how the showing is a representation of what happened in the room – not so much a created thing as an agglomeration of movements and multiple creations”. To think of the showing as a final product is to approach Open House in the wrong spirit entirely.

A more useful thought is this: Open House was designed to be alive to chance. We want theatre to be alive – but anything living is constantly changing, so how do you allow for that mutability on stage? As in, night after night, so that the show is never a fixed entity but changes in accordance with the weather and the news and the people who walk through the door? (Coincidentally, I write this having just seen Uninvited Guests' extraordinary Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, which asks similar questions and finds astoundingly effective routes to an answer.) And how do you rehearse that liveness, that receptivity to chance and change? What are you doing in the room?

In a sense, Thursday was the perfect day to be in the rehearsal room, because the Wednesday showing had surpassed Chris and co's expectations – and now they had to repeat it. Or not. There was a tension in the room all day, between, as T explained to Pauline, “starting from scratch and showing something completely different, or being lazy and showing the same thing”. Much of that tension came from a place of tiredness, a muscle-ache of frustration with what T, again, described to Louisa, as they lay together on the floor, as “quite a demand – burden – in rehearsal to create SOMETHING”. It was assuaged with a lot of quiet, recuperative mooching and mulling. For minutes on end, nothing happened. Time passed and passed and passed. And then someone would move, and that would inspire someone else to move, and suddenly, breathtakingly, everything would happen.

For me, this was the most palpable tension in the room: the spine-tingling awareness that, any minute, the merest wisp of a thought might trigger an explosion of activity. It made me (and, I'm sure, other visitors) reluctant to walk out, even for a few minutes, for fear of missing anything. In my memory, music inspired a lot of that activity, be it T strumming aimlessly on a guitar or T putting on Sigur Ros and proceeding to read-rap lines from that day's paper as an accompaniment. (And – for someone who also writes about pop music – there was something particularly engrossing about Chris's later attempts to find the right piece of music to communicate with and draw out each action, witnessing for myself the changes in mood he achieved, for instance with Pauline's dance, by shifting the soundtrack from a jaunty but level pop song by the Coral to a more pulsing, quivering, soaring track by Orbital. There was a cherishable moment when he told the assembled group that he thought the Wedding Present were exactly what was needed for a proposed sequence of hurling across the floor on kneepads, and I was the only person nodding frantically in agreement, because I too have an indie-schmindie past – who am I kidding when I say past? – and I knew instantly he was right.)

The most mesmerising, exhilarating sequence of the day began with J dancing, a jittery, tempestuous dance, to Bowie's Modern Love played at heart-pounding volume. As the music faded, J quietly narrated one of the pieces of text pinned to the wall (I think the one titled The Lover and the Revolutionary), while T, who had earlier divested himself of his jeans, transformed his trousers into a sculpture on the floor, folding and arranging them as though this, too, were origami. And then T held J. They wrapped their limbs around each other so tightly, it was difficult to tell where each tangled body ended and began. T read from Thornton Wilder's Our Town (it was one of the inspiration pieces for Open House), finishing with the words: “You need to pass this on.” And then a word poem began, J and T taking turns to contribute a single word: “blue-heart-like-blossom-in-spring-soft-as-a-fire-sky-like-grinning-heather”. It was strange, jagged, nonsensical, absorbing, beautiful. T transcribed their words, folded the piece of paper into an origami house, and J read out from it, the word-poem reconfigured into a new, random order. And on, and on, until they ran out of ideas, or their energy fizzled out, as though someone had pulled a plug.

Watching all this, it struck me that the core team shared a mindset, a thought process, that was, not private exactly, but particular to them, from which visitors – no matter how welcomed, how empowered to contribute – remained excluded. But the team rarely gave this difference open expression, and if they did it was when alone, checking in with each other after the showing, or before visitors arrived for the day's rehearsal. The rough notes I have about this weren't written at the time of speaking but of sudden remembering several hours later: “participation – but on our terms // something T talked about – still difficult, getting people to come into their world”. Their world was naked, mercurial, impetuous, rigorous, uninhibited, abandoned. Visitors were clearly comfortable creating their own work, trying out their own ideas; as the core team, one by one, left for lunch and returned, they marvelled at how the room seemed to have an energy of its own, such that they could walk away and things would still be created. Visitors had confidence, then, but only so much; by comparison with the core team they were diffident, cautious, contained. It's worth emphasising that this was simply something I noticed, and not something voiced in the room. What the core team did articulate, sweetly, with a perceptible note of awe, was admiration and supportive interest – particularly for Pauline's dance exercises, impulses and routines. And if that “participation – but on our terms” thought was spoken aloud in any way, it was probably like this: in another of my favourite sequences of the day, T buzzed hither and thither, impish and preoccupied, taping pieces of paper to the floor, to the wall, pushing the piano below the central beam so he could climb up to stick the last pieces there. Written on them was a message, communicated piecemeal, to be understood by anyone curious enough to follow their higgledy path: “How you do this is up to you.”

That curiously mobile piano became emblematic for me of another key feature of Open House: the fluidity of the space. Posters went up, fell down, were moved around; chairs were pushed against the wall, then tugged into a circle in the middle of the room. By the time Chris returned from lunch, the room had been reconfigured, redecorated. Individual personalities betrayed themselves in their interactions with the space, whether it was Theresa's incessant tidying, taking lunch plates back to the cafe and, more finically, moving posters back to what she felt to be their original positions, or J throwing off his underpants, neglecting to put them back on when getting dressed again, and forgetting to pick them up for several hours. All small things, but all subtly affecting the perception of the people who entered there. And how vital, how heartening, that such extremes of personal approach could be simultaneously accommodated, that there was space for conservatism, even if it was, arguably, antithetical to the spirit of the room.

And me, what difference did I make being there, curled up like a small animal or squashed beneath chairs, failing always to melt into invisibility? It was piercingly odd, being still and silent in that room: I felt inimical. Not to the people: such was the atmosphere of gentle inclusivity, it was perfectly fine for visitors to sit and watch and not participate at all. It was the energy of the room I was denying, the tendrils of change and effect with a force of their own, which kept reaching out to me to take part, and which I kept pushing away. It wasn't until the end of my day, shortly before I had to leave for the train back home, that I got up and joined in, with a run-through of the dance that had whisked so many people to their feet the night before. The sense of relief and release in doing so was immense. Apart from that, my sole contribution was when T unexpectedly asked me to give him three words, words that had previously been spoken aloud in the room. What came immediately to my head were: “blue” (colour or mood?), “project” (noun or verb?) and “mystify”. As he skipped off to make something of them, I felt as though I had unconsciously exposed myself.

There was another time T came and sat with me, just for a chat, when he asked me what I was thinking. I told him the truth: I was wondering, for the umpteenth time that day, how someone would feel walking in for the first time. He asked what had prompted this thought: I suspected he assumed it was watching J take off his clothes and stand naked, crushed, trembling, clutching his jeans to his face. But it wasn't that. That was action, demonstration, externalised thought. As Kylie had intimated the day before, it was the lengthy periods of quiet, of calm and self-absorption, when everyone in the room seemed to be reflecting, or recharging, or simply resting, that were really intimidating. This is how I'd written the thought in my notebook much earlier in the day:

how would someone feel walking in here for the first time?

T playing guitar

T quavery singing

Pauline making tape outlines on the floor

J at the piano

baffling

strange

inconsequential

T locking J into chairs

You couldn't slip into that scene without feeling like an intruder, feeling faintly voyeuristic. No, that's not it: you couldn't slip into that scene without having to encounter yourself. You could hear your heartbeat in that quiet, feel each thought shiver across your brain. With nothing to watch, no complicated action to absorb, you inevitably turn inwards. As mentioned in an earlier CG&C post, I thought a lot about courage while I was in Leeds: the courage it takes to let someone build a cage of chairs around you; to strip yourself of all the carapaces you grow to shield you from the world; to try out ideas knowing they might fail; to reveal yourself – I mean mentally, more than physically – in the company of strangers; to accept an invitation; to decide that something is not for you, however much you long for it to be. The periods of silence demanded more of that courage, because they gave you nowhere to hide.

Although the rehearsal felt largely chaotic, as with the showing, that chaos wasn't wholly unstructured (although T, I think, would have been happier if it the showing especially were more free-form – the phrase he used, delightfully, was along the lines of “in a constant state of jam”). Intermittently through the day, Chris held check-in sessions, to find out how everyone was feeling, what they wanted to explore or achieve. Each time there was an emphasis on liveness: a desire to create in the moment, so that what audiences saw could only have happened at that minute on that day in that room. There was conflict: over how to position the chairs, what risks were being taken by stepping in front of the audience, how noisy and obstreperous they should be and how much they should be holding the audience's hands. But it was the conflict of competing theatrical ideologies that I can't pretend to have comprehended sufficiently to represent here. In any case, what impressed itself upon me more wasn't disunity but the harmony made possible by the selflessness of all participants. Strikingly, in the later check-in sessions, when the group discussed ideas and actions that had emerged in the past few hours, no one spoke of their own work but passionately of everybody else's: T described how T had done this, J related how J had done that. In the simplest, directest way it underscored how nothing in this piece was individual, everything was collective. The final check-in was devoted to sorting out a kind of set-list for that evening's showing. I had to leave for London an hour before it started, so didn't get to see how it played out, but Chris assured me later it was absolutely terrible.

Each day ended with the core group alone, without any of the new participants, decompressing, checking out. I was at the Wednesday check-out, and what I talked to the group about then is what I keep coming back to here. That incredible sense of community. That idea that anyone, at any point, could join in, could break away, could participate, could observe, and that every one of those decisions could be made autonomously, but with the profound understanding that it would affect the atmosphere and affect the group. How rare this is in the theatre. And the more I dwell on it, the more rare it seems outside of it, too.

I mean something quite particular by that. The final line in the song Chris wrote for us to sing went like this: “We all live every day in an open house.” I can't say the words made much of an impression at the time: they were cheerful but, you know, pretty anodyne. But the more I read through my notebook from those 24 hours, preparing to write this, the more those words reached out to me. To live in an open house. To reject competition, selfishness, secrecy, all the back-stabbing and hidden corruption of our world. To think more widely than the nuclear family, or indeed the extended family. To think about the implications of our actions within the home on the planet (my husband works in climate change, and has coherent and terrifying arguments for why behaviour within the home needs to change if human life is to be sustainable). To think about our responsibility for each other. Not occasionally, but every single day. The final moments of Open House made me cry, and it's taken a lot of digging to figure out what made them so emotional for me. It wasn't just the feeling of community, but the implication of what you can achieve with community. Change.

On my desk I have a (fake) Blue Peter badge. I got it for being part of Open House.

Thursday, 26 January 2012

my head's in a haze

You'd think I'd have Shrew out of my system by now, but apparently not. I wrote the last post much too quickly, hurling it out before moving on to the next thing, so it's super-scrappy and missed out whole strands of argument, many of which emerged in the comments on the piece in G2. The one that has particularly bugged me is the idea that Petruchio does Katherine a favour: he shows her that to treat people violently, to thrash out at others not necessarily indiscriminately, but as an externalised expression of your own self-loathing, is unacceptable and merely reinforces your own unhappiness. It's one thing for her to tie up her sister's hands and clout her: that's what siblings are for (spoken like a true older sister). But Kate also smashes a lute over Hortensio's head, is unable to express herself other than rudely, demands respect from her father while showing none. Lisa Dillon was good on this: she thinks what Katherine achieves with Petruchio is “a growth and a maturity. She's disgracefully immature to begin with. Most of the time she deserves what she gets [ie the epithets of shrew and mad], because she's fuelling it all the time. But she finds a place of balance, for the first time ever in her life, because of this man.”

Approach the play with this understanding and you can read Petruchio's violence completely differently: as a show, designed to make Katherine rethink her own behaviour. Nichola McAuliffe suggests (and I think she's right, that it's there, if subtly, in the text) that Petruchio's servants are bewildered by his erratic, pugnacious behaviour: he doesn't usually treat them this way, and the point of him doing so is to reflect Katherine back at herself. And it works: Katherine, in standing up for the servants, begins to appreciate the value of respect. She finds in herself calm, and patience, and a kind of gratitude: she realises how much in life she has taken for granted before now. If Petruchio has killed something in her, it's her toxic rage at the world – and only kindness could assuage that. There was something lovely Kathryn Hunter said: Katherine's story is “the journey of a person who's learned how to play again”. To begin with, “she's rebelling against the kind of constraints that are expected of her, to get married and to conform, she's hitting against that and is angry with everyone, to the extent that she's lost her sense of humour. I think something happens in their relationship, it suddenly clicks and she gets it back, and then she's able to love him and say, 'So you want me to play that game? OK, I'll play it.' She finds a freedom within constraints. She finds freedom.” It's the freedom of happiness and security; OK, it's the freedom of a traditionally structured marriage, where Petruchio is her “keeper”, but 400-odd years ago, that was pretty much the best a woman could hope for.

I'm starting to feel like Shrew is an itch that will never sufficiently be scratched. So I'm going to stop – although first, there was something else that came out of the piece that has troubled me a lot. The day it was published I had an email from Tim Crouch, querying the assumptions projected by my throwaway comment that Bailey's production is the third from the RSC in a decade, fourth if you count his adaptation for young people. We had both agreed, while chatting on the phone, that it was really sad that only Dominic Cavendish had reviewed his production, and that this was symptomatic of the lack of value placed on work for children and teenagers. And the way I'd phrased myself, it looked as though I was collaborating in the same devaluation that I usually bemoan. I've been feeling entirely ashamed of myself: I knew I was being glib even as I wrote it, and Tim was absolutely right to call me on it.

Believe it or not, I've been thinking about stuff other than Shrew over the past week. I've been mulling on L'Immediat, which I saw at the Barbican with Lyn Gardner, and probably really annoyed her with all my fidgeting. I found the show exhausting, really draining to watch. The first sequence – Matt Trueman made a point similar to this – is like the entirety of Michael Frayn's Noises Off condensed into 10 minutes of stomach-churning chaos. When one of the performers started scrambling up a tower of cardboard boxes that I hadn't even noticed, despite it reaching up to the lighting rig, I instinctively pushed myself right back into my chair to brace myself against its inevitable collapse. Where I disagree with Matt is in finding the rest of the show a deflation of that first sequence. What follows is quieter, but all the more desperate for it. There is an extraordinary, devastating scene when the cast attempt to re-set the stage, and someone's arm emerges from the rubble. It's as though we're seeing the survivor of an earthquake, or a bomb, reaching out for help, praying to be saved – but instead of pulling the person out, the rest of the cast merely shrug and pile furniture above the trapped body, higher and higher, until what they've created is a pyre (let's burn humanity at the stake!), a tower of landfill (see the detritus of materialism!), a curiously hopeful – because it is secure, this structure, it's architecturally sound – sculpture constructed from the flotsam and jetsam of our lives (not dissimilar to the exhilarating, and themselves farcical, creations of Phyllida Barlow). With newspapers full of images of the Costa Concordia lying on its side in the sea, it was hard to watch the tilting sequence – slowly, deliberately, everything on stage, furniture and bodies and black satin curtains and lights and props, is tilted to the same 30-degree angle – and not think of sinking ships. The agonising, funny in a toe-curling way, sketch of people fighting to reach a plastic bottle, struggling against their own refractory bodies, competing and losing and yet never allowing themselves to be defeated, had the clang of Beckett about it: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” For all its humanity, it's an oddly inhumane piece, furiously demanding of its performers, so precisely choreographed that you're loathe to blink in case you miss a detail, even if that detail exposes the fragility of the timing, the vulnerability of the enterprise. My exhaustion was that of undivided attention; I found it draining because, for all the laughter, it is a relentlessly sorrowful work.

It's been a good week for extracurricular activities, too. I've made an infinitesimally small leap – more of a nudge, really – towards finally fulfilling some sewing projects, with progress on the all-new basic pattern block, designed to fit perfectly my all-new, still surprising, occasionally demoralising, post-childbearing shape. I've tried out another basic, this one from the awe-inspiring Pattern Magic books, and my Mum, who is herself a magician with patterns, from a combination of experience and formidable instinct, gave me a hand with the fitting over Christmas. There is such quick, calm efficiency about her as she folds and creases the paper to shift the darts and eliminate excess fabric; the process is as delicate, transparent, yet mystifying, as origami. On Tuesday I cut out a toile from the edited pattern; if it fits then I'll be all set for the 40s/50s dress-making class that starts next term.

Tap class, which started three weeks ago, is unspeakably brilliant. I spend the entire time there giddy and grinning and glowing fuchsia-pink, partly because it's bloody hard and I'm always getting the steps wrong (I have no instant aptitude for intricate, particularly repetitive, body movements; I had the same problem trying to play guitar when I was a teenager, although back then I had no patience for practice, either: at least I've now acquired that), partly because it's surprisingly good exercise. My route home takes me past Crazy for You, which I saw in December: it was so adorable, cheerful and spirited and depression-defying (the narrative itself is, plus I had only just left the Actionettes), that I left feeling almost effervescent and started looking for tap classes the next day. Somewhat unfortunately, the route also takes me past the Delauney; I sidled in yesterday and am relieved to report that the coconut and pineapple dacquoise didn't taste quite as good as it looked: the pineapple puree was too sweet, and made the bottom layer of coconut macaroon soggy where it should have been crisp. There's still the cheesecake and the sachertorte to try before I dismiss the place outright, but chances are moderate that it won't become a weekly compulsion, which would be ruinous in more ways than one. It's bad enough that I can't go within 200 paces of Maison Bertaux without popping in for a macaroon. I did, however, exceedingly enjoy eating the dacquoise while waiting for the bus, licking every smudge of cream from my fingers, standing outside Boots, directly in front of a large advertisement for half-price weight-watching products. It's the little things in life …

Lots of musical activity this week, too. I finally listened to the new Andrew Bird and it's exquisite, so here's a song from that:

and the Laura Gibson album, La Grande: she's not someone I've paid much attention to before, but this song is brilliant, all shooting stars and Amazon queens and wild animals prowling through the undergrowth:

After a lot of avoiding him, because on first listen (several months ago) he honestly just seemed scary, I suddenly clicked with DM Stith, and had an especially heady moment with Fire of Birds, so here's that:

A breakthrough, too, with Wilco's The Whole Love, which I'd shaken hands with a couple of times last year, but hadn't taken the time to chat to: I don't think it will ever be a close friend like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Summerteeth, but we'll keep in touch.

Honestly, no wonder I was accused this week of knowing nothing about Motown. It's in the comments below my review of Martha Reeves, a show I really tried to be positive about, but failed. I suspected disaster might be afoot when I went to the toilets before the show began and there were leopard-print tiles on the walls. One unexpected consequence of reading How To Be a Woman is that I now have a disquieting desire for a leopard-print coat (page 215, number one on the list of fashion rules: Leopardskin is a neutral. Oh, the power of suggestion). I thought it was a vague fancy that could be easily silenced, but then I met up with the magical Betty Clarke and wore hers (vintage, an ebay buy, calf-length, very luxurious, but the fur was the softest, palest grey colour – I'd ruin it within minutes) and the desire became all-consuming. Of course, when a thought like that enters your brain, you become weirdly possessed (OK, maybe it's just me): now it seems everywhere I go I spot another one. Mostly they are too short, too straight, too modern-looking, so clearly I'm going to have to make my own. The picture I have in my mind is knee-length, fitted to the waist but flaring out, with a big, sweeping collar. I've sewn with leopard-print fake fur before, making a cave-woman frock for an Actionettes show in Benidorm (a multitude of don't asks), and it's blessedly easy, primarily because it doesn't fray. Knowing me, the coat will be ready just in time for summer in 2016.

Anyway, it was fine seeing leopard-print coats everywhere, but the minute I saw these leopard-print tiles I remembered that hilarious, terrifying riff in Mark O'Rowe's coruscating Howie the Rookie, about the – was it American Indian? South American? - people who believe that your death will be presaged by some vision that will inexorably present itself to you once, twice, thrice, its import unknown until death deals its fatal blow. Like I say, I'm susceptible – and the leopard-print tiles made me pause, and shiver, just slightly.

I won't repeat what I thought of Martha's singing, there's no need. Still, one good thing did come of that show. When she played Heatwave, it was all I could do to stop myself leaping out of my chair and doing what's affectionately known in the Actionettes' camp as the Brucie; when she started demonstrating the pony and the swim and the mashed potato and the funky chicken, my heart began to ache and wouldn't stop. The truth is, the past two months of not being an Actionette have been miserable, and they haven't even been doing that much. So, I've rejoined. Yay! In celebration, here is a completely ridiculous video of go-go girls: it's from a Greek film, whose name translates, splendidly, as Ah That's My Wife.

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

vanity project 5: the taming of the shrew

Even at interview stage, I knew my piece for G2 on The Taming of the Shrew was going to strain at the limits of its word count and demand extra space here. There were so many contradictions to wade through and attempt to resolve; even people who seemed essentially to agree didn't agree in quite the same way. It's not a play I've seen in a major production, and although I'm sure I reviewed it on the fringe once for Time Out, I don't remember anything about that show. I re-read it a few days before starting to interview and initially struggled to see why it's considered such a problem, at least in terms of the characteristics deemed problematic: I couldn't see the brutality, the disgusting misogyny. The way Baptista favours one daughter over another is obviously repulsive, but that's about bad parenting, not the sanctity of the male hegemony. As I read on, however, lines kept snagging me: I simply didn't know which way to take them. Petruchio's capricious behaviour on his wedding day felt incomprehensible, as did his sleep/food deprivation plan. When Katherine tells him she will henceforth call the sun the moon, or any blessed thing he might choose, I couldn't tell if the voice I heard in my head was wry and amused or weary and resigned. And her final speech, reminding wives that they owe their husbands a duty of “love, fair looks and true obedience”, made me shiver. When I got married, the ceremony text was perfunctory and words such as obey were significantly absent. Katherine's speech may celebrate mutual respect, but it's a respect founded on, in Petruchio's words, a sense of the “awful rule and right supremacy” that put men at the head of the family and women at their feet.

Talking to people who have staged the play and played the roles exploded my idea of it wide open. I found myself in total sympathy with those who understand Shrew as a love story: an uneasy, inscrutable, passionate depiction of what it is to link your hand to someone else's and, no matter how much life buffets you, never let go. Something I wanted to get into the piece, but had to edit out at writing stage, was how even people who have performed in violent productions that present Petruchio as a misogynist felt unconvinced by that interpretation. Michelle Gomez, talking about Conall Morrison's contentious 2008 production for the RSC, said his reading “made sense to me academically and intellectually”, but also felt too emphatic in its relentless violence. “There has to be some humour injected into that dynamic between Kate and Petruchio and we worked very hard to take it out,” she said. “I think we were working against it – I think it's in there.”

Her words echoed what Tim Crouch (lovely, lovely Tim Crouch, whom I didn't even manage to fit into the finished piece) and David Farr said. Talking about that tricky sun and moon exchange, Tim said: “She decides to play with him, so they play together. I don't think she acquiesces: she joins in and that feels like they find an equality.” And on Kate's final speech: “To ironise it, or to deliver it as an act of coercion seems to go against the quality of the words.” Farr, too, felt: “If you go for the ending that is purely punitive and pessimistic, I think you're fighting an inherent spirit in the writing. If you just play the negative, ie she is now just a bullied subservient housewife figure, that may work intellectually but it's not what's actually happening emotionally.”

But what is actually happening? The fascinating thing is that, beyond the consensus that it's a love story, there is no proper consensus – and if some of the misogyny camp suspect they're bending the play one way, some of the love people confess they're bending it another. There was something Lucy Bailey said, when talking about how Petruchio dominates the second half, and Kate is constantly in reaction, that struck me: “If you played it just as it was on the page, the play would tip very quickly into all the difficult areas that people struggle with.” Edward Hall said much the same thing: if you play it as it is written, you get violence and you get misogyny and you get searing irony at the end; you do get love, too, but it's a Stockholm Syndrome love. My suspicion (and really, what the hell do I know?) is that what you don't get is any character growth, only stasis (Petruchio) and reduction (Katherine). Maybe we love-readers are just hopeless romantics, or maybe we think there's more to Shakespeare's characters than that.

For me, Tim Crouch summed up the problem with the misogyny-because-it's-on-the-page reading perfectly. He once played Petruchio himself, in America, in a production set in the Wild West; he was a man-with-no-name figure, the kind of shoot-a-guy-soon-as-look-at-him outsider that makes cowboy movies so compulsive. His treatment of Kate was “an act of subjugation” and her final speech was delivered through tears. What didn't work for him about this was that “the final speech got fixed absolutely, and I felt it lost its ambiguity. Everything became one note, and the note is subjugation, male supremacy and domination.” In the love reading, those notes are still played – but the music is more complicated, and much more intriguing.

Anyway, enough preamble. This is the piece I wrote, before I edited it to fit the word count, which was before the Guardian edited it to fit the page. It's a bit messy and no doubt benefited from the trim but at this stage there doesn't seem much point in trying to be a fraction less verbose. As an aside, another fantastic thing that came of writing this piece was locating the original “personal is political” essay from 1969 on the interweb, a thrilling essay that I should have looked up years ago.

A man acquires a rich but headstrong woman for his bride. At the wedding he punches the priest; afterwards he refuses to attend the family party. He drags his bewildered wife through mud to his country house, where he starves her, deprives her of sleep and contradicts every word she says. By the time they return to her father's home, the woman's spirit has been quashed: she is meek and submissive, ready to put her hand beneath her husband's foot.

When you strip The Taming of the Shrew of its comic sub-plot, in which a bevy of disguised lovers woo a charming social beauty, and focus on the bare bones of the story of wild-cat Katherine and her “tamer”, Petruchio, Shakespeare's early play looks like a nasty piece of work. Indeed, critics and academics have spent much of the past century denouncing it as barbarous, offensive and misogynistic. Yet Shrew is remarkably popular with audiences: the production opening in Stratford-upon-Avon this week is the Royal Shakespeare Company's third (fourth, if you count last year's adaptation for young audiences) in less than a decade. Either theatregoers are secret sadists, who like nothing better of an evening than to witness a spot of wife-bashing, or there's more to The Taming of the Shrew than meets the eye.

Over the past two decades, productions of the play have divided fairly neatly into two camps. On one side are the performances that emphasise the brutality of Kate and Petruchio's relationship. In this interpretation, The Taming of the Shrew can be considered, in director Edward Hall's words, “theatre of cruelty”. His all-male production in 2007 “followed the text through to its bitterest conclusion. Look at what Shakespeare has written: Kate is starved of sleep, beaten, refused food.” Too often, he argues, this abuse is played for laughs, when what should be being communicated is the extent of Katherine's suffering.

What exonerates the play for Hall is that he doesn't think Shakespeare was himself being misogynistic in his portrayal of female subjugation, but questioning the values of his patriarchal society. “He's challenging an audience's expectations of how a woman is supposed to behave. What if, as a human being, she doesn't want to roll over and do what the man wants, as was expected in Shakespeare's day? I actually think he's championing the woman's rights. He reminds us that we need to treat each other with respect.”

The other, less stomach-churning interpretation of Kate and Petruchio's relationship is that theirs is a deeply felt, curiously misunderstood love story. Lucy Bailey, who is directing the new RSC production, believes the attraction between the pair is instant, and what unfolds is “all foreplay to one event, which is to get these two people together into bed”. For this reading to work, Bailey says, it's vital that Petruchio never appears to be superior to Katherine. “In rehearsals the play quickly becomes odd if Petruchio starts to lecture, becomes the educator, or takes any moral position. It becomes punitive, and you start to think: 'This is dead and ghastly.' It is a fantastic battle of the sexes, in which Katherine must always win as well as Petruchio – and it's because they won't allow each other to win that the game continues.”

The trouble with the love-at-first-sight version is that it's even harder to understand why Petruchio should mistreat Katherine so. Gregory Doran, who directed the play for the RSC in 2003, suggests that Petruchio doesn't know how to handle their relationship, because he is as much of an outcast as Katherine is. He points out that both characters are frequently described as mad by the people around them: “Madness is a way that society can label you and put you in a bin. That's what Kate and Petruchio are struggling against – but they find somebody else in their bin. I don't think it's describing an ideal relationship, but it is a real relationship.”

Like Doran, director David Farr, who staged the play in 2002, shifting the setting to 1950s America, believes that Shakespeare offers a key to Petruchio's mental imbalance by telling us that his father has recently died. “Here is a man in grief,” says Farr, “who takes out his disaffection and anger with the world on other people almost as an experiment.” That idea of experimenting is crucial to David Caves, who is playing Petruchio in Bailey's production. He finds the classic characterisation of Petruchio as an innate bully abhorrent; he prefers to see Petruchio as a man whose pride is piqued by encountering a woman capable of outwitting him. “If he dishes something out to her, she dishes it back to him twice as bad. He's constantly having to improvise.”

Nichola McAuliffe, who has played Katherine twice and hopes to direct the play herself one day, believes we misread Petruchio's actions, because we don't understand his references to falconry. She points to Petruchio's key speech in which he relates how he will “kill a wife with kindness”, by depriving Katherine of sleep and food. It is, she argues, “a falconer's speech”: it describes how falcons and other birds of prey are socialised. “If you know anything about falconry, you would know that you have to go through this with the bird: if it's cruel, it's cruel to yourself, too.” Sure enough, Shakespeare gives the impression that it is Petruchio himself keeping Katherine awake – and when she doesn't eat, he doesn't either.

There remains a difficulty in these “torture” scenes: Katharine barely speaks, whereas Petruchio never shuts up. According to Lisa Dillon, who plays Katherine in Bailey's production, this is what makes sense of Katherine's long final speech, in which she advises wives to be gentle towards their husbands. “If you look at the language she uses, all the way into the second half, it's odd,” says Dillon. “The verse is staccato, there's lots of saying 'what?' and 'why?' to people. You get the feeling that nobody ever listens to her. But Petruchio gives her the power of speech and language: he gives her proper freedom to speak. That is not a woman being crushed.”

What's so appealing about the love interpretation is that Shrew becomes, not a sappy romance, but a more complex critique of society and attitudes to women, which were changing in Shakespeare's time and have continued to change ever since. Bailey and Dillon argue that Katherine is rescued by Petruchio: so censured was her unfeminine boldness that if she didn't marry him, says Dillon, “she would go from shrew to witch and end her days as a madwoman. He saves her from herself, and from a structured society in which she's never going to change.”

Kathryn Hunter, who played Katherine at the Globe in 2003, says what rankled about the character was that “her father was going to marry her off after a single interview”. For McAuliffe, too, it is the bartering of daughters that looks really misogynistic in the play. Katherine's sister, Bianca, is so popular that their father, Baptista, is able to pit her suitors against each other, promising her hand to the man who has most to offer financially. And, as a portrait of womanhood, spirited Katherine is far preferable to flirty, wily Bianca. As Michelle Gomez, who played Katherine for the RSC in 2008, puts it: “Bianca is the manipulative, backstabbing, awful version of what women are, fluttering her eyelids to get what she wants. She gives women a very bad name.”

One of the abiding tenets of 20th-century feminism was that the personal is political. Perhaps what's so difficult for modern feminist audiences of The Taming of the Shrew is remembering that, in this play, the personal is just personal. Katherine's final speech, says Bailey, “is a love gift. It's so clarifying: out of the chaos and small-mindedness of this town that suffocates both of them, Kate and Petruchio invent a way forward that's entirely for themselves. She's not talking about other people, she wouldn't behave like this if she were married to anyone else. She behaves like this at this moment with him. That's why it's wrong to mix it up with a weird sexual political statement: it's a personal statement.”

Not only that, says McAuliffe, but it's a recognisable statement. “When she says, I'll put my hand under your foot, that's basically what I say to my husband: I will put my hand under your foot if you want – but I trust you not to ask me to.” Shrew, she says, is a warts-and-all portrait of how a marriage works: “You make room for each other, you fit their holes and they fit yours. Yes, they drive you potty – but that's between you two, you are a united front. That's what Kate and Petruchio learn. They are one person by the end, like a falconer with his bird.”

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