attended six plays, one film, one art
exhibition and three panel discussions;
written two album reviews, five posts
for two different blogs, published a long post on another blog that
I'd been working on for some weeks, and written/co-delivered a
presentation at a panel discussion;
hosted two Theatre Clubs;
done a job interview while sitting in a
stationary cupboard;
got the job (a writing gig for
December, nice);
danced at two practices with the
Actionettes;
(and spent time reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, both inspiring, in different ways);
(and finally encountered the brilliance of Borgen);
(and done the school runs, and organised childcare, and cooked dinners);
(I think I've just realised why I'm always so tired);
and I honestly think in all of that the
thing I'm most proud of doing is making a really nice pomegranate
cake on Sunday morning. A few weeks ago I had a glut of pomegranates
and the usual recipe books (Claudia Roden, Sophie Grigson,
Nigel'n'Nigella) weren't offering any inspiration, so I sent my magic
friend Samantha a text asking for suggestions and she offered: a
trifle made of lemon cake layered with cherries stewed in sherry,
orange flower water and pomegranate molasses and Greek yoghurt mixed
with more orange flower water, then drizzled with pomegranate
molasses and pistachios; a pavlova with rosewater in the meringue and
the cream and pomegranates on top; a sponge cake with them in the
cream and on top; and Nigella's pomegranate cake. See why she's
magic? I made a less complicated version of the trifle and very good
it was too.
On Sunday I had another glut and this
time turned to the Nigella recipe. And, as usual, decided to mess
around with it. Instead of just putting the pomegranates/syrup on top
at the end, I turned it into a caramelised upside-down pomegranate
cake, which was just as well because on removing it from the oven I
dropped it face-down on the oven door, and it would have been ruined
if the topping hadn't been on the bottom. So this is my recipe, and
not for the first time it's dedicated to Sam, with love and mutual
heritage:
Upside-down pomegranate cake
4 eggs, separated
150g caster sugar
100g ground almonds
50g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
half tsp mixed spice
half tsp almond essence
for the topping:
75g brown sugar
20g butter
1 tblsp pomegranate molasses
seeds of 2 pomegranates
the oven was at roughly 170C for this,
and I cook it in a round 19cm springform cake tin lined with baking
parchment
Get the seeds out of the pomegranates
first.
Put the sugar into a saucepan on the
lowest possible heat to melt. While doing the
beating/whisking/folding jobs that follow, keep an eye on the sugar
so it doesn't burn, and when about a third of it is melted add the
pomegranate molasses and butter. It needs stirring to stop it from
sticking. Or turning into a lump.
Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until
they're pale and thick, then fold in the almonds, flour, baking
powder, mixed spice and almond essence – I ended up being fairly
vigorous with it, because it gets pretty stiff. Whisk the egg whites
until you can turn the bowl upside-down without them falling out,
stir as much of them as is required into the rest of the mixture to
loosen it, then fold in the rest.
Pour the caramel into the cake tin and
swirl it around to cover the bottom of the tin. Tip all the
pomegranate seeds on top, then spoon the cake mixture on top of that.
Bake for about 45/50 minutes until a tester comes out clean. The
caramel oozes into the cake mixture, the sponge is really light
because it hasn't got any butter, the almond essence makes it taste a
bit like macaroons and the mixed spice got me ready for Christmas.
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 Mini Grey book Egg
Drop, an impatient egg decides to fly by leaping from the top of
a very tall tower, 583 steps high. A double spread of illustrated
polaroids depicts the many futile attempts to put him back together
again. They try string, sticky tape, tomato soup, chewing gum.
“Nothing really worked”, says the narrator, mournfully, “and
shells don't heal.”
I
went to see Dirty Market's Oxbow Lakes hoping it would fix me. There
was a pertinence to its marketing – “Oxbow Lakes dramatises a
child's experience of his parents' conflicted feelings towards him
and themselves,” no less – that made me think this play would
KNOW. That it was coming from a place of knowing, because Dirty
Market's directors, Georgina Sowerby and Jon Lee, are a couple, and
have children. In the event, the play felt like the string and sticky
tape, tomato soup and chewing gum that prove so ineffective in
healing shells, because I saw it when so broken by a trip to London
Zoo – can I just pause here for a diatribe against London Zoo? What
a fucking nightmare of capitalist extortion. As soon as you walk in –
and even getting through the gates costs enough to fill a fridge and
food cupboard – it's trying to prise money from you. Take the kids
to the toilet and there's the shop, taunting them. Just past the
entrance are face-painting and a bouncy castle and fairground rides,
all at extra cost. And then everywhere you go there are merchandise
stalls, so there's no escape from objects of obscure desire that
attract your children ineluctably, far more than the animals, most of
whom are asleep anyway. I HATE IT. And the most recent visit was so
traumatic that a) I never want to go back, not even to see again how
beautiful giraffes' eyelashes are and how much otters love to lick
each other's genitals, and b) I arrived at Oxbow Lakes drowning in my
unfitness as a mother.
Oxbow
Lakes starts with a party, an attempt at a party, poisoned by the
child refusing to fall asleep for fear of the shadowy figures lurking
in the dark, and the husband and wife (played by Jon and Georgina)
arguing over their responsibility in voices choked by the frustration
that cloaks guilt: the guilt of regret, of longing, of feeling
inadequate to the task of raising another human. The guilt of knowing
that a child is supposed to expand your horizons and perspective, yet
feeling instead a narrowing of self and existence. How appropriate
that this first scene plays out on an impossibly skinny rectangle of
stage, the child a black shadow on a white curtain, casting a pall on
everything the adults attempt to do.
But
what starts as gruesome kitchen-sink realism (there's even a Look
Back in Anger ironing board) transforms into grotesque fairy tale
when we're moved behind the curtain to the kitsch horror landscape of
Oxbow Lakes. The child has fallen into a bedtime story and
disappeared into the night; his parents chase after him, mother
frantic, Dad inept, both thwarted by a constabulary that would
control them and creepy snobbish locals whose nefarious motives are
obscure. There was menace here, but also comedy: characters styled as
though in a John Waters film, all quiffs and kookiness, those played
by Benedict Hopper in particular dry as dead leaves and daffy as
panto. The deeper the parents sink into this murky, cartoon world –
and again, the set is really considered, a series of painted flats in
a magnified Victorian toy theatre – the more estranged they become,
until one of them literally no longer recognises the other. Are they
really searching for the child? Or a notion of happiness that might
not even exist?
There
was something problematic about the transition to the final space: a
clumsiness in the handling of the audience, who were left behind then
admonished for not following sooner; it slowed us down and
interrupted the tension. The space we move into is the most menacing
yet; I recall plastic sheeting, looming witches, lights swinging, a
ribbon rope our only protection, a huge sheela-na-gig icon with
gaping, lairy mouth – was it threatening to eat the parents?
Destroy them at least. It is their last chance to recognise the
distance between the real life they have come to think of as a
nightmare, and this place of horror and fear; and because this is a
kind fairy story, they do. They rediscover their love for each other,
and for their child; they cry out, with relief, with hope, with
expressions of love. My broken heart trembled, and longed to feel a
similar redemption.
I
don't know Georgina or Jon, but we twitter-spoke the next day, after
which I sent Georgina an email, a tribute to her bravery I guess; I
wanted to confess that I'd seen my darkest soul splayed across the
piece, and ask if making it had helped her find a state of grace. She
admitted in return that in some respects it worsened the strain,
consuming both her and Jon through the summer, as they wrote and
rehearsed and built the set and cleaned the venue, leaving scant
space for their seething children (who, it transpires, are the same
age as mine). For all that it felt like an ensemble work –
particularly in the middle section, where a looseness in the text
conveyed the multiple collaborative voices engaged in its creation –
Oxbow Lakes felt acutely personal, too: a slightly jumbled,
self-conscious, but willingly truthful portrait of the struggle to
accept that parenting is a difficult, messy business, a concatenation
of tiny defeats that puncture the spirits, intermingled with a joy so
extreme it turns you to jelly. Strawberry jelly, that the kids
consume whole. My life met theirs in that performance space; at
points I'd glance around the younger people in the audience,
wondering: do you have children? Do you want them? What does this
story mean to you? Are you reading this as lived experience? As a
cautionary tale?
*
From
the oily murk of Oxbow Lakes to the white soil of Albemarle. Two
weeks of October were spent in a rehearsal room with Chris Goode and
Company, watching a new phase of research and development into this
big strange illogical re-creation of a dream. And immediately I
think: no, stop now, don't pin it down in writing, don't define it
when – like a child – it still has so much growing to do. But
this is just a snapshot of Albemarle in its infancy, taken not to
forget. And Albemarle is so like a child at the moment, so like my
four-year-old son: curious, and open, and full of love for the
individuals who nurture it; unafraid to be naked, or to speak its
mind and heart truthfully, without coding or restraint.
There
were times in the rehearsal room when I found that truthfulness
unbearable. On Monday when I watched H take off her
clothes and mark with black biro every aspect of her body that has
caused her anxiety, tracing its lingering scars of uneasy existence,
evidence of brutality against herself, and inflicted on her by a
capitalist, competitive society. On the same day, J talked
about the battle to avoid invasive surgery when transitioning from
male to female, the lack of care or respect demonstrated by doctors
whose only concern is to fix a body within rigid conservative notions
of gender. These events were coloured by a piece of text Chris had
written, which he read out on a day when I wasn't in the room,
detailing one by one the childhood experiences that had estranged him
from his body, and filled him with shame. The unbearable became
two-fold: there is so much pain in so many people, and so much noise
in my own head that I find hard to block out. As ever, I took refuge
in music, and for most of the fortnight I had this song in my head:
And
when Lou Reed died, at the end of the fortnight, it was quietly
replaced with this song:
And
yet, the body was also the site of immense joy in the rehearsal room.
There was the shared pleasure of dancing, dancing like no one is
watching, dancing to discover freedom. (In the dream that he's
re-creating, Chris is directing a dance show – something he's
always wanted, but been too afraid, to do.) There was the
brain-testing delight of watching J speak in sign language,
each moment of comprehension a happy surprise. (J plays Chris'
neighbour, Simon Pegg – it's a dream, OK? – and is integral to
the utopia Chris is creating within the piece, in which ethnicity,
gender, disability, sexuality, are not crushed by iron hierarchical
structures that promote primarily the white middle-class heterosexual
able-bodied “normal” male, but co-exist in more fluid, generous
social arrangements.) There was, for J – who plays Chris' mum (in
the dream no longer dead) – and Chris, a shared experience of
taking control of the body's representation, inspiring to witness.
J, I sense from her blog, is engaged in a long slow process of
stripping away the carapace she built around herself in unhappy
decades of living as a man; on a day when I wasn't in the room, she
did this literally, flinging off her clothes in a fervour of relief
at feeling accepted, admired, for the complicated, transgender being
that she is. On a day when I was in the room, I saw Chris –
fleetingly, in glimpses, because I was busy swirling around like a
gush of water – move in a way I've never seen him move before: he's
usually so tip-toey and timid, but here he ran and leapt and
frolicked like a foal discovering the power of its feet. Afterwards
we sat as a group and talked about this transformation, and he looked
suddenly years younger, luminous.
We
talked about healing, too, and self-indulgence. This was an indulgent
room. Many days began with a massage, with taking the time to care
for someone quietly, physically, listening to their body's needs. How
is that work? All these cries from the soul: isn't that what therapy
is for? At the end of the fortnight, Albemarle travelled to Leeds for
a further stage of R&D, this time with the dancers; one of them,
J, also works in construction, and quickly demonstrated his
impatience with the touchy-feely London room. When do builders, or
supermarket workers, or train drivers, get the space to sift through
crushing experiences of scorn and betrayal, of bullying and shame?
It's
easy to condemn artists for abysmal narcissism. It's much harder to
attempt to answer why capitalist structures foster scorn, betrayal,
bullying and shame – and what kind of society could we build in
which people no longer cause or feel this pain? A society in which
consideration is more important than competition? We carry within
ourselves what we need to make utopia, Chris suggested on that
luminous day, but it's beaten down by violence, brutality and fear.
While
working with Chris, I read a book by American writer and queer
activist Sarah Schulman that was like having my eyes scoured with
brillo pads: I saw the world around me, and myself, differently, more
clearly, afterwards. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a
Lost Imagination looks at the impact of Aids on the queer, trans,
immigrant, artist and in myriad ways other communities of New York in
the 1980s, its acceleration of a two-fold process of gentrification:
the same physical gentrification that I've been witnessing across
London in my lifetime, whereby areas once home to huddle-muddle
social groups become colonised by white moneyed middle-classes,
squeezing and pricing everyone else either out of the area or into
isolation and inferiority; and a mental gentrification no less
recognisable, whereby what she scathingly describes as “supremacy
ideology” promotes a homogenised culture in which corporate,
non-individual, non-antagonistic expression are given social
dominance while radicalism or dissent are either punitively
restricted or, once the mind is successfully gentrified, not
attempted at all. It's an uncomfortable read, because it demands
accountability, and because it cherishes discomfort:
“Gentrified
happiness is often available to us in return for collusion with
injustice. We go along with it, usually, because of the privilege of
dominance, which is the privilege not to notice how our way of living
affects less powerful people. … Depending on our caste and context,
opportunities are regularly presented that enable us to achieve more
safety by exploiting unjust systems. … We get to feel better
precisely because someone else doesn't have what they need.
“Conveniently
there is a billion-dollar self-help industry that tells us to treat
the very skewed frame as if it were neutral: Accept it. Be grateful
for it. Do not resist. … If you are the demographic that the frame
was designed to inflate, accepting it will help you maximise its
privileges. But if you are the demographic that the frame was
designed to defeat or marginalise, accepting it makes it more
effective for its intended beneficiaries. …
“We
live with an idea of happiness that is based in other people's
diminishment. But we do not address this because we hold an idea of
happiness that … excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying
things that are true but which might make us and others
uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be
uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the
revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy.”
The
Gentrification of the Mind, p166-7
For
Schulman, people have “an unquestionable responsibility” to take
care of others, “even if it makes you uncomfortable”. People have
a right to individuated expression. People need to recognise that the
perceptions of the privileged, prioritised in most cultural activity,
are not the only reality. She speaks throughout from personal
experience, subjective anecdote, painful memory. And yet, there is
nothing indulgent about this book. It is a book that names and
exposes the homogenising social frameworks that deny difference,
disobedience, diversity, and begins to argue a path (back) towards
utopia. Reading this book, I saw another glimpse of Albemarle.
*
Indulgence
is a ticklish word within Chris Goode and Co. I wasn't involved in
the rehearsal process for Scottee's show The Worst of Scottee earlier
this year, which Chris directed, but understand that it came up a lot
in that room, too. In The Worst, Scottee looks at four key
experiences in his life, times when he lied, stole, took advantage of
people, and did something in shy innocence with such cataclysmic
negative effect that he's still living with the damage. Now and then,
during the show, we see a filmed interview with someone Scottee knew
during that time; the videos feel pointless, because all these people
have long since moved on – but that, of course, is the point. No
one bears as much ill-will towards Scottee as Scottee himself.
I
thought The Worst was extraordinary. I know Scottee a little bit –
I interviewed
him
early last year for the Guardian, about his brilliant beauty pageant
(Ham)Burger Queen, and he surprised me: the minuscule awareness I had
of his work had given me the now-incomprehensible impression that
he'd be arrogant, aggressive, mocking; in fact he was friendly and
thoughtful, if a touch businesslike, and admirably cogent in his
argument for a live-art-meets-light-entertainment brand of
performance that reaches out to people like his mum and his
neighbours on the council estate where he lives – but I don't think
knowing him much affected my response to The Worst, except perhaps in
making me worry for his health while he's touring it. Part of what
makes it extraordinary is its lacerating honesty; that, and the frame
Scottee (and Chris) have created for its articulation. Scottee
performs almost the entire thing in a mock-up photobooth, the kind of
place teenagers used to go to take selfies before smartphones changed
everything. He talks not directly to us but to the camera, to himself
and to an anonymous world, a remove that allows impossible truths to
be voiced aloud. He could be taking confession, except the only place
absolution is going to come from is himself. Until now, what he's
given himself instead is metamorphosis, from the fucked-up teenager
with an eating disorder finding oblivion in alcohol and drugs to
outrageously glam femme-chub Scottee; The Worst opens with him decked
out in a piss-take funeral suit and black face paint, obstreperously
singing Cry Me a River while fake tears soak his ruffled shirt. By
the end, he has stripped away clothes, paint, skin, and his
vulnerability is shocking.
“Time
is a healer,” Matt Trueman wrote in his
review
of The Worst, “and it’s here that the show sidesteps any
suggestion of self-indulgence.” I found this interesting, not least
because Matt is one of three people who described Chris' show
God/Head as self-indulgent, and he used the same word privately to me
as an indictment of Wuthering Heights, which we saw on the same night
at Battersea Arts Centre, almost at the end of my Albemarle
fortnight. How curious, I thought. Wuthering Heights wasn't
indulgent. It was healing.
Wuthering
Heights made me laugh and flinch and ache and cry. I want to try and
remember it moment by moment, because none of the reviews I've read
(with the exception of Catherine
Love's)
quite captures its richness, but I didn't take notes, so what follows
is a jumble. It starts with a horse (Nick Anderson) whinnying as it
gallops around the perimeter of the space, acknowledging and
accepting its entrapment, while three men spruce themselves up in
early-Victorian suits. The horse is monogamous, proud yet caring,
with great respect for his ancestors who lived outwith captivity (how
I love the cadence of that phrase). This, it's clear, is Heathcliff's
horse: a measure of the man. But this is not – so Peter McMaster,
who performs in and directed the piece, acknowledges in his
introduction – a straightforward adaptation of Heathcliff's story.
Peter realises this will trouble some people, but hopes they
understand that this performance is being given to them with love.
We
know these men love us because they recognise that Wuthering Heights,
for a lot of people, means Kate Bush's batshriek wail just as much as
Emily Bronte's novel, and within five minutes of the show starting
it's blaring through the sound system and they're dancing:
Because
I'm quite stupid, it wasn't until I read the reviews that I realised
they were re-creating that video; in any case, I was too busy wanting
to have sex with all of them right there to think about postmodern
cultural cut-and-paste. I think this scene does something remarkable:
it's light and it's funny and it's adorable, and in being so it shows
you everything that is potentially attractive about self-possessed,
confident, cheeky, preening, smarmy, lascivious masculinity. The
masculinity that doesn't know its own privilege because it never
needs to question it. Big, bold, butter-wouldn't-melt masculinity
that gets away with murder, the murder of people and planet enacted
day after day in the name of patriarchal society, because it's so
seductive.
It's
a masculinity the four men carry inside them: another early scene has
them coughing as though drilling to the depths of their torsos to
dislodge it. One morning in the Albemarle rehearsal room, Jamie Wood
talked diffidently of his inner caveman, whose savage existence
troubles him sometimes, but protects him, too. What is lost in the
rejection of traditional, “natural” masculinity? What is gained?
There
are two relays: in the first, the four men each describe an incident
that contributed to shaping their ideas of masculinity. I remember
Thom Scullion's: he recalled walking hand-in-hand with his father,
aged about seven, and his father saying to him, “One day you won't
want to do this any more.” Was his father preparing his son for
manly isolationism, or preparing himself for inevitable rejection?
Thom's story reminded me of a man I spoke to when taking part in
Rosana Cade's brilliant Walking:Holding in August at Forest Fringe,
a man in his 60s who had spent decades not holding hands with people,
not even his wife, because when he was a child his father had told
him men don't do such things.
In
the second, the four take turns to comment on each other as though
delivering a form sheet on a race horse: height, weight, key
characteristics. He's in an 11-year relationship – wooh! Yeah! Slap
him on the arse! He's a fan of masturbation – louder cheers!
Champion pose! Slap him on the arse! In this sequence they are
footballers scoring hard-fought goals, Usain Bolt on winning gold at
the Olympics: self-aggrandising, swaggering, playing down weakness.
The arse-slapping was perfectly judged: it is the bodily contact that
alpha males find acceptable, anything else being gay and therefore
abhorrent.
There
is a slender thread running through all of this: a longing to father
and be fathered. Another brief diversion: the word fathering
inevitably makes me think of this song:
Hand-in-hand
with that, this song:
Why
Mark Mulcahy never became as famous as Jeff Buckley defeats me.
What
next? Other masculine archetypes emerge: Thom stands in the centre of
the circle, stiff-backed, authoritarian, a monolithic, unemotional
figure who starts out generic, an industrialist, a grandfather, a
begetter of individuals and so of society, but slowly transmogrifies
into the no less authoritarian or monolithic Heathcliff, doomed both
to perpetuate this figure and measure himself against it. The horse
talks about Heathcliff and himself, in doing so emphasising that the
field boundaries that contain his existence are replicated in his
master's life. Heathcliff's ancestors may have lived outwith
captivity, but Heathcliff is enclosed within a patriarchy that is
slowly adapting to prudish Victorian morality and the slow rise of
capitalism.
The
irony is that to Cathy, Heathcliff represents a freedom, one she
can't have. In one of the few sections that feel close to the novel,
Cathy and Nelly – played by (I think) Murray Wason and Peter,
dressed in long silken dresses that gape at the back, zips stuck
beneath shoulder blades – Cathy and Nelly commune by candlelight:
Cathy tells Nelly that she has agreed to marry Linton, but she's
afraid, because she loves Heathcliff. She sinks to the floor, howling
with the wildness and transformational potential of that love: “I
love him because he's more me than I am myself.” I love him because
with him I could reject or take on the world. I love him because he
fills the air with extra oxygen. I love him even though he's trouble,
because he's trouble, because I want to make trouble. I love him
because we make each other better, stronger, braver people. There
isn't enough of that kind of love in the world.
What
else? Cathy's death, in Heathcliff's arms, him begging, desperate,
wanting – but it's too late, because his pride murdered her, and
his social position, and his jealousy, and his wildness, and his
freedom. Her body is laid out in the centre of the circle and, in
recognition of that dreary violence, the other three sing a murder
ballad, Down in the Willow Garden, as though recanting a liturgy:
Another
diversion: it's a source of some regret to me how much I love murder
ballads. I have a sickening catalogue in my head of women strangled,
stabbed, slashed at the neck, shot, left in a ravine, dumped in a
lake, hidden beneath bracken, abandoned, decomposing, pecked at by
birds of prey, sometimes because they had the temerity to look at or
kiss or fuck another man, sometimes for no reason at all. I hate
their violence, their misogyny, their jealous black emotion – and
yet, there is a magnetic pull to their lurching rhythms and bleak
chords that turns my head and makes me almost giddy. Songs in which
the perpetrator is a woman are rare but I secretly, savagely relish
them; these are two of my favourites:
It's
after the murder ballad, I think, that Wuthering Heights fractures.
Peter, still dressed as Nelly, walks up to Heathcliff, stands maybe a
foot away from him, and begins to ask a series of questions, calmly
at first, gradually becoming agitated, enraged, convulsed by pain.
It's important that he's both male and female now, himself and a
character; the questions could be spoken by Nelly to Heathcliff, by
women or by men, by an individual or by society as a whole:
Are
you feeling alone?
Do
you like yourself?
Do
you think you are a good person?
Do
you see yourself in nature?
Do
you get scared?
What
do you think about sex?
What
do you really think about sex?
What
makes you feel aggressive?
Do
you value women?
You
know the things that happen in the night to women in parks or other
dark places – do you think you could ever be the person who does
that?
Are
you homophobic?
Have
you ever fantasized over a man?
Do
you believe men and women are different?
Do
you enjoy having power?
Do
you know how to manipulate people?
When
are you at your most vulnerable?
What
will you never mention out loud?
What
do you care about?
Are
you trapped?
Does
it make you sick?
Deflated?
Proud?
Anxious?
Horny?
Angry?
Ashamed?
Sorry?
Will
it change?
Is
it changing?
How
long will it be like this?
How
long?
There
is something still to do isn’t there?
What
is it?
That's
maybe a quarter of the text; Peter reads it from sheets of paper, his
voice growing hoarse as anger and anguish rip through his chest.
Thom/Heathcliff stands motionless in the face of this hurricane,
features barely flinching, but every word is like a dagger, and at
just the moment when you think, surely he can't take any more, you
realise that Cathy has risen and is standing behind him, her arms
wrapped around his chest, not quite protecting him, or even forgiving
him, but supporting him, reassuring him that this needs to be faced.
One body holding another, beginning a process of healing. Creating a
new framework of existence in which care is key.
What
happens next? The scene is so excoriating, a prolonged electric
shock, I don't quite remember. Soon Peter and Murray put their suits
back on and there's a sequence in which Heathcliff searches for
Cathy. Murray, or was it Thom, stands in the centre, the other three
at corners of the room, and directs them in an outward-facing scream
of longing: you're looking for her with hope, frustration,
embarrassment, the agony of lost hope, the burning memory of someone
you once loved, shame. Each time he adds a set of instructions to
characterise their cries, one of them stops screaming and quietly
watches him, knowing that he risks revealing more and more of
himself. There is confusion here, and pain, and nothing in the way of
answers, only a knowing that if we – not just men – don't name
all these feelings, all the frustration, hope, embarrassment, agony,
burning memories, shame, nothing can change.
Somewhere
here I think they talk about what they want for the future. As men.
As fathers. And the final words belong to the horse, still calm,
still proud, understanding and accepting that his freedom from
captivity will come with age, and death. For men, for us, it has to
happen before then.
So
no, Wuthering Heights isn't an adaptation: it's a multi-authored
autobiography, a social study, an inquiry, an exorcism, a challenge,
a howl of pain. And yes, I know Peter McMaster: we met a year ago by
chance, when Dialogue was resident at BAC, and now I bring into his
work an ongoing conversation with him that is sometimes
light-hearted, sometimes intense, sometimes political, sometimes
personal, always full of respect, admiration and trust. One strand of
that conversation deals with his belief that there is a masculine
responsibility not to rely on feminism to fix the modern world, which
in effect places women in an impossible position, but for men to work
together to address the malignity of masculinity, break it down, and
find new ways of being, and being together, that are more
androgynous, spiritual, conscious, that will wreak less havoc and
injury. I caught echoes of those conversations in Wuthering Heights –
but also sensed the private soul-searching conversations that had
taken place between its performers, quiet admissions to each other
that burnish the work, giving it a complexity of texture: distress
and tenderness, rage and sympathy.
It
wasn't Peter but the horse, Nick Anderson, who told me later that
their Wuthering Heights is only possible because the four of them
check in and out each day: sit together and ask each other how they
are, confess emotional baggage rather than attempt to conceal it,
sharing these burdens rather than expecting individuals to deal with
them alone. The check-in/-out is central to Chris Goode and Co's
work, too: it creates within Chris's rehearsal rooms and theatre
places of understanding, listening, not-judging, that cherish
openness, honesty, truth. These places make change possible. Healing
possible.
*
The
more I think about theatre as a place of healing, the more I realise
that almost everything I've seen over the past year fits into this
narrative. Perhaps it's the central narrative of all theatre. But
I've already been writing this post for what feels like weeks: it has
to end somewhere. Over that time, I saw two more stories of healing
that felt different in some essential way to the ones mentioned
above. Oxbow, Albemarle, The Worst and Wuthering Heights all wrench
open the self to attempt a healing from the gut and the heart:
Landscape II and The Events are more cerebral, journeys wrought by an
omniscient author, that trace the arc of a character's progress from
trauma towards healing. My response to both was less personal, more
intellectual.
Appropriately
enough, it took two goes at Landscape II for me to grasp it. Partly
that's down to the subtlety of the work: it's a mark of how intricate
and barely perceptible its gestures are that Melanie Wilson
acknowledges her audience's presence, our active role in the room, by
walking through the auditorium to the stage, then giving us a wisp of
a smile and a five-degree nod of the head. Yet another aside: the
further I get from the experience of sitting in the same room as
her/this work, the more I connect Wilson with PJ Harvey – it's
something to do with the way Landscape and Let England Shake are
constructed with a painstaking attention to minute detail conveyed
with the lightest of touch.
Partly
my responses were conditioned by the circumstances of watching. The
first time I was at the Lighthouse in Poole, with a small in number,
slightly older audience, many of whom fidgeted throughout. I felt
that discomfort, that boredom, that distance from the story, and to a
degree shared it, because Wilson's delivery is slow, acoustically
resonant but not emotionally so, soft and flat and requiring absolute
focus and investment just to stay awake, let alone absorb and
comprehend what she's saying. But I also resisted, because the story
fascinated me. Wilson portrays a war photographer called Vivian,
holed up in an isolated barnhouse in the North Devon moors, slowly
encountering her great-great grandmother Beatrice (who stayed in the
same house some 100 years previously) through a stash of brown
crinkly diary-letters discovered in an upstairs room, and resisting
the memory of another woman, Mina, whom she befriended in an unnamed
country in a war zone in the Middle East, whose story she once had a
responsibility to tell – a responsibility she feels she failed.
It's a complicated tale, and Wilson recounts it with a soporific
patience, shifting between landscapes, slipping between sheets of
time, using a computer and a mixing desk to trigger her meticulous
score and backdrop images, multiplying distractions. The sound design
alone is extraordinary: a fascinating mixture of abstract and
representational, the snarl of fox folding into the crackle of paper
and the creak of wooden beams, the mulch of leaves, the static stab
of memory, and always the electric buzz of atoms vibrating in the
air. And the film – by Will Duke, incorporating images from the Beaford Old Archive – is gorgeous: sharp blue skies,
wide expanses of land, intricately detailed photographs of plants,
spider webs, rocks, the veins on hands, looked at with the curious
intensity of a child. In Poole, it was too much: as when watching
opera, I couldn't simultaneously take in the words, the visuals and
the audio. (How brilliant that Wilson is working on an opera next:
she's perfect for it.)
My
second go was at the Lakeside in Colchester, with a bigger and more
engaged audience, mostly comprising students, whose thrillingly mixed
response I'm going to write about on the Fuel/New Theatre in YourNeighbourhood blog if I EVER get this stupid post finished. Their
focus improved mine – but also I was better placed to focus: having
already seen the visuals, I could hear the words more clearly. I even
took notes, but I've since lost the scrap of paper they're written
on: apologies to Melanie if I'm misquoting. I was particularly struck
by the theory of photography: Vivian takes photographs to hear voices
better, which seems so contrary, but then it's clear, later in the
piece, that she's forcibly being silenced when her camera is removed
from her. Vivian takes photographs to make those voices audible to a
wider world: to bring women out of isolated communities and ensure
that their existence is at the very least recorded (you only need to
read the first paragraph of this
report,
by Unicef, to recognise how important that is). Photography here
potentially stands in for all art: certainly I understood it as
representing Wilson's own task in making Landscape II, her sense of
duty towards other women, towards all humanity, when creating
theatre. What is the difference between reading about Mina, the woman
in the Middle East, in a newspaper, and encountering her in the
theatre? How much more does her story resonate? What possibilities
are created for feeling a sense of connection with her?
What
Wilson does, with the delicacy of a spider spinning its web, is draw
the lines of connection between Mina, Vivian, Vivian's
great-great-grandmother Beatrice – and from them to herself and her
audience. In one of the diary-letters, Vivian discovers an
instruction from Beatrice's mother: the time Beatrice is spending in
North Devon is her last moment of self-determination before she is to
take up her role as a woman, as a wife and mother. A century later,
Mina tells Vivian that she must have children, because children bring
a woman her truest happiness, her truest role in life, and her truest
hope for the future. Mina and Beatrice occupy the same cultural space
in which women's lives are circumscribed and defined by their genetic
procreativity. Vivian occupies a new cultural space, in which women
have the freedom to choose non-gendered creativity instead. If Vivian
falters when asked whether women have equality in her country, it's
because she is aware how much work there is left to do, not least in
questioning what we mean by equality and what value judgments are
being utilised to measure that equality. Photography, art, theatre
create spaces in which to ask those questions.
I
took lots of forgotten notes about solitude, too: what it means to be
alone, to isolate oneself. Beatrice's retreat from family,
expectations, responsibilities, to the isolation of the moors is a
gift; for Vivian, it's an escape from failure. Beatrice becomes an
adventurer, an explorer of nature, takes long wild walks, scratches
her initials into a wooden beam of the house – a modest mark to
make on the world, but a mark none the less. Vivian timidly follows
in her footsteps, spending long hours gazing out to sea, feeling
rootless and lost. But it's through communing with the ghost of
Beatrice, facing up to her memories of Mina, and nursing a wounded
fox – the animal symbol of her wounded self – that Vivian finds
equilibrium again, and finds her way back to the world. I completely
missed the first time around the import of the final letter Vivian
reads, an invitation to take on a new job. Her receptiveness to it is
our signal that she has healed.
DavidGreig's The Events follows a similar trauma-to-healing trajectory.
The woman, Claire, is a victim, and her victim-hood isolates her from
society as effectively as if she had been the perpetrator of
violence. It estranges her from her girlfriend, makes her bullying
and impatient, prevents her relating to people, makes her contemplate
suicide and murder. Her soul has left her: she felt it fly away, when
a gun was pointed at herself and another woman and they were asked to
choose who should be shot. More prosaically, she has lost all
connection with the world.
Matt
Trueman's review – so rigorous and penetrating I had to read it
twice to comprehend it – has rendered most other commentary
superfluous, even if you don't agree with his argument (I agree with
92% of it). But what's a blog for if not indulging superfluities.
Like Matt, I'm caught by the conflict of art and violence in The
Events, and to the possibility that the perpetrator of violence, The
Boy, represents a majority view. I'd assumed he's quite young, but that's because I'm rubbish at history:
By
the time he was my age Jesus had founded a world religion.
By
the time he was my age Bob Geldof had saved Africa.
By
the time he was my age Gavrilo Princip had fired the shot that
started world war one.
If
I'm going to make a mark on the world I have to do it now.
The
only means I have are art or violence.
And
I was never any good at drawing.
Princip
was almost 20, Jesus was (probably) late-20s, Geldof at the time of
Band Aid was 33, Live Aid 34. So let's say The Boy is 34. January 5,
2010, age 34, I woke up at 7am to the shattering realisation that
everything I'd wanted to do for the past 10 years (minimum) still
hadn't been done. The writing. The making. The staking a meaningful
place in the world. What's interesting about The Boy – and this is
particularly because Rudi Dharmalingam's performance is astonishing,
casual yet hypnotic – is that he represents anything you might want
to throw at him: he is every white supremacist who espouses fascism
and every Islamist who follows al-Qaida/equivalent supremacist
organisations, he is the Boston bombers and the killers of Lee Rigby
and the men firing guns in a shopping mall in Kenya, he is the people
who pick up rifles and shoot children, co-workers, strangers, in
schools and workplaces and public spaces across the world. Within the
specific world of the play he is, for Claire, The Boy's father, the
politician whose ideology he shared, the journalist who popularised
him, plus her psychiatrist, her partner, a man who stops her throwing
herself off a cliff – Dharmalingam plays them all, modulating his
voice and gestures minutely each time. The Boy is Everyman –
Everyhuman. And that includes, potentially, us.
On
the one hand, that's about art. I defy anyone who makes art in any
capacity to say that they're not trying to leave a mark on the world.
We're so embarrassed by ambition, by ego, most of all by the fear of
being caught out, that we pull a curtain of self-deprecation over
everything we do – but the ambition and ego are there all the same.
The arrogance and self-belief, that others, even one other person,
should pay attention to the things we write or make or draw or dance.
It's a wonder more art doesn't get called self-indulgent.
On
the other, that's about violence. The first time he speaks, The Boy
tells a story about an “aboriginal boy” seeing three ships
approach his land from England, carrying “class and religion and
disease and a multitude of other instruments of objectification and
violence, all of which are about to be unleashed upon his people”.
The Boy thinks the people on the ships should all be killed. Claire
sees the positive side: isn't it just possible, she muses, that the
aboriginal boy might think, “Thank fuck something interesting has
finally happened round here.” Well, yes, that's possible. But who
is more persuasive in their thinking: Claire? Or The Boy?
Greig
underscores the terrifying notion that we all carry The Boy – or at
least, an incomprehensible “thing of darkness” – within us when
Claire uses exactly the same words at the end of The Events to
address the audience as she used to greet The Boy at the beginning,
to welcome him to the community choir that she runs in her tiny
parish church in a nowhere corner of Scotland, and invite him to join
in. It wasn't until talking to the as ever brilliant Young Vic/TwoBoroughs Theatre Club discussion group that I was able to articulate the levels of fiction and reality I'd seen in The Events. Claire and The Boy occupy a fictional space; the
community choir sharing the stage with them are the mirror of the
audience in the real world; in the bridging space between are the
stage manager and the repetiteur. Claire's healing journey takes her
from a place of isolation within the fictional space – at the
beginning she stands on the side, truculent and cold, separated from
the choir and from the audience, unable to make eye contact with
anyone – across the bridge into the real world that we occupy with
the choir, a gap now closed by their movement forward until they
might shake hands with the front row. What heals her is the
understanding that she will never comprehend violence in other people
– but she can reject it within herself. To act with compassion is
the best we can do.
I
saw The Events twice, too: in Edinburgh with (I think) the Soweto
Melodic Voices choir (the Soweto bit of that is right, even if
nothing else is) and at the Young Vic with the Greenwich Soul Choir.
I preferred it the first time, for the simple reason that the choir
all had black skin and different accents to the actors; in London
most of them were white and talked as though presenting the Today
programme. It makes a difference to the play's advocacy of
multiculturalism, of multiple tribes living side by side, when
Dharmalingam isn't the darkest-skinned person on stage. Both times, I
felt invigorated by the argument, excited, alarmed, impressed – but
it wasn't until the very last moments that something emotional in me
moved. “And we're all here,” the choir sing, locking eyes with
their audience, “we're all in here.” I know it's not real, the
togetherness: it's transitory, a fiction almost. But I believe in its
potential – to articulate hard truths, create the possibility of
change, to heal. And I find that tremblingly beautiful.
*
“It's
weirdly passive to commit gentrification, even though the consequence
is brutal. It feels safe to be like others, and frightening to be
one's self – because that requires knowing what one's true self is
– and not in a New Agey sense where anything one “feels” (a
euphemism for wants) is right. But in a truthful sense, to see one's
dark side and conflicts and in that way, realise one's self as human.
Not as an excuse to not change, but as a starting point for change.”
Sarah
Shulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, p177-8
Well this is something I NEVER thought
I'd say but comments have been turned off on something I've written
for the Guardian and I'm really annoyed about it. For the past two
days I've been having a lengthy – very lengthy – conversation
below the line (a place I generally avoid) with Daniel York, about my
review of his play The
Fu Manchu Complex at Ovalhouse. It was my turn to respond – and
I can't, because the tiny window of opportunity for comments has
closed. Hence coming here.
This whole experience has been odd from
start to finish. I wasn't supposed to see Daniel's play: I had
tickets to see a scratch show by Make/Shift
with Chris Brett Bailey as a kind of David Bowie mer-boy (how
brilliant does that sound?) plus Clout's
The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity at BAC, but had to cancel
because Michael Billington was off sick and Lyn Gardner had to pick
up his shows so I got one of hers. So already I was in the wrong
place. And then the play was just not my cup of tea: a “cod-Edwardian
schlock-horror farce burdened with cock jokes and schoolboy
sniggering” is how I described it in the review. Politically, it
was really interesting: a representation of Empire fears of (again,
my review, paraphrasing from the play) “the Yellow Peril swarming
from China, a pestilence of locusts that threatens western economic
hegemony” that very clearly argued that the same fear exists now,
both at a macro level, in wary media discussion around what will
happen when China takes over America's role as the world's biggest
superpower, and at a micro level, in the lack of opportunities for
east-Asians in British theatre. But the framing, the farce, the
innuendo, the silliness, all got in the way for me.
There are two things I regret about my
review. One: the construction, “York could have written anything,
and almost anything would be an improvement on this”. I knew when I
was writing it I was being rude. It was a neatly turned sentence, and
it made me think about Mark Kermode's brilliant
piece in the Obs recently, about how negative reviews are the
ones that get remembered, and how I don't really want to be one of
those writers. I'd rather be earnest and sensitive and sympathetic
and forgotten than flamboyantly rude and memorable. (OK, I'm lying:
of course I want to be memorable. But also earnest, etc etc.) Two:
mishearing “traumatic” for “dramatic” and using that as the
starting point for an overly compacted sentence that clumsily tried
to communicate that a) the theatrical form used by the play felt
dated to me and b) includes the words “postmodern irony” which
even as I wrote them I was thinking, really? Come on, me, you can do
better than that.
It was that error around the word
traumatic that prompted Daniel to respond in the comments box. And
I'm REALLY glad he did. It hasn't been an easy conversation – how
could it be, when I've criticised his work, in public? There's quite
a lot of anger in his responses, of course there is. But I don't have
to rise to that. Our interaction has very quickly become a Dialogue
project for me. Is it possible for a critic to write a negative
review, or articulate a negative opinion, and still be able to have a
useful, non-antagonistic and non-hierarchical conversation with the
people who made that work? In the critical culture that Jake and I
propose, non-hierarchical is key: we want to create spaces in which
critics, makers and audiences (and of course those three things
overlap) meet and talk as equals. I've been thinking a lot this week
about X “putting your armour down”:
letting go of ego, letting go of all the status and authority and
privilege you, consciously or unconsciously, arm yourself with in
your interactions with the world. My two-star review, his
retaliation: armour up. Everything I've written to him in comments
boxes, I've tried really hard to put my armour down.
As it happens, my conversation with
Daniel coincided with the publication on Rajni
Shah's blog of a conversation between herself and Matt Trueman
about her show Glorious, which Matt saw in London a couple of years
ago and basically hated. It's discursive, thoughtful, respectful, and
requires Matt to be very specific about how he watched that show, in
London, and again several months later in Lancaster. I cherish that
conversation, in the same way that I cherish this unexpected,
spiralling splurge of a discussion I'm having with Daniel: because
we're all rejecting the prevalent culture, in which critics and
makers are in two separate camps and critics get to pass judgement
and makers are just supposed to take it. Come on: everything about
that construction is wrong. We're in this world together: let's be
brave enough to talk to each other, to accept each other's criticism,
to really talk about the world and how we see it. Isn't that why we
make, go to, live through theatre? Because it illuminates and
detonates and remakes the world?
The difficult thing about putting my
armour down is being aware, constantly, of sounding really stupid in
my replies to Daniel. I'm OK with that, I think. We're talking about complex stuff – race, racism, stereotype, re-enactment,
cultural specificity – and coming at those issues from
different ethnic backgrounds. The more we talk, the more I see the
world through his eyes. Not his play, the world. And the more we
talk, the more we're telling people who will never see Daniel's play
about the issues he wanted to address on stage, and the experience of
racism that prompted him to write it.
Another Dialogue principle: a
piece of theatre, and the review it inspires, are the beginning of a
discussion. So here's our discussion so far:
DY, 11 Oct, 8.42am
I wouldn't normally do this but I have
to correct Maddy right at the end there. The words "dashedly"
and "dramatic" are never juxtaposed in this way at any
point in my script. I believe the line Maddy's referring to is Dr.
Petrie's "it’s so truly and appallingly and dashedly TRAUmatic
that...it calls for sustenance" and there is no attempt at
post-modernism here (though there is plenty elsewhere.
Far be it from me to criticise a critic
but if you're going to quote a writer's lines at them I would've
thought it good practice to make absolutely sure they're correct but
then,like the rest of your review, it does rather seem that you were
writing your own somewhat lurid version of my play as you went along.
MC, 11 Oct, 12.25pm
Hi Daniel - thank you so much for
posting this comment, critics SHOULD be criticised, especially when
we make mistakes. And I'm somewhat traumatised to admit that I've
done wrong, for which a huge apology. Not for the first time, i wish
scripts for new plays were made available to reviewers as a matter of
course - it wouldn't cost anyone anything to email a copy of the text
to the reviewer, right? And would certainly help avoid stupid
mistakes like this one.
I'm interested that you think I've
presented a lurid version of your play: isn't the intention that it's
quite lurid? In terms of the production and design, in that it draws
very vividly on stylised and melodramatic arts such as Hammer horror
and burlesque; in terms of the writing, in that it's a pulp-fiction
detective story? Don't worry if you haven't time or desire to
respond, I'm just curious. All very best, and sincere apologies again
for being a cloth-eared nitwit, Maddy
DY: 11 Oct, 2.44pm
Maddy. It IS intentionally lurid but I
think you’ve chosen to focus on elements which you’ve blown
completely out of proportion. The cock jokes. Only about five in the
whole thing if memory serves. You may not like them but far better
writers than myself have used them with far greater regularity.
Shakespeare and Aristophanes to name but two. The whole of New Dr.
Who (the biggest show on TV) is awash with smutty sex jokes. I don’t
see you going after a multi-millionaire power-house like Steven
Moffat. Instead you pick on little ethnics in pokey fringe theatres
putting on their first play. I’m flattered you pay me the
compliment of not patronising me but I don’t think you’ve looked
terribly hard or been terribly objective.
You focus also on the opening song
describing it as “too indignant for subtlety”. I don’t know how
aware of this you are but the “Yellow Peril” press headlines of
the period were if anything even less subtle and even a “great
British writer” like Rudyard Kipling maintained that it was “right
to kill the Chinaman”. The song structure is based on the overture
from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, again set in “foggy old London”,
where the cast sing deliberately lurid lyrics about a threat lurking
in the capital. You can say it fails but I would’ve thought an
experienced critic like yourself would’ve got the intention at
least. Instead you seem to imply that I’ve strung these things
together to try and get cheap laughs which is not what I’m about at
all. Incidentally we did at one point consider putting quotes from
the period (along with more recent ones like Jeremy Clarkson’s
recent Morcambe Bay crack) on video during the transitions but we
decided it would be patronising to the audience.
You also (like one or two others)
mention “the Irish man ridiculed as a "potato-nosher
clover-face". There is no Irish man in my play. There is a
cockney manservant with an Irish surname who’s assumed by the
representative of the establishment to be “Irish”. Every BAME
actor (and indeed person) has had this experience. You are placed in
a box marked “other” despite being ostensibly British. I’m not
sure how you missed that.
And while you’re berating me for a
lack of “subtlety” you rather undermine yourself with your own
rather obvious “kung fu kick of ribaldry” swipe which strikes me
as the worst kind of racial profiling.
I’m also a little taken aback that
you choose to waste one entire paragraph on my bakcground arguing
"for east Asian theatremakers to create opportunities for
themselves" when you’re decrying “brevity” on Twitter. I
honestly think you were reviewing me rather than my play and
certainly not my director, my cast or my designer, none of whom merit
even the briefest of mentions.
You decry the lack of “post modern
irony” but when I have one character lamenting that once upon a
time they were rounded out and three dimensional, another declaring
that they were created from the “lurid imaginings of noble white
master” and Fu Manchu him(her)self remarking that
“every
conceivable cliche and trope” has been “catered for”
I’m not sure how much more obvious I can be without being really
unsubtle.
If I’m even more honest though I
think you have entirely proved my point that elements of the
establishment media seem to baulk strongly whenever East Asians
attempt anything other than Suffering In China or being Swathed In
Silk.
I’d be interested to see how you
would ‘ve reacted if a black person had written the same play but I
guess that’s hypothetical. Are you going to deny that the audience
find it entertaining and, yes, thought provoking?
Only the other day Lyn Gardner was
asking if theatre criticism is in crisis. I’d say yes IMHO.
PS I would’ve sent you the script if
you’d asked.
MC: 11 Oct, 11.36pm
Hi Daniel – again, thanks for taking
the time to comment, there is SO MUCH food for thought here...
So: theatre criticism in crisis. As is
happens, I feel a lot of discomfort around this kind of review
format. In fact, I almost never do it – Lyn was supposed to come to
Fu Manchu, but Michael B was ill this week, so she had to take over
his jobs and I took on one of hers. I feel odd about the spurious
authority it imposes on the critic, the bluntness of the star rating.
Last year I co-founded an organisation called Dialogue, essentially
to question everything about how theatre criticism operates and begin
to figure out whether we could create a parallel practice in which
critics didn't write a judgement of a show but engaged in a dialogue
about it, with the makers and with audiences. So yes, totally agree
with you: there are people for whom the 300-word-plus-star-rating
review works really well, but I think criticism can be much more than
that.
I seem to be working backwards so:
certainly, some people in the audience I was with found it
entertaining; I wasn't with them long enough to find out if they
found it thought-provoking. Yes, I think that question is
hypothetical – but you saying that reminded me of Kwame Kwei-Armah
(who I totally love) talking about how important it is to him to tell
stories through his cultural lens. He argues constantly that by
writing with cultural specificity, you create stories that have
universal resonance.
This has been a useful thing to
remember thinking about representation in Fu Manchu. By setting it in
the era that you do, I feel like you see Chinese people not through
your own cultural lens, but through the lens of the British empire.
And I'm curious to know why you made that choice? Clearly I'm looking
at this play through my own cultural lens: I'm a white woman, born in
London, but with Cypriot parents; I've never experienced racism but
my brother did whenever he got a suntan. So I'm coming from a
particular perspective when I wonder what the value is to an audience
to present to them Empire stereotypes of Chinese people – slanty
eyes, slipperiness, exoticism – rather than reject that in favour
of expressing your own cultural specificity, encouraging audiences to
look through your cultural lens.
Agreed: who wants to see Suffering in
China or Swathed in Silk again and again? But I spent a lot of time
during the play wondering what kind of modern Chinese story you might
have written, or is missing from our theatre. I noticed that you'd
been part of the Royal Court Unheard Voices initiative and found that
fascinating, because this is totally unlike anything I'd expect from
a writer who'd been through the Royal Court. Which says a lot about
expectations raised by the Royal Court, of course, but also is my way
of saying I was really surprised by how old-fashioned this felt. I
haven't seen a play like this for a really long time – which could
be a good thing, of course – but what I really mean by that is that
I spend a lot of time in fringe theatres, mostly seeing pretty
experimental work. Or in the Royal Court, seeing pretty modern work.
This play was neither of those things, and I wonder what direction
you're heading in next?
One more thing on gaze/cultural
specificity: I wonder if I emphasised the cock jokes – which in my
head includes all sexual innuendo, although clearly that's a
ridiculous shorthand, apologies – because I'm a woman and a
feminist and generally oversensitive to such writing? To me, smut is
easy comedy. But maybe that's being unfair. It's also really
interesting that the flick-knife/kung fu kick metaphor communicates
as racial profiling: again, is that about how you interpret that
metaphorical construction from an easy-Asian perspective?
OK this is a lot of words so one last
thing: thanks so much for the background info on the opening song –
I love that it nods to Sweeney. I've seen Sweeney only once, about 14
years ago, hence not catching the reference. Again, it's so
fascinating what this image of the “professional” or
“experienced” critic suggests to people: a kind of encyclopedic
knowledge of everything that ever got staged. Oh, which reminds me:
your comment made me wonder whether any east-Asian critics have
reviewed the play, and how they responded to it. And whether there
even are any, because openings into criticism are narrow too. Another
thing I argue through Dialogue is that theatre talks a lot about
artist development – but critic development is massively important,
too.
I've no idea if you'll have time,
energy or appetite to respond to any of this; if not, I just want to
say thank you for the conversation so far. This isn't a critical
culture in which it's easy for makers and critics to talk together. I
think it's vital that we do. And as I mentioned at the start, your
comments have been really thought-provoking and usefully challenging.
All very best, Maddy
MC: 11 Oct, 11.45pm
typo alert: easy-Asian!! Sorry, it's
been a loooong day.
MC: 12 Oct, 8.18am
I woke up thinking: bloody hell, my
reply to you makes it seem like I missed the point and completely
misunderstood what you're doing. YES parallels between the weird
representation of/anxiety surrounding the prospect of Chinese
economic hegemony now/fear of Chinese as other then, desire to
subjugate, impossibility of doing so. YES: parallels between that
politics and politics within acting community. It's not that I didn't
get it, the style ensures you get the substance very, very quickly.
I'm asking whether there is something very slippery and difficult
that happens between satire and re-enactment.
DY: 12 Oct, 9.58am
Maddy,
the whole thing is a satire on the way the Western media views
Chinese and other East Asian people which is stuck squarely in
archaic Victoriana/Edwardiana. We are literally imprisoned in a
bizarre period drama straight out of Sax Rohmer. Did you not see the
“Chinese” episode of the multi-award winning Sherlock created by
the multi-award winning Steven Moffatt (who perpetrates “smut” on
a nuclear scale)? They updated the whole thing except the Chinese who
were straight out of The Yellow Claw. They even put sinister flute
music over shots of ordinary Chinese people shopping for groceries in
Chinatown. Western media (and by that I mean TV and theatre
primarily) is fixated on the idea that Chinese people are quaint
little foreigners with strange accents. Ask any East Asian actor and
their eyes will roll upwards at the mere mention of the words
“Chinese accent”. And the “Chinese accent” wanted is usually
more akin to the sound kids in the playground make when they’re
taking the piss than any genuine recreation of someone speaking a
foreign language.
So, you’re used to “experimental”
or “modern” work. Rather a judgemental viewpoint I’d suggest,
surely it’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it. Even
then I have to ask: have you really seen lots of plays that have a
Scottish housemaid played by a half-Chinese man with a beard in a
white face mask delivering a monologue on colonialism? Another big
theme in the play is the politics of period drama. I sometimes watch
trailers on TV of all the series I will never appear in-Downton, Call
The Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, Ripper Street-unless there’s one
episode that requires a seedy opium dealer (though I’ll usually be
considered not “Chinese” enough). Period drama is a staple of
British culture. And we’re excluded from it. I have to ask again:
how many English period dramas have you seen featuring an entirely
East Asian cast? The play takes place inside Nayland Smith’s head
which is trapped in a colonialist period-piece but it’s been
invaded by East Asians and in fact he himself is ultimately an East
Asian.
One of the things I found a little
dismaying I have to say is that both yourself and Matt Trueman (the
more established “professional” critics) were so quick to damn
but seemed to have so little idea of the context or the iconography
of the Fu Manchu character. I possibly haven’t made this clear
enough but all the same it’s a little worrying that online blog
reviewers seemed to have a far greater researched knowledge of this
and therefore reviewed in a far more thoughtful way. Only last year
The Times Literary Supplement posited that no other 20th Century
literary villain lingers in the Western media consciousness like Fu
Manchu. The idea that “orientals” (that word is always used in
inverted commas) are sinister, cunning, mysterious and plain weird is
deeply ingrained in Western media thought. You only have to look at
the reaction to the Chinese swimmer Yi Shiwen’s gold medal
performances last year at the Olympics (she was drugged/genetically
modified) to get this. I even helpfully included some rather obvious
lines about this but they obviously weren’t “post-modern”
enough.
So I find this-“ I wonder what
the value is to an audience to present to them Empire stereotypes of
Chinese people – slanty eyes, slipperiness, exoticism – rather
than reject that in favour of expressing your own cultural
specificity, encouraging audiences to look through your cultural
lens.”-baffling. They’re being “presented” as what they are:
fictional creations and they’re being utterly rejected. There was
originally a whole final scene where the actors came out of character
and said this. We had a line where Fu Manchu actually said “You
invented me”. But it just seemed way too crude and patronising so
we cut it as we thought the audience was ahead of us and got this.
I can’t help wondering if we’ve
done it a bit too well and that’s why you don’t get it. I’ve
aped the style too well, the cast play it too well, Justin and Lily
have nailed the world too well. We didn’t leave any “joins” so
you don’t get the “experimentation”. CONT'D
Then there’s the implication that
this stuff is “obvious” in some way. Is it? Really? If that’s
the case why have you and your fellow critics not been saying
anything every time a theatre company has rolled out a “yellowface”
production in the last thirty years? Why was it left to us to do it
last year? Do you know I had one goal during RSC Zhao-gate. It was to
get every single mainstream reviewer to mention it in their reviews
even if they then went on to say “but who cares about a bunch of
upstart little yellow people who probably aren’t very good actors?”
Because it had never been mentioned before. The arbiters of cultural
taste, the custodians of theatrical excellence, the assessors of the
performing arts all had a collective indifference to exclusion and
blatant discrimination when it came to East Asians. How is it
“obvious” when in 2013 Cameron Macintosh will not rule out
casting a white man as The Engineer in Miss Saigon? And if it
happens, guess what, it won’t be you lot leading the condemnation.
It’ll be us again, putting our careers on the line, getting
racially abused in comments forums and told to “shut up and stop
whingeing”.
Smut. Again it’s a satire on the
public school mentality which is obsessed with this stuff. I’m
surprised though as a feminist you completely missed the
meta-commentary of the Fah Lo Suee character who is a complete
send-up of the whole “oriental dragon-lady” stereotype and an
obvious indictment of the way East Asian women are fetishized in the
West. “I am oriental damsel. Delicate, subservient and obediant. At
the same time imminently untrustworthy, shallow and sly.” It’s
open to criticism (like everything) but to accuse me of “presenting
stereotypes” and not “rejecting” them is so wide of the mark
it’s in another country frankly.
“Cultural lens”. Oh, I get it.
Kwarme wrote Elmira’s Kitchen and you think I should write Chan’s
Takeaway. Sorry, Maddy, not my world or my “lens”. This reminds
me of a conversation at the Royal Court. I challenged Simon Godwin on
why the Court never casts East Asian actors and he responded by
saying “the Court would look to engage writers from those
communities”. I came straight back with “But I’m not from a
“community””. I’m half-Chinese. Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of
time in Asia, I can speak rudimentary Mandarin but my sensibilities
are actually very British. I grew up with British TV, British
theatre. But you won’t allow me to do that. I have to find my own
“cultural lens”.
Maddy, I didn’t just come through the
Royal Court Unheard Voices group. I was one of only two to be
selected for the Studio group. Maybe the Court are more open-minded
than you are. In fact one of the things I found a little unpleasant
about your opening paragraph (and indeed Matt Trueman’s) is the way
you somehow seem to imply that’s I’ve got a play on because I
kicked up a fuss last year. Before any of this happened I’d written
screenplays (one of them was fairly seriously considered by Film4)
and actors like Frances Barber and Lauren Crace were happy to appear
in my films for a (I regret to say) pittance. I never tried to sell
this play on the back of what happened last year (though other, far
less involved East Asians, did just that in the wake of it). It’s
water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned and I’m more
interested in the future.
Talking of Matt Trueman it’s
astonishing how “indenti-kit” your reviews are. Both start with a
bit about me (he calls me “vociferous”), both launch in early
about “crude stereotypes” with absolutely no acknowledgement that
they’re being subverted (they clearly are) and both feature a
horribly crass “cultural reference” - for your “kung-fu kick of
ribaldry” we get his “jokes so obvious they’re visible from the
Great Wall Of China”. I have no idea what you mean by “easy-Asian”
but I think it’s more than a little insulting. If Kwarme writes a
play you don’t like are you going to make reference to his “African
bogle dance of inanity”? Is Matt going to lament that his comedy is
“so stark it can be glimpsed in the Matabele lands”? CONT'D
That’s exactly what I meant with my
hypothetical question. It’s all very well thinking you’re “above”
something, Maddy, but that sense of detached superiority has to be
earned and in my extremely humble opinion you haven’t and it all
comes across as a bit knee-jerk I’m afraid.
In answer to your question, no, there’s
no East Asian theatre critic. I did get an email from a lady who has
an online resource to encourage East Asian writers (Banana Writers)
saying this “Each little line had a lot of thought in it - using
words like "conkers" in a funny way. I also liked the deep
meaning and the serious undertones of the play as a whole. How you
covered important topics like colonialism and asked the question WHY
people are so scared of the Chinese. You were daring enough to take
it to where you as an East Asian writer wanted to go and I think the
risk has paid off. I really see the difference between a Chinese (or
half Chinese) writer's message on the stage compared with a Caucasian
writer's message of how they think Chinese people feel in their
hearts. It is a lot more meaningful and convinces me even more why we
need more East Asian writers. “ Hi Ching, producer and curator of
the S.E.A. Fest described it as a “landmark play”. Here’s what
award-winning poet Stephanie Dogfoot thinks about it
http://stephdogfoot.wordpress.com/ You can look also look at my
Twitter feed and the @fmccomplex one to see what other East Asians
think about it. You’ll also see that Lee Simpson of Improbable
(“experimental” and “modern” enough for you?) completely gets
it.
MC: 12 Oct, 9.30pm
Hi Daniel – once again, thanks so
much for taking the time to respond so thoroughly. Since reading your
comment, I've been feeling quite dismayed by the obtuse quality of my
own – since before that, in fact, hence posting the additional
comment this morning about re-enactment. Your response highlights
something crucial: you mention a whole lot of things from popular
culture – TV programmes, media coverage of the Olympics, Jeremy ugh
ugh ugh Clarkson – and absolutely none of it is stuff I engage
with. You've mentioned Steven Moffat twice now, and in a sense you're
right, I wouldn't criticise him – because I don't even pay him the
courtesy of watching his work. For all the attention I give him, he
might as well not exist. All of those TV programmes you mention?
Haven't watched any of them. (Incidentally, I LOVE the way you say “I
watch trailers for” - ha!! So damning.) So when I suggest that this
kind of representation is the Empire's cultural lens, in a sense what
I'm failing to see is that it's not just then, it's also NOW.
In another sense, I'm not failing to
see that at all – this is where the theatre parallel comes in, the
“heaven forbid we let them play Shakespeare” (sorry, that's a
vague attempt at quoting your first song). And I guess what I'm
getting at is something to do with the terms of rejection. Your play
re-enacts to subvert and reject – but what play would you write if
you bypassed the re-enactment and went straight for the rejection?
Again, this is where my own very
personal perspective comes into play. I do a lot of rejecting in my
life: I don't click on Daily Mail links, I turn away from billboards
with Clarkson's objectionable face on them, I avoid anything that has
no place in the world I want to live in. I'm a ridiculous idealist
who hopes that by starving these things of the oxygen of attention
they will gradually wither up and die. You're doing something else –
and again, there's something incredibly obtuse about my suggestion
that you shouldn't. If you want to write a cod-Edwardian
schlock-horror farce, of course you should write a cod-Edwardian
schlock-horror farce! It's idiotic to imply you shouldn't do that!
But I wonder what other east-Asian stories could be told from a place
not of re-enacting stereotypes to reject them, but rejecting
stereotypes outright to create something new. Does that make sense?
And I think (but correct me if I'm
wrong) that's what you're arguing for, too, when you challenge Simon
Godwin on the lack of east-Asian actors at the Royal Court. It's
about not being limited to one story, one representation – whether
or not you're smashing that representation. It's about being able to
just be. And again, these things, Empire representation, the roots of
racism, they mustn't be forgotten, it's not like we should sweep it
all under the carpet and pretend it never happened: it happened, and
it still colours our world in despicable ways. As I say, my parents
are Cypriot, their country is still divided because of what the
British did there. We have to address the legacy of Empire: condemn
it, not celebrate it. On another note, I was thinking earlier today
about Tarantino's Django, and its re-enactment of slavery stories,
and also its subversion of slavery stories, and what an incredible
challenge that film was, and also what an incredible film that was, I
loved it to pieces. Art can do brilliant things in reminding us of
how we got to where we are today, and where we can go next. And it's
when you do this in your play, to go back to my initial review, that
I see the glint of knife-sharp political commentary.
Which brings us to the ribaldry, and
what I said earlier, style getting in the way of substance for me. As
you rightly point out, that's a personal judgement. For a lot of
people, the public school humour is going to be very funny. For me,
it's just public school humour, in the realm of things I reject. OK,
yes, you're sending it up by exposing its homoerotic undertones, but
it's still public school humour. It's satire vs re-enactment all over
again. (Re-reading this, I think: exposing homoerotic undertones? Because what, homoeroticism is inherently funny? There's something really wrong about that construction.)
Re Matt's review: yes, it IS
interesting how similar they are. I actually read his review before
writing mine, and was struck by how similarly we felt. I also re-read
the news story about Zhao (which I didn't see), Lyn's two blogs on
the need for east-Asian actors to write their own stories, plus
reviews of all the shows I mentioned in the first para (of which I've
only seen Chimerica, and was really troubled by its enactment,
whether or not intentional, of white middle-class male privilege). I
mentioned it all because it felt relevant that you were the only
writer of all those who is British AND east-Asian – and yes,
because this play ought to be a calling card. For a lot of people,
the people who mention – including Hi Ching, who has now commented
above, for which thank you very much – your play IS a calling card.
It offers a distinct perspective. That's a brilliant thing, and
context highlights that. At least, I hope it does.
Anyway, I'm trying to limit myself to a
single comment box – although frankly, as a habitual overwriter, I
salute you and your 2.5 boxes – so I'll stop there. Once again, I'd
like to say how much I value this conversation. You wrote a play. I
wrote a 300 word review. Between us, we've written a squillion words
of comment. Theatre isn't just entertainment to me: it's my life. It
gives me the opportunity to have conversations like this one, really
knotty conversations in which I struggle to articulate myself,
sometimes succeed, sometimes fail. And yes, it's a bit weird that we
wouldn't have had this conversation if I'd laughed more at the public
school humour. But I appreciate you taking that journey with me. All
best, Maddy
