Three things that I made when not writing about theatre

This first one isn't really something I've made, at least not in the most literal interpretation of the words. It's a poem by Harry Giles, and he wrote it for me in return for me starting to give him money viaPatreon. I'd been meaning to do so since he emailed me about this “scary money experiment thing” in February 2015: I love him, despite having very little contact with him, and think he's all good things in the world, so of course I want to support him. And yet, it wasn't until January 2016 that I actually made that support financial. I still feel weird that there is now this financial element to our relationship.

At the time, Harry wrote an excellent post laying out his own arguments for and against asking for patronage, which I found really helpful. Like him, I worry that “it’s so clearly all a part of the neoliberalisation of arts funding: the expectation that artists have to become solo entrepreneurs” – and, the correlative of that, the expectation that art is something to be funded by its consumers, and not in common, as a basic provision of healthy civil society. More positively, like him, “I like making it clear that art is not something that just happens, is not something that other people decide to make happen, but rather something that we all have a stake in making happen, and in making happen in more radical ways.”

In an email, I admitted to him that the relationship between giving on Patreon and giving to registered charities confuses me. In a nutshell: “if I give £5 a month to Shelter and that's to help ALL the homeless people in the UK then to give £2 or even £1 a month to a single person so they can make art kind of doesn't add up; but then, I can spend twice as much on a single ticket to go to the theatre as I do on a monthly donation to Unicef which is supposed to be helping ALL the children living in poverty and plight around the world, and I could just as effectively give that ticket money to you in £2 per month donations”. In the event, that's pretty much what I decided to do.

The thing that makes me most uncomfortable with Patreon is exclusivity: the idea that, because I have some funds at my disposal, I can get stuff that other people don't get. That's how capitalism divides people and I want to resist it. But Harry's gift to all new patrons is to write them a poem, on a subject of their choosing. I decided that I was only happy for this to happen if it could be a poem that we made publicly accessible, and he agreed, in an email that also contained a gentle reminder that maybe the key problem of capitalism isn't commerce but exploitation. The word that was stuck in my head at the time was “longing” (it quite often is, to be honest), and this is what it inspired Harry to write. I like to think that his poem reflects the many conversations we've had together about class, and capitalism, and togetherness, and making; that, although it isn't something I've made, it has a specificity rooted in our relationship that means I have, in some way, made it happen – and not just by giving money.

THE LONGING FOR ONE THING INSIDE OF ANOTHER

by Harry Giles

There was a world where tokens were exchanged

for food, and when a token met your hand

a spur extended blandly into your palm

to take a sip of blood. This payment kept

the tokens bright enough to check your hair in,

cool enough to glide from purse to purse.

And in this world there were two friends who made

assemblages of wood and steel: stairways,

sunshades, simple things to see through, things

to pause on, things to touch. They worked apart,

and then from time to time they met to look

and say, "This works", and say, "This doesn't work."

One day one friend came with a gift, a question.

They bought some time discussing techniques, and then

they said, "I heard your purse was light. I saw

your building shed was empty and your tools

were sore for oil." And they held out their hand

with sixteen hungry tokens free to take.

Now, both these friends were just the kind of folk

to argue far too hard about the way

things are on other worlds, or could be, or were,

and how to cross between them without snapping

painful laws of space and time. At times,

they held that wood and steel could build a bridge

to where a body could eat without blood.

And so they laughed as they watched the sixteen tokens

pass from palm to palm and felt the prick

and wiped the reddish smears on the handkerchiefs

that all folk carry tucked in their back pocket,

the depth of the dye declaring the force of the flag.

*

This second one started as a whim but became an act of love. At Devoted and Disgruntled in January, a tall man with sandy hair wearing a checked shirt voiced a request for “someone with sewing skills to help a 6'5” drag queen”. I tweeted in response that I might be about to find my calling, and a couple of hours later I was fixing a date with Robert Beck, aka the Marvellous Miss Mimi Martini, to talk frock-making. Our first meeting was spent sharing images: Rob emailed me a few pictures that had given him some tentative notions (floatiness, a big split up the front for showing off shapely legs); we scanned google for drag queens and Adrian of Hollywood dresses, and flicked through my Schiaparelli paper-dolls book (pause to sigh with pleasure that such a thing exists in the world). By the end we had a few sketches, a vague idea to make a dress with a ribbon of chiffon around it like the pink line twisting through a stick of rock, and a plan to go fabric shopping.

Fabric shopping changed everything. To be honest, it was so exciting that after an hour I had a violent adrenaline crash. Luckily we'd already found Rob's dream fabrics: a hot-pink satin and a chiffon dyed fuchsia at one end and electric blue at the other. To show off that colour shift, we switched patterns to something more like a Greek gown (showing my roots, dears) with chiffon floating around the skirt and rippling over the bust before swooping off the shoulders. It took two fittings to get the pattern right, and a third for tweaks with the actual fabric; there are all sorts of things about it that I wish I'd done better, or differently, or more professionally, but at the same time I recognise that it's one of the most ambitious things I've ever made, and not too bad for it. Here it is on my dressmaker's doll: her figure isn't quite as buxom as Mimi's, but you get the general idea. 

 

I rarely sew for anyone other than myself, and doing so was just delightful. As in, I genuinely got teary when Mimi's frock started to come together: the magic of sewing never ceases to amaze me. I already have heaps of ideas for other things I'd like to make for her: things I'd never dream of wearing myself, but would love to construct, to bring into being. And I would so love to do this for more people. So if there are any other drag queens out there looking for someone with sewing skills...

*

This third one I made in the way I make most cakes or puddingy things: somewhat haphazardly, from scratch and imagination and vaguely retained memories of endless reading of recipes. It was for my lovely friends Andrew and Marta, who were coming to my house for dinner before flying off to Poland. I had bought tickets for the double bill at the Yard that night, and so prepared a meal then left my husband to serve it, thinking they were only going away for a couple of weeks on holiday. I found out on my return, at 11.30pm, with everyone heading for bed, that they were leaving at 8am and planned to stay in Poland for several months. Indefinitely even.

I've been feeling a lot lately that I have my priorities all skewed. Going to the theatre as much as I do means I'm almost never home to give my kids a bath, read to them at bedtime, tuck them in with a goodnight kiss. It means that I rarely have proper conversations with my friends, rarely even see them, because I put seeing theatre first. Sometimes that theatre is nourishing, joyful, inspiring; it makes me feel like I'm levitating, like my brain has expanded, that I want to write and write like it's the only thing that matters. Sometimes that theatre is Ophelias Zimmer: technically impressive but gruelling, draining, an act of intellectual violence. Either way, the strongest relationship I have at the moment isn't with a human being, it's with the collective human act of theatre. And I don't know if that's right.

The shows I was seeing at the Yard that night were by people I know and admire and enjoy chatting with; people I would love to call friends, were our encounters less transient, or insecure. It felt important to see their work, to support them in some way, knowing that for each of them it was a leap and a challenge to make this performance. But I feel sad that I sacrificed this other night of friendship for it. I feel sad that so many of the choices I make in life feel like the wrong choice. I'm writing this tonight, having been meaning to write it for three weeks now – I finished Mimi's dress on 7 May, and Harry sent me the poem on 10 May – because at 9.01pm this evening I made the decision not to watch Hannah Nicklin's Equations for aMoving Body at CPT but to come home and work. I've felt a twist of nausea ever since: guilt at not being there for Hannah, not supporting her. She is another person I admire and enjoy chatting with and would love to call a friend; this was my only chance to see the show; the audience was small; it would have been a kindness to stay. I've made the wrong call again, but in the other direction. Sometimes it feels as though the thing I make most productively in my life is worry.

Anyway: Andrew and Marta emailed me from Poland to ask for the recipe for that dessert, and as it came out quite well I thought I'd post it. Apologies to Nigel Slater if it turns out to be one of your recipes that I've unconsciously memorised and am now claiming as my own.

Pistachio and chocolate tart

Stupidly I didn't write down what I did at the time, but I'm pretty sure this was it: first I ground 150g shelled pistachios with 50g caster sugar in a blender, adding some dried orange peel towards the end (in season, I'd use peel grated from a fresh unwaxed orange I think). Pretty sure I picked up the blending nuts with sugar trick from Nigella: it helps to soak up the oil that comes out as they're ground. I then melted 40g butter in a saucepan, and stirred that together with the nut and sugar mixture, a sprinkle of cinnamon and another 50g caster sugar in a bowl until it was all nicely emulsified. I lined a 20cm flan or sandwich tin with greaseproof paper, smoothed over the nut mixture and pressed it down so the surface was flat and the mixture as tight as possible, then baked it for what I think was the equivalent of 15 minutes at about 150C or gas 2 (my oven use is never as simple as that, hence the uncertainty here. Basically: nuts burn easily, and that makes them bitter, so keep things quite gentle). The base has to cool after that for a bit.

Next step is the chocolate ganache topping, which is pretty simple: pour 300ml double cream into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and warm over a low heat until nearly boiling point, then stir in at least 150g dark chocolate (that's how much I used, but I wanted more – I reckon 250g would be good). I used 72% cocoa solids: you need that darkness to counter the cream. Once that's melted, take the pan off the heat and beat the mixture with a whisk for as long as you can be bothered – the more time you give it, the smoother the mixture will be. Pour that over the nut base, smooth the surface, then leave in the fridge until ready to serve – the chocolate mixture firms up in the cool temperature. We didn't have it with raspberries, but I bet a few on the side would be bloody delicious.

and in with the new (plus Vanity 11, Carrie Cracknell)

On the days I was writing this piece about Carrie Cracknell, a jury found the shooting of Mark Duggan to be lawful.

This got stuck in my head walking to school:

(assault assault assault assault assault assault assault assault THE LAW!)

Several fire stations were closed in London.

Amiri Baraka died. I love the opening lines from his Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, written when he was still LeRoi Jones:

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way

The ground opens up and envelopes me

Each time I go out to walk the dog.

Or the broad edged silly music the wind

Makes when I run for the bus...

Things have come to that.

I went to the launch party of my friend Sam's book, her first, a feminist-literary-criticism-memoir (not only has she written a book, she's invented a genre!), and watched in what was probably forlorn envy as she signed books for her friends, and wondered why I felt to ask her myself would be tacky. I had a long conversation with someone who knows cast members of Nirbhaya, who fumed at the lack of emotional or psychological support given to those women telling their stories of being raped; and I was generally doleful about how, for an industry dedicated to expressions of empathy, theatre is astonishingly uncaring (the show's the thing). I also learned that an Actionette friend was fired by Marie Claire just before Christmas, then phoned by them just after New Year because they had a hole on their pages and would she be OK to fill it?

Andrew Haydon's Postcards from the Gods blog shot up from essential to why would you bother reading anything else?

I spent 45 minutes in a branch of Nationwide opening little savings accounts for my kids, and contemplating how doing stuff online lets me, everyone, forget how a lot of people live. Exacerbates my impatience. Makes literature oddly vital as a site of encounter with other cultures, people without privilege. A thought mostly connected to reading Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners between Christmas and New Year: what an exquisite novel, so direct in its realisation that nothing is right, so radiant with hope. The pages about the natural affinity between London's immigrant black and working-class white communities are fiercely political yet tender; the final pages, addressing the impossibility of leaving London, the way this city claims you as its own, burrowed to the heart of my own family's immigrant experience.

Fergus Evans told the Guardian via twitter that I should be included on an alternative Stage 100 theatre list, for continuing to challenge what a critic should be.

I wrote an email to Mark Ball, artistic director of LIFT, who employed me in November to create editorial copy for their 2014 programme brochure being published in February, to say thank you: “The ongoing shifts in theatre practice are absolutely crying out for shifts in media coverage: I'm completely astounded that I'm getting to do this with you. This isn't flattery: the Guardian called me two days ago to say they're terminating my contract... There is so much really stupid thinking around arts organisations commissioning their own magazines: I feel like with this brochure you're giving me the space to create something that has journalistic integrity, yet the bouncy excitedness that will get people buying tickets. Fucking brilliant.” (This was before people started making me rewrite my copy: even in paradise, there is compromise.)

And, yes, the Guardian phoned me to tell me they're not going to renew my contract in March.

*

Sometimes my work feels like the most important thing in the world. And sometimes it feels like a colossal waste of time.

Sometimes I feel like the only thing that's important to me is to write about theatre, because to do so is to write about society, politics, feminism, anti-capitalism, inequality, privilege, poverty, psychology, parenting, climate change, art, cinema, books, long walks in the countryside, immigrant experience, second-generation immigrant experience, belonging, not belonging, crowded urban living, utopian longing, the poleaxing confusion of “how you live with other people [and] how you live with yourself”. It doesn't matter that a piece on here attracts maybe 300 hits (of that, how many people actually read to the end? Or past the first paragraph?). If I can bolster, challenge, inspire, entertain, incite into some kind of positive action one or two people each time, that's enough.

Sometimes I think, unless I'm trying to communicate with a massive audience, trying to effect real change in understanding and appreciation of theatre at a micro level, the world at macro, what the fuck am I doing with my life?

A jury found the shooting of Mark Duggan to be lawful and several London fire stations were closed last week. Who knows, maybe I could be doing something about that.

*

I've been expecting the call from the Guardian for almost as many years as I've been freelancing. By the standards of writers' pay, I've been being overpaid. I worked out that I got paid roughly £44 an hour for the Carrie Cracknell piece. That's patently ludicrous. Under the new pay terms, I'd get closer to £28 an hour. As an isolated figure, that's still ludicrous.

There are no isolated figures.

This month I'm writing two features for the Guardian; from September to December I wrote none. It's not that I didn't pitch features: three out of four ideas I send are rejected, and even those accepted don't always work out. That's natural, but time-consuming. I spent the weeks doing a combination of unpaid work, freelance work, and applications for grants, both of which were rejected. I love my work. But it's still work. And I'm constantly working. Sometimes I wonder what there is to show for it.

In the conventional sense, my Guardian salary was the thing to show for it. It's also been a security blanket. Last summer, Andrew Haydon asked why I don't have the courage of my convictions: if the structures within which I live are so abhorrent to me, why not walk away from them? I'm full of admiration for the way he's successfully achieved that – becoming in the process theatre's key critical voice to boot. But he doesn't have a family; I have. [Note added 22/1/14: Andrew pointed out, very gently, on twitter today that he does have a family, he just doesn't have dependents. I know from reading Stella Duffy's blog how hurtful this kind of unconscious expression of heteronormative superiority can be, and wish I'd been more thoughtful with my phrasing.] Families lock you into structures, responsibilities. I feel I ought to embrace being shoved out of a traditional financial structure. Instead I just feel scared.

*

When I was 21 and 22 and lost in the wilderness, not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life except that I didn't want to sit on the reception desk at my parents' factory, or in any other way join their business, I truly believed the most precious commodity in newspapers was space. Column inches. I sent in ideas, which were ignored. I wrote reviews, which were rejected. You had to be really fucking good to be given space in newspapers, and for a long time I wasn't good enough. Money was no object in this industry; when I got my first job, I was shocked by how much I earned (£26,000pa – enough to save up a deposit to buy my own flat, admittedly at now distant prices). Newspapers were happy to pay you – but give you column inches? Dream on.

Now I wonder if I was kidding myself: after all, my newly affluent parents were always at the edge of the wilderness, supporting me. But I also wonder whether the situation has reversed. The internet has given newspapers limitless space, but advertising revenue has disappeared in that black hole and now money is their most precious commodity. You can write for them, but be paid? That's the tricky part.

*

I've been walking around like a sack of broken china.

(Things have come to that.)

I've been thinking that, finally, I've been found out for the talentless fraud I really am.

(Things have come to that.)

I've been feeling sorry for myself, because theatre is my life, but now I'm not earning my own money, how can I afford to buy tickets? And who will give me press tickets for a blog review that maybe 300 people will read?

(Where do I even start on the self-centredness on this? How do I expect theatre practitioners to pay their rent if people aren't buying tickets? Isn't part of the problem with newspapers that no one wants to pay for them any more? When was the last time I actually bought a newspaper? I get my news from twitter, read the few articles that catch my attention online, expect everything for free. Of course the economics are fucked: but I can't ignore my role in making them so.)

And then:

I've tried to remember that people whose intellect and craft as writers dazzle me, make me feel unutterably puny, not only enjoy my writing but respect it, praise it, encourage it.

And that this is the push I need to work properly on Dialogue, and on reinventing what it is to write about theatre; to challenge myself as a writer; to discover a new audience, maybe not a massive or a mainstream audience, but possibly an audience that doesn't yet know that it wants to read about theatre, and all the things that writing about theatre entail. Society, politics, feminism, anti-capitalism, inequality...

X

It's the push I need to build on the work I've been doing with Fuel/New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood, to stop running scared from the Shunt book idea, to help Exeunt/theatremagazine become vital.

It might have been the push I needed to get the novels written, except that over Christmas I read a novel that was fine, serviceable, essentially not very good, and was forced to admit to myself that if I wrote a novel in time for turning 40, this is how it would read. A depressing truth, tempered by the fact that Penelope Fitzgerald was 58 before she published a book. I still have two decades to become good enough for myself.

The hardest thing, and I feel pretty stupid saying this, will be learning to say “it's Maddy Costa” when I call people, rather than “it's Maddy from the Guardian”. My identity has been tied up in that newspaper for 14 years. I've no idea if I'm ready to stand up on my own. But I'm going to have to.

That, and get used to not getting paid.

*

The days between sending the piece in and waiting for it to be published were spent working with LIFT. I'm late posting this because every spare hour lately has been devoted to that. It's blissful. I'm working on paper again, making pages, making a magazine. It's brought home to me how much I miss the tangible, miss commissioning other writers, miss working with designers, framing stories, seeing things from a reader's perspective. I miss the sense of achievement in seeing a project through to completion. Sometimes I think I'm still heartbroken by my failure to become Guardian arts editor.

On two of those days, working in the design office, this song played:

Both times I stopped freefalling and started floating. And now every time I listen I feel it rushing through my blood and it's like somersaults.

(Dug this one out again too. Also magic.)

*

There's a longer version of the Carrie Cracknell, by the way. (There always is.) Bizarrely, someone called Hobo O'Riley seems to have decided to post up his comment on the Guardian feature not there but on two unconnected posts here. He must really want to talk to me about it. At the point when I spoke to Carrie, I hadn't seen the explicit video for Blurred Lines, and the “prudishness” question was mostly directed at myself. I've since seen the explicit, and my problem with it can be boiled down to four words: naked women, dressed men. When that gets reversed, the conversation will start feeling very different.

Talking to Carrie has inspired me finally to read Susan Faludi's Backlash, a book I've owned for two decades but only ever dipped into, cover-to-cover. It ought to be out of date by now. So far, depressingly, infuriatingly, not quite astonishingly, it isn't. Dialogue is lining up a Theatre Club on Blurred Lines: I'm really looking forward to it.

Summer 2013 and controversy is raging. Robin Thicke's supremely catchy song Blurred Lines – in which a man in a nightclub tries to persuade a beautiful woman to stop being a “good girl” and do what he knows she really wants – is being banned from student unions up and down the country, condemned in blogs and newspapers for promoting rape culture, and topping pop charts across the globe. All this is fuelled by the song's video, in which – in the explicit version – women wearing nothing but silken G-strings and clompy shoes cavort around three men in suits who clearly can't believe their luck.

For theatre director Carrie Cracknell, who is directing a new show for the National Theatre Shed deliberately named after the song, Blurred Lines is a red rag. When I wonder whether it's prudishness that makes people recoil from it, she argues: “It's really easy for women to get accused of being prudish, but there is an absolute line about sexual consent which cannot be blurred. The rage I feel in relation to that song is about the idea of strong men, fully dressed, animalising and brutalising a group of scantily clad women who apparently are empowered and completely in control of their bodies.

“Of course sex is part of our life and not something we should repress or censor, but rape is not sex, and non-consensual sex for young women is a massive problem. A whole generation of young boys and girls are growing up and their first sexual experiences are pornography which is deeply hateful and misogynistic and full of violence, and this song is the tip of that iceberg. It has to take responsibility for the normalisation of that. Anyway, rant over.” And she stops, suddenly sheepish.

A willowy, elegant 33-year-old, Cracknell is all thoughtful restraint on the surface, but seething beneath. It seems odd that she should feel the need to apologise for expressing herself strongly, but it turns out this has been a running theme in the Blurred Lines rehearsal room. “That anxiety about being strident or pushy comes back to the socially constructed idea of gender,” she suggests, “and how women feel they have to find a feminine version of power to get what they want, while anything that feels outwardly aggressive or masculine is held back in some way.”

For Blurred Lines, which opens this week, she's working with eight female actors – including Sinead Matthews, Ruth Sheen, Claire Skinner and Michaela Coel – and a male writer, Nick Payne, to devise the show in the rehearsal room. Together they've been improvising a series of scenes that tackle the representation of women across film, television, theatre and pop. They're also contemplating casual misogyny, the normalisation of the sex industry, rape culture, and ongoing problems to do with work and parenting.

It's useful, Cracknell says, to have a male writer taking part: Payne describes himself as a feminist, and argues that the issues with which they're grappling are not women's only. “Nick said in rehearsal one day: a lot of this is a male problem. Rape is a male problem. Men are not trained as boys that they might become rapists, they're not taught in sex education that they have to take responsibility for whether a girl says yes or no. Of course we could argue that it should be a female playwright, but his perspective and searching and questioning have been as relevant as mine.”

Apart from Thicke's song, Blurred Lines has its roots in the work that pulled Cracknell into the mainstream: her 2012 production of A Doll's House, the Ibsen play championed by feminists because it depicts a woman walking out on her husband and children in an attempt to discover her real self. The production, starring Hattie Morahan as a fluttering, manipulative Nora, had two successful runs at the Young Vic in London before transferring to the West End; it moves to New York in February.

“The first question we asked when we started making A Doll's House,” says Cracknell, “was: what does the play look like now? What's the relationship between the gender politics of the 1890s and the world we live in? The thing that Hattie drew out was this idea that Nora's power is completely seated in her sexuality. That really struck me, because of this idea that women are more sexualised now than they've ever been, or trying to move towards an ever-narrowing ideal of what it means to be beautiful and therefore powerful.”

Are things really worse now, or is the problem that we expect decades of feminism to have made things better? “Women have always been judged on how they look more than men, women have always been objectified more than men,” Cracknell agrees. “What happens now is a pernicious, deep-rooted connection between global capitalism and an unobtainable physical ideal. The desire for profit of those big beauty firms and of our television culture, and the way that those things are hooking into each other, feels really overwhelming.”

To coincide with the stage production, Cracknell made a short film for the Young Vic and the Guardian, in which Nora – again played by Morahan – is updated to a modern working mother, falling to pieces as she struggles with her impossible juggling act. Payne co-wrote it with her, and had a strong influence on her thinking about both Noras when he handed her a copy of Kat Banyard's wake-up call to a generation of post-feminists, The Equality Illusion. Reading it, Cracknell says, “I had a feminist awakening. I'm of a generation that to some extent have been told that we're equal, that women have every opportunity men have. But I believe Kat's thesis: the equality we'd been sold was an illusion. Women are still disproportionately disempowered in public life and being paid less than men, while sexual harassment and violence are endemic in our culture.”

None of this occurred to Cracknell as a teenager. “I was raised with the idea that it was irrelevant that I was a woman: you just had to get on with being funny, being kind and working hard.” Back then, theatre was a hobby; her real ambition was to be a politician. She had a “strong left-wing upbringing”: her mother was a primary school teacher and latterly head; her father a businessman who taught at Oxford Brookes University and became a local councillor. “The first time I voted was for my dad. This idea of the right to vote was such a profound thing in our house,” Cracknell recalls. She studied history at Nottingham with full intentions of becoming an MP, but theatre snared her in her first year. Now she pins her socialist hopes on her nephew, who is also studying history and politics at Nottingham and wants to run the Labour party. “I've asked if I can be in his cabinet on gender and culture,” she laughs.

She spent a few years assisting directors including Dominic Dromgoole and Katie Mitchell, then at 26 became the youngest artistic director in the country, co-running the Gate in London with Natalie Abrahami. “We had a brilliant five years where we got to find our own identity make loads of public fuck-ups in a quite joyful teenage way,” she says. “Natalie and I were interested in experimenting with form, in what theatre and dance look like when they're together, so it always felt like this punk little venue.”

She managed to combine that with having two children, now aged two and four (they have a starring role in the Nora film, where they get abandoned on a trampoline). Cracknell won't talk about how she balances work and motherhood, but does admit that she finds balancing her own ambitions complex. “My desire to parent is as strong now as my desire to move forward. But I feel calm about making a bit less work, and enjoy that work more as a consequence, focusing on it more, having more time to develop it. A Doll's House was born out of a year of preparation because I was on maternity leave; I probably couldn't have made that work without that space to cook it in my mind.”

Rather than her own struggle with childcare arrangements, she prefers to comment on the bigger picture: “In Blurred Lines we've been doing quite a lot of research into the economics of how parenting affects the female work force. There's an elite 15% of hyper-educated women who are in many respects echoing the working patterns of men, very long hours, completely committed to their careers. A proportion of them have children and tend to go back to work quite quickly, and can therefore afford childcare and just about make that work. The financial gap is growing between that group and women who work in part-time, less well-paid or less skilled jobs who can't always afford formalised or flexible childcare and therefore can't affect change over their salaries or over the kinds of roles they can take on.”

Theatre tends to be low-paid with long hours, so where Cracknell fits into that picture isn't clear. Again, it's not something she's comfortable going into. So far, she says, being a woman hasn't diminished her own opportunities: mostly she's been able to do the work she wants to do, and she's been given some fantastic opportunities. Alongside her West End debut with A Doll's House, last year she directed her first opera, a well-received Wozzeck for ENO. But she feels a more general frustration with theatre culture: “It's still a male-dominated world because the stories we tell are inherited from a culture in which women weren't allowed to do those things. And we still predominately think the stories of men are more important and more interesting than the stories of women.

“We're only in the second generation in which women have really been able to take full control in public life and therefore we don't have all of those stories yet. We have to understand who those characters are, we have to take the female narrative out of the domestic and into the public.” Recently she was invited to direct a play for the National's biggest space, the Olivier, and was startled by how difficult it was to find a female character with the “scale or scope of emotional depth” to fill the room. Somewhat predictably, the play she's going to direct is a Greek tragedy, Medea.

That's in June; before that she'll be at the Royal Court, directing a new play dissecting rock'n'roll celebrity by Simon Stephens, and contributing to the life of the building as associate director. One of her key tasks is dealing with gender imbalance. “An American actress brilliantly suggested that you could take every screenplay and change half the male character names to female ones. Why can't the doctor or the policeman or lawyer or the judge just be women? Sometimes I think at the Court we can do that, we can encourage writers to think of their protagonist as a woman without actually changing very many of the characteristics.”

Despite that early ambition to become an MP, Cracknell is constantly surprised by the extent to which politics, gender or otherwise, now govern her theatre-making. “I used to call my work 'political with a small p': it was about the human experience. As I get older, I understand that the human experience is at the heart of a bigger experience, and I've found that really liberating and intellectually stimulating. Rather than my work always being about the story, it's about the context for the story as well.”

In the republic of happiness and the radiance of the imagination, except on the days when it's all just a tragic (sloppy usage) waste of time

I've been writing this for most of this year already, which is a ridiculous state of affairs. I've tried to abandon it but it keeps needling away at me, like the children when they want things. What does this post, this blog, want from me? At the moment, I think, it just wants me to remember that writing about theatre isn't a WHOLLY POINTLESS WASTE of fucking time and thought and passion and energy and TIME. I had quite the slump of faith following this year's Devoted and Disgruntled, irritated by the smallness of most people's concerns (mine included), disappointed by the lack of care across theatre, depressed by the wide-spread belief that Lyn Gardner single-handedly keeps the industry alive (I don't dispute that, but I'd like to raise the profile of the generation in her slipstream), flabbergasted that so many people are in thrall to the West End model of existence, despite the fact that it works in the West End for particular reasons that make it unsuitable elsewhere... 

Somewhere in the midst of that petulant sulk, I became haunted by this: 

It was David Peschek who persuaded me to give Father John Misty a listen (I approach Bella Union with caution), and for six months Fear Fun's lilting twists on country music cheered me whenever I put it on. But then Dorian Lynskey tweeted that “Now I'm Learning To Love the War contains one of the best arguments for creating art I've heard” (I paraphrase), and I realised that I'd hardly listened to the lyrics because I'd been too intoxicated by Tillman's voice. He doesn't sing so much as let sound waft from his body, the way fumes rise from a perfectly aged single malt. Now I've started paying attention, Fear Fun feels a lot more complicated, abrasive and brain-joltingly smart. Particularly the ethical argument underpinning Now I'm Learning To Love the War, directly linking the politics of oil to art/everyday existence X.

There is a fragility to Tillman's expression of internal conflict and attempt at consolation in this song that I find terribly moving. But what makes it so specifically acute is his recognition of the egoism involved in any act of creation:

Let's just call this what it is

The gentler side of mankind's death wish

When it's my time to go

Gonna leave behind things that won't decompose

I'll just call this what it is

My vanity gone wild with my crisis

One day this all will repeat

I sure hope they make something useful out of me

The desire to do something meaningful; the frustration of knowing that it's not so much one's own actions but their reception that counts; the desolation of insignificance; the abysmal conceit: all expressed in two succinct choruses. No wonder the song wouldn't leave me be.

That's where I was when I abandoned this again, to go to Bristol for In Between Time, four intoxicating days of impeccably curated performance and art and theatre and live art where I was the writer-in-residence who hardly wrote a thing, and when I did it was in the old mould, the broadsheet review (albeit longer). So that was another gloom of failure in which this didn't get written. A week later I snuck off to the cinema to see Django Unchained and OH THE RAPTURE of Quentin Tarantino, idiosyncratic and scurrilous; of fearlessness in storytelling, myth-stealing, narrative pace, characterisation, political attack: the kind of devil-may-care brashness that says yes, in this story of America in 1858 I will give my lead character a brushed suede jacket and round sunglasses that make him look like a character from Superfly, and yes, in this soundtrack homage to 1960s spaghetti westerns I will inject blasts of rap. Unfortunately, I've just wasted about 30 minutes failing to track down various tweets I vaguely recall reading, along the lines of: I wish more theatre were like this. Which made me think: theatre IS like this – maybe you're just watching the wrong theatre. Or watching it in the wrong way. I watched Django Unchained in a huge room in Brixton Ritzy with maybe 30 other people; in the theatre, that sort of low attendance would trouble me, but here I didn't care. There is such self-consciousness, such insecurity, such a need for validation in theatre; I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. Let's not waste time justifying ourselves: let's use it to be courageous, fierce, and brilliant.

None of which is what I set out to say here. This started life as a post about Martin Crimp and Polly Stenham and the London international mime festival, by way of Nick Cave, Patti Smith and chocolate cake. Now it's spiralled out of control, tugging me into its vortex. Why don't I just bin it? Why do I bother? My cynical side says I'm just suffocatingly beholden to the people who have given me free tickets for stuff. X Last night on the tube, after watching Laura Mugridge's Watery Journey of Nereus Pike, a joyful piece of romantic storytelling and child-like playing in which the audience get to participate in the most delightful of ways – for happy instance, using glowsticks to create the effect of bioluminscent fish in the depths of the ocean, to a pounding soundtrack that made me wish I'd not been scared to go to raves as a teenager – I finished reading John Berger's And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, and had a little moment with this passage about poetry:

Poetry's impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons (all comparisons are hierarchical) or to diminish the particularity of any event; it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of existence.

I'm no poet, but I recognise that impulse as my own. So hey ho, let's go:

In the republic...

Just as I'd decided not to bother writing about In the Republic of Happiness, I belatedly caught up with Dan Rebellato's astute account of it, and recalled that no one seems to have seen it in quite the way I did. So I came back to this, only to read, three days later, Catherine Love's meticulous review, which is not only formidably good but says almost everything I'd intended to say, only better. Since then, I've just been dithering. Still, mustn't succumb to wounded pride. Plus, there are at least three minute details in which I differ from Catherine. And I've done a lot of complaining on Deliq about the Royal Court: the least I can do in return for the tickets they give me is write about the shows I love.

And I did love the Crimp, passionately – the more so because I felt awful going in. The crowd in the bar and the auditorium seemed gallingly well-bred and I just didn't fit. I listened to Nick Cave's No More Shall We Part when the new one came out and was reminded by the line in Darker With the Day – “The streets groan with little Caesars, Napoleons and cunts” – of David P's work-of-genius Mojo review of the album: “There speaks a man who lives in west London.” THAT'S how it felt in the Royal Court: everyone around me privileged and proud. And then Martin Crimp took a skewer to them. Repeatedly.

So yes, this is a reductive reading, but I see the three republics of the title as family, celebrity and online. See is the key word there, not reading: the interpretation is primarily a response to Miriam Buether's set designs (which Andrew Haydon has dismissed as not her best, so that's another confidence-booster).

I saw Republic a few days after The Architects, and because thoughts on one show inevitably infect another, Family felt like another articulation of the argument I saw in Shunt's piece, interrogating what we think we're worth, what we think we deserve. There are two daughters in this family, both teenagers; Debbie is pregnant, and – to the fury of her sister Hazel – the parents have bought her a car and diamond earrings for Christmas. Does she need them? But of course: a pregnant woman needs to be reassured of her own value – and surely can't be expected to use public transport. (We're not told where they live, but the implication is that it's not a lack of buses that's the problem, but Debbie's inflated self-importance.) You'd assume from the gifts that the family is wealthy, but Crimp implies that they're struggling financially: Dad rations their use of electric bulbs, not because he's concerned about climate change, but to save money: “electricity's got so expensive”. This is partly why the grandmother's confession to a love of taxis (or, in another bit of David P brilliance, “slipping into something more comfortable”) has such a frisson about it: she keeps it a secret because the family can't afford it.

Remember the Squeezed Middle? This is them: not rich enough to feel comfortable, not poor enough to merit sympathy, grasping at luxuries they cannot afford. Priorities skewed, the parents are raising their daughters to be spoiled, demanding and self-regarding, care-less women for whom the height of ambition is to marry for money: “I'll make him pay for my meals/ I'll strut and fuck him in heels.” When Mum's errant brother Bob and his wife Madeleine materialise and begin puncturing the family's vanity and complacency, it's exhilarating – because every word feels like an assault on the audience, too, on their own nothing-is-too-good-for-my-children attitudes that keep inequality unchecked. No wonder the claret walls of the set cave in.

We shift to what looks like a bland grey TV studio, the highway to 21st-century celebrity. The particularity of this celebrity is two-fold: it's more intimately connected with the promise of money and luxury than the light-entertainment competitions of the past (or is that simplistically nostalgic?); it's also, with the dominance of trash media and its predatory impetus, more intimately connected with self-exposure. (I talk about this like I'm not part of the problem: recently I interviewed Rebecca Lenkiewicz knowing full well that the work itself – an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw which I didn't even make time to see – was a flimsy excuse to probe into a life that fascinates me. Fans of Crimp won't be surprised to hear that when I interviewed him for the National revival of Attempts, he was not only resistant to any questions about his family life but perplexed that I should even ask.)

Celebrity confession now happens in a context of increased awareness of pop psychology, a lucrative self-help industry, and the dominance of me journalism, in blogs and broadsheet media alike. This is the landscape of Crimp's second republic, and he dissects it with microscopic precision. Again, what makes this section so piercing is that every word feels as though it's addressed at you, yes you, sitting in the auditorium demanding space for your voice to be heard in the cacophony of the world. You with your mitherings about what-life-is and how-it-should-be, you convinced that you're different –

I am the one – yes – writing the script.

… Nobody looks like me. Nobody speaks the way I do now. Nobody can imitate this way of speaking.

No way.

No way can anyone speak like I do. I make myself what I am: I'm free – okay? – to invent myself as I go along.

… I've got my own voice: I don't repeat what other people say.

– and that what you say is worth hearing. As Sylvia Plath noted on twitter (ha!) while I was writing this: We all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists.

On the page, the final part opens with a quotation from Dante's Paradiso: “Thou are not upon earth, as thou believest” (thanks, google translate). For a lot of people, that encouraged an interpretation of the three republics as hell/purgatory/heaven; for me, it confirmed what I thought when watching it: that Miriam Buether situates Bob and Madeleine inside a computer. The backdrop – nine panes of glass opening out to a flat vague wash of green and blue – looks like a pun on Windows Vista. The gleaming white of the room is like the pearlescent white of an Apple laptop. The fetishism of thinness that you get in new-technology adverts: it's there in Madeleine's language when she describes the world she and Bob will inhabit as “Hard. Clear. Sharp. Clean” and “thin … as a pane of glass”.

Online, we transcend earth, and in doing so enter a realm where all the mess of human existence can be avoided if we wish. Mulling over the Crimp took me back to a TED talk by Sherry Turkle, in which she mourns the effect of social media on our ability to communicate with each other, to engage with argument or criticism, to respond to deep feeling. Or, as Bob sings in the 100% Happy song:

It's a new kind of world

and it doesn't come cheap

and you'll only survive

if you don't go deep

It made me think about the way I/we use twitter, the way I/we use blogs, our disorienting oscillations between snippish little aphorisms and monolithic monologues; the way both allow us to impose ourselves on people we've never met, even as we fail to talk meaningfully to friends we've known for years. A few days after I saw Republic the Suzanne Moore storm raged through social and traditional media and it felt like the new world in action: on the plus side, I learned that there is a generation of feminist thinking I want to catch up on, in which I'm cisgendered and there's a word (intersectionality) for that awareness you try to keep as a white western university-educated working middle-class heterosexual feminist, that individuals are oppressed in multiple ways – but for a couple of days I felt terrified by all the anger and emotion and verbal abuse and all but withdrew. It's the attraction to leadership in that world that Crimp interrogates, the inanity in the spaces between the intellectual arguments that he satirises. Click on my smiling face and you can install a version of this song/ that has no words at all.

I talked about that Sherry Turkle thesis with a friend after seeing David Parkin's Good Friday at BAC: she contested it, and told me about another TED talk, on choice and its concomitant regrets. In turn I told her about the quiver in the heart I felt reading this in Berger's And Our Faces:

… death was [once] thought of as the companion of life, as the precondition for that which came into Being from Non-being; one was not possible without the other. As a result, death was qualified by that which it could not destroy or by that which would return.

That life is brief was continually lamented. Time was death's agent and one of life's constituents. But the timeless – that which death could not destroy – was another. All cyclic views of time held these two constituents together: the wheel turning and the ground on which it turned.

The mainstream of modern thought has removed time from this unity and transformed it into a single, all-powerful and active force. In so doing it has transferred the spectral character of death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all. …

Man now becomes condemned to time, which is no longer a condition of life and therefore something sacred, but the inhuman principle which spares nothing. Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment.

And yes, she and I are all about the big life crises, so we talk about this stuff anyway – but Parkin's show shifts the context, by saying one possible subtext out loud. Parkin barely discusses the roots of the depression that led him to attempt suicide in a lay-by in Croydon in 2009: little more specific than a brief reference to a broken heart. It's a smart move: without the imposition of personal biography, his experience communicates more widely. You think that sounds bland (and calculating), but in a moment of transition within the show, from the viscous murk of self-hatred to the tentative brightness of recovery, Parkin asks a question of the audience: who has, or knows someone, with depression? Almost all hands go up. I felt the same choke in my throat seeing them raised that I feel on train journeys through the outskirts of London, gazing through mud-splattered windows at the dense network of suburban streets, house after house after house: so many people, so many stories, not waving but drowning. Parkin doesn't tell us if what we drown in is affluenza or the inevitable by-product of capitalism or the anguish of souls wrenched from communion with the earth: he just clears the path to a place where we can think these things through ourselves.

Rather than causes, Good Friday is concerned with one individual effect. Essentially, it's a gig, in which Parkin performs beginning to end the concept album he wrote while teaching himself to play piano in the aftermath of the suicide attempt. It's is a funny little show, because for all its craft – the exquisite undertow of cello, the rhythmic tick of an antique clock, the allure of velvety shadows – it feels artless. It wasn't until Parkin contacted me on twitter that I realised he had experience as a theatre-maker (15 years with metro-boulot-dodo): he comes across like an earnest big kid, doing his best for his parents – although perhaps that's partly because his parents were watching the same night as me.

That gawkiness infuses his songwriting, too, which is why if Good Friday actually were an album, I don't think I'd like it much. Running through the decades, the mood it conveys has generally found me here:

here:

here:

and, dear god hold me and don't let go, here:

Although it did occur to me watching John Grant play Pale Green Ghosts live last night that he and Parkin share songwriting DNA (autobiography, lacerating honesty, colloquial turns of phrase), a connection most apparent in this song:

It wasn't the music but the performance of Good Friday that absorbed me: its careful expression of emotion, its solicitude towards the audience, its understated bravery. And one line in particular will stay with me, the way a paraphrased reflection of Jenny Diski's has stayed with me, that people who commit suicide are paradoxically consumed by hope, the hope that everything will be better on the other side of death. Parkin's was the sober observation that we all go out and do battle with the world – but people who are depressed come home and do battle with themselves.

...of happiness...

When I was a kid I thought I'd never grow out of going on the swings. See-saws, merry-go-rounds, even slides I could give or take, but not the swings. The discovery a few years ago that I'd grown out of them to such a degree that going on them gave me motion sickness was a melancholy one. And then the kids were born and pretty soon it seemed wrong to go on the swings, or roll down a grassy hill, or do any childish thing. Somehow, I let myself stop playing.

And then last autumn, in a moment of topsy-turvy, transcendental happiness, I reclaimed the playground. I would deliberately get to school too early so I could clamber with my son on the climbing frame and listen to him laugh as I swung with my feet stretched high and my head tipped low. Giddy times.

That was the rapture I felt watching Ockham's Razor's Not Until We Are Lost in the London international mime festival. The five performers scamper across the scaffolding set like an Enid Blyton gang, scrabbling up hills and swinging in caverns. The show is full of dares and double-dares: when one of them is unhappy, two others rally round, tipping her, swinging her, nudging her off balance, until her smile is no longer begrudging but wide and real. There's romance, too, particularly when the performance moves to a tall perspex box in which a man is trapped, and an impish, playful woman climbs up to lead him out. And so much beauty: in the opening scene, with a woman in the perspex box alone, surrounded by tissue paper, pulling it down around her like a bridal veil; in the use of a choir, a large group of local singers who emerge from the audience as though we too could fill our lungs and join in; and, throughout, the elegant glimmering sound of a harp.

It wasn't until I read the company's notes in the programme that I appreciated what a big thing it was for them that this show was promenade: I enjoyed the proximity to the performers, seeing the curl of their feet around scaffolding poles, the stretch of their muscles as they swung – but proximity is a habitual thing for me. It was a useful reminder of the importance of seeing things on the makers' terms, not only your own: a central tenet of the Dialogue project, and something I failed to honour in writing about our September residency at BAC, as pointed out by Caroline Williams (writer, director and illustrator of Puffball) when she emailed to say that I'd misapprehended a crucial aspect of her work. In the same 24-hour period as receiving that email I made this year's marmalade, which took several hours, required ignoring my son for most of a day and left one of the pans burned. It's now so solid you can't spread it. A day of flailing, in which once again it seemed necessary to reassess every single choice I make in my haphazard life. What made everything better that time was cake: specifically, making a decent chocolate porridge cake. The idea came from my son: he loves chocolate, he loves porridge, so in his imagination this is manna. For Ben:

Chocolate porridge cake

150g butter

50g dark chocolate

100g milk chocolate

3 eggs

150g light muscovado sugar

75g fine ground oatmeal

50g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1-2 tsp vanilla extract

Melt the butter and two chocolates; meanwhile beat the egg yolks with the sugar, then stir through the melted stuff. Add the rest of the ingredients – not the egg whites – and beat it all together. Then whisk the three egg whites until stiff and fold them through. Bake it in a square 20cm tin, lined, for about an hour at 180/gas 4. It comes out like a chocolate-flavoured parkin, chewy and slightly nutty.

I spend most of my life convinced I'm making the wrong decisions X. One of my favourite shows at In Between Time – that's a stupid construction, nearly everything I saw there was a favourite show – was Sylvia Rimat's If You Decide To Stay, because it recognised and took blessedly seriously this constant sense of dilemma. What intrigues Sylvia isn't just the why of choosing but the how: she talks to a neuroscientist about what happens in the brain during decision-making, a mathematician about probability, a therapist about the tangle of childhood experiences that might have influenced her path through life. There are moments of awe at the fathomless power of luck in people's lives (Sylvia wouldn't exist if her grandparents, as intended, had boarded a cruise ship that later sank); and moments of playfulness, when she attempts to disrupt the audience's own decision-making, or influence it through the power of suggestion. Watching it, I felt very moved by its attempt to see choice as cause for celebration rather than self-reproach and regret; later I appreciated something else, a subtle contribution to feminist argument in a note from the neuroscientist. Emotion and cognition, he said, are intimately entwined, so it doesn't make sense to talk about them in separate terms. We imagine that decisions are made in the cognitive part of the brain, but emotion is involved, too – and mood is integral to our ability to make good decisions. What interests me about this is the case it makes for instinct, emotional response, as a valid basis for decision-making: so often denigrated compared with the cool, rational reasoning prioritised in a patriarchal culture.

...and the radiance of the imagination

Since having kids, I've been consumed by the anxiety of choice: whatever I'm doing, I'm sure I should be doing something else. I want to give them everything money can't buy: stories and escapades and the wild beauty of autumn and spring. Instead I spend most of our time yelling at them to stop fighting, use a fork, get a tissue, go to the toilet, a tedium so unrelenting, demoralising and exhausting I haven't the energy for the fun stuff. This is partly what drew me into Polly Stenham's No Quarter: in the relationship between Robin and his mother Lily, Stenham depicts a different kind of motherhood, a romantic version in which childhood is an adventure. The argument that the mother's eccentricity damages the child, makes him incapable of functioning within society, is strong. And I understand why people would find Robin unbearable: “a pretentious, pompous, self-regarding, colossal prick”, to quote Dan Rebellato. Possibly I'd think Robin were all those things too, except that he was played by Tom Sturridge, and I'm not sure I could find anyone played by Tom Sturridge unbearable.

Truthfully, I've found it difficult to remember what I liked so much about No Quarter since reading Dan's review: he objects to it with irrefutable authority. I remember thinking that Stenham's writing was like a fireworks display: a plain black expanse disrupted, with variable frequency, by lines that glittered and sparked. I remember thinking that much of the political argument between Robin and his older brother Oliver felt schematic, but that the secrecy surrounding their mother's suicide, the assumptions cherished by each sibling, the complicated ethics, the impossible question of whether lies within a family protect or corrode, was more involving. That said, I remember being struck by one accusation Robin hurls at his brother: “It's a twisting irony that after so many years of people trying to ferret their way up the socio-economic scale, you would like nothing more than to slither all the way down it.” Around the same time as I saw No Quarter, Alex Andreou began an extraordinary conversation on twitter about poverty, and I felt ridiculous taking part in it because I was mostly protected from my parents' experience of poverty, and because even to talk about it makes me sound as though I'm engaging in that slithering Robin speaks of so scornfully. But just as the psychotherapist Sylvia Rimat interviewed argued that everything in Sylvia's life today can be traced back to a childhood experience, I'm sure my life has been shaped by my family's hand-to-mouth existence in a flat in Hackney with an electricity meter my parents occasionally couldn't feed, from which we were evicted when I was about nine; the brief period in which we were homeless and refused to stay in a Bayswater hotel, instead filling the crevices of my granny's flat; and the two years spent in short-term council accommodation. It made my already ambitious mother bloody-minded in her pursuit of middle-class security – and has given me a deference for that security that I can't control.

But there was something else I sympathised with in No Quarter, which I might have read differently or as negatively as Dan Reb were it not for the coincidence of finishing Patti Smith's Just Kids that week. I'd been working up to Just Kids for a while, wary of being disappointed out of my adulation of Patti Smith, reluctant because I have a reflex antipathy to the entire genre of autobiography – yes, I do wince at the irony. A fair bit of Just Kids confirmed that prejudice: much as I love Patti, I'm not that interested in her cheese-sandwich dinners, no matter how shrewdly she punctures the romantic-poetic image of poverty; similarly, there's a part of me that reads her encounters with this or that famous person as little more than name-dropping. But mostly it was everything I'd want a book by Patti Smith to be: electric with strength of character, inspiring in its politics, a manifesto for the life to which I aspire. The brief description of her relationship with Sam Shepard alone made it worth reading:

“I can't do this,” I said. “I don't know what to say.”

“Say anything,” he said. “You can't make a mistake when you improvise.”

“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”

“You can't,” he said. “It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

That, and a tiny phrase at the very beginning, where she describes her burgeoning appreciation of language, in the form of prayer, as: “my entrance into the radiance of the imagination”. Looking at the whole of that passage again in Just Kids, I realise how close it is to a note by Berger on language and poetry in And Our Faces: “One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or god. Yet its very openness can signify indifference. (The indifference of language is continually solicited and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiques, files.) Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and incite a caring.”

Where Just Kids connects with No Quarter is in Patti's cogent argument for rejecting the conventional mores of society while embracing the social responsibility that makes art worthwhile. She waited until she was 28 to sign her record deal (offers before that “came, I felt, too easy”), because she wanted the music she made to be reverent and relevant. When the time eventually came to record Horses, she walked into the vocal booth thinking intently of:

The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one's actions.

Of her band, she says:

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.

Stenham's Robin is a musician, too, a pianist, but in rejecting conventional society he also rejects human responsibility. Oliver is a politician with an overweening appreciation of his own social engagement. Stenham – and I bet Dan Reb would scorn this – attempts to steer the middle path with No Quarter: celebrating the value of words, or art, for themselves while using them to articulate our shared responsibility for the planet and the future. Even if she didn't pull it off, that's what made me like it.

So this is now 5500 words long: anyone who has made it this far, I don't know whether to kiss you or pity you. This postscript is for David Peschek, who called me today and read me the introduction to a biography of Elizabeth Smart by Rosemary Sullivan, with emphasis on the lines, “she knew how the role assigned the mother emptied the writer's ego”, and: “she had a rage of will: she bashed on regardless”. That, too, is why I'm still here.