Last night I fell asleep burning to
write about Kathleen Hanna, but then my son woke me up at 1.44am and
6am needing help because he has a dicky tummy and was exploding with
diarrhoea, and now I'm looking at the eight-project to-do list and
wondering if I should bother.
This morning my best friend from
teenage years, the girl who stood on stage with me in an upstairs
room in Camden and read out poetry by Sylvia Plath while I clanged
around with a guitar (we only did it once), sent me an email
confessing that she feels ordinary, vanilla. “Having kids knocked
the stuffing out of me,” she writes. The line rattles in my heart
like a pebble.
Last night we saw The Punk Singer
together. It reminded me of every time I've thought about starting a
band and weaselled out. Of every time I've shut up and let someone
else tell me what to do rather than standing my ground. Of wanting to
start a magazine and looking for permission, which is slightly more
than but also the same as looking for money, instead of just slapping
one together with a stick of glue and a stapler. The constant nagging
thought in my head: I'm not doing enough, I'm not loud enough, I'm
not strong enough to remake the world.
But that's not what it's about.
There's a brilliant line in The Punk
Singer, where Hanna talks about making the first Julie Ruin record,
alone, in her bedroom, quietly rebuilding herself after the fallout
of Bikini Kill. I won't paraphrase it; here's her making the same
point in an interview in 2013:
I needed to get used to the sound of my
own voice, and I think that’s what makes a girl’s bedroom
special. You can make whatever you want when you’re alone in your
room. The thing that’s interesting to me about the mention of it in
the film and the way it was structured is that there are all these
different girls' bedrooms and all these girls are making their stuff,
and then they’re throwing it away, and how can we connect these
bedrooms? We’ve seen today that we can connect these bedrooms
through the Internet. That’s one of the positive things happening.
Around the time that interview was
published, I threw away most of my teenage years and 20s: it was all
just so much clutter. Not the fanzines, though. I kept those.
(I talk a lot at the moment about wanting to connect the disparate conversations happening in theatre, about finding ways to share ideas, the responsibility I feel to join the dots. How writing might do that, a magazine might do that. The itch to make another fanzine is strong.)
Truth is, when my best friend and I
went to see Bikini Kill, I guess when they toured in 1993, I was
disappointed: they were a racket, and aggressive, and the whole thing
was so confrontational I couldn't connect to it. The anger terrified
me. And there was a lot about their construction of feminism I didn't
understand. Why push boys to the back, instead of fighting for a
space where girls and boys could stand-dance-sing side by side? I have a letter
from another riot grrrl, older than me, explaining that one with
gentle patience; I remember reading it and feeling like an idiot.
I'm berating myself again.
Watching The Punk Singer, I recognised
the extent to which Kathleen Hanna raised the stick against which I
have measured most of my life. Riot grrrl changed me. It gave me
feminism, politics, a way of looking at the world. I knew I wanted to
make stuff when it happened (writing, art, music, I didn't know, but
something), and it told me to just get started. It told me to think hard
about what I was saying. And something else it told me, which even now I keep
needing to remind myself: if, by saying something truthful, something
vulnerable, you can connect with one other person and make them feel
less weird, less stupid, less alone, that is enough.
Like all feminists, I have moments of
feeling unutterably depressed by apparently how little has changed
for the positive in the 20 years since I encountered it. From the
micro – girls are still pushed out of the front at gigs – to the
macro, which is just about everything. When I started reading Susan
Faludi's Backlash last year, a book I bought some 20 years ago, I was
astonished: she's writing about the virulent media, cultural and
political backlash against feminism in the 1980s, but all the
newspaper articles she quotes, all the instances she gives of films
and speeches and stupid attitudes, could have dated from any time
since.
But the systems we struggle against are
strong, and we can't give up, I can't give up. There's another
brilliant line in The Punk Singer where Hanna talks about starting Le
Tigre with Johanna Fateman, the two of them sharing all the shit
they'd experienced, and deciding they wanted their new band to be
celebratory, to focus on the stuff that made them happy. By the time
I got home I had Diane di Prima shouting in my ears: ALL POWER TO
JOY, WHICH WILL REMAKE THE WORLD. Anger is vital. But so is joy.
Having kids knocked the stuffing out of
me, too. I still feel I have to ask for permission to work, not just
from the family, from myself. Every day is a fight against spurious
expectations, guilt, convention. If dismantling the patriarchy starts
at home, I'm failing. I don't need anyone to tread me down: I do it
to myself. As for the kids, every time one of them espouses
conformist gender cliches, a bit of my soul breaks. But it's not just
about me teaching (nagging) them to be different: it's about letting
them find the culture that will give them the tools to make
themselves different. If they find something even half as inspiring,
challenging, electrifying as riot grrrl, I'll be happy.
This morning, over breakfast, I played
them Le Tigre, and we talked about What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?, and
my son said he's not a misobogutist because that would mean he hates
me and his sister. So, you know, that's a start.
The word 'free-lance', I used to think,
had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when I tried to be one,
that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon
to tilt at literary windmills.
A common refrain you hear when it comes
to poetry is, “That’s not work. Picking up the garbage is work!”
The people who say this are usually also the people who think that
poetry IS garbage, so I’m not sure what their problem is.
Feelings about the new freelance life:
uncertain, laced with despondence.
Left shoulder: still broken.
Right wrist: repetitive strain injury.
Days until I turn 39: not enough.
I don't really know what I'm doing
here.
*
Calvary is very uncertain about the
“value” of art. It's fairly uncertain about the value of
anything. Its characters grizzle and grouse, stew and steam, because
the things that seemed most solid in Ireland – the sanctity of
church and the wealth of state – have been exposed as sham, and now
everything feels meaningless: marriage, money, faith, life itself.
The chiselled cliffs of County Sligo loom in shot after shot,
monolithic, enduring; the more I think about the film, the more they
strike me as a colossal joke, mocking the inference that the country
might just as well sink into the sea.
John Michael McDonagh has
written/directed a furious piece of political and moral polemic, as
red-raw and twisted as Francis Bacon's Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
You can get the basics from Peter
Bradshaw's and Xan
Brooks' reviews, but here they are quickly: it
centres on a Good Man, a priest, given a week to live by an
embittered parishioner. The Good Man does his best to countervail the
sins of his local community – which run the gamut from adultery to
murder, via arson, domestic violence, drugs and rape – attempting
not to condemn but to illuminate the redemption he intuits (perhaps
over-generously) they deep-down crave; and, while facing up to the
prospect of his own imminent death, aids the convalescence of his
suicidal daughter, ministers the accidental death of a tourist, and
acquires a pistol for an elderly friend. Over the course of the film,
his hope is chipped and battered, so much so that by the end you
could argue he's given up. All of which is rich, knotty and
absorbing, but the thing that made my head really buzz, the thought I
vomited over my husband as we walked from the cinema, is its undertow
commentary on art, particularly art's ability to address what I'm
going to call, more for the ring of it than pinsharp meaning,
impossible things.
It starts like this. The parishioner,
encased in the shadows of the confessional, announces: “I first
tasted semen when I was seven years old.” And the priest, played
with charcoal humour by Brendan Gleeson, responds: “Certainly a
startling opening line.” We've barely begun and already McDonagh
has communicated two things: 1) he's bloody pleased with himself; 2)
if you're going to make art about something as painful,
incomprehensible and repellent as child abuse, to aestheticise would
be insulting. You have to do something else.
As a salvo, there's nothing subtle
about it – but it serves useful notice that we're to think about
what McDonagh is doing, and what our role is as audience. Which is
something I'm more habituated to in theatre, but McDonagh is pretty
merciless (and unsubtle again) in his dig at the tedium of theatre.
That comes later, when the priest and his daughter walk arm-in-arm on
a grassy cliff-top and she wonders what they'd say to each other if
delivering the Third Act Emotional Revelation in “one of those
bloody boring plays at the Abbey”. It's a cliche jibe, unfair but
probably accurate; what they go on to say is sufficiently sentimental
to expose McDonagh's underlying motive, making his own art look
better by scorning another's.
He's kinder to literature: played by M
Emmet Walsh, the character of the American author has a whiskey sour
burnish and ornery snap. He's seen a lot of life and now he's
torching the page with it; I wanted to read his books the same way I
want to gobble every scrap published by BS
Johnson. But it's telling that McDonagh
emphasises the author's isolation, immured in a stone hut amid the
crags of a cliff, accessible only by boat. Where's the collaboration,
the compromise, required of film-making? Where's the direct
engagement with difficult, weird, infuriating humanity?
As for visual art, well now. Dylan
Moran, with exquisite butter-wouldn't-melt foppish insouciance, plays
a very rich man dismissed on his first appearance as a “fucking
prick”. He's one of those people who became staggeringly wealthy in
the days before financial meltdown and now lives like royalty in a
hollow mansion while his country rots. Whether he gives the church a
donation of £10,000 or £100,000 is irrelevant to him, that's how
much money he's got. He asks the priest to visit him, saying he's got
a proposition to make – but the proposition appears to be simply
that nothing has value. Least of all art.
There's an extraordinary piquancy to
the specific piece of art McDonagh uses in this scene. Hans Holbein's
The
Ambassadors luxuriates in materialism while
acknowledging its immateriality in the face of death. It's not a
painting I'd thought much about until reading John Berger's Ways of
Seeing: he interprets it not just “at the level of what it shows
within its frame, but at the level of what it refers to outside it”.
For Berger, the painting is typical of “a class who were convinced
that the world was there to furnish their residency in it”. He
writes:
The gaze of the ambassadors is both
aloof and wary. They expect no reciprocity. They wish the image of
their presence to impress others with their vigilance and their
distance. The presence of kings and emperors had once impressed in a
similar way, but their images had been comparatively impersonal. What
is new and disconcerting here is the individualized presence
which needs to suggest distance. Individualism finally posits
equality. Yet equality must be made inconceivable. [Berger's italics]
That equality was made inconceivable
through the institutionalised racism of colonialism, through
monotheism, and imperialism, through the dehumanising processes of
capitalism – the mechanics of which are among the objects
represented with such painstaking verisimilitude in the painting. In
a scene of breathtaking complexity, and not a little swagger,
McDonagh shows that painting vandalised: at the time I recoiled from
it, but now a bit of me cheers.
McDonagh does this throughout Calvary:
shows you humanity at its worst, the more strongly to encourage you
to seek for its best. What that undertow commentary on art pulls you
towards is a belief in art's ability to inspire empathy. This is the
argument for subsidy it's so difficult to communicate to a government
and an ideology that denies empathy at every turn. Dylan Moran's
character is a Tory monster, a caricature of heartless,
get-the-best-and-fuck-the-rest capitalism. If you encountered him in
a newspaper, you'd just think he's a scumbag. And yet, by the end of
the film, you sympathise with him, because McDonagh shifts the mask
of money just enough to show what's underneath: a lonely, lost,
damaged individual, desperate to feel.
That sounds like apologism, but I think
it's more complicated than that. Empathy demands that we see past
surfaces to the human beneath. In a key line in the film, the priest
rumbles that there's too much talk about sins and not enough about
virtues – in particular, the virtue of forgiveness. It's a fraught
moment, because this is a film triggered by an awareness of, and
desire to face up to, institutionalised child abuse. Where and how
are forgiveness possible for people damaged, haunted, by rape? But
Calvary explores different frames of empathy, different kinds of
understanding and forgiveness, and the darkness that falls when they
are missing. It knows that, in the face of atrocity, art might be
futile – but equally, it might be our best hope.
*
Maybe it's the moment that I'm in –
fragile, adrift, London a cold sea, so many sharks – but everything
has been reading as an attempt to address impossible things. Or maybe
that's all (good) theatre, right? The week that ended with Calvary
started with Oh My Sweet Land at the Young Vic, which had an odd
effect on me: the performer, Corinne Jaber, spends the show
constructing kibbeh, one of many delicious but fiddly to construct
fried things designed, as far as I can tell, to keep the women of the
Mediterranean and Middle East in the kitchen and out of the way. For
the character, they are grandmother, roots, the pull of homeland, and
as I watched her I saw my grandmother teaching my mum to make
flaounia, my mum showing me how to make bourekia, myself making and
tweaking my aunt's recipe for baklava. Always through food that
Cyprus claims me: scents and flavours of an ancestry I've resisted, a
language I've never spoken, a culture I mostly abhor.
The character makes kibbeh to console
and escape, to lose herself in the rhythms of pounding meat,
squeezing bulgher, kneading and shaping, and this is the problem of
the piece: it allows too much escape from its
impossible-to-comprehend subject, the war in Syria. There are scenes
that sear, of beatings, torture, the bleached bodies of children
murdered with gas, casual destruction of lives and livelihoods, but
the pain that drives the piece is a personal one, the heartache of a
woman bereft when the love that flared between her and a refugee is
extinguished. Focusing on romance diminishes the woman; Jaber's face,
chiselled, proud, is too intelligent for that.
In between Calvary and Oh My Sweet Land
was an odd double-bill at Soho Theatre, Captain
Amazing and La Merda, neither of which gained from being thrust
in such close proximity. Captain Amazing really is amazing:
inventive, minutely detailed, small but swollen with heart and
imagination. It jolts from cartoon fantasy to “real life”, from
superheroes who complain about their laundry and argue with estate
agents, to the drab existence of a man discovering a new capacity for
emotion when he accidentally has a child, registering each
handbreak-turn with little more than the barely perceptible swish of
a cape and a twitch in a hangdog face. One of the many things I love
about Alistair
McDowall's script is his understanding of how
hard it is to conjure up bedtime stories for children, how difficult
to escape banality and create another world while struggling to
explain the contradictions, unfairness and oddities of this one. And
one of the many things I loved about Mark Weinman's unobtrusive
performance is that I knew very quickly where the story was going,
basically into my worst nightmare, but I wanted to travel there with
him, no matter how painful it might be.
La
Merda, thankfully, really isn't merda, but it
is a hard, scratchy, angry piece, which scoured away the softness of
Captain Amazing and demanded more of me than I was at that moment
prepared to give. I couldn't tell if it was inspiring or
intimidating: part of me wanted to punch the air, but another wanted
to hide under the seats. Which is pretty much the split of emotion I
felt reading Valerie Solanas' Scum
Manifesto, with which Christian Ceresoli's text
shares an intemperance of energy and expression, and at least the
first bit of her rage to “overthrow the government, eliminate the
money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male
sex”. Silvia Gallerano, naked, voluptuous, although not in the
1950s pin-up way, her body undulating and drooping like softly
moulded clay, mouth a red gash set rigid as she grows ever more
hysterical, is riveting to watch, the self-hatred that cascades from
her at once alarming in its extremity and recognisable in its
banality. She made me want to be kinder to myself, especially to my
thighs, and remember what a political act this can be.
*
16/5/14
Feelings about the new freelance life:
curious, frightened, hopeful, confused.
Left shoulder: physio hurts.
Right wrist: needs a rest.
Days until I turn 39: even fewer.
Losing myself in the shaping of
sentences and the scrabble for words.
Without knowing why.
*
I've been pulling at this question of
how art addresses impossible things, although about as constructively
as when I pull a soggy tissue to shreds, since seeing We Are Proud To
Present at the Bush at the end of March. It really annoyed me; I
always love co-hosting Dialogue Theatre Clubs but was particularly
grateful to this one for helping me exorcise some of that nark. To
give it the whole title, We Are Proud To Present a Presentation About
the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the
German Sudewestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915, asks what theatre
can tell us about colonial genocide, what actors are doing when they
represent such a thing, whose story is being told, what audiences are
getting from it. I can see how Siobhan
Murphy in Metro found it excoriating, but can
also see how Dominic
Cavendish in the Telegraph found it
excruciating. I was somewhere in the middle: occasionally
entertained, mostly involved, increasingly irritated, ultimately
unconvinced.
I think I might have liked it more if
it were actually what it purports to be, a show created by a group of
actors working together, struggling to transform research into
movement, emotion, metaphor: that way, multiple moments in which the
characters reveal themselves as egotistical, greedy for the
limelight, and all too ready to re-enact colonialist or racist
attitudes, might feel less like impositions of caricature. As far as
I can tell, however, the whole thing was scripted by Jackie Sibblies
Drury, as her final thesis on her graduate playwriting programme. I
found this in the Washington
Post when scouring interviews for clues of the
play's genesis:
Is “We Are Proud to Present . . .”
on some level a writer defending her turf? After all, part of it is
poking fun at theater collectives trying to create work as a group.
“I hadn’t thought about it that
way,” Drury laughs. “I hope so. That makes me feel like I have a
lot more chutzpah than I really do.”
It's perfectly possible that Drury is
being misquoted or misrepresented, that she doesn't really want to
come across as a playwright mocking ensemble making processes. And I
realise I'm overprecious when it comes to such processes. X
Over the past several months, I've
become increasingly committed to spending, if not rehearsal-room
time, at least performance-space time with the Lyric Hammersmith
Secret Theatre ensemble. I've seen them experiment with old text and
odd text, freighted text and weightless text; I've seen them come a
cropper one minute and reap gold the next. And in Show 5, I saw them
create (with director Sean Holmes and dramaturg Joel Horwood) a
chaotic, joyful, puzzling piece that invites its audiences to think
very hard, interpret, seek to comprehend – but also have a laugh, a
sing, and a bloody good time. X
It's the first Secret Theatre show I've
wanted to see multiple times, because it's the first that I'm sure
would be radically different every night. It starts with the name of
someone in the ensemble being picked from a hat: whoever gets called
becomes the protagonist. The next 75 or so minutes are constructed
around sequences of activities: the protagonist embarks on an
absurdist assault course (the show's title is A Series of
Increasingly Impossible Acts), wrestles their fears, negotiates
confrontational conversations, serenades a member of the audience,
leads the dance. The night I saw it, Billy Seymour was the star turn;
about a third of the way through he barked at someone in the
audience: “What do you think the show is about?” And when the
audience member responded with a gurgle of confusion (pretty much the
response I'd have made at that point in the show), Billy bounded
across the room yelling: “Love! I think it's about love!”
We Are Proud invokes a rehearsal room
in its staging; Show 5 (at the Lyric, at least – I don't know what
they're planning for Edinburgh) is staged in the ensemble's actual
rehearsal room, with audience chairs lining three walls and seating
for the performers along the fourth. There's something so electric
about this sharing of space: it's such a clear indication that we're
all creating the show together. By far my favourite bit of We Are
Proud was walking through another, more real rehearsal space between
the entrance and the auditorium, drinking in the dense collection of
research materials pinned along the walls while the cast played ball
beside me. The Secret Theatre ensemble's pre-work is, to a degree,
visible in their room, too: pinned up on the walls are A4 sheets of
text and more prominent setlists giving each action a title (Fears,
Clinic, I Just), which, once I made that connection, felt a
wonderfully compact way of giving a baffled audience a modicum of
security, a key to unlock at least part of the show. Afterwards I
walked round and read all the small-print, too, the questions they
set themselves, their goals for the piece. On the night I saw it, it
mostly was about love, but even more it was about chaos: the chaos of
existing. Trying to be faithful to someone and failing; staying
hopeful in the face of cynicism; fighting despite the risk of defeat,
clinging on, falling apart, finding order and togetherness in dance.
(I was really taken by the dancing: the Actionettes
have an early dance to the same song, and the Show 5 routine is much
better than ours.) Somewhere in the small-print, there's a list of
other things the show might be about: capitalism, violence,
conservatism. Everything that militates against love.
Show 5 is structured as a series of
loops, each one opening/closing with the same series of impossible
acts. These actions are always the same; what changes is the lead
performer's relationship with the ensemble. They watch from the
sidelines, silent, expectant. They coach, shout, taunt, groan with
disappointment at every failure. And then they help. They make the
impossible possible. At which point, my adoring heart just about
burst.
We Are Proud moves in cycles, too –
but there the cycles always hit the same brick wall, follow the same
line of argument, move inexorably to a re-enactment of violence, as
though nothing else were possible. With UKIP dominating British
media, nothing else is. But I didn't trust the writing in We Are
Proud, and because of that, I didn't trust the scenario, didn't trust
its depiction of racism, didn't trust the production's motives in
turning the video camera on the few people of colour in the audience,
and didn't trust the degrading climax at all.
*
23/5/14
There's a question that keeps arising
around pay.
How much is my time worth?
What is my value?
(Thank you Mary, Kevin, Lily, for help
steering through this.)
Feelings about the new freelance life:
I want to trust in fate or stars or the goodness of people. I want
not to be anxious. I don't want to be envious of other people getting
opportunities I've already had. I want to reach for the impossible,
the absurd, otherness, change. I want to be ready for anything.
Left shoulder: hurts in a dull, tedious
way. I'm scared. And I miss dancing.
Right wrist: gnarled gnawing ow ow ow.
Days until I turn 39: just don't even.
“The English theatre has a wonderful
ability to encourage you to collude with your own disappearance.”
Six years since Peter
Gill said this to me. I've never forgotten it.
I don't want to value myself in the
language of market economy. I want a new language for what I (could)
do. And a new way of doing it: not alone, but together.
*
I think I was particularly disappointed
by We Are Proud because when I saw it I was lost in the blizzard of
Italo Calvino's If
on a winter's night a traveller, one of the most dazzling, if
discombobulating, books I've ever read. It calls itself a novel, and
it is, in that it has a defined setting and storyline, a central
character who falls in love with another character, whose affair is
thwarted by a bunch of ancillary characters, in a fashion as much
akin to detective fiction as romance – but it's interrupted by
excerpts from 10 other novels (definitely not short stories), each
with a defined setting, style, storyline and host of characters, each
a struggle to begin, but slowly absorbing me, until it was cut off
exasperatingly at a crucial twist in its plot, leaving me longing to
know more. It was exhausting, it was exhilarating. And those
feelings, that experience of reading, are central to the novel
itself, because the main character and his inamorata are readers –
you, now, reading, and your other. What it is to read, what
constitutes a novel, what the relationship is between the author,
text and reader, notions of deception and complicity, are the energy
fuelling the story. All expressed with such irrepressible and
profound love of words, their relationship to each other, the games
they play, that no matter how frustrated I felt one, two, three
nights, guaranteed I'd be in raptures the next. It made me long to
see a piece of theatre that addresses its own medium and that
reciprocal relationship with its audience with as much love and
scintillating intelligence, not even realising that in Andy Smith's
performances of Commonwealth and All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I
already had.
I saw them in a double bill at Camden
People's Theatre, a few days before We Are Proud and a few months
after seeing a
film of Tim Crouch performing Commonwealth in
last summer's Royal Court Surprise series. Tim brought mordancy and a
glint of aggression to the show; I preferred Andy's gentler, less
teasing presence. Commonwealth and All That Is Solid do something
similar: think out loud about theatre, and capitalism, and the things
we make together, as individuals, in small groups of people, and as a
society, and the things we could make, if we stopped more, thought
more, questioned more. They posit theatre as “an act of potential”.
Theatre as a place of hope, of imagining and rehearsing change. Andy
says all this so directly that a part of me quivers at how likely he
is to attract huffed Daily Mail
left-wing-propaganda-get-a-megaphone-and-stand-on-a-street-corner-why-don't-you
responses, but a) I have no problem with direct-address
anti-capitalism and b) the tingling sense of possibility Andy's words
communicate lies as much in his muted performance of them. I've never
before sat in a theatre and been so overwhelmed by the thought that I
Could Do This. I could get a bunch of people together, give them
something to eat, somewhere to sit, and at some point in the evening
stand up and begin. It makes me realise how impossibly other so much
theatre presents itself as: impressing audiences with its vigilance
and distance, rendering equality inconceivable. In the spaces of
Commonwealth and All That Is Solid, Andy could be replaced with
anyone in the room, and the work would be as effective, possibly more
so. And that's a profoundly radical gesture.
Something in the marketing for Werner
Schwab's Dead at Last, No More Air made me think it might be a neat
counterpoint to Andy's work: confrontational, vituperative, furious
with theatre for inspiring not change but polite indifference. I
wanted to love it, or at the very least get into a mud pit and
wrestle with it. Instead, I dutifully watched the first quarter,
trying to figure out why everyone stood declaiming, why no one seemed
to understand what they were saying, or if they did why they
interpreted everything so literally, why the whole thing seemed so
embarrassed and clumsy; spent the next quarter persuading myself that
almost nothing would have looked good after what I'd seen the night
before, Ivo van Hove's trenchant and astonishingly well-acted A
View from the Bridge at the Young Vic, reminding myself that
this is the fringe and they probably hadn't had enough rehearsal
time, fantasy casting the Secret Theatre ensemble in the roles, and
wishing Sean Holmes had been brave enough to tackle this instead of
Woyzeck;
and spent the final half pretending to make copious notes to write an
erudite review but actually taking the opportunity to get some work
done. I was obnoxious. But fuck it: from what Andrew
Haydon says about Schwab, maybe so was he.
I've been trying to read the text,
seeking out the punk-rock and the Einsturzende
Neubauten and the young and drunk and
rumbustious in it, but can't find it in the laboured superfluity of
language on the page, either. It reminds me of trying to read Ubu Roi
and thinking it was pants. That was after seeing a production at the
Young Vic that had Ubu and his wife like grotesque dolls in a
too-small toy palace, leering and cackling while a lugubrious foley
puppeteer enacted grisly deaths using graters, whisks, rolling pins
and vegetables: I remember it still, maybe 15 years later, as one of
the most stomach-churning, thrilling pieces of theatre I've seen.
Dead at Last had a decent stage
concept: most of the air in the space was pressed out by a pile of
black inflatable mattresses (so much hot air), as imposing and
comical as the balloons in Martin Creed's Half
the air in a given space; at the end, with the
death of the theatre director, they all deflate. But a single concept
doesn't make theatre. Or militate against verbiage.
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.
*
Here I am in the new freelance life,
typing one-handed because, in the now-traditional Cyprus Holiday
Medical Emergency, I slipped on a mountain slope indulging my small
people's desire to “do something more creative” when walking
(nope, no idea where that came from) and fractured my left shoulder.
So although I have small bits of proper (as in, to whatever degree,
paid) work to buckle down to, I'm consoling myself with a mental
clear-out.
Or maybe, in finally writing about
Headlong's 1984, what I really want to do is cement an idea, a
provocation, in my brain. The notion of surveillance culture has
unsettled me ever since my parents forced a mobile phone on me in the
late-1990s (they'd had one for years already); and yet, the more I
swipe the Oyster card, or idly tweet my whereabouts, or buy stuff
unnecessarily for the Nectar points, the harder it gets to resist its
mechanisms – or even register I'm submitting to them. I've become
one of the people Duncan Macmillan's script scorns, too busy staring
at my smart phone to notice my own complicity. It's come to a pretty
sorry pass when my one consistent act of resistance is to refuse to
say where I heard about a show on a theatre booking site.
Not that any of this informed the
wariness I felt about seeing 1984: that was more to do with Headlong
– the last show of theirs I'd seen, Chimerica,
was so
irritating – and the show's director, Robert Icke, whose
production of Boys
was infuriating (in a shop in Cyprus I saw a giant wooden spoon like
the one used in the final scene of that show and had an instant spasm
of cross). Despite all the jaw-to
the-floor
reviews from writers-I-love for 1984, I took my seat thinking about
qualities of aggression in stagecraft and Matt Trueman's Guardian
interview
with Rupert Goold (particularly the “I'm a populist” bit),
and wondering what if any affinity I feel for Headlong's hardwired
showiness. A churlish mood not improved by a 40-minute delay to the
start, thanks to “technical issues” triggered by one of the cast
getting stuck in traffic.
True to form, 1984 was aggressive,
populist, showy – and dazzling. I was hooked from the opening scene
– in which Winston Smith begins to write in a diary, words
scratched in black ink and projected, magnified, on a screen above
his head – whose accidental flashback to Chris Goode's Cendrars
project was a good auger for the slipperiness to follow. “1984?”
Winston writes, then stares, perplexed, as a book group arrive,
readers who argue the toss over the book, its author, its
authenticity. These figures melt into Winston's bureau companions; he
stumbles among them, startled incomprehension furrowing his features,
struggling to apprehend their identities – a struggle shared,
thrillingly, by us in the audience.
For the whole first swathe of the play,
it felt as though time was folding in on itself. Scenes replayed in
unnerving Groundhog-Day iterations, a live-action game of spot the
difference: with each not-quite-repeat Winston would falter, halted
in his tracks by the uncertain familiarity, the absence where a
person had been. The other characters would glare at him, issuing a
challenge: “Where do you think you are?” And again, the frisson
of feeling that challenge poke the audience. When Winston and Julia
become lovers, our status as audience becomes yet more complicated:
although innately sympathetic with the couple in their detestation of
Big Brother, the ability we're given to spy on them in their secret
hideaway casts us in that all-seeing role. But how much power or
insight do we really have? We can't tell if these projected images of
intimacy are live or pre-recorded. And then comes a startling twist:
another of those character metamorphoses, that exposes how trusting
we've been of everything placed before us.
This icy argument – the impossibility
of trusting anyone, not even a soulmate – dominates the final
section, in the script and the glaring white light and abrasive noise
of the staging. Something about this section troubled me, but I
couldn't decipher that until I started reading the programme. Which
is excellent: it's packed with meaty thought, usefully contains a
long extract from the little-read Appendix to 1984 that inspired the
book-group frame, and makes space for design sketches. At the front
is an interview with Icke and Macmillan, with a nutshell description
of the duo's guiding principles:
“How do we achieve doublethink [says
Macmillan], how do we deliver the intellectual argument, and also can
we take along a 15-year-old who has never read the book while
satisfying the scholar who has read this book 100 times? And once
you've seen it and go back to the book, is it all still there...?”
To which, he concludes: “I think we've ended up being incredibly
faithful to the book.”
This, I realised, was my problem. At
risk of sounding a right ignoramus, I've not read 1984, only skimmed
it, cramming in as much as I could the night before interviewing
Blind Summit about their
staging of it in 2009. In selecting the sequence of events to
present on stage, Icke and Macmillan had made precisely the same
choices I remember Blind Summit making. Who knows, maybe they're the
only possible choices. But the similarity struck me as odd.
A fair bit was written about books as a
source of material for theatre in the days following 1984's arrival
at the Almeida, mostly provoked by Michael Billington's tub-thumping,
ought-to-be-cut coda
to his review, arguing for original drama over dramatisations. To
which Andrew
Haydon responded with spluttering incomprehension and followed by
customary exactitude, while Lyn
Gardner gently waved the flag for less traditional
theatre-making. The exchange made me feel a bit peculiar, because I
agreed with Andrew and Lyn, but felt Michael had a point. Much as I
enjoyed The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I couldn't see the
point of it except as a money-spinner (a view somewhat mollified by
its schools tour); I was really excited about seeing Let
the Right One In but all it did was confirm that I think vampire
stories are stupid and stage blood is unconvincing. If dramatisation
exists to blind people into buying theatre tickets rather than three
or four novels and a pack of Digestives, I can't get behind it.
Realising that Headlong's 1984 wasn't
so far removed from Blind Summit's 1984 reminded me how extremely
distant it was from Chris Goode's properly radical, often
bewildering, not-at-all populist dramatisation of sundry modernist
texts by Blaise
Cendrars. Which is, of course, why 1984 is now in the West End
while the Cendrars project, for all its intelligence and beauty, has
been seen by 48 people and a dog-human (aka xx). If
dramatisation means taking wild leaps from the printed material,
making scholars work fucking hard to recognise shards of the original
text, giving a 15-year-old two astonishing experiences of discovery,
and eschewing generalised notions of relevance to cry from the heart
about why this story right now, bring it on. There's a column
by Catherine Love written soon after she saw 1984 that makes
roughly this point: “I would much rather see the likes of Peter
McMaster's Wuthering Heights, which bears little resemblance to
Emily Bronte's novel but uses it as a foundation for its meditation
on modern masculinity, than a slavish reproduction of something
better suited to the page than the stage.” I loved that
Wuthering Heights so much I've engineered a trip to Mayfest
in Bristol specifically to see it again. A few weeks before 1984 I
saw another adaptation for the second time, Tom Frankland and Keir
Cooper's punk-romance
spin on Don
Quijote, which takes an actual power saw to a copy of the novel
before running individual pages through a shredder. Icke's opening
gambit of putting a question-mark after the title of 1984 looks
prissy by comparison.
All of which was a useful mental stew
to take into the fourth Lyric Hammersmith Secret Theatre show,
Glitterland,
also an adaptation, of John Webster's The White Devil. Not that I'd
have known this when sitting in front of it, were it not for the
questionable new decision to hand out programme notes before the show
rather than after. I've read the play but too many years ago to
count; what I recognised was the Jacobean flavour of the text, a
blood pudding treated with liquid nitrogen. Except that the story has
been rewritten by Hayley Squires as a squalid dystopian fairy-tale
instantly redolent of Philip Ridley (bless Lyn
Gardner for being the only other reviewer I've clocked make that
comparison), in the modern-baroque flourish of the language and, most
of all, the characters' fanciful choice of drugs. The two styles
meshing and colliding is the closest I've seen on stage to a
DJ/producer mash-up, theatre's version of Danger
Mouse's Grey Album.
Amid this rococo-futurism sits the
soundtrack, another of those iPod shuffle jobs, although mostly 1960s
soul this time, employed as a means of political discourse, for
public expressions of grief and determination, to cajole a populace
(the audience, effectively) and seduce it. Me? I was in raptures.
Reading the sometimesmealy-mouthed
reviews by writers-I-love, I was surprised by how few of their
reservations I shared. It's not set in a clearly defined world, its
politics aren't rigorous enough, the women lack agency: all fair
enough, but none of these things ruffled me, because the world felt
so complete in its otherness. Part of that otherness comes from the
embedded Secret Theatre manifesto of non-naturalism, which continues
to play teasing games with Charlotte Joseph's gender and fruitfully
cast Nadia Albina as a sleazy male film director, all slicked-back
oiliness and winkle-picker spike. Part of that otherness comes from
the insular nature of the ensemble, in which I, as an increasingly
devoted fan, feel included and complicit. Watching them is like
playing with electricity: sometimes the light just won't switch on,
sometimes you'll get your fingers burned, but the constant between is
a buzz of excitement. And the voltage surges every time Leo Bill
walks on stage: no matter how repulsive his character – and the
reptilian, murderous, self-serving politician he plays in
Glitterland, selling out his own sister for the sake of his ambition,
is high-grade obnoxious – he is impossibly charismatic. Yes, that's
now a bona-fide crush talking.
The one thing that threw me, on reading
the programme notes, was that Glitterland's director wasn't – as in
Secret Shows 1-3 – Sean Holmes. Appropriately enough, it was the
devilish figure of the white-suited trickster who misled me: slinking
between black panelled walls and lurking in shadows, luring Leo Bill
to destruction with her siren song, she seemed a direct quotation
from Three
Kingdoms and yet another instance of Holmes' fanboy devotion to
that show's director, Sebastian Nubling. Discovering that
Glitterland's director was actually Ellen McDougall made me wonder
whether allegiance to Nubling has to be sworn by everyone in the
ensemble.
McDougall directed one of my favourite
shows of 2013, and one of the best adaptations I've ever seen: Ignace
Cornelissen's rewrite
ofHenry
the Fifth, which equates political machinations with sandpit
competition, storytelling with the power to control one's own
destiny, and feminism with the grace that will save us all. This
Henry V is a Hal who remained behind clouds: irresponsible,
truculent, defiant, choosing to go to war in utter disregard of its
impact on the populace because it might fill the coffers and
definitely boosts the ego. Oh, hello, Tory repugnance. Faced with
such bracingly direct attacks on their ideology, no wonder they're
opposed to arts subsidy.
More galvanising still was
Cornelissen's transformation of the French princess Katherine, bent
by Shakespeare to Henry's charms, but here given agency and a buoyant
sense of adventure. The moments when Katherine, exquisitely played by
Hannah Boyde, escapes her patriarchal world, first by stealing the
coat of the narrator, then by rejecting the masculine premise and
trappings of power, made me shivery with glee. Bear in mind that this
powerful introduction to key feminist ideas was aimed at school
children, aged roughly 8-11, and you'll understand why I felt like
the world shone more brightly for a week after I saw it.
If I'd thought about it, I'd have
connected Henry the Fifth and Glitterland instantly by their careful
staging of violence. These are blood-soaked plays: the first set in a
war zone, the second steeped in greed, lust, mistrust and revenge.
But McDougall refuses to re-enact where she can as trenchantly
represent. In Henry the Fifth, the ranks of armed men take the form
of balloons: the visceral sound of each one popping, the useless
shrivel of deflated plastic left behind, was surprisingly, but
genuinely, stomach-clenching to witness. In Glitterland, guns are
mimed by the palm of the hand – not crooked around a pretend
trigger but flat and gleaming with blood. To kill, a murderer simply
smeared their hand over a victim. No seductive glint of metal, no
hint of gangster glamorisation: just the action and its consequence.
Brilliant.
All this was nicely simmering when, two
weeks after Glitterland, I snuck off to Plymouth for Chris Goode's
Mad Man. I
wish I'd been able to see that twice as well: I saw the first
preview, when a good 50% of it felt like
ride-the-chaos-by-the-seat-of-the-pants-and-just-hope-we-make-it-to-the-other-side.
In my head I wanted it to be: “No, this is how you do adaptation.”
It wasn't. But it also kind of was.
The wasn't first. As the title warns,
Mad Man deletes the diary structure from Nikolai Gogol's story Diary
of a Madman, and unsettles its first-person narrative, presenting the
character at once from inside and out. But scan the text and its key
features are all staged: the talking dogs (hilariously played by
G and G), the obsession with sharpening
quills (here, pencils), the reading of the dog's letters, the
preposterous trip to the theatre, the delusion of grandeur. This was
much more “I think we've ended up being incredibly faithful to the
book” than power-saw massacre. Even the wood-panelled set looked
like Winston Smith's bureau in 1984. (Except for the green glass
lamp, which I recognised from the desk of God in, you guessed it, the
Cendrars project. A useful augur...)
Reading Gogol's story, I found the
lengthy sequence in which the “madman”, Poprishchin, comes to the
realisation that he's the King of Spain difficult: partly because his
mental fragility, and inability to read social situations, are
unconsciously yet terribly sad, mostly because his labouring of the
point is quite tedious. As on the page, so on the stage: L's beleaguered madman, now Pushpin, bleached hair haywire and
lips puckered exactly as though she were a tortoise in a sack, spent
what felt like aeons contemplating what it meant to be the King of
Spain, while the mechanisms of office life rolled quietly, tediously
on around him. It was boring. But it was boring in the way that
winding a very stiff and difficult crank on a mechanical toy, or
pushing a heavy sledge up a snow-covered hill, are boring. They are
the hard work necessary to appreciate the vertiginous thrill of
free-fall.
Which brings us to the was. Again, this
was a first preview, so the material was more in control of the
performers than vice versa. But I'm pretty sure I was seeing played
from snatched memory what was intended to become rehearsed. As Matt
Trueman wrote in his Guardian
review (I wasn't allowed to review it because I'm too close to
Chris for trustworthy independent opinion – don't get me started):
Chris Goode's freeform staging is just
as singular. Cartoonish and careering, it constantly bursts its frame
with extended dance sequences and scripted meta-theatrics. At one
point, it gets stuck on repeat for days and, though the stubborn
refusal to adhere to conventional, satisfying rhythms can be
frustrating, the resulting unpredictability is thrilling and fitting.
When we first walk into the room, the
stage is in total disarray. Furniture upended, clothes strewn, party
paraphernalia scattered. G, G and N erupt into
the space through trap doors and hidden panels and – to the
blaring, bracingly antagonistic accompaniment of Mark E Smith barking
Paranoid Man in Cheap Shit Room (ha!) – hurl themselves with
panicked fury into tidying up. Order is restored – but the imprint
of chaos remains. The measured calm of office life feels like a
front.
Chris has shifted the setting to the
1930s (hence the proximity of the design to 1984); that ghost of
chaos is also the spectre of global violence and economic depression.
A world disrupted by capitalism. In which some people have everything
and most people have nothing. Repeatedly Pushpin questions what makes
his office co-workers so superior, the topsy-turvy values of a
society that treats humans as machines and values money above life.
He does so from a place of mental breakdown, the way Shakespeare's
Fools speak the clearest truths. And because this is theatre, Chris
can rupture the facade. In probably my favourite moment of the entire
show, N's bluff, bullying office director sits at his desk and,
in his most wheedling voice, calls to his secretary. Once, twice, no
answer. So he just severs the pretence: “G---!” he snips. He
wants to know what she thinks of his performance, if he's overplaying
the crassness, being too broad. And at the moment when Pushpin,
napping at his desk, begins to stir, N/the director says:
“Quick, look real.” It's profoundly disconcerting, because it's
more than meta-theatrics: it's the moment when you apprehend the
possibility that this world – and by extension our world: the time
on the clock hanging on the back wall of the stage is real – is
specifically constructed to make people mad. As Ann Cvetkovich writes
in the essential book Depression: A Public Feeling, mental illness
“can be seen as a category that manages and medicalises the affects
associated with keeping up with corporate culture and the market
economy, or with being completely neglected by it”. Faced with
capitalism and its concomitant inequities and oppressions, she
continues,“depression seem[s] not so much a medical or biochemical
dysfunction as a very rational response to global conditions”. The
madness isn't in Pushpin: it's in society.
And yet none of this is said out loud.
And that wrongfooty feeling, of this being a punk show disguised as
populism, of fierce politics boiling beneath the surface of a
fantastical story, was delicious. Point after radical point is made,
but fleetingly, almost subconsciously – except in the moments where
they're outrageous in their crass expression. The scene in which
Pushpin, at an apex of madness, gives a public announcement tearfully
acknowledging that “the earth is going to bum the moon”, was
howlingly funny: on come G and N, each holding a large
disc apparently constructed by a five-year-old, the earth fitted with
a wonkily drawn penis on a split pin, to simulate the rape. It's so
preposterous and yet, in its suggestion of rich men buying up chunks
of space (a key news story the day I saw Uninvited Guests' Make
Better Please) or even the devastations of climate change,
soberingly true.
What recourse do we have, what means of
escape? In my other favourite scene, Pushpin falls asleep again, a
mirror ball lowers from the ceiling, the Fall return, G puts on
a muzzle, G a collar, N, perfectly, a dog-lampshade, and
together they dance. “I'm lost in music, feel so alive, I quit my
10 to 5.” OK, yes, it's Chris Goode doing a Headlong – but
fucking how. Unlike most Headlong copyist dance routines – even
most Headlong dance routines – this one didn't feel gratuitous to
the plot, there for the sake of razzle-dazzle entertainment. It felt
queer and disturbing and blood-rush exciting. The three office
workers cast off the constraints they've constructed for themselves,
lose themselves in art, lose themselves in music. They quit. And it
makes you wonder what might happen if we all quit: stopped making
capitalism, and started doing something else instead.*
In all the linguistic games Chris plays
with his script – from N's arcane line of grotesque insults
to Pushpin's helplessly jumbled malapropisms – one phrase rings out
consistently: Pushpin's assertion of “quiet dignity”. He clings
to it through the final, devastating chunk of Mad Man, when – as in
1984 – the walls of the office open up to reveal a blank space
beyond and – as in 1984 – the main character is transported to a
vision of hell, where – as in 1984 – he's beaten and tortured to
force him to conform. I still, to my shame, haven't read in its
entirety Chris's
mammoth blog post on the subject of (among other things)
nakedness; generally it's the failure in my thinking about his work,
my incomplete understanding of how and why he asks for nakedness: so
I'm not fully confident I know what was happening in the closing
scene, when G – wearing nothing but a pair of chunky DM boots –
reaches out a hand to L's now crumpled, abject Pushpin. You
could see discomfort streaking G's face: I hope he settled into
it, because what I think that scene was doing was giving Pushpin back
his quiet dignity. Pushpin is defeated by the world he lives in:
let's face it, we're all going to be. Mad Man at least made that
knowledge feel a little less lonely, offering a secret handshake of
solidarity to anyone who wants to read its codes.
*In the new freelance life, “doing
something else” feels more indulgent than ever. It's not going to
pay any bills or feed my kids. I've spent about 17 hours on this
piece of writing, hours I'm struggling not to consider in some way
wasted because they weren't used making money. This, of course, is
the triumph of 1984: thought control, the pervasive belief that
nothing else is possible. In the grip of terror that I'll never earn
a minimum wage, let alone a London living wage, from writing again,
in the midst of disgust at the self-regard this implies (just get a
job in Sainsbury's already), I want to believe in the dream of
quitting, but can't square it with the reality of a fairly
conservative family existence.
A thought has been itching in my head
for weeks now, a thought about love, and landscapes, and marriage,
and Andy Field's new show with Ira Brand, Put Your Sweet Hand in Mine. A thought that I haven't found the time or space to formulate;
a thought that, no matter how many times I sat down over Christmas
and New Year to email Andy, refused to coalesce into words. But I'm
in a new time zone now, and a new space, a hotel near Niagara Falls,
surrounded by rough-tumble piles of hard-packed greying snow; and,
perhaps most importantly, I'm alone. Somehow the thought about
marriage felt shy of emerging with my husband hovering in the
background.
I don't remember when Andy and I
started talking about Put Your Sweet Hand in Mine, except that back
then it was still called “I would like to talk to the capitalists
about money, but they only wanted to tell love stories”. Maybe it
was when he sent me an early text that Ira performed at Buzzcut in
Glasgow in spring 2013 and I emailed him a bunch of thoughts it
inspired about the intensity of looking a stranger in the eye,
romance versus altruism, and the capitalist ideology enacted by
Hollywood love stories. Maybe it was autumn 2012 when, with fizzing
brain and palpitating heart, I read and re-read a talk he'd given in
Nottingham, Political Art: A User's Manuel. In a section called Love
dedicated to Rebecca Solnit, he quoted a passage of her
life-enhancing book A Paradise Built in Hell, the bit celebrating
“other loves”: the non-romantic loves you don't see in popular
culture, that express themselves in genuine philanthropy – philia,
friendship, for anthropi, (hu)mankind – a word narrowed and twisted
by capitalism so it now connotes lofty patronage, rather than an
active desire anyone might feel to make the world better,
particularly for the powerless. At the end of that section on Love,
Andy threw down a challenge:
I would like you to make a show about
love
In which no one falls in love
Maybe he told me then that he was
setting that challenge for himself.
In December just gone, I went to BAC to
visit Andy,
Ira and their producer, Beckie Darlington, in the middle of a
two-week stint working on Sweet Hand. They showed me what they had
made so far, then we sat in the cafe and wrangled over it. I say we:
Andy and I wrangled, while every now and then Ira, whose head was
cotton-woolly from a cold, would say that she finds it hard to work
in the abstract in this way, that she makes by doing, trying, moving.
What we were struggling to figure out was how the show could travel
from a conventional romantic beginning – eyes meeting across a
crowded room, the consuming sense of possibility generated in that
moment of connection – to a contemplation of other loves:
everything you might do or at least deliberate if you weren't
constantly dreaming about those eyes/their possibility, but actively
engaged with the world and more concerned with a wider philanthropy.
At one point I said it was the difference between looking at someone
and thinking, “I want to marry you, have children with you, live
with you for the rest of our days”, or thinking, “I want to start
a riot with you [and change the world].” It took me several weeks
to realise that these weren't opposites: they were just different
angles on the same romantic love story, so ingrained in my psyche
that it's hard to see beyond it.
I
really enjoyed the scratch showing a week later, even though it
didn't quite work. The audience sat (and still do) in two rows facing
each other, with a narrow pathway between; Andy and Ira sat (and
still do) on opposite sides, but not opposite each other. When they
speak, they don't look across at each other, but directly at the
audience-member in front of them, so when their characters lock eyes
at the beginning of the show, or bump into each other on the Paris
metro, those initial stirrings of love are communicated outside of
the couple, not within it. I happened to be sitting beside Andy that
night, and watching the person opposite him was extraordinary: he
knew he was at the heart of the story and there was a palpable
electricity to that. But what the scratch didn't make clear was that
everyone in the audience is at the centre of the story, everyone is
invited to catch eyes with the stranger sitting opposite and imagine
falling in love, or starting a riot – or eschewing the traditional
romantic narrative altogether. It wasn't until close to the end, when
we're instructed to hold hands with the person opposite and hold
their gaze, that this potential connection was made, and that was too
late.
The
fragmentary structure of the piece felt really important: every time
we were lulled into thinking about romantic love, crack, something
happened to disrupt that. But somehow this never resulted in a
contemplation of other loves. Until, that is, the final scene, when
Andy and Ira took off their clothes and replaced them with
dripping-wet outfits extracted from buckets of water, to play an
apocalyptic disaster in which they stand at either end of the aisle
and – in a mixture of quotes from Hollywood films – try to save
each other, and everyone else. “It started as quite funny, but very
very quickly became utterly devastating,” I wrote in my compulsory
email to Andy. “It is shockingly romantic, the more so because of
the distance between you. It is full of longing and desire and
absence and need and yet when you talk it's about none of those
things: it's anxiety for others, it's social care. I think it's the
moment when you're doing both things at once: looking inside love and
outside. Personal and political.”
The week after the scratch, Andy and co
took
Sweet Hand-making to ARC in Stockton, where they created an exquisite
(I say this having only read Andy's report of it, but can't see how
it could be otherwise) companion piece, I Want To Know What Love Is:
a participatory work which involves people looking through a list of
100 types of love and, if they find one that relates to them, writing
a few words about it, in return for a Casablanca thimble. If they
don't find anything relevant, they get to smash the thimble. Oh it
sounds perfect: a gorgeous invitation really to think about and
celebrate other loves, loves for friends, for pets, for ideas, for
places. The love of landscape, Andy told me later, emerged so
strongly from this work; he hoped he would be able to get that into
the show.
The
word landscape snagged at my brain, and this is the thought I've been
trying to prise out since. I see marriage as a kind of landscape,
too. When you first fall in love, that landscape is verdant, all
spring blossom and clover, but the further you travel across it, the
more you notice its jagged stumbling stones, the steepness of its
incline, the prickling gorse you have to avoid. The scamper across a
soft grassy slope becomes a hike across a windswept moorland: ardour
becomes arduous. That sounds unremittingly negative, maybe it is. But
I can see the positives in it. Tough ground feels very sure beneath
the feet. In August 2012, in the midst of a spectacularly dizzy high,
when I felt I could be in love with almost everyone, it occurred to
me how grateful I was for the security of marriage: I could enjoy
this mind-spinning love for the people around me and still think
about other things, get stuff done. Romantic love is distracting: as
Andy wrote in that piece dedicated to Rebecca Solnit,
Perhaps
love becomes a vacuum In which we can’t hear the other things
we’re trying to say
Love-in-marriage
(and maybe by that I simply mean long-term love) isn't distracting:
it's just there, a landscape of few defining features, stretching as
far as the eye can see. No wonder popular culture has so little
interest in it.
Thinking
about marriage in this way, I realised that something has always
troubled me about Solnit's celebration of other loves. I don't have the book with me so can't quote this accurately, but central to
this idea is the story of an
extraordinary woman who lived in the San Francisco area in the early
part of the 20th century, who experienced the 1906 earthquakes as a
child and was so emotionally struck by the charity people extended to
each other that she decided not to marry but to devote herself to
philanthropy. Whether intentionally or not, Solnit appears to convey
here that marriage and other loves are mutually exclusive. But
they're not. Marriage isn't a closing off from the world, but the
terrain one walks across when opening up to it.
I
tried to formulate something of that when Andy and I wrangled at BAC
but it wouldn't come out then either. Perhaps it's not even relevant.
But my inability to articulate a thought about another kind of love
than the headily romantic feels part of the same problem as the one
Andy (and Ira and Beckie) were grappling with when making Sweet Hand.
It
was odd seeing the finished show on Saturday night (February 15); to
be honest, I didn't properly see it, because I had spent the day
metaphorically locked in a darkened room, cradling a broken heart
(broken in the way that only love can break your heart), and was lost
in a fog of misery. It's still an oblique and fragmentary piece,
which requires its audience to make connections between disparate
propositions, and on Saturday night I could barely identify the
propositions, let alone connect them. And as I scan my memories of
it, I'm not sure what belongs to Saturday night, and what to the
December scratch. The invitation to connect with the person opposite
is more clearly made at the beginning now, and there's a wonderful
sequence in the middle where you're invited to gaze at each other,
not into each other's eyes but through them to the mind behind, to
its secret longings, fears and pains. Even so, I was surprised by how
easy it is for people sitting just a metre apart to look at anything
but the stranger in front of them. And the grip of the traditional
romantic narrative felt even more tenacious in this version,
particularly when Andy sings, in a fragile quaver, the Beach Boys'
God Only Knows. I think it's brilliant that Sweet Hand ends with
Foreigner's I Want To Know What Love Is, partly because it's a
dreadful song that none the less makes me want to wave lighters in
the air, partly because the show is genuinely saying that: I want to
know what love is, I want you to show me. It's the perfect soundtrack to the journey Sweet Hand now takes, thinking about romantic love.
The
day before I saw Sweet Hand, Valentine's Day (don't get me started on
the pernicious manipulation of Valentine's Day), I spent a couple of
hours volunteering at a centre dedicated to getting people into work.
The vetting process for this had been fairly rigorous – I'd had to
send in a CV and application form explaining why I wanted to
volunteer, and talk all this through again on the phone and in person
– and despite all that, the first question I was asked when I
reported for duty was: “Why are you doing this? You're a mum, you
work: why this as well?” As though the concept of philanthropy were
utterly alien.
Popular
culture could do so much to counter that, to create, as Solnit puts
it, “maps of the human psyche with altruism, idealism, and even
ideas on them”. What I've been trying to work out from within the
fog of Saturday night is whether Sweet Hand still tries to create
that map, or whether it simply talks about romantic love. I think Sweet Hand is many lovely things, but it's not a show
about love in which no one falls in love. Like a child evading its
parent's desires, it grew from that embryonic challenge into
something else.
At
least, that's the way I see it having spent so many months tracing
its progress. And I might not have written about Sweet Hand at all,
except that I'm in this hotel near Niagara to take part in a
university conference about, among other things, “embedded
criticism”, so I've been reconsidering what the gains and losses
are in involvement in process of this kind. I couldn't see the
finished version of Sweet Hand clearly because I was watching it
through a personal-crisis fog – but also because the show isn't a
single entity for me, it's split into twins. There's the living
breathing show that's playing at BAC and about to tour, and then
there's its ghost twin, a dream of a show about other loves that exists only
in the ether. I sent an earlier version of this post to Andy, which I hope not too many people have read, which he felt was a value judgement on the show that exists. It's not: it's an observation about the weird perspective I have on it, a perspective I have from being involved in the process. I'm still wrestling with what that perspective means.
The
conference, for anyone reading this on the day of publication, was
set up by the amazing Karen Fricker, is taking place at Brock
University in a small town in Canada that reminds me of Stockton, and
is live-being streamed here (click on the live videos tab) and tweeted at
#DARTcritics. The embedded panel is today at 4pm (9pm GMT), and also
features Andy Horwitz of Culturebot, meeting whom has been an
absolute privilege.
