Theatre: A British Institution?

I recently saw the RSC’s “A Museum in Baghdad”, and I came out considering the role theatre plays in modern Britain.

As we sat down in the intimate theatre, seats only metres away from the stage, the first of the characters moved out onto the stage. Sitting at a small desk she proceeded to diligently scribble away, until a few minutes later the lights dimmed and the audience settled into silence.

Having attended Quaker Meetings for Worship for the past three months, silence has taken on a new significance for me: I take note of it, I feel somehow that in my silence, I become actively a part of one whole, rather than passively ceasing to speak. The silence gave way to a stillness, and the body becomes the container of the seeing eyes, separate from the part of the self that watches. The physical sharing of a space with actors allows them to consume the energy of movement, it is physical and real to them, and in order for it to be the same for you, there is a sense that one must remain static, a ghost in the audience, barely there in space.

The separation of the audience and the actor intrigues: The figure on the stage, when writing and occasionally looking towards the audience without ever looking at them, seemed haunting and distant when there remained a bustle of spirit and sound amongst the audience. As the stillness descended, the roles reversed: she came alive. We share the space, the actors walk onto the stage along the path we took to our passive seats, but the ownership of the air, the set laid submissively at the feet of the suddenly alive figures we watched.

The moment though that I feel now will remain with me long after I forget the actions and the meaning and the words of the play happened just as the second act began. I was sat further along the row than I had been during the first half, and was nearer the front than the side of the stage. I watched as the first figure, who had been at first writing, was walking along the stage. I can’t, perhaps shamefully, recall the words she spoke, or even what she spoke of, but as she began to speak, her eyes walked across the audience, and then suddenly, in a way that shocked me, she stared straight at me. I couldn’t move. In the way that I sometimes find myself still. Stopped. Weighed down at a meeting for worship, I couldn’t let my eyes move or close or do anything but stare. I held her gaze, or rather she held mine for a moment – it seemed for long seconds, though of course, in the incredibly cliched truth it was most likely an instant only – and when she moved away I fell into a form of glazed-over shock, thrilled by what had happened, though it was barely even a ‘happening’, and was at once so intensely present, and so vaguely, absently still. We may watch a show though a screen, and some illusion of eye contact is made between the flat figure and the flattened viewer, but this was different, it was intensely personal, intimate, I did not know who it was I looked at – for we always now question the person behind the imitated figure – and to me the two, the real and the illusion became one, I accepted the impossible falsity of it and yet did not have to sacrifice the real, they came together into one, solid, illusionary, floating moment. I stared back, half out of not being able to do any differently, and half as a challenge, the response was one that I felt shared the same intent (even though it rationally probably did not), and then breezed onwards, left me dismissed, overwhelmed, empty, but ever so kindly.

I was forced to confront, to stare, and that is what theatre is, it pleads to us: watch, look, take in. We direct our own gaze, we are allowed to look at it all, at one moment, at one angle, at one brick, on anything, no two can ever have the same experience, it will always be infinitesimally, or perhaps inconceivably, unique. We cannot conform, and though the silence and stillness and passive distant may be British, we are forced to confront and approach the scene in front of us ourselves: we have to face our own irrelevancy and embrace a story, to follow it happening in front of us in a physical way that we only ever otherwise experience events through when they are real, and a part of our own experience and world. We become abstract, cannot be categorised, cannot be solid or understandable in a way the British desire, the binary falls apart in the duality of roles, audience and actor never completely separate, presently existing but not moving forwards in any demonstrable way. Whilst sat in the theatre we are simultaneously engulfed in the scene (as we never are with film or literature) through our physical presence, and never allowed to alter: the play is still and continuing on the following night as it did regardless of your presence.

As the play ended and the actors bowed, I tried for the final time to steal the eyes that had hovered one moment towards mine, but I did not (quite obviously, for this experience, though for me the epitome of the play, meant nothing to anyone else at all) and I am glad of it. The bowing marks something gone: the faces the same, the costumes unchanged, and yet the stage is stripped of the bodies that it possessed moments ago. The illusion had gone, and the audience aware of their voyeuristic watching of the play applauded the weakening figures for their deception, blinking their eyes back to perceive the world’s truth once again.

Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion: An Historical Romance?

I was recently given, as a gift, a copy of Richard Brautigan’s ‘The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966’, having been warned of its strangeness, but told, as I think many are, of its library. The library (in which unpublished manuscripts are taken in and homed at all hours of the day and night) is where the novel’s notoriety lies, and I suspect that without it, this is a story that would’ve been left behind.

The historical nature of the novel, as suggested by the title, is clear; the description of the unbelievably, even dangerously beautiful Vida is undoubtedly one of the past. Vida’s “Playboy furniture legs”, and her spreading of “erotic confusion” creates an undeniably-Seventies mystical object of the protagonist’s love interest. Having brought to the library a manuscript in which she describes the horror of the seductive effect her body has on everyone around her, the unnamed protagonist himself proceeds to be caught under the lure of Vida, who finally causes him to leave the library three years after he entered, as the couple travel to Tijuana, where Vida can have an abortion.

I find myself still undecided on Brautigan’s style of prose. At first it seemed dull, repetitive and monotonous, the unfailingly consistent use of “said” sitting calmly besides the elaborate and overbearing similes and metaphors, Vida flinging her coat open “as if it were a door to some horrible dungeon filled with torture instruments, pain and dynamic confession.”, though welcome in the thought put into it’s conception, is oddly out of place. One odd use of word (and number) that I did enjoy also relied on Brautigan’s mundane repetition: “Vida smiled 1/2: ly… Vida was now smiling 1/4: ly… Vida was now smiling 1/37: ly”, charming in its defiant and original use of text, provoking a consideration of the formation of the written word.

The unnamed protagonist’s solitary existence before Vida’s appearance gives an immediate and ongoing sense of stillness and silence. Sleep seems forgotten as he carefully receives and categorises the un-acknowledged individual manuscripts through the night, as Brautigan highlights both a loneliness found in writing, and the value and warmth of the human acknowledgement gained through the sharing of words. His escape from society is perhaps indicative of a desire to live slowly amid the bustling culture of a Sixties’ San Francisco, and this culture seems to materialise, upon his eventual emergence from the library, only in references to The Beatles, the passing public shouting ‘BEATLE’ at the protagonist whilst gawking continuously at Vida, the novel coming to a close as Vida playing Rubber Soul as she welcomes the readers back into the psychedelic Sixties.

The ‘plot’ of The Abortion is slow, more of a gentle walk than a marathon, and the distance traveled in order that Vida’s abortion can be carried out serves only to emphasise the constant objectification of Vida, and the subsequent carnage she causes, as well as drawing away the protagonist from his library. In getting Vida pregnant, and the subsequent necessity of an abortion, Brautigan and the protagonist use Vida’s body as a means for escape and drive; just as the abortion liberates Vida, Vida’s existence becomes a vessel through which the protagonist’s life is shown: his time working at the library ‘aborted’ by his desire for Vida. His sexual involvement which leads to the pregnancy and abortion ultimately makes him ‘impure’, pushed out of the library by a woman who decided that he no longer “deserve[d] to be in charge of the library”, an unbridled dedication to literature lost.

Although Brautigan’s description of Vida is frequently misogynistic, an interesting point is made in the dread she feels in her body. An attempt has been made, initially at least, to engage in a female perspective of patriarchal objectification, and there is a slight awareness of the detachment of body and personality unique to the female experience; the men never physically described any more specifically than being tall. Brautigan’s approach to the romantically driven novel may be a still one, but does raise questions of female and male bodily experience, and tentatively plays with the prose form.

Shena Mackay’s Music Upstairs and Novels of the 60s

In my love of charity and second-hand bookshops I’ve ended up with a bookshelf almost half composed of books randomly found, chosen just from the blurb or a recognised title, and with the knowledge that they will cost me no more than £2.50. I recently bought a copy of Shena Mackay’s Music Upstairs, having seen the deep green cover and little apple of a Virago book. The book follows Sidonie as she moves into a room of the Beacons. Within the first 50 pages Sidonie has been with both of the couple, first Pam and then her husband Lenny. Almost instantly their relationships become drowned in jealousy, as Sidonie’s world quickly becomes darker.

One of the first things that struck me was the description of the Beacon’s children. Never called by a name, and merely posed as a burden upon Pam, the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement are echoed through Mackay’s writing as she allows a woman, a wife, to act in a way more expected of a male character; an almost complete lack of love ever shown towards a child (radically opposing notions of motherhood and the assumed maternal nature of all women), and attraction towards a woman.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the novel is the creation of these two separate relationships, between Sidonie and each of the couple, and it is impossible not to compare the events and sense of each of these emotions. When I think about Sidonie’s relationship with Pam, I instinctively seem to recall a relationship far more gentle and less manipulative relationship than that she has with Lenny. Looking back over the book, this isn’t truly the case. Yes, Sidonie does express almost constantly a desire to be away from Lenny, feeling constantly trapped, whilst throughout the novel describing a true physical desire for Pam, but that doesn’t make her and Pam’s relationship gentle. Pam has hardly begun to suggest her interest in Sidonie before stating “Don’t look at me like that, love, I might rape you”, already a dark juxtaposition is created by Mackay in Sidonie’s love life, and what feels at first out of place quickly becomes the constant of the book. Perhaps it is the assumption of women, particularly mothers, as caring, maternal, almost totally incapable of causing harm to others, that led me to create this rose-tinted ideal of a calm, gentle love (or lust) between two women, one mark-ably older than the other.

The darkness and underlying sense of dread and unease that is laced through Mackay’s writing reminded me greatly of the similar tone created by Duffy in ‘The Microcosm’. A novel linked to Mackay’s further by its being written at a similar time and in exploring romantic and sexual female relationships. We have become now so accustomed to darkness and a constant sense of foreboding in lesbian stories that we applaud almost anything that offers a happy respite from this doom, and these older novels are perfect examples of the doom so often associated with lesbian narratives. However, in these two examples, often this sense of doom is not presented as a result of the women’s ‘deviant’ relationships, but instead the world they live in. Sidonie’s life, as she becomes closer to Pam, becomes closer to the life of a housewife, and this is the thing that she seems to dread: the drudgery and monotony of housework, not the relationship shared between the two women themselves.

Links could also be make between ‘Carol’ or ‘The Price of Salt’, both in the exploration of the relationships between women at differing stages of life: one a mother and one a younger, less experienced and somewhat lost young woman, and in the roles played by the husbands of the women involved, the anger, jealousy and fury exacerbated by the fact that they have been placed aside in favour of a woman, raising subsequent questions surrounding gender, masculinity and pride.

There are certainly happier books to be read, and at times Mackay’s writing can become disjointed and confusing especially during larger sections of speech, but I do think that ultimately the immersion into Sidonie’s life as given by Mackay makes for a fascinating read, equally intriguing and believable, and an insight into a certain kind of London life in the sixties.

Ali Smith’s Spring, the Unfailingly Present and Eternal Past

I read Autumn, Winter and Spring in quick succession over a week or two, and though I often find Ali Smith’s books a little overwhelming and gloomy in their themes (particularly in her recent books), I find that they stay with me and with time I grow to love the layers of characters, their obsessions and their relationships. Spring especially got under my skin, I’m not sure why, perhaps it was reading it in one sitting the morning before going to see Ali Smith do a reading of it that evening, or the character of Paddy and the sense of her remaining firmly present even in her absence as Richard grieves, or maybe the links drawing its predecessors back into my mind, but I know that I cannot shake the images of this book, and that Ali Smith baffles me even further each time I pick out one of her books.

It is perhaps because of my slight fear of the news and current events that I find myself made uncomfortable by Ali Smith’s work, and Brittany’s story in Spring particular unnerved me. But I think this is Smith’s goal, in making us squirm and dread and despair at these characters and situations, we are forced to face reality, and made aware of the world around us. The act of reading a book is too often deemed a solitary, detached and anti-social escape, and Smith completely flips this inward looking narrative surrounding reading, embracing the ability to write and have a book published in such a short period of time in order to drag her readers into the present.

The idea of ‘the present’ is played with in Spring, as Richard recalls his memories of Paddy, from their first meeting right through to the final days they spent together, we are put in the centre of Richard’s whirlwind of emotion, memory and grief, as each merge into the singular creation of Paddy, now trapped in time. Though Paddy can never exist again physically in Richard’s present, Smith demonstrates how through his grief, Richard keeps the spirit of Paddy alive, the sense of her captured forever in the words written and held in the book.

Through Brittany and Florence’s story, the opposite is true of time: the true horror for those held indefinitely is the never ending nature of their time existing in this in-between world, lying uncomfortably across the border of danger and safety. Smith separates those who cling to the past, painfully aware of the limit of time, and those forgotten and trapped in a place with no end date. As these two worlds meet, perspective is provided, without undermining the pain of Richard and of loss, loss which is ultimately the most universal thing of all.

Although Smith’s work is most often praised for its relevance and discussions of this sort, the thing that ultimately draws me to her work is her characters, more specifically her character’s obsessions. The artists drawn into each of the narratives add texture to the already layered creations, Pauline Boty in Autumn, Barbara Hepworth in Winter and Tacita Dean in Spring. After finishing each book I spent hours researching, reading, thinking and sharing with others these artists, they became by obsessions, I was able to delve into the character’s brains in seeing the subject of their thoughts, and lived, for a moment, in parallel with them.

For me, the most effective introduction of these artists was of Pauline Boty in Autumn. At first, the surreal, bright, glowing descriptions given by Daniel seemed to me creations of his imagination, glorious but never there to look truly at. Looking now at Boty’s work, even just through the screen of my laptop, seems unfailingly magical, they exist in a separate way to me now, and to so many others too, united in experiencing this perfect revelation of existence. The work of Boty and her place in our past has been brought into the present by Smith, another figure retained forever through her writing. This light and joy derived from Smith’s stories balances the darkness, drawing me through the book as it helps the characters move through their lives.

Nearing the end of Spring, we come to realise Richard’s daughter is a character that we already know, far more so than her own father. Perhaps he is so trapped in the past precisely because it is the only stage at which he truly knew her, and so trapped by the memory of Paddy as she provided to him an opportunity to retain this connection, gave him back a daughter of sorts.

I could say so much more on Spring, about Richard’s constant questioning of his actions as correct in his present, a man so much a product of his time even in his slightest use of speech and most private inner thoughts, about Florence’s place within the book (Jen Cambell highlighted in this Review in Toast https://www.toa.st/magazine/spring-by-ali-smith-book-club.htm the significance of ‘flo’ in Florence’s name, as she disrupts the assumed narrative), about the postcard motif and the film Richard works on, but for now I’ll leave it at this, but maybe I’ll return to one of the seasons again, and find something more to write on.

Please let me know your thoughts on Spring, or any Ali Smith’s work, and on my review, I’ve never written anything much like a review, so I’m welcome to any kind of constructive criticism!

A Welcome

This blog is an attempt to write a little of my thoughts on each of the books I read, hopefully working through the steadily growing rows lining my shelves of books yet to be read. A bit about me: my name is Philippa, I adore books, having seemed to develop a collection of books largely based around the themes of gender, sexuality, and feminism. I am passionate (maybe obsessed) with second hand books in particular, and hope not just to explore the more well-know, talked about books, but also the older, forgotten, and never fully appreciated stories that I have found in the hours spent sifting through the stacks and shelves of these discarded books.