Friday 7th February 2025 - on Zoom
Present: Rachel Bavidge, Marie Collett, Colin Ellwood, Sara Granato, Sian Macfie, Anthony Ofoegbu, David Whitworth, Julia Winwood Code Red by Emily Mann (2024) A timely read on Friday with a great group of a new play in manuscript…beautiful but also devastating in its analysis of US cultural trends and tensions Emily Mann is a distinguished US playwright and director. Her new play Code Red is beautiful, intricate, insightful, compassionate and dramaturgically deft. Intimate in focus it nonetheless bears witness to huge social and political concerns. There is great satisfaction to be had from its close attention to and ‘presence with’ its central characters, as their delicate care-full world of long-term commitments and vocations is tested and threatened by the (related) blights of guns and social anger amidst the erosion of social structures and community care. But this is to describe its concerns in too reductive a way. The play offers a nuanced anatomisation of a complex matrix of forces, both positive and negative. The (almost) single location is the ‘break room’ of a public school in Upper NY State in which three women of working-class origin - school employees and very long-term friends and workmates - regularly meet for mutual solace, support and discussion in between classes and increasingly frequent Active Shooter drills. Tiz is a 65-year-old Special Education teacher; Kay is 60 and teaches mainstream English, and Mare is an ex-Special Education teaching assistant, now secretary to the school principal. As we first meet them the women are worried about many things, but a particular focus is Warren, a discontented student who tends to bring his weekend hunting guns to school in his pickup truck. They agonise about reporting him. Are they overreacting? Meanwhile a shooting happens in another school 20 miles away. Tiz can’t take it anymore and announces she’s aiming to retire at the end of the school year. For the others, Tiz’s imminent leaving feels like the end of an era in Special Needs teaching at the school. Her commitment to her students, with its many positive outcomes, is legendary. She loves teaching Special Needs, preparing the kids for the kind of simple tasks in which they might subsequently find meaningful employment (the kind of tasks that, at best, can surely embody a purity for the pure of heart and committed. A bit like teaching…and acting, perhaps, c.f. ‘A series of simple tasks that speak of life and nature’ – Joe Chaikin). But it’s all getting too much for Tiz, and perhaps for all of them. It’s not just the regular news stories of school shootings and the constant Active Shooter drills. The women’s experience is of a hugely under resourced school alongside apparent management indifference to the complex needs of the students. They report a marked deterioration in student behaviour; increasingly aggressive or disengaged parents; more ‘detached’ attitudes in newer teachers in search of better ‘work/life balances’; poor pay - and spousal indifference. Their overall conclusion is that, generally in society, ‘everyone’s got selfish’. They also note a continuous decline in parenting over the three generations they have witnessed in their long careers. If this all sounds like it might be a series of tedious blowhard, self-aggrandising moans, this is not the case. There is something about the guile of the writing, the humility of the characters and the unassuming intricacy of the depicted relationships that allows these views to emerge organically like fumes in a “Brownian motion’ chamber sampling atmospheric particles and fumes. The friends worry whether they are now really making a difference, in a country that to them seems as if it has stopped really, functionally, caring about kids. They are in fact all thinking of packing it in And yet… Refracted through their mutually supportive and gently probing chat we get a sense of the rich weave and texture of their broader lives. Mare’s mother has Alzheimer’s with various surreal effects; Kim has a Down’s Syndrome child called Hank who is in Tiz’s class. Hank is apparently something of a star: intrepid, good natured and with a preternatural ability to accurate diagnosis any prevailing societal or situational malaise. And the kids generally are simultaneously in need and yet full of promise. It is often the apparently unpromising kids who deliver, and sometimes the promising ones who - agonisingly - mess up, although not always. A brilliant student in Kay’s mainstream English class writes an essay on the gun situation. He’d rather kill himself by jumping out the window than face a shooter. His paper, in Kay’s admiring and impassioned account, sets out the broader context of the cultural and political madness, pointing out the absurdity of it all There is nonetheless a general sense of an encroaching apocalypse As news comes through that the teacher shot in the school attack 20 miles away is now seriously disabled for life, Kay reveals to a shocked Tiz that she’s seen Mare carrying a gun in school. When the Principle subsequently gives a talk to staff advocating teacher gun training, Mare admits she’s had the gun for a year and has joined a kind of vigilante group with her partner. She makes the case for being armed, and admits that carrying has changed her. She now checks places out when she is in them and - perhaps more disturbingly for her friends and indicative of a much wider social malaise - she feels powerful ‘instead of nervous and anxious all the time’ ‘Talk about your whole world changing’, responds Kay ‘I’m kind of an evangelist for it now’ says Mare. Is she trying to recruit them? Two months pass, in the meantime Kay’s and Tiz’s estrangement from Mare has deepened. Barb, an ex-trainee of Tiz’s, shows up to take over her class when she retires at the end of the school year. Meanwhile Kay has told her son Hank about Tiz’s imminent leaving without checking with her first, causing consternation amongst Tiz’s kids, including Hank. The failure of Kay to coordinate the announcement with Tiz feels like a further degrading of the friendship group But now something much more immediately worrying is looming. Warren is still on the radar, and Kay has – uncharacteristically - filed a report to the principal about Warren hitting his girlfriend Armed with her new vigilante worldview Mare seems to be on the boy’s side, and this generates more friction. The implications of Mare ‘carrying’, and the effect on the friendship is becoming apparent, and because the longstanding relationship is so well delineated in the play, we feel the impact of this More time passes. Kay reveals she has had to fail Warren in her English class for poor performance. Ominously, in response, he has started to stalk her. He stares at her constantly. Clearly there will be no help or support from the school hierarchy, or from its hugely under resources guidance provision Warren’s behaviour worsens and Kay’s attempt to approach his parents doesn't help. The mother seems totally disengaged Over the course of the subsequent week the pressure on Kay from Warren intensifies ‘I’m so scared. He has me cornered, and he knows it, and he knows I know it’. She reveals to her friends' consternation that she herself has joined a gun class, having been the most vociferous about Mare previously having done the same It emerges that Warren has again driven to school with his hunting guns in the back of his pickup, and Kay must face up to what she might be prepared to do to preserve her own life Then the school alarm sounds. A shot rings out… The play’s climax and the twist it contains is both surprising yet on reflection inevitable. It manages wonderfully and terribly to evince the tragedy and pain that all are susceptible to, whatever sides they take in the binaries and oppositions that we all so easily and simplistically construct and impose Overall then, this is a superbly crafted, compassionate and nuanced ‘beating heart’ of a play, asking that ‘attention be paid’ while managing to chronicle and value hope and love in the most depressing and anxious of situations. It ‘earths’ its huge issues without stridency and with a close focus on compelling individuals. A few small sighs of undue compression towards the end perhaps (a rather compacted almost choric late appearance of Warren’s mother for example) and a slight risk of hovering towards the corny at times, but a play that amply earns its small licences, by means of its very careful and hugely effective - and authentic - dramatic craft. Its careful balance of joy and despair somehow manages to integrate expertly-managed suspense and wide social and cultural resonance within a richly achieved relationship drama with a Chekhovian sense of the thresholds, sadnesses and strangenesses of life And Hank has the last – and perhaps the most telling and accurate – word Colin Ellwood
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Friday 4th October - Actors East, Haggerston
Present: Rachel Bavidge, John Chancer, Marie Collett, Colin Ellwood, Simon Furness-Gibbon, Valerie Gogan, Ben McIntire, Georgia Murphy, Simon Usher, David Whitworth Not That Kind of Child by Kristine Brusdal, translated by Siân Mackie (2024) Part of an unexpected and very welcome delivery from Unge Viken, of four scripts from the most recent round of their Ung Tekst scheme (of which we have such good memories from our collaboration in showcasing the previous round's plays at the Norwegian Embassy in London in late 2022). And what a discovery this accomplished, urgent and timely play proved Three women of different generations enter the space…and, after a silence, begin a theatrical conjuring, a mutual evoking of an emergency that leads ultimately to a devastating (but perhaps ultimately salving) emergence: the teasing out of a long-suppressed secret and its multi-generational consequences. Dramatic storytelling and psychological 'processing' are here persuasively fused in this exploration of the long-term consequences of trauma, and of the value of emotional recognition and support, for being seen, of ‘attention being paid’ - however delayed - in the healing from it. And the attention here is brilliantly theatrical, the play being also an exploration of the value of performance itself. As often with Shakespeare, the actual performance and the fictional drama are brilliantly sutured together, the one becoming vertiginous metaphor and enactment of the other. Are we watching actors, or the characters themselves enacting? Theatre or therapy? Whichever of the foregoing, are the performers evoking an exterior reality or an inner stream of consciousness? If the latter, is it an interweaving of three minds perpetually in isolation, or a slow convergence and integration? And In a theatrical present, or a therapeutic or theatrical reenactment of the past? All these options seem at times kept ambiguously and effectively in play The speakers/enactors are ‘A Daughter’, ‘A Mother’ and ‘A Grandmother’ (the indefinite articles apt as what follows is both specific to a single multi-generational family and potentially emblematic of something possibly – and disturbingly – more widespread). The full action is as follows, run through here in the hope of communicating how well worked and ‘placed’ it is, with its various layers so powerfully and sure-footedly integrated and its revelations so telling and well-judged From the initial evoking of (what seems like) a familial idyll, a ghostly double exposure hints at an underlying crisis: a drug overdose, perhaps even the suicide attempt, of A Daughter now in intensive care. This underlying implied ‘present moment’ initiates an intricate weave of probing, evoking, resisting, solacing and, ultimately, of revelation The older women’s hurried journey towards A Daughter’s stricken bedside becoming a reference point orientating us – at first – to the past celebration of a high achieving ‘good’ child. But we are in fact sharing the heartbreaking ‘trauma response’ of the older women as they try to make sense what’s happened, how such an apparently happy and virtuous child has come to be in intensive care. We begin to see through the celebration, glimpsing a child desperate to fulfil her mother’s expectations, emotionally ‘unseen’, hyper self-critical, short of self-esteem, while setting impossibly high standards for herself and deeply affected by the condition of the world. We also sense a troubling emotional shutdown across all three generations. Some of A Daughter’s responses seem acutely typical of a modern teenager but, without access to recognition and support, a tightrope was clearly being walked across a very dark abyss. The relentless positivity of A Mother seems brittle and blocking. The spectre of her daughter on life support in the emergency room recurs, despite her mother’s attempt to reconfigure the image to one of her daughter on a cruise ship sun bed. Sparely and powerfully, the daughter’s past is evoked and enacted, like a drama therapy embodiment of mutually but tacitly ‘held’ family lore. We learn that Daughter’s parents are divorced, and no sign of a grandfather. Daughter as a young child substitutes food for love and body issues ensue. The relationship between Mother and Daughter is complicated by the former's emotional projections, associating the child’s apparent weight issues with the body of the absent father/partner. Puberty further tips the mother/daughter relationship into a kind of erotically-projecting Electra complex, and hints emerge that the once high-achieving daughter is going off the rails. As she reaches 15, her mother discovers her using her piano lessons as a fake alibi for illicit activities. There’s an attempt by mother to ‘ambush’ her daughter into a doctor’s intimate examination. The present-moment convergence on the emergency room is evoked again. Mother phones grandmother with a view to meeting her at the hospital. Then a further vista opens, onto the history of the troubled relationship between mother and grandmother. The shock of her child’s overdose tips the mother into regressing. She needs her own mother and recalls her childhood. Mother and Daughter keen for their fathers, but Grandmother shuts this down. Then, as if perhaps in therapeutic role play, Grandmother finds herself drawn to granddaughter for emotional support and guidance - or to the actor playing her. Daughter enacts Grandmother’s own emotionally distant mother ‘from another time’. And here finally, chillingly, we are afforded a glimpse of the family ‘primal scene’, the root of its curse and its passed-down emotional occlusions. Grandmother as a teenager tries to tell her own mother about what we surmise was a rape; a stranger (?) in a car; the brief, spare evoking of the insidious modus operandi of the practiced abuser. How will her mother respond? She slaps her daughter. The inference is that this rape led to the conception of ‘A Mother’. With what feels like acute psychological insight, the subsequent birth is overlayed with memory of the rape. The ensuing ongoing mental anguish is smothered beneath a coercive notion of motherhood as an incontestable positive. For Grandmother, inevitable attachment issues are made worse by what feels like the cruel ironic twist of her child’s joyous nature. A brief moment of authentic connection is blocked as the shielding stoicism of Grandmother asserts itself. Her child is left feeling unloved, ugly, and when she herself becomes pregnant, her mother cannot bring herself to express joy despite her desire to do so. Back in the present day the matriarch finally arrives at the hospital and after a brief rendezvous with her daughter tries to get a vending machine to work: I can’t go back to my daughter/completely/empty-handed. Surely no theatrical encounter with a vending machine has ever evoked such a powerful Chekhov-type combination of pathos and bathos, as she desperately tries to acquire a gift of, literally, peanuts. Through this apparent cry for help – at least at the level of the wider performative ‘meta-game’- A Daughter and A Grandmother are suddenly again communicating, but this time as themselves, imagining a possible future meeting, where Daughter - in her 20s and a student - asks about her grandmother’s earlier life. We sense, finally, the small possibility of a real-world explicit acknowledgment of Grandmother’s distress and its cause, and perhaps even the potential of a healing empathy: Did you have anyone to talk to, about what happened...about the rape? In apparent shock at the knowledge this reveals in Daughter, Grandmother – or perhaps the actor playing her, or both - leaves the space. A Mother confesses: I’ve always been a bit gabby’ The remaining older woman begins reminiscing again about supposed past good times with her daughter. But this time, the latter seems to offer a potential way out of their shared hell: We’ll never be able to move on/If you don’t stop now She - or the actor playing her - calls Grandmother back onto stage and coaches her to say what she never has before - that she loves her child. That’s the role you’re going to play now Finally, Mother and Grandmother go to see the daughter in the trauma room The former again searches for reasons for the daughter’s overdose. Again Daughter draws her back to reality and now Imagine any potential reasons are just excuses/…/this is the only important moment The two older women seem now finally, truly ‘present’. They begin to worry about the future. What if this overdose is just the beginning? Daughter respond: We don’t know yet Do we just sit here? Daughter again: Yes/now you just sit/ and exist/ right here A silence The end, and hopefully – for the featured family - a beginning Friday 6th October 2023
November 26th, 2021. Present (row-by-row from top left): David Whitworth; Colin Ellwood; Emi Herman; Amelie Eberle; Susie New; Susan Raasay; Charlotte Pyke
This was a slightly tricky read, partly of course because James’s characters express themselves and negotiate their complex moral dilemmas in long, nuanced, beautifully-modulated paragraphs - a joy when got right but very tricky from out modern 'un-performative/spontaneous/behavioural' linguistic norms, and double so when it's being sight read. The challenge was compounded here in that the only available text was absolutely encrusted with what initially appear as the oddest and most cheese-paring of novelistic stage directions, to the point where simply making out the dialogue from the surrounding verbiage in the heat of the moment was at times almost impossible. So it was a struggle, wading through entangled bracken with only a dim awareness of the overgrown path beneath. Doubly challenging, given that one of the central attractions of James’s characters is their supreme poise and self-possession. Watching them negotiate the complex moral dilemmas James throws at them is like being privy to an in-the-moment commentary by a group of bomb disposal experts collectively disarming an especially awkward enemy munition. James's characters are experts in moral disarmament, as it were. So under spontaneous 'reading' conditions, the necessary sureness of foot proved often very difficult to get anywhere near. It was hiking with ballet pumps on – but nonetheless - and very rewardingly - there were some characteristically heroic attempts - with some very quick-witted footwork and gusto in attack - from new attendees and regulars alike - with the consequence that the play's Rolls Royce engine intermittently and brilliantly kicked in, and its underlying potency could be glimpsed ...and what a deft, supple play by Henry James, written with a wonderful awareness of the expressive possibilities of the physical stage. More accomplished and richer in texture than pretty much all of (his contemporary) Oscar Wilde’s slightly rackety melodramas. Pared of its stage directions the play is revealed as stark and beautifully honed, making bravura use of continuous time and a single location – in this case the entrance hall of a slightly gone-to-seed country seat whose provenance stretches back to medieval times. The aged family custodian is dead. The heir is Captain Yule, a young radical politician who through family estrangement has never seen the place nor made any prior imaginative contact with his heritage. He is enticed to visit by Prodmore, a successful businessman with political aspirations, who wants Yule to marry his reluctant daughter Cora and convert to his mercantilist politics in return for the cancelling of the immense mortgages on the property the rights to which he (Prodmore) has acquired. The aim is that Yule become the local (puppet) MP. These were, after all, (at the time of the play’s writing) newly democratic times, and an 'old-family' MP would clearly be a very useful front for Prodmore’s Liberal ‘moneyed interest'. Moneyed interests being very much a thing then as now, of course, with Lloyd George flogging peerages and all. Yule’s central moral dilemma then is either to accept the deal, or to give up the house and his inheritance. Initially it looks like he will choose the latter, honourable, path. Cora, meanwhile, dare not resist her dominant father's plan, despite being in love with another young man who makes a brief hurried appearance at the top of the play. Into all this descends (literally and marvellously - having been rooting around in the upper gallery to savour the antiquities, with the aged family retainer's permission) Mrs Gracedew, a rich American widow much enamoured of and expert in English heritage. As the play progresses she gradually introduces Yule to his inheritance in the form of the house and its artisanal, Walter-Benjamin-esque 'aura', and persuades him of the accrued millennium-long love of which it is the material embodiment. At the same time she is progressively apprised of Prodmore’s complex machinations, the dilemma of Yule and the personal reasons for Cora's reluctance to acquiesce to her dad. The key, unspoken thing though is that it becomes slowly apparent to both Yule and Gracedew that the other is, like themselves, an evangelist for a cause (With Yule its socialism and for Mrs G the moral value of ‘taste’, the appreciation of culture and the good life) that they are each advocating to home communities from which they are themselves isolated (East London for Yule, Missoura Top for Mrs G); and that they are both also alone in terms of family. The play's fundamental underlying tectonic shift then primes their mutual and parallel escape from loneliness and into the possibility of a full life, by uniting Yule's radicalism and Mrs G's respect for heritage. The conditions for their unlikely love are discretely and thoroughly arranged by James, and when the pieces ultimately and unexpectedly fall into place, they plausibly represent a joint implicit mission to heal the political divide demarcating the culture wars of the time (and, arguably, of our time too). Given this slow, subtle assimilation, the ‘magic wand’ of the play is Mrs G’s money, which seems to know no bounds, and her waving of that wand to confound the venal Prodmore is so much more than the act of a crude Deus Ex Machina, in fact genuinely has a sense of theatre magic when it is applied, and (for Mrs G) it also has a theatrical sense of personal commitment to it. Here - to glance at a famous Wilde witticism - through the deployment of Mrs G's money, value decidedly drives out price, rather than the other way around. The upshot is that despite their age difference, Mrs G and Yule will marry (the theatrical effect of this depends surely in keeping the audience distracted from alighting on this possibility until the very moment it comes finally into play). Yes the play is a form of wish-fulfillment, of sympathetic magic,…but it is so well crafted, its characters so fresh, so accomplished and nuanced in their responsiveness, so unlike the ‘types’ of Shaw…so psychologically fluid and 'feeling', that it seems genuinely to work in the way that the resolutions of WInter's Tale or Twelfth Night work – the implausible is given by James as with Shakespeare a kind of elemental magical and psychic power. Mrs G is a needy, feeling goddess...and her magic power is money, Is it too much to call this a kind of 'myth drama' beneath the comedy of manners? Drama as balm, as healing ceremony on numerous levels. And ultimately enacting an escape from isolation and loneliness through the finding common ground with an opposite, and through acknowledging oneself - through birth or personal election - as being part of the main. The 'common ground' is - literally - rooted in the play's setting, the old family seat. Throughout, the house wears its symbolic significance as ‘England’ lightly and persuasively: heritage and tradition gone to seed and in danger of becoming a tomb rather than a home; of being destroyed by socialism rather than repurposed by it, and equally of becoming nothing more than a tourist ‘heritage’ commodity There are beautiful, deft dramatic effects throughout (the unspoken and moving revelation of the old retainer’s unpaid loyalty, beautifully tempered with a nod to his understandable keenness to pocket any money that might be going); the beautiful metaphorical enlisting of a literally-broken vase. The characters throughout are imbued with a sense of ethical ambivalence (including Yule and Mrs G). Even Prodmore transcends the Shavian chauvinist industrialist stereotype by displaying a genuine Rupert Murdoch-like acuity in verbal and intellectual combat. He is clearly at the top of a very good personal and business game. And of course overall there is the theme of political corruption, of money buying influence. Its not quite Granville Barker, but in its own Mozartian, subtle way it skirts the same swampy area. The central love interest could all be horribly sentimental of course - love dalliance as glutinous foregone conclusion. But in the same way that Brief Encounter avoids moment-to-moment sentimentality because the proponents play it straight and are complex characters who unsentimentally acknowledge and accept their operating in a cruel and unsympathetic world (the real one, in other words), this risk surely has the potential to be avoided if played properly And for all their distractive-ness, the ‘stage directions’ when studied at leisure are more than interesting. The initial assumption was that they were lifted from the originating James short story, but on closer inspection they are revealed as extraordinary proper director’s staging and interpretative notes, and they demonstrate a wonderful sense of the theatre and its physical possibilities. Assuming they are James’s own (they must be, surely, given his very wide experience of the theatre as a critic and spectator, and that they are clearly the work of a highly-sensitive artist), then on this evidence James would have made an extraordinary theatre director. He loved the theatre for what he saw as – at its best - its intensity of life; the extraordinary intuition and moral subtlety that could be elegantly, gracefully and thoroughly processed and attuned within a richly textured social milieu. The play was produced in London in the '60s with Eartha Kitt as Mrs G, and you can see how that idea might have arisen. With the right cast and direction, this is surely a great possible hit now, and even a necessary play for our acrimonious times . October 29th, 2021. Present (row-by-row from top left): Fiz Marcus; Colin Ellwood; David Whitworth; Jamie Newall; John Chancer; Amelie Eberle; Susan Raasay
Firstly and briefly, Daniel Ockrent’s short actor-musician ensemble piece, Seventeen. Seven brothers meet to mark the seventeenth birthday of the youngest, Esteban. The dangerous mammal in the room is the legend that the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son – which Esteban is – will on his seventeenth birthday turn into a werewolf. Over the course of fifteen or so minutes, this ‘unspoken’ fear slowly manifests and is addressed. At Esteban’s request his brothers tie him up and arm themselves with knives. It’s a beautiful simple ensemble take, deftly told and progressively more disturbing as the very real precautions and psychological effects take hold. Esteban launches obsessively into prayer, and what initially seems an arch and playful piece enacts a transformation of its own, into the experience of confronting - as a family, a collective – the prospect, however remote, of a terrible reality. Then the great Spanish dramatist Alfonso Sastre’s Ululame, inspired by Edgar Alan Poe’s poem of the same name that allegorically and in mystical terms explores the poet’s response to the death of his wife. Sastre brilliantly projects this strange psychological journey onto the biographical mystery of Poe’s movements immediately prior to his death in Baltimore. He was stopping off there while on a railway journey from Virginia to New York to retrieve some valuables from his beloved Aunt’s (and mother in law’s) home in New York, prior to his marriage of convenience to a childhood friend and fan. No-one knows with any certainty what happened to him in the two days he went missing before being discovered in an alcoholic stupor and in someone else's clothes. In the play Poe is already fragile with the cognitive and physical effects of alcoholism and opium addiction as he sets out alone. Beautifully and evocatively translated by Paul Rankin, Sastre captures Poe’s sense of self-estrangement and dislocation through tortuous circumlocutions and conversational false starts and misunderstandings. Once he reaches Baltimore, at election time with brass bands playing and all kinds of election shenanigans going on, the chaotic events of an incipient binge are filtered through the writer’s alcohol-induced psychotic state, and the inner ‘Ululame’ trajectory is projected onto the experience. For all its delusional, dream quality, the result is a hugely telling enactment of the madness of an estranged world and of the chaos of grief and loss. Poe is emotionally alive during the Baltimore psychosis since psychosis is surely an excess of meaning, and meaning is both something we all yearn for and of which grief deprives us. We share Poe’s distorted experience even as we glimpse beyond it the real chaos and randomness of his Baltimore exploits. Ultimately he returns to the sense of frozen dislocation that he experienced prior. Beyond that is his death, and then the constancy of his devoted old aunt in visiting his grave. Sastre’s Poe is a writer addicted to his visions as much as to alcohol, the latter being a comfort blanket against the cold blasts of reality and mourning. Without the visions and the meanings they validate - and that are symbolised by the possibility of reconnection to the spirit of his beloved wife – he is nothing. The play is a celebration of the unique imagination of Poe, haunted by his stories and poems - all of which seemed to grow out of his psyche’s imperatives - as well as a savouring of the fragility and innocence of the artist and of the reality of love, even where it cannot be properly received (as is the case with his Aunt''s long-suffering devotion to him). The play is both tragic and deeply funny, as Poe is buffeted through the Baltimore night like a hapless Buster Keaton, encountering apparently random lunatics and venal election agents and a gallery of grotesque characters as he repeatedly tries to make his train connection. And the (in reality) missing clothes? Corrupt election agents used to pay people to vote repeatedly, changing their clothes in the hope they wouldn't be spotted by the authorities. The money was often spent on drink. Read with relish and the group loved the play October 8th, 2021. Present (row-by-row from top left): David Whitworth; Colin Ellwood; Fiz Marcus; Marie Collett; Amelie Eberle; Simon Furness; Sophie Juge; Kevin McMonagle; John Chancer; Jamie Newall; Samuel Meyer; Julia Winwood
Good to be back after about two months summer break. And to be exploring a play as good as Von Kleist’s extraordinary political/expressionist psychodrama from – would you believe - 1809, in this ‘version’ by Dennis Kelly, from the Donmar in 2012. The eponymous Prince is a naïve, arrogant, impulsive, entitled, feted, vague, disconnected, juvenile, indulged cavalry commander in the Prussian army of the Great Elector fighting the Swedes for survival in the late C17th. Exhausted from relentless combat and prone to sleepwalking, he is discovered by the Elector and his entourage sleep-enacting/dreaming what seems to be a kind of personal myth – plaiting a laurel wreath of victory for himself. The Elector responds by doing what C20th dictators became very good at: he manipulates the Prince’s dream/myth, in this case by weaving his own (the Elector’s) chain of office into the wreath and having the court’s ‘anima’ - Princess Natalia - present it back to the Prince, still as he dreams. It’s a wonderful composite image – an eroticisation of military victory in the service if the state. The intensity of the Prince’s response spooks the courtiers and the Elector. Something obsessive has clearly been triggered, something implanted or amplified in his psyche. As the courtiers retreat, the Prince, still dreaming, snatches Natalie’s glove, and this further validates the Prince’s merging of dream and reality when, awakened, he discovers that the ‘real-world’ incarnation of the ‘dream-glove’ is indeed Natalie’s. In his subsequent schizoid/fugue state, he can’t focus on the convoluted military briefing for the next combat, and the eroticised myth/metaphor/dream world overwhelms him: In the past fortune has glanced in my direction, touched my hair, cast the odd favour at my feet. But now she rushes at me like a bullet fired from a gun, the wind lifting her veil so I can see her face and she is smiling. She is smiling at me. I think I shall search her out on this battlefield today – and even if she is chained to the Swedish victory cart I will rip her free and all her blessings will be mine. Later, presumably still at the mercy of this myth-reality, he disobeys orders and attacks the enemy when he should have held back, in the process behaving with extraordinary arrogance and ignoring the pleas of fellow officers charged with the task of managing his renowned impulsiveness. On the one hand, his actions win the battle; on the other, disobeying the Elector’s orders is a capital offence, and the Prince is accordingly arrested on the Elector’s orders. This seems potentially to set up a battle between pre-modern magical/mythical thinking and ‘modern’ managerial instrumentalism as the appropriate driver of action in relation to the state. But the Elector clearly involves himself with both. Is he looking to engineer Homburg as the perfect totalitarian disciple, 'breaking him in', so to speak, to a point where law/instructions and instinct are one? Or is he just teaching him a lesson, or even eliminating a potential rival? (In accounts of the battle, the Elector doesn’t come out terribly well, but Homburg is lauded. And Homburg’s tacit marriage proposal to Natalie threatens to remove her potential usefulness to the Elector as a diplomatic ‘marriage pawn’). Or maybe the Elector is just as he claims, a stickler for (his new imposition of) military micro-managerial instructions Still in his adolescent ‘myth-world’ the Prince doesn’t take his death warrant seriously, dismissing the subsequent court martial as just a chance for the Elector to enact his own entry into the Prince’s fantasy: How could he have paraded me before that table of judges, hooting their song of death at me if he himself did not intend to enter their circle, god-like, and overthrow the verdict? My friend, he has amassed the storm clouds around my head so that he may rise through them like a sun and pierce my gloom But when it looks like his is going to be a real execution and not a mythical/symbolic one, he falls apart. I have seen my grave. I have seen my grave on the way here, by torchlight. I saw the open hole that will receive my body tomorrow. Aunt, these eyes that look at you now are to turn opaque and dull, shadowed with death. This breast is to be pierced with the cold metal of bullets. Already they’ve sold the seats in the windows that overlook the marketplace where my blood will pour from my veins, and he who currently stands before you on life’s summit looking forward into the future like it were a myth will tomorrow be rotting in a box with nothing but a stone to say ‘He Once Lived’. He repudiates Natalie to her face and cravenly and humiliatingly begs for his life. It seems the classic ‘Franz Klammar’ moment of someone who has previously been able to operate on instinct in pressured situations suddenly waking up/looking down and having to deal with an enhanced sense of real-world consequences. Everything that happens to him feels like a dream (as he continually remarks) until it doesn’t. But then something even more subtle and interesting ensues. Natalie confronts the Elector, aiming to get the Prince exonerated as a ‘child’, but quietly as a back-up she also arranges the mobilisation of military forces that could potentially stage a coup if the Elector doesn’t acquiesce. But he seems to do exactly that, writing a letter offering the Prince total exoneration, ready for Natalie to take to the Prince’s cell. When the Prince subsequently reads it, however, the condition demanded by the Elector is the logical one that the Prince state that the Elector was wrong to condemn his (literal) insubordination in not following orders ‘My dear Prince of Homburg, when I ordered your arrest for disobeying orders with your premature attack, I believed I was doing my duty. Indeed I believed that you yourself, as a general and a man of honour, would’ve approved my actions. So I ask of you this question – if you believe that I have done wrong then give me two words and I shall send you your sword upon the instant’. The Prince won’t do it. He calls the Elector’s letter a ‘masterpiece’ and says: I will not stand so unworthy before him who stands so worthy before me. I am guilty as charged, as well I understand. But if he can only forgive me if we dispute the facts and force me into a lie, then I’m not interested in forgiveness. It looks as if the dream, the ‘golden chivalric myth’ is again trumping the sordid, terrifying reality of death. Or even that - given that it was the Prince's ‘mything’ and his ignoring of the Elector’s ‘managerial’ instructions that got him into trouble in the first place - his accepting of the death sentence occasioned by the latter is a kind of integration of both myth/dream/instinct and law/instruction/reality/death, such that both can be ‘held’ together in the imagination. Which of course in a sense is the perfect totalitarian (and proto-fascist) state of affairs (and affairs of state): law becoming instinct in pursuance of the primal myth of authority. And when this ensues in a death, then this symbolic/real erasing of the individual in relation to the ‘myth’ of the state is surely a welcome additional emblem of self-abnegation. The thrust of this seems to be consolidated in another fascinating, deft and well-engineered phase of the play. Now Natalie swings into action with her ‘plan B’, engineering a confrontation between the military and the Elector in support of the Prince. One officer’s argument to the Elector – the veteran Kottwittz – is surely key: You talk of rules? The highest rule is that which beats in the hearts of your generals, it isn’t written with papers and pens. It is an ideal. It is the flag of this Fatherland we build, it is the crown and he that wears it. Rules? Why should it matter to you what rule defeats an enemy, so long as that enemy is defeated, so long as he lays at your feet. The rule that destroys those who threaten you and your people is the only rule. But of course the opposition between rules/laws and instinct here is in many ways a false one. The ‘rules’ they have in mind are ultimately not there to enforce rights of the individual for example, but just slightly different means of ensuring the same result as would whatever emerges from ‘that which beats in the heart’. Could the Elector very cleverly be ‘catechising’ this answer all along - just as he manipulates the Prince’s self-condemnation through appearing to offer the opposite (the Prince’s acquittal?. Wonderfully, Kleist leaves this possibility in play, along with the opposite, that the Elector is being put under severe pressure and simply responding to events in order to try to save his own skin. The protest/debate is closed down anyway when the Elector produces his trump card – the Prince himself, who declares himself for death. And here the Kelly ‘version’ and Kleist’s original diverge. In the former, the execution is carried out, with conspicuous lack of support of the military and the court. It’s a crude and brutal account of a straightforward political killing that surely overplays the ‘fascism’ of the Elector and suggests he won’t last long (when I fact we know that the regime set up by the Prussian ‘Great Elector’ lasted very long indeed, and with ultimately terrible consequences). The original is much more disturbing, and surely much more telling in relation to the ability of modern autocracies to get into the heads and dreamworlds of its inhabitants: At the apparent moment of execution, the Prince’s blindfold is removed. There follows the staged-managed (by the Elector again) apparent continuation of the Prince’s myth/dream from the beginning of the play. Natalie crowns him with his laurel wreath, puts the Elector’s chain round his neck, and presses his hand to her heart. He faints – a mythical/symbolic rather than a real death - and on reviving he asks if it has all been a dream, to which the courtiers reply ‘yes’. Brecht does a very similar thing with Galy Gay in Man Equals Man regarding his renouncing his former identity to become the perfect fighting man. It is the creation of the perfect totalitarian subject through the unifying of law and instinct in pursuit of an image that fuses also personal honour (the wreath), the state (as embodied in the ruler – hence the Elector’s chain) and erotic desire…(Natalie). And to have all that experienced at the level of dreams. Kind of what Hitler and Stalin did, surely? Immediately after this, the play ends with them all charging into battle defying the enemies of Prussia/Brandenburg The difference between the characters and the audience is that we have the option of seeing this process from the outside. Whether Kleist did (see it from the outside), is surely a moot point, but the tortured quality and general tenor of his work surely suggest that sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t – which ambivalent position also surely is conducive to the most telling and effective of art And of course that inside/outside-the-dream vision – that accommodates the cool perspective of a Brecht on the mechanisms of power, along and the interior schizoid intensity of the Expressionists – would make for a very interesting production challenge An extraordinary and richly ambiguous play, then, full of vivid secondary (military) characters, reminiscent perhaps of Renoir’s Le Grande Illusion, and with at its heart three very modern, psychologically acute, ambivalently-drawn individuals: Natalie, the Prince and the Elector. And in the case of the last of these, also one of at mystery: potentially a Grand Inquisitor, the Duke from Measure for Measure, but genuinely put under pressure in conducting his exorcism, his psychological vampiric rebirthing of his acolyte the Prince On Friday all given a characteristically characterful and urgent reading (and we read both the ‘Kelly’ ending, and Kleist’s original) C.E. |
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