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R E A D I N G  G R O U P  B L O G 

JUMP TO THIS MONTH'S ARCHIVE CHOICE: Schwellenangst by Colin Ellwood

A Season-Concluding Strudel

30/6/2020

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Present: Emmanuela Lia, Colin Ellwood, David Whitworth, Kevin McMonagle, Paul Hamilton, Sakuntala Ramanee, Anthony Ofoegbu, Jamie Newall, Rachel Bavidge, John Chancer, Julia Winwood, Helen Budge, Hemi Yeroham, Marta Kielkovicz, Adam Tyler, Rob Pomfret, Valerie Gogan, Simon Usher.


  • La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler (trans. Frank Marcus), written 1890, set in 1890
  • A Patriot for Me by John Osborne, written 1966, set in 1890
  • Schweyk in the Second World War by Bertold Brecht (trans. William Rowlinson), written 1943, set in 1943

​A strudel is a type of sweet or savoury layered pastry with a filling inside. The rolled version of the pastry looks like the inside of a whirlpool. It is most often associated with Austrian cuisine, but is also a traditional pastry in the area formerly belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“My homeland,' says the guest, 'no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away.”               Sándor Márai, Embers, on the Austro Hungarian Empire
 

Well, a long, hot afternoon but with some wonderful rich, insightful individual 'soundings' sparked from a combined edifice of absolutely granite 'long-game' plays.  For the final session of our thirteen-week epic virtual perambulation we expanded on our recent focus on the circumstances and fallout of the 1914 Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, this time looking more broadly at the Austro-Hungarian Empire and also back a further twenty years to its final flourishing (or late-stage rheumy, cynical decadence…take your pick), via John Osborne’s extraordinary, mighty, intricate, measured,  subversive slow-burn larghetto of a play A Patriot for Me (written for the Royal Court in 1966, and one of the twin wrecking balls – the other being  Edward Bond’s Saved – of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorious ascendancy) and Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Also featured was a Brecht scene as a Hapsburgian premonitory prelude/coda. We mirrored the mittel-kingdom’s scale with a (for us) record twenty participants; and also perhaps its multiplicity in our attempted ‘melding’ of the Schnitzler and Brecht scenes with the Osborne. This latter promised to work wonderfully well, although sadly time limits meant we were only able to read a small sample of the interposed Ronde extracts.  But with even those limited additions, the effect created was of an all-levelling, proliferation of Hapsburg bedrooms featuring  multiple genders and proclivities: A textual and situational immersiveness. The Osborne is set exactly in  the time and milieu out of which the Schnitzler was written.  The queer intrigue and subversive eroticism of the former was contextualised beautifully by the equally transgressive heterosexual daisy-chain bed-hopping of the latter, with the whole thing becoming a continuum of fluid eroticism beneath a crust of Hapsburg protocol.  Together they embodied a tension between characters’ residual belief in fundamentalist Catholic Hapsburg ideals and the broad cosmopolitan tolerance (shading into cynicism) that sanctioned and/or drove the cavorting.  Which was the more thoroughgoing ‘drag’ mode: the men’s in the famous Osborne ball scene, or the same men (and their straight contemporaries) in their ostrich-plumed Empire-parade-ground finery? There is surely a middle phase in all imperialist enterprises, after the departure of the founding ideologues, obsessives and psychopaths, when functionality and decadence; primness and permissiveness; licensing and licentiousness exist all together as, respectively, mechanism and lubrication. Then the mechanism tightens and the lubricious lubrication begins to run out-of-phase and turns corrosive. So, the ever-more-formalised racist ideologies of the latter British Empire reportedly existed on an increasingly decadent subsoil; and latter-day Soviet Marxism was largely no more than cant disguising graft.  A similar stand-off was clearly a feature of establishment London at the time of Osborne’s writing (witness the Profumo goings on), and perhaps nowhere more notably than at the Royal Court itself, at the time supposedly a bastion of Anglo-Saxon spade-is-a-spade ‘vibrancy’  set against the ‘continental’ sexual subversiveness of the preceding HM Tennant ascendancy, but in fact a sexually complex and conflicted place all by itself. Osborne’s riven protagonist in Patriot is the upwardly mobile and talented Redl, pulled apart by competing and incompatible (in his world) needs for personal and societal acceptance and success. As with the Cambridge spies, espionage and betrayal form Redl’s attempt to square that circle, with genuinely tragic results.
 
Although we only managed to read two of Osborne’s three acts together with a sample of the Ronde scenes (actually doing the whole thing in three shorter maybe two-hour sessions over a day would have been ideal!), we nonetheless navigated the key stages of Redl’s compromising and his professional corruption (in a ‘bed’ of Rondedness), with only his eventual downfall untouched.  As a character, Redl is in some ways the opposite of Jimmy Porter in Look Back: a man not given to blowing his own trumpet,  mostly self-contained, readable by the audience through silent night crying rather than extended verbal peroration. Patriot is surely a very major work, with Osborne beautifully and forensically anatomising the complex mechanisms, subversions and micro-transactions of Hapsburg regimen in a flinty and un-showy way. And from what we now know of Osborne himself, he is clearly here negotiating his own internal ambivalences and contradictions, working  to contain and express rather than to pre-emptively resolve.  As with Jimmy Porter though, Redl’s thwarted romanticism is apparent even as his behaviour becomes more hopeless and contradictory, and the play itself also has a magisterial and insouciant sense of slow-unfolding confidence: Osborne is, by this stage in his career, theatrical aristocracy: laidback in dramaturgical attitude and understated in accomplishment. In Friday’s reading the group really tapped the work’s dark, illicit, eroticised and watchful tone, which is an especially amazing feat over zoom.  Even the stage directions (which as stage directions generally  go are fantastic in the Osborne: beautifully novelistic/cinematic) were wonderfully conjured. 
 
We had begun the afternoon fifty years beyond Patriot’s/Ronde’s Hapsburg highpoint (so concluding some unfinished business from a couple of weeks back,) with the magnificent final major scene of Schweyk in the Second World War, in which Brecht’s version of Jaroslav Hasek’s other First War corporal, lights out in search of Nazi-besieged Stalingrad. This is perhaps where - by means of the subversive, insinuating Schweyk and the whole Nazi regime itself - the two contradictory tendencies of the Hapsburg ethos meet their final nemesis.  Our reading of the scene included a brilliant Gisela May account of the first of its Eisler-composed songs, and a plangent Fumio Yasuda/Theo Bleckmann arrangement of its second, the haunting, bitterly poignant Deutsche Requiem. The Brecht scrubbed up beautifully as a rich, nostalgic - and coruscating and subversive – premonition of this ultimate Hapsburg vanishing point.
 
Altogether a very satisfying if 'incomplete' afternoon, and hopefully a fitting end to our twelve-week lockdown journey, which has tackled over twenty scripts, including classics and new writing in the original English, and in translations from Italy, Chile, Norway, Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Austria and USA; featuring around thirty-five performers  collectively putting in something like one hundred and sixty separate appearances (and goodness knows how many roles and individual readings of roles that has included: many multiples of that); also guest playwrights, translators and directors; a musician and a psychotherapist. 
 
For me, a particular satisfaction over the weeks has been witnessing regular participants relaxing into the zoom medium. Zoom tends to isolate and focus on individual contributions, to put them on a zoom-square-circumscribed ‘slab’. In response, participants have increasingly  ‘owned and explored’ their individual spaces and opportunities, creating in effect a series of beautiful animated and expressive tessellations (examples visible sometimes in the ‘stills’ of each session uploaded onto this blog).  Aside from the voices in these, there has also been a hugely expressive mosaic of faces caught in the process of actually speaking but perhaps even more so in listening and responding mode, in for example the smiles of appreciation of colleagues work, or in unselfconscious ‘catching’ of the mood or tone of a play or of a single moment.  This was certainly evident in the tense and measured unwinding of the Osborne on Friday. Which effect - in the spirit of at least two of Friday’s plays – might perhaps be termed a fitting consummation for our getting into virtual bed with each other over thirteen ‘daisy chain’ weeks
 
More, by way of zoom and also perhaps beyond and growing from that, over the summer I hope.

Anyway, huge thanks to all who have taken part.
 
And finally a mention of an issue that emerged – very much in line with the current societal zeitgeist – in relation to the play selection on Friday: some concerns arising out of the racism, misogyny and homophobia expressed by characters in all three scripts.  A bit and complex issue that we can only attempt to navigate with honesty and good heart, and that perhaps should be a subject for a future post.

​CE
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    ​INDEX of dates:​​
    • WINTER 2021
    • AUTUMN 2020
    • ​SUMMER 2020​
    • SPRING 2020​
    • SPRING 2019
    • SUMMER-AUTUMN 2017
    • AUTUMN 2016-WINTER 2017​
    • WINTER 2015-SPRING 2016
    • SUMMER 2015
    • WINTER-SPRING 2015​
    • AUTUMN 2014
    • ​SPRING-SUMMER 2014​
    ​INDEX of playwrights and plays:
    • Maxwell Anderson: Key Largo
    • Aleksandr Blok: ​The Stranger
    • Edward Bond: Lear
    • ​Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Dramatic Scenes
    • Oystein Brager: ​Cloud Yellow
    • Fredrik Brattberg: ​The Returnings
    • Bertold Brecht: ​Schweyk in the Second World War
    • Helen Budge: ​Grey Collar
    • Joseph Chaikin: ​When the World was Good
    • John Chancer
    • Kia Corthon: ​7/11
    • Noel Coward: Star Chamber
    • ​Don DeLillo: The Day Room
    • Per Olov Enquist
    • Regine Folkman Rosness: ​Exposed
    • Jon Fosse: ​Freedom
    • Julia Gale: ​A Beautiful Room to Die In
    • Griselda Gambaro: Asking Too Much,  Mother by Trade​, Siamese Twins, Whatever Happens Happens, Dear Ibsen, I am Nora, Asking Too Much
    • Carla Grauls: ​Made for Him
    • David Grieg: ​Being a Norwegian
    • Jaroslav Hasek: ​The Good Soldier Schweyk
    • Jacob Hirdwall: Emperor Fukishima
    • Robert Holman: ​A Breakfast of Eels, ​Rafts and Dreams
    • Odon Von Horvath: ​Judgement Day
    • Henrik Ibsen: The Lady from the Sea
    • Jean-Claude Van Italie: ​The Serpent
    • Simon Jaggers: Breaking Horses ​
    • Elfride Jelinek: Wut (Rage)
    • Charlotte Keatley: Emilie's Reason
    • Lucy Kirkwood: NSWF
    • Marie-Héléne Larose-Truchon: ​Midnight
    • ​Maurice Maeterlinck: The Blind
    • Hannah Moscovitch: ​Little One
    • Gregory Motton: ​A Worthless Man ​
    • Rona Munro: ​Basement Flat
    • Maria Nygren: Hummingbird,   Missing Cat
    • John Osborne: ​A Patriot for Me
    • Nick Payne: ​The Frugal Horn
    • Harlold Pinter: ​A Night Out
    • Luigi Pirandello: Absolutely (Perhaps)! ​
    • Gerlind Reinshagen: Sunday's Children ​
    • Friedrich Schiller: Joan of Arc ​
    • Arthur Schnitzler: ​La Ronde
    • Sam Shepard: A Short Life of Trouble, The War In Heaven,  ​When the World was Good​
    • ​Laurie Slade: Supermoon
    • N.F. Simpson
    • Simon Stephens: ​Country Music, ​ Herons, Rage
    • Nis-Momme Stockman: ​The Man Who Ate the World
    • Ramon del Valle-Inclan: Bohemian Lights
    • David Watson: That's What I Call Music
    • John Webster: ​The White Devil
    • ​John Whiting: Saint's Day
    • Oliver Yellop: ​I am Gavrilo Princip
    • Carla Zuniga: ​I'd Rather Be Eaten by Dogs, ​S.A.D. Summers of Princess Diana
    INDEX of articles:​
    • Dellilo Delight (17/3/21)​
    • Country House Catastrophes (17/3/21)​​
    • Key Largo... in need of upping the ante from largo to andante (17/3/21)​
    • Ibsen in the Dolls'/Dog House (22/1/21)
    • Commitment versus Accomodation (22/1/21)
    • An American Primal Moment (22/1/21)
    • Beauty and Terror in the unknown (22/1/21)
    • Schiller - Thriller or Filler? (24/10/20)
    • From Summer to Autumn, from Eden to the Fall (21/10/20)
    • Our 'Summer Season' of Readings (15/9/20)
    • A Season-Concluding Strudel (30/6/20)
    • The Sacred, the Profane and the Reconfiguring of Action (22/6/20)
    • Spartacus and The Butterfly Effect (15/6/20)
    • ​Writing a Forgotten Person (10/6/20)​
    • Fragile Worlds (8/6/20)
    • Contrasting Gender Agendas? (8/6/20)
    • Imagined Realities (24/5/20)
    • Freedom and Confinement (19/5/20)
    • Social Restrictions amidst a Covert ‘Epidemic’ of Lawlessness (9/5/20)
    • Rage and Transfiguration (4/5/20)
    • An Epic, Surreal Journey on a Raft across Dreams by C. E.
    • ​'S.A.D. Summers of Princess Diana': a Taste of an Ending by C. E. 
    • A Brilliant New Chilean Take on a Familiar Fairy Tale Story by C. E.
    • Reality or Madness….or both? An Expedition with Pirandello into the new Zoom Universe by C.E.
    • READING NEW PLAY BY REGINE FOLKMAN ROSSNES by Colin Ellwood
    • A Collaborative Complicity by Charlotte Keatley 
    • ​A Blind Poet and a Blind King Corralled in a Discovery of Chairs by Colin Ellwood (07/10/16)​​
    • ​An Atmosphere of Daring by Gwen MacKeith
    • ​Keeping Afloat by Siubhan Harrison
    • ​Between the Lines by Christopher Naylor 
    • ​Prospecting by Bill Nash 
    • ​Missing Voices by Jamie deCourcey (02/05/15)
    • The Propensity to be Enriching by Danny Horn (19/01/15)
    INDEX of contributors:
    • John Chancer
    • Jamie de Courcey
    • ​Colin Ellwood
    • ​Tom Freeman
    • Valerie Gogan
    • Siubhan Harrison
    • Danny Horn
    • ​Charlotte Keatley
    • Stephanie Königer
    • Gwen MacKeith
    • Caitlin McLeod
    • ​Bill Nash
    • Christopher Naylor
    • Alex Ramon
    • ​Stephanie Rutherford
    • ​Simon Stephens
    • Jack Tarlton
    • Oliver Yellop​
    TAKE ME BACK
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