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

An Epic, Surreal Journey on a Raft across Dreams

24/4/2020

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Present:
Helen Budge, Colin Ellwood , Kirsten Foster, Simon Furness-Gibbon, Valerie Gogan, David Hounslow, Emmanuela Lia, Robert Lightfoot, Kevin McMonagle, Jamie Newall, Anthony Ofoegbu, Susan Raasay, Zara Tomkinson, Simon Usher, David Whitworth, Julia Winwood, Hemi Yeroham, Laurie Slade (Guest) ​
For our 3rd-ever Zoom session, this was a full-afternoon’s journey reading Robert Holman's intimate epic Rafts and Dreams from 1991, in which a tale of escape from domestic abuse gets subsumed by almost another narrative entirely, of cataclysmic global flooding. The Tufnell Park house-share of the main characters becomes literally a raft swept by flood waters (which emanate from a hole in the characters’ garden caused by an uprooted tree) via polar regions to equatorial Africa. The survivors – an OCD-suffering army wife, her insecure but loving Sgt. Major husband, and their neighbour, a trainee-doctor whose childhood with a pimp/prostitute mother involved some horrendous abuse recounted here in baroque and disturbing detail – all wrestle with the fallout from both the unfolding aquatic global emergency and from their earlier traumas. They variously overcome or succumb to the latter by means of challenges presented by the former, such as are offered for example by encounters with a live chicken and a decomposing caribou. The former encounter is strikingly and unexpectedly moving, as the OCD sufferer faces and overcomes her fear of contamination when  the raft reaches Africa, by means of physical contact with said chicken when offered it by a local woman suffering from leprosy, apparently as a welcoming gift. Close to an ultimate test for a germaphobe, surely. This is a play that somehow makes the borderline-risible seem inevitable, necessary and telling. Not unlike in a dream, in fact. On their travels the central trio are joined first by the wife of a now-imprisoned solicitor who had repeatedly staged and filmed the student-doctor’s childhood abuse, and subsequently by the precocious teenaged son of an aged C of E Bishop found drifting on a passing ice-flow. The script, after a highly dramatic and determinedly realist opening, amplifies the apparently-random-but-significant ‘feel’ of a dream in regard to its external incident, as if the flood water had cracked open and warped the play's space-time continuum, while the characters themselves continue to behave in a psychologically realist way, taking the various serendipitous arrivals and strange global journeyings almost in their stride, as of course you do in dreams. At the point where the rotting caribou carcass is quietly repurposed as a sail for the raft, you begin to realise the play is even more sneakily subversive than even its ‘flood’ narrative implies. With its characters' realistic mental health issues and admittedly grotesque childhood trauma held in tension with its broader dislocated 'ecological/global/dream' dimension, there is a bold sense of the whole being  disorientatingly ‘out of phase’. But that almost Kafkaesque effect makes the play stick to the unconscious like burrs. The trajectory of the characters’ inner journey is perhaps mirrored/amplified in the over-arching epic travel narrative, transitioning from Arctic cold towards Equatorial warmth, and there is fresh directness and simplicity of statement in the dialogue. Everyone just 'delivers' their back story and their diagnoses of each others psyches in a very stark way which, together with the home-made, equivalently stark feel of the drama as a whole, is at times refreshing. In fact it's as if the play is the dream of the slightly autistic-spectrum Bishop’s son who was found adrift on an ice flow painting the vista before him in oils. Tellingly, despite the human and animal drama in his painting, his main focus is on the colours on display. Latterly he is tacitly adopted by the student doctor and the disgraced solicitor’s wife. Unaware that his unacknowledged new ‘father’ has subsequently walked out of earshot and apparently shot himself rather than face the challenges of living, the boy has what is in effect the play’s final and perhaps ultimately orientating, anchoring statement. This apparent non-sequitur recalls a moment earlier in his life and implies that the play' prevailing sense of  ‘un-moored-ness’ has bee on account of something that has been missing from everyone’s experience all along, a sense of familial love and trust:

At Gatwick, Jo, coming home, my parents were there, and I absolutely surprised myself by rushing straight into their arms. That was it, that's all it was, I was home.

The group's reading overall was careful and measured, everyone sticking with it and feeling their way through, probing constantly, rather as if we were ourselves guardedly crossing a vast, mysterious tundra, sparsely populated with some gloriously exotic fauna. As Oscar Wilde almost said of Wagner, this play had many exquisite moments embedded in some perplexing half-hours. 

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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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