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R E A D I N G  G R O U P  B L O G 
​(Redux)

​Things to savour about plays we read; and remarks on the readings…

Birthday Beasts and Bingeing in Baltimore

1/11/2021

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Picture
October 29th, 2021. Present (row-by-row from top left): Fiz Marcus; Colin Ellwood; David Whitworth; Jamie Newall; ​John Chancer; Amelie Eberle; Susan Raasay

  • Seventeen by Daniel Ockrent
  • Ululame by Alphonso Sastre, translated by Paul Rankin

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 

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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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