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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

Contrasting Gender Agendas?

8/6/2020

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​​​Present from top row left to right: David Whitworth; Colin Ellwood; Sakuntala Ramanee; Dom Shaw; Susan Raasay; Jamie Newall; Kevin McMonagle; Julia Winwood; Fran Olivares; Rob Pomfret; Simon Furness; Larisa Munoz; Valerie Gogan/Simon Usher; Emmanuela Lia

  • I'd Rather Be Eaten By Dogs by Carla Zunega (trans. Fran Olivares)
  • A Night Out by Harold Pinter

I'd Rather Be Eaten By Dogs

Great contrast last Friday (29th May), reading another play by Chilean writer Carla Zunega, following on from the great experience of her The S.A.D. Summers of Princess Diana a few weeks ago. This time we read her 2017 I’d Rather Be Eaten By Dogs, again in translation by Fran Olivares (who again was able to join us for the session). As with Diana this play is based on a real-life incident, and follows attempts by young lesbian and sometime-prostitute Eugenia to get therapy for a traumatic incident experienced ten years prior when working as a nursery nurse, and which may or may not have featured a potted plant. But her chosen therapist wants nothing to do with her and has her own traumas to deal with. Meanwhile Eugenia’s imaginary ‘friend’, in the form of the father she has never met, is giving her a very hard time indeed, including suggesting that there may be more imaginary people in her life she hasn’t noticed.  Eugenia’s mother hates her and wishes she hadn’t been born, because of her sexuality.  As a coping mechanism, Eugenia also has a habit of breaking into houses and hiding in closets in a bid to feel close to people and ‘normal’. She targets one particular house and family, connected to the trauma of the ‘plant’….but also, now, the house of her therapist.  In a bid to get rid of her, the therapist suggests pills, but for Eugenia, their effect would not be ‘real’.  However her current state of reality is pretty unbearable, and in any case may not be real either (c.f. the plant, and the possible proliferation of imaginary associates).  No-one wants to know Eugenia, and everything she tries turns to disaster.  Bystanders get inadvertently shot, an entirely unconnected therapy client is pushed towards another suicide attempt, all as collateral damage in her wake. On one level the play is a deadpan exploration of how bad it can get, an inexpressive-expression of terrible, raw, emotional pain. But on another, the immiserated haplessness of Eugenia and indeed of just about everyone else yields the blackest of black comedy, and generates hysterical laughter at its unremitting awfulness.  If Eugenia’s world didn’t feel real to her, the experience of reading the play felt very real to us, very fresh and alive, very difficult to ‘compartmentalise’. Carla Zunega is a genuinely original theatre voice, a poet of misery, perhaps (taking this play in tandem with Diana.). She seems to find a poised beauty and dramatic inevitability in the bleakest of experiences and through the flattest of voices. Its as if a trained dancer, with exquisite technique, were embodying a classical tragedy while heavily tranquilised. You laugh because you don’t think you should be laughing: at the disjuncture between the material and the voice; at the haplessness of the characters, stunned into clumsiness and casual cruelty by their pain. In Dogs for example a suicidal young man so unhappy that he draws a picture of his imaginary friend on a wall so that he can shoots him too in a suicide pact. The play ends brilliantly, ambiguously, offering hope...or is that ironic, or imaginary…? It’s a kind of boldly free-floating ending, only partly connected to the remorseless dramatic logic and measured unfolding of what has gone before.  If it is ‘real’, the route to it is not fully explained. That in itself is wonderfully bold dramaturgy

A Night Out

I really enjoyed and completely related to poor Albert in A Night Out. Pinter’s exploration of male territorial combat is anthropological. It reminded me of the unwritten 'gang rules' in the Army or Public School: same wine, different bottles. I’d forgotten the ending and thought he was going to murder her. Male fear is under the microscope in this play.  Outsiders want to join the insiders but deep down they remain outsiders.                Simon Furness on the reading of Pinter's A Night Out

Zunega’s play features mainly women characters and a comparatively powerless young woman as central character, and the most negative voice in the play is male: her (imaginary) father.  In Harold Pinter's short 1960 television script A Night Out, the protagonist is a comparatively powerless young man, and the negative controlling voice here is his mother. So our second read contributed a certain gendered symmetry to the session. Albert is a young office worker, still living at home, and tonight intent on attending a co-worker’s retirement party, in the process escaping the controlling attentions of his recently-widowed mother.  Clearly, there would be a case to be made for the loneliness and anxiety of the mother, but Pinter doesn’t make it. Instead we witness her devices and tricks intended to guilt trip poor Albert into staying home.  He escapes, but at the party is wrongly accused of ‘touching’ one of the office girls. Women, eh? Always causing or being the cause of  problems for us men, seems to be the general tenor.  Having also anatomised the absurdities and contortions of male office rivalry and mating rituals, Pinter then follows Albert back home to his mother. But her nagging at his late return provokes him into taking the clock that validates her attempted regimen  ‘into his own hands’ and he, well, 'clocks' her with it, with possibly fatal results. Subsequently wandering the late night streets, he ends up in the bed-sit of a girl who has casually picked him up. In this deeply ambiguous encounter he threatens to repeat the offensive clock-action. Having achieved a kind of double-temporal revenge against the female gender, and perhaps having also reclaimed control, via clock-as-offensive-weapon, of the ‘time’ necessary for male regimentation and professional punctuality (I'd note that Pozzo's watch in Waiting for Godot is an emblem of status and control, until of course it stops working...), he returns home to find his mother very much alive, and bashed but also unabashed.  Like Zunega’s, the play is partly a deadpan delineation of hapless interpersonal cruelty and bathetic power manoeuvring amongst the fundamentally powerless. For Pinter, though, a certain anger at women seems to be at work.  In the play’s favour are the wit and precision – and the recognisable accuracy - of its  portrayal of male power manoeuvres and guarded friendships. And the scene with the girl in the bedsit is on a different level, harking forward to later, more mature Pinter, exploring a mutual territory of loneliness and defensiveness with delicacy and genuine strangeness.
​
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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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  • Home
  • AT PRESENCE
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    • Previous projects >
      • Rehearsed Readings
      • INCUBATIONS