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

From Summer to Autumn, from Eden to the Fall

12/10/2020

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Present (from top, left to right along each row: Kevin McMonagle; Colin Ellwood; David Whitworth; Rob Pomfret; Michael Warburton; Simon Jaggers; Simon Usher; Julia Winwood; Emily Essery
 
  • Breaking Horses by Simon Jaggers

Concluding our Summer Season supplemented by Summer Sustained (scroll down this post for accounts of that) and also as a bridge to out Autumn programme, it was a rich delight on Friday 9th October to be reading and hearing Simon Jaggers’s new play Breaking Horses with the writer present. A Faulkner-esque drama set on an a hill ‘somewhere in England’, featuring down-at-heel horseman and blacksmith Bill Brogan facing the prospect of his land being undermined – literally - by fracking, and inundated (metaphorically) by the slow-lapping tides of  consumerism and suburbia. Enter his estranged half-brother Alan as the fracker’s emissary and, more sympathetically, his niece, fifteen-year-old Alice along with her almost-boyfriend Jimmy. Alice is half in love with history, tradition and ritual and very much in love with Jimmy and with Fergus. Jimmy is seventeen, disapproved of by Alice’s father, starved of affection by his own father, and about to join the army.  Fergus is Brogan’s ailing old horse, very much a proxy for Brogan himself. As the frackers loom, Brogan is gearing up to put Fergus out of his misery, shooting him in strict accord with the horseman’s lore that has long insulated him against modernity and which may now in itself be a kind of madness (Brogan sustains this ideology while actually subsisting on mars bars and coleslaw illicitly scavenged from the local SPAR). Overall, the play maps the inter-generational father-son passing on of law and tradition, the fundamentally ruthless and damaging ‘breaking’ and ‘branding’ this entails and the pain it causes, and how it can be done well or badly. And, interestingly, the play's central ’shift’seems to imply the passing of this function in the contemporary world onto the female line, as if the men are becoming mere superfluous husks as the women grow in authority, confidence and expediency. That is where, if anywhere, the hope of the play seems to lie, with the ‘sap’ somehow passing to the female line. Brogan is not good at  winning friends and influencing people, and he soon makes an enemy of the naïve Jimmy. Perhaps all good plays fundamentally enact a battle of inner with outer, intimacy with obviousness, and here the inner ‘glass menagerie’ of the lore of the horse offers a way of being that is felt rather than priced. Very much against the tenor of the times, the play also stands up for (old male) bastards while acknowledging their likely faults and even possibly something darker than mere ‘faults’. In doing all this it rather gloriously embraces the boldness of melodrama without ever quite falling fully into that form's overheated embrace (a delicate balance that of course Tennessee Williams - and indeed Faulkner - at their best maintained also). Some long buried secrets are revealed while others– including Brogan’s possible track record of sexual transgressions  – are left tellingly unresolved; dark plots are attempted and foiled. Just when you think the play is about to settle into a relatively safe genre haven of familiar tunes, it moves up a gear to a weirder and more wonderful place in which the significance of the title becomes clear, complete with the clanking of the devil’s horse-shoe-shod foot. Will Alice herself take on Brogan’s mantle for the next generation and be able to enforce all the creative/destructive ‘breaking’ it entails?

Might the play benefit from a more specific  geographical/regional location? The play very much offers an imagined rather than a ‘literal’ world, but perhaps any knowledge of the actual England, and the different relations between the urban and rural environment that tend to prevail in each region,  slightly undercuts a whole-hearted engagement with Jaggers’s vivid imaginative synthesis. Are we in a remote outpost, or in the garden of England? The plays epic tone, its focus on horses, together with the extreme patriarchy and the actual rural/urban relationship portrayed, even at times seem to suggests something from, say, the US Midwest. Maybe that is simply an eccentric response, but the telling influence of classic John Ford era movie ‘Westerns’ is nonetheless surely present in the play's potent, heady mix
 
In the reading itself the actors shared and swapped roles, each drawing on their own accent and origins, creating overall a vivid mosaic of English/Scottish voices, all somehow converging and integrating at very visceral levels of experience and expression . And a good chat afterward. A great afternoon

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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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