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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Check the recording of final scene of S.A.D. Summers below. The final few moments of the script, with Princess Diana suffering the execution the play imagines, as her attendants complain about her and a journalist tries to get quotes from her and take her photos, and her distraught sons look on. In the subsequent final scene, son Henri draws a picture of his imagined aborted sister, and is visited by the ghost of Diana's butler and a previous girlfriend, and the by his brother Guillermo.
Friday 17th April and with the new limit of 12 participants in the first of what will now be weekly zoom sessions we had a brilliant time with The S.A.D. Summers of Princess Diana, by Chilean playwright Carla Zuñiga, translated by Fran Olivares, who joined us for the reading. This proved a wonderful scrambled, curdled, scabrous fairly-tale/mythical reconceiving of the demise of the the unfortunate princess, complete with sons 'Guillermo' and 'Henri' scurrying across town in furry animal disguise to make contact with the Princess's cross-dressing ex-butler; while viciously censorious retainers 'Brunhilda' and 'Dorothea' 'gaslight' the princess and repeatedly adulterate her meals with dead rodents, aborted animal foetuses and ultimately an amputated human foot. The palace Fool, after perpetrating possibly the most excruciatingly inappropriate slapstick routine in dramatic literature, is subject to a well-deserved fatal defenestration. Overall shockingly and transgressively funny as well as deeply poignant and heartfelt. And within its dream-distortions, also a subtle and astute 'outsider' analysis of a deep cultural and social malaise. Regular group participant Ami Sayers writes: While we were reading this play on Friday I kept thinking, this is the play I always wish would come out whenever I sit down to write. This has only happened to me with the work of two other playwrights, Sarah Kane and Philip Ridley. Both British, both grotesque yet profoundly poetic in their approach to language, both unafraid of raw, visceral emotion and the power of a strong theatrical image that feels at once like it was scribbled in crayon by a child and by someone with a lifetime of pain and suffering clawing to be let out. Both of these writers are controversial and divisive, in my mind the only way to be as a playwright. For me, Carla Zuniga manages to both evoke the work of both of these playwrights and create her own beautifully unique, contemporary voice that feels as relevant and poignant now as it would have done the day after Princess Diana's death. Because it is about Diana yes, but it is not just about Diana. It is about the many, many women like her (and not just women but those who do not fit the mould of what is expected of them by society). It is about Anne Boleyn, it is about Marilyn Monroe, Amy Winehouse, Caroline Flack and countless other 'icons' or 'idols' who have failed to live up to expectations (because how could they possibly). It is about the scrutiny the media places upon such figures- as we see so palpably in the scene between the journalist (who has got herself stuck in the window of the tower Diana is locked inside) when she asks "what would you say to bulimics who are going to read this interview' and Princess Diana replies, echoing King Lear's Cordelia 'nothing'. She is exhausted by this continual scrutiny and intrusion of her life, it is one of the reasons she is 'bulimic' and yet she is being held up and expected to be an icon, a role model to those suffering in the same way. They analyse and scrutinise and tear her apart. Her life is made entertainment, her life is made a moral tale of how a woman should or should not behave, she cannot win. Amy Winehouse could not win, Caroline Flack could not win, they were pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed until they fell, metaphorically, from that tower in which we had imprisoned them. There are so many other layers to this exquisite piece of writing, but the above is what hit me in the face, it is what made me shake as I read the first scene out loud, along with other wonderful members of the Presence reading group last Friday. The voice of a woman so profoundly exhausted by what has been thrown at her, by being inside her own skin, by feeling that she is going mad and not knowing whether she really is or whether her cruel, cruel maids are gaslighting her or if indeed it is both- because one is the product of the other. Her sheer exhaustion, her shame, her anger, her pain. Her final speech is one that I feel many writers are attempting currently, but none (that I have read) have managed to encapsulate such a strong, angry female voice that still somehow feels relevant to all genders. Despite her biting gnashing anger at the patriarchy, misogyny becomes a human problem that we are all victims of. To write something that does this is no small task, I have tried and failed many a time. I feel privileged to have been a part of this reading. I wish this play every success in the future. It will raise eyebrows, spark anger, divide audiences. It will be accused, I am sure, of attempting to 'burn down the palace' as Diana commands toward the end of the play. But we need writing like this in the theatre now, we need it, we need it, we need it, we need it. We ran an exploratory reading group session on Zoom on Friday 3rd April, in which 20 people took part. Our reading of Pirandello's Cosi e (se vi pare) - translated by Tony Kushner as Absolutely (Perhaps)! - in the end ran for about 3 hours what with chatting at the beginning and a brief break in the middle, and apart from anything else was a very congenial and jolly break from social distancing. And it was a fascinating and at times very funny play - a farce on the inaccessibility of 'truth' and identity, with its own example of enforced 'social distancing'. Experiencing it in our current situation felt a bit like gleefully careering round the airy corridors of an abandoned Palladian mansion somewhere on the Campania....
…a small-town civil servant is either his second wife (the first having died) or his first wife whom he has - deludedly/inadvertently - 'remarried' thinking she is someone else, after she returns to him following a breakdown. The former version of 'reality' is avowed to the curious townsfolk by the civil servant himself, the latter by his mother-in-law. Which one is mad of course depends on which version is true....and deciding that is complicated by the fact that both characters humour each other in their in-law's version of the reality. Eventually the wife herself appears. But she remains veiled and refuses to confirm either version, preferring to sustain the mystery as a necessary and adequate condition of the family's continuing equanimity. Almost a 'model' of theatre itself, perhaps, as the embodiment of ambiguous stories, the 'truth' of which is irrelevant, provided they are emotionally 'useful' (and even or especially if they are useful to different people in different ways) All it took to take part was clicking on a forwarded link, and having a device with a camera and microphone. Scripts are forwarded for downloading to second devices if you have such, AND scripts are scrolled across the main screen if you have only one device. We are already very excited to conduct the next one. If you are interested in taking part, please contact Colin Ellwood via: colinpresence@gmail.com The Presence Actors’ Monthly Play Reading Group Feb 28th….and beyond.
Two great days of script exploration at Presence, this time in partnership with our good friends at Unge Viken Theater in Lillestrom, Norway. On Friday our regular play reading group on at the IES centre in Holborn, welcoming playwright Regine Rossnes and Unge Viken’s dramaturg Oystein Brager to hear Regine’s play Exposed. Then on Saturday heading to Theatre Delicatessen’s brilliant re-purposed space in the City of London for a full day’s exploratory work on the script with performance students from Rose Bruford College Friday, The Presence Actors’ Play Reading Group Friday’s session began with an almost-full house of reading group regulars, and with Oystein and Regine from Unge Viken still hurtling along the Piccadilly Line, their early morning flight from Olso having been slightly delayed. While waiting for them we started with Gregory Motton’s 2017 A Worthless Man. It’s a challenging, complex script, and as such warrants close and detailed consideration: The following is not that, but rather preliminary reflections drawn from hearing the play read aloud on Friday. The play is a series of interweaved stream-of-consciousness monologues: Two families, one working class, one kind-of bohemian bourgeois (both denominations not quite adequate in the plays mapping of a polarising social landscape). Each family consists of a mother, father and just-grown-up daughter, and all are notionally in bed alone in the moments before sleep, remembering their day and reflecting on their relationships with each other and with the wider world. What begins as class satire, ends in existential despair (or at the most optimistic, as a bleak call to arms). Extraordinarily vivid metaphors bubble into the monologues ultimately threatening to un-seam the fiction, leading us progressively from the astute revelation and pointing of attitudinal absurdity into richer, darker territory. It’s as if the characters, on their way to sleep, become latterly themselves dreamt, and by an imagined consciousness in melt-down, or one achieving a very primary sort of creative clarity. Hieronimo may or may not be mad again. The father of the more ‘upscale’ family is a marketing executive-cum-college lecturer who deploys management-speak conceits with an impressive but sinister grace. Progressively he is revealed as a demented identity-fascist, striving for a book-burning Year Zero of continual revolution, all history, and all material and biological reality, nullified in the cause of extreme libertarian self-reinvention. All, that is, apart from the ethnic, gender and cultural identities that form the cornerstones of current identity politics, to which he offers a pious obeisance. The contradictions here are clearly part of the satirical point. The mother craves ‘experience’ at any cost (the cost being always on other people’s tabs) up to and including cannibalism; the daughter amuses herself by inventing bizarre self-identities while crassly overriding the obvious and painful material and economic conditions endured by those less fortunate than herself. In fact the whole family in their enormous sense of entitlement are utterly oblivious to the material and cultural resources that underpin their narcissistic gravity-free posturing. If the play’s posh family strive for continual cultural revolution, the other, or at least its father figure (an ex-miner turned septic tank engineer), dream ineffectually of real political and socio-economic insurrection. For them, the despair is borderline existential and Motton’s portrayal is fundamentally empathetic. The play’s starkest and bleakest metaphors surely belong to this family’s daughter Frizzy, who keens at the meaninglessness of words as an alienating tsunami of bad-faith noise. She likens herself at one point to a self-ravishing nun (not sure that one quiet works, but it somehow does in the play’s almost psychedelic later stages). The insidious and alienating bad faith of language is a key focus throughout, as the satire gradually straitens and dissolves into spectral bleakness, before finally shuddering to a conclusion with a gesture that can only be termed, oxymoronically, sublime bathos. On Friday the reading began with a savouring of the social satire and absurdity before slowly retracting into something less certain (while maintaining a commendable richness of characterisation and relish of language) as we realised we weren’t in Kansas any more. Surely this is the exact trajectory that any production should seek to induce in the audience, as the sarky anger and subversive mischief of the opening become cut with pain and finally bitter despair. At the end, words kind of failed us (as the play surely prescribes….). Motton might be both Caryl Churchill’s lost dark twin and also possibly her worst nightmare. Chastening. As we entered the final pages of A Worthless Man, and with immaculate timing, the Norwegians arrived. Regine Rossnes is a slam poet, and her play Exposed, newly translated with scary slam-aplomb by Neil Howard, is set in a Norwegian high school where new student and free spirit Eili’s sexual indiscretion with her recently-ex boyfriend’s (possibly ‘supposed’ boyfriend’s ) best friend gets uploaded and shared around Snapchat, with devastating effect. If, for Motton, words are simply lies, for Rossnes, they are ultimately valid instruments of expression and potential moral good, and her play accordingly offered a contrast to the near-despair of A Worthless Man. Exposed is a play where moral choices are difficult but conditionally valid, and positive trajectories at least not out of the question. Short stark duologues and trios alternate with slam-poetic interior monologues, embodying a world of intense group loyalties under pressure from new adolescent feelings, experiences and temptations. The ending of the play offers a positive way forward for the characters that is (deliberately) troubled and troubling, but made possible at all through a central and defining act of bravery and solidarity on the part of the two main ‘wronged’ characters. Calibrating that marginally-positive ambivalence, while also mapping the intense shifting emotions and impulses (in all the characters not just the easier-to-like protagonists) that lie beneath the play’s explicit teenage censoriousness, is surely the play’s central endeavour. Our reading yielded some fascinating discoveries. Of course this is a spontaneous reading, and expecting full-on emotional availability in such circumstances is of course mad, but perhaps there is also something else going on here. No-one in the group is in the right age range of course (sixteen to eighteen), hence perhaps a slight hesitation to inhabit and internalise the required teenage argot and emotional world. Our culture’s centre of gravity now is arguably the teenager, so the attempt of anyone over the age of twenty to fully commit to a teenage structure of feeling or (related) means of expression maybe feel like an act of aspirational delusion. On the other hand it might be that the teenage ‘identity’ is even more fraught with posturing, self delusion and protective cliche than the ‘adult’ one, and this triggers the reluctance of more world-wise and absurdity-wary adults to engage other than ironically. Or maybe teenaged earnestness – or all earnestness (and teenaged earnestness is surely the purest kind…) - is tricky, in our cynical and wary culture. Anyway, fascinating. What the reading also reveals, I think, is that beneath the play’s teenaged hedging and posturing (and the play seems to delicately map many such manoeuvrings) lies a well of unconditional, categorical, intense and authentic feelings. It is in fact this ‘charged’ reservoir or root that infuses the script with its poetry (one key strain of poetry surely being by definition instances of simple language and gesture containing or restraining complex, rich, intense ambivalent feeling) and such is evidence in Exposed, as much in the short, terse dialogue exchanges as it its explicitly ‘poetic’ inner monologues. Rendering the former ‘conversational’ (as seemed understandably sometimes the intuitive tactic in the reading) doesn’t quite seem to work. For one thing it disguises the various genuinely (and beautifully defined in the script) failed ‘conversational’ gambits in each exchange that are eviscerated in almost every case by the characters’ emergent deep feeling. For another, it simply dislocates the link to that underlying ‘root’ of feeling that sharpens the exchanges. If the play’s poetic language of the ‘slam’ monologues is about emotional expression, its poetry of the dialogues is about the containment of emotion. Thinking of this ‘teen-spirit’ – expressed AND contained - I kept thinking of the way actors tap into and inhabit the (to us as contemporary adults) in some ways equally ‘alien’ unconditional and emotionally-absolutist worlds of Lorca’s plays or of the Spanish Golden Age writers. Such clarifications and hunches are of course made possible through the wonderful glittering, ‘tessellating’, multi-faceted and multi-voiced instrument that is the Presence play reading group… After the reading, a wonderfully energised discussion ensues around the issues arising in the play, such as the ethics of image-appropriation in relation to the demands of ‘old fashioned’ sexual morality; and the crudeness of the tools currently used by adults to manage this kind of teenage behaviour, tools such as the legal system that inappropriately scar both victim and perpetrator in non-proportionate ways. Whatever else the virtues of the play, it absolutely – and necessarily - touches a very sensitive and current cultural nerve. After a late (and short) lunch we reconvene to read Lucy Kirkwood’s 2012 Royal Court NSWF, in which a ‘lads mag’ publishes a photo of the breasts of a fourteen-year-old girl without checking her age, and her father subsequently arrives at the magazine’s offices. As with Exposed, we have here the exploitation without consent of an underage sexual image, but the lens is very different. Instead of starkness and poetry we have an extremely focused, sharp and very telling satire on hypocrisy and venality. Not unlike the Motton, but with a more defined strategy of attack and without the incipient existential despair. Here the hypocrisies and MOs of the (2012) popular media are used as a way of exposing a society built entirely around the commodification of everything for financial gain: innocence, desire, family relations, the body, intimacy. The third act is set in the offices of a new women’s magazine where similar strategies are deployed: a plague then on both your gender identities… the issues are therefore ultimately posited as being of class and culture rather than gender-related. The play is a riotous read, and with some very deft and clever performances in evidence as the roles circulate round the group. After that, to the pub |
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