Radio 4’s Women’s Hour serial this week is I Leap Over The Wall, by Monica Baldwin, about which I’ve previously blogged (here and here) – a brilliant tale from a woman who entered a sequestered order of nuns just before WWI broke out, then emerged in the middle of WWII. (You can only listen through the website – no podcast.)
And the Telegraph has a story with the words “sex” and “archives” in the same headline – and it is even worth checking out.
Spend a few minutes, or hours, with Katherine Mansfield (in her journal), or W. N. P. Barbellion (an amazing early 20th-century character oh whom I confess I was previously unaware).
Thanks to Paul, of the amazing Bibliodyssey, for the Mansfield link.
Fear is on the prowl in Zimbabwe – in, sadly, the real Zimbabwe, and in the Zimbabwe of Fraser Grace’s Breakfast with Mugabe, the RSC New Work production now at the Soho Theatre. The beast first unleashed, perhaps, when a group of Australopithicenes turned first on a sabre-toothed tiger and made themselves not prey but predator, the beast of revenge, of the anger born of suffering, is here. It was reined-in, controlled, soothed, managed – so miraculously – in South Africa by Nelson Mandela, but not in Zimbabwe.
So it is appropriate that Grace should build his play around a psychiatrist – a white, liberal psychiatrist who’s spent his life studying the intersection of western thought on the brain and African spirituality – called in to treat the problems of President Robert Mugabe (Christopher Obi), who’s being tormented by a ngozi, the angry spirit of a former comrade-in-arms. The psychiatrist, Andrew Perric (David Rintoul) – in appearance and voice all bluff, red-faced classic settler type – is patently aware of the dangers of his position, but determined to turn the President into “Robert”, the patient. Although his motives might just extend beyond a doctor’s desire to heal.
The lighter relief – this is always dark comedy, but there is no shortage of laughs – come chiefly through Grace Mugabe (Noma Dumezwemi). She is brittle, smart and grasping, with no illusions about the way modern Zimbabwe functions. Grace doesn’t fear ghosts, but has a healthy horror or her husband’s mental instability. Her scene with the strong-arm bodyguard Gabriel (Christopher Obi) – no angel he – conducted entirely in Shona, except for two key words, “Mercedes” and “Coupe”, is a tiny comic masterpiece of writing and acting. READ MORE
The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller’s powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s version – its first Miller production – has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you’d expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding “glorification of terrorism” coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.
The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who’ve used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.
The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold – just – the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without. READ MORE
There’s a lot to praise about 412 Letters, the inaugural production of the play by Matthew Wilkie that opened tonight at the Union Theatre in Southwark.
There’s an affectionate, sparky chemistry between its two actresses, Emma Field-Rayner, who plays Ros, the uptight, respectably middle-class, high-flying PR executive, and Louise Kempton, who’s Charlotte, the working class, mixed-up but determined would-be writer.
The script is beautifully structured around the letters the two have exchanged – letters written primarily by Ros, that Charlotte has appropriated for her latest attempt to write the Great British Novel. We jump back and forth through time, as the carefully catalogued sheets reveal how the two met – Charlotte was the drummer in a band booed off-stage, who typically decided to take on the whole abusive audience with her fists, and came out worst from the deal – and how their relationship developed, then imploded.
The repartee is fast and witty, even if the roles the two play – Ros the grown-up, bossy organiser, Charlotte, the rebellion child, are, except for the lesbian nature of their relationship, already widely explored, perhaps to the point of cliche.
“I need closure,” Ros exclaims.
“Do I look like a fucking door?” Charlotte replies.
Plastic Zion, which has just opened at the White Bear, was written in 1982, and is very much an artefact of that time, featuring a representative subset of the angry, disillusioned youth of Thatcher’s Britain, and their music.
At the centre of this discordant little group, transplanted by some unfortunate attempt to experience kulture to an abandoned cafe in backwoods France, is the working-class lad made rock star hero Clem (Nigel Croft-Adams) and his middle-class rebel, self-mutilating, self-hating, girlfriend Josephine (Caroline O’Hara).
Their “groupie” pack – much depleted from Clem’s glory days – consists of his longterm and faithful schoolfriend Yak (Ben Richardson), who’s been unable to imagine a life of his own, and two spongers, the transvestite Carly (Tim McFarland), a petulant, camp imp, and the dim but assertive Dagmar (Minouche Kaftel).
Over the course of a moderately drunken evening they squabble, make-up, and act out all of their anxieties and problems. Yet at the end of it, with the exception of one, perhaps shattering, revelation, they are at the same point as they started.
This is a play that is both better, and worse, than that description suggests. A sketch of the characters suggest stereotypes, and yet the playwright, Chris Ward, makes each of these come alive as real, suffering human beings. READ MORE
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