[REVIEW] Bitch Boxer at the Soho Theatre

On Wednesday, I saw Bitch Boxer at the Soho Theatre; a one-hour, one-woman play written and performed by Charlotte Josephine. Having seen Josephine in Julius Caesar earlier this year, I was excited to see her own work – and, to be honest, I’m a bit in love with the Soho Theatre and their apparent directorial policy of ‘stage work that Sophie wants to see, and don’t charge her more than a tenner for doing so’. For me, Bitch Boxer was an incredibly inspiring, salutary and encouraging piece of theatre. Alongside my fascination with the play’s story and characters, I was delighted to see such a young writer and performer performing with such skill and immediacy – and being so warmly received.

Bitch Boxer is the story of Chloe, a young working-class boxer from Leytonstone, East London, who is gearing up for her final qualifying fight before the London Olympics; the first Olympics in which women could box. I am a bespectacled, myopic, borderline-dyspraxic, undersized and severely uncoordinated scrap of laziness, and I came out of Bitch Boxer wanting to box. The play’s exposition of the sport’s technical side is unexpectedly fascinating. I also found Bitch Boxer a more complex and nuanced exploration of boxing than On It, Tony Pitts’s recent Afternoon Play about the late Liam Jones, a young drug addict who attempted to conquer his addictions via boxing. Both plays tell powerful stories of pain and loss, but Bitch Boxer gets far further beyond the predictable narrative of boxing-as-emotional-salvation. Not only does Chloe use boxing to express and control her adolescent anger, but training and fighting give her an identity that reorders and reorients the rest of her life. Bitch Boxer‘s most emotionally articulate scene is Chloe’s recognition that her opponent in the ring is as determined, excited, frightened and committed as herself. This gives the boxer a compassion and respect for the process of fighting that makes the final confrontation moving, but not mawkish.

I said that Josephine was warmly received by her audience, and the vast majority of the reviews have also been excellent. However, one critic has objected in misogynist – and also misspelt – terms that Charlotte Josephine’s body is not plausibly that of a boxer, and that this physical dissonance damages the integrity and believability of the piece. That is an extremely polite paraphrase of what this lone lunatic actually came out with, and I’m not going to link to the review, because, well, don’t feed the trolls.

Firstly, Charlotte Josephine’s body is very plausibly that of a boxer. Secondly, and not to position myself as the tiny Cassandra of critical misogyny, but after watching Bitch Boxer, I was expecting to find that this kind of play would draw this kind of criticism. Women cannot put their bodies out in public looking like Charlotte Josephine looks, without attractive derisive male comment. Josephine looks fit and strong, in a way that’s toned but which connotes substance, strength and stamina, rather than the ultra-tiny LA yoga bod that’s the  mainstream default and pinnacle of the sporty female body. She looks admirably powerful. It’s not really surprising that a woman daring to be visibly sporty, healthy and herself causes controversy: for God’s sake, look at what happened to Rebecca Adlington and Jessica Ennis.

I sat there watching Josephine and I thought how brave she was not to be in Sweaty Betty pinkified sports gear, but instead to look like a boxer, in Lonsdale shorts, black ankle socks and an ordinary vest; all of them sweat-soaked, as the intensely physical piece progressed. And then I wondered what the hell had happened to society, and to my brain, that I found it brave for a young woman to dress as her character without concessions to sexiness, and that I couldn’t ever remember seeing an actress visibly sweat. In order to bring out the troll in one theatrical critic, all Charlotte Josephine had to do was be visible as a professional and as an artist. Quite often, that is all we have to do, as women, to infuriate misogynists: just show up. I encourage you to show up at Bitch Boxer, as soon as you can.

A Snuff Box Theatre production, Bitch Boxer runs at about 65 minutes, includes Eminem karaoke, bereavement, a confrontation with a savage dog, and a controversial pair of Nikes. With Julius Caesar only last month, I’m suddenly incredibly hopeful about the future of feminist theatre.

 

[not really a REVIEW]: Julius Caesar, Harriet Walter and all-female Shakespeare

The cast of Julius Caesar. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

Long-time readers will know that Harriet Walter is not irrelevant to my interests. I have purchased a certain number of theatre tickets in order to see her perform. I have a certain degree of familiarity with her first book, Other People’s Shoes. She was central to Clamorous Voices, the book after which this blog was named, and she appears in my thesis more than is seemly or subtle for a work that’s supposedly about the nineteenth century. I think she’s the most perfect actress of her generation, I hope to God I’m never called upon to be articulate in her presence, and I have still not forgiven the Queen for making Helen Mirren a Dame first.

(c) Helen Maybanks

For these reasons, I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to review Julius Caesar. Not in a balanced way, or even a way that manages to eschew capital letters and superlatives. Harriet Walter plays Brutus, which automatically precludes all chance of a review that doesn’t devolve into my myriad feelings and/or an anecdote about the time my friend Charlie and I (both then aged sixteen) spent half an hour in a biting wind outside the old RST, so that Walter could sign our programmes for (I think) The Hollow Crown.*

Frances Barber plays Julius Caesar. This is also bad news for my sang-froid. Walter may have played Fanny Dashwood, Lady Macbeth, and Harriet Vane, but Barber played the Bolter and the first Shakespearean heroine I ever saw. She was an Edwardian Viola in the snowy Twelfth Night that may not be as good as I remember it, but the fact is that my six-year-old self fell simultaneously in love with her and Anton Lesser. As Feste, Lesser had ringlets and eyeliner; Barber had a waistcoat. I didn’t know which one I more wanted to be.

So, then, when I found myself in the front row of Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse, watching Barber, Walter, and a monstrous regiment of miraculous women turn Julius Caesar into a mashup of Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Bad Girls, Chicago and Our Country’s Good, I asked myself a question. Am I going to review this production in a careful, analytical, balanced manner, soberly locating the play in its aesthetic, historical and dramaturgical contexts? Shall I make solemn interrogation of the directorial choices, and cast a cool eye over the production’s lasting influence, and longevity? If you should never meet your idols, you probably shouldn’t review them, either.

This is not a production to be solemn or cautious about. This is a production which demands you enter its world; a women’s prison wing, where the inmates are performing – and in some cases living – Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Until now, Julius Caesar is a play I’ve actually preferred to read rather than see, which is a) anathema to everything else I feel about Shakespeare, and b) a direct result of the play having almost no women, and going on about war for too long.

This production’s play-within-a-play conceit interrupts Shakespeare’s action with the inevitabilities of the prison day. Med checks and lockdowns tear up the script, daring to put modern-day swearing next to Roman rhetoric. But deliberately breaking this suspension of disbelief only makes the Shakespeare more real, as the play becomes increasingly important to the prisoners, racing to complete their performance before they’re returned to their cells.

Jenny Jules as Cassius. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

At its quietest – as when Brutus, played with ravaged elegance by Walter, tells Jenny Jules (a highly flammable young Cassius, all-consuming as the military leader) of Portia’s death – the Donmar production is tender, understated and mesmeric. In exhilarating contrast, the play’s battles become a cross between a riot and a 90s video nasty, with chaotic sequences of lights, drums, and drugged-out dancing.

It’s so rare to see a show that feels so dynamic and experimental, headed by actors who also speak verse with virtuosic ease. Walter and Barber are, as expected, marvellous. Barber, in particular, can slide from sublime poetry to sounding like the Missing Mitchell Sister without missing a single Shakespearian beat. Two of the supporting cast, Carrie Rock (Soothsayer) and Jen Joseph (Trebonius) are alumnae of Clean Break theatre company. Clean Break exists both to stage the experiences of imprisoned women (via award-winning plays), and empower women who are at risk of offending, or who already have experience of the criminal justice system, via theatre-based educational courses.

Frances Barber with Carrie Rock. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

Both Rock and Joseph gave excellent performances; Rock’s disturbed, too-knowing child has stayed in my mind ever since. Both Rock and Joseph speak blank verse as though it’s not only instinctive, but imperative; that their characters cannot and must not be expressed in any other way. The total absence of anything unnatural – stagey hangups, theatrical tics – meant that they never seemed to be acting. Ironically, Joseph’s overwhelmingly warm stage presence (tell me the name of Trebonius in any production you’ve ever seen) also meant that I assumed I was watching someone who was already very famous, as opposed to someone who merely deserved to be.

Cush Jumbo as Mark Antony. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

The joy of single-sex Shakespeare lies in creating amazing and unanticipated combinations of actors and roles. Without cross-casting, Cush Jumbo’s performance as Mark Antony would never have existed; Jen Joseph would have been no more likely to play Trebonius than Mark Rylance was to play Olivia.

But one of the most challenging and unsettling things about all-female Shakespeare is that it tips the audience into a world where femininity, not masculinity is the default setting. All-male Shakespeare has the simultaneous advantages of historical justification and novelty. Notions of authenticity and original practice legitimise all-male productions, offering us a glimpse of a history that’s sufficiently distant to make the all-male theatrical event unusual. All-male Shakespeare is affirmed and celebrated where other aspects of “original” performance – the cavalier addition of togas to Elizabethan dress, for example – are largely discarded; nor has the modern Globe begun casting pre-pubescent Juliets. I’m not disparaging any of this; productions like Mark Rylance’s Richard II make theatre far richer. Sometimes the consequences veer towards pantomime, as when the (sorely-missed) Peter Shorey’s Duchess of York harangued Liam Brennan’s Henry IV in the BBC’s 2003 broadcast of Rylance’s Globe show. But that merely shows how Shakespeare thrives on the broadest comedy – else why send Falstaff into a laundry basket, then change him to the Fat Woman of Brentford?

Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

The history of all-female Shakespeare, meanwhile, is the histories of girls’ schools and women’s colleges; organisations like the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute; women’s prisons, and private reading circles from the eighteenth- to the twenty-first century. These may not be traditional arenas for academic attention, but they are – I hope – attracting more and more work from scholars. I’d love to know about Shakespeare as read and performed by all kinds of female groups: Shakespeare by and for landgirls, Shakespeare by nuns (did he make it into convents, or only convent schools?), Shakespeare in nursing schools (back when nursing was a female profession). The final chapter of my thesis is about Shakespeare and the suffragettes – the chapter of my thesis that most excited me, and one which (happily) other people seem to find exciting as well – but I’d love to know more about different, all-female groups. Tangentially, I really regret not seeing the RSC’s partially cross-cast King John last year, because it might have addressed my unease regarding partially cross-cast Shakespeares; I’ve yet to see one that seemed truly successful.

On Monday, the Donmar will release its last Barclays Front Row tickets for the run. While wary of schemes that force people to jump through hoops to get affordable tickets, Barclays Front Row is infinitely better than day-tickets, London-only tickets, or ostensibly benevolent schemes that use young theatregoers to fill unsellable seats. I hope everyone reading this gets a ticket. I hope I’m successful for a second time. If we’re there together, say hello. I really loved this production; I hope you get a chance to do so.**

*Charlie and I could also give a deeply moving rendition of the final seconds of Greg Doran’s The Taming of the Shrew, with both of us simultaneously playing both Alexandra Gilbreath and Jasper Britton at the moment of “My hand is ready; may it do him ease”. I want you to really imagine two schoolgirls, each one of whom is trying to be two Shakespearean actors at once (while providing very loud commentary on how brilliant they were). Charlie is now a professional actress (in fact she’s Charlie Ryall), but sticks to being one person at a time.

**Film version, anyone?

Advent Calendar Day 6: Harlequin!

This poster, from the collections of the V&A Museum, was made in 1878. It advertises the 1878 Grand Pantomime at the Surrey Theatre, The House That Jack Built! or Harlequin Dame Trot.

First built in 1792, and demolished in 1934, the Surrey Theatre is probably my favourite illegitimate-and-now-not-there-any-more playhouse in London! It stood in Blackfriars Road, in the middle of (then) prostitute-ridden Lambeth. And yes, I have a favourite not-there-any-more-playhouse. My second favourite is the Coburg; I am the coolest person you know.

T. P. Cooke and Miss Scott as William and Susan, c. 1829 (NPG).

The Surrey was the first home of Douglas Jerrold‘s epically excellent melodramatic masterpiece, Black-Ey’d Susan (1829), which ran for over 300 nights and thoroughly embedded itself in nineteenth-century culture. Ira Aldridge performed there repeatedly in the 1840s.

The Surrey turns up a lot in the annals of the Basement Project (the sideline research I’ve been doing since August), and it lifts my heart every time.

Lindsay Duncan taken ill onstage, during matinee of Hay Fever – how is she doing?

Heard the very sad news this evening (from my parents, who were in the audience) that the actress Lindsay Duncan was taken ill onstage today, during the matinee of Hay Fever at the Noel Coward Theatre. After needing three successive prompts (until which she’d been incredibly good, apparently, but the action had seemed oddly slow), Miss Duncan apologised to the audience that she couldn’t go on. She held out her hand to Kevin R McNally, who plays her husband, and he led her from the stage (other cast members followed). The curtain was brought down, and subsequently two announcements were made (onstage) by the House Manager, confirming Miss Duncan’s illness. The play resumed with Miss Duncan’s understudy in the role of Judith Bliss. Apparently, Rosalind Cressy was also splendid, and duly received special recognition at the curtain call.

I’ve been checking twitter and news sources for any information/updates on Lindsay Duncan’s condition, but to no avail. If anyone does know, I’d be ever so grateful – she’s the most wonderful actress, and (way back when) someone with whom my mother worked at Stratford. I’ve loved her performances since I was a small child, too, but above all it’s just horrific to imagine somebody so talented & so professional being so unwell.

Neither of my parents, in all their years on both sides of the curtain, had ever seen anything like it; apparently, it was very upsetting and I’m glad I wasn’t there. I have huge sympathy for everyone involved and hope Miss Duncan is better soon. Again, if anyone does know (or, indeed, sees Hay Fever tonight/over the next few days), I’d be really glad to hear how she’s doing.

In Memoriam: Postman’s Park and George Frederic Watts

(c) Ingrid Newton, 2011.

Fellow dead Victorian things enthusiasts may well enjoy photographer Ingrid Newton’s latest, absolutely beautiful post on London memorials. I am a big fan of Ingrid’s work, but particularly enjoyed this photograph. Ingrid describes the Postman’s Park memorial to those who have died via acts of self-sacrifice. The designer, as the above image shows, was George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), the first husband of Ellen Terry (who, of course, is a major subject of my thesis – though Madge Kendal may usurp the no. 1 spot). Watts had proposed a national monument to unsung heroes to coincide with Queen Victoria’s 1887 jubilee; when he received no response, he decided to go ahead with the idea himself. I suppose the online memorial sites, newspapers, and things like the Pride of Britain awards fulfil a similar function today, but there’s something infinitely more poignant about the little ceramic tributes. They remind me of the tablets offering thanks for answered prayers you find around shrines in French churches.

Notre Dame, 2009. In a shock twist of fate this was taken by my amateur self, notice how the most interesting tablet's in the bottom-right corner and I have OMITTED it.

The emotional impetus in Postman’s Park seems far sadder – but, then again, Watts’s memorial is still about thanksgiving. Several of the tiles commemorate children.

As Ingrid’s post reminds us, the length of time for which someone is remembered is a fraught issue. Who is remembered, how, and by whom? It’s an issue I’ve been grappling with thanks to an unexpected and exciting development in my research. When I started investigating the writings by these actresses, I automatically discounted the possibility of contact with anyone who knew them. Even “discounted” is too strong a word: it didn’t enter my head. And yet, I am now in correspondence with one of my subjects’ granddaughter and great-granddaughter, and hope soon to read some of their family manuscripts. The granddaughter is now 91; the link is there (there are other issues, about biographical vs academic remembrance, and whether some people should be remembered at all, but that’s a different post).

My next London research trip will probably constitute a return to the Garrick Club Library, but one of the many tangential/side project/should-never-see-daylight .docs attached to my DPhil describes an alternate tour. Without particularly knowing why, I started listing places where Victorian actors are buried. My supervisor’s built a fantastic SAA paper out of recording examples of the Early Modern &c, but somehow I doubt my tramp round Brompton Cemetery will have the same result…

These thoughts are rather disconnected, but then I am mid-chapter-edit. Alex is between drafts, in that glorious limbo of “free”/anxiety “time”. I am not. So type type type.

Columbia Road Flower Market

Columbia Road Flower Market, London, 2010.

The first Columbia Road market was conceived in 1869 as an attempt to wean costermongers from the streets. Today, the Sunday morning flower market in Columbia Road and nearby Ezra Street has become something of an institution. Selling cut flowers, pot plants, herbs, trees and even mature shrubs, the market spills out into back streets with all the charm of Camden, but none of the commercialism and none of the goths. Get up by dawn.

Adapted from The London Encyclopedia (1985), by Hibbert, Weinreb, Keay & Keay.

Columbia Road began its life as a pathway along which sheep were driven to the slaughterhouses at Smithfield.

Columbia Road (2010).

“I have been trading for 35 years on Columbia Road. I sell herbs including Fern Leaf Dill, Rosemary, Purple sage, Sweet Basil, Coriander, Lemon Thyme. My father worked in the Romford markets and he came from a family of fruit sellers.”

Simon Grover, Columbia Road trader since 1973.

oranges and lemons, say the bells of –

I’m in London Wednesday to Friday this week. Thursday’s fully booked during office hours but otherwise parental unit and I are free. I mean my mum – dad’s filming in Bristol, replete with masses of Sunday roast leftovers destined for some apocalyptic fry-up. He took them in a Pyrex bowl, it feels a bit like he’s the student.

Our natural stomping ground is always Soho, Covent Garden, Charing Cross way (food, shops, books) – we used to stay in Piccadilly but this time, for various reasons, it’ll be the City. This is our second visit – until the first, I don’t think I’d ever set foot in the place before. I’m wondering about the bits of London I don’t know so well, and which to explore this time.

I/we already know Southwark, Spitalfields/Aldgate/Aldgate East/Petticoat Lane/Middlesex Street/Liverpool Street way, Shepherd’s Bush, Notting Hill Gate, Camden, Haringey, Hampstead, Mayfair, Marylebone, Waterloo, Kensington, Camden and Maida Vale/Warwick Avenue/Little Venice way reasonably well. And no, that list wasn’t in any kind of geographical order, thank god, it was by emotional association – Shepherd’s Bush is my friends Lucy and Jenny, and the Oxford Tube. Haringey is at least five Oxford friends. Charing Cross is Rhian, Kensington’s a recent addition, the South Bank is school trips, Maida Vale’s my uncle and Hampstead is my mother. Camden is the summit of ALL my EARTHLY AMBITION when I was about sixteen.Waterloo is the Old Vic first night party where Jack and I almost disgraced ourselves (Jack really wanted to run up behind John Suchet and shout BONG, possibly my clearest memory of the evening).

I don’t know where else to go. I welcome suggestions! Help me, lazywebs, you’re my only hope (&c).

REVIEW: Madame de Sade | theatre writing & why I love it

Deborah Findlay and Judi Dench in Madame de Sade. Judi Dench is not actually playing Mme de Sade, which is a bit confusing since everybody's come to see her ANYWAY.

Yesterday afternoon I turned down a ticket to see Judi Dench in Madame de Sade, in the names of diligence and economy, and yesterday evening I was sitting in the Royal Circle at the Wyndhams watching her all the same (thank you Krishna). My mother, when I rang like dutiful daughter, to say “Do not ring me this evening, maman, for I am AWAY to the CAPITAL, what yes of course the coursework essay due tomorrow’s done, BIEN SUR”, said first “Er, I don’t think she’s on, darling” and secondly, also without thinking, “the reviews have been dreadful“. She then did rather rectify her mistake by saying but OF COURSE Judi Dench, Frances Barber, I would cross water to see it, hurrah for your friends, and my wrath was appeased. Mum’s first remark can be explained as follows: Dame Judi, while leaving the Stage Door last Friday fell and seriously sprained her ankle (does she not have people who PREVENT THIS?), but was back onstage four performances later. I had managed not to say anything so absolutely ungracious as ‘but is she on?’ before getting to the theatre, though I did ask the attendants as soon as we arrived. And she was.

I can’t be objective about Judi Dench. I do objectively know and may even concede that Harriet Walter is my all-time favourite actress, but I don’t love her like I do Dame Judi. I realise this is the fourth play I’ve seen her in, and I adore her. She makes me clutch my hair like a tiny Liverpudlian girl during Beatlemania, I have watched every episode of As Time Goes By AND the Trevor Nunn musical version of Comedy of Errors (in which she doesn’t sing. Beautifully. No, it’s really good, no it is, shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about, it is INTENSELY HUMMABLE and records an early example of Roger Rees being doe-eyed. For history), AND oh god, I adore her. So it’s pleasant for me to report that, once again, she was very, very, very good.

Despite being on a cane (she took three steps in, I thought, oh – I wonder if the cane’s part of the character or from the fall? She took another three steps and I thought my GOD, the woman’s both a saint and in agony), and looking raw with pain at the curtain call, she continues to be both emotionally and technically brilliant. You hear every whisper as a whisper, every note in every word.

The problem about greatness, about really great acting, is that in writing about it, you either have to deny your perceptions of the actor, or that actor’s humanity. I can tell you that Dench has amazing vocal technique; although the Wyndham’s acoustics are stunning, like all Delfont Mackintosh theatres (we were in the back row of the Circle and had perfect sight & sound – after visiting the Prince Edward and sitting way back in the stalls, I’m inclined to think you just don’t get a bad view in a Mackintosh theatre), Frances Barber shouts and Rosamund Pike has to heave to make herself heard. I can tell you that she moves beautifully, even on a cane, that her characterisation is believable and understated. I can relate my confusion that her character’s NOT Madame de Sade, but Madame de Montreuil, a baffling revelation since the whole play is of course clearly about her. But none of this will do, because what I want to tell you in big gold-black letters is that JUDI DENCH IS NO WOMAN BUT A GODDESS, except it’s no truer of Dench now, than it was of Siddons, as seen by Hazlitt.

But does it matter? Certainly, the passages where Tony Sher writes of his ‘red-gold sickness’ in encountering (and adoring) the work of Olivier are among the most embarassing in literature. Certainly even Harriet Walter gets a bit earnest and painful when she describes writing on acting as ‘writing on water’. Certainly a lot of now antiquated Victorian theatre criticism seems sentimental and florid. But it’s the only way, absolutely the only way – theatre writing must try to be experiential, because theatre is experiential, and because accounts of dramatic art have to make that art live in way that accounts of poetry or prose never have to do. Texts themselves will always be there, but after a production closes, even if there’s a script, the reviews are all that remains.

I would rather read one passionate (positive or negative) critical review of a play then ten dispassionately calm ones. I would rather write the same; but, crucially, even though there’s a certain angry satisfaction in telling the truth about a theatrical atrocity that’s robbed you of three hours of life, the best reviews in the world (for me, at least) are those where you come out of a theatre both inarticulate with LOVE  (convinced it was genius, convinced there were stars, convinced you’ve just had a LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE) and half-desperate with the desire to articulate it. I am not a good critic yet, because I can’t articulate the joy nearly as easily as the rage, and because my own studies in criticism and journalism have taught me to trust my enthusiasms far less than my mistrust. I think this is true of us as a culture, and certainly of an academic culture — as an undergraduate, the last thing you should ever say is ‘I like this, it’s good’ in an essay, and post-1980s theory especially (while very valuable) teaches us to ‘other’ the text, the performance, to pick apart its biases, to suspect ourselves of misinformation, to mistrust and subvert. And then suddenly, at M.St, the beloved tutor looks round at his twelve students, dumb in the face of some immortal literature and says, despairingly, “Well, do any of you LIKE it?”. And we go, “Oh. Yes. …does it matter?” and he despairs, and we enthuse, and we progress.

This is one of the things I love about graduate study; although I had a very free undergraduate experience in terms of what I studied, never before have I been given so much freedom to pursue my own interests (which is, of course, the point of a Masters degree). We all embrace our own interests more than previously, and I know I am more emotional now when discussing my work, or theatre, than I used to be. Correction: I’m more openly emotional. But then, I’m studying the period where Hazlitt called Siddons a goddess, when Wilde wrote poems for the roles Langtry played, when Terry (note: people should feel v free to buy me this) and Irving were goddess and god, and when Edward Gordon Craig could write of the latter as the last of the Immortals without anybody calling ‘daddy issues’! (note: I do tend to do this). It was an era when people did a lot more crying. Not that I’m suggesting we should weep over our research, although most Oxford grad students will find that at some point this comes naturally. I’m also more inclined to trust my emotional responses to theatre, having realised just how much I’ve seen. I made a list today. Excluding pantomimes, my own shows, and, um, things I saw before I was four (and also those dreadful Theatre-in-Education things school inflicted on me, because they are Just Wrong), I have seen 111 different stage productions: 28 Oxford student shows, 39 RSC, 33 non-RSC dramas or comedies and 23 musicals. Some of these productions I saw more than once. Divide that by the nearly-eighteen years since I was four, and that’s.. a lot of shows and rather a lot of money and goodness if my parents are reading this they’ll probably rethinking their mode of raising me. Or possibly NOT, since they’ve always held the very sensible attitude that life is too short not to go to the theatre, because going to the theatre is essentially better than anything else in the world. Except world peace, and first love, and a cure-all vaccine for cancer and AIDS. But after that.

Anyway, Judi Dench is superlative, and so is the rest of the cast, even Rosamund Pike. This is a very good thing, since Yuko Mishima’s script, as translated by Donald Keene, is… well. If you stop and think about it for too long, the dialogue is dreadful: the first few lines between Deborah Findlay and Frances Barber, in particular, are quite dangerously bad. You can generally forget this, given the beauty of acting and design – Dench enters as a coffee-cream Miss Havisham, bewiching and a little terrifying, while Frances Barber is just unbelievably sexy. Everybody gets through several dresses – Dench’s are the best, although Rosamund Pike’s last and Barber’s first are close competitors (later, she looks too much like a Disney princess to be quite believable) – and several wigs. Impressively for a stage show set 1780s France, only two of the wigs are very stupid – Frances Barber’s second (which nobody could have made me wear), and Pike’s first. This, an enormous blonde sphere of curls, has the unfortunate effect of making her look exactly like an idiotic china doll, a performance she definitely does not give. By comparison, I doubt the heap of hair she wears in the last act is her own, but it does at least look vaguely human. The sound is the best I’ve ever heard in a theatre, and even if some of the stage effects are a little too cinematic for my taste (SURPRISE BARBER is projected onto the back wall shortly before the finale), the overall effect is stunning – a grandeur to match the cast.

All the actors grew on me, although I was extremely prepared to be won over. It’s a testament to the quality of the performances that you do get some idea of the prior relationship between de Montreuil and her daughters, the free-spirited Anne and the saintly Renee (Pike), wife to the imprisoned Marquis de Sade. The Marquis, unfortunately, so dominates the script that everything about the de Montreuil women is conveyed without words, even though their relationship is far more interesting than the precise configurations in which the Marquis has been whipped by or whipping whom. I’m reminded of the Bechdel Test, which originated in a 1985 Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip called “The Rule“. This is a feminist movie-going concept in which a female character will only go and see a film if it fulfils three conditions –

1) It contains at least two women, who

2) talk to each other

3) about something besides a man.

….Madame de Sade, for most of its 105 minutes (I know, a cheek at the price, but it does feel like a full-length play), does not obey the third part of the rule. It’s true (I’m now wondering which Shakespeare plays do, and which do not. Richard II does, just. Much Ado does. AMND does, I think; LLL does, well, but not for long). But Pike is a revelation. Findlay is as good as she always is. Frances Barber is stunning, and Dame Judi Dench is the greatest actress of her generation and you should go to see her being goddess-like in the gold picture-frame of the Wyndham’s stage. I say this even having waved feminist objections around, because there are no men and six amazing women in this (occasionally shockingly hot) play on a West End stage and this may NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. DENCH. BARBER. FINDLAY.

Side note. Oddity on leaving the theatre: black-and-white picture of Joe Orton, in all his bug-eyed glory, looking simultaneously sixteen and sixty while “watching rehearsals for Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Wyndham’s theatre, 1964″. That play in that cream confection of a theatre? Can’t decide if I like the thought or not.

Brief Love’s Labours Lost update: M. Omkar tells me he has nearly finished cutting the script. This makes me very slightly nervous. Suspect will have NO LINES left. We are to send in measurements soon. Slightly concerned. My bust, though not considerable, is presumably bigger than that of a twelve-year-old boy.

The British Library – a small rant.

British Library, uploaded by supafly

A library doesn’t need to do a lot to get me on-side. I love libraries. The waft of literature on a summer evening through Radcliffe Square (seriously – walk past there after dark in Trinity. You can smell the books) is the nearest thing to a numinous experience. I like freizes, I like mosaics, I like big leather-bound rows of crackling volumes and imagining who might ever want to look in them. I love beautiful beautiful compendia like this – I actually keep the Librophiliac Love Letter on my bookmarks bar. One of my favourite parts of my own college is the Senior Library, designed by James Wyatt, with its imposing mezzanine and cool, cool pillars, apparently bearing the promise that here, in the long gallery, with the silent green baize and small brown desks, you will finally find a way out of procrastination. Here, they say, you will find your work ethic. I love Duke Humfrey’s (and not just so, like Harriet, I can pretend to ‘collect material, in a lesiurely way’ while secretly sleuthing after dark. I wish I was secretly sleuthing after dark). I love the Upper Res, despite its horribly mismatched, scoliosis-inducing furniture, and I have a weird sort of affection for the banality of the EFL (especially now the nice ladies have accepted my cheque apology and reinstated my borrowing rights).  The stage was set for an almighty London love affair.

And it all started so well. Andrew was right – the British Library is the future. It’s enormous, airy, timeless in structure and impressive in both design and scope. There are people (hot people, cool people, diverse in age and race and gender people) everywhere, talking in all sorts of languages, sitting on everything, using wireless (a library where they actually accept that yes, you do want all the wireless, ALL OF THE TIME), eating food. EATING FOOD. There’s a cafe, guys. You can eat and read books in the same building. It feels alive. It’s really well-lit. The geography makes sense, there was a cute exhibition on Darwin, the shop is to bloody well die for, there was piped birdsong, weird little hidden exhibitions of stamps and propaganda, and a side-room where I got to listen to recordings of blissful Ellen Terry and Forbes Robertson. And Prince Philip sounding oddly hot in the early 1960s.

Even Reader Registration was relatively painless – the waiting area only slightly resembled Immigration and/or a GP’s room during a pandemic, and the cloakroom attendant was pleasantry to my cluelessness, and the Manuscript Reading Room was willing to acknowledge my existence.

However.

I don’t know if it’s something in my face that just makes library staff hate me. I don’t know. Several of my friends are, or have been, librarians, and they are able to hold conversations with me without reaching for knives, so either I’m unfortunate or my friends just built up a resistance. But – and with all due respect, and in the firm knowledge that I may never, ever, ever make a successful Stack Request again – it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that if you want somebody to be rude to you, go to a library.

The British Library’s issuing, requesting, and bloody well reading procedures are labyrinthine, illogical and baffling to the initiating. That’s FINE. I am okay with that. The Bodleian uses a system built on trust, tiny yellow papers and insanity, split over nine thousand different sites and yet not allowing you to stack request to the English Faculty. The SSL, forty seconds away? Oh yes. Oh yes oh yes. The EFL, no. And yet I cheerfully wear my striped scarf, sign off my College Fee and say floreat oxon, and with it that spectacularly unattractive bunker designed to resemble a temple. I cheerfully accept that every encounter I ever make with a major UK institution’s books with involve a prolonged induction of chaos and confusion. I won’t know where anything is. I won’t know how to find snake weights, or foam wedges, or even the bit of my desk with a plug on it. I won’t know that I’m not allowed to have more than one MS out at a time, OR how to tell that a MS isn’t restricted and can be got within the hour, simply by looking at its number. I will be childishly thrilled to carry books between levels in the Shakespeare Institute (guys! You don’t even have to fill in a slip!), marvel, wide-eyed at speedy arrivals from MS Add. and I won’t have a clue (until sternly told otherwise) that pens are forbidden – on pain of death – in the second floor BL Manuscripts Room. I will get lost looking for the New Bod’s Special Collections room. I will spend four years at Oxford and never make it to the Radcliffe Science Library. I will walk right past the dictionary I want in the Rothermere Institute, and submit to the fact that the EFL’s cataloguing system ends with 1880- . I am perfectly happy to spend much of my research time in a state of locative confusion. It’s great. I don’t like white water rapids and I’ve never wanted to go back-packing. This is my idea of fun.

In other words: I don’t mind being ignorant, I don’t mind having room to learn. What I do mind, however, is that when I am forced to ask a question – when do you close, how do I get a slippy thing, does the library just KNOW my seat number because I can’t see anywhere to tell you and does that ‘INITIALS’ bit on the side mean yours or mine, and where are the sodding snake weights – regardless of institution, county, or, I suspect, continent, the library professional opposite me will feel it necessary to preface his or her reply with a long, contemptuous exhale through the nose. Again, I don’t know if it’s just that they hate me. Probably if you’re asked forty times a day where the snake weights are, it gets annoying but hey I have worked in customer service and one of customer service’s functions is to cheerfully put the F into the FAQ. And perhaps, just perhaps, if a librarian sees me (Reader, I am not stout. I am not hale. I do not have the length of arm or leg) struggling with a MS box the size and weight of a young oak, or with enormous foam rests the same size as the lilos kids play on at swim parties), it might be nice to unpurse your lips, return your jaw to its original setting, and give me a sodding hand. This is even before we tell the story of how a certain Oxford library that shall remain nameless once sent eight of my stack requests back to Cheshire (why does the Bodleian store its books in Cheshire? CHESHIRE?) when I had specifically told them not to.

I have, of course, met lovely librarians; Marjory, saintly college librarian who not only buys one stuff, has a sense of humour when one has a tantrum and accidentally loses jewellery down her library shelves, but is just generally fab; that poor maligned boy in the Bod who seems to exist only for his horrid colleagues to bully, and everybody ever at the Shakespeare Institute, all of who are charming and kind. On the other hand, going back to my old school last weekend I discovered there’s now an ‘ADULT FICTION’ section of books that only sixth formers are allowed to read, so perhaps the disease is spreading – stupidly and arbitrarily selected ‘ADULT FICTION’, I must say. Dan Brown isn’t suitable, but Virginia Andrews (incest, Southern Gothic, o happy Year 8 English) is? Sebastian Faulks must be kept off-limits until the reader hits sixteen? ‘Point Romance’ and all manner of slushy crap with ‘Boyd’ and ‘Tina’ on the spine is appropriate for intelligent, adolescent girls, but ‘The Master and Margarita’, Nabakov and everything I read in Year 10 will be fatal to their moral fibre? I think The Horse Whisperer is even still on the main shelves, a book I – and doubtless every other girl who was in 7x c. 1998 – remembers as the book that taught us the meaning of the word ‘engorged’. Also, I seem to remember that the libretto to Sondehim’s Sweeney Todd is still in the main Drama & Poetry section, i.e. the musical where the Judge gives himself an orgasm through self-flagellation. Splendid. I hate the idea of ADULT FICTION anyway – surely the point of school libraries is that it gives you a self-defined reading life, untrammelled by considerations of yr pocket money or yr curriculum or yr parents (fortunately my parents, esp my mother, conspired in my desire to read everything to the extent that when she actually did forbid me to read one book, it took me years to disobey her). I mean possibly titles on how to knit-your-own-Columbine should be avoided, but otherwise, let the poor things get on with it. And stop hiding the snake weights.

P.S. With all my complaints about the BL, I am excited to be going back next week, and entirely agree with the sentiments here – sod the Olympics, let’s buy more books.

1891 census, or why I hate the bloody sodding archives.

As a matter of academic record, I would like to wish damnation upon Oscar Wilde (‘unidentified hand’ indeed), the Google Maps geeks who persistently refer to Battersea as Wandsworth, and the census-takers who covered the former area during the 1891 census.

As for the man, woman or child who tore the page recording Enumeration District 9 of Wandsworth some time between 1891 and January 2009, I rain curses down upon them.