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Review: ‘Yellow’ – “sensitive and complex”

Zad El Bacha
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Review: ‘Yellow’ – “sensitive and complex”

The opening scene of Yellow immediately characterises the protagonists: Charlotte is a bubbly blonde, perhaps a bit too bubbly, full of teasing humour. She’s teasing her husband for putting on a working class accent to talk to a cab driver. He denies the accusations:  he’s a good man! With a good social conscience! He knows all about classism and cultural appropriation! Then he gives in, alright, yes, he did it. His admission does not hold any actual guilt in it, any acknowledgement of the damage his actions could cause. It’s a goofy, well-meaning error from a man who is clearly a good guy. His wife takes it the same way and hugs him.

At this point of the play, the characters seem nothing but annoying. But very soon, the traits they display in this scene are filled with wistfulness and pain. As the play goes on, we discover that Charlotte is held hostage by her husband and an evil doctor so that she may “recover” (from what?) and spend time with her newborn baby. She is slowly isolated from everything, forbidden even from reading books. Writing, which used to be her career, becomes her little secret. The bubbliness we see in the first scene is curbed, until it disappears completely.

The play reveals the violence in the husband’s well-meaning, caring demeanour. In one particularly moving scene, he ignores her protests as he further isolates her from all that she loves, gaslights her when she expresses her feelings about it, and then tenderly kisses her on the head. He is also portrayed as a good and caring father (unlike her, the selfish mother), and the hypocrisy of his act is revealed.

For example, he tells her off for leaving the baby alone while she went to the library, despite having been away for a conference for an entire week. He says, horrified of her and conscious of his own goodness: “I had to rock her tiny little body until she fell asleep!” As if that was a shocking, unexpected thing for him to do.

The character development is made through frequent flashbacks, which also have all the poignancy of a time of freedom which is so different from the present. I was impressed by the smoothness and unity of these flashbacks. Non-linear narration is hard to pull of in a play without falling into an excessive experimentalism, but Yellow managed it seamlessly.

This was partly due to the simple set, which remained always the same as the scenes changes, keeping the viewer grounded in the reality of an isolated room. A particularly harrowing, and technically well-done, flashback was one where the protagonist is in a club with her best friend, who is planning to get herself a post-breakup goldfish. The scene perfectly captures the moments of drunken female friendships that we all know from nights out, and the contrast between the carefree, silly tone of the scene and the rest of the play is truly heartbreaking.

The set is surrounded by a net, illuminated in a faint yellow. It slightly clouds the vision of the play, and I expected it to fall down at any moment. It never did. This made perfect sense with the progression of the story, as Charlotte’s truth is clouded more and more, and she is always more entrapped in the little box that is her room. Its transparency allowed for an artful rendering of “the woman behind the wallpaper”, who was simply standing behind the the screen. Unfortunately, the technical limitations of the Pilch’s lighting system meant she couldn’t move much without getting out of the light, but the artful directing turned that into a solemn, eerie stillness.

The only criticism I could level against this play is the exceptional flatness of the evil doctor. However, given the shortness of the play, and the complexity of the themes it was handling, this cannot be but a passing note. Overall, a sensitive and complex portrayal of the ways ideas of motherhood are used with a benevolent facade to violently police a woman’s life.

Five Minutes With… Hugh Tappin

Cherwell Stage
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Five Minutes With… Hugh Tappin

How did you get involved in drama?

When I started at Oxford, I always knew I wanted to be involved in drama. I’d done a lot of acting at school, and back then it was sort of a pipe dream idea that I wanted to go into acting. I knew I wanted to get involved, and so I started out with Cuppers. I directed a really, really bad St John’s Cuppers play, and that was basically it!

What’s your happiest memory of drama at Oxford?

My happiest memory? Oh my lord… I have so many happy memories, it’s hard to think of one in particular! Working with the cast I did over the summer for the OUDS Shakespeare tour would have to be some of the most fun memories I have, it was just a wonderful cast to work with, but so much other stuff too!

Have you ever had any production nightmares while in Oxford?

I directed a play in Trinity last year, and I wouldn’t say it was disastrous, I just got very stressed because one of my actors didn’t learn the lines fairly close up to the production, so that was quite stressful. Oh, and we’re currently trying to find a sink for Lovesong, which is causing a little bit of stress. It’s fairly hard to find a sink.

Do you have a particular favourite play?

That’s so hard! I read what Lucy (Hayes, Chair of OUDS) wrote and basically completely agreed with her that I cant really choose one. And I’ve never seen or read Angels in America, which I feel singles me out as one of the few people in Oxford drama who didn’t see that production of Angels at the National! In general, I have quite an eclectic taste in theatre. I really like modern stuff, I’m a big fan of David Hare and his writing in general, but I don’t really know what my favourite play is. Sorry, that’s a really bad answer!

Are there any plays that you’d like to see put on in Oxford?

I play that I really really like is a play called Betrayal by Harold Pinter. It’s really cool, it’s got a very small cast, it’s a very intense play about three people and it goes backwards chronologically, over the course of an affair that’s happened, which I think is a really cool concept, having a play that goes backwards.

Do you have any inspirations in the world of theatre?

There are some truly amazing people at Oxford drama. In terms of who inspires me, I would have to say Chris Burr is up there, simply because of the sheer amount of work and shows that man can get done – he’s an absolute machine. It’s really quite impressive. In sheer terms of workload that man is an inspiration to everyone. And then, I wouldn’t say I have one person who inspires me, but I’m inspired by the sheer talent of everyone around me. It’s so much fun working with them.

Do you have any plans to go to drama school after Oxford?

I need to get my applications in over the Christmas holidays, so yes, that is the plan. I was tempted to apply before (in lieu of going to Oxford) but I’m very glad I didn’t because I feel like I’ve got a lot better since university, and I feel like I’ve also grown up quite a lot.

Do you have any advice for freshers who want to get involved with drama at Oxford?

Just go for it, generally. Really go for it, throw yourself into it. Go to socials. Go to the drinks events. Go to workshops. The auditions workshops are really good if you’re in anyway nervous about auditioning, for example if you don’t know what monologue to do, go along to those. There’s a new lot coming up run by Fran Amewudah-Rivers through the BAME Drama Society which she’s founded, which is really cool. I also think that anyone can get involved with drama, not just freshers. There was a friend of mine who graduated a few years ago, who in fact helped me get into drama, and he only started acting in his third year at Oxford, he really got into it and now wants to go into it professionally, so I don’t think you have to be a fresher to want to get into drama.

What’s your favourite role on the production team?

My first love is acting. I did really enjoy directing Skylight, and I’m really enjoying producing (for Lovesong), it’s good fun. I’m working with an amazing cast on Lovesong at the moment, and I’m producing Crocodile which is coming up next term with the same production company.

Have you seen any plays at Oxford that stand out to you?

What have I seen this term that’s been amazing? I’m trying to think. A few years ago I saw a production of Rhinoceros which has stuck in my mind as being one of the most amazing shows I’ve seen at Oxford, it was just incredible. I saw it right at the end of my first year and it’s just stuck in my head. Then the tour show last year, which was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I remember seeing that and finding that one of the funniest shows I’d seen in a long time, which is always hard with Shakespeare.

Could you tell us a bit about the OUDS tour?

This summer we had the privilege of doing a week at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which is part of Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s completely auditioned from Oxford actors, directed by Oxford people, and it just gives you the opportunity to work with a company of actors for the space of two and a half months. I wouldn’t say it was that different to any other Oxford show, except in the size of it and the length of the run. That’s one of the things about Oxford shows, you work really hard for about 2 or 3 months on a show and then it’s over in 3 or 4 days, so it was great to have the opportunity to do a show where you do it and keep on doing it,and you learn new stuff along the way.

Could you tell us a bit about Lovesong?

The concept of Lovesong is that there is a couple, who we see at the start of their relationship just after they’ve got married, and then we see them 50 years on, but we don’t see them in separate scenes, we see the characters working together, interacting with each other on stage, principally through movement, so you have one actor coming in and being replaced by another, and it’s very fluid in that sense, so you don’t have this strict timeline. It’s also very beautiful, and I think it’s a really important show for Oxford because physical theatre doesn’t get done enough. I think what Luke is trying to do in Lovesong is really important, and it’s really fun, but really hard for the actors. I was in a rehearsal the other day and the actors were working with Luke deciding how to physically represent a sequence, and it was really interesting to watch because they were there working with each other, devising movement as they went along, which is just a really cool way of working.

Do you have any other exciting projects coming up?

We are in the process of holding callbacks for The Crocodile, which is a show that we’re doing in 7th week at the Pilch next term, which is different to Lovesong in the sense that it’s a comedy – it’s by Tom Basden, so it’s absolutely hilarious. It’s all being done through Nitrous Cow, which is me, Luke and Alex, so hopefully we’ll be able to give it a bit of a quirky edge, like we’re trying to do with Lovesong. It may well be my last project. Obviously I’ll audition for the tour again next year and hopefully do that, but this may well be one of my last projects. I’m trying to do a bit more film, I’ve got a couple of films coming up in the holidays with some Oxford people, but that might be it for me! Well, it would make my tutor happy. It’s been fun while it lasted.

How did you go about founding your own production company?

It’s much easier than you think. People worry that there’s a lot of paper work and everything, but basically its you, a producer and a director, basically deciding that they want to run some theatre together and creating a Facebook page, and that’s basically it. You can go about slightly more complicated things by having a bank account and stuff like that, but realistically it’s very doable. You establish really strong working relationships with people, and it’s nice knowing that you’ve got people there to get stuff done.

Do you have any quirks before going on stage?

I brush my teeth. I also have a tongue twister which I always do to myself, generally, which I was taught when I was about 14, and I’ve pretty much been doing it to myself ever since. I don’t have any grand rituals, like spinning round three times in the wind facing north. In fact, it’s not even a tongue twister, it’s just a weird little phrase. I will keep it to myself. It will remain a secret.

Lovesong is playing at the Michael Pilch Studio from November 29th to December 2nd and is currently sold out, but more seats may be added.

Lucy Rose enraptures and comforts her audience in Oxford

Ollie Braddy
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Lucy Rose enraptures and comforts her audience in Oxford

Having had a quick flick through the upcoming schedule for SJE Arts, it’s clear that an artist like Lucy Rose is not a regular. The 19th century former evangelist church, turned university owned music and arts venue is the natural habitat for piano recitals and choir performances, however, it was transformed with the aid of some terrific stage and light design to create an intimate and tranquil space to match Lucy’s performance.

Rather predictably, the set began with the opening two tracks from her latest record ‘Something’s Changing’. That being said, there’s a reason so many artists go for this technique and the carefully constructed introduction was a delightful reminder of why there wasn’t an empty seat in the house.

Lucy Rose has a spectacular talent for making such an intimate voice fill a space. This may be due, in part, to the audio set up. It’s clear that a lot of time and effort has gone into ensuring that wherever you’re sat, it sounds like you’re in the front row. For someone like Lucy Rose, you can really notice this. Her vocals are so intricate and detailed, always perfectly in tune. They effortlessly skip across melodies and the transcending whispery vibrato on extended notes were a perfect soothing remedy for the stresses of Oxford life.

The strength of Lucy’s vocal performance was matched by her warm personality that regularly shone throughout the evening. Early on she invited people to sit on the ground just in front of the performance area, an offer eagerly accepted by the younger audience members. There were multiple humorous anecdotes sprinkled between tracks, including one ironically berating her warm up Charlie Cunningham for introducing a cold to the band which ended in an exclamation “JESUS”, which she swiftly apologised for — noting her religious setting — to the great amusement of her audience.

During the more upbeat tracks like ‘No Good At All’ and ‘Bike’ the engagement Lucy has with her audience is clear — she seeks people’s gaze, willing them to join in her delight for the music she’s playing and it works! Despite the seated arrangement of the venue, people were moving, letting go of inhibitions that might be bestowed upon entering such a formal, religious setting. Lucy even requested people sing along during the encore ‘Like an Arrow’, which was raucously responded to, testament to the welcoming environment that she had created throughout the preceding hour and a half.

I suppose the best aspect of the evening was witnessing someone truly loving what they’re doing and projecting that joy onto an audience. During an interlude, Lucy spoke about how after the release of her second album she became disenfranchised with music and came to question why she created/performed at all.

However, during an 8 week tour of South America, which was completely organised and facilitated by fans, she explains how she re-found her love for music. It no longer mattered to her how many streams she had on Spotify, or how many records she sold — the fact that her music was able to affect just one person in a significant and poignant way was enough. And it’s that attitude that makes her such a delight to see. She is living in the present, sharing an experience, a moment, with everyone in the room. At the end of the day, isn’t that exactly what a live performance is all about?

No soggy bottoms, as Channel Four puts the icing on the cake

Miranda Gleaves and Patrick Naylor
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No soggy bottoms, as Channel Four puts the icing on the cake

Echoes of “for God’s sake, Prue” reverberated through living rooms up and down the country as the nation (or 7.3 million of us, at least) sat down to watch the finale of the 2017 Great British Bake Off. For many, the accidental reveal of the winner on Twitter ten hours before the episode aired ruined its suspense, but the series itself was not undermined by this one slip: it was a triumph from start to finish.

Like so many of the bakes this year, Bake Off is the victory of style over substance, and should be celebrated as such. From Liam’s “Sunday Dinner Pie”, and Noel’s recipe book of shirts, to the weekly saga of Yan’s slowly fading scooter scar, and even the comforting obviousness of everything the contestants say – for instance the classic, “I just hope I don’t drop it!” – this series was a full-scale assault of heart-warming gaffes and middle-England charm, and no Prue Leith tweet can ruin that.

The move to Channel 4 hasn’t taken away any of Bake Off’s charm, though it has diminished its following with half of its viewers lost (the last BBC finale claimed an audience of 14 million). We can’t see why. The same narrative arcs have played out in this series, just as in all previous offerings: the rise and fall of heroes (Steven), the witty baker in the corner who cuts through the tears with comic relief (Yan), and the person you love to hate (Julia). Admittedly, however, Liam has captured the nation’s heart in a way that not even Selasi, Tamal, or Glenn managed.

The only noticeable downgrade is the adverts, although in the majority of episodes this has led to the death of the “History Section”, which can only be a good thing. Having seen Mel and Sue traipse through France in search of macaroons one too many times, it was a relief that Noel and Sandy were largely confined to The Tent.

When Bake Off made the move there was national mourning over the loss of Mel, Sue, and Mary, as it seemed as though we might never recover. However, Noel, Sandy, and Prue have risen to HollywoodHandshake level glory.

In the light of Prue Leith’s sharp tongue, Mary Berry’s unfailingly kind commentary, irrespective of the quality of the bake, now seems to have a sickly-sweet aftertaste. Prue Leith has spoken her mind throughout the series, providing a refreshingly cheerful foil to Paul’s steely-eyed criticism instead of simply patting the contestants’ bruised egos.

Noel and Sandy, too, have acquitted themselves admirably. We started the series with very different views on the pair (one of us a fan of both, and the other far from convinced) and ended the series’ final episode delighted that the pair had ‘proved’ themselves without ‘kneading’ too much time.

Applications for the next series are already open, but what will it entail? More of the same, or, given the successful face lift of this series, will the producers be bolder? Could we expect new judges each series: perhaps a guest judge appearance from Nigella or Nigel Slater? How about a wacky new location? Stonehenge perhaps, or floating on Loch Ness, or even on the cobbles outside our very own Radcliffe Camera.

We think not. We like the tent where it is, and long may Prue rule over Tuesday prime-time. Just as the clocks change, the crisping leaves turn reddy-brown, and fall with the conkers, Bake Off defines this time of the year, coming to a close as the nights draw in. This has been a series just like every other. Thank goodness.

England on the brink of success

TJ Fitzgerald
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England on the brink of success

“Youngsters these days have no regard for tradition. We don’t get to finals of world cups. How dare they.”

Peter Crouch’s tweet sums up English international football at the moment. England have strug- gled to find success for a long time now at international football at the senior level.

Gareth Southgate’s England may have qualified for the 2018 World Cup and have not been beaten in over 35 qualifying games for major tournaments. They have the odd world-class player such as Harry Kane leading the line, but, to be honest, nobody is going into this World Cup full of confidence.

However, at youth level, England cannot stop winning. So far in 2017 England have won the Under-17 World Cup, the Under-20 World Cup and the European Under-19 Championships. Maybe World Cups are just like buses: we wait fifty years and then two come at once. Rhian Brewster has grabbed a lot of the headlines throughout the U17 tournament, scoring hat-tricks in both the quarter-finals and the semi-finals, and leading the massive comeback from 2-0 down to winning 5-2 in the final.

The Liverpool striker’s eight goals throughout the tournament have shown the world why Jürgen Klopp is so excited about this young talent. However, he is just one of a much wider team that has had so much success.

The Under-20 team saw similar success this summer too, with Liverpool forward Dominic Solanke winning the Golden Boot at that age group’s World Cup. Many of these young players are trying to fight their way into their respective clubs’ starting teams. Dominic Calvert-Lewin is regularly starting for Everton, and Joe Gomez (England U21 Captain) and Trent Alexander-Arnold are shining this season for Liverpool.

This is providing England fans with a lot of hope for the future. After all, not only do England have a sensational amount of talent about to break through, but also the current senior line-up has a number of young stars, such as Marcus Rashford and Dele Alli, in the team. Jordan Pickford is a promising young keeper, and Kane will be in the prime of his career by 2022.

All England need is a top manager to help organise the national team in an effective manner and bring the success in international football at the senior level that we all hope for.

Mauricio Pochettino has played a big role in bringing a number of current England players through, and has been described as ‘England’s secret weapon’ by Gareth Southgate.

Indeed, Pochettino has recently revealed ambitions to manage England in the future – so maybe, England senior team may one day soon follow its youth divisions and bring the World Cup home.

The insincerity of the female nude

Priya Vempali
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The insincerity of the female nude

John Berger once wrote: “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.”

These are the words which ring in my ears as I stroll through the halls of an art gallery, confronted by a never-ending stream of breasts, lips, cheeks, and hair – these are faces without stories, mouths without voices, smiles without substance.

As a woman, you become accustomed to seeing your own image reflected wherever you look, in a glamourised, beautified format. However, something about seeing the female form anatomised, deconstructed and rebuilt according to the male gaze never fails to astound me. It’s a disconcerting experience, only ever seeing reflections of your gender from an outsider’s perspective.

That’s not to say that men cannot express the subtleties of the female form within their work, but rather that women shouldn’t be confined to the other side of the canvas. When it comes to the artist-subject dynamic, I think that women probably have a better understanding of their own bodies than the men who attempt to possess them.

Historically, the gender imbalance within the art world has seen women adopting the role of the silent muse, the creative spark which spurs the male genius into producing yet another masterpiece – so long as he doesn’t cast her off in favour of a younger, prettier model. This is the view which continues to pervade the creative fields, despite second and third-wave feminist attempts to reclaim the female body as our own.

Indeed, Germaine Greer has described the muse, in her purest aspect, as being “the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work.” Disregarding the overtly sexualised submission within this statement, Greer’s perception of the female role here is rather degrading, as the woman is conceptualised as an aspect of the male genius rather than an individual in her own right. The compensation here, apparently, is that there is a kind of role reversal, whereby the female assumes the dominant position: “her role is to penetrate the mind rather than to have her body penetrated.”

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced by this flimsy recompense. As an English student, I am constantly presented with the patriarchal tradition of glorifying the female body, most blatantly for instance in Petrarchan poetry. Just like the female muse in artwork, the Petrarchan vision espouses a notion of femininity, which is supposedly empowered through identification with the erotic. Indeed, the form exalts the apparent sexual authority of the writer’s ‘cruel mistress’, whilst she, ironically, remains little more than the silent object of male fantasies.

The idea that as a woman, the muse should take pride in her sexual dominance over the male creative is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Should we, as a gender, not aspire to be more than glorified mannequins ready to be stripped and painted, or is the glass ceiling too firmly established to be broken within the world of fine art?

One individual whose work provides a direct response to female objectification is the artist Tracey Emin, whose installation ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’ saw her painting naked in a Stockholm art gallery for three weeks in 1996.

Viewers could come and see her working through fish-eye lenses in the gallery walls, and yet as the subject and object of her own piece, Emin remained in complete control. She subverted the traditional role of the female nude by bringing her naked body into a position of authority rather than submission, the domain of the creator rather than the muse.

In this way, she provided women with an example of what true female empowerment within the arts might look like: a world in which female nudity is not necessarily sexualised, but an extension of our own authentic identities.

Instead of attempting to reclaim the ‘nude’ from centuries of male artists, let us as women boldly reclaim that which is already ours – our own naked bodies.

Memorable sax solos and individual flair at the Varsity jazz-off

Thomas Athey and Kenji Newton
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Memorable sax solos and individual flair at the Varsity jazz-off

In the World of Oxford jazz, events don’t come much bigger than the annual co-hosted gig with Cambridge. A musical equivalent of a Varsity match, the show involves back-to-back performances from the Oxford University Jazz Orchestra (OUJO) and their Cambridge equivalent, with each side showing the very best they have to offer. Having been held regularly since 2004, this year was billed as one of the biggest yet.

Held in the Magdalen College Auditorium, it took place last Friday in the appropriately chosen venue. Naturally the acoustics were excellent, both for the audience and the performers themselves as you could tell from the tightness of the performance that for the most part the orchestras could hear each other well. Admittedly, there was a small amount of home advantage. Cambridge seemed to suffer more from technical difficulties (sabotage?), and to some extent Oxford was able to be more adventurous given they knew the surroundings better. To be fair though, the Tabs handled the constraints well, and their male singer Harry Castle deserves to be commended for his ability to recover from originally not having a working microphone.

Cambridge were first to take to the stage this year, and worked through a mixture of covers and original arrangements. I particular liked the performance of ‘Crazy’, originally by Gnarls Barkley, which for me was when Cambridge seemed most relaxed and able to enjoy their performance. Robin Jacob-Owens also deserves a special mention for his alto sax solos, which received appraising applause from the audience as indeed did all the solos throughout the show. More generally however, it was a solid and well-executed performance from the Cambridge orchestra that grew in confidence as the show  progressed.

Oxford’s set too consisted of many impressive individual performances and solos, indeed too many to separately name. However, Matt Ward’s many trumpet solos were the most memorable, especially the one in Oxford’s second number ‘Basically Blues.’ Drummer Matt Venvell seemed to have been given greater freedom for moments of individual flair as well as keeping rhythm, ensuring a strong performance all round. Encompassing a variety of covers and original arrangements, the orchestra showed an impressive unity of sound with clear focus.

With at least seventeen musicians on stage at any one time, and sometimes more when singers were present, this was an impressive achievement. It was perhaps best expressed in arrangements such as ‘Pennies from Heaven’, where Oxford had ample opportunity to show everything they had to offer. If this show was about demonstrating the very best they can do, then OUJO delivered. With the show having been brought to a climax with Oxford’s final number, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, as way of an encore there was a slightly rouge arrangement of ‘Wonderwall’. I wish I could say that OUJO managed to breath life back into this tired classic, but to be honest, it’s just too far gone. However, at least this gave the performers a chance to relax on this final number, with all musicians clearly enjoying themselves.

The jury’s out on whether either orchestra can be said to have ‘won’, but it was a highly successful show and on this evidence there deserve to be many more such line-ups in the future.

Mountains review – ‘uncomfortable and immersive’

Michael OConnor
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Mountains review – ‘uncomfortable and immersive’

Mountains isn’t really a play. It’s a sensory experience. Other than three poetic monologues, there are no words. Instead, the actors convey the drama of pregnancy and birth through movement and sound. As such, the performance is unlike most other student theatre in Oxford.

The journey to the performance venue – St Catherine’s boathouse – is an adventure in itself. Walking along the Thames path, Oxford gradually disappears into the night and the open country begins. The boathouse is only ten minutes out from St Aldate’s. But it feels as though it’s off the map in the middle of nowhere. Outside the boathouse, audience members are handed masks to wear. Then the audience is led up to the room where the action takes place. At first glance, it looks like the setting for a cultish ceremony – it is dimly-lit and draped with red fabric. The beginning of the play hardly dispels this impression.

The first five minutes of the performance are immensely disorienting. The actors pound the floor with their hands, slap their chests, tear at their clothes and contort their limbs. The space is small and the actors are less than a metre away from the audience. Combined with the subject matter, this means that the whole experience is oddly voyeuristic. If not for the masks, I would have felt distinctly awkward. But that is part of the performance’s power – it is intimate, uncomfortable and immersive.

Mountains must be physically exhausting for the cast. They throw themselves around the stage from start to finish. I, too, found the performance tiring as the audience must stand up for the whole hour. From time to time, I also found it mentally draining. There are periods when the actors’ movements repeat endlessly and William Lucas’s soundtrack seems stuck in a loop. Mountains feels as though it could do with a little more editing, a little sanding down at the edges. Nonetheless, it still retains a raw energy that is enough to overcome most of its faults.

The three monologues, written by Kat Dixon-Ward, are poetic and arrestingly direct. Occasionally, they lapse into cliché or ring false. But for the most part they are just the right mixture of smooth musicality and sharpness. For me, the Second Woman’s meditation on her unborn child particularly stood out. It was delivered with warmth and feeling by Teddy Brigs and proved to be one of the few hopeful moments in an otherwise dark performance.

Towards the end of the play, the audience is led out of the close confines of the boathouse into the night. At this point, three or four people are led off in separate direction to hear stories of pregnancy or motherhood while the bulk of the audience are treated to an improvised speech by one of the cast. In the background, a film installation by Bea Grant plays.

This shift of scene is, I imagine, intended to mimic the emergence of a young baby into the world – and it succeeds. The transition from a small, dark, warm room to the open air is quite unexpected and helps to shift the play out of the theatre and into the outside world. The director, Bea Udale-Smith deserves a great deal of credit for this coup de théâtre.

Mountain is an exciting performance. It could be shorter, tighter, more economical with its movements and more varied in its sounds. But it is nothing if not adventurous. I would recommend it to anyone who fancies something a little bit off the beaten track.

Rock’s best storyteller

Barney Pite
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Rock’s best storyteller

Outside the world of indie rock, John Darnielle is almost unheard of, and even within it he’s not exactly a household name. As the lead singer of the Mountain Goats, a band with a small but extremely devoted cult-following, he’s had to get used to artistic anonymity. If you get it, his music is sensitive and all encompassing, emotionally charged and always well considered. If you don’t, it’s rasping and weird.

Darinelle published his second novel this year. Following his 2014 debut, Wolf in a White Van, the new Universal Harvester is a story set in built out of creepy homes and Iowa cornfields. Darnielle’s songs tend to look back to past times that have disappeared: his childhood in Southern California with an abusive stepfather, or his experiences living as a teenage meth-addict in Portland, Oregon. Universal Harvester, which evokes the pre-digital age of burner phones, fi lm rental and the dial-up internet, is no exception.

It is a mysterious and accomplished work of fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature, described it as ‘moving’ and ‘beautifully etched’, whilst the TSL judged its tone to be ‘bewitchingly and eerily still’. Darnielle’s greatest skill as a songwriter is his ability to write a defined sense of atmosphere, and this ability is extended into his novel; Universal Harvester evokes a world in which nothing changes, where the days ‘roll on like hills too low to give names to.’

The world of indie rock has proved to be fertile ground for novelists. Nick Cave has published prolifically and Colin Meloy of the Decemberists writes fantasy novels for younger readers. Darnielle’s new novel confirms the status that Rolling Stone granted him, that of ‘Rock’s best storyteller’, and supports what fans of the Mountain Goats believed: he deserves more attention than he gets.

House of Fear and the reinvention of fairytale

Libby Cherry
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House of Fear and the reinvention of fairytale

In his Preface to Carrington’s House of Fear, Max Ernst defined the ideal reader of Leonora Carrington, as one that would less read than imbibe her prose. Written in 1974, The Hearing Trumpet is the focal point of Carrington’s new period of artistic creation, and in part acts as a meditation on her Surrealist art of the 1930s. Like any fairytale, reading Carrington’s most extended piece of prose is coloured not only by the story itself, but by its accompanying artwork. Her painting, The Giantess adorns the cover of my edition and captures the haphazard, mythic strands of the novella in a single tableau, from the egg to the wolf to the black geese.

The fairytale is a collision site of temporality, combining the childish and the macabre, and The Hearing Trumpet is no different. “People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats,” attests Carmella to the nonagenarian protagonist, Marion. Childhood and old age become fused and separated from the ‘adult’ world. Indeed, it’s only through Camella’s gift of the eponymous trumpet that Marion can pierce this divide and is able to discover her children’s plot to send her to retirement home. Yet the home itself has more of the atmosphere of a lively all-girls boarding school, watched over by the ineffectual Dr Gambit. Guided by Marion through the story, we find the wild ramblings of an infant equivalent to demented mental wanderings, as the “wild anemones” of fairytale morph into the “wild enemas” of aging’s reality.

Carrington’s work represents an outgrowing of fairytale, grotesquely lurid rather than romantically tinted. Within the institution, the women live in parodies of fairytale houses such as “dwellings shaped like toadstalls”, shaped being the word of significance here. or the institution is a place of falsities, the saccharine pastel shades of their houses are cloying and the furniture an illusion, painted on the walls. It’s “like banging one’s nose against a glass door” grumbles Marion in her deadpan tone. Despite the ridiculousness, there is a sinister element to the home, perhaps reminiscent of Carrington’s own experience within a Spanish mental asylum in 1940. Dr Gambit’s continual mantra to “Remember Ourselves” in order to “create objective observation of Personality”, denies imagination and forces the women into an identity socially prescribed to them.

The image of the glass door and, by extension, the glass ceiling becomes all the more important because the story progresses, as the retirement home becomes a female utopia that “creeps with ovaries” and where women dance under the moon and pray to Venus. Out of a mishmash of myths, Carrington creates a pseudofeminist creed offering the women a literal and ideological escape from their damsel-like languishing within the prisons of their plastic fairytale homes. Old age, with its associated wisdom, ugliness and menopause-associated androgyny, becomes a route out of feminine passive beauty. Marion’s “short grey beard” re-claims and re-purposes female masculinity as not “repulsive” but “gallant”, witchlike features not only a symptom of societal ostracism but power.

In this way, Carrington’s own voice and philosophy is defiantly audible. I shall never get on with my narrative if I can’t control these memories”, Marion/Carrington declares, and indeed amongst the mythic references with the novella itself are threads from Carrington’s own extraordinary life, rupturing the fictional world she has created. We imagine Marion’s companions were taken from real life, the European crones sequestered in an unspecified Spanish-speaking country mirroring Carrington’s own French intellectual community in Mexico. Carrington uses Marion as a platform for her own sentiments, from bewailing the domestication of Surrealist art that hangs in “almost every village rectory and girl’s school” to recounting her own life experiences.

The Hearing Trumpet may be a piece of flagrant and unabashed escapism, in its own words, “not an intellectual book, just fairytales”. Yet like any fairytale behind the psychedelic effects, there are moments of cogent truth, such as “why was Eve blamed for everything?” and “for real understanding one can only depend on dogs”. Carrington’s novel offers the literary equivalent of Andre Breton’s surrealist “dizzy descent into ourselves”, where the strangeness of the fictional world reveals the true oddities and malformities in what we consider reality.

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