The Bluestocking, vol 113: "Do you feel patronised, as a woman?"
Happy Friday!
Another theatre recommendation this week - last Friday night I went to see Appropriate at the Donmar, a revival of a play first staged in the US in 2014. It's in the vein of All My Sons or The Wild Duck - family secrets suddenly burst into the light. That's a great drama format, because a) what family does not have decades-old beef? b) the drip-drip-BOOM format is dramaturgical gold. You don't have to cycle through small actions that the audience can see to build the tension, but instead you can refer to absolute whoppers that everyone has been brooding about for decades. The characters don't have to get from nought to 60 in two hours, they can start at an easy 30.
Appropriate is set on a plantation - bought as a semi-retirement concern by the family patriarch, recently deceased. Of his three children, one, Toni, stayed nearby and resents that fact intensely; another, Bo, went off and became a success, but fears losing his prestigious job; and the last one, Frank, disappeared off the grid for several years after getting a local underage girl pregnant. He's now resurfaced as a hippie called Franz with a girlfriend called River. They're probably vegan.
The engine of the plot is the discovery of a book full of photographs of lynchings, presumably owned and treasured by the family patriarch. Yes, there is a bit where people say the name of the play in the play (classic theatre trope #21) when Bo's wife insists that it's not "appropriate" for her daughter to see the pictures. But apart from that, the audience is left to go away and mull the idea of appropriateness as it relates to the story.
Here's my take. The most shocking moment is one which doesn't happen. Bo is disappointed to learn that debts will eat up the plantation's value, already eroded by the presence of a slave cemetery. When he discovers that the book of photographs might be worth serious money, he is delighted. A broker is called. Valuations are given. Perhaps everything is going to be OK!
You suspect that Franz and River, representing white liberalism (they live in Portland, ffs) might dissent from the idea of selling the photographs, but that argument is never had. Toni, who has angrily defended their father from accusations of racism - he was "too sociable" to be in the KKK. she claims - raises no quibble about Bo's actions. The younger characters, Toni's son and Bo's daughter, don't either. It adds up to a family who are reluctantly engaging with the idea of racism in the past - but have no intention of confronting it in the present. I mean - who are these "collectors" of lynching photographs? What kind of person pays thousands of dollars for a memento of joyful sadism? Can't the family see the parallels between those dead slaves in the graveyard, without even a headstone to commemorate them, and their present-day profiteering off black misery? (No.)
The unspoken challenge hangs in the air. It was such a ferocious absence that I forgave the janky ending of this production, which veered into ooky-spooky haunted house. After all, how do you provide resolution to a story that hasn't ended? America is still a brutally divided country, in terms of economic and opportunity: the wrongs do not date only from the antebellum era, but can be accounted by the black farmers who lost their land in the twentieth century, and the black tenants denied housing by Donald Trump's father.
Anyway, all this has made me add Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to my Approved Theatre list (ie, I will give anything he does a whirl). Appropriate is on until 5 October at the Donmar.
Helen
PS. I'm on the News Quiz tonight. Intriguing (to me) nugget from the recording yesterday. The Radio 4 audience is in many ways a classic Corbyn Labour one: lots of retired public sector workers. Maybe two years ago they would have bristled at any rudeness about Corbyn (don't you know he's trying to end austerity and save the NHS?). Last night, Andy Hamilton made an offhand remark about how all this prorogation business wouldn't be happening if Labour had "well, anyone else" as a leader. They laughed.
Yes, yes, this is the smallest, most homogenous focus group in the world, but I still found it interesting. Now I need to ask a load of 21-year-olds if they are still on the Corbyn train, or whether Brexit - which brought with it the poisonous suggestion that he was triangulating, and therefore a politician like any other - has taken the shine off.
Dorothy Byrne: I am the Methusaleh of TV
"That first day at Granada, a female boss had also told me that a director would take me out to teach me the basics of filming and he would sexually assault me, but I wasn’t to take it personally because he sexually assaulted all women he worked with.
Sure enough he did assault me – one of the few examples in my career of the promise of a TV boss coming true. His assault was a criminal offence but who could I complain to? I learned early on that as a woman I was on my own."
Dorothy Byrne's MacTaggart lecture is worth reading in full, not least because it prompted Downing Street to get very grumpy that she called Boris Johnson - a man sacked twice for lying - a liar. No prisoners taken, no fucks given.
"I'm Radioactive"
Until the spring of 2018, Jonathan Kaiman was the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Today he is living at the home of his parents in Phoenix under conditions he describes as a form of psychological house arrest. There are no visitors, and his few remaining friends rarely call. He feels unable to make new ones, because he fears the reaction of anyone who Googles him. He's 32, unemployed, and perhaps unemployable—"I'm radioactive," as he puts it. And he's still trying to find the right combination of psychotropic medication to quell the recurrent thought that ending his life may be the best way out.
This is a very hmmmm MeToo case, in the vein of Aziz Ansari. One of the accusers has since disputed the article's position in a lengthy, and compelling, Twitter thread. (She points out that she complied with a very thorough investigation process by the LA Times.) It's all very messy. My over-riding feeling is that the systems we have to deal with cases like this are wholly inadequate, just as with people accused of racism. There's no track for proportionate consequences, education and rehabilitation.
The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism
To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplification of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.
Russian state television appears to have offered minorities hard cash to brawl with each other on camera, so that global far right websites can portray migrant-friendly Sweden as a crime-ridden hellhole.
Quick links:
"Do you feel patronised, as a woman?" This supercut of Richard Madeley on GMB is pure joy,
I'm not too proud to say I've watched this about a dozen times.
Stephen Colbert, one of my favourite satirists, lost his dad and two brothers in a place crash when he was a kid. He talked about that experience with Anderson Cooper, whose mother recently died.
"We've been relying on the 'crime of passion, spontaneous red-mist' explanation [of killing] forever - and it's just not true," Dr Monckton Smith told the BBC. "If you start looking at all these cases, there's planning, determination, there's always coercive control." I've written about this in the book - the idea that men "snap" is a common media narrative, but it doesn't reflect the experiences of victims and their families.
Big news! I've found the least sympathetic man in the world.
Guest gif:
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