The Bluestocking, vol 117: Why Succession is a play
Happy Friday!
This week, I wrote about how hard it is to cover Brexit as a journalist, and raved about Alice Birch's play [BLANK] at the Donmar. In fact, it has been a theatre extravaganza, because I also did Saturday Review on Radio 4, for which we travelled to the Leeds Playhouse to watch Charley Miles's There Are No Beginnings, a tightly written four-hander about life in the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper. If you live Up North, I'd really recommend it.
The podcast extra version of Saturday Review also has me complaining about the Old Vic's gender neutral loos - particularly when Leeds Playhouse has gone for the obvious, universally acceptable solution in its redesign: men's, women's AND some gender neutral cubicles. On which note, I was at the Almeida on Monday and failed in my usual whippet-like dash for the loos at the interval, and so spent a full 15 minutes in a queue which snaked around the foyer. Strangely, no men came to join us in queuing solidarity, and instead just breezed straight past into the urinals.
I was at the Almeida for Vassa, Mike Bartlett's rewrite of a 1910 Gorky play about a family business crumbling (like CAPITALISM). It was a mess, for reasons which I still don't fully understand and am therefore intrigued by. How, as a director, do you get all your cast doing the same style of acting? I assumed it's one of those things that just happens - but clearly not, because here they were all over the place. Some naturalistic, some borderline panto.
Talking of theatre, I think Succession works so well because the writing and editing team has three top-level British playwrights in it - Lucy Prebble, Lucy Kirkwood and Alice Birch. "One reason Succession is so addictive is that each episode is like a season-finale setpiece which gathers all the main characters in one place," wrote Dorian Lynskey on Twitter. "Unlike most ensemble shows, you don't get plot strands of variable quality - it's always everyone at once so you never lose interest."
This is so true: one of the problems the Friends writers talked about was that people only wanted to see the Six together - they didn't want Ross to marry Emily, or Chandler to stay with Janice. It's notable that in the last episode, Mike is mysteriously off playing piano somewhere so that it's just the six of them saying goodbye to Monica's apartment.
Succession is brilliant at putting all its characters together: at Shiv's wedding, at the family therapy retreat, at the "Boar on the Floor" dinner, at the Aspen-ish summit, at board meetings, at Logan's party in Dundee, at the Last Supper on the yacht. It gives them long scenes where allegiances change and power turns on a sixpence. It's very theatrical: a big dinner party is a staple of theatre, where you can't quickly cut between scenes and you can't afford shedloads of staging. My favourite scene in [BLANK] is a dinner party, where middle-class feminism is given a thorough shoe-ing.
Restrictions of form often spur innovation, and the theatre rewards writers who can get six-plus characters together in a scene and bounce them off each other without it going flat. For all that Succession feels very now, with its dark humour, odd sexual relationships (I ship Roman and Gerri) and Trumpian/Murdochian family, it also relies on a type of writing that's quite old-fashioned. It's also hard. I've seen enough bad plays to tell you that juggling that many voices is a true test of skill. But when it works! Oh, how it works.
Helen
Dinner With Martin Amis
In an instant, I knew what awaited me. I foresaw how I would wind up at the edge of the table, probably stuck with a professor who would want to talk about shipbuilding in Jane Austen. Martin Amis would hold forth, several drinks down, enjoying the inspection and attention, and his braying accomplices would laugh like he was the most interesting person on the planet. And, even if I could hear anything over my social anxiety, what would I say to him? What did we have in common? I was not the kind of skinny blonde he might want to impress, I disliked his books, and now that I had actually seen him in the flesh, I was even less excited by the idea of eating some tepid, fancy food with a Famous Writer. What could I hope to gain from this? I had met him now, kind of, and ringing in my ears was that strange Awright. As I was contemplating, my cell phone rang loudly. It was my friend Barbara.
This piece has maybe the best first sentence ever written: "The one time I had an opportunity to meet Martin Amis, I ended up taking heroin instead."
Elizabeth Warren and Electability
Warren’s ascent is coming despite nagging worries among Democrats about electability and gender. In the survey, among the segment of respondents who selected a man for the horse race, but shifted to a female candidate when given a magic wand, 78% reported believing it is “harder” or “much harder” for a female candidate to defeat Trump. Predictably, among these Democrats, almost no respondents cited any kind of personal bias or sexism. Instead, 62% reported believing that others are much less or less likely to vote for a female candidate. “Above all, the belief that women are hard to elect is most closely tied to how voters perceive their fellow citizens,” Avalanche wrote in a memo about their findings. As in June, when Avalanche first conducted an electability survey, women were more likely than men to cite gender as a concern in the general election.
Me By Elton John
Me is its own original thing because Elton makes fun of no one more than himself. He is utterly, astonishingly, hilariously self-lacerating. A half-hearted suicide attempt at the height of his fame could have been played for drama; instead Elton merely asks: “Why was I behaving like such a twat?” He sums up the experience of writing songs for The Lion King, which ultimately won him an Oscar, as: “I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot.” And yes, Elton was also mystified by the hysteria over the version of “Candle in the Wind” he wrote for Diana’s funeral.
Someone please buy me this book for Christmas.
British Journalists Have Become Part of Boris Johnson's Fake News Machine
This has become a signature technique of the Johnson media machine. Officially no comment. Meanwhile it makes its views known to friendly political editors, who push them without much inspection or analysis out into the public domain.
The examples in this Peter Oborne piece about the Downing Street spin machine are chilling. We are talking about an operation that has anonymously smeared two former Cabinet ministers, Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond, with no consequences. It has pumped out lie after lie: some of which have fallen apart within hours. Why any journalist would continue to let themselves be used as an uncritical amplifier like this is beyond me. (Chaser: here's my piece on a similar theme.)
Quick Links
Sarah Ditum is excellent on Michelle Tea's essay collection and its weird habit of letting present-day Tea quietly edit her own past selves.
"I've been pregnant nine times. I have one child". This Atlantic piece about miscarriage brought home just how uncomfortable women are talking about their bodies, particularly in hyper-capitalist America, with its appalling social safety net.
"Kennedy’s case fit into a new idea Lecky was developing, called self-consistency theory. It posited that people are always striving to create a world in which their ideas of themselves make sense. We are motivated, sometimes above any sense of morality or personal gain, simply to hold our views of ourselves constant. This allows us to maintain a coherent sense of order, even if it means doing things the rest of the world would see as counterproductive." Fascinating piece on "identity fusion".
The vast and magnificent brain of Kathleen Stock on whether drag is comparable to blackface.
Guest gif: me when Jonathan goes, "Are you arguing on Twitter?"
See you next time! By the way, did I mention that I've written a book? Can't believe I forgot to mention that! No! Wait! COME BACK! Pre-order it here.