The Bluestocking, vol 120: Stutters and stories
Happy Friday!
This week, I went to see Annie Baker's new play, The Antipodes, at the National Theatre. It's about to finish its run, so tough luck, because it is unsettling and brilliant and weird and a bit too long and impossible to categorise and distinctive and unlike anything else other writers are doing.
Baker's first big play in Britain was The Flick, which I didn't much like, because I've worked in very dull minimum wage jobs where there's nothing to do but sit around and waste time, and I didn't need to see that experience recreated on stage for three hours. (It didn't help that it is set in Worcester - though Massachusetts, not the one in the Midlands, where I grew up.) But hey, what do I know? It won the Pulitzer.
Last year, the National Theatre brought over John, another slow-crawl about a couple visiting a guest house on a tour of civil war sites. It had this faint underlying eerieness - like at any moment the couple might discover that the guesthouse owner was a ghost - helped by Chloe Lamford's set, which had dozens of those vacant-eyed porcelain dolls you see advertised at the back of Sunday supplements staring down from the walls.
The Antipodes maxes that out. It's set in a conference room, under a halo light, with a hideous orange carpet which evokes The Shining and a pyramid of Perrier cases, like it's a nuclear bunker. It's a great example of how a space can create meaning. First, status. The set-up is a writers' room for an unnamed and unexplained television show, directed by a showrunner called Sandy, who answers to mysterious men who are never seen (though one is heard over the speaker system, as all the writers wear VR headsets). Sandy sits at the head of the table; the junior writers spread down it. Dave (Arthur Darvill) takes off his shoes and puts them on the table. Danny M1 (Matt Bardock) sprawls over two chairs, Keeler-style. They are veterans of a previous Sandy project, and it shows.
Second, physical proximity as psychological pressure. The writers are trapped, phone-less, brainstorming about monsters and telling stories from their private lives (worst experience, loss of virginity, biggest regrets). Sandy drifts in and out, and his secretary Eleanor can come and go as she wants, dressed in a different outfit each time. When Danny M2 is summoned to Sandy's office, after telling a bizarre story about his love of chickens, we already know we won't see him again. No One Comes Back From Sandy's Office.
What was the plot? Who knows. How stories create the fabric of reality. How TV development is excruciating. How any group of people left together will invisibly sort themselves into their own hierarchy. Ultimately, though, it felt like a version of Huis Clos, Jean-Paul Sartre's play which suggested that "hell is other people". That conference room feels like purgatory. Its odd relationship to the outside world is confirmed at the end, when the writers try to leave, and discover that the whiteboard which was easily brought in by Sandy's notetaker doesn't fit back out through the doorway and corridor. (That scene also made me want to shout PIVOT! like Ross in Friends.)
Anyway, you've pretty much missed this one, but the National seems to be on a streak over bringing over everything Annie Baker does, so catch you at the next one.
Helen
What Jeffrey Epstein Offered Prince Andrew
From the start, it was apparent that the queen’s second son dwells not on Earth, but on Planet Aristocracy. It is a land governed by rules and codes that are unfathomable to the rest of us. When the BBC’s Emily Maitlis asked whether he had invited Epstein to a party, Andrew quickly corrected her: “It was a shooting weekend … a straightforward shooting weekend.” The distinction—between an evening event and staying with friends to fire guns in muddy fields—is meaningless to anyone who grew up outside the English upper classes. Throughout, he seemed to adhere to an honor code where ghosting a friend is unconscionably discourteous, but exploiting underage girls is merely a “manner unbecoming.” It is essentially a two-tier view of the world, where people are divided into equals and human chaff.
As soon as Prince Andrew said the words "straightforward shooting weekend", I knew I had to write about his interview with Emily Maitlis.
The End Of Babies
Danes don't face the horrors of American student debt, our debilitating medical bills or our lack of paid family leave. College is free. Income inequality is low. In short, many of the factors that cause young Americans to delay having families simply aren’t present.
Even so, many Danes find themselves contending with the spiritual maladies that accompany late capitalism even in wealthy, egalitarian countries. With their basic needs met and an abundance of opportunities at their fingertips, Danes instead must grapple with the promise and pressure of seemingly limitless freedom, which can combine to make children an afterthought, or an unwelcome intrusion on a life that offers rewards and satisfactions of a different kind — an engaging career, esoteric hobbies, exotic holidays.
“Parents say that ‘children are the most important thing in my life,’” said Dr. Ziebe, a father of two. By contrast, those who haven’t tried it — who cannot imagine the shifts in priorities it produces, nor fathom its rewards — see parenting as an unwelcome responsibility. “Young people say, ‘Having children is the end of my life.’”
Really interesting piece, and I thought this quote was apt: "In his view, people have children either because they truly want them, because they fear the consequences of not having them, or because it’s the “normal” thing. None of those reasons apply to him."
Biden says he hasn’t felt himself caught in a traditional stutter in several decades. “I mean, I can’t remember a time where I’ve ever worried before a crowd of 80,000 people or 800 people or 80 people—I haven’t had that feeling of dread since, I guess, speech class in college,” he says, referring to an undergraduate public-speaking course at the University of Delaware.
This is when I ask him what happened that night in Detroit.
After saying he doesn’t remember, Biden opines: “I’m everybody’s target; they have to take me down. And so, what I found is—not anymore—I’ve found that it’s difficult to deal with some of the criticism, based on the nature of the person directing the criticism. It’s awful hard to be, to respond the same way in a national debate—especially when you’re, you know, the guy who is characterized as the white-guy-of-privilege kind of thing—to turn and say to someone who says, ‘I’m not saying you’re a racist, but …’ and know you’re being set up. So I have to admit to you, I found my mind going, What the hell? How do I respond to that? Because I know she’s being completely unfair.”
My colleague John has written a piece about Joe Biden's stutter (which he hates to acknowledge) and his own. It's got so much in it: masculinity, shame, not wanting to seem like a victim or show weakness.
The Intersectional Left's End Game
Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.
Andrew Sullivan contests Ibram Kendi's thesis on anti-racism. As a bonus, in the second item he writes about the progressive attempt to rewrite homosexuality as homogenderism - saying that it's about being attracted to a gender identity, rather than a particular type of body. That leads us to this truly loopy Slate advice column answer to someone asking if they can inquire about the genitals of a person they are dating before they have sex with them. (Answer: no. After all, "the writer says that he doesn’t want to play with a penis. But he doesn’t have to, even if one is present.")
It all just reminds me of Terry Pratchett's dwarves, who all present as male, and then have to have a delicate conversation just before marriage about what's under their iron kilts. But at least they were allowed to ask. This new phenomenon - suggesting it's bigoted to exclude people from being your sexual partner because of what genitals they have - intrigues me. Political lesbianism failed in the 1970s because lots of women just weren't prepared to forsake the D. They were called "collaborators" by some radical feminists. I doubt this new attempt to rewrite people's sexual preferences by fiat will be any more successful.
Quick Links
1. Actually good interactive about "Billionaire's Row" in Hampstead, which is full of London's most expensive property, some of which are burned out husks. One owner "was called 'notoriously corrupt, even for Azerbaijan'."
2. The character Lorraine is playing on television just took a heel turn.
Guest gif:
See you soon!