The Bluestocking, vol 158
"There Isn't One True Version. There Isn't."
Happy Friday!
In a break from our regularly scheduled programming, this week’s newsletter begins with an extract from my newly published introduction to Robert Icke’s Works One, for which I executed my long-held dream of writing something in the style of Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts, a profile written entirely using introductory paragraphs. I repeated the trick, except I used thirty-three false starts, and mine is about adaptation.
Possibly one for hardcore theatre nerds only, but it’s not going online anywhere, so at least you should feel like you’re getting a DVD extra.
Incidentally, I’ve ended up talking a lot recently about what non-fiction longform writers can learn from fiction (see the Nine Dots podcast at the end of this newsletter). Is there a good essay on this already out there? Or should I write one?
Helen
16.
If there is anything I have learned from the writer and director Robert Icke, it’s that the medium is the message. A play about identity should play with identity. A play about the truth should question whether what we are seeing is the truth. A play about justice should ask us to judge.
Form and content are two sides of the same coin, just like the two queens in his adaptation of Schiller’s Mary Stuart. The play begins with the company walking on stage, and Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams dressed identically, in black trousers and white shirts. A courtier spins a coin, with its slow revolutions captured on an overhead camera. (In the West End, the coin-toss was projected not just into the theatre, but the foyer outside. Icke had wanted anyone walking past to be able to see the outcome, in a small, democratising gesture.) Whoever calls the coin toss right is Elizabeth I, all-powerful Gloriana: the company turns and bows to her. The loser becomes Mary, Queen of Scots, destined for capture, imprisonment and death.
That opening highlighted the arbitrary nature of fate, and the kinship between two women in a man’s world. It also had a purely theatrical element, turning the play into a demonstration of virtuosity. Both Lia Williams and Juliet Stevenson had to learn two lead roles in a ferociously verbal drama. (They had more lines than Hamlet.) The rest of the company, meanwhile, rehearsed each scene twice, and never knew which reactions would be needed. The high-wire uncertainty removed the deadening hand of perfection from the performance — the sense that you’re getting a theatrical McDonalds, made to a fixed recipe designed for scale. Here, instead, was a complicated meal being cooked in front of you.
Icke also foregrounded the act of theatre in The Wild Duck, which started with an empty stage. Gregory (Gregers in the Ibsen) walked on, wearing rehearsal clothes, and told the audience to switch off their phones. Icke’s version is full of these addresses, delivered through a microphone, constantly undercutting what we see on stage: Ibsen himself had an illegitimate child, we are told, but unlike Charles Woods, he did the absolute minimum he could to support him. Once the boy was old enough — Hedwig’s age — the playwright cut her off. Ibsen’s text can be read as an excuse, or a confession, or a cover-up.
The Wild Duck is a play obsessed with truth. Is James (Hjalmar) better off not knowing about Hedwig’s parentage? Are all of us happier, as Relling suggests, with a ‘life-lie’ to make our existence bearable? And so Icke put storytelling itself on trial. The handheld microphones and direct address forced the audience to confront the fact that theatre bends the truth, adapting messy reality to something neater, cleaner.
That suspicion of storytelling is a motif of Icke’s work. In the words of Orestes: ‘There isn’t one true version. There isn’t. There isn’t one story—a line of truth that stretches start to end. That doesn’t happen any more, maybe it never happened, but even as I say this now, as I say this now, in each of your minds you create your own versions, different lenses pointing at the same thing at the same time and seeing that thing differently...’
17.
In the loo queue at the Almeida on press night of Robert Icke’s play The Doctor, I heard a famous actor say: ‘It’s a lot, isn’t it?’
Well, why wouldn’t it be? Who writes a play hoping it will only be a little?
18.
‘I find period dress as an aesthetic choice to be like a political choice – lazy and safe,’ the director Robert Icke told me the first time we met. He believed that corsets and codpieces encouraged a nostalgic vision of the past: ‘You know, it was safer then and there were no brown people to fuck things up’. His Agamemnon dressed like a modern politician, as did his Claudius, with the austere figure of Angus Wright playing both in dark suits and white shirts.
His frequent collaborator Hildegard Bechtler favours an aggressively neutral palette – grey, navy, khaki, beige – and the company’s clothes are often almost interchangeable.
That minimalism has the unexpected effect of creating more capacity for meaning, not less. The occasional deviations, the small details, stand out. The Doctor begins with the company putting on their identities: stethoscopes, clipboards, lanyards.
In Oresteia, Agamemnon, Klytemnestra and Orestes – three killers – wear flashes of red against the monochrome palette.
The couple’s young daughter Iphigenia, who is sacrificed to win the war, wears a yellow dress. That colour becomes her signifier, as she wanders ghost-like through later scenes. The tortured, prophetic Cassandra, whom the stage directions tell us should be ‘reminiscent somehow of Iphigenia’, wears yellow too. The echo highlights the full horror of Agamemnon’s decision to bring his sex-slave home from the war, and sit her at the family dinner table. He is haunted by girls in yellow dresses.
Bechtler also clothed the Tudor court of Mary Stuart in business-casual. The queens looked alike throughout, until their fates (and costumes) diverged in the final act. Mary was stripped to a plain white shift, surrounded by her waiting women, renouncing the world, at peace: her death was also a kind of liberation. Elizabeth’s burden got heavier. She stood still while attendants loaded on a farthingale, corset and white face paint — a rig which snuffs out any chance of spontaneity or intimacy.
The powerful, flirtatious queen was revealed as a fundamentally lonely figure, an icon from whom everyone else had to keep their distance. Elizabeth the Queen was a more powerful image because it was withheld from us for so long.
19.
Robert Icke has never watched a whole episode of Friends. He has never seen Star Wars. He has never seen Back to The Future. It sometimes feels like he has read every play ever written. I suppose this is how he had the time.
If you liked that, there’s another 5,000 words where that came from, plus the play-texts themselves (which are not bad I SUPPOSE), available here.
Life As A Non-Violent Psychopath (Atlantic)
In 2005, James Fallon's life started to resemble the plot of a well-honed joke or big-screen thriller: A neuroscientist is working in his laboratory one day when he thinks he has stumbled upon a big mistake. He is researching Alzheimer's and using his healthy family members' brain scans as a control, while simultaneously reviewing the fMRIs of murderous psychopaths for a side project. It appears, though, that one of the killers' scans has been shuffled into the wrong batch.
The scans are anonymously labeled, so the researcher has a technician break the code to identify the individual in his family, and place his or her scan in its proper place. When he sees the results, however, Fallon immediately orders the technician to double check the code. But no mistake has been made: The brain scan that mirrors those of the psychopaths is his own.
I’ve been in the library this week reading research on intelligence and creativity, and the endlessly disputed interaction between nature and nurture, so this was a fun article to find: a man who ought to be a stone-cold killer, but isn’t, probably thanks to his family.
Quick Links
Carlos Lozada, last year’s Pulitzer-winning critic, has read 150 books about the Trump era. This is what he found.
This has ruined all musicals for me, but I don’t care.
“I decide to Google my rapist’s name, something I’ve never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He’s successful. He’s married—to a woman who recently spoke on a “Lean In” panel with Sheryl Sandberg.” (The Nation, 2013)
This is also why I don’t use my parfait French.
Matt Hancock murdering Don’t Stop Me Now at karaoke.
The Nine Dots Prize has just launched: a $100,000 contract for a short book on the question of being young in an ageing world. You enter by writing a 3,000 word essay on the subject. Here’s me on the 9D podcast giving advice on using small details in the service of a bigger narrative.
