Whenever Plough and the Stars is staged at the Abbey Theatre (which is often), audiences get the thrill of feeling that they are sitting pretty close to the imagined location of the events being staged.
Pull of the Stars at the Gate Theatre has outdone its rival in this critical respect, with The Gate nuzzling in the very shadow of the Rotunda Hospital.
By all means go and see it. It will exhaust you, but inspire you as well.
This is Emma Donoghue’s own adaptation of her own novel. Necessary sacrifices have been made. Gone is Julia Power’s house and her commute to work. Gone are the male doctors and orderlies. Gone (but frequently referred to) is the mute brother with PTSD. The opening scene is phantasmagoric – the ruined environs of O’ Connell street evoking an affinity with the trench warfare that we (but not the characters on stage) know is nearly over. This is, emphatically, a war zone – and a war zone that will not achieve any armistice as a result of a few general signing anything in a train carriage a few days after the events we are about to witness.
The performances are remarkable. Una Kavanagh offers a striking vision of someone in continual delirium. India Mullen gives evolving humanity to the snooty south Dublin character whose pain and whose loss confers a heightened sense of shared humanity. The one villain, “Sister Luke” is rendered very plausible by Ruth McCabe and I found myself resenting the audience’s momentary admiration for her admirable casuistry when replying that she didn’t know any “Mrs Lynn”
At the heart of the play are the lovers, Julia and Bridie. Julia and Julia’s choices govern the novel and the play and Sarah Morris has the task of communicating the breakneck speed of decisions that have to be made. As various characters note, life in this ward involves temporal distortions – a day that will never end nonetheless flashes by in an instant. Time is relative to action and the action never stops.
Ghaliah Conroy is magnificent as Bridie. There is something about the way Bridie towers over Julia that actually accentuates the former’s vulnerability. She is an overgrown child – an infantilised prisoner – someone for whom the freedoms of adulthood are an impossible dream. Yet she is also intoxicated by the experience of “mattering” or “making a difference”. The three days she spends on the ward might seem nightmarish to anyone else but to Bridie the intensity and urgency of action are everything. She is at the heart of something meaningful.
Morris and Conroy dance awkwardly towards their rooftop kiss – a moment of unreserved beauty in the cruellest of worlds.
Perhaps the one awkward performance (perhaps it isn’t even to do with the actual performance) is Maeve Fitzgerald as Dr Kathleen Lynn. She seems to be the least realistic character – despite the fact that she is the only real character – the only historically authentic character we see. Of course, Aristotle theorised this very paradox, the paradox that composite characters and composite actions are more plausible on stage than historical characters and historical actions. The actual is not always probable. At times, in the context of this dramatised situation, Dr Lynn feels like a character who so desperately ought to exist that it becomes difficult to believe that she really did exist.
I do not know if I have ever witnessed on stage depictions of such prolonged and overlapping physical pain. Bridie and Julia are spinning plates when it comes to rapid decisions as to whose agony it is most important to relieve. Sometimes the pangs are consecutive, sometimes they are simultaneous, and there are rare moments when nobody is especially in pain. Rare ones.
This is a short play, but nonetheless I do think that one of the reasons why it plays without an interval is that some members of the audience might prefer not to come back.
I was trying to find additional versions of Ibsen online to show my students and I found this 1970s TV Doll’s House, directed by the legendary postwar German film director Fassbinder. Although in German, it does not feature the notorious “German Ending” – the one insisted upon in 1880 by Hedwig Niemann-Raabe – an ending which is in some ways bleaker than the uncensored familiar ending.
The set resembles a confusing conservatory more than a Norwegian house. You are constantly looking through slightly dirty glass at what is going on. It’s a world of cruel exposure yet bewildering refraction. The set and furnishings are in a mixture of off-whites, cream and beige tones and the cast are similarly costumed. The effect of this disconcerting and unwholesome colour palate is to evoke a sense of sour milk. If you can paint a smell – then this design concept has painted the smell of dairy products that are some way past their expiration dates.
Anthony Hopkins remains my favourite Thorvald preserved on film, because he’s so sympathetic – and a sympathetic Thorvald makes for a more disturbing drama. When Claire Bloom leaves him at the end there is such puppy dog hurt and bewilderment on his face that can’t help but feel something for a man whose had to digest a brand new feminist-existentialist manifesto from scratch in less than ten minutes. A sympathetic Thorvald ensures that husbands in the audience feel implicated and therefore troubled. If Nora can leave this guy – then perhaps no marriage (no conventional patriarchal marriage) is safe.
Joachim Hansen on the other hand is very strict and stern as this Thorvald. There’s nothing very playful about him as he infantilises his wife as a squirrel and a skylark. This is a rigid insensitive soul incapable of comprehending the necessary reciprocities of anything resembling love.
Margit Carstensen on the other hand lives continuously in a trance but a trance that takes constant effort. Even when on the brink of despair you sense proximate hysterical laughter. Her (supposed) frivolity has a very deliberate feel to it as though she has a principled objection to acknowledging the realities of nineteenth-century socio-sexual politics. Carstensen was a recurrent muse for Fassbinder, starring in many of his most famous works, including The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Given Fassbinder’s own flexible and eclectic sexuality and his fascination with versatile intimacies it is no surprise to see many characters standing awkwardly too close to one another. Fassbinder interprets A Doll’s House as a world without personal space or privacy.
Some oddities. Changing the title to Nora Helmer is odd – especially when the very nature of this strange house is so foregrounded. In this production we see no tarantella dance. The effect of cutting the dance – a highlight of almost all productions, is to ensure that the repressive atmosphere is denied even momentary relief. The tarantella scene shows a Nora who is able to express herself through dance when verbal expression is denied her. Fassbinder refuses her this expressive release.
The scene with Krogstad and Kristine is also lost – a scene which allows a redemptive ending for two of the secondary characters. The merest hint of redemption for anyone is seemingly vetoed by Fassbinder.
No door is slammed. It’s true that this sickly filigree of a conservatory does not appear to be equipped with any slammable doors, but the absence of the single most expressive sound in Ibsen’s play is puzzling nonetheless.
Perhaps he removed the slam because of its fame. Because we’re anticipating it. Because we’re looking forward to it.
Conferences have changed. I remember, in the 90s, it was still possible to attend an eighteenth-century studies conferences that was dominated by three or four canonical authors. The big beasts of Pope, Swift, and Johnson studies would circle one another, seeking dominance. A very brave postgraduate might ask a question or they might not. Someone who misquoted a Warburton footnote to Pope’s Dunciad would expect to be corrected with a degree of triumphant relish.
There was an infinite amount to be known about a very limited body of work.
I have undoubtedly traduced and misrepresented the situation. The big beasts of 1990s scholarship were of course delightful people. But I’m not sure that I’ve traduced or misrepresented perceptions of this age we hath lost as originally experienced by junior scholars.
We’re not going back to this reality. And nor should we.
Nowadays papers can be on almost anything. It is impossible not to learn something about someone you’ve never heard of. Nobody enters a conference panel feeling that they already know absolutely everything about the content of the panel.
Panels are also far more polite. It’s not just the chairs – it’s the feeling in the room. There’s a broad consensus that everyone contributing has worked hard and deserves to be encouraged with thanks and applause.
And this is how it should be.
BUT…
Have we become too nice?
Have we become frightened of controversy at conferences?
In part, I think, we have become nicer because the humanities in particular and higher education in general is under such relentless political attack. We want to cherish and support one another. But there’s the paradox that speaking with one voice may play into the hands of those people who like to suggest that there is no diversity of opinion in universities. Unless we acknowledge that we disagree (and we really do disagree) then we risk being perceived as a temple of complacent self congratulation.
Now on no account should we be rolling out the red carpet for authoritarians and fear-mongers. Too many journos seem to take the view that being extra polite and hospitable to Nazis is the only legitimate test of free speech. Besides which, debate between people who are politically poles apart is impossible – because they have no shared values or even facts between them. Staged debates between opposites just result in folks shouting past one another. There is no dialectical element – no chance of synthesis.
But academics working in the humanities do disagree about all sorts of things. From a scholarly point of view, there are disagreements about interpretations of works of art and music and literature. There are historical disagreements about how to read certain forms of evidence and which forms of evidence deserve priority. From a political point of view, there are important debates about the value of positing “universal” norms of value. Are universal values necessary for any transformative progressive agenda – any agenda that suggests that tomorrow can be better than today or are all universals tainted by ethnocentrism?
We could make a point of ensuring that conferences stage a few debates between people known to disagree with one another – speakers who are old and tough and gnarly enough to survive some fairly direct interrogation. We could lay some ground rules showing that civility can be maintained and mutual respect can be acknowledged.
And I think the effect would be not only exciting and stimulating but also vindicate the essential “niceness” that has transformed all conferences, I think, for the better.
Well, we had the sad news yesterday. The best, the very best, podcast is concluded. It was the best podcast as far as I was concerned because it’s the only podcast I have ever followed, religiously.
I listened to them all.
Nearly all of them were brilliant. There were only two or three that perhaps didn’t quite work… out of 131. And they worked because they were about love and affection and because, above all, podcaster Chris Shaw inspired the very best from his “pot pourri delicious guests”. I’m sure they’re all nice people to begin with (in fact I know for a fact that some of them are), but there’s something about talking to Chris Shaw that brings the niceness bubbling up happily to the surface. As Paul McCartney sang recently – “it’s alright to be nice”.
This niceness has nothing to do with naivety. Indeed it is impossible to know as much about The Beatles as Chris Shaw and his guests while retaining too much naivety. In the long Beatles story (1957-1980) there were nasty times. However, in the long run, and over the long haul, the Beatles were all about Peace, Love and Understanding. John and Paul had some nasty years (less than three out of twenty-three) but love won. George managed to be the most spiritual Beatle and the most materialistic Beatle at one and the same time and built a strange career out of being fully aware of this. Ringo was Ringo – someone all about friendship – whose very percussive creed was based on empathy and locking in with the emotional needs of a lead singer.
There is, or should be, some quality control when it comes to being a Beatles fan. Are you a horrible racist? Do you think you like the Beatles? No. Go away and stop being a horrible racist and then you can listen afresh. Chris Shaw’s guests affirmed a version of common decency – decency with implications that spiral far from the stated context of listening to 1960s music. And cementing these decent guests was the audible, palpable decency of Chris Shaw himself – who devoted himself to the legacy of John, Paul, George, and Ringo because by so doing he was making the world a better place.
We don’t want things to end. We don’t want the Eggpod to end in the same way nobody wanted The Beatles to end. The Eggpod was a labour of love – but loving labour is still labour and labour demands eventual rest. Labour has to be finite.
And the Eggpods themselves have not been destroyed – anymore than Derek Taylor destroyed every Beatles record when confirming the demise of the band in 1970. We can continue to revisit these interviews and we can argue about them if we like.
Indeed, if I had time and generosity enough to start a new podcast, I might go for “Eggpodpod” – exploring the legacy of the Eggpods with a pot pourri of delicious guests.
But in the meantime, there is Chris Shaw to be thanked yet again. It’s a magnificent achievement he’s bequeathed us. He has shown us the right way to talk about The Beatles – the most generous and joyous way of talking about The Beatles.
It’s up to us now.
conradbrunstrom 