Henry V, Shakespeare and the metamorphosis of English.

A couple of weeks ago I finally took myself to the Globe. I stood as a groundling, rain jacket tucked under my arm, and waited for Jamie Parker to transport me the the fields of Agincourt.

There is something magical about that theatre. I can’t for the life of me recall why I’ve never been, other than the idiocy of trying to book tickets with other people and not being able to co-ordinate diaries. Perhaps it was serendipitous that my first play there should be Henry V, with its mention of the Wooden O, so obviously the Globe itself when you’re standing in it, and the chorus who exhorts the audience to use their imaginations and project castles, armies, and battlefields onto the limited wooden stage. It’s a play of obvious conspiracy between audience and actors, which of course all theatre is, but all the more exciting when your actors can see you, interact with you, and incite you to follow him into battle (and all he had to do was ask and we would have gone, all of us).

Before that damp Friday evening I’d never seen the play. Never seen the Branagh film, never seen either of the Henry IV’s, and only had a vague idea of Prince Hal as a swaggering sort of fella. Richard II I know inside and out (A level text, plus a transformative performance by Derek Jacobi in Newcastle) so at least I had that on my side. But should you go and see a Shakespeare play if you don’t know it? What if you can’t follow what is going on? Isn’t the language a bit dense?

The misconception that Shakespeare is incoherent comes about because we first come across him at our school desks, wearing scratchy uniforms and dreaming of the boy with the curly hair three school years ahead, who is never going to look at you once let alone twice. You are told that Will is the greatest playwright ever, that his powers of language and storytelling surpass all others. You fight your way through the text, dry as dust on the page, wade through the York notes, with the teacher determined to wring every last inch of meaning from every word.

You stumble, you fall, you fail to undersand.

And this is not your fault.

Because you have to see it.

You have to live through it, the words lifted and given breath by talented actors. It’s their job to interpret for you, to bring feeling, humour and humanity. This is what Shakespeare was all about – he was an actor as well as a writer – and I’m sure he never imagined that anyone would be sitting reading his plays in silence. They were always an interaction for him. And if you have good enough interpreters then those 400 years between the writer and you just melt away, because, honestly, things haven’t changed that much.

Henry V has weather jokes. It has a turn on the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman joke. It has a comedic and touching wooing scene. It has the biggest blunderbuss of all Shakespeare speeches. There are rude jokes (a smutty sense of humour has been part of our culture for centuries).  It has hopelessness on the eve of war, the spirit of the underdog, kingship, undertaken by a mere mortal.

English has changed, obviously. Our rhythms are different, we’ve dropped a pronoun (thou, equivalent to the French ‘tu’), added a few words, lost a few words, but it isn’t a million miles away. (If you want incoherence in your literature have a peep at Chaucer.) Feel what Shakespeare is telling us. Don’t worry about catching every last word, understanding exactly who is who. You don’t need to.

Pay your fiver and take part in the conspiracy.

(Henry V runs until the end of August, and you can still get tickets. And you should, if you can. It’s really very good.)

Finding Time: using a Day Planner

Danuta wrote a great post this week about finding time to write, which is something every writer I know struggles with. Who knows why it plagues us, but it does. We can waste time wondering, or we can try to fix it, which is one of my continual quests.

I am a convert to the list, and to the planner, and to a planner for all reasons. The simple act of thinking what you want to do in a week and writing it down seems to bring rewards disproportionate to the effort expended.

We have a weekly planner for the home, which I invented because we found we weren’t getting those stupid DIY tasks done, or communicating what the hell was going to happen this week: when is the grocery shop coming, when are you out, which days have playdates, what are we going to try to fix. We have a quick meeting at the beginning of the week, fill it in and then stick it up. Miraculously, stuff gets done, and everyone is in the right place at the right time.

So I thought, why not have one that can help me get the bigger things done? Things like ‘run a 5k’ and ‘write a novel’. And in one of those internet moments of serendipity it came to me: the Day Grid balancer. There’s a list version and a more organic version, but the basic principle is blocking off time to do the stuff that will make you happy, and not frittering it away because you haven’t got a clue where to start.

If it’s still not working, you could also try the emergent task timer, to see where your energy is really going. That can be a real eye opener. And if, like me, you find the blummin’ internet is eating your life and you are still powerless to stop it, then you might just have to invest in Freedom as well.

Shame

I finally got around to watching Shame at the weekend.

You’ll notice now that Michael Fassbender is everywhere, but if you’d wanted to know who would be the next big thing, you should have listened to my mate Will. A couple of years ago when trying to convey the essence of the protagonist of his novel Will told me I should think of Michael Fassbender. ‘Who?’ I asked.

We should probably gloss over that exchange.

Shame is a British film, made by artist turned film maker Steve McQueen. Fassbender plays Brandon, who has a carefully planned and orchestrated life, constructed so that he can submit to his sex addiction without too much disturbance. His sister Sissy (played beautifully by Carey Mulligan) barges her way into his flat and his life for who knows how long, distorting his life and routines, and driving him crazy.

They are damaged by the same past (hinted at but never revealed), but have responded in different ways as adults. Brandon is on a knife edge, kept sane only by locking his feelings deep within himself, and losing himself in the meaningless physicality of sex without intimacy, without which he is a time bomb of anger. Sissy craves intimacy, hunts it down dramatically, gives herself to anyone immediately. Where Brandon rages, she weeps, but she has the advantage over him in being able to feel. Through the whole film she was the only one to sport anything of colour -a bright red hat, playfully transferred onto her brother’s head, a symbol that she could, in fact, help him heal, despite the damage they both suffer from.

She opens enough cracks for us to see what is going on behind his facade. The man is in despair, a prisoner of his addiction, his inability to form attachments. Brandon goes on one date with a co-worker, and you sense that he is actually enjoying himself, conversing, trying to connect, but is so unpractised at intimacy that he doesn’t even know how to kiss the woman goodnight. It is one of the saddest things I have seen on film.

When Shame came out, much was made of the sex and nudity it contains, because the natural response to sex and nudity on film is that it will be raunchy, rude or just plain pornographic. That this overshadows everything else is a shame in itself, because there is nothing remotely titillating about the sex in the film. It is all sadness and despair.

For several hours after watching I felt crushed by the experience, yet uplifted, because I’d been in the presence of artists who’d connected me to what it was like for this person to be living with this awful compulsion, that core of emptiness. As hard as it is to watch, it is so rewarding to see something that assumes I can think. In a way, McQueen reminds me of Terence Malick, and I’m full of anticipation for his next project (Twelve Years a Slave), which promises to be just as challenging.

Gird yourself and try to see it. To persuade you, here they both are talking about the film:

McQueen & Fassbender interviewed together on Shame and working together 

(Warning: contains a little bit of a swear.)

 

Solstice, Hilary Mantel & a moment of clarity

And so summer has begun. Hard to tell, given the amount of sogginess around at the moment, but I’m trying to counter the gloom of cloudy skies with the thought that we aren’t going to all die of dehydration, or be the generation that began the water riots, punching our neighbours at standpipes, and wandering around with unwashed hair and armpits.

I’ve been living in the summer of 1789 recently, since I couldn’t bring myself to cart Bring Up The Bodies on holiday, but had A Place of Greater Safety on the kindle. I went to Hilary Mantel’s event at the Southbank in May, where she read from and talked about the new Cromwell book, and I came away wanting her to adopt me. Again. I’ve seen her before, and always come away feeling that she ought to be on telly every week, as an example of how to be interesting, educated and enthusiastic, without being pompous or irritating. She is a lesson to all young girls who dream of rising above their beginnings.

My thoughts about A Place of Greater Safety run thus, so far:

  • I should have had it to hand when I studied the French Revolution for A level.
  • I am nonetheless still often confused by who is doing what, where, and when. This is generally a problem with this revolution, but the book makes you feel this is just how it was as it happened, rather than trying to impose order on events like historians and the Cambridge Exam Board.
  • Hilary’s prowess at translating research into novel has improved subsequently. Not that this is a bad novel – far from it, but it is more treacly than Wolf Hall.
  • I am a little bit in love with Desmoulins.
  • I might have to counter it with something lighter halfway through.
Reading things that are good doesn’t half help when you need to encourage yourself to do some writing. Much easier than when you’ve read something atrocious and have to fling it across the room* muttering ‘and this crap got published!’, the life sapped out of you and the will to make a good sentence evaporated.
(*or just carefully delete from your e-book reading device. Not as dramatic, but less expensive in the long run.)

 

Make Good Art

It’s been floating around the ether for a couple of days, but just in case you’ve missed it, I want to make sure you can get to Neil Gaiman’s speech to the graduates of the University of the Arts. It’s twenty minutes, but if you’ve ever wondered whether you ought to be doing what you’re doing, (especially if it has anything to do with making something, whether that be sculpture, clothes, fiction…) then you could do worse than spend your time with Neil.

Two things stood out for me. One: the exhortation to make mistakes, because if you’re making mistakes then you’re obviously doing something. And doing something is the only way you’ll get anything good, even if you have to write a hundred crappy stories to get it.

And two, you should only do work that you’re proud of, and excited about, even if it brings you no money. You will still have the work, and your pride.

This might be hard to swallow, especially with regard to money. But the life of an artist is so precarious anyway that it’s not worth compromising what you want to do just for money. Believe in it. Believe in your own version of success. Write it down. Put it somewhere you can look at it. Keep walking towards it.

Even if you never make it you’ll always know you were heading in the write* direction.

(Ah hell. I swear this was one of those Freudian things.)

Ladies! Let’s stop fighting about our wombs.

It’s polling day here in London, and various other places around the country. I vote every single time I have the opportunity, clutching my black and white card and thinking about the Pankhursts, and Emily Davison, and the hunger strikers force fed in Holloway prison as I stride towards the polling booth.

Voting is a privilege women have had in this country for less than a hundred years. We should still be talking about it.

But today one of the first articles I read was another argument in the mothers versus not-mothers war that the press seems intent on inflaming. Having read Dr Worsley’s words (originally in the Radio Times), I’m not sure she was being sneery when she said she’d been ‘educated out of the natural reproductive function’ (I have a masters degree – was that not enough? should I have got a PHD?), in as much as she anticipated the (obvious and tiresome) question and developed a riposte (poor choice of words though, Lucy). If she’d been a man, it wouldn’t even be in the article.

Danuta Keane’s response (with inflammatory Mail headline) asks us to consider how much more political becoming a mother can make us, which is true (though not for all), and that the changes that having a child bring can be welcome, even if you’ve resisted them, even if you are educated. Even if they do, inevitably, turn you into a different person.

The key word being different, not better.

I am clearly not who I’d be if I hadn’t had my son, but then the person I would be wouldn’t know that, and wouldn’t mind (probably). Indeed, who knows what might have happened to that person in the last three years, and what changes might have been wrought? Imagine if we could meet each other, my other self and me. Would we argue with each other, try to plead our case for or against? And if so, why? Who is making us feel as if we have to justify this most personal of choices (and sometimes it isn’t a choice) one way or the other? Other women? Our culture? Society at large?

Because this is what has happened: it’s everybody’s business, and anyone can probe a woman about her reproductive status. Women who choose not to have children feel they have to justify that or be labelled as selfish. Women who haven’t been able to have children have to justify it while hiding their private sadness behind a veil. Women who have only one have to justify that or be labelled as selfish. Women who have more than one are never allowed to complain about the difficulties of marshalling toddlers, keeping a house and possibly a career. Women who work have to justify that as well as fight for their right to work part-time, or full time or from home. Women who choose not to return to work have to justify that because otherwise what was feminism about. Women who have larger families have to justify that or be labelled a drain on the planet’s resources.

Why are we doing this to each other? When did we stop looking at everything else that was happening to women?

When I was growing up we still talked about whether you should say ‘chairperson’ rather than ‘chairman’, ‘ms’ instead of ‘miss’. Somewhere in the last twenty years, because things got a little bit better, we assumed the battle was won, and we stopped talking about it. We just assumed we could say anything we liked, be anything we liked, do anything we liked. And yes, it’s truer than it has ever been, but only for some of us.

Recently unemployment went up again, and it went up most sharply for women. Job losses in the public sector disproportionately affect women because they make up around 65% of the workforce (more in some sectors). Older women are losing their jobs at a time when they are running out of time to make pension contributions, ensuring their poverty will linger for decades more. The cuts to tax credits and benefit changes will adversely affect women more than men. Women are more likely to be in part-time and lower paid jobs, in part because they are trying to juggle with other responsibilities, like childcare, or caring for elderly parents, but also partly because women are still paid less than men. Here are some figures from the Fawcett Society:

  • The full-time gender pay gap between women and men is 14.9 per cent
  • The pay gap varies across sectors and regions, rising to up to 55% in the finance sector and up to 33.3% in the City of London
  • 64% of the lowest paid workers are women, contributing not only to women’s poverty but to the poverty of their children
  • There are almost four times as many women in part-time work as men.  Part-time workers are likely to receive lower hourly rates of pay than full-time workers.

Isn’t it time we stopped squabbling about whether wombs are good or not, and talked together about some of this other stuff?

For the last word on the kids debate, I leave you with Stella Duffy, who writes wisely and compassionately. Now go on and vote.

(Deep apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, by the way. It couldn’t be helped.)