A Tedious Theatre?

My friends in the refined universities are all on strike and having a great time - they're losing a lot of money but they're reconnecting with each other and with their students - kind of funny how you never see your colleagues until you all decide not to do any work – and the rather pathetic machinations of their employers and the pension scheme are being exposed faster than a flasher's undercarriage.

But I've gone on about the USS pension strike enough recently, though I'll doubtlessly return to it before long. Instead, a bit of culture for you. And a moan, obviously. I can't leave you without your weekly fix.

Last semester we taught The Duchess of Malfi as part of our Shakespeare and the English Renaissance module. Volpone was received very badly indeed one year, so I've tried to include a revenge tragedy each year to widen the students' sense of what was available on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. We did Webster's The White Devil for a couple of years, and now it's his Duchess. I'm not sure I did it full justice in my lecture, but despite absolutely hating horror and murder films, TV and books, I have a soft spot for the revenge plays for their dramatisation of a violent, paranoiac culture and society, and while we have Hamlet on the course it helps to have its cousins there for comparison.

This week, the RSC put Malfi on at Stratford, and arranged heavily discounted travel-and-ticket packages supported by the Arts Council, with coaches going from certain economically-deprived towns and cities (and Oxford and Warwick). One coach, open to university and school students, went from our other campus where the drama students live, so I duly signed up and advertised it to the English Lit group. Cometh the hour, cometh the coach. Cometh, however, me, our departmental Graduate Teaching Assistant and her partner. No English students. No drama students. No school kids, teachers, or dogs.

How did this happen? Certainly all my students have jobs and a large number have children or other caring responsibilities. Money is also tight. The scheme wasn't widely publicised – nobody from the RSC contacted my department and we'd have moved heaven and earth to make it a success – and there isn't a culture of theatre-going in this area. That said, I work really hard to make cultural opportunities available and even harder to make them attractive, varied and exciting. Eimear McBride is on the first-year syllabus and she came to talk to the students.



The Making A Scene module includes theatre trips, brings in professional actors for students to direct, includes various sorts of drama training and studies a really interesting, non-standard range of plays. Basically, we work really hard to make literary studies enjoyable, challenging, exciting and vital, particularly as those who come straight from A-levels seem so exhausted and disillusioned. And yet we can't get a critical mass of people who want to try new things. Excluding those who just couldn't attend, a large group of people who studied this play with us, or who will do so next year, decided that they didn't need to experience it live on stage. Clearly that's a failure on my part and I don't really know what is to be done.

The three of us had a great time at the RSC. This production used an ultra-modern, stark setting. The live music was particularly affecting, and Joan Iyiola and Nicholas Tennant were particularly mesmerising as The Duchess and Bosola.



The early acts really brought out the Duchess's emotional and sexual needs in ways I didn't focus on in my teaching, and cut the material that encourages you to understand events as products of a corrupted society (as does Hamlet), while the second half concentrated on the horror. A cow's carcass was stabbed straight after the interval and the enormous quantities of blood slowly filled the stage over the course of the remaining hour – so much that the front rows were given blankets to protect their clothes. The actors then proceeded to dial down the acting and up the hamming, rolling around in the pool until everybody was soaked in the claret. It was certainly viscerally horrific, but I wasn't sure how dramatically successful this element was. It brings up the play's problem: how do you convincingly play someone who gets strangled or stabbed and then keeps waking up do deliver final lines? The RSC production decided to amp up the symbolism and the horror rather than attempt realism, which I think was probably a good idea, but something still didn't quite work in the last acts. Respect for having live dead children in the cast though.

As I keep telling my students, even seeing a bad production gives you things to think about. This wasn't a bad production, but a mixed one and it's made me rethink how I'll approach teaching Malfi next year.

Not a lot else has happened this week. I lectured on Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem again, which gave me a chance to wax lyrical about travellers, free festivals, the Criminal Justice Bill, the Battle of the Beanfield, the Green Man and the constructed nature of national identity, and I deleted 6000+ emails, which felt like a real achievement. A little light union casework, some peer observation, writing a PhD examiners' report and a bit of dissertation supervision. Other than that, I've gone to work, got home late, fallen asleep in my cycling gear then hauled my stinking carcass off to bed. Oh - and met an academic publisher foolish enough to take my politicians' novels idea seriously. I might actually have to write the damn thing now.

This afternoon has ended the week well though. I read this Guardian appreciation of Joni Mitchell and have played album after album of her work today. I actually cannot remember who introduced me to her stuff – I now have a (very few) friends who like her but I started listening to her work in the 90s and I'm sure my usual sources of new music at that point (Radio 3, John Peel, NME and the Evening Session) didn't rate her much and I distinctly remember the Cob Records staff mocking me roundly for buying The Hissing of Summer Lawns alongside some Anhrefn and Broadcast singles. Whoever it was: thanks. I like the weird tunings, the huge range of musical styles across her albums, the refusal to become comfortable or predictable (like Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Joanna Newsom and Scott Walker), the narrative songs and the grown-up attitudes.

Here are some of my favourite Joni tracks:









And while I'm in a 60s/70s mood, and reminded of the Malfi line 'like diamonds we are cut with our own dust', here's Joan Baez's 'Diamonds and Rust', about the aftermath of her relationship with Bob Dylan. Coming from the folk tradition she doesn't often write her own music, but in my opinion this song is easily as good as anything he ever did. It's packed with subtle, beautiful literary and artistic references, with the rueful affection of a valued, broken relationship and a couplet that just can't be topped for expressing the tension between being fully part of a couple while realising intellectually (and with rueful hindsight) that even in the most romantic moment you can't fully know your other.

Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

I managed to see her play about ten years ago: now she's retiring and I'll miss her.

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

I could mine Hamlet for quotes for ever, but one line has never been my motto: 'Brevity is the soul of wit' (see my Twitter feed if you don't believe me). Why Hamlet this morning? Well, because I went on a school trip to see it at the RSC in Stratford on Saturday. Students and colleagues all saw the matinée performance directed by Simon Godwin and starring Papa Essiedu in the title role.



The setting was still 'Denmark' but clearly in the present, and the rotten state was African: virtually the entire cast was African or of African origin, as were the music, accents, materials, furniture and politics. Over-elaborate military uniforms were the order of the day for Claudius and his subalterns, or shiny silk suits and brightly patterned fabrics.

The acting was superb without exception. Essiedu played Hamlet as sulky, sarcastic, sexually twisted and slyly mocking. Tanya Moodie was superb as Gertrude: a touch of Winnie Mandela about her, regal, morally adrift but determined to hang on to power. Cyril Nri had a tough job as Polonius: foolish old man or obsequious courtier who knows how to survive shifting power. The scenes with his daughter Ophelia (Natalie Simpson) are often played as evidence that he's a droning old bore, but this time his paternalistic advice seemed genuine and heartfelt. Simpson was just wonderful as Ophelia: it's a problematic part, moving from carefree teen to maddened victim but she made it comprehensible and moving. The other interesting casting choices were a pair of white actors as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: James Cooney and Bethan Cullinane. They started out as Hamlet's old university mates, looking like a pair of Inter-railers, then very convincingly got sucked into his uncle's machinations initially out of concern but before long due to self-interest.

Visually it looked superb: all the light and heat of a tense African capital, though I was less convinced by the overly-complicated stage set, all moving panels and clever mechanics which seemed a bit distracting. The rather obvious paintings and graffiti used to convey Hamlet's madness also seemed a bit unnecessary too. My clever friend Hilary suggested that Basquiat was the model, and she's much cleverer than me.

However, I did have one problem with the production. I can imagine it working brilliantly in an African capital with an African audience because the African setting could easily be interpreted as a political intervention. I did feel slightly uncomfortable sitting in an almost all-white crowd in the heart of the UK watching a play about superstition and political decay set in Africa. I confess that I don't know what Denmark signified to Shakespeare's audience, but popular stereotypes of Africa as a place of political violence and superstition were fully reinforced by this play's staging. It's not the casting: this cast was just brilliant and would have been brilliant wherever and whenever the play was set. Maybe I'm just an over-sensitive liberal or putting too much emphasis on the difference between the cast and the audience but it did feel slightly like conspiracy and superstition were being exoticism rather than recognised as a fundamental part of European culture.

That aside: it was a wonderful performance. Highly recommended.

The other thing I did this weekend was co-host a meeting to propose a Literature Festival in this city. Well over 50 people turned up so it looks like it's happening. What, where and who is yet to be decided but these are merely details. Now we just have to form a committee (oh god, another committee) and find some money. It's going to be in January because a) there aren't any other literary festivals in the winter and b) there's nothing else to do. The plan is to have a small number of well-known people but to really make it a festival of local literary activity: workshops and so on rather than just sitting there listening to visitors from the world of Literature. We don't want to imply that Literature isn't going on here, or is the preserve of other kinds of people. We shall see…