The Duchess of Malfi at UWA

By John and Tracy


Last night we saw the closing night performance of John Webster’s darkly tragic play The Duchess of Malfi (written 1612-13), directed by Steve Chinna with a cast drawn from UWA’s English & Cultural Studies theatre students.

From the moment we sat down the show looked promising – a simple set with plain flats – and the opening dance scene was eye-catching. Other than the odd piece of furniture – and at one point a starkly menacing coffin – most of the scene changes required nothing more than the deft shifting of these flats, ably handled by the cast.

I love the kind of understated design and direction that is not so minimalist as to be pretentious, but knows how to enhance a complicated plot and set of characters by keeping it streamlined.

I agree with what Tracy says above. It’s a richly cross-genre play, ranging from wit through an almost surreal burlesque (at least to modern tastes), through horror, to a more ‘conventional’ (maybe read ‘modern’) notion of tragedy. Teasing all these elements out so effectively shows what a brilliant director Steve Chinna is.

Tracy and I have worked with Steve before, and he and I are colleagues at UWA. I have met few directors and thinkers on theatre with as much depth, creativity and versatility as Steve. All his skills were on display in this production.

It’s such an intense blast of grotesque psycho-trauma fully charged not only to entertain but to challenge us as audience. It even asks questions of the theatre itself. This play includes some of the most memorable lines in English-language theatre. Beneath its in-your-face drama is an almost surprising subtlety, so hard to weave in a world in which the “ten thousand several doors” that death has, “for men to take their exits”, are almost default settings.

This brings to mind two of this production’s great aspects: the entries and exits that were deft and often stimulating in themselves, ominous and full of suggestion; and also the skilful handling of the substitutions within the blank verse, the movements into prose speech (e.g. Antonio), and the mini-closures of rhyming couplets. Steve Chinna is a supreme interpreter of verse in drama, much like Tim Cribb of Cambridge University.

The actors handled these with varying degrees of success, but what stood out across the performance was their ease of expression: the language glowed with clarity, as if the events were taking place down the road – though it’d be a very weird place they were happening in... The music was excellent, especially the live flute and percussion, never overdone.

As for the actors, I was taken with most performances in different ways at different times. After the show, I chatted with Steve, and he noted that he had asked the performers to let their characters grow and evolve with the moment. To be ‘mercurial’, I think he said, rather than operate within the expectation or ‘stencil’ of a character. Astute advice. It’s what allowed Aisling Murray as the Duchess, who began by playing the role a little too rigidly ‘haughty’, to settle into a far more complex and wide-ranging performance, coming into her own particularly in her last scenes.

Similarly with David Roman’s Duke Ferdinand: his interpretation of the Duchess’s mad, conflicted brother, actually blossomed with the revelations of his lycanthropy — Roman’s extreme take on this actually brought pathos as well as grotesque ‘humour’ to the part. There was tragedy in his revenge lust as well.

The Duchess’s other brother, the lustful and plotting Cardinal, was played with staid poise and perverse aloofness by Patrick Whitelaw. One of the play’s star turns was by Harriet Roberts as the saucy and coquettish Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress. Her timing was excellent.

Maybe the essence of this production’s tackling of the absurd contradictions in John Webster’s tragic revenge play was embodied in Mark Tilly’s Bosolo (‘a malcontent’) and his perversities. Tilly played Bosolo as both panto-villain and traumatised wrestler of split personality — a Jekyll and Hyde act that could have fallen flat on its face, but didn’t. In fact, insofar as he is the machine driving the plot and the ephemeral nature of ‘conscience’, I think he nailed Bosolo.

Reverting to the Personal Pronoun: engaging the ‘lyrical I’

By John; posted by Tracy

The reclaiming of ‘I’ isn’t a gain, but a willingness to be held accountable for the necessarily compromising effects and affect implicit in the deployment of words. The concentrations of poetry increase the impact of allusion as much as declaration, and the machinations to avoid locating culpability for the possibly deleterious effects of one's words should be held to account.

By removing the unified self in its overt guise from the picture, the poet seeks both to universalise the text and to comment on the false claims any individual has to a ‘right’ way of seeing, into any sort of unique knowledge. It’s a social ploy, and that’s useful, and it resists capitalist fetishisation of text as brand-named product, and questions the authority of any one individual.

But it’s a smokescreen because whether written individually or collaboratively or even instigated in some random way, the original impetus necessarily relies on at least the notion of personal subjectivity in terms of its reception. All readers and listeners listen and read differently — most of those who reject the ‘I’ would at least consider this likely. 

Tendentious, yes, but any claims of the best way to programme a poem are just that. And to my point: the ‘I’ is very rarely ‘honest’ anyway, and can only be a representation of the idea of self even with the most self-centred, world-seeing, self-defining authority of a poet. The I is the ultimate persona. 

However, I believe one can bolster the ‘I’ with a personal willingness to take responsibility and be held accountable for witness, observation, and the many slippages and ambiguities that make a poetic text. A super-ego I, that reflects on the conditions of not only its making, but its accountability.

This is achieved through mixing verifiable ‘fact’ with that which evades confirmation: the conversation between these qualities is at the crux of the poem, and in many ways the ‘I’ manages this conversation (its conflicts and agreements and neutralities) within the poem.

The accountable I is the mediator, not the judge of the poem. Its accountability is to do with the value of presence in the text, and in the environment observed and/or created by the text. Its position is one the reader/listener might scrutinise: its position in terms of how it conveys and manages the presentation of poetic ideas and poetic language.

What’s more, it’s not (necessarily or necessarily desirably) the job of this ‘I’ to ‘confess’ anything. To hold one’s hand up and be responsible for one's own actions is not to have to lay one’s private history on the table. But it is an offering of a form of ‘privacy’: the accepting that even in its most private moments of creation the writing of a poem for publication is an act of declaration, a surrendering of varying degrees of privacy.

Mother and daughter movie

By Tracy

I don't usually get to watch films on broadcast t.v. (not enough time, too much else to do!) but last night, having sat down to watch the first episode of Chris Lilley's long-awaited new series Angry Boys (mixed feelings,  but it's only the first, so we'll have to wait and see) -- well, I got caught, because a French film came on straight after, and I stayed up too late.

The film -- Carine Tardieu's La Tête de Maman (In Mum's Head) (2007) was mixed, too: I'm not a fan of the quirky, mildly pretentious bits that French film-makers seem to feel obliged to put in as perhaps some sort of nod to their often-experimental and non-realist history -- one more sequence that might-be-happening-but-isn't, one more irruption of a fantasy-character into an otherwise smoothly plausible plot, and I switch off.

However, certain aspects were quite compelling. The teenage daughter of the film, Lulu, is a tomboy on the cusp of maturity but stuck there partly because of the grinding pressure of her mother's (Juliette's, or Juju's) permanent depression and fixation on apparently psychosomatic illness.

Lulu accidentally discovers a photo and then a home movie in which she glimpses her now-staid mother's pre-marital life, twenty years before. Juliette back then was vivacious, happy, freewheeling and open to experiment of all sorts, madly in love with Jacques... not the man she married.

The rest of the film is about what happens when Lulu digs around in that past and tries to "improve" things for her mother. Despite the sometimes-twee gestures the film makes, the central story -- how naive youth works on assumptions about its parents -- kept me watching, and was handled with appropriate ironic distance on the daughter's actions as well as compassion for her own process of growth and lesson-learning.

(I could have done without the cameo from Jane Birkin, whom I find somehow irritating. Lulu is an obsessive Birkin fan and the singer-actress appears as herself in fantasy mode, as a kind of substitute mother-figure to Lulu, materialising and vanishing after their short dialogues.)

It's fairly well-acted in the parts that count (mother and daughter -- the rest are foils, even the waspish grandmother) and kept me watching till the end, in spite of myself...

(NB On the web this movie is often named with U.S. spelling, In Mom's Head.)

Graphology Postscriptum 8: Moondyne Festival, Toodyay

Poem by John, posted by Tracy

Graphology Postscriptum 8: Moondyne Festival, Toodyay

 

The marks a crosscut saw ‘insinuates’     (too soft, too quaint?)

Into the log’s circles of growth     (irony, parody?)

Make carnevale and genealogy     (fate of tree a footnote)

 

Or the shearer working hand-blades     (sheep’s relief and distress)

Or Irish dancers smacking the road with heels     (midday heat, not twilight)

And the Top Pub’s dark threshold     (stories of you told in fourth person)

 

Snare drum and minor keys answering back     (with a crash and a yawp)

Stand-up convict with dead-weight epilogue     (heat straightening his beard)

Cautious proselytisers offering a glimpse     (free games — prizes for the kids)

 

Moon-aspiring Plymouth and wavy white Corvettes    (MGs delicately bright)

Classic and vintage prompts to touring     (weekend outings fuel the town)

Old petrol-guzzlers cataclysms of clean air     (drought hills, stark blue sky)

 

Carnevale on May Day where locals aspire ‘down’     (each a rebel, ipso facto)

Carnevale on May Day where Moondyne Joe rides again     (here, onset of 

                                                                                               escapism)

Carnevale on May Day where Joe melds bikies and establishment    (which is 

                                                                                          which?)

 

And so the orange metal of the mobile forge     (beaten flat)

And so the whores with hearts of gold     (only the well-off could afford the 

                                                                           blousy historic costumes)

And so the coconut shies to raise funds for a swimming pool     (the river run dry,

                                                                                                                unhealthy)

 

Each recognition a brief encounter     (acts of mutual tolerance)

Each official doing-the-head-count     (religion is truly the weather)

Each sale a contract     (with the devil of Settlement)

 

We weave our way through with Sunday shopping   (‘into town’ doubles as 

                                                                                      survival)

We hear the town singers singing     (against the jam session’s rousing)

We learn this ‘carnivalesque’ is post-Lent     (masks on and off with curiosity)

 

 

            John Kinsella

Southerly

By Tracy

Just another reminder for those interested in literary discussions: you can visit and comment on the blog at Southerly online. I'm their current monthly guest blogger, and there are others to follow.

The most recent topic is "Creative Collaborations". Just click on the speech balloon below the post if you want to respond...

Reconfiguring and Revitalising Anthropomorphics

Written by John, posted by Tracy

Returning to translating Leconte de Lisle, especially his animal poems, has reaffirmed my growing belief that the bad press given to anthropomorphism arises from a ‘modern’ tendency to separate the animal off from the human. On the positive side, this gives animals the autonomy and self-identification they deserve and any notions of liberty should encompass. Animal rights necessarily require the human to be able to allow, compensate for, and respect difference between themselves and other creatures that occupy the planet. Through this we are able to perceive that what benefits us might not benefit a different ‘species’.

However, built into this very same perception is a degree of removal from personal and collective empathy with the plight of animals that ‘excuses’ the prioritising of the human condition over that of the animal. If we are unable to identify with the ‘feelings’ and sensations, never mind the ideas, of a given animal, then we are more able not to apply the natural justice we would necessarily offer a fellow human. I increasingly believe that anthropomorphics that are motivated by a desire to empathise with the ‘state of being animal’ are largely ways of extending these rights across ‘species’.

Ironically, the attribution of human traits to animals allows for the perception of difference by creating a familiar, even a level playing field. As the very useful Burns poem goes, ‘see ourselves as others see us’, and vice versa. Allow that animals’ eyes (or senses), are relative in their perceptions to ours. Allow they feel as we feel, allow that pain is pain, and pleasure is pleasure and so on. And if one requires a mirror for this to be the case, then that’s a step in the right direction.

Or even more indirectly, if we need to see the animal as a form of ourselves ‘wearing a mask’, and no matter how distorting that mask, that behind the unusual features we might roughly equate to our own, are the same needs, desires, and range of emotions and conceptualisations, then so be it. Whatever allows the bridge to be created, the ‘other’ to be dissolved.

Of course, ‘the other’ is not necessarily an undesirable state for some. To be seen as outside, different, even ‘less than’, might be considerably better than being part of or equated with. Difference is intactness and agency. But if difference is used by those empowered to oppress and demean, it can never be ‘right’.

I have also been thinking about these issues in the context of the ‘close encounter’ I had with a short-beaked echidna on the block last week. A young echidna, probably just ‘free’ of its parental bonds, was establishing territory around the great granites in the north-west corner. I watched it (with Tracy and Tim), explore, hide, curl up in a cleft between boulders. This was around sunset and it was very active — digging over ground around and under rocks, searching for termites.

We walked back down along the track to the house, but a short while later, I went back up, out of curious compulsion. I usually just leave things be, and I did so here, but I did go and look in between the rocks. I crouched. The echidna was in a coiled and curled position, quills bristling. And then it stretched and emerged. It moved towards me, sniffed the ground around my feet with its sensitive tubular snout, examined me with its tiny eyes, circumnavigated me, then proceeded to dig at the ground for termites. I stayed as still as possible. Eventually it ambled back into its cleft, and I discreetly removed myself.

Over the years, I have written many echidna poems, often through the lens of Derridean notions of metaphor. But this was quite different. I wrote a poem. I struggled to avoid equating the echidna’s emotions and actions with mine, or any correlative to mine. And I succeeded reasonably well, though underneath the moment you map an ‘encounter’ you are imposing human understanding about the processes behind ‘engagement’.

But since writing that poem and since working on de Lisle, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should write a more directly anthropomorphic take on the interaction. That is, give the echidna human traits and feelings, the better to understand my own motivation for writing the poem, and even more so for strongly believing it, as a creature, is no different from myself in terms of the rights it should have, the respect it should have, and the empowerment it should have. I almost said ‘it deserves’, and stopped myself, but maybe that’s the point. It does ‘deserve’ and because I am clearly in the empowered position (we share space, of course, but in truth I have far more control over the dispensation of that space), maybe I need to be frank and declare this position. My conscience prevents me from doing so because I know it’s wrong.

But in the twists and ambiguities of a poem, these contradictions, this conflict between how one feels it should be and how it really is, can be articulated without one position preventing awareness of the other. The poem that uses expressions attributing human feeling and, say, features, to an animal, can also illustrate the problems behind doing this.

Anthropomorphism can become generative and liberating in the sense that one gives away one’s platform of authority by expressing the belief that equality is implicit in the relationship, but that in reality there are few grounds for it to exist. It doesn’t surprise me that many of those I’ve read and met who are so rigidly opposed to the anthropomorphic, to pathetic fallacy, are those who either have the most conflicted views over the use of animals for human benefit, or are in fact the most indifferent to the conditions of animals outside their ‘use’ to humans, either as food, medicine, clothing, or pets.

John Kinsella

 

Note: the photo was taken when the echidna was in the ball position. It was also taken from a distance. The echidna was not disturbed nor directly intruded upon. Its territory now covers acres across the block. Its lines of foraging take in areas around the house, especially the outcrop just above us.

Narnia from page to screen

By Tracy

Tim (now 8) and I just finished reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together. It's a book I have some reservations about, but he's got a huge appetite for fantasy fiction just now (John's reading The Hobbit with him), and so in some ways it was inevitable.

This weekend we also watched the film version, and it was interesting to see the changes that had been made between the two formats.

Some were minor alterations to make the children seem more feisty (perhaps), such as their breaking a window with a cricket ball to send them hiding into the wardrobe (as opposed to the novel's idea, which has them merely seeking to escape visitors).

Others were minor gender-role revisions. (Tim had already observed that Susan's reluctance for adventure and pushing forward was "like Anne in the Famous Five" -- although to be fair, in both story-worlds the more nervous girl-character is offset by a braver one.)

All in all, the film would not be a disappointment for readers of the book -- though a comic scene Tim was looking forward to, in which the cowardly White Witch lifts her skirts and flees from Aslan's roar, became a mere sinking back into her chariot before him, removing the bathos I suspect Lewis was trying to associate with the ego of evildoers...

It was beautifully animated and the children were good in their roles. Tilda Swinton is a perfect White Witch and a hideous vision especially when she turns warrior-queen in the latter half of the film.

But it's always disappointing for me, the way that Lewis's story can turn what could be an image of non-violent response (Aslan's suffering at the Stone Table) into the core of a quasi-militaristic vision (self-sacrifice = the noble interpretation of war?).

Setting aside the question of whether the heavy-handed Christian allegory at times mars the story, Lewis comes across as at pains to avoid any possibility of pacifist ideals. Overtly, for the children in the story, growing up and growing better means accepting not only the need to do harm, but the "nobility" of doing so under the supposedly appropriate circumstances. (Lewis of course famously wrote a speech entitled, "Why I Am Not a Pacifist", so it's hardly surprising his fiction should be so hooked on violence.)