Leigh Swinbourne

‘Bass Strait, 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, runs through the grass of a wild island at the edge of the world. Eighteen years later in Manchester, Charles Dickens is a sensation, starring in a play that resembles the frozen landscape of his own inner life.’

The inner flap of Tasmanian Richard Flanagan’s 20008 novel: ‘Wanting’.

In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end, Flanagan (in case we didn’t get it) informs us that his work is ‘a meditation on desire―the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs’.  Here Flanagan, uncharacteristically, undersells himself, for while ‘Wanting’ is certainly about this, it is also about much more. We all have thwarted desires and count the cost, but these are, for the large part, private and anonymous. But what are the effects of thwarted desires, or otherwise, of major public figures? Presumably any private cost must also be reckoned in the public sphere. The ramifications are political and historical, and therefore continuing.

In the opening of Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s 1989 novel, ‘Solomon Gursky was Here’, ‘during the record cold spell of 1851’ out of the swirling snows surrounding the mill town of Magog emerges a ‘long, heavily laden sled at the stern of which stands ‘Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip’. The locals gather with a few questions:

                ‘Where are you from?’

                ‘The north, my good fellow.’

                ‘Where… north?’

                ‘Far.’

Although he never admits it, what also emerges is that Ephraim has somehow escaped from Sir John Franklin’s final disastrous expedition to find the fabled North-West passage. No recorded survivors, but here is an unknown sailor, like most, and it is entirely plausible that this man has made it out, and so Richler has a free hand to chart his subsequent life and that of his descendants.

But let’s say Sir John Franklin himself came out of those mists. If he tells the Magogans who he is, Richler is at once constrained. The subsequent life he invents for Sir John must be conditioned by his known life to date and his status. What has happened to his crew? His boats? And he has a wife, Lady Jane, searching for him etcetera. The hand is not so free, still, there is room.

                The general convention for historical fiction is that the protagonists are the sailors, tailors, tinkers, folks like us, who can pretty much do what they like except that, unlike us, they have to live through the impact of known events, mostly caused by historical personages who have to do what they did. These giant shadowy figures are usually floating in the background or make the occasional guest appearance but with their ‘inner life’ being left where it was. There are exceptions: Tolstoy gives us Napoleon in War and Peace as a lucky bumbler, which could hardly have been the case, but suits his agenda.

                And Flanagan goes the whole hog in ‘Wanting’, a novel composed almost entirely of historical figures, inner life and all. They have to do what they did, but beyond this, the author does pretty much what he likes. Central to the story are Sir John Franklin, Governor of Tasmania (1837-1843) and his adopted Aboriginal child, Mathinna. But also we have Lady Jane Franklin, who is ingeniously linked, in a parallel story two decades hence, to Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Ellen Ternan and sundry others. All pretty fully realised according to Flanagan’s agenda. Is this credible? Does it matter?

                Let’s start with the language, which raises like issues. Flanagan has soaked himself in Dickens and his fellows and the tale is told in an anachronistic pastiche which might have purists tearing their hair out. But for the ‘ordinary’ reader it only matters that what is presented is consistent, so they can forget about the telling and fall into what is being told. And it is consistent, what’s more, it is highly accomplished, reminding me of Peter Carey’s Victorian novels, ‘Jack Maggs’ , ‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’, and others where a completely convincing ‘type’ of English is invented over to suit each story.

                For this story the question becomes: being fiction of factual figures, is it credible within itself? Again, purists might demur, but surely it is only fair to grant the novelist his premise and see how it all pans out. As with the language, for the reader it really only matters if it jells, if it works as an artistic whole, and again for this reader, it does triumphantly. Even to the extent of having to accept a central crucial event which, upon any reasonable reflection, would not have occurred.

                In all of his novels, Flanagan’s characters are trapped in some vast machine. That machine is usually Western Capitalism, in various guises. In ‘Wanting’ that guise is Colonialism, one of the many dark roots of W.C. The general effect throughout his oeuvre is to foreground the machine rather than the individuals. Flanagan is an ‘issues’ writer. Here the issue is the evil of Colonialism and so he manipulates his characters, inner lives and all, to demonstrate this. In some other of his novels the manipulation feels like him climbing up onto a soapbox and haranguing us directly, but not here. In ‘Wanting’ all the pieces work neatly together without his intervention, including the secondary narrative.

                ‘Wanting’ is Mathinna’s story, and also Sir John’s, but Mathinna’s story is a truly terrible one, difficult to read, but read it we must, so to help us get to the end, Flanagan offers us periodic relief with the story of Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan. Many writers employ this ‘sonata form’ device, but two that particularly come to mind, and Flanagan cites them so we can assume an influence, are the unlikely bedfellows of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Secondary narratives in these two writers regularly offer both relief and diversion, but of course beyond this they subtly continue and develop the primary narrative. For example, Dickens as a writer was, amongst other things, a crusader against the evils of rampant capitalism, also he performed in a play about Sir John and the arctic, and so on.

                Dickens relationship with Ellen is not the same as Sir John’s with Mathinna but does contain similar elements, so while we follow one, we are reflecting on the other. The biggest similarity is one of imbalance of power. Sir John can do with Mathinna whatever he wishes, which he eventually does, because he is the Governor and she is an Aborigine. Likewise Dickens is rich, famous and charismatic and so it is difficult, and imprudent, for Ellen to resist his desires. Interestingly, in stark contrast to Sir John and Mathinna, Flanagan points to a happy ending between the novelist and the actor, despite considerable collateral damage to Dickens’ wife and his relationship with his favourite child.

                But with poor abused Mathinna we witness Colonialism at its most pernicious. An indigenous race cruelly persecuted, rounded up and exiled to an unhealthy sanatorium, essentially a prison. Mathinna then plucked from this place as a plaything for Lady Jane gradually becoming an object of desire for Sir John who in a moment of drunken hubris commits an atrocious act (no spoiler, well flagged in advance) which destroys the young girl, whom the couple then abandon to destitution and death.

                With the exception of this act, and Sir John’s desire, this lamentable story is well documented and known, in fact most of what occurs in both stories is on the record. But Sir John’s ‘made-up’ relationship with Mathinna is absolutely central to Flanagan’s messages concerning Colonialism, the shocking black heart of his book. Because of this, the power of his conviction, and also of his writing, we accept this relationship as contiguous with the whole. Well I did.

                Sir John commits an evil, but he is not an evil man, not a psychopath. He is a weak man in a strong position, himself also a victim of the machine. It is important Flanagan engenders some sympathy for Sir John so we keep that machine in mind. Finally, the only way to escape himself and the machine is in the frozen wastes, where there is nothing: ‘There came to him a sense of his own horror. Cold was crossing his skin, invading his being, fine shards of ice were already webbing his lungs’.  A through passage perhaps for the innocent Ephraim, but not for Sir John.

‘Wanting’ is a fine historical novel of past sins and questionable legacies.

Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Mars Room’ is a masterclass in writing of a particular kind of novel, the ‘issues’ or ‘social conscience’ novel, such as Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ or John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’. And as in those two fine exemplars, Kushner basically lets her chosen victims do the talking, no soapbox, but we do get the message loud and clear.

Her protagonist is Romy Hall, a woman definitely more sinned against than sinning, although I struggled to understand why she was so done over by the Californian justice system, two consecutive life sentences plus another six years for killing her creepy stalker in a fit of rage and frustration. Deep down she’s a good-hearted gal and there are extenuating circumstances, but I guess it’s important for Kushner that she has us right onside for her heroine so we accept this gross injustice as just one of those things that can happen to almost anyone who, as Stephen King says in one of the celebrity quotes bulking the front of my copy, ‘have fallen through the gaping cracks in American life’.

Romy’s tale is in first person, whereas all the other stories are close third person (with one exception). Normally change of ‘person’ in a novel irritates me but it works well here with Romy as the central thread and the others like beads strung along. There are connections, and connections of connections, so by the time we’re approaching the climax Kushner has presented us with a pretty broad spectrum of the experience of being incarcerated and the various ways this might occur, the agents in and out of the system. This gives the novel overall a documentary feel, Kushner has done extraordinary homework, all the stories, men included, are detailed and convincing.

Kushner focusses on women’s prison, but we get the odd peak into the men’s tribulations too. For a literary work ‘The Mars Room’ covers some spectacularly seedy characters and settings, the title is a lap-dancing club in San Francisco where Romy makes her living. There is even a ‘noir’ thriller aspect to some of the prose which is punchy and unadorned à la Hemmingway, Hammett etc. Of classical influences Zola comes to mind, but Kushner cites Dostoevsky throughout, particularly ‘Crime and Punishment’, the Russian novelist’s sympathy for the marginalised obviously a spur and inspiration.

In ‘Crime and Punishment’, amongst many other things, Dostoevsky presents an ironic view of St. Petersburg, the glittering Czarist capital, which for Raskolnikov and others is a big verminous slum. So Romy and San Francisco, the lauded beauty of the city irrelevant and unseen by those born to poverty, neglect and struggle.  Entering into the prison system― the novel opens with a long bus ride there―is like taking a trip down into the underworld, a sort of modern Hades. Once inside, we get a gripping up-close horror show of a self-contained territory that is largely out of sight and mind to relatively well-off middle-class readers such as myself. But chasing up the relevant stats in my own home town, Hobart, the scenario is not much different, so those cracks are not just Californian or American.

We accept that we need punishment for crimes against society, and incarceration, the taking of freedom, is an obvious answer. The problem is that once any system is established it becomes its own beast, and that beast’s purpose here is to crush any humanity out of both of gaolers and gaoled, which makes things wretched for everyone and does not serve society at all. So constant input is needed from outside, education, occupation etc. for the inmates, this is not news, but it does cost money, and there are no votes in it for politicians, whereas there are, unfortunately, always votes in beating a big law-and-order drum.

The same old story, we all know it, but we forget it or ignore it unless it impinges on our lives. And this is what Kushner seeks to do: wake us up to this particular inhumanity in our affluent nations, and maybe even somehow stir us into action. Still, whilst eliciting our sympathies, she is sensible to show there are actually bad people, in and out of prison, and not everyone is a victim. Amongst various portraits of undesirables, scattered at intervals is the diary of Ted Kaczinski (the exception), the Unabomber, just for an insight into a mind that is truly evil.

Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression is that of a widespread State-sanctioned injustice, lives and potential being crushed for no good reason, although the end of the novel, the climax and after, heart-stopping and heart-breaking, is oddly life affirming. In ‘The Mars Room’ Kushner has given us something that is genuinely chastening and literary to boot. Not too innovative or flashy, but powerful and accomplished.

In Hilary Mantel’s first novel, ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, unpublished for thirteen years, the political becomes the personal. Mantel takes on the task of describing the progression of the French Revolution from the inside out, treating three outstanding historical principals involved―Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre― as characters in a novel, taking her cue as much as she can from the record, but then moving on to create their personalities and drives in detail using her imagination.

She animates not only their psychological worlds, but also those of their families and loves and wives.  Hers is not a claim for a particular historical truth beyond source documents, rather a way of trying to understand history, saying something like: yes, we know what these men did, and so might appraise them accordingly, but here is one interpretation of why they did what they did. Which shows them to be not only actors in some grand dramatic pageant, as in Thomas Carlyle’s history, but individuals perhaps like ourselves, except caught up in historic events, and then by temperament and chance and opportunity becoming and creating those events.

Mantel has said that as she wrote the book, she liked Danton less and Robespierre more but―trust the tale not the teller―the central figure and hero here is surely George-Jacques Danton. For those who don’t know, we are told early on that he will die. We are not told the fates of the others, and I would urge readers who do not know the facts here to do no reading in advance and go with the story. The impact will be greater.

The first thing to be said about this novel is that it is long, 872 pages in my edition. And yet it is, as they say, ‘unputdownable’. It could have been cut, of course, and it could easily have been longer. But the accumulation of the pages gathers momentum as you read and, having spent so much time with these people, the end, the climax, even if you do know it, carries tremendous power. For although we might have foresight, these men cannot, and that ignorance, the ordinary ignorance of living a life, can generate tremendous tension and pathos, ‘dramatic irony’, as it is known in the theatre.

The second thing to be said is that, technically, the novel is a miracle of organisation. We are given a long list of characters at the start, which I needed, nevertheless there is never any problem in following who is doing what to whom and why. Mantel balances her large cast with such a sure touch you hardly notice. The obvious comparison here is ‘War and Peace’ and like Tolstoy, Mantel focuses on a couple of families and sketches in the others as she feels necessary.

There are sacrifices, deliberate ones, even in such a long work. Much circumstantial detail is omitted, broader description of place particularly. We know we’re in 18^th century Paris and surrounds, but for the most part, we could almost be in any city and its countryside. Similarly, with the exception of the finale, Mantel avoids potentially great set-pieces. The King is dispatched in a few trenchant sentences, the Queen has a couple of gripping pages, but little more. The mob riots, the frontier battles, the internal insurrections, are almost all conveyed indirectly, through conversation.

In fact, this is a book of conversation. There are a few internal ruminations, but it is mainly through conversation that this huge story is told, not successive dramatic monologues, as in Dostoevsky, but actual one-on-one exchanges, always pithy and pregnant with meaning and portent. This gives the novel a peculiar contemporaneity. Politics is, after all, a timeless human activity.

I mention above that our hero is Danton. Danton is a man who is morally compromised from the start and continues on that path throughout. He is your old-style politician, larger than life, trading, haggling, helping himself, helping others, immensely charismatic. But despite all of that, he is also throughout, and particularly at the close, a great moral force. No hypocrite, always true to himself, and true, despite all he does, to the high ideals of the Revolution. In stark contrast to the politically correct clerks who bring him down and destroy what had begun with such hope and energy. Perhaps, because like Cromwell, history has judged him a villain, and Mantel likes her underdogs, she strives to give Robespierre a better press than I think he deserves. Crucially, he betrays his colleagues through an invented incident. It is the only time Mantel skews history to her prejudice.

For this is the conundrum or great issue of the French Revolution: how something so idealistic and holding such promise could in so few years descend into terrible barbarity. Through successive conversations Mantel shows us the corrupting process; with this I would have liked a little more scaffolding, the charters, manifestos, so that we might observe more closely how they became perverted. And all those innocent beheadings, whole families, bystanders, one after another, Mantel relays all this, of course, but the moral effect of such mass evil seems somewhat muted when reported second hand.

The other hero of this book, a heroine, is, I assume, largely an invention, Camille Desmoulins wife, Lucille. While Danton pretty much remains Danton throughout his extraordinary journey, Lucille starts as a precocious spoiled brat, selfish and spiteful. Through her marriage with Camille and involvement in his affairs we watch her grow in moral stature until at the end, she is like some great figure from Classical French Drama or Opera.  The Revolution destroys so much, but it makes Lucille Desmoulins, enables her to realise her inner potential, rise into the woman she becomes, of which there is no notion, and certainly not to herself, to begin with. It is a wonderful piece of writing.

Why do it? This huge and hugely ambitious enterprise begun when Mantel was a poor ex-student shop assistant in Manchester and finished as a seriously sick teacher/housewife in a bush town in Botswana. A nine-hundred-page novel about the French Revolution. What was she thinking? What was she doing? I suppose she was doing what she felt she could.

And the meaning of the title? On p651 of my copy, well into the work, there is the following exchange:

                ‘Can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?’

                ‘The grave,’ Camille said. ‘The grave.’

What I believe Mantel is saying here is that life itself is inherently dangerous, more dangerous for revolutionaries than most of us no doubt, nevertheless that living fully involves making choices and commitments, saying and doing things we might prefer not to, sticking our necks out, both for ourselves and those we love and admire. The more we dare, the braver we are, the more complete our lives, even if, as a result, they might be cut off prematurely. Danton died a young man but lived a complete life, a great life, and placed his head on the block knowing this and knowing others would know it too. ‘Show my head to the people,’ he is reported to have said to his executioner. ‘It’s worth the trouble’. For Mantel, this was worth a book.  

The broader philosophical take here is that in times of crisis or upheaval, political and otherwise, evil men and evil itself will prosper when good men are passive. This is a thing we all know and history, particularly twentieth century history, has demonstrated it time and again. But still it is important that these great truths are occasionally brought to the forefront of our minds, pushing aside for a while the trivia of daily life, and this magnificent novel, amongst much else, surely achieves that.

‘Request Program’, a play by Franz Xaver Kroetz

A Black Bag Trilogy Performance,

Detached Gallery, Hobart, 5^th to 14^th August, 2022

Earl Art Centre, Launceston, 25^th to 27^th May, 2023

Language is vital to me. Whatever the writing project, I am always conscious of its beauty, power and utility. One of my attractions to Drama is that I see it as a traditionally language-driven art form. But not all playwrights agree; take Franz Xaver Kroetz:

‘Authors like Shakespeare and Goethe have glorious monologues that flood the theatre with words. This endless verbalizing is a lie. This perfect harmony between heart and tongue exists only on a stage. I wanted to use language realistically to dramatize the tension that arises when the correspondence between feelings and language breaks down. Even Brecht swindled when it comes to language. His peasants speak more intelligently and more beautifully than any university professor. I wanted to smash this convention of stage language. I do not believe that people can heave their hearts into their mouths and speak their inner torments trippingly on the tongue. Language should not be the central element in drama. Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the inability to express oneself. Language should have the same function in the theatre that it has in reality.’

Kroetz’s most performed play is ‘Request Program’, written in 1971. ‘Written’, but it is a play without any language. The solo performer is silent for seventy minutes. For that period the audience watches a woman, who lives alone, arrive home from work and proceed through her customary evening activities. Just before the end of the play there is a moment of acute tension.

Last year, Tasmanian audiences had the privilege of experiencing this work performed by acclaimed Hobart-based actor Jane Longhurst as the second part of her ongoing ‘Black Bag Trilogy’ project. I caught up with Jane for a conversation during her first run of ‘Request Program’, and a mutual edit of this after her second run earlier this year.

Leigh: Thanks for your time. Tell me a little about this extended theatrical project of yours.

Jane: In 2018 I was lucky to be supported by Arts Tasmania and the Regional Arts Fund to construct a year of mentoring for professional development. I had just turned fifty and, famously, actresses often struggle to find roles past fifty. I wanted to give my skills a reboot. Initially, I travelled to New York City to observe ‘Elevator Repair Service’, an innovative theatre ensemble, devise new work. Whilst there I happened to see (actor) Dianne Wiest in a free performance of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’. I already knew about ‘Request Program’ through (director) Robert Jarman. So, I thought: you want a challenge, Jane? Why don’t you perform ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Request Program’. Mad non-stop language versus lack of language. After these, the final part of the trilogy will be a devised work, a new work, inspired by the themes of the first two, also addressing issues of social isolation and disconnection, which Becket realises in an absurd and Kreutz in a realistic way. I’m thinking of something involving famous Tasmanian ‘Domestic Goddess’ Marjorie Bligh.

Leigh: Already the subject of a book by Danielle Wood and a musical by Stella Kent. When can we expect to see this?

Jane: When it’s done. The labour that it takes to produce and perform your own work is very intense. You need a lot of support. And if it takes me another five years to realise project three, so be it.

Leigh: In addition to what you have already said, what drew you to ‘Request Program’?

Jane: I must admit to having a personal fascination with daily tasks and domestic mundanity. I thought I’d like to take these tasks and elevated them theatrically.

Leigh: Why?

Jane: Largely as a key to accessibility. With theatre, you can take an audience into some very special and memorable places. This play is not theatrical, but it is memorable. It is special and different.

Leigh: Tell me about the title of the play.

Jane: It’s also been known as ‘Family Favourites’. The way Christopher Lawrence has curated the soundtrack, we listen to a standard request program. Through the company of the radio soundscape, you have relief from the silence of the play, and as well you get a glimpse in a very clever way into other people’s lives who are also listening to the radio.

Leigh: Who might be like your character.

Jane: Yes, it’s a community of individuals, just like when we were isolated for Covid.

Leigh: So, with Beckett you have Winnie babbling away constantly, if only to cover a desperate emptiness, and with Kroetz the nameless protagonist is silent throughout. I was wondering that given that centrality of language is usually one difference between, say, stage and film, how do you think this material might present as a film with all film’s sophisticated technical possibilities?  

Jane: I think nothing can duplicate the pressure-cooker environment of sixty, a hundred and twenty, three hundred and sixty people, and a cast, delivering a text, even a play with no text, because of the immediacy of live performance. That’s what makes this work so powerful and why I I’ve had a wave of responses from people who’ve seen it.

Leigh: Of course I agree, and what you’ve said is a bit of a given for theatre. Does the fact that you don’t speak at all change the way you physically move?

Jane: I would say that I am speaking in my mind the whole time. There is a monologue in my head.

Leigh: Is it an articulate monologue or something you’re just saying to yourself?

Jane: It is an articulate monologue but it’s no different to what I think we all do, you know, you’re washing up and you think ‘I haven’t been there for ages’ and you just spin off that. It’s the way I find that I get through doing the work, by coaching and coaxing myself through the action.

Leigh: But still, did you feel any need to heighten your physicality?

Jane: Not at all. If anything, the challenge is to resist that and to not to ‘act’ but just ‘be’.

Leigh: Tell me a little about your approach to acting in general.

Jane: My approach to acting has refined as I’ve got older. I think for all artists you find your groove, you find a way of working and you bring your bag of tricks to any given role or play or context. And by about the age of forty you know what you are capable of, and there’s a great relief with that. I came out of VCA as a classically trained actor and went straight into television, so I had to grapple with the technicality of a type of performing which was completely different. But I knew from VCA that the work that appealed to me most was not that where I hid in another character, like say a Meryl Streep who is unrecognisable from role to role. I don’t do that, I am more of a school of thought which is about mining the truth of any given moment, but filtered through my passion, my character. I don’t feel I need to go out and become a serial killer to play a serial killer…

Leigh: I’m pleased to hear that.

Jane: …but as much as I can I seek the human frailty or the truth of any given moment. Then I temper it artistically through the choices of a given circumstance.

Leigh: So, there’s always a bit of Jane Longhurst in any character you play.

Jane: I think so.

Leigh: Robert Maxwell (previous interview 07/07/2022) talked of various schools of acting that he had used in developing his craft. Do you have a paradigm or a methodology that works as a guide for you?

Jane: I’m too much of a magpie with these things. I just cherry pick and rely on different modes of being I’ve been exposed to, either through my training or through my projects. But I’ve reached a point that I’m now so self-accepting of what I’m capable of, I don’t try and pretend to be something that I’m not. I come into a project, role, character and If I’ve got something that the director sees is going to serve that role, that’s fantastic, but if I’m not what they want, then best to part ways.

Leigh: Have you had that happen?

Jane: No yet, but I’m up for it. Theatre is so demanding and becomes such a preoccupation that if I’m going to put that amount of energy into a project then it has to be pretty special. I’m not going to do just anything. It has to be meaningful.

Leigh: As you move through a run, do you feel from performance to performance that your character is changing or evolving in any way?

Jane: I don’t think so. There are only seven performances (first run). I guess I recognise that my impulses and instincts from the beginning are still serving the work. Rather than evolving, I’m finding a surety with the performance that I trust is working for an audience.

Leigh: But naturally, each performance is subtly different, and largely because of the audience. Back in the ‘nineties I took a play of mine, ‘The Tryst’, down to the Adelaide Fringe. It had finished a Sydney season and by then the content of the drama was white to me. Watching the play night after night, what I noticed was the successive dialogues between the audience and the actors, and how these slightly altered the play each night. How aware are you of the audience?

Jane: About five per cent of your brain is listening to the audience. The whole time. When you hear a person shuffle, that determines when you turn a tap on.

Leigh: I was thinking of something more psychological. The woman in the flat is completely engaged in what she is doing, but Jane Longhurst is 95% engaged. What’s that 5% doing to your performance. Anything at all?

Jane: It’s playing with the spontaneity of the performance. People are paying minute attention to what I am doing, so I must not underestimate the power of that detail. Beyond what we’ve rehearsed, my job is to keep listening to the audience.

Leigh: The woman goes about her business. Nothing remarkable happens, but still, time is concentrated, you’ve got an evening compressed into one hour. And also at the end there is suddenly this moment of enormous tension, when your character lays out the sleeping pills and contemplates suicide. How serious is she?

Jane: I think it’s really important that the work leaves the audience with their (collective) heart in their mouth. That sense of, is she or isn’t she?

Leigh: Well, in your performance she decides no. Although not completely. She doesn’t flush the pills down the toilet or anything. She could still change her mind. How did you feel as the character at this point, or was it different each night? 

Jane: It always felt consistent for me, what we took the audience through. And a play with no text is a big commitment for an audience.  But I was satisfied, doing the work twice, that they were with me right to the very end.

Leigh: Why might she commit suicide. What’s the tipping point here?

Jane: This is her normal ritual on a normal night, there’s nothing, really, to distinguish this night from any other, yet the play is pregnant with the possibility that this could be her last. On stage, I have a whole story in my head. She might do this every night, or maybe this is the night she goes that little bit further.

Leigh: And each night is like this for her. I was thinking, after watching you, how as a young man I went through some very bitter times but I never contemplated suicide. And I guess it was because I always thought that things would get better. Mother Nature equips us with a little pilot light, but with your character that pilot light is flickering, or indeed has gone out.  

Jane: One of the reasons for doing the play was to destigmatise this issue, even that of loneliness. It’s difficult to confess that you’re lonely. Nobody likes to admit it.

Leigh: Particularly in a world where there is so much interconnection, although that, in ways, can produce loneliness. People stuck in their room for hours with only a screen.

Jane: This is why I feel this work still has a lot to offer for an audience fifty years after it was written. On our set there’s not even a house-plant, because that suggests life one might be responsible for. She doesn’t have a pet. Robert and I wanted to keep showing very clearly that this is a woman with a job, with a place to live, with a life, but no connection that might keep that pilot light going, to use your metaphor. The political and the personal fall into a kind of Venn diagram for this character because there is so little for us to latch on to.

Leigh: What kind of specific responsibility did you feel for your audience here.

Jane: These days we’re accustomed to trigger warnings. I took on board very seriously a presentation of this work that was respectful for an audience. I approached Lifeline Tasmania who were wonderful in providing us with a Lifeline volunteer for every performance. They were there in the room if somebody needed to have a conversation. I know that it was taken advantage of at least once. Also I made sure that all marketing material showed the play contained suicide ideation.

Leigh: As you said, with your character we have no background information. We know she’s alone. We don’t know why. For acting purposes, did you develop a biography?

Jane: I did develop in my mind a kind of a history and a couple of key moments in the character’s life.

Leigh: You gave yourself a structure.

Jane: Homework.

Leigh: That’s yours alone.

Jane: Yes.

Leigh: Did you share that with the director?

Jane: No. It’s just for me.

Leigh: While I appreciate Kroetz is trying to present the situation as it is, with that focus, the lack of background was a bit of a problem for me. Why is she alone, I asked. Why are there no family members or ex-husband or friends. Why is there no-one she can contact if she feels this level of despair?

Jane: I think most people sitting in the auditorium were asking themselves those same questions. And I think that’s one reason I’m so fond of the work. I like that it doesn’t provide answers. The audience individually fills in the gaps. Everyone conjures up their own biography.

Leigh: I don’t have the text for the Kroetz. I know that in ‘Happy Day’ Beckett details every little move that the character must make. Is that that case here, or was there room for invention or improvisation?

Jane: Kroetz does the same. It amounts to about six or seven pages that he has structured into five parts. He speaks in the present tense. So, Part One: On any working day at about 6.30pm Miss Rush returns home after work, having done her shopping. She enters the house, looks for her mail, finds only junk mail, picks it up, goes to her door, locks it, and enters. Robert and I chose a contemporary aesthetic for the staging.

Leigh: I’m assuming Beckett’s influence on Kroetz. Beckett also uses broken language and silence plus the subject matter here chimes with much of Beckett’s. Normally in theatre drama comes out of language, most often combined with physical interaction between characters. Here dramatic tension is generated by what the audience understands but is actually unexpressed by the character. We intuit her loneliness, but then as an actor you must somehow project this. Everything has to be conveyed of her increasing desperation. How did you address this challenge.

Jane: I like your word ‘intuit’. In this play, the audience must work.

Leigh: I think they’re willing to work.

Jane: I think so too. Everything you see, all those actions over the durations of sixty-five minutes, there’s nothing theatrical about it.

Leigh: It’s anti-theatrical.

Jane: Yes. Which doesn’t mean it’s not without drama. It’s the confluence of the location, the intimacy, the single woman, the domestic ritual that we all do and we all know and there’s nothing special about it and I like the fact that the work still generates an emotional response.

Leigh: Jane, if I did this as an actor, everyone would walk out within ten minutes. Somehow, you convey the tension underneath.

Jane: Some of the things I tried to do give clues into the personality of the woman. Her fastidious nature. Folding up tea-towels, folding up toilet paper, none of this was talked about in rehearsal, it just happened. As an actor I honoured various actions concerning the character because they felt right in this context for this work, to portray this woman in these small minute gestures.

Leigh: Fine, but I tend to think something more is going on. Peter Brook writes in the opening of ‘The Empty Space’: ‘A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged’. But that man must move in such a way that persuades someone else to look at him. A physical charisma perhaps.

Jane: I think it’s the act of being in the moment. With ‘Request Program’ it is the traffic of those tiny little gestures and actions that makes the work. The audience attends to these. They bring themselves to these.

Leigh: You know, as a writer I’m always concerned to entertain my audience. Maybe it’s an insecurity. Prose or drama when they read or hear a statement, I need them to be wanting the next. Kroetz, to some extent, throws this out the window. It’s important to him, I believe, that we feel in some sense the overbearing tedium of this woman’s life.

Jane: Although he does say in the text, in the preview notes, that he doesn’t want to provoke the audience into boredom. Earlier you mentioned the compression of time in the play.

Leigh: Sure, that’s working away. While we’re watching it we’re not aware of it being compressed.

Jane: But he urges a creative team to honour the real time aspects, so for example when the microwave needs to cook for two minutes, it takes two minutes. He also says that he does not want an audience to be trapped in this woman’s world for three and a half hours. And you have the radio.

Leigh: I wonder would it be better if we were a little more bored? Often, I found myself listening to the radio rather than focussing on the character.

Jane: Turning the radio off towards the end does impact. That silence.

Leigh: Sure, that’s a powerful moment. You sense something’s about to happen. I did very much feel that Kroetz had great sympathy for this woman. She’s marginalised. She’s not wealthy or anything. The audience can readily identify with her. Extending this, do you think the play has a broader political dimension?

Jane: Yes. When Kroetz wrote it as a young man he was in his communist phase. He was saying: look what the state does to these people.

Leigh: Not just the State. Capitalism.

Jane: Very much. You go to work, you come home, you rinse and repeat. There is no connection to any real dreams or aspirations. He was railing against the wheels of capitalism. What it asks of workers and what it asks of individuals.

Leigh: The individual cost.

Jane: Exactly.

Leigh: And perhaps Kroetz would think that anti-capitalist note is a good one for us to end on. Jane, thanks once again, and good luck for the next project. I look forward to it very much.

Jane Longhurst is an award-winning actor, broadcaster with ABC Local Radio, voice artist and popular presenter of events big and small.

Leigh Swinbourne has published two collections of stories and a novel. He has six plays digitally published with Australian Plays Transform. You can read about his work here.

Rebecca West described Christina Stead in her early career as ‘insanely ambitious’. Nowhere is this ambition more manifest than in her second novel, ‘The Beauties and Furies’, set in Paris in the mid- 1930s where Stead was living and working. It’s not a long book―‘House of All Nations’ which followed it is over twice its length―nor is the story original, on the contrary: a bored English housewife, Elvira, leaves her dull steady husband, Paul, for an affair in Paris with a younger student, Oliver, all playing out with predictable consequences. There are Stead’s standard leftist political rants, but these are just persiflage; bourgeois values, despite being mocked, seemed to hold up pretty well by the end. Rather, Stead’s ambition is in the extended prose phantasmagorias with which she ‘gussies up’ her familiar tale of ‘illicit’ love.

At one point Oliver opines: ‘All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor’. Since this novel is the first, it is almost as though Stead is challenging herself to craft an extraordinary work from ordinary material. ‘The trials of three’ refers not so much to the abandoned husband, who does make a cameo appearance, but rather to a Machiavellian businessman lace-buyer, Marpurgo, whom Elvira meets on the Paris train and acts as an arch manipulator between the lovers.  The character dynamic here, and the setting, is recognisably the same as that in Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Magician’, which Stead would have known, however she moves off on a different tack.

There are a few other players in a fairly restricted cast: Marpurgo’s squabbling business partners, an eccentric family of traditional lace makers (capitalism is destroying art and craft), and a Baudelaire reciting actress/grisette, Blanche, mascot of underworld Paris. But largely we are focussed on the trials and tribulations of the Elvira and Oliver and Marpurgo. The characters generally have not the depth and development of those in Stead’s first novel, ‘Seven Poor Men of Sydney’, and this is probably because she has invested less in them.

I mention Maugham but Stead’s literary inspiration here is Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, very much in writers’ minds at the time, in which, again, an ordinary tale is gussied up in an extraordinary way. Thankfully, Stead does not adopt a stream-of-consciousness technique, so her book is easily readable. Where she takes her cue from Joyce is in the prose flights mentioned above which are surrealist/Freudian ‘trips’ or nightmares, most like the dramatised ‘brothel’ section of Ulysses. Whereas in ‘Ulysses’ all the mythical and Freudian paraphernalia is fully integrated into the text, in Stead’s book it is as though the characters, particularly Marpurgo, occasionally just happen to drop into a ‘Daliesque’ landscape which they proceed to describe in vivid linguistic detail. What these ‘trips’, ‘flights’, have to do with the actual story at hand is not readily apparent, to this reader anyway.

So one’s appreciation here hinges pretty much on whether you take to this, or can get into it in some way. It’s almost as if Stead has placed a kind of surrealist template or transfer over her work, but to what end? The only time it makes direct dramatic sense is when Oliver is actually drugged by Marpurgo so his hallucinations have rational (of sorts) basis. Virtually all of Marpugo’s conversations are in this wild baroque vein, and so completely incredible. Even in Paris cafés people don’t talk like this, and hardly anyone anywhere thinks like this, but if the language employed is brilliant, gorgeous and imaginative enough, does that matter?   

While I can hardly ignore that ‘Ulysses’ is one of the touchstones of (relatively) modern literature, it is a work I have never taken to. Despite the unrelenting display of amazing linguistic and imaginative fireworks, to cut short a potentially very long aside, my basic problem is that it is largely about Joyce and not itself. This may be a writer’s rather than a reader’s prejudice or a classicist’s rather than a romantic’s, whatever, but I have always liked to keep, as much as possible, in a literary sense, the object in clear view with minimum clutter. There is an episode in Stead’s novel where the lovers travel to Fontainebleau in winter in which a fantastic landscape is only about themselves, and it is profound and moving.

But let me not knock ambition, and the promise here is evident, however it would find a more powerful and complete expression in Stead’s later works. Still, if this kind of thing is your cup of morphia, don’t let me dissuade you.

Hazel Rowley’s biography of Australian ex-pat novelist Christina Stead paints a portrait of a woman possessed by demons, however melodramatic this sounds, but also herself possessing literary genius. So as readers, we can, at a remove, feel the grip of these demons (and they are many and varied), that harried this unhappy self-crossed individual.

A miserable childhood is often prerequisite for a successful artist, rage and guilt great goads. So it is here. Stead escaped from parochial isolated 1920s Sydney, and her family, chasing love mostly but also experience in the wider world and found both, but not in the ways she expected. Fortunately, for her and us, she was blessed early on to find a partner, American Bill Blake, faithful (unlike Stead) and loving, who quickly recognised her talent and encouraged and supported her throughout their shared life. When he died she could no longer write.

They led a peripatetic existence, shifting from Europe to America and back as fortune, or lack of it, dictated. Which means, while relating this, Rowley shows how the couple were enmeshed in major historical movements and events, Communism, the Spanish Civil War, World War Two, the Cold War, giving a fascinating keyhole perspective of much of the twentieth century. Which is reflected in Stead’s writing.

While back in Sydney, her great counterpart, Patrick White, having decisively left Europe and its high culture, was also turning out a succession of masterpieces. His fiction, like most writers, tends to revisit a confined number of concerns, and certainly stylistically, is always recognisably his. Stead’s prose (I think) displays a wider range, fitted to wider purpose, always accomplished, whether expressionistic, lyrical, satirical or dramatic.

But Rowley demonstrates convincingly that it was the above-mentioned demons that inspired her greatest work. So, in ‘The Man who Loved Children’, her most acclaimed book, Stead turbo-charges the family dysfunctions of her childhood and adolescence to create an intense Dostoevsky-meets-the-Greeks psychodrama that could not credibly have been her actual day-to-day lived experience, but the reader is swept away anyway, although I must admit I was happy enough to finish it, almost as emotionally exhausted and wasted as the characters.

Anger, never an attractive emotion, is Stead’s major spur in many of her novels, and while personal anger obviously distorts narrative balance and psychology, it definitely gives a black power to the writing. It also lost Stead a lot of friends, particularly women, upon seeing themselves caricatured one after another (Stead bizarrely refused to change even minor biographical details) as greedy jealous over-sexed harpies. The men fared better, but not always.

Rowley does not disguise her distaste for Stead’s bad behaviour on and off the page, but at least aims to contextualise if not excuse it. A bit of overreach in Freudian interpretation, although the temptation here is certainly strong. At its heart is Stead’s vexed relationship with her father, noted naturalist David Stead, glamourous and polarising, who, like Stead, made difficulties for himself and others through an often pig-headed intransigence.

After early successes, Stead fell off the radar, partly due to McCarthyism, but nevertheless continued to write while she and Blake wandered perilously penurious through post-war Europe. Then unexpected re-discovery with the 1965 reprint of ‘The Man…’ Another short season in the sun before further personal difficulties and Bill’s declining health shadowed things again.

The final years in Australia, despite some belated acclaim, were on the whole pretty pathetic. Although growing old is no joke, entertaining crazy self-delusions and drinking like a fish never help matters. In an age of increasing self-promotion this is one writer that did not aid her cause. Which considering the outstanding quality of the work, is a pity.

Hazel Rowley has seized a good opportunity, to write the first comprehensive biography of a significant literary powerhouse, still largely neglected. Like Stead, she spoke German and French and lived in most of the countries Stead lived in. As well, Stead’s life is a fascinating story, both in itself, and also in the many things it touches.

Thoroughly researched, cleanly written, well indexed etc. I cannot imagine this bio being eclipsed any time soon, if ever. A fine book on a great writer.