Arabian Nights Barbie and Ken

It's not too late to get these for your Valentine.

I find the existence of these dolls, made in 1964, more surreal that anything in the Nights. Scheherezade is, according to the packaging, "absolutely ravishing" (how can we disagree?) "in a spectacularly patterned skirt, with a matching top embellished with golden highlights. She wears pink and blue veils in her hair that spiral gracefully around her, adding an air of mystery." Sultan Ken wears "a pink tunic" (racy!) "with golden trim over billowy golden pants. A blue-and-purple sash ties at his waist and serves as a place to rest his trusty sword. His colourful turban shines with a faux ruby and is topped with a golden plume." And what a moustache he has! On which note, may I just point out that Marina Warner's excellent book on the Nights, Stranger Magic, has, pleasingly, an entire chapter on Magnificent Moustaches.

The right kind of snow

This was the view from the train on the way up to Edinburgh to rehearse my new short play for Agent 160 Theatre. I'd woken up to heavy snow (a foot at least) in London, and the headlines all read TRAVEL CHAOS and THE BIG CHILL but The Show Must Go On so I packed emergency tea, emergency chocolate, emergency gin and an emergency party top in case I got stranded and was compelled to party. And apart from a rather worrying stop somewhere between Peterborough and York, where I took this picture, it was fine...delayed by only 45 minutes. Which is pretty miraculous for a snowy day's rail travel in the UK. Obviously it was not, this time, the wrong kind of snow. And after a lovely day of rehearsals, I'm on my way back, with velvety black skies outside, and the excitement of a play being just about to startle into life.

"All I ask, is the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me..."

This is cross-posted from the Agent 160 Theatre blog, where there's plenty more on the company—a new female writer-led company which launches in February with fourteen new short plays by women (including one by me), premiering in Glasgow, Cardiff and London.

Virginia Woolf said “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds”. And so I went to Westminster Abbey.

But the Abbey information lady had no idea who she was. “Could you spell that please?” she asked. And “Who was he?” But when we found her, she got excited: “She was a spy!” Agent 160 was her spy name, in fact. But she wasn't listed as a writer. Which was odd. And she's not in Poets' Corner (why not?) but in the Cloister. And the inscription on her grave—"Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough againft Mortality"—seems a bit harsh. But her works do live on.

We don’t know much about her. Maybe spying made her secretive; maybe she liked inhabiting other roles, speaking other voices. She called herself a "playwright of many voices" and was evidently an inventive self-fashioner—and a dedicated libertine. Woolf called “shady and amorous”. Born in Kent in 1640, possibly a barber’s daughter, possibly a Catholic, she married at 24, but two years later she was single and spying for Charles II in Europe and in Surinam, where she met the African slave who inspired her great anti-slavery novel Oroonoko. Charles II didn't pay his spies promptly, and after she found herself in jail for debt, she gave up espionage and took up her pen, first as a hack and then in the theatre. Her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, was produced in 1671, when she was 31. Ten years later Nell Gwyn starred in her hit, The Rover. She died in 1689.

 

In a preface she wrote to The Lucky Chance, she wrote:

Had the Plays I have writ come forth under any Man's Name, and never known to have been mine; I appeal to all unbyast Judges of Sense, if they had not said that Person had made as many good Comedies, as any one Man that has writ in our Age; but a Devil on't the Woman damns the poet.... All I ask, is the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in... If I must not, because of my Sex, have this Freedom...I lay down my Quill.”

That was in 1686. According to Sphinx Theatre Company, three hundred years later, only 17 per cent of plays produced in the UK are by women. Which is why I think Agent 160’s so necessary.

If life were a rom com #1

On the Tube a week or so ago, it was so early that everyone else in the carriage was asleep and on the way back from working through the night, or drunk and dazed from a particularly heavy evening out, all apart from me and a man doing a Rubik's cube. I know; so retro!

What made it particularly unearthly was how early it was, on a Sunday, and that I was only half-awake myself. I'd stayed over at a friend's, and let myself out early as I had a train to catch. I'd tiptoed out, and shut the front door behind me, and sat on the step to put my boots on, and when I looked up, five foxes were staring at me. It wasn't as light as I had thought it was, and no one human was stirring. I walked through the silent, deserted streets, not entirely sure where the nearest Tube was, trailing my fox friends in my wake. By the time I found a station, the sky was pink and grey and my fox posse had gone. I was so sleepy that I couldn't really read; my eyes kept snagging on random words and dragging the sense apart.

I looked up just as the man solved the Rubik's cube.

Now I know there are tricks for how to do this but I don't think he was using them. I think it was the first time he had solved the cube. He didn't scramble it back but turned it round and round, marvelling at it. And then he looked up, for someone to share his triumph, and there was only me, and I couldn't disappoint him, so I did a little air punch and mouthed "yay!" and he did a little air punch and mouthed "yay!" right back at me.

And then it was my stop.

If life were a rom com, we'd be getting married.

On being part of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora

Towards the end of last year I was interviewed, along with two other second generation Iraqi Jews, for a documentary presented by Alan Yentob, produced by Hannah Marshall. Sadly we ended up on the cutting room floor but Jewish Renaissance magazine has posted a snippet of the interview here. And the recipes for the food I made are here.

Dance more

was my only new year's resolution. Usually I make heaps but this year I had so much to be getting on with, what with writing a children's play set in Baghdad, trying to finish off a full-length play, and starting a book, that really my resolution should have been work more but hopefully I'll be doing that anyway. And over the last couple of months my seizures have been much better (I hope this won't turn out to be magical thinking again), so I thought I could risk dance more. I say risk because dancing when you have seizures is not easy. I can't do flashing lights. I can't dance with strangers unless I warn them I might fall over etc. (and I haven't found that to be the ideal response "would you like to dance?"). Dance teachers often panic when I explain. And if, scurrilously, I don't explain and hope for the best, it's unethical (and makes me anxious). But I'd rather be defiant than defeated, so here goes...there's some great dance classes on youtube, my lovely friends have promised to take me dancing (and carry me home, if necessary), and even though so far this year I've been mainly snuffling about the house with sinusitis, writing in bed, and reading Jilly Cooper's Riders (research for the book, honest), I wasn't going to break a resolution so I've been dancing in my kitchen. And, finally, to show willing, I've written a short play, about bellydancing, and identity, and the joy of reinvention (all in fifteen minutes!) and it's going on in February, commissioned and produced by a brilliant new theatre company led by female playwrights called Agent 160.

More light

Happy last-day-of-Chanukah! This is the menorah I've had since I was little. It's rickety but I love its brass curlicues and the way the doors open to reveal the ten commandments and I love lighting candles every night. Be warned: this is probably the schmaltziest post I've written all year, but schmaltz really just means oil and Chanukah's the festival of oil as well as light, so there.

So this year, Chanukah coincided with the winter solstice. That morning, I woke up early, in a house in Cullercoats, near Newcastle. I'd gone up the night before to see my friend Stephen Sharkey's heartwarming, romantic play The Glass Slipper, and despite all the wine we'd drunk to celebrate how good it was, I'd woken to the sun rising pink and gold and perfect over the fabulously bleak and rugged Northumbrian coast. I pulled wellington boots and a coat on over my pajamas and went to stand in the sea, and thought about the tilted spin of the earth and the days getting longer and how the festivals of light (Chanukah and solstice) had coincided, and how that felt somehow lucky.

And now I've lit the last Chanukah candles of the year, and the chicken we roasted for Christmas is simmering away to make chicken soup, and as ever, I'm trying to think up the best resolutions to ensure the happiest possible 2012, but for now I just wanted to make a wish, in general, for more light.