Postfeminism

Miranda Cook and David Hartley, photography by Alex Brenner

So I did a bit of directing last week and it was fun. Admittedly I cunningly avoided the real hard slog of putting on a play by doing a tiny two-hander (with an enormous title...Postfeminism) in a very supportive atmosphere (at The Miniaturists). I don't remotely want to be a director but I wanted to explore the play without too much mediation. To play with it a bit with two very lovely actors, and then to see if it worked. And if it might be the seed of something bigger (I think it might...hooray!) and the only way to do it is, well, to do it. And I can't really be more coherent about it than that. Pleasingly, it even got a mini review from the West End Whingers.

DisenTangled

Given my fascination with hair, Rapunzel was always going to be a core text so I was excited Disney were making a film of it. But I discovered via Feministing that Rapunzel is now not the heroine but a secondary character. The lead is a hero (a hero?) called Flynn Rider. What? According to the producers he's "an infamous bandit" who "meets his match in the girl with the 70 feet of magical golden hair"—this according to the film's producer. The film's been renamed Tangled to make it appeal to boys as well as girls.

I went back to the Brothers Grimm. A woman, finally pregnant after years of trying, gets a craving for rampion (also called rapunzel, and in danger of going extinct). Her husband steals some from their neighbour...who turns out to be an enchantress, and demands the unborn child as recompense. She calls the child Rapunzel and locks her away in a tower

which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window. When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and cried: "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair to me." Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it.

One day a prince hears Rapunzel's singing, is captivated and asks her to let down her hair. Once in the tower, they start to plan an escape. But she unwittingly reveals the secret to the enchantress, who cuts off her hair and dispatches her to a desert. She gloats that the prince will never see Rapunzel again, he leaps out of the tower in horror, and falls into thorns which blind him. The ending is extraordinary:

Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went towards it, and when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again, and he could see with them as before. He led her to his kingdom where he was joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterwards, happy and contented.

Disney's had to go pretty far from that to get to Tangled as is clear from the current trailer. It begins with Flynn escaping prison. The titles say it all:

He's fearless. He's dangerous. But the kingdom's greatest thief just picked the wrong place to hide. He's seen it all. She's been grounded. Like..FOREVER. It takes two get...Tangled.

The feminist in me hates the change of focus. This earlier trailer shows what might have been; it's narrated by Rapunzel who calls her magic hair "a gift" and plangently expresses her own dilemma: "I've been looking out of a window for eighteen years. Dreaming."

But you couldn't call the new Rapunzel passive. She uses her hair as a lasso, a weapon, and a swing. She's impervious to Flynn's cheesy flirting, and when he asks her to let down her hair, she does with such force that she knocks him flat.

And the writer in me is excited by the chutzpah of such a radical shift in point of view. There's something thrilling about it. I'm looking forward to Tangled.

The Thousand and Second Night

Oliver Rix, Charlene Craig and Jonas van Thielen

Some gorgeous pictures just came in from Nicholas Kornum for my play, The Thousand and Second Night, so here's a bit more about it. I wrote it for 24 actors-in-training at LAMDA where it is on now, directed by Hannah Eidinow.

1938. Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth is in Paris, in exile from the Nazis, living out of a suitcase, reporting on the fall of Europe for any papers that will publish him and drinking himself to death.

He begins what starts out as his most frivolous novel yet. The Tale of the Thousand and Second Night is inspired by a visit to Vienna by the Shah of Persia in the 1870s. He causes a diplomatic crisis when he sees a countess at a ball and demands that she join his harem for the night. Refusal is impossible, but so is asking the countess to comply. So a prostitute lookalike is found to substitute. The Shah, none the wiser but oddly unsatisfied, gives her a string of pearls. But pearls are unlucky...

Georgia Maguire, Sarah-Jayne Butler and Naomi Sheldon

As he writes it, Roth's own life gets bleaker. The novel starts as a fairytale but gets darker and more grotesque. My play charts Roth's slide into despair, as he starts to feel, like Scheherezade, that only art can save us.

Nicholas Jacobs

If you would like to read the script (in a post-production draft which can be performed by a cast of 16) please get in touch.

William Donaldson and Tom Berish

Charlene Craig and Keira Malik

Dominic Allburn

Oliver Rix

SuzyMcClintock and Kemi-Bo Millar

Philip Scott-Wallace and Tom Berish