The puddle and the Rose

"Bring a jumper," said the box office man at The Rose; "we can't heat it because of the puddle". Philip Henslowe's 1587 theatre, discovered in 1989, during a routine archaeological excavation after an office block was knocked down, survived because the marshy Thames bank preserved the foundations. Once the archaeologists brought them to light (they've excavated two-thirds, and are fundraising for the rest) they started to dry and crack. So they made a permanent puddle. The actors perform on a sliver of the original stage, the rest of the theatre stretching out beyond them, a big dark space, surreally lit by red fibre-optic cables that outline the foundations and glimmer eerily on the water. I love the Globe, of course, but the Rose felt more Shakespeare-haunted. Or maybe it was the cold that was making me shiver.

Dancing with scrolls

My great-grandfather was a rabbi and scribe and the Av Beth Din in Baghdad. His name was Rabbi Ezra Murad Hakham David and when he died in 1936, his four daughters and one son all prayed they'd have sons so they could name them after him, and within a couple of years there were five Ezras, including my father. I was in Jerusalem last week because two of his Torah scrolls were being given a new home in a synagogue there.

He wrote lots of Torah scrolls (each took a year) and would dip in the mikveh each morning before writing.

In 1950, when most of the Jews left Iraq, his brother managed to take two of the scrolls. Which was pretty miraculous as most Jews couldn't take much; my other great-grandfather even had his medicine confiscated. But this great-great-uncle arrived at the airport with a scroll under each arm, and told the airport staff that the scrolls were holy and if they mishandled them, bad things would happen in heaven—and it worked.

The scrolls survived the journey to Israel, they survived a fire in a storage place in Jaffa, and were used in various synagogues, and now they've found this new home, in a synaogogue some cousins go to.

The script was still beautiful and dark and clear on these scrolls, written in 1894, and the rabbis put a stitch for each of our names, right into the vellum. It was unexpectedly moving, even though, being a girl, I was watching from behind a mechitza...

Finally, the men danced with the scrolls and put them one by one back into the ark.

Jewish carnivalesque circa 1948

My favourite museum in Tel Aviv is the Eretz Israel Museum. Right now the star exhibit is a huge ceramic cockroach, but there's also an amazing show by 84-year-old photographer Rachel Fisher. She survived Auschwitz, got home to Transylvania, married her childhood sweetheart and set off for Palestine in 1947 only to get banged up in a Cyprus detention camp.

She turned a tent into a darkroom (painting a kerosene lamp red and setting the exposure by opening the tent flap). Her pictures capture the extraordinary resilience of the detainees (52,000 of them), who set up barber's shops, dentist's surgeries, sculpture workshops, and even had weddings in the camps. My favourite picture (appropriately, given the date) shows them celebrating Purim. There are boys in lipstick, girls in suits and one young man in a moustache and greasy flick, playing Hitler. It seemed the most resilient thing of all—for a survivor of the war and probably the concentration camps, now stuck in another camp, his future uncertain, to find the guts and humour to lampoon Hitler. It was properly thrilling, properly carnivalesque. Happy Purim!

Salt and chalk circles and fiery rum

In Stewart Lee's brilliant How I Escaped My Certain Fate (probably the best book about performing I've read—and good on writing too), there's a transcript of a live show in which he talks about a festival in the Languedoc abou tthe art of the medieval bouffon...

And what they do is they, they run through all these French mountaintop villages. And outside the baker's, they make fun of the baker. And outside the town hall, they'll take the piss out of the mayor or whatever. But before they did stuff about the church, right, outside the church they drew this kind of shape round them in the dirt, so they were kind of protected from prosecution, if you like, under the kind of magic spell of comedy.

At this point in the show, he'd draw a circle on the stage in chalk before he started making jokes about religion—and of course this was after the whole Jerry Springer fandango. He says in a footnote...

Re-reading this makes my skin tingle. I am not religious or superstitious, but it always felt great stopping to draw the circle, engaging in the briefest nod towards ritual magic. I shared a dressing room with Ram, a Haitian voodoo band, for a month in Edinburgh in 2000. Before every show they poured rum on the floor, set fire to it and danced over it, as a good-luck charm. How I envied them the certainty of their belief. Before I go on I just have a cup of tea and go to the toilet.

I don't perform, but I ever have to go on stage, I carry salt, to ward off the Evil Eye. It feels a bit mad and irrational, but then again there was the time I didn't and my hair caught fire. Sometimes even having my work on stage feels dangerous so I scatter a few grains of salt somewhere out of the way, just to be safe.

Top Tudor clichés

So sometimes when I really can't come up with any ideas for myself, I put out a plea to the hive-mind on Facebook. The other day I asked for Tudor clichés. Wow, my friends really delivered...

• black teeth
• Henry VIII chucking chicken drumsticks over his shoulders
• gout
• banquets
• men in tights
• jousting
• women getting their heads chopped off
• that weird thing where they stuff a pigeon inside a duck inside a turkey or something
• forming new religions
• poisoned dresses
• hunting stags
• romps in corridors next to stone pillars
• wigs on bald women
• big silver chalices stolen/liberated from monasteries
• Greensleeves being played at every possible occasion
• huge dresses
• dark wooden four poster beds
• comedy codpieces
• irritating professional jester types
• sexual desire and political intrigue negotiated concurrently by means of flashing glances
• jousting, lances, early-modern knob-gags about the aforementioned
• serious mental illness
• tiny bands of frightened Jews
• mean-looking Spaniards
• top-totty English pirates
• gay Frenchmen
• Scots that are impossible to understand
• tapestry
• venison
• MEAD
• men wearing earrings
• birds of prey as men's wristware
• lutes; hundreds and hundreds of lutes; anything that isn't a codpiece, a slashed doublet or a massive fistful of rings should be a lute
• madrigals
• pomanders
• quills
• parchment
• sexually-transmitted nastinesses
• streets running with swine and effluvia
• manuscripts peppered with fs and ys
• pearls
• Renaissance men
• explorers
• heretical astronomers
• galleried houses
• York and Lancaster roses
• LEECHES
• quills with great feathery bits on the end
• lots of yellowy paper
• secret notes and letters
• boatmen on the Thames

• cheeky urchins with dirt on their faces
• (poisoned) royal food tasters  
• endless arguments over transubstantiation ending in death  
• large drumsticks torn lustily from bird (which is likely poisoned...)

Seventeen per cent

is just one of the shocking figures I heard at last year's Vamps, Vixens and Feminists conference run by Sphinx Theatre Company. It's the percentage of produced plays in the UK that are written by women. Directors have it slightly better; 23% of directors of produced plays are women. And 35% of roles on the British stage are for women. (Though Equity is campaigning to change this.)

I think part of the problem is in that while men might get commissioned to write about anything at all, on the basis that their views will be objective, women are often asked to write from our subjective experience. The resulting plays are then seen as "women's plays", and the playwrights then marginalised even more. In my more strident feminist days I used to say "I don't want to be the margin, I want to be the centre!" I still think it applies. I wish it didn't.

And yes, there are more important things to be worrying about on International Women's Day, well,  yes absolutely there are, but if women aren't heard, and aren't visible, or only 17% of us are (or 23% or 35%), then how will be understood, how will we tell stories and laugh ourselves out of old patterns and how will anything change?

Seeing (and believing) things we know to be untrue

I just watched Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of FW Murnau's 1922 silent chiller (a film so scary that it spawned another film, Shadow of a Vampire, with the conceit that Murnau's star, Max Schreck, was a real vampire).

While Murnau's film is very Weimar, drenched with looming horror, Herzog's is ancient and visceral. There's some brilliantly batty over the top acting (in his 1976 curio Heart of Glass, he got the actors to perform under hypnosis, and this film feels similarly underwater) and an extraordinary sequence about the plague. Rats swarm over the town (the citizens of Delft, where it was filmed, were not, apparently, thrilled), and Isabelle Adjani's Lucy wanders the streets, amid funerals and plague-stricken desperadoes eating their last suppers in silks and jewels, or dancing wildly.

She defines faith as "the amazing human capacity that makes it possible for us to see things that we know are untrue". (Stoker's original line was "that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue".) Faith often involves believing in things you can't see; only rationalists claim that seeing is believing. But she is making the point that because she has faith, she can overcome her reason and her knowledge of the world and be the only one who can see the evil Count Dracula is wreaking and so (eventually) she can stop him. And it's an interesting twist on how we behave in the face of plague and other disasters; in Daniel Defoe's amazing Journal of the Plague Year the plague's horrible progress across London creates a hunger for fortune-telling, prophecies, old wives' tales, religious fever, with ersatz prophets and quacks railing in the streets. Herzog turns that on its head; when Adjani screams in the town square, she's telling the truth.