Samantha Ellis

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

2012-01-30T10:34:00.004Z

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

2012-01-26T09:51:00.000Z

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

2012-01-16T18:02:00.000Z

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

2012-01-09T17:47:00.000Z

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

2011-12-27T18:15:00.000Z

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.

"What would you think if we was the last two people on earth?"

2011-12-16T11:26:00.001Z

is what one lonely character asks another in Robert Holman's beautiful, startling, scabrous play Jonah and Otto. I've been reading two-handers because I'm writing one. Actually I'm writing two. If I combined them I could have a quadrille. One is a short for Agent 160, of which more soon, the other is one I've been working on for a while. And I've been wondering if all two-handers are about that sensation of two people on their own, with no one else in the world to rescue them from each other.

Two-handers can be duels—conflicts where one character must lose, or even die. Or they can be love stories—dances where two people connect, or fail to. But I love the ones that are also about the different roles we end up playing in our relationships...like the moment in John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea where angry, inarticulate Danny tells Roberta, the broken woman he's spent the night with, that he forgives her. She mocks him for talking as if he's a priest; who is he to forgive her? And he replies "I am whatever I gotta be". Because sometimes you do have to become someone's priest. Or their mother, friend, saviour, nemesis...

I'm still working out how to write mine. But here are some of the ones I've been reading for inspiration, all brilliant in very different ways...

Robert Holman's Jonah and Otto
John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea

Amy Rosenthal's Henna Night

Owen McCafferty's Days of Wine and Roses (adapted from the film)

David Greig's Midsummer
Dennis Kelly's After the End
Georgia Fitch's adrenalin...heart
Sarah Phelps's Modern Dance for Beginners
Duncan Macmillan's Lungs

The Jane Austen Underpass

2011-12-02T10:38:00.001Z

In an (otherwise gorgeous) walk around Jane Austen's old haunts, I came across this. At first I thought Austen would be horrified at having her name and silhouette splashed over the entrance to a skanky underpass. But then I thought actually, she might have found it as funny as I did.

Oh and if you haven't listened to The Last Jews of Iraq; it's on listen again for four more days.

The last seven Jews of Iraq

2011-11-25T13:23:00.004Z

Just wanted to let you all know about The Last Jews of Iraq, on Radio 4 this Tuesday at 8pm, presented by Alan Yentob and produced by Hannah Marshall. I was going to be in it—cooking an Iraqi meal. But the documentary's focus changed after Wikileaks published details about the last seven Jews in Iraq.

While it's amazing that there are any Jews in Iraq at all, I also find it incredibly sad that there are only seven. After all, we were there for 2600 years, and in the 1940s, Baghdad was one-third Jewish.

And as I can't go there myself, or speak the language—when I try, my family say I sound like I've got meatballs in my mouth—the only way I can connect is cook the food. Whereupon, of course, I literally have meatballs in my mouth. This is the meal I cooked.

Sambusek bi tawa—chickpea crescents

For the filling, take one can of chickpeas and bash them up with a tablespoon of warm water to a coarse, chunky mash. Chop up four onions small and fry on a very low heat until they are golden. Add them to the chickpeas, and mix in a teaspoon of ground cumin, a teaspoon of turmeric, and salt and pepper.

For the dough, mix 400g self-raising flour and a teaspoon of salt with 250ml lukewarm water. Knead to make a soft dough. Form into a ball, cover with cling film and chill.

Roll the dough out thinly. Use a tumbler to cut out circles. Put a teaspoon of chickpea filling in the middle of each circle and fold it over. Then crimp the ends of each crescent together.

Heat some sunflower oil in a frying pan till it's medium hot and fry the sambusek in batches, turning them over halfway through. When they're golden and puffed on both sides, they're ready to go on a plate covered in a couple of layers of kitchen roll. They're nice warm or cold.

Ras asfoor wiya shwandar—literally "little birds' heads with beetroot", actually beetroot and meatballs

Chop four onions very small. Mix them with 400g of lamb mince, a handful of finely chopped parsley, a teaspoon of allspice, a teaspoon of ground cumin and half a teaspoon of cinnamon. With damp hands, start forming tiny meatballs, putting them on a tray lined with cling film.

Fry an onion, chopped small, gently in sunflower oil. Add the meatballs all at once in one layer. Once they're browned, add boiling water to cover them, as well as about three tablespoons of tomato puree, and a cupful of lemon juice and the same of caster sugar. Season it and taste it; if it's not quite sweet and sour, add more lemon or sugar. Simmer for twenty minutes. Then add cooked beetroot in slices. Simmer it a little longer with the lid off, to reduce it all down. Serve it at once, or reheat it later.

Rice and all that

I made white basmati rice, with half a teaspoon of turmeric to turn it yellow. On top, I scattered barberries which I'd soaked in warm water for an hour then drained and fried very slowly in sunflower oil. Also, an onion, sliced into skinny crescents and fried slowly, with the lid on, till they're dark. And I made a salad out of cucumbers and tomatoes, chopped small, mixed with chopped parsley and mint, and dressed in lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper, and sumac.

Masafan—chewy macaroons.

I've already done the recipe for them here.

For more Iraqi recipes, have a look at my friend Linda Dangoor's lovely cookbook, Flavours of Babylon. Another lovely friend of mine, Marina Benjamin (who blogs at A Garden Among Fires) has written a fantastic history of the Jews of Iraq called Last Days in Babylon and Rachel Shabi (also a friend! also brilliant!) is the author of a book that follows the Iraqi-Jewish story to Israel.

RIP Shelagh Delaney—who proved women can and should be as angry as men

2011-11-21T17:58:00.003Z

I've just been reading the obituaries for Shelagh Delaney.

Even now the plot of her 1958 play A Taste of Honey sounds radical; it's about a teenage girl, her irresponsible mother, her drunk stepfather, a black sailor who gets her pregnant and a gay art student who helps with the baby. I first read it when I was writing a column for the Guardian about famous first nights. I found it so brave and mesmerising that I massively over-identified with Delaney, and when I came to read the box of press cuttings in the Theatre Museum's archive, I felt gutted at the ones that weren't completely positive. Luckily most of them were—my column on the premiere is here.

I love Joan Littlewood, who directed it, saying Delaney was "the antithesis of London's Angry Young Men. She knows what she is angry about." But the best compliment came from Kenneth Tynan who said:

Miss Delaney brings real people on to her stage, joking and flaring and scuffling and eventually, out of the zest for life she gives them, surviving.

It felt, and still feels, like a manifesto for the kind of play we all should be writing. RIP Shelagh Delaney.

Celery is not a feminist issue

2011-11-18T09:29:00.001Z

Talking to my best friend the other day about celery, I said I'd eaten so much of it when I was a teenager because of the negative calories myth, chomping whole stalks of it, that when I hit my feminist stride and decided dieting was for retrosexists, I went cold turkey on celery. In my postfeminist late twenties, I rediscovered rom coms, embraced cupcakes but somehow never quite got round to letting celery back into my life. Only in the last few years have I started eating it again—and very much enjoying it.

To which my friend said she just didn't like the taste. What, I said, so you have no ideological reason for not eating it? You just don't like the taste? The silence on the end of the phone made me realise that yet again I had been overthinking...

In other celery news, artist Carl Warner's celery forest is amazing.

Theatre really can be radical

2011-11-12T11:40:00.003Z

I once said to an activist friend of mine that I was tired of having to defend theatre—and immediately felt embarrassed because she's dedicated her life to fighting for a better future, and what have I done? But she said she didn't understand how anyone would think theatre isn't important. And yes, some playwrights are more overtly political but (she said) we don't all have to be Vaclav Havel to be making theatre that is engaged, provocative and heart-opening. I thought of her when my lovely publishers Nick Hern Books sent me this story about the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protestors doing a reading of Jerusalem. I loved Jez Butterworth's play. It said so much about what I think we all long for—an atavistic connection with landscape and wilderness, a sense of magic, myth and ritual, and an anarchic questioning of how things are. (I'd tried to write about these longings myself with the tree sit in Cling To Me Like Ivy.) And this protestors' story shows just how radical the play really is. When a play's really exciting, the conversation goes on long after the curtain falls (not that it has yet, on Jerusalem...you've got till January) And it keeps on going; my friend Matthew Morrison's written about it too.

We bake cake! And go to the theatre...

2011-11-08T16:43:00.002Z

I'm stuck in bed with flu but feeling very cheered by this embarrassingly lovely post my friend Maddy Costa has done over at her blog, all about Cling To Me Like Ivy, and cake.

A (not very impressive) black eye

2011-10-28T10:26:00.002+01:00

Last week, on my way to see my friend Ben Musgrave's play His Teeth at Only Connect (which is raw, startling, lyrical, gets inside the experience of being an illegal immigrant in London and is still on, so go), I had a seizure and fell on my face. I staggered into the theatre, my friends got me ice from the bar and I watched the play with it pressed to my face. In the morning, I called NHS Direct, established that my cheekbone wasn't broken and my brain wasn't leaking, and tried to work out what to do about my big meeting that afternoon. I was sorely (ha!) tempted to style it out, pretend to be a prizefighter, demand raw steaks but I decided instead to cover it up with clever use of makeup. Except I am terrible at using makeup, and I caught sight of myself in a shop window and winced. I arrived at the meeting looking like a woozy drag queen. I ended up just telling the story.

By day four the bruise had morphed into a (not very impressive) black eye and a greenish cheek. I was having brunch with a friend at the Roundhouse and a woman followed me into the loos and said "leave him. He's not worth it." I was so stunned by this terrible bit of dialogue that I wasn't able to muster a proper response. "It's not his fault," I began. She gave me a pitying look. "No, no. It really isn't his fault." When we finally emerged, I realised the whole café were giving him dirty looks.

It's fading now. To a writer, obviously, everything's material, but some things I'd rather have to make up than actually have to experience.

Living on the page

2011-10-20T17:56:00.002+01:00

Did you know LM Montgomery had written another heroine after Anne Shirley? Nope, me neither. Of course if you're Canadian, you'll know because Emily of New Moon is a major TV series. Please could someone show it here immediately. Because Emily Byrd Starr is brilliant.

She's a bolder, angrier Anne Shirley. She's also more committed to writing. She starts writing as a child; when she's unhappy she "writes it out". Later on, she hones her craft, withstands mockery and professional disappointment and makes it. And she burns her own work.

All the heroines of the girls' books I loved got their work burned. In Little Women, Jo's sister burns her book, Katy's work gets burned in What Katy Did, and in Frost in May, Nanda's book is cast into hellfire. But LM Montgomery spins the convention. Emily first burns her work to save it from being mocked by an unsympathetic aunt. Later there's a storyline which could be in a writer's primer.

A trusted friend tells her that her first novel is no good. It's "a pretty little story", he says, adding: "How could you write a real story? You've never LIVED." She burns the book and gives up writing. She agrees to marry him. For many, anguishing pages, they plan their wedding. But at last she breaks away. He eventually admits the book was good, and he trashed it out of envy. We've all had toxic critics. And it's easy to criticise him from a feminist perspective—of course, with the benefit of being both older and a man, of course he's been able to have a more obviously interesting life than Emily. But what I love is that eventually Emily realises something I've written about before: she doesn't need to wait to know who she is to start writing. It's not about living and then writing about it; the two activities are entwined. You work out who you are by writing it. You work out what you think by writing it. (Joan Didion agrees!) You can live on the page. I'm writing a play that is challenging everything I think about men, women, relationships, feminism, role models, desire and the enormous, unanswerable question of whether we have an essential self that never changes or whether, in fact, we can fashion ourselves into whoever we want to be. And it's incredibly exciting. And I have no idea, none, how it ends.

Stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way

2011-10-07T16:10:00.000+01:00

On my last day in Cambridge, a friend gave me a postcard of this Mondrian painting (it's called Tree) and scrawled on the back, this quote from Chekhov:

Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments...you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.

The card's been blu-tacked up above every desk I've ever had. It reminds me of discovering theatre in freshers' week when a couple of other students asked me if I'd write a play with them because they wanted a woman to write the women. The card reminds me of learning about theatre by just doing it, making my own work—and my own mistakes. It reminds me of the time I hauled a coffin across town for a vampire musical I'd written and the stares I got from passers-by. It reminds me of talking about how to make plays over cinnamon toast in the buttery next to the library, and staying up all night to read The Empty Space cover to cover, like a thriller. It reminds me of a student production of Uncle Vanya that made me cry and laugh and realise theatre could make me feel things and know things before I really felt or knew them in real life. And it reminds me of that last day, with the sun shining on my endless boxes, and people popping in and out of the rooms I shared in a Jacobean building in the wonderfully-named Walnut Tree Court, where the walls were half a metre thick and the windows were leaded and you always felt like you should be wearing some kind of bodice, and knowing that in a month I'd be doing the first play I'd done outside Cambridge, the first play I'd written on my own, a Generation X melodrama called The Candy Jar, which was bad, but had a lot of heart. And hoping it wouldn't be the last play I wrote. And—despite much stumbling, and more to come, I'm sure—I'm glad it wasn't.

Maria vs The Baroness

2011-10-03T19:44:00.002+01:00

So I caught twenty minutes of The Sound of Music the other day. I used to watch that film continually. It was the only video at my grandparents' house. Apart from Fiddler on the Roof. So it was Nazis or Cossacks or joining the conversation about my family's flight from Baghdad. Nazis, Cossacks, Iraqis; that was my weekend. And The Sound of Music had the best tunes.

Also I loved Captain von Trapp (gorgeous Christopher Plummer...and he was excellent in Beginners). But is it just me, or is he Rochester again? There he is, scary and brooding, and in comes the governess to wake him up to love (and music)...no wonder I got the message that women are supposed to redeem men.

Anyway, I'd forgotten how villainous Baroness Schräder is, scheming to snag Captain von Trapp, flirting with the Nazis, trying to get Captain von Trapp to flirt with the Nazis (like he ever would!), hopeless with the children. And after she catches Captain von Trapp, there's an amazing scene. She goes to Maria's room, in the guise of helping her dress for dinner, and opens with the suggestion that she wears "that lovely little thing you were wearing the other evening, when the captain couldn't keep his eyes off you". Maria is alarmed. The Baroness then turns soothing: "Come, my dear, we are women. Let's not pretend we don't know when a man notices us." When Maria says she hasn't done anything to attract him, the Baroness really hits home: "You don't have to, my dear. Nothing's more irresistible to a man than a woman who's in love with him." BOOM! "Don't take it to heart," she continues. "He'll get over it soon enough, I think. Men do, you know." By now, Maria is dragging out her carpet bag with a wild look in her eyes and all the Baroness has to do is deliver the final stinger: "I'm sure you'll make a very fine nun."

It's Classic Bitch Technique. I think I could have learned a lot from the Baroness. And she can be sweet. Well almost. When she calls herself "just wealthy, unattached little me, searching, just like you", it would be adorable if she hadn't carefully reminded him of her money. And she's hilarious. When Captain von Trapp and the children break into song, her face expresses my nauseous feelings entirely (Edelweiss is the world's sickliest song) and she acidly berates Max for not warning her: "I would have brought along my harmonica"!!

And she redeems herself in the end...when Captain von Trapp starts ineptly trying to get out of the engagement (he doesn't come right out and say "I prefer the singing nun with the bad haircut" like a real man would), she says firmly

I really don't think you're the right man for me. You're much too independent. And I need someone who needs me desperately. Or at least needs my money desperately. I've enjoyed every moment we've had together and I do thank you for that. Now, if you'll forgive me, I'll go inside, pack my little bags, and return to Vienna where I belong. And somewhere out there is a young lady who, I think, will never be a nun. Auf Wiedersehn, darling.

How's that for an elegant and dignified goodbye? And generous too. I started quite liking the Baroness.

A walk across the sea

2011-09-30T19:40:00.001+01:00

Just before Rosh Hashanah, my best friend and I went to Lindisfarne, the Holy Island. Because it's a tidal island, you have to walk across the sea to get there. And, you really do have to run the gauntlet of scary signs...

The first danger sign...

The second.

Now with graphics.

A refuge hut to climb into when the waves come

If the sea doesn't get you, the explosions and quicksand will

Or the guns

Or the rocks

Or you might slip!

This was the Bleakest Moment of Ultimate Fear

It was getting hilarious, how much supposed peril we were in. And then we arrived, and it was so serene. This serene:

Happy new year!

2011-09-28T18:13:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I was walking on the cliffs, crossing from England to Scotland and back again, and now I'm back in London and it's Rosh Hashanah so I've spent all the time I wasn't writing today (scratch that; all the time I should have been writing today) getting ready. First there was the problem of the quince. Yes, singular. One was about 15foot up my tree, and there was no getting it down. The second, I got down by using a ridiculous fruit picker. I felt like a loon, but it was worth it. The quince was satisfyingly heavy, and smelled faintly of orange blossom. It's poaching now, with some water, sherry, cinnamon and a bay leaf. We'll have half tonight and half tomorrow; it's the symbolism of the thing, really, eating the first fruits for the new year. I've also been running round getting figs, honey, pomegranates, carrots and a zillion other vegetables for a seven-vegetable stew (seven is the lucky number!), string beans, chives, dates—oh, and silver polish. Because my candlesticks look like they came from before the Flood and a friend recently described my housekeeping as "erratic" so obviously I have to prove him wrong! I'm nearly ready for all the wishing and symbolic destruction of enemies that goes on in the Sephardi seder. So: happy new year! I hope your years are round and sweet and full of good things.

Black swans

2011-09-23T18:05:00.001+01:00

All summer I've been seeing this black swan in St James's Park. It was fatter and fluffier than the sleek white swans. I just read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan.

Taleb writes that the medievals thought all swans were white. Then in 1697 Willem de Vlamingh saw black swans in Australia and millennia of empirical evidence were disproved. Knowledge is fragile, life is uncertain. You can suddenly see a black swan. Or neutrinos can go faster than light! The trick is to be robust in the face of negative black swans and expose ourselves to as many positive black swans as possible. I find this strangely comforting.

Taleb's first black swan came when the Lebanese civil war started in 1975. I grew up with people whose black swan was the loss of their home, culture, community and language—they were anxious but also amazingly resilient to change. They taught me that when the unthinkable happens, you cope and hope. They made me an optimist. Happy weekend!

Quinces are go!

2011-09-17T09:42:00.000+01:00

So just as I had given up on my quince tree for this year, two (two!) quinces appeared. I rang my mother and asked how much lowzina mel haiwa we could make with two quinces. Lowzina are diamond-shaped marzipan sweets flavoured with cardamom and lemon juice and quince and sometimes rosewater or orange flower water. They are ridiculously sweet—and satisfyingly scarlet. The answer was: not very much lowzina. So we'll have to see if more quinces appear. We're very early in the season, after all. But I'm going to do something with them for Rosh Hashanah, when one of the Iraqi Jewish new year traditions is to eat a "first fruit".

How Iraqi do you feel?

2011-09-10T10:13:00.000+01:00

I got asked this question this week, when I was interviewed for a radio documentary about Iraqi Jews (which involved me cooking dinner on the radio!!!...transmission date to be confirmed, but I will keep you posted). I think I feel, well, pretty Iraqi. I've just written a play about Gertrude Bell making the state of Iraq in the 1920s, dedicated to my grandfather, who first told me about her. I'm writing a play, for children, about my own childhood dreams of flying to Baghdad on a magic carpet. Out of my window, right now, I can see the quince tree I planted because quinces were one of the first fruits to be successfully transplanted from east to west and it makes me feel more rooted, just knowing it's there. (I'm still waiting, by the way, for it to fruit.) I use orange blossom perfume. I carry salt. And I put date syrup in my porridge. And, yes, porridge is more Little Lord Fauntleroy than Thousand and One Nights, but I'm second-generation, I can't be authentic either to London or Baghdad. And it's delicious.

Time machine

2011-09-04T17:52:00.001+01:00

So my new computer has a programme called Time Machine. I was scared to enable it in case I found myself flung into the Dark Ages or, you know, the Spanish Inquisition and couldn't get back. It would be just like me to be able to configure a programme but not then reconfigure it. Then I started thinking how great it would be to meet Boadicea or Gertrude Bell or Henry VIII. It turns out it is a data capture device. I'll leave you to imagine my disappointment.

Saints on the run

2011-09-02T18:06:00.000+01:00

I may have disagreed with my family on who might be my Mr Right but I've never had to grow a beard to escape a marriage. Which is exactly what happened to Saint Wilgefortis. Promised to a man she didn't like, she prayed she'd be made repulsive and woke on her wedding day with a full beard. Her father had her crucified. Years ago, I visited her shrine in Prague. It's bizarre. She looks like Jesus in a dress. I admire her pluck. Also her hirsuteness; how many men could grow a full beard (and moustache!) overnight?

Apparently her English name is Uncumber—and she's particularly venerated by women who want to escape (be disencumbered from) bad husbands.

It's amazing how many saints started out as women on the run from marriage. I met another when I was on holiday in the Lake District. St Bega was a seventh century Irish princess who fled the man her parents wanted to marry, crossing the Irish sea to land in Cumbria. She found it "covered with a thick forest, admirably adapted for a solitary life", she became a nun and performed miracles including healing people with her bracelet (I love a miracle that involves good jewellery) and causing a snowstorm which saved some monks from people who were trying to steal their land. I took this picture at her church. I hadn't meant to go there but I was glad to have encountered her.

Things I learned from Holly Golightly

2011-08-23T06:42:00.001+01:00

(In the book, not the film):

1. Elegance is “a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker...[and] an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness”

2. To achieve this one should live on cottage cheese and melba toast and martinis

3. How to escape a lech (climb out of the bathroom window, onto the fire escape and throw yourself on the mercy of your neighbour)

4. You can train yourself to fall in love with anyone

5. If you only have one piece of furniture it should be a bed

6. Some men laugh in bed and some men bite in bed (and the laughers are better than the biters)

7. If you learn about horses and baseball you’ll never be at a loss for words with a man and so they will love you

8. You can steel yourself for bad news by putting on lipstick

9. The most important thing is to have an honest heart.

Danger. Please keep away from irony.

2011-08-14T09:48:00.000+01:00

While London was burning and smashing up and shouting, I was in the Lake District facing nothing more threatening than marauding bees.

But as we watched the horrible images on the news, all the more unnerving in contrast to the hills and sheep and sky we could see out of the window, I took refuge in irony. The news that the only shop left untouched in Clapham was a bookshop. The tweet about the Turkish and Asian groups who chased the rioters away ("Bloody immigrants. Coming over here, defending our boroughs & communities.") The story that Iran wanted to send over a team of experts to investigate human rights violations.

But then I realised that yet again I was using irony instead of feeling. And as I'm trying to work out how to feel it, I've found this incredibly heartfelt (and important) piece by Russell Brand. I also like Zoe Williams's careful, beautifully-argued attempt to understand.

Reading my own work

2011-08-06T08:44:00.022+01:00

I once worked with a director who asks every playwright to read her whole play aloud. I found this completely agonising. I hate my voice, I know I don't read well, I stumble over words, I can't do accents, I get self-conscious. And reading a play with a cast of six, switching between roles, is surreal. Half an hour in, I asked the director how it could possibly be helping. And she told me: the humour came in different places from when she'd read it, and it felt a lot funnier now; the words I was stressing was helping her work out what the undercurrents of the play really were, what made it tick; and, most of all, she realised the play had to run fast. That's what convinced me to go on. I hate plays done slowly. I don't like pauses. I like to be racing to catch up with a play. I like my own plays to zoom along. So maybe it was worth the agony of reading it aloud.

Fastforward to this year and I've started doing readings of work in progress again, just round my kitchen table over a bottle of wine. There's nothing more useful than hearing a play. But I've realised that it's also quite useful to read. Not just because then I can set the play's manic breakneck pace but mostly because when you read, you're in it. You can't get away with anything. You feel immediately what does and doesn't work. And the good thing about being the playwright is that if the script turns out to be a dud, you can go away and rewrite it.

Con trick love

2011-08-02T17:12:00.007+01:00

I've been watching a lot of screwball comedies because I'm struggling to write one. Also I love the screwball heroines. They're raging, anarchic forces of nature. They make the ditsy heroines of later romcoms (Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Manhattan; all films I love) look stoic and sensible. They don't run around with leopards like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, or ruin their husbands' new marriages like Irene Dunne in My Favourite Wife, or jump off yachts like Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night or tear after stories like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. And the men don't stand a chance against these wilful, wicked women. They're straight men to these scatterbrained comediennes, and they end up reeling, not sure how they've been conned into love.

In The Lady Eve this is literal. Barbara Stanwyck is a con artist who travels the high seas with her card sharp father. When Henry Fonda's millionaire joins the ship, she wins him over, not by cooing and flirting like the other women on board, but by tripping him up, having a go at him for breaking her shoe and making him escort her back to her cabin. By which time he's gone—and grateful to be allowed to kneel at her feet and put on a new pair of shoes (vertiginous heels, naturally).

And by the end of the film, several con tricks later (spoiler alert!), she gets her man, she gets him to love her for who she is and she opens her heart. What more could you want from a heroine?

And yet it's a terrifying film because can a love that comes from con tricks ever become real?

It made me think of that awful dating manual The Rules, which I found deeply sinister with its retrosexist messages about hiking up your skirt to get a man, never accepting a Saturday night date after Wednesday even if you're free on Saturday, and then if you're still free on Saturday, spending it doing sit-ups in front of the TV (like that's even possible; how can you see the screen?) Worst of all, it suggests that you lie to men continually. You lie and conceal yourself and play hard to get. And even after you've snagged your man, you go on lying. I seem to remember them advising never letting your husband see you in a tracksuit, keeping up the game, and then your husband will continue to value you—and this bit, I do remember, he will send you roses after sex.

At the risk of never getting roses again, I'll say now that I found this terrifying. The idea of finding The One—who is supposed, after all, to open your heart and understand you absolutely—and then never ever being able to be truthful with him...well, it's just so empty. And The Lady Eve exposes all that. And that's why it's my new favourite film.

Writing on the nose

2011-07-23T21:37:00.002+01:00

I just read For the Reckord, a book of three plays by Barry Reckord; my review is in this weeks's TLS, sadly not online. It was a thrill to discover Reckord; I wish he was better known. And I'd love to see someone revive his 1958 hit play Flesh to a Tiger, which is as visceral and brilliantly melodramatic a play as you could ever hope for. The dialogue is amazingly vivid and intense; in a preface to another of his plays, Skyvers, set in a school, Reckord explains why:

Although I have avoided any artificially heightened language and kept within the range of cockney idiom, the language in this play is clearly invented. Schoolboys, on the whole, don’t talk in the way I make them talk. Usually their talk is less interesting. But if the play sounds real it is because I’ve got down what these boys do in fact think and feel, though often they are too inarticulate to say it. This, to me, is the imaginative process—the whole business of writing.

Often the kind of writing he describes here is derided for being too obvious, on the nose, lacking in subtext. And sometimes all that's true. But one of the things I love about theatre is that sometimes the characters get to spill their hearts out and, done right, the liveness of it, and the rawness of what they're feeling and saying, can be exhilarating.

Yes &

2011-07-18T09:36:00.002+01:00

is an improvisation rule where when one performer makes an offer, the other must accept it (yes) and also make their own offer (&; for some reason I always visualise an ampersand). Otherwise the improvisation is blocked. I was blocked myself the other day, and because I'm writing a relationship play involving cross-dressing, confusion, thwarted love and strange adventures, I went back to Northrop Frye, who I last read at university when I was trying to make sense of Shakespeare's comedies. At the time I much preferred the tragedies. An extremely patronising man told me that when I grew up I'd drink red wine, eat dark chocolate and like the comedies best ("because they're darker than you think", he said). It infuriates me that this has mostly come true. But, anyway, Frye argues that rather Shakespeare rammed his plays with improbabilities for the joy of inviting us to say yes to the implausibility, the mad theatrical conventions, the wild adventures—and once we've said yes, he gives us a whole heap of ampersands. It's a more active suspension of disbelief, says Frye, quoting Paulina in The Winter's Tale who warns that something epically unlikely is about to happen and that we must believe it if we want the story, the feeling, the rush: "It is required you do awake your faith." As Frye points out, it's striking how often a Shakespeare play ends with the characters invited to go offstage where all will be explained. We don't get the explanation. But if we really said yes, we don't need it. We leave the theatre and that's the &.

Different for girls

2011-07-06T16:31:00.001+01:00

So this week I've been mostly watching screwball romances and listening to the rain (oh and writing, yes of course, writing), but I also read Louise Wener's autobiography, which has the rather brilliant title Different for Girls. I loved Sleeper—what I laughingly call my musical taste is mostly stuck in the Eighties but I make an exception for Sleeper. How could you not love a band who wrote songs with lyrics as stinging as these (from Inbetweener):

He's not a prince, he's not a king
He's not a work of art or anything
It makes no sense, another year
What kind of A-Z would get you here?
He's nothing special, she's not too smart
He studies fashion, she studies art
I think I told you right from the start
You were just my inbetween, just my inbetween
You're such an inbetweener.

I also loved them because in Lady Love Your Countryside they namechecked Belsize Park. Where I live! All right, not in the most positive fashion; the line goes "come over here / and we could spend our lives puking in Belsize Park" but still! Who else has mentioned Belsize Park in song? So far as I know, no one.

Anyway, Wener's autobiography is brilliant because it punctures the idea that Britpop was all about the boys—and because she freely, brazenly, proudly admits the scurrilous things she did to make it. Like, when she and her band (then named Surrender Dorothy after the smoke trail in The Wizard of Oz; they had to change it because other bands were called that, but where are those bands now, huh?) found out a record company rep was coming to one of their gigs, she put an advert in The Stage saying they were auditioning for people to be in their next video, to make sure the gig was rammed with enthusiastic people in supercool clothes. And to get the band together in the first place, she faked an NME review by literally cutting and pasting and then photocopying it, so she could show it to potential band members to prove they were joining a going concern. And when playing support gigs, she'd hide in the loo until enough of the audience arrived to make it worth her while. It's inspiring to read about a female artist who is so happy to talk about her hunger to make it.

And there's plenty of Eighties nostalgia in there too. David Bowie. Moon boots. The stress of recording a mix tape. The pleasures of shopping in Gants Hill. And a manifesto we can surely all get behind: "In the midst of personal tragedy, there is always Flashdance."

How to save yourself from meaninglessness (and not become a drama queen)

2011-06-27T11:51:00.001+01:00

I'm reading Vivian Gornick's memoir Fierce Attachments, which is extraordinary. It's about her relationship with her mother and her mother's friend Nettie, who lives downstairs from them in a tenement in the Bronx. Her mother is histrionic, a force of nature. Nettie is dreamy; she likes to imagine rescues from her own life, beginning with the formula "Wouldn't it be wonderful if..." Then Gornick starts doing her own imagining:

It was the year after my father's death, the year in which I began to sit on the fire escape late at night making up stories in my head... My mother's grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air...

I began sitting on the fire escape in the spring, and I sat there every night throughout that immeasurably long first summer... I found I could make myself feel better simply by swinging my legs across the windowsill and turning my face fully outward, away from the room behind me.

The shabby tenement streets below our windows were transformed by darkness and silence. There was in the nighttime air a clarity, a softness and a fullness, indescribably sweet, that intensified the magical isolation I sought and that easily became a conduit for waking dreams. A hungry fantasising went instantly to work as soon as I was seated with my back to the apartment, my eyes trained on the street. The fantasising was only one step removed from Nettie's "Wouldn't it be wonderful," but it was an important step. Mine began 'Just suppose' and was followed not by tales of immediate rescue but by imaginings of "large meaning". that is, things always ended badly but there was grandeur in the disaster. The point of my romances was precisely that life is tragic. To be 'in tragedy' was to be saved from what I took to be the pedestrian pains of my own life. These seemed meaningless. To be saved from meaninglessness, I knew, was everything. Largeness of meaning was redemption. It was an adolescent writer's beginning: I had started to mythicise.

I've always been plagued by fears that I'm in danger of becoming melodramatic in my life, that sometimes instead of carefully spinning my fears and dreams and experiences into stories I'm actually becoming self-dramatising in a less productive way. There's being alert to the dramas of everyday life, and there's being a drama queen. But this passage reminded me of when I first started dreaming up stories, and became aware other people were doing it too, and of why we do it: to find meaning, "to be saved from meaninglessness".

Who the wild things are

2011-06-15T16:39:00.001+01:00

What can and can't you put in a children's play? At a workshop on writing for children at the Belgrade Theatre, I started thinking about why I love Maurice Sendak's books so much. Like me, he was the child of recent refugees, and as he said in this interview about Where The Wild Things Are:

The wild things are my aunts, uncles and cousins who used to come from the old country, those few who got in before the gate closed... These people didn't speak English, only Yiddish. And they were unkempt. Their teeth were horrifying. They had hair unravelling out of their noses. And they'd pick you up and hug you and kiss you. 'Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up,' they'd say... that's who the wild things are. Foreigners, lost in America without a language.

I really identify with this picture of loving, intense, lost relatives. (Although my relatives weren't unkempt!) and I love the clarity and passion with which Sendak defended his work (in a speech he made accepting the Caldecott award) against those who find it too scary for children:

Max...discharges his anger against his mother, and returns to the real world sleepy, hungry, and at peace with himself.

Certainly we want to protect our children form new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious—and what is too often overlooked—is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, that fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, that they continually cope with frustration as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood—the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of all Wild Things—that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have.

A lot of children grow up, as I did, with grownups who are loving and kind and wonderful but also bewildered, struggling, lost, trying to get past the bad memories of persecution and oppression. I think I must have loved Sendak's books because they weren't afraid to acknowledge that. I still do.

Fairy princess hair

2011-06-11T22:37:00.002+01:00

A friend just sent me this poster image from an amateur production of Cling To Me Like Ivy in Finland. I really like it. It reminds me of researching the play in a wig shop in Finchley. I'd always found the idea of wigs a bit bleugh but when the lady in the shop suggested I try one on, I couldn't say no. It was research. Plus you write about what you fear and what you desire; this logic once led me to step into an enclosure containing wild boars. I shut my eyes. She pulled my frizzy messy hair into a tight bun at the nape of my neck then came some poking and prodding. I opened my eyes and I had fairy princess hair. Blonde, poker-straight, shimmering nearly to my waist. I gulped. I did the flick from the Timotei advert. The hair spun out in a shining cloud around my head. It was the hair I dreamed of when I was a child and now it was mine, all mine, if only for a minute. Sometimes dreams do come true.

"Girls can't write books, ha, ha, ha!"

2011-06-08T22:53:00.001+01:00

I'd love to puncture VS Naipaul's outburst about women not being able to write by showing him this advert for Brontë sister action dolls in which a Naipaul-esque Victorian gentlemen publisher says "Girls can't write books, ha, ha, ha!" whereupon the tiny, fierce, plastic Brontës throw books at him like grenades. (Sadly the advert's a spoof. I'd SO buy the dolls if someone manufactured them; wouldn't you?)

While we're on the Brontës, I'm thrilled that so many people commented so passionately on my Observer piece on role models for girls. Thanks very much if you were one of them. There was some stuff I couldn't get into the piece, so I'll post bits here over the next few months. Along with writing my first play for young people; I hope to write a heroine even half as engaging as the heroines of all those battered books.

Role models for girls

2011-06-06T21:26:00.000+01:00

So I finally got around to putting some of my thoughts on role models for girls down on paper and the Observer were nice enough to print it here.

Story vertigo

2011-06-02T09:56:00.000+01:00

Along with the story hunger, the Nights also induce a sort of story vertigo. A fear that the stories won't ever end, that you're in a story in a story in a story, and you'll never make it back to the real world. Which is of course another story; the frame narrative of Scheherezade and the king. And, of course, even when I put the book down, I'm in a story just as suspenseful; my own story, that I'm living now.

Story hunger

2011-05-31T09:23:00.008+01:00

One of the things I'm loving most about The Thousand and One Nights is that everyone in them is ravenous for stories. Not just the king, who's avidly listening to Scheherezade ("By God," he says to himself at the end of the first night, "I am not going to kill her until I hear the rest of the story"), but everyone in the stories, and everyone in the stories-within-stories and so on. A genie is about to kill a man, but then three old men appear, each accompanied by various creatures, and beg the genie to listen to their stories, and if they find them "marvellous", to let the man go. He agrees and, several stories later, the man is released. A fisherman is about to be killed by another genie—but first the genie insists on telling him his story. "Tell it," says the fisherman, "but keep it short as I am at my last gasp". After he has heard the story and tricked the genie back into the bottle, he tells a cautionary tale about sparing people's lives. The genie, speaking from inside the bottle, then tries to tempt the fisherman into letting him out so he can tell yet another story. But the fisherman says no. It seems like the storytelling (and in fact the story) is at an end.

But then the fisherman feels bad and lets the genie free (empathy trumping story hunger). The second the genie gets out of the bottle he starts threatening the fisherman again, but the fisherman has only to remind him of the cautionary tale he told for the genie to decide that in fact he's going to help him.

Which he does...by leading him to a strange pool in which there are oddly-coloured fish...it will turn out that these fish, when fried, rise from the frying pan and talk to a beautiful woman who magically appears...but that's a whole nother story.

I love the idea that stories can save us, and the picture of a world in which everyone is constantly craving stories feels very true to now. But I also love the idea that as well as having a head full of stories you can use in risky situations (or just to entertain people), you can also turn whatever terrible and crazy things happen to you into a story, and the story will be extremely valuable; it could save your own life, or someone else's life, or stop a vengeful genie in his tracks.

Last week, I did a little workshopping of my very fledgling play which will involve some tropes or possibly even characters from the Nights, at the Unicorn, during which for one tiny, eerie, startling moment, actor Eric Nzaramba became a character from my own life.

I found this picture, of the cover of an edition of the Nights, via Journal of The Nights.

Girl in a blue jumper

2011-05-28T09:24:00.000+01:00

Sam Hall of 17 per cent, who is valiantly campaigning to get more plays by women onto UK stages, did a little interview with me, on maybe the windiest day of the year, which is here.

The funniest line in literature ever?

2011-05-20T22:36:00.003+01:00

From the frame story of The Thousand and One Nights...

Every night for the next three years, Shahriyar would take a virgin, deflower her and then kill her. this led to unrest among the citizens...

I should think it did!

Yet cannot hold this visible shape

2011-05-17T22:36:00.001+01:00

When I first started having seizures, in my first term at university, I didn't know what they were and as I struggled to describe them, a bit of Antony and Cleopatra kept coming into my head. (I'd done it for A-level so it was burned in there.) It's near the end, where Mark Antony's lost everything. He says he is like a cloud that changes shape with the weather, becoming "indistinct / As water is in water". He tries to explain how he feels: "here I am Antony: / Yet cannot hold this visible shape".

It wasn't much use telling my doctor that I couldn't hold my visible shape. I meant that when I felt the ground vanish, I felt like I was vanishing too. And also, I meant: the seizures were taking me over. I couldn't remember where they ended and I began. Siri Hustvedt explores this in her book about her seizures, The Shaking Woman or a History of my Nerves. I've just reviewed it for Disability Arts Online. It's a pretty amazing book about how illness or disability can take a person over, about how to hold onto a sense of oneself when everything seems to be changing. About what really makes us who we are. The review's here.

Sinbad was no sailor

2011-05-13T23:51:00.001+01:00

I'm still only on the introduction of Malcolm Lyons's new translation of The Thousand and One Nights and already I'm reeling. Apparently Sinbad was a merchant. I rang my mother who said "of course, we call him Sinbad of the sea". Which confused me further.

How to become unsquelchable...part two

2011-05-08T19:26:00.003+01:00

So I've read Anne of Avonlea and I'm devouring Anne of the Island now (I defy anyone to start these and not stop), and I've realised the way LM Montgomery makes Anne unsquelchable is: she gives her a sense of humour. The eighteen-year-old Anne laughs off slights that would have crushed her at eleven. She gets this from Marilla, also, even in her sternest moments, a great laugher. And it's not cruel laughter; it's about not minding if other people are mean and not taking life too seriously. Or, as she puts it,

Don't you know that it is only very foolish folk who talk sense all the time?

Montgomery herself never lost her sense of humour, even at the darkest times in her life. In 1908, soon after Anne of Green Gables came out, she marvelled in her diaries:

One of the reviews says 'the book radiates happiness and optimism.' When I think of the conditions of worry and gloom and care under which it was written I wonder at this. Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work.

But I'm not sure she does keep the shadows out of her work—the Anne books take in mean-spiritedness, death, illness, financial misfortune, orphans (endlessly), blindness, grief and unrequited love. Just for starters. And like the grit in the oyster, I think the books are better for acknowledging the shadows.

Inconsolata

2011-05-02T18:53:00.002+01:00

is the name of my new font. I think it's lovely.

Bluebells bluebells

2011-05-01T21:52:00.003+01:00

Like Cassandra Mortmain (a lovely role model for girls), I love bluebells—although I wouldn't wear them as scent.

And did you know, the UK supports 49% of the world's bluebells? My best friend and I went to Claybury Woods, just down the Central Line (forty minutes from Liverpool Street!) to a wood called Hospital Wood because there used to be a Victorian mental asylum there. The woods were supposed to be soothing, and this pioneering asylum even had its own theatre.

At first the bluebells were elusive. I had a map but if I was a superheroine my superpower would be getting lost. Then suddenly we came upon them. A little blowsy, a little leggy, a little tipsy-looking, like woozy lovesick Dorothy Parker heroines, and blue blue blue.

How to save yourself and your sisters

2011-04-29T17:46:00.003+01:00

In Richard E Grant's fun programme on the Arabian Nights, academic Mona Mikhail quotes Scheherezade as saying "I am doing this to save myself and my sisters", casting Scheherezade as a feminist heroine who saved herself and her sisters (and cured her husband of misogyny) through imagination, words and also strategy; the early stories reinforce the king's view of women as fickle and untrustworthy, but once she's got him hooked, Scheherezade promotes values such as mercy and wisdom and an acceptance of women's sexuality (and, yes, at times, she gets racy).

In this 1969 illustration of Scheherezade telling the stories by HJ Ford, the king seems almost incidental; she is telling the story to her rapt sister.

I'm about to read the Tales again, as research for a new play. I'm excited.

Where the storm ended and I began

2011-04-27T10:38:00.001+01:00

So, also in response to Robert Anasi's piece, I started thinking about a cruise I went on when I was fifteen. I felt, well, snarkcastic. I wanted to be in London, wearing black eyeliner and writing dark stormy poems about dark stormy boys. Instead I was trapped on a ship with my family, and because my luggage had got left behind, I was dressed in a polo shirt emblazoned with the cruise ship logo. Sylvia Plath never had to suffer such indignities. So I was glad when the skies turned black and the ship started pitching and rolling. We were going through a hurricane!

Everyone got seasick and the ship went very Marie Celeste. We were told absolutely not to go on deck. But I was supposed to be a poet and poets don't listen to health and safety notices. That night I slipped out of my cabin and climbed the stairs. I opened a door and was instantly soaked in spray and flung back by the gale. I emerged again, gripping the rails on the body of the ship, and inched along the deck. Waves were smashing em against the ship. I couldn't see where the storm ended and I began. It was exhilarating. And then I heard a strange unearthly sound. It was a bagpiper.

He serenaded me—with All You Need Is Love. Which, on the bagpipes, in a hurricane, is no mean feat. And then he helped me get back inside. I was drenched but thrilled.

And it proves nothing except maybe you can have extraordinary encounters if you're willing to risk yourself a little.

Irony and heartlessness

2011-04-26T13:03:00.000+01:00

My friend Robert Anasi's written a very interesting piece about David Foster Wallace, but really, I think, about why ironic writing feels so heartless. He also writes here that the writing he likes "bring[s] these others closer to us. That’s one of the things that I want art to do. Something like love." Well yes. I'm thinking of calling my next play Ironic Dancing because I hate that we do everything with irony. If you can't even lose yourself when you're dancing, you're really lost. If you don't believe me, read this piece on how living in the moment is the key to happiness.

Going back to Green Gables...and becoming non-squelchable

2011-04-25T16:39:00.002+01:00

I've just re-read Anne of Green Gables; I'm going to re-read all six. (Actually, LM Montgomery wrote even more, but I stopped at the end of Anne of Ingleside, when Anne was forty, then an unimaginable age; in the later books, she apparently gives up her heroine status to her daughter, and I wasn't so interested in that).

I was worried about re-reading it. I read the six books seven times each when I was little, and I loved Anne. I loved the fact that she went from eleven to forty—where other books left girls on the brink of womanhood, LM Montgomery had the gumption to see her girl through. I loved that she had green eyes like me, except hers went grey in some moods and lights whereas mine were and are just green. I loved that she never pretended to be stupid, even in front of boys, but that she'd still rather be pretty than clever. I loved that she smashed a slate over Gilbert Blythe's head when he teased her. And I loved that she was stubborn and passionate and used her imagination to make any situation better.

To my huge relief, I still love all this. But even more, I think what most appealed to me about Anne, though I could never have articulated it at the time, is that the book champions romance and imagination and poetry, but also gently suggests through the character of Marilla, who reluctantly adopts Anne (they'd expected an orphan boy, to help out on the farm, but a mix-up means they get Anne instead) that all these things have to be leavened with a bit of sense and practicality. And by the end of the book, stern Marilla, who has, says her oldest friend "got mellow." Margaret Atwood has argued that the real heroine of the books is Marilla, who learns to love, but I'm not sure I totally agree. It's Anne who teaches her to love, after all. And I think she does it by never relinquishing her dreams; she works hard and tries to be kind and good, and she starts getting what she wants...even on this grown-up re-read I cried when she got her puffed sleeves. There's a very pleasing guide to how to look like Anne on the Penny Dreadful Vintage blog; I'll have to restrain myself from buying every single item on the list.

I was a too-dreamy girl, terrified of witches and ghosts, just as Anne is scared by her own imaginings of the Haunted Wood. I too often got so wrapped up in romantic imaginings that I ignored the poetry of what was happening right in front of me. And maybe reading Anne's adventures over and over was a way of waking up to reality while not giving up the magic. I think maybe this is why Montgomery wrote the books in the first place; Atwood says Montgomery's own life was full of disappointments. Like Anne, she lost her mother when she was 21 months old; her first memory was of seeing her in her casket. She had a lonely childhood with her strict grandparents, and her long-awaited reunion with her father didn't work out as she didn't get on with her stepmother. Her love life was so troubled that in her thirties she gave up utterly on romance and looked after her grandmother. When she finally married, it was rocky; her husband had "religious melancholia" (he was probably bipolar), she lost one son, another son was deeply troubled, and she herself struggled with depression. Three years ago, Montgomery's granddaughter revealed that she may even have taken her own life. She was, it seems, writing as escape, as wish-fulfilment, but also perhaps because she wanted to believe that her values were right, that living well could lead to happiness. In her journal, she wrote a letter to a future great-great-granddaughter in which she says:

I lived a hundred years before you did, but my blood runs in your veins and I lived and loved and suffered and enjoyed and struggled and toiled just as you do. I found life good, in spite of everything... I found that courage and kindness are the two essential things...

Also in the journals, she writes about how important imagination is, even if it makes you unhappy...

One cannot have imagination and the gift of wings, along with the placidity and contentment of those who creep on the earth's solid surface and never open their eyes on aught but material things. But the gift of wings is better than placidity and contentment after all.

Which still makes me want to shout YES!

And, finally, she writes about reading a poem to her father and his unenthusiastic response which...

squelched me for a time; but if the love of writing is bred in your bones, you will be practically non-squelchable.

In the light of all this failing I've been doing, coming across this today felt like a message, an encounter. I can't wait to get on with the rest of the Anne books.

Failing again, failing better

2011-04-21T18:30:00.002+01:00

So when I was writing at LAMDA I kept telling the actors we had to fail. Just like Beckett! ("Try again, fail again, fail better"). I kept saying we had to take risks, and support each other's risks, we had to go into the dark. And I believe it. But sometimes I don't feel like being brave. Sometimes it feels weak and undignified to wilfully go into the forest without a map. As Marissa Skudlarek just wrote

I have never felt that it would be OK for me to fail; failure would shame me. To make a totally reductive generalization, male artists tend to be Bad Boys and female artists tend to be Dutiful Daughters.

That's me! And it's hard to hold your nerve and insist on not-knowing in these days of development culture and theatres demanding treatments and synopses. And when I realised a week ago that this play I'm writing is not quite what I thought it was, I felt like an idiot and it wasn't easy to pick myself up again and be defiant about it, but then again, with my seizures, I have to do that all the time. And that's much harder. I realised when I started having them, when I was eighteen, that if I was boring and sensible, I'd never go out. A lot of people with seizures are agoraphobic—and with good reason. It's dangerous to take the risks I do. But the alternative is to sit at home and stew so I know what I choose. And it's just the same with the writing. You do have to not know sometimes and just leap off the cliff and see what happens. So here we go.

Cuts again

2011-04-15T10:03:00.000+01:00

Now that the cuts have happened, it's been tempting to give up the fight, but I've been really heartened by the forests being saved and the nurses getting an apology and a rethink and I think it's time to fight this scorn and make some really good arguments for the arts. Andrew Haydon's done it brilliantly already. And I've been thinking again about this argument that keeps on being made about the arts taking money from the NHS. The other night, a playwright (a playwright!) started arguing that the NHS cures people but what benefit do we provide? And what about when you go and see a play and hate it? And yes, we've all had bad nights out at the theatre. But it's a false analogy. The NHS does cure people, absolutely, and brilliantly, and thank goodness we have them, but they don't cure everyone; how could they? It would be similarly unreal to expect the arts to entertain everyone every single time. But I appreciate the NHS having a go at curing everyone. And I think we need to make the argument clearly and bravely, ignoring the scorners, that artists are having a go at entertaining every single time. And yes it sometimes goes wrong. But when it goes right, the arts can make money to pay for the NHS to keep doing the amazing work they do. So it really isn't trees or nurses or theatre; it's about sticking together, and making the argument for the arts, not letting artists get sidelined or mocked, showing the arts are crucial contributors to, well, happiness. I'm not exactly comfortable on a soapbox but it feels like it's not yet time to get off it.

Don't wait till you know who you are to start making things

2011-04-13T09:08:00.000+01:00

I admit, upfront, this is stolen. From writer-artist Austin Kleon, who's most famous probably for his Humument-esque newspaper blackout poems which are wild. He's just posted an amazing liberating piece on the creative process called How To Steal Like An Artist and 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me (thus sort of making it ok for me to steal one of the nine things). It's so true. You find things out by making stuff. If you're a writer, you learn you who you are by writing. I once spent one school holiday writing a female version of Oliver Twist and though the results were worse than terrible, I don't remotely regret spending that summer ducking and diving through Victorian London. I worked out loads of things about myself and I got essentially a free, time-travelling masterclass from Charles Dickens. And I hate the idea that an artist has to be perfect and finished and all-knowing; who is, for a start? And anyway, we don't. We have to be brave enough to jump in the water anyway. Actually in France, just now, I swam (very briefly; it was still, just, March) in a river. They said there might be pike. I fear fish with teeth. And also I fear pike because they're scary and subterranean and have bulgy eyes. They said it would be cold. And yes, it was. But it was exhilarating. I'm diving into a new play at the moment. I don't know where I'm going. I like that.

The writers' drug

2011-04-10T10:11:00.001+01:00

People call walking the writer's drug, and certainly I find if I really can't solve a problem at my desk I can sometimes do it on the move. I was recently on a retreat in France, and started doing this thing I used to do where I took a dictaphone with me so I could record ideas without having to stop and get out a pen and paper. I've used a dictaphone since then but only when I felt too seizurey to sit up and write. This was different. I'd forgotten how good it was. You don't have to break rhythm; you just have to look like a numptie talking into your dictaphone. But in the middle of the Loire Valley there was no one there to notice. By now you will have rumbled me and you'll know that this post is really an excuse to put up my holiday snaps. But just look at those birds' nests!

And this earth and sky...

When Harry Met Sally...redux

2011-04-07T11:42:00.000+01:00

When Harry Met Sally is probably my favourite film (I never said I had taste), and this video from Funny or Die is just brilliant.

Culture of scorn

2011-04-05T18:09:00.015+01:00

I don't usually do politics on here, and if you want proper analysis of the arts cuts, have a look at the Guardian's culture cuts blog, or at Fin Kennedy's but I do want to say something about the way people talk about the arts these days. It's as if there's a new culture of scorn. It seems to be OK now to say the arts are a useless drain on public funds, a vanity industry, full of air-kissing luvvies (I hate that word) screeching "loved it, darling" across the bar at each other's plays.

This is so not true of my experience. The audiences for my play Cling To Me Like Ivy on its first run in Birmingham were, to use another word I hate, diverse. There were schoolchildren and pensioners, there were Orthodox Jews and people who'd never met a Jew before, there were people of every age and ethnicity. There was a sign-language interpreted night and a rural tour where the play packed out village halls. And on the final night there were a load of tree sitters in the front row. Which was just the way I wanted it. I wouldn't write a play for my friends to see; what would be the point? The playwrights I know are constantly challenging ourselves to write new and exciting stories, to tell stories that aren't told, to represent people who aren't represented, to make theatre that's thrilling and gutsy and poetic and bold, to be entertaining and provocative. We're not "squealing luvvies" (thanks, Quentin Letts). If you really want to see how vitriolic the scorners are these days, read Dan Rebellato's piece on trolls (not the Ibsen kind). He points out:

Fact: the arts make more money for Treasury than they take. It’s not a choice between hospital beds and the arts. The arts pay for those hospital beds.

I needed this argument when a friend said, "You're not a nurse, are you?" He's a tax lawyer. I should have explained to him that art doesn't need funding because it doesn't make money—as a whole, art is crucial to the economy, but art has to be risky and funding means the risks can be spread. I should have explained that every artist I know has worked for nothing, for years. I should have told him how little a playwright gets for a play. I should have told him about my audiences. And from now on, I'm going to start making these arguments a lot more clearly. Because I don't want to live in a country where the arts are continually scorned. I don't think anybody does.

Crying wolf

2011-04-01T11:46:00.000+01:00

I just came across this quote from Vladimir Nabokov:

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

For obvious reasons, I love it.

Mouse in my house

2011-03-30T08:14:00.000+01:00

Actually I live in a flat, but I am like a five-year-old when it comes to stupid rhymes. I'm also really rodent-phobic...I cried in front of the pest control man. But it turned out to be a false alarm. Which is good. Also, I got to make small talk with the pest control man...

PEST CONTROLLER: Have you been on holiday then?
ME: I just got back from Israel.
PEST CONTROLLER: Oh they've got cockroaches there, haven't they? Flying ones. And lizards.
ME: Yes...
PEST CONTROLLER: I've just been to New York. There's a bedbug epidemic over there...

If only I were better travelled. We could have gone on and on...

The puddle and the Rose

2011-03-28T11:23:00.020+01:00

"Bring a jumper," said the box office man at The Rose; "we can't heat it because of the puddle". It turns out that Philip Henslowe's 1587 theatre, only 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

2011-03-24T15:33:00.014Z

Dancing with scrolls

So 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. I was in Jerusalem last week with three of the Ezras, and many cousins, 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 into the mikveh each day before writing...which makes my pre-writing ritual (coffee, deep breath, coffee) seem a bit weak...

Stitching

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 apparently this great-great-uncle arrived at the airport with no clothes, no posessions, just a scroll under each arm, and he 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...

The view from the mechitza

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

Jewish carnivalesque circa 1948

2011-03-19T16:53:00.002Z

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, managed to get home to Transylvania (where she married her childhood sweetheart) and set off for Palestine in 1947 only to get intercepted by the British and 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

2011-03-16T15:50:00.004Z

In Stewart Lee's brilliant How I Escaped My Certain Fate (probably the best book about performing I've read...pretty good on writing too), there's a transcript of a live shows in which he talks about a festival in the Languedoc where the 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 ever really perform, but if I do anything remotely performative, I carry salt, to ward off the Evil Eye. Like Lee, I feel a bit mad and irrational doing it, but then again there was the time I didn't and my hair caught fire. Having my work on stage feels like having a bit of me on stage, and if I can do it without anyone noticing, I sometimes try to scatter a few grains of salt somewhere on stage, just to be safe.

I write this from Tel Aviv, where the orange trees are all blossom...

Top Tudor clichés

2011-03-11T10:17:00.001Z

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

2011-03-08T09:35:00.001Z

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, & there is the tantalising possibility that they/we might try to apply the gender equality duty to regularly funded theatres.)

I think part of the problem is in what women playwrights get commissioned to write. While a man might get commissioned to write about anything at all, on the basis that his views will be objective, women are often asked to write from our subjective experience. And 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

2011-03-02T15:40:00.002Z

I forgot, back at Halloween, when I saw The Amityville Horror, that an estate agent also plays a major role in Dracula. 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). And I'd forgotten that Jonathan Harker gets into the whole mess because he agrees to show Count Dracula floorplans.

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.

An irksome anniversary

2011-02-23T10:37:00.011Z

It's seventeen years since I started having seizures. And to be less curmudgeonly about it, it's a good time to say thank you to all the friends who pick me up, and all the kind strangers.

Curtain Up

2011-02-19T10:35:00.008Z

Journalism is, as every editor I ever had kept telling me, about news, but I was never a proper journalist, and my favourite gig was a year of writing a theatrical history column for the Guardian called Curtain Up. I didn't have to hare across London to interview people who were suspicious I was going to stitch them up, and I didn't need to worry my editors would stitch them up once I'd filed. I just rootled around in the Theatre Museum archives and bashed out a few hundred words a week on the first suffragette play or the first Freudian play, or a play banned because of a lewdly dancing doll. For a bookworm and theatre obsessive, it was bliss. Anyway, now a very kind San Francisco theatre blogger has created an index of my columns, and as she points out, it's very reassuring how many great plays were flops on their premieres.

Virginia or Liza?

2011-02-15T09:52:00.006Z

It's a year today since Cling To Me Like Ivy opened at the Birmingham Rep. And on the 26th, I'll be reading bits of it at Jewish Book Week's opening night literary salon. Or cabaret. The Bookniks' Salon is, apparently, going to be both. Which is confusing because what do you wear? Literary salon, to me, says Bloomsbury; winsome fluttery prints, drop-waists, cloche hats, tweed skirts, sturdy boots; the kind of thing you could get if you shopped at Old Town. Cabaret says fishnets. Top hat. Red lipstick.

Virginia Woolf or Liza Minellie? It's a conundrum. Also facing wardrobe dilemmas will be Maya Levy, Joanne Limburg, Adam Taylor, Eve Grubin and Vivi Lachs. Tickets are here.

Oh, and if you want to know more about Iraqi Jewish food than I could ever tell you, my friend the potter and writer Linda Dangoor is launching her cookbook Flavours of Babylon at Jewish Book Week too.

What I'd like for Valentine's please

2011-02-12T23:58:00.001Z

It's a bleeding heart cake! From Lily Vanilli, who even give the recipe here. Honestly, what could be better? Apparently they are a red velvet sponge with cream cheese icing and blackcurrant and cherry "blood". I post this fully expecting several of these to turn up on Monday. I'd much rather one (or many) of these than any number of red roses or duff cards. Just saying.

Breaking the rules

2011-02-09T17:23:00.000Z

I've got a review in this week's TLS of Steve Waters's new book, The Secret Life of Plays, which, among other things, questions the theatre's over-reliance on Aristotle and advocates writing plays that are unruly, dangerous and strange. It's refreshing to hear someone say that the Poetics is not a rulebook, that some truly great plays (Hamlet, for example) break all the rules. (TS Eliot thought Hamlet was a failure, of course...) Playwrights are always, these days, having to justify our decisions on intellectual and rational grounds, to identify their play's inciting incident (a student of a friend of mine once called this the Exciting Incident, and since then, I can't think about it seriously at all), to explain why the climax doesn't appear exactly in the middle and so on... And I'm not saying we should just throw whatever at the page and expect it to work—I spend more time than I care to think about wrenching my stories into a structure that might be satisfying—but some of the best bits of writing are (and have to be) instinctive, wild and yes, unruly, dangerous and strange.

Miss Marie Lloyd

2011-02-03T12:55:00.007Z

Two more characters have gone...rewrites are brutal. But also, sometimes, FUN. Yesterday I wrote a scene where Marie Lloyd appears. I love Marie Lloyd; truly a lady of gumption, and famous/notorious for making everything sound lewd. When a po-faced reporter tried to shame her, she hit back:

They don't pay their sixpences and shillings at a music hall to hear the Salvation Army. If was to try to sing highly moral songs, they would fire ginger beer bottles and beer mugs at me. I can't help it if people want to turn and twist my meanings.

She sang on the picket lines in the 1907 Music Hall Strike and did her bit for World War One recruitment by singing,

I didn't like you much before you joined the army, John
But I do like you, cocky, now you've got yer khaki on

She had no luck with men but didn't let society tell her what to do; she risked her reputation with a divorce in 1905. She was blowsy and gutsy and even jollied up TS Eliot. A definite role model for girls...and writing a scene for her's cheered me right up.

Rewrites, rewrites

2011-01-27T13:06:00.001Z

Actually I don't know why I call them rewrites because I do so many drafts that most of my writing process is rewriting. And it can be pretty savage...the worst is cutting a character because I know that character won't ever live. They only existed in my head and now they'll never exist anywhere else. And all the love I've given them is wasted. I could have called this post Wasted Love. Most rewriting is just the usual despairing at my desk, but I also like shine some light on the drafts, misshapen and messy though they are. My writers' group meets every Tuesday in a pub in Soho, taking it in turns to bring in drafts for critique and questions and provocations. It's hugely creatively sustaining. I'm also lucky to have other friends who read my work and tell me honestly what they think of it. Now and then, I also need to hear a play. Last night, I got eight lovely actors round my kitchen table with some cake and wine and the latest draft of my epic. It's nervewracking hearing a play read—and incredibly hard work. It makes me angry that often in playwright's contracts, we are paid "attendance fees" for going to readings and rehearsals, as though we just sit there whereas actually I find my mind's racing, reeling, trying to see what works, what doesn't work, what could work, how to make it better. It's emotionally draining too, to hear a killer scene fall flat, or a scene I wrote through tears seem trite. I sit there, scrawling on my script, and by the end, however well it's gone, however kind and generous everyone is in giving their thoughts on the play, it always feels like Contemplating The Wreckage. And, last night, I went to bed still buzzing with ideas, finally fell asleep only to dream about my characters (who in my dreams are all demanding, frantic, importuning people determined that instead of sleeping I should pay them more attention, make them live), I woke up twice to write something down (on my arms, as I couldn't find any paper) which by the time my alarm went off had become just black squiggles, unreadable as hieroglyphics. I made coffee and read an email from a kind friend with more useful thoughts. I cleared up the kitchen. Kind of. And now I'll take a deep breath and I'll go back Into The Fray.

It's particularly galling to get swine flu if you're Jewish

2011-01-13T20:30:00.002Z

and I'm not the first to think so. In 2009, the Israeli government considered calling it Mexican flu instead. I think it's gone now, but what an unfun start to 2011.

What you are I wouldn't eat

2011-01-07T13:24:00.001Z

I should have watched To Be Or Not To Be years ago. Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film is right up my street; a pitch-black comedy full of sparkle and masquerading and farcical jokes, it's about a Jewish-Polish theatre troupe who brilliantly outwit the Nazis and wrench a (nearly) happy ending out of despair. It revels in theatricality, which in this film is a sort of superpower that can defeat the Nazis. And it makes the Nazi war machine look like bad theatre—kitsch, humourless and obsessive.

The film is so dazzling, so quickfire, so funny, that it was only after it finished that I realised that like the glass that is broken at Jewish weddings to remind us in the midst of happiness of the pain of the Temple being destroyed (and, post-1938, of Kristallnacht), Lubitsch has embedded a shard of glass in his happy ending. Spoiler alert! The troupe escapes to England but one actor is missing. Greenberg, the most self-consciously Jewish actor, who enters the film with the excellent line "What you are I wouldn't eat!" (to which of course the reply is "How dare you call me a HAM?") has vanished, last seen dragged off by Nazis. It takes some unravelling to work out what has happened. The complex escape plot has culminated in the troupe dressed as Nazis at the opera house, whereupon Greenberg is called upon to create a commotion. He goes up to the actor playing Hitler and asks "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" We know it's a game—and we know he's fulfilling a lifetime ambition to play Shylock—and in the joy of the player-Nazis escaping, we forget at first that Greenberg is not with them. Until finally, we realise that the Nazis who dragged him off were real, and at this point his Shylock speech shifts from being triumphant to poignant to full-on tragic.

I don't think the film could get made today. It's too brave, too uneasy. Even then the critics didn't like it. When Lubitsch fought back in a piece for The New York Times entitled Mr Lubitsch Takes the Floor for Rebuttal, he provided the best defence I've ever heard of tragicomedy: "I was tired," he wrote, "of two established, recognised recipes, drama with comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief. I made up my mind to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time."

Happy new year!

2011-01-04T18:42:00.000Z

So it's 2011. The last days of 2010, for me anyway, passed in a haze of flu, and I'm still not myself. I did manage to get to my first ever Limmud which was exhilarating. As well as doing a session on Cling To Me Like Ivy, I went to lectures on the representation of Esther in a new Book of Esther (where she appears only from behind, at a distance, in a burqa, although at one point, racily, her hand is seen about to grasp the king's sceptre), and on the Jewish material collated by Mass Observation, heard a Muslim storyteller tell stories alongside an Orthodox Jew, had a story from my life improvised by a scratch troupe of actors, and speculated at lunch on the intriguing possibility that Isaac could have been as old as 37 at the time of the akedah, and may also have been learning-disabled; this could perhaps explain why soon after his birth, Sarah was so tormented by Hagar's laughter (having previously been quite a laugher herself) and why as an old man Isaac was so easily fooled by his sons.

I stayed overnight in Coventry, and went of course to the cathedral. I was in awe at the story of how, after it was bombed in 1940, the community decided to try to forgive, sent crosses to Kiel, Dresden and Berlin and set up peace and reconciliation centres all over the world. And I loved that the ruins of the old cathedral, and the new cathedral built by Basil Spence (who also did Swiss Cottage library...I love a north London connection!) are both hallowed ground, that together they form a cathedral. Spence's idea was that the old cathedral would stand "for the sacrifice, one side of the Christian Faith and I knew my task was to design a new one which should stand for the Triumph of the Resurrection." A friend drove me back to my hotel and the whole city was wreathed in thick fog. I kept saying "it's just next to the cathedral" as we looped round and round many roundabouts and junctions, but we couldn't see it until suddenly it loomed up in front of us, the fog looking eerily like smoke...it must have looked not terribly different on that terrifying night in 1940.

My new year's eve was themed coincidentally around the Blitz. No bombs but a lot of red lipstick. Due to the dreaded flu, I failed to make a single resolution. And I love resolutions. I'm also gnashing my teeth at having lost so much work time—the perpetual gripe of the freelancer—but I did start a whole new play yesterday. Of which more soon.

Talking food

2010-12-21T16:54:00.000Z

A sticker on my pack of Total 0% yoghurt says "Try me in place of cream this Christmas". Total 0%, I love you, but no, I will not try you in place of cream this Christmas. It's Christmas. Is nothing sacred? And yes, I know, I'm a Jew.

Also, Total 0%, it spooks me when my food talks to me. Does anyone know if OXO cubes still say "I like to be kept in a cool, dark place"? They did. I try to make a rule of not eating anything that talks. This is what divides me from cannibals. When my yoghurt and my stock cubes start getting chatty, the whole thing comes apart.

Dips' gossip, then and now

2010-12-18T13:28:00.001Z

I've been devouring Wikileaks' backstage dips' (diplomats') gossip about Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm writing a play set in Iraq in the 1920s and my research involved reading the equivalent of today's cables. The parallels are fascinating. Now, Hamid Karzai's described as "extremely weak" and "easily swayed" and according to US ambassador Karl Eikenberry, split between being "a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation building and overly self-conscious that his time in the spotlight of glowing reviews from the international community has passed" and "an ever-shrewd politician who sees himself as a nationalist hero who can save the country." In the 1920s, Sir Percy Cox, Iraq's High Commissioner, said of Feisal, who he had installed as Iraq's first king, that he had "unmistakeably displayed the cloven hoof. I have endeavoured to be absolutely straightforward and frank with him, and to treat him like a brother, but there you are, when he is scratched deep enough, the racial weakness displays itself." Cox's successor Sir Henry Dobbs reflected that "[Iraq] may be able to rub along in a corrupt, inefficient, oriental sort of way, something better than she was under Turkish rule...If this is the result, even though it be not a very splendid one, we shall have built better than we know." And Gertrude Bell, the heroine of my play, and the woman who essentially created the Iraqi state, was unwaveringly honest about both her shifting feelings about Feisal and her own failings. Feisal got his own back, saying "European statesmen are like impressionist paintings. The effect at a distance is excellent". I'd love to know what Karzai says about Eikenberry.

Whenever I hear a diplomat being bland and glossy for the press, I wonder what they really think, if there's anything real behind the spin. And for all the bitching (calling Kim Jong-Il flabby, and speculating on Qaddafi's botox and the Putin-Berlusconi bromance) it's reassuring, in a way, to find that there is.

Living at a slant

2010-12-05T20:12:00.000Z

Sadly, due to epic snow in Essex, the Chankuah party/playreading didn't happen (though I did spend two amazing days writing holed up in a haunted Georgian manor house in a park in the snow...with peacocks (shades of Flannery). At one point I thought I'd seen the ghost (a Grey Lady) but it was in fact my own coat and beret hanging on a hook. And I wound up celebrating Chanukah here instead of there. Tonight I lit candles with a friend who always puts the candles in the menorah from right to left and then lights them from left to right. In my family, we do everything left to right. The great thing about Judaism is that probably neither of us is wrong. I love that we fix our mezuzot at a slant because one Talmudic sage thought they should be vertical, one horizontal. As a pretty secular Jew, when I go into my house, or from room to room, I don't just remember God, but also that I'm part of a tradition that celebrates difference, compromises, skews and idiosyncrasies and tilts and tangents. Happy Chanukah!

GO Scottish beavers!

2010-11-25T23:09:00.000Z

Apparently at least twenty beavers are on the loose in Scotland now...having gone on a long journey in my thoughts about wildness (which you can read about here), I feel pretty excited at the thought that the beaver is back in Scotland! GO Scottish beavers!

What I'm up to

2010-11-22T16:28:00.000Z

apart from the usual wool-gathering and despairing at my desk includes a couple of things you could come to, if you wanted. First up, I'm going back to Metal, where I'm doing a very informal reading of a new play, an epic, not with actors but with whoever turns up taking the roles. Naomi Alderman's reading a short story on the same evening. It's on Wednesday 1st December at 7pm at Metal, at Chalkwell Hall, which is here.

Also in December, I'll be at Limmud, on the 29th, reading from and talking about Cling To Me Like Ivy. It would be lovely to see you at either!

Shedding her outer layer of superstition and misery, from the immemorial slave, there emerged THE WOMAN

2010-11-20T12:23:00.011Z

This picture by José Renau jumped out at me at the Museo Reina Sofia. The title translates as: "Shedding her outer layer of superstition and misery, from the immemorial slave there emerged THE WOMAN capable of active participation in the making of the future". So I want to propose Spanish Republican women, en masse, as role models for girls. They threw off their hats (when Dorothy Parker visited, she threw off her cloche), they wore dungarees (the anarchists) or culottes (the communists), they joined the front line (although when they got there, they often did the washing as well as wield a rifle). Their heroine Dolores Ibárruri aka La Pasionara, coined the slogan "They shall not pass" and railed against "the joyless, dismal, pain-ridden thralldom that was our mother's lot." Despite all that, I've got mixed feelings about this picture; I want to be in the space between the women—neither veiled, weighed-down by jewellery and oppressed nor strident and fighting and dungareed (or even culotted). I don't like the idea that it takes a war for feminists to achieve their aims (even though it's striking how that happened with female suffrage in Britain, and how even now Kurdish feminists often join the struggle for freedom, feeling that there they can be equal to men...my radio play Sugar and Snow was about a woman joining up). But for the women of the Spanish Republic, the alternative didn't bear thinking about; Franco marched with the preserved arm of St Teresa of Avila as a sort of pickled-limb mascot, stripped women of their rights, denied them education and rewarded them for having as many children as possible. And there's one thing that does make me love this picture...the woman on the left is looking down, her mouth shut; the one on the right looks into the future, and she's shouting. So, dungarees and all, I know which one I'd rather be.

Elsewhere

2010-11-15T10:45:00.001Z

I've got a piece (not online, unfortunately) in the TLS about the Brontës' juvenilia, only now published together in an accessible edition—probably because they're too internalised and too mad to read unless you're either a Brontë and living in that fevered hypercreative world or you have constant recourse to footnotes. Which sounds a terrible alternative but actually the footnotes are like a door that opens into their imaginative world. Reading it made me wish I'd had more imaginative co-conspirators when I was small. And that I was as bold and gutsy now. I found the new Bernhard Schlink, which I reviewed for the Literary Review, pretty uncourageous.

The obligatory Halloween post

2010-10-31T10:57:00.000Z

I don't really do Halloween. This is because I'm a total wimp about anything scary. I like old schlocky horror films, but I hate modern horror. This is because I don't believe in vampires so they don't scare me, but I am scared of things that could actually happen, like moving into a sinister house, and having children who have imaginary friends. (Both of which occurred in The Amityville Horror, which I unwisely saw last night.) On which point, what happens if I have children and they have imaginary friends? Do I immediately suspect that evil forces are at work? Or do I encourage my children's creativity? Perhaps I need to watch more horror films in order to know what to look out for. Mind you, I would never put up with what the protagonists of horror films put up with. For example, if I discovered, as the Amityville people did, that the pathway to hell was in my basement I would immediately move house.

When I was really small, I was terrified of witches and my mother kept telling me they didn't exist. And one day—this was before I could read—an advert came on TV for Which? magazine and I was outraged that the grownups had been trying to pull the wool over my eyes; witches even had their own magazine.

Flannery

2010-10-29T11:03:00.020+01:00

I cried when I got to the end of Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor. I didn't want her to die. I felt the same way at Haworth when I saw Charlotte Brontë's stockings hung in a display case, the sun shining through her careful darning. I've been passionate about them both for ages—and even more when I found out what it cost them to write.

O'Connor was in her mid-twenties, hanging out at Yaddo with Robert Lowell, starting to overcome her shyness, dancing the conga in severe black dresses, getting her mordant, peculiar stories published, when she suddenly got lupus. It was nasty (the symptoms kept shifting, so she'd be in pain, on crutches, barely able to eat because of necrosis of the jaw, exhausted, in and out of hospital...) so she moved in with her mother on a farm in Georgia. Which pretty much meant giving up on romance. Though she did find sustenance in faith. She called herself not just a Catholic but "a thirteenth century Catholic" and there is something medieval about her work; the looming apocalypse, the savagery and grace, the fierce honesty burning through what she called the "blind wills and low dodges of the heart". But she's also (acidly) funny; as a child she sewed clothes for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist. And courageous, even trying to learn from illness:

I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow...

It did eventually take her, reluctantly, to Lourdes where she said

I prayed...for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I care about less.

She's a proper heroine, I think, because she wrote to save herself from being crushed by it all, from the limitations of being ill. Sometimes, when I'm having a lot of seizures, I think about how she dragged herself out of bed at dawn for coffee and mass with her mother and then three hours' solid writing (all she could manage), and the afternoons spent eating peppermint chiffon pie on her porch, receiving guests like a proper southern lady, watching her peacocks eat her mother's roses, and gathering wool, but also material; because she couldn't get out much, she turned her fierce gaze on the people she could see from the porch. "In my stories," she said, "is where I live" and maybe it's the fact that she threw everything into her writing—because she had to—that makes her writing so brilliantly, terrifyingly, irrepressibly alive.

Vivid transformation or radical displacement

2010-10-25T11:52:00.002+01:00

I love that, interviewed in the Paris Review in 1983, Philip Roth said:

My hero has to be in a state of vivid transformation or radical displacement. 'I am not what I am—I am, if anything, what I am not.' The litany begins something like that."

The question, amusingly, had been, "So your hero always has to be enraged or in trouble or complaining?"

Wine, witchcraft, women, wool

2010-10-21T21:19:00.001+01:00

is how the shelfmarks go at the London Library. For some reason, women being nestled in there between witchcraft and wool makes me really happy.

Best women

2010-10-18T14:58:00.003+01:00

I've always dreaded hen weekends, so when I had to organise one, my heart sank. I feared L-plates. I feared vodka jelly. It turns out that you can have a hen weekend involving with fine wines, (duck) eggs florentine, lovely walks, fiery women, ostriches...oh, and a girl in a bath covered in cake.

Over dinner, we toasted female friendship, and then at the wedding, the best woman (so much nicer than being called a maid of honour) made a speech as well as the best man. It was wonderful (I cried). Speeches at weddings are always about the boys, with the best man talking about his japes and scrapes with the groom while the bride just gets told she's pretty. And I'm not against anyone telling brides they're pretty (and I was totally charmed by the father of the bride's speech about how beautiful his daughter looked hopscotching on a field full of dew drops that sparkled like diamonds) but it was also wonderful to hear about her gift for friendship. So here's to friendship, and to best women.

Entering the inner life

2010-09-29T12:19:00.002+01:00

According to Lucasta Miller's excellent The Brontë Myth (my obsession continues...), Charlotte taught herself to write with her eyes shut, partly perhaps because she feared inheriting her father's eyesight problems, but also, as Miller says, "a telling metaphor for shutting out the external world and entering the inner life". It's a startling image: the young writer protecting her gift, and digging deeper...

Having a meaningful Yom Kippur

2010-09-19T11:12:00.002+01:00

Sometimes Yom Kippur just gives me headaches. I'm one of those people who can either fast or go to synagogue, so I fast, because I like that Judaism puts ritual above belief. I did plan this year to go to kol nidre but got thwarted and spent the evening instead in A&E (for a false alarm) where a woman was brought in, handcuffed, by two policemen, with a face like a tragedy mask and one of the policemen smugly eating nectarines as she raged about not being given any food while she was in custody. At one point, she made a run for it, but with such a look of mischievous glee that the whole waiting room collapsed into giggles. As we left we saw her, still handcuffed and the glee entirely vanished. I hope she got a nectarine at least, eventually. Back home I kept thinking about a wish a friend sent me that my fast would be "good, easy and meaningful" and somehow, eventually, it was. And I made a resolution (defying my cheder teacher who said making resolutions was wrong because it was imitating-the-Christians). I like resolutions. My last resolutions were to Eat More Greens, Wear More Red and Be Less Yellow. I've now got red shoes, and I can't wait for cavolo nero to be back in season, but I wanted something else. So inspired by this amazing talk by Patsy Rodenburg, in which she talks about why theatre is important because it is honest, and because it is about being present, and being present with people, I'm just resolving to Be Present.

The thing that's always perplexed me about An American in Paris

2010-09-14T22:35:00.002+01:00

is how come Gene Kelly's paintings are so bad? Especially when he's so good at everything else (singing, dancing, charming...

Burrowing at the London Library

2010-09-13T17:33:00.002+01:00

At the London Library where I've been burrowing, boxing is filed next to botany, and Iraq is filed under Mesopotamia...

Barberries, marmalade madams, and cultural relocation

2010-09-08T09:39:00.000+01:00

I went on a very Iraqi shopping expedition the other day—to get date syrup and semolina and barberries. I love barberries (ruby-bright, sour-sweet), and I usually eat them on what some people call jewelled rice. I soak the barberries in hot water till they puff up, then fry them and scatter them over the rice, along with caramelised onions, flaked toasted almonds, sultanas done the same way as the barberries. I went online to find out other ways to use them and according to The Old Foodie they are one of those ingredients that no one uses any more. Maybe Mrs Beeton is to blame; she said they were so sour even birds don't eat them. But medieval and Tudor cookbooks were full of them. Which bolsters my theory that things used to be a lot more mixed up than we think. Whenever I eat so-called fusion food or read food writers "discovering" foods like quince and tamarind, I think how much the Tudors loved this stuff. I suppose part of it was the thrill of the new—the spice routes were only just opening up. Barberries were apparently used to colour quince paste. (And because quinces were supposed to be aphrodisiacs, London prostitutes were known as marmalade madams). Or they put barberries in pies, or with chicken, or in stews (this before anyone discriminated between a stew and a tagine). Perhaps I should say, in fact, I went on a very English shopping expedition.

Oh and happy new year!

Marjorie Morningstar redux

2010-09-06T15:31:00.035+01:00

So the film of Marjorie Morningstar is even more depressing than the book—and the book made me sad.

Natalie Wood's a gorgeous Marjorie, with her glossy black hair, starry eyes, red, red lips. Gene Kelly's not bad either, and although he doesn't get to say my favourite line from the book—"I eat girls like you for breakfast"—he does pace about in black, like an ersatz Fifties, Jewish Hamlet, ranting about how he hates convention.

But: in the book, Marjorie dreams and dreams about Noel but then after she finally sleeps with him is so overcome with guilt that she refuses to marry him and (as penance) marries a Nice Jewish Lawyer (not that nice; he is mainly praised for kindly overlooking her "deformity" of not being a virgin) and gets Old, Grey and Dull. In the film we never be a serious actor, so her attraction to creative unconvention is all about Noel. And she doesn't sleep with him. Instead she agonises about it. And wears her virgin/whore dilemma literally on her sleeves. Those schoolgirl cuffs and collar! That chiffon decolletage! Those Pierrot polka dots!

She Grows Up and realises Noel's not The One (because he hasn't grown up...he can't because this is her film so she's the only one who gets a journey) and then boring, stalkerish Wally Wronken (implausibly a successful playwright) rescues her. It feels like even more of a betrayal because Hollywood rewrote the film—but with no guts! Why couldn't they let Marjorie marry Noel and find a way of being creative and unconventional together? Apparently the remake Scarlett Johansson was going to make is now not happening. But surely one day someone will give Marjorie a happy ending.

Fugitive scraps

2010-08-20T10:29:00.000+01:00

I'm sure Branwell Brontë would have judged me unfavourably for basking in the sun at Top Withens. This is how he described his fictional version of the house, which he called Darkwall:

The farthest house was one which stood on the highest level of the far pasture land, with large black walls and mossy porch and a plantation of gloomy firs, one clump of which—the oldest and the highest—stretched their horizontal arms above one gable like the Genii of that desolate scene. Beyond this house...the path led on to an interminable moor...

Daphne du Maurier's riveting 1960 biography was written to rescue Branwell from his wastrel reputation. At times she seems to be arguing with the dead; when Charlotte mocks Branwell for getting a job on the railways, du Maurier points out that the railways, with their gleaming rails and promise of connectivity, were The Future. She becomes incandescent when she describes Charlotte's decision to keep the sisters' literary success from Branwell "for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied". For du Maurier, Branwell was a tragically thwarted genius, possibly even the co-author of Wuthering Heights, whose failures might be due to epilepsy. (I don't only read about nineteenth century writers who may have had seizures, honest). Trawling through the archives she finds Branwell's father noting in the family volume of Domestic Medicine that tic douleureux signify a "painful convulsive fit" and should be pronounced "tic doolaroos", she finds evidence that Branwell had fits later in life and speculates that he never got into art school in London because a seizure sent him home.

What really excites du Maurier—and maybe this is why we love the Brontës so much—is the way Branwell uses his imagination to transfigure his life and make it bearable. She writes about his relationship with his alter ego Alexander Percy,

This latest Percy, who had behind him half a lifetime of experience of women and their ways, made an excellent double into whose exalted frame Branwell could slip at will and find himself at ease. The insignificant Brontë, bespectacled and small, who had not grown an inch since he turned fourteen, vanished with the flick of an eyelid, and Alexander Percy, a positive danger to female society, stood in his place; so that taking tea with Mrs Thompson, wife of his artist friend, became a mild excitement instead of sixty minutes' discomfort. Mrs Thompson, did she but know it, was judgetd with an appraising eye; the polite young men who sat before her, balancing a teacup and saucer, could strip her in seconds... The snubs and slights received by a young man endeavouring to make his way into a wider circle need not even be felt. Alexander Percy gave the snubs. His was the withering glance, the scorching tongue. The knowledge that he could at will assume this second personality must have become a source of secret delight to Branwell, and an ever-present remedy to pain.

Writing was a way out of his life for Branwell, as it was for his sisters too. In 1837 he wrote to Wordworth for advice (the older poet never replied), writing about living

among secluded hills, where I could neither know what I was or what I could do. I read for the same reason that I ate or drank; because it was a real craving of nature. I wrote on the same principle as I spoke—out of the impulse and feelings of the mind; nor could I help it, for what came, came out, and there was the end of it.

From a friend of Branwell's we get a vivid image of him keeping his works-in-progress in his hat; his friend called them "his fugitive scraps" and so they proved to be, as he never was to write anything as lasting as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. But maybe what draws us back to the Brontës is not so much the wonder of their novels but the brilliance of their strategy for making their lives less miserable, by creating alternate worlds, alternate lives, and living in them instead.

As for me...still in London, still wool-gathering...

The saddest thing at Haworth

2010-08-13T09:35:00.001+01:00

might have been this closed-down wedding shop, with the dresses abandoned and ghostlike on the rails.

I thought I recognised Haworth because of my Brontë obsession, or maybe some subliminal connection with its literary past. Then I realised I recognised it from the Hovis advert.

Jane or Cathy or?

2010-08-11T12:55:00.001+01:00

All the way to Wuthering Heights (really called Top Withens; here's a sign in Japanese!), my friend and I argued: Jane or Cathy? Jane makes her own way, chases independence not a husband, but is she too stoic? Is she boring? Cathy's wild and free and passionate (and I'm not above channelling Kate Bush when, you know, tramping over a moor) but is she maybe sometimes a bit silly?

And is the real question Charlotte or Emily? Charlotte fell in love, and got her heart broken and came back and wrote about a governess who says no to her employer's impossible (wild, romantic, cruel) demands—and gets him anyway. Emily never fell in love; imagine what she might have written if she had. She was also never sensible, or wise. But Charlotte did risk her heart...she wasn't sensible and wise about everything.

Sylvia Plath was an Emily. When she went to Wuthering Heights she feared that

If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

And Ted Hughes was or wanted an Emily. His poem Emily Brontë, starts

The wind on Crow Hill was her darling.
His fierce, high tale in her ear was her secret
But his kiss was fatal.

When we got to Top Withens, the wind didn't wuther—the sun shoved through the clouds, and swallows flew.
If this happened to a character, it would mean she was lacking in passion, unworthy of romance (she got to Wuthering Heights and it didn't even wuther?) but luckily I am not a character and I still believe in romance. And wildness

Maybe Jane/Cathy (Charlotte/Emily) is a false dichotomy (and don't say Anne; I love the mystery and verve of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but it also feels, as Charlotte said, "dejected"; too much a book about how women suffer) but I've been thinking a lot about Branwell. Maybe this whole role models for girls thing is limiting...

I'm back now, by the way, but catching up on posting. And missing the fresh air and the weirdly stary sheep.

Heptonstall

2010-08-07T22:36:00.006+01:00

It's quite a climb to Sylvia Plath's grave at Heptonstall.

In my teens, I was obsessed by Plath. I wrote poems about being unhappy, although actually I was fine. Later, when I was unhappy, I didn't want to write about it. But I always go back to her poetry, as a touchstone. And she was the most important role model I had as a girl—apart from the women I actually knew.

One of my first memories is of sitting under the kitchen table at my grandma’s and pulling parsley leaves off their stalks, for tabbouleh. Above me I could hear my mother, grandmother and aunt, reminiscing, gossiping, arguing, chopping tomatoes, squeezing lemons. They were strong women who’d been through a lot and they wanted me to have a boring life; theirs had been too interesting. I wanted to write. I don’t remember starting but I do remember, aged nine, copying my poems into a book I titled “collected poems". And spending one summer writing a female Oliver Twist; my plucky heroine became a queen of the Victorian underworld. Soon after I discovered Plath's poetry, I found her diaries in a bookshop in the States. They weren’t available over here so they felt like a secret prize. I read them avidly. I admired the way she struggled to work out the kind of woman she wanted to be—and to marry a man who would be companion, sparring-partner and muse. I loved reading about them building a marriage that would be all about making—“Books & Babies & Beef Stew” as she puts it. I love that they took The Joy of Cooking and the Complete Works of Shakespeare on their honeymoon. I loved that Plath read diaries too, to work out how to live; her Plath was Virginia Woolf:

She works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less! ---and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her.

Her diaries are full of resolutions, plans of how to live with relish. She showed me I could will myself into whatever life I wanted.

I thought it would feel weird, in a year when I've lost people, to be visiting the grave of a woman I've never met, but it didn't. Other visitors had left pens—biros and ballpoints huddled against the headstone. I put a stone on her grave. And we walked back down the hill, and the rain scented everything fresh and green.

Grandma's dentures

2010-08-04T10:18:00.008+01:00

Another thing I liked from Ted Hughes's Poetry in the Making...

When Balzac, the great French novelist, was writing, he used to rave about his room, shouting and muttering and pouring with sweat. On one occasion, imagining the anguish of one of his characters, he tore a bedspread to pieces with his teeth. He gave everything he had, you see, though that is not the only way to do it.

I saw these teeth-rotters in a fair in Hebden Bridge.

Fishing and writing

2010-08-04T09:15:00.009+01:00

I've been walking along the Rochdale Canal, where Ted Hughes fished as a child. In Poetry in the Making, he said that he'd learned the writer's way of thinking by fishing where

Your whole being rests lightly on your float, but not drowsily: very alert, so that the least twitch of the float arrives like an electric shock. And you are not only watching the float. You are aware, in a horizonless and slightly mesmerized way, like listening to the double bass in orchestral music, of the fish below there in the dark. At every moment your imagination is alarming itself with the size of the thing slowly leaving the weeds and approaching your bait. Or with the world of beauties down there, suspended in total ignorance of you. And the whole purpose of this concentrated excitement, in this arena of apprehension and unforseeable events, is to bring up some lovely solid thing like living metal from a world where nothing exists but those inevitable facts which raise life out of nothing and return it to nothing.

So you see, fishing with a float is a sort of mental exercise in concentration on a small pint, while at the same time letting your imagination work freely to collect everything that might concern that still point: in this case the still pint is the float and the things that concern the float are all the fish you are busy imagining.

This blog's becoming something of a commonplace book, which, apparently, is no bad thing.

Scout Rocks

2010-08-03T19:29:00.007+01:00

I'm in Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire, in Ted Hughes's house. And this is the view: the cliff face of Scout Rocks; dark, brooding, craggy, and other adjectives you could equally apply to Hughes. (According to the walking guide, Scout Rocks "darkly mesmerised" him. Darkly, broodingly, craggily and other adjectives etc.) Looking out from the top, I remembered that Hughes wrote, of the descent, that "After each visit I must have returned less and less of myself to the valley. This was where the division of body and soul, for me, began." And where poetry begins too?

Wool-gathering

2010-08-01T11:31:00.002+01:00

Doris Lessing, in her second, sad and wry, volume of autobiography, Walking in the Shade, writes that you can't describe writing because what happens is mostly not writing but

'wool-gathering'. And this goes on when you are shopping, cooking, anything. You are reading but find the book has lowered itself; you are wool-gathering .The creative dark. Incommunicable. And what about the pages discarded and thrown away, the stories that were misbegotten—into the wastepaper basket, the ideas that lived in your mind for a day or two, or a week, but haven't any life, so out with them. What life, what is it, why is one page alive and another not, what is this aliveness, which is born so very deep, out of sight, fed by love?

Thank you, Ms Lessing, for the perfect response to the writers' nightmare question what are you up to.

Splinter swerves

2010-07-30T10:31:00.009+01:00

I feel like a numptie because I've never liked Emily Dickinson; I always thought she was a prim, sickly, virginal Victorian lady poet, wafting about in white and never even getting a happy ending like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I only picked up Lyndall Gordon's new biography because she speculates that Dickinson had seizures, and hid away to get some privacy—and control. And then I went back to the poems, especially the ones Gordon thinks were inspired by seizures. Living with seizures is like living

A still—Volcano—Life—
That flickered in the night—
When it was dark enough to do
Without erasing sight—

in that it's a constant emergency, a predictable unpredictability. And this startling poem

The Brain, within its Groove

Runs evenly – and true –
But let a Splinter swerve –
’Twere easier for You –

To put a Current back –
When Floods have slit the Hills –
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves –
And trodden out the Mills –

which describe a seizure's sudden, violent, wrenching. Of course, biography shouldn't make a difference, but it's exciting that a poet might be speaking so directly from her experience to mine. Also, I always thought Dickinson looked like this (left), but according to Gordon, she never did. Dickinson's family found the original picture too stark so after she died they got an artist to paint over the daguerrotype, painting on curls and frills, softening her, making her an angel in the house. Here, (right) is what she really looked like: bold, volcanic, gazing fearlessly into the camera and wearing black.