Theatre review: Romeo + Juliet pops with vitality at the Rose Theatre Kingston

It's not only the gold Nike Airs that dazzle in Sally Cookson's new production of Romeo + Juliet at the Rose Theatre Kingston. The cast are positively aglow with kinetic energy in this contemporary dress production of one of the most universal love stories. Cookson succeeds in reinvigorating the play in a way that rivals even Baz Luhrmann's trailblazing 1996 film for freshness and flair.

This production daubs the whole cast in gold for a trippy slow-motion ball dance, complete with glittering ski goggles. It kills its female Mercutio with a hammer, and amalgamates Capulet and Lady Capulet into one terrifyingly fiery matriarch. And it works. Cookson is known for taking risks (her extraordinary Jane Eyre at Bristol Old Vic and Hetty Feather at the Rose are two recent examples) and even to more traditional theatre-goers who may not have a taste for this particular interpretation of Shakespeare, it should be clear that she does so with consummate pizazz. The quirks and modern twists do not feel forced or extraneous, but fuse together to create a production of great intensity and contemporary resonance. 

From the Prologue spoken in unison to the synchronised physical theatre touches – the cast moves as one like a viscous, globuled mass surrounding Juliet while she tries to break out to reach Romeo – this feels like an incredibly tight production. Every actor brings a real vigour to their character that makes the theatre hum with life. By the time you hear Juliet (the effervescent Audrey Brisson) scream with feral wildness as she realises Romeo's body is lifeless upon her, your own body feels equally consumed by their passion. Sharon D Clarke's superb Caribbean Nurse is a kind, simple soul whose love for her young charge spills over into an astonishing, heartrending song of lamentation when she believes Juliet is dead. And the true potency of Shakespeare's words is palpable in every line in the play – I have never before felt simultaneously so immersed in the emotion of the story and so fully able to appreciate the virtuosic poetry as it is spoken on stage.

There is something about this production that feels truly wired – as if it has been pumped full of caffeine and spun on its head (in a breakdance move that would be entirely in keeping with the mood of the play). Cookson has found a new dynamism in the plight of these lovers that is allowed to pulse freely in Katie Sykes’s brutalist set and Aideen Malone’s spunky lighting. Benji Bower's score eeks out eerie, beautiful synths and live melodies across each scene, and leaves space for all-important silence to breathe a further ecstatic tension into the air. It is hard to fault this interpretation of such a familiar play, apart from perhaps too ardent a paring back of the script in places (for example, replacing Juliet's final speech, in which she hopes that ‘Haply poison yet doth hang’ on Romeo’s cold lips, entirely with actions feels somehow unsatisfying). 

In Romeo’s visit to Juliet on their wedding night, in the wake of his killing her cousin Tybalt, I have never seen such an authentic expression of the conflicted emotions Juliet would feel at that moment. Joseph Drake (Romeo) and Audrey Brisson join together in a lustful, recoiling dance that leads them – desperate, tussling, weaving in rapturous agony – across the many levels of the set. Juliet pushes hard against Romeo's chest as if both to reject and to seize his heart. And you leave the Rose feeling as if your own heart has been equally pummelled, as the play is reconstituted and recharged to deliver its final blows of love and loss with an irresistible, bodily power.

Romeo + Juliet plays until Saturday 21 March at the Rose Theatre, Kingston

Book review: do we need another Second World War novel? First Time Solo by Iain Maloney

"Our time here is infinitesimally small in the span of geological time yet we fill it with such importance." So says one of the four trainee RAF pilots of First Time Solo, musing upon the nature of humanity in the midst of the Second World War. The question this may prompt the reader to ask is, in this infinitesimally small time we have is there really need for yet another novel set during the Second World War?

 

Iain Maloney’s debut to some extent justifies its existence with riffs on the relationship between war and music. His narrative follows Jack Devine, an aspiring pilot from a remote Aberdeenshire farm with an unusual zeal for jazz. This allows Maloney to play with the synchronicity between losing oneself in music and in flight, to juxtapose the liberation of music with the repression of war. He persuasively uses the mesmeric rhythms of jazz as a means by which to escape the terror of reality; Jack frees himself from the "barriers, frontiers, prison bars" of notation to play his trumpet with true abandon.

 

Jack befriends and forms a jazz band with fellow recruitees Joe, Terry and Doug – a union that gives them a tantalising picture of their potential future, were they not facing imminent death in the fight against "Jerry". The boredom, exhilaration, hard graft and horror of training are all present in this novel, but are never quite conjured with real potency. And as Joe becomes increasingly deranged and dangerous, the friendships break down and so does the legitimacy of the plot – the lethal tricks Joe plays begin to seem contrived simply to create dramatic urgency, not only tricking the characters but also the reader into thinking they should feel emotion rather than genuinely inducing it.

 

Maloney fluctuates between traditional narrative and stylistic play with short, sharp sentences, which disintegrate convincingly at points into fragmented half-thoughts as Jack struggles to process his experiences. Sometimes this works, sometimes it feels overly simplistic rather than poetic. Tellingly, the note at the back of the book in which Maloney cites his own grandfather’s experiences as the inspiration forFirst Time Solo retrospectively gives the whole narrative more emotional heft. But that impact just isn’t there in the novel itself, and after a rather anticlimactic ending it feels like Maloney never quite gets off the training blocks and truly takes flight.

This review was first published on We Love This Book.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Book review: a 'puzzling' debut from Andrew Ladd

A quiet lament to a lost way of life haunts What Ends, Ladd’s debut novel chronicling the slow but inevitable decline of a small community living on the fictional Hebridean island Eilean Fìor. The guesthouse run by the McCloud family, last remaining inhabitants of the island, represents a complex nucleus of home comforts and uncomfortable entrapment that exist in constant conflict and eventually lead the family, and their home, to implode. 

The three children represent three wildly differing attitudes towards the island. Through them Ladd offers no judgement on the paths taken by them or their stubborn but goodhearted parents. Barry, bullied on a mainland school, is severed irrevocably from the innocence of the island. Flora remains conflicted between the artistic inspiration she draws from the island’s wildness and a need to validate her life by seeking approval beyond its shores. Only Trevor, the youngest, retains a sense of wonder at the human and natural history of his home, and a desire to explore and preserve it. 

Ladd's prose has flaws – there is some clunky dialogue and images bordering on cliché that undermine an otherwise thoughtful novel. In tone he evokes the quietude of John Banville (although does not reach Banville’s linguistic virtuosity). And Ladd’s angry, lyrical mourning of a lost community echoes Brian Friel’s great Irish play Translations, even in the shared storyline of starstruck lovers, one native trying to escape and one foreigner desperate to assimilate a dying way of life. 

It feels as though Ladd develops as a writer even through the course of the novel. At its beginning, he struggles to inhabit a young child’s mind convincingly; by the end, he presents a stunning vision of dementia, rendered stylistically with such precision and flair that it leaves the reader wishing he had exhibited this more. Using the trope of crossword clues once beloved of the afflicted character, the narrative intertwines his thoughts with poetically concise thoughts-as-clues, which are as multi-layered and satisfying to ponder as crossword puzzles themselves. A powerful end to an intriguing, understated debut. 

This review was first published on We Love This Book.

Poem: An Anchor

First published in Miracle, Tuesday 15th July 2014

Two of my poems have been published in the most recent issue of Miracle, an online and print-on-demand literary and art magazine.

The theme is 'Cage', which I interpreted liberally.

Here is one of them:

An anchor

You drew an I♥U

on my trouser leg. You

linked the letters so it looked more

like a Popeye tattoo. I let you

because these trousers are old and,

as you say, it’ll probably

come out in the wash.

Read both poems in Miracle's 'Cage' issue >>

Poem: Hilda Horsley’s Alarm Clock

Published on The Missing Slate, Tuesday 6 May

My first published poem appears on The Missing Slate as their Poem of the Week.Inspired by the World War I Centenary and a desire to see it not just from the point of view of the men fighting but the women affected at home, it is from the point of view of Hilda Horsley, a 17 year old dressmaker in Hartlepool in 1914. She was the first civilian and the first female casualty of the First World War, when the Germans shelled Hartlepool on 16th December 1914.

The bell sings       no more. A tooth

chipped, no cheshire cat

smile.    ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ It isn’t half

gawkey. The clock’s     face

scarred worse than         mine

when they found me, a       yawning

gape                                      ripped

straight through its afternoon

or dead                   of night.

At eight o’clock in the morning a piece

of shrapnel burrowed its tick into the small

intestine, like clockwork. The ground

shook still, and worried

the dinger into a frenzy of chattering

fit now only for hysterics.

I fumbled

the key in the shrunken lock with needle-

thin hands. Perhaps if the clock

had only broken

earlier I might have over-          slept

not been buried beneath

the clemmies of the front door

with that sound                ringing

out the blood from my    soaking

clothed                     bones.

Hilda Horsley's Alarm Clock on The Missing Slate >>

Theatre review: Translations at Rose Theatre Kingston

Translations by Brian Friel
Dir. James Grieve
Until Sat 3 May

«««««

Erosion – of language, of a culture, of the hearts of a generation – is central to Brian Friel’s great play Translations (1980). In a superlative co-production from the Rose Theatre Kingston, English Touring Theatre and Sheffield Theatres, the audience’s heart too is eroded by the intense emotional contours of this quietly angry account of the English colonisation of Ireland in the 1830s.

Set in Baile Baeg, Friel’s fictional town (literally meaning a universal ‘small town’ in anglicised Irish), we witness a close community disintegrating as the English military set about mapping Ireland, and in the process renaming every parish, hillock and stream. Friel makes it clear that centuries of identity and meaning are eradicated in the process; by placing the action in a backwater hedge school with an irascible old master still bent on teaching spoken Latin, Greek and Irish, we perceive both the futility of keeping dead languages alive and the conflict of imposing a coloniser’s language on a people who must choose either to fight against it or embrace it as progress and revitalisation.

Director James Grieve’s consummate production allows Friel’s play to breathe, staying faithful to the text and instilling it with a vibrancy that echoes through the centuries. His two blundering Englishmen, Lancey and Yolland, are at first hilarious (the audience was howling with laughter at Lancey’s bungled attempts to explain their project through ludicrous sign language and over-enunciated Queen’s English). But this is poignantly offset as a star-crossed love blooms between Yolland and Máire, a women determined to better her position by learning English. They dance around each other in a theatrically taut expression of love that both understand implicitly despite not knowing a word of the other’s speech. Friel’s great experimental triumph is to have both characters speaking English on stage – understanding and misunderstanding are in a constant, agonising dialogue in which the audience plays an integral part.

The acting is superb, from Roxanna Nic Liam as the dumb shrinking violet Sarah to Niall Buggy as Hugh, drunken master of the hedge school who pulls off inebriation faultlessly and brings to Friel’s great lines a gravitas that echoes through the whole play. Paul Cawley is pitch-perfect as Lancey, transforming from bumbling sapper to deadly soldier seamlessly. The whole cast are exceptional, Grieve’s direction is highly intelligent and Lucy Osborne’s set provides an evocative backdrop to the play’s subtle tragedy.

Now, nearly 200 years on from the play’s setting, it is clear that Friel’s themes of colonisation, identity and linguistic mutability are just as vital and relevant to our world. As Russia imposes its might on Ukraine, as the West deliberates its actions toward Syria, we are relentlessly faced with the moral, political and social problems of imposing one set of values, culture and language on another. All too often, humans are insensible to or blatantly disregard the consequences. 

This production allows Friel’s individual tale to appeal to the heart while making the audience draw its own conclusions about the rippling resonance of Translations today. This play is theatrically, linguistically and emotionally perfect. So good, I had to go twice. See it, now.

Translations at the Rose Theatre, Kingston

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Joseph and the Bird – How will I know?

A stunning cover of an almost unrecognisable Whitney Houston song – such an original take on a 90s classic it feels like it could become a 20tweens classic in no time...

The seductive, perfectly controlled tones of vocalist Romy Quinnen and ingenious production from Joseph Luxton speak for themselves. The video is hypnotic. From the starry sky to the fading street lights projected onto a tantalising silhouette, you want to immerse yourself in its sights and sounds.

Watch it, now:

Book review: The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris

Published 13 February 2014 by Gollancz

In a world of gods, ice folk and dwarves, Joanne Harris chooses as her hero the trickster god Loki, bent upon making mischief throughout the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology.

Unfortunately for the reader, his tongue-in-cheek tone and irritating colloquialisms make him less an endearing anti-hero and more an annoying younger brother with a penchant for tall stories.

Shape-shifting and deceiving his way through the tale, Loki rises from the depths of Chaos to dwell among the gods of Asgard, ruled by the Allfather Odin who repeatedly (and inexplicably) gives him the benefit of the doubt. A series of misadventures, tricks and tussles each bear a chapter title relating to Loki’s attempted enlightenment of his reader, his gospel ‘Lokabrenna’. These consist of such platitudes as ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ and ‘Most problems can be solved through cake’. Tension builds as Loki pushes the boundaries of the gods’ – and the readers’ – patience, until finally he colludes in bringing about Ragnarok, the cataclysmic end of the gods.

Harris does succeed in constructing a vivid, convincing world in which cinematic set pieces shimmer with the ‘glam’ of runes and bristle with the looming dramatic compulsion of prophecy. But this world is so sullied by the incongruous cleaving to it of contemporary idioms that it feels inescapably artificial. The story should be a thrilling one, but somehow Loki’s infuriating slang (‘Chillax’, ‘Boom!’) and heavy-handed presaging of things to come (‘But that was a lesson I had yet to learn’; ‘Just proves how wrong you can be I guess’) turns his adventures into a succession of contrived vignettes that do not fuse together into a satisfying whole.

AS Byatt’s recent foray into Norse Mythology, Ragnarok, proves how compelling and poetic this world of gods can be. She sums Loki up in one succinct, beautiful phrase: ‘Ungraspable Loki flamed amazement and pleased himself.’ Joanne Harris has taken an entire novel to do the same, with less success. The dust jacket sells The Gospel of Loki as a retelling of history, as its hero’s ‘turn to take the stage’. Perhaps this incarnation of Loki failed to make his voice heard for a reason; perhaps he should have stayed in the wings.

This review was originally published on We Love This Book.

South London Bookshop Review: Herne Hill Bookshop

289 Railton Road, South London, SE24 0LY

Where?

On the corner just as you come out of Herne Hill Station, a cheery green façade welcomes you into this small but savvily stocked bookshop. On Sundays it is a fitting piece of the jigsaw of shops that frame Herne Hill Farmers Market, which offers organic food and trinkets to complement a discerning reader’s taste in literature.

What?

Its somewhat bare shelves first imply a poor collection or a struggling business, and create an atmosphere of slight dilapidation. But on closer inspection there is quite a range of works for such a small place – a medley of contemporary and classic fiction, plus a line in local interest and children’s books. They’ve clearly stocked for the local demographic, including the yummy mummies of nearby Dulwich.

Reason to visit?

If you’re indecisive. Here lies a pared-down selection of good books, so a certain amount of the fearsome choice that faces you in larger bookshops has already been made. All you have to do is pick up pretty much anything, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy – and you’ll find a book worth reading.

What’s missing?

Lots. But as I say, that’s not always a bad thing. If you want something specific, it’s likely you’ll need to order it in (as the smaller sister of Clapham Books, you can request anything they don’t have from down the road). It's a shame that instead of stuffing their shelves there are some gaping holes, which feels almost embarrassedly naked. But this bookshop works wonders as a place for a quick pop-in and browse when you’ve got five minutes to spare while the butcher wraps up your joint of beef for Sunday lunch.

East London Bookshop Review: The Book Stall, Spitalfields Market

The Book Stall, Old Spitalfields Market, E1 6EW

Where?

Amidst the tarnished ‘vintage’ jewellery and ubiquitous owl-patterned dresses of Spitalfields Market, one unassuming stall juxtaposes that hipster consumerism with a quiet, unpretentious erudition. Its prime spot at the edge of the market stops passers-by on their journey to the over-priced bric-a-brac, and rewards them with a wide array of classics, modern classics and esoteric books at very reasonable remainder-stock prices.

What?

Anything from Vintage imprint Woolf, Kafka or Faulkner to Oliver Sacks’s entire oeuvre, How to thrive in a digital age by Tom Chatfield or an intriguing volume of Graffiti Argentina. All books are around £3 - £4, and all are pretty much guaranteed to enhance your experience of the world.

Best on the shelves?

Forgotten editions of modern classics, particularly for authors whose collected works have since been standardised into series with consistent book jackets. The gleeful cat grasping the moon on the 2003 Vintage cover of The Master and Margarita; a slender arm and coy collar bones adorning the Faber Firsts edition of The Bell Jar; the arched curve of the diving boy on the 2009 edition of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna. These aren’t as rare as lost or vintage editions, but are often usurped designs that have their own beauty and deserve still to be appreciated. And all for a bargain price – what’s not to love?

What’s missing?

The limitations of this book stall are the preconditions of its existence: not enough books and no new titles. But cool-as-cucumber Ezra, the stall owner, fills the small space with a discerning selection that maximises on quality. And any bookshop can sell the new, zeitgeist titles – this stall picks from the zeitgeists of years gone by the books that deserve to be remembered. Well worth a trip.

Theatre review: nut at NT's The Shed

nut

By debbie tucker green

The Shed, National Theatre

The deliberately contrived lower case letters in debbie tucker green’s name and the names of her plays do not, thankfully, translate into the content of her work. There is little contrivance in nut’s whip-crack dialogue and its depiction of a reclusive young woman fighting her demons.

nut opens as protagonist Elayne holds a bizarre conversation with her friends Aimee and Devon about who would write their eulogies, how they would ‘go out’, and who they would invite to their funerals. The surreal dialogue is peppered with telling insight into the serious undercurrents underlying many young, banterous relationships that are struggling to stay jocular in the face of real problems. But the lengthy scene peters out into confusion towards the end as it loses its sense of focus.

We’re catapulted into a gripping duologue, however, when we cut to Elayne’s sister having a painfully plausible spat with her ex-husband about custody of their child. Anyone who has ever fought with a loved one will squirm with recognition. It is only when Elayne’s sister visits that the link between them is established and the uncanny nature of the first scene is explained. Slowly everything assumes a retrospective poignancy and anguish that endures through the final scene as the innate love between the sisters seems as ephemeral and extinguishable as the burning cigarettes that pepper the play.

Tucker Green's language artfully combines naturalistic sparring with poetic nuances that resonate throughout the play. And the actors’ delivery is mostly pitch-perfect, particularly from Sharlene Whyte as Elayne’s sister and Gershwyn Eustache Jr as her ex, who make you feel the voyeuristic discomfort of watching a real couple puzzling out their personal conflicts. The unique set design from Lisa Marie Hall – all curved rusting poles and furniture that seems to mutate into sculpture – creates a beautiful, functional and ensnaring cage in which the characters pace and snarl.

Ultimately it feels there is something missing that would have turned this from a good play into a great one. Perhaps it is lost in that first long scene where the characters’ interactions don’t always ring true, and leave you fearing a lack of emotional investment. But by the end of the play, you sense the burn of the cigarettes Elayne inflicts upon herself as if they are on your own skin, you inhale the oppressive smoke into your lungs and feel truly affected by the daily grind of this vignette of lives struggling for air.

This is a feisty little play, not flawless but absolutely worthy of being programmed in the experimental space of the NT’s The Shed. It makes you intensely uncomfortable and laugh out loud simultaneously, and leaves you feeling shell shocked – in its very conflict lies its power.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Mount Kimbie make you want to dance away your faultless youth all night long...

Mount Kimbie Live

Koko, London, Thursday 14 November

This review first appeared on More than the Music

Kai Campos and Dominic Maker have perfected a tricky balance in their live sets: they fluctuate between using live vocals, guitar and drums to faithfully enhance tunes from their most recent album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, and also produce exhilarating live remixes that tantalise the audience and stay faithful to their electronic roots.

Campos does the majority of the singing, and although his voice isn’t flawless, it brings an appropriately gritty sincerity to songs like Home Recording. Live drums make the thumping percussion refreshingly authentic and serve to complement the band’s glitchier beats – Maker even cracks out some impressively precise clapping into the mic which is rather mesmerising. In Blood and Form, Campos’s guitar and vocals provide a delicate counterbalance to the tune’s relentlessly electronic industrial sounds. And when the duo sing in unison on Made to Stray, there is an extra umph that turns Campos’s sometimes weak voice into an irresistible pull on the audience to join in.

Mount Kimbie’s achievement in bringing their post-dubstep electronic sounds into a live forum is at its zenith in their collaboration with spoken word rapper King Krule. On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, the two tracks with Krule’s vociferous vocals can jar against the mellow delicacy of the rest of the album. But in the live set he brings an energy to the stage that enlivens crowd and band alike. As he moves from spoken-singing to truly impassioned rapping, Campos and Maker’s increasingly insistent drones seem perfectly matched to the paroxysms into which Krule sends himself.

This duo have moved on from the electronica of their first album, Crooks and Lovers, to hone a sound that embraces everything from trip-hop, dubstep and rap to techno and even free jazz. This heady mix explodes onstage into a varied and immersive experience that is musically assured and excitingly experimental. And as well as the cerebral enjoyment you can take from Mount Kimbie’s music, it also makes you want to dance away your faultless youth the whole night long.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Gig review: 'Like taking a wholesome walk through the forests of the world' - Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit

Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit
Hackney Empire, 10th October

This review originally appeared on More Than The Music

Johnny Flynn has recently taken a hiatus from music, instead gracing the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe and the West End to act in Richard III, Twelfth Night and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Now the tousled English folkster has returned to the folk scene in which he cuts such an inimitable figure. This current tour, promoting his new album Country Mile, proves that he has not lost his touch.

Flynn’s voice appears effortless, slipping the notes into each phrase like delicate fingers into a perfectly fitting glove. He is as pitch-perfect live as he is on recordings, and brings an additional frisson to his performance with his unforced authenticity and the occasional well-placed extra glissando. The Sussex Wit (made up of Flynn’s sister Lillie on vocals, flute and melodian, David Beauchamp on drums, Adam Beach on bass, Joe Zeitlin on cello and newest member Cosmo Sheldrake on keyboard) complement Flynn beautifully. The band sit separately on a sparse stage, silhouetted by backlighting; a beguiling set-up that belies the perfect synchrony of their performance as a seamless whole. Lillie’s voice adds an ethereal aura to her brother’s earthy tones, which together mingle with miscellaneous folk instruments to create a sound that maintains its integrity as much at Hackney Empire as it did at their intimate Rough Trade record store gig two weeks ago.

The set was compiled from a satisfying mix of old favourites and new songs. Many of the new ones do sound remarkably similar to those from his previous two albums, A Larum and Been Listening – Flynn’s sound has definitely not been revolutionised, lending a certain sameyness to the gig. But if you like intriguing, imaginative folk then that’s no bad thing. From the heart-warming Einstein’s Idea (written when his son was born – cue every woman in the crowd melting) and the two-part contrapuntal harmony of After Eliot, to the vigorous trumpet-enhanced folk-rock of Howl and the rollicking Tickle Me Pink, there is plenty of diversity within Flynn’s oeuvre to keep you wanting more.

Flynn’s music always instills a certain emotional heft, with his catchy hooks and ambiguous, poetic lyrics. Seeing him live, you feel this even more keenly – there is a lack of pretension in these songs that makes you want to slow down your pace of life, pick up a banjo and strum your heart out. Watching a Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit gig is like going for a wholesome walk through the forests of the world, taking in everything from acorn to oak and emerging covered in mud with ruddy cheeks, much like Flynn’s own, and gratifyingly invigorated by your nourishing musical experience.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

'The poeticism of the prose is exquisite': a review of The Tilted World

By Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Published 1st October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

Husband and wife writers, poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin, have composed a poem of devotion to their land and to love in the form of lyrical novel The Tilted World. They weave a tender tale of lost souls in the Deep South and of discovered solace amidst the cataclysm of the great 1927 Mississippi flood.

The palpable threat of the flood is manifested through the prism of Dixie Clay – already emotionally drowned by her unhappy marriage to a bootlegger making whisky in defiance of prohibition law – and through Ingersoll, an emotionally stagnated prohibition agent, come to Mississippi as the flood waters threaten to burst the levees. When this strange, mud-caked man appears through the rain to leave a baby on Dixie’s doorstep, the world will tilt and warp the boundaries of law, friendship, community and love.

The Tilted World takes time to absorb the reader in its delicately rendered tale. The structure, which inhabits Dixie’s and Ingersoll’s thoughts episodically, does not immediately fully realise their psychologies, and boredom occasionally threatens in the opening chapters. The syntax can seem almost wilfully excluding – it is not clear from the start that the narrative voice has sprinklings of southern American phrasing, so the lack or direct and indirect objects and unnatural verb uses can be confusing. But slowly the lives of Dixie and Ingersoll become compelling, and representative of the lives of all those who lived through prohibition, who lived through the war, and through the upheavals of the Deep South at the turn of the century.

The poeticism of the prose is exquisite; metaphors are sprinkled through the book, giving you pause even as the plot surges on like the flood that propels it. Beautiful images that conjure a very specific time and place are simultaneously timeless: in the heavy wind of a low-flying navy plane ‘the corn [is] blown into italics all around’; when the Mississippi river is at breaking point Ingersoll can ‘feel the levee wavering like a struck tuning fork’; the sky is ‘gauzy and low, like a rafter cobweb Dixie Clay yearned to knock down with a broom’.

The Tilted World is a deeply-felt, elegiac homage to a particular time and to the endurance of love, unafraid to shy away from the mundane realities of life, rewarding the reader’s commitment to its tilted world.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

A universal tale of mystery and enlightenment: Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things

Published 1 October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

From the author of the multi-million bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, comes something quite its opposite. The Signature of All Things is an epic, universal tale traversing the 19th century on a voyage of mystery and enlightenment, taking in multiple continents, scientific theories on evolution and the entire spectrum of human experience – including birth, love, death, heartbreak, religious doubt and sexual turmoil.

The novel tells of the bold, brilliant Alma Whittaker, blessed not with beauty but with a formidable intellect and a voracious desire for knowledge. As she immerses herself in scientific pursuits, her botanical specialism in mosses leads her to revelatory ideas about time and evolution. These ideas are challenged by the man she falls in love with, and Alma’s all-encompassing need to seek answers impels her to investigate the enigmas of her own lover’s past.

Gilbert uses Alma’s science to enrich her human plight, rendering one person’s instinctive, evolutionary battle for survival into a compassionate, tender account of unerring fortitude. There is something of Jane Eyre in Gilbert’s heroine; Alma’s plainness is negated by her resilience and enduring faith in life.

Gilbert’s prose is not perfect – she occasionally labours a metaphor or employs a clunky turn of phrase that seems almost to complement Alma’s own unwieldy demeanour. And the plot is absorbing, but occasionally one can feel a little like Alma, adrift in a tempestuous sea of subtle narrative hints: ‘all she had ever wanted was to know things, yet […] all she did was ponder and wonder and guess’. That said, however, The Signature of All Things is an accomplished and irresistible novel. Expertly researched and exquisitely realised, it compels the reader to adopt Alma’s own unquenchable need to know everything, from the minutiae of her world to the grand narratives that inform it.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Man Booker Prize shortlisted Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre

Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre
Tuesday 10 September
On The Luminaries, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize

‘The novel is the most expansive and supple form that exists. It is almost like a virus; it keeps adapting to remain resilient. It pushes the boundaries of what is possible.’ A resounding testimony of faith in fiction from one of the most talented writers of fiction today; Eleanor Catton’s talk on the night of the announcement for the Man Booker Prize shortlist proves her worthy of her place upon it. She spoke yesterday with eloquence and erudition on everything from the beauty of paradox to the mathematics of the Golden Ratio.

Her shortlisted novel The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand Gold Rush of the 1860s. A weighty tome of 832 pages, is has been hailed as an ‘ambitious’ work not because it is somehow deficiently aspirational, but because it interweaves through an immensely complex structure (based upon rigidly adhered-to astrological schema) a rollicking tale of murder, greed and revelation that defies the seeming arbitrariness of its composition.

Catton was captivated by the notion that ‘each aspect of the zodiac planets governs a part of the self that makes a whole’, and accordingly based each of her characters on a zodiac sign and determined their behaviour by its defining features. The chapters are also governed by the Golden Ratio, necessitating that each is half as long as the preceding chapter (hence the sizeable length of the novel).

This may seem an artificial construct that could impose a certain clinical flavour upon her writing, but the reverse is the case. She gives a typically unassuming caveat to the potential strangeness of her self-imposed structures: ‘my internal monologue is saying ‘don’t sound like too much of a crackpot’ at this point...’. But crackpot she certainly is not; Catton is clearly an author who thrives upon structure but who populates that structure with a world both vividly realised and compelling. Her desire to use the Golden Ratio stemmed from the sense that it is appreciated as beautiful in the visual arts, in mathematics and even in the simple shape of a door or a book, and that its beauty could be manifested in literature but has never been tested. The Luminaries seems both empirically and emotionally to prove the truth of her hypothesis.

The skill of Catton’s writing is in forming her characters fully, allowing their psyches to develop and absorb the reader while building them as ‘spheres within spheres’, each entwined with the next so they become parts of the whole. She cited the influence of Martin Buber’s philosophical tract I and Thou, which led her to investigate the notion that the zenith of life is found when souls truly comprehend each other, understanding themselves to be kindred spirits within humanity.

If this all sounds highly conceptualised and abstract, Catton’s flair is for combining such ideas with a characteristic down-to-earth quality in both her writing and her speech. In last night’s talk, she shrewdly compared the novel to TV box sets, acknowledging that the latter can now ‘give space for psychological complexity’ almost as holistically as the former. Similarly, she acknowledged the pressures on a New Zealand writer shortlisted for the Man Booker; as only the third nominated Kiwi and youngest ever shortlistee, she hopes that she can set the standard for a new generation of writers from her country to contribute to its relatively nascent canon.

She wears her virtuosity with a lightness of touch that turns her systematised, byzantine novel into a timeless human tale. Catton speaks of writing dialogue (one of her particular strengths) as ‘an orchestration, requiring the writer to be a composer, and to be invisible'. And The Luminaries truly is a structural, narrative and emotional symphony, worthy of the praise being heaped upon it.

Follow me on twitter @BetweenTheReeds

Seamus Heaney: we can be consoled that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' of his words

Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest poets of our time - his is the death not only of a naturalist at one with the natural world, but of a lyricist, a balladeer of our times who was gifted with the grace of rendering our political, ecological and personal upheavals with a deft, melodic turn of phrase. His words were as the birds to whom St Francis preached: they 'Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played/ And sang, like images took flight [...] His argument true, his tone light.'

His poetic soul will endure and be remembered for its brilliance, but he will also be remembered as a great and good man. To use Heaney's own phrase, ‘in his presence, time rode easy’, anchored on his mild humility and generous embrace of all people. All who knew him have attested to this: 'a joy to be with and a warm and caring friend' Bill Clinton; ‘a very humble, modest man' Jimmy Deenihan, Irish Arts minister; 'a person of truly exceptional grace and intelligence' former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion; 'He wore his huge wisdom very lightly and he gave so generously of his time' Bishop of Derry Dr Edward Daly.

We can be consoled that Heaney's words will remain as a testament both to his virtuosic poetic skill and to his generosity of spirit. In The Folk Singers, he acknowledges that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' - we can rest assured that people will be strumming to his tune for generations to come, and finding solace in the enduring quality of his ‘time-turned words’.

To read my Southbank Centre blog post on Heaney’s death, see here.

Theatre review: pulsing eroticism and galvanising hate in Mies Julie

Mies Julie
Saturday 17 August, Oxford Playhouse
World tour commences 2014

««««

An insistent drone pervades the still air. Red light seeps through the mist, casting elusive shadows amidst the sparse set. A slowly rotating ceiling fan catches the eye, slicing the air with ominous intent, presaging the unrelenting suspense to come. And thus the scene is set for one of the most formidably visceral, psychologically afflicting plays of the decade.

Director Yael Farber has taken August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, a tale of power, lust and class limitations, and thrust into its melting pot the cataclysmic catalyst of post-apartheid racial tension. Julie is the white daughter of a South African farm owner; John is the black farm hand to whom she directs her quivering desire one hot night, with devastating consequences. What follows is a heady battle between man and woman, black and white, master and servant, colonial domination and native subjugation, intellect and physicality, love and lust, self and self-destruction.

Every movement in this play is exquisitely choreographed to feel at once naturalistic and aesthetically sublime. The physicalisation of John and Julie’s conflicting impulses forms a sparring dance that leaps across the stage and draws you into its gravitational pull. The capitulation of their coupling is an erotic, animalistic union that seems at once inevitable and catastrophic, epitomising the irresistibility of John and Julie’s subconscious need to play out the impossible, irrefutable differences between them.

Hilda Cronjé as Julie exudes sexuality and uses her commanding, almost metallic voice to augment the purposeful thrusts of her physical and emotional needs. But there is something about her that is not only unlikable but also slightly irritating – it makes her initial maltreatment of John hard to endure, and her interactions with her beloved nanny and John’s mother Christine (a stoic, spiritual performance from Zoleka Helesi) feel insincere. But as John, Bongile Mantsai is truly transfixing. His vocal control and bodily power belie a man who at once knows what he wants and has no idea how to achieve it. His instinctive reactions to Julie are brilliantly conditioned not by, as William Golding puts it, ‘a civilisation that knew nothing of him but was in ruins’, but by his own natural moral compass and his proud self-control. He resists Julie’s brazen advances with impressive rigour, relenting only after he has warned her she goes too far: ‘I am only a man’.

Farber’s consummate production perfectly complements the actors’ power. The portentous music, performed live on laptop and saxophone by Mark Fransman and Brydon Bolton, creates an atmosphere taut with reluctant, unresolved cadences and dissonant chords. This is occasionally punctuated by the eerie interjections of renowned Xhosa musician Tandiwe Lungisa as one of John’s spectral ancestors, added to Strindberg’s original cast by Farber to prowl the stage with guttural murmurings that shake the soul. And Patrick Curtis’s set design, a sparsely populated kitchen in which all the action takes place, provides the obstacles around which John and Julie can perform their mating dance and destruction.

Farber’s crowning achievement is successfully, agonizingly to cleave the timeless concerns of Strindberg’s story to the very specific concerns of post-apartheid South Africa. She slowly strips away the layers of grime, sweat and skin that cloak John and Julie in social convention and ancestral history, until they are laid bare with just their passions to speak for them. Farber then builds up the layers again, excruciatingly, one by one, until there is no way they can overcome the impenetrable barriers between them. Mistress and servant dream of escape and equality, but they only prove to themselves and to the shellshocked audience that they cannot undo the binding reality of ‘the new South Africa, where miracles leave us exactly where we began’.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds