The Kill (La Curee)

I’m currently having a go at reading Les Rougon-Macquart, Emile Zola’s 20-volume novel sequence, tracing the ‘natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire’. Zola wanted it to embody his vision of a scientific creativity, a naturalist fiction that would demonstrate the effects of heredity and society in several generations of a family living through the bloated and corrupt Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon.

Some of the books tell rather small, delicate stories. The most famous of them are based in some major sector of French society in the 1850s and 1860s. Among mineowrkers (Germinal), the drinking dens of the Goutte d’Or (L’Assommoir), a department store (Au Bonheur Des Dames), among the Impressionists (L’Oeuvre), the railways (La Bête Humaine), the markets (Le Ventre de Paris), in the theatre (Nana), and the world of high finance (L’Argent).

The latter is often paired with its predecessor, La Curée, translated as The Kill. This is set during the transformation of Paris under the prefecture of Baron Haussmann and focuses on the twin corruptions of sex and money. The play’s villainous anti-hero is Aristide Saccard, who fraudulently builds up a massive firm speculating in property and financial instruments.

Zola is extraordinary at showing us, Foucault-like, a history of the present. That is, he shows us our own world being built. Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies Paradise) is particularly striking for showing the growth of what I still recognise as the contemporary attitude to consumerism.

But read this passage from La Curée and ask if it doesn’t remind you precisely of the decade we’ve just lived through:

[Aristide] had a way of enumerating his riches that bewildered his listeners and prevented them from seeing the truth. His Provençal accent grew more pronounced: with his short phrases and nervous gesture he let off fireworks in which millions shot up like rockets and ended by dazzling the most incredulous. These frenetic performances were mainly responsible for his reputation as a lucky speculator. In truth, no one knew whether he had any solid capital assets. His various partners, who were necessarily acquainted with his position as regards themselves, explained his colossal fortune by believing in his absolute luck in other speculations, those in which they had no share. He spent money madly; the flow from his cash-box continued, though the sources of that stream of gold had not yet been discovered. It was pure folly, a frenzy of money, handfuls of louis flung out of the windows, the safe emptied every evening to its last sou, filling up again during the night, no one knew how, and never supplying such large sums as when Saccard pretended to have lost the keys.
Zola, Émile. The Kill. Trans. Brian Nelson. World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 113.

Dramatic Character in an Age of Digital Reproduction

When I’m teaching playwriting there’s usually a bit where we talk about character. Now here’s the thing: I tend not to think about character separate from the play. What I mean by that is that I might well draw a diagram of the structure or describe for my own satisfaction the backstory on a separate document, but I’ll rarely do anything like that for character. In this, I’m pretty Aristotelian: character isn’t what you send people into the story with, it’s what they come out of the story with.

I’ve stolen an image to describe what character is not from David Harrower: it’s the ‘Mr Potato Head Theory of Character’. That is, there is an idea some people have that to give a character depth, or make them more rounded, you stick facts on them: give them an eccentric hobby, or a peculiar catchphrase, or some speech defect, or a limp, or a fashion error. It’s the Mr Potato Head Theory because it implies that you can individualise your characters by sticking odd things onto them until they look freakish enough that they won’t be confused with anyone else. It doesn’t work, obviously, because they just end up being remote figures, actually lacking in individuality, because they’re really just receptacles for a whole basket of tics and quirks.

I’ve slightly revised this view due to a recent experience. I’m writing a play that exists entirely online, mainly through social media, specifically Twitter. To create the characters for this play we - the co-author Daniel Bye and I - set up a number of extra Twitter accounts in new names. We’ve got around ten each. To set up a Twitter account is a simple thing. You need to have an email account and you need to think of your Twitter name. Once you’ve done that, Twitter takes you through a simple process of creating your biog, encouraging you to follow a few people, and that’s it.

Twitter is not a place where it’s easy to create a deep sense of character. You get - as everyone knows - 140 characters per tweet. It’s a place for the aperçu, the one-liner, the observation, or the pun. And you can only accumulate a sense of character over a great many of those, and then only really in the moments where the wit falters and something else comes through.

But where you can get a sudden immersive rush of ‘character’ is through who you follow. When you set up the account, Twitter encourages you, as I said, to follow people, but it conveniently groups people into topics. So when I set up some of the characters and had little more than a name and a function in the story, I went a bit Mr Potato Head: okay, maybe he’s into classical music, so I’ll follow a load of classical music feeds. Maybe she’s a fan of Arsenal, so she can follow loads of fan and news feeds. Usually, I put two or three of these together: so she likes local politics, Arsenal, and prog rock. Very Mr Potato Head.

What this means is that when I call up their Twitter timeline, I suddenly get an intense burst of what it might be like to inhabit that set of interests. Suddenly I’ve got people talking about these things, a wealth of language and references and a style and attitude towards these things; there are links to websites and photos; there are jokes and pearly wisdoms. And because most of them have two or three of these interests, I get that interesting textural clash, where @Arsenal’s ‘Thomas Vermaelen admits it is a relief to be playing consistently again after missing most of last season - arsenal.com/news/news-arch…’ is followed immediately by  @MrHarryCole’s ‘RT @nicholaswatt: No 10 declines to comment on allegations about Jeremy Hunt. 'We are not providing a running commentary' <- told ya’ which in turn gives way to @StuartAndrewMP’s ‘Attending the Disability Group APPG meeting to hear DWP Minister, Maria Miller to hear about changes to DLA’. What this means is that it’s not just the contents that I’m negotiating, it’s imagining what sort of person would negotiate between these different things.

It is a bit Potato Head, but it’s like not just plugging in the eyes and ears but also suddenly being given what they see and hear. It’s a very interesting experience where you get to put yourself in someone’s digital shoes. It may seem like a rather artificial thing, but, hey, quite a lot of my time, my actual lived experience, takes place in front of Twitter. It’s quite a thing to experience what it would be like to be someone else in front of Twitter, especially when one of my (@danrebellato) tweets sails by and I see its flimsiness, its superficiality against the intense political wonking and the extended goonerism. I’ve found myself since wondering how someone would feel if they got access to my Twitter feed, how they’d do at being me.

This prompts me then to wonder whether we currently experience our personalities most sharply in social media. No, let me say hastily, of course we don’t; we experience ourselves most sharply in the way we love and maintain friendships and the way we fear and react and cry and think about the world. But Facebook and Twitter do require you to force your personality through tiny holes and some people reveal a lot about themselves by the way they navigate these tiny holes - and they do so in a rather theatrical way. Just as the stage places an intense magnifying frame around the things people do and say, so do the minimal spaces of the status update. It’s interesting how quickly people can reveal themselves to be smart, well-informed, and witty or vulgar, ignorant, or self-regarding. And I can say for myself that I’ve discovered things about myself through Twitter; there’s a sort of phantom version of yourself that you dangle, like a seductress’s leg, to the passing trade,  which is both rather like you and not particularly like you, which is, after all, how I feel a lot of the time: not like me, or, to put it in less essentialist terms, I feel I am, like The Fall, always different, always the same.

So I guess I’m wondering if, In a sense, our experience of ourselves, in an age of digital reproduction, is becoming more dramaturgical.

That Would Be Myself, Lord Sugar

A verbal habit has recently become ingrained. This is to replace the words ‘me’ and ‘you’ with ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’. It’s everywhere at the moment. In shops, assistants say ‘and is this for yourself?’. Footballers tell us ‘that’s a conversation between myself and my manager’. Contestants on The Apprentice when asked who was in charge of the task say ‘that would be myself, Lord Sugar’.

I think it’s a genteelism, i.e. a mistaken bit a grammar that is actually an attempt to sound more formal. And, I guess, ‘myself’ sounds slightly more formal than saying ‘me’. It’s related to the thing where people vaguely remember that you’re grammatically supposed to say ‘My wife and I went to church’ rather than ‘Me and my wife went to church’ and misapply the rule to every situation ‘it really pissed off my my wife and I’, ‘that’s nothing to do with my wife and I’.

But it’s not just a genteelism; or, rather, genteelism doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain why this genteelism and not others. Why have we singled out ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’ as words to substitute into our sentences?

I wonder if, right now, we feel that ‘you’ and ‘me’ are too blunt, too direct. Saying ‘that was me, Lord Sugar’ maybe sounds a bit like you’re pushing yourself forward; maybe it sounds like going ‘Me me me, lord Sugar!’. I wonder if ‘And is this for you?’ sounds rather like a challenge, too personal, a bit like ‘are you seriously going to wear this?’

And that in turn may - yes, ‘may’, this is all speculation - to a general concern about avoiding responsibility and avoiding judgment. That manic insistence that everyone’s entitled to their own opinion - and I mean really manic, the complete confidence that having an opinion is sacrosanct and cannot be criticised - has been around for a decade now. And it goes together which a reflex insistence that we can’t judge anybody else: ‘I’m not having a go at you...’ says the phone-in caller just before having a go at you; ‘I’m not criticising you...’ she says, to preface her criticisms.

This is a kind of popular postmodernism, at least a popular version of the postmodernism that was about complete relativism - cultural, moral, aesthetic, even epistemic. Though most of the smart pomo thinkers clearly weren’t relativists in any banal way (Derrida, Foucault, for example), it’s hard to see Lyotard’s work as endorsing anything other than the belief that judging anyone else is a kind of profound, primary ethical error. And this seemed for him to include making epistemic judgments about the world, insofar as they impinge upon anyone else. I guess for a while this seemed liberating, but ultimately it locks us in tiny boxes, afraid of commenting on anyone else.

And you see the foolishness of that in the idea that your opinions are sacred and you can’t be judged. Because what are your opinions but kinds of judgment? Put another way, if your opinions on anything are sacred, what about my opinions of your opinions?

I taught a course about pop music a couple of years ago. I did a class where we talked about Bob Dylan’s lyrics. One students asked, aggressively, ‘what if we think his lyrics are crap?’ I said, ‘what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘are we allowed to think his lyrics are crap?’ And what he meant by that, I think, was to challenge my assumption that we could all find value in Dylan’s lyrics, that they might repay a bit of pressure, spending a little time with them. But also, it was aggressive because it pushed a crude and inarticulate opinion in the way of the collective work of analysis and debate in which the rest of us were engaged. And the answer I wanted to give but, obviously, didn’t, was ‘of course you can think that Dylan’s lyrics are crap, but you have also to understand that if you think that, we are all entitled to think that your taste is crap and we might well form rather serious negative judgments of you for making such a crass stand on something you clearly don’t get, because if honestly you think his lyrics aren’t to your taste, but actually you think they are bad, crap lyrics, I can only assume that you are, on some level, a fool and, though you believe opinions exist in some divinely-protected magic circle, they don’t because, look, I now think you’re an idiot and I didn’t before’.

Because this is how ideas work; they’re meaningful, serious things. To think that Dylan’s lyrics are crap entails a belief about other people’s beliefs; in other words, you can’t think that Dylan’s lyrics are crap without thinking, in some way, that the opinions of people who think he’s a genius are a bit crap too.

In a sense, then, I wonder if the plague of myselfs and yourselfs reflects a kind of fearfulness about judgment and refusal to engage that is part of a wider issue in our culture. Of course, I may be talking nonsense. You can contact myself at the usual address.

28 September 189

Because no matter how permanent the world may seem, it has a history and we made it, and history does not end and we can unmake it.

Enter Tainment

​The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar is very, very funny. It has a stellar cast without a weak link. Tobias Menzies as Plume is a roguish, swaggering, handsome lead and Mackenzie Crook excellent as his devious sidekick, especially in the perfectly-judged fortune-teller scene. Rachael Stirling is gorgeous and hilarious as Melinda, teetering like a weeble in her hooped skirt. Aimee-Ffion Edwards is perky and flirty and earthy and Nancy Carroll is perfect in the breeches role. And when Mark Gatiss comes in as Brazen, all wig and m’dears, the evening reaches a pitch of hysterical comedy that it maintains thereafter. Its a robust, brilliant debut from Josie Rourke, which beautifully rethinks the relations - actorly and design - between stage and auditorium - and brings the play to vigorous life.

I want to start with that hymn of praise because it’s important to say how hugely entertaining it is before I note a sound of caution.

It reminded me of the evening I spent a couple of weeks before at She Stoops to Conquer at the National. The same high comedy, the same brilliant use of music and the ensemble, huge colourful sets, bright costumes, some moments of good, dirty humour and a tremendous sense of brio.

That show reminded me of the evening last year I spent watching One Man, Two Guvnors. All the same things: music, high comedy, audience participation, big laughs, physical humour, and great, great reviews.

The cautionary thought that occurred to me, watching these plays, is whether I was watching theatre for an age of austerity. Is there nothing else in The Recruiting Officer and She Stoops to Conquer than a sex farce? Is anything lost from Goldoni in his transposition to 60s London? I don’t mean that these comedies should be treated as ponderous theses on social mores. I have absolutely no problem with laughter; I love laughing and I hugely enjoyed these productions. Mark Gatiss’s Brazen brought me to squealing tearful laughter with his first scene (‘he married the daughter of old Tongue-Pad, the Master in Chancery, a very pretty woman, only squinted a little’). It’s just that I felt I was seeing a new style of production that was about light, speed and colour, a kind of production aesthetic that gave you no time to think, to reflect, even to savour. It was performance as distraction, sumptuous riches on the stage to delight the eye, acting to feast on, and the plays, on the whole, chosen for their slightness, all the easier to gussy up with the production’s own jewels. At bottom, there seemed to me something rather conservative about these shows.

​That said, how wonderful to have so many genuinely funny theatre shows on at the same time - and, note, all coming out of the subsidised sector. And these casts, too; wonderful to see actors like Rachael Stirling and Tobias Menzies making - apparently - so effortless a transition into comedy. Mackenzie Crooke continues to prove himself a wonderful stage actor, growing in confidence every time I see him. And I may just queue to see once more Mark Gatiss arrest the action of the play for a full 20 seconds as Brazen struggles to recall if his friend’s daughter ‘twas called Margaret or Marjorie.