This weekend my auntie and I went to see ‘His Dark Materials’ at the theatre in Bath. As anyone who has heard of my English dissertation topic knows, I absolutely adore the trilogy and this was an experience I’d been looking forward to for months… And it was great! For someone who has been lucky enough to take advantage of the RSC’s £5 student tickets for the last few years, as well as see a good portion of the latest west-end musicals, I went into the theatre with pretty high standards and I’m really happy to say that I wasn’t at all disappointed. The play was in two parts – each about 2.5 hours long. There was a break of about 2 hours between the parts (and if you wanted you could go see the second part the next day) and the three novels were split fairly evenly between the hours.
Having not bought a programme until the interval of Part One, I only noticed the young age of the cast when it came to characters who are conspicuously old in the novels, such as the Master of Jordan College, Farder Coram and Lord Faa. I was still shocked, however, when I read that the production was made up of entirely under-18s! The presence of some of the principal actors – Lord Asriel, Serafina Pekkala, Mrs Coulter, for example – was so incredibly mature. Literally, they walked on stage and the whole audience became transfixed. They spoke, boomed, screamed and you felt the same way you did when you read them doing so in the books… For such young people to capture that was, to me, awe-inspiring. Not that there weren’t a few exceptions – those three in particular were flawless, but Lee Scoresby on the other hand was strangely underused (disappearing completely in the second half) and only vaguely Texan. Lyra, who was played by 3 actresses ranging from 13 to 18 – one for each book – was very well done, as was Will, also played by multiple actors. I was perhaps the most impressed by the youngest Lyra, who at one point screamed so very loudly it made all my hairs stick up on my arms (and I was sitting WAAAAAAY back in the gods!) – it was also she, I think, who best captured the savage loyalty of the character, particularly in the scene where she is about to be cut from Pan.
One of the best parts of the production came from its comparison to the film version of ‘The Golden Compass’. Unlike the movie, the play embraced every smidgen of Pullman’s religious controversy with bald alacrity. This production KNEW very clearly who its villains were, there was no skating around the issue of the corrupt ‘Authority’ (although they did omit Metatron and replace him with the assassin character, also renamed, for the purposes of Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel’s decline) who, in the film, is only referred to vaguely and downplayed as the backbone of the Consistorial Court. The gay angels were very much there, and very much gay (or as gay as two teenage boys can be expected to play them). The witches, too, openly declared their revulsion for the Church and its oppression of ‘every good feeling’. To be fair to the film, however, a lot of the religious undertones of the trilogy do not reach fruition until the second and third books, and as I’ve heard there may not even be a sequel made (unfortunate if true, I liked the film on the whole) it may never pose the same issue it did to the script of the play.
Only one tiny thing (apart from the kid 2 rows ahead who kept BOBBING every time something dramatic happened) which annoyed me about the play was this: the presentation of the Gallivespians. Granted, the staging of characters who are the size of a hand and ride on dragonflies was never going to be easy… And using dolls held up by actors did, to a certain extent, work aesthetically. But they took the piss. Lord Roke became a slapstick mimicry of Pullman’s characterisation when he simpered over being invited to perch on Asriel’s hand and was given a silly, high-pitched voice that grated on the ears. The two other Gallivespians were better, but damaged by Roke’s portrayal. It wasn’t so much the way they were played that was annoying, it was the way that they were so unlike their portrayal in the books – the Gallivespians are supposed to be gallant, respectful WARRIORS for god’s sake. Instead they were manipulated like Punch and Judy puppets with the power of stings which, unlike the killing-spurs of the books’ characters, was made to look no harsher than a bee sting and, what’s more, portrayed as misplaced illusions of grandeur rather than a reason to respect them. Still, the way they communicated via the lodestone resonator (so that the big screen behind showed actual actors talking and gesturing whilst the dolls mimicked them) was pretty ingenius and most welcome to the audience up in the grand circle… so I wasn’t completely unimpressed by the characters’ adaptation so much as underwhelmed.
The bears made up for them. And the daemons. And the simplistic-yet-effective use of screens, the Oxfordshire accents, the ghosts, the surprising-yet-most-welcome appearance of random witches all over the theatre who responded to the actors as if still on stage and, mainly, the huge energy and passion of the whole thing… It was just… so… His Dark Materials. And from me, it doesn’t get much more praiseworthy than that.
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Tags: his dark materials, play, review, theatre
the others
Home. Land of life and scans ahoy… A few weeks ago my little sister (the rebel who told my parents she was going on holiday and then disappeared for about 9 months apart from visiting 2 days when my Dad was on the oncology ward last september and a brief xmas appearance) returned to the parental homeland. But she did not return alone. Who did she bring with her? Friends met along the way? The elusive Kenyan army boyfriend? I wish. Nope, she brought her belly. And in it, a 20-week-old feotus. Who else did not know that antibiotics reduce the affects of the contraceptive pill?
Went to a scan the other day… very strange, especially when the little alien started squiggling around and for a tiny dot of a moment the whole screen seemed to gasp with tiny fingers and feet. Apparently they can hear noises in utero and sometimes they move their hands to cover their ears. This little one kept throwing her arms up and putting a shadow over her heart so that the technician couldn’t measure it properly. How delicate must a creature be that the movement of their limbs throws a shadow over their very core? I hope she’s as naughty as her mother.
Dad’s got a scan next week. His headaches are back with a new, spiky sensation. Hopefully it is just stress from selling the business or something like that. Since the chemo stopped working and he’s been neat on dexamethasone his hair has grown back a bit, but he still looks like a beachball on sticks. It won’t go away… but as long as it doesn’t get bigger, we can all breathe a little deeper.
Was life simpler when we could not scan our bodies to see what was happening inside them? Can secrets ever stay locked away indefinitely? Would they be there if no one could feel them? And, can the human pysche ever bear to turn its back on finding out for sure? In a paradoxical way, what’s happened to my dad and sister is not all that unrelated. Both have othered entities growing inside them, and neither knew about it until their bodies began to respond… The hosts are the same, feeding, watering, living… But the others? Well, I guess that’s the difference between life and death.
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Tags: cancer, holidays, home, host, parasite, pregnancy, scans
i wish
i wish
i could
slip into
a second.
A fingertipped
touch
of moment.
And stay there.
just here.
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alcohol for alcohol’s sake?
Do you drink to get drunk? Or just because you like the taste of alcohol? A lot of teetotals I know say that a reason they don’t drink is a matter of taste. Other people drink, but only a little and rarely to get drunk. Control is often a big issue. So is health. And then there are all the social, ethical and religious issues related to alcohol which affect a person’s decision to drink or not.
I drink to get drunk. Or, at least, I drink to achieve a state of mind that goes beyond sobriety, and once I get there I’ll often do all I can to stay there. When I’m drunk I can dance, I can shout, I can talk to people I don’t know… I do it for confidence. I do it to escape from being so agonisingly obsessed with how other people see me every dragging second of sobriety. But it’s not just a social thing, often I’ll drink wine with close friends or family in a domestic setting and I’m always, always ready for a refill… The only reason I can muster for that is similar to the previous one – that I’m trying to escape the internalisation of negativity. (You should have seen the amount of wine/gin my mum and I got through the week after my dad went into hospital last summer!) Just a few moments of things seeming a little better than they are is worth the hangover.
I didn’t post with the intention of whinging again! oops! I wanted to open a debate about alcohol – if you drink, what are your reasons? Is there a stigma attached to the admission that one ‘drinks to get drunk’? What are your reasons for not drinking?
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Tags: anxiety, binge drinking, cocktails, confidence, drinking, shyness, wine
So it has come to this…
…so bored of my dissertation i have written a sonnet. The sheer desperation of a procrastinating brain never ceases to amaze me.
Emblem of Poor Memory.
A flicker on a page sparks mystery,
An innocuous deja-vu impaled
In the fragments of my own history
Enfeebled sensation mulishly veiled.
Are you a mark of the lost memorable,
Enigma of recognition unfound?
A stigmata of the ephemeral
Glimpse into nothing, illusory profound?
Or are you a glimmer from the lost imp,
The half-form of my shambolic skinbag,
Remnants of wisdom solicitously scrimp’d
To ferment ten years into this fleeting nag.
Or is the point of your uncanny possession
To entrap my mind in pointless transgression?
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Tags: dissertation, poetry, procrastination, quite pointless really, untaggable but here we are
Scary TV!
Just saw an advert for this programme: http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/cutting_edge/baby_bible_bashers/index.html
Looks even scarier than the one about the fake babies. Did anyone see that? Here is a clip I found: http://www.channel4.com/video/my-fake-baby/series-1/episode-1/living-doll_p_1.html
There was a grandmother who was ordered one of the dolls to look exactly like her grandson. I don’t know if it was more disturbing that the editors of the programme implied right until the end that the real grandson had died, or that the woman talked as if it was a bad thing that her daughter recovered from cancer (which is why the grandparents looked after the little boy for so long when he was a baby) and moved away. Shudder.
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Tags: bible bashers, documentary, fake babies, reality tv
An Excess of Pheomelanin
When I was about 10, I realised that there was a huge double standard in my world. Remember the late 90s? Nope, me neither, but I do remember that amongst what little I DID know about the big wide world, racism being a terrible thing was certainly something. There were talks by teachers, special assemblies, issues raised oh-so-subtly by the creme de la creme of kids’ tv… Meanwhile kids shouted ‘Ginger!’ at me and no one batted an eye-lid. I wasn’t bullied, no, I was very lucky in that sense, but, like countless other redheads, I was made to know that I was different. Enough kids let me know they hated my hair and acted like it was my fault – at least they were sincere. I hated the adults. Even the ones who were trying to be nice, leaning over me going, “Haven’tyougotlovelyhairIexpectyouhateitdon’tyou.” If I disagreed, I felt vain, conceited, to LIKE yourself was not an option back then. On the other hand, I was loathe to agree with such a pillock. In actual fact, I never really formed an opinion on the matter and simply resented being expected to.
Like I said, it wasn’t the discrimination so much as the social othering that pissed me off. One particularly nastly little cretin once said to me, “You don’t have an opinion, you’re ginger.” I asked him what he thought of racism. He admitted it was terrible, but in the same breath asserted that it “wasn’t the same thing at all.” Having grown up a bit, I have to conclude that much of Britain seems to agree with him. When people are stabbed or murdered because of their skin colour, everyone hears about it. When the same thing happens because of someone’s red hair… well, when was the last time you read about it?
Here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6725653.stm
Perhaps I’m just over-sensitive because I happen to suffer from acute social anxiety. Is it hypocritical of me to complain about social othering, but take advantage of it during one of my rare moments of social confidence? Shouting “Of course!” when a guy in LA caught sight of me, smirked and drawled, “So is it true what they say about redheads?” – was this hypocritical? Was it perpetuating a negative stereotype? Even though I was admittedly a little perplexed by his question? (though I had a fair idea 
) Is it then wrong of me to get frustrated when I’m nonchalantly minding my own business on the tube and warrant a “Ginge!” from some unknown source so that everybody stares at me and my package-deal complexion turns an unflattering shade of, well, red? Kids and cretins aside, what about authority figures? A secondary school teacher who was trying to learn our names once looked me over on my turn and remarked, “Well it shouldn’t be too hard for me to remember YOU!” Ok, yeah, I was one of the luckier redheads and didn’t get horribly bullied because of my hair, but I sometimes wonder now if that had more to do with my keeping a low profile. Surely a comment like that only encourages kids to make physical judgements and ostracise others because of external differences? Would she have gotten away with saying that to the clinically obese child?
I’m not trying to say that I have no sense of humour when it comes to being a redhead. I loved the South Park Ginger Kids episode www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjwnt7WGViA and the Catherine Tate ‘gingers for justice’ sketch made me laugh too. But there is a tiny sting in it all, still. A sting that knows that no one really wants pasty skin and freckles. A sting that remembers when other girls were dying their hair, it was the worst thing in the world when it came out looking ‘all ginger’. (Then they’d turn and catch sight of me with hushed “oh my god!s” of sudden realisation) I guess the ostracising balances out the compliments.
I don’t really have an opinion on my own redheadedness any more than I did when I was a little kid, constantly told that I must hate it. Meh. It’s just hair.
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Tags: gingerism, hair, redhead
out with the old…
Haven’t written the blog for a loooong time….. This is mainly because something in my brain has triggered an alarm and I am s l o w l y realising that if I don’t sort out my MA forms and figure out what I want to do, it ain’t gona get done… Ditto, with the disserfuckingtation – which has mercifully retreated a little from the disaster level at which it was peaking in December with its piles of unread books and badly-received draft and ohgodwhatamigoingtodowithit mind rays.
Most people have written about the New Year and reflected on the old one. 2oo7 was not a great year for my family. It doesn’t seem to have been a great year for many people, in fact. I’m not going to write a big thing about it all or about hopes for 2oo8 because what will happen will happen, no matter how many resolutions I don’t keep.
On a different note, I thought I’d write about a dream I had the other night, because it was vivid and blogative. The world was going to end. Knowing this was both inexplicable, indisputable and unique to me. It also lead me to realise that everything that the human race stood for, believed and strove for was false and pointless. Earth was going to fold up on itself and die because no one had done anything that really mattered – no one had done anything that made the Earth and its inhabitants worth saving. Knowing this made me change – because it was such an inhuman concept to truly believe, believing it made me inhuman. My identity became combined with an imagined projection of myself. I told other people about the world ending. Those who truly believed me were changed, like me – they could suddenly do things that went beyond the boundaries of human ability – fly, morph into different shapes or identities, disregard time and slip through seconds, etc. Those who didn’t believe called us all heretic and tried to kill us. When the world ended, those of us who had changed made ourselves grow until we became larger than the planet itself. Then we simply stepped away from it as it crumbled.
I don’t know what it means. It did get me thinking, though, about human nature. A lot of people I know are terrified of death, but I find the possibility that life is meaningless much more scary. Everyone wants to think that they have a purpose, that their life means something - only if it means something just to them. But what if there is no meaning? What if we are all just living on a little pebble in the middle of an ocean, twiddling around our insouciant jobs, benefitting nothing but our own diminitive existence? What if religion was born out of the human obsession with the notion that we are all here for a reason? What if religion created the obsession? What if that was the point?
I don’t know. I probably just have subconscious illusions of grandeur or something.
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Tags: dissertation, dreams, MA, new year
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