Words on stage

Frankenstein_sketch_3_by_Dumaker COMING SALONS IN London

17th April LIT IN PIT— Salon special in collaboration with Wendy Meakin and Pitfield– an evening of food, wine and The Wasteland

April 1st or April 2nd: 10 week study of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick begins

April 28th: Five week study of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! begins (Mondays 8-10 PM)

April 24th: ONe meeting study of Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets”

 

With renewed commitment to get out and enjoy cultural London rather than (simply?) living in the realm of words, parenting, teaching and running through the Heath with a muddy dog – I enjoyed two theatrical productions this past weekend (thanks to inspired friends).

Olwen Fouéré  in her solo stage interpretation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake becomes the language she speaks. Without plot, character, consistent setting nor event, we are left with pure language which is often just sound played and expanded.  Fouéré uses her body to convey meaning while the language tends to elude interpretation—and we travel the river’s meanderings with her, flashing through our own memories that her chants and rhymes evoke, occasionally meeting the Irish world of rich traditions and song that she swims through. Salvation morphs into Salve Ocean –I know that song.

The next evening was in the layers of the Lion and Unicorn—part pub, restaurant and tiny theatre—for a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This work has been the source of many interpretations over the years: one might argue that the interpretations have eclipsed Shelley’s stark and complex tale. Those who know the story primarily through its film versions are surprised to discover how the story itself focuses on intimate relationships, the struggle between work and family and the responsibility of the creator for the one created. Any theatrical or film production of the work must make choices about what parts of the story to illuminate and in so doing changes the focus of Shelley’s complex vision. The performance at the Lion and Unicorn reduced Frankenstein’s relationships with his family and loved ones and the careful education—in both books and human relations—that the Monster undergoes.  This version highlighted the way Victor’s creation of the monster destroys him psychically and physically: but I found his character less compelling with the lack of context.

Both of these experiences have me humming on the nature of language and story: what makes a story worth telling- worth re-telling? I think about how we each hold our particular version of a beloved story—that has as much to do with our own ideas & history as it does the text itself and its placement in time and perspective. How I would love to make my own production of Ulysses—to help the language leap towards an audience, to make the beloved and appalling characters dance out their story. As our study of The Magic Mountain nears its end, I see that the unfolding of a work with a group of minds deeply engaged gives us each an entrance to the vision of the writer. We make our own production.

Frankenstein September Intensive Registration

““Individuality is a continuous process of arguing against your own beliefs…” E. Mendelson, The Things that Matter

I suggest that the greatest works of literature reflect, in various modes, a deep intellectual conflict that is the evidence of the dynamic state of the individual. In Frankenstein, Shelley seems to be grappling with issues around relationship, parental responsibility and the capacity for sympathy (also the limits of human capability in the sciences…).

Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, proposed (controversially): “A great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents” (from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792). At first we may read Frankenstein as an illustration of this statement, but I think there are more subtle interrogations of this at work in the book.

Each statement that I may be tempted to make about Shelley’s thematic stance, such as ‘monsters are evil embodied’, are queried in this work.  The issues and ideas of this work, written early in the 19th century, seem extremely timely in these chaotic August days. 

 

This Salon is run as a one-day intensive study so it is important to have the book read before we meet. The Norton Critical Edition, which is what I recommend for the study, is 150 pages so this is a very manageable 9and accessible) read. Please do confirm your participation soon and I will send along the opening notes to support your preparation.
The BBC offers an interview about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12460086

 


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Frankenstein – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th February 2011 00.46 UTC

Forget Boris Karloff with a bolt through his neck. Forget even Peter Boyle as the new, improved monster singing Puttin’ On The Ritz in the Mel Brooks pastiche. What you get in Danny Boyle’s production and Nick Dear’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s mythic fable, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, is neither shlock nor satire. Instead it’s a humane, intelligent retelling of the original story in which much of the focus is on the plight of the obsessive scientist’s sad creation, who becomes his alter ego and his nemesis: it’s rather like seeing The Tempest rewritten from Caliban’s point of view.

As a piece of staging, it is brilliant. But, before listing its virtues, one has to concede that Boyle and Dear, in focusing more on the victim than on Victor, downplay some of Shelley’s themes. Because Victor himself hardly figures until halfway through the action, his initial hubris in animating lifeless matter is minimised. Mary Shelley’s story also throbs with a fierce sense of injustice: a cultivated French family is ruined by its defiance of government, the innocent suffer through Victor’s divine presumption. The echoes are still there in Dear’s two-hour version but Shelley’s rage against existing social structures is muted.

If there are losses, there are also huge gains. We follow the painful progress of the Creature from his first sensational, stuttering steps as he bursts stark naked out of a vertical frame to his education in language and feeling by Karl Johnson’s blind, political exile. We also see the Creature’s yearning for companionship, his longing for love, his aching need for a female counterpart. Even when he is driven to murder, the guilt ultimately belongs to Victor. And when the Creature rapes Victor’s bride before killing her, it is as if he is expressing his creator’s own dark, suppressed desires.

In performance, it is also fascinating to compare the two actors. Cumberbatch’s Creature is unforgettable. “Tall as a pine tree,” as the text insists, he has humour as well as pathos: his naked entry into the world is marked by a totter on splayed feet and, when he moves, it is with a forward-thrusting, angular, almost Hulotesque curiosity. But there is also an epic grandeur about Cumberbatch. As he quotes Paradise Lost, his voice savours every syllable of Milton’s words and when, in outrage at his rejection by the exile’s family, he burns their cottage, he utters a Hamletesque cry of “I sweep to my revenge.” It is an astonishing performance.

Miller’s strength, in contrast, lies in his menace. Stockier than Cumberbatch, his Creature makes you believe in the character’s Satanic impulse and in his capacity for murder: when he hoists Victor’s brother on to his shoulders you instantly fear for the boy’s life. You feel Miller exults in the ultimate role-reversal in which the servant becomes the master. But when it comes to Frankenstein, I felt Cumberbatch had the edge in that he offered clearer hints of the scientist’s cold-hearted single-mindedness.

The actors complement each other perfectly rather than provide a contest and Boyle’s production is a bravura triumph in which Mark Tildesley’s design provides a whole series of visual coups. A candle-filled canopy overhangs the auditorium and blazes into light to evoke Victor’s galvanizing experiments. A steam-belching train surges ominously forward to summon up early 19th-century industrialisation. And the Creature’s rhapsodic discovery of nature is beautifully suggested through birds shooting forth from treetops and rain saturating a narrow strip of turf.

Once or twice the language lapses into bathos: you feel Victor’s bride might come up with something less prim than “We’ll have none of that” when the Creature paws her breast. But, on the whole, this a stunning evening. Dear and Boyle highlight the feminist critique of male usurpation of divinity that lurks in Shelley’s text. Above all, they constantly make us ask which of the two main characters is the real monster. Is it the disfigured, repulsive Creature or Frankenstein himself with his subordination of love and friendship to the idea of creative perfection? The issue is not so much resolved as left hanging as the two figures memorably depart into an eternal icy wilderness.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”     

― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

In the 200th anniversary year of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel we are able to peel back the layers of the block-headed, hideous monster and get down to Mary Shelley’s original concern: what is the relationship between the created and the creator?

Edward Mendelson offers: “Frankenstein is the story of childbirth as it would be if it had been invented by someone who wanted power more than love.” The story draws the reader into the entangled and unlimited relationship between the Creature and its creator as we move through narrators to get to the frozen final confrontation. The book raises philosophical questions around ambition and creation: if we are able to scientifically create life, should we employ that knowledge? What are the responsibilities of the creator to the created?

I recommend the Norton Critical Edition as this edition includes Mary Shelley’s original 1818 edition with extensive commentary including a consideration of why the 1831 edition that Percy Bysshe Shelley heavily edited has been more popular but the earlier edition is the better- and bolder- work. Contained in that publication story is an artifact of the struggles women faced publishing.

SALON DETAILS

  • Three-meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, Norton Critical Edition 2E (Norton Critical Editions 2012); ISBN-13: 978-0393927931

The Mad Woman’s Vision

The Mad Woman’s Vision: Creation and Destruction from Frankenstein to Housekeeping

The female realm is traditionally imaged as domestic and nurturing; narrative space gives room for a very different perspective. The constriction of female experience as defined by patriarchal institutions may produce anxiety, rebellion and madness. From the 17th -20th century, we find the majority of those institutionalised for mental illness are women. As Elaine Showalter perceptively asks; does this reflect the implicit view of madness as one of the wrongs of women or madness unveiling itself before scientific rationality? Or does the confining role of women in earlier times result in the kind of behaviours that the medical establishment sought to pathologise?
Using works by Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Marilynne Robinson, we will explore how female artists explored the limits and extremes of selfhood interrogating definitions of sanity and madness. From my experience with these works, I believe we will find the uncanny interwoven with the empathic. This course will develop ideas and understanding around the domestic and traditional constructs of gender and how this impacts female identity.

There is renewed interest in Mary Shelley’s classic, Frankenstein. The recent National Theatre production  peeled back the layers of the block-headed, bolted monster and gets down to Mary Shelly’s original concern: what is the relationship between the created and the creator? The form of the story also draws the reader into the entangled and unlimited relationship between the Creature and its creator as we move through narrators to get to the frozen final confrontation. We will discuss, among other themes, the question of adult male friendship and how Victor’s tragedy is one of arrogance and solitude. The philosophical questions the book raises continue to be absolutely pertinent to our time.

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea offers a modernist retelling of a cultural icon. Jane Eyre has always held readers’ imagination: Charlotte Bronte presents her heroine as fiercely independent in a world where there is no place for a free-thinking female. The hidden, voiceless character of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, who even in her silence greatly impacts Jane’s story, has caught the attention of critics and other writers. Jean Rhys, an early Modernist writer, chose to explore Bertha Rochester’s history in her brief but crystalline work, Wide Sargasso Sea. The text is not only a brilliant deconstruction of Brontë’s legacy, but is also a damning history of colonialism in the Caribbean.

In Marilynne Robinson’s haunting first work, Housekeeping, each line is carefully crafted and ice-sharp. Through Ruth’s narration we learn more about the impermanence of things- people, places, home- and watch her struggle to adulthood with the awareness that nothing stays in place. There is a freedom found here- and this book reveals profound possibilities in a spare world.

“There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

SALON DETAILS

  • Three-meeting study
  • Recommended editions:
    • Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism; Norton Critical Editions (Jan 2012); ISBN-13: 978-0393927931
    • Wide Sargasso Sea (Annotated Edition), by Jean Rhys; Penguin Modern Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0141182858
    • Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson; Faber & Faber (2005); ISBN-13: 978-0571230082
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