Review: The Northern Light Falls on Us

 'NORTHERNESS is an elusive thing to define' so says the playwrite Simon Stephens in the programme to his play 'Light Falls' at the Manchester Royal Exchange.  He says this as the current
Artistic Director at the Royal Exchange is about to step down to go down the London and become Director of the prestigious drama school LAMDA (London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art).  

Ms. Sarah Frankcom caused a bit of a stir in October 2013, when she said that she was ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ on the issue of female casting by choosing Maxine Peake to play Hamlet, and 'There is now a generation of women who are not going to put up with it anymore'.

She was reacting to research conducted by The Guardian in collaboration with Elizabeth Freestone, Artistic Director of Pentabus Theatre, Ludlow.  It seems that in contrast to the situation on stage, figures from Ipsos Mori revealed that on average 68% of theatre audiences are women.  But that when it comes to producing the works of Shakespeare there is an inherent gender imbalance due to the original male only casts, with 155 female characters compared to 826 male characters across the Bard’s plays.

Her experiment using Maxine as Hamlet worked a treat but her more recent production of a female dominated version of Macbeth bewilderingly confusion as did other who came with me and I saw it twice.

Maxine Peake is from Westhoughton, Bolton, and she has been pressed to drop her northern accent for some roles.   

One comment responded to Ms. Frankcom's feminist 'Hamlet' thus:
'That is ridiculous man!  How arrogant of Sarah Frankcom to feel qualified to re-write the work of a genius. Perhaps she should re-pen Beethoven's 9th while she's at it.  It is such a rare treat and luxury to see a Shakespeare play, and I'm sick and tired of the likes of Frankcom trying to give herself a name at the expense of what is a truly genius piece of literature.  Perhaps she'd like to paint the Mona Lisa as a man too.  What a load of self indulgent pseudo-feminist crap. Just give us the art as it was intended.  It really is that simple.  If you don't like it, write your own bloody play!'

But I think the play's writer Simon Stephens is a man.   When he asked people in his research for this play if they considered themselves northern, he said they all did.  When asked how they defined 'northerness', they seemed to hestitate and then suggest it was their capacity to deal with the rain or cold and deal with it with humour:  'We don't like umbrellas, up here.  We just put our hoods up.'

Mr. Stephens, who now lives in London, He claims:  'I think something has happened with kindness in this country.  It seems that suspicion and mockery are the default position in this county.  Kindness has, in a way that has taken me completely by suprise, become a politically default position.' 

 The current play shifts around the North from the high streets of Doncaster and Blackpool, and the farms of Ulverston and the shut-down shops and pubs of Warrington and Durham to Cheshire Plains and the foothills of the Lake Districts and the Yorkshire Dales.  Warrington and Durham he writes:  'shops and bars heaving under the weight of half a decade of austerity.'


Bill Bryson commenting in 'The Road to Little Dribbling' wrote about a Council's lack of funds to afford it to maintain a shrub planter and made a curious comparison with Durham Cathedral:  'Now I'm no expert on the matter, but I am pretty sure that we are a lot richer today than we were in the eleventh century, and yet back then they could find the resources to build something as splendid and eternal as Durham Cathedral an today we can't afford to keep six shrubs in a planter.'

Today we are better at tearing things down than in maintaining things. As when during the time of the last Labour government he had a mad scheme to set up the Pathfinder Initiative to tear down 400,000 homes, mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, in the north of England - see Bryson.

Bill Bryson can see this decline acutely because he can view it in relief and observe the changes after coming in from the States after being abroad.  Stephen Simon can come back to the North from London and spot 'the seen but unnoticed' features of what's going on in the North. 

The play struggles with the hyper-aspects of everyday life: a middle aged woman has a stroke and dies reaching for a bottle of vodka in a supermarket; a married man attempts to accomplish a three-some; a insecure student tries to please hie older boyfriend; a single mum tussles with the father of her baby.  The roundhouse stage struggles to fit-in these competing elements, and it just about manages to encompass the performances.

******************

  

HYMN to the NORTH

by Jarvis Cocker

Our Father who art down in the pub

Our Mother doing the washing up

Well that was then, an this is now

So you better listen up

Factories lia empty

Manuafacting emptiness

Life still needs to be filled none the less

So go and find something to love

But just promise me this one thing, yes

Please stay in sight of the mainland

I always know you've got to go

I don't want you to go

So before you go, there's just one thing you ought to know, yeah

there's just one thing you ought to know

there's just one thing you ought to know

there's just one thing

just one thing

You can fill your life with love

You can fill your life with hope

You can fill you life with food and drink or whatever floats your boat

I'll be be singing you this song 

There's a million things in store for you just beyond the horizon

But please stay in sight of the mainland

So stay in sight of the mainland

You're wiser than I'll ever be

You're beautiful smart, so funny

You fill my heart, you fill my dreams 

And my only hope is you succeed

my only hope is you succeed

 my only hope is you succeed

you're my only hope

you're my only hope 

 you're my only hope

So please 

Please
Please
Please
Please

Trust and believe

In you and me

Northern lights will guide you home

Northern lives just like you're own

Northern rain turning into a flood 

But Don't forget your northern blood

Do never forget your northern blood

And please stay in sight of the mainland

Yeah please stay in sight of the mainland

Pease stay in touch with me

In this contactless society

Anywhere that you may be

The northern star leads back to me
Yeah the northern star leads back to me

 Yeah the northern star leads back to me

 Yeah the northern star leads back to me

You're my northern star

*******************************

Review: 'STREETCAR' to Claustrophobia

A journey through sociological & sexual 'rape'

AFTER her performance as Hamlet in the play of the same name last year, I was wondering how Maxine Peak originally a lass from Bolton would manage to tackle the lead role of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee William's play 'A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE' now being performed at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre.  I needn't have worried Maxine rose to the job and took us down into a wounded world of which Arthur Miller described as 'STREETCAR is a cry of pain; forgetting that is to forget the play'.

But how are we to approach such a play mired as it is in the cramped space of a two room sparsely furnished apartment offering us views of a combined living-room and bedroom with a bathroom on the side?  When Blanche from Mississippi arrives to live with her sister Stella and her brother-in-law Stanley, in New Orleans she was already what we would now call 'damaged' by having experienced a marriage to a homosexual man who had just died.  Then begins the disintegration not only mentally of Blanche, but of the relationships of those who come into contact with her, not just Stanley and Stella, but Stanley's workmates, like Mitch.

Rachel Clements, lecturer in drama, theatre and performance University of Manchester, in the program's brochure writes:

'There are reports that in (Elia) Kazan's 1947 production (on Broadway), some audience members cheered as Stanley carried Blanche to the bed to rape her.  Although one hopes this kind of response is now consigned to the past, both Mitch and Stanley's reactions to and judgements about Blanche's sexuality are not so wholly remote.'

And Ms. Clements in keeping with our contemporary 'Women's Studies' addiction continues:

'How far STREETCAR recreates or critiques rape culture sits somewhere between the play, the particular production and each individual audience member.'

That last comment by the academic would worry me if she hadn't concluded:

'But STREETCAR is a social, even a political, play because it works to show us how and why Blanche becomes disbelieved.'

While the play is about an individual's mental condition, and how others relate to how Blanche breaches or disrupts the social order of a tight-knit community, it is also about how the participants can recover social order in the claustrophobic setting in which they all find themselves.

Ms Clements further argues:

'Indeed, the tragedy of the play's closing scene is desperately total:  everyone loses.'

In a real sense by excluding Blanche, everyone loses personally in order to recover social, and perhaps political, order and even sanity.  Because I believe Tennessee Williams is what I would call a grown-up homosexual he is playing-off realism against a more romantic magical approach in the theatre.  Blanche wants she calls magic rather than realism, but being romantic and dancing to music, doesn't prevent Blanche from describing Stanley as a Neanderthal and a Polack*, not to mention dreaming the day away in Stanley's bathroom, playing the radio or drinking his bourbon.  

I'm not a professional drama critic, I'm an electrician by trade, who later became an ethnomethodologist (student of people's studies) at Manchester Poly. in the 1970s, but I can see the predictable sociological destination of a claustrophobic society such as that portrayed in 'A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE'. 

This is not approve of the physical rape of Blanche in any way, but rather to draw attention to her own sociological 'rape' of the lives of the other characters in the play, especially of Stella and Stanley's private life.  One has only to be aware of the underlying cultural, ethnic and clash social-class between Blanche and Stanley in the play to grasp the politics of the play.  Having lived in Spain (Mi casa, Su casa) in part of the last half of the last century where the guest may be privileged over the host; I am also aware that in some cultures Blanche's plight may be seen in a different light than that in more Anglo-Saxon cultures such as England or the USA, and it may well be that even in the deep-south 'in the heat of the New Orleans apartment' the attitude to the 'guest' may be different from ours.

*  The noun Polack in the contemporary English language, is an ethnic slur and a derogatory reference to a person of Polish descent. It is an Anglicisation of the Polish language word Polak, which means a ... Look up Polack, Pollack, Pollock, or Polock in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.