theatretravelogues

Cluj - Interferences 2010

2010-12-11T11:20:00.002Z

Amid the furore caused by recent inclement weather, many of us might have had a sudden urge to escape. And even though Romania may be the last on your list of destinations at the best of times, when the big freeze struck and my boiler broke down, the prospect of a theatre festival in Transylvania seemed particularly heart-warming.

Commencing on 1 December – a Romanian national holiday celebrating a historical conquest of the region – the Interferences 2010 festival, organized by the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, appears to be an act of spirited defiance. On leave from his visiting professorship at the University of San Diego, the theatre’s artistic director Gabor Tompa will have brought an impressive flow of theatre people from around the world to the city’s Hungarian suburb over the fortnight. In just a weekend I attended a Spanish production of Endgame directed by the Polish director/designer Krystian Lupa, a French stage adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac’s novel The Other World and a co-production between Sweden’s Lars Noren and the French Romanian actress Simona Maicanescu of Wallace Shawn’s monologue about poverty Fever.

My personal favourite was the Process City Trilogy by the Croatian troupe Shadowcasters. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, this complex adaptation is rarely seen in sequence, as each piece stands alone and communicates to its audience on its own terms.

Knowledge of Kafka’s story comes in useful only for the third part - Process in Progress – a three hander with VJ-ing performed in Cluj’s 900-seater opera house. Two actors, one actress and a series of live video-projections take it in turns to portray Josef K, not as a victim of circumstances – the way he is often understood by literary critics – but as a victim of his own ill-judged choices. Surprisingly dynamic and exciting, this piece, which also features small-scale object manipulation - has the feel of a well-constructed piece of music. It sweeps you up and carries you ahead in a way which makes some of the court scenes seem like bewildered ritual dances rather than displays of rational absurdity.

The second part of the trilogy Ex-Position, is a series of one to one performances conducted by ten actors who meet the audience members individually, gently blindfold them, and walk them through what seems like very personal narratives. On a previous occasion earlier this year at Ex-Position in Chemnitz, I ended up being taken to Hiroshima on my journey and taking away with me an origami crane, which was going to bring me luck, and which I had made myself with my eyes closed, guided by my storyteller. This year I got taken to a kind of bedlam, but was rewarded with the most tasty sandwich I ever had. The audience start out as a group in a ‘waiting room’ regaled in true Balkan fashion with - literally - 'endless' anecdotes by the trilogy’s director Boris Bakal. Bakal delivers a series of personal stories (which on closer inspection seem to be based on Kafka's motifs, an unfriendly landlady being one of the examples) and as the audience member you may never actually catch the beginning or the end of a particular story, as they go on regardless of your own entrances and exits. At the end of the journey the audience members are met in the ‘room 100’ by the piece’s softly-spoken dramaturg Katarina Pejovic for a leisurely chat over a drink. Room 100 is also known as the 'control room', where the audience can view and follow live audio and video broadcasts on small monitors of the individual journeys of other audience members. Earlier in the year at Chemnitz, I remember having endless discussions with a group of British colleagues I was attending with, about the ethical implications of this piece. The live broadcast of the audience members' individual journeys seemed too intrusive and exploitative to some audience members, even despite my counter-argument that this is anyway happening to us on a daily basis on CCTV cameras without us ever noticing. But I was not surprised by the 'ethical issues' raised about this sort of performance, as I had already dealt with more or less similar issues surrounding the piece Internal by the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed a few months previously and concluded that the ethics on such occasions seem to be used as a kind of defence mechanism. However, what none of us knew at the time was the fact that Ex-Position was inspired by a particular parabolic reference in Kafka’s story to a peasant who waits to be admitted through the door of the Law, only to be told at the end of his life that it was up to him to find a way in. It makes me wonder whether a proscenium arch audience member is an equivalent of that peasant, as opposed to those of us choosing to take the risk and break the fourth wall as we participate in the ever-increasing trend of interactive theatre?

Finally, the first part of the trilogy, which was the last to be made chronologically but which was my very first port of call last weekend, is based on a short story by Kafka, pre-dating The Trail and featuring Josef K as a protagonist for the first time. Entitled Vacation from History, this part is based on a post-Fukuyaman premise that the only times we can take a rest from history is when we sleep or when we die. Hence, the Shadowcasters greet their audience into a room with a beautiful ceiling and tuck each member into their own bed, before proceeding with a creation of a live, intriguing, disturbing and oneiric soundscape in near darkness. And this was just what I needed, on my way out of the history-making London snow!

Moscow 14-20 February 2010

2010-03-01T03:31:00.002Z

Second year into Professor Paul Allain’s Leverhulme-funded project with the Moscow Arts Theatre entitled ‘Tradition and Innovation’, my colleague Frank Camilleri and I are sent to participate in this exchange of pedagogical practices. We are to observe a number of classes as well as delivering some ourselves. A number of meetings and some theatre trips have also been scheduled. It is a bit of a daunting prospect – not least because the temperatures have been reported as hitting ‘-30’ in Russia this winter.

* * *

The School

First things first: when you travel to Russia on an academic mission, you should ditch all your Foucaults, Butlers, even Žižeks and Badious. This is a place where ideas of post-modernism might be part of the epistemic frame of reference, but still a place entirely untouched by them in practice. This is best witnessed in a classroom – and particularly in the classroom of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s – the Moscow Art Theatre School. Although founded some 45 years after the opening of the theatre itself in 1897, the school is still seen as an inseparable part of the theatre – not least because the two share the same site and some of the buildings as well. This is an extremely prestigious institution and a fundamental part of not just the Russian theatre scene but the Russian culture as a whole. We were told by one of the teachers that some 500 students audition at the school every day of the year and only about 20 make it through the final round. The director of the school Anatoly Smeliansky also told us that they expect about a quarter of each acting class to drop out by the final year. “This is not for everyone”, he explains. Arts managers and set designers are also trained at the school, but while they tend to be mostly from Moscow, and some of them are paying students, the actors are mostly from the provinces and fully subsidised. Smeliansky has rather pragmatically arranged the curriculum in such a way where the Russian acting students use the state subsidy and sometimes even the school subsidy to see them through their studies, but he uses the school’s American training programmes as a source of revenue.

Within a set up like this, it is quite normal therefore for the students to be at work (at the school or the theatre itself) for up to 12 hours a day. Almost every day of the week. We arrived on a Sunday which was also Valentine’s Day. At about midnight that night, it was quite common to bump into students on the corridors of their dorm - rehearsing. What impressed me the most is that the staff and the students at the school and the theatre have a tradition of saying hello to everyone on the corridors of their buildings. Even if they don’t know each other. The fact that you happen to be within such an exclusive place means that you form part of the same community in some way.

We observed a selection of classes for a variety of year groups including movement (‘plastika’), dance, stage combat and fencing. I watched these students, often wondering what key characteristics could be discerned about them – what is it that makes them a MHAT student, one in the thousands who managed to get here. These are some of the traits I have identified with just their body language at my disposal: inner beauty, grace, alertness, openness, determination and asexuality. This is particularly true of the first years. As they get older, they become progressively more self-aware – especially in their dance class – their eyes surreptitiously darting towards the mirror, their bodies exuding quiet charisma. One of the most important parts of their curriculum is the fencing class – or so the fencing teacher Andrey Uraev told us. This is the oldest class in Russian actor training. As a metaphor for stage dialogue, fencing helps you choose only those actions which are necessary and there is a correlation between an individual’s personality and the precise choice of their actions. Uraev tells us this while his students devise a fencing sequence around a rhythm he has given them. “Everything that grandpa Stanislavski taught is contained within a fencing class.” But thinking about the tradition and decorum, the thing that strikes me the most is how each class and each routine begins with a ritualistic greeting. This is the case also when someone enters the classroom unexpectedly.

These students’ commitment to their work is absolute, unwavering, unquestioning. And it is often reflective of what their movement teacher Slava Rybakov has called the ‘Chinese system’: ‘when you can do it, push yourself further’. And they do push themselves further, much further beyond what the health and safety rules would permit in the UK – jumping onto and straddling each other, pulling on each others’ limbs, holding each other suspended in mid-air. And Slava gets seriously cross with them if they do something that he has warned them against, but otherwise he addresses them as ‘ladies and gentlemen’, and he tells them jokes.

One theorist that does come to mind in this context however is Jacques Ranciere and his 1987 text on pedagogy and emancipation Le Maitre ignorant. Here Ranciere famously recounted the case of Joseph Jacotot who in the late 19^th century gained a significant insight into pedagogy when he simply set his Flemish students a task of reading Homer and writing an essay in French even though none of them understood each other’s languages. When they completed the task, Jacotot realised that they have gained knowledge independently without him having to provide it for them, and that indeed the ability to learn was inherent to all of us whether or not we had a (knowing) teacher. Needless to say Jacotot’s promotion of his own discovery caused great scandal in enlightened capitalist Europe. A question going through my mind was - could Slava or Andrey be able to function as Ranciere’s virtuous ‘ignorant masters’? Could they have that luxury? Probably not – partly because of the students’ expectation too. This is the place directly linked to the uber-master himself Konstantin Stanislavsky – and there is no Rancerian ‘emancipation’ here, not even when the students have graduated. But then there is little learning by independent enquiry among the Olympic athletes too.

Moscow and Muscovites

Even if you have been to Moscow before, it repeatedly presents itself as a surprising and unfathomable place. Quite magical at times. On our first walk down the Tverskaya street, our lovely hostess Nastia– a former opera singer currently training at the MHAT as a producer and simultaneously running the school’s American section – shows us all the pre-revolution buildings and merchants’ houses that have been physically moved to make the street wider. This up until now may have seemed like the stuff of fairytales. Then we’re introduced to ‘the palaces for the people’ – Moscow’s metro stations. And eventually – a moment that gave me great delight – we find out in passing where Soviet cosmonauts used to live (the Presnya Tower – one of seven architectural wonders of the Stalinist period).

My idea of Russia was always informed by the impression that the Soviet communism was much tougher and poorer than the liberal Yugoslav brand which I grew up on. We’d often heard stories of hunger and queuing and grayness and suffering. But walking through Moscow today – as probably ever before – one is confronted at every step with endless imperial ostentatiousness. Marble and crystal and semi-precious stone gracing many public buildings’ interiors. This includes the ‘palaces for the people’ too. Still, however impressive and nourishing for your aesthetic sensibilities, these surroundings would hardly have kept Soviet stomachs from rambling for a very long time. On my first night, my trepidation concerning Russian winter was unexpectedly reversed when, surprisingly for me, I couldn’t fall asleep in a permanently heated apartment. Supermarkets and restaurants – which are often open 24 hours a day – inspired a desire to live here for at least a year in order to be able to try all the supremely imaginative salads and cakes and fresh fruit delicacies. Though the latter might just be the sign of the times, it is evident that Russia had once been a major empire and that that amount of excessive private wealth – and its inevitable flip side of excessive poverty – must have been necessary in the first place for the idea of communist revolution to take place here in practice. (I wonder how on earth it had occurred to anyone in the Balkans, where any amassed capital was so totally negligible by comparison, that communism would ever be a viable prospect?)

But then there is something else that all of these Slavic tribes share – both Orthodox and Catholic ones: the power of the dogma, the ecclesiastical notion of ‘the keepers of the faith’. Unlike their Protestant brothers who would attend their minimalist unadorned churches at perfectly regular intervals dutifully ticking off various religious and civil duties off their annual ‘to do’ list, the Slavs appear to be absolute in their fanaticisms. It is only when I came to the UK that I discovered that ‘being a martyr’ did not necessarily imply a virtue.

This sort of religious/ ideological fanaticism could easily extend to most other areas of life – education, sport, politics, even gulags. It is often held against the Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito that following Yugoslavia’s split from the Soviet Union in 1948 he set up a gulag-like institution on a bare island in the Adriatic called Goli Otok in order to re-educate staunch Stalinists there and get Stalin out of their hearts and minds. Even if it sounds like a tautological tragedy, one wonders what alternative there would have been…

And so onto the houses of Muscovites we visited on our trip. First there was Stanislavsky’s last apartment – the place he was moved into when his considerable family heritage had been requisitioned by the communist authorities. Having enough space in this 17^th century apartment with hand-painted ceilings for rehearsals, salonic gatherings and private quarters for all the family members – the Stanislavskys appeared to have fared well after all at this difficult time. Even his fear of the draught was accommodated and all doors refitted as double-sided.

Meyerhold’s apartment is a very different sort of story. Even though according to a documentary they would play for you here, Meyerhold as a one time director of public parades revealed to Stalin the power of that tear-jerking trick where the president receives flowers from a random child, Stalin continued to hug children well after he had sent Meyerhold to prison. Stanislavsky managed to save Meyerhold temporarily and delay his ugly fate, however when the master died from ill health in 1938, soon his former protégé followed. A former Protestant-turned-Orthodox, Meyerhold however found a great deal of zeal for the Bolshevik revolution, but his artistic innovation, a taste for satire and a rejection of social realism eventually got him into trouble. The most tragic story hovering in between the walls of this apartment is that concerning his second wife and muse, actress Zinaida Raikh. A year after Meyerhold was taken into prison, Raikh wrote a letter to Stalin pleading for her husband to be released. However, instead, a couple of anonymous assassins broke into their apartment and stabbed Raikh seventeen times, deliberately avoiding her vital organs so that she would bleed to death. She left behind two children from her earlier relationship with the poet Sergey Yesenin.

Finally, Bulgakov’s house was pure magic in many respects. I should perhaps just leave it at that and advise you strongly not to miss it if you're ever in the neighbourhood…

Theatre

Directed by Yuri Butusov and starring one of the MHAT master-teachers – Kostantin Raikin, Richard III has now been running for six years at the Satirikon Theatre. Although not easily reachable by public transport, this is a must-see production for any true theatre enthusiast on a visit to Moscow. And we certainly didn’t regret our trek – which involved a tube and a ride on a ‘marshrutka’ (a cross between a taxi and a mini-bus).

Black and white, angular, mostly uplit and extraordinarily dynamic, this production is immediately enticing. Maybe because Moscow is currently plastered with giant posters of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, I keep thinking of this reference too, not least because the scene changes have a mad-hatter quality to them and Queen Margaret (played by Natalia Vdovina who is also cast as Lady Anne) sports a massive orange wig. I had seen one similarly exhilarating Richard III set in a kindergarten before – the 1998 Malachi Bogdanov production with Paul Hunter in the title role, and cut down to fit into a small-scale touring circuit slot. Butusov’s production is a full-length rendition of Shakespeare’s play, in the 19^th century translation by Gregory Ben and Aleksander Druzhinin and adapted here as a ‘tragi-farce’ in the key of an illustrated-bedtime-story. A bed – or a slight distortion of it – is a prominent part of Alexander Shishkin’s set, and Richard’s famous wooing attempts tend to literally unfold from a grave into this horizontal throne. In addition the whole stage is covered in white sheets of changing textures. Often featuring two-dimensional cut-outs of animals, furniture which towers over the protagonists and a musical accompaniment which mixes cabaret, bossanova and a playing-den brass-orchestra, the production also at times evokes German Expressionism and Ionesco. It is not a surprise when subsequently we discover that forty-odd year old Butusov’s greatest hits which, propelled him to international fame in the early stages of his career, included a production of Woyzeck and of Ionesco’s Macbett.

There are memorably poignant moments here too however. Clarence is killed as glasses of red wine are flung onto his white night-shirt. Margaret’s curse is delivered in a snow storm as she stands on top of a giant kitchen table. The snow storm motif is repeated during Richard’s dream in the second half, and his speech is delivered like a nursery rhyme. On the battlefield he is haunted by the dead princes who are having a pillow-fight just like they did moments before their death. The frolicking brothers are also given the very last ‘word’ in the show – chasing each other around Richard’s dead body as it gets bound up in the silky sheets which had first seen the deaths of his victims – thus somehow appearing to restore the divine justice.

Having managed to obtain a meeting with the otherwise very busy director, we got an opportunity to hear some additional first hand insights into the creative process that led to this production. I will write about this in more detail elsewhere, but can reveal here a few words concerning the snow – seeing as it was such an important part of our whole trip and not just this production alone. The snow, Butusov informed us, was representative of ‘changes in reality’. There are emotional reasons underlying these choices – the sense of being covered... It is also reminiscent of Christmas-time and a particular ritual which all Russians know and remember from their childhood – the festive custom of being put on a chair and asked to recite a poem. For a child it is often a terrible moment, a moment of sickness which often leads to the horror of forgetting your words. ‘And then of course what this leads to is a desire to become an actor or a director in order to resolve this complex caused by a bad memory’. For Butusov on this occasion, the main motor in creating this piece was his main actor Konstantin Raikin’s childhood and the problems that accompany growing up in the shadow of a famous father, with the son having to prove that he is deserving of being an actor in his own right.

Another, very lucky for us, outcome of this unexpected encounter with Butusov was an opportunity to see the entirely sold out and much talked about production of Uncle Vanya running at the Vakhtangov Theatre since September 2009. He offered to arrange the tickets for us and Nastia and Pavlina declared that we simply could not pass on an opportunity like that.

But the first few moments of the much anticipated performance of Uncle Vanya, preceded by a brief reception at the Artistic Director Rimas Tuminas’ cabinet, left us a bit baffled. Here was standard Chekhov as far as verbal delivery was concerned. The whole piece was underscored by an utterly exquisite requiem-like score by the Lithuanian composer Faustas Latenas, and the very deep set designed by Adomasa Yatsovskisa consisted of a hanging full moon, a statue of a reclining white lion in the background and a carpentry-workshop table in the front. Once again black and white colours predominated in this world, but what was giving the whole experience a decidedly odd and mystifying impression was the movement of actors which at times seemed entirely disembodied and at others excessively stylised, but for no discernable reason. On his first entry, Uncle Vanya, played by the beloved Russian actor Segey Makovetsky, ambles on with his arms hanging in front of him as if they don’t belong to him. Then all the rest of the cast, as a chorus, in butoh-like slow motion advance down the stage. Yelena strikes up a series of tableaus, which Vanya admires. I have numerous notes about exposed legs (including those of old Maria Vasilyevna who is here sporting a Louise Brooks-type bob and dark glasses), or shoes and impatient feet… But through most of the first half I was thinking precisely about the whole mission which my visit was a part of – the problem of tradition vs. innovation…

On the previous day we had met a GITIS professor of the history of art and theatre, Bartoshevich. He has written books about Shakespeare and he goes to Stratford upon Avon for a Shakespeare conference every summer, but he rarely sees anything that he particularly likes in British theatre. He finds it mostly ‘perfunctory’ he says – even Greg Doran’s Hamlet with David Tennant in the title role was just a beautifully packaged theatrical souvenir ‘for tourists’. It seems that he clearly thought that Russian theatre was more exciting – and he may well be right when it came to the staging of classics. But the most exciting exponents of Russian theatre in my view – Derevo and their spiritual step-father Slava Polunin – were self-taught and working outside of the country. I was watching the first half of Uncle Vanya admiring it aesthetically but wondering how long it would take before any kind of artistic and ideological pluralism was truly possible in any of the former communist countries (including my own). How far can it all go down this same route, within its own bubble, and for how much longer can it possibly be perpetrated? Even though Tuminas himself is Lithuanian and therefore probably perceived as quite exotic in his style around here, this is still the same paradigm, the same way of working, the same theatre vocabulary. Lehman’s Postdramatic theatre may well be part of the verbal vocabulary here – but will it ever be identifiable in the Russain creative practice? How would someone like Tim Crouch go down here? And isn’t it ironic that in fact it was not the British theatre that was the last bastion of literary theatre after all… Yes, the British are comparatively theatrically unadventurous when it comes to drama, but the British notion of ‘devising’ still doesn’t have a true equivalent or examples of notable quality in the creative practices of a lot of other cultures…

My thinking was also partly influenced by another event witnessed earlier in the day. We had accompanied the Producing students to the Bolshoi theatre for their class with Mr Getsman – the Deputy General Manager (effectively Man number 2 in the entire organisation). After a bit of a wait he arrived with a coffee, an ashtray and a packet of cigarettes. Despite it being a Friday afternoon he didn’t seem in a particularly good mood. He had a brief exchange with the students before he announced that the topic of today’s class was ‘integration’. He gave a detailed run down of the Russian cultural economy and funding system (one of the students was helpfully writing it all down in English for us), before he lit a cigarette and embarked on a passionate diatribe in response to one of the questions asked. He went red and his eyes bulged ominously as he pressed down the point that when he wants to make business with his French colleagues (it being the year of French culture in Russia at the moment) they look at him in shock when he tries to explain the complexities of the system and how much he depends on the state. The state still holds all the funding and it takes all the revenue back including the profits, leaving Mr Getsman’s hands tied. Even though – as he made sure he told us after the class – the Bolshoi employs around 3000 people on long term contracts (including both the administration and the artists) – which is more than any other Opera House in Europe. Its scale is easily discernable just by looking at the size and splendour of the interiors; and worth noting also is the fact that its various buildings are connected by underground corridors which run underneath the street level – in a truly inimitable Moscow way.

It was only in the second act of Tuminas’ Uncle Vanya, therefore that the director’s concept revealed itself more explicitly – especially by the time Sonya ties up her hair readying her self to ‘work’, and proceeds to try and open Uncle Vanya’s eyes before his ‘wind up’ mechanism takes him off stage. This Russia indeed is still a puppet-making, doll-producing workshop. Much beauty and charm – and soul too, of course! – but no autonomy of any kind. No single puppet-master either, just a sense of no one really being an owner of their own individuality and their own fate.

And this is how on reflection, perhaps, Mr Getsman's pedagogical style may have suggested a third model of a master - neither the knowing nor the ignorant - but the one who wishes to incite a change.

On travelling and homecoming

2010-02-07T01:58:00.003Z

Even though my year started with an unexpected escape to Barcelona – right at the time of the snow disaster – I didn’t actually see any theatre on the occasion of that visit. Instead, I took ‘the Dragons’ – as my parents are endearingly nicknamed by my British friends – to meet the dragons of Gaudi’s Park Guell. The significant thing here was that this was the first time in nearly twenty years that my parents were able to travel anywhere in Europe without a visa. Ironically our planned trip to Spain in 1991 was thwarted by the outbreak of war in Croatia. What’s a bit of a snow emergency by comparison…

* * *

So there has been nothing of note to report recently vis-a-vis theatre-related travels, but a chance encounter with a former student last week prompted me to rethink the strictness of my self-imposed brief for the content of this blog.

Eszter graduated last year in drama, and unlike many of her peers who found themselves catapulted together with their gowns and mortars straight into the heart of the British recession, Eszter went back home to Hungary and landed two jobs in the theatre and some independent commissions. I doubt that the general economic situation in Hungary is any better than anywhere else, but the point of this story is something altogether different.

I marvelled at Eszter’s quiet determination, a mixture of modesty and genuine wonder at her own ability, remembering her struggles as a student to find a platform for her creativity, even though she never tired of hard work servicing other people’s visions. She had arrived to her degree in England as a fully fledged professional photographer and therefore fell into the pigeon-hole of being every aspiring director’s designer, stage manager and an occasional dogsbody. She also struggled to find true admiration for a lot of professional theatre in Britain – as she often found it lacking in imagination.

Last week, as I waited to see the Old Vic’s new production of Six Degrees of Separation, I was having cappuccino with Eszter and she was telling me of her very busy new life – juggling two assistantships for two major Hungarian directors and working towards her own dreams. And then she mentioned, by the way, a project she created in her flat in Budapest. A show which took place in two parts – a week apart from each other. In the first half a girl arrives ‘home’ to find that she is pregnant. In the second, a week later, she is looking after a six year old girl. If the audience is temporarily led to believe that six years have passed in between the two parts and this was the child whose conception had been discovered in their presence on the previous occasion, this suspicion is soon demolished as the child’s mother comes to pick her up and our heroine proceeds with her plans for an abortion.

I loved this concept and its dramaturgical structure and urged Eszter to consider bringing it over to the UK. The piece was very successful in Hungary too, getting her rave reviews and quite a few house visitors who left generous donations on their way out. It ran for four moths and she eventually had to close it because it lost its authenticity over time. Even though Eszter briefly considered my suggestion of relocating this piece to an Edinburgh apartment during the Fringe, she eventually explained that this would indeed be impossible. Part of the concept was that this had taken place in her apartment in Budapest, in the detail contained within its own décor, its opulence, the books on the shelves and a very particular light-bulb which needs replacing.

Eszter’s piece and the idea of it has played on my mind for a week now. I couldn’t quite work out what it was that was so compelling about it until the light bulb went on last night, and I realised that this piece was really about homecoming. A sense of belonging and of feeling ‘settled’, which breeds a creativity of its own. I have not had this feeling for seventeen years, and from this (unstable) position of an enforced nomad, this seems so appealing, almost painfully so. Maybe on some level, as a prodigal daughter herself, Eszter instinctively understands this too. One gains so much when one is displaced, but one loses so much more. Even if and when one returns home, s/he is never the same, and the sense of belonging is never the same. Having not had that experience really, I can only assume that one returns home with a feeling of pregnancy one is not ready for just yet, one returns with an added part of oneself which one temporarily wishes to abort or amputate in order to rediscover one’s roots… But there is an ambiguity about it too, because one knows that there is no going back, only going forward, and six years down the line you might well rediscover that hidden part of you conceived while you were in exile…

Travelling is the state I know and now feel comfortable with, but maybe travelling is a bit like casual, protected sex, it doesn’t really commit you to anything for any meaningful period of time. Living in exile doesn’t count either – exile is an arid zone. The only thing that counts is making a home, if you cannot return to one. Or failing that, making theatre itself – the illusion of a home and a sense of belonging.

New York - November 2009

2009-11-07T21:26:00.011Z

It's high time this blog got up to date. Especially as my recent trip to the States gives me a good excuse... Maybe a week's delay would do on this occasion...

31/10/09

New York says hello to you. To you personally. On your coffee cup, in all adverts - it always addresses 'you'! It is warm, but in a no-nonsense way. I think it is a lady...

I arrive on Halloween, unaware of just what a significant occasion this is in New York. The streets fill with people in disguise - outrageous costumes, pregnant nuns, angels and demons with wings, lamp-shades posing as hats, Disney characters hailing taxis. The most popular impersonation is Michael Jackson - in various phases of his career.

Despite having just landed, I walk from my hotel on 55th street down Broadway and across Times Square to the Dance Theater Workshop on 19th street to see Anne Bogart's new piece. I walk because I got car sick on the way back from the airport and I am anxious to make sure I have done something research-related in order to justify the fact that I am here on a Saturday at the expense of the university (even though the travel agent insisted being here on a Saturday would halve the air fare).

The Irish dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke's version of Antigone was initially envisaged as an opera in collaboration between Anne Bogart and a Greek composer. Gradually however, the opportunity diminished and members of SITI Company retreated to the Getty Villa in LA in May this year to try out a version of the script for a theatre performance. It worked, and their sharing of a very simple script in hand performance around a table at the Getty Villa had a powerful effect on its audience.

Conceived of and often referred to as an 'insurgent', this particular Antigone is fresh and highly relevant. Even though Kreont and the chorus of elders are more reminiscent of the belligerent Bush administration, Clarke's version of the play is often polemical and sometimes even verging on a veritable thriller. The SITI Company regular Will Bond plays the leader of the chorus and occasionally steps out of the main action (situated around a quadrangle of tables) to address the audience and relate the mythological and historical roots of this story - starting from Zeus and Cadmus and culminating with the story of Antigone's tragic father - Oedipus. Much is made of the storyteller's struggle to begin his story (repeatedly asking 'how does it all begin') and his equally tortured task of ending it. This device in itself is reflective also of the main theme of Clarke's version - the circular nature of history - which underlies Sophosles' own issues of love and duty towards the family and the state.

Bogart's production is slick and inspired. A barefoot composer/violinist Christian Fredrckson is the first to enter the starkly lit stage, but although present throughout he quickly becomes incidental - just like his all-enveloping, Laurie Anderson-esque score. The centre-piece of all action is the said quadrangle of tables and numerous chairs surrounding it - around which the performers run or glide or which they simply straddle. This structure provides effective depictions of numerous settings - government offices, domestic scenes, even eventually a funeral wake.

If by last week this version appeared inscribed with a slightly out of date anti-war sentiment, the most recent events at Fort Hood will certainly cast new light and yield several possible new interpretations of SITI's Antigone.

On the way back to my hotel, a man on Times Square was vending 'Obama condoms'. Another one was vending prayers - small adverts for his church. Welcome to New York!

01/11/09

As for my anxiety to get the most out of my weekend - I needn't have worried. My dear friend and prospective interviewee for my research in ensemble theatre - Adriano Shaplin had lined up a most wonderful feast for me on the post-Halloween Sunday. Like proper Taureans, we started at a small Greek cafe on 8th avenue - just around the corner from my hotel - with a healthy but American-sized brunch. It's a year since we last saw each other at the premiere of his play The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes at the RSC - and many things have happened since. Chiefly, his company the Riot Group has staged two revivals of his previous plays and Adriano is writing another - a double bill entitled The Freedom Club. Having dealt with the English Civil War in Hobbes, Adriano was keen to get his teeth into the American Civil War for his latest play - dealing with the Assassin of Abraham Lincoln. The second part of the double bill however, is set in future, and Adriano informs me that a comment I had made in one of my write ups on the topic of feminism and how the 'sexual liberation' has in fact crippled women's freedom - had a resonance and a relevance to him in relation to this play. Needless to say I am really intrigued! Another interesting development is the Riot Group's collaboration with the Philadelphia-based ensemble New Paradise Laboratories...

Following our brunch, Adriano takes me downtown to a venue called 3LD Art & Technology Center - to see an installation called Zee - 'a hallucinatory architecture of light' by the German artist Kurt Hentschlager. After about 15 minutes of warnings about possible epileptic reactions (even if you've never been diagnosed with epilepsy) - half a dozen of us audience members are let into the room via a number of ante-chambers and a series of doors. As the final door opens and we enter a room filled with dense fog, strobe lighting and a droning soundscape, the first thought that enters my head is 'this is what death must be like' - although I must clarify, I mean that in the most positive sense of the term. We are in there for about 20 minutes and our perception is completely controlled in a way that is devoid of anything recognizable from our daily experience. The fog makes it impossible to discern anything tangible around us. Even the perception of our own bodies is altered - it becomes strangely fascinating - though not at all anchoring to gaze at one's own extremities. The strobe light and the sound seem to mostly have an enhancing effect on one's mood. This is where I guess I became aware of an acute difference between the artist's and mine own world-view. Whereas the mood that he picked for this simulation of what might be perceived as a pre-natal or post-mortal experience is somewhat clinical, perhaps a bit mystical and verging on the sci-fi, I would have opted for something more optimistic, perhaps even something more physically comfortable. Towards the end of the spell I got a bit bored and wished I'd been able to lie down or at least sit down. However this was a bit of a risk in a room where people were moving without being able to see where they were going... Adriano loved it however, and has lined up a whole new set of visits to it for the remainder of the run. In the meantime, the show has become so popular it is only possible to go in by appointment.

Our next excursion later that evening was a trip to St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. Adriano tells me this is where the Wooster Group performs these days and this is where Kneehigh will be showing the Brief Encounter in December. I loved everything about the venue and the surrounding area (the Brooklyn bridge arching over our heads, and a lovely wine bar around the corner where we sit on American bar stools, served by an enthusiastic Russian lady and getting chatted up by someone who looks like a member of the Village People). The show we saw was Enda Walsh's New Electric Ballroom - in Druid's original production. I hadn't seen this in Edinburgh, but I had seen the companion piece Walworth Farce. Although I had found it hard to relate to this piece about a family of Irish immigrants re-enacting their memory of leaving home, I was willing to give New Electric Ballroom a chance. The latter was also envisaged as a piece about memory but from a female perspective. It struck me as a reworking of Chekhov's Three Sisters in a mode which crosses Beckett with soap opera. But ultimately I found it frustratingly unspectacular. There is a moment when an unwanted guest, a local fisherman, transforms into Elvis - but all the rest is a radio play.

Still time flies in good company - and my day had gone in a flash!

02/11/09

I am still very elated by being in this new environment - everything is extremely heightened, not least because I am actually up in the morning earlier than usual - and it's so easy! Today I'm off to Boston to do the first half of the job that I am here for - i.e. to persuade young American students to come and study in England. I had collected a list of pros by canvassing my friends and colleagues. The tips include: English fees are half as expensive as the American fees, Canterbury has a cathedral which is a 1000 years old and the campus is on a hill overlooking the cathedral, we are 50 minutes by train to London and about two hours to Paris, you can drink in England from the age of 18 (rather than 21).

I'm waiting for my train to Boston in Borders in Madison Square Gardens (just above the Penn Station), contemplating this place. The place where they call you by your name to give you your coffee. The place which smells of sweet nuts, where people mutter to themselves, amused, or speak their minds to their neighbours. Through the big window, I am looking out onto the street lined with yellow taxis and small cafes and shops next to each other - an Italian, a Hispanic, a Jewish, an Irish one - all side by side. And nestling in between them is a street sign for a palmist, and another one for a beautician... This city is definitely a woman...

03/11/09

After a short but immensely colourful time in Boston, I am back in the embrace of the city which always feels warm and looks familiar every step of the way.

My second gig is in the Riverside Church in New York. The taxi takes me up Riverside Drive, a street lined with residential palaces - opulent beyond all imagination. It's both comfortable and unsettling driving past these buildings. It makes me think about human aspiration and desire. Is it possible that this kind of a life-style is enough? Does it make one happy? Or would anyone, having got here, find something else to wish for? It makes me think about my own needs and desires - and why it is so difficult to be buddhist about it - to be happy with one's lot and stop yearning for something else in life, be it a car or a house, a job or a child, the love of someone special, or just good health...

Because every tourist book I've touched seems to have opened on the page featuring the Russian Tea Room, and because my past experiences of America have traditionally had a Russian element to them, and because the Russian Tea Room is a couple of blocks away from my hotel - I decide to go to the Russian Tea Room with Lauren - an English acting student at the Lee Strasberg school and a friend of a mutual friend. It meets all expectations of kitsch and glamour and extremely fine wine.

04/11/09

Another beautiful day. Sunny and warm and extremely pleasant. Another beautiful walk to the Union Square. This time to meet writer Caridad Svich for the first time after years of corresponding and hearing wonderful things about her and being caught up in similar passions - such as the play Huddersfield by Ugljesa Sajtinac which I was fairy godmother too and which Caridad brought to the American audience by reworking my English translation.

We have a leisurely chat which - before we know it - has taken full two hours! But there are so many stories to tell and hear! And still some left over for the next time we meet...

The rest of the day, I spend in New Jersey - interviewing Adriano for my research... I will reveal none of it here - but am really looking forward to having it transcribed - it will be pure gold... It is extremely inspiring and illuminating to see Adriano in his natural habitat. A beautiful bohemian apartment, light and airy and with walls painted in deep red... In true Taurean fashion we complete our communion by a trip to a Mexican restaurant - another truly delicious choice of restaurant by Adriano! And then Bar Majestic for a glass of wine and a spot of baseball. We talk about what makes us happy. It all boils down to simple pleasures. Well, there we are - and it is a certainly moment of true happiness for me!

05/11/09

So who is this woman, this woman that has had me under her spell for days, even years since my very first brief visit a few years ago? This woman who stands there with her beacon, beckoning sailors and adventurers, beckoning - you! - into her mysterious chambers, down perfect streets, straight lines and secret alleys, broad avenues and misty parks... She waves her hands at you helping you cross the streets and then offers to read your palm, like a sorceress, her petticoats rustling in the breeze, she ambles leisurely around the train station, at her own pace, even if you are in a rush, she's learnt to manage her stress and you'll have to bear with her, she stretches her limbs before a run, she counts her calories, she makes the best smelling coffee in the world, she tells you 'jeez, I love your coat', she is taking her dog for a walk and checking her iphone at the same time, she smiles mysteriously before she waves you good bye, adieu, ciao for now - she hums a sweet melody under her breath... Till the next time...

Davidson College, North Carolina, 01.02.06

2008-12-08T23:05:00.002Z

Davidson Travelogue

01.02.06

Each seat on the US Airline plane has a satellite phone which also doubles as a remote control for the in-flight entertainment. The stewardess sells earphones for those at $5 a pair. Having just realised that there is a mix up in my schedule - my arrival time at Davidson was mistaken for my departure time - and that I won’t be there in time for my first talk, I briefly consider calling Bethany or Ginny from my satellite phone. But then I think – a) they are probably all still asleep, b) the more sensible members of the RSC (such as Ginny or Sarah) might be scandalised by such an extravagance, c) they’ll probably work it out anyway and think of a contingency. So I decide to buy a pair of earphones instead.

These are the things I did during the eight or nine hours on the plane: attempted holding a conversation with a businessman who runs a coaxial cable production company in Charlotte, moved away from businessman in pursuit of more legroom, watched a BBC 24 movie-bulletin, ate a meal, listened to an in-flight entertainment relaxation tape, slept, read sonnets, brainstormed ideas for sonnet theatre project, ate another meal, listened to more in-flight entertainment CDs, made more notes about the teaching of Shakespeare to uni students, particularly enjoyed Miles Davis… Panicked when realised I forgot ear-filters in my suitcase, but resigned self to the prospect of post-flying deafness…

It was a relief to see a banner with my name as soon as I came out through the arrivals. Don, my host, is a retired college professor with an air of wise serenity, who I warm up to immediately. He was a molecular biologist and tells me a story about his research. Spiders, when they are young, live in a community. They carry yolk from the eggs that they hatch out of in their stomachs, and when the yolk runs out they leave their communities to start living on their own and spinning their own webs… Don was really interested in what makes spiders leave their communities and become loners. I am fascinated by this and notice the analogy with humans. Oh, yes, says Don, it’s analogous to entire political systems – it proves that socialism cannot exist…

Next, we talk about England and Europe. Don reminisces about the first time he visited. He was a choir boy and was selected to come with his choir to Edinburgh. They also went to Frankfurt and this was in the mid-1950s when Germany hadn’t quite recovered from the war yet… It feels strange that Don is a link to such a distant time and place – he himself certainly doesn’t look seventy.

When we arrive at the Guest House in Davidson – I am utterly mesmerised by the grandeur of the interior. There is a large hall, and a massive reception room with a dining and seating area (and a grand piano) on the ground floor. On the upper floor – yet another football pitch of a landing. I am led to my room where I find a big hamper on the dressing table and a note from Bethany. Not much later, Ginny materialises in front of my door – I jump up and down for joy – and gesture at my lovely room. She tells me to wait till I see hers, but first we need a briefing meeting.

Bethany and then Melanie join us in a reading room downstairs as Ginny talks me efficiently through my time-table. They are about to have a meeting and I am really impressed by the fact that Mel proves it is possible to walk around in flip-flops in February in North Carolina. I don’t dare attempt a similar feat however, but put on my coat and my boots as I go to find Merryn and Endy.

They are meant to be doing an acting class for a self-selecting group of students at the Student Union. As no one turns up for a while, they decide that it is probably not going to happen and decide to walk me back – but include a brief visit to the theatre. Gemma is in the middle of the tech for the show she is putting together with the students, but looks remarkably bright and cheerful. We catch her during the break. Reluctant to leave the room because the students have been giving blood outside, she is chatting to Professor Cynthia Lewis. Cynthia has her leg in a plaster cast. It all feels a bit surreal – but then again I might be experiencing a mild jetlag.

Later on Merryn takes me to the local coffee shop. Davidson is a tiny little town with a total of five shops (one of which is a wedding dress shop). The coffee in the coffee shop is remarkably good however – and Merryn tells me stories about the shop’s owner and his links to Columbia etc, etc. He seems to know all the locals and every so often he mentions a girl called Christina.

Like in a proper American movie, we meet Christina in passing at our next location. She has big curly hair and is riding a bicycle. She seems ever so slightly reticent, but very pleasant. They agree to meet later and we walk into the local library where Nick, Merryn and Endy will be doing a workshop on playwriting.

He starts us off by asking us to tell each other stories about our names. There are a few really good stories in the room but my favourite was Endy’s. Endy had a friend called Bridget whose parents had her in order to try and save a relationship and named her accordingly. Endy’s parents also had Endy in order to save their relationship, but Endy’s name certainly turned out to be auspicious.

There was a woman next to me who seemed very keen on having a conversation afterwards. She is a former actress who is writing a play and whose son had been converted into a playwright thanks to Nick’s exercises. She is also very keen on talking to Endy about her play and a particular tribe she has been researching which she wants to take Endy to visit… After a while this perfectly innocent conversation does begin to acquire some strange undertones signifying perhaps a pathological loneliness of Davidson’s non-student population…

By the time Endy and I arrive there, the Brick House – the only bar in Davidson – has stopped serving food. I fancied just a salad to diversify the kind of dry airplane diet I’d been on all day. We join Nick and his friend and Merryn and Christina and I get a chance to learn a bit more about her. A former Davidson student, Christina has decided to return to her first love - music. She is applying to study music at Berkley and is likely to get in. In the meantime she is staying here and visiting England from time to time. Christina is originally from Panama and comes from a large family, not all of who understand her passion for music. She is an Aries. Merryn is a Sagittarius; Nick a Taurus and Endy is a Libra. I spend most of the rest of the time in the bar chatting to Endy about her boyfriend and about matters of the heart in general.

02.02.06

Ginny presides over the breakfast table in a way which is thoroughly admirable and a perfect model of good management practice. She is firm but polite, giving everyone a space while also driving the agenda along in an efficient manner. I appreciate the experience immensely and intensely…

First in the never ending time-table for today is a visit to a local school. I feel several steps behind everyone as I am still delighting in things that they’ve all grown sick and tired of or just started taking for granted – such as the super-powerful showers in the bathroom, everybody’s unrivalled kindness and enthusiasm, Davidson’s extra-terrestrial peacefulness. They’d all been to the Davidson school some time ago and we (Nick, Keith, Mel and I) are now here on a follow up visit to see the kids’ performances of the Dream and Julius Caesar.

For some strange reason I am reminded of my own school as we sit in the gym, munching on the Headmistress’s cakes, surrounded by eager parents and waiting for the shows to start. I’m thinking of how (dis)similar it is to my childhood experience while also recognising the image of an American school from films and TV series. It turns out we’ve been waiting for Bobby Vogt – the Davidson College President – as the Schoolmistress really wanted to thank him formally for this opportunity before she displayed her diligent pupils. There are going to be four different groups of kids doing four different scenes from each play and one of the groups would be joined by a young teacher who has had to step in instead of a kid that didn’t turn up today. Wrapped up in random bits and pieces of costume, the first group proceeds to compete with an exceptionally loud air-conditioner. Keith, Nick, Mel and I are all focusing on a different group as we are going to have a mini-feedback session with each group following the performance.

The kids are adorable – extremely open and bright. We discuss the themes of the plays and how they dealt with the language, the subject matter and their characters. I am particularly impressed by the 9-year old protagonists of Julius Caesar who – when pressed – can draw very meaningful parallels between this play on the one hand and their relationships with their siblings, as well as contemporary films, stories and video games on the other!

Amy drives us back to campus immediately after the session as we are all whizzing off to the next event on our schedules. Mine is a talk with a group of Non-Fiction Writing students. I am meant to talk to them about theatre reviewing. We all sit in a circle, in a windowless room and in those chairs with a flap on the right-hand side for taking notes. I’m slightly overwhelmed by the experience of being in an American classroom (again because of the intense accompanying feeling reminiscent of having stepped into a movie), but the students are all wide-eyed, enthusiastic and full of anticipation. This certainly sparks off my own enthusiasm and by the end of the hour, we’ve all had a productive, interesting and entertaining time.

Over the next few days we would be having a whole range of equally stimulating, extraordinary and thoroughly memorable experiences. A coffee afternoon with a Gay and Lesbian society, a pizza evening with a Religious and Philosophical society, a posh lunch with the board of the college (at which I munched on salad while entertaining Mr Burger King), Gemma's show, a less posh banqueting lunch with a selection of local high school kids and eventually a party, which started off with a gig by Ellen Cherry... But what topped it all for me was just a simple shopping trip with the composer Keith Clouston and our lovely hostess Amy to a mall in Charlotte - the trip itself resulted in almost no shopping at all, but we had some cakes and a lovely time.

Stratford-upon-Avon, 25.11. 2005

2008-11-30T22:21:00.005Z

(Not strictly speaking an account of a trip but more of a reflection on an arrival).

I met the Prince yesterday. It was a cake day and we sat in a roof-top room (with the exhibit of an Oscar in a glass container) and I stuck next to the radiators not really wanting to talk to anyone, thinking: "if I don’t say anything to the Prince does it still count as though I met him". I sat on a windowsill for a moment holding a porcelain cup of tea and a very delicate slice of carrot cake and said to my companion – "I feel like Alice in Wonderland; all the time"… She said I was ‘bonkers’ and turned her attention to a very heavy photo-camera.

I sometimes wonder how different things might have been in a number of ways. I wonder whether I’d’ve always ended up here whatever I’d done, whichever pathways I'd chosen?

The Prince was just like he looks on the pictures of himself. He wore a golden ring on the little finger of his left hand and reached for his handkerchief every so often because he had a minor cold. He even sneezed delicately once. You know how bad I am at remembering what people wear, but I remember that he wore a pink tie. He even cracked a joke - about there being 'much ado about the merry wives of Windsor this summer, but that all's well that ends well' - and everybody laughed.

When I later told this to my friend Saska, she cracked her own joke: So did he say it all in his mother tongue – in Queen’s English?…

After I left the room with the Prince – I descended a long, winding staircase and I went into a cellar and cried. I didn’t want to break down, but it took me by surprise, I seriously thought for a moment, perhaps I should just give the whole thing up… Paranoia sets in early in Wonderland…

I’m still on my own but I am learning to handle my loneliness, even love it sometimes…

Newcastle- Aberysthwyth-Maryland-New York, (May-June 2005)

2008-11-30T03:13:00.005Z

May 2005 Newcastle

In between changing jobs and in between Oxford and New York, Robert Young delivers a paper as part of a Postcolonial Seminar series at Newcastle University on Asylum Seeking and Water Benjamin. He plays the opening sequence of Casablanca to set the scene. This however sets the scene for something else in my head. I’m thinking of:

- 1492 – and Christopher Columbus as the original migrant. Exactly 500 years before 1992 – the year that some major migrations occurred from the former Yugoslavia outwards – quite a few towards America too.

- A theatre version of Casablanca, perhaps highlighting the contemporary aspect of the Middle East as a ‘waiting room’.

09.05.05 Aberystwyth

A Greek American co-smoker at a conference tells me the story of how his grandparents met. It sounds vaguely like the story of Captain Corelli’s mandolin.

I’m thinking of an invented story of an artist (perhaps a lady photographer from Crete, married to a German during World War II, dodging bombs in Berlin). Her life story is documented through samples of her work. The sole biographical fact that we have is her date of birth, but not the date of her death - only the date of her disappearance.

What if there was no date of my death but only a date of my disappearance – would it mean that I outlived my death?

Some of the ways in which I have been described by others:

“You look like a Gypsy”

“You speak English with a Swedish accent”

“You look like Anne Frank would have looked if she grew up”

26.06.05 University of Maryland

I’m listening to an exceptionally beautiful French woman who is not explicitly aware of it because she is completely preoccupied with paradoxes and philosophical perspectives of listening to opera. Otherwise she teaches French literature, does her hair up and manicures her nails. I contemplate her beauty of body and mind. Who is she? Where does she come from? Where and who are her family? I contemplate the quivering delicacy in her appreciation of art.

28.06.05 University of Maryland

I’m listening to a black man talking about a Serbian choreographer from the 14^th century called Vuladin Šon. He says this is spelt Sion. Several nicotine-patch-fuelled-dreams later I am in a seminar where I’m asking whether anyone knows anything about this person. Some members postulate the possibility that his name was misread from the Cyrillic alphabet as Šon when in fact it was Koh.

I am in Janet’s flat (which is actually situated in a skyscraper building in KŠ at the end of the street in which I grew up) and there is a party going on. I end up with a live fish being slid behind my neck.

I am in my bedroom in Maryland where three people are standing around me. As I try to get rid of them, the number of people increases and with it my frustration and inability to keep it all under control. It all turns into a big unruly family situation where I am trying to address them and nobody is taking any notice.

New York

One of the following few days we actually leave for New York. Everything smells fresh because I am using a peach shower gel and I don’t smoke anymore. Instead I have Starbucks coffee and fruit salad every morning. So when we arrive at the Grand Central station we stop off for a Starbucks snack and I get a cup with my name written on it in black marker – Douchqa (one of the more exotic variations I've had in my time).

Due to my naivete combined with a small budget and a desire for an en suite room, we are sleeping in Queens. This has its charms. We walk past a Chinese patisserie shop every day and once I try a fruit drink there which I don’t like. George has it instead. While he shops at Abercrombie and Fitch I meet with Joey who is in New York too with her current gig with Cirque de Soleil. Eventually George joins us and we decide to accompany Joey to the big top in New Jersey and see the show. It is a magnificent experience. We spend the afternoon behind the scenes, meeting her various colleagues. It turns out one of the dancers, Helen, went to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds and she remembers Marcella. We watch the show from the second row. Like school kids. Mesmerised. Afterwards we are on the coach back to the rooms where some members of the company are staying. I get an opportunity to meet the show’s violinist Vuk – from Belgarde – but I’m panicking about possibly having lost my mobile phone. After some cocktails with Joey, we take the ferry back to Manhattan. I film some of it. A classic shot.

There are also instances – not necessarily in that order - where we watch Christian Slater and Jessica Lange in The Glass Menagerie and emerge angry at them and sorry for a lonely girl sitting next to us for having had to pay all that money for a substandard performance; we eat in a small Italian restaurant on Broadway, I briefly consider escargots, but am discouraged; we start watching an Elvis musical because George liked the poster and just as I warm up he changes his mind in the interval and demands that we go to the opposite end of town to watch Naked Boys Singing. I am having nicotine withdrawal symptoms and our brief shouting match at Times Square ends up with me demanding gin and tonic as a compromise. An unexpected highlight is a tour of Manhattan on an open top bus. This is how I fall in love with New York. But the following day we are on our way back to Washington DC to board our plane. Just missing 4th July.

Wroclaw – Krzyżowa - Wroclaw, Poland, 01-15 April 2005; The Eugenio Barba Summer School

2008-07-14T22:03:00.007+01:00

Wroclaw - Krzyżowa - Wroclaw, Poland, 01-15 April 2005

ISTA - International School of Theatre Anthropology  

Director: Eugenio Barba   

ISTA XIV  IMPROVISATION -

Memory, Repetition, Discontinuity  

Organised by  The Centre for Study of Jerzy Grotowski's Work  and for Cultural and Theatrical Research

As soon as we land at the Wroclaw airport we are collected by a waiting coach and transported to a residential enclosure in a rural location – the village of Krzyzowa. We are allocated beds in single sex dormitoria where each room is shared by three or four people. It feels like being on a school trip and the sense of constriction and repression is palpable from the word 'go'. Soon enough we are given a very strict time-table according to which we are to rise at 6AM every morning and attend a singing sunrise ritual. This is followed by breakfast and a full working day consisting of workshops, lectures and demonstrations. The morning workshops are usually a double block consisting of an Odin workshop and a workshop led by one of Euginio Barba’s friends - usually from a non-occidental performance tradition. These workshops include Indian, Japanese, Balinese and South American dances as well as Biomechanics and Mime. The workshops are followed by talks or sessions led by Barba and they eventually result in the participants being sent away in small groups to devise their own response to a given task. Because Barba is working on his version of Hamlet – based on the original Danish source – and he needs a scene representing death by the plague, we spend most of the week devising ways of dying. But we don’t know the reason until the very end of the summer school when Barba chooses some of the individual pieces, weaves them together into a scene and contextualises this by revealing his underlying aim. During our week in Krzyzowa, we also attend a couple of off-site events, including a singing performance at a local church, and we also get some extra-curricular input– most notably by the Polish voice coach Zygmunt Molik. Apart from a couple of truly amazing highlights of this kind - and the saving grace of having my friend George and our new friend Patrick to frolic with in the central courtyard during the afternoon siesta hours - I end up having a mostly miserable time at this summer school. Barba’s deliberate mystification of his work, his one-way master-student attitude, the accompanying ban on laughing or clapping in the class, his unwillingness to take questions or comments from the participants and the fact that most of the technical classes are designed for students to copy the teacher rather than really understand any of the underlying principles unleash my teenage angst and rebellion. My notes below are therefore a mixture of disillusioned observations and positive learning experiences that I manage to derive for myself.

01.04.05 – Arrival

Theatre is all about shared history. A theatre company can be just a party of friends. Like Eugenio Barba’s ISTA: A certain level of arrogance. A mystification of the craft. The master–student power dynamic. An intention to instil a sense of religious following… I would have been seduced by this some time ago. Suddenly I feel older and more cynical. However, I recognise other directors I’ve worked with in Eugenio. The way he introduces his collaborators and guests. The way it looks impressive and slightly exclusive to the rest of us. The way it makes us want to belong. The way hierarchies are created on the basis of the length of time people have known each other and been together. The way authority is created simply through personality traits, courage and attitude. The way it gives right to self-indulgence.

02.04.05

* Balinese Dance

The frustration I feel with this class teaches me:

- the importance of breaking down the teaching point into smallest possible parts

- the importance of learning a gesture or a series of gestures rather than a movement sequence

- movement as a purely physical, external phenomenon is less effective than the learning of the mechanism of movement on an inner-outer, psychologically/internally motivated level

- learning a technique is based on bodily strength or an assumption of bodily strength

* Odin’s Roberta Carreri

I like Roberta. She places an interesting emphasis on:

- the use of the eyes

- the difference between action and beautiful movement

- the difference between intention and tension

- sitting down without falling

- getting up without jerking

- stomach as the centre of energy

* Barba’s Lecture - Organic Dramatrurgy:

- Dramaturgy is a succession of events, suggesting rather than illustrating; influencing the audience’s nervous system

- An error can become part of the score through the actor deliberately repeating the error twice more but changing it every time

- Performance of an action in No changes in each instance – the way that different conductors may change the opening of a Beethoven symphony – interpretation in No is like musical improvisation

03.04.04 – Barba’s ‘Action-Reaction’ Principle

- Barba’s teaching is based on the ‘action-reaction’ principle. In my understanding, this is a version of the Aristotelian dramaturgical system which Barba applies to movement, action and the dynamic of the piece or the process as a whole. He talks about the importance of ‘tension’ or ‘opposition’ (what I would interpret as Aristotelian ‘agon’ or ‘conflict’) and the notion of ‘finding the impulse’ within it. He is also aware of 'the rule of the three' even though he doesn’t use it explicitly. For example, he claims that:

“Improvisation [which is the overarching topic of this summer school] consists of three or four actions constituting opposition [tension] and featuring an impulse.”

He often advises to: ‘Do the opposite’

Barba claims that:

- theatre is about taking away unmemorable moments from life

- theatre is an art of: -

· memory

· seeing, making visible

· giving life

- biography happens in the discontinuity of memory – omitting the unmemorable

life: before – after

biography: after – before

- ‘the first day’ doesn’t belong to life but to memory; it’s our job to be biographers

- ‘the first day’ is a woodworm

- body memory – remains (separation after the act of creation)

- soul memory – is lost

How to achieve being continually in a creative condition?

- Stanislavski’s answer – ‘improvisation’

Barba understands and uses ‘improvisation’ in a Stanislavskian sense of the word and as a rehearsal methodology rather than something that can potentially be a performer’s tool in the process of performance. (In contemporary Western training I think that this particular understanding of ‘improvisation’ would simply be considered ‘creativity’.) I don’t get a chance to ask whether he is aware of the latter possibility and what his standpoint is in relation to it, and he never suggests that he might indeed be aware of it.

According to Barba:

Improvisation is a struggle against 1. spontaneity

2. time

3. pre-vision; foreseeing, predictability

(most important)

On a wider level, Barba also offers a pearl of wisdom, making a distinction between:

loyalty – ‘respecting the contract with another’

faithfulness – ‘respecting the contract with oneself’

03.04.05

ZYGMUNT MOLIK

(Grotowski’s actor and collaborator, now a voice coach and acting teacher)

Molik asks for someone with a pre-prepared speech to come onto the stage. A Greek Cypriot actor Apostolos volunteers. Molik asks Apostolos to kneel on the floor and close his eyes. He takes him through a visualisation where he asks him to imagine that he is a plant or a bush. He asks him to imagine the being of this plant all the way to its roots. His coming up has to involve a sense of struggle. To start off with there is only a vibration of the voice, then comes the text. Molik asks Apostolos to deliver his text, but Apostolos struggles.

Molik: What is your plant?

Apostolos whispers into Molik’s ear - to a general delight of the audience. They talk privately for a bit.

Molik sends Apostolos away warmly, and then informs us in a reassuring way that ‘this was not completely a plant as it had elements of the human being in it.’

Barba and Molik stand quietly and meditatively on the side of the stage for a bit and then Barba attempts to change the mood or just take the limelight again by expressing his joy and gratitude for Molik’s being here in a typically long and pompous way.

Molik: But we are not here so you can make me a confession of your gratitude, we are here to do things!

Applause.

Barba: I am happy to give you the last bits of my authority that I’ve got left and make you the chieftan of this horde!

Molik: I’ll take you up on your invitation and do some work with them.

Molik asks the audience to make a low level murmur. Slowly and gradually, he orchestrates a choir of voices – a symphony of positive energy, an all enveloping good vibration which lasts for about 15 minutes. It’s almost as though he is performing a healing ritual on Barba’s loyal but exhausted and exasperated horde. Equally gradually he brings the choir to an end and walks slowly out of the lights to stand aside once again, in silence. We all sit in silence for a while.

Molik (to Barba): Is that all?

Silence.

More silence.

Molik starts a tentative conversation with Barba - which might have been a chit chat – in French.

Silence. A Kind of comfortable silence.

Molik: Is that all? Shall I say something for the end? (To all): Have a good evening and good night.

Rapturous applause.

Finally – the real master. Stripped from all ego but imbued with a reverence which is earned and comes easily from the others. By comparison, all the rest of this summer school seems facile – pure vanity, surface and ego. In an embarrassing kind of way. Deeply embarrassing. It strikes me that everything Barba does is potentially a result of deep seated insecurity. Perhaps everybody in theatre is deeply insecure? Perhaps the whole point is to achieve a liberation from insecurity and a very simple focus on what is essential.

04.04.05

Some Thoughts on Pedagogy: Advice from the Student to the Teacher

First decide why you are here and why I am here; what do you want to teach me?
Break down your instruction into units so that I know what I am meant to learn.
If you are teaching me how to walk, it is not fair for you to correct me on how I hold my hands (to point out my mistakes in an unrelated area).
Don’t use my getting something wrong so you can show off your power, superiority or knowledge – that goes without saying.
Don’t bore me.
Don’t patronise me.
Don’t take me for granted.
I am prepared to suffer in order to gain knowledge, but I am not prepared to suffer your incompetence or your ego.
I am not here because of you, I am here because of the knowledge.

Some Thoughts on Belief

Belief is an emotional state. In order to believe something I need to be guided emotionally. The same applies to the process of learning and to the process of watching theatre.

Believability is the ability to maintain suspension of disbelief.

Some Thoughts on Barba’s System and Improvisation

Barba’s Aristotelian-inspired system of ‘action-reaction’ works both macro- and microcosmically, both in terms of a narrative and in terms of action: each individual action, each movement, each step. Individual actions are montaged on the basis of counterpoint.

Improvisation is explored through fixed forms, within the controlled circumstances of rehearsal. I think that in this way creativity is hindered. In such a case the creativity of the actor(s) is exploited by the director rather than being facilitated by him. The improvisation is not being used to foster a creative collective ownership of the piece. The work is in a way taken away from the actor-creator and does not necessarily serve his process and creative journey through the piece.

I would say that there are three kinds of improvisation:

1. improvisation - in a Stanislavskian sense - that serves to generate material (from a theme, situation, task)

2. improvisation that helps the actor’s process

3. improvisation that is necessitated in the process of performance as a result of an unforeseen obstacle

Members of Odin on Improvisation

Individual members of Odin theatre demonstrate their techniques of sequencing actions-reactions on a given topic to generate material. They take it in turns to give particular examples.

The most interesting one is given by Roberta Carreri. She relates an occasion on which she was given a nursery rhyme on the basis of which to improvise a scene – a sequence of movement – around. Her response was to begin by enacting the nursery rhyme. However, in order to avoid illustration she decided to change the scale of objects in the narrative (so stirring a pot could become really big, or very, very small). She also tried responding personally to particular aspects of the narrative. So in response to the line ‘the fog rises over the sharp hills’, she would try seeing the fog, being the fog, remembering that her brother had a car accident and died in the fog, or she would try walking on the sharp hills, imagining them round and sharp like the breasts of a woman, rain over the hills, being able to feel it, taste it, etc. In other words her strategies would be:

association
changing the subject/the character of the narrative
not following the linearity of time – going backwards and forwards in the narrative
concentrating on the verbs rather than adjectives
changing the physical pattern – the dynamics: slow-fast
changing direction
thinking in terms of details (not in general), clear images, precision

They warn also against the danger of over-improvising, becoming too technical, and the importance of editing.

This riveting account again seems to me to be a very interesting and useful take on devising and the actor’s creative process, rather than improvisation per se.

05.04.05

Following a talk by one of Barba’s dramaturges – the Italian academic Franco Ruffini who chose to deliver his paper on improvisation via an interpreter, I am sitting with him outside of the lecture hall having a cigarette. I didn’t really understand much of his paper and I am eager to get an answer to my question: ‘What about improvisation as an actor’s tool in the process of performance in Barba’s theatre’? Ruffini, probably on a high from having just delivered his paper, suddenly starts speaking to me in beautiful English:

“The working space is like a church to Barba. That’s why he doesn’t like people laughing or clapping. He wants to make theatre because it allows him to ‘scream’ – which real life doesn’t allow. To scream about the insufferable, the pain.

He doesn’t really have much to teach a young director because he works with a mysterious kind of energy, and with instinct. You can’t teach that. Organic dramaturgy.

There are three kinds of improvisation:

1. towards the actor

2. towards the spectator

and then

(Ruffini gets closer to me and lowers the tone of his voice significantly)

3. towards God –

but we mustn’t speak about that!”

Ruffini explains that this last kind of improvisation cannot really be taught because the notion itself can easily be misinterpreted. He claims that he only ever saw this kind of ‘improvisation’ in Grotowski’s own work – ‘an improvisation towards God, towards the sacred, towards the ‘not known’ – ‘that which cannot be named’. Not everybody can do that (although what Molik did the other night could perhaps be seen as coming close to it).

“An actor might think that they can improvise for God, but when they strip the layers – they get to the banal – a man and woman having sex.”

My conversation with Ruffini reminds me once again about that aspect of theatre which is to do with ‘mystification’ which I don’t seem to like. I am guessing this is why I prefer reflexivity in theatre, metatheatricality – it’s more honest. I am reminded again that the unspoken contract between theatre-makers and the audience involves communication and belief, and I guess I am more in favour of a flat, trusting, equal relationship between the two parties than a vertical one. This is in keeping with my conviction that there are many truths, rather than a single absolute one – which is not to deny the importance of a higher consciousness, a higher spiritual value we are all trying to tap into. Even this whole experience points to the fact that God can be celebrated in many different ways. And theatre must accommodate a plurality of views.

The last few days before I left Newcastle for Poland had been spent working towards the premiere of Julia Darling’s musical Manifesto for a New City in Hexham. It was based on a series of poems Julia had written for us the previous year for an event called Flying Homages which I created with four poets and three Northern Stage actors-musicians to accompany the run of Homage to Catalonia. Actor Jim Kitson wrote the music for it and Alan Lyddiard directed it as his last piece for Northern Stage (as he had just resigned as the Artistic Director of the company). Julia and I had spent a lot of time together over the last few months – which was made even easier by the fact that our offices were on the same corridor at Newcastle University. However, her condition had been deteriorating rapidly over and she would often be lying down on her sofa when I went to her for a working session. Julia was pretty much bedbound the last few weeks before the opening but she managed to pay us a visit for a dress rehearsal.

Since coming here, I have been thinking of Julia intensely, texting her and reading her blog. In it she said that her trip to the dress rehearsal of the Manifesto was probably the last time she ever got out of bed. I was panicking, but trying not to show it – calling Julia to arrange to see her on my return, calling our friend Margaret to share my anxieties…

But I was feeling very inarticulate, afraid and increasingly sad. I was remembering times I’d shared with her, how I met her in a book first, ages before we actually set eyes upon each other, then I met her by word of mouth, just weeks before we actually met. Her complete smile. When she came round for a cup of tea and told me she made lists of things she wanted to do or wanted to come true. Sometimes they did or did not, but at least she kept finding these notes to herself months later… I’ll take that with me.

Margaret said: This is not about us, it’s about her. This time is for her…

Driving with Julia through snow, one evening after rehearsal, sharing stories of falling in public places. I must remember her caps and hats….

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

07.04.05

Some Thoughts on Theatre

Dramaturgy is about conceptualising.

Acting is about instinct.

Directing is about power.

Barba’s principle of action-direction is really about returning to the laws of physics. A see-saw.

This inspires me to think of the whole of theatre-making practice in terms of the paradigm of a children’s playground:

- a see-saw – as the principle of ‘action-direction'

- the swings – as ‘communication’ with the audience

- a walking bridge – as a dramatic arc

A flourish of today:

An ‘improvisation’ in which life is represented through a metaphor of eating an orange, and death arrives when eating finishes.

08.04.05

Having spent about a week in Krzyżowa we are finally back in Wroclaw for a theatre festival organized by the Grotowski Institute. However, the return to Wroclaw is marked by the downbeat feeling surrounding the recent death of Pope Paul II who was of course Polish. Ever since the Pope’s death on 2 April, there has been a palpable sense of anxiety among the Polish people as to how this will reflect on their political situation. Our arrival into Wroclaw coincides with the TV broadcast of the Pope’s funeral so the entire city is quiet... Nevertheless, over the next few days we get to see some really interesting theatre (including Odin’s Andersen’s Dream) and this at least goes some way in redressing the balance of the entire experience which has been less than ecstatic for me so far. Even though we get a terrible cold in our last few days in Poland, I am still much happier having the freedom of being in a city...

09.04.05

For me ISTA has been a culture shock in reverse. Everything that constitutes Barba’s theatre practice is intensely familiar to me as a conservative, hierarchical, vertical system of values that characterises both the notion of theatre practice and of education in Eastern Europe.

Having settled in Western Europe more than ten years ago, I was forced to unlearn and leave behind such elitist ways of thinking about knowledge and theatre in favour of more democratic, empowering and inclusive processes. As a result I have grown to resent those ways I’d left behind.

At the end of this ISTA I find that in many ways adaptation sums up my state of being. But that having moved away from one context and having left one way of being behind for another - diametrically opposed - one, it is impossible to continue to appreciate or return to the original condition.

Maybe one decides to stay faithful to something on the basis of the level of difficulty it took to get there.

A Post Scriptum on

Memory, Repetition, Discontinuity

For Julia

Julia died on 13 April 2005. I returned to Newcastle two days later and placed this under In Memoriam on her website:

I returned from Poland yesterday with a jar of raspberry confiture. I was going to call round with it. In amongst other things, Julia asked for home-grown raspberries in the Manifesto. She also asked for imaginary travel, and I hoped this was going to be an imaginary postcard in a jar.

I also met Julia through a story first – a story called Bloodlines which I found in a small publisher’s collection many years ago. All I remembered about it was its beauty, a nameless city with the metro and references to Spain. Then in 2002 a friend of mine urged me to catch Personal Belongings at that year’s Fringe. When I moved to Newcastle the following month, one of the first people I met was Julia Darling. And when you met Julia it was impossible not to become an instant friend. She was also one of my first visitors in my new home, one Sunday afternoon when she was on a research trip to that part of town. In retrospect I realised, that visit was my small casual initiation ritual. Julia had also been a newcomer once and she loved making people feel welcome in this place that she made her home.

Everything about Julia always seemed so effortless – her boundless generosity of spirit, her radiant smile, her literature. She always responded to every call, to every cause, to every occasion – she loved people and she loved writing and those two loves always went hand in hand. And those two loves never asked for anything in return.

I think it was at the time when we were rehearsing Valentine Verses that I learnt about Julia’s illness. We were in the lift in the School of English and just before she got out on the second floor she joked about how her cancer was part of her literary reputation. I stayed behind shell-shocked. I could never have imagined that cancer could co-exist with so much beauty and love, and I tried to reassure myself that the latter would surely triumph.

On occasions like this, when recollection is a means of coping, every memory inevitably seems magnified. In this particular place, where Julia revealed her innermost feelings and thoughts, it is impossible to ignore the cancer. Yet on a daily basis, the strength of Julia’s personality was such that it always overshadowed her actual state of health. Yes, she would casually mention the nurses, her acupuncture sessions and her afternoon naps on her new sofa, but always with her beaming smile.

Almost a year to the date after our theatrical celebration of poetry and love, we were planning another staged poetry event. This time the idea was to link the event with Northern Stage’s co-production of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. We would send Julia, Bill Herbert, Linda France and Colin Teevan on Easyjet flights to Barcelona and get them to write their own homages to Catalonia. Julia returned from Barcelona with a Manifesto for a New City. In it she famously called for the artists and makers to take over the city and for the property developers to cut up their suits and make them again. Soon after her return, Julia found that her cancer had started spreading…

As a result of the success of Flying Homages – the evening of poetry and music performed by the writers together with Northern Stage’s actors – Julia was commissioned to write a full scale musical for the company. We started working on it intensively last autumn and Julia seemed to be bursting with ideas. Occasionally she’d say: “I have to go and have my blood changed, but maybe you could come with me and we can work in the hospital”. Such was her attitude to her work in relation to the demands of her body.

The second floor at the School of English has always been a lively place – a home to writers and creative individuals who would call in on each other with ideas or just wave joyously across the corridor filled with the smell of incense coming from Julia’s office. I loved going into her office for meetings. Not only did it smell nice, but it was a real writer’s den furnished with simple luxuries – beautiful lighting, intriguing pictures and carefully chosen words and notes to herself. And of course – there was the sofa. When Jim Kitson came in on the Manifesto meetings, the second floor was also filled with catchy tunes and beautiful music.

Manifesto the musical had several incarnations. At first it was a proper play with songs and jokes and a character called Maureen who would bring Maureenism into the City. Around Christmas-time, however, the director Alan Lyddiard became really keen on the idea of Julia being in the show herself. For a moment it seemed like Julia was also up for it, but then she confessed that she could not be relied on and just continued writing furiously, bringing up new possible versions of the musical.

I don’t know where she found the time, but she was also keeping at least another fifteen projects on the go – poetry readings, masterclasses, radio plays, interviews – and she was also travelling or planning travels. In January we staged another reading as part of the Holocaust Memorial Day exploring the theme of survival. At this point Julia was very much into knitting and we built this newly-discovered means of survival into the show. I later thought – what a wonderful metaphor for poetry! I often think of playwriting as weaving anyway – maybe the entire literary activity can be reclaimed by women on the grounds of their inherent handcrafting inclinations.

I would have liked to have shared this thought with Julia. In the last two weeks, stuck at a symposium in Poland, I kept thinking of all the things I would have liked to have shared with Julia but never got the chance to. Then I realised that we shared wonderful moments working together, and work was exactly what kept Julia going. There was never any time for sentiments – only pure feelings, pure enthusiasm and a sense of purpose.

The last time I saw Julia at the dress rehearsal of the Manifesto, we parted with the words “See you!” The last time I spoke to her a week ago, we almost made an appointment. I came back with a jar of raspberry confiture hoping to call round with it as a token of imaginary travel. And it is this set of circumstances which made it impossible for me to see Julia once again that brings out the sentiments in me, and the memories: the times she smiled, the time when I realised I had met her first all those years ago through her story, the time when she came into my office with a radio and two cappuccinos and we listened to the Appointments while watching the snow through the window, the way in which I was swept off the beach while reading The Taxi Driver’s Daughter in Nice and then continued turning the soaked pages till the end.

In a way, knowing Julia was like experiencing that wave in Nice and I am deeply honoured to have had the opportunity.

Copenhagen - 05.11.2004

2008-07-11T00:02:00.008+01:00

(On Bonfire Night, Jane Arnfeld - my friend and Northern Stage actress - and I shared a taxi from the rehearsal rooms at St Luke's to Newcastle airport. We met Jane's partner Tony at the airport and then flew together to Copenhagen. I remember Tony saying he wondered what it would be like to cartwheel down the airport corridors, and I'm sure it might have been something to do with the fact that it was a Friday afternoon. It was a coincidence that we all travelled together and that it was Bonfire Night. Jane and Tony were on a weekend away and I was going to meet Alan wh0 had already been working in Copenhagen for a while at the Betty Nansen Theatre. We were to start conversations about the UK version of a show Alan had made there in 2002 - 1001 Nights Now... A plane take off on Bonfire Night is truly magical, and so is Copenhagen, lit with candles... All four of us ended up having a supper together. It was a brief visit packed with meetings and there was very little to convey about that particular trip, but the paper below came about soon afterwards, and was in a way tinged with the memory of Copenhagen.)

1001 Nights Now

A Dramaturgical Rationale

“To erect the palace of The Thousand and One Nights, it took generations of men, and those men are our benefactors, as we have inherited this inexhaustible book, this book capable of so much metamorphosis.” Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights (1980)

“It seems however that this politic damsel (who had been reading Machiavelli, beyond doubt) had a very ingenious little plot in her mind.” Edgar Allan Poe, The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade

Several years ago, when the London-based Middle-Eastern Broadcasting Network (MBC) undertook the making of a Middle Eastern version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, one of their first top-prize winners was a housewife. She explained that she owed her success to the fact that she spent a lot of her time reading encyclopaedias while looking after her children.

The charm of this little anecdote is contained in the fact that it defies two stereotypes – the stereotype of a housewife and the stereotype of a Muslim woman. Yet this quiz show queen is not very far removed from her distant ancestress Sheherazade – another bookworm whose love of a good story and readiness to take on a challenge eventually saved her head as well as the heads of many maidens of Baghdad.

Borges is probably not being sexist when he praises the men who left us the heritage of The Thousand and One Nights, for even if men compiled, conveyed and recorded the tales, they also bestowed great power to their female protagonist – the power of wisdom, the power of ennobling action and the power of survival. Sheherazade and the tales of the Arabian Nights have survived centuries in fact and continue to inspire great works of art including among others, the music of Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel, the paintings of Chagall and Matisse, the films of Pasolini, the poetry of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Poe and the prose of Italo Calvino and Salman Rushdie.

A word about the nature and history of the Nights

The origins of the stories can be traced back to the 9^th century Persia. This Persian layer also includes stories that can be recognised as belonging to a variety of storytelling traditions, from the Greek to the Chinese. In addition, the frame story of Sheherazade is believed to be of Indian origin. Further records of the stories’ journeys are found a century later in Baghdad and then from the 12^th century onwards in Cairo. A 16^th century Syrian version of The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laylah Wa Laylah) was the source text for the first European translation by the French explorer Antoine Galland. The first volume of Galland’s translation was published in 1704 and although this volume featured some 200 nights, further volumes abandoned the notion of counting. The actual number of stories was always a contentious point as the stories and their numbers changed from every individual version to the next. And even though some scholars have argued that the phrases ‘one thousand nights’ or ‘the thousand and one nights’ were simply meant to suggest ‘many nights’ in Arabic, this was not necessarily clear to European readers who were hungry for more and continued to demand the exact number of stories. The European demand caused a stir and more stories were added to various editions, sometimes based on oral renditions of stories which were then recorded and translated. By 19^th century The Thousand and One Nights had been translated, retranslated, canonised – and basically colonialised – in most European languages. The most famous initial English translations include the so called ‘Grub Street version’ of Galland’s translation published in 1708, Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation of the so-called ‘Calcutta II’ edition (which features 1001 re-collected stories) in 1885 and Edward W. Lane’s annotated translation in several volumes published from 1838-1841.

Also important to note is the fact that The Thousand and One Nights acquired the status of a classic in Europe faster than in the Arab world. Several factors are cited as reasons why the Arab world has been reluctant to embrace the Nights. Some of these factors are linked to the diminished literary value of the text which was recorded in various colloquial versions of Arabic rather than the standard literary language. In addition, partly due to religious constraints, the Arabic canon is based on the kind of literature which is truth-seeking in its essence (i.e. poetry), rather than being explicitly ‘fictional’ or ‘fantastic’. Finally, of course, the actual content of the stories is often so bacchanalian and licentious, that it would have probably evaded cononisation even by Western standards had it not withstood the test of time.

The text remains a constant subject of debate, especially in the context of such literary theories as feminism and postcolonialism. The debate, needless to say, is as complex as the text itself, and the oriental scholars in particular are torn between either acclaiming the text (at the expense of their feminist or post-colonialist position) or denouncing it and thus involuntarily upholding the position of chauvinist, fundamentalist and nationalist ideologies.

However, the inherent complexity and resilience of the text itself is only a testament to its own main theme: the passion for survival.

So what does 1001 Nights means to us now?

At the time and place where anything Islamic is increasingly treated with great suspicion, anxiety and paranoia – I write in the immediate aftermath of the murders of Van Gogh in Amsterdam and Kenneth Bigley in the hands of masked Muslim terrorists in Iraq – it would be easy to consider a theatre production entitled 1001 Nights Now as potentially controversial.

By commissioning eight contemporary, predominantly Muslim, writers to tell us about their experience – are we inadvertently championing the Muslim cause? Are we being flippant in actually saying: ‘Muslim terrorism and killing aside, what about sex, hashish and Arabic oud’? Are we running the risk of naivity and myopia? Or are we, on the other hand, likely to offend the Muslim sentiment itself, by shamelessly appropriating and ransacking one of their most famous legends of all time?

The answer is – no, we’re considering precisely these questions themselves. This project is not about politics or taking sides but about the human condition and the need to tell stories in order to survive. Some of those stories are politically conditioned, and some of them will take one side or the other. Our task is to let them be told and let them be heard in a way that is most relevant to our reality now.

The key word, in every respect, is ‘now’. What do the Arabian nights mean to us now? And what is the urgency with which these stories have to be told and heard?

The Format

Eight stories commissioned from contemporary Middle Eastern writers are told by eight performers. Four of the stories have survived from the Danish production of 1001 Nights Now directed by Alan Lyddiard as part of The Thoughts of The Other project, in turn conceived by Kitte Wagner. These stories are written by Atiq Rahimi (Afghanistan), Muarthan Mungan (Turkey), Maziar Bahari (Iran) and Reza Parsa (Iran/Sweden).

Another four stories are commissioned from Fadia Faqir (Jordan/Durham), Abas Amini (Iran/ Nottingham), Shazia Mirza (Iran/London) and one more London-based writer.

The stories vary in subject matter and genre, ranging possibly from a stand-up comedy routine to a contemporary adaptation of the Sheherazade story to a psychological thriller about rape and revenge.

The piece is set in a Christmas decorations factory, featuring immigrant workers from the Middle East. In a ritualised manner, each night they use their fifteen minute break to tell each other stories, to keep each other going.

The piece opens with Atiq Rahimi’s ‘The Ninth Night’. The nights are counted for as long as it takes.

The Aesthetics

Set in a factory, the piece will be contextualised by an industrial setting which is however enhanced by the nature of the manufactured products – i.e. Christmas decorations and glitter balls.

The workers listen to the music via a tannoy – it’s the music from home. It is possible that more contemporary kinds of Arabic music will be used as well.

The piece uses storytelling, but is also physical in nature and will have a choreographer (hopefully with the Middle Eastern background).

The Kargoz Shadow Puppetry is also used for at least one of the stories. It is possible that other indigenous forms of theatre or performing arts will be explored for inclusion in the piece (such as Sufi dancing etc.)

What does 1001 Nights Now have to do with The Thousand and One Nights

“At all events, Scheherazade, who, being lineally descended from Eve, fell heir, perhaps, to the whole seven baskets of talk, which the latter lady, we all know, picked up from under the trees in the garden of Eden – Scheherazade, I say, finally triumphed, and the tariff upon beauty was repealed.”

In his satirical story The Thousand and Second Tale of Ssheherazade, Edgar Allan Poe imagines what might have happened the night after Sharyar granted life to Sheherazade. (Poe was not alone in this quest of the imagination, a lot of contemporary writers from all over the world have attempted a similar exercise with particular angles of their own.) So, Sheherazade decides to tell one more tale concerning the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor whereby he describes places he has visited and things he has seen. All of these places and objects are taken directly from Poe’s own experience and/or knowledge of the world, including both the natural wonders and the manifestations of technological advancement. Ironically, Sharyar’s scepticism is awakened and despite having marvelled at Sheherazade’s fantastic plots up until then, he is so enraged by her ‘lying’ that he decides to have her beheaded after all. And Poe concludes: “She derived however, great consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from the reflection that much of the history remained still untold, and that the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for him a most righteous reward, depriving him of many inconceivable adventures.”

There are two things to be learnt from Poe’s endeavour: the first concerns the nature of ‘the truth being stranger than fiction’ and the second – the importance of fiction as an educational device. Here we also return to the truth-seeking nature of Islamic fiction itself.

Our contemporary writers’ stories, though often fictional, are informed and shaped by their own personal experience. These experiences concern gender or exile or simply life in its different guises in different parts of the world.

The archetypal character of Sheherazade is in this instance metaphorically shared by eight storytellers from distinct backgrounds and with distinct voices. They are however unified in their quest with the Arabian Princess, sharing with her the passion for survival and the ability to make a difference.

The value of archetypal material is such that we carry it with us, without having to be consciously aware of it. If this knowledge is suppressed, rejected or denied, as in the case of Poe’s Sharyar – we deprive ourselves of ‘many inconceivable adventures’. If it is perpetuated, underlined and enriched, we can’t have much to lose; and just like the housewife who won the million without even knowing that Sheherazade might have had anything to do with it, we may emerge from 1001 Nights Now inspired to make a difference too.

Duska Radosavljevic

Dramaturg

21.11.04

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Fourteen and the Highlights- 6 June 2004

2008-06-01T17:37:00.012+01:00

(By the time of the Russian part of our Chekhov Carver trip, we'd already had a week-long work in progress working with the actors on the stories by both writers and some staging solutions to the ideas arising from our regular development meetings. Margaret and I had been meeting on a weekly basis developing the plot outline in some detail, based on a very basic structure that had emerged soon after our American trip. We also decided on the name of the play - Kaput! - and were working towards a launch event which would happen on the day of the 100th anniversary of Chekhov's death - 2 July 2004. We envisaged that on this day we would have the actors read Carver's story Errand, in which he imagined Chekhov's death, around a long table for invited guests, members of the press and promoters. I also suggested that we might serve some nibbles and a cocktail we would call Chekhov-Cava - or maybe even Chava! - and our Marketing Director Richard Bliss came with an excellent recipe for it involving some vodka.

However, at that stage, we were still a long way away from what would eventually become Kaput! - an idea of which you can get here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0954145631/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-page.

A more detailed account of how we eventually got there can be found on:

http://www.dramforum.com/?articleid=77

and a review of the piece on:

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/kaput-rev.htm

The photos connected to this trip were taken by Neil Murray, unless otherwise indicated).

Sunday, 06 June 2004

Breakfast at the Sovyetski for the last time.

Coffee and money session with Tanya on the balcony, which goes very well.

A long goodbye with Tanya in front of the hotel.

And that’s it...

At the airport, I struggle to remember the Russian word for ‘abacus’ as Neil’s bag gets intercepted by the staff on X-Ray machines. I mime counting, she looks at us as though we’re strange but harmless and eventually lets us through.

And, oh, Neil threw his cigarettes out as soon as we landed in Newcastle and has never lit up since (apparently). As for the smell of smoke on his clothes, he’ll just tell everybody it was because he spent two weeks in the presence of a chain-smoker. Or even two.

Highlights

Favourite Moments in St Petersburg

Neil:

- The ambience in The Restaurant

- Going to lunch with Pasha

- The run-down alleys of the Dostoyevski Tour

Margaret:

- Passing the Cathedral of the Spilt Blood on the boat

- The babushkas in the Hermitage

- Arriving at the theatre for Uncle Vanya

Duska:

- The midnight tour of St Petersburg

- Doing the Hermitage in 9 min 45 sec

- Pasha (any moment)

Favourite Yalta Moments

Neil:

- The completely crazy waitress by the seaside

- Chekhov’s garden

- Chekhov’s bedroom with his canvas travelling bag hanging on the wall

Margaret:

- The moment we walked into the first dining room in Chekhov’s house

- Touching Chekhov’s desk

- The walk through Yalta

Duska:

- Working on Neil’s balcony

- Working out the characters’ star-signs while walking through a garden with Margaret

- Walking around the church in the Romanoffs Palace

Favourite Moscow moments

Neil:

- Buying the icon at the flea market

- The gardener at Melihovo resting

- The granny in the Chekhov museum (in her big shoes and jumper)

Margaret:

- Dinner at Tanya’s

- Everyone chewing toffees at Melihovo

- Negotiating the metro

- Champagne at the hotel reception

- Working on the balcony

- The Novodevichy

- Moments in Moscow Choir

Duska:

- The champagne reception

- The adventure with Neil and Max

- Accidentally filming the chestnut tree blossom at the Novodevichy

Favourite Moments from Plays

Neil:

- Platonov fanning himself with a cabbage leaf

- The snake dance in Platonov

- Set for Uncle Vanya

Margaret:

- Platonov: ‘Let me get better and I’ll seduce you.’

Duska:

- A pair of shoes in the Seagull

- All of Platonov

(http://www.theatre.ru/chekhov_fest/eng_bez_nazv.html)

Most Moving Moments (general)

- Seeing Pasha waiting for us

- The intense excitement in the Maly theatre

- Pasha and Tanya taking us to the Siege Museum

- Lunch in the Blinny place

- The cemetery wall with urn boxes and scratched portraits at Novodevichy

- Generosity of spirit in Yalta

- The granny with big shoes in the Chekhov Museum

For the end I have a mathematical problem for you (in honour of the skills which we have acquired or honed on this trip):

Margaret and Duska bought two bottles of perfume at the Duty Free. Margaret’s perfume cost 68 euros or (2412,09 roubles) and Duska’s perfume cost 51 euros (or 1809,07 roubles).

Margaret contributed 236 roubles in cash and Duska contributed 940,60 roubles in cash towards the price of both bottles of perfume and the rest was charged to Duska’s credit card.

When Duska got her statement she found that £69,20 was charged to her account in this transaction.

How many £ exactly has Duska spent in this transaction and how many £ has Margaret spent in this transaction?

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Thirteen - 5 June 2004

2008-06-01T17:21:00.002+01:00

The Flea Market and Tanya’s Dinner Party

Having overslept this morning, by the time I come down everybody’s had breakfast already and Neil is chatting to young Igor – one of Tanya’s private English students who she sent to us to escort us around the flea market and practise his English. We introduce ourselves and Neil says – 'Guess what, Igor works at the Mayerhold Museum and he travels a lot and he’s been to London and guess what he's seen!? – Phantom in the Opera, that’s the only show he saw in London!'. We invite him to Newcastle.

After a bit of a confusion with Margaret looking for me and me looking for her, and me quickly getting a glass of fruit juice off the breakfast table, we finally set off. It’s a wonderful, sunny day. Igor is a bit timid and his conversation exercise is slowly diminishing. By the time we get into the metro he’s reading a book. In Russian.

We have to pay to get into the flea market. In the process of making my lists I’ve also made a communal shopping list. Margaret wants a polished stone necklace and a present for Claire and Neil wants a lot of interesting obscure objects as well as various presents. I don’t have any particular wishes in relation to the flea market as my own shopping list was mainly to do with films and books.

I think we spent something like 2-3 hours walking around endless stalls (also watching some bears for a while entertaining the shoppers from behind a fence) and examining and trying on various items. Margaret finds her necklace quite quickly and it has dead insects in it, and it’s at least 50 years old and the stall keeper says to us: ‘Look at me, I’m serious, I’m serious – it’s really good’. Most stall keepers are fully conversant in a number of languages anyway, so Igor just does his own browsing and occasionally keeps an eye on us.

By the end of our shopping trips we end up with the following items:

Margaret: necklace, shawl, chess set, and a number of small gifts

Neil: icon (which we’re all envious of), wooden toys, knitted socks and gloves for Rosie, abacus (!), a map of some obscure region, various cards, Soviet memorabilia and similar curious objects

Duska: mink scarf and a ‘silver’ belt from Afghanistan (both by the decision of the jury that they really suited me and that I should really get them), icon, postcards (including a photograph of the MHAT members with Stanislavski and Chekhov among them)

We display all of these in front of Tanya as soon as we arrive so to get her verdict, and she reckons we’ve done well. Then we take a tour of Tanya’s neat and airy tower-block apartment, with most amazing family photographs and even more amazing works of art created by her grandmother. In Soviet times, when she couldn’t get any paints, Tanya’s grandma put together little pieces of cloth of different colours and designs and created some mind-blowing ‘still lives’ and ‘landscapes’. We keep discovering these all over the flat and eventually settle at the kitchen table next to the grandma’s painting of 'some chickens’.

The kitchen is quite small but everything is at arm’s length and Tanya has prepared a hundred-course meal. She’s also invited a theatre director Sergei Zhenovach with whom she’s worked intensely as an interpreter and whose work she adores. He is a sweet man and we have a very lively afternoon talking about theatre and Chekhov and life – mostly through Tanya.

At some point Tanya’s husband Volodya – who is also a very witty non-English speaker – tries to tell us a story of his high school IT teacher. Tanya asks him to clarify what he’s saying, then translates. So, this teacher tried to explain the difference between maths and information technology by saying –.... and then an amusing marital communication breakdown ensues. They argue and Tanya comments to us: ‘He’s just asked me to translate something and then he changed his mind, he says it doesn’t matter!’ We find this utterly hilarious from both ends of the language barrier. Then Volodya makes his point: the teacher quoted the first line of Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog to illustrate how there was much more information than words in this sentence.

He also tells us a story of a guy who got photographed with Lenin as a little boy and then grew to resemble Lenin himself, so eventually started offering to others to get photographed with him - mirroring the same positions. This comes across more effortlessly and to an equally enthusiastic reception, but Tanya has had enough and disappears to try and get us a recipe for cabbage pie by talking to someone on the phone (which goes on for ever). Meanwhile we try to communicate between ourselves (and the fact that we’ve consumed quite a bit of vodka helps to an extent). Sergei tries to explain to me that Chekhov really liked gooseberries and therefore wrote the story of the same title. We say we know the story, but we wonder how gooseberry jam is made? At that point Tanya returns to the table and says: ‘Don’t tell me you want a recipe for gooseberry jam as well!?’ We say – no, we just want to know what Chekhov enjoyed about it. The Russians then proceed to explain to us how this is not really jam but just ‘varennie’. Something that you have small spoonfuls of while drinking tea. I recognize this ritual as something that we do at home, which basically amounts to sampling small amounts of fruit preserve (with the fruit often having been cooked whole or in chunky pieces in a sugar syrup).

Tanya then declares that we should try and get ready-made pastry if we want to make this cabbage pie because the pastry sounds very complicated, and then she gives us the recipe and I take notes:

‘Pirog s Kapustoi’ or ‘Kapustnii Pirog’

(Cabbage Pie)

- chop cabbage (or two cabbages)

- boil in water for 5 minutes

- drain

- add butter

- add cream (enough to cover bottom of pot)

- add salt

- put back on fire and let liquid evaporate

- cabbage should still be al dente

- add 2 boiled eggs (chopped)

- add pepper

- when spreading cabbage on the pastry, add butter

- cover with another pastry layer and bake

[As for the pastry it should consist of 250gr margarine (melted), ½ l warm milk, 1 sachet of dry yeast, 1 tablespoon (flat) salt, 1 tablespoon (flat) sugar, 2 eggs (beaten), 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1kg flour.]

We explain to the other puzzled guests that we want to make a cabbage pie for our 2 July event. Volodya comments that that would really make the audience remember Chekhov forever. We laugh.

When everybody has dispersed and we’re waiting for our taxi (this time we’ve asked Tanya to double-check how much it should cost and she claims between 250-300 roubles) we are again looking at our new acquisitions. Neil’s map of an obscure Soviet region prompts Tanya to tell us a story about someone she once met and also simultaneously prompts Volodya to show us pictures of architecture from that region. Meanwhile Neil is marvelling at his abacus and wondering how it is used. Volodya tells us via Tanya that there is an entire science on how to use an abacus. At that moment our taxi arrives and we say quick goodbyes. Volodya walks us down to our taxi and is telling me about how when the first Russian cosmonauts went into space there was an entire army of mathematicians working on abacuses. I no longer know when to take him seriously, but we are sure to remember both him and Tanya and them as a couple fondly, for a very long time.

As we drive back, Neil is keeping an eye on the watch (we were told if it takes him less than half hour to get us through the city it should be just 250 roubles). Margaret and I are arranging our multitude of impressions. When we arrive at the hotel, it’s been exactly 27 minutes. The driver asks for 450 roubles. Out of frustration and anger and the taxi-driver’s wound to our budget the other day, I suddenly speak up in Russian and say to him that we were told it should be 250 for under half an hour and no more than 350. He does budge and we come out triumphant.

However, that’s not the end of it. Even though Margaret thought she had enough money to last her till tomorrow (and we can’t take roubles out of the country), it turns out that she has spent up and needs more cash. So I go to the hotel’s ‘bankomat’ but at the last minute it suddenly goes faulty on me. I ask a concierge what I should do and he tells me that there is another bankomat opposite the hotel on the corner. I come back to the table and ask Neil to accompany me as it’s dark. So we come out and see the bank and walk all around it – but no bankomat. We go back in, grab another concierge who is minding the door of the Yar Restaurant and looking very bored (as there is the wedding party number 112 since our arrival going on in the hotel). He has an infectiously calm demeanour and is quite chatty as he explains that he also knows that there should be a bankomat across the road. He offers to take us there. So we all go back again, but no luck. He says he knows some others but we’d have to go in a taxi and it should cost no more than 200 roubles. We go back to inform Margaret that we are having to go on – what Neil ominously calls – ‘another adventure’. Meanwhile Max is chatting to a taxi driver outside who looks really grumpy. We say to Max it’s very nice of him to be doing this for us and he says:

‘Let me tell you a Jewish joke:

There is this man who has a daughter who is not married.

One day a guy comes to this man and says:

- Oh, congratulations, you married your daughter off!

The man says:

- What do you mean?

- Oh, I just saw your daughter and she is holding a baby and the baby is eating milk from her breast.

- Oh, well, if you have some time, and if you have milk, why not do a good deed!?’

Neil laughs immediately, but it takes me a while to put this together in my head in my present state.

Anyway, so Max is arguing with the taxi driver trying to talk him into taking us there and back for 100 roubles. We wonder what’s going on. Then Max turns around slightly disappointed and says: ‘He’ll only do it for 200 roubles.’

We say: ‘No, that’s fine, that’s perfectly all right, let’s go! Can you come with us?’

‘Yes, but I must go and check with my manager’

So we are standing there with the grumpy taxi driver, thinking this probably means we have to tip Max as well.

Max re-emerges followed by his efficient sounding manager who says to us: ‘The bankomat is just there just across the car park, the far corner across from here.’

We thank them and proceed to walk across the car park leaving the taxi driver in an even worse mood. We are saying, ‘well he was probably bored at work, but how sweet’ etc. When suddenly we hear a muffled voice behind us. I go week at the knees again, thinking, here we go again.

We turn around and it’s Max again: ‘My manager sent me to accompany you.’

Relieved we start chatting to Max about his English which is very good, and how long he’s been working here and so on. On the way back we’re so chummy that we’re on the brink of inviting Max over to Newcastle, but we apparently receive a funny look from one of his female colleagues and he politely excuses himself saying he has to get back to work. We ask him whether we can give him a tip or get him a drink, and he says – no, it’s part of his job, and it was his pleasure.

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Twelve - 4 June 2004

2008-06-01T16:59:00.002+01:00

Melihovo, Shopping, and Minor Joys and Disasters

Tanya has hired a driver to take us to a village called Melihovo, some 100km outside of Moscow. Chekhov bought a dacha/house in the village after selling some rights to his writing and set up a doctor’s practice in there.

Half way down to Melihovo we take a break at the kind of ‘service station’ that is by now almost certainly extinct. We’re sitting in a tiny gazebo we found here looking at a café/bar that looks like a shed and a petrol station that doesn’t look like anything at all. It feels like we are definitely leaving the civilisation by now, but nothing can quite prepare us for what we actually find in Melihovo itself. Intensely rural, the place would probably have been completely inaccessible had it not have been for Chekhov’s famous home. At the entrance to the museum’s gardens there is a blown up quote by Chekhov from one of his letters where he’s inviting people to come and visit him. There is also a small kiosk selling relevant souvenirs, including blue pencils with Chekhov’s name on (which Margaret is particularly keen on).

We’re greeted here by an eccentric, verbose and bordering-on-annoying director of the museum who introduces himself as a writer and absolutely insists that we must bring our show to a festival that he organises every year here in May. He quickly takes us across the gardens (at one moment prostrating himself across a massive tree that ‘Chekhov planted with his own hands’) and around a small servants’ house and kitchen. We are immediately taken in by the dusty and informal appeal of this place and would like to stay in the kitchen for much longer, but he hurries us on because he wants to hand us over to a young ‘babushka’ and go into a meeting. There are flies buzzing around our heads as we go through Chekhov’s little house overlooking a tiny lake (Margaret informs us that he was very happy here because ‘he could fish out of his bedroom window’). There is none of that Moscovite or even Yaltaesque preciousness about this museum at all. They show us what they’ve got with a nice mixture of reverence and informality but they are completely focused on our experience of Chekhov’s world rather than their own reverence for it. We all enjoy this trip immensely and derive a lot of personal pleasure from it.

When we’ve finished the tour of the house, the babushkas let us out into the gardens to do whatever we like and Margaret gives them a box of English toffee. So we wander around the gardens. There is even a gazebo here – which was actually part of a set of some production of The Seagull. The Seagull itself was also written in a tiny little building in the garden which is closed at the moment. I am convinced from the word ‘go’ that this is the kind of place that our character Sasha’s dacha might be like.

We watch a security guard strolling around, and women in curiously sparkly tops digging the garden, and carrying vessels of water from somewhere – watering the plants, and their children running around the museum gardens, their mouths all full of sticky English toffee by now. (It also occurs to me that the Russians are consistently unashamed of working – we’ve even seen people at work within the splendour of Peterhof – they are cleaning and polishing and digging and watering at all times).

Eventually we join Margaret who is sitting on a bench facing a veranda of the house (a site of a famous photograph of Chekhov with his dog). She says she got very emotional earlier on. Neil says he’s been bitten by insects and – even though he ridiculed our decision to buy an insect repellent before we set off – he now demands some anti-bite cream. Margaret says she doesn’t have it here, she’ll give it to him when we get to the hotel. Neil says – 'by the time we get to the hotel his arm might have to be amputated!'

On our way out we plan to slip out without saying goodbye to the director. However, the little shop is closed and we do need someone to sell us the pencils and other things. So I give Tanya my business card to leave for him and pass on our thanks as she goes to ask for a shop assistant. However, our plan falls through because he comes back rattling at full speed and giving us the details of the contract concerning our participation in his festival. He asks what the show’s title is. We say – Kaput! He goes quiet for a moment and asks what it is about? I try to answer. He explains the word ‘kaput’ is only associated with WW2 and the Germans around here and suggests that we should rename the show for Russian purposes, that perhaps we should call it ‘Slom’. I like ‘slom’, there is the same word in Serbian meaning ‘a break-down’, but Tanya says afterwards that it wouldn’t be a good word to use in Russian because of some connotations she couldn’t quite pinpoint.

Having finally got rid of the pestilence called ‘Melihovo’s Director’ and having bought our trinkets, we go across the road to a small shop to buy coffee and sandwiches. It is a less than pleasant experience, the shop keeper not being used to such traffic all at once with such difficult requirements, and getting a bit pissed off as a result. All the while, our taxi driver is waiting for us patiently, making notes in his little notebook.

The journey back has us all in a relatively good mood, full of impressions. We’re deciding whether to go to the hotel or into town – I’ve been wanting to go to a bookshop and Neil’s been wanting to go to an Art Nouveau supermarket that Tanya pointed out to us the other day. We settle for a bookshop first.

When we arrive to the place where the driver has been asked to drop us off, we’re all profoundly shocked when we get the bill. Tanya has made enquiries in advance and given us a quote which we budgeted around, but the fare comes to more than twice what we expected. Margaret and I get out of the car. Speechless. I’m thinking this would never happen with Pasha! Shortly we’re joined by Tanya who tries to lift our spirits, unsuccessfully. Finally Neil, the ‘banker’ emerges with a look of someone who’s just been robbed.

So Tanya explains to us how to get back on the metro when we’ve finished shopping and disappears. We wander pensively through a relatively big but quite a dense store. I’m unsuccessfully looking through theatre books and videos and fairytales. There is nothing of particular interest here. We all buy postcards of the Moscow metro (which by the way is truly stunning!) and I do find some fairytales eventually.

The Art Nouveau in its full glory brings any known supermarket to its knees. We’re in a much better mood as we walk through air conditioned lanes in between colourful shelves and aquariums and rows of expensive chocolates. Neil declares this feels very ‘New York’ and then clarifies that he expected to see supermarkets with rotten apples in Russia. We pick a couple of small items to take through the check out, but once through, the spell is broken and we are once again reminded of our financial disaster. We are torn between the desire to take a taxi back and the necessity to suffer going through the metro on our own. I volunteer to take care of getting us to the hotel safely and breathe a sigh of relief when we finally negotiate all the challenges of Moscow metro and emerge out of the doors of our – Dynamo – station. The only problem is, once we come out, we don’t recognize anything. We only ever took a metro in the mornings when the place was heaving with makeshift stalls, and now it’s completely empty and unrecognizable. Neil begins to panic. Then Margaret and I begin to panic too. So tantalisingly close to home, and we don’t know where to go. So I walk to a taxi rank and ask in my broken Russian which direction the hotel is in? They gesture and we go that way only to find out that the station entrance that we actually do recognize is a 100m down the road.

Over dinner we discuss strategies of dealing with Tanya’s expenses and the remaining money in the ‘float’. Neil has been worrying about and bringing up the ‘float’ almost every day since day one. Now for once we’re all deeply worried about it. We’re also worried about the fact that Tanya has invited us for dinner tomorrow which means that we probably won’t be able to talk to her about the issue until Sunday morning. So we just leave it temporarily and get on with talking about the actual play.

Meanwhile a cocky waiter who surprised us the other evening by remembering what we usually have to drink comes to take our order and makes a big display of not taking any notes.

We’re discussing our character Olga’s eating habits in terms of a narrative strand. Up until now we’ve mainly been discussing who would be playing Olga. Margaret is very keen on an actress who appeared at Live once before, but Neil didn’t like her much when he met her briefly. By now, Neil is coming round to the idea. So Olga chews on paper in the first act in a moment of eccentricity, but this is never pursued in the rest of the play. I think that in the second act she should be introduced to the American wonder called the ‘chewing gum’. For the third – bedroom-act -- Margaret has the idea of giving Olga a pang of hunger in bed. Perhaps Olga should say she really fancies some blinnies from The Blinnaya in St Petersburg, brought to her by Pasha, a troika driver. I shriek – 'Can I play Olga'!?*

Our food is brought to us – but seemingly not in exactly the way we’ve ordered it. It turns out our waiter’s memory failed him, he took only half of our order and then disappeared. There are further mix-ups with our drinks too and we’re getting quite irritated. Eventually he comes back and offers Margaret what he considers her usual – Bloody Mary – instead of what she asked for. When she says – 'I don’t want Bloody Mary', he just says – 'oh, that’s a surprise'.

What a day!

----------------------

*Eventually Neil auditioned for an actress in London, and found a perfect Olga in Angela Clerkin. Unfortunately however, Angela fell so seriously ill on the very last day of the run that she had to be hospitalised. As the show was completely sold out, Alan refused to let us cancel the last performance, and Neil decided to ask me to step in! When I eventually agreed and went through an emergency rehearsal with whoever was available that afternoon, Neil said: "Thank you so much! I'd never do it. I'd rather eat a plate of dog food than perform on the stage!". In any case, one should be careful what one asks for, even in jest!

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Eleven - 3 June 2004

2008-06-01T16:43:00.002+01:00

Chekhov’s House – Novodevichy – The Cherry Orchard

After a posh breakfast at our posh hotel, Neil, Margaret and I have a posh working session on the balcony. We’re having some really nice breakthroughs and finding interesting solutions to various emerging questions.

We are meant to be meeting Tanya for lunch in town so we make our own way to our local metro station next to the Dynamo football stadium. Neil and I are slightly nervous about going into the metro on our own; Margaret is chatty. I tell her the story of Dushechka and she identifies it as being translated into English as The Darling.

Today we’re going to Chekhov’s Moscow house (we’re not doing our trail chronologically, of course: his Yalta house was the last house he lived in, the one today is a house from his student days in Moscow, when he’d just set up his medical practice). We are greeted by an elderly lady called Galina (a very sophisticated version of ‘babushka’) who is very sweet but quite stern with us, asking us to put plastic bags/slippers on our feet and to turn off all recording equipment. She reminds me a bit of my own grandma and I have an urge to film just her as she is talking to us. She of course tells us the whole Chekhov family story which we’ve heard before, as she leads us through various rooms ornamented with silent ‘babushkas’ in corners. I like this house. On the ground floor there is Chekhov’s GP reception as well as his and his painter-brother’s tiny bedrooms. The sophisticated babushka talks us through various details in Russian, all the time warning us not to tread on the carpet with our feet (enveloped in plastic bags). Meanwhile, she is wearing her own everyday shoes. In the corner of this room there is a lovely babushka with big feet who seems to be taking in every single word of Galina’s with a glint in her eye, as if she is hearing it all for the first time. We all fall in love with her at once (but only realise this later), stealing little glances of her while pretending to listen to our lesson. Galina then offers to make an exception and take us into Chekhov’s bedroom which is usually roped off and the babushka with big feet immediately lunges across to take the rope off. Leading us across the room, Galina kicks the corner of the carpet with her shoe out of the way for us.

Upstairs there is a lovely salon where the Chekhovs entertained. Galina tells us they used to love partying and Anton always celebrated his birthday with a cabbage pie – his favourite dish. Our light-bulbs immediately go on in relation to the 2 July event.

By the way, this whole 2 July thing is getting really confusing because we’re finding out that even though he died on 2 July European time, this is equivalent to 15 July Russian time, which is the day when they mark the centenary of his death. We are also finding that the different museums all lay their own claim to authenticity regarding the items that they curate and we’re already seeing the items and photographs we’ve seen before and believed they were the authentic ones. Galina informs us that they provide the Yalta museum with a lot of their own material for exhibitions etc. Needless to say, we’re getting a bit confused.

On the upper floor there is also the bedroom of Chekhov’s sister Maria. Hers is directly above her brothers’ rooms and equivalent in size to both of theirs together. All bedrooms are facing out onto the street. Her room houses her painting paraphernalia and a sowing machine (which I’m sure has English writing on it) and a dressing table. Galina tells us that actors love to come here and get photographed.

Eventually she takes us to a big gallery on the side of the upper floor and onto a tiny studio theatre where they exhibit posters of various productions of Chekhov’s plays from all over the world. She also requests a copy of our poster when it’s ready. We promise her one and say fond farewells, eager to get out of the blue shopping bags on our feet.

Next is the Novodevichy cemetery (also to be found in Cinzano and Smirnova's Birthday). This is several metro changes away. Tanya proceeds to read a paper in the train while we cower in a corner standing next to some really suspicious looking young men. Then she makes two false attempts to lead us out of the train (one resulting in us almost losing Neil), as she’s got her stations mixed up.

A short walk away (along which Neil manages to get a copy of Russian Vogue and agrees to let me have a look at it later only if I 'promise not to break the spine'), we finally step into a massive neatly laid out cemetery walled off from the rest of the world. This however is a world of its own – we see grave stones ranging from tiny crosses and urn boxes with scratched out portraits, to entire tanks and extravagant monuments towering over tiny allotments. We try to find Chekhov’s grave on the map we were given and take a turn past a monument to a ballerina next to a monument to a clown (who looks more like a drunkard) with his dog. We enter a lane which we think we should be on and suddenly strange things start happening: there are flowers falling off in droves from – what Neil identifies as – chestnut trees. Then as we approach Chekhov’s grave, the Novodevichy Monastery’s bells start going off tentatively and then increasing in speed and volume and – it starts raining. By coincidence of circumstances it all turns out to be a rather solemn and poetic occasion. Chekhov’s grave has the MHAT logo on it – an engraving of a seagull – and so does Olga Knipper’s, right next to his. I’m relieved to find out that the death-date on his gravestone is given as 2 July. We huddle under umbrellas and after a while we spot more graves with seagulls on them – Stanislavski’s (the most prominent one in its section), and Nemirovch-Danshchenko’s and Bulgakov’s, and then there is a tiny stone to Efimov (the recent late director of MHAT that Tanya’s friend Irina had a life-long crush on). It is very evident that proximity to Stanislavski’s grave has a special significance in the world of dead Russian theatre artists.

Driven by the rain, we make our way back to the metro with the intention of getting something to eat before going to MHAT to see The Cherry Orchard.

We find a café opposite MHAT called The City Café. It’s Margaret’s son’s birthday today and she’s been trying unsuccessfully to get through to him all day. She’s slightly agitated about this. Meanwhile, Neil asks Tanya to translate our horoscopes to us from his Russian Vogue while we wait for food. As she settles down to it, she presses the page, running the edge of her hand down the inner spine. Neil’s face contorts into an expression of horror. I decide not to ask him to have a look at his Vogue after all. As our food arrives, the fact concerning the quality of the food we’ve been having so far – is stated yet again. This is when the thought of compiling lists occurs to me and I ask everyone to give me their favourite dishes and favourite places in the last ten days. The lists look like this (not necessarily in order of preference):

Tanya:

- Fried mussels in Café Yalta (by the sea)

- Asparagus in mustard sauce (same place)

- Breakfast in the Hotel Yalta

Neil:

- Smoked salmon breakfast in the Sovietski Hotel

- The ‘four legged’ flat chicken (called ‘Tabaka’) in The Restaurant in St Pete

- Pelmeni with Salmon in Blinnaya in St Pete

- The Solyanka Soup in The Three Piglets (in Pushkin)

Margaret:

- Chicken kebab (she’s having right now in the City Café in Moscow)

- Yalta Hotel breakfast

- Blinnies in St Pete (on the final day with me)

Duska:

- Blinnies in St Pete

- The Sturgeon on the second night in St Petersburg

In a moment of highly atypical carelessness, Margaret catches a cup with the end of her sleeve, and while she manages to save it from spilling all over us, the momentum of her sudden movement causes a chain reaction and knocks over a glass of bear in Neil’s direction. Luckily the Vogue is safely out of the way.

There is a mounting excitement on the pavement outside of theatre. It is the premiere of The Cherry Orchard tonight and Ranyevskaya is played by a famous film actress. This is her theatre debut and the crowds are here mainly because of her. Tanya decided not to go into the theatre with us, but books us a taxi and waits till we get in. I’ve got my camera out on the crowd and the street, and then a McDonalds sign in Cyrillic letters, and as I turn around to record a little Gypsy boy who is falling asleep while playing a famous Strauss tune on the Danube theme, Lev Dodin flies into my frame, putting money in the boy’s donations box. Accompanied by his entourage he’s here also for the premiere.

Later, while we are seated and waiting for a massive MHAT curtain (with the seagull logo) to lift, we see Dodin saying hellos to people in his row. Then the actor who played Vanya and Platonov walks past looking for his seat. We’re getting impatient, but there is a customary 15 minute delay. Then, the show starts, and the first scene is played solely in front of the curtain with the seagull on.

When the curtain finally opens out – there is nothing behind it. Within the first few minutes we realise that this is going to be a bit of a disappointment – quite a sleek and classy disappointment, but a disappointment all the same.

In the interval we contemplate leaving, but we know we have a taxi booked for after the show. So we resign ourselves to another hour of watching the actors strut around an empty set (which has by now started to revolve as well). While Margaret and Neil go back to the auditorium I decide to go to the toilet. Suddenly as I’m standing in the queue, I see Neil moving with great urgency and saying ‘Guess who I’ve just been to the toilet with’, he points at a figure in front of him and it’s Vanya/Platonov. I laugh for a long time afterwards, all the while attracting strange glances from heavily made up female members of the audience.

When I come back to my seat, it transpires that Margaret sent Neil into the toilet after Platonov, but the male diva took one glance at the overflowing queues and decided not to go in after all.

The second half is shorter and actually features an entire orchestra on the stage for some 10 minutes. However, the curtain call – as usual – is twice the length of the show.

Relieved, we walk out and while waiting for the taxi, Neil decides to go and buy some cigarettes. Margaret points at someone behind me – Platonov again, with a female companion. I say – ‘well, this means we really ought to go and say how much we’ve enjoyed his performance’. Margaret tries to dissuade me from doing this, but I just walk across and say what I intended. It is a massive disaster. The female companion translates our congratulations, but the guy is just gazing into the distance above our heads. Slightly embarrassed, we say good luck for their Moscow season and start to depart. At that point Neil on his way back is walking past us – he’s clearly seen us but pretends he doesn’t know us. We’re deeply embarrassed and Margaret is inconsolable for a long time afterwards.

On the way back we say – how lucky that we didn’t have to talk to the director of the show after all – as Tanya was going to arrange a meeting with him for us. Neil says: ‘I mean, what would I say to him – did you have issues with the budget?’

Back at the hotel I continue to compile lists, which leads Neil to start a conversation about Russian 'inspection-shelf loos'. I’m puzzled as to what this is and then he draws an ordinary loo and an 'inspection-shelf loo' for me. I remember! This is the conversation we already had in America – the strange luxury most non-British people enjoy: the ability to inspect their own product.

So here is another product of my list compilation:

Most Interesting Moments (so far):

- The waitress in the Yalta Café by the sea (Neil)

- The debacle with the actor tonight (Margaret and me)

- Fish flying into my vodka (general)

- The curtain call for Uncle Vanya (me)

- Neil getting stung and saying: ‘By the time we get back my arm will have to be amputated’. (me)

- The mugging (Neil)

- Having a hangover in the Dostoyevski Museum (Margaret)

- The loo in the Chekhov Museum in Yalta having an inspection shelf (Neil)

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Ten - 2 June 2004

2008-06-01T15:53:00.002+01:00

MHAT – Red Square – Taganka

Tanya, who is now finally on her home turf, has booked us in with her friend Irina, the director of the Moscow Arts Theatre (MHAT)’s museum and archive. We spend the first bit of the morning browsing through albums of photographs from Chekhov’s original productions. Margaret reveals that if she lived in Moscow she would probably be working here.

When Irina receives us, she asks not to be filmed because she’s been in a traffic accident and doesn’t look too good at the moment. But I record her story of Chekhov’s death and post-humus honours while focusing my camera on other things. Some of this – like the story that his doctor ordered champagne just before his death, we already know from Carver and other sources, but that his corpse travelled back with a consignment of oysters is a novelty - and a kind of story that Chekhov himself might have relished.

After about an hour Irina entrusts us to one of the museum curators – a relatively young ‘babushka’ in a massive sheepskin waistcoat who first of all takes us to the landing to have a cigarette. We like her immediately. She talks in Russian as she takes us through the story of MHAT and its beginning in Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danshchenko’s experiments. Tanya translates. We are actually dragging a small group of British and American tourists with us who were kind of attached to us by another curator (later I discover that they had actually participated at the IFTR conference in St Pete's last week). They ask some questions which we are not terribly interested in, and the entire thing once again turns into a detailed study of various items of props, sets and costumes in glass cabinets.

Eventually the lovely babushka in a sheepskin coat takes us to Nemirovich-Danshchenko’s office (which hasn’t been touched ever since) and then onto Stanislavski’s office/dressing room. Eventually she insists that we should see the office/dressing room of MHAT’s penultimate artistic director Efimov who died a couple of years ago. We try to decline, unsuccessfully.

After the babushka’s got rid of the Americans, she deposits us at the backstage canteen where Tanya is waiting for us. Over lunch she tells us how we were taken to that final artistic director's office because her friend Irina had been ‘secretly’ in love with Efimov all her life and the babushka said Irina would’ve killed her if we'd given it a miss.

After a light snack, and a coffee across the road – where Tanya lists all our potential expenses this week while Neil watches a fashion show on TV – we decide to take a walk to the Kremlin. The walk is of course spectacular, but there are no queues in front of Lenin’s tomb, which means that it is closed and that we’re not missing the opportunity to go. Going past St Basil’s, somebody mentions the story of how, on its completion, Ivan the Terrible blinded the architects who had built it so that they couldn’t repeat a similar edifice anywhere else. Past the rows of stalls selling Russian dolls with the faces of various American and Russian presidents and Hollywood film stars, we are heading for the Hotel Russia where we can sip our drinks and savour the view of the Red Square in peace. It suddenly occurs to us that we'd initially had the option of staying here, but we are SO much happier that we’re staying where we are.

There isn’t much time before the theatre for anything else, so as soon as we’ve finished our drinks we head for the Taganka theatre (famous for its golden - politically controversial - age under the late artistic director Lyubimov). Maly is doing The Moscow Choir here tonight. It is a new play written by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, but I hope Neil won’t ask who the author is before we go in (as I fear he would be prejudiced against it as a result of his relatively recent artistic struggle with her earlier plays Cinzano and Smirnova's Birthday). He does.

Tanya has arranged for us to meet Dina Dodina (Dodin’s niece and Maly’s International Director) before the show, but has decided not to stay and see it herself for the third time. Instead she has a coffee with all of us, books us a taxi and disappears. Dina says Dodin would be very happy to meet us after the show and we arrange to meet by the ‘ugly statue of Pushkin’ after the curtain call.

As usual by now, the Maly show is extremely well attended and spectacular from the word ‘go’. There is a multi-layered set on the stage simulating communal living in the 1950s – which is the period the play is set in. It’s a simple but effective family story with lots of choral singing (built into the show as a backdrop to the communal life: everyone sings together in order to survive by winning a choral competition.) The surtitles are in Italian this time round, but we somehow manage to put bits and pieces together and make sense of it. The curtain call is another test of clapping endurance and this time round the show’s director as well as Dodin and Petrushevskaya herself take to the stage.

When he sees us backstage, Dodin looks genuinely happy to do so, despite the fact he and his company are completely enveloped by adoring fans. He beams at us especially when we flatter him that we are here on Chekhov AND Dodin pilgrimage. He exudes a very positive energy and we are all elated by the encounter. He sends his fondest regards to Alan and when we turn around to go, Neil bumps into a tiny woman who hugs and kisses him. At first we think it’s a fan who got her facts and faces mixed up, but then Neil explains that that was Tanya, Dodin’s wife and a former primadonna of the Maly - and he suddenly looks very sad realising the state of her. There is a famous anecdote about how Tanya had tried to kill herself once when they were on tour in Paris - by jumping from the window of her hotel room (even though it was on the first floor). But they are evidently still together, and Dodin, who has recently had a successful heart operation looks in top form - whereas Tanya seems to have considerably withered away, at least according to Neil's memory of her.*

That night I finally read the story called Dushechka. From what I make out of it, it’s all about a woman who tried to please her husbands and ended up on her own, finally learning life from scratch.

---------------------

* Lev Dodin's link to Northern Stage goes back to 1998 when on Alan Lyddiard's invitation he came to Newcastle with his dramaturg Michael Stronin and some members of his company to conduct a residency with members of the Northern Stage ensemble somewhere in the depths of Northumberland. They worked on Uncle Vanya and, according to the recollections of some ensemble members, they spent the first day listening to Dodin read the whole of Uncle Vanya in the original Russian, while Stronin translated! Nevertheless, despite the fact that Alan usually has the attention span of a three year old when it comes to text-based theatre, he still adores Dodin unquestioningly. Interestingly for me, I share my birthday with Dodin, and this year, I had my thirtieth on the same day as he had his sixtieth - and both of us got our special birthday wishes from Alan. It is said of Taureans that they have the tendency to retell War and Peace page by page. Judging by the length of Dodin's productions and the length of this particular travelogue itself - this is probably true of both of us!

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Nine - 1 June 2004

2008-06-01T15:50:00.000+01:00

Yalta – Moscow

It’s the day of our departure and the last day of the mass-produced breakfast. We try to spend the last of our Grivnas but run out of time before we are uploaded into a taxi. Neil and I suddenly remember Nicola – because she’s always wanted to come to Yalta, so I send her a text. It turns out she & co. are having a very good time in Romania. So we feel better.

More queuing and form filling at the airport etc, etc. It occurs to me I’ve forgotten to lock my suitcase before I checked it in, and so did Margaret, so we panic because we’ve been told that locking suitcases is very important around here. But this turns out not to be too much of a problem – we are led through a door on the side and allowed to find and lock our suitcases which are waiting in piles on a couple of massive trolleys.

In Moscow, the taxi driver can’t actually close the boot of his car. Our suitcases are sticking out, but he just ties them with a rope. I spend much of the journey looking backwards for any lost items until he reassures me he’s never lost anything. I think wistfully of Pasha again.

It’s a straight, though longish drive from the airport to our imposing hotel called the Sovyetski. But the Sovyetski is a real Soviet marvel. It has porters and red carpets and interiors that look like they’ve jumped out of a top class brochure. As we’re checked in we are served champagne and then escorted to our rooms. There is a harp playing in the background and I’m turning around to spot the movie cameras. The rooms are in keeping with the first impressions and I can’t wait to luxuriate in here for the rest of the week. In fact I wouldn’t mind staying here indefinitely.

I take the stairs on my trip down with my camera. I meet a portrait of Stalin on the landing of the second floor, and all the while the harp is playing.

On a mini landing in between the first and the ground floors, a double door opens out on what looks like a balcony, and behind the curtains flowing in gentle breeze, I spot – Neil, with his camera. We complete the tour, all the way down to the Yar Restaurant – a major Russian establishment surviving from the 19^th century and situated here since 1910. Its prices – we are told – are very high.

Within this oasis of sumptuousness, Neil, Margaret and I proceed with yet another working session while browsing through the menu and picking some delicious sounding items to accompany our by now regular order of beer (Neil), vodka (Margaret) and G&T (me).

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Eight - 31 May 2004

2008-06-01T15:39:00.002+01:00

Work – The Tsar’s Palace – Work – and more food

I’m getting really concerned about the amount of food we scoff on a regular basis. After another giant breakfast (where I reduced the amount of eggs and bread and increased the portion of fruit), we settle down on Neil’s balcony to work. We find out we’re lacking coffee, so I get to practice my Russian again and order coffees by phone. It feels very luxurious to be brought drinks to the 11^th floor. We have an excellent working session – some of which Neil actually films (more specifically the point when I comment on a particular scene by saying ‘I wonder whether this would be a post-coital conversation’).

As soon as our car pulls up to the grounds of the tsar’s Palace (the place where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had the famous Yalta conference at which it was decided that the country I was born in should be a communist country), my magpie’s eye spots a cap hanging in one of many stalls selling trinkets and souvenirs. It’s golden yellow and has long tresses at the back. The seller says it’s a Tartar cap (Tanya tells us that the Tartars were traditionally settled here before Stalin cleared them out because he was afraid they’d betray them during WW2). She gives me a quote which amounts to about £15. Margaret and Neil declare that it suits me and Margaret urges me to buy it because I might regret not buying it. I say I’ll get it if it’s still there when we return. So we buy tickets and make our way through a babushka-guarded gate to the entrance of the Palace. The babushka and Tanya are shouting something to each other. I’ve walked in with a camera on and I think it’s probably to do with this, but it turns out the babushka is advising us not to get lunch in the Palace because it’s very expensive and to go to a little tent under some trees. So we come out again and are seated under the trees, being attacked by insects and munching on rather simple sandwiches (the golden cap continuously within my field of vision).

Eventually we put our customary slippers on (this is a must in every Russian museum) and parade through long corridors, first of all surreptitiously touching Stalin’s chair (despite Tanya’s very serious warning that if they catch us the babushkas will bite our heads off). Then we go into the Romanoffs bit. Apart from the fact that Romanoff wrote very boring diaries (they are exhibited on the walls and every one of them states where he drove in his car today; much like this one focusing on what we ate today!), there is something really moving about these rooms and the pictures in them. The Romanoffs were obviously quite religious – there are icons on various walls - and quite keen on photography. There are endless pictures of the princesses in white dresses and the young leukaemia-suffering prince. Tanya tells me the story of how they were thrown down a miner’s pit after many days of being kept hostage. There are books by Chekhov in their library, but apparently they didn’t visit this particular Palace very often.

After we come out into the tastefully arranged garden we spend a long time wandering around pensively. Eventually we come to a small chapel at the other end of the building and I wonder whether Stalin ever took his American and British counterparts to see this. The chapel is exquisite and it also features an icon of the royal family who were beatified after their death.

On the way back, the stall with the golden cap is being dismantled, but I get there just in time, and I end up with an outrageous acquisition. Neil says I have to wear belly dancing gear with it and I propose to do it on the opening night of the show – just turn up dressed like Ruth St Denis.

Being chauffeured around by some random taxi driver, I wonder out loud what Pasha might be doing now. Neil says – ‘He’s happily married, you know, are you trying to split his family up?’ Tanya says he had an American DJ lined up after us. She then proceeds to tell us how talented and clever he is, having gone to a very distinguished engineer’s college in St Pete he then found out that there was no work in his field in post-perestroika years. So he’s been driving and now he finds it’s too late to resume his career but he’s very happy with the sense of freedom he gets from his job. I say to Margaret there is a story in there somewhere and she proceeds to discuss the idea in detail...

We have another very fruitful working session on Neil’s balcony in the afternoon before going onto a restaurant 'treasure hunt'. We’ve decided to try and find a restaurant on the beach that Janet Malcolm discovered by walking through a tunnel at the bottom of the hotel. (So we ditched the idea of dining at our kind passer-by’s restaurant but we did deliver a box of chocolates for her earlier today). We go down in the hotel lift to the bottom floor which opens onto a tunnel. We walk through it for quite a while, Neil smoking all along. As we get out, he throws his cigarette end leisurely on the pavement and suddenly a ‘babushka’ (who is seemingly minding the tunnel here) springs out of nowhere and starts shouting hysterically for Neil to pick it up. Taken by surprise, Neil picks it up muttering ‘Sorry’ and Tanya reassuringly says to the babushka in Russian ‘He is terribly sorry’. In a way that feels like she is running after us threateningly, the babushka replies: ‘He’s not terribly sorry, he is just sorry’. I name this one Baba Yaga. (Baba Yaga is a Russian fairy tale creature equivalent to an evil witch). Finally we walk down to the sea and stumble upon a restaurant which has tables and chairs under an awning right beside the beach. We decide this is it and settle down.

This time we are served by a very choleric, hyperactive waitress, which – when she interprets the menu to Tanya (enthusiastically and very efficiently) – sounds a bit like she’s highly agitated. Tanya replies in a way that almost matches the waitress’s tempo. We’re all slightly taken aback and burst out laughing with relief every time she leaves our table. But she keeps coming back with suggestions and we are all being characteristically picky and the conversation between Tanya and the waitress escalates so much so that at one point concerned Margaret asks: ‘What is the emotional content?’ I say I don’t think there is any as they continue to shout over each other clarifying the number and the kind of starters as well as the number and the kind of side orders. In the end, we all end up with four starters each!

Neil has the four legged flat chicken again, and I have the fishes which Tanya recommended as a local delicacy but which look slightly familiar to me – I think they are very similar to the fish that jumped into my vodka, and I press them down firmly to my plate.

The waitress with logorrhoea keeps coming back and this all turns into – a delicious – but a very weird meal. As we finally walk back to the hotel it’s pelting down with rain and we’re too late for the lift so we end up climbing a mountain, at least comforting ourselves that this is good for burning all the excess calories.

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Seven - 30 May 2004

2008-06-01T15:12:00.002+01:00

The Chekhov House and Garden – The Cherry Orchard

My hopes and repeated requests for an easy-going day off at some point don’t seem likely to yield any results. As we descend to breakfast at the massive Hotel Yalta’s canteen we’re discussing various arrangements and plans that we have for the next two days (this includes more excursions and more concentrated working sessions). The breakfast buffet is mind-blowing, featuring every kind of breakfast you can imagine – and more. Rows of fruit and salads, and neatly rolled pieces of steaming omelette and pancakes and stuffed cabbage leaves, and cereals and pastries and – we wonder again where the poor people from New Writing North had been on their travels in Russia when their cautionary stories to us before our departure sounded so grim.

The major pilgrimage for the day is Chekhov’s house in Yalta. In fact there are two –the other one being much smaller and much further away and therefore deemed not of particular interest. We were meant to be hosted by the museum’s director but Tanya can’t reach him on his mobile and it turns out that we will be hosted by his assistant. I quickly get Margaret to my room to choose the chocolates we’d take as a present. I empty the contents of my bag on the bed and Margaret looks very concerned. Then she bursts out laughing. She says the boxes look like rats have been at them – all the corners are squashed and there are bends and creases all along the sides. Neil says we’ve obviously misallocated all the roles – he says he would be very good as the chocolatier because he would be very anally retentive about packing them. He offers that we swap roles, but Margaret just takes over the chocolates as she’s been rather underutilised in her capacity as the pharmacist – the only medicine we needed were eardrops for me which we had to buy in St Pete and Lemsip for me which I already had. She gives me Solpadeine in return which she says is very good first thing in the morning to help you wake up and kill any pain you might have.

It’s wet and foggy in Yalta (though the view from our windows is magnificent). We arrive into the museum and are introduced to our guide Alla. She doesn’t speak any English so Tanya will translate. But first we are offered the opportunity to watch a performance of A Lady with the Lapdog put on by the Simferopol drama students particularly for the pleasure of an American group of tourists. It’s a very basic piece which is both narrated and performed by the actors and which has cut out very few lines from the original. We sit through it and just as we’re about to breathe a sigh of relief at the end, there is a bizarre dance routine taking place. Alla offers us to go to a café across the road called The Cherry Orchard for some refreshments before the start of our tour. The café is one of those places which works only when there is somebody in it, we drink fruit juice from cartons and coffee from plastic caps all the time eyed by a couple of strange-looking regulars.

When we finally reach Chekhov’s garden Margaret is struck by an urge to take a stone from the garden to use as a paper weight – she asks Neil to choose one for her. Meanwhile Neil is discussing the plants – his knowledge of individual species is astonishing! We’ve been talking about Jeanette Winterson a lot and I talked about Tradescant the explorer in Sexing the Cherry and suddenly Neil points out a spring of tradescantia and has the wonderful idea to pick a leaf and send it to Jeanette Winterson asking her to come and read Errand on 2 July at Northern Stage (as part of an event we were planning in order to launch the whole project which would be due to open in October).

Alla is a very enthusiastic but very quiet, bespectacled lady (looking like a librarian) who leads us around the garden and the house with great attention to detail. She tells us many stories about origins of ideas which we find in Chekhov’s plays – like the bookcase in Cherry Orchard which was actually modelled on a chest of drawers in Chekhov’s bedroom. She also tells us about which pieces exactly were written here and which trees exactly were planted by Chekhov. There is much pride in her demeanour as a curator of this particular museum. Predictably we spend a lot of time in his study examining every single object. My favourite however is a little veranda off the dining room on the first floor. There is a bed on the veranda and I speculate whether this might be the kind of place where our character Sasha falls into eternal sleep. I’ve been insisting on really locating our characters and events in various places we’ve come across on our travels – like: identifying exactly where Sasha’s guests might be living when they are not visiting him in his dacha etc.

There is a piano in the room and Alla tells us that the famous singer Shalyapin was a regular guest here and we listen to a recording of Shalyapin singing ‘Ochi charnie…’. Also Tolstoy and Rachmaninov and Bunin occur on various photographs taken in and around the place and then we listen to more stories from Chekhov’s personal and family life.

After about a couple of hours we emerge into the courtyard and Neil and I find the equivalent of a bike-shed to have a cigarette. Meanwhile, Alla tells us about how this house was requisitioned by a German officer during WW2 even though Chekhov’s elderly sister still lived in it. But his stay didn’t last long. After the war a bust of Chekhov’s was revealed in Yalta and both his sister Maria and his wife – actress Olga Knipper – by now in their eighties, were present. The first one politely declined to give any speeches, but the second – jumped at the opportunity, of course!

Alla takes us back to the gallery where we saw the students’ performance and yet another detailed tour of pictures and photographs ensues. There is another desk of Chekhov’s there and Margaret goes to stroke the bottom of the desk panel – she lets us into the secret that she did it in the house as well, and that this is ‘what writers do when they think’!

Neil and I go back into the garden for another cigarette and in search of what Margaret now calls ‘the rock’ for her desk. Eventually she ends up with three heavy items to add to her luggage.

Walking out of the museum grounds, escorted by Alla, we catch glimpse of a little paddle with water-lilies in them. The lily story continues – I say maybe we should have these in the show. Neil is not overly impressed and instead Margaret and him proceed to talk about their heroine Verushka – this is a déjà vu – a repetition of a conversation I remember them having in Seattle.

On our way into town, Tanya stops a passer by to ask for directions to a good restaurant. The girl says she is a cook at a really good one which works only in the evenings, and leads us to a small Turkish place which she likes. Margaret observes that it would have been really good to have had extra chocolates on us now to reward the girl for her efforts, and we vow to go to her restaurant tomorrow and give her a box. We have a really nice leisurely lunch followed by Turkish coffee and a session of fortunetelling from the cups. Tanya and I are well versed in this, but Margaret and Neil also have a go and both turn out to be very good, particularly Neil who sees in my cup a heavy curtain drenched with water – whatever that might mean.

Neil is attentively listening to a kind of local pop music (at home we have a term for this kind of music - ‘turbo-folk’). He proclaims he likes it and would like to get a CD of it. Margaret energetically tries to dissuade him from doing it and Neil says: I know why you’re doing this, you’re afraid it might end up in the show!

Then we take a walk through town. We go to a music shop and I end up buying a random CD with Russian film music, two videos with feature film fairytales (which I fondly remember from my childhood) and a DVD of a multi-award wining Russian ‘melodrama’ filmed last year in Yalta. Neil decides not to buy any music. Then we walk into a square where we meet Grisha – a really friendly monkey. And eventually we walk back to the hotel taking the route by the beach which also features a number of dilapidated huts which Neil photographs with real gusto.

Arriving at the bottom of the flowery path leading up to our gigantic hotel, Margaret and I discuss what star sign the characters in the play might be. We all make a spontaneous decision to settle down in an open air bar and drink cocktails – and we continue our work-related conversations. Neil draws for us his ideas for the installations. I think of the four seasons theme, which is very fitting considering our working process (starting in American winter, via Russian spring/summer and English autumn). We stay here for quite a while till it gets dark and we decide to go into the hotel and find another restaurant.

The waitress serving us in one of the hotel’s restaurants is (very pretty and) quite frisky, which Tanya interprets as her ‘probably being drunk’. And so every time she comes back we’re straining to smell her breath. We’ve settled down in a corner under an enormous TV set playing Ukrainian music. I keep wondering whether their Eurovision winner will come up – everyone seems to have heard this song apart from me. For some reason this restaurant really reminds me of the place we dined at in Port Angelis. I think about it and realise that our trips have had perfect dramaturgical three act structure (Yakima – Port Angeles – Seattle; … St Petersburg – Yalta – Moscow; … table – lake – bed*). All along in Yalta I’m having an urge to go swimming but never get a chance to go to the swimming pool, and it’s too cold for the sea. We all establish we’ve never imagined our stay in Yalta like this – we’ve always thought we’d be basking in the sun (Margaret even got us some sun-screen).

Suddenly, the whole spell is broken with the arrival of a very bad accordionist who insists on playing really loudly even though nobody’s reacting positively to him. After a while – our irritation reaching boiling point – some people next to us applaud him, probably in the hope he’d go away. Our waitress comes back and Tanya complains about the music. The waitress says ‘we’ll fucking turn him off’. This endears her very much to all of us, and Tanya decides she’s not drunk after all, just temperamental.

We make arrangements for an early morning working session and go to sleep.

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* 'Table-lake-bed' was a three-act formula I proposed for the play, based on our editing process. We'd initially read and shortlisted a number of short stories by both Chekhov and Carver. On our return from the American trip we sat down and put together lists of impressions, images, places and situations. Three groups of imagery predominated: situations around tables, situations around water and situations around beds and bedrooms. This therefore bacame a useful basis for our three act structure.

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Six - 29 May 2004

2008-06-01T15:06:00.002+01:00

St Pete – Moscow – Yalta

It is the last time Pasha waits for us outside the hotel. We’ve said goodbye and left presents for our hostesses (some of which have assumed an almost familial relationship with us by now). They also got up in the small hours to see us off. We fill the ‘troika’ with our suitcases and drive to the airport. Tanya – suddenly very much in charge – is panicking slightly and I’m feeling very tired and very ill as well as very frightened of plane-deafness which is made worse when I travel with a cold. Pasha walks us to our terminal and Tanya insists that we take our luggage to be wrapped up in cellophane, especially if we haven’t got keys and locks for it. Margaret asks Pasha for his address and he takes her notebook and goes to sit down on a bench where he starts writing. I kind of feel quite sad. Tanya is shouting for us to get going. We say goodbye to Pasha and proceed down a path of multiple X-rays and security checks. I decide to carry one of my bags with chocolate gifts with me onto the plane, although it is quite heavy because it now also contains my newly acquired books.

I hate this entire trip as I’m not feeling well at all. This is made worse when on arrival in Moscow we are huddled together in a mass of sweaty passengers waiting for some gates to open and let us through to pick up our luggage. This goes on for ever and becomes one of my least favourite moments of the trip.

To cut a long story short – ha! ;-) – after much queuing, form-filling and utter suffering, we eventually arrive at Simferopol in Ukraine; then we wade through a flock of taxi-vultures and somehow manage to get a ride to Yalta.

Our hotel in Yalta is at the opposite extreme to the one in St Pete. This one actually has something like 15 floors and 2000 rooms (several casinos, restaurants and a cinema!) and has been described by Janet Malcolm (the writer of a book about a Chekhov pilgrimage which everyone apart from me has read) as an ‘example of spectacular ugliness’. She’s actually described the rooms and all of her experiences in great detail and everyone is really eager to find out how accurate she was. Our rooms are on the 11^th floor – Neil’s and mine facing the sea, and Tanya’s and Margaret’s facing an open air dolphinarium. I like my room very much. It feels bright and has a lovely balcony. They are all more or less identical anyway. I dislike this Janet Malcolm and her condescending superiority complex straightaway – but that might be because I’m so tired and bad tempered.

When we’re reunited in order to draw some money and go to the restaurant – I find that everybody agrees with me about Janet Malcolm (and I think maybe she was actually tired and bad tempered herself when she arrived, which distorted her impressions for the worse) – so I feel better. For a bit we all sit down and do maths. In fact we all sit down and I do maths – doing complicated equations such as:

V 1E = 6.10G ۸ 10E = £7

=> £7 = 61G ۸ £10 = X

=> 7 : 61 = 10 : X

=> X = 610:7 = 87,1

And so in the absence of the up to date exchange rates, going via Euro, I work out that there are 87,1 Ukrainian Grivnas in £10 or 8,71 Grivnas in £1 and proceed to draw money from the hotel bankomat. Neil says I should have been the ‘banker’.

We stroll down a winding path going from the hotel through some fragrant gardens past kitschy restaurants into a black hole (which we’ve been advised to steer clear from at night). There are two kitschy restaurants on the right and we opt for one called The Café which looks less kitschy, where the door is permanently open for some reason even though it’s really cold and rainy, and smoking is not allowed inside. I continue to suffer and order copious amounts of green tea for which I have to keep ordering extra lemon. I can’t remember much about the food but I don’t think I enjoyed it. Tanya entertains us with a story about her mother who used to be a fashion designer in Soviet Russia, designing dresses out of (something we call the ‘balloon silk’), a material used for making rain-coats in the 1950s and 1960s. She tells us her mother was even sent to meet Christian Dior...

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Five - 28 May 2004

2008-06-01T14:47:00.002+01:00

Dostoyevski, Dostoyevski and Blinnaya again

Interestingly I’m the first to come out for breakfast. Neil follows but he’s a bit crestfallen. We talk about the last night and he tells me how they went for vodka afterwards and how Tanya got a bit tipsy and due to her argument with the taxi driver in the process of which she mistranslated, he ended up giving the taxi driver 2000 instead of 200 roubles. (This is the equivalent of £40 instead of £4). Tanya arrives half way through the story, saying she’ll make it up to us.

I’m thinking about my afternoon nap which I’m already really looking forward to. But there is the Crime and Punishment tour to do first. Tanya and Pasha work it out using Margaret’s guidebook and then take us to various courtyards and into houses which are meant to have been the sites of various events in the book. We’re all very disappointed as none of this matches any of our mental pictures of the places. But the trail is interesting and quite atmospheric. At some point it seems that we’ve all spontaneously given up on the idea of continuing with this tour and we sit down to have coffee in a makeshift pavement café. We discuss which of St Petersburg many museums we should see today – I mean in addition to what you’d expect there is also the Museum of the Siege, the Museum of Chocolate, the Museum of Dreams, the Museum of Monsters and many more to choose from. Neil has been going on about the Museum of Monsters ever since it was first pointed out to him on Day 1. Now he’s also keen on the Museum of the Siege which Tanya and Pasha have been advocating very strongly. I fancy the Museum of Dreams but nobody wants to take the risk. So we get up and go to the Dostoyevski house-museum first. We’re given walkmans with an audio tour. Margaret and I do this in detail going through various exhibits – and I find the tour a very inspiring and moving experience. I suggest that we should use the principle of the audio tour in one of the installations which will accompany our production, but Neil is put off by the required number of walkmans.

As soon as we are out we demand that Pasha takes us to the blinny and pelmeni place again, but this time we can’t decide which one to go to. I’m really keen on the blinny one and everyone else seems keen on the pelmeni (ravioli), so I go to the blinny one on my own. Soon however, Margaret changes her mind and comes to join me. We are sitting in amongst all these Russian people on their lunch break and just having a nice chat. Several days later, reflecting on this experience, Margaret says it actually felt to her like we were really living in St Petersburg.

We’ve been hoping to go for an afternoon nap but Pasha and Tanya suggest that we go to the Museum of the Siege first. We say maybe we should go to the Monsters’ Museum as well in that case, and as it is the closest we go there first. This is actually what is known as the Kunst Camera – a museum of ethnography founded by Peter the Great. In addition to various items from all over the world, there is also a particular room featuring deformed human or animal foetuses. Peter the Great apparently wanted to dispel superstition by getting people to understand that foetal deformation was 'caused by the mother’s lifestyle' rather than being a result of black magic. He encouraged people to bring him samples of such creatures and he would reward them by giving them a walrus horn (which at the time was believed to be a valuable amulet and which Peter the Great had a great collection of)!

I’m really enjoying this museum as every exhibit seems slightly different from each other, and they are all amazingly well preserved. I’m also getting more and more interested in this Peter the Great who we’ve heard so much about and who seems to have been a real Renaissance man (190cm tall, as we’ve been told many times) – skilled at ruling as well as shipbuilding, writing, carpentry and even dentistry – he pulled his subjects’ teeth out with his own hands - and you can even see some of those teeth on display here. However, suddenly, Neil has completely lost interest in this and he’s really impatient to go to the Museum of the Siege now.

When we finally get there, I recognize it as a kind of monument you find in much of Eastern Europe – a memorial centre to the victims of WW2 – rather imposing and solemn, featuring bullet-ridden exhibits and documents, as well as documentary film-footage. The people of St Petersburg (or rather Leningrad) were under siege for 900 days during WW2, starving, dying and/or even being forced to resort to cannibalism in extreme cases. Tanya cries as she translates a diary entry belonging to a teenage girl. Pasha is also very, very sad. Later, when we come out, he tells me that his grandmother who died last year was a teenager in Leningrad at the time. We keep quiet a lot about what we’ve just seen.

Being about to go and have our afternoon nap, we need to tell Pasha what time we need picking up to go for a boat trip in the evening before going to a restaurant that Tanya has found and booked for us for 9.30. We can’t find a phone number to ring the boat service so Pasha decides to drive us to a dock where we can find out. And we arrive at a fortress that Anya took us to on Day 1, and this time in front of the church where all of the Romanoffs were buried there is a military orchestra playing numbers from My Fair Lady. We’re all wincing while waiting for Tanya and when she arrives she tells us that there is a boat leaving in 15 minutes. After some deliberation we decide to go straightaway and as we walk to the dock Neil is distracted by a stall selling Russian wooden toys. Feisty Tanya shouts at him to hurry up, but then we end up sitting on the boat for another 15 minutes waiting for it to fill up with random passengers before setting off. St Pete from the boat looks absolutely amazing. As we sail along, in amongst many wonderful sights, we also see what is probably the wedding party number nine so far in the last few days with a bride and groom on horses at the top of a bridge. The Church of Spilt Blood is also top of our list in terms of the most spectacular sites to be seen from this perspective, and we spend a lot of time admiring it.

It’s about 7pm when we are eventually reunited with Pasha. I suggest that maybe we should try to change our booking at the restaurant (called simply the Restaurant, and situated next to the Monsters’ Museum) and go straightaway. Tanya tries to do it by phone, but has no success; she says they are overbooked. Pasha suggests that we call in there anyway as it’s on the way. As Tanya and I get through the doors, a stern looking man demands our coats. The Restaurant is breathtaking at the first glance and only semi-full. The manager says he can squeeze us in after all. I say to Neil to get his camera ready as my battery has gone off, and at first he sneers at a bankomat next to a pile of wood in a small entrance hall, but as we walk through a spotless whitewashed space with wooden tables and massive windows through which the White Night evening sunlight is streaming in – we are all quite speechless. The space is actually a designer space and there is a little plaque next to the entrance testifying to this.

The food – well I have no superlatives left – but what can you expect by now. Our starter arrives while Tanya is in the toilet, but all the same, I try to offload some fish that she really likes onto her plate. By physical laws unknown to humankind, the fish (which is actually dead) slides off my fork, flips in the air and lands headfirst into my glass of vodka and tonic. The waiter – Maxim – happens to be there at the moment and there are massive gasps of wonder and delight all around the table. Maxim offers to get me another glass, but I’m really curious as to whether I might have unwittingly invented a new vodka flavour, so I keep it.

When Tanya comes back from the toilet, she declares that 'the bathroom is a poem'! In the course of the evening we go to check this claim, but are all a bit disillusioned and proceed to qualify what kind of a poem it might be. For me it is closest to Mayakovski. Which is more than can be said about our conversation that night which mostly consisted of: ‘extraordinary’ and 'staggeringly beautiful’ (Neil), ‘wonderful’ (Margaret) and ‘amazing’ (me).

Full of dead fishes soaked in vodka – Neil actually had an entire chicken (with four legs, according to Tanya), laid flat on his plate – we attempt to walk back, but give up and travel back to our hotel in a cab.

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Four - 27 May 2004

2008-06-01T14:34:00.002+01:00

Hermitage, Platonov and the Midnight Tour

Tanya has taken to calling me Dushechka. This is because there is a famous story by Chekhov called Dushechka. (The other day I actually bought a collection of Chekhov’s stories in Russian which includes this one.)

As we get into the Hermitage – by the official entrance (because we have the passes) – we encounter the first example of a phenomenon peculiar to Russian museums which we name ‘the babushka’. The ‘babushkas’ of the Hermitage are usually middle-to-old-aged ladies who stand in various corners watching the visitors and occasionally offering advice and sometimes even delivering tours. The first babushka that we meet is one at ‘the wardrobe’ where we are meant to leave our coats (Russians have a thing about leaving their coats in designated areas in almost all public places). I’m thinking whether or not I should leave my coat while everybody else is already joining in the ritual, but then the ‘wardrobe babushka’ – who has obviously overheard Tanya talking to me – asks specifically for Dushechka’s coat.

Armed with my video camera, George and I decide to do our own tour of the museum. We start off slowly with the marble statues of Cain and Abel (pointed out by Neil who we bump into), but then get bored and decide to enact a scene from Godard’s Bande a Part and Bertolucci’s The Dreamers where the leading characters race through the Louvre in 9 min 45 sec. It turns out to be much fun and results in a near-hallucinatory experience featuring Napoleon and Voltaire and golden sledges and Poussain’s canvases and glimpses of inner gardens through massive windows all mixed up in one long take. This particular visual take is solely mental, as my camera couldn’t possibly deal with the actual speed at which we were going. Eventually we miraculously find ourselves back at the place where we started.

The other day Anya told us exactly how many years, months, days and hours it would take us to see the entire Hermitage properly, but I’ve forgotten. In any case, we’ve just done two out of three extended floors in under two hours and are sitting at a padded bench waiting for the rest of our jolly party. When they arrive they are indeed jolly and brimming with stories about babushkas and their individual encounters with them. Neil describes them in particularly graphic ways miming aspects of their physique. The only one that we actually registered properly on our trip was a younger looking one who approached us sternly, clutching her handbag, and motioned at us with a single terrifying jolt of her head, while we were taking a rest by sitting on an ornate radiator.

As Margaret, Neil and I have had a sudden urge to convene a brief working session, we all separate temporarily. We find a small café off the so-called Palace Square (in front of the Hermitage) and Neil and I proceed to chain-smoke while discussing in great depth various aspects of the play which this trip is meant to be inspiring (a play, which having been developed by all of us, will be written by Margaret and directed and designed by Neil). Ah, yes, by this point Neil IS chain-smoking, which works much better than my temporary nicotine-abstention in America. We have a very productive session and then go back to meet Pasha who has agreed to take us once again to the magical blinny and pelmeni place so that we can now try the branch which serves the ravioli. Neil enthuses at great length about his portion which actually features a salmon variety that is the speciality of this place in particular.

Back in the car, Neil and Margaret’s recurring discussions of the colour scheme of St Petersburg are finally evolving into a very interesting and quite technical speculation on how they might invent a new palette of paints to be marketed in England. We were going to continue working for another hour somewhere near the hotel, but instead we succumb to the urge to have an afternoon nap, while lovely Pasha offers to wait for us in his car! I’m very moved by this and Margaret and I talk about how wonderful he is. Margaret tells me interesting things she’s found out by talking to Pasha – how he is an avid volleyball-player and how he has been married twice and has a son.

In the evening we are back at the Maly theatre where we’re watching Platonov. The lead is the handsome guy who played Vanya the other night, and he’s brilliant once again. I enjoy this much more and even sneakily get my camera out to film the set. Then Neil points out a lady in the audience holding a bunch of lily of the valley. By now we all agree this is really spooky and I wonder whether we should rename the character of Anna in our play and call her Lily instead – maybe even Liliana? Neil says – 'that would add another fucking hour to the running time of the show'! I say – this has got to be ‘Neil’s quote of the week’.

George and I decide to go out on the town after the show, as this is his last night in St Pete. He’s arranged to meet some friends in front of the Marinski Theatre and we hail a car. In Russia you can take a taxi, or you can just hitchhike quite effortlessly. The car that we stop is driven by a guy who gives me the creeps – not least because when George greets him with a customary ‘you all right’, he makes a long pause before stating in a rather low tone that he is… all… right. George is completely oblivious to this as he’s still buzzing after the play and shrieking excitedly about all of his favourite moments etc. I hold my breath all the way through thinking of ways we can jump out if we need to. When we finally arrive at the Marinski I breathe out and leave the car as quickly as possible; George follows while still continuing to chirp. I suggest that we go and get something to eat while we wait, so we end up at a restaurant called Waterloo. They’ve obviously had a karaoke night tonight, but the place is empty. When Vlad and Misha arrive they order some Georgian wine (this is the first wine I’ve had in Russia), and it is really very good indeed. So we chat. Vlad is a PhD student in economics in London and Misha is a tourist guide in St Pete. We tell him about the babushkas at the Hermitage and he volunteers a number of his own stories (one about an Italian flicking at a statue by Michelangelo to check if it was real marble, and a babushka in the corner getting hysterical as a result). We talk about which club might be good to go to, but by the time we get our act together it seems it’s too late. To make matters worse it’s just gone 1am and I find out that we can’t get back to the hotel until 3am because we are on the wrong side and all the bridges on the river go up between 1 and 3am to let the tall ships pass. My heart sinks. I am chronically tired ever since setting off and cannot imagine having only 4 hours sleep. I moan, but there is nothing to be done. Misha however takes the initiative to make our time interesting – he gives us a tour of St Pete at night – and it really turns out to be a real treat. Finally I get to take in all the information I’m given, and Misha does make it sound very interesting, giving us the unofficial version of the city and lots of anecdotes concerning Peter and Catherine the Great. Eventually, we go back to the Palace Square once again, only this time it is empty, bedewed, covered in the peace of the night – there is only a lonely saxophone tune to be heard coming from the foot of the central tower. It feels very special and, in a funny way, this becomes one of my favourite moments in St Pete.

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Three - 26 May 2004

2008-06-01T14:25:00.002+01:00

Peterhof, The Three Piglets and The Georgian Restaurant

Once again, Pasha – who is really growing on me and Margaret by now – is patiently waiting for us outside of our hotel. Today we’re going to Peterhof – Peter the Great’s summer palace some 100km out of Petersburg. Pasha drives us and talks quietly. Tanya translates selectively. Neil and I have our cameras pointed at the roadside. Pasha takes us on little detours in the country – some really scenic and picturesque places, telling us about various people and politicians who visited here. Tanya and Pasha tell us – ‘Our president Putin is from St Petersburg’.

Peterhof is indescribable. We pay to get into the gardens alone; going into all the different buildings within this massive 18th century estate weighed with gold, would cost more money. It takes us the entire morning just to walk from the central fountain to a small fishing cottage (one of many mansions here) and back. It’s a hot day and it all feels exceptionally healthy (despite the omnipresence of hordes of tourists).

By the time we finish our walk we are all starving. But Pasha has another gastronomic surprise up his sleeve for us. He takes us to a village called Pushkin and to an unimposing looking Russian restaurant called The Three Piglets. Compared to the splendour of Peterhof, it feels very cold and dark in this relatively kitschy place (its windows are actually completely covered up). Again – the food is glorious and we heap a lot of praise upon Pasha who is actually sitting with us at the table for the first time. He’s got his glasses off, revealing beautiful blue eyes and quite a shy attitude. He’s sipping orange juice, and I guess correctly that he’s a Virgo. Led by Tanya we’re trying to persuade him to set up a business selling tours of authentic St Petersburgian restaurants. He nods endearingly, smiling and not saying very much in return.

Then he takes us back in his ‘troika’ (I’ve just realised that his car plate - T901KA - actually reads 'troika'!) to our hotel where we collapse into our respective siestas.

Tanya has booked us into a Georgian Restaurant – recommended to her by her son who is the editor of Moscow’s Time Out. I’ve arranged for my friend George Rodostheonous to meet us there too (despite the fact we’re staying at the same six-bedroom guesthouse, this is the first time we actually get together properly as he has finally given his paper at the theatre conference!). Deterred by the prices at the restaurant (and the fact that we are not quite hungry yet) we decide to have drinks first at a neighbouring bar where we also wait for Tanya’s contact to bring us passes for the Hermitage. We sit at a table outside the bar. There is a Gypsy girl parading past us on a horse and asking for money. The horse shits from time to time and we decide to stay mean. Then we spot another Georgian Restaurant directly opposite us which turns out to be very good. We end up being the last to leave the restaurant having had a really good time; and by the time we come out, it is raining.

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day Two - 25 May 2004

2008-06-01T14:11:00.002+01:00

St Pete: Bitching about Anya, Nearly Getting Mugged & Eating the Sturgeon

I’m still very much asleep by the time I arrive to breakfast (a boiled egg, 2 boiled sausages, 2 pieces of bread, butter and cream cheese). But Neil and Margaret are wide awake and being entertained by Tanya’s gripping stories about travelling to Africa when she was young, in the company of the famous Russian woman cosmonaut. Pasha waits for us outside and then takes us to the Alexandrinsky theatre (named after Pushkin, and the site of the first flop of The Seagull). There is a conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research going on at the theatre and Tanya has got us passes if we want to attend any of the proceedings. However, once at the theatre, Tanya delivers us to Anya – a local guide – who is vigorously complaining about something.

Within the first few minutes of being ‘guided’ by Anya we are worried. She rattles off meaningless facts at us (such as the precise height and weight of various towers etc) at meaningless speed. We can’t wait for the car to stop so we can get out, pretend to take pictures and discuss strategies of dealing with her. This basically amounts to bitching about Anya. She gives us a veritable tourist version of St Pete (which I can’t remember much of) and as we stop at one of the tourist infested bridges to admire the Winter Palace, we spend much time gazing at a bear entertaining the tourists. Eventually she takes us to an expensive Gallery/ Gift Shop (called Onegin) where we are served free coffee and chocolates and where we browse for ages. Anya obviously has a deal with the owners and probably takes all her clients there, but also charges for the time spent in the shop.

Our salvation arrives in the form of Tanya, and Pasha decides to take us to a tiny little tea-room for lunch. This is a basic, authentic place called Blinnaya which has two independent units next to each other (one serves the Russian pancakes – blinnies and the other the Russian ravioli – pelmeni). We have one of the best and most memorable gastronomic experiences ever!

After an afternoon nap at the hotel, Neil and I decide to go for a walk, having arranged to meet Tanya and Margaret in front of the theatre where we are seeing The Seagull tonight. We descend into the world of Petersburgian underground railway, heading back for the city centre. Neil is wearing a bag advertising the Baltic flour mill (a contemporary art gallery in Newcastle) as well as a badge with his name on which Tanya gave us in order to gain access to the theatre conference. Idly chatting away we are about to re-emerge back into the city again when we’re suddenly pressed against the exit doors by a group of men dressed in black who had been hovering around. The doors open inwards so we’re trapped - but the men aren't really saying or doing anything. They are probably waiting for us to panic and surrender. Somehow I manage to wriggle away, my heart beating loudly and my legs literally going weak at the knees. For a brief second I watch Neil struggling out past the door, holding onto his pockets and bag and exclaiming sharp ‘No, no, no’s! We’re both out and I establish I am in a state of shock. Neil is relatively calm and says the shock will probably come later to him.

We continue to wander around, look at a man polishing a statue of a horse on a bridge, go for a cheap coffee at a scary and overpriced Russian café (where we get charged for sachets of sugar and milk), wander a bit more, I get to ask for directions in my broken Russian for the first time, and eventually we stumble across an appealing restaurant where we decide to have dinner despite the fact that it’s completely empty. The waitress, looking like a Russian version of Barbie, talks to us in very good English and escorts us to our table. It’s all damask tablecloths and napkins, candles and expensive wine-lists. We’re sitting next to what Neil identifies as a china fireplace. On the waitress’s recommendation we choose sturgeon for two (one of the priciest items on the menu) and proceed to wait for it for 25 minutes, sipping our G&Ts (having been advised against having wine in Russia). Meanwhile several waiters are rushing around placing starters on all surrounding tables. What makes this look really surreal is that we’re still the only people in the room and there is no food on our table. Some minutes later an entire army of tourists files in (we recognize some of them from our plane, in fact). So evidently, we’ve fallen into Anya’s trap. Finally our sturgeon is paraded in front of us, cooked but still in one piece, and then taken away for carving. For a moment we wonder whether that was for real, but as soon as we tuck into our food we’re speechless once again. We remember the horror stories we’ve heard about food in Russia and consider ourselves extremely lucky. Until we see the bill that is – which is comparable to any posh restaurant in England. Still, we decide the sturgeon was thoroughly unique and well worth the price and we start looking forward to telling Margaret and Tanya all about it!

The theatre is around the corner and as we arrive the two of them are chatting to the director of tonight’s show – Gregori Kozlov. The show turns out to be a student production, without surtitles, and the students turn out to be a mixed bag of talent and good and not so good looks. We wonder whether it was a good idea to have arranged a post-show meeting with the director. But we must go through with it, and as we settle down at a café called Harlequin with vodka and pickled herring forced down our throats (on account that ‘Chekhov really liked these’), Tanya has one of the most difficult times in her career. We’re all very civilised; Gregori is very pensive and quite quiet (apparently, unhappy with how the show went) and we’re struggling to find things to say to him. He then asks us very directly – via Tanya – what we thought about the show. I brave the storm and proceed to give my detailed account of the performance and his interpretation of the play. He informs me he looked up the word ‘seagull’ in a thesaurus before he started working on the show. Then he tells us all about his research – some of which is quite interesting. After another bout of um-ing and er-ing, Gregori kisses the ladies’ hands and withdraws. Soon after we too hail a taxi and go to the hotel where after a brief soiree in my salon (and another couple of Tanya’s interesting stories) we disperse and go to bed.

The Chekhov Carver Russian Trip - Day One - 24 May 2004

2008-06-01T14:02:00.008+01:00

(By the time the Russian part of our Chekhov Carver trip took place, we had already had a week-long work in progress working with the actors on the stories by both writers and some staging solutions to the ideas arising from our regular development meetings. Margaret and I have been meeting on a weekly basis developing the plot outline in some detail, based on a very basic structure that had emerged soon after our American trip. We also decided on the name of the play - Kaput! - and were working towards a launch event which would happen on the day of the 100th anniversary of Chekhov's death - 2 July 2004. We envisaged that on this day we would have the actors read Carver's story Errand, in which he imagined Chekhov's death, around a long table for invited guests, members of the press and promoters. I also suggested that we might serve some nibbles and a cocktail we would call Chekhov-Cava - or maybe even Chava! - and our Marketing Director Richard Bliss came with an excellent recipe for it involving some vodka.

However, at that stage, we were still a long way away from what would eventually become Kaput! - an idea of which you can get here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0954145631/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-page.

A more detailed account of how we eventually got there can be found on:

http://www.dramforum.com/?articleid=77

and a review of the piece on:

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/kaput-rev.htm

The photos connected to this trip were taken by Neil Murray, unless otherwise indicated).

Newcastle – Amsterdam – St Petersburg: Introductions

Margaret and I arrive at the airport at the crack of dawn and Neil approaches us preceded by a bouquet of lily of the valley, freshly picked from his garden, which he divides into two bunches and hands one to each. We’re both touched. As we check our bags in, we quickly recap on our individual duties. Margaret and I have been shopping for medicines and chocolates over the last few days – the former ‘just in case’ and the latter as potential presents for random people we are likely to meet. Neil’s been looking after our communal financial ‘float’ and so he becomes the ‘banker’. Margaret takes on the role of the ‘pharmacist’ and I end up as the ‘chocolatier’. Then full of anticipation and early morning coffee we set off for our gate and bump into none other but Gabor Tompa (a Romanian Hungarian director who has just made Ionesco's The New Tenant for our theatre). Ah, the cosmopolitanism of Northern Stage!

It is in Amsterdam – at more or less the same table that we sat at on our way to Seattle – that Neil contemplates a potential cigarette while I’m enjoying mine. He tells us a story of how he has been smoking occasionally during his recent stay in Barcelona and how one night, prompted by a pang of guilt, he jumped out of his bed and flung his packet of remaining cigarettes out of the window. We try to imagine a lucky finder walking past, and then proceed to do complex calculations concerning the amount of money in Neil’s bank. He has a tiny booklet specifically for this purpose.

As soon as we land at St Petersburg, we’re faced with the ritual of Russian form-filling. My school knowledge of Russian is sneaking upon me and it feels very rejuvenating. We’ve been speculating on what our guide/interpreter Tanya Oskolkova might be like and when the doors open and we finally see her leaning on a banister with a bored expression and a placard saying ‘Northern Stage’, I think we’re going to like her. She is a lively, tall woman in her 50s who gives off an air of informal efficiency. She immediately leads us to our car and hastily introduces us to our St Petersburg driver – Pavel. Pavel, in his 30s, is hiding behind a pair of wrap-around reflective shades and several layers of clothes including a polo-neck. It’s a nice day and Margaret and Neil keep saying how it all looks/feels like Newcastle. Pavel is quiet and seemingly very proud of his car. When I identify and enthusiastically point out a Zhiguli to Neil (Zhiguli is a Russian car which raised a lot of questions during the rehearsals of Cinzano/Smirnova's Birthday which Neil directed and I dramaturged last year), Pavel issues a moan regarding the Russian car industry and Tanya explains how it used to be a very chic car when she was young.

Our hotel turns out to be a flat in a dilapidated building on Petrovgradskaya side of the city. There is a tiny lift going up to the second floor – where our ‘hotel’ is. Margaret notes how this is very much like Crime and Punishment. Our hostess opens the door and she also somehow fits the world of Dostoyevski – she looks a bit drained and humourless as she leads us to a makeshift reception where an overweight lady asks for our passports. Then they send us to our rooms while they detain our documents and proceed to fill in numerous forms. I end up having the biggest room – which also has a sitting room area and which I christen ‘my salon’. The ‘hotel’ is quite clean and homely and has lots of towels and toiletries even though we’ve been warned of shortages in this department. There is a breakfast area painted in yellow and featuring a number of small round tables in the centre of the flat (which consists of the total of six guest-rooms). A friend of mine who is here for a conference is staying in the same hotel which means that we’ve occupied more or less the whole place.

We have just enough time to squeeze in a quick meal before going to see Dodin’s Uncle Vanya at the Maly tonight. Pasha takes us to a cash dispenser (bankomat) and then to a Ukrainian restaurant where we are fed some really nice food. I’m wondering whether they’ll play the Eurovision winner, but they don’t. Instead they bring us small glasses of delicious, fruity liqueur which they call ‘spotikach’ (lit. a thing that makes you trip over). Pasha has been waiting for us outside and eventually he takes us to the theatre. There is a very lively atmosphere, loads of enthusiastic audience and chattering. I struggle to keep awake through the show due to tiredness and plane-induced deafness, but the enthusiasm is infectious, and the English surtitles help. Vanya is played by a youngish looking and very handsome actor. They play under stacks of hay for most of it and eventually the hay comes down as Sonya says ‘We must work, we must work’, at the end of the play. Immediately the audience jumps to their feet and proceed to clap in unison for fifteen minutes. Members of cast assume various curtain call poses and look either very bored or very surprised as they receive their numerous bouquets of flowers. We’re quite taken by the experience. When we finally emerge from the theatre at about 10.30, it’s still daylight – these are the famous White Nights of St Petersburg.

On our return to the hotel, we find fresh bouquets of lily of the valley in our rooms. Tomorrow Neil will be saying – 'How extraordinary'!

Barcelona, February-May 2004

2008-05-24T10:40:00.007+01:00

(In the spring of 2004, in preparation for the Barcelona Connection Festival - which would frame the new co-production of an adaptation of George Orwell's memoir about the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia - I conceived a project involving four Newcastle-based poets Julia Darling, Bill Herbert, Linda France and Colin Teevan and the photographer Sasa Savic. We made two separate trips to Barcelona sponsored by Easyjet in order to create our own homages to

Catalonia, and I called the project Flying Homages. Northern Stage actor and musician Jim Kitson came on board to set some of Julia's poems to music and Mark Lloyd and Peter Peverley joined Jim and the poets in the performance of these poems and songs on the stage. The project later lead to a commissioning of a musical from Julia Darling A Manifesto for a New City - which was the last thing she wrote before her death).

This entry features poems by Julia Darling, Linda France, W.N. Herbert and Colin Teevan and photographs by Sasa Savic.

FLYING HOMAGES

Linda France:

Homage to the Earth Solid and Beautiful under my Feet

As soon as we land, my feet taste

the difference in the Spanish earth.

My legs grow heavier, longing to plant

themselves in that dark ochre and grow

like a plane tree in the city’s squares,

dappled with sunlight, bearing globed fruit.

With every step a rose blooms

from the stone flags. The tight buds

of my toes uncurl; my heels spur like thorns,

click like castanets. I step

on all the cracks and feel the stretch

inch its way slowly up my thighs.

The Passeig de Gracia is a meadow

of sea creatures and figs, beachcombed leaves.

I steer myself across it; nothing to do

but buy a pair of new brown boots,

made for walking. Their iguana tongues

lick my calves into life, root me.

Julia Darling:

(The Manifesto For Tyneside Upon England . MAY. 2004)

Friends. I am inventing a life in which your ingredients are returned to you!

Our lives are run by car parks, carrier bags, suits and credit cards.

This is my homage to you.

And from this evening I am removing power from our city leaders

and this city shall be run by its artisans and makers, by bread-kneaders

and stone masons, sculptors and chocolate fanciers, by egg painters and flower arrangers,

blacksmiths and magicians.

The air of the new city shall smell of pies.

There will be many bicycle repair shops and free bikes.

The city shall be filled with the sounds of making, of sparking metal, of whirring minds, of fresh cheese, of new poetry.

We shall all discuss small things.

Each of us will learn a contemporary dance.

There shall be lesbian happy hour between six and seven.

Schools will be small. Doctors will be cheerful.

Everyone shall make their own coffin and use it as a table.

We shall be encouraged to grow English apples and raspberries.

Plain English shall be used at all times.

Porridge and soup will be plentiful.

We shall know our saints.

We shall know our devils.

Visitors, who will come in droves, must bring gifts to the great hall. Perhaps food, chocolate or wine would be appropriate. These gifts shall be shared equally. You cannot enter the city without a gift.

Julia Darling:

Imaginary Travel

I imagine Tenerife, Majorca, Istanbul. I cut

Pictures from old magazines, of deep blue pools.

We have the travel club. We wear sunglasses.

There is the travel agent still, the well thumb brochures.

At night we sit and recall the Torromolinos of our childhood,

straw donkeys, tang of foreign chips and suntan cream.

Amazing how we used to jump on planes and land.

And it’s so much safer to pretend. It fills me up.

Colin Teevan:

Darling, you and your Darlingists and Darlingistas – we know who you are!

Ha! I knew your revolution would not have the courage of its convictions.

A dissident, an escapee of your night of the long pinking shears

Has made it here to Barcelona Libre

Needless to say,

It was not just his suit that was all cut up.

Is that any way to treat Mark’s and Spencer’s finest off the peg?

He barely had a leg to walk in.

But he also confirmed that you’ve begun to doubt the fairness

Of your edicts and your actions

And that your utopia has broken into factions

Of those who have tailors and those who’ve not.

Sympathy is the chink in the city manager’s psyche.

With us, nature’s true managers and administrators,

Sympathy is most unlikely.

And daily, Darling, do our numbers swell in Catalonia.

With exiles from your makers’ Utopia.

Suffer the marketing men, the bookkeepers to come unto me,

For theirs shall be the kingdom of Barcelona.

We have been given space by the Casa de la Ciutat

To found an academy of middle management

Fancy that, eh?

A master race of committed committee men and women.

They have also approved our plans for urban renewal

We’ll rebuild the place in our own likeness, Darling,

You’ll see that a city

Must be built without any pity.

Alderman Gavin de Earl Grey

W.N. Herbert:

In the rainy placa de Jordi Orwell
around the chocolate table in La Concha
where all the colours muted out of its fawn fitting
are turned up on the little TV to their tangerine max
even as we’re being cheated for squid & tortilla
I realise that this dark and shabby weather is a dalek
designed by Picasso, bringing us our bill
on a salver made of compacted salt and slavers.

The pigeons puff out feathers in the gaps
in the wall of Sant Maria del Mar, become
cubes of fluffy rat flesh; bagsnatchers leap prams
in the slick treets outside the Catedral
where the smell of rain mingles with incense
at the entrance to the cloisters. A girl kisses
the hand of the man holding an umbrella over her
and I go in: the bishops are balanced on
tilty cubist beds but do not slip from the walls.
the Roman geese that fill the garden have
little tufts like candle flames on their warning heads.
Two men lower a stick over which
holy vestements have been stretchered
into a brazier and a flame shoots up, Pentecostal.

In El Quatre Gats, Picasso kicks me in the back
so I can hardly walk past the Clansman Bar
(Partick Thistle Nil v. Celtic this Sunday)
to his Museu, where an origami Velasquez states
‘I don’t have an imagination
I have an inquisition’ stuffing doves
into shoeboxes yolked with Provencal dawns.

I bow beneath the interrogation of the rain.

*

As we walk across the mirroring ripples of the Ramblas’
wavery paving stones, Julia says
‘There’ll be no silver cowboys out in this.’
I look for Orwell’s rifle and can’t see him cross
the river full of folk.

Linda France:

Homage to a Woman with a Space Where her Heart is

after a sculpture by Miro

Up in the white maze of the rooftop

her body is blood and lipstick, varnished

against the elements – small curves

for hips, her torso an open fan.

Her face is woven tortilla and she wears

a sitting bull in hair that isn’t there:

crescent horns balancing the smile

of her waist, her invisible arms.

Blue sky paints itself in the empty moon

of her heart, a fat plume of cloud

feathering the space all around her,

inside her and all the way through her.

Behind her there’s the shock of two

small footballs that make her buttocks –

one red, one green: the place she’s kicked,

the place she bounces, cushioned by air.

Julia Darling

Learning A Disappearing Language

I am a bus driver

And I am being made to learn –

What is the point?

I have been taught to say

Hallo, how are your family?

Is it far from here to the mountains?

I am a stranger in this land.

Do you have a glass of water?

The words are gluey, they change

Within a minute of hearing them.

And I have no one to speak to,

So I must practise as I drive.

Hallo, how are your family?

Is it far from here to the mountains?

I am a stranger in this land.

Do you have a glass of water?

The passengers nod obligingly.

They seem to like the babble.

It’s like a waterfall, said one,

or a Chinese whisper.

Hallo, how are your family?

Is it far from here to the mountains?

I am a stranger in this land.

Do you have a glass of water?

Linda France:

Homage to the Rain in Spain Falling Mainly on the Plain

For two days the rain washed everything

she didn’t need away. Its fingertips

rinsed her face. On her tongue it tasted

of nothing at all: just liquid, falling

to fill the spaces she made with her shoulders

as she hopped over puddles and avoided

the spray from cabs too close to the kerb.

Dark men stood in doorways selling umbrellas

against drowning. A high-tailed rooster

shook his spurs and crowed. Santa Maria del Mar

launched a small metal boat lit by candles

to save her. Even though it felt like

tilting at windmills, she climbed in.

Its name on the side in gold was Esperanza.

Her whole life flashed before her eyes

and she cried ‘Mother! Mother!’, naked

as a baby she’d wrap in soft white cotton.

She sailed with all the people of the world

down Las Ramblas, the stream of birds

and the stream of flowers, the small canals.

She would wait in that shallow place

between hope and despair, watching raindrops

rip holes in the net of the sky like diamonds.

W.N. Herbert:

Memo to George

The throat of a young Italian speaking
a language you do not understand.
The difficulty in obtaining a pistol.
The appearance of shabby overalls
on rich people, car mechanics, lice.
The woman walking down the street in furs,
with her poodle, between the crossfire
from the Cafe Moska and the belfry.
The language of your own newspapers
which you do not understand.

The wound appearing in your own throat.

It’s like a language that you used to speak

quite fluently, but then you moved away

from the household of her hips, and as the weeks

rephrased as years you couldn’t understand,

the patois of that profile and those hands

began to slip until you couldn’t read

her in the phrases of those other throats

who conjugated you in warmer beds.

You realized that you no longer dreamt

in the sharp vowels of her breast and hair;

the names of her mind’s streets had all turned gray

and you could only speak a dialect

which let you say you loved her all the more

though in the wrong case, and the perfect tense.

Colin Teevan:

Darling, Darlingists and Darlingistas

And associated Herbertists and France-oists

Each day brings news of our advances

And, with them, the diminuition of your chances.

A bus driver showed up babbling Sanskrit

Saying he had been forced to learn it

And give up his football of a Saturday afternoon.

Soon, he won’t be able to converse with his family.

A modern tragedy in an ancient tongue.

Darling, what function does it serve

To preserve dead languages in the heads of public transport workers?

Departments within your infrastructures soon won’t be able

To communicate.

Too late you’ll find you have built a tower of Babel.

Functionality, streamlining and simplicity

These are the watchwords upon which to found a city.

Where once Barcelona had two tongues,

Now thanks to my rationalising intervention, it has one;

English, why attempt to buck a trend?

I’m assured by our marketing men

That soon all the world shall talk the same

Same questions, same answers, same desires.

This is the functional, streamlined simplicity

To which the modern manager aspires.

Alderman Gavin de el Rey.

Julia Darling:

The Meeting of the Property Developers At Midnight

She took away our suits, and then our phones.

Our accountants were driven off in a bus.

We were not allowed to walk in our own foyers.

Our screens are dark as night. It’s medieval.

Those glistening buildings were our life’s work,

and they brought prosperity, purses, force,

clean young men, sharp stiletto shoes.

No one warned us that the river smelt of war.

They make us sleep in dormitories, they say

that we must build rooms for the potters,

and poets will be the new architects. I say,

‘God help the tenants of the future.’

I’ve agreed to do a course in silver-smithing,

But everyone knows this madness won’t last.

Soon they’ll be no porridge in the mornings

Then they’ll ask where the clever boys are?

W.N. Herbert:

Homage to Jamon

I saw a pig’s trotter sticking in Julia’s ear

in the Can Massano restaurant

as though she was receiving messages

from Radio Free Trotter,

from irate carcasses,

and all coathooks and handles became

deep-fried curlicue aerials

of pigtails and pintles.

Didn’t you always want to be

in telepathic contact with a pig?

Haven’t you heard them transmitting from the pirate sty

how they were our irresistible substitute

for eating each other?

Don’t even vegetarians snort and roll at night

In lucid morcilla-devouring visions?

Haven’t you awoken from the cut-throat dream

knowing exactly what parts of everybody’s flanks

you’d slice and cure and eat?

Tell me you’d not drink Circe’s flask

of soya milk-based smoothie juice

laced with extracts from medieval parchments

from the Ars Compendiosa Inveniendi Veritatem

and let yourself become

an edible one?

A delible mark on the plates of Catalonia,

a delicacy who can describe its own consumption.

Think of the colour of your own serrated flesh:

the honey and beetroot varnished pane

you’re sure they fitted into wattle hut frames

back when you’d slit your own throat at Michaelmas

and salt your quartered hanging flesh

and seal your house against the sleet

with drumskin meat, snow-fat cataracts

while you became your own hamfisted, stock-bone furniture.

Praise to the horizontal humans

who make lampshades from their own jamon

who make magic lanterns from their spinning hips

and crackling, on which they cast

the movie that we still can’t watch

in which a well-stropped cloud is drawn across

the eyeball of Sylvia Plath.

Colin Teevan:

Greetings, Darling and your dwindling Darlingians.

Rumour has it your Utopia’s on its knees.

You should have known.

Utopia means no-place, don’t you see?

Meanwhile, we have assumed complete control of Barcelona and it environs

And concluded our most ambitious programme yet:

To drain the colour from the place.

What is the point in all those primaries?

What is the point in light, in fact?

Even their football team now play in stripes of black and white,

La Rambla is now a tatty Ratner necklace of chain stores,

And the once proud population of artisans,

Exhausted by their siestaless days,

Console themselves on weekend nights by drinking

Newcie Browns or Bacardi Breezers

(We make the Newcie Browns by mixing tea and cava

And leaving it to stand in the sun to warm and lose its fizz)

And then they eat chips, and totter home through vomit dappled streets

And they might get lucky and have a shag

Or a fight,

Or both.

All of which helps keep the economy turning

(Though in truth none of us knows how or why)

Meanwhile, your revolution like the cava fizzes out .

All ideas have their sell-by-date.

They become hard and rigid

And become a stick with which to beat the people.

Only management is eternal.

So, the twinning mission complete.

Barcelona has fallen,

It is now Newcastle upon Med.

All changed.

All except the bridge at Pont Vell.

Well, we like our bridges.

The one weakness we retain for making things.

Besides,, they get us from A to B.

Progress. They signify progress, you see.

And I look forward to progressing home

And reassuming my seat in the Great Hall.

Then you, you weavers of words and instigators of ideas,

You shall be the first against the wall.

Gavin I, El Rey.

Julia Darling:

Oh Dear

My manifesto came undone,

I forgot some parts,

like income, revenue.

We lasted for a month or two

There was a coup, and now,

there’s a new man with a megaphone.

My standards went downward.

The artists kept arguing.

The earnest and the logical stepped in

And soon we were outcasts.

Begging for someone to let us in.

But friends, we had polkas, hot salsas

I danced like a horse! I stood, that first night

on the steps of Swan House Roundabout,

I could taste invention. It tasted like nails.

Linda France:

Homage to What Fire Makes Possible

I lost myself in the crowd gathered around him

as he rose from the pavement like a flame.

Whatever dark magic he was making,

I felt the spark of it ignite my belly

as I stared at his, tight and rippling.

His hips slid away from him

as if he’d had enough of them,

brown chest rearing like a small horse.

His rough hands made the signs for gallop

and bridle. I caught the fire in his eyes

and felt my body loosen, letting go

into the orange tongues of my own death,

the limits of my flesh and my open heart

that will never perish. I couldn’t tell

anymore what was blood and what was drumming.

My fingers were burnt twigs. Everything

was filled with the light of its own colour

and nothing I looked at would ever be the same.

The Chekhov Carver American Trip - Part 2: Yakima-Port Angeles-Seattle, 18-21 January 2004

2008-05-24T00:06:00.002+01:00

The American Dream-Travelogue

Part 2

In the episodes so far: Neil, Margaret and Duska have been wading through dirty American snow, examining outdoor swimming pools and wonders of American suburban architecture: some extremely unusual buildings and constructions of various sizes and designs. Having arrived into the US, they spent one whole day in Yakima on a Raymond Carver pilgrimage, and in the company of accidental acquaintances – mainly exceptionally charming queens with dogs (that’s gay men with house pets, rather than any particularly Chekhovian ‘ladies with lap-dogs’). Margaret has been commenting on various experiences with great insight and wisdom; Neil has been wielding his video camera and Duska has been wearing a nicotine patch and having vivid dreams. They’ve seen some amazing sights and heard fantastic stories…

Sunday, 18.01.04

I look out of the window at the thick sheets of the falling snow. It’s strangely comforting. It’s not until Bob rings to cancel our breakfast trip to Toppenish – another Indian reservation – that I think about this snow as an obstacle or a problem in any way. He has given me the airline telephone number, and because I’m not quite ready yet, I make the mistake number one and ring Neil asking him to contact the airline and check whether our flight is still going. Half an hour later, all three of us meet in Neil’s tastefully re-arranged hotel room to take stock of the situation. After a long and tense wait on the phone, Neil has been told by the airline representative that the flight is still scheduled, BUT that it could all change any minute. Plagued by endless ‘what if’s, our view of the situation is steadily deteriorating.

Led by Neil, on our way to breakfast we’re all envisaging the scenario of being stranded and having nowhere to sleep when Alaska Airlines decides at the last minute that they are not flying today. This is despite the fact that we’ve just walked across the hotel courtyard and could very clearly see that what we were facing was really just a harmless idyllic spell of snow rather than a celestial aberration. Over a postprandial cup of coffee Neil concludes his grand prophecy of doom with an effective flourish: ‘And if you remember, we’ve known that this would happen all along; we said ages ago that we would get here and just spend four days stranded in an airport!’

The spell broken, Margaret attempts to introduce the subject of the benefits of meditation. She remarks how thinking positive thoughts can sometimes lead to positive events and how even seemingly negative situations can sometimes lead to positive opportunities. Neil says – ‘yes, but being stranded in an airport is just so boring’. We decide we should just turn up at the airport and let the staff on duty deal with our accommodation in case of any cancellations.

Cut to: we’re all sitting at an airport café with a nice view of the runway. It’s a perfect, clean winter day. All our luggage has been checked in and we’re recounting the events of the previous day with amusement and a sense of satisfaction at having done everything there was to be done in Yakima, and more. We speculate about Port Angeles and what that would be like. The detour to Port Angeles was a last minute idea as Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher only responded to us several days before our departure agreeing to see us. Carver spent the last years of his life in this place, so we build Port Angeles in our imagination as a really elegant, bohemian place with lots of nice fish restaurants. Harrogate comes to mind as a means of comparison. We’re also fretting about meeting Tess because Neil found her scary on some photographs and we’ve been warned about her highly eccentric, whimsical nature.

Then at one point, by some strange association of ideas Margaret asks Neil to tell us his story about the Bamboo House. Now, all I can say is – if you’d like to hear this (rather beautifully told) story, you’ll have to ask Neil to tell it to you himself. I only know that for some bizarre reason – or a set of reasons which might include jetlag, tiredness, stress, nicotine withdrawal and god knows what else – on this particular occasion, the telling of the story almost ends up in flying cups and saucers. Even the unsuspecting waitress doesn’t know how lucky she is that she gets away with just being called ‘dirty’ behind her back.

In other words, all of a sudden all hell breaks loose at this tiny little airport in the middle of nowhere and it has nothing to do with natural disasters. The long and short of it is, we all board the plane without talking to each other. Neil and I are sitting next to each other in a way which Margaret later describes using the word ‘ice’. Across the isle, Margaret is talking to a rather animated woman. I’m reading Carver. The Gazebo story. It strikes me that the hotel in which the couple in the story live and work could have been the hotel which we stayed in in Yakima. Then I read another one about a historian, whose wife has written him a letter (in unrecognizable handwriting) before she leaves him. There are some horses in the story – just like the horses in Call if You Need Me – only this one is perhaps a bit more Chekhovian. And it says something really interesting about how when your partner leaves you, you lose a bit of your history. Carver’s stories rarely ever make such observations, they just leave it up to you.

When we arrive in Seattle, Neil tentatively begins communicating with Margaret. Because Margaret makes an effort, anyway. I’m just being stubborn. My explanation is: I have already offered an apology which has been dismissed, there’s nothing else I can do. An hour later all three of us are sitting next to each other on a heated bench at Sea-Tac’s bus terminals – Margaret in the middle. Margaret tells me that Neil is worried that we may not be able to record the interview with Tess Gallagher because while the video camera seems to be playing back the images, it doesn’t do voice. I say I doubt that a video camera can’t pick up sound and that even if we’re not getting it in playback it doesn’t mean it’s not recorded. Margaret asks Neil whether he’s heard that. He says no and – before leaving in utter despair – Margaret asks us to sort out why we’re still sulking with each other. It takes some dramatic gut-spilling from both sides, but ten minutes later the storm has cleared and we are all on our way back to normal. I suggest we ring Northern Stage tomorrow and check how to use the camera for sound-recording.

When our bus to Port Angeles arrives it actually turns out to be a taxi-van. There is a slight problem with our reservations not having come through, but we eventually get in. We’re quite exhausted and the journey turns out to be quite long. Neil is dozing off or looking through the window. Margaret and I continue our conversations about the difference between playwriting and novel-writing which we’d started on the transatlantic plane. For some reason I’d been going on about John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation. Now we are talking about novels. We make some crucial illuminating discoveries. Then we chat. Because I recently took my mother to London to visit her aunt – which occasion generated an avalanche of stories – I’m telling Margaret about my family tree. I remember my distant cousin Lidia whose wedding I was taken to when I was a child. The groom was robbed on his wedding day, there was a fight, and we all drove home embarrassed.

By the time we are dropped off at our hotel it is completely dark. This too is a Red Lion (like the one in Yakima), only it feels completely different. The reception is a tiny little drop-in point and there are no pretentious foyers which only mask the basic nature of the rooms themselves. On the contrary, the rooms here are actually accessed from inside long corridors, feel warmer and look much nicer than in Yakima. Margaret and I are sharing a room because of some booking alterations we had to make at the last minute before departure. There are certain recognizable trademark features, but this room is more spacious and very comfortable. There is a self contained balcony overlooking a massive car park positioned at the bottom of a slope lined with evergreen trees. It has been raining, you can smell the sea and for some reason I feel like I am on a school trip. By comparison, Yakima felt like an accidental destination.

Margaret discovers that this time round they went through her bags at the airport. She’s got a leaflet informing her of this and has also found holes where somebody must have poked latex gloved fingers in her face cream tubs.

When we come down for dinner, the lady at the reception desk recommends some fish restaurant which she describes as being orange on the outside. We don’t quite know where to go but as soon as we venture outside of the hotel compound we realise this is more like Blackpool than Harrogate. The orange restaurant is lit with neon lights and is basically a small American diner with tiled walls and a couple of small aquariums by the entrance. I remember Dr Bob Plumb recommending oysters from the Pacific Ocean and noting that they are ‘the size of a dick’ in Seattle. I also remember my Russian friend Masha being sick from the Pacific oysters on several occasions so am very much repelled by the idea of any seafood. This leaves the option of fish and chips which appears in this restaurant’s menu in any number of guises. Over the meal we discuss tomorrow’s conversation with Tess as well as the actual play and what shape and form it might take. Margaret is eager to start writing as soon as possible. Back in the room, Margaret and I spend another hour drinking decaffeinated coffee so I can get over my nicotine craving. We talk about exes and relationships.

That night I dream I am at a party. Margaret is this really glamorous film star and I am secretly really proud to know her. The party is also a film screening. I don’t remember anything about the film that was screened but it had Margaret in it.

Monday, 19.01.04

There are two sections to the hotel restaurant. The one overlooking the sea is not being used for breakfast but we manage to persuade the waiters to set up our meeting in there. There is a great amount of anticipation as we sit at the table, Neil’s camera ready and waiting in between plates. When she finally arrives we recognize her face from the pictures we had seen but she has cut off her hair. I’m thinking that she still looks attractive as she informs us that she had just come back from Ireland with her companion who is Irish and a painter. We spend the next couple of hours getting gradually elated through sheer indulgence in our shared favourite interest. Tess is very kind and giving and generous, extremely sympathetic to our idea and full of enthusiasm for it. She tries very hard to give us detailed responses to all our questions, the only catch being that she makes her own presence felt in all her accounts. She tells us how she met Ray at a conference and how they lived distances apart but caught up with each other eventually. She tells us how she helped him stay away from the bottle. She tells us how she was the first reader, editor and curator of his work. They researched some subjects together – gazebos were her interest to start with, for example, and that’s how he got the idea. But she also paints him occasionally with the mysticism often afforded to a writer – she tells us how she was reading one of his stories to her sick sister and the sister demanded that they ring him and find out what happens after the story ends. Most interestingly, even though we had been fretting about how we would ask her about Carver’s death – death being one of the main themes of our project – she volunteers the story herself. She tells us that on the night of his death Ray had been lying in a bed they’d set up in the living room of her house. Funnily enough, the film of The Lady with the Lap-Dog with Marcello Mastroianni was on television that night but Ray was bothered by a raccoon that he saw through the window. He kept asking for it to be sent away and Tess’s mother tried to get rid of it with a broom.

She regrets that we haven’t got more time because she would have taken us on their favourite walk or maybe even to the house. We regret it too – to say the least. The parting is quite drawn out. Chatting, we find out that she is on a cusp between Cancer and Leo. Ray was a Cancerian. They were both very home oriented, and her favourite meal is breakfast. In preparation for saying our goodbyes, we are talking about her coming over to Newcastle. While talking about it I also mention Thomas from the Box Office who buys Carver’s books for Christmas presents and who was so excited about our trip. We give each other hugs and as soon as she’s left we are bursting with impressions once again. Can’t wait to see Neil’s recording…

We pick up our bags from the reception and board the taxi-van. The driver is really laid back and tells us about the passengers he needs to pick up on the way (we’re the first). We ask him how long it would take to get to Seattle, he calculates that he’d get us there by about 5.30. We’re disappointed by the prospect of travelling for five hours and not being able to see much of the city when we get there. He says it’s a bank holiday today, everyone is off work but the shops should be open till late. We set off and Neil and Margaret are restless because we are going very slowly. The first port of call is the shuttle’s own base, a tiny office in the middle of nowhere where he is meant to be picking up a passenger who doesn’t turn up. Then we drive through a pretty town and into a residential area where we pick up a middle-aged couple. The driver is very happy as he finds an eager conversation buddy in the guy, who sits next to him; the woman sits behind the driver but in front of us and takes out her knitting. The three of us at the back are still talking about Tess Gallagher, discussing Carver’s death, discussing Chekhov’s death the way that Carver imagined it in his story Errand; generating wonderful ideas for the show, but not being able to write them down because we all suffer from car sickness. Margaret says something about using a raccoon hat in a way which is both Russian and American. We generally find a lot of Russianness in this experience of America anyway. We’re hoping to find a lot of similarly unimposing Americanness in Russia. We wonder what we should call the piece – whether the title should be a fusion of titles from both writers perhaps? I think it should be a fusion of their names and that we should just call it the Charver Project. Eventually we arrive at some retail park and find a black guy waiting for us – he was the passenger that never arrived at the shuttle’s base.

We pass some fantastic landscapes on our way which we weren’t able to see in the dusk of the previous day’s journey. This is definitely an area of exceptional natural beauty – I later find out that Port Angeles is at the foot of Olympia mountains and on the edge of the strait of Juan de Fuca – this is actually the American /Canadian border at its western-most end. As we drive down to Seattle via the Sea-Tac airport we actually drive along the strait and sometimes it looks like a series of lakes. Every so often we are shrieking at each other – ‘Look!’ The knitting woman in front of us responds to something we say and Margaret starts up a conversation with her. She – I think her name was Janet – tells us about how they are on their way to their holiday house in New Zealand and will be staying there till April. They used to have a holiday house in Hawaii but decided to sell it around the time of some natural disaster. She tells us that the place where they live now and where we picked them up from was called Blyn. Blyn is in a bay and well sheltered and that’s why an awful lot of pilots have retired to the place – they remembered it as remarkably sunny and clear every tame they took off and promised to themselves they’d retire there one day. Janet’s children – two daughters and two sons all live in the state of Washington now, although as a family they didn’t all live there all the time. In response to simple questions from Margaret, Janet tells us interesting stories. They are all quite simple in content but delivered with such skill and conversational ease that it’s quite a pleasure listening to her. She tells us what her children and grandchildren do. She explains some of her grandchildren’s inclination to want to be teachers as genetic because her husband’s parents were teachers and so were hers and she was also trained to be one. Some other of her grandchildren are very good athletes, but she doesn’t explain where that comes from. Her youngest son doesn’t have children but he and his fiancé have dogs. Her older son is a fruit specialist and lives in Yakima with his family. Her oldest daughter is divorced. She has a daughter who is training to be a hairdresser. She’s learnt by now to be on her own but she has just met somebody at a New Year’s party when she least expected it and they seem to be getting on fine. In talking about their family history she mentions living in a place which had a volcano disaster. She talks about coming back home from holiday and finding inches and inches of ash everywhere. ‘Some artistic people made jewellery out of the objects they found in it,’ she tells us.

Observing that she does it in an English way, Margaret asks Janet about her knitting technique. Janet listens. Then Margaret asks what it is that she is knitting. Janet says – ‘This is a lawn. Or a carpet for a doll’s house.’ In any case it is a green thing that does look like either. Most probably it will be a scarf, however, with tiny grassblades.

We drop off various passengers at various points. The black guy is one of the first. Neil mutters how the guy could have at least apologized for keeping us late. By the time we’ve dropped everyone off and waved goodbye to the lawn-knitting woman and her husband, Margaret and I are getting quite excited about getting back into civilisation. Looking forward to seeing people, lots of people, the urban types. At a certain point, as we drive past huge shipbuilding cranes and general industrial landscapes on our left, we start to see the city on the horizon. It is all lit by the setting sun further to the left, and the entire picture looks quite appealing. Once we drive into the city, Margaret is making a mental shopping list, pointing at all the different department stores. She primarily wants to go to a bookshop however, while Neil is very keen to get to the famous Pike Place Market. I would really like to see a good show. Our hotel is up the road from the Space Needle – we can see it as we park by – but nobody seems to be interested enough in going there. We check in and somehow manage to get some maps and directions to bookshops from the reception clerk who is quite difficult to get through to. We go into our rooms and even though I can finally see the busy street from my window, I feel quite unsettled. Everything is somehow so much more dingy and worn out. For the first time ever I think of all the kinds of things that people use hotel rooms for and am instantly put off. I just put the heating on and go out to wait for Margaret and Neil. First we go to a shopping centre which has a big bookshop in the basement. Everything is so perfectly navigable, the streets being straight and the corners definite. We find the bookshop and I’m impressed by their collection of notebooks. Margaret is looking for relevant literature and Neil goes off somewhere completely different. After a while we decide to go to the Pike Market and possibly even look for another smaller and possibly more interesting bookshop which we identified on the map. Going in a perfectly straight line down a gradually slanting street (which probably has its own number) we observe the famous Seattle train which goes around buildings at approximately the first floor level. The one that we see is stationary but we express a wish to find out what it feels like to travel in one of those. Margaret explains that the train was built as part of Seattle’s Expo in 1962. We later find other references to the same event. As we arrive at the market it just strikes us as an ordinary fish market with its characteristic smells. It’s closing time so we realise that we’re probably not even going to get close to glimpsing the market’s full glory. We only find a couple of pages from some newspaper. They happen to be the culture section and I try to read it while walking in an attempt to identify an interesting piece of theatre. It doesn’t work.

We make our way to the other bookshop which seems relatively easy to get to from the market. It only takes a walk along a pleasant boulevard which feels quite Parisian in fact and leads to a place called the Pioneer’s Square. Once again we notice very few people on the streets and they are mostly beggars. One of them asks us for some change and after we apologise and walk past him, he turns around and starts walking in the same direction a couple of meters behind us. After a while it feels quite worrying and I alert Neil and Margaret and ask them to cross the street. As it’s getting darker we’re all panicking a bit and vowing that we’re taking a taxi after this block. Luckily, the next block’s corner is the entrance to our bookshop. This is quite an atmospheric place with lots of different rooms, tall shelving units, staircases and displays of both brand new titles and some rare second-hand items. The bookshop has a bit of a reputation for political titles, I think. I scour the theatre and drama sections. Only after several hours I suddenly come across a whole lot of books I really want to buy – mainly as presents for various people. I get a book on Hans Christian Andersen (with some pictures) for Neil and Six Degrees of Separation for Margaret. It feels so perfect. I pay for my collection and go downstairs to look for Neil and Margaret in a café, feeling quite elated. We decide to find somewhere to eat and somebody recommends a place called something like Pigalle back in the Pike Market.

Pigalle is a really pretentious little restaurant which we dislike almost as soon as we sit down. It’s one of those places which serves small portions on big plates and even though the tables are intimately lit, the waiters keep hovering around rather intrusively and filling up our glasses. I’m particularly annoyed about having my water glass continually refilled with icy water. There is a waitress who comes to each table with a particular task of reciting the menu in a really ‘pleasant’ but almost dehumanised manner. Neil particularly hates her. Once again we order some fish dishes and talk about fairytales most of the time during the meal. I ask both Neil and Margaret what their favourites are and they keep changing their minds. Margaret talks about some famous interpretations of various fairytales and although profoundly disillusioning, some of them are quite interesting. On the way back I’m struggling against the desire to smoke. Neil and Margaret keep telling me horror stories about how I am bound to have to put at least stone on – I hate the thought of it. Then we think of Alan and start worrying about his diabetes. We conclude that there is nothing we can take him back as a present as he seems to have no vices anymore.

We complete the evening by going back to the bookshop in the shopping mall near our hotel once again. This time Neil gets me a Carver book with a pretty cover called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and I am really touched and sad and overwhelmed. I’m worried that my gesture earlier on may have created an obligation, which I certainly didn’t want to happen. But than again it would be quite selfish only to be a giver and not a receiver as well. In any case it’s a rather nice end to the eventful and emotional journey and it’s good to be able to celebrate things. We go to Neil’s tastefully re-arranged room to look at all our new books. It’s also Margaret’s turn to make a phonecall and arrange the transport for tomorrow. The phonecall turns out to be quite exhausting for Margaret and we all end up dispersing very quickly.

That night, I get a phonecall from my ex and am really annoyed because he keeps asking me to do things for him and it’s my thirtieth birthday and he’s forgotten all about it. In fact I’m back at home in Krusevac, in my grandma’s house. My cousin is having one of her many weddings to her husband. Because their families are in different places they end up having to have them all over Europe. Guests are arriving for the wedding and I am nowhere near ready. I feel bad about it and offer to go on an errand and fetch someone from the other end of town – a settlement called the United Nations. I walk through town and suddenly when I get to what is supposed to be the Archaeological Park, I am suddenly in a place that I know as Kirkstall in Leeds even though it doesn’t look like Kirkstall at all. It looks like a council estate somewhere and some really shady characters – the down and outs from Seattle – are walking around. I get confronted by one of them and get terribly frightened and want to get away and luckily, at that moment, I come across a group of schoolchildren walking in rows together. I join them and follow them to their school explaining quickly to the teachers what has happened. I talk to them in English. The teachers ask me in and say they’ll try and get someone to drop me off where I need to be. I stay behind with one of them and tell her in great detail what has happened. With a French accent she says – ‘That can only happen in this country!’ (I don’t know which country she means but I’m thinking she must be their French teacher). I’m sitting at a table on an upper level drinking coffee and looking down on the school assembly. All of a sudden I sense somebody sitting opposite me reading a newspaper. I’m thinking I know this person, I was always meant to meet him and this is it now – I only hope I like him. I turn around to face him and am neither impressed nor disappointed. We talk. He tells me he knows all about where I come from because he is a geography teacher. I ask him how old he is. He says 32. He’s a Cancerian, will be 33 in June. We chat some more and then he says he has to go. I ask him what his name is and he tells me a Serbian surname. I think he is taking the piss. Then I ask his colleagues what his name was and they give an English name. I am confused but calm. I carry on waiting for a solution and after awhile my geography teacher comes back and says he would give me a lift as he has re-arranged his class. On the way to his car he observes that I should put more weight on and I say I am very likely to as I’ve just given up smoking. He talks to me in an enigmatic way which basically amounts to a reality check. When we get back to where my cousin’s reception is meant to be taking place, it is obvious that the ceremony has already happened and that I missed it. We go in and everybody asks me where I’ve been and I start relating my adventure in great detail while my geographer goes to explore the music selection and eventually comes back with his choices. They all start dancing together, and I wake up. I’m thinking – what a disappointment. It was only a dream. And in Seattle! And nicotine fuelled.

Tuesday, 20.01.04

It is my family’s saint’s day – and we’re all dispersed all over the world. I’m thinking I understand the geography issue and the places merging into each other but why did all the time-lines get completely muddled up as well? I will be thirty in May and my cousin’s Serbian wedding happened last summer. And yet I was obviously also aware of having just stopped smoking here and now. Margaret phones me to ask me whether I slept well and I say yes, I fell in love. We decide to go for a coffee and croissants in a Starbucks around the corner. Neil is nowhere to be found, so we go on our own. Half-way through our breakfast and my account of the dream, I see Neil through the window and he joins us and we talk again about fairytales and Theatre de Complicite and missed opportunities in life.

In order not to miss our plane, we hurry back to the hotel. Once again Margaret is doing the maths as to how much we should give the taxi driver as a tip. As we count the change, it suddenly occurs to me we must’ve spent some 15% of our time on this trip just working out tips. Or Margaret working them out, mainly. When we arrive to the check-in point we proceed to heavily confuse the stewardess with our seating requirements. We all want an isle seat but none of us want anyone sitting next to us. We seem to disagree amongst ourselves as to what it is that we actually want. We draw little diagrams for the stewardess. In the end she just makes her own decision. As we walk towards our gate, Margaret is trying to find the exact descriptions of stubbornness that each one of us possesses. I think we settle on ‘rigid’ for Neil, ‘stubborn’ for me and ‘headstrong’ for Margaret. As we approach passport control, there is a nice lady smiling at me but putting me in a different queue to Neil and Margaret’s. At first I am amused and incredulous that this is happening to me again but gradually my anger and frustration mounts. I am being searched by a female attendant and watching my hand luggage being thoroughly examined. I didn’t even know what junk I was carrying in my bag and am now having to own up to. It is banal but I am not used to these levels of intrusion even with the people who are closest to me. The guy examining my bag smiles at me and informs me that he now has to put it all back in again. I don’t smile back forgivingly. In fact I suddenly realise that this whole operation is being carried out mainly by black people and am particularly angry about this ploy of the US government which is quite clearly designed to subliminally work on the victim and prevent them from any confrontational behaviour. How can you possibly confront a black person for just doing their job, how can you take your anger out on someone like that without appearing as though you’re being racist? So you basically just have to grin and bear it. I’m fuming – metaphorically, because I actually can’t in any other way.

While Neil and Margaret go to the duty free shop I go to the airport staff wanting to make a complaint, wanting an explanation as to why I’m being singled out and whether I should expect this to happen to me every time I go in and out of their country? An officer they send to me to deal with my query just listens sympathetically. He claims this is all random (even though I ‘randomly’ got singled out twice out of the two possible times while neither of my companions did!) Then he starts telling me about how he lost his driving licence for speeding and how he is often assumed to have been convicted only just because he was tried and how you can’t do anything about it. People have to do their jobs etc. I’m thinking he must have been taught this as a strategy too – if somebody complains in an agitated manner and you don’t know what to do just tell them the worst and most humiliating thing that has happened to you. Make it up if you have to, do whatever it takes to uphold this masquerade called ‘democracy’ where everyone is given the right to complain and demand compensations for every trivial thing, where one is rewarded for his/her stupidity, where you can write to the papers to complain about the weather but where you are quite impotent when it comes to essential freedoms – the freedom to be judged on the strength of who you really are rather than the stereotypes that can be attached to you. Yes, I may carry a British passport but I have an odd accent and am therefore a possible threat. And while they are busy dealing with some indignant dramaturg who is trying to acquaint them with the theatrical value of Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver’s prose (and who is also suffering from nicotine withdrawal!), entire shipments of weapons and most elaborate criminal schemes are probably sailing past their noses unnoticed, their perpetrators probably just complaining about the weather.

Once on the plane, I’m fully exhausted. Margaret is being really supportive and good to me. We watch some silly movie about children behaving as adults and adults behaving as children, but most of the rest of the time is just time-travel backwards in complete darkness, with most of us asleep. We’ve forgotten our silicone earplugs in our luggage so I plan to try and buy some in Amsterdam. Margaret and Neil want to get some special liquorice. We are very tired but going on auto-pilot. Once we hit the ground we spend a lot of time frantically searching for things. It’s very early in the morning on 21.01.04. Starting to get light… Facing one last bit of the journey home, we’re daydreaming of lavazza coffee. Looking forward to some proper rest… Worrying about what the food will be like in Russia… We’ve got bottles of melatonin to sample when we get back home!... And a grand piano is playing at the Amsterdam airport…

The Chekhov Carver American Trip - Part 1: Seattle-Yakima, 16-17 January 2004

2008-05-23T20:25:00.002+01:00

(In 2003, the American-born/Newcastle-based writer Margaret Wilkinson, the Northern Stage Associate Director and Designer Neil Murray and I started working on what we called the Chekhov-Carver Project. The idea was to commemorate the centenary of Chekhov's death in 2004, using Carver's story Errand - in which he imagined Chekhov's death - as a departure point. The more we read about the two writers, the more parallels we found between their work and their lives. We were extremely lucky that we also managed to obtain Arts Council funding for research trips to the Carver Country (the State of Washington) and Russia and Ukraine...)

The American Dream-Travelogue

Part 1

First of all there’s all the stories – Chekhov and Carver. All quite similar but – different time-zones, different languages, different periods. And it’s all rather sparse and simple and poignant. Perhaps a portrait of a couple falling apart silently in an unstated way; over a cup of coffee; while perhaps some birds or horses are shuffling around in the background. There’s one, for example – Carver’s – about a man pouring whiskey over the belly of his wife who wants to jump out of the window of the hotel where they work as caretakers because he’s screwing a Mexican maid in between fixing the taps and cleaning the swimming pool. In the minutes before she leaves him forever they remember how they drove out of the town called Yakima and stopped at a farmhouse and asked some old couple for a glass of water and the old couple invited them in to their gazebo. And then there’s several about people drinking alcohol; or people in snowy, hilly or watery landscapes; or people telling each other strange thin

gs that are not at all what they mean but that depict much deeper levels of meaning.

So we’ve been binging on these stories for months now and are revisiting some of them while sitting on a transatlantic plane. At least Neil and Margaret are revisiting them in between Neil’s taking pictures through the window and Margaret’s grappling with an idea for a play. I’m wearing a nicotine patch, which is quite an absorbing experience, actually. An identity crisis, almost. Predictably I can’t concentrate on reading or writing or thinking a complicated thought. Neil’s warned me I could even get ‘hysterical’. So I go to sleep across two of the six seats in the middle row. Sandwiched in between Margaret and some Russians. An American and some Russians, that is. Across several different time-zones. In my slumber, I’m getting all sorts of thoughts about time travel and what would happen if we went around the globe enough times without stopping…– when suddenly Neil comes over to us from his window shouting: You’ve missed Greenland!

Eventually, Margaret and I are frantically stuffing blue silicone screws into our ears to prevent them from getting painful and blocked during the landing, and I recall my GP telling me ‘we are not designed to do this, we’re not designed to fly’. I’m eager to discover America for the first time ever, but everything that happens in the next three or four days will be completely unanticipated, will completely defy all expectations.

Just to get us all off to a dramatic start, I get harassed on arrival by immigration authorities. I offer to leave my fingerprints hoping that that would dispel their concerns about my accent and my name, but even though they take my offer, they also send me through a sinister hurdle race involving sarcastic remarks, mysterious smiles and an embarrassing surgery (with latex gloves!) of my luggage content. Neil and Margaret are waiting for me at the finishing line and we quickly try and forget all about it.

We spend several hours at ‘Sea-Tac’. The Seattle-Tacoma airport. It’s a beautiful afternoon and some winter sunshine streams in across distant landscapes and through the giant airport windows. Neil obsesses about hand luggage trolleys while Margaret and I are trying to work out how to use a public phone. A young black man wanders over to us and just gives us a 50 dollar phonecard. We ring home realising that it’s actually after 10PM. When we settle down to our take-away Starbucks coffee we are both tired and full of anticipation. Neil and I munch on newly discovered pretzels; Margaret is reading; then Neil pulls out his video camera and starts killing the time we have to spend waiting for a delayed commuter flight to Yakima. We are going to visit the place of Carver’s childhood (he spent some 20 years there from the age of three, and his first wife was from the same place).

Several hours later we are in a snowy mountainous landscape. We’ve been scattered all over the plane. The air steward has been making surreal inarticulate announcements, Margaret has been chatting to a peacekeeper, Neil has been forced into conversation by Dr Bob Plumb and I’ve been trying to imagine the terrorist that I might have been in the immigration authorities’ imagination. On our descent Dr Bob Plumb introduces us to his partner Alfredo (Fred) and insists on us giving him a call tomorrow and coming over for drinks. We say we would.

Yakima is a really small, provincial town at a relatively high altitude, historically renowned for apple orchards, and recently also re-invented as a wine region. The hotel driver who picked us up from the airport couldn’t think of any important cultural sites in the town; didn’t know who Raymond Carver was; recommended Mexican restaurants and told us that Yakima (or Yakama) comes from the name of the local Indian tribe. They live in a reservation across the river. There is another town that Yakima grew into and/or out of Union Gap (everyone has their Newcastle and Gateshead). We are driving through Yakima in the dark and the houses remind Neil of Carrie, the movie. He likes some of them and wants to come back and photograph them. From the outside, the hotel looks quite OK. Once through the automatic doors however, we are in for a few surprises. At first we think that the reception manager who’s just moved back from San Francisco is amusing. Then we realise that our rooms are actually accessed from the outside – just like in some 1980s thrillers. There is an outdoors swimming pool in the courtyard and we have to wade through some dirty dry snow surrounding the footpaths in order to make shortcuts. I think my room is very cold, but I’d always think that (especially if its entrance is exposed to the elements). We all meet back in the bar where Neil is drinking his wine and complaining about the average age of the guests he’s registered in the hotel restaurant. We contemplate finding another place to eat but are reminded of the fact that we’ve been up for 24 hours now and settle for the delights of the Red Lion hotel’s chef.

At the table, for some reason we are discussing American toilets. Probably just goes to show how tired we are. And another thing – in America, everything’s possible, you can really get chips with everything. Margaret enjoys the details and the flavours she finds familiar and we just enjoy the food. Because I can’t resist having a cigarette after the meal, I take my patch off and go into the bar for five minutes. The customers are all very strange looking, stuck in some different time, or just plain eccentric – a couple of men are wearing cowboy hats and three middle aged women are dancing to Santana’s Black Magic Woman on an empty dance floor.

We go to sleep and I have terrible nightmares which basically amount to being besieged or attacked.

17.01.04

There’s fruit and yogurt and porridge and pancakes and French toast and all sorts of omelettes you can choose from for breakfast. Over a cup of coffee we are looking at the telephone directory, looking for Herb Blissard, a local Carver enthusiast who also happens to be Bob’s remote colleague. He was recommended to us in an email by Tess Gallagher (Carver’s widow and a poetess). She also recommended another guy whom we can’t find at all. Margaret’s drawn up a list of places to visit. They include a couple of fishing ponds, a lake or a creek (some of which occur in Carver’s stories or in Carver’s life), Carver’s first house in a trailer park, a gazebo/band stand in Central Washington State Fair and some wooden houses. Margaret and Neil’s objections to ringing Dr Bob Plumb amount to a slight feeling of unease about the man we only just met and the effort of politeness the whole thing would require. Plus why would he want to host us? We are probably just exotic and interesting to him because the place is so boring, and we might be a good dinner party story – is Margaret’s elaboration of Bob’s motives. Neil just finds him creepy. As nobody likes talking on the phone it eventually falls to me to ring Bob because I’m the only one up for the idea. Besides, we can’t get hold of Herb either. Bob offers to come and pick us up in his car at midday and I put another nicotine patch on. We decide to go for a little walk around the hotel which is being invaded by various war veterans with strange caps.

On our walk we get as far as the Mexican supermarket across the road. By comparison to England, all buildings in Yakima look rather lonely, there being a lot of space around them. The supermarket is just a plain barrack-type thing with several drive-ins and take-aways scattered around it. For some unexplained reason, Margaret and I feel compelled to buy strange things – she picks a bag of pork-scratchings and I get a jar of sourkraut. Meanwhile, Neil is photographing cactus leaves on the vegetable stalls. We then marvel at some washing boards and Neil says Emma Rice would now be buying hundreds of these if she was here. We spend a surprisingly long period of time wandering aimlessly around this big but rather basic grocery store and I wonder whether this is what jetlag actually feels like.

After cheerfully announcing that Fred is making lunch for us, Bob asks what we want to see today. When Margaret gets to the gazebo on her list, Bob remarks: ‘Oh, I wonder whether that’s the gazebo in our garden’. Somehow it sounds like a Bob remark, but we are intrigued. I pull out the story called Gazebo and Margaret finds the place in it where it mentions an old farm and Terrace Heights – which actually is Bob’s address. All traces of initial reserve instantly disappear and turn into unflinching enthusiasm. And there it really is, a tiny little gazebo behind the fence and a couple of wire dancers sticking out of the deep snow. Bob’s dogs greet us at the door while Fred shouts hello from the kitchen. The house is quite interesting – a labyrinth of rooms with all kinds of tables, antiques and art objects in them. Bob gives us a walk around the house first and shows us a dresser from Jakarta that their handyman who is banned from driving has fixed with little lights, a big painting/wooden collage that their friend Leo has made and refused to sign until they redecorate the wall which they hang it on, a cold room with a sowing machine in it, a room with a square breakfast table and a portrait of a woman on the wall, a bedroom which Bob called an S&M room for some clever reason which I now forget, and lots and lots of other dining tables of various shapes and sizes in the central part of the house and in the adjacent conservatory. We are told there is an equivalent labyrinth in the basement but we don’t get to see it. For lunch, we have omelette with raspberry yogurt and champagne in the conservatory. Then Bob’s ex-student and her daughter (both apparently Hispanic) come round and help us identify the fishing ponds we’re after on the map. Just after lunch we go out into the garden, wade through the snow past a swimming pool – once again – and get photographed with and without the dogs in the gazebo. Margaret wants to write a story about it. When we get back, we find a big fat cat on the table eating Margaret’s yogurt – I do feel like Alice in Wonderland, and it’s only just starting – we put our coats on and set off on our tour of Yakima.

Some of the sites, like the wooden houses, we only film out of the window of the moving car. We stop off at one trailer park which reminds me of a temporary Gypsy settlement somewhere in Eastern Europe. We spend quite a bit of time at the Washington State Fair – wading through snow, of course – to get to the bandstand. This is followed by a visit to Walmart as we need the toilet. Once there, we all swoop on bottles of Melatonin – Neil’s favourite catchphrase prior, during and following this entire trip. While being recommended as a sleeping aid in cases of jetlag or insomnia, the said product is banned in the UK. The cashier however doesn’t know this and is thoroughly puzzled and semi-amused having served all three of us, one by one, each holding his/her own bottle. Obviously, my strip search at the border hadn’t deterred me from committing an act of drug-smuggling.

Next, we drive past Carver’s first house in another trailer park which now looks more like something out of the film 8 Mile. In fact, I’m glamorising it a bit but squalor is so hard to associate with the esteemed subject of our research trip. None of us seem too eager to get out of the car, so Bob jumps out and takes a quick snapshot. Within minutes we continue onto the exploration of fishing ponds. Interestingly, even though we visit two fishing sites, we see absolutely no water anywhere as these ponds dry out in winter. Still, we have some fantastic walks. Eventually, on our way to a gallery which we were informed also sells books on Carver, quite by accident, Margaret spots a running advertisement at the top of a building mentioning a Raymond Carver conference. We park the car, and armed with the video camera, Neil goes to investigate the advertisement more closely. We turn out to be just a week to early for the conference which is due to happen in Yakima College and we resign ourselves to quietly contemplating the notion of fate. We could’ve been a week too late…

As a special treat, Bob and Fred decide to take us for a visit to their friend Leo Adams’. Yet again we get to something which resembles a Gypsy quarter. The road ends and we find ourselves on a dirt track. To our right there is an expanse of naked apple trees, neatly positioned in endless rows stretching into the dusk. Margaret mentions a story by Chekhov or Carver in which somebody makes a fire in an orchard. Bob and Fred explain that we are in the Indian reservation and the orchard belongs to Leo. The house belonging to Leo however is something like a tardis. On the outside it looks like a shed (there’s a window above the entrance through which we can glimpse an old chair leaning at an angle in amongst other reject stuff). There is a series of entrance doors which Leo – an American Indian Lindsay Kemp look-alike – opens for us. We find ourselves in the kitchen first, greeting Leo and Noel’s dogs. Then a whole new world of carefully thought out, carefully arranged space and objects opens up in front of us. To the right there is a Japanese style seating area which you have to step down into, like a jaccuzi made of cushions. This area has a TV set which is hidden away, it has its own fireplace and a blue painted metal washing tub hanging over it. Strange as it may sound, the washing tub never actually looks out of place. Straight through, past a small stove and behind a Japanese style rice paper wall, there is a bedroom with a giant four-poster. This is a typical magazine item, so detailed, so luxurious and so complete that you can only ever take in the whole thing, not knowing where to begin taking it apart mentally so to register the detail. There is a door leading out of this room onto a wooden porch which runs all around the house. Russian olive trees shelter some of the porch and there is – a swimming pool! – at some point down this particular labyrinth. Neil goes out to explore the exteriors and other parts of the house, while Margaret and I go into a huge room on the left of the kitchen which I remember as being a massive space dotted with Leo-restored salon furniture. There are some dry flowers with very long stems on the floor which Leo was obviously going to arrange into something interesting and the walls are lined with pieces of wood – something like a wall parquet. It is a genuinely sigh-provoking space with drapes and unusual yet supremely elegant pieces of interior decoration. By the time we return to the kitchen Noel – Leo’s partner – has poured out some wine and there is a big piece of smoked salmon fillet on the table. I don’t remember Leo saying much at all for a long time while we are arranging our awe-stricken impressions around the table. Bob and Fred lead the conversation and Noel sits quietly with a glass of wine on a wooden staircase facing us. Leo’s neutral expression strikes me as being semi-displeased, with the corners of his mouth turned tensely downwards (when I later relate this to my mother, she observes that indeed this is a typical expression we see on the portraits of Red Indians). The conversation is lively and it doesn’t take long for it to branch out into several simultaneous ones. Margaret is explaining the project animatedly, Fred is getting drunk, Bob is getting excited and Neil and I are praising the salmon. Then all of a sudden, Leo turns to the three of us: ‘You all have very interesting noses!’

We laugh and soon afterwards Leo is telling us the kind of stories that are just as heart-warming and elaborate, just as authentic and luxurious, just as mind-boggling and puzzling as his designs. (‘I’m a Scorpio, that’s why I’m so earthy.’) He was born a twin, but while Eric was liked and became an heir, Leo was cursed by his magician grandfather on his father’s side. He survived the curse delivered at his birth and was cursed again at the age of ten. This time his grandmother on his mother’s side who was also a magician spent three days and three nights trying to remove the curse. He was cursed because he was an unusual child he had all this creative energy and he was also quite feminine. Once, on his way back from school, he found a shawl under a bridge and wrapped himself in it, thus sauntering home in a feminine attire. (He speaks with a slight endearingly effeminate inflection as well.) He visited his grandfather at his deathbed in a hospital as well. And his grandfather just issued an emphatic prolonged hiss at him. His brother got the 40 acres of land. As a young man, he got married to a friend of his. They believed it would help her because ‘she had problems with her legs’. They got a baby girl. He hasn’t seen her since she was five. His wife was vile to him in court, telling all sorts of lies to defame him and get custody of the child. She is very rich and spoilt. He’s heartbroken and pining after his daughter.

On our way to a Mexican restaurant which everyone suddenly insists on going to, Bob and Fred fill us in on the rest of Leo’s story – he won various scholarships thanks to his remarkable talent and studied in France and in Japan. He has worked as a consultant on many rich and famous people’s interiors and was recently an honorary guest at Ray Allan’s (former Bill Gate’s business partner) party.

When we get to the restaurant it is a disappointment, but anything would have been. The food is also quite unremarkable although served as seemingly authentic. At the table, I listen to Bob’s story. He was married to a University professor. She was a sociologist/English lit. specialist and has published a book on Djuna Barnes, I think. They had a son. Fred was a friend of hers. He had come over from the Philippines at the age of 15 and went to the University of Seattle to study chemistry. He was ahead of his class and never quite fitted in. He was always gay. He participated in Bob’s family life from his son’s early childhood. Bob’s wife encouraged Bob to come out. She was teaching at Pennsylvania University when Bob and Fred started living together some ten years ago. She never found anyone else although she had a couple of brief affairs. She died two years ago from a brain haemorrhage. Bob and Fred gave her a magnificent funeral and Bob just recently became a happy grandfather.

In the restaurant I’m surprised by the presence of so many people. Our general experience all day out on the streets has been of Yakima as a rather ‘underpopulated’ town. We did see a parade at one point (it was a Martin Luther King memorial day), but the place as a whole looked quite post-apocalyptic. The restaurant is packed, and on our way out we notice a young Hispanic guy standing in a corner singing famous Spanish-American songs. He looks shy and very much out of place, his face is expressionless and his eyes fixed on some distant point, yet his voice is extremely professional and mature, almost disembodied. I’m still thinking of Bob’s wife, of her loneliness, of this Spanish boy’s loneliness in this corner here and how much less lonely everybody else is thanks to their selfless sacrifice, and it all makes me really sad.

We take a long time to part, it’s quite cold and we make hasty arrangements to go to another Indian reservation for breakfast tomorrow. On the way to our hotel, Bob and Fred tell us an amusing story about Bob’s facelift some years ago and how it all went terribly wrong because he stumbled down some stairs at a party and started gushing with blood, and his surgeon was very cross with him for ruining his work. There is something quite Chekhovian about the story, something terribly embarrassing about having to listen to it, but then again it has actually been a day for generating dinner-party stories and I think we’ve actually ended up with quite a generous doggy bag. The actual doggy bag from the Mexican restaurant we donate to Bob and Fred’s dogs before we wave goodbye.

In amongst other things, that night I dreamt of having a cappuccino in the foyer of the new Northern Stage building, which felt a bit like Victoria Arcade in Leeds. Some dogs were frolicking in the snow outside, and the interiors were all very much ‘Leo Adams’.

To Be Continued

In part 2: Duska and Neil going ‘hysterical’ on the way back to Sea-Tac. American Blackpool. The dreaded meeting with ‘capricious’ Tess Gallagher. Sleeping in Seattle. And more… and more dreams…