Sunday, December 6, 2015

6 January: The Vagina Monolgues

Firstly, many many thanks for the very kind gift you gave me in December.  At time of writing I am looking forward very much to the theatre trip and dinner (two of my favourite things!).  It was a very thoughtful and appropriate present, but I really must reiterate that I do find this such fun to do and am incredibly grateful that Rina makes it so much easier to administer!

I have to say that I am truly delighted that you all seem to enjoy this group so much: your pleasure really makes it all worth while.

I am so glad that The Play That Goes Wrong went so well and that we were all able to enjoy the humour of the piece even though it relies so much on the physicality of the actors and an amazing set!

January: The Vagina Monolgues


I don't need to tell  you what next month's play is!  I think we all know!  I will not be offended if anyone opts to skip the meeting because they feel this play is a step too far. 

What I will say is that it is a period piece of its time (1996), a ground-breaking feminist work that today might seem rather dated and excessive in its use of 'choice' (non-native English speakers, that's a euphemism for 'rude') language and the subject matter it tackles.

It is not a work I have found easy to include in our schedule.  It started as a bit of a joke, but the more I think about it the more I believe it is a piece of history that we should not be ashamed to read.

Whilst the language might make us blush and giggle with embarrassment, I don't think it's there just for the sake of shocking.  New Yorker Eve Ensler, who at the time was in her early 40s (not that that's particularly relevant!) based her work on real women, many from the poorer parts of American society who will have spoken to her freely.

It is funny, shocking and very moving.  It is a serious work, not just an opportunity for a writer to get people to say or listen to words and sentences that will make us feel uncomfortable.  I hope that those of you who are in two-minds about this work will give it a chance. 

Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called the play "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade." In 2011, Ensler was awarded the Isabelle Stevenson Award at the 65th Tony Awards, which recognizes an individual from the theater community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service, or charitable organizations. Ensler originally starred in the production, but since then it has been performed by a variety of famous people as monologues or individual pieces - and of course by amateurs!

In 1998, Ensler and others launched V-Day, a global non-profit movement that has raised over $100 million for groups working to end violence against women and girls anti-violence through benefits of The Vagina Monologues

In a strange twist of fate, in 2010 Ensler revealed that she was receiving treatment for Uterine Cancer.

Wikipedia has a long list of the awards that Ensler has received.  Because I think that this work should not be viewed as a piece designed to shock, rather a work to raise awareness and address female issues, I am reprinting the list in full.  It is very impressive and, I feel, shows how art and social awareness can work together:

  • Tony Award – In 2011, Ensler was awarded the Isabelle Stevenson Award at the 65th Tony Awards, which recognizes an individual from the theater community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service, or charitable organizations.
  • Obie Award for The Vagina Monologues, 1997
  • Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting, 1999
  • Berrilla-Kerr Award for Playwriting, 2000
  • Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, 2001
  • Amnesty International Media Spotlight Award for Leadership, 2002
  • The Matrix Award, 2002
  • Jury Award for Theater at the US Comedy Arts Festival, 2002
  • Lion of Judah by the United Jewish Communities, 2002
  • Sundance Film Festival's Freedom of Expression Award for What I Want my Words to do to You, 2003
  • Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from her alma mater, Middlebury College, 2003
  • NETC Theatre Award, a regional Boston theatre award, 2004
  • NOW Award from the Intrepid Award Gala, 2004
  • The Civil Revolutionary Award from Miami Dade College, 2004
  • Award for International Peace Efforts from Cardozo Law School, 2004
  • The Avon Award, 2005
  • The Sandra Day O'Connor Award from the Arizona Foundation for Women, 2005
  • Honorary Doctor of Human Letters from Manhattanville College, 2005
  • Honorary Doctor of Communications from Simmons College, 2006
  • City of New York Proclamation in honor of founding and her work for V-Day, 2006
  • OK2BU Humanitarian Award In recognition of outstanding contributions to the LGBT community, 2006
  • Honorary speaker D010 at TED Talks, Dec 2010
  • Ensler has also been honored for her effort to end violence against women and girls by such organizations as Planned Parenthood (2004, 2006), The Women's Prison Association (2004), Sahkti (2004), and several LGBT centers (2004, 2006)


Eve Ensler

Some Quotes from The Vagina Monologues



“When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet.”

“The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it's shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remember.”

“No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.”

“Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.”

“I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)”

“I bet you're worried. I was worried. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them.”

“I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas-- a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them-- like the Bermunda Triangle.”

“It's a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct-- "Darling, could you stroke my vagina?"-- you kill the act right there. I'm worried about vaginas, what we call them and don't call them.”

“To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed.”

“The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to "removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.”


Wednesday, November 11, 2015

2 December: The Play That Goes Wrong

Before I look at next month's play, my sincere thanks to Miriam for the delicious cake that she brought along, and for kindly agreeing to share the recipe with the rest of us!

Miriam's Delicious Cake

225gr. softened butter
225gr. caster sugar
4 eggs
275 gr. self-raising flour
2 teasp. baking powder
peel of one lemon (but I forgot to add this) 

·         I beat the eggs a bit first and then beat everything together for a couple of minutes in the Kenwood.
·         Put into a greased and lined backing tin and bake for 35 - 40 minutes at 160 fan oven.
·         Split when cool, add raspberry jam and whipped cream.
·         For topping mix 150gr. icing sugar with juice of one lemon. 

Enjoy! 

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

I hope you all enjoyed last month's play: Dangerous Corner.  I liked the unravelling of the couples'/friends' complicated relationships, and how easily our lives can change direction.

We had a large turn out last month, and so here are a couple of pictures of us!  I think we were all present!



Next Month: The Play That Goes Wrong

by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields

I have to confess that I have some concerns about reading this, as it is a farce and a very well-received one in London: it won the 2015 Olivier Award for the Best New Comedy.

The success of the play hangs on its incredibly well-timed accidents and collapsing set, so let's just hope that our imaginations will be able to do justice to the script!  

NB:  Part of the comedy hangs on word play, so I will try to ensure that native English speakers are given those roles at the appropriate time.

Characters

The action of the play takes place on the set of a production by the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society's production of a murder mystery: Murder at Haversham Manor, written by Susie H. K. Brideswell.  
 
Annie: 
Stage Manager
Trevor:
Lighting & Sound Operator
Chris:
Head of the drama society, director of the play and playing the role of Inspector Carter - an esteemed local police inspector
Jonathan
Plays Charles Haversham, deceased
Robert
Plays Thomas Colleymoore, Charles’ old school friend
Dennis
Plays Perkins, Charles’ butler
Max
Plays Cecil Haversham, Charles’ brother, and Arthur, the gardener at Haversham Manor
Sandra
Plays Florence Colleymoore, Charles’ fiancée and Thomas’s sister


The writers with their Olivier


The set

 

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

4 November - Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley

Thank you to everyone who managed to defy the striking bus, metro and tram drivers and make it to Etterbeek for our October play reading.

I hope that you all managed to follow The Women without too much trouble:  it did occur to me during the play that there were an awful lot of women for us to become familiar with!

Next month we have a far easier read:  Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley.  Not one of his most famous works, but on a quick read-through it seems a decent play - and one that will be far easier to allocate the roles for!


John Boynton Priestley,

(13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984), was an English author, novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, social commentator, man of letters and broadcaster, whose career straddled the 20th Century.
His Yorkshire background is reflected in much of his fiction which first brought him to wide public notice.

Important for our reading of Dangerous Corner (see below),  many of his plays are structured around a time slip, and he went on to develop a new theory of time, with different dimensions that link past, present and future.

Interestingly, in 1940, he broadcast a series of short propaganda talks that were credited with saving civilian morale during the Battle of Britain. His left-wing beliefs brought him into conflict with the government, but influenced the birth of the Welfare State.




Dangerous Corner

Wikipedia has a very thorough summary of the play, which I would encourage you NOT to read!  I fear that it might spoil the reading for you if you know the twists and turns.

However, it will be of benefit to know the characters involved in this 1932 play (1934 film):

  • Martin Caplan - Deceased brother of Robert
  • Robert Caplan - Director of a Publishing Firm
  • Freda Caplan - His wife
  • Gordon Whitehouse - Director of a Publishing Firm
  • Betty Whitehouse - His wife
  • Olwen Peel - Close friend of the Caplans and Whitehouses
  • Charles Trevor Stanton  - Employee of the firm
  • Maud Mockridge - A Novelist







Thursday, September 3, 2015

7 October - The Women

We were a select group of play readers today (2 September), but it was interesting to see that a small group of us could read a play that demanded we sometimes had to each read 2 (or even 3) characters at a time!

However, the highlight of the afternoon was Charlotte's wonderful chocolate cake.  By popular demand here is the recipe:

Charlotte's Chocolate & Marron Cake

150g Dark Chocolate
130g Butter
500g Creme de Marron not puree (available from Match)
4 Eggs

  • Melt the chocolate & butter
  • Beat the eggs into the creme de marron one at a time
  • Add chocolate & butter slowly into the creme de marron
  • Cook at 150 degrees for 50 minutes

The Women by Clare Boothe Luce

The Women is a 1936 play about a group of Manhattan socialites, their pampered lives, power struggles and gossip.  It was made revived in 1973 and 2001, and turned into a film three times: in 1939 and then in 1956 (as The Opposite Sex) and 2008It strikes me as a Sex in the City for the 1930s!


Clare Booth Luce

Although best known for her play, The Women, Clare Boothe Luce (March 10, 1903 – October 9, 1987) was the first American woman appointed to a major ambassadorial post abroad.




Characters

Mary (Mrs. Haines): middle 30s, upper middle-class housewife, married to Stephen Haines with two children (little Mary and little Stephen), demure, faithful, innocent/positive outlook towards marriage

Crystal: middle 20s, single (until marriage to Stephen): no children, lower-class, fragrance salesperson, flirtatious, deceitful, ambitious, manipulative, unfaithful, disrespectful

Sylvia (Mrs. Fowler): 34, upper middle-class housewife, married to Howard Fowler with two children (male born with forceps, female born by Caesarean section), gossiper, assertive, disloyal, dishonest, blunt, inconsiderate, selfish

Peggy (Mrs. Day): 25, middle-class housewife (she has money but not her husband), married to John Day with no children (but longs for a child), innocent, compliant, awkward, sympathetic

Nancy Blake: 35, upper middle-class writer, single, possibly bi-sexual (virgin), traveler, blunt, direct, feminist, unemotional

Edith (Mrs. Potter): 33/34, upper middle-class housewife, married to Phelps Potter with 4 children, one-dimensional, dull, non-confrontational, does not like children, sexual tendencies, static

Mrs. Morehead: 55, upper middle-class, Mary's mother, presumably a widow, old fashioned/traditional, strict, wise

Countess De Lage: middle-aged, upper middle-class, divorced four times, outgoing, hopeless romantic

 
The 1936 original cast

1939


2008




Thursday, July 30, 2015

August - Play Reading Cancelled

Sincere apologies, but due to personal circumstances I need to cancel our meeting on 5 August.   I look forward to seeing you in September, when we will read When We Are Married.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

5 August - When We Are Married by J B Priestley

We had a marvellous turn out for such a hot day - 11 of us were grateful for any breeze we could catch with the windows and doors open!

We were delighted to welcome Christine for a taster of the play reading group, but very sad that this was Ryoko's last meeting with us before her return to Japan at the end of the month: Ryoko you have been a lovely member of the group and we are really going to miss you.  We wish you had found us earlier and been able to be to more meetings.  We all wish you much happiness in being reunited with your family.

And so to the plays.  Well, after Bennett's somewhat saucy romp, very much set in the English Farce style and looking at not just bodies by human foibles and obsessions - and also perhaps very much a play of the 60s/70s - we are next going to step back in time to the more restrained Victorian Era.

In J. B. Priestley's 1938 hit play, a group of three couples, old friends and all married on the same day in the same chapel, gathers at the Helliwells’ home to celebrate their silver anniversary somewhere in the north of England.

When they discover that they are not legally married, each couple initially reacts with proper Victorian horror – what will the neighbours think? – and all three couples find themselves re-evaluating their marriages.

Hovering closely over the proceedings is the Yorkshire Argus' alcohol-soaked photographer, keen to record the evening's events for posterity, and a wickedly destructive housekeeper who is hoping to use the couples' mortification to her own advantage.

When we are Married was turned into a film in 1943.

A still from the 1943 film
 
In an interesting connection with July's play: in a 1994 radio adaptation of When we are Married Alan Bennett played one of the husbands!
 
This is a popular 'traditional' play, which I hope you will all enjoy.

The three couples in the original cast: clockwise from top left, Raymond Huntley, Lloyd Pearson, Ernest Butcher; Ethel Coleridge, Muriel George, Helena Pickard

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

1 July - Habeas Corpus by Alan Bennett

Postponed from 3 June: for further information about this play, please see below.

3 June - Change of Play - The Visitor

As we were a small group today, we had a last-minute change of plan and instead of reading Habeas Corpus we read The Visitor by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.  This was a very different play to the one the group was expecting to read, addressing serious issues with very little light comic relief.  However, the group seemed to enjoy the play and discussing the questions it raised.

The Visitor, based on a real incident, imagines a night between the invasion of Vienna by the Nazis in 1938 and Freud's departure to safety with his wife and daughter, Anna.  Anna is taken away by a Nazi officer to be interrogated after she is rude to him.  Freud wrestles with his conscience over whether or not to sign a declaration that will enable him to leave Austria, and a strange, well-dressed, man appears in his room.  Who is he?  Is he a magician?  Is he an escaped psychotic patient?  Or is he God?

This intellectual play raises issues about faith as well as coping with life under the Nazi threat. 



Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt was born in France in 1960 and now lives in Belgium.  After being brought up as an agnostic he became a Christian  years ago. He is quite prolific and has a large number of plays, films and books to his name, most notable Oscar and the Lady in Pink.




Much is known, and written, about Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).  Most relevant to The Visitor he believed that God was created by man's desire to have a permanent father-figure.  He died in London, just after a year after signing the paper that enabled him to leave Austria.



Anna Freud (1895-1982) was born in Austria; the last child of Freud and his wife, Martha Berneys.  She followed her father and worked in the field of psychoanalysis, particularly child psychoanalysis.







Thursday, May 14, 2015

3 June - Habeas Corpus by Alan Bennett

Well, The Rivers of China certainly gave us something to think about.  I think we all found this a life-changing play and will be certainly taking home with us the following passages (I copy them here so that you can print them off and put them on your fridge):

"Woman is from ground.  Self development not possible for her unless she is with man"

"Only way for woman is to evolve - go to what you call 'heaven' - is with man"

"There are women try to become man, but this wrong for her nature. Man has aspiration to find heaven because has possibility for immortality. But such aspiration poison for woman unless has man to help her"

We might also have taken away the message from this play that there should be equality of the sexes and that neither should be the ruling gender.


Habeas Corpus by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett is a popular playwright with the group, and after today's more challenging play we are throwing ourselves back into his arms!

Habeas Corpus is the legal term for: You shall have the body.  And that pretty well sums up this 1973 farce!  I think we can look forward to a bit of a romp, double entendres and rumpy pumpy! I read that Bennett wanted to write using the farce tradition, but with a twist.  His twist is that there are few stage instructions ... so you'll need to keep on the ball!

The play concerns the aging Dr. Arthur Wicksteed and his pursuit of a nubile patient, Felicity Rumpers. Wicksteed's wife, Muriel, is, in turn, lusting after the charming head of the British Medical Association, Sir Percy Shorter, who, as well as being Wicksteed's old rival, turns out to be Felicity's father - the result of an under-the-table liaison during an air-raid with Lady Rumpers, her mother.  Felicity herself is pregnant and finds a way to cover it up in the hypochondriac son of Dr. Wicksteed, Denis.  Meanwhile, Wicksteed's spinster sister Connie, ashamed of her flat-chestedness, has schemes of her own.

Sir Alec Guinness and Madeline Smith









Monday, April 20, 2015

6 May - The Rivers of China by Alma de Groen



Alma de Groen, the author of The Rivers of China, is an Australian playwright, born in New Zealand. 



In The Rivers of China two plots interweave: the Fontainebleau narrative and the Sydney narrative, both involved with the life and death of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield, and both concerned with the place of women and artists in a patriarchal society. In 1923 the writer Katherine Mansfield went to the guru Gurdjieff in Fontainebleau that he might "cure her soul." In the 1980s (or 'today') in Sydney, a young man awakes in a hospital to find himself in a world dominated by women. As they struggle to discover their true identity, their separate stories intriguingly interweave. Alma De Groen makes free use of Mansfield's journals and letters and the writings of Gurdjieff.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D H Lawrence and Viriginia Woolf. Her life-style was 'bohemian'.  She had lovers of both genders and whilst romantically engaged with  Arnold Trowell took his brother, Garnet, as her lover.  Pregnant by Garnet, Mansfield quickly married George Bowden, but left  him the same evening before the marriage could be consummated and returned briefly to Garnet, but lost the baby after her mother dispatched her to Bavaria.  Shortly after her mother cut her out of her will.

She then began on a tempestuous relationship, and marriage, with the magazine editor John Middleton Murry. 

Mansfield was greatly affected by the loss of her brother in France during WW1.

Mansfield spent her last years seeking increasingly unorthodox cures for her tuberculosis. The play The Rivers of China is a based on the time she spent Georges Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France.  She died of TB aged only 34 in 1923.





George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (January 13, 1866–1877? - October 29, 1949), was an influential spiritual teacher of the early to mid-20th century who taught that most humans live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to transcend to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential.  At different times in his life, Gurdjieff formed and closed various schools around the world to teach The Work. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and early travels expressed the truth found in ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives and humanity's place in the universe.

Gurdjieff was born in culturally diverse Kars, a former outpost of the Ottoman Empire, and grew up speaking Armenian, Pontic Greek, Russian and Turkish before acquiring various European languages.  He traveled widely, funding himself through various 'business' enterprises along the way. As well as seeking 'the Truth', Gurdjieff was a writer, choreographer, composer and lecturer who gave assistance to members of his extended family fleeing from Russia.

The establishment at Fontainbleu was spartan and Gurdjieff put into practice his teaching that man needs to develop physically, emotionally and intellectually, hence the mixture of lectures, music, dance, and manual work and Gurdjieff was often harsh on his pupils.  He acquired notoriety as "the man who killed Katherine Mansfield" after she died under his care. However, another school of thought is that Mansfield knew she would soon die and that Gurdjieff made her last days happy and fulfilling.  

During the play the author directs some of Gurdjieff's music to be used.  You can find it here: 

 



The Rivers of China also makes reference to various other works, most notably the three poems below:


The Soul has Bandaged moments - Emily Dickinson

The Soul has Bandaged moments -
When too appalled to stir -
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her -

Salute her, with long fingers -
Caress her freezing hair -
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover - hovered - o'er -
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme - so - fair -

The soul has moments of escape -
When bursting all the doors -
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings opon the Hours,

As do the Bee - delirious borne -
Long Dungeoned from his Rose -
Touch Liberty - then know no more -
But Noon, and Paradise

The Soul's retaken moments -
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the song,

The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue –


On First Looking into Chapman's Homer - Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
   Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
   That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
   When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
   He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.


Rarely, rarely, comest thou - Shelley

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
         Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
         Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou are fled away.

How shall ever one like me
         Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
         Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade
         Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismay'd;
         Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Let me set my mournful ditty
         To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
         Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

I love all that thou lovest,
         Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dress'd,
         And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms
         Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
         Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

I love tranquil solitude,
         And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good;
         Between thee and me
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.

I love Love—though he has wings,
         And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
         Spirit, I love thee—
Thou art love and life! Oh come,
Make once more my heart thy home.