DEBATING THE WAR

Was it a bit imperialistic to be one of hundreds of Aussie civilians sitting in the Melbourne Town Hall listening in on a debate on the justification for risking Australian lives in Afghanistan while millions of Afghanis (and desperate folks elsewhere) are living war every day?  But I guess that’s the luck of the draw; despite our tragic individual losses, we win already.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t debate such things; it just felt very academic; because, in effect, the war doesn’t really touch most of us. 

But I digress.  The Affirmative party, arguing that there is no justification for risking Australian lives, was comprised of: lawyer Kelly Tranter; Raoul Heinrichs, scholar, editor, and former foreign and security advisor to Kevin Rudd in Opposition; and Eva Cox, ex-academic, ex-political advisor (weren’t told to whom,) sociologist by trade and a promoter of ideas (!)  Arguing against the proposition were: Jim Molan, retired Major-General who, from 2004, oversaw a multinational force of 300,000 troops in Iraq; Sonia Ziaee, Afghan businesswoman and community activist; and Peter Singer, philosopher identity who needs no introduction. 

First speaker Kelly was dressed in a black suit and white ruffled shirt ensemble, plus fab glasses and hairdo, suggestive of an American TV series lawyer type.  She tucked straight into some unpleasant facts as a result of her research; apparently, governments are not telling us the truth and things are pretty awful on the ground in Afghanistan, worse than when the war began in some respects and in some parts of the country, strongly challenging whether our 1550 troops, as part of a 340,000 foreign troop contingent, are really necessary to what her information suggests is an unsuccessful war effort.  Unfortunately, she wasn’t much of an orator.  And a microphone malfunction meant that some people down the back didn’t hear much of her speech which justifiably irritated her.   Second speaker Jim also conformed to stereotype: a tall, bluff, manly man, just the type you’d expect for running things and wrangling hundreds of thousands of other manly men.  And in retirement, still fit, still got his fingers in pies, still authoritative, still able to convince that he’s in charge and we should just listen up and take orders from him, (except that it’s now called advice.)  He spoke really well: paced himself; made his points clearly; had a terrific timbre; and he pleaded the anticipated party line about fighting for democracy and backing up our big ol’ ally, the US of A.  

As would have been expected, these first speakers set the pace and tone for their respective teams.  I can’t remember what Raoul said, but when all speakers were given a chance at rebuttal he did raise a good point around the concept of a ‘just war’ -  one criterion for waging such a war is a realistic expectation of winning it.  According to the Negative team, the war against anti-democratic forces will be won in 2014 because that is the proposed date for withdrawal of all US and other foreign troops.  By 2014, there will be 30,000 more trained Afghani soldiers, the economy will be in better shape, and with a bit of luck (I believe that was the term used) Karzai and his corrupt government will be voted out.  The Affirmative side made much of the lack of true distinction between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, Afghanistan’s main political forces, when it comes to human rights and totalitarianism, but the Negative didn’t really address this problem satisfactorily, which begged the question: ‘Which party/people, then, in three years’ time, will form a democratic government that guarantees equal rights and security for women and oppressed ethnic groups such as the Hazara?’  The second speaker for the Negative side was an Afghani woman in her late 20s who lived in Afghanistan until she was 12, (with a stint in Pakistan,) and so was able to tell us her memories of that time.  She also relayed a message of thanks from her father to the Australian people (represented by us.)  An interesting speech that called for an empathic response from the audience, but not totally to the point. 

Lastly, and at last, the big two – Eva and Peter.  Eva had to follow Sonia; it’s a big call to follow an emotive appeal from an attractive young woman, but Eva does have her own refugee credential, and an impressively cranky, don’t-give-me-that-crap attitude when she took the mike and even when she was just sitting there on the podium.  She was satisfyingly succinct, to the point, logical.  From where I was sitting halfway down the Hall, I’m sure I saw her rolling her eyes, if not actually then figuratively.  (Or perhaps this was just transference on my part.)  My favourite bit was when she told Peter Singer she didn’t want to hear any more, thanks all the same, about men going to war to protect women.  And if we really cared as a nation about women, Afghanis and refugees, we wouldn’t be letting our government treat asylum seekers the way it does.  The much lauded Peter Singer was hugely disappointing and waffly, trucking out unconvincing (to me) points about democracy and women’s rights.  He tried to have half each way by protesting that he’d taken a public position against the war when it started in 2001, but had since come to understand that we were ethically obliged to keep on making war (killing more people) now we were in it.

After these podium debaters had stated their positions it was Open Mike time for the audience.  This allowed for some obvious and not-so-obvious points to be raised.  My favourite of the latter was made by an older man who complained about how the price of bananas and coal was affecting Australian pensioners.  Him being a strongly accented gentleman of European extraction, it was a little difficult to understand exactly what he was saying or meaning, but he seemed to be complaining that the debate, or perhaps the government, was off-topic and should be focusing on the shocking lack of affordable bananas on the home front.  His polar opposite was an equally older woman who whinged that the billions of dollars spent in maintaining the war may have been better deployed in establishing a strong Afghani infrastructure – health, education, roads etc to kickstart the country after the mess everyone’s made of it since the Russians first moved in in 1979.  Others queried that if we were so bent on rescuing women from oppression, why we weren’t liberating them in other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.  The answer to this, according to Jim, is that we can’t do good everywhere, but we should do it somewhere; Afghanistan won the jackpot. 

Two more points about my evening out are worthy of note.  Firstly, in the row in front of me were four teenagers, fourteen year olds - I know this because I asked them afterwards.  All through the debate, they were leaning forward in their seats, rapt.  One of them even took the opportunity to participate in the floor debate.  This dynamic teenage engagement in seriousness gave me a thrill. The other cause for alternative excitement was when a man sitting in the aisle seat next to the teenagers left the hall in the middle of proceedings, leaving his backpack behind on the floor.  Who would do that?  Leave his personal belongings unattended in a crowded hall of people discussing terrorism and the Taliban and (briefly) Al Quaeda?  After a couple of minutes I considered getting up and also leaving.  Then, when the bomb was detonated – presumably by his mobile phone – I would be saved.  But what about everyone else in the auditorium?   Should I yell, Bomb Bomb! just in case, to alert them all of potential catastrophe?   How much trouble would I be in, exactly, if it were a false alarm?  How bad would I feel, exactly, if the hall and everyone in it were to be blown up and I had made a lucky escape?  Happily the man returned shortly, saving me from an awful ethical dilemma.

The result of the debate?  On entering the auditorium we were asked to participate in a poll: at that juncture, 37% of us were undecided; more than 37% were for the proposition, and considerably less were against.  After the debate we were polled again: 7% undecided; and this time, the Negative team clear winners.  I guess people are more persuaded by emotive appeals and big, strong, important men who claim to know how best to protect us than by dry facts and common sense.  Eva shrugged; I guess she’s used to it.             

DAYTRIPPING TO THE ARCHIBALD

A still sunny winter’s morning seemed the perfect opportunity to motor into the local countryside for a squizz at the Archibald losers and one winner, this year displayed at the Tarrawarra Gallery deep in the Yarra Valley wine-tasting region - presumably so that two birds can be killed with one stone; (I would literally like to see how it’s done, it sounds very clever.)  Yes! what a brilliant way to spend the day, we congratulated ourselves, me and my three artist friends who know what they’re on about - whereas I, like the opinionated Python pope who doesn’t know much about art, know what I like.  To be fair, I’ve looked at plenty of art that I’ve liked very much that other people also think is pretty good.  Once, I fortuitously went into a gallery in Ballarat and was made emotional by an Arthur Boyd landscape, don’t know why; I’m quite a fan of the Assyrian artefacts at the Louvre and the Chagall ceiling in the Opera Garnier; and another time, amused by rooms of Baroque nonsense on a rainy day in Salzburg, thought I’d become a Baroque expert, after that spotting them everywhere; and, of course, Blue Poles is genius and Gough was smart to buy it.  Like many Australians, I make an effort every now and then to go to a place where art is kept, usually pay some money up front, and then gander at most of the art-things for as long as it takes to feel I’ve got my money’s worth.  For your information, it only costs $10 to see the Archibald finalists, and judging by the numbers of bargain hunters leaving already as we were arriving at 11am we were in for a good value show.

Tarrawarra is a super gallery to show off paintings; it has expanses of tall wall in good-sized rooms.  (Although I saw a Robert Baines exhibition there of relatively smallish pieces of sculpture/jewellery in a corridor gallery and the walls were quite menacing.) On this day, despite the fullness of the carpark, not too many people were crowding up the gallery, so it was possible to see the paintings from all angles, up close and far off, and read their blurbs without too much of a wait for spectators to shuffle off sideways. There was a friendly vibe of folks looking at pictures before going to lunch, and you can vote for your favourite one at the end so it’s a comfortable egalitarian experience.  Talking of which, the Packers’ prize was awarded to a realistic depiction of Matt Moran posing self-consciously in a milieu of meat and hacking happily into a haunch, not a metaphor for Masterchef I hope.  Other recognisable celebrities are Gemma Ward looking like a supermodel, Cathy Freeman looking like she has a beard, Jessica Watson looking off into the distance, (planning her next watery conquest perhaps,) Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh just looking, Quentin Bryce looking toffy, and Waleed Aly looking a tad downcast although I don’t know what for; he can’t be broke, I even saw him on the ABC 24 hour news channel recently.  Since the public already own these people because we’ve seen them talking and running and posing all over the place and time, we feel qualified to judge how closely the artist has come to hitting the mark for us.  What can I say?  The aforesaid portraits were nice.  Better for me was Lucy Culliton’s fat, big-nosed old boozer snap of art dealer Ray Hughes with his big meaty hand coming out of the canvas at us.  And Christopher McVinish’s Robin Nevin: what a formidable look she has!  I saw her in The Trojan Women not long ago; I’d be terrified to meet her.  And Del Kathryn Barton’s portrait of Cate Blanchett looking like an illustration of a witch from a children’s tale about to eat one of her three juicy young boys; it’s a highly detailed painting including waratahs and starlings and a galaxy of dots.  It’s beautiful and bewitching and I’d like to have it on my wall so I could look at it for years; and so would you I reckon.  I also liked the Ken Done self-portrait in two shades of yellow, with black strokes to distinguish Ken’s presence in all this sunny paint.  You don’t have to be so self-effacing, Ken. 

And then there was some cleverness that didn’t appeal to me: a miniature for instance, some of it apparently done with a pin rather than a brush by Natasha Bieniek.  On the blurb it said something about the space between the viewer and portrait being forcibly narrowed – yes, yes, but we still had to stand behind the yellow line; how about a magnifying glass?  My artist friends loved Rodney Pople’s Artist and Family (after Caravaggio) which showed the artist being beheaded by his wife with his two sons attending, only the artist showing upset at this gory domestic retribution.  It was a bit like a reconfigured Neighbours episode.  I wonder does Pople want to sell it; or will it be hung for fun in the family home?  Giles Alexander’s Space or Bust I found silly: a Roman-style bust of artist Stan Leach stuck in space with Earth in the background; I’m not clever enough to appreciate this one.  And more gimmickry, in my opinion, in Amanda Marburg’s portrait of David Astle, which was a claymation style head and torso with a gridded bookshelf background to indicate David’s dealings with words as a cryptic crossword maker; this one was Highly Commended by the people in charge of the Highly Commending department.

And then the winner: Margaret Olley painted by Ben Quilty.  We’d seen it in photographs and judged it to be worthwhile seeing the real thing.  And you know what? – It really was; and surely the stand-out winner.  What can I say?  It was painterly.  Marg’s face in the middle was white canvas, and all around this pale centre her hair and her clothes and all the background were made out of delicious creamy slathers of paint, like a chocolaty, berry mousse dessert.  On her canvas face, Quilty had made her eyes and mouth out of thick twisty dabs of paint.  Up close, her left eye is wild, her right tame, her lips collapsed, her look defiant.  Back up a bit and you see the apprehensive, even frightened face of a woman at a vulnerable age.  I don’t know Margaret Olley; she hasn’t been on the telly or in the movies as far as I know, but I do know she is an artist of standing who paints colourful generous scenes of flowers and common objects and places.  What a treasure of a subject and a painting she is!  This one I could hang on my wall, to watch each other as I grow old and older, like a portrait of a sister to keep me company.   

The Night of the Stuffed Zucchini

Last night I ate deliciously.  At Colombo’s in Balwyn, which is an enormous noisy place spread over several levels, crammed with tables, busy every night as far as I can tell, (and I do drive by every evening,) reminding me of an old-fashioned cafeteria except for the friendly waiter service and alcohol sold.  The sort of place families go to for a fair-priced feed in a relaxed environment which isn’t the same thing as eating in McDonalds and food courts which prosper on the premise that everyone can feel safe and unjudged in ordering exactly the same food to be served in exactly the same dimensions, same ingredients, same taste, every time.  And this is where Colombo’s makes a significant digression from the mass-produced fast-dining experience: there’s an extensive pasta and pizza menu, but if you order the same dish on two different nights they won’t necessarily look or taste the same, or have the same ingredients, or even similar ones.  Depending on the dish, this anomaly could be due to what’s in the kitchen on the night, or what’s left in the kitchen, or who’s cooking – that’s my guess, anyway.  For example, the gourmet veg pizza doesn’t necessarily have on it the veggies advertised in the descriptor, and the minestrone soup can be less chunky, although still flavoursome, later in the evening.  Sometimes there’s a very frisky amount of garlic, other times the cook’s completely forgotten it.  Occasionally, ordering something I’ve had before and loved I’ll be disappointed, but these experiences don’t stop me returning and even ordering that dish again because I know it can be good.  The first place I look at on the menu, though, is the specials list; it’s short, usually one entrée, and a couple of mains.  Desserts don’t really count; there’s a fabulously lurid gelati bar and a dessert case, but what everyone comes for is the hearty Italian feed.  And surely, especially, the sugo, oh the sugo!  It’s lavishly sploshed on the food, it’s a gorgeous red, it’s exactly the right texture and thickness, the right balance of salty and sweet.   To be frank, I couldn’t care less for a creamy pasta sauce, or a seafood fry-up, or a chicken breast with whatever accoutrements, or even a pizza base with a smear of tomato sauce; what I want is as much sugo on the plate as I’m entitled to, and something substantial and complementary in the middle of it.  Which was why I was tentatively excited, last night, to see stuffed zucchini on the specials list as an entrée and order it.  Since the main portions are enormous feeds I usually order an entrée anyway and I didn’t want to wait long; (well, no-one ever waits long, but there’s also no urgency to synchronise plates arriving at a table – it’s not the point here.)  While waiting I made small talk with my dining buddy while picturing a legion of baked zucchinis lolling in trays out the back, developing their flavours, becoming more succulent and desirable by the minute, resting up for their big finale in front of me.  And then they came, two squat ones of a well-cooked muddy-green colour, up past their axles in a half bowl of soupy sugo.  Not waiting more than thirty seconds, which was enough time to relish the look of the zucchinis’ lumpy homeliness garnished with a good-sized sprig of basil, I carved into the juicy skin of zucchini flesh encasing a sausage of finely ground beef seasoned with a delicate, just-there touch of cinnamon.  Smothered in sugo, each little bite was even more convincingly satisfying, humble, faultless, amazing than the previous.  I dragged out the pleasure as long as I could without letting the meal go cold, and was only sorry I couldn’t lick the bowl.  Afterwards, lingering while my dining buddy finally got her mushroom pizza and ate it, I longed to go out the back and see my devoured zucchinis’ innocent companions basking in their trays, and maybe take some home for laters, but it’s wise to remember that too much of a good thing only ends in disillusionment and disgust.  Although I wonder if I went back tonight there’d be more of the same batch left; if yes, I wouldn’t order anything else.          

Candide and Meek's Cutoff

I do like a thin book.  I like succinctness and I like to finish a story in one reading before I forget what happened at the beginning and who the people are and what the whole thing is supposed to be about.  Which led me to highly favour a re-reading of Voltaire’s Candide.  (Surely I MUST have read it before.)  Also, the Penguin Classic of Candide has a fab cover, apparently a detail from a bigger painting called Lever de Voltaire, showing a scrawny old person in a nightshirt and bizarre nightcap with a ribbon, executing an unlikely acrobatic pose to step into a pair of pants, with a small spaniel looking on.  It begs the question: What could be happening in the rest of the painting?  Which is a bit like the book.  Even though there’s so much going on in the vicinity of our main character Candide, starting with wholesale slaughter and rape, disembowelment and hanging of his loved one and old tutor respectively, tempest, shipwreck and earthquake, the reader is thinking: This is ghastly, the whole world is a barbaric bloodbath, no-one is safe; who would want to live there?  Even though Voltaire’s fable is a philosophical joke (hoax) meant to debunk a callous optimism about the suffering of others – God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world – and it’s written to be ridiculously funny, so that graphically butchered characters spring back to life cartoonishly to continue living in a world of hellish violence, as a reader I was on a tightrope of being thoroughly entertained by grotesque  misery (- why the old woman has only got one buttock!) and feeling appalled about horrors inflicted on humanity, past, present and future.  It’s a big call, Voltaire, but I think you pulled it off.  It certainly had me ruminating on how dreadful life is for many people other than lucky Australian me.  But to my mind, the big philosophical question is this:  After travelling the world and finding it mean and ugly everywhere, why doesn’t our hero stay in Eldorado, the mythical land of plenty where everyone is innocent and happy, and free to worship God and Science without dire Inquisitorial interest?  The excuse Candide gives us for wanting to leave is that he could never be truly happy without his lady love; and with his next breath the truth comes out: ‘If we stay here, we shall be no different from anybody else.’  Exactly.  Candide, like everyone, is besotted with advantage, which is to say - being rich enough to be powerful.  So the second half of the book tells how stupid Candide spends his money stupidly until all that’s left to him is a motley retinue of friends, an ugly old wife, and a modest block of land to work so they can all eat.  Which is just about all the average person can expect of life, to be fair.  Which sounds like Australia.

And then, me being free to do so, I went to the movies.  For some reason that I can’t remember now, I wanted to see Meek’s Cutoff, an Indie movie showing at the Nova only.  I’d read some encouraging reviews, it’s been shown at festivals, Michelle Williams is in it and was gracious enough not to complain about the shooting conditions in the desert, I’d also read somewhere.  I probably would have seen a different movie, if there’d been a vaguely alluring different movie on at the time.  No, I’m making it up; I wanted to see Meek’s Cutoff, whatever the title means, which I still don’t know.  For what it’s worth, Meek is the name of the tough, scruffy, bearded, middle-aged loner type who leads a pitiful wagon train of three couples and a kid into a desert, the idea being of course to get to a mythical promised land, an Eldorado perhaps of innocence and happiness and freedom to worship God and Science without dire inquisitorial interest.  Except that they’re lost from the start, and we watch the characters walk through a terrifically boring terrain, and we squint at them in the dark because the (lack of) lighting is meant to be realistic, and then there’s no water and then there’s an Indian: yes, only one, and he actually sings when one of the characters is sick, and he’s very stoic and doesn’t speak English, and he has a dead rat for a hair tie on his ponytail.  Apart from the rat, which seemed to deteriorate with time, (yes, the details were drainingly and gratuitously realistic – who needs this?  We all have lives!)  it was mildly exciting when we hoped Michelle Williams would shoot Meek (but she didn’t) and when one of the wagons expectedly broke up while it was being lowered by rope (tediously, tediously)down a not-very-steep incline.  And I’m sure nobody in the audience cared, by then, about the poor suffering couple left without a wagon.  (Actually, we would have preferred everyone’s wagons to have broken.)  Didn’t they, after all, still have their oxen, a sturdy brace with massive curly horns and lustrous brown eyes?  Not grey Brahmin bulls, or water buffalo, or even bison, but brown bullocks.  (And why weren’t these enormous overworked beasts dying from lack of water? – THAT would have been realistic.)  You see how I was distracted by the minutiae, in my desperation to find some succour (!) in the piece, destitute as I found it of sense or meaning or interest.  Other things I liked were Michelle Williams’ lovely round cheeks, the interesting bonnets, closely inspecting the continuity of the women and their clothes getting dirtier and dirtier, and wondering how fresh young Michelle Williams, after the fashion of a French movie, had ended up hitched to an old man.  If you haven’t seen Meek’s Cutoff yet, and are attracted to do so by my review, I will spoil the ending for you now if you haven’t already guessed it.  That’s right: nothing happens.  They are still lost, only instead of Meek (his Cutoff?) they are following the Indian –who knows why? since our Noble Host Savage hasn’t led them to water or civilization and we’re not meant to think he will.  Or are we?  Will the Indian, plodding off into the undulating sameness of his own environment, lead us all to Salvation?  About a minute from the end, one of the characters says something hokily deterministic, I think it’s Meek, rough philosopher that he is.  We have all been lead, inexorably, fatalistically, to this: following the Noble Natural Man who is the only one apparently not scared and apparently on course.  The End.

If I wanted to, I could make a case for the endings of Candide and Meek’s Cutoff amounting to the same thing, philosophically speaking, but not actually speaking, since Michelle and her friends are going to die if they don’t find food and water soon.  In terms of survival, which seems to be what counts for most people on the planet, philosophy isn’t so nutritious.  In a sequel to Meek’s Cutoff, our new friends could eat the oxen; that should take two hours, what with making jerky and tanning the skins and doing other pioneer things.  And Candide and his friends could be set upon by vagabonds or whatever again.  It’s never The End.         

Joanna and Elfriede

Just wanted something light and amusing to read in bed to kick off the holidays, so borrowed two Joanna Trollope books.  Seen her name around the reviews, stroked her spines a few times in shops and libraries, it’s not the first time I’ve thought, ‘SHOULD I read her, give her a go?’  And then, ‘Mmm, no.’ The covers are quite offputting if the idea is to lure me in as a Woman; I’m not much intrigued by a soft focus pensive woman.  And the titles equally damning: A Village Affair, A Passionate Man (!), The Men and the Girls (really?), A Spanish Lover (I don’t think so.)  Does the world really need more stories about passive women (girls?) and the men who dump them?  What was I thinking then, when I selected Marrying the Mistress and The Rector’s Wife (apart from a snigger over the silly titles?)  It was partly being in a hurry and needing to choose quickly, and I was also thinking in the humble fashion of one not published oneself: why not override my sniggery pseudo-intellectual prejudice; after all, doesn’t Jo get invited to Lit Fests etc?  (Or does she?) Isn’t she much published and regarded and read?  Aren’t there people better equipped to assess her literary merit than I, a mere sulky reader.  Reviewers such as Victoria Glendinning from The Times, quoted on the cover of The Rector’s Wife: ‘I would have killed anyone who wrested this novel from my hands…it’s compulsive reading.’  Strong words to make the prospective reader pretty excited if not for the silly soft porn imagery of one woman passively trying to read and the other (playfully? aggressively?) wresting.  As for Marrying the Mistress: ‘A swift and riveting read’ (The Times); ‘Particularly rich and satisfying’ (Mail on Sunday); and ‘Clever, clever…the heart of a…’ (All the rest obscured by the barcode – I love how librarians do that, such power they have.)  Normally, I don’t take these review bites seriously, but since I’d already decided to borrow the books I did.  Even though the blurbs were alarming: ‘He wanted to share her with his family, with the world.  He wanted, dammit, to marry her.  And he was quite unprepared for the painful storm which followed.’  Yes, shamefully, that’s what I borrowed.

So I had a go at Marrying the Mistress.  ‘There’s your first problem,’ said my daughter, so it isn’t just me who thinks so.  (I may have bred her ideologically to agree with me, but she is the type to wrest a rubbish book out of my hands and tear it up for everyone’s good.)  And the second problem is also one of nomenclature: the hero is a judge called Guy (not kidding), the mistress is called Merrion (get out of here!) and the wife is Laura.  And everyone else has nice middle class names like Simon and Emma and Rachel, and one of Guy’s sons is gay and smokes cigarettes and shacks up with a doctor and there’s a house in the country with an English garden.  And the heart of this obnoxious story is that poor old Guy who’s put up with his boring long-suffering wife all these years just wants to have a hot young professional wife instead now, and we’re meant to sympathise with him and even CARE.  It’s a storyline with huge comedic potential – yet, unbelievably, it’s not funny or witty or ironic.  How can this be?  I kept waiting for the punchline.  I read 150 pages and found myself wallowing in the shallows of depression.  I skipped 100 pages to see if anything was going on.  Here’s what I found: ‘Whatever would she think of a son who had found love – true love – in his fifties when already a grandfather?  What would she think of Laura’s reaction and her insistence upon Simon’s succour?’   Simon’s succour?   Succour and wresting, that sums up this book.  There aren’t any ideas, it’s a tedious domestic drama, and it’s offensive in its stereotyping, particularly of Laura the middle-aged, boring, whinging wife who has nothing to offer fab Guy in his sexually sprightly senior years.  Oh puh-lease.  Did I read The Rector’s Wife?  No.

Luckily that very afternoon I had tickets to The Princess Dramas, three short plays by Elfriede Jelinek, put on by Red Stitch Theatre Company.  In contrast to Trollope’s books, this obscure offering had gotten mixed reviews, people walking out, theatre not full both times I went.  Yes, both times: it was that good I had to see it again.  What was so good about it?  What was there to see? - Two and three people on a small stage: a picket fence, a rolladoor with Go To Austria stencilled on it, a barbeque, lederhosen and wigs that went from head to head, princesses and a god-prince, a hunter, swastikas on a dirndl, the head of Jackie Kennedy imposed on a sheet, Jackie herself in a pink tailored jacket, a toy gun, a great deal of silliness and heavy-handed symbolism.  It was two acts of madness of ideas and language, a tornado that circled and circled, speaking of death and artifice and truth and beauty and politics: what else is there?  It was hard and fast, you had to pay attention: good for me who has a teensy attention span; if things get slow and dull, I’m gone elsewhere.  It was laugh-out-loud funny in parts.  By the end of it, I felt like I’d been slapped around, slapped into shape in the old-fashioned way to remind me that these are the important ideas: the imposition of mythology on society to shape it into a compliant form only to find that the shape, the mould is all there is, and all we probably want.  The first time I was thinking more about feminist politics, the second time class.  If as a viewer you don’t bring your own ideological framework (or a familiar standard one) to this play I don’t think there’s any way for it to make sense.  (Is this why people left?   Or because they wanted something more Trollope-like?)  There are plenty of cues and clues, visual and verbal, but the onus has to be on the viewer to organize the information into some kind of coherency.  In the last moments both my daughter and I started sobbing involuntarily.  Just prior, the Jackie character had been speaking very fast, and my daughter put up a theory that we’d had a kinaesthetic reaction, sobbing mimicking the fast breathing of the actor.  Whatever, it was a suitable emotional closure to a wild intellectual ride; we don’t just respond intellectually, after all.  We SHOULD be emotionally devastated by accepted ideologies that impose and sanction hierarchies of abuse and suffering and subjugation – for the greater good, of course.  I came away invigorated by Red Stitch’s arch take on Jelinek’s wild caustic text, my Trollope-induced depression all gone.