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.