In the last month, the Ancient Greeks have been pushed to the forefront of my mind - principally, the bards and storytellers, the myths and legends. I saw a modern adaptation of The Oresteia, all gore and revenge in a Sevenoaks mansion. I rewatched Helen McCrory’s unmatched portrayal of Medea. I goggled at The Odyssey (though sadly not in iMax), and thought it would have been nice if it had been a little less grey.

When I think about the Greek myths, they are in technicolour (apart from Hades – that does tend to conjure more of the black/grey shades so beloved of Christopher Nolan). The red of the anemone flowers that blossom from Adonis’ spilled blood, the glittering shower of gold impregnating Danaë, daughter of the King of Argos, the cobalt blue of the Aegean sea with its dusting of bubbled, white foam.

These stories of gods and goddesses are not redolent of behaviour of exemplary goodness. They are not a call to exist in a state of love and compassion to all, to swallow your impulses. These immortal beings, sat high on Olympus, are as prey to emotional frailty and bad behaviour as the confused humans rushing around down below.

Jealousy, fury, lust – the gods are propelled by these forces in their dealings both with each other and with humankind. There is moral justice, but it is merciless. The Furies, their wings stirring the wind into a frenzy, hunt the guilty until they are driven to madness. Their code of morality is unflinching, and chief among crimes is disrespect to the gods or killing a family member.

As with so many constructions of understanding the order of the universe, blood is one of the most potent symbols. The gods themselves do not have the dark red blood of humans – the fluid that runs through their veins is the golden ‘ichor’. This whispering fluid is one of the primary distinctions between the bodily form of the gods and their human counterparts:

‘they eat no bread, they drink no shining wine, and so

the gods are bloodless, so we call them deathless.’

(The Illiad, book V.)

So though controlled by the same emotional impulses as humans, their bodies are sustained by a mysterious alchemy of liquid. This is in opposition to the Christian tradition – the god that walked on earth had none of the baser human emotions that dictate much of our actions, yet the blood that flowed from each piercing on the cross was, as ours, ruby red.

In Greek myth, blood creates some of the most essential forces – morality and love. In the origin stories of the myths, first there is Chaos – an abyss of time and place, only to be understood in the negative. From within this hung suspension, paradoxically created without action or impulse, emerges, unprompted, Gaia, Mother Earth. Then comes Tartarus and Eros; the one a prison of infinite pain, descending destruction on the soul, the other the pull and tension of attraction from which springs all creation and generation.

Gaia produces Uranus, the sky, to hold her in his embrace, and they generate the twelve Titans. Gaia encourages one of these, Cronus, to overthrow his father, and Cronus castrates Uranus with a sickle. The blood falls down onto the earth, soaking into the dust, and from the drenched ground of Gaia’s body spring the Furies, born of a mother’s anger and fear for her children. They carry within them the sin of hubris, of overthrowing a god, and of killing kin.

Cronus throws his father’s genitals into the sea, and the severed flesh lingers on the water, turning into thick, white foam. In this foam, lovingly, slowly, Aphrodite is gently created, the goddess of love and sexual desire, one of the most powerful of the gods. There is no hurry and no rush as she forms into perfection, before stepping onto solid ground to wreak smiles and tears.

Aphrodite spends a lot of time on earth muddling in human affairs, along with her other brothers and sisters. The gods descend from Olympus to cause havoc, fighting, quarrelling, loving. There they find the human heroes and villains, acting under the same impulses of love and conflict. Medea is bewitched by desperate love for Jason, leading her to betray her family to be with him, and then kills their children when he betrays her in turn. Ares, god of war, joins the heroic Hector against the Greeks in the Trojan war. He is spurred into battle with the Trojan soldiers around him, throats choked with dust and bloodlust.

At the end of it all there is the underworld, Hades. In all meaning-making water is another inescapable symbol. The different rivers of Hades travel quietly to its gates and within its confines, a compounding of saltwater tears of sorrow, loss, regret. Charon rows his souls across Acheron, taking them on their final journey to the land of the dead. The water lapping the sides of his boat is softly insistent: the sound and the fury of life is done, and now all is darkness. High above the earth’s kernel, the gods and goddesses continue to play at love and war, before ascending to Olympus once again.

When someone is murdered, the news story is cold. Definite. It presents the facts, and sometimes those facts have the weight of systemic injustice festering within them. Such was the case with the shooting of Tyisha Miller on the 28^th July 1998, an African-American woman killed whilst unconscious in a car by four police officers, shot twelve times.

However, these facts aren’t able to convey the full vitality of a young life, and that is what ‘Dreamscape’ does, a play written by Rickerby Hinds, directed by Hinds and Mxolisi Masilela. In the play, the young woman is Myeisha Mills, superbly played by Kim Blanche Adonis. The story is told through the mediums of beatboxing, spoken word, rap and hip-hop dance, and it flows through each expressive form.

We are told the police find her in a car after relatives call for an ambulance, with a gun on her lap and clear signs she is undergoing a potentially fatal drug overdose whilst unconscious. Kgwadi Tshwarelo Selolo doubles as a police officer peering into the car and the coroner reading out the autopsy in precise and detached detail. Each bullet hole is specified, beatboxing mimicking the sound of the bullet entering.

Yet from within this spoken dismembering of her body into anatomical parts a story is defiantly pulled. Though the real spectre of racism within the US police is hovering in the background, Myeisha’s dreamlike, alive-ghost of a narration centres her own life and celebrates it. The coroner narrates the bullet hole in the skull and Myeisha muses on hair styling; the bullet hole through her chest triggers her to remember the development of her sexuality, her growing awareness of it within her body.

Adonis is a beautiful dancer, fluid and joyful in her movements, and the characters’ sheer revelling in the expressive potential of her body is paradoxically one of the most tragic parts of this portrayal of a life denied. She is also funny, warmly sharing small moments of humour and excitement with us. There is a sense throughout of a life on the brink; that there is so much to come in womanhood, having just left adolescence behind.

At times the story felt slightly hingeless – a ghost come back with fervent aliveness to share fragmented snapshots and vignettes. There was a sense of wanting more from the script – more of the rootedness of this life, an engagement with the people around Myeisha who shared her life with her. Nonetheless, Adonis’ vivacity and emotional range imbued the story both with the inherent grief of a life cut short whilst creating a celebration of each memory.

☆☆☆☆

Dreamscape is at the Arcola Theatre until the 8^th August. Tickets linked here: https://www.arcolatheatre.com/event/dreamscape/

The opening to the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 is deceptive in its simplicity. Each note sits midway between sorrow and sublimity, strung on the air like droplets on a stem. Then the orchestra enters, and the lonely refrain is replaced by its understanding, taking the lament and opening its sound world into harmonies that hint at consolation. The piano returns, refuting the ecstasy of sound. Finally, they join together in a way that feels inevitable, and then, and only then, the weight of the solo line lightens.

Mozart was the musical constant of my childhood, a composer I would return to again and again. I went to sleep listening to the letter duet from Mozart’s opera ‘The Marriage of Figaro’. Age 12, I was performing Mozart violin concertos. In the choir at school, I sang the ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem. I remember the sound filling the cathedral we sang in, imagining the stain glasses windows shattering in glittering shards from the sheer force of the music.

The 20^th century theologian Karl Barth began every day by listening to Mozart. He said that when the angels are playing music for God, they play Bach. ‘However, when they are among themselves, they play Mozart, and that then, indeed, God listens in with special pleasure.’ I read that years ago and the image imprinted in my mind – God eavesdropping on the angels as they played Mozart off-duty.

Barth had a clear shift of theological perspective due to the outbreak of the World War One. Many of the leading academics and cultural figures within Germany signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, supporting the war and defending the actions of the military. This included some of his previous teachers, who had been instrumental in shaping his theological thought, and the seed was planted for his divergence from the belief in the rootedness of the divine within history and human experience.

For Barth, God was unknowable, and how God decides to meet us is unexpected and out of human control. He famously said: ‘God may speak to us through Russian communism, through a flute concerto, through a blossoming shrub or through a dead dog.’ There is no formula for spiritual revelation – merely openings through which revelation could occur, and these can be the opposite of what we associate with the divine.

He loved Mozart’s music for its humility – its radical simplicity, where ‘the earth stays in its place, remains itself, without feeling that it must therefore rise in titanic revolt against the heavens.’ Unlike Beethoven’s furious symphonies, there is no call to tear down the walls and sound the trumpets of revolt.

Nonetheless, Mozart’s music didn’t avoid the political, and, as ever, within the lightness is equally found weight. Written a few years before the French Revolution, his famous opera The Marriage of Figaro is based on the French writer Beaumarchais’ play of the same name. It was censored in France when first published due to its commentary on and satire of a corrupt elite; a nobleman is humiliated by the plot of his servant Figaro and wife, the Countess Rosina, after trying to sleep with Figaro’s wife, Susanna. The conventional order is overturned – the aristocrat is taught a lesson by his inferior.

Mozart softened Beaumarchais’ play with a libretto focusing more on the human elements of the story - forgiveness borne of deep love, even after pain and betrayal. As Barth said, in Mozart ‘the laughter is never without tears, tears are never unrelieved by laughter.’ The Countess sheds countless tears in her grief at her husband’s infidelity and loss of love. But when the Countess and Susanna compose a note supposedly from Susanna to lure the count into an assignation to trick him, beneath the longing is the laughter of remembered pleasure and love as she writes of the breeze that will blow through the pines at the lovers’ meeting place.

My favourite film scene is from the Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Dufresne, a prisoner at Shawshank State Prison, plays the letter duet over the public address system to the whole prison. The inmates stop and listen, eyes upwards. Morgan Freeman’s character, Ellis Boyd Redding, who narrates the story, has this to say: ‘It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments every last man at Shawshank felt free.’

As the sopranos echo each other and overlap before finally merging into one, the corrupt warden bangs increasingly frantically on the locked door; Andy turns up the volume of the record, and the soprano reaches for the top B flat. Knowing he will receiving a gruelling punishment, those 3 minutes 31 seconds are worth it. In that moment, he is as free as any man walking outside the grey, high walls.

With the lightest of touch, Mozart’s music brushes the soul. American composer Leonard Bernstein described Mozart as embodying ‘a spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering—a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.’ Mozart’s music shows an inherent belief in the essential beauty and goodness of humanity, partly due to his ability to create a sense of wholeness – what Barth described as the laughter-tears duality.

I cannot puzzle with my cognitive processes why Mozart evokes this within his music more than any other composer, including the mathematical purity of Bach. But I do know that this sense of wholeness has, and always will, counter the dis-ease of the human psyche when it fractures into parts and one part looms larger than the others, blooming bruise-purple. The philosopher and psychologist Ian McGilchrist explores the idea that psychological suffering is created through the narrowing or entire loss of context that happens within this fracturing. In ‘The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World’ he expounds his theory of fragmentation:

‘If the detached, highly focused attention of the left hemisphere is brought to bear on living things, and not later resolved into the whole picture by right-hemisphere attention, which yields depth and context, it is destructive.’

I have found the music of Mozart organises itself in such a way as to defy this fragmentation; that it takes both the acuteness of laughter and tears and contextualises them within a greater whole that means they are only oppositions within the same ultimate coherence of meaning.

As a generation, we are undergoing a crisis of meaning, and meaning comes not from the explainable, the tangible, but from the sublime. And if there is any word that can describe the music of Mozart, that is it. I’ll leave on this note – find the second movement of Mozart’s concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra. Listen to a minute in, beyond the hesitant echo of the clarinet and harp of the opening strings, when the harp breaks into arpeggios and the clarinet blossoms above. As God eavesdrops, with the weight of a universe on his shoulders, that’s the moment he cracks a smile.

Some people’s lives read more like fiction than reality, and the price they often pay is intense suffering. Rika’s Rooms is a one woman play based on the playwright Gail Louw’s own mother, whose extraordinary life was borne of vast historical events that traumatised swathes of humanity. Directed by Anthony Shrubsall, the play charts a story forged from the fire and rubble of Nazi Germany, the Jewish resistance to the British in Palestine and Apartheid South Africa.

Emma Wilkinson Wright plays the eponymous Rika across all stages of her life, from a frightened, bewildered Jewish child, to a beautiful young girl operating as an undercover agent for the Irgun, to an old woman with Alzheimer’s, hunched over with age. Her performance is jaw-dropping, as she metamorphoses through each change, somehow as believable with a ‘shining morning face’ as in ‘second childishness’. She also voices the other characters: the nurses in the care home, her lovers, her children, her husband’s family. This could feel gimmicky with another actor but through her skill Wilkinson Wright instead brings these ghosts from Rika’s past into the room.

Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, and Louw doesn’t shy away from her portrayal of the painful unselfing of someone she loves. With the illness comes a re-emergence of past trauma, as Rika becomes confused between past and present and ghosts feel more alive than warm flesh and blood. Wilkinson Wright brilliantly conveys the lingering pain of Rika’s turbulent past – the fear of interrogation, of being watched, betrayed, and abandoned.

However, the balance between past and present felt off, as the moments portraying Rika’s present day felt overly focused on compared to her earlier life. The same scenes in the present played out again and again – and though in part effective in conveying the confusion of Rika’s narration as her world becomes unreliable it began to feel dramatically repetitive. Rika’s time in South Africa felt particularly underdeveloped, with a swift transition from her outrage at the racism and division to her lotus-eating – sipping tea, eating dainty biscuits and shouting at the servants, like all the other Johannesburg middle class white women.

The set is simple but effective – a stage littered with paraphernalia where the significance of individual items is gradually revealed. A smart leather bag given to a poor young woman that turned her head towards marrying the wrong man; a china cup in a dazzling hotel where that same young woman was wined and dined by a man she would help betray. After an experience of acute grief Rika talks of the emptiness she feels inside, with shelves stripped of belongings. However, within these caverns remains a spirit that can’t be quelled, a spirit to whom Wilkinson Wright does beautiful and unflinching justice.

Rika’s Rooms is at the Tabard Theatre until the 25^th July. Tickets linked here: https://www.tabard.org.uk/production/rikas-rooms

Credit: Johan Perrson

Hell hath no fury like a mother betrayed. The Greeks understood the power of maternal love like no-one else – not as a fuzzy, domestic feeling, but charged by the furious instinct to destroy anything that threatens or harms the beloved child.

Simon Stone’s production of The Oresteia is a modern-day update of the Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragedies, condensed into an unrelenting three hours. Moving backwards and forwards between past and present day, Stone’s version masterfully reveals the story bit by bit, giving it the edge of a crime thriller. The play starts on 21^st birthday of the elusive Isabelle, the daughter of Christopher (David Morrissey) and Montie (Mary-Louise Parker). Fast forward and we learn we will never meet Isabelle – she died on that day, and Christopher is to blame.

Her death sets the events in motion, leading to the unravelling of mother, father and two siblings, Augie (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Isabelle’s twin Alice (Rosie Sheehy). Their modern-day palace is a glass-walled, sleek box of a house in Sevenoaks with floodlights up the walls; the king is burly businessman Christopher, the head of Middletech, a defense tech company involved in murky dealings. Wealth reflects off every polished surface, and hanger-on cousin Jerome (John Macmillan) is shamed by Christopher for buying Bollinger rather than Dom Pérignon (don’t worry, he gets his own back.)

The glass box revolves as we peer into each room, where another little wound is being cut until the stage is gory with trauma. Glynn-Carney and Parker are particularly brilliant in that most Greek of dysfunctional relationships – the broken mother-son bond. There is a moment where Augie returns from the army after years away, cast out of the house. Montie comes back from her Pilates (the necessary counterbalance to the drug addiction of a Home Counties almond mother) to find him in his room, wan and pale with PTSD. The audience gazes upwards, and the lighting seems to soften for a moment as they connect across the chasm of private pain. The connection refracts again, but it was there.

Stone is brilliant at points of contrast like these, where both his direction and writing soften the overwhelming horror of the story through humour or bursts of hope. There were moments of uproarious laughter from the audience, as the mask of tragedy flipped to comedy with effortless ease due to the superb acting. There was also some good luxuriating within wordplay (‘dismember…remember’), which luckily does fit with the tortured characters.

The only moment where the luxuriating went too far was Montie describing her dream of flying across New York as a winged, taloned creature. There is nothing more boring than listening to someone talking about their dream, no matter how much psychological torture it reveals. Nonetheless, the conjuring of the monstrous shadow of a Fury within the mother figure is a brilliant touch. Montie’s shoulder blades press stark against the glass wall, and you can almost see the wings beginning to sprout through.

Stone has taken on a forbidding task in this latest production – but, similarly to his 2023 production of Phaedra, there is a messiness that is ultimately unsatisfying. Certain plot choices feel random and slightly contrived, and the ending in particular is more like a neat bow being tied on a pile of misery rather than the final explosion it is meant to be.

Nonetheless, his version reveals the tender sinews of the psyche we prefer to look away from, laying them raw and exposed, and the emotional complexity bought out of the script by the cast is breathtaking.

☆☆☆☆

The Oresteia is at the Bridge Theatre until the 19^th September. Tickets linked here: https://www.bridgetheatre.co.uk/performances/?event=27834

Credit: Edward Sogunro

Sitting in a park, coffee in hand, Callum tells me, ‘I think our music would send a Victorian child into a coma.’ Pausing to consider, he adds, ‘and would probably kill Beethoven.’

Imogen Davey and Callum Murray are the two halves that make up the audiovisual duo snake_case, whose work plays with the boundaries between humans and machines, incorporating code and algorithm. It’s a far cry from the chord progressions of Beethoven, interrogating how technology can be used within music.

Imogen and Callum both come from more conventional musical backgrounds (classical and jazz respectively.) Callum started playing around with algorithmic inspired pieces pre-pandemic, giving himself sets of rules with rhythms and pitches and seeing what the musical outcome was. During the pandemic he had more time and started using programming to create musical scores. This developed into creating more of his own algorithms and synthesizing audio.

Imogen’s process developed differently. She describes it as an ‘audio collage’, gathering her own field recordings or sourcing them from vast databases of human and non-human sounds. The whole world is her receptacle, finding music in the most surprising places.

The two processes laid the foundations for their work, each one now used by both Imogen and Callum. The ideas they want to explore have also intermingled. Imogen is fascinated by memory and nostalgia, a slippery part of the human emotional ecosystem that creeps up on us to floor us. ‘Every time you think about a memory, you go back to it. Are you remembering the memory of that memory or the actual moment? It’s kind of the same if you’re revisiting a sound.’

Callum agrees, but his approach is more focused on taking apart the way music triggers both emotion and memory. ‘I’ve always wanted to ‘work out’ music, which is kind of an impossible task. Why am I associating sounds with certain memories or feelings or sensations in my body?’

For both Callum and Imogen, the Japanese audio-visual artist Ryoji Ikeda is a huge inspiration. They saw his 2021 exhibition at 180 Studios, including his data-verse trilogy, and saw how far this medium could go in order to create what they describe as a ‘watershed’ experience. ‘Sometimes when you go to a concert, exhibition, film, something like that, it turns you upside down a little bit; something you thought you were really set on is called into question.’

A formative moment for Callum long before even music college was seeing a performance of the piece for quartet ‘Tetras’ by Iannis Xenakis. The work used techniques like glissandi and intentionally warped tuning in way that was seamlessly coordinated between the players. Reading up on the composer, Callum learned the music was written using algorithms to decide the length of the glissandi, the specificity of the intervals, providing an initial insight into the possibilities beyond traditional composition.

Club culture is another inspiration, with Imogen and Callum wanting their performances to create a similarly physical response. As an audience member their work is intense, and at points hypnotic. ‘When you’re in the club you’re hit by significant sound pressure, you’re sort of at the mercy of it in a way that feels like your consciousness is being altered, not just your emotions.’ Emotionally, the audience response is often different to what they expect, without the clear throughline of chord progressions and melody leading to a specific emotional outcome.

The intensity can be uncomfortable, and intentionally so - they’re both interested in creating sounds that challenge and unsettle. Most recently they created a piece entitled ‘dark site’ for the multidisciplinary exhibition PLAYFORM, curated by Resonant Ground, which explored postmodern architecture. Imogen and Callum created their piece around the stimulus of data centres. With their interest in creating hostile sounds, the choice is particularly relevant – there is increasing focus on the invisible but damaging cost of the infrasound the data centres emit. Recently the New York Times published an article on these below-human hearing frequencies that cause symptoms such as insomnia, headaches, internal ear pressure, nausea and anxiety.

The inspiration of data centres also provided rich material for their interest in memory slippage. The new data centres being built are increasingly used for AI training rather than just data storage. ‘We were thinking about how knowledge could be transformed within these data centres in a speculative future of cosmic time scales of thousands of years. What would be within these data centres? How would the memories of human knowledge be transformed? What would an AI store about humans if we weren’t here?’ Ultimately, the piece shows how little control we have over this speculative future.

The audiovisuals of ‘dark site’ have infinite variety; Imogen and Callum established the logic, and the outcomes chosen each time by the computer are different. CCTV images flicker to lines of code, dissolve to Amazon reviews; dots and pinpricks of sound repeat. The piece portrays how in this imagined future information and memory will be changed beyond recognition; the audiovisuals representing the final epochs imagined within the piece are completely distorted.

The name itself is a reference to the increased hostility of these buildings, as fewer humans will be involved in construction, maintenance and security – vast, blackout spaces with permanently lowered levels of oxygen in the air.

A bleak view of the future. And yet, for Imogen and Callum, technology is a rich source of, and enhancer of, creativity, not purely a dark abyss swallowing up human endeavour. ‘One of the most generative aspects of our work is the computer making choices, as there is such a massive number of unpredictable possible states. You can’t do that manually! Technology helps us curate an experience that is as immersive and innovative as possible. That’s what we’re focused on, rather than being occupied with the fact our work isn’t purely live human performance.’

In fact, Imogen has found that their audio-visual creations have influenced her approach to playing classical music. ‘I used to hate playing music by composers like Bach – I’d be like, why are there all these unspoken rules, why do I have to play this exactly as it is on the page? Now I enjoy playing it without feeling so constrained by the rules.’

Callum agrees: ‘what interests me is the relationship between the composer and the musician, rather than trying to make the performer perfectly execute my rhythms. It’s kind of even more the case with the computer, because it’s executing my rhythms perfectly anyway.’

Their work shows both the possibilities technology creates within music whilst acknowledging the unknown and therefore threatening potential that comes with it. ‘Our aim with our work is to present technology in a new way – to show what a fluid, complex topic it is and to encourage people to question their own relationships with it.’ A relationship that will become harder to navigate, as ribbons of code write a reality that is spiralling forwards in ways no-one can predict.

Links to their work:

snake_case website: https://www.snakecasehq.com/

snake_case insta: https://www.instagram.com/_snake_case_/

Imogen’s website: https://www.imogendavey.com/

Callum’s website: https://www.callummurray.com/

We all know someone, or someone who knows someone, who has become entangled in a clash over a will. There is the delicate maneuvering around the contents, the hushed respect for the deceased, before it emerges that there are some slight differences of opinion. Delicacy then promptly goes out the window.

Relics, a new play by Ben Ockrent, is a perceptive and often laugh-out-loud take on this family saga. Four siblings turn up to their deceased mother’s house in order to divy up its contents and get a surprise when it turns out the gloomy painting everyone used to hate is a lost masterpiece, probably acquired from Nazi loot by their grandfather during the war.

The siblings are each true to their place within the family, from the over-functioning oldest sister Liv (Sally Phillips) to the rebellious youngest child Michelle (Charly Clive). In between are the opposites Rob (Sam Swainsbury) and Jonny (JJ Field), the former anxiously placating everyone else until he defiantly bursts out into a haka to soothe his anxiety, the latter arrogant and self-absorbed. (I’m not saying these are the only two options for the uneasy middle child, especially being one myself.) After barely seeing his family for years the gilet-ed Jonny seems to be there to mend bridges, until it becomes clear that his interest in the painting is far from sentimental.

Ockrent captures the pain within family relationships where expectations and loyalties have become twisted and unmet. Sibling bonds can be one of the most beautiful of relationships – and the most bitter. The cast brilliantly portray the way childhood casts a shadow over adult relationships that is both dark with unresolved trauma and then, in the most unexpected moments, cooling relief – the relief of shared humour, understanding, and karaoke (Clive’s karaoke alone makes the play worth seeing.)

The beginning felt a little slow, with moments of physical comedy that were over-egged (there’s only so much humour that can be strung out of struggling with sticky tape.) However, it did do a sterling job at setting up the particularities of the Venn diagram of sibling dynamics. The second half more than made up for any earlier laboriousness in both comedy and emotional impact. Field was particularly compelling in his portrayal of the smooth-talking Jonny’s descent into taking off a gilet that seemed previously melded to his form – and with it his dignity and emotional detachment.

The play explores how getting older involves a divergence of values that become excruciatingly stark in moments such as these. For each sibling the reality of what matters - family, morality, the challenges of real financial hardship or the allure of just that bit more cash – becomes unavoidable. Phillips perfectly captured the heartbreak of the sibling that clings to an illusion of what the morals of the family are, when they have long since been swallowed by the need for a new swimming pool. One flaw in the second half was the neglect of Rob and Michelle – they became backdrop figures for the central conflict of the differing moral compasses of Liv and Jonny.

Michael Longhurst’s direction crafts the play into a comedy that is nuanced, thoughtful and, at times, unabashedly raucous. Aided by an immensely skilled cast, it is a domestic drama that gradually accelerates into the explosiveness borne of that most potent of combinations within a family: love and hurt. Throw in the possibility of filthy lucre? It’s no wonder the mother’s healing crystal doesn’t realign the chakras of these four siblings.

☆☆☆☆

Relics is at the Lyric Hammersmith until 18th July. Tickets linked here: https://lyric.co.uk/shows/relics/book-now/

Originally written for A Young(ish) Perspective

If you walked into a kitchen and were confronted with a taxidermy albatross you would get a bit of a shock. Understandably, the characters in this play all feel strongly about the bird, as it sits accusingly next to the sink.

In Albatross by Martha Loader, in the Menagerie Theatre Company’s production, the eponymous stuffed bird is a gift from Martin (Patrick Morris) to his new girlfriend Eve (Agnes Lillis), whose kitchen the play is set in. They’re planning a cruise to Antarctica and are all loved up, flirting with each other by means of reciting the different cuisines that will be on board the ship (I didn’t know ‘omelette station’ could be said so flirtatiously.) Into this scene of domestic bliss comes Alice (Caroline Rippin), the daughter of Eve, returning from her research trip in…Antarctica. All boats lead there, including the polluting cruise liners.

Alice is all wrapped up in her wintery gear, and as wrapped up in her work as a glaciologist, at one point explaining the collapse of an ice shelf due to climate change through upending a tub of ice-cream. Her relationship with Eve is strained, due to the demands of her work taking priority over her own daughter, who Eve cares for when Alice is away. As the play goes on, more and more hurt surfaces between the two.

The play beautifully explores the complexity of motherhood – the guilt when you are an absent parent and the equally painful regret when the role takes away your own separate identity and future. Lillis is particularly moving in her wistful mentions of her brief career as a dancer – in the throwaway phrases there is a whole world of well-trodden thoughts of longing.

Rippin and Lillis portray the dynamics of interweaving love and hurt with nuance, creating a convincing bond of mother-daughter love. However, there were moments when the dialogue felt a little forced, and the overlapping was slow, leaving half-finished phrases hanging weightily in the air.

Their relationship is a microcosm for tension between those at the frontline of the climate crisis and those turning a blind eye to the severity of it. Alice is brimming with barely concealed frustration, returning from the silence of icy wastes to an even more silent society.

However, in her writing Loader demonstrates the nuance within the situation – Alice has a job that has raised her to the middle classes, whereas Eve is struggling with the reality of working-class life in the UK, managing day to day, accusing Alice’s preoccupation with the climate above all else as ‘privilege’. Loader also prevents the play from becoming a doom fest through the moments of humour which Morris’ direction makes the most of. The play merges the political urgency of the crisis with the domestic in a way that reminds us how the climate crisis is not something happening ‘over there’, but relevant to the lives of every single one of us.

Albatross is at the Omnibus Theatre until the 30^th May. Tickets available here: https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/whatson/albatross

☆☆☆

When I was interviewing the author Imogen Crimp this week, she told me she always handwrites rather than types her manuscripts. It helps with the flow of thought, enabling her to write with more freedom and abandon. From Joyce Carol Oates to Quentin Tarantino, writers find the process of putting pen to paper unlocks creativity in a way the tapping of each letter on a keyboard simply cannot replicate.

Handwriting is intensely personal, which is why receiving a handwritten letter feels so intimate. When you see someone’s handwriting, it opens a little window into who they are. Maybe they write with precise, firmly rounded letters; maybe the letters are compressed, narrow, lean to one side with focused intensity.

When I was at school, I changed my handwriting depending on how I felt, or who I wanted to be. When I wanted containment and order, I would write in separate letters, with a double storey |a|. When I wanted creativity and freedom, mess and chaos, I would write joined up, looping, swirling letters that swelled in volume. My handwriting would also change depending on who I was reading – if it was Jane Austen it would become elegant, with discrete little flourishes on letters like ‘f’; if it was Tolstoy the letters would become smaller, more firmly delineated, with crisp finishes to the ends of letters, the bottoms of ‘n’ and ‘m’.

A book I always return to is Letters of Note, a series of letters from across the ages. It’s a treasure trove, containing epistles ranging from Mary Stuart writing to Henry III of France about her impending execution to three Elvis Presley fans writing to President Eisenhower begging him to exempt Elvis from having an army haircut, destroying his luscious quiff. There’s a letter from scientist Francis Crick telling him about the discovery of a little thing called DNA; there’s Virginia Woolf’s heartbreaking letter to her husband Leonard discovered after her suicide, saying goodbye to him with the final line ‘I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.’

The thread of connection created through a letter is partly due to the handwriting, the slight physical movements that have been imprinted eternally in a trail of ink. I love the handwriting of all the people who are close to me because it seems to hold a part of them in its idiosyncrasies. In ‘Letters of Note’ the character of the writer is vivid not just in the words themselves but in the physical formation of those words. Mark Twain, having lost his son, daughter and wife to various illnesses, writes to a quack who has sent him a pamphlet selling him a ‘medicine’ termed ‘The Elixir of Life’, meant to cure all ills. His handwriting is slanted, with flourishes such as ‘t’s’ with extra-long lines on top; as the letter goes on the lines become longer and generally letters become more connected as he writes with more fervour. In a letter from a woman in an asylum at the beginning of the 19^th century to her husband, the jagged letters overlap each other until they merge into one blurry shadow as she writes ‘Sweetheart come’ again and again. There will never be a better way to express emotions that physical distance or emotional overwhelm impede than a letter. Sweat, tears, perfume soak up into the page. An extra firm full stop punctuates a hole in the paper.

In an essay for the New York Times written in 1999, the writer Mary Gordon ponders on the use of a pen as opposed to typing. She revels in the physicality of it. ‘[Handwriting] involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.’ Handwriting ties the airy world of thought and feeling to expression that is not just reflective of our cognition and emotion but also our physicality.

Handwriting unlocks thought in a way that other word-capture doesn’t. Due to a health condition in my teenage years, I dictated my essays rather than wrote them. The sentences felt contained; I had to know at the beginning of a sentence how it would end, rather than feeling my way there through the movement of my hand, a movement Gordon describes as ‘a kind of dance.’ It felt like it limited thought, made it too certain and definite. In contrast, the act of writing by hand feels like a stirring up of shadows in my mind, casting strange shapes on its inner walls – and like looking at clouds in the sky, the shapes reform within moments of looking at them. The sentence begins, and the ending only becomes clear in the act of writing.

I don’t do it religiously, but I like Julia Cameron’s exercise in The Artist’s Way, where you cover three pages of a notebook writing by hand without conscious intention or thought. What emerges is often quite surreal – I never know what is going to come out, and there is often an absurdist or dreamlike quality to it, or at least an incongruity of thought from one second to the next. Henri Focillon, the 19^th century art historian wrote an essay entitled ‘In Praise of Hands’, where he argues that the intelligence of the hand is an essential component of human creativity, not just the tool that enacts it. He said this in relation to drawing: ‘the hand is not the mind’s docile slave. It searches and experiments for its master’s benefit; it has all sorts of adventures; it tries its chance.’ The same could equally be said of handwriting, something I have found most clearly when I let the pen lead me with no conscious aim of directing where it goes. With each loop and curl, a trace of words is left behind me, plucked out of my subconscious through the rhythmic dance of my fingers.

Art and power have always been inextricably linked. Why is it that creative relationships can so easily become the playground for power games? In her second novel, Give Me Everything You’ve Got, Imogen Crimp gives us a trio of women caught up in the games of both creativity and love, during a fevered, hot summer in England.

The novel is set in the gilded world of an English country house – wide lawn, huge swimming pool, sash windows left wide open. The house is owned by Ellen, a renowned feminist film director, who has invited Ruby down to the house to stay, ostensibly to mentor her through writing her first feature. On arrival, 30-year-old Ruby meets Lara, the insouciant 20-year-old daughter of Ellen. Starting off as Ellen’s creative mentee, Ruby becomes drawn into the family, helping tutor Lara for her Oxbridge entrance.

Imogen is familiar both with the world of art and tutoring. Originally studying English at Cambridge, she then studied postgraduate singing at music college. After leaving, she pursued singing for a few years, grinding away in the unforgiving world of opera. She was simultaneously tutoring to support herself, including doing residential stays on grand estates. Some of her tutees had the same golden, troubled carelessness of Lara – who has what Imogen describes as ‘the carelessness of someone who’s never really had to sort their own life out.’ There was also the strange sense of being an outsider – within the family sanctum but nonetheless invisible, an employee.

The novel is an update of the literary trope of the governess from Gothic literature – the solitary figure swallowed up within a confined world, prey to the simmering tensions of a family. Ruby and Lara become involved in a questionable affair. ‘A lot of the gothic is about things you’ve repressed coming to the surface. Ruby’s desire for that world becomes entangled in her desire for Lara.’ The fascination with the world of the wealthy has exploded in the modern world, reflected in art such as the Emerald Fennell film Saltburn and the popularity of series like Rivals.

The book is very consciously and beautifully visual. The characters cut up ripe tomatoes, drink champagne under a trampoline and dip their toes in the sparkling pool. As befitting the first person perspective of Ruby, it is written very cinematically, moving between wide shots and close ups. There’s a sense of fluidity, like a director has allowed the camera to keep on rolling. Imogen handwrites, and for this text, one she initially struggled to get on the page having made copious notes, it was written without paragraph breaks, right up to the margins of the pages. The style also feels cinematic due to its heavy reliance on dialogue, especially initially, as we decode Ellen and Lara along with Ruby.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of focus on imbalanced power dynamics between men and women in the worlds of film and music. Imogen tells me about observing this dynamic: ‘these can be very difficult relationships, because you so often idolize the person who’s in a position of power over you, and that’s easy to take advantage of.’ She wanted to explore this in the more nuanced dynamic of female creative relationships that are less black and white than the kind that we are more used to seeing in art and the media.

In the book all the characters are morally dubious – there is no clear aggressor or victim. ‘I think there’s quite a lot of pressure as a female artist to portray women as good, moral, always having ‘nice’ relationships with other women.’ In Imogen’s previous novel, A Very Nice Girl, she tears apart the stereotype of the ‘nice’ woman, showing how dangerous it is. In a piece for the publication Stylist, she writes: ‘nice girls are what’s needed to keep the patriarchy rolling. We don’t need niceness; we need the rage underneath.’

Men are notably absent from the novel, but Imogen doesn’t shy away from showing the tension and ugliness within female relationships. Ruby feels exposed and used by Ellen, mined for her trauma; she describes how ‘[Ellen] would elicit information from me, grab onto it and rip it apart.’

The novel also shines a light on the clash between the different generations in regards to feminism. Ellen is an old-school feminist who believes the fight still needs to be fought; Ruby is more characteristic of the ambivalence of the generation after. ‘She’s a millennial like me – I think my generation was strangely contradictory about lots of feminist issues. We grew up in an era of optimism – the “Girl Power” of the 90s – where feminism felt like a battle that had been won. We called ourselves feminists, but so often went along with patriarchal conventions – removing all our body hair or waiting to be proposed to.’ Ruby mirrors this sense of contradiction – at once tethered by traditional norms and values and simultaneously left cold by them.

There’s rising pressure on writers to write about what they know, to both avoid accusations of asserting authority over someone else’s narrative, and to make their work more marketable by tying it to their own lived experience, and specifically trauma. The novel satirises this pressure, one Imogen herself has found intensely frustrating. When she was doing publicity for her first book, the focus was often on the extent to which it was or wasn’t autobiographical.

Imogen tells me she feels this is particularly prevalent in regard to female artists: ‘there’s this need for women to expose themselves and turn their own trauma into a brand. It’s a game of trying to be authentic by recounting the bad things which have happened to you, in order to legitimize your art.’

Conversely, there’s also pressure internally as an artist to mine your own life for experience. Both being former musicians, we discuss the way art can become more real and intense than life. ‘The danger of being an artist is you cannibalise your own life, collecting experiences to use within your art rather than living it.’ I suggest that with Ruby, she gets so wrapped up in the parallel world of filmmaking that her own personal life stalls. Imogen nods. ‘Ruby’s detachment or coldness is almost a young trait. She’s a bit too old for a coming-of-age novel, but it’s what this almost feels like.’

Not just a ‘Summer of Love’ however, but a summer of confusion, menace, and appetite. As Lara says: ‘as long as you still want, you’ll lose – one day, you’ll lose – you’ll give in – you can’t not.’

Give Me Everything You’ve Got is out now in hardback published by Bloomsbury.

Credit: Robert Crowley

Crossover can be a tricky genre to nail, sometimes not really doing justice to either genre. However, GS X2 at Ronnie Scott’s, the show born of a collaboration between cellist Gabriella Swallow and clarinettist Giacomo Smith, is a seamless melding of classical and jazz that shows how much both genres can learn from the other. The rest of the ensemble consisted of the acclaimed jazz musicians Joe Webb (piano) and Will Sach (bass).

Gabriella Swallow has made a diverse career from exploring a variety of genres, and this freedom and openness translates to her interpretations of classical pieces. The performance opened with the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G major, the semi-quavers airily blown upwards to the domed, richly patterned ceiling.

Swallow and Smith hosted the evening, and early on mentioned a crucial inspiration for the show: Don Shirley, the American classical and jazz pianist, composer and arranger, whose story was portrayed in the 2018 Oscar-winning film Green Book. Swallow bought a lovely touch of humour with an admission of her ‘deep dive’ into Shirley – which culminated in her getting into correspondence with his daughter-in-law. One of the more impressive deep dives I’ve come across.

Shirley was an astonishing musician, described by Stravinsky as having ‘virtuosity worthy of Gods’. The next piece was a direct homage to Shirley – an arrangement of his medley of the traditional Spirituals ‘I’m On My Way’ and ‘Freedom’. Next came an arrangement of Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’: streams of notes poured from Webb’s deft fingers in this sweeping tune, toying wistfully with each tender syncopation.

Bernstein is a personal favourite of mine, so I was delighted by ‘Some Other Time’ from the musical ‘On the Town’, about a sailor in New York on 24 hour shore leave during WW2, who, you’ve guessed it, falls in love – and they’ve only got a brief window to share that love. Swallow and Webb performed this number with the breathlessness and pathos of a whirlwind love affair, magicking the story out of the notes.

Another piece that vividly conjured up a story was Scott Joplin’s ‘Solace’. Starting with the clarinet and piano, the black and white notes became a black and white film in my mind: a bowler hatted man strolling down the street twirling an umbrella, jabbing it with each alert syncopation. In the simplicity of the melodic line, Smith’s command over the instrument was clear – it is in the simplest music where the difference between the good and the great musicians is evident. This command was also apparent in the razzle dazzle of ‘Notes Noires’, where he seemed to lose the human necessity of breathing in as well as breathing out, as notes flew thick and fast.

Nearing the close of the show we were treated to Webb performing his own composition ‘Breuddwyd Cariad’ (translation from Welsh to English: Love’s Dream). Inspired by Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3, the opening similarly anchors around middle C, pulling all the other notes into its warm centre. The arpeggios hover in the background and the moments of discordance come without warning, like a lover surprised, in a brilliant reimagining of a classical masterpiece.

The only moment of the show that didn’t deliver was sadly the end: an arrangement of Bach’s Concerto for two violins. It was a good concept – to return to a composer Shirley was so passionate about – but the intricacies of the dialogue between instruments felt slightly under-rehearsed. Nonetheless, a sprightly encore ended the night on a resonant note, and to watch musicians of this calibre play with the boundaries between jazz and classical made for a wonderfully exploratory evening of music.

Tickets to upcoming shows at Ronnie Scott’s can be found here: https://www.ronniescotts.co.uk/find-a-show

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Back in 2023 there was a viral Tiktok trend of people saying that things were their ‘Roman Empire’, about anything and everything, from iced oat lattes to the fact Queen Elizabeth II was a trained mechanic. It means something random you become a bit obsessed with, and evolved from the initial ‘how often do you think about the Roman Empire’ trend, where various men claimed they think about the Roman Empire multiple times a day.

I would personally have been more sympathetic to this odd trend if the question had been ‘how often do you think about the French Revolution.’ I would never claim to think about it on the daily, but I do think about it every few months (along with the Titanic a few times a year, and Jack the Ripper maybe once a year), and this week, inevitably, it popped up again in the conversation going on in my little grey cells.

When I was younger it completely captured my childish imagination. Some of my favourite books were about the French Revolution, pacey novels that captured the sense of excitement and horror of a dream turned nightmarish bloodbath. I found Robespierre particularly chilling – the ‘wolf in sheeps clothing’, a quiet, intellectual figure with an underlying ruthlessness. I prefer my villains loud, unashamedly villainous, and ideally a bit flamboyant (more on this to come in future articles.) In portraits of a younger Robespierre, he’s rosy cheeked, with a winning little smile and a glint in his eye. Dressed in sombre black, with a tastefully moderate wig, he was the antidote to the excesses of the aristos, with their willful disregard for the rest of a starving, suffering society.

When I was younger, I did love the bits in the books that described the glittering extravagances and exploits of the French elite – and wig-wise, the bigger the wig the better. I was however distressed to learn that due to the wigs being held together with animal fat and covered in powder made from finely ground flour, they attracted mice, who would nest in them. So, the aristos had it hard too – but much like Bella Hadid talking about the pain of only receiving her first pair of Louboutins after graduating high school, the mice in wigs due to flour didn’t cut it with the proletariat, who needed that flour for actual bread. Marie Antoinette, the Queen who played at being a milkmaid, was particularly reviled for her excesses. She created a mock rustic village within the grounds of Versailles, where she would skip around in whimsical milkmaid outfits, serving fresh cream to other nobles playing at the simple life.

Dickens in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ portrays both the horror of the ancien régime and the equal horror of the regime that replaced it (there’s also a brilliant film version with Dirk Bogarde). As Lord Acton, the 19^th century politician, famously noted, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It doesn’t matter the ideals you start out with, we all have the same human propensities and weaknesses, and power is famously a concept the human psyche doesn’t deal too well with.

Of course, the French Revolution did start out with some good ideas (equality, liberty, fraternity for example), germinating from the writings of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu. The bubbling of intellectual dissent started years before, in the coffee shops of Paris. Enlivened by caffeine, reformers, revolutionaries and radicals met to pose, philosophise and plot (the first two often go together – the genius was joining it to the third). Camille Desmoulins, the journalist and politician, described in a letter the atmosphere in the cafés of Paris in the lead up to the revolution: ‘[The radicals] stand on tables, people band together to listen to their speeches. They read out the most powerful writing of the day on current affairs.’ Imagine standing on a table in Blank Street, giving a speech about Keir Starmer – and everyone actually being keen to listen (slightly less rousing subject matter admittedly). Desmoulins enjoyed hopping on a table himself and was very effective at it – on one occasion, it resulted in the storming of the Bastille.

The French Revolution was one of many warnings as to the danger of aiming to completely remake a society according to a utopian vision. The problem with utopias is they’re made up of humans, and humans are flawed, no matter how good the original intentions are. Blake called the time prior to the revolution the ‘slumber of five thousand years’; years of unquestioned acceptance of systems of absolute power. In ‘The Prelude’ Wordsworth retrospectively remembers the optimism at the start, when the best instincts of human nature were ‘called upon to exercise their skills,/Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,/Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!//But in the very world, which is the world/Of all of us.’

The leaders of the revolution didn’t want to just assume power, they wanted to establish a whole new time, to differentiate the ‘slumber’ of the past from the awake present. You know an egalitarian utopia is taking a wrong turn when the heads of government decide to create a new system of time (witness the Soviet Union and the Khmer Rouge regime). The new time system, known as decimal time, was based around the number ten: ten days in a week, with each day lasting ten hours, each hour lasting one hundred minutes, and each minute made up of one hundred seconds. The aim was to create a more rational system of time separate from the old regime and the influence of the church; ultimately it just created confusion and a populace disgruntled by the lack of a seventh day of rest.

The initial idealism of the revolution was duly crushed by the Reign of Terror, and the massacre of thousands by ‘Madame Guillotine.’ Standing in the middle of Place de la Concorde, the guillotine loomed large over the crowds hungry for spectacle. Programs of the lists of condemned were sold, and those close to the platform would angle to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of the executed as a souvenir of a jolly day out. A constant presence was the tricoteuses, the knitting women. Day and night they would sit, their needles click-clacking away, another strand of wool pulled tight as another life slackened. When I read about the French Revolution when I was younger, their relentless gaze, fixed on the blade as their hands worked automatically, seemed most terrifying of all.

Who doesn’t enjoy drama at a dinner party? When you’re not involved of course. Unfortunately for the guests at this particular dinner, everyone becomes involved in one way or another, with disturbing, hilarious and dark consequences.

This production of ‘Dinner’ by Moira Buffini, directed by David Fairs and Conor O’Kane, is the first revival of the play since its West End run more than 20 years ago. Set in the early 2000s, it portrays a world of wealth, greed and the pomposity of a self-satisfied liberal elite. The internet is just starting to become a thing, and guess what? You can get absolutely anything you like on it! Your darkest desires arrive at your door, neatly tied up with a sash - in this case, a silent waitress dressed in traditional Japanese dress. The hostess, Paige, played with chilling sarcasm by Matsume Kai, has hired the waitress to serve her assortment of guests: a microbiologist, his newsreader wife, a flowery artist and (unexpectedly) a van driver who got lost in the fog outside. This production adds the element of Japanese ceremony to the formalities of the dinner parties of the English elite, creating another binding of ritual and custom that inevitably cannot keep the dinner from falling apart.

The guests are gathered to celebrate a book written by Paige’s husband, Lars, entitled ‘Beyond Belief’; a pop psychology self-help book written to encourage devotees to find their ‘psychic drive’, with a ready disciple in the flowery artist, Wynne (Rebecca Joy Wilson). The comedy was struck with an almost pitch perfect note by all the cast, preventing the badinage from becoming leaden in a play which descends into the back and forth careless cruelty to be expected of a pretty hollow bunch.

As each course arrives, the mood sours further; in a particularly tough moment for Wynne, the only vegetarian present, she is presented with a raw cabbage. The cabbage silently stares back at her from her plate. She is luckier than the other guests, who have to decide whether they will boil their lobster main alive, or send it to live a long and happy life in the briny pond outside. As the play becomes more farcical, the skill of the actors keeps it anchored in emotional realism. Oliver Maynard and Clarisse Zamba, the microbiologist and the newsreader, movingly convey the complexity of a relationship frayed with resentment and tension, but rooted in real love.

The production is a visual feast, with the striking backdrop of black ink dissolving on the white folding screens, with a simple set of low tables that are arranged and rearranged throughout the play to create different formations. The muted aggression and simmering tension are released in transition moments of blaring music and wild dancing; in one particularly effective moment Paige dances as if possessed, before the lights reveal the characters arranged in another beautiful, cold formation. They sit like a Lotte Laserstein painting – present, but each wrapped up in their own inward-gazing world, nursing their own wounds and then lashing out again.

For a play written twenty years ago, it feels strikingly relevant to our society today; a black comedy that relentlessly satirises a greed that’s never satiated. You’re left thinking: would I boil that lobster, or would I put it in the briny pond and be able to face my reflection in the surface of the water?

Dinner is at the Omnibus Theatre until the 24^th May. Tickets linked here: https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/whatson/dinner

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Originally written for A Young(ish) Perspective

Musical skill is a funny thing. It becomes so ingrained in your body, the muscle memory, that it becomes a part of you, no matter how far you stray from it. For Violetta, her relationship with the violin was always the backbone of her life, and despite the divergences of her path, it seems both surprising and yet inevitable she has ended up as a musician: chamber musician, orchestral player, soloist, and part of the experimental electronic-chamber music fusion that is the Komuna Collective.

Chamber music is Violetta’s primary love. When studying for her masters in Professional Performance at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she threw herself into it, forming multiple ensembles. When played well, chamber music appears effortless; beneath the surface, hours of work have happened in order to meticulously meld the parts into one coherent whole. Violetta enjoys a long process where an understanding of the full score means she has a complete grasp of how every part works with the others, and how the combination is creating the emotional narrative of the music.

Her path to the masters was irregular. Violetta grew up in a musical household, and her dad is a violin teacher. She studied at The Yehudi Menuhin School between the ages of eight and eleven, a specialist music school of around 80 musicians from all around the world. We met there and had the same strange experience of a school with an unusual combination of freedom and discipline. Set in beautiful countryside, with a huge professional concert hall, the school engrained in Violetta a love of musical collaboration and a wiring for intensity and dedication. ‘It gave me a sense of what real collaboration is like; it’s so unusual to experience that young that level of understanding and closeness between people in relation to this shared goal.’ She also found it inspiring to be one of the younger students, surrounded by older musical role models.

However, she left the school to go to a normal secondary school, attending alongside the Junior Royal Academy of Music. She dreamed of going to Oxford, seeing it as ‘another magic place’, ultimately gaining a place to study French and Italian and winning multiple academic prizes whilst there. Violin became more of an extracurricular, with Violetta playing in all the orchestras for enjoyment. Then Covid intervened; she was on her year abroad in a small French town, where the public transport was on strike for four months. With little else to occupy her, she started practicing seriously again.

Coming to the end of her degree, with the corporate career of an Oxford graduate looming before her, she decided to apply for the masters, and received multiple offers. It was a shock to the system; being back in the same intensely stimulating environment, where you are collaborating on a difficult creative and analytical skill with people you are very close to. After the streamlined intellectual activity of Oxford, the demands of practicing, learning music, working on technique, developing stylistic expertise, and analytically and emotionally understanding the demands of the music, felt overwhelming. ‘There were so many more inputs needed than previously and I needed to master them to be able to, in the moment of playing, have the freedom to respond to the impulse coming towards me.’

We talk about the skill of performing – each musician has their own journey and relationship with the oddness of standing on stage and having people stare at you. Violetta tells me of the occasional moment where she experiences a disconnect and a level of fear before going on stage: ‘I think to myself, hang on, what I’m doing is really difficult. How am I going to get my hands around this?’ What recentres her is body connection: ‘that physical gesture of putting the violin under your chin and then actually just feeling the vibration of your own sound, your connection to the actual physical instrument through your arms and your shoulders and your whole body into your core, into your feet. Your mental regulation for the performance is based on your physical experience with the violin.’

Since 2022, Violetta has been working with the Komuna Collective. They are a group consisting of artistic director and composer Adam Possener, a contemporary classical quartet (including Violetta), visual artist Gala Hills and DJs Still Loading and Bek. Their aim is to bring contemporary classical music to more unusual spaces, experimenting within genre-crossing, with performances ranging from raves to fashion shows to nightclubs, from London to Berlin to Sweden. At club nights, an hour of their work is sandwiched between the standard club music, introducing new audiences to contemporary classical music with the bridge of electronics. ‘Electronic music is more immediately relatable because it’s the world of our phones, our laptops, our screens - it’s a world that we all have exposure to in different ways. You’re building a narrative through referencing other artists that people can more readily find a shared sense of identity in.’

I ask Violetta where she thinks the classical music industry is in terms of current relevance to younger audiences. ‘I think the most powerful thing about classical music is it’s one of the oldest forms of art and narrative and communication; through this medium we have an archive of human output.’ She also points out that classical music is far more embedded in our psyche that we realise – most people have been exposed to it through film and TV scores. ‘My friends tell me they don’t know anything about classical music and I’m like, you do! You’ve watched a film about a superhero and heard the French horns and associated that with triumph or watched a scene with a section of violins up in like seventh position, creating this soaring and beautiful sound. People understand the codes of how classical music works a lot more than they think.’

Classical music involves a very different type of listening to the one we are used to. In an age of singles, it’s rare to even listen to a full album of any genre, let alone classical. We discuss falling prey to the dopamine kick of listening to that one three-minute song 120 times in a row. Violetta tells me that being an artist has changed how she approaches listening. ‘I think, am I be being the listener to other artists that I would want people to be to me? I think expanding your taste is being able to say okay, maybe this isn’t me, but what can I still get from this? What are they trying to do?’

We both share the conviction that taste isn’t set in stone – it is to do with engagement and exposure. Violetta tells me that she believes a lot of enjoying classical music is to do with understanding; the more understanding you have, the more engaged you are, and the more you can appreciate the complexity and extraordinary creativity of some of the music. Violetta finds inspiration from a range of listening, from techno to old Corsican folk music. She also loves Irish folk music (unsurprising due to her Irish-Italian heritage.) Folk songs are at the heart of a lot of classical music, and Violetta finds their clarity of purpose invigorating for creating her interpretation of classical works. ‘In folk music, the songs have a certain purpose: death songs, marriage songs, dancing songs… all crafted around human community and psychology. Classical music can be a bit esoteric in its complexity – I like finding the primal emotions at its heart.’

Violetta’s next performance is a recital at St Martin in the Fields, including aa programme of Ravel, Beethoven and Janáček. Tickets here: https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/calendar/violetta-suvini-violin-and-sofia-sacco-piano/

Originally written for A Young(ish) Perspective

La Linea is the London Latin Music festival showcasing the best of Latin Music and its most exciting established and up and coming musicians across different venues in London. Performing at the Jazz Café were Maria Arnal and Queralt Lahoz, two Catalonian artists who bought completely different sounds to an unusual headliner pairing.

Maria Arnal’s performance was all clean-lined presentation and blurred sounds. Her stage presence was understated but powerful, with the intensity of her music broken up by the low-key charm of her stage manner. Her music is a mixture of avant-pop, electronics and traditional polyphonic music, where the influence of traditional folk music is melded and forged into a futuristic, silver sound.

Arnal has recently released a new album, Ama, with the performance featuring many of her new songs. Her extraordinary voice ducks and weaves around the synthesized backing voices. During the concert Arnal tells the audience of one of the main influences of the album, the words of Sappho, the Grecian lyric poet: ‘what you have left to say will remain to be cried.’ She tells the audience the album is about tears – of joy, grief, release, regret.

Her strength as an artist is grounding the experimentation of her sound with a voice that stays true and resonant with human emotion, soaring above the complexities of interweaving sounds. A highlight was ‘Que me Quiten’, where the melody starts accompanied by a light quavering sound, to slowly build in depth and layers until it reaches a climax to abruptly cut off, leaving the crowd breathless. ‘Tú que vienes a rondarme’, one of Arnal’s most well-loved songs, was received with delight, with its whirling poeticism and hypnotic simplicity.

Queralt Lahoz’s energy created a complete change, bursting onto the stage with a toss of her long hair. Her music merges the traditional influences of flamenco and bolero with hip-hop, pop and dancehall, and her performance got the whole room dancing (potentially even those sitting having a classy cocktail in the upstairs restaurant area). With the slight rasp in her voice, a black corset and the uninhibited passion of her performance, there was a hint of the modern-day Carmen – if Carmen sang with hip-hop influences. She had the audience irresistibly moving to catchy tunes such as ‘Santa Rosa’, and she exuded the contagious enjoyment of a performer who loves her stage and her audience, finishing off an evening that aptly demonstrated the calibre of talent in the Latin music scene right now.

La Linea Festival runs until Wednesday 6th May across various venues in London. Tickets available here: https://comono.co.uk/la-linea/

☆☆☆☆

No-one disputes the difficulty of creating change within such an unwieldly machine. As each year passes, its unoiled mechanisms seem to screech ever more painfully. The Amos report is only the most recent example of reports and investigations examining the state of UK maternity care over the last few decades, and the similarities between these reports are alarming. In Dr Bill Kirkup’s Morecambe Investigation Report, published in 2015, he outlines very similar concerns to those voiced in the Amos report, many of which relate to a lack of accountability and poor team relationships, underpinned by a toxic combination of defensiveness and blame-shifting.

Rather than clear processes that give families the answers they need, the report reveals instances where there was ‘ambiguity’ over whether a baby was stillborn or not. More disturbingly, there are cases where the parents saw signs of life in the baby, but the death was recorded as stillborn in order to prevent an independent investigation.

In a variety of cases, when ‘denied openness and honesty in the aftermath of harm and bereavement’ families ‘felt that they had no option but to pursue litigation.’ In 2024/2025 the NHS spent £3.6 billion on clinical negligence claims, with £1.3 billion alone on maternity-related claims. The policy seems to be to obfuscate and deny any wrongdoing where possible, presumably out of a fear of litigation. But as these figures prove, that policy is not only short-sighted but also deeply morally wrong.

The Interim report states that ‘we have repeatedly heard from women and families about a lack of transparency, clear communication and learning when things went wrong.’ It goes on to note the feeling that their had been ‘a ‘cover-up’ and defensiveness from NHS trusts’, rather than genuine concern and a desire to use these tragic incidents to learn from and to ensure there is no repetition of such grievous mistakes.

It is an obvious truth that improvement within any realm comes from an openness to admitting mistakes and ensuring to the best of one’s ability that they do not happen again. When the realm in question deals with people’s health and ultimately lives, it is extraordinary that the same rigour that is applied to other safety models has been sorely lacking in the NHS for years.

Compare this to flight safety systems: flight accidents are incredibly rare as the systems in place are watertight and rely on a non-punitive culture where the modus operandi is that humans are subject to making mistakes. With human error as the accepted baseline, the question then becomes, how can measures be put in place that will ensure these errors happen as infrequently as possible, and thereby saving many lives. This is where the Swiss Cheese Model comes in.

Developed by psychologist James Reason in the 1990s, the model was used by the aviation industry to strengthen their safety system. The importance of Swiss cheese, rather than another sort, is in the prevalence of holes, representing errors. When stacked together, despite the number of holes, the likelihood of them aligning is extremely small; in the case of aviation, this alignment entails the loss of a considerable number of lives.

The model outlines that fatal error is prevented through perfecting a system, rather than the blame resting on an individual. This lowers defensiveness and allows for the creation of a new ‘just culture’, based on blame-free reporting and learning. This culture means there is no fear of punishment when reporting errors, meaning even the smallest of errors is picked up on and thus learned from. This contrasts to what the Amos report termed a ‘reluctance on the part of trusts and professionals to admit mistakes,’ in a work culture where mistakes are still too often pinned to the individual rather than seen as systemic.

The Amos report shows the way teamwork and communication are severely lacking, despite being integral to preventing unnecessary errors. In aviation, CRM (Crew Resource Management) was developed as a result of new insights into accident causation; that accidents often happen not because of problems with the aircraft itself, but because of a breakdown of communication and teamwork within the crew. CRM focuses on the psychological and interpersonal aspects of a successful flight, with a focus on mutual information exchange between all team members. The training crucially encourages challenging decisions and raising concerns immediately, regardless of hierarchies, which in turn creates a just culture of openness and honesty.

The report calls for ‘obstetricians and midwives to work effectively in teams, respecting each other’s expertise and having a shared approach to common objectives.’ It goes onto say that ‘the effect on care of differing approaches can be disastrous.’ The lack of communication and teamwork leads to errors, which then leads to cover-ups, in a chain of dishonesty and obfuscation that has had a deep impact on those families that have already experienced trauma or bereavement as result. Families have experienced medical notes being amended or redacted, no invitation to be involved in investigations and the inability of staff to admit failures of standards of care.

It is evident there is not the culture in place to support staff and enable the necessary transparency in the case of errors. The report noted clear links between culture and leadership, where poor leadership leads to negative teamworking. It was found that ‘training, time and support’ are crucial for those in senior positions, and these are consistently underprioritized. When training has been put in place it has often proved more ‘reactive’ than consistent.

In 2018 NHS Resolution, an organisation that provides expertise to the NHS to resolve concerns, launched the Maternity (Perinatal) Incentive Scheme to provide financial incentivisation to demonstrate that they have implemented safety actions. By 2025, Safety Action 8, multiprofessional training, had the lowest compliance, once again demonstrating that its importance is still not being recognised as integral to outcomes.

Of course, the aviation industry is dealing with far less variability and complexity than the medical profession. However, the competency of the systems in place and the success with which the aviation industry has created a culture of openness, honesty and the ability to learn from mistakes, should be a culture also evident in the NHS. It is clear from the Interim report that this will be even more blatant when the full report is released and that the culture of blame and its attendant lack of accountability needs to change, after years of stagnancy and the real cost to human life and suffering that has inevitably followed on from this.

Growing up my family and I visited Botswana multiple times, due to links to conservation projects there. I have vague sensory memories of visits when I was little – the smell of the bushveld being the most evocative, with its unmistakable mix of earth, dry grass and potent, musky herbs and other plants. This intensifies in the rainy season, when the parched earth is relieved by the blessing of rain – the word ‘pula’ means rain in Setswana (the national language of Botswana) but also carries connotations of peace and blessings; and the freshness and sense of renewal does feel like a blessing, as the earth reinvigorates.

From when I was little to my later childhood years there was a gap in our visits, and I remember the smell hitting me upon my return with the familiarity of a core childhood memory. Driving through the savanna in the open vehicle, the heat blasting my face, my gut recognition mingling with a new sense of awe (I wasn’t quite capable of awe as a toddler). The land rover slowed and then ground to a halt. Ahead, behind an acacia bush, there was movement. Moving with ponderous gravity, an elephant came into view, and what would have before been the uncomprehending gaze of a toddler trying to make sense of a giant was now an uncontrollable and keen sense of excitement and wonder.

Since then, I’ve loved elephants. They are the emperors and empresses of the bush, moving through the landscape with a deliberate, yet surprisingly graceful, tread. I’m quite heavy-footed myself, often compared to an elephant when coming down the stairs, but having seen them move in the wild I don’t see that as the insult it might be intended to be. I also resonate with their enjoyment of a long bath (but without the element of mud elephants enjoy - I would be keen to try a mud bath too though.) They cover their bodies in mud, sometimes using their trunks to spray themselves with it in an act of frolicsome pragmatism, as the mud also acts as sunscreen, protecting their surprisingly sensitive skin from the sun.

One of the most joyful scenes I’ve witnessed was two young elephants playing in the water together, ducking, weaving trunks, locking tusks and generally using it as a never-ending source of delight. This capacity for play is only one instance of the emotional complexity they exhibit, also displaying empathy and grief. They are incredibly intelligent, with astonishing spatiotemporal and social memory capabilities – hence the common phrase ‘the memory of an elephant’. They can remember useful routes over long periods of time and across vast distances, helping them locate watering holes and food sources. They can also remember hundreds of individuals over similar lengths of time, which contributes to the complexity of their social organisation, living within a fission-fusion system (a system where they break and reform into smaller and larger groups dependent on different ecological and social pressures.)

In the dark, you can feel their presence before they emerge before the light of the spotlight used during night drives. They move quietly in the massy darkness, and then suddenly you’re surrounded – a whole herd, from the matriarch down to the babies clinging to their mother’s side. Looking at an elephant, something in me goes quiet – I feel a serene depth mirrored by the ancient wisdom hidden in their long-lashed eyes. Maybe it’s their unhurriedness – time does not exist for them, and being among them disrupts the strange units and compressions of time created by modern life. They move in the same rhythms as the slow rising of the sun in the morning, and the brief burning of the sky as dusk falls. As the day draws to a close, the sun sinks rapidly over the horizon and the first stars come out; then, each constellation hangs blinking in the sky, and looking up I can trace Scorpius, my sign. When you scramble to the top of a kopje to watch this breathtaking sequence, you see the expanse before you, seemingly limitless. In the vastness down below, a herd of elephants moves in a straggled line, giants dwarfed by the landscape.

Smarginatura (Italian, noun, feminine). Translation: 1. The trimming of margins of the page before print; 2. The bleeding off the page (in typography.)

Elena Ferrante famously takes this word in the Neapolitan novels and uses it with new meaning: as Ann Goldstein translates it, dissolving margins or boundaries. The books centre around two friends, Lenù and Lila, tracing their journey from childhood to adulthood in a poor neighbourhood in Naples in the ‘50s. Lila is uniquely able to pay attention to the minutiae of reality, seeing situations and people with clarity and depth of understanding. However, she undergoes a smarginatura at various points throughout the books, and her attentiveness becomes the burning channel for chaos.

Attention can be the means with which we reorientate ourselves within the present, finding an anchor through intentional perception of the outer world. It can centre us within the solidity of reality: the feeling of water running through our fingers, the warmth of sun on our face, the silence in between each word. Taken further, attention can be an entry point to an understanding of the interconnectedness of things and, pressed further still, a portal to the sacred. Simone Weil articulates this: ‘attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.’ The poet Mary Oliver finds her way to the same conclusion, but from the opposite starting point: ‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.’ In her poetry, Oliver pays attention to the world with startling clarity and force, and her reward is an opening up to grace.

But what happens when you attend to the world with clarity and force, and the pressure of this attention does not elevate experience to the sublime but instead dissolves the margins separating objects and people? And within this dissolution is not a sense of the sacred, but a perception of a state of terrible collapse and fragility inherent within reality?

This is what Lila experiences age 14, when a competition over fireworks with neighbours escalates into chaos and violence. Watching her brother hurl abuse at the aggressors, his boundaries dissolve, revealing him as he really is: ‘Something violated the organic structure of her brother, exercising over him a pressure so strong that it broke down his outlines, and the matter expanded like a magma, showing her what he was truly made of.’ The ugliness of human nature is revealed, and this ugliness does not stay contained in his form but leaks into the matter around him.

As Lila progresses to womanhood, experiencing an earthquake triggers the same response: ‘Gasping for breath, she cried out that the car’s boundaries were dissolving, the boundaries of Marcello, too, at the wheel were dissolving, the thing and the person were gushing out of themselves, mixing liquid metal and flesh.’ Her acute awareness of the world turns on her, becoming a poisoned feast. She sees the intermingled nature of things and is made aware of a dissolution that will never fully resolve, will always hover in the background.

Lila’s gift is her ability to pay attention: to perceive the world with a clarity that penetrates the nature of things. Lila might echo Oliver: ‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.’ She cannot close her eyes to reality at any point, and her attention is a prayer that encompasses both dark and light, beauty and ugliness. However, this attention does not only crystallise reality but contains within it the dark threat of dissolving boundaries.

Originally written for A Young(ish) Perspective

This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the Unicorn Theatre’s first co-production with the Royal Shakespeare Company, creating a pared back version of the play that is accessible to children as young as seven. The production is playful and witty, blending smart moments of direction with an ability to tap into childish wonder.

Co-directors Rachel Bagshaw and Robin Bellfield have approached the daunting task of slimming down Shakespeare with precision, and the play feels approachable for a younger audience without, for the most part, losing the depth and nuance of the original script. The use of projected captions in various funky fonts on the pared back backdrop of plywood-like material is an especially clever device, working particularly well for the voice-over interjections of Titania’s attendant fairies.

The play centers around four lovers fleeing Athens for the woods surrounding for their own different romantic reasons, encountering magical confusion and chaos. The forest is ruled by its quarrelling fairy King and Queen, Oberon and Titania, played by Chris Jared and Amelia Donkor. Both Jared and Donkor display a commanding presence befitting their characters, with a standout scene being their first explosive argument, physically twisting as if they are both being blown around by the storms that have manifested from their quarrel, as the guardians of nature.

The lovers’ portrayal of both the comedy and the deep pain of love is enthusiastically conveyed by a lively and responsive quartet. Boni Adelyi is particularly captivating as Helena, moving from confused anguish to playful exuberance, making Helena’s desperate pursuit of Demetrius both pitiable and deeply understandable, not always the case with this character. The lovers’ scenes contrast with the comic relief of the bumbling mechanicals, led by one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant comic creations, Bottom (Emmy Stonelake). Stonelake gives a fantastic rendition, making each well-loved line feel fresh and spontaneous, drawing laughs from all ages within the audience.

Praise must also be given for Puck, played by Joséphine-Fransilja Brookman with charm and the accompaniment of silver bells of laughter. Necessarily for a children’s production, the character loses some of its complexity, the more darkly mischievous elements of a fairy who is aligned with her sometimes immensely cruel master. Nonetheless, Brookman floats and dances across the stage with an effortless physicality, ultimately drawing the play to a quiet and beautiful close. In another strong piece of staging, she bends over a glowing orb, her shadow leaping up the wall, sending the audience away feeling the world is a little more magical.

☆☆☆☆

The production is at the Unicorn Theatre, London, until the 10^th May. Tickets linked here: https://www.unicorntheatre.com/events/a-midsummer-nights-dream

Originally written for A Young(ish) Perspective

Can you fall deeply in love with someone when you haven’t met them in real life? A seemingly modern dilemma. The two protagonists of Dear Jack, Dear Louise, however, meet and interact not through Instagram message, but through letters. As World War II rages, with the background whine of air raid sirens, Jack (Preston Nyman) and Louise (Eva Feiler) correspond back and forth and, in the process, fall in love. Directed by Simon Reade and written by Ken Ludwig, the play is inspired by the story of Ludwig’s parents, and his care and tenderness for their story manifests within the charm and intricacy of the writing.

The set is beautiful – simple but effective, a canopy of camouflage netting from which dangle letters. The characters voice the letters without ever looking at one another, starting with Jack’s stiff and awkward opening gambit to Louise. He sits writing the letter from where he is stationed in Oregon, as a military doctor and US Army Captain. Complete opposites in many ways, she is an actress and dancer pursuing her dreams in New York. Feiler bounds around the stage with infectious enthusiasm, articulating her joys and woes to Jack, feeling each emotion with utter abandon. It’s hard not to fall in love with her eagerness for life – and Jack does. Slowly he unfolds, responding to her curiosity first with bashfulness before its radiance is rewarded with vulnerability and openness. Nyman undertakes this journey with nuance and beautifully pitched humour, honouring the gentle comedy of the script.

Throughout the war they are separated, writing letters that range from recounting everyday mundanities, to the excitement of getting an audition, to the shattering and tragic events of war. The play is a heart-warming presentation of love against the background of the devastating extremities of the time, and the day-to-day bravery it takes to maintain a spirit of courage and hope. However, it feels lacking direction at times, with a plot that tends to meander rather than propel forward.

This lack of dramatic tension is exacerbated by the conceit of voicing the letters. At the beginning of the play, the letter voicing feels unexpected and is carried along by the skill of the actors. However, as the play progresses, the concept feels strained, with the lack of physical and face-to-face interaction becoming increasingly unsatisfying. Nonetheless, the excellent casting and the witty and evocative script make this an uplifting experience that portrays the beauty of slowly, quietly, unexpectedly, falling in love.

3.5 ☆

The play is at the Arcola Theatre until the 2^nd May. Link to tickets here: https://www.arcolatheatre.com/event/dear-jack-dear-louise/