A critical response to the critical responses to Jude Christian’s latest, by Maddy Costa
Let’s begin with a disclaimer: I’ve known Jude Christian for years, a friendship of distance (we almost never see or speak to each other) grown from shared appreciation for how each of us thinks and how that thinking applies to theatre. So yes, effectively this negates all the words that follow, because friendship in theatre is seen as the death of critical rigour. And yet. Love sharpens the mind, makes it demanding, instils a desire for more. It would be wrong to see this text as springing from love for a friend, however, or a desire for more supportive, let alone admiring, reviews of her work. Its root is in love for and an abiding belief in the necessity of critical thinking, a desire for more complexity in cultural discussion.
With that in mind, I’m going to select five quotes from reviews of two recent productions of works adapted and directed by Jude: Manon Lescaut, for English Touring Opera, which I saw at Bath Theatre Royal, and The Taming of the Shrew, which I saw on its press night at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Following each quote, I’ll offer a few questions, interpretations and alternative considerations in response. Off we go.
1. Tell me what to think
From golden dogs to water coolers, odd props are laden with a portentous symbolic freight that generates clutter without much illumination. (Arts Desk on Manon)
Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut is not a work I know, although I’ve seen a ballet version of the same story, which can basically be summarised as waft, waft, oh my, oh my, obviously the woman dies. Sorry, I’m being facetious. I didn’t read about Jude’s Manon in advance so my experience of watching it was a pendulum swing between comprehension and confusion. It begins with Manon’s impecunious father threatening to send her to a nunnery – so why is this set in an empty swimming pool? Manon escapes into the arms of two lovers: one is pompous and wealthy, and enables a different entrapment, into the baby-pink boudoir of a sexually supple Barbie doll; the other, who can meet her only in shadows, is poor and (judging by his all-white outfit) pure – so why, in the final act, is Manon collapsed in a sea of gold lurex?
For sure all this design could be seen as “clutter without much illumination”, but for me the key word here is why. Why has that costume been chosen, that prop, that setting? Why are you looking for answers to those questions from Jude, rather than within? To me, theatre is at its most interesting, most absorbing, when it offers a challenge to intelligence: when it invites its audience to think for themselves. This is why – to leap momentarily back onto my hobbyhorse (am I ever off it?) – I regularly host post-show discussions with audiences to which the makers of the show are not invited: I’m fascinated by how people tackle those “why” questions when they don’t have access to the “right” answers. They draw on their lives, their emotional experiences, their knowledge, and through all that offer interpretations that might unlock an insight for someone who is listening.
Really, a pendulum is the wrong metaphor for my experience of watching Jude’s Manon: it was more like a tug-of-war, the work itself the taut rope holding comprehension and confusion in delicious tension. I grinned with delight when it occurred to me that the costumes of all the subsidiary characters were in the jewelled colours of Quality Street wrappers: Manon is a chocolate-box opera and that’s how Jude has dressed it. Like the woman who wrapped up Brussels sprouts in Ferrero Rocher foil to trick her greedy father, however, Jude repeatedly insists that the chocolate of Manon is bitter, not sweet. In doing so she refuses to present it as anything other than a work of the romantic era that aestheticises the subjugation of women, diminishes women in its very form. I wish I could claim credit for this observation but instead I needed Jude herself to point it out: Manon is an opera in which the lead female after which it is named has one aria while her paramour has seven.
2. Pretty woman
Manon spends the entire evening tightly wound in what look like hospital bandages, which makes Des Grieux’s oft-repeated encomium to her sublime physical grace hard to believe. (iNews on Manon)
So yes, Manon is about a powerless woman who is trapped in a patriarchal society, a society that tries to contain and control and punish her sexuality, that allows no deviation from the roles of virgin or whore. Thank goodness that’s not the society we re-enter on exiting the theatre, right?
Much has been made in reviews of Jude staging Manon as a feminist nightmare; there is an unnerving, fascinating scene in the middle that she has inserted, in which a woman dressed in drab grey and muted brown, cramped in an office space similarly drained of bright colour, startles awake at a desk. Introducing the workplace here is a useful jolt: just how relevant is the predicament of Manon to the modern independent woman whose life has been transformed by decades and waves of feminist struggle? The critical dislike for Manon’s costume, ruched and figure hugging, would suggest: pretty relevant, actually. Women are still judged on their looks, their clothes, their waist size; worse, they are expected to have the waspish figure naturally that was once achieved through corsetry. Why might a male critic struggle to believe in soprano Jenny Stafford’s sublime physical grace? Might it be because patriarchy never dies?
Something I picked up on in this production, though, was a querying of Manon’s complicity in her nightmare existence: she loves poor Des Grieux to an extent – but she loves the pampered lifestyle enabled by wily Geronte much more. She’s not condemned for it – by the production, I mean; she’s definitely condemned within her own society – but presented with compassion: after all, who wouldn’t want to escape banishment to a nunnery? Manon can’t beat men at this game: she might as well try and bend it to her advantage. But her actions carry a tinge of the lean-in feminisms: choosing wealth over sincerity, Manon brings to mind the far too many white women who persist in supporting figures like Trump, willing accomplices in perpetual subjugation.
3. It’s simple, stoopid
The thing you really, really need to know about Manon Lescaut before the curtain goes up on English Touring Opera’s new production is that the heroine of Puccini’s opera is going to die of thirst. That idea does a lot of heavy lifting in Jude Christian’s staging. (Guardian on Manon)
The thing you really, really need to know about Jude’s production of Manon is that it opens with a wealthy-looking woman being showered in mineral water. Bottles of it. These are people with so much water they can waste it.
It’s always interesting to me when politics this upfront are overlooked or under-considered. Plastic bottles of mineral water are an environmental catastrophe: everyone except for the bottled-water industry will tell you so. And yet, in places of polluted water or severe drought (and there have been plenty of examples of both in recent years), bottled water is a human necessity. Either way you look at it, to treat bottled water with such callous disdain is indicative of a society without moral compass.
These are the people Manon aspires to be; she tries to have the hot tub and the private swimming pool, both symbols of wealth and waste; she tries to have the carefree life of a woman who can travel by yacht and shower in mineral water, but poor she begins and poor she dies. The gold that surrounds her final scene has been touched by Midas, wealth transformed into mirage. No matter how assiduously Des Grieux searches the water bottles there’s not a drop to drink. “It’s almost inevitable,” that Guardian review continues, “that Des Grieux will be flinging empty water-cooler canisters around in ridiculous despair.” Well, yes: because in their world, as in our world, plenty is limited and relies for its existence on inequality and widespread harm.
4. Maybe it’s dramaturgical design
If the hope is to show a woman broken and ripped apart by the hands of male abuse, then Christian has succeeded – Katharina ends as a shell of the person she once was. But, what is the point of it all if the ending remains unchanged and unchallenged? (Time Out on Shrew)
Before we dig into Jude’s Taming of the Shrew, a brief meander down memory lane. In 2017, performers Zoe Coombs Marr, Adrienne Truscott and Ursula Martinez created a show called Wild Bore from some of their more withering reviews, as described in this interview:
AT: When we started comparing our reviews, we found that there was a certain language that was used to describe work by us and artists like us – ways of describing women, and ways of misunderstanding them. If we hadn’t seen a trend beyond ourselves, I’m not sure that we would have pursued this idea.
ZCM: Someone wrote about a Post show, “What if this was dramaturgical design?” Well of course it was.
AT: I got “What if this is meticulous design? Maybe there’s method to her madness.”
UM: Someone wrote of my show Free Admission that I did a certain thing “For no apparent reason.”
Wild Bore was scathing – mortifying in places – and nowhere more so than in the trio’s repetition of the phrase “maybe it’s dramaturgical design”. Please, dear critics, can we at the very least assume that someone who thinks for months about how they will stage a show, someone who has to build this vision with designers and actors, someone who has as idiosyncratic an imagination as Jude, might be making deliberate rather than accidental choices?
I mention this because of that perplexing “if” in the Time Out review of Taming of the Shrew. If the hope is to show a woman WHO IS LITERALLY STARVED AND SLEEP-DEPRIVED BY THE MAN TO WHOM SHE IS PALMED OFF IN MARRIAGE WITH BARELY ANY DISCUSSION AND NO CONSENT, WHO CONTROLS HER USING THE SAME TACTICS USED BY THOSE WHO ENACT TORTURE IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY broken and ripped apart by the hands of male abuse, then Christian has succeeded. Not gonna lie, I am struggling to see the problem here.
That doesn’t mean I, for what it’s worth, “liked” this production. Truth is I found it increasingly uncomfortable and by the end could barely speak I felt so nauseous. But that’s because Jude takes seriously and at face value its depiction of domestic violence: rather than read Shrew as satire, she shrewdly argues that Shakespeare doesn’t so much mock male abuse as make more of it. There is no enjoyment for me in watching that – but I admire the stance immensely.
What does it mean to want a fun night out with Taming of the Shrew? To want to see Katharina bounce back, declare that a hit feels like a kiss, to play Petruchio’s game and then mock her sister for being too gauche for such a nuanced relationship? This review recoils from the “indignity” of Katharina’s “fall into submission”, from the “bizarrely sour taste” of her “painful final speech” being “performed without a trace of irony”. But what should Taming of the Shrew taste like: candy floss?
When Katharina delivers that speech at the end, she does so knowing that this abusive man is listening to every word, waiting for her to slip up. I found Andrew Leung as Petruchio repellently convincing: his face, his smug expression, as he watched her deliver this exhortation to female softness and nurturing compliance, how certain he was of her obedience, all of it was galling. Katharine is earnest to the point of excess because if she put a foot wrong here – distorted the line instead of toeing it – would she get any supper or sleep that night? Hell no. I believed that absolutely, and that’s why this Shrew was brilliant.
5. Reason not the need
But why do Bianca’s unsuitable suitors speak through giant Hieronymus Bosch faces strapped to their stomachs and why does her dad have Shrek feet and hands? Why does her true love Lucentio always exit via a mini-trampoline? Why the flatulent brass interludes? (Evening Standard on Shrew)
Remember what I said in the first chunk, about the importance of asking why? It’s not enough: something more is needed from the writer, not definitive answers that might close down discussion but suggestions, offers, wonderings – hesitancy, ideally, instead of conviction, but certainly ideas.
The writer of this Evening Standard review does exactly that and I applaud them for it. In fact, it’s unfair and misrepresentative of me to pick these sentences over others of a more interpretative bent. There’s so much in this review that gets my brain whirring, for instance: “I think Katharina’s biddable sister Bianca speaks through a doll because society has infantilised her” (brilliant! I wondered if it was because she is biddable and sweet only as a pose or on the surface, while her real self is demanding and manipulative); “and Petruchio through a ventriloquist’s dummy of himself because he’s parroting learned attitudes” (oof that’s a great suggestion; I’m so instantly creeped out by ventriloquist’s dummies – blame the TV advert for Chucky – that all I could do was recoil).
I really hope no one is reading this speculative dialogue as sarcastic rather than genuinely appreciative: appreciative of the thought process and appreciative of the space left open for me to think as well/alongside/through. Some years ago another writer told me – maybe he’d read this in Irving Wardle’s pontifications on criticism – that no words are more redundant than “I think”: you’re writing it, of course you think it. But the specificity, the subjectivity, of “I think” is a useful guard against an assumed objectivity: just because I think this doesn’t mean anyone else will.
“So society is institutionally abusive and misogynist, and we are all trapped in an absurdist nightmare where violence and coercive control elicit laughter… until they don’t. I think this is what Christian is getting at.” Yes! That horrible gigantic teddy bear with love hearts for eyes that dominates the stage with its bland (it is SO beige), soft, soppy notion of romance: from Hallmark to Hollywood, from pop music to politics, love and care are commodities that can be exploited for all their financial potential. The design is by Rosie Elnile, one of whose abiding preoccupations is that actors have places to rest on stage, and it’s a pleasure to see Thalissa Teixeira’s Katharina doing so: Jude and Rosie look after her, even if Petruchio doesn’t. By sharp contrast, beside the teddy is a hard wooden bench where Jamie-Rose Monk sits almost throughout: Shakespeare presented Shrew as a play within a play, and Monk is its director – indeed, its most visibly violent character, headbutting Teixeira before she’s even inhabited the role of Katharina. Which says a lot to me about the role of art in habituating a society to institutionalised abuse, reinforcing the place of misogynist violence within a culture.
This is why I pick up on that particular paragraph where the Evening Standard writer’s capacity for wondering (and indeed wonder) apparently runs dry. Those why questions slam me back into the place of “clutter without much illumination”, shoved on stage “for no apparent reason”. I have all sorts of thoughts about them:
Why the flatulent brass interludes? Because Shakespeare called music the food of love, and so many people get stomach aches from it?
Why does her true love Lucentio always exit via a mini-trampoline? Because it makes him look like he’s floating on air – which is just what a young and foolish man in love would do.
Why does her dad have Shrek feet and hands? I have no idea, except that it made all his movements clumsy, underscoring his ham-fistedness as a parent (and the phrase ham-fisted suddenly brings to mind those brilliantly weird scenes in Everything Everywhere All at Once where Maggie Cheung and Jamie Lee Curtis had long floppy hotdog fingers).
Why do Bianca’s unsuitable suitors speak through giant Hieronymus Bosch faces strapped to their stomachs? I found these so unpleasant to look at: they were at once like fish heads and alien masks and had the leering quality of the elderly men in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders, and when the actors put their hands through the mouth holes situated over their stomachs they looked simultaneously like floppy penises and the waggling tongue of a drag performer miming cunnilingus. So gross!
See, isn’t this fun? And yet, so few of the people writing about Jude’s Shrew, or her Manon, did this playful thinking; instead they found all the design discombobulating to the point of irritation and distaste. I snag on that paragraph in the Evening Standard review because of the word “jolt” in this sentence: “I think Christian aims to jolt us out of preconceptions that the play can’t be funny as well as horrible and isn’t relevant to today.” I’m working as a dramaturg at the moment and in that collaboration we’ve been talking about Brecht’s insistence on alienation, or defamiliarisation: using theatre not to present naturalism, a realistic facsimile of life off of the stage, but to expose these purportedly natural structures as construction – and, as such, all the more possible to change. Jude makes Taming of the Shrew funny not to make it palatable but to emphasise how horrible it is; she fills it with weirdness and discomfort to ensure that it’s uncomfortable to watch a woman being abused; she distorts the aesthetics to lengthen time and fragment it, because this abuse is always and it is now.
But before I sound too sure of myself, let me end with another disclaimer. I mentioned the Quality Street theory about the Manon costumes to Jude and she laughed and said actually she’d had Skittles in mind; as for the trampoline, she admitted that it’s an irreverent touch inspired by Michael Billington’s review of Three Kingdoms (wow, talk about a trip down memory lane…) which complained about how characters exited the stage in leaps and bounds. Maybe some dramaturgical design has no reason except the director’s impish delight in the possibilities of theatre. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
For the curious, there are two engaging – and balanced rather than unequivocally positive! – reviews of these shows worth reading: one from a student paper, of Manon; and one from the Financial Times, of Shrew.
Something Other 