Plagued Performance

One Flea Spare

NUTS

ANU Arts Centre, May 14-17

If this play doesn’t win awards and accolades for the fabulous set (designed by Gowrie Varma and Ellie Greenwood), there is no justice in this world. The jumble of furniture and picture frames hanging from the ceiling and hammered to the walls screams chaos. This is a world where social, sexual, political and cultural mores are turned upside down and we are immediately plunged into this moral morass.

If, however, there is no justice; that would also be fitting, as inequality is one of the major themes the play examines. In 1665 when the plague stalks the streets of London, the wealthy couple William and Darcy Snelgrave (Andrew Eddey and Sarah Heywood) are quarantined in their house for four weeks. On the last day of their confinement, the house is broken into by Bunce (Lewis McDonald), a sailor, and Morse (Cheski Walker), a strange adolescent who turns out to be the serving girl of their neighbours. Once the guard, Kabe (George Mitton) detects their presence, the house is sealed up for another 28 days, forcing the unlikely foursome to live together in less than perfect harmony.

The isolation is stifling and the silences are admirably awkward as the unwelcome house-guests begin to learn about each other. The members of the confined quartet all give solid performances as they tease out information and back-stories from their characters. As in previous NUTS productions, the age of the available actors limits the possible range of expression, but the actors playing the fifty-something Snelgraves gave pretty fine performances considering. Darcy Snelgrave has been physically, sexually and emotionally repressed for over thirty years, and although Heywood plays this as more grumpy irritation than subdued longing, her thawing is persuasive as she rediscovers the pleasure of touch and intimacy.

Her husband is caught between trying to be the boss and wanting to explore the worlds that Bunce has seen. Eddey portrays this dichotomy with sincerity and his interrogation scenes are a masterpiece of cautious curiosity. McDonald, meanwhile, imbues Bunce with authority and awareness, whether instructing William and Darcy on physical intimacy or regaling the company with tales of wanderlust. He adds just the right hint of intimidation when he dresses in another man’s clothes and literally assumes the mantle of power.

As Morse, Cheski Walker luxuriates in a childlike limpidity and her movements around the stage are fluid and compelling. She might benefit from more variety of tone, however, as the depiction of fey spirit child becomes a little tiresome, and renders the screaming passion unconvincing. Similarly, Mitton could bring more menace to the role of Kabe. His jovial cheek adds a light comic touch, but a man who has been handed control over his past masters would surely take a more spiteful advantage of his new-found promotion.

There are some pacing issues in the play, which may be due to the co-direction of Gowrie Varma and Ellie Greenwood. Perhaps having two directors rather than one muddles the focus and prevents continuity. At times it feels as though everyone thought someone else was providing the vision and it all gets a little lost. At the interval, I heard several people wondering if it was actually the end, and only the fact that they hadn’t seen the actors bow persuaded them to return to the auditorium. Parts of the second half also flagged as though the actors were unsure how to combine the separate movements into a cohesive symphony.

Naomi Wallace took the title of her play from a John Donne poem in which a man exalts in the thought of a flea mingling the blood of a pair of lovers. Of course the flea’s ability to cross borders of sanguinity has darker consequences in terms of disease. In the enforced isolation the characters are simultaneously saved and damned by proximity and contact. The important moments all come through physical transfer: transmitting gin from one mouth to another; the caress of a body that has not been touched for 37 years; the placing of a finger into an open wound; the angel’s breath of a child or death; the strangely seductive handling of an orange; the thrilling fetish of toe-sucking.

This plague affects all – the rich and poor alike – and has no respect of place, persons nor time. Donne was a metaphysical poet; a term coined by Samuel Johnson to describe a loose bunch of poets concerned with conceits and speculation on themes such as politics and religion. The play’s treatment of class disparity is apt in this context and the poetic surface belies a blunt sub-text of growing concern over inequality as exemplified by recent riots and Occupy movements.

Of course, as every English school-child knows, the 1665 epidemic of the Bubonic Plague in London was swept away by the Great Fire of 1666. The notion of purity is strong on this stage; from the white outfits the characters wear, all the better to show up the blood and the dirt, to the constant washing of the floorboards with vinegar to prevent infection. The compulsory propinquity may lead not only to epidemic outbreaks of disease, but social revolution. Wallace seems to suggest that our contemporary plague is greed and individualism, and only through sharing and collectivism will we recover healthy community.

Great Walls and Fire! Museum of London (Part One)

The Museum of London had been recommended to me by my super-in-law, so I took a tube there one day while in the city.

As the Olympics have been held in London three times, and everyone has caught the fever, there was an exhibition in the foyer on the subject. This one hopes to be the most sustainable games to date – for example, the top ring of the Olympic stadium is made from surplus gas pipes.

I skipped through exhibitions about London before London and Roman London (not literally skipped, you understand, that would be weird). The city was burned in AD60 by Boudicca and was then rebuilt and expanded. By AD100 it replaced Colchester as the capital of Britannia. Glass cases contained bones and pottery, models of amphitheatres, stone sculpture tools, coins and horseshoes, but I was being selective, and pressed on.

I was intrigued by the remaining part of the London Wall, however. The first fort was built in AD120 for the soldiers in Londinium. There were remaining mosaics from AD 200 when these walls were strengthened and incorporated into a city wall to protect London. In AD410 the Romans abandoned London; the city declined as it was empty for nearly 400 years and the wall began to collapse.

The Saxons moved in (in AD886), repaired the walls, and added towers for extra protection against Viking attack. They built houses right up against the wall, but they were destroyed in the Great Fire of London (1666). In the nineteenth century, warehouses and shops again abutted the wall. World War II bombing caused extensive damage to both the wall and the buildings, and when archaeologists dug up the ruins, they found sections of the original wall, one of which is displayed here, looking secretive in the summer sunshine. I love how the stones are steeped in history.

Real children were playing in a reconstructed house in the Medieval Britain section. Here the displays feature weapons, keys, chain mail, pottery, preserved doors and altarpieces, rings, paintings, books, manuscripts (bibles and primers from the 1400s) and illustrated letters. There’s a collection of London Delftware pottery, and the Cheapside Hoard, a treasure of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewels discovered in 1912 under the cellar floor of a seventeenth century house in Cheapside.

Again, I raced through this bit, but was morbidly interested by the display on the Plague, Black Death and Pestilence caused by the stink and filth of the city. The ‘War Plague and Fire’ section also interested me as it has a model of the Rose Theatre from 1587 and the three copper plates of the 1559 Copper Plate Map – fifteen plates made up a map of London, and only these three survive, although there is no contemporary printed map.

Oliver Cromwell’s death mask is also on display here. He is claimed to have said, in a 1656 interview, “I am as much for a government by consent as any man; but where shall we find that consent?”

London was teeming – furniture, models of 1660s timber houses, and pictures of the Great Fire illustrate this state. Donald Lupton wrote in London and the Countrey (1632), “London is the great beehive of Christendom... she swarms with people of all ages, natures, sexes, callings... she seems to be a glutton, for she desires always to be full.”

One-fifth of the population died in 1665 due to the Great Plague. In an effort to ward it off, people wore bunches of herbs; lavender, cloves, and pommo d’ambre (a mixture of whale vomit, animal scents and flowers – thought to be efficacious). And then came the Great Fire.

London booksellers stored all their books and papers in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral for safety, but it was covered in wooden scaffolding which caught fire, the lead in the roof melted, the cathedral burned down, and everything was destroyed. Fortunately London Bridge had a gap between shops in it (from a previous fire), which prevented the fire from spreading to Southwark, and causing further loss of life.

The gaolers took pity on the debtors in prison at Newgate, and released them to fend for themselves. People pulled down houses and Charles II himself helped with throwing water on the conflagration which raged for five days, destroying 13,000 homes – the King arranged for bread to be delivered each day to feed the many homeless.