list.co.uk/festival Naked ambition
Over the past couple of years Nic Green has created an epic exploration of what it means to be a woman today. Mark Fisher meets the theatre-maker who’s still proud to call herself a feminist
Nic Green was leading a discussion recently when a young man questioned her use of the word ‘feminism’. ‘No one wants to hear that word, can’t you call it womanism?’ he asked. Green accepts that the term has picked up a load of ‘humourless and joyless’ baggage, but she is happy to identify herself with the movement they used to call women’s lib.
‘Part of this project has been about understanding what I think feminism is and sharing those ideas with other women,’ she says. ‘It feels like young women don’t want to say they’re feminist in case boys and men don’t like them! I’d like it to be celebrated in a way that means we might all be happier.’ Over the past couple of years, she
has been building the show that is coming together as Trilogy in St Stephen’s Church, former home of Aurora Nova, now occupied by Glasgow’s Arches. It starts with a 20- minute celebration of womanhood, featuring a display of joyous naked dancing by local volunteers, and finishes with a rendition of ‘Jerusalem’ during which women in the audience are encouraged to strip off too. The centrepiece, Town Bloody Hall, is a response to a landmark feminist discussion in 1971 featuring Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer. ‘It’s about recognising the amazing
things that have come before me under the guise of feminism,’ says Green, thrilled by the enthusiasm of audiences. ‘There have been some wonderful women and men who have spoken under the name of feminism and I don’t want to forget about that.’ ■ Trilogy, St Stephen’s, 0141 565 1000, 12–31 Aug (not 18, 25), 7.30pm, £12 (£9). Previews 9 & 10 Aug, £9.
Festival Theatre
SPARK OF GENIUS With two new productions of her novels coming to the Fringe, Edinburgh audiences are about to discover there’s much more to Muriel Spark than Miss Jean Brodie, says Kirstin Innes
T hink Muriel Spark, think Miss Jean Brodie. The glittering presence of a Scottish schoolteacher with fascist leanings – in her prime – has increasingly come to overshadow everything else that one of Scotland’s greatest, and most prolific, writers has done.
You’re thinking of Dame Maggie Smith, of course, with her exquisite pronunciation, riding her bicycle over the Edinburgh cobbles. This defining image is all down to Hollywood screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, who saw the potential in Jean Brodie to be a breakout character in 1961, the year the book was published. The Brodie legacy, through theatre, television and film, stems from Presson Allen’s script, a simplified, rudimentary version of Spark’s novel.
Independent of each other, two theatre companies are taking on separate adaptations of two of Spark’s novels at the same Fringe venue this year. Northampton’s Royal & Derngate Theatre Company is using a choir of children to add fascistic depth to its interpretation of Presson Allen’s Brodie script, while Scotland’s Stellar Quines has commissioned playwright Judith Adams to adapt The Girls of Slender Means. This is only the second of Spark’s 22 novels to be adapted for theatre, 46 years after Vanessa Redgrave debuted as Brodie in the West End.
‘Muriel Spark is, without a doubt, the greatest female writer of modern times that Scotland had,’ explains Muriel Romanes, who conceived and is directing the new production. ‘The reason I’m doing this has a lot to do with Brodie – I know the film is very popular, it’s a very camp, clever piece of work, but there’s more to Spark than that. Hopefully people will see this and realise that there are lots more books that would make equally brilliant plays. Slender Means is a little bit of art.’ The Girls of Slender Means was published two years after Brodie, and can be seen as a matured re-examination of similar themes. ‘This isn’t a community of schoolchildren, as in Brodie,’ says Romanes. ‘They’ve grown up. These are young women, who have just survived World War II and are living only in the moment. And it’s savage. Muriel Spark is very savage. This isn’t a nice little story of young girls being secretaries and having love affairs. They have to be savage to survive.’
More often than not, transferring novels to the stage or screen becomes a straightforward matter of lifting the plot, wholesale, beginning to end. What Spark excels in, though, is the non-linear narrative. Her plots – especially the story of the young ladies living at the May of Teck Club in Slender Means – erode timezones, sometimes taking in the whole of a character’s past and future in one devastatingly casual sentence. She doesn’t
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‘MURIEL SPARK IS VERY SAVAGE’
even pay lip service to the idea of realism; she’s always so very conscious of herself as an author and her characters as fictional creations that the art and meaning of her works is an intricate structure. What’s so intriguing about Stellar Quines’ The Girls of Slender Means is Romanes and Adams’ approach to their source material: it becomes clear that a genuine act of translation from sculpted prose to live theatricality is happening here. ‘For me, the value is that it’s non-linear,’ says Romanes. ‘Judith Adams has a wonderfully surreal mind, and is able to completely extrapolate text and mess around with it. She’s written in film and sound and mad fantasticals. I trust her absolutely.’
So, one imagines, would Spark.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Assembly Hall, 623 3030, 8–31 Aug (not 17, 24), noon, £17.50–£22 (£16–£20). Previews 6 & 7 Aug, £10; The Girls of Slender Means, Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, 8–31 Aug (not 10, 17, 24), 4.20pm, £15–£18 (£14–£16). Previews 6 & 7 Aug, £10 (£5).