Shook – Footnotes
My Footnotes to our episode on Shook include more observations on our prejudices against people from different classes or circumstances, parenting as empathy, and the heartbreak of long-distance childbirth.
“I’m always going to be a problem to people like him”
Cain perceptively encapsulates the wariness we feel about people from different classes of society who we know little about and dismiss or fear. He is referring to the prison governor who he rightly assumes lives in a separate world to him and his fellow inmates. It is not just the practical problem of having to lock offenders away to protect ourselves that Cain is describing; it is a much wider general attitude that amounts to social prejudice:
“And he’s telling me I’m the problem? Thinking he’s better than me. I’m always going to be a problem to people like him, innit. Nothing I ever do is right. Where I live is a problem, what music I listen to is a problem,what I wear is a problem. Whenever we have kids, it’s a problem….They should just fucking come clean and admit they just don’t like us and that’s why they locked us up in here.”
Who among us has not made judgements such as these about people from other social classes or circumstances. It is all too easy to disparage, even write off people who are not like us. What we see in Cain, Jonjo and Riyad are complex human beings, who certainly have flaws and who have done harm to others, but who also have talents and inherent goodness. Cain again challenges Grace and us to consider who is “good”. When Jonjo asks Grace if her son Alex is good, she replies “pretty good”; but Cain realises that the question is deeper than that, because he knows that it is difficult to say of them that they are “pretty good”. Their badness has not been trivial – “robbing people, hurting them” – and from a young age. The implication I think is that somehow their lack of goodness is inherent or an inevitable function of the failures of character or behaviour in their families or class. As George so rightly says in our conversation, our view of these boys also stands for our views more generally of others who are less privileged, and is not limited to confirmed criminals. The positive power of the play, however, is as George says that “it makes us care about people that normally we would cross the road to avoid”, which is the beginning of true empathy.
Photo: Kiran Mensah – Evening Standard
Josef Davies as Jonjo
“Parenting is empathy”
We talked a lot about parenting in the podcast, including the inescapable impact that our upbringing or our behaviour as a parent has on our own or our children’s lives. We also talked about the boys’ instinctive desire to be good parents; hence their taking part in the course, despite Riyad’s proclamation that parenting can’t be taught. He contradicts himself however when he sensibly suggests to Grace that parenting skills should be taught in school, along with other practical life skills, like “how you’d get a flat…or vote”; especially “in case you ain’t got no one to show you.” The lack of parenting role models does of course have a huge practical impact on the lives of these boys.
When Sam said during our conversation that “parenting is empathy” he also identified the emotive meaning of being a parent, and the emotional cost to these boys who have not benefited from it. Grace explained that for all of the practical skills she tries to impart, parenting ultimately boils down to being there when “they come to you to make it better”. And Cain speaks for all of us when he tells Riyad that by the time parents are responsible for looking after teenagers they’re all “just making it up as they go along.” So what parenting finally is is learning to care for someone else, and most poignantly what these boys crave is to learn how to love and to be loved. This is vividly expressed in the final image of Jonjo cradling the baby at the close of the play: the lifeless doll substituting for the real baby he won’t be able to touch and the comfort he himself has been denied.
Long-distance childbirth
Riyad reveals his innate empathy when he describes being at the birth of his son. He contrived to delay his entry to prison in order to be there for the birth, and despite the “screaming and all that”, he was overwhelmed by the exultant moment when he hears “those little lungs…Crying out for you.” He also displays empathy for the effort of the mother in her labours when he counsels Jonjo that his supporting role is to “tell her it’s all good”. There is no more graphic or heartbreaking symbol of the isolation of these incarcerated fathers than the vision Riyad presents of Jonjo being ‘allowed’ to listen on the phone to the birth of his child when the time comes, and to tell his girl “it’s all good.”
063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.
062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward
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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.
I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – March
Before the theatres went dark this month I was lucky enough to see Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Bridge, and spend more than seven hours in thrall to Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota at the National. Plus, some thoughts on what we miss when there is no theatre.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – February
Another great mix of shows this month, from Tom Stoppard’s new play, to Ibsen, Beckett and newer plays in smaller London venues.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – January
The January roundup included both classic plays, such as The Duchess of Malfi, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, as well as recent musicals Dear Evan Hansen and Girl from the North Country …
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