2nd March 2017 – a Matinee
performance of Twelfth Night
Vanessa Bell at Dulwich Picture Gallery
It was a strange afternoon,
weatherwise. I walked to the underground station in pouring rain; I emerged by
the Thames in bright sunshine. I walked across the river by the footbridge from
Charing Cross Station, the next bridge downstream from Westminster. Then along
the Southbank, with its confusing proliferation of concrete modernist
buildings, to one of the biggest of them – the National Theatre.
There was a matinee
performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth
Night, beginning at 2pm. Forty minutes or so into the first half, the
terrorist atrocity was perpetrated about ½ mile away, in Westminster. The show
went on.
In the interval, the benign
weather continuing, it was good to walk out onto the small Olivier Theatre
Circle terrace, with its westward river views. All seemed normal – but there
was the insistent near drone of a helicopter (not in itself an unusual sound).
This must have been about half an hour after the atrocity. People checked their
recently turned off phones. There was no newsflash feeds on mine, and off it
went again as we filed back into the vast insulated space of the Olivier. No
helicopters or sirens intruded there. The show went on.
Just before 5pm we jostled
slowly out. There was a brief PA announcement. Westminster and Embankment
underground stations were closed, as was Westminster Bridge. We looked over to
Waterloo Bridge. There was a huge jam of vehicles, mostly buses nose to tail.
We sat down and checked
phones. Now the news was there: and attack, with (at that point) one confirmed
fatality, at Westminster.
We went out to the riverside
walkway. There were a lot of people (it being the beginning of the end of the
working day), walking or jogging in the direction of Westminster. We could see
people walking across the Charing Cross footbridge. It all looked – normal. Not
trusting this normality, and mindful of the NT’s announcement of closures, we
walked to the east, to Blackfriars and a train to north London.
There was a different sort of
“Westminster Bubble” that day: a bubble of senseless tragedy, which also became
a lockdown bubble. People in Westminster were in it, as were helpless visitors
to the London Eye, kept for hours in the transparent pods. Just outside the
bubble, the National carried on, as did the promenaders on the Southbank. What
else to do? Doubtless, had the National stopped the play because of the news of
events just upstream, we would in shock have accepted the decision without
demur. But I’m glad that the show went on.
“Gender fluidity”
Twelfth Night
was the Shakespeare play I had to study for “O” level in the 1960s (possibly I
re-read it for my English Literature degree, but it is the teenage experience
that I recall). I remembered only snatches of the lines, but latent familiarity
was often triggered by the glittering NT production. This was a rompish
celebration of, in current jargon, “gender fluidity” (no Shakespearean phrase
that).
There is a cross-dressing
(female to male) plot device at the heart of the play; to which the production
adds a female Malvolia, the puritan steward in love with her mistress, Olivia,
and a female clown, Feste (name unchanged..).
On the lesbian twist is piled a homoerotic insinuation: the Duke
Orsino, deceived into thinking that Viola, in disguise, is a young man, is
inordinately affectionate to him/her, even as he employs the pretend boy as a
go-between in Orsino’s conventional courtly love suit to the resistant Olivia
(Orsino protests his love too much, we are made to feel). Meanwhile Olivia
falls gropingly for the disguised Viola.
But the nicest twist is
reserved for the final scenes. Viola’s twin, the very male Sebastian, thought
drowned, turns up. Olivia easily and immediately transfers her affections to
him (a comment on superfluidity). And, so it seems, it is the same with Orsino.
He is happy to discover that his young man is in fact a young woman with a
massive crush on him. We understand that heterosexual desires have finally
found their appropriate channels.
But… as the four lovers
consort in amazement at the dramatic revelations, Orsino seizes Sebastian,
casually mistaking him for his revealed sister, and passionately snogs him. The
implication is that man or woman, one twin or the other, it is all the same to
him.
As the NT programme notes
gleefully ask: Is the play suggesting
that gender and sex themselves are “performances” and that both are as much
social constructs as physical ones?
Vanessa
Bell at Dulwich Picture Gallery
More fluidity: I had not
fully realised until visiting the Bell exhibition that the Bloomsbury circle of
the early C20 would happily take on allcomers if there were a contest in
transgressing adult sexual norms.
A couple of years ago I
visited Charleston, The Sussex home of Vanessa Bell, and learned something of
her complex life spent there, with husband Clive Bell and lover and artistic
collaborator Duncan Grant; and a walk-on stellar cast of straight, gay and
especially bisexual friends, including Lytton Strachey and Geoffrey Keynes.
However, the DPG exhibition,
enchanting as it was, plunged me into more biographical confusion. My vague
knowledge and vague misapprehension (that Duncan Grant was Vanessa’s life
partner) were confounded. Grant was a transitory lover (though fathering
Vanessa’s last child, to be brought up as Clive’s) and fundamentally gay.
Therefore, at the Charleston
house, the ménage was: Vanessa (separate), Clive (separate plus women), Duncan
(separate plus men) – and children.
The overheated scriptwriter
of these fluid lives adds an improbable postscript. Vanessa’s daughter (by
Duncan) eventually married the ex-lover of her father, David Garnett.
In addition to a certain set
of attitudes and tastes, it must also take considerable strength of character
to lead a life like Bell’s. That comes across in her art. There is always
strength, a solidity in her painting, whether of men, women, or child; or of
places or still life. Together with vividness, gorgeousness even, of colour,
the result is formidable, and pleasing.
March 2017
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