How do we understand TV as a literary medium?

These are the notes I made in advance of the BSFA/SFF panel. The discussion went off in other and equally interesting directions, but I thought these notes might be of interest anyway. ( Read more... )

King Lear at Wandlebury Country Park

Tears begun streaming down my face and my froat akit.
Lissener hispert, ‘Whats the matter?’
I hispert back, ‘O what we ben! And what we come to!’
Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban

On Tuesday evening, I went with edge_of_ruin out to Wandlebury Country Park to see a terrific production of King Lear by in situ, a Cambridge-based experimental theatre company. The production took the form of a walk through the meadows and woodland of the park, as the sun went down and night encroached. The seven cast members led us through long grass, round the orchard, down the Roman Road, through the woods, and back out again into the sunset. The play wasn’t performed in full, the actors didn’t take specific parts, and the several set-pieces were interspersed with improvisation. The programme notes stated, “we’ve imagined a group of people who, perhaps as a result of some social or personal trauma, are attempting a re-enactment of a tragedy, the details of which they can barely remember.”

The result was amazing. Our first guide – who appeared to be a battlefield survivor – led us out into the meadow where the four male cast members, their backs turned to the audience, boomed out the division of the kingdom, like an Old Testament god setting history in motion. The three women came slowly towards us from out of the trees, flesh rising up from the grass. Then we were led towards the setting sun, to follow the disintegration of a self, or of a social body. At the start of the Roman Road, the three women, walking slowly backwards, began Lear’s curse; we were taken past them further up the road, stopping where Lear/the Fool was talking to himself. In time the curse caught up with us. People struggled to explain what it was they had seen that they could not find words for, using broken toys to try to communicate with us; suddenly remembered what they had seen, drawing eyes on the trees or placing pairs of shells or stones in the earth. Coming out from a clearing where a noose had been tied for the hanging that was going to happen/had happened, we finished in a darkening meadow, where the cast came towards us calling out singly for Cordelia.

A bold and imaginative production that made real demands on the audience, and I’m glad I followed where it took us.

(My disappointing pictures here.)