The greatest swinger in town
Kneehigh's dazzling show affirms Angela Carter's long-deserved place in the limelight
Susannah Clapp
Sunday 29 January 2006 02.12 GMT
Up she goes, 'shaking out about her those tremendous red and purple pinions ... Now all London lies beneath her flying feet.' That's Fevvers, the heroine of Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus: the Cockney Venus, an aerialist with attitude. And that is Angela Carter's reputation since her death, 14 years ago, at the age of 51. She's on the school syllabus; she's been the subject of numerous PhDs; she's not just revered, but loved for her unique mixture of the voluptuous and the snarling, the erudite and the demotic. She is soaring.
It's easy to forget that during her life she was sidelined, regarded as a feminist exotic. Although she won the Somerset Maugham prize in her twenties, using the money to run away from her first husband ('I'm sure Somerset Maugham would have been very pleased'), she never won a major prize in her maturity, was never even short-listed for the Booker: the omission of her last novel Wise Children from the 1991 list was one reason for the setting up of the all-women Orange Prize for fiction. She was a decade too old and too female to be mentioned alongside Amis, Barnes and McEwan as one of the young pillars of British fiction. When she was a Booker judge, TV presenter Selina Scott mistook her for a hanger-on, and inquired if she'd read any of the short-listed novels.
This year sees a further move away from all that. Some of her books are being reissued in paperback; on the South Bank this summer, there will be an event in celebration of her writing. And stage versions of her fiction are popping up everywhere: in Scotland, America, Australia. Bryony Lavery is adapting Wise Children, for the National and, under the direction of Emma Rice, the Kneehightheatre company is staging Nights at the Circus in a co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith and Bristol Old Vic.
Here I must declare an interest. As Angela Carter's literary executor, I gave permission for these adaptations. Enthusiastically. Although she hated the cut-glass accents, the mopping and mowing of 'naturalistic' theatre - 'that dreadful spectacle of painted loons in the middle distance making fools of themselves' - Carter was an extraordinarily theatrical writer. She was fascinated by the popular stage: by circuses, panto and music hall; the heroines of Wise Children are hoofers. She wrote brilliantly about pastiche and performance in daily life: about women making themselves up, or down, 'every face a work of anti-art'; about architecture, like that of the Granada Cinema in Tooting, where the fake and real sit side by side, and you can't tell what's imitating what. She played with style in her own speech, too: her voice could skitter in a sentence from the genteel to an early version of estuary, both sounding like parody; her conversation was orchestrated, punctuated by a battery of hesitations, gabbled repetitions and long, wheezing laughs.
When, after her death, I went to her house in Clapham and pulled out the drawers of the filing cabinet in which she kept drafts and discards of her work, I hoped to find some unpublished stories, or notes on the novel about Jane Eyre's stepdaughter for which she'd submitted a synopsis: Adele was going to fall in love with a schoolteacher, seduce her own father and watch her mother being guillotined; it was going to play 'some tricks with history ... But then it is a novel'.
No luck with any of that. But there were other, more unexpected treasures. There was a profusion of gorgeously coloured drawings: of her son Alexander, of slinky cats and floppy-petalled flowers. There were journals - part working notebooks and part daily jottings, some of which I'm about to edit for publication. And there was a wealth of scripts. There were the broadcast plays - born in 1940, Angela was a child of the wireless - and the successful films, The Magic Toyshop and The Company of Wolves (written with Neil Jordan). Friends had heard about the version of Wedekind's Lulu that the National had commissioned but not put on. I saw her at a party, white with the fury of rejection: 'The National have just flushed my Lulu down the toilet.' But few people knew about the screenplays that didn't get produced: the cowboy morality script, Gun for the Devil, or The Christchurch Murder, a fictional re-creation of the event that was the basis of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. Fragments of a libretto for an opera of Orlando - to be set to music by Michael Berkeley - were a surprise: Angela had complained of Virginia Woolf's brown-nosing of the aristocracy.
These scripts were sent to theatres after her death, but found no takers. Yet here is Kneehigh tackling the far more daunting task of putting on her lavishly complicated turn-of-the-last-century novel. Nights at the Circus plays strange tricks with time and is loaded with arcane vocabulary ('steatopygous' - meaning protuberant buttocks - appears on the front page). Most problematically, its heroine is a fleshy fantasy: a blowsy creature with wings sprouting from her shoulder blades, who claims to have learnt to fly by jumping from the mantelpiece of a brothel. She is ready to open the gate to the next century, where women will be free. 'Is she fact or is she fiction?' runs her slogan.
It's pointless to pretend that the actress Natalia Tena, 21 and radiant, is a dead ringer for Fevvers, who is huge and battered, with a face 'as broad and oval as a meat dish'. Tena was, says Emma Rice, exactly who she wasn't looking for. But fat actresses have been 'drummed out of the business years ago', and Tena has the gusto and frankness to tap straight into the character. The greed, too: when Rice saw her shovelling pavlova into her mouth during a break, she got her to do the same on stage. She's not allowed centre stage enough, but she is heart-stopping in the opening moments - spangled, swinging on a trapeze, singing 'I'm only a bird in a gilded cage', first plaintively, and then as a belting challenge - and she's rousing at the close, when she and Gisli Orn Gardarsson, the Icelandic actor (and circus-trained international gymnast) twirl side by side on bungee trapezes in an aerial romance.
There are gaps as well as glories: despite radical cutting of the plot by Rice and Tom Morris, the narrative thread still needs tightening. But the show - a kind of carnival - has found visual equivalents for the richness of Carter's novel. A series of theatre curtains create stages within stages, and mimic the permanently raised eyebrows of her ironic prose. Slapstick echoes her bawdiness. And quite wonderful songs (music by Stu Barker and words by Morris, delivered to brass, washboard and accordion) shift the mood in seconds to savagery, melancholy or lyricism: Ed Woodall's fine, lugubrious clown sings of his love for his whippet-thin wife (the plaintive but full-voiced Amanda Lawrence), while cuffing her at the end of every soulful line. After its run at the Lyric, Nights at the Circus sets out on tour, like a real circus. It will grow in the process. It has already given a flourishing start to what promises to be Angela Carter's year.
How did other people like the show? We switched on the review radar ...
Denise Stephenson forties, actor
It's an extraordinary, delicious feast. The characters were delightful: funny and horrific at the same time.
Sirius Flatz 25, student
It was like going to a circus 110 years ago, and I am very grateful for that. I wish I could sprout wings one day!
Sally Goldsworthy, 43, director of children's centre
The ending was fantastic and I loved the design. There's a potential here for a really great show.
Amit Lehav, 33, theatre director
I was a bit lost at the beginning but they really conveyed the whole culture of the circus. The atmosphere was incredible.
Tony Gilfoyle, 53, actor
It was very beautiful and moving and very sexy. I think it's going to grow into something rather wonderful.
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