I’m Not Dead pt 2

Having finally cornered my willing volunteer on a day when neither of us has been too ill to stand up (many long stories in that one – and thanks for this entry due to the lovely H)… here is part the second of I’m Not Dead.

For this one, I’ve been using Snazaroo water-based paints (the colours I used were Black, White, Bright Red, Bright Yellow and Bright Green – the last two are entirely optional though) and Special FX Wax, which is a bit like mortician’s wax only easier to apply and water-soluble so you can get it off more easily afterwards – you can get all of them direct from Snazaroo here http://www.snazaroo.com along with all kinds of other bits and pieces that are just so much fun to muck about with!  I’ve also been using the fake blood I made last time around, for which it’s really useful to have a dropper,  just for ease of application.  Next time you eat sushi (or as in my case are sat next to someone eating sushi), steal the little plastic soy sauce container from them once they’re done.  It’s so handy.

Anyway, what you need to do first is make a mound of the wax slightly longer than and wider than the cut, and smooth the edges in so you can’t see them as much.  This doesn’t have to be perfect, because it just looks a bit like you’re peeling skin (or so H told me!) but, y’know.  Enough for it to blend in with the real skin.  Like this:

And then with your spatula, or the blunt side of a table knife, you score down the middle to make the cut.  It doesn’t need to be as far down as the skin, depending on how much wax you’ve stuck on, and how deep you want it to look:

Then, you need to mix some of the Bright Red and Bright Yellow with a lot of White to make a very pale skin colour, and just dab it around the cut, over the wax and the skin, so that it makes the skin look paler – a bit like with the grease paint cuts before.  Then, you mix some Bright Red with a little bit of Bright Green and Black to make it less pinky and a bit darker, and paint right the way along the groove in the wax, up the sides and everything.  Like before, you can fleckle this with a bit of darker red (like the cool red, only you have to mix it yourself this time), by which time it looks a bit like this:

…and if you’re really going overboard, mix some Bright Red and Bright Yellow, and smudge that in a bit too:

And now you can use your blood, which is very exciting!  Just fill the cut right up.

The rest is history.  You’re welcome to think about blood trajectory, or smudge it about the place a bit, really, the more the merrier!  I have to say, by this point, H and I got a bit overexcited, so I lopped one of her fingers off and we went to terrify next door – whose face was an absolute picture.  Sadly, however, she’s now got the hang of the fact that any horrific injuries on our corridor tend to be something to do with me.  Oh well.  Fun while it lasted.

(We splashed a bit more blood on after the photo and it looked a lot better, promise!)

Water-based, painty love xx

Sylvia Plath: ‘Three Women’

Last Saturday I saw a play by a writer famous for more than just her writing. Plath is notorious for her life story, which ended tragically with her suicide in 1962. Although a poet, novelist and storywriter of great talent, until now her one surviving playscript has never been performed on a public stage. Its one major performance was on BBC Radio, six months before Plath’s death.

Originally written as a radio play, ‘Three Women’ is a play for three voices describing varying experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. The youngest, a student, has to give her baby up for adoption; there is a woman who gives birth happily, and is able to keep her newborn son, although there are slight undertones of fear running through a lot of her monologues; but the most haunting character for me was the character of the woman who is unable to carry a baby to full term.

Through certain hints Plath makes you aware that she has probably had multiple failed pregnancies, and for me she was the most affecting character because it makes you think about the biological purpose of womanhood, and how awful it must be if for some reason you are denied the chance to fulfil a natural and beautifully desirable role. Plath herself had experience of a period of ‘barrenness’, and had at least one miscarriage, and – as with most of her writing – she’s most effective when writing of the worst emotions.

As someone who has studied Plath quite intensely, hearing her work performed and spoken aloud is a bizarre and wonderful experience, because the whole play became suddenly much more arresting. Whilst this is true of a lot of dramatic work, I feel it is especially true of this one, because of the extremely personal approach, something representational of Plath’s work as a whole. This play, being about something not just personal to Plath but also directly relating to any woman in the audience, and also, indirectly to any men watching (so therefore relating to everyone) is extremely moving.

I wish she’d written more plays; I would also have loved there to have been more interaction between the characters because (as the director of this one said in an interview) there are glimpses here of what she might have become as a playwright, but she died before any more could come out, and the play as it stands is not so much a play as three monologues thematically linked, and interspersed with each other. The director managed to portray some interaction by implying that the women were all in the hospital together at one point, and although they address the audience in their monologues, for one heightened moment, they all looked at and seemed to be addressing one another.

The student herself I felt was also representative of Plath at that stage of her life. Whilst the other two characters have experiences Plath herself went through, many people say that the character of the ‘student’ is less fully-formed because Plath never experienced an unwanted pregnancy nor the struggle of giving a child up for adoption. However, if one looks at the student’s experience, of having a secret to keep from classmates, and having to take an extended break from study, before returning with a secret ‘wound’ (as Plath calls it in the play) to try and finish a degree, the experience becomes very similar to Plath’s own experience of college life. Following a breakdown during one summer, she was incarcerated in a mental hospital for several months, before being declared healed and returned to her studies. She apparently felt this keenly, since after her return she found herself feeling a little isolated from her by now younger classmates, who had no inkling of her experiences. The student therefore shares Plath’s experience of feeling old before her time, and feeling separated from her peers, whilst struggling to heal. As a character therefore, I found her very fascinating.

Being interested in the writing as well as the drama and my direct response to it, I was also listening to the words used; she’s almost Shakespearian at times, I thought, and it was beautiful. But in addition to that, the student who gives her child up for adoption gives birth to a “red daughter”, which is redolent of symbolism for Plath – red was ‘her’ colour, symbolic of her life with Hughes, and symbolic of her womanhood, and her anger. So red, at the time this play was written, is symbolic of the negativity of her marriage to him, the breakdown of a home and a relationship which had sustained her through the best times of her life; it’s also a hot, angry colour, she uses it as symbolic of her younger, angry self.

Interesting therefore that the boy who is born to the ‘mother’ character is described as ‘blue’. Blue was Plath’s colour after the breakdown of her marriage. She wrote a letter to her mother saying that she’d chosen blue to be ‘her’ colour, and to be symbolic of what she hoped would be an eventual, personal rebirth. She was full of the idea of reincarnation. Not as in proper, corporeal death, as we mean it, but ‘little deaths’. Her suicide attempt was something she saw as a ‘death’. Other similar events were equally ‘little deaths’, like the ending of her marriage to Hughes.

Therefore in the aftermath of their separation, she was undergoing a period of death and rebirth, hence blue was the colour of her newer, hopeful life. Except that when a baby’s blue that’s a sign of lifelessness, of a lack of oxygen, and although the little boy becomes a normal colour again during the course of the play, and you know it’s still alive, he is continually referred to as the little blue boy. And blue being the colour Plath chose to symbolise herself during the time that led to her suicide, although it was supposed to be a hopeful colour, considering the horror of that time for her, it really isn’t. Blue is cold and the Winter of ’61-2 was very, very cold.

And the thing which shook me most was the way the mother referred to her baby’s eyelids as being “soft as moths”. The passage in ‘The Bell Jar’ which describes her suicide attempt talks of the cobwebs and darkness brushing her eyelids with “the softness of moths”. She’d already written ‘The Bell Jar’ at this point; maybe it was just a recycling of a phrase that she liked, but if you’re aware of what ‘softness of moths’ has previously been used to describe in her work it’s a horrible foreshadowing of darkness for the baby. So is the mother’s desperate need to keep her young son unblemished by society; she wants him to retain the innocence he was born with. Any reference to male figures in the play is in a negative tone. In fact, when any of the three women mentions men they are described as being “flat”. It is perhaps because they are cut off from the intensely emotional experience of motherhood, the ultimate symbol of womanhood, which gives men this ’flatness’. They cannot feel these extremes, because they cannot experience them. Therefore, their lack of understanding, and superiority in the face of these problems (the ’barren’ woman suffers a haemorrhage at work, the first sign of her miscarriage, and is treated with absolute indifference by her male co-workers) makes men into oppressors, and sets the women up as facing the world against them. Because of this misandrist tone, there is a sense of doom for the boy, who seems to be already condemned, being male.

As an experience, ‘Three Women’ was something unmissable. Even without a wider awareness of Plath’s work, it is an extraordinarily moving piece, poignant and affecting because of its supreme relevance to everyone. Childbirth is such an emotional and intense experience; Plath captures this and the huge range of emotions which accompany it with her usual flair and directness.

‘Three Women’ runs at The Jermyn Street Theatre, 16b Jermyn Street, until 7th February. www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

I’m Not Dead pt 1

Sorry I’ve not been about for a particularly long time!  I’ve been at the theatre, and with this in mind, thought my first post back should be theatrical.  And the way my mind works is this: you can do it while sitting down, it involves making a mess of some description and I get to take photos: stage make-up it is.  And the most exciting type of stage make-up, of course, is the wound.  So the first thing I thought of, rather worryingly, is “I know!  I’ll slit my wrists!”

Now, I have some wax coming through soon (sat down the other day and spent £25 on water-based paint and pretty effects, yes, I know) so as soon as it does I’ll show you some raised wounds, but in the meantime, here is your basic grease paint cut and, of course, a nice bit of mucking about with blood.

This is my lovely paint set as it stands (Kryolan supracolor 12 grease paints, you can get them from Screenface, which has a fantastic website, isn’t too horrifically expensive and sends things off to you really quickly – think I got these in about twelve hours, which was nice):

So the first thing you need to do, once you’ve decided where your cut’s going to be is to mix some bright red and cool red (bottom two on the right) and draw yourself a line:

Then you thicken the line in the same colour, pointy up the ends a bit, and make it more uneven – obviously, when you have a real cut, it’s not that uneven, but quite surprisingly it looks more realistic if you do that.

(It still looks a bit rubbish at the moment but I promise it gets better!)

Then you mix white (bottom left) with a little very pale pink and you outline your cut to make it stand out.

Then you can smudge the white in a bit:

And then the fun part, for which you need a very thin brush.  Just splodge along one side of the cut a bit of black, and some cool red, and then along the other (if you’re getting quite excited about this now) a little bit of yellow.  And this makes your cut look something like this:

…which from a distance is quite enough to make someone do a double take!

Of course, if you’re really getting into it, you’ll want some fake blood, for which you need these:

Golden syrup, granulated coffee, plain flour, red food colouring.  Obviously the brands are utterly irrelevant, and I am terribly immoral – please don’t be like me and just go for first granulated coffee you can get your hands on, preferably go for Fairtrade but even if that’s too much effort don’t use Nestle… (in my defence I was very nearly late for a lecture and wasn’t really looking… but still…)

Anyway.  It’s laughably simple: mix some golden syrup with water so it’s about three parts syrup to one part water.  Stick a bit of food colouring in til it’s properly red – you’ll notice it goes a bit pinky when you stir it up the sides of the bowl, which is what the coffee is for.  Stick a spoonful of coffee in just to stop it being so pinky, stir it manically for a bit so the granules dissove, and then thicken it up with a spoonful of flour – you can do this by eye, really – until all the blobs have gone.  Shake it up a bit and then dribble it about the place.  Worry about trajectory angles if you’re really, really bothered, otherwise be like me and just wave your bloodied arm at as many of your flatmates happen to be in the vicinity at the time.  It really is too exciting!

Not Dead pt 2 to follow when my moulding wax comes through!  Much love xx

‘The Reader’ – A Review

Whilst there often seem to be films made about the Second World War, or the Holocaust, the usual perspective (at least of the ones that I have seen) seem to be from the side of the Allies, or mainly showing the Allies as heroes, and All Germany as out-and-out villains. Maybe I haven’t been watching the right films…

However, the thing which struck me most about ‘The Reader’ was the remarkably detached view it took of the horrific events of the Holocaust. Unlike many films, which seem to want to depict the horror in as graphic and shocking detail as they can (whilst still being acceptable for public viewing) ‘The Reader’ showed us no deaths, no mass murders, and the only glimpse of the gas chambers was as they are now, in the museum which is on the site of Auschwitz. This, to me, was not exactly refreshing, that’s not the right word. But illuminating. Interesting. Moving, most definitely.

The story, for those who don’t know it, focuses on a young man (fifteen at the start of the film) and his relationship with a much older woman. It starts in the fifties, when this woman, Hanna, is about 30. The two swiftly develop a strong attraction for one another, and begin an illicit relationship. The love the two share is not portrayed as wrong or immoral in any way, which was the most peculiar thing for me about this part of the film. One would think that any adult who has sex with a minor is breaking consent laws, etc etc. But it wasn’t shown like that, and you didn’t see it like that. The boy, Michael, was however shown rejecting his own age group for this woman, and you gradually became aware of his growing isolation. This moving portrait of a strongly unbalanced relationship was allowed to develop, until suddenly Hanna abandons him. This comes as a shock to the audience as much as it does to Michael, and David Kross (who played the young Michael) was beautiful in his despair at this loss.

It was only at this point forward that we began to realise that what had seemed at first a healthy, natural relationship might have anything other than positive consequences. Interjected with scenes of Michael as an adult (played by Ralph Fiennes, and living a relatively solitary existence) we see the young Michael, working towards a law degree on a course where he seems to have few close friends. Empathising with him all the way, the audience too is thrown into turmoil with him when, with the rest of his class, he sits in on a trial of women SS guards accused of crimes against the Jewish prisoners under their jurisdiction. Hanna is among the accused.

From this point forward, the film took on a more moralising note, as debates between the students focussed on the possible responses to the actions of Nazis during the time of Hitler’s dictatorship. The question of guilt and culpability was debated soundly, both during the trial scenes and during the scenes in the classrooms outside of the courts. It was this approach which gave the film the added dimension that I feel other films on the same subject lack. By debating the issue onscreen, ‘The Reader’ allowed its audience the time to think through their own thoughts and work out whether or not they disagreed with the views expressed onscreen.

There are other plot details which I do not want to give away – go and see it for yourselves; it may not be a fast-paced edge-of-your-seat movie, like some, but it is because of this very depth and thoughtfulness that I feel this film is truly special. The powerful and sensitive way with which both the Holocaust itself (there were some beautiful and haunting scenes within Auschwitz as it is now) and also the aftermath of the Holocaust were dealt with give the film its power and grace, and being made to think is something cinema doesn’t often give us the chance to do nowadays. And as well as that, the story – being as it is, a very human story of awakening and growing up, and love - catches the audience fully. It was so beautifully and simply expressed that the effect of the film as a whole was quite breathtaking, and left the audience in silence at the end.