Picking up from my previous post What We Love and to attempt to put words to the insight I had, it strikes me that in a range of interests one has that the depth of interest will vary from the very deep to the slight. The depth of interest will extend from the history of the area of interest and the depth of interest in the structure of the interest.
For example, I am interested in aircraft, always have been. But my interest is not deep. The history of aircraft is deeply attractive to the point of reading the history of the de Havilland Aircraft Company, for example. But the depth of the knowledge of the structure of aircraft is slight. I know the aerofoils, chords, span, lift, drag, etc. The fundamentals of aerodynamics I am familiar with. After all I studied it at university. But my grasp of it is not sound. My love of aircraft I don’t doubt. My depth of love is not that great. Possibly this is linked to intellectual capacity, I don’t know.
If I turn to theatre and plays, my knowledge of plays is profound. My love of theatre, of plays is very great. My ability to grasp all of the elements of play writing is undoubted.
With discipline and effort I could write plays. I have had more ideas for plays than a lifetime would suffice to develop them. What I have lacked is the discipline, the sustaining power to take a sketch, an idea, and to flesh it into a fully worked one act or three act play.
As I have observed in the previous post What We Love, the love is not sufficient. Hard work is involved in developing the play from the idea into something that actors can act and an audience can enjoy.
I have fully developed a play It is a full 5 act play, the House of Atreus. It runs all the way through to the Island of Aulis and the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father to favour the course of the war.
But I view the developed stuff as worthless. It seems flat, lifeless. I laboured many weeks, months; many drafts exist but I don’t think the results are worth tuppence.
What does it lack? Creativity, in a word. It was written mechanically. I need say no more.
I will turn instead to two ideas for plays where the spark of creativity for them these many years later still lives within me.
The working idea for the first one is the Festival of Britain play. It has no known source that I am aware of. The Festival of Britain took place on the South Bank of the Thames in London, where the Festival Hall still stands, in 1951. Britain showed at that point that the county was finally recovering from the aftermath of WWII and a new sense of hope emerging after years of deprivation. There was talk of a Second Elizabethan Age to rival the First. That it didn’t transpire that way is beside the point. At the time, hope were high.
The second idea has in me an even greater spark of creativity. The thought of the idea of the play stirs the phagocytes within me still.
The working title of the play is the Blood of Spain and is suggested by a book published some years ago.
The idea of the play is to tell of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.
The idea of the play is to tell of the Spanish Civil War which led to the ascension of General Franco to taking power, through the eyes and mouths of the women as they live through the experience of the war taking place around them, whether Fangalist, Republican or Communist. Wives are never any of these things, only their husbands are.
How do you develop the play? Easy. Choose some central well defined characters and play tells itself.
The success of the play, the writing of the play lies in the balance of the characters. This is possibly a fairly mechanical exercise. You can imagine for yourself how it would (will) be done. At the most basic level, you have a balance of strong and weak characters. Of course, when one says weak – they can only appear weak. Strengths appear later when the stronger characters love their strength as the fighting takes it toll on loved ones.
Then the other basic selection factor is age. This is crucial for young characters bring to the stage hope and older characters bring experience, perhaps even stories of previous wars.
Then, within this mix might, I say might, be individual circumstance; the young unmarried, the newly married, the middle aged woman, the widow, the grandmother.
After that, you probably have to decide how many central characters there are. I don’t know. Six – too few. Eight – too many.
Since this is an oral tale, that is to say, the war is taking place around the women, so you have the audience hearing of the war as it unfolds directly from the women reporting to the audience what is happening at that moment.
The play would gain strength from having a chorus of women who would support the central characters.
So the basic design structure is of choral scenes describing the stages of the development of the war – a week, let’s say, the final crucial week would be a good choice, interspersed by development scenes between central characters. Since these are women, these could easily be alternating scenes between one side of the battle-lines and the other.
So we are talking of a 3 act play. You could open and close acts with choral scenes, This is too symmetrical. So an alternative would be to have Act 2 close with a development scene which cuts for intermission and then picks up again a the beginning of Act 3. You would almost certainly not want the play to close with a chorus. No triumphalism. So close with a deeply distressing, tragic development scene.
A chorus could close with some paean to to the futility of war and no audience would want that and rightly so.
The appeal of the play is that in war, during war, the women’s point of view is seldom told. We are not talking here of combat wives. We are talking of women who are losing husbands and children as we speak.
You could certainly not stage characters, women, loosing husbands and children right there on stage in front of you. It would be far too harrowing, not least for the actors attempting to perform it. But chorus members can mine it.
Ronald Fraser’s book Blood of Spain, an Oral History of the Spanish Civil War was published first in 1979 and is based upon the three hundred or so interview that Fraser conducted between June 1973 and May 1975. So, although he, or his publisher, refer to the book as an Oral History, it is really an interview of memories.
The play, as you have seen is structured quite differently. The play would be oral in the correct sense.
One of the problems that anyone faces wishing to study the Civil War in Spain is the dense jargon associated with the various sides and political positions (CEDA, JONS, MAOC, POUM, etc.) taken at the time. Ideology runs rife during this period. The play sidesteps all of this. Women, by and large, are not devotees of jargon.
Fraser makes two points in his Introduction to the book, Blood of Spain, that are worth repeating in the context of the discussion we have been having.
“To turn one’s back on the past, a past like this anyway, is always a temptation. but to do so is to forget that the past cannot be forgotten, only repressed. To forget that Spain today, and a generation of Spaniards, have been shaped by the outcome of the civil war… To deny the past, rather than confront it, is to deny not only history but a generation’s experience.” (p10, The Blood of Spain)
I think Fraser vastly understates the case. When the United Nations, and the Americans after them, went into Bosnia, after the fall of Yugoslavia, to separate the warring factions, the past, bottled for 30 years by Tito in an attempt to create a unified state, erupted and a horrific vendetta of Serb against Croat and both against Muslim bystanders began. This, despite the fact that widespread intermarriage had penetrated many of these peoples. The deep divisions created by the actions of the various groups during the Second World War, one side siding with Hitler, the other with Stalin, which Tito bottled up, viscously spit the former Yugoslavia into a myriad quilt of pocket sized states with tragic consequence.
When Apartheid finally fell in South Africa, wisdom had South Africa engage in a Truth Commission that may have been clumsy in its execution but nonetheless set the course for a possible, I repeat, possible future.
Has such a reconciliation not been attempted, widespread bloodshed would surely have resulted. Was it successful? Only time will show that.
The other passage is perhaps of greater resonance in our times when shopping appears to dominate all other human activities (other than being perpetually on the cell-phone) and ideology seems as quaint as penny farthings (a kind of Victorian bicycle).
“If the roots of the Spanish war seem remote to us today, it is because capitalist development has tempered the antagonistic style of class relationships … has modulated the virulence of ideological commitment, moderated expectations. Spain of the 1930s … was part of what we would call today the third world.” (p10, The Blood of Spain)
The class conflict is writ large in the history of the Spanish Civil War. The ideological commitment, still held when Fraser wrote these words in 1986 to disappear, a few years later, almost overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was fierce indeed in 1935, and perhaps fiercer still at the close of the Spanish Civil War and the commencement of the Second World War, which, at several levels, was a war of ideological confrontations, a few months later, which, in passing we might note, the Fascist governed Spaniards sat out in supposed neutrality.
Filed under: Arts, Spanish Civil War, theatre, women
24 December, 2010 • 1:36 am 0
Blogging – So Far
The hardest part of setting up the blog was to complete the About section. I simply don’t know what to say. This writing, then, is in part, a beginning, is a start towards being able to fill it out. For I hesitate to list my interests. They are multitude and the extent of them will frighten most people. Besides, is that what I am “About”? No, I am more than the sum of my interests. I could populate the About with my achievements, my accomplishments. But that doesn’t seem right either. I could fill the About with domestic details but that would not be right either. For my blog is rather more than a personal blog.
So I cannot for the present complete the About section. When I began the blog I recognised that part of the the blog is about is to find out About me, who the About is.
That defining process began with the first post and continues with this.
In fact the blog may not be the right medium at all. Writing is about rewriting. Working a sentence, a paragraph over and over. A blog is not that. Hmm. That set of questions will answer themselves in their own way in their own time.
The title of this post is What We Love. And my blogs are just that. To explore what I love, what I have loved
I loved my time in South Africa. No, it is not a case of fond memories. In the sense that I gild the memories I have. No gilding is required. I loved being there. I came here to the United States to join a much loved brother. Since he is no more, I cannot regret that I came. But life in the United States is incomparably more difficult than was life for me in South Africa. Of course, when I left South Africa in 1984 no one could have predicted at that time what would come to pass a few years later. What happened in one sense is nothing short of a miracle. Perhaps that is why, at one level, all South Africans feel blessed.
So, I also run a South African blog. It pretty much reflects my American blog, which is only American in the sense that it is hosted on US territory. That is not quite true. Its readership is largely American. It competes for readership among the vast range and numbers of American blogs and has the most dismal readership of all my blogs.
I mention the South African blog because it is on that blog that I got what I would regard as an absolute gift as a comment. I hold it so dear that I wish to share it on my other blogs as well.
I will not say who left it. You can visit the blog yourself to find it if you are curious. The blog is Where Two?
“This is a totally fascinating blog, if rather confusing with its range from austerely academic to the intensely personal. In fact, an attempt to assimilate the content from inception has left me rather breathless.”
The stats system on the SA blog leaves something to be desired but readership is not bad. My first post there was November 11, 2010 and the number of views is on its way to 1000. 22 page views a day on average. Not bad. 5 stars have been silently placed by some blessed souls against Our Address is Music , A Free Press, A Multiparty Government, A Healthy Country and The Night the Theatre Went Dark. A heartfelt thank you to whoever (plural I would think) awarded them. The site itself carries a 5 star rating. I even have one fan. A thank you to you for that.
The next part of my Blogging So Far story is astonishing. At least to me. All writers love having readers. Every single reader is precious. (Spamers are exempt and most blog sites handle this aspect of blogging very well).
My best looking blog is at pas un oiseau tombé. Even the title is gorgeous. The acute shouldn’t really be there but it is hard to say without it. The content again reflects what the parent blog carries. But since I follow European and French affairs, my posts, like the South African site, reflect my interests and views. It wouldn’t be meaningful to post them without a French language site.
Readership has risen steadily though I haven’t a clue why. The stat system is excellent. Far better than what WordPress offer. My first post here was on November 10, 2010, my birthday, and for November I had a steady average of around 22 visits a day. For December the average for the number of visits is about half the November figure but page views has dramatically increased. The three highest are 103, 147 and an astonishing 171 on December 17, 2010. Sadly, no comments. I really would like to hear from at least one of my site visitors. Are the French shy to comment?
If the French confound me, the Belgians completely flummox me. où à? is my blog in Belgium (not everyone blogs in Belgium) is hosted by the Belgium newspaper La Libre. The site, like its American cousin, has a Blog Top Site stat on the front page that is running at 297 when I look at it. What it means I have no idea. I first posted there on the 7 of November with 17 visits the first day. In November the average was 32 a day. Dropped a bit for the first week of December but is now running around the 32 mark. I had no idea that I would get this kind of readership in French speaking territories.
So, last but not least, the parent site. The readership is abysmal, appalling. I simply do not exist in the greater bloggosphere. I am not even a speck. I am smaller than that. I first posted October 19, 2010. Visits run at less than 10 a day. I have the Blog Top Site thing reading 252 at present. I am just not on the radar. I post to Facebook, I post to Twitter. I do notice that the visits increase somewhat when I post comments on other sites. The most memorable of these was from Crickey.com. 95 views after I posted Who Defends the Blogger? – Who Dropped the Ball on the Blogger in Australia? and commented at Crikey that I had done so.
So, where to from here? I will continue to blog to find out.
Filed under: Arts, blogging, comments, stats