Sleepova: Looking Through the Window and Into the Mirror

Copyright © Helen Murray 2023

‘I’ve got Haribo, Maoams, milk choc digestives – dark choc tastes evil - torch, first-aid kit, Swiss Army knife and brought my dad’s laptop.’

A little while ago I saw the excellent play ‘Sleepova' by Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (The Bush Theatre, London). It shines a light on the lives of four Black 16-year-old girls, as they gossip, squabble, quip and debate in the security of their own bedrooms. 

‘Marcus Knight asked me to be his date… He’s the sixth pengest boy in Morrison Boys. He moved up six places, after he got his ear pierced and sorted out his BO.’

Shan has sickle cell disease and is endeavouring to enjoy a normal life. Funmi is smart, curious and interested in reconnecting with her Yoruba heritage. Rey is forthright, gay and privileged. Elle is a Christian with protective parents. 

‘My mum says, why should I be sleeping in other people’s houses when I’m not homeless?’

The girls discuss exams and job prospects, hair and make-up, ice cream and desserts. Their conversation is laced with slang, profanity and cultural references. Sometimes they can be direct, sometimes allusive. Sometimes they can be naïve, sometimes insightful.

Playwright Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini

‘Shan, GCSEs are just memory tests. What are we going to do with algebra, magnetism or river formations?’

Romance is quite high on their agenda, and two of the girls fancy Shan’s brother, Solomon (much to her discomfort).

‘I’d be all over him like cocoa butter.’
‘I’d be all over him like Christ’s love for mankind.’

With a school prom approaching, the girls consider whether they should all attend together or take a date.

‘I want to go with Jonah Asamoah in year eleven. I like how his first name rhymes with his surname…He’s really cute. He has dimples, his afro’s always neat and he has braces...When he smiles it actually sparkles, like he’s wearing jewellery but on his teeth.’

As the play progresses the characters have to deal with sexual awakening, sickness and bereavement. They navigate romantic journeys, ideological differences and parental rifts. We see how their friendship is constantly challenged and yet endures.

‘So I’m seeing this new guy Malachi. We met at McDonalds. He works there and he gave me a free McFlurry.
‘Couldn’t give you a free burger? Cheapskate.’

It’s often observed that, while some dramas hold up a mirror to our lives, helping us to see our everyday behaviour in a different light; others help us peer through a window into other people’s worlds, introducing us to cultures and experiences far from our own.

‘Look, the only advice I give straight girls who date boys is never pay for anything. Until society addresses the gender pay gap, make him pay.’

‘Sleepova’ had half the audience looking in the mirror. They were young Londoners laughing along with the jokes, singing along with the tunes, recognising the dilemmas, references and vernacular. The other half of the audience – me included – were peering through a window at a fascinating, charming, mercurial sisterhood.

‘I told him we need to take it slow. Not had a boyfriend before and I don’t want to rush it. Like let me do some research first.’

It struck me that this was a particularly powerful cocktail: combining an audience of insiders and outsiders. It certainly created a vibrant atmosphere in the theatre. Perhaps it’s a dual effect that drama should aim to achieve more often.

‘I’ve been erasing histories for so long, the government doesn’t even know who I really am.’

Inevitably Shan, Funmi, Rey and Elle end up having quite different experiences at the prom.

‘I wish we took more pictures man, I don’t want to forget this night, hashtag nopain, I’m not even tired man.’
‘I can’t wait to get dementia so I can forget this night forever.’

Nonetheless their friendship continues to sustain them with emotional support, laser-sharp wit and occasional words of wisdom.

‘Funmi, I won’t lie to you, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and then it’s gonna get even more worse, then it might get a little better and you think you’ve finished before it gets worser.’

'I hear every word they talk.
Tried not to care at all.
I know it's frontin’,
Don't know me from nothing.
Still learning to shake it off,
I know I can take it all.
I know they frontin'
You know they frontin', bae.
So if you hear that rah-rah-rah about me,
Talking all out the side of they mouth about me,
I beg you, don't listen.
I beg you, just hear me.
Believe me.
Trust you can see through it all,
Believe through it all,
Breathe through it all.’

Kehlani, ‘Everybody Business’ (C Munoz / C Hugo / K Parrish / K Price / P Williams / S Carter)

No. 425

Somerset Maugham on Reason and Passion: ‘I Don’t Offer You Happiness. I Offer You Love’

W Somerset Maugham, 1957. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

A little while ago I saw ‘The Circle,’ a splendid 1921 play by W. Somerset Maugham. (The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond until 17 June)

‘I suppose it’s difficult for the young to realize that one may be old without being a fool.’

Maugham is rarely performed nowadays. Perhaps his writing is a little too polished, his characters a little too aristocratic, for modern tastes. Nonetheless, he was a sharp, witty wordsmith with an eye for the nuances of social attitudes and cultural change, and he has been described as ‘the missing link between Wilde and Coward.’

‘England seems to me full of people doing things they don’t want to because other people expect it of them.’

‘The Circle’ considers the compromises of marriage and the consequences of love. In a lightly humorous way, it asks us to reflect on the true nature of happiness.

‘Man is a gregarious animal. We’re members of a herd. If we break the herd’s laws we suffer for it. And we suffer damnably.’

The action takes place at a Dorset country house where Arnold Champion-Cheney is preparing to meet his mother, Lady Kitty, for the first time since she ran off with her husband’s friend Lord Porteus 30 years ago. 

‘I don’t mean to bear malice, but the fact remains that she did me the most irreparable harm. I can find no excuse for her.’

Arnold is a somewhat stiff fellow, who serves as an MP and is primarily interested in politics and furniture.

‘It always makes me uncomfortable when people are effusive.’

Oivia Vinall and Chirag Benedict Lobo in The Circle, photo by Ellie Kurttz

Elizabeth, Arnold's wife of three years, is, by contrast, a romantic. She rather admires Lady Kitty for sacrificing her social standing for love, and she has engineered the reunion.  

‘When you’re loved as she’s loved, you may grow old, but you grow old beautifully.’

Elizabeth is beginning to find life as a rural MP’s wife terribly tedious, and she is falling in love with Teddy Luton, her husband’s friend, a charming businessman visiting from Malaya.

It looks like history is about to repeat itself.

As the drama plays out, it transpires that the Champion-Cheneys' guests are not quite the idyllic couple Elizabeth has imagined. Lord Porteus is grumpy and combative. Lady Kitty is selfish and frivolous.

‘My dear, her soul is as thickly rouged as her face.’

Nonetheless Elizabeth is convinced that her relationship with Arnold is redundant.

‘A marriage without love is no marriage at all…When two people are married it’s very difficult for one of them to be unhappy without making the other unhappy too.’

At this point Lady Kitty speaks out for her son, warning Elizabeth that infatuation fades.

‘It breaks my heart to think that you’re going to make the same pitiful mistake that I made… One sacrifices one’s life for love and then one finds that love doesn’t last. The tragedy of love isn’t death or separation. One gets over them. The tragedy of love is indifference.’

As Elizabeth oscillates between fidelity and romance; reason and passion; staying and going, Teddy makes a desperate plea for her to start a new life with him.

'But I wasn’t offering you happiness. I don’t think my sort of love tends to happiness. I’m jealous. I’m not a very easy man to get on with. I’m often out of temper and irritable. I should be fed to the teeth with you sometimes, and so would you be with me. I daresay we’d fight like cat and dog, and sometimes we’d hate each other. Often you’d be wretched and bored stiff and lonely, and often you’d be frightfully homesick, and then you’d regret all you’d lost. Stupid women would be rude to you because we’d run away together. And some of them would cut you. I don’t offer you peace and quietness. I offer you unrest and anxiety. I don’t offer you happiness. I offer you love.’

I was quite taken with Teddy Luton’s speech. 

We spend a good deal of time nowadays reflecting on happiness. We survey the most ‘liveable’ towns and cities, the most agreeable countries and cultures. We calculate and calibrate our own personal satisfaction and wellbeing. We create happiness indexes. The assumption is that all of our decisions, in life and work, should ultimately add up to a higher level of contentment.

Yet perhaps happiness is not all it’s cracked up to be. 

‘There is no more lamentable pursuit than a life of pleasure.’

If we narrowly judge careers against a set of logical contentment criteria; against an imagined goal of enduring happiness, we may end up pursuing a path that is ultimately unfulfilling. Sometimes there’s reward to be found in struggle and challenge; in passion and devotion; in ‘unrest and anxiety’.

Perhaps we should seek a job we love rather than one that makes us happy.

In raising questions about marriage and the conventional understanding of fulfilment, Maugham was somewhat ahead of his time. ‘The Circle’ was booed on its opening night. But I suspect he would have reassured himself that he was ‘merely a very truthful man’.

‘I never know whether you’re a humorist or a cynic, Father.’
‘I’m neither, my dear boy; I’m merely a very truthful man. But people are so unused to the truth that they’re apt to mistake it for a joke or a sneer.’

'My thoughts go back to a heavenly dance,
A moment of bliss we spent.
Our hearts were filled with a song of romance
As into the night we went,
And sang to our hearts’ content.
The song is ended,
But the melody lingers on.
You and the song are gone,
But the melody lingers on.’

Annette Hanshaw, 'The Song Is Ended (but the Melody Lingers On)' (Irving Berlin)

No. 422

‘My Nails Are Longer Than My Future’: ‘Our Generation’ and the Power of Verbatim Reporting

'They make you remember so much things. And it’s just like a waste of brain space. Yeah, like my brain’s only thirty-two GB.’

I recently watched ‘Our Generation,’ a fine play articulating the perspectives of contemporary teenagers. (The National Theatre, London, until 9 April, and then the Chichester Festival Theatre, 22 April to 14 May.)

‘If I-I don’t get my top grades I’m just gonna go into policing. I feel like I’m good at investigating like when something goes on at home. I’m very good at solving the crime.’

Over a five-year period Alecky Blythe and her team of ‘collectors’ interviewed twelve young people in London, Birmingham, Northamptonshire, Anglesey, Glasgow and Belfast. She then edited these testimonies into a tapestry of the concerns, obsessions, fears and fantasies of a generation. The teenagers are played by talented actors who retain the hesitations, repetitions and deviations of the source material.

‘I switched, um, friends groups. Er, I’m hanging more round with Sienna, cos like, Sienna’s a quiet girl and she hangs around with, like, people like Amy and Charity and they’re, like, quiet people. And then, yeah cos of that, I think that if I continue hanging around with her then I will get myself into less trouble.’

The young people come across as at once charming and frustrating. They oscillate wildly from one subject to another. Sometimes they are uncannily wise and sometimes extraordinarily foolish. They worry about exams and fitting in and relationships. They dream of wealth, celebrity, America and Primark. 

'Celebrities are a big part of my life because I’ve always wanted to become one.’

‘I’ve gotta be at a hundred per cent health so I can watch Love Island.’

‘I’m not falling in love because one, I’m not allowed; two, I can’t be bothered with it; three, it never works out.’

Their worldview is naturally narrow and self-centred. And they have a tendency to catastrophize.

‘Be obsessed with yourself because you never meet anyone like yourself.’

‘I’ve stopped going out, I’ve got no friends, I’ve got no life.’

Occasionally they reveal heart-rending vulnerability. 

‘So, mm, as I got older I started realising that, you know, um, I’m not really, like, I don’t know I just feel like… I’m not pretty.’

To some extent these concerns are timeless. I recognise many of them from my own distant youth - with a pang of melancholy. But then there are also themes that are particular to the modern world.

‘I love my phone. So much. It’s my life. I’m not even lying. It’s got my whole life in it.’

‘I just need to take a picture, like, yeah? That’s my mentality, take a picture. Instagram’s gotta have a picture.’

‘I got nine’een likes on that, eighty-two on that, hundred and twenty on that, a hundred and three on that, a hundred and twenty-two on that.’

‘Maybe it’s FOMO culture; we’re constantly seeing what everyone else is doing so we wanna be involved, so we never get a break.’

‘Our Generation’ is an excellent example of what’s termed verbatim theatre. It documents the spoken words of real people, and as such it has a very particular, authentic resonance.

I have always been struck by the way verbatim text sounds so different to what we are accustomed to hearing on stage and screen. Here we are confronted with the pauses, stutters, malapropisms and grammatical errors of everyday speech. It’s raw, genuine, true.

‘I’m not accepting this. This isn’t, this isn’t, this isn’t my result. I can do much more better than this… I don’t want to be in this class any more. I made the choice. I don’t wanna be in this class.’

I began my career as a Qualitative Market Researcher. I’d go up and down the country talking to consumers about beer and boilers and baked beans. When we presented our findings, I tried to impress my Clients with my insight, analysis and eloquence. One day I realised that the Clients were not that interested in my intellect. They were, however, fascinated by the occasional direct quotes that I inserted into the debrief. Suddenly they looked up and leaned in. These verbatim statements put the consumer in the room - unfiltered, unmediated, unvarnished. When subsequently we were able to video respondents, the effect was enhanced still further.

‘I don’t like to think about my future, like ever. I literally haven’t thought about what I’m gonna eat for dinner.’

I had to come to terms with the fact that real people articulating their opinions in their own voice are more compelling than my interpretation of what real people say. Perhaps we should all endeavour, not just to report what consumers are doing and thinking – but to bring their perspectives into the room with us.

‘That wasn’t me, that was someone else.’

I left ‘Our Generation’ with a greater understanding of, and sympathy for, a much younger generation. It’s tough out there. I also emerged with a commitment to introduce a little youthful levity into the too earnest world of Middle-to-Old Age.

‘I don’t want to be like serious adult then have serious children and have serious future in a serious house and serious everything.’

‘It's a rap race, with a fast pace.
Concrete words, abstract words,
Crazy words and lying words.
Hazy words and dying words,
Words of faith, tell me straight.
Rare words and swear words,
Good words and bad words.
What are words worth?
What are words worth? Words.’

Tom Tom Club, ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ (C Frantz Christopher / S Stanley) 

No. 364

The Industrialisation of Storytelling: Have We Lost the Plot?

Arthur Darvill as Dave in The Antipodes at the National Theatre (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

‘I just wanted to remind all of you that what you’re doing is important. We need stories as a culture. It’s what we live for. These are dark times. Stories are a little bit of light that we cup in our palms like votive candles to show us the way out of the forest.‘
Sandy, ‘The Antipodes’

I recently saw Annie Baker’s excellent play ‘The Antipodes’ at the National Theatre, London (until 23 November).

Baker’s writing is thoughtful, funny, full of nuance and intrigue. She seems more interested in character than narrative; in atmosphere than plot. Her dramas unfold naturally, in their own time, enigmatically. Critics have called her work ‘slow theatre’.

‘The Antipodes’ is set in a brainstorming session amongst a group of creatives trying to come up with an extraordinary story. No medium is specified.

Most of us recognise the large characterless conference room with its grand glass table and carpet reminiscent of ‘The Shining’. There is the industrial quantity of mineral water, the obsession with food – ordering it with great ceremony, eating it with quiet intensity. There is the reverence for authority and process, the dominant masculinity, the awkward silences, the vainglorious Boss. There is the arrogant veteran, the patronised PA, the eccentric knitter, the selective note taker. The participant who is ‘disappeared’ half way through the process. There is the mythologizing of the company’s Golden Age. The lanyards and the NDAs. The liberal use of ‘awesome’ and ‘genius’. The swearing.

It’s all painfully familiar.

‘The most important thing is that we all feel comfortable saying whatever weird shit comes into our minds so we don’t feel like we have to self-censor and we can all just sit around telling stories. Because that’s where the good stuff comes from.’

Of course, only the Boss is allowed to use his phone in this brainstorm, and he is constantly leaving the room, distracted by domestic concerns. A conference call with senior management begins with a chat about the weather and then lurches uncomfortably into technical difficulties. Despite promises to respect participants’ time, as the project proceeds the sessions become longer and later, until finally the creatives are sleeping in the conference room. 

 ‘The stories we create teach people what it’s like to be someone else on a visceral level. As storytellers we know how to shift perspective and inhabit different viewpoints. Imagine what would happen if everyone in the world could do every once in a while what we already do on a daily basis. It would be revolutionary.’

Baker seems to be asking us to question the value of storytelling and its relevance to contemporary issues and anxieties.

We all know that stories make sense of the world. They teach our children about cause and effect, freedom and responsibility. They enable us to articulate our brightest hopes and darkest fears. They provide understanding and escape. They help us walk in other people’s shoes. They bind communities together.

But we have turned storytelling into an industry. We classify and codify it. It is a course we can take at college, a craft we can learn, a process we can teach. It’s a commodity, a business, an algorithm.

Baker quotes Christopher Booker’s 'The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.'

Annie Baker, Photo: Zack DeZon

1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Rebirth
6. Comedy
7. Tragedy

Baker wants to remind us that storytelling is not entirely benign. Stories can mislead and distract, exaggerate and embellish. Stories can obstruct truth and defer action. And our individual ‘journeys’ can be contrived and self-deceiving. One of the characters expresses concern that personal experiences shouldn’t simply be translated into material for storytelling. Surely some episodes are too precious to be broadcast.

‘I guess I’ve always felt like my personal life is the part of my life that I don’t want to turn into a story.’

We become aware that, while the creatives are struggling to invent the greatest story ever told, all is not well in the real world beyond the conference room. There seems to be an escalation of storms and natural disasters out there. Towards the end of the play the Boss questions the relevance of stories to a world facing existential crisis. 

‘I think maybe there are no more stories. Not that we’ve told all the stories. Or that there are only six types of stories or something. But I think maybe it’s the end of an era. Or maybe it should be the end of an era. Like maybe this is the worst possible time in the history of the world to be telling stories.’

So where does this lead us? 

Well, despite the compelling provocation posed by ‘The Antipodes’, I still believe in the power of stories to convey understanding, to create community and to inspire change. I still believe therefore that they have a role in tackling our current concerns. But I also think we need to protect the intimacy and magic of storytelling from commoditisation and industrialisation. We need to ensure storytelling prompts action rather than postpones it.  And we need to be cautious about the ends to which we deploy it.

 ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’
Joan Didion

'But if you disguise
What these things are doing to me,
If you criticize them,
I'll know that you can see.
Until you realize,
It's just a story.
Until you realize,
It's just a story.’

The Teardrop Explodes, 'Treason (It’s Just a Story)’ (G Dwyer / N Michael / J Cope)

No. 257

Calculated Creativity: You Need Left-Brain as Well as Right-Brain Thinking to Make Commercial Communication

‘The music industry isn’t about healing pain and heartbreak and vulnerability. It’s about selling it.’

I recently saw ‘Mood Music’, an entertaining and thoughtful new play by Joe Penhall (at the Old Vic until 16 June). The piece revolves around a dispute between Bernard, a middle-aged music producer, and Cat, a young singer-songwriter. They have collaborated over a successful album, but their relationship unravels as Bernard claims sole authorship of its hit song.

‘Making other people feel better doesn’t really make me feel better.’

Our sympathies are with Cat. She is inexperienced, vulnerable and idealistic. We want to believe her romantic characterisation of the creative process.

‘When we’re making great music and it’s working, I’m free. Everything has clarity. Energy. Like a surge of life force. Something that’s uniquely mine pours out and connects. I can perform magical tricks. I can fly.’

Bernard, by contrast, is cynical, manipulative and misanthropic. He finds it hard to recognise the talent of others.

‘You see, singers tend to live in a world of their own. They have to completely empty their minds in order to sing, and then they just stay that way.’

‘The thing you need to understand about bass players is they’re not musical.’

‘Drummers can’t feel pain. They’re like fish.’

Bernard is undoubtedly the villain of the piece. And yet sometimes, in the midst of the bullying, bitterness and bile, his pronouncements about the craft of songwriting ring true.

‘A good song doesn’t have a ‘heart.’ It has a void. It’s a ‘black hole’. It sucks you inside it, and you fill it with yourself until there’s no escape.’

Bernard believes that creating music is not about freedom, passion and self-expression. For him it’s all a matter of detachment, compromise and control.

‘The key to emotion is nuance, and the key to nuance is precision. You have to be very mechanical to make it emotional. It’s a real dichotomy.’

Bernard goes on to muse on the character traits of successful creative people.

‘Well, you see, music is traditionally all about expressing yourself, and musicians are generally against repressing their feelings. But I think some people should be a bit more repressed.’ 

These themes may resonate for us in the commercial communication sector, where creativity is put to work; applied to a task; managed and manipulated to achieve a particular goal. We deal in calculated creativity.

Many veteran creatives have, like Bernard, a disarming air of cynicism about them. They wear their disappointments and past defeats as badges of pride. But often they also have the experience and expertise to adjust and adapt ideas; to revise and refine them so as to realise their full potential.

As an industry we spend a good deal of time paying our respects to the right-brain aspects of our work: to the anarchic free spirit; the magical spark of invention; the unfettered imagination. But the commercial creative requires logic, analysis and objectivity as much as intuition, thoughtfulness and subjectivity. Maybe we should spend more time celebrating the left-brain: the calculation and control that translate a raw idea into a compelling and effective piece of communication; the precise knowhow that guides concepts through the development process to execution; the craft of creativity.

Perhaps if we lauded calculated creativity more than maverick invention - if we gave due attention to craft skills, and taught them properly in our schools – we’d be better appreciated by our Clients, and better understood in the wider fields of commerce. And we’d be less inclined to indulge the unruly behaviour and wearying extravagance of the conventional creative stereotype.

In the course of ‘Mood Music’ both Bernard and Cat take to counselling to address their frustrations. Cat’s psychotherapist observes:

‘I’m just saying you find a lot of damaged people – sociopaths and psychopaths, for example – are drawn to the music industry because lack of empathy, raging narcissism and grandiose eccentricity is expected of them. It’s normal.’

It doesn’t have to be.

No. 183

August Strindberg and the Pricey Grey Tank Top: We Tend To Desire the Desired

August Strindberg 

August Strindberg’s short one-scene play, The Stronger, features only two characters, one of whom does not speak. Mrs X encounters Miss Y at a café. At first Mrs X talks proudly of her happy marriage and family life, and is sympathetic towards Miss Y’s solitary status. But Mrs X gradually realises that the silent Miss Y has in fact been her husband’s lover. Her anger turns to scorn and she reassures herself that at least her husband is attractive to other women.

‘Why should I take what nobody will have?’

I was quite struck by this sentiment. It’s a rarely acknowledged truth that the scale of someone’s appeal to an individual can be enhanced by the extent of that person’s appeal to other people: we tend to desire the desired.

This is a lesson sometimes lost on the marketing community. We often aspire to a utopian dream of laser-targeted communication: a world without waste, where every message reaches a current or prospective buyer. We imagine that in an ideal scenario our brand could have a tailored, private dialogue with candidate consumers – direct, head-to-head, one-to-one.

But, of course, brands are social entities. They are shared beliefs. The role of marketing is not just to develop depth of appeal with current and prospective buyers. It is also to spread breadth of interest in the wider community - because breadth of belief sustains depth of desire.

I’m sure we can all draw on our own personal experiences of how breadth of belief in a brand helps support a price premium.

Many years ago I was somewhat enamoured of tank tops. (The earnest woollen British variety, not the cotton singlets beloved of American men.) On a quiet lunchtime I wandered into a small Soho menswear shop and picked up a smart grey number with a cool monkey logo. I tried it on and liked what I saw. I strode confidently to the till. Feeling cavalier, I’d not inspected the price tag. And when the attendant asked for an eye-watering amount of money, I didn’t flinch - I didn’t want to give him the impression that I thought it was expensive. But I walked back to my office in a cold sweat, my heart pumping, thoughts racing. Surely this was a mistake. A grey woollen tank top couldn’t possibly cost that much. At my desk I pulled out the receipt to discover that there really was no error at play. I’d inadvertently walked into a shop that specialised in rare and exclusive Japanese street wear.

A few days later, still smarting from my naivety, I wore my regretted purchase to a fashionable bar. An attractive young barmaid served me a consoling gin and tonic. She paused for a moment as she handed me my change. ‘I love your Bathing Ape tank top.’ Suddenly the exorbitant price didn’t seem to matter any more. In fact it all seemed rather good value.

As August Strindberg knew, we tend to desire the desired.

No. 129