Girl power vs. the Ancient Greeks (circa 2015)

(Source: Gaggle/Almeida Theatre)

I’m coming to the end of my time in London, so this week I managed to squeeze in two Greek plays at the Almeida (thank goodness for student prices). On Wednesday, I saw Euripides’ Bakkhai, newly translated by Anne Carson and starring Ben Whishaw as Dionysus. Then last night, I saw Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, performed by Gaggle and starring Charlotte Church. While the tone of these plays is very different (the first a tragedy, the second a comedy) both explore gender politics through the power (and the threat) of a large group of women speaking and acting collectively. Take these plays from their original context (fifth century BC Athens), and it’s surprising just how relevant the issues they present remain in contemporary society. It was only through seeing two striking groups of female performers in such quick succession that I realised how unusual it is to see women given a space in this way.

The Bakkhai are a chorus of women who have gathered in the mountains to carry out Dionysian rituals, to dance and wear ivy and drink wine. They are positioned physically and ideologically between the neglected, offended god Dionysus and the dismissive Pentheus, King of Thebes. To what extent this position is elected is ambiguous, creating a tension that runs right through the play to its painful climax. At a critical moment in the action, Ben Whishaw (Dionysus) stands opposite Bertie Carvel (Pentheus) in the middle of the stage. Whishaw is wearing a dress and holding a thyrsus that mimics the curves of his slight frame, while Carvel stands tall and straight, almost hypermasculine by comparison. Dionysus advises Pentheus to dress up as a woman, and Pentheus’ response is one of horror – it would mean giving up his status as man and ruler, and all the social and cultural connotations of this identity. Meanwhile, the Bakkhai interject with song and dance, commanding the stage with a different kind of control that contradicts their association with weakness and frenzy, making them more dangerous.

As object of worship, Dionysus is simultaneously compelling and repugnant (a combination which Whishaw negotiates very successfully, demonstrated similarly in his previous role as Richard II). However, Anne Carson and James MacDonald don’t make it easy for us as an audience – there is no explicit ideological stance taken in this production. This is most clear in the unforgettable (and troubling) acts of the Bakkhai women. Their idol-worship of Dionysus is uncomfortable, their final, brutal undertaking vicious and painful. In the rare moments in which they use speech rather than song, their robotic, monotonous use of the singular pronoun ‘I’ jars against their sophisticated musical harmonies. And yet the overwhelming impression they create remains one of incredible power. The other characters become secondary to their mesmerising collective presence. The Bakkhai women are not just a mass saying the same things in the same way. Instead, they create a textured visual and aural scape on the stage which continues to surprise, to engage, and to shock, far more hypnotic than Dionysus could ever be.

Bakkhai creates an uneasy ethical situation, especially as a woman viewer. On the one hand, the Bakkhai women appear to be possessed, being used as a weapon by a single male divine figure. On the other hand, to dismiss their anger, celebration and seeming liberation from repressive practices as a product of outside manipulation limits their agency and responsibility. It risks belittling the legitimacy of female anger and ecstasy. This problem persists in contemporary feminist debate, and is something at the forefront of Deborah Coughlin’s Lysistrata. Like the Bakkhai women, Gaggle completely own the stage. They stamp and they thump and they work with and against each other, making a wall of sound. Again, their collectivity is paramount, but they refuse to be homogeneous.

Lysistrata is about the capacity of women to influence change. Dissatisfied by pervading warfare, a group of women decide to hold a sex strike until war ends. Coughlin brings the drama to post-election Britain. There is a failed politician (Charlotte Church), a well-off alcoholic (Katy Menczer), a mum-of-ten (Jamie-Rose Monk), and an outspoken hairdresser (Lauren La Rocque). There’s also God in a glittery dress (Scarlett Lasoff) and an ever-so-slightly-irritating newsreader (Roberta Morris). And yet, to classify the women in this way (as if they were contestants on Masterchef) seems entirely to defeat the point. What this production demonstrates is that women from different backgrounds can work together to dismantle oppressive systems. It might not be plain sailing, it might even end up as a kind of tragedy itself (in the newspaper sense of the word), but the emphasis is ultimately on collective movement and energy, exploring the places where experiences intersect and differ, rather than pursuing a kind of individualism that ultimately reproduces rather than challenges existing structures.

Lysistrata ends with ‘Make Love Not War’, a song with a pulsing beat that reinforces the creativity and celebration involved in collective action, while maintaining the anger providing its impetus and dynamism. Instead of a usual music video setup, in which female performers are filtered through a gaze explicitly gendered male, Gaggle rock the boat. There are flashing penis graphics and all kinds of fun things, but, more importantly, there is a group of women confidently asserting their sexuality, for themselves and for each other. It was frightening to realise just how radical this seems. You only have to scroll absent-mindedly through the comments of almost any article on feminism and feminist action (or even just women) to find people who evidently feel intimidated by and hostile towards groups of women, especially ones who are enjoying themselves against the status quo, or demanding change. Two and a half thousand years after they were written, plays like Bakkhai and Lysistrata can still shock – not because of some incredible transcendent quality of the writing, but because our gender politics remain skewed to the extent that women collectively can still very easily and very believably be portrayed as a threat.

How to be both: women, writing, and literary prizes

Not drinking Baileys? Francesco del Cossa's April.

Last week, Nicola Griffith published data showing a gender gap in the books that win big literary prizes. While books that win awards like the Pulitzer and the Man Booker are written by women (although not as many as by men), they are almost never about women. Analysing the pie charts she has compiled, Griffith asks why women appear to have ‘literary cooties’, why women’s experience is a topic without a secure place in the literary establishment, and what strategies could be developed to examine this problem further.

A few days after Griffith's post went viral, Ali Smith won the Baileys Prize (formerly the Orange Prize), an award exclusively for women’s fiction that was set up in 1996. The prize has often been a topic of debate – in 2010, A. S. Byatt deemed it a ‘sexist prize’, and last year, Antonia Fraser suggested that it has become unnecessary, as women are shortlisted more and more for other literary awards. Meanwhile, Eimear McBride, 2014 winner of the Baileys Prize, offered an alternative viewpoint: ‘Part of the pleasure of being on last year's Baileys short-list was the relief of being able to just talk about my work rather than being continually obliged to quantify the relationship of my gender to my work and vice versa.’ In one sense, creating a space exclusively for women’s writing results in an elision of some of the issues at hand. In another sense, creating such a space is a political gesture, drawing attention to the historical implications of a literary environment in which most canonical writers have been male (and white, middle class, heterosexual, cisgender, etc.), and have written about people very similar to them. As Griffith’s research shows, these false norms still act as norms in contemporary writing, or at least the contemporary writing that wins prizes, and therefore the existence of an award like the Baileys remains politically relevant.

Within this context, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both seems incredibly timely. Whereas Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing explicitly addresses female experience from the perspective of a single, unnamed speaker, How to Be Both is a novel about two named characters, Francesco and George. Significantly, both of these characters are read as both male and female during the course of the narrative (apologies in advance for the inevitable abundance of the word ‘both’ in discussing this book). Francesco del Cossa was a real, little known painter of the Italian Renaissance. Smith revives him ­– but as a girl dressed as a boy, a complex figure who also comes to experience twenty-first century Cambridge through the medium of a teenager with an androgynous name: ‘This boy is a girl. I knew it.’

However, Smith doesn’t just turn the boys into girls and leave it at that – gender politics are highly charged throughout the novel, remaining fluid, moving from background to foreground and back again in the fresco style which Smith successfully experiments with in her narrative(s). There is something almost Orlando-esque about Francesco’s journeys through time and relationships with people, whether these relationships be familial, platonic or sexual. However, attempts to draw boundaries between different types of relationship seems to be exactly the kind of action that the novel resists. Instead, it traces the intense connections that can be made between people, overstepping cultural constraints of history, gender, sexuality. George’s mum sees a picture of one of Francesco’s paintings in a magazine, and immediately decides to go to Italy to see it with her children. Francesco forms intimate and yet transactional relationships with a circle of prostitutes, whose faces later make it onto the walls of the Duke of Ferrara's palace. George and H text each other song lyrics and scientific facts translated into Latin, back and forth between Cambridge and Copenhagen.

Steadily, threads unwind and spill out, like ‘a mighty twisting thing fast as a fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook’, or like the seed that leaves an expanding, circular ripple in a pool of urine. Smith maps the two stories onto each other, shifting attention from one to the other, from the painting on the surface to the sketched underneath, and yet constantly maintaining a glimmer of both, a flash of connection, the ends of a story before its start. Ideas of meaning become culturally specific, but also emotional, personal. Mrs Rock recounts the etymology of the word ‘mystery’, something that once ‘meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed’ but now ‘tends to mean something more answerable [...] a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV’. Meanwhile, George becomes ‘so, so tired of what stories are meant to mean’, finding her own way to put things together, to make people notice.

In form as well as in subject matter, Smith questions the usual trajectories of meaning in narrative fiction. Half of the copies of How to Be Both are printed with the modern story at the beginning, the other half with the fifteenth century one. It makes for a reflexive reading experience, both within the novel's covers and beyond them, encouraging contemplation of reading cultures more generally. What does it mean to have a book that doesn’t have a singular beginning and end? What would have happened if the copy had been printed the other way around? I'm glad that my book began with Francesco's narrative. However, I’m planning to lend the book to my mum when I get home, and I think she’d prefer it the other way. Perhaps I could get her to read it from the halfway mark and go back.

It’s strange being able to think about a book in these terms. Not only does Smith create a complicated idea of women’s experience, but also a complicated idea of reading. When positioned as the winner of the Baileys Prize, the novel can be conceptualised more specifically in terms of women readers, both the all-female judging panel, and beyond. Literary prizes produces a goal-driven, top-down model of assessment, a narrative in which prizewinners accumulate to form a history, a club of their own. Somehow, How to Be Both seems to feed into the debates of gender and reading and writing that emerge from discussions like Griffith's, and yet also to refuse to be limited by them.

I’m unsure what the fate of a women-only literary prize will be, and even exactly what it means to have a women-only literary prize. The fact that we’re still having to talk about the presence or absence of ‘female perspectives’ and ‘women’s experience’ in books granted status by the literary establishment is incredibly frustrating, as if ‘women’s experience’ could be unified in this way. Instead, we should be able to talk about gender in all its multiplicities in literature, gender as it intersects with race and class and sexuality and disability. As a winner, though, How to Be Both is (both) effortless and challenging, suggesting that literature is firmly ahead of the structures that attempt to place a value on it. However, that doesn’t mean these structures should stop trying to catch up.

The £9000 generation: notes on education, elections, etc.

We all know the story of the Lib Dems. Once upon a time, a man in a yellow tie called Nick Clegg promised to scrap university tuition fees. Suddenly, fees almost tripled, and university cost £9000 a year. Nick apologised and it became a funny YouTube video. We all laughed heartily as we filled in our student finance forms.

Next came Mr Gove, as he was affectionately known in the newspapers. The divisive Conservative Education Secretary fought for more exams, harder exams, and a return to 'traditional' (read uninspiring, regressive, elitist) teaching methods. Academies and free schools galore. Competition and performance. 'Get Gove Out' became the slogan for striking teachers. Meanwhile, David Willetts tried to sell off Higher Education.

The last five years have not been the whole story, with New Labour laying the foundations for many of these changes, but it has certainly been a strange five years to be a student. At the last General Election, I was fifteen, in my first GCSE year. Now, halfway through my degree, I'm gleefully harbouring a debt of (so far) nearly £30,000. With my arts degree (which doesn't amount to much going by the ever-pragmatic 'global market' rhetoric of both the Labour and Conservative parties), it's unlikely I'll ever make the money to pay it all back. There's about £30 billion of this apparently virtual money hanging around unpaid, according to recent statistics.

In light of the manifestos released in the last few days, the £9000 figure seems short-lived, and I'm still a bit unsure where it came from in the first place. Labour promise to cut fees to £6000. The Greens promise to cut them entirely. I get a piece of paper once a year with some numbers on telling me that some money is going from somewhere to somewhere and is vaguely attached to my name. I can't help feeling that this monetary value granted to university education is arbitrary, a confused formality. This is, obviously, very dangerous. One day not far from now, real, actual money will be leaving my account every month.

It never ceases to amaze me that for some students, the ones who have been educated at private or public schools, university education is comparatively cheap. Last month, some researchers published a report on how different types of schools prepare pupils for Cambridge University. Unsurprisingly, students from privileged educational backgrounds are the most at ease in an institution historically associated with students from privileged educational backgrounds. By contrast, students from state schools, although likely to have good independent learning skills, are also likely to experience social and intellectual anxiety at Cambridge. This can affect eventual performance, but also general day-to-day interaction. As a state school student myself, I can vouch strongly for these feelings of anxiety and inferiority. It's taken me two years to feel even remotely comfortable with the Cambridge 'supervision' system, and I wouldn't describe my background as disadvantaged (other than in the highly distorted relative terms that the Cambridge University demographic suggests).

Although reports like the one mentioned above are useful in that they highlight different lived experiences of elite universities, they elide complexities in the categorisation of the education system.  State education is far from monolithic, and is becoming ever more complicated. For example, the year after I took my GCSEs, my school became an academy. The Tories claimed, and continue to claim, that academies encourage better teaching, better education, better results. But my school's GCSE pass rate (already significantly below the national target) dropped by a further 10% when granted academy status. Nobody really talked about the students whose futures would be dramatically affected by this.

The teething process of academisation did not ensure better results. The constant restructuring of schools like mine, accompanied by repeated changes to exam specifications, instead created dispossessed school leavers. My school was already failing, but it continued to fail, as did most of the other schools run by the the academy chain. Similarly, free schools, marketed by the Tories as beneficial for local communities, only make education a matter of private interests, in both financial and ideological terms. The Conservative manifesto proposes 500 more of these schools. They also pledge that every failing school will be academised.

Privatisation of the education system is not an answer to failing schools. Rewriting the system according to a competitive business model is dangerous. 'We will not allow state schools to make a profit', the government says, and yet somebody somewhere is already profiting from state education. The not-for-profit charitable trusts in charge of academy chains and free schools can use outsourcing and subcontractors for non-teaching staff. Similarly, in universities, zero-hours contracts and pay below the Living Wage allows a minority to continue to make money from the education system.

Consistent emphasis on numbers and measures to assess performance and value creates a culture which is alienating for young people. According to Conservative Party proposals, children that do not achieved the required results in SATs exams will have to resit them upon arriving at secondary school. Aged eleven, children will be told that they are not good enough, and that exams are the only way to show that they are good enough. Enforcing a rigid testing system as a way to reframe the importance of literacy and numeracy is not helpful. Neither is appointing an all white, all male Ofsted committee to regulate schools through testing for things like the teaching of 'British values'.

Writing these notes, I don't need political rhetoric to tell me that the education system is in crisis. The tuition fees scandal is an easy way to pinpoint the government's continued attempt over the last five years to define and redefine the value of education, but this is something that affects all levels of the system, including the places where there aren't strikes and protests and people holding up signs and shouting. Education will always face constraints, constraints of funding, constraints of time, but with 40% of teachers leaving the profession in the first five years, it's clear that current models of education are offering unstable futures.

Young people voting in the General Election for the first time in 2015 have been directly affected by the loose canon of recent education policy. The Lib Dems cannot expect the student vote this time round, and their failure to deliver seems instrumental in the shattering of the three-party dominance of previous elections. In 2015, we have more choices, but also more uncertainties. As young people, we are constantly asked to question what we are worth, especially as part of the potentially brief £9000 generation.

We've been the testing ground for experiments that have failed, ideas that have been retracted, the rapid increase in privatisation of the education system, and the constant restating of values. Young people who do not fit within the streamlining of academisation and the uncompromising ideas of what constitutes success have fallen by the wayside and will continue to fall by the wayside. I'm privileged in that I have access to a university institution in which my ideas and opinions are encouraged, and, more importantly, listened to. But, even more importantly, this story is about many more young people than just me.