Wilding the Tame: Two Encounters with Wolves

Wolf's Child, Wild Works in association with Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Felbrigg Hall
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall (Faber, 2015)

Two (artistic) encounters with wolves over the last couple of weeks have got me thinking about our relationship with the wild in ourselves and in nature, and whether there is a difference between the tame, and the domesticated. And just how easy it is to romanticise the wild from an urban lifestyle, without really experiencing it as it is.

Wild Works new site-specific immersive story, produced at Felbrigg Hall in partnership with Norfolk and Norwich Festival, takes us on a fairy-tale adventure that mirrors the Greek myth of Calisto - the nymph turned bear - and the unusual life of Peter the Wild Boy, an eighteenth century boy found living wild in the woods of Northern Germany and brought back to live in the UK.This is what Wild Works do: they set up camp somewhere, meet people, uncover stories, and produce theatre that has that place and those stories at their heart.

In this one, we begin with a warning: do not stray from the middle of the paths - wolves are about, and our safety cannot be guaranteed. Nor can it be for Rowan, mute orphan and heroine of this show, who plays her wobbly fear with strained abandon. We first meet her amid the orphanage of Mother, a prim and austere woman who has dedicated her life to creating civilised order and ladylike manners in a manicured house on the edge of a dark forest. But Mother likes to scare her orphans into propriety. and when Rowan is sent out into the woods with a shotgun, she begins an odyssey that takes in an erotic encounter with some sort of wild stag-man, a pack of wolves, a child, and an inter-generational conflict with Mother and her harem of order.

We're guided around the forest by a murder of crows: they narrate the story and entertain us on the long walks between scenes. The female crow, with her esturine squarking runs away with the show, so fantastically does she capture the playful inquisitive intelligence of the crow.

There are other triumphs, too - a puppet of a young daughter taking her first steps in the wolf pack; the image of mother riding upright on her horse before the great grandeur of National Trust's Felbrigg Hall; and the way that an hour in we realise we have left the path and are totally lost in the woods with no idea which direction lies civilisation. The sun has sunk, the sky is a blueish grey, lighter than the treetops shadowed against it. There are candles lighting our path, sometimes a blue tinge to our destination, but either side is darkness and unknown.

If there is a criticism, it is that of many large-scale site specific works - the shepherding of an audience takes time and, for all the efforts of the crows, breaks the intensity of the story. And while the story they tell feels wild and unrestrained, following a line of theatre goers doesn't. I found myself taken out of the story too often to fully immerse, which after the intensity of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing the night before, was a shame.

There's also a sense of romanticising the wildness. This feels like a story for an urban arts audience. Perhaps I just wanted some proper danger and uncertainty! But its an amazing spectacle nonetheless.

What Sarah Hall does in The Wolf Border is simultaneously less dramatic, and more creative. The novel is about transition and change, mutability, and an interaction between the tame and the wild, voluntary, changeable, permeable. Rather than looking to a mythical past for her story, she sets it the UK today, telling a story of rewilding a tame landscape as the old-order begins to break-down, and wild new possibilities open up in a newly independent Scotland. It's a cunning tale from one of the wildest of UK writers: Sarah Hall's oevre is packed with tales of altered landscapes and characters longing to throw off the shackles of conventional life for something altogether more elemental, physical, less governed by the mind.

The heroine here is Rachel Caine, refugee from a bohemian mother, who has for years been working as a wolf expert in the US. But her life is in transition, and following her mothers death and an unexpected pregnancy, she decides to accept the offer of an Earl who has an eccentric plan to reintroduce the wolf to the UK landscape on his vast estate. In language that is scented to the earthy, metallic Cumbrian landscape, we almost feel as though Rachel is some sort of shamen figure, totemically running free alongside the pack, guiding them towards their natural home. If there is a philosophy underpinning this book, it is that we cannot escape our nature, that we are all part tame, part wild and both parts will get us in the end.

This is reflected in the narrative of Scottish Independence, which sits alongside the main plot. But what starts as a naturalistic presentation of the UK over the summer of 2014, begins to become altered as the vote goes the other way, and the public schoolboy Westminster power-base is challenged. The portrait of Scotland is slightly one-dimensional; a rugged antithesis of ennobled England. But the border is both physical and metaphorical, a transition of mindset as well as of landscape.

Sarah Hall's writing is swift and enthralling, the plot sucks you in and her very real characters enchant. She's one of my favourite British novelists, and her perspective that sits somewhere between naturalist and farmer is an unusual one in the often too bland middle-England literature. There's much familiar about this tale, in setting and atmosphere. It feels like Haweswater meets The Carhullan Army, and I flew through it in a couple of days - very quick for me! - starting on a train from Lancaster to London as I mourned the fading Cumbrian landscape behind me. There's a thrill in the wild, it calls to us like a romantic longling for something we feel we've lost. Something human, though. Governed, by our fantasies and imaginings. Wolf's Child taps right into this, and is limited by it. But The Wolf Border takes a step further, exposing that longing as an empty misunderstanding, and presenting a wilderness that is. It just is. That's Sarah /Hall's brilliance.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing: The Play

Tonight's theatrical Norfolk and Norwich Festival adventure took in the stage adaptation (by Annie Ryan) of Eimear McBride's prize-hoovering novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. As with the book, it's a difficult to watch but impossible to look away masterpiece, a verbally instant and insistent barrage of emotion and experience. Guttural.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing follows the inner narrative of a girl from the womb to twenty, her relationship with her sick brother, and search for herself. It has attracted 5-star reviews from nearly everyone who has seen it, and is performed as a one-woman show by Aoife Duffin who is simply mesmeric. Hers is a performance to shape a career. Duffin holds the stage without much movement or action, and conjures characters with a slight inflection of the voice of posture. She is utterly convincing and untouchable on an raised up stage. Sometimes, so embodying the role, it feels as though she is a child playing make believe alone in her bedroom. How she can go through that visceral performance night after night and not be a gibbering wreck is anybodies guess.

And for the audience a difference from the book. Because with a book you can always put it down, but here together in a theatre it is relentless. There is nowhere nowhere to hide. It's Excoriating. I came out tense and wordless. All around was stunned silence and soft checking each other was okay after it all. The impact and power of those words and that body and voice were written all over our faces.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is playing at Norwich Playhouse until Saturday 16th. Go and see it if you can. It is, it is, it is it

Sunday Supplement: On Theatre (Inspired by Black Watch)

I've never felt entirely comfortable in the threatre. Its an uncompromisingly physical experience for me. Actors exert their physicality upon you with their voices, their movements, their projection of the self on a large scale. Even on a stage there's no hiding from the fact that they are human beings, embodied, impressive, incontrovertable. This creates in me a feeling of being attacked by things I can't control. My comfort zone is challenged, and even where that's a rewarding experience I'm left shaken up and uncertain for a while.

Its only theatre - and possibly live popular misoc - that do this to me. TV and Cinema have that difference of fixed distance between audience and performance. Classical music, ballet, dance, opera, sport: all happen in a specific place, but somehow feel less immediate. Perhaps because there's so little speech involved, which means that communication between performers and audience is indirect, translated through movement or instruments. When reading, you not only have some level of control over your physical surroundings, but more than any other artform reading invites you to collaborate in creating the art, you as reader choose consciously or subconsciously how to conjur those words on the page. Books as a safe space, a protected space. In the words of Edward P Morgan, 'a book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an expolosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.' It is this that attracts me to reading more than anything else.

On the other hand, as a child and teenager, the confrontation of theatre scared me. Indeed, it still does today. Yet when younger I wasn't emotionally strong enough to understand that being made uncomfortable could be the purpose of great art. That a response - any response - was preferable to nothing. Great art is valuable because it creates experiences outside the norm that enable us to understand ourselves, other people, and our environements anew.

All of which brings me to Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland play that has been wowing audiences and critics for the last 7 years. Moving between a bar in Fife and the front line during the Iraq war, it is based on interviews with former members of the legendary Scottish regiment. We see the experiences through their eyes, and it is accompanied with a powerful and inventive use of movement, music, and song to create a visceral, complex and urgent piece of theatre.

I loved it. The soldiers repeated assertion that they had signed up to defend their country, not attack others, was a powerful summery of all wrong with that foolish Iraq invasion. But it was about more than that. I shared its essential tennets that the boredom of war breeds a craving for violence, for anything to fill the void. But it was about more than that, too. It was about humanising soldiers, something I often need reminding of. As a pacifist, I often find it hard to rationalise a belief that violence can never be worth the destruction it causes, with the contribution that army training and identity can make to a society. Black Watch made both points effectively, dramatised the tragedies of war at its human legacy on those prosecuting it. But also regretting the disolution of the Black Watch regiment. One of the most powerful scenes involves a recreation of the history of the Black Watch, from a hired brigaid in the seventeenth century through nearly every war the UK has fought in the last 200 years. As the uniforms evolve, the wars pile up: Napoleonic, Crimean, Boer, World Wars, Korea, The Gulf, Kosovo. Relatively few defensive wars, a great number about expansion, empire, exerting will upon others.

The production itself is energetic, lively, full of swearing and practical jokes, and young men with more bravado than sense. The staging, placed in between two stands of seats facing each other, enables you to watch the reaction of other people, enables you to see the emotions it brings out in you reflected on the faces of others. 

If it felt slightly dated, if the historical argument about the value of invading Iraq largely determined, then it is probably art like this that has got us there. Black Watch says nothing new about the Iraq. But it documents those arguments, and will remain worth watching because it is ultimately about people and ideas. And because it is exceptional.

Black Watch is just short of 2 hours of moving, powerful, skilfully choreographed, well written and acted, theatre.I felt uncomfortable throughout. Yet that is the power of theatre. And I'm now strong enough to enjoy that.