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Why, I asked some months back, in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about?

Well… everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport.

Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of one Ohio housewife, a former college teacher who now bakes pies for money, attempts to keep her household shipshape, feels the pinch of post-bail-out America, is frustrated in the usual ways, and frets persistently about the physical, moral and emotional safety of her offspring (other people’s too) in those ostensibly United States.

Song lyrics, boarlets, clickbait headlines, bits of her children’s homework, first world problems, Schubert, shopping, getting cancer, the Amish, things she’s forgotten, assassinated presidents, FOOSH injuries, actors’ names, wordplays, her mother’s death, Revere Ware pots (me either), the life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, styptic sticks, lines from Shakespeare, fake-brick wallpaper, captions for YouTube videos, her husband’s fear of bridge-collapses, her own Mid-West gosh-darn-it lexicon, the plots of classic movies, ‘Indian’ burial mounds, lists of places/diseases/brandnames/pies (Umberto Eco would have very much approved)…

All human – at least, All-American – life is here. And death too, obvs. There are, in case you hadn’t heard, a lot of shootings.

At random, from page 52: ‘Miss America, misanthropy, missed opportunity’ … ‘willy-nilly, folkloric, the fact that a female police officer led a double life for nine years, Horror Movie Hotel’ … ‘the fact that it’s not just my outfits that bug Stace though, the fact that it’s everything I do, or don’t do, the fact that, boy, she keeps a beady eye on me…’

These ‘facts’, the hooks for her seemingly ever-expanding tapestry: ‘the fact that anyway I think you can overdo remembering stuff’, ‘the fact that everybody’s got a gun now’, ‘the fact that it begins to seem positively unAmerican to internalize things’, ‘the fact that Philip Glass can get a little bit repetitive’, ‘the fact that I think there’s maybe too much emphasis on facts these days, or maybe there are just too many facts’.

So by ‘everything’ I really do mean everything. Through all these facts, distracts, and (mis)rememberings (there is an iffy G&S line somewhere), our unnamed Everywoman becomes a living, breathing information overload, perhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I’ve ever witnessed.

And while ‘neurotic’ might be overstating it, this is a woman who is worrying 24/7, across the entire imaginable gamut (she worries about that too), rising to quite alarming levels of morbidity, especially – and you can rather see this coming – with regards to violence against women, mothers and/or children in every corner of the faunal kingdom. Intermingled with her own glacial release of biographic data (what one might otherwise be calling ‘narrative’), there appear sporadic scenes from the unfolding story of a mountain lioness and her cubs – which come to bear.

In all, in its assessment of the Big Contemporary American Themes of violence, headline news and environmentalism, what Ducks… amounts to is one great trauma diagnosis for the entire country: ‘the fact that people are always saying this isn’t “who we are as a nation,” but, well, it kind of is.’ The book was published, with mordant wit, on July 4th.

Unless you too are a nervous, baking-enthusiast Ohio housewife it’s fair to say your sympathy will wax and wane a little as the book goes on; but Ellmann’s Joycean achievement is to drag you along, complicitly, in her endurance marathon of anxiety and trivia – not least, of course, because you’ve no idea what might or might not turn out to be trivia (‘ducks, Newburyport’).

It’s a colossal feat. And if you didn’t exactly see it cluttering the Beach Reads lists this summer – it may yet be more read about than read – it’s now been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (announced next month), and frankly that’s no less than it deserves.

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For The Spectator

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House

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For The Spectator

— The Nelson Evening Mail, July 4 1908

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Eight wickets for eight runs is the worst batting collapse in Twenty20 international cricket.

St Blaise is the patron saint of sore throats, and of knitting.

Estonian literature suffers from a dearth of stories by trucks drivers and/or prostitutes.

The presidential statues on Mount Rushmore were originally intended to extend down to the waist.

The Athenian philosopher Chrysippus died from laughing at his own jokes.

Richard Nixon once wrote a memo instructing his Secret Service detail to make sure no press took pictures of him with a drink in hand.

Tramps have heels like turnips.

Samuel Derrick, pimp, failed actor and master of the ceremonies at Bath, wrote a novel in the voice of Shakespeare’s ghost.

People now take in five times more information every day than they did thirty years ago.

Geoffrey Chaucer addressed his 1391 A Treatise on the Astrolabe to his ten-year-old son, Lewis.

The Japanese toilet industry has agreed to standardise complex bidet controls.

Calling somebody a pussy is not illegal.

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The Betty Nansen Teatret’s Mozart Undone features six singers and five instrumentalists in a two-hour ‘freewheeling musical deconstruction’ of 20 of Mozart’s most recognisable melodies – or what Nikolaj Cederholm would call ‘hits’. Formerly-recognisable, anyway. These ‘hits’ have been, according to the show’s garrulous and inimitable press release, ‘re-imagined and re-engineered into a wild synthesis of ancient and modern genres’ involving such (neo?-)classical touchstones as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mumford & Sons, and – deep breath – Dolly Parton.

The players come nominally dressed as characters from The Magic Flute – plus Don Giovanni (naturally) – but with only half a dozen of them, each playing numerous ‘roles’, there are never-ending on-stage costume-changes, and no shortage of off-stage antics (we will say nothing of the poor girl charged with inserting microphones into condoms…). The costumes themselves, however, seem influenced less by the fashions of Mozart’s own era than, say, the aesthetics of a Stanley Kubrick production, with a dash of Lady Gaga thrown in for good measure – the net result roughly approximating, perhaps, the opium-befuddled nightmares of an overwrought Mozart scholar. In many respects, it’s not a million miles away from Amadeus. Except that – ahem – there is no actual narrative to speak of. What there is, is a lot of water. Bloody gallons of the stuff.

This entire thing probably has to be seen to be believed – a kind of full-on (and slightly inevitable) ‘Cirque du Gubbay’. But doubters be warned: the company’s Beethoven show had Darwin, Turner, and Nelson Mandela in it. And that ran for months. In Norway.

So, what is a ‘theatre concert’? You have to run to keep up with Cederholm’s comically relentless enthusiasm for his work (think Adrian Edmondon’s Red Baron in Blackadder), but the rough explanation goes something like this:

‘Theatre and music are very old colleagues. But the musical, vaudeville, opera – these are not the ancestors of the theatre concert: they are its cousins. The theatre concert is a real hybrid: music and theatre as equals!

‘In Copenhagen, in the Nineties, we wanted to do musicals; but there was a dissatisfaction with the way that musicals were done – the music was always serving a secondary role. You know when the story calls for a song about someone finding a letter on a mantelpiece… and it’s always a bad song! And there’s always that certain style of singing. Rock concerts, also, had these Old Testament-style rituals: “Good evening, London!” And they had a very low dynamic. In the first quarter of an hour they had shown you everything they had to offer: lighting, playing, singing.

‘So our first show was Gasoline, about ‘The Rolling Stones of Denmark’, and we took an interpretation of their work – as when a theatre does Shakespeare or Chekhov. The only difference is we can hear how the Beatles were supposed to sound. We had the boldness to say, “It doesn’t matter: a song can mean a lot of things.” We interpret not only through the music but also through the rituals, the costumes, the dramas. It’s very rich. You cannot necessarily get everything from seeing it only once.’

Cederholm, it seems, is constitutionally incapable of resisting a challenge. Having subsequently pulled off theatre concerts on Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and the Beatles (twice), he thought ‘Why don’t we do a classical composer?’ Why not, indeed. But between the mischievous mentions of ‘electro-Irish, punk, and power ballad’ influences, and the programme credits for ‘Music Directors and Producers’ (Jens and Peter Hellemann) and ‘Songs written by’ (Neill Cardinal Furio), an obvious question arises: what really remains of Mozart once he’s done being undone?

Cederholm doesn’t falter: ‘The basic notes.’ But his aim is not to put on a note-for-note concert of Mozart’s music so much as to recreate the antic spirit of, say, Die Zauberflöte’s original Freihaus performances. ‘We just took the music that we could talk with,’ then ‘we tried to make the lyrics about important issues today that would fit…’

To wit, as played over (a piece formerly known as) a piano concerto: ‘Where is my target? / Where is my drone? / The cruel insurgency / I track on my phone.’

Your call. As I said, there’s no storyline. ‘This is not about Mozart, certainly. But if you want to make connections, you are free to do that for yourself.’

Traditionalists will argue that the end product is less Mozart being re-worked than Mozart being worked over. At best, it’s Mozart being sampled (remember the Lloyd Webbers vs Paganini, back in the day? That. Only more so). But Cederholm is unbothered. In fact, he’s far more concerned about people turning away from it because it’s ‘Mozart’.

‘Is it for Mozart-lovers? Maybe… if you are an open-minded Mozart-lover!’ But not liking Mozart is not a reason not to go, either. ‘The years gone since Mozart composed have added to the significance of his music,’ he says, with heavy ambivalence. ‘Same as with The Beatles, Mozart produced some of the greatest hits – part of our understanding of what Music should sound like. He’s a big hit-maker: in the cinema, in the supermarket… So the audience come with their luggage; but the most exciting thing is people don’t know what it is they are going to experience.’

The whole performance, not so incidentally, is in English. ‘Mozart was German but wrote in Italian, the language of opera. English is the language of pop music, and we want to reach out to an audience everywhere.’

And that audience is…? ‘It’s a lot of people who would rather go to the movies. But also traditional theatre-goers, who find the energy very satisfying. It’s a family form. It’s for everybody who loves a good show!’

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For Sinfini Music. Published/edited version here.

If the play itself already feels like a multicultural parody (not to mention a parody of Shakespeare), then the venue was doing its best to rise to the occasion: a Sudanese theatre troupe performing – in the grey half-outdoors – an Arabic-language play about Italians and Celts to an audience of Sikhs and South Americans, grannies, backpackers, academics, hi-viz cyclists, American tourists and African embassy officials, to the tune of a flautist playing Bach under a nearby railway arch and the thunder of Chinooks overhead. A matchlessly “London” welcome for the South Sudan Theatre Company’s first international gig.

In and around the SSTC’s ebullient song and dance (lit.) – complete with weaponry, day-glo cowrie shells, bead necklaces, bush-hats, rubber sandals, and acres of leopardskin (from ‘sustainable’ leopards, you understand; I don’t think there are that many real ones in South Sudan) – the play was delivered in the lingua franca of the new South Sudanese state, Juba Arabic, augmented by a rough and irregularly synoptic paraphrase thrown up on the supertitles (“paratitles”? “supernopsis”?) and occasional grace-notes of English: “This woman, very crazy!” These oral/aural pull-quotes added much to the humour of the afternoon (see below), as well as encouraging, I found, the risk of little socio-cultural mondegreens, mishearings that conformed to what you thought might be going on on the stage.

At an obvious cost to most audients of the bulk of Shakespeare’s original poetry, the Juba adaptation offered some curious gains in terms of narrative clarity (if only more of his scenes could be boiled down to just a half-dozen sentences!). In fact, I for one would not have complained if, in what was already an act (so to speak) of substantial linguistic and cultural translation, the SSTC had trimmed a few extra minutes from the longer of the soliloquies. In this regard, also – the adaptation aspect – they could actually have pushed the boat out more: from the programme I thought that “a soldier in England army” was a bit of flavoursome patois. Ditto Postumus (spelled at least four different ways, by my count) and Innogen (an accepted alternative, it seems; but not the one they used on the screens). But no; they were just typos. An opportunity missed, perhaps.

Notwithstanding what already looks like a weird mish-mash of cultural references – culminating at the Python-esque paratitle, “Posthumus orders his servant Pisanio to kill Innogen at Milford Haven.” (Isn’t there a Butlins there?) – the jury, apparently, is still out on whether Cymbeline is a tragedy or a romance (and if this be a romance it’s surely the only one in which one character plans to rape another on the body of a third and then marry her!). So the SSTC decided, with commendable enthusiasm and daring, to grasp the obvious third option and play it as a comedy.

I dunno what liberties Joseph Abuk (translator/co-director) had to take with the text to achieve this, but, big scheming monologues aside, it was pretty funny. Sitting in the Juba-speaking section of the audience, I was in absolutely no doubt as to which bits were amusing and which lamentable. I also knew when to murmur in agreement, when to yelp in mock horror, and when to clap my hands to my forehead in prayer. (The German lady immediately in front of me did not seem to think this quite cricket.)

The canny reverse-scheming doctor (Francis Paulino Lugali, also playing Posthumus) got particularly big laughs, and well deserved. And if it did occasionally seem that there was more laughter than there ought to be (to wit: when the malign Cloten looks up the sleeping Imogen’s skirt, the black audience fell about the place; the white audience, not so much), that only constituted immediate evidence that a indigenous Sudanese version of this story would, had it existed, clearly have been told in a markedly different way.

It’s probably fair to conclude that Cymbeline isn’t, in any language, a first-timer’s Shakespeare play. But while it’s tempting to argue that you’re no less likely to follow the silly twists and turns of Shakespeare if you sit through it in Russian or Swahili, it does pose a problem with the long solo scenes: sneeze and you’ll miss a vital plot-point, but laborious soliloquies are left in, the paratitles not ticking over for minutes on end.

From which we learn… ? That Shakespeare wastes an astonishing proportion of his running time in grand explanatory fiddle-faddle (the unmasking of an obviously female “boy” – funnier back when there were only men on the stage, I grant you – takes an aeon and a half), to say nothing of his unconscionably operatic endings. Cymbeline’s closing shopping-list of revelations is unusually absurd (these two shepherds-slash-princes have birthmarks? So what?!), all the more so if it’s not even being played for laughs. (NB We also learn that it’s not worth taking Shakespeare too literally, in your home language or otherwise. I’m not a dermatologist or anything, but you have to ask how easily a man can spot a mole on a black breast in an unlit bedroom at midnight.)

Apart from the basic themes of internecine strife (and international war), a sneaky extra line about using ‘government position for your own benefit’, and a general question mark over the issue of rendering unto Caesar those brightly-coloured ostrich feathers which are Caesar’s, it was not entirely clear why South Sudan had landed this particular play for the Globe to Globe proceedings (I guess at some point in the epic inter-cultural preparations someone was going to be handed a hat with only King John left in it), so I won’t read too much into it. Except to say that as Cymbeline accepted his vassal status before Rome, and declared peace in our time, another massive Army helicopter thundered overhead.

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A shorter version of this article was published on theartsdesk

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For theartsdesk