Author: Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Bourdain has his noodles and coke, I have my greasy spoon. All I want after a night bracing the cold in the name of a dance and drinking  is a good breakfast. A proper breakfast. No avocados. Thick white bread and conspicuous eggs. Some form of repackaged potatoes, fried. Clattering of cheap cutlery on wellworn plates. The greasy spoon has been the hangover haunt of ravers, drinkers, and night-owls for as long as people have found only a tenner left in their wallet after a night of lambasting the liver. The rich history of these unassuming cafeterias spell out an answer for our ‘identity crisis Britain’ of 2026, and celebrate the contributions people from around the world and across the social ladder have made to British cuisine and culture. With a round of toast at the ready, a strong brew at hand, and an endless supply of bubble-and-squeak,  welcome to Caff Society. 

The infamous egg-sandwich a la ‘Withnail and I’ – the opening of the best British film ever made bases itself in a 1960s caf 

The greasy spoon was born out of a hunger for cheap and filling food, fast. Against the embers of WWII and its subsequent rations, a new war-time industrial workforce demanded feeding. Labouring round the clock, Britons needed places that could fill their bellies up at any hour. A far cry away from the post-war lagging vegetal ration at home, they intrigued workers with plates of hot food full of carbs and meat. These workers’ cafeterias, soon baptised to ‘caffs’ –   cafes being too continental – unquestionably became a post-war phenomenon, transforming their one-time necessity into a perennial staple of the high street. With populations from across the world arriving in Britain in search of new opportunities, these eateries were repurposed by immigrants, serving British bellies with the food they knew, with a few twists. The arrival of Italians in the UK made Britain start to switch the teapot for the mokapot, leading to the caff embracing the pillars of Italian coffee culture: cheap and strong coffee, served at a bar, quick no-fuss service, and a brief chit-chat to start the day. As Greeks, Cypriots, Turks and more came ashore, each country’s cafe culture was brought into this new British scene. Caffs slowly moved beyond their utilitarian purpose and became the epicentre for newly emerging immigrant populations to establish home on new soil, whilst also integrating with the locals and their cuisine. To this day, most greasy spoons are owned by families who came to Britain in search of something new, displaying menus that celebrate both the beige comfort of Britain and traditional breakfasts from across the globe. Sausages sit next to shatsuka, jacket potatoes next to pasta al forno. All is equal on the laminated pages of the caff menu. Founded on the promise of cheap, warm and hearty food, the greasy spoon has been a faithful hallmark of the highstreet. Serving savvy shoppers, bulking builders with long cold shifts ahead, and flustered mums in search of a hot drink and satiating slice of cake for the school run, the greasy spoon is a truly egalitarian eatery. 

As the post-war industrial workforce began to decline, the greasy spoon was able to keep the friers on by continually meeting a British appetite for cheap food. The austerity of the 80s, strikes, changing pallets of aspirational metrosexual cityslickers, the greasy spoon soldiered it all. Cheap, filling food with familiarity, if not nostalgia. It is not uncommon to go to a greasy spoon and see ‘school cake and custard’ on offer, satiating our hunger for cheap thrills and blasts from the past. What these slabs of stodge consist of is besides the point; the e-number infused fluorescent pink icing and molten custard bring back all the child-like wonder of a cold schoolhall in a polyester sweatshirt. The greasy spoon caters to both our bellies and minds – something trendy cafes and bohemian attitudes fail to do. Walls are decorated with more nostalgic relics. Mario’s Cafe (Kentish Town, est. 1989/1958) boasts a collection of Italian merchandise, photos of the band Madness, who used to hang out in Mario’s with Saint Ettienne, and PEZ machines all serving to delineate the personal history of its Italian owners, and its place within pop culture over the years. Prints of favourite footballers, drawings by local children or the next generation of caff owners, and relics from the homeland all serve in the greasy spoons’ nostalgia trip, physicalising a personal yet shared history of Britain. Part of the nostalgia for those effervescent, unlocatable ‘simpler times’ is the community that we somewhere along the line had been told had been lost. Enter the caff and the community is right there, alive as ever before. 

Unified in an appetite for a quick, no-frills meal on a fornica table, striking up conversation in a greasy spoon is encouraged, if not expected, amongst those who dine there. The cheap promise of the greasy spoon solidifies its position as a sanctuary for many who otherwise might not talk to others as frequently. It is no wonder the first lines of Withnail and I are said in a caff as I’s hangover epiphany takes head. It is in looking at all these faces, all these Londoners, that he realises his place among them, and the state of the world he has found himself in. Be it through working unsociable hours, the unaffordability of congregating in other spaces for long periods of time, or elderly isolation, the caff provides a space for all to sit, receive something warm with a smile, and to talk to a stranger whilst passing unbranded sauces back and forth. It is for this reason many artists, like Saint Etienne or Gilbert and George, who refuse to eat in their home and prefer their local Market Cafe, have come to love the caff. Not only does the promise of a hot meal appeal to the starving artist, but they are fertile grounds for inspiration due to the heart of the caff being found in the people that make and frequent them. Local and tourist alike commune under the roofs of these community sanctuaries, filling in the space for community centers, workers cafeterias, and social clubs when the state fails. 

However, it hasn’t been all golden for the greasy spoon. Whilst the greasy spoon helped change British pallets by serving their owners’ homeland favourites alongside British staples, British snobbery can never be underestimated. Caffs are working-class institutions and it wasn’t long until their locations and plates were going to be scorned for being rough, unnutritious, and showcasing an unpolished Britishness.  

There is a lot to be said for the unimaginative quality of British cuisine (‘bombs flying overhead’ springs to mind), but there is a time and a place for it, particularly if you’re hard up or facing a long, laborious shift ahead.  As more Britons began working the 9-5 in offices, the need for a hearty fry-up breakfast, or an omelette, chips, and salad lunch, waivered, and palates became more aspirational with this turn away. Rationing gave British food a bad name, blighting any chance of British food actually having a renaissance – note how during the 90s ‘Cool Britannia’ era, all touched by Britain turned to gold, besides our food.  Moreover, the grease that gave these caffs their name was no longer a desirable hallmark of a good meal.  A more health conscious, aspirational Britain didn’t envision greasyspoons in its 21st century make-over. Hit with the blow of rising rents and food prices, the greasy spoon is more of a treat than ever on our high streets.  

In a climate where luxury items have been replaced by luxury experiences, even your morning cuppa has to be a signifier of your wealth, with brand name coffee cups becoming the must-have item on the morning commute. People love them for their in-n-out service, consistency across cities, and variety of different combinations to give your day a sugary caffeinated start. Each coffee shop has its own unique appeal, from a trendy logo to being matcha pioneers. If you frequent Blank Street coffee, your coffee won’t even be made by a person – how fantastic! Breakfast spots have transformed from a necessity and a local hub, to an overdone, overpriced experiment in the power of marketing. As a South London native, watching my local high streets succumb to this trend has further pushed the greasy spoon to the side as we favour slick coffeeshops with the familiar comfort of an instantly recognisable logo and name. The caffs of London, built off post-war spirit and optimism, have now been replaced by heartless corporations, pushing locals further away. However, there is cash to be made in nostalgia, so we can trust corporations to cash-in. Norman’s, a shallow imitation of the ‘working-class cafe, yah’, is the prime example of the co-opting of British nostalgia and working class culture in order to market an experience to audiences who want the caff ‘vibes’ without the actual grease or Common People. Norman’s hipster-facing, venture capitalist-backed attempt to gentrify the caff fell flat on its face after 5 years, despite being used by Burbury in a campaign in 2023. It’s uncanny in its hollow evocation of these institutions with owners who should have listened to Jarvis Cocker more. A picture of the England men winning the ‘66 cup is slightly too neatly hung on a freshly painted wall; no one who works there was around for that moment and there is no sense of personal attachment to anything. The signage is too curated, informed by a vision board, not picked from a list of slightly funky, slightly carnival-esq, slightly formal fonts from a signage company. There are wine bottles next to the cans of pop. It wants all the aesthetic, with none of the authenticity. British class dynamics are a contradictory, intricate, and often confounding series of movements to follow, but the love of the higher-classes to play poor will forever haunt our culture. Norman’s and other such institutions that owe their success, failure, or idea from the caff will never live like common people, they’ll never do whatever common people do, but attempt to capitalise off the uniquely British romanticisation of the common person. Norman’s failed due to its inauthenticity, bringing hope back to the local caff as customers crave the ethos that powers them on. 

I propose to embrace the current nostalgia trip trend affording greasy spoons the current attention they’re receiving – viva the greasy spoon renaissance. Instagram accounts like @cafss_not_cafes and @eggchipbeanpint are reintroducing these spaces to a younger, digital clientele to whom the greasy spoon is the relic of the past with olden times prices. We like them for their cheapness, their familiarity, and their authenticity as local establishments, but let’s take that further. Whilst my local Pret by Brixton station has responded to the fact that the local homeless population often bed down outside its doors by promising it donates to homelessness charities, The Hope, a caff on Holloway Road, boasts a sign that encourages those in need to come in from the cold and have a bite to eat, paid for by a charity pot on the counter filled by its local customers. Whilst not all caffs operate on such a charitable basis, their place as institutions that offer cheap cups of tea and toast, where cash is always king, and there are no questions asked about the length of your stay (most caffs operate on a counter service leaving tables unsurveyed by floor staff) provides refuge for many in need. They stand as a testimony to the optimism of a post-war society where local businesses could serve as local community hubs, ensuring all were well-fed – including the new arrivals to the country that took on the leases. They became the physical incarnation of Modernity Britain, a tolerant multi-cultural society that provided for all, and perhaps could help glue together the fragmented country we find ourselves in today, one sausage bap at a time. 

THE BEST CAFFS 

• Mario’s Cafe, Kentish Town (obviously) 
• The Electric Cafe, Brixton 
• Rosy Lee Irish Cafe, Tooting 
• Rick’s Diner, Oxford 
• Regency Cafe, Pimlico 

Featured Image – Pinterest

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

all images courtesy of Braxton Haugen

It’s a never-ending pursuit, and I think that’s the point. When you start thinking differently is when you’re going to get yourself into trouble. – Braxton Haugen

Let us go then, you and I, and enter the technicolour world of Braxton Haugen. It is rather easy to find his rabbit hole, and chances are you have stumbled across it before. Braxton’s niche corner of the internet that he inhabits is one of poetry, carefully made props, hotel stationery – asked very politely for at reception desks across the world – and curios, the music of the 1960s, and most importantly film. Taking the form of the artistic polymath for the 21st century, Braxton has dabbled and triumphed in art and film-making in its myriad forms, yet his colourful, twee, vibrantly personal series The World of Braxton Haugen has catapulted this filmmaker onto the cultural radar. It is with this world that we are reminded of what makes our own world so dear; the ability to hold things, the ability to personalise our spaces and the ability to be an individual. In a time of increasingly digitalised, uniformed existences, Haugen’s world embraces the tangible, the uniquely man made, and is an ever increasing reminder of the necessity for art and artists. Haugen’s world is a culmination of and testimony to all that he has learnt, seen, done and forayed in other years; it is the attention to detail of place, character and identity that has given us these glimpses inside a life as nourished with artistic endeavour as Haugen’s. Drawing on one of his many artistic inspirations when asked to introduce himself,  “There’s that great Dylan line off ‘Farewell Angelina’ that goes, ‘call me any name you’d like, I will never deny it.’”, Haugen encapsulates his world and his artistic story in Dylan’s line. The World of Braxton Haugen is one of experiment, of trying a new name when called to and never denying the character you are working with, quirks and all. Fascinated by the world Braxton has carved out for himself, I spoke with Haugen to get to the core of his world, and discover what it could teach ours. 

“There were ten years before the sun came up” on Braxton’s seemingly “overnight success” with the World mini-series, ten years during which longform film, feature films, poetry series and being suspended between Los Angeles and London all had to happen in order for Braxton’s world to finally reach us. The series started in June and quickly rose to reel prominence, but like the emergence of a new star in the sky, his light had always been there – it just took us time to receive it. 

BH – World was initially a difficult project to get off the ground. […] I guess I was looking for something I could do that was of a smaller scale than the kind of work I’d done in the last year. I actually made three prototype episodes in January, but they were missing something. I wasn’t ready. Some of the ideas were there, or rather the seeds, but the execution was underdeveloped and lacked vision. I watched the rough cut of the first part and didn’t buy it. I ended up scraping that early version and put the entire project on the shelf.

In the meantime, I went back to London and kept myself busy with a couple of new writing projects. But I wasn’t especially happy with anything that was coming out on the page either. I guess somewhere in the back of my mind the idea of World had stuck around long enough that I began scribbling down little ideas for it while I was supposed to be writing. Around May I knew I had to make a decision about getting serious about a project. It felt like one of those fork-in-the-road moments. What I was writing then and the short films I imagined comprising World were very much two separate things and I knew I couldn’t do both, and I knew once I’d started on one sincerely that I wouldn’t want to change horses midstream. So I just said to myself: “World is going to be your next project, come hell or high water. You’re going to make these movies.” 

It began as a way for me to document some of the people, places and things that were meaningful to me. I found the process challenging and rewarding enough that I’ve just kept making them. It was also the first project I’d ever received attention for right out of the gate. I’ve been publishing movies like these on the internet for almost ten years. I’d gotten used to people not really caring about me, so it was validating to see these movies connect so quickly with an audience. I’m incredibly grateful for that. But it took me showing up in the right place and in the right moment for that to happen. I guess I’d always resisted showing up in these places for one reason or another. But my girlfriend really encouraged me to think about sharing my movies on Instagram. So I started an account. At the time I posted the first part of my series, I don’t think I’d ever seen a Reel all the way through in my entire life other than the ones I was making for Van Neistat. So the whole thing was new to me. I think it gave the impression that I was some kind of overnight success, but of course there were ten years before the sun came up. That’s how the story goes. 

However, World wasn’t the first time the phone screen had seen Haugen. Answering also to the call of ‘poet’, In His Own Words saw Haugen publish his poetry using film. The words are zany, there’s a frenetic strength of  delivery and energy held in the lines, and a spontaneity worthy of the Beat Generation’s urgency of feeling.  Filmmaking and poetry aren’t foreign entities, explains Haugen, but rather he “look[s] at it as the same dance, but with a different partner”. It’s all part of the same creative process, vision and world. 

BH – I write, I paint, I make movies, I build sculptures, I take pictures – and when you put it like that, it can seem like these are separate mediums, but I choose to look at it all as more or less the same thing. I think it all comes from the same place. But film is my native medium. Even in my written work, I chose to visualise my manuscripts as opposed to binding them in a book. So in that way, filmmaking is at the core of my creative life. 

The four written collections were initially born out of a dissatisfaction I felt with filmmaking at the time. It was 2020, I’d dropped out of university, I was living on my own I’d just come off making 50 short films in a row for my series The Home Movies. I was disappointed and disillusioned with the reception, the film festivals, the whole scene really. I just didn’t feel like there was much space left for me to grow. I’d become increasingly uncomfortable with the self-obsessed, attention-seeking spirit of the times and I think I was curious what my life would look like if it didn’t revolve around making movies. I needed to step away from everything for a while to figure out what it was I had to say next. I wanted to push myself as an artist.

So that was where my head was at going into COVID. It was a strange time. It was a strange time for everyone. I was pretty isolated for the lockdowns. I spent most of it reading. I became fixated with blues music, the Beat Generation, and the films of the French New Wave. I would read all day long and write through the night. Looking back, I don’t really know where all that energy was coming from. I felt this fire in me to learn as much as I could about the things I was interested in. I was hungry. I just soaked up everything I could get my hands on about the lives of writers, poets, painters, musicians and filmmakers. I saw myself in that whole bunch of people and figured I was going to need all the help I could get along the way. I was giving myself an education. I was doing a lot of writing just for the page, which is something I’d never really done up until that point; I’d always just written for the screen. That feeling of newness and the challenge that came with it sustained me for those collections. I feel like, in the end, I more or less said everything I had to say with them. 

Writing is still at the cornerstone of how I work now, but it just takes on a different final form. What I am doing now has more in common with what I was writing when I was seventeen than what I was writing when I was twenty-two. I’m really proud of some of those stories. I read them today, and I don’t really know where a lot of them came from. I’m interested in eventually putting some of those years of experience writing prose and poetry towards a fictional screenplay. There are a few ideas that really excite me, but right now I’ve got my hands full as is. 

It is not only Haugen’s hands that are full, but his past credits. Since turning to filmmaking as a child, Haugen has worked on personal projects aplenty, but has also collaborated with some of his greatest inspirations. Van Neistat’s The Spirited Man series was a reflective, poetic series, and gave Haugen the chance to work with a hero. 

BH – Working with Neistat was the thrill of a lifetime. He was one of my formative influences growing up, and to be up close and personal with a hero was nothing short of a life-changing experience for me. Maybe life-affirming is a better word for it. It was the ultimate validation to work so closely with him for the last few years. It was like going into battle with an old samurai master. I learned a lot from Neistat, and I think he learned some from me too. We worked really well together. Even though there’s an entire generation between us, our approach to things really wasn’t dissimilar. It felt as if we both sort of came from the same place out of the earth. There was a shared language of our tastes and references that I think came as a surprise to both of us. When we met for the first time, I felt as if I’d known him all my life. I’ve never felt that way about anyone before or since.

Haugen’s experience on the eclectic set of The Spirited Man enriched his creative vision further. Neistat’s embrace of the tactile and tangible within his films and general life – he is a keen repairman and tinkerer – has revitalised an interest in the physical in an increasingly digital age. Impersonal consumerism, new apps set on making our lives vaguely better and a common acceptance that nothing is built to last anymore. Neistat and Haugen’s physical media revolution feeds into a wider desire to return to a time when the physical, the real and the held was top dog. Armed with a garrison of props, collections, prized possessions and curios, Haugen is an advocate for the handmade and handheld. 

BH – The handmade ethos is a really important part of my filmmaking. It goes beyond just aesthetics for me. I think it’s a way of celebrating the human touch in the arts. Filmmaking can be such a magical and mysterious medium, and I am drawn to seeing just a little bit behind the curtain. It’s also an attitude as much as it is a technical kind of thing. It’s Springsteen choosing to put out Nebraska in the format he did. That record has got a sound and a quality to it that no amount of studio polish could possibly capture. I feel the hand of the artist in every one of those songs. It’s like seeing the brushstrokes of a master painter. It’s part of the composition. Nothing is concealed. It’s all right there in front of you, in all of its beauty and contradiction. I think in our time, with the age of artificial intelligence upon us, that’s the kind of humanity that should be at the centre of the arts.

His penchant for the handheld is not a mere quirk or flourish of artistry, but part of his success. Episode 4 of World saw Haugen reveal his hotel stationery collection. Keen observers of his work will have already noted the apparition of these headed sheets – with their monolithic crests and elegant typefaces – throughout Haugen’s work, acting as part of his utilisation of everyday objects to transform his vision into tangible art. The dissection of his stationery habits and rituals resulted in his videos being brought to prominence online, reminding us that there is still a fascination in the physical object despite the intrusion of the digital. 

BH – It’s so funny to me that was the movie which really introduced people to the World. Hotel Stationery was the fourth part of this new series and very quickly took on a life of its own. I had no idea that many people would be interested in this thing I kind of thought was my own weird little hobby. The stationery community really came out for it, and God bless them for it. It was really cool to see the positive reception. There’s a comment on that video with something like four thousand likes by the designer who is working on the Hilton’s stationery redesign, and all kinds of people are chiming in with their suggestions and preferences. I think I responded that the best ones give plenty of room to write with the letterhead not eating into the page too much. I definitely prefer unlined stationery for drawings and a little extra paper weight is always appreciated. Oh, and absolutely under no circumstances is it acceptable to put social media icons on stationery. I think even a website link is pushing it, but we do live in the 21st century. Other than that I’m not too picky. Good typography, tasteful logos – I suppose just your basic tenets of good design.

Palpable visualisation  is at the forefront of Haugen’s world, allowing the creation of a world for us on screen that is colourful, carefully curated, exudes personality and revolves around the tactile and the textural. For a dyslexic, like myself and Haugen, the visual becomes all the more important when articulation can be a stifling endeavour.  When words frustrate but the nag to tell stories still persists, the visual and the tangible become all the more vital to artistic expression and conveying what words fail to reach. “As a little boy all I wanted to do was tell stories”, Haugen says, “I had a lively imagination, but it was restricted by my ability to read and write as fluently as my peers. I can remember I would get so worked up over not being able to spell that I would just start crying, and I’d get so upset that I would forget the story I wanted to tell. I had all these ideas and pictures in my head, and getting them out was a painful process”.  A tumultuous relationship with reading and writing led to Haugen discovering filmmaking at a remarkably young age: “When I discovered that I could tell stories through the little movies I made in the backyard, it was like discovering a loophole. I suddenly didn’t feel stupid. I taught myself to edit when I was seven years old. I embraced those skills as some kind of superpower or something.” With a talent for vision and articulation, Haugen has refused to let his filmmaking be stopped, and wants his films to reflect the “humanity and truthfulness” that is at the heart of all his endeavours. Each film is not another chapter in a manifesto, but rather a search for the humanity and truthfulness that lies at the core of each of our worlds. 

Haugen refuses to walk the road for humanity and truthfulness alone, and his scripts, poems and soundtracks all ring as an homage to the artists that shaped his artistry and individuality. An avid reader, his library is an eclectic menagerie of genre, perspective, time and thought. 

EBP – You talk about living for stories and making a living from stories – what pieces of literature have inspired you the most, and what is it you look for within a story? What do you want your story to say about you? 

BH – I guess the books that come to mind first are what I was reading during the pandemic. My library is really all over the place. Those early Hemingway novels, particularly A Farewell to Arms, really struck me. Edith Wharton’s beautifully written novel The Age of Innocence. I also really fell in love with poetry in that time. The Inferno and Paradise Lost. The Odyssey. Everything Rimbaud ever wrote. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience made a big impression on me. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Baldwin’s essays. I read all the big Dylan biographies. Patti Smith’s stunning memoir Just Kids. Those are a few that come to mind off the top of my head. I just picked up Patti’s new memoir Bread of Angels, and am really looking forward to reading that. Just Kids is probably the book I find myself recommending the most, especially to young artists. I think it’s maybe the most generous book I’ve ever read. What a gift she shared with the world in writing that book. It’s a masterpiece. I’m completely in awe of her artistry and her spirit. I’m not really sure I’m looking for anything specific from stories beyond some kind of truthfulness. But I certainly found what I was looking for in her writing.

In a world where individuality is increasingly obscured, where digitalisation is prioritised before human experience and truth is lost within a murky echo of voices, Haugen’s artistic vision strikes an urgently compelling, charming note within this chaotic symphony. Taking a chance on your vision and developing your own world to explore and share is what drove Haugen, and something he believes any artist should hold dear to their pursuit. Putting life and humanity back into the arts is essential, and acts as a rebellion against the noise of the art world. Life should be vast, vibrant and – most importantly – human. 

BH – Read a lot. Watch a lot. Listen to different music. I hope I’ve mentioned enough in this conversation that there’s a reading list or a watchlist someone could pull out of this. Getting an education doesn’t mean going to school. I’m a dropout, and I care more about learning now than I ever did sitting in a classroom. I think that talent can only ever be as great as one’s curiosity. And in the beginning, your curiosity is the thing powering everything. I’d say travel. Fall in love. Take big risks. Do things that make you feel as if your life depends on it. When you’re scared or nervous, that means you’re growing. It means you care. If you want to be an artist or a writer or a filmmaker, don’t put ‘aspiring’ in front of it. Just be it. We live in a time where anyone reading this interview has what they need in their hands to tell great stories. So there’s no reason to diminish yourself by placing a label like that in front of what you want to be. These are vocations which consume your life. You’re going to need to learn to live with it sooner than later; you might as well give yourself the head start. Life is about becoming who you want to be. I don’t really like the connotation that once you make a film or get a paycheck for your art, that somehow that means you’re no longer aspiring, because great artists are always aspiring to something more. It’s a never-ending pursuit, and I think that’s the point. When you start thinking differently is when you’re going to get yourself into trouble.

Get out, make art, live and – most importantly – be as generous to your art and to others in order to make your world as human and vibrant as Braxton Haugen’s. 

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF BRAXTON HAUGEN

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

“Famed for her devotion to all that is most vapid and mindless in this world […] and her appalling taste in clothes” – Kingsley Amis 

I am a thoroughbred republican. Gaudy displays of wealth, inherited titles, birthdays (of which they have more than the average poloi), and dogs seldom impress me. Faced with the prospect of another royal wedding, jubilee, or cause celebre I turn my back and grumble. Armed with my quip that they don’t actually contribute anything to our economy, I have come to loath anything that merely is touched by the royal hand, orientating their ordained seal of approvals into the category of the hopelessly unfashionable and tragedy of organised, mandated fun. In recent years it has become easier to hold this, what for some is, offensively ‘un-British’ opinion of our rulers as each line of succession has slowly snipped away at the ties that hold it in a place above the rest, forcing them to decline and fall to a cacophony of disgrace as clamorous as Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’.  Where I falter, where the entertainment and pride that this family bestows upon the nation is finally realised by my red-blooded heart is in the ever-contentious Princess Margaret. 

Margaret’s name is synonymous with the idea of being ‘spare’ – that provocative term that her great-nephew would coin into popularity many years later. Living in the shadow of her sister, Margaret was unable to escape the sphere of influence of centuries-old orders and rules about how a royal should behave. The more her sister performed her role as matriarch, the less influence Margaret had at court, slowly slipping down the ranks of succession and jobs. Given both the regiment of her life, and the lack of purpose given to her as an individual, her name became a by-word for royally bad behaviour. Late nights, excessive drinking, large bills from hairdressers, jewellers, and designers. She pioneered a great brat-ishness as opposed to a great Britishness, making herself well known in both tabloid and broadsheets with her wryly brutal comments and controversial love affairs. As she later said to avant-guard filmmaker and harbinger of pretension Jean Cocteau, “disobedience is my joy”. The pomp and circumstance of her position stifled her and, whilst it certainly gave her the grace and excuse of lofty privilege, ultimately left her with little shape to carve out her own public persona, unless she actively took a step against protocol. It is in this very quote, said to a French Surrealist no less (not the usual member of a royal audience), that makes Margot more than a spare; she understood what she, and in turn the monarchy could be: artistic, engaged, interesting beyond expectation, and ultimately colourfully characterful. 

My disdain for the royal image often extends beyond the national, as I scorn their attempts to invade the personal privacy of my own phone with their out-of-touch, Cath-Kidston-meets-Barbour-inspired Instagram shoots that somehow always worm their way into my algorithms. This attempt to be ‘modern’ and ‘relatable’ misses the mark, royally. These people will never be ordinary; why pretend that they are like us? Modernity doesn’t mean engaging with us in forms that are new, but rather  encapsulating a new age and the interests of a time, and knowing how to position yourself within this. The public persona of the royal family is a difficult PR stunt to execute, but only difficult if the authenticity is taken out of it. Growing up my nonno would recite the phrase “anche la Principessa Margherita mangia pollo con la dita (even the Princess Margaret eats chicken with her fingers) at any sly attempt to rise above our station as children; why though, with her name being a by-word for gaudy exuberance and privilege, is Margaret’s name invoked as a way to quieten children and for them to be humble in their actions?  Margaret did nothing but show the public herself, who wasn’t afraid to get her fingers dirty in order to further her own cause of making herself look modern and engage with the contemporary society around her, refusing to be stuck in the lofty illusions and portences of being different to her subjects. 

The eclipsing power of the royal family is another strike against their name in my books. Erring continually to the side of caution in a scrambled attempt to save their faces they pass round their hands and some well-briefed, sensible words of praise, shielding their real feelings with cliched sayings and sentiments, hoping the camera will stay focused on their extended hands and the label of their dress. With her fate sealed, Margaret realised no matter how she behaved her name would slowly climb down the list, eclipsed by each announcement of a new royal birth. Her entrance in society gave her the first instance of agency in curating her own look and name amongst the crowd of other majesties. She rose to this occasion in 1951 wearing a Christian Dior dress.  She debuted her adult persona in the New Look, hoping to bring the principles of this new fashion in her time as princess; modern, a new shape that dismisses traditional expectation, feminine, cosmopolitan, active, sexual. This first slight, her first disobedience, gave her the joy that inspired her to later run off and create a new look for what a royal could be and could look like.

Cameras came to love her through her ability to strike against protocol. Tweed was swapped for silks. Shoulders were worn bare. Bright colours with bright patterns swayed against revealed legs. The tiaras and heavy metal seen around Margaret’s face were brought with her own money in auctions, suited to her own tastes, rid of the weight of inheritance. She drank with the Beatles. Ate with artists. Danced with Presidents. Wanting to be seen frequently besides what she loved, she positioned herself within the urbane interests of theatre, dance, music, and fashion. Whilst public tastes moved from the countryhouses of Wilde to the Salford kitchen sinks of Delaney, Margaret lavished recognition within the royal box of whatever play the theatre could offer her, regardless of traditional tastes and images. During dowager dinner parties, Margaret and Armstrong-Jones, her commoner husband (if you look past the private education, Society debutant mother, and Earl step-father), would create piles of pieces of torn bread, each nugget representing another cliche that had been passed around the table with the wine. Despondent to hackneyed sentiments, the President of the Royal Ballet and the patron of the newly built Brutalist National Theatre took the tabloids by storm in their fashionable silhouettes and sophisticated tastes, turning their backs to the traditional, country-centric interests of previous princesses, and embracing the lavish artistic explosion around them. 

Rising from the hairdresser’s chair, as she so frequently did, Margaret goes to sign the cheque for her obedient servant. ‘Margaret’ appears on the dotted line. Simply ‘Margaret’. No HRH. No Princesses. No Windsor. The tragedy of the royal family, the reason I believe they grow to become so terrible or simply bland, is their lack of vocation. From the moment they are born they have one job to do and are told they can never want for another. This is what is desirable: waiting in line and shaking hands until it’s their time to wear the headgear. Instead of descending into ruin within this maddening, archaic environment, Margaret made her job ‘the Margaret job’, not the royal job. The unfairness (a boldly sympathetic word for a republican to use, I know) of such a dogmatic dynasty was exposed in Margaret’s youth, not just through her position as ‘spare’ but also in her unfortunate affair with Group Captain Townsend. Living in her sister’s shadow and orbit, governed by the cruel spinster of centuries-old royal protocols and Acts, Margaret refused to throw a silver spoon out of her mouth and complain, but played by her own rules, being simply Margaret, not just a pawn or a rebel. By fashioning herself as a cut different to the rest, she built a persona of modernity and hedonism that suited her. Her push and pull of the rules that governed her life allowed her to both uphold her position and tear down the farce of pomp and circumstance. Craig Brown’s wickedly witty biography on the Princesses is aptly subtitled ‘99 glimpses of Princess Margaret’, because the princess only gave us peeks of the life she lead. Her dazzling provocative exchanges with the public eye fashioned her as a sight of modernity and difference, often obscuring her declining place within her own family and the difficulties of protocol. 

Whilst Margaret certainly had a privileged life (to say the least), and neither desired to be nor was considered ordinary, she dismissed the idea of being of a different cut to the people around her. As the Elizabethan age came into definition, Margaret learned to change with the times and aim towards modernity in building a persona that she could comfortably recognise as herself.  She didn’t pretend to be anything she was not; she didn’t want to relate to us, to appear to us in a football scarf for a team she would have no relation to, or to say some shallow remarks about a cause she had been told to care about. She didn’t try to be liked by all, as she knew that was impossible, in the same way she knew her job of being the perfect princess was also impossible. She gave us Margaret, not a Princess. She was self-affacing and affected, yes, undeniably, and at times she was stuck up and rude. At other glimpses she was bohemian and cultured; in the next instance she could be lost in a sea of organised celebration maintaining her royal name. However, in all these sightings, in person, press, or in piercing rumours, she was always Margaret. Not the Princess of York, or the Countess of Snowdon, or Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret Rose, just Margaret, acting in her own interests with her own agency, wherever possible. 

Featured Image: Margot in Kingston, Jamaica at the races, 1955 / Popperfoto

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

‘It wasn’t for long, I wasn’t there long. But drinking bitter black coffee I catch that medicinal smell in a cloud of ancient tobacco and something touches me in that still place and a wound from two years ago opens like a cadaver and a long-buried shame roars its foul decaying grief.’ – 4:48 Psychosis

House lights on. Audience, now visible, is made of a wash of parents, siblings, and supportive peers. Five teenage girls blink up as the lights turn on. There is mascara running down their face. Their hair is knotted, tangled, and shines against the lanterns. Ribbons surround them. Small little ribbons litter the stage, peeping out in gaps where they dared to tread. Long red ribbons slink and slack around the girls’ arms, crawling up their wrists and following them like a veil. No one claps. No one smiles. The girls are out of breath, cautiously grinning at each other, unable to speak until the examiner dismisses them. Still, no one claps. They rise, bow, and begin to clear the stage. Still, no one claps. These spectators have just watched somebody kill themselves for 45 minutes. Can their clapping augment the pain? Can their proud smiles for their daughters exist against the ferocity of violence and the macabre they have been subjected to in their slightly too small classroom chairs? Was it a play even? It was the vast violent living of Sarah Kane. 

Sarah Kane lived in the shadow of a decade that pickled sheep for art, pumped music out of factories, and prescribed an incessant need to be ‘Cool’ to combat a Britain that lay bare, devoid of iron. Her short career spun across the 90s, beginning with the Balkan Wars and ending with a cri de coeur of disillusionment and defeat. Her stages gorge and delight in all consuming actual violence and self-violence. Blasted transforms a Leeds hotel room into the epicentre of brutality and manufactured human violence, where an eyeless journalist and a soldier violently mourn one another, attempting to carve survival out of an obliterated, wretched reality. Boards are trodden with obscene language, an unhinged sexuality, and bloodshed that appears unflinchingly before the audience’s eyes. Equally, flowers ‘burst upwards, their yellow covering the entire stage’ that was once filled with blood; daffodils blossom from Cleansed’s arena of furious passion. Love exists with violence; disgust resides in the belly of beauty. To experience the vast violent living is to experience, to bear witness, to learn to stomach and scream at all the frightening dualities Kane caught within her stage. 

Roland Barthes’ A Lovers Discourse is the key that unlocks the maddening world of Sarah Kane. ‘Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous “event” is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli is the lover’s discourse.’. The discourse Kane flings on stage is personal, a ‘sacred history’ of both self and society that exists both within language and action. Love exists not behind rehearsed lines and revised scripts, but in a fraught mentality catapulted on stage that examines all the crevices of consciousness that define love’s existence. Barthes furthers Kane’s manifesto by celebrating the theatre for being a place in which extremes can live, where the consciousness of love and life can be understood in its capacity for juxtaposition. Beauty, horror, violence, adoration, sex, lies, truth – all exist layered on top of one another, crashing together, muddling and catastrophising our world view. In one instance the stage is a funeral pyre, in the next instance it is transformed into a wedding. 

The glaring surface of Kane’s work is cruel and provocative. It dares to be disliked. After leaving Blasted’s Press Night, critics called it a ‘feast of filth’ and ‘devoid of intellectual and artistic merit’ due to its obscene portrayals of human suffering and longing. Kane is still stained by this, even today. She is ‘tricky’ to put on, and people question whether an audience would even consent and pay to watch something so dark in a place of entertainment. However, this is not the full picture. The shock of the violence is a stinging reminder of the pain that comes with living; that living can be strained and fraught with peril, and yet there exists a capacity for a hopeful growth within the bleak depths of humanity. That flowers can grow again. That a scene of abject horror can change into one of comedy. That love will always exist, in its mysterious and desperate ways, amongst the fall out. Kane both wrote and experienced suffering, yet also loved, vibrantly and violently. She danced to Joy Division – an action that cements the duality of her works; songs of deep darkness from a band named after a grotesque Nazi operation, changed utterly by the action in ‘pure hypnotic moment[s]’, holding both woe and wonder within that instance. 

The battle of locating ‘artistic merit’ within violence was not instigated by Kane. The trenches ran deep in the popular consciousness of how art should be. ‘Father of Cruelty’ Antonin Artaud wanted theatre to induce ‘very violent reactions’, leaving the audience with ‘no misunderstanding’ that going to the theatre was not simply a pastime for melodramatic entertainment, but a spectacle to encapsulate human resilience and variety. His manifesto, The Theatre and Its Double, holds true to Kane’s desire for the full force of life to be displayed, to have Barthes’ instantaneousness of love play to effect; for every feeling, action or thought there is an equally fierce opposite, its double. For Artaud, as for Kane living in the grey waters of post-Thatcherism, ‘our sensibility has reached the point where we surely need theatre that wakes up heart and nerves’. Classical ideas of catharsis were reinstalled, where breaking point and release had to be met by both actor and audience alike: a communal epiphany and energy beating back against the ordinary.

100 years prior to Artaud, Percy Shelley’s The Cenci caused equally shocking waves amongst theatre goers. Banned and brutalised for the play’s demand for the audience to witness the relentless abuse of the real Beatrice Cenci of Rome, the murder of a patriarch, and the godless, lawless abandon of his house. The secular venom in which Shelley approached his radical theatrics caused the play to be censored, never performed in his lifetime. The rebellion within both Shelley’s original material and Artaud’s Cruel interpretation of The Cenci force a new perspective, capturing the full capacity of human extremities, asking audiences to not fear the abhorrent but to stare it in the face. Kane’s plays act as a late 20^th century renewal of these demands. Her violence is not without reason, and her manifesto lies within a radical tradition of redefining theatre in the quest for accurate realism. 

The cruelty Kane inflicts is not baseless. It is a mission to find the double, the duality, the full picture of life. Her final, posthumous play cements this mission. The interpretation of 4:48 Psychosis as a performed suicide note helps soften the blow, diverts the attention from the screaming pain and wrongdoing that lies within its core; it is a play about misunderstanding. Kane’s theatre continues to be misunderstood, and upon her own suicide in 1999 her work still brayed on her mind, her critics unable to decipher her poetry. Her own suicide has come to be misunderstood, as her staged suicide did. 4:48 comes from a writer, and centres its ambition in a place beyond tears, in a place away from sentimentality and sensibility. The poetics of mental decline hold the audience hostage. The tragedy is unrefined and unapologetic in its brutality. 4:48 pivots on the inability for true feelings to be communicated, with no designated speaker or roles, and is at once confessional and deeply private. Stifled conversations, the inability to decipher reality within the pain of mental anguish – nothing on Kane’s stage is sacred or secure. The realities of living with severe mental anguish are documented, as a speaker cries ‘my life is caught in a web of reason spun by a doctor to augment the sane’; suffering is misunderstood in order to be palatable to those without pain. In order to attempt to reason the unreasonable, it is only through achieving a true, cruel, Artaudian realism on stage that the misunderstanding of Kane’s reality can be understood. By unrelenting in the tragedy, Kane exposes a realism to the audience that is not a pretty or entertaining reality, but a harsh one. Yet one that is not pure violence and tragedy but showcases the abundance of life even under the strain of tragedy; 4:48 is the moment in which laughter, love, sorrow, loss, anger, and desperation co-exist in a gaudy explosion of life at the edge of death.  

Kane’s dramatic manifesto demands you to ‘watch me’, to endure and experience all volumes of life. By turning away from the violence we forget about its unfortunate reality, and we demand that art must engage in only certain forms and demerit the poetry of the darker shades of living. Kane did not intend for people to enjoy her plays, but to be moved by them. Whether 4:48 is met with the stunned silence of concerned parents, or the stage becomes a flower bed of praise, it doesn’t matter. The lamentable, the obscene, the catastrophic is the concern of Kane’s punching poetics, and her need for radicalism, for discomfort, for upset helps theatre achieve its full capacity of realism, even in its strangest stagings. The shockwaves from her performances will always ring out, cringing upon audience and critic alike, her formidable ideas still causing contention. But when the flowers rise from the boards, when blood spills across the audience, when moments of vulnerability are documented with force, Kane shows the realest truth of all in her theatre; that life, love, and passion have never been so violently fragile, obliterating and launching at once.

Featured Image: Marianne Thiel / Getty Images, 1998

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

 – Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song

On this day, in 1963, during the coldest winter in living memory, a woman died. Her name was Sylvia Plath.

So, there she is, the American genius, sent to Cambridge on the promise of extraordinary, who by the age of 30 would change English poetry for a damnable good. Boyfriends numerous, looks renowned, tongue sharp. She is Miss America – coming to our shores to dazzle us out of post-war grey prose, and into the neon lexicon of exceptionalism. A double exposure of both catastrophe and creative flair. A bright tragedy, burning brighter, brightest now. Shadowed now, by the 1980’s answer to poet laureateship, and a gas oven.

This is not a piece of anti-Hughes venom. This is not a piece of excuses and blame. This is a piece against sensation. This is not a fairytale. There is no winner, no villain, no dastardly plot; this is vast, violent living. A prose we can only hope to grasp, with each word holding a negative side, a double exposure of intention and sight. Words left unsaid. Double Exposure, diaries, drafts burnt. This is the reality of a tragedy; we now live in the fallout. The world is utterly changed by this, yes, but this is not a world ending story. This is life in its most phenomenal form. 

It would be naïve of me to say that Plath’s marriage was complicated. It would be more naïve of me to say that it was brilliant. From the moment of its inception, on the 25^th of February 1956, in a smoky poetry-infused evening, a terrible beauty was born. Plath bites Hughes cheek, much to the dismay of Shirley, Ted’s girlfriend of the time, whilst Hughes steals Plath’s earrings. This was Hughes’ launch for his Saint Botolph’s Review, a stab in the dark for an emerging poet in an upstairs room in Cambridge that would change the course of poetry forever. Even their passionate meeting, a fatal poetry; the apple-cheeked bite that damned the soul, thwarting the fate of man. An explosive longing and ruinous sentencing, at once.  It is easy to see why the pair came together with such intensity. The pair would later marry on ‘Bloomsday’ adding further fuel to the fire of their literary perfection. Two poets, both alike in dignity, matched their courage, and embarked on a love that violently bit away for decades to come. With such intensity steeped and stewed in literary coincidence and allusion it is easy to glamourise, pine, attack, and mythologise the events that surrounded this pairing. The myth that has surrounded a marriage, a union simply brought on by bureaucratic necessities, has terrorised the literary scene since, dividing and demonstrating the passionate love begot from Plath’s prose within its captivated readers. 

To read The Bell Jar for the first time, as I did like every other lonesome 13 year old girl, is to bear the burden of a beating prose. Plath’s poetry refuses to retire when in novelistic form, each sentence upholding a thumping march towards utter depraved bleakness. ‘I am, I am, I am’ becomes not only the echo of a worn out heart, but the attitude we take on when immersing ourselves into the dazzlingly twisted light of Plath. We become Esther, we take those miseries to heart, each assertion against an unjust, wretched world clarifying our own world view. We all have a fig tree growing in our heads, whose branches have always been braying against each battled decision we must take. To be met then, aged 14, with Ted Hughes’ seismic war poem Bayonet Charge, so vastly different yet equally enrapturing as Plath’s own war of words, in my GCSE classroom and the chaotic contextual notes that come with it, shattering. The Plath I had found solace in, who’s writing resonated in such an extraordinary echoing concert of nuances, had been with him? The magical meeting I have just described is destroyed by such a crushing piece of sensation. The literary clad love is stripped and moulded into a story of abuse and blame, furthering the dramatisation of Plath’s life. The monolithic marriage glossing over the exposures that lie beneath, glossing over Sylvia herself. 

Teenage loyalty follows Plath, even in her non-teenage followers. Her mythic haunting of the canon has tormented her legacy within both pop culture, Hughes’ life, and the literary scene. The fascination with the Hughes/Plath union has spiralled into a morbid mutilation of itself, with stubborn opinions shadowing the past. The understated and overlooked element of their relationship, what to me is the Rosetta stone that unlocks the intensity of both their marriage and poetry, is their closeness. Apart from Sylvia’s Michaelmas term in 1956, when they lived apart in fear of the Newnham College seniorities, they often didn’t spend more than half a day away from each other, living during the climaxes of their marriage on the road across America together, or in a secluded part of Devon. Their writing is in constant conversation with each other – each partner lurking in the lines of the other’s, and often they were in conversation with each other whilst writing, editing and guiding each other. 

Image courtesy of James Coyne, 1958

‘Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun’  – Plath, Unabridged Diaries, March 10^th 1956

Even in its all-consuming poetic brilliance, the poetic candour of this relationship is embellished. The ‘Bloomsday’ ceremony, a coincidence. The biting encounter, a drunken flurry. Plath’s perspective on the pairing, even in the private confines of her rigorous kept journal, is ever poetic. Nothing is casual coincidence. From Plath’s private notes on Hughes, throughout their relationship, we see her use her life and mind as a way to explore the poetic boundaries of her confessional style. Her life is her muse, yet, like all muses, it was the way in which she captured it that cemented it as a grand, glowing, myth, not the object itself.  Their married life was fairly ordinary. There were holidays, work parties, and hobbies taken up in harmony. Household business went unorganised and mounted. Worries about money came and went. The marriage failed, as marriages do. People betrayed promises, as people do. They shared a closeness that couldn’t be contained in the boundaries of the ordinary marriage they attempted construct. It is a sad story, made sadder by Hughes’ attempts to reach Plath during her final days, but this is not an extraordinary story. It is a marriage mythologised and a life absorbed.

Reduced to a moment of unimaginable pain, her words misconstrued, the marriage’s pain magnified; she is yet to exist as just Sylvia. She has become a teen idol – appearing in Lana del Rey lyrics, appearing alongside Kat Stratford in 10 Things I hate About You, appearing in quotes and illusions as Angelina Jolie wreaks an effortlessly cool havoc on Plath’s own alma mater McClean Hospital. This is a lot to attach to one 30 year old, catapulting her name beyond the canon and into the canonised veneration of cultural icon. By attaching so much to a life and works, things get lost. The complicated tones of discussing Hughes and Plath are reduced into tangible volatile forces, the complicated nature of Plath’s own mind and poetry is reduced to throw away lines that carry a weight beyond their intention. Plath becomes an object, part of the make up for some aesthetic that is abstract from her and unrecognisable from her own time. Her confessional style that opened the world to the workings of her mind has now bore a life of its own, trapping her in those poetic moments, obscuring the life that existed around them. 

Attending a star-spangled poetry class with Anne Sexton and taught by Robert Lowell in 1959, Plath ventured headlong into the confessional form. The art of confessional poetry is a controversial form, one that strives to unleash the inner most perspectives and psychologies from the poet onto the world, teaching the reader about escape in a most intimate form, straying away from the abstracted, open form of poetry that came before it. Plath’s poems explore her own mind, they don’t attempt to convince us, but rather to feel beyond the surface. She captures the double exposure of humanity, the identification of the world, and the terrible beauty that brays persistently beneath it. There is no simpleness, no stillness; there is more to the world that meets Plath’s eyes. This double exposure identification has left Plath herself double exposed, with her writing being used to further prescribe her with her tragedy, condensing her to her most profoundly rapturous creative outbursts.

All these iterations of Plath leave her in a manipulated, mutilated legacy. For some she will be dying forever. Her suicide being the morbid fascination that pins her manic adorations and depressive tirades together. After all, death has always mystified our interests more than life. For others, her bruises will never heal, as she gets wheeled out to puppet the cries against Hughes, her mouth filled with venom that corrodes the love and artistic companionship that existed alongside the bitterness and pain until the end. Sometimes, she’s a bright girl from the States who took the poetry world by storm, carefully typing away with thesaurus on her lap, other times she is the tortured poet writing in the dark in an unbreakable artistic frenzy. All of these should exist at once. Each glimpse of Plath pertains to a negative exposure –  a double exposure of a rich, verbose life. These glimmers of life should be respected for their beauty and magnitude, whilst the urge to hold them forever, to understand why the light breaks through the darkness thus, is to destroy and falsify what is there. We must learn to be content with the Plath we know briefly, be fascinated by what she is, not what she was not, refusing to let our love for her madden us to transform Plath into a figure we make up in our heads.

 

Image courtesy of Newnham College, Cambridge

If the moon smiled she would resemble you. /You leave the same impression/Of something beautiful, but annihilating’. Let Sylvia close. Let the ideal of a mythic poetess live in the imaginary. She can only resemble our hopes and dreamy projections, but her life leaves a lingering presence, ‘something beautiful, but annihilating’ its shocking, ordinary reality. 

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

‘I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.’ – FLEABAG.

“Where’d you just go?” – HOT PRIEST. At the heart of Fleabag’s awkward sex scenes, off-hand quips, and family rifts lies this most important question: “Where” is Fleabag going? Often described as a ‘tour-de-force’, the fever and frenzy of Fleabag lies in the show’s refusal ever to stop. Fleabag narrates her own life whilst the action around her continues, rapidly focusing in and out of these two spaces, hanging between the balance of the two. But this constant momentum never falters or halts, seemingly in perpetual pursuit of whichever destination Fleabag is aiming for, regardless of the chaos surrounding the tracks. The confessions of Fleabag still echo – confessions we have taken to be ‘honest’, ‘feminist’ windows of clarity about ourselves, about womanhood under the strain of the 21st century. But, what if Fleabag never tried to “go” to us in these moments of fourth-wall fragmentation? What if we were not just spectators, but Fleabag’s new best friend, or Fleabag’s psyche? Fleabag doesn’t define our role, our role is irrelevant; our connection to Fleabag is the destination. 

Bertold Brecht redefined the role of the audience under his pioneering theory of ‘epic theatre’ isolating the audience and manipulating the tether between audience and actor. There is no set power. No set control. In one scene the audience is held by a leash only to be holding the leash over the actors the next. The audience’s perception and jolting of the stage allows for art to be transformed, making it “not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”. Fleabag’s first televised word is “you”;  Fleabag effortlessly seizes you, hurtling you along with her. I have yet to find someone who wants her to let go, who finds her immediate intensity overwhelming. The connection we create with her by becoming “you” is non-confrontational and seemingly natural.  We are “you”. But who is “you”? “You” is deictic and cannot exist outside of the context Fleabag has placed it in, thus redefining the audience, not as spectators of her so much, but also spectators of ourselves and how we draw these connections with others. “You” is a role waiting to be filled, reflecting Fleabag’s loneliness, but also the show’s examination of connections. We are an undefined role to her. We don’t exist to her outside the ramblings of her mind. We aren’t her confidants. We aren’t her attempt of rationalising her behaviour through finding a common, shared experience of “you”. We are the glance she gives in the mirror, the raised eyebrows we give when eye contact flits to another. We are figments of her perception and an example of the very extremes of connections. 

“I am obsessed with audiences,” confesses Waller-Bridge in her introduction to the play’s script. The audience isn’t trying to be won, bought, or rationalised by Fleabag – our connection with her exists out of a compulsion to distract and input. The original play reads like the fumbling mind palace of post-embarrassment realisation, provoked by flashing a loan manager. Whilst there is no explicit direction to suggest this, the play is split into thirds: meeting the manager, acting as a descent into Fleabag’s mind with the manager just being a voice we hear and process; Fleabag’s inner monologue where time seems to stop as we enter her hysteria; resuming and returning to the manager and the blur between monologue and naturalism. The middle part, which is the main part, is a dialogue with herself where she is frantically self-criticising and searching for the right answer, getting lost in her memories along the way, where she distracts herself from the situation at hand with macabre intrusions. 

My attempt at watching Fleabag aged 16 threw me into a spiral of over-analysis. Who was I meant to be connecting with during the dialogue? Where is Fleabag going and where do I break? My countless rewatches of the show couldn’t answer it. With every run I found myself addressing different people and changing the levels of connection I held with the audience, loosening the leash on a line before clinging onto it for dear life the next.  There is no clear consistency; you, Fleabag, must decide what information is going to directly connect to the front row.  Waller-Bridge wrote a script that rigorously demands you to perceive yourself through connection. The play cannot function without the understanding of it. The realisation is she is not speaking to us, but herself, addressing us as a distraction from the mess and trying to realise which response to her life will make the best connection in order to move forward. In the same way that we can’t make eye contact when stressed, feel the need to fiddle when anxious, or fidget when bored, Fleabag speaks as a way to distract herself.  Her mind is boiling over, and we are her thought process and intrusive comments, before choosing to turn the heat off or scream. We are the distraction taking her out of the constant momentum of her life, allowing her to live in her head and her body. We are both being taught by Brechtian whispers about our connections and are being used, obsessionally, by Waller-Bridge’s hunger for extreme connectivity.

“I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it” confesses Fleabag, almost immediately after showing us a racy night of anal sex whilst meeting us for the first time. If Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s intention for Fleabag to explore “power, control, people trying to hold everything together”,  is to be realised, this is achieved through Fleabag’s connection with us, and with sex.  

FLEABAG -I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.

Her confession epitomises the experience of operating in extremes. Clinging on to sex, people, whatever, obsessively, acts as a way to find a calling. An honest distraction, a pause, in her life. The sex is complicated, hot, raw, confusing, tender, and tangled much like her connection with us.  The hunt for sex is often seen as a game, a mission. Take Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. “Let us sport as we may” for the victory of pleasure. Pleasure that is won through an art of persuasion and flirting,  a series of steps and follies to achieve, a game we’ve knowingly played for millennia. For Fleabag, sex is the final destination, acting as her “someone to tell me” when she has no one.

 Fleabag operates in extremes; extreme honesty, extreme connection, the extremes of sex. Fleabag goes from sex as a constant distraction, to celibacy.  After a night that left me a confusion of anger, grief, loneliness and fear, I took the same vow, albeit brief. Abstinence, however, cannot miraculously solve everything, and once sex enters your life, it is difficult to get it to leave; that part of yourself grows into a nagging obsession but in a new unrecognisable form of relationship. Celibacy acts as a stopgap for this higher calling Fleabag craves, as it comes with its own rules, regulations, and restraints. A primal direction, like intrusive thinking to the point of dissociation or mindless shagging, to keep you in line. But, for Fleabag, as for me, this change is still a distraction. She repeatedly turns to us, gushing over “his [HP’s] arms” on the way to a Quaker meeting. We are her distraction, her loophole, so that she can explore a new connection, whilst retaining the habits of old connections. We aren’t the connection with a being outside of herself that can “tell [her] how to live her life”, as we are part of her life.

Despite the distraction of sex, Fleabag continues to talk to us during it. The connection is stifled, unable to reach its full potential causing her to connect elsewhere. When Fleabag finally has sex with Hot Priest she doesn’t want to be distracted. She doesn’t want us, actively pushing us away, shutting the door on us as if we’ve walked in. A new, full connection has been formed. One that she wants to wholly cherish and not leave. One she wants to be completely present for. Slowly,  we see her cutaways become less frequent during scenes featuring the two of them. She is letting us go, she is not letting her perception and the intrusions of her mind limit her. The connection with us is re-evaluated towards the end of series two, and we see her relationship and use of us change. She isn’t moving on from hijacking us into being her therapist, because we never were that to her, she is choosing to be present, to make lasting connections, and to stop making the most lasting connection and presence in her life the way she responds to life outside of herself.  The context of her “you” has changed; we still exist to observe her, but we are no longer invited into the inner sanctum of her mind. To escape the distraction of self-dependence. To teach us to live presently. To “shape” the way we perceive ourselves and our love. 

Image from the National Theatre 2019 production poster at Wyndham’s Theatre, London

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

“Many things might be regarded as the hallmarks of this competition, but the eagerness to embrace change isn’t one of them” – Jeremy Paxman, 2020.

“University Challenge. With your host” … “Bamber Gascoigne” interrupts my father, tea in hand, settling down for some Monday night armchair quizzing. For my father, the host will always be Bamber, whereas I am part of the newly inaugurated Amol generation. We, like thousands of other families, groups of students, and housemates, up and down the country, see each era of University Challenge as part of the Monday night ambience – consistently transmitting throughout the school year, consistently baffling us, and consistently challenging the random pockets of seemingly useless information we have stored away. But how does one graduate from the sofa to the lightbox adorned desk?

The team from Durham University is representing an institution famed for its cobblestone streets, a beautiful array of colleges, and the worst nightclub in Europe. Its recent academics include Joe Ancell, historian, flautist, Greek dictionary, and expert climber; Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini, Elvet Riverside’s noisiest shoe wearer, anti-Dickens advocate, and fashion secretary; Jake Roberts, their captain with a profound ability to store away information on both Dutch masters and long dead physicists; Luke Nash, our physical incarnation of Merlin Bird ID, and enthusiastic social sec; and James Gowers, football trivia coach come step-in Paxman, and reserve player.

 “How many do you reckon you can get?” James asks his grandmother, setting up the competition UC emits into living rooms, each viewer tempted by the allure of the small intellectual victories a correct starter buzz can provide, and “watching to be impressed”, as James reveals, by the spectacle of intelligence and reflexes on display. For a show that has cemented itself in pop culture history for having 14 letter Greek words as answers, being gifted a round that fits your unique knowledge-scape seems almost miraculous – spurring your viewership forward. Post-UC Twitter, a place that has become both coveted and feared by us as our broadcast date draws ever nearer, feeds this excitement, no matter how high or low your score. One thing UC has taught us is to be content with your knowledge and take pride in it. Until a recent shift, the consensus of the show was something, as Luke put, where students in “dodgy fashion and unironed shirts” battled for academic valour with highly classical questions and antiquated answers. Now, however, the academic valour is something to play with, enjoy, and laugh about. Correct answers may not be derived from the most lucid stream of consciousness, you may be reeling the answer in from a vault of facts originated through 1am doom scrolling and not from a sophisticated book, however, “does it really matter where knowledge comes from?”, mulls Jake, “if your answer is still right?” When we, from Jake’s living room during Monday evenings in deep January, buzzed in with a correct answer, we still got to experience that pride and satisfaction that we’ve felt for years watching the show, even with our filming date looming above us. Knowing that your answer to a question derived from an offhand comment from a lecturer, or that the composer of the music round bonus came to you from a Wes Anderson soundtrack, you realise it doesn’t matter at all where knowledge is gathered as any knowledge is celebrated here.

Quizzing prowess is often celebrated in this country with jackpot prizes, rounds of pints, scampi fries, and bragging rights. “It’s quite easy to get yourself involved” according to James. After all, who doesn’t love a pub quiz? The arguments over a sticky pub table over the right answers are “fundamentally intertwined with British pub culture”, says Luke. Mates, UC inclined or simply up for some fun, gather together for some knowledge-based rivalry. The Old Elm Tree became our pre-UC watching haunt, suggested by Luke due to its boast of hosting a challenging pub quiz that confuses both students and professors. For the rest of my team University Challenge wasn’t a graduation from South London pub quizzes, but the next step in their quizzing journeys. Luke and Joe had both been part of competitive quizzing teams at school and met James and Jake at Durham Quizbowl. Imported from America, Quizbowl is a place where the questions are cryptic, varied, and rapidly fired at contestants. Universities face off at large-scale tournaments that attract hundreds of quizzing students, who can be recognised from a UK quizzing leaderboard, featuring alongside Chasers from ITV’s The Chase. “Sport-like quizzing”, as Jake put it, seemed to me like UC on steroids, a far abstraction from the pub quizzes I was familiar with. However, my first visit to Durham’s Quizbowl practice as part of my preparation for the show was a warm welcome into the quiz-world that UC, in part, has helped cultivate. 

When telling people about my imminent airing I’m often eagerly asked “did you win?” and “what do you win?”. Whilst a BBC contract guards the answer to the first question, the latter is nothing, which is often met with confusion. UC offers simply bragging rights, your lightbox nameplate, and a trophy for your institution. Whilst the quiz being televised for the scrutiny of the nation, or your university being reigning champions at the time of filming, does set some lofty expectations, the stakes themselves aren’t high; it’s all for some light entertainment and a good story at the end of it. Quizbowl echoes this friendly form of quizzing, even when the questions are harder than UC ones (difficult to imagine, I know). We laughed over clues that were painfully directed at American players and were nonsense to us, we poked fun at the absurdity of some of the bonus round categories, and we traded tips on how to learn more random points. During filming Jake and Luke recognised many of our competitors, both in the greenroom and on the airing series, from Quizbowl – showcasing the breath of this community, both in knowledge and location. As a nation we love quizzing, and from pubs, schoolrooms, studios, and unoccupied seminar rooms, we know how to have fun with it – something the Amol era of UC has nurtured.

“You are people of ignorance too” responds Paxman to a slightly bemused, slightly terrified team of KCL’s brightest. Paxman approached the “smart ass” teams he was presented with with the contempt of a Victorian schoolmaster. Unapologetic. Scathing. Formidable. The Paxo era is noted for its presenter’s brazen approach. Being fans of the show, we were unsurprised to hear he would be stepping down, yet looking back, we were all at a loss for who would take his place. No one would be like Paxman. But, the show didn’t need another Paxman. During his later series, more and more questions began to reflect the more diverse university courses on offer, like animation or game design, allowing more students to be included in the game than before, keeping UC in the quizzing zeitgeist.  “Paxman’s snobbery was part of the appeal” confesses Luke. But, “Amol was definitely more welcoming” admits Luke, with Jake adding that “he didn’t have to be so friendly during filming…”.  The show is still fiercely mind boggling, but what we came to realise as our anki-decks piled up by the thousands, is that it is just fun and games – especially when the history of house music round briefly became memed and remixed. Amol asks about mascots and adds in quips about his own favourite musicians and philosophers during filming. Off-camera he talks about his lunch and jokes around with us. The days of stuffy Oxbridge teams in St.Michaels jumpers gifted by their grandmother’s Christmases ago are firmly behind, instead, one could even describe the new UC look as cool, with contestants and presenter alike having as much fun as possible when faced with difficult questions, 5 different cameras, and Roger Tilling’s voice booming around the studio.

***

I signed up for University Challenge, partly, as a joke. During my rather structureless gap-year, University Challenge’s consistent Monday night slot became a weekly marker and something I looked forward to returning to after work. My good friend Olivia had started English Literature at Oxford, and I received an enviable text, ‘Just did the University Challenge application test, I got 11…’. I never anticipated that my desire to send a similar text back, and to laugh about our lacklustre performances of academic rigour, would lead to me texting her ‘I MADE THE TEAM????’. We found out we made the team in the last week before Christmas, each nursing various stages of hangovers and being unable to contain the excitement. “UC kind of felt distant, [something] that just happened on TV, and that other people did” recalls Joe, my fellow Fresher on the team; it had never occurred to us that this is something that people actually applied to do. But now we, being newly inaugurated university students, could be challenged, and so we applied for the written test. Our first challenge would be to find these testing sites. “I couldn’t actually find my way to Mary’s and bumped into Jake who was also a bit lost” admits Ancell. This would become a theme of ours as our team would learn to navigate Manchester train stations, the maze of Media City, and the eternal corridors of the studios whilst all being a bit lost and clouded by the excitement and fear of the questioning that would come.

The “distance” of UC kept us in a perpetual state of amazement. Post-dinner revision slots  in the tucked away desks in St. John’s library, I would look out at the dark Durham sky, depressed with the blues of January, and catch my reflection. An array of flashcards in front of me, of which our collective pile of cards and Ankis reached 8000 –  “is this really happening to me? Am I now a person who is on a show like this?” I still can’t believe it, and neither can the rest of us realise “how the hell”, as Luke put it, got to this point. I probably won’t until I see myself on the TV; the same TV that has projected all those “distant” UC students and stars on a Monday night, will soon bare my face too, and maybe that will make it less distant. The Media City Holiday Inn, our refuge during filming, echoed this distant, start-struck bewilderment down its corporate corridors. We couldn’t believe that Amol Rajan and Roger Tilling (an actual man not just a voice) were eating breakfast on the table across the room. The evening before in the bar we scouted out other suspiciously studenty groups of 5 that appeared, a sort of celebrity gracing the air, as we realised these people were here, taking time off uni for a reason that had to be kept secret, now part of the same club as us.

Before filming you aren’t told who you’re playing, you have a time and that’s it. The team you just brought a drink with could very well be the team who thrash you the next day for millions of people to watch. This “distance” between you and the people of University Challenge never really leaves, even when Amol is joking with you behind your respective desks during a filming break, or when you buzz in and hear your name, or when the iconic theme tune blares through the studio to count the cameras in; you can’t help but laugh with complete amazement.

Keeping the team a secret has been “almost impossible” admits Luke. Seeing five students tapping a table in the SU cafe and blurting out answers to questions read from a brain-sized book probably did look slightly suspicious. For once we weren’t allowed to give the correct answers, having to hastily reply “quiz” when people would ask how we all knew each other when we bumped into each other in Jimmies, or were asked by friends at the Trevelyan College pub quiz. 8 months since filming we can now share our starters for 10 with you on Monday the 7^th of October, BBC 2, 8:30pm. For now, it’s goodnight from the Series 31 Durham Team, goodnight, and goodnight from me too, goodnight.