Alistair McDowall's Pomona

David Ian Rabey

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315304939
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Arte dramático británico

'It's all real. All of it. Everything bad is real' - Moe

Alistair McDowall's Pomona was first staged in 2014 and won properly startling, and startled, acclaim. Its edgeland setting permits a surrealistic disengagement of linear forms of time, which is both dreamlike and wildly funny; nightmarish and ominously enveloping. The play has as its imaginative springboard a landscape which is both real and surreal. It offers an unforgettable journey into radical uncertainty, alongside unpredictable action that presents and questions the forms by which all too much of British life is lived.

Rabey offers us a wild plunge into this modern English urban rabbit hole, a haunting and bewildering high-stakes hunt for meaning and value, set in a gothic noir Manchester, possibly dystopian (or possibly not).

1

Introduction

Darkness on the edge of town

To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law – to be linked with the vast outside – to come close to the knighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate – surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul and sanity!

–H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ (Lovecraft, 1999: 237)

‘Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever’ writes David Mitchell in Slade House (Mitchell, 2015: 119). His protagonist might be describing or entering Pomona: Alistair McDowall’s play, inspired by a region of Manchester which has a dedicated tram stop only 15 minutes’ ride from Manchester’s central Piccadilly rail station. The Pomona region is best visited by day, as after dark there are no streetlights in its wilder ranges: it is a place where, if investigated, you literally outwalk the furthest city light.

Walk left, disembarking from the metro station, and you will see how tidy new gated factories try to outstare the opposite side of the canal towpath, which harbours the bottles and mattresses of rough sleepers in its foliage. Walk right, and you enter a landscape which could serve as a site-specific walking dramatization of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel The Road (2006). Extravagantly strange vegetation pushes up through split concrete to reclaim a post-industrial landscape of buckled gates, tangled wire and mysterious potholes leading down into – what? Sewers? Or… ?

Under a viaduct, a nocturnal encampment for rough sleepers is manifested by a cluster of furniture (including a bizarre chair, awaiting the customer of a demonic barber or dentist). This is the region described in the first scene of the play: ‘It’s a hole./A hole in the middle of the city./Looks like what the world’ll be in a few thousand years’ (19). See Image 1.1.

So what happens in Alistair McDowall’s play, which bears this place’s name and draws the audience steadily into a nightmare vision of its landscape? Dan Rebellato makes an honourable attempt at summary:

So, describe Pomona then. Well that’s already tough. I’d say that a woman goes missing in Manchester and her identical twin tries to enlist help to find her. I think the missing woman has problems with drugs and debts and becomes a prostitute and then falls in with a gang who get her to film violent porn movies. I think she then disappears one day and her friend in the brothel discovers that their boss has their blood-type information on her computer. I think their boss then enlists two security guards to kill the friend, perhaps acting on the authority of The Girl, a mythical unnamed figure who controls everything and I mean everything. I think the guards kidnap the friend but bungle it and are forced to fake a violent attack. I think that inadvertently one of the guards dies from the wounds administered in the fake attack. I think the sister looking for her twin eventually stumbles upon an underground hospital where the disappeared are being kept, their organs harvested, their bodies used as baby farms. I think the twin escapes but her sister does not. However, some or all of this might just be events taking place in a RPG, dungeon-mastered by Charlie. It could be a dream or a nightmare or a fiction or it might all be real. I’ll be honest, I spent some of the performance confused, much of it uneasy, moments of it actually frightened, but at no point did I doubt that what I was watching was somehow necessary, urgent, inevitable, and about us now. Moe, one of the guards, announces ‘It’s all real./All of it./Everything bad is real.’

(Pomona, p. 101; Rebellato, 2014)

Image 1.1 That is the real Pomona: an unusually surreal place

Photo of Pomona, 31 October 2015, by Charmian Savill, used by permission

Where did this thing spring from? Alistair McDowall says:

I never have an answer as to where a play has come from, but I can show you some of the elements: some of the mess that was orbiting at the time.

Usually a character or maybe a scene or just an image occurs to me – in Pomona it was this guy in a car with the chicken nuggets circling the M60 – and I’ll carry it round in my head with me for a long time, at the same time accruing notes and scraps of dialogue that spring from it and other places, until eventually maybe I realise: this is a ghost story, or maybe it’s not, this is a detective story, or maybe it’s both? And then maybe I’ll read some Raymond Chandler or watch Chinatown (I always thought Pomona was like a horror version of Chinatown), try and find pieces of the tonal world I want the play to live in. And music is very important at this stage, most of the plays have a song, or a couple of songs that I’ll listen to repeatedly, finding the way the play feels, the beat of it … I quite often draw little cartoons of the characters, or some of the images in the play. Eventually I’ve gathered heaps of this stuff, and then I’ll start putting it into ‘pots’, arranging it so structures start to appear, and I’ll write out the structure again and again and again.

I try to get to a point where I’ve worked so long doing everything else that I become desperate to write, I can’t do anything else. Then (hopefully), the play can pour out of its own volition.

(McDowall, 2016)

On the surface, Pomona starts out evoking the appeal, form and tropes of the detective story, in which we observe a protagonist, on an investigative quest for knowledge, and we share her or his perspective (either completely or predominantly) as complex tangles of corruption are uncovered. However, Pomona has dimensions which may exceed even those detected in its forerunner, Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown: dimensions which Michael Eaton significantly identifies as simultaneously political (about the nature of power), sexual (about the nature of gender), metaphysical (about the nature of evil), psychological (about the nature of the self) and philosophical (about the nature of knowledge) (Eaton, 1997: 43).

Pomona evokes the shockingly violent world of the crime thriller and the (apparently) nihilistic film noir, shot through with savage black humour. But it does so with a political purpose: in order to develop a scenario of the fiscal logic of human objectification, carried through to an underground trade in baby farming and organ harvesting. This scenario may also bring to mind Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005), but even more troublingly locates in Manchester events which are more regularly and horrifyingly documented in other countries (just as Sarah Kane’s 1995 Blasted relocated atrocities from Bosnia to tear through the would-be soporific placelessness of a hotel room in Leeds, collapsing dramatic space in dramatic time). Indeed, since Pomona was performed in Manchester, the existence of subterranean communities in the bowels of the city has been nationally reported by journalist Dean Kirby in The Independent newspaper (Kirby, 2016). Some of Manchester’s shockingly large number of destitute and homeless “rough sleepers” have been discovered living in the relative shelter, but in appalling pitch-black conditions, afforded by an underground cave, near the River Irwell. So aspects of what might be initially dismissed as science fiction and apocalyptic dystopia are already apparent in present-day social upheavals and their consequences. Theatre is a particularly good imaginative form for exploring consequences, and giving them physical forms, which can be both appealing and troubling: in short, haunting.

McDowall comments on some responses to the play:

Some people said Pomona was quite a cinematic play: I always thought that was just because it had a plot. When I tried breaking down why people were saying it was like a film, it seemed to me like it was just because they were excited to know what happened next; but I’d want that from anything, I don’t think that’s inherently cinematic. What I care about most is story, really. Who are we following, and what do they want?

Maybe another reason it was thought to be cinematic was due to some of the reference points. I have always been obsessed with film; but I’ve also always been obsessed with novels, poetry, comics, music. Once I started really discovering theatre as a teenager, I was reading plays pretty much constantly, and soon got just as obsessed with writing for the stage.

I am interested in writing for the screen, but my plays are plays. At the moment I’m interested in being in a room with a story and making it explode; and the theatre is the only place I can do that. I want everyone in the room to feel it punch at the same time. Theatre’s the only thing I love that disappoints me as often as it does. It’s so rare to go and see a play and it’s great. But what keeps me hanging on is that when you see one that is great, it’s not just great for that evening or that week, but it’s great forever, because you won’t forget that feeling of being in that room with that thing. That’s an event. And that’s what I want to write, and I think that’s a purely theatrical impulse.

(McDowall, 2016)

McDowall further suggests that shattering the stylistic “rules” of theatrical naturalism is an appropriate way to testify to the strangeness of contemporary existence: ‘Real life is weird and scary, it feels technicolour and grayscale altogether. It’s everything, all at once. Physicalizing that is something theatre – and only theatre – can do’ (McDowall in Trueman, 2014). Interestingly, McDowall will, however, acknowledge a perceived affinity between the media of theatre and comics/graphic novels:

A comic is two panels and a space in between; everything that happens exists in that gap. You fill in the blanks. It’s the same with theatre: it’s all created, not on stage or in the audience, but somewhere in the air in between them.

(McDowall in Trueman, 2014)

This is a significant feature of Pomona, which challenges its audiences to “jump the gaps” imaginatively between scenes, and to reconsider earlier events from the startling perspectives of gradually emergent contexts. They have to imagine connections, in a world where disconnection is the rule and system of a materialistic society. Here, as Rachel Clements observes:

disconnection takes on a broader, perhaps more political dimension… . There are some doors you don’t want to open, Zeppo thinks. Because once you know the answer, you might have to do something different – or you might get hurt. Pomona is full of characters deciding whether or not to get involved, whether or not to ask questions. It’s full of characters facing the gap between what they tell themselves and what they might find if they actually looked.

(Clements, 2015)

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts have developed the term ‘edgeland’, first coined by Marion Shoard, as an aperture through which to reconsider ‘places where an overlooked England truly exists’, including ‘places where the city’s dirty secrets are laid bare’ (Farley and Roberts, 2012: 10). These semi-forgotten, apparently no-man’s-lands(capes) are where the post-industrial ‘slipstream’ of diverted money, energy, people and traffic has left behind ‘a zone of inattention’ (103), pivotal on/to the shifting borders of development, abandonment and decay. Mysterious urban and rewilding areas of dereliction, where eccentric vegetation splits and flourishes through concrete, are ruins which nevertheless contain ‘a collage of time’ which may threaten to ‘turn space inside out’ (157). These mutating wastelands indicate that ‘we are only ever passing through’, but they also infer that there is something discernible, however briefly, which is ‘much bigger than us’ (157).

McDowall’s Pomona lends strange new flesh to these intimations, and projects recognizably urban surface processes (extending them, in a geometric sense) down into an atrocious Gothic underworld of visceral heat, oiled by self-detachment: a domain systematically malignant to human individuality, which is rendered down into disintegrated wet profit. The edgeland may appear to be ‘a place of forgetting’, for landfill, fly-tipping, rough sleeping: ‘a place to put things out of mind on an industrial scale’ (Farley and Roberts, 2012: 58–9). However, it also re-presents what might cluster at “the back of our minds”, on a social and political scale: the aggression, violence and pain on which this landscape’s promises and selective instances of a comfortable standard of living (for some) float, and may depend. Pomona offers the apocalyptically bleak vision of an everyday unconsecrated limbo, churning with a mechanized hum of industrial consumption. In Pomona, the mute shape of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu haunts these recesses, like an edgelands’ hinkypunk or neon will-o-th’-wisp, a presiding figure of terrible cosmic indifference to this human designation of human insignificance; and/or perhaps, the minotaur, to be appeased, squatting at the centre of the concrete labyrinth.

In a 2015 article for The Guardian, Robert McFarlane wrote about the distinctively eerie sense of the English landscape in film and literature, noting how digging ‘down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth’ is a recurrent trope, and how what is discovered as the subject of this willed erasure is ‘almost always a version of capital’ (for example, in Patrick Keiller’s 2010 film Robinson in Ruins, the protagonist tracks the buried cables and gas-pipes of Oxfordshire, following them as ‘postmodern leylines, and tracing them outwards to hidden global structures of financial ownership’); and McFarlane adds how he eagerly awaits the English horror film ‘that must surely soon be shot [featuring] sink-holes as maws’ from out of which rises the demonic shape of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: ‘Perhaps filming is already under way’ (McFarlane, 2015). In fact, McDowall’s Pomona ...