Lear Settings

The film Lear Settings is in three parts, of which two feature musical settings of Lear poetry by composer Alastair Borthwick – these settings are of the nonsense poems ‘The Jumblies’ and its darker companion piece ‘The Dong with a luminous nose’.

 

The basic storyline of the film is drawn directly from the two nonsense poems and can be summarised thus: The jumblies go to sea in a sieve and land on the island of the Dong. There they visit many places, including a market, ‘the Lakes’, the ‘Torrible Zone’ and ‘the hills of the Chankly Bore’. Our protagonist the ‘Dong’ falls in love with a jumbly girl, but after twenty years or so, the jumblies return home; there they are honoured with a feast and admired for how tall they’ve grown. Meanwhile in Dong-land, the Dong searches for his lost love forever more; he lights up the way by building a lantern which he attaches to the end of his nose.

 

In order to bridge the two settings, and to provide the vehicle for engaging audiences that I required for outreach purposes, I developed with the assistance of numerous collaborators, including animator Rozi Fuller and Andrew Marvell Business and Enterprise College, an animated short film entitled ‘A Jumbly Girl’ which offers opportunities 1) to contemplate what might have happened when the Jumblies landed on the Dong’s island; and more importantly 2) to explore in more detail the concept of difference that lies at the heart of this tragi-comic tale of love and loss.

 

The complexity of many authorial voices – namely poet, composer, writer-director, animation director, workshop groups and soprano soloist, as well as imagined authorial voices of characters described within the texts – increases the risk of confusing audiences. My solution to this problem is to offer the following simple conceit, where a specific subject position is pinpointed at a specific point in time; it enables the disparate voices to coalesce and the complexities of time, temporality, and subjectivity to be drawn together.

 

In Section 1 the singer adopts the persona of a Jumbly Woman (formerly the Dong’s Jumbly Girl); she tells a child stories about her past (possibly as the child sleeps) and in her recounting of the tale she adopts the various personas of the characters from her past; as she sings her tale, the audience witnesses the child’s imagined version of events expressed through stills and short animated sequences. Here the Jumbly Woman demonstrates emotional empathy for the Jumblies, as a collective group.

 

In Section 2 - the central animation – the images we see and the sounds we hear shift to the Jumbly Woman’s perspective during a moment of reflection. This version of what she recalls as ‘what really happened’ (perhaps itself a distorted version of events) consists of the scenes and fragments from her memory, including (where appropriate) her imaginings of the Dong’s emotions and perspectives, including his sense of abandonment. The images for this section are generated by professional animators. Here the Jumbly Woman focuses on herself and her own emotions.

 

In Section 3, the Jumbly Woman resumes her account; her nightmare anxieties about the Dong’s fate develop into a free-flowing fantasy. (These anxieties are implicit in the guilt-ridden line ‘he was happy and gay ‘till he fell in love with a jumbly girl’.) We may infer from the Jumbly Woman’s references to herself in the third person suppressed feelings of guilt as she attempts to distance herself from her act of abandonment. Here the Jumbly Woman empathises with the Dong.

 

Having the soprano adopt the persona of the Jumbly Woman opens up the performance possibility of staging the work as a monodrama. Exactly how the Jumbly Woman and child as concurrent authors or ‘narrators’ of the tale are presented may affect the audience’s sense of its own subjectivity. If the child is represented physically on stage, the audience observes the Jumbly Woman recounting her tale and has the added impossible privilege of peeking in on the child’s thoughts. By contrast, if the child is absent from the stage as is the case during today’s screening, the soprano addresses the audience directly; thus, the audience becomes the child. Of course, in today’s screening some of the audience that are present adopted the role of the child when they generated images during phase 3 of the workshops; it is fitting that the performance enables them to return to this role, to continue to participate actively in the musical artwork.