I definitely would like Samuel Beckett. I’ve heard he was amazing company when he got going; he had incredible piercing blue eyes, he was incredibly funny and loved word play; a very kind and sweet man. I have been working in his world for ten years and would love to talk to him about the themes. So much of his back story, his life resonates with mine.
I would like to invite Rudolf Nureyev because I danced with him when I was 12 in Coppelia. He came to Ireland with the Cleveland San Jose Ballet company and I was chosen to dance with him. It was two years before he died and I’d sit with him at the side of the stage before going on every night, and he was trying to make conversation. I was so shy I could barely speak to him, I’d love to have that time back. Now I am older I’d like to talk to him about growing up in Russia, his approach to dance, what it really meant to him, his view on how ballet had changed …I’m very interested in that.
I am just amazed by Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, particularly his violin concerto. It would be amazing to talk to him. Ernest Hemingway would be good fun at a party too. I love his essays. He manages to make boyish adolescence and anger feel attractive which is a very difficult thing to do.
Oh! And TS Eliot – I’d love to have a go at him about his relationship with his wife. He is my favourite poet. I’d invite Joan of Arc and Antigone. I’d force the men at the table to shut up and listen to them, and not dramatise them. Joan of Arc had to suffer so much, in a similar way as Antigone. When you look at their speeches and their letters they are so measured and non-hysterical – you can really see they are swept up in a Crucible-like conviction. They are convicted of hysteria and heresy – it feels as if their opinions and words were twisted. In actual fact they are incredibly measured and mature in their arguments. They have such solid arguments that have stood the test of time. It’s the scourge of women in society – it’s very easy to expel things women say as histrionic and hysterical rather than looking at the content. Women are represented unfairly – I was steered to think that Antigone was idealist, unrealistic, hysterical and adolescent in her view. The truth – when you go back to the original Euripides text – is just not the case. It’s not just men who are guilty of female misogyny – we can be dreadfully unkind to our own. Joan and Antigone worked so hard to avoid those labels; they were so calm in the face of such pain and death – held their line; and that showed enormous courage.
Next would be Charlie Chaplin: he was an utter genius.
Can I have Anish Kapoor as well? I feel like he resonates with my soul. I have deeply personal experiences when I sit opposite his work; I have a very visceral response to his work.
And Lord Reith – the founder of the BBC – would come along too. I have great admiration for him. The work of my guests was so crucial to them; the stakes were extremely high, the bar was high. When you think of Rudolf Nureyev’s leap for freedom, you understand what his work meant to him; Beckett’s alienation from the country and family to write down some of his greatest truths cost him a great deal; it all came at a great price…they lived and died for their art. The likes of Reith put a value on it. There was great integrity and that is hard to find in this day and age. We are selling ourselves too cheaply.
The venue of the party is a place back in time. Countess Constance Georgina Markievicz, during the Irish Revolution, lived in Surrey House in Rathmines. All the young republicans were in that house– James Connolly, Jim Larkin, Michael Collins…
When you think of the shenanigans that took place in that house – weapons under the beds; operations on injured soldiers on the kitchen table – all of the soldiers built this dream, this ideology; this picture of an independent Ireland around that kitchen table, their speeches drawn from poetry, inspired from art – Yeats was a friend of Markievicz.
I wouldn’t want to be back in that day for any other reason than the poignancy of the situation, could I phone for a takeaway from 2014 from my favourite Japanese takeaway?
There has to be a sing-song – each to their own! Eating, debating, drinking, singing, laughing…with Hogarth taking sketches in the corner, recording the evening.
All of these artists showed incredible courage in the difficult themes they approached. All their work is so deeply personal and honest they become universal. They give me courage.
Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby is a Royal Court Theatre and Lisa Dwan production in association with Cusack Projects Ltd. Following London dates at the Southbank Centre, the tour continues in Belfast, Cambridge, Birmingham, Salford and New York. For more details about the Southbank Centre’s programme of events please visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk IP