Michelene Wandor

Michelene Wandor has re-told the Old Testament Book of Esther twice in her writings, and their significant differences show how her work has developed.

In ‘The Mask of Esther’, from Musica Transalpina (2005), the story of the Jewish heroine who became a Persian Queen, and saved the Jews from harm, takes the form of a musical libretto (the piece for two soloists and choirs was premiered at St. Albans Cathedral). Wandor mixes Biblical quotation with her own poetic language to make sing-able phrases: ‘In Shushan / the sun the moon and the stars / are made out of marzipan’. It tells a dramatic scenario of love and death - involving King Ahasuerus, his evil adviser Haman, Mordecai the faithful Jew and Esther the concubine-turned-Queen. This is given a richly metaphorical gloss, concluding ‘with celebrations / a fountain has become a river / a river has become a people / a woman has found her name again’. Going back to Gardens of Eden: Poems for Eve & Lilith (1984), there’s quite a different feminist emphasis. ‘Lilith re-tells Esther’s Story’ focuses first on Queen Vashti, discarded because she disobeyed the King, objecting to being ‘shown off like / a prize cow’. In Lilith’s rather impatient view, there is ‘something missing / from this story’, namely Esther’s own desires: it ‘doesn’t bother to say / whether Esther / actually liked / King A’.

Gardens of Eden - later expanded as Gardens of Eden Revisited (1999) - gives wittily irreverent voices to the Biblical figures of Eve and Lilith (respectively, the first female transgressor against male authority, and Adam’s unsubmissive first wife). These are pieces often playing with gender stereotypes, like the Jewish Mother: ‘you work your ribs to the bone/ setting up the human race/ and do you get any thanks?’ (‘Eve in the morning’). The original edition concludes with an overt political cabaret piece, ‘Eve at Greenham Common’. Wandor’s writing has therefore been informed both by her own Jewish cultural heritage and a long association with feminism – which she has called ‘crucial to my sense of purpose and audience’. She came to prominence on the wave of feminist writers in London from the 1970s with Spare Rib, becoming poetry and theatre editor for Time Out magazine. She collaborated with her friends, as in the poems of Touch Papers (1982) with Judith Kazantzis and Michele Roberts, and the novel Arky Types (1987), co-written with Sara Maitland. They are among the contributors to On Gender and Writing (1983), which she edited; her introduction recalling ‘that sense of ‘belonging’ which I used to find in acting and which I found in the heady euphoria of the early 1970s feminism … [that] reappears sometimes through writing’.

She also has an ongoing career as a dramatist, both of original stage plays or adaptations for fringe companies as well as the National Theatre. Her work has been particularly well suited to radio, most recently Tulips in Winter (broadcast in October 2008). As a critical thinker on drama, she has produced some key works of feminist sexual politics. Carry On, Understudies (1986) discusses the impact of feminism on new forms of popular theatre and Look Back in Gender (1987, revised edition 2001) is a wide-ranging look at the sexual politics of the best-known post-war plays in the British theatre. In the latter, Wandor’s purpose is polemical as well as historical, decrying the male-dominated theatre tradition but also the domination of directors over writers. The implicit radical optimism of the earlier edition, however, seems to have been compromised by the time she discusses the ‘outspoken wasteland of interpersonal relations’ in playwrights during the 1990s such as Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. She concludes with an incisively praising account of Alan Ayckbourn’s ‘House and Garden’.    

Introducing Musica Transalpina for the Poetry Book Society Bulletin (Spring 2006), Wandor acknowledges how her enthusiasm for the art and music of late Renaissance Italy has come to be ‘translated’ into her poetry: ‘music and performance cross over into words, influence and transform each other’. This is reflected, for example, in a short poem about playing an instrument: ‘while the inner ear congratulates the outer / and the hard shine slinks / as the sound slides shrugging / over your dark gleaming shoulders’ (‘Viola da Gamba’). Some of the longer pieces, as with ‘The Mask of Esther’, have been performed with appropriate music. In the case of the intriguing closing work, ‘Emilia’s Poem or The Marriage of True Minds or Have you heard the one about the Dark (Jewish?) Lady of the Sonnets?’, this is the music of the time of Shakespeare. The poem is both documentary in its history of the Jews in London, and playful in its romantic entwining of Emilia’s story as the ‘secret mistress’ of the national bard. Emilia, the daughter of an Italian Jew, is ‘the first woman in England to publish a long devotional poem’, in which she ‘unites Eve with Mary Magdalene / With the God of the Old Testament / And the Christ of the new’.   

The theme of reconciliation between peoples and faiths is expanded upon in The Music of the Prophets (2006), commissioned to mark the 350th anniversary of the official return of the Jews to England. This is a dramatic poem, again performed by Wandor’s own group, with music by Henry Purcell and others. It actually became part of her recent radio play Tulips in Winter, featuring the philosopher Spinoza and his family, the painter Rembrandt - and the working out of the agreement for the resettlement of the Jews in Cromwell’s England. Of course, as both the play and poem elaborate, despite persecution and their expulsion in 1290, Jews had had a clandestine presence in London ever since, and remain vital to international trade. ‘A Jew is a bird of passage’, it observes, ‘an invisible feather on the breath of sanctuary’.

Rembrandt’s elegant picture of the rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, negotiator for the Dutch Jews, contrasts with the ‘warts and all’ portrait of Cromwell. They ‘share a dream’ of ‘a Messiah and a Second Coming’, and sit together in the coffee house, ‘where all but women can meet’. Their meeting amusingly travesties lines from Marvell’s poem ‘To his Coy Mistress’: ‘Had we but world enough and time / this leisure, Cromwell, were no crime’. And then some from Karl Marx, a Jew who much later found sanctuary in London: ‘theologians may explain the world / our job is to change it’. At the end of a Whitehall Conference there are seven new government commandments for the Jews but also, crucially, ‘informal permission’ to worship. The final section fast-forwards to a London where ‘the Jews are secret no more’ and an Amsterdam where you can drink coffee ‘in the Rembrandt Corner Café’. As Judith Kazantzis has observed, Michelene Wandor’s work ‘has a depth of historical and cultural understanding unusual in contemporary British poetry’.        

Dr Jules Smith, 2008