Text distilled down to only that which needs to be said, seen and felt - A Girl on Stage
How did the stage adaptation of Eimear McBride’s stream of consciousness novel A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing capture the hearts and minds of its audience? I review the play at The Traverse theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with the original novel and adapted play script in hand.
The novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride was adapted for stage by Annie Ryan in 2014. The narrative is a searing account of Irish girlhood that plunges us into the mind of a young woman who inhabits the darkest of worlds. This is a realm where love is absent and ‘that which is bad’ dominates. Sex, Religion and Humanity are all present; in their most perverted form.
The play, like the book, received enormous critical acclaim and was subsequently performed at New York’s Baryschnikov Arts Centre and venues across the UK, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015. The audience experienced more than a vivid adaptation for stage; this was text distilled down to only that which needs to be said, and seen, and felt, to empower the audience to share in a potent example of less, becoming more. A Girl is a Half Formed Thing became a successful adaptation and theatrical experience because, perhaps paradoxically, it celebrates the power of text in the black box inhabiting the well-written play.
A shrewd emplotment structures the narrative into six parts, each rich with accounts of vivid memories that begin in the womb and end at the protagonist’s death age twenty. A homodiegetic narrator conveys fragmented thoughts and speech, with little distinction between the two, and it is through this internal focalisation the reader is invited to experience the diegesis.
The girl remains unnamed, as do her world mates (‘mammy’, ‘uncle’, ‘brother’) which invites the audience to fill in these spaces themselves. The girl voices these characters and her impersonations characterise her indirectly. The contempt she feels for her aunt, for example, is illustrated in the passage of direct discourse.
“Did you get that cheque? Did you get that cheque she kept saying to her I keep forgetting if I’ve asked? Yabber yabber.”
This deliberate decision not to involve casting an actor to realise the role of the aunt, for example, is key to why Ryan’s adaptation remains rooted in the original. Consequently, this narrative assumes a subversive style of writing which, in its dissolution of syntax, rewards focus and patience with a gripping monologue closer to poetry than prose. The narrative content is stripped to the essentials which invites the human imagination to fill the gaps. The rich imagery of a domestic scene from part one is an example of this.
“Two me. Four you five or so. Baby full of snot and tears. You squeeze on my sides just a bit. I retch up awful tickle giggs. I flee from washing brushing.”
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is a rare invitation into the female experience in a sphere which mostly offers a male gaze onto the female form. The experimental style highlights, not the limits of language in its desire to capture the human spirit, but the rich source of word play – no matter the matter in hand, it is ‘words at play’ and, unashamedly and gleefully theatre - and its audience love it. It is fitting then, that this should be transposed to the stage; the place where the human condition is analysed in inquest, and autopsy, that transcends written prose. Language is pushed to its limits? Hardly; language on the bouncy castle. The following passage appears on the previous page during the attack.
“Grouged breth sacld my lungs til I. Puk blodd over me frum. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP. Look. And I breathe. And I breathe my. I make.”
Scattered capitalisation indicates a loss of consciousness. Explicit language makes for a visceral and 3D imagining. The effects of a disordered syntax are jarring and disconcerting. The absence of speech marks and basic information means the scene moves pace and fluidity. The reader can play the girl in their imagination, in real time, as opposed to simply reading her stream of consciousness. What is hidden beneath the surface of the human mind’s superficial manifestations is what makes McBride a modernist, but this attempt to express the female experience in a fluid and rhythmic code is what constitutes this writing as, what Luce Irigaray called, écriture féminine. This feminine language finds itself at the margins of phallogocentric discourses, where phallogocentric language does not make sense, where it is disrupted. ‘A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing’ is a rare invitation into the female experience in a sphere which mostly offers a male gaze onto the female form.
Making space, in every sense, invites the audience to inhabit, to occupy, to take possession of. The narrative is timeless, and available to be experienced by Everyman, or even Everywoman. A process of mean-making is demanded from the reader as spatial and temporal clues are offered. This makes for a challenging and disorientating read, but fundamentally it allows the reader to fill in the gaps with their own personal life experience. In this passage the reader is imagining the mirror, which must exist for the girl to notice her reflection. If there were a real mirror, the audience would see the girl; in the imagined mirror, the audience see themselves.
“I turn the bath light on I see I think that fuck punge of my face. Door handle turn. Don’t come in it’s. For him the who’s there uncle looking in at you. No. At me.”
Temporal inconsistencies have unsettling effects. The following is an illustration of a brief, intense embrace with her mother, where textual space is greater than story time. This is juxtaposed with a summary of the days following, which not so much removes their status but creates an impression of time merged and indecipherable.
“She puts her arms around me… My mother. Feel the. Strange and I am comfort there. I am the. Right. I am the right thing. These hours days. And everybody. All around here. Tapping all the time out.”
The result is a dreamlike diegesis, absent of temporal and spacial frames. After the death of her brother, the narrators communicative addressee, the girl says “Who am I talking to? Who am I talking to now?” which is particular disconcerting. Moments later, when she submerges herself in the lake in which she sees her sibling, the reader is left to assume that everything that has come before was an analepsis, a life review experience.
“The black I swim. The coldest water. Deepest mirror of the past and in it I am. Fine look because I see you under. Because we are very young. And we are very clean here like when we wash our hands. When we’re in the rain… Come on you say. Come with. Come down”…”Turn. Look up. Bubble from my mouth drift high. Blue tinge lips. Floating hair. Air famished eyes. Brown water turning into light. There now. There now. That just was life. and now. What? My name is gone.”
The reader does not just accept the convention of flashback because it is a familiar convention, it emphasises the irrelevance of a time to this story. Story seems to precede its telling, but what is important is its emplotment, the what, of what is happening now. All time that exists is now.
A dramatic experience, in a theatre, involves audience as much as it involves the character ‘being’ on the stage. A play, is the audience, their imaginations, are the theatre of the human condition. The adaptation gave the novel the synergy of the theatre elements and textual drivers, and drew the audience in because there were spaces for them to go. This adaptation knew when to stop and allow the play to be. It stopped short of enhancing the meaning and simply delivered that meaning by clearly understanding how the written word comes to life.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing was at The Traverse Theatre as part of the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in 2016 went on to be performed at The Young Vic in London and the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York.
