Highness

The show begins, appropriately, with an immobile, monumental female figure seated on a podium.  This is, after all, a show about queens – or Queens - every kind of queen: ‘royal’ queens, film star queens, queens of pop, drag queens, warrior queens, even queen bees…. 

But – an indication of the subversive way Melanie Jame Wolf will proceed – the figure is entirely covered, from its head to the tips of ridiculously high heel boots, with a richly flowered fabric, fit for a queen.  Another small but significant touch: the sigh of relief when this covering – this carapace - is peeled off, revealing Ms Wolf in white underwear.  But that underwear will be added to – a hair piece, a shawl, a necklace, an absurd Marie Antoinette wig - and then changed again, creating a series of personas that are not people, but images and icons. 

The figure is attended by what look like two tennis court ball boys (Ivey Wawn and Martin Hansen), all in white like their queen(s), but who behave like courtiers – and who, throughout, will dress and undress the series of queens Ms Wolf creates.  These lithe, slight figures, suggestively choreographed by Ms Wolf, will also move that podium, operate the projections on the huge, blank backdrop curtains, build screens, cages, enclosures, comment on the action, mould her like pottery, comfort one queen and rouse another, an exhausted queen, back into her role. 

An example of how suggestively these images work comes early when Ms Wolf and her courtiers are behind a translucent screen, which covers her down to mid-thigh.  Thus, as her courtiers effect a costume change, there are the real woman’s legs and feet below and the blurry (secret?) movements of transformation to queen above.

Queen of whatever sort we see – or imagine – Ms Wolf doesn’t let us forget that the foundation is a woman’s body – overlaid, suborned, supressed, used.  In a powerful sequence, there are flashes of red internal organs projected on the huge screens.  In another, an everyday queen, so to speak, that is, a representative woman, enumerates key steps or stages in her life: losing her virginity, marriage, divorce, failure to conceive…  Each disappointment a smash of something fragile, but met with an ironic ‘Ohh…’ 

A woman’s body can be, say, a pop star whose song is a series of groans, but then, later, an iconic warrior figure, ramrod straight and backed by flags, a figure for a memorial statue, not life.  I was reminded of the first Queen Elizabeth telling her troops she had the heart of a lion – i.e. that she was no mere woman.  To be a Queen – capital ‘q’ – involves performance, sacrifice and compromise.

Or, as Hilary Mantel pointed out, writing of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, as the nation waited for the outcome of her first pregnancy, that Kate had become a publicly owned womb, her individuality sacrificed so that she looked like a woman ‘designed by a committee’.  Ms Mantel copped vitriolic abuse for this since the sycophantic royal watchers love the fairy tale and missed Mantel’s point that in fact she felt immense sympathy for this new princess, disappearing under the requirements of becoming a ‘member of the Royal Family’.  That’s not an example Ms Wolf uses (although she could’ve); instead Princess Diana appears with her ‘poor me’ plea, complete with Ms Wolf’s own ironic gestures. 

The work of Ms Wolf’s collaborators is all integrated and directed to her purpose.  The allusive but minimal costumes are designed by Veronika Schneider.  The video projections the work of Sam Smith (also set design) and Ms Wolf herself, while the crucial sound design is the work of Annika Henderson and Savage Amusement.

There is no ‘story’ here.  The analysis – because fundamentally it is analysis that is what is going on – is incisive, deliberately provocative and funny.  There is much laughter, even if much of it is the rueful laughter of recognition from the women in the audience.  Ms Wolf describes her show (accurately I think) as a ‘kind of shape shift through a series of Queen personas… a fluid passing through of the work of wearlng a crown in the everyday; in stories and histories of colony and blood, theft, duty, devotion and spectacle…’  It proceeds via images, tableaux, juxtaposed video projections, sparing use of sound, including pop songs and an eerie bit of lip synch.  It is never less than striking, but despite its originality of choices and interpretations, always perfectly clear.  (An example to those who seek to be profound but end up being obscure and opaque.)

Highness is Part II of a trilogy which began with Mira Fuchs (seen at Arts House in 2016), a study of sex as performance and commodity – i.e. the WHORE.  Now we have the QUEEN – and Part III to come, the HAG.  In Highness, as she did with Mira Fuchs, Ms Wolf relies on recognisable images, some deliberately chosen clichés, but giving them new contexts or interpretations.  You leave her show shaken but stimulated.  Her images reverberate.  This is ‘performance art’ at a very high, intelligent level.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Bryony Jackson