(This review concerns the Chinese stage adaptation of Zweig’s novella “Fear” by Meng Jinghui.)

A face lit like evidence. A voice held like breath. A camera that refuses to look away.

the woman’s qing (情)— not just desire, but also duty, face, circumstance, and guilt — arriving, at last, at the courage to admit and to forgive herself.

Light as Grammar: Angles that Translate “Being Watched”

The first thing the Hive theatre gives you is restraint. Before any cue hits, the stage sits in a disciplined greyscale: black/white/grey planes; two sofas; a circular, sand-toned arena; a half-open “back room.” The palette reads almost antiseptic — cool metal, a sand ring, a whitened table — so that when colour arrives (hard reds, acid greens) it isn’t mood music; it’s syntax. Beams slam into the ring like punctuation, cutting sentences from day/night, inside/outside, want/shame.

In this staging of Tender Night — final panel in Meng Jinghui’s “Zweig trilogy” — light is not illumination but grammar. A tight top-light pins her like a question mark; a lateral blade edits the room into admissible facts. Each switch of zone feels like an internal cut — the psyche montaged in real time. Even the half-room upstage behaves like a clause we only half understand, a dependent phrase that keeps dragging the subject back.

Crucially, these surfaces aren’t sterile; they are reflective. The lightly futurist textures (silvered props, a mannequin head fitted with a camera) act as a container that forces emotion to show its edges. The sand circle works as an inquest ring: she orbits, stalls, retreats; each corner of the walk is an advocation to answer, What are you doing here — loving, postponing, or trying not to be seen? A single step outside a cone of light becomes instantly legible as evasion; a step back into brightness reads as an attempt to testify. You can feel the show tightening the screws not by raising the volume but by narrowing the beam.

One visual ticking point becomes the dinner table. When the clock ticks and she produces the sentence — “I’ll get the ring back the day after tomorrow” — the light cools to surgical, the tabletop splits under a steel blade of white, and suddenly time is no longer invisible flow but plated artefact. The stage has turned chronology into evidence.

The “Live” of It: Cameras, Tapes, and the Ethics of Looking

The production’s clearest invention is the live image. A roving camera tracks Huang Xiangli, projecting her face across two walls — left and upstage — so the stage and her magnified portrait play as parallel courts. It’s not a flourish; it’s a procedure. The show threads “Tape 1 / Tape 2” into the action, so every cutaway becomes evidence and every replay a cross-examination. The numbered tapes do double duty: they justify the presence of live capture inside the fiction and, thematically, they convert memory into a chain of custody.

Geometry matters. Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman ( one of Meng Jinghui’s “Zweig trilogy), a triangular rake and three-sided audience put projections front/back. Here, with a frontal stage, images swing left and rear, turning us into accomplices who watch her being watched. We glance from the living body to its enlarged double; the act of viewing acquires a measurable vector. The face — pores, lid tremor, the minute undoing at the mouth’s edge — reads like a spreadsheet of micro-admissions.

And then there’s the backstage. The lens follows her beyond the proscenium — into corridors, doors, and that semi-revealed “red house.” We’re given angles no seat can provide. The result is a contemporary physics of shame: gaze = energy. The closer the lens, the more charged the air. Her flinch, her swallow, the tremor at the lip — scarcely theatrical at human scale — become legible as facts. The camera doesn’t decorate the monodrama; it programmes it.

There is also a moral dare embedded here, one familiar to those who have seen Ivo van Hove/Versweyveld’s live-feed theatres or Katie Mitchell’s “live cinema”: when technology writes the rules of what can be seen, it also proposes the terms of what can be known. Tender Night locates itself in that conversation but makes the premise intimate rather than monumental. The screen is not a public broadcast; it is a bedside lamp turned suddenly too bright.

Voice and Body: Turning “Admission” into a Muscle

Huang’s instrument is all grain and control. She breaks lines to sand, then draws them out like silk. The way she parks on a breath precisely where admission would land — just before the yes — makes the audience do the breathing for her. Those breaths are strategic delays, not hesitations; they are the exact temporal shape of shame.

Her cross-casting is clipped, never cute: a drier register for the lawyer-husband (words arrive like filings); a scuffed rasp for the extortionist (words arrive as scratches); an almost ceremonial clarity for the pharmacy scene (words arrive as a clean pour). Costume and mask amplify the hinge: the glossy long dress (with that back slit) is both home and fissure; the exaggerated brows and deep lip read like toggles — daylight reason / nocturnal abandon. At times she dons a voluminous, deliberately “ill-kept” wig — an outward sign that the narrative has slipped its decorum, that desire and confusion are staging a coup.

Movement honours Zweig’s “easy to go up, hard to come down.” She ascends to the lover (swift, light), and descends home (slow, heavy). The staircase itself — onstage or on screen — plays as a metronome for conscience: one beat per riser. Her homecoming steps drag, as if each tread were a sentence to be served.

The pharmacy is devastated by softness. “I like the smell of medicinal herbs,” she says almost tenderly, staring at the blue liquid as if it were an exit ramp from fear. It isn’t a death wish so much as a wish to pause living. When the husband appears and quietly takes the vial, mercy returns to the body as a gesture. She collapses, yes — but not as spectacle. She collapses like a muscle finally allowed to speak. The collapse is not an endpoint but a function: after prolonged isometrics of denial, the body gets to do what the mouth refused.

Sound completes that muscle memory. The design leans cold: low electrical hums, the measured click of a wall clock, a hush of surf and the faint rasp of crickets (the pre-show speech primes our ears to hear these textures as world, not wallpaper). When stress peaks, a narrow band of strings blooms and shuts — an inhale/exhale in orchestral form. In late scenes, a shard of Beethoven (a Fidelio-shaped courage) enters not as triumph but as irony: the heroic major-key swell sits uneasily beside a woman who has already sentenced herself. Where some productions would ask music to redeem, this one lets music reveal the disproportion between the public myth of bravery and the private labour of saying “yes”.

Shame / Desire / Punishment: Rings, Tapes, and Why “Penalty Hurts Less than Fear”

Zweig plaits shame, desire and punishment into one rope; the stage tightens it. The ring is perfect dramaturgy: removing it suspends marriage; pawning it stakes fate; retrieving it petitions for pardon. The ring’s absence becomes the dinner scene’s fulcrum. “Where is your ring?” is not curiosity; it is a summons. Her reply — “It’s at the jeweller’s; I’ll get it back the day after tomorrow” — doesn’t so much convince as buy time. The sand ring underfoot makes that purchase visible: a woman pacing inside a literal countdown.

The “toy horse” anecdote is the smartest bridge in this adaptation: a childhood system for handling unfairness — destroying what you cannot have, bargaining for equal pain — replays in adult secrecy. The parent’s urge to punish is less about cruelty than about ending the indeterminacy. No wonder she says, matter-of-fact, that punishment is easier to bear than fear. Unbounded dread corrodes; a defined wound heals.

The tape structure and the live camera build a clean chain of custody: each playback is a submission; each silence, a delay. When the husband admits he staged the blackmail to herd her home, the disclosure isn’t catharsis; it’s a legalistic paradox. He wants to push her back into “reason,” but he does it by making her walk through “guilt.” The show refuses to rule on that strategy. It merely shows its operation: men with resources outsourcing the dirty work of salvation.

As for the very end, the staging keeps oxygen in the room. Whether you hear a gun or not, judgment is not final; admission is. That distinction matters. A verdict belongs to a system; an admission belongs to a person. The latter can change you; the former can only close your file.

A Small Letter to Her (and to Mine)

I often thought of my own novel, Nowhere to Return. I, too, have written the secret “him”: door codes, stairwells, rain, replies that arrive a beat too late. “It’s easy to go to the lover, hard to go home” — the show makes this a map: ascent as acceleration, descent as drag. Keys, doors, card slots in my pages; rings, lenses, light zones onstage — intimate objects are small until crisis enlarges them to the size of verdicts.

The staging sharpens something I’ve circled on paper: many women’s qing (情)is not a question of dare I love, but dare I admit. Admission isn’t collapse; admission is a realignment — standing with oneself even under a hostile light. Confession here is not a church ritual, not a legal plea; it’s a practical choice to stop letting fear do the scheduling. The moment she says “yes” — or rather, the moment her body can afford to say it — other clocks in the room start to keep ordinary time again.

There is a quiet solidarity between her “programme of being watched” and the kind of autofiction I love: both accept that certain truths become speakable only when you show the machinery. The show externalises the machines — the cameras, the cuts, the cords — so that the admission does not have to carry the entire freight of revelation. In writing, I do that with paragraph breaks and the unembarrassed naming of objects; in this theatre, they do it with a ring and a lens.

If this thread — desire, delay, confession — resonates, you might enjoy my novel Nowhere to Return, a fragmentary London–Beijing map of intimacy and after-the-fact courage.

Nowhere to Return: A novel of exile, desire, and memory

Mercy Under Hard Light

The show’s paradox is beautiful: it uses the least “tender” tools — hard light, close-ups, live feed, looped replay — to conduct an act of tenderness. The cameras corner her so that she can stop running; the beams expose her so that she can stop hiding. The moustache-thin differences between truth, story, and performance are not ironed out; they are kept in frame.

From greyscale to shock colour, from stage to backstage, from “her” body to her enlarged face, Tender Night isn’t a “cheating melodrama.” It is a seminar on how a woman carries qing (情)— through shame, through tech, through the ordinary law of the day — toward the small, exact word that frees her: Yes. If you need a single image to remember the night by, keep the moment her hand hovers where the ring should be. The skin there is paler, a circular ghost; even absence leaves a mark you can read.

Walking out, the phone screen lights up again. We are all in our own live feed, practising the sentence that arrives late but changes everything. Hard light needn’t only punish; a lens needn’t only pry. Sometimes the witness stand is the place where you finally stand with yourself. And if mercy visits, it may not be in the key of triumph, but in the quieter register of being allowed to go on.

Production Card (performance attended)

Venue: Beijing Hive Theatre (蜂巢剧场)
Work: Tender Night (adapted from Stefan Zweig’s novella Fear)
Form: Monodrama
Director: Meng Jinghui
Performer: Huang Xiangli
Running time: ~75 minutes, no interval
Website: https://h5.clewm.net/?url=qr71.cn/ohjFlU/qucxTTV

If this piece kept you company in the dark, ☕️ buy me a coffee — help me keep writing light and witness

Production Card (performance attended)
Venue: Beijing Hive Theatre (蜂巢剧场)
• Work: Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life (adapted from Stefan Zweig’s novella, 1927)
• Form: Monodrama
• Director: Meng Jinghui
• Performer: Huang Xiangli
• Running time: ~75 minutes, no interval
• Spatial set-up: triangular raked stage, audience on three sides
• Visual/props: white tablecloth over a long table; a lone chair at the far end; a silver mannequin head fitted with a camera facing the table; a topography of glasses at different heights; a small stack of coins; a three-branched candelabrum

1 | You enter and you’re already inside the story

This was my first time seeing a Meng Jinghui production live, and it happened to be a solo show. Before the house lights dimmed, the foyer had already done half the dramaturgy: a compact cinema-retro skin — coffee counter, merch, posters, looping monochrome trailers — stretched the theatre’s modest scale into an antechamber of narrative. Inside, a near-hundred-seat black box wrapped a triangular rake. The geometry leans you forward; your eyes fall downhill.

Then the room does something deceptively simple. It lays out a cold, near-future, almost punk minimalism: white tablecloth; a long table ending in one chair; opposite, a silver, camera-headed mannequin like a mute inquisitor. On the tabletop, glasses of different heights catch the dim light, coins lie in a small, arrogant mound, and a candelabrum refuses to be lit. The stage looks less like décor than a lab bench for ethics and desire.

The first ten minutes are wordless. Huang Xiangli moves in amplified, patterned repetition — abstract and pointed at once — so the body starts telling before language arrives. A male voice-over stitches her movement to our coordinates in time: we are sliding into Mrs. C.’s confession. Huang’s all-black palette — cropped hair, long dress, ankle boots, jacket — turns her into a moving silhouette against white walls where the projection throws sea, light, her shadow, and the suggested shape of a man. The two walls mirror and cross-fade: body and image glance off each other. Somewhere between them, without fanfare, your breathing catches the stage’s tempo. You thought you came to watch; you discover you are being watched — by the room, by the lens, by the story’s own ethics.

2 | My novel’s echo: how a “24-hour high-concentration” becomes private memory

When Mrs. C. slides in under a day — into a nameless intimacy (love? lust? compassion heated to its flash point so it behaves like love), I jolted back to scenes from my own novel: that swift intoxication with expectation — you want him to be sincere; you want a future you can actually walk into. Too often, the reply is a good-bye text or a wedding invitation with someone else’s name.

Mrs. C.’s second encounter at the casino — betrayal and public humiliation — rings on the same frequency as the women I write: the anger after the promise collapses, the grief after the private vow meets the world’s indifference. They may not storm out; sometimes they wait — and the waiting becomes a self-aware discipline: acknowledging the wish you once dared to name, and acknowledging its ruin without erasing it.

👉 Reader pathway (upfront so it isn’t lost at the end)
If you’d like to extend this “twenty-four-hour high concentration” into a longer arc, you can read my English-language novel Nowhere to Return.

Nowhere to Return: A novel of exile, desire, and memory

3 | Four anchors — the hand, the sea, the gaming table, and time — and why Zweig still works on stage

Zweig’s move is disarmingly clear: compress an entire life into one day and let psychic intensity outrun clock-time. He likes sealed containers — hotel lounges, cabins, casinos — where obsession, shame, desire, and loss of control run to a brink. The 1927 novella has proven almost media-agnostic: so many screen and stage versions exist because the kernel is durable — a short-span, high-density engine that theatres can translate into physiology.

Why the hand? Because faces can be trained by society, hands are worse liars. In the casino, Mrs. C. learns to look only at hands: some grip until knuckles threaten to crack; some go limp and court the windfall; and one pair — “so beautifully frightening” — seems to fight itself at the tipping second between loss and win. The body leaks truth before words decide. The production obeys that logic with a micro-choreography of fingers: tightening, small tremors, veins like a sketch under the skin — the current of impulse is made visible.

Then there are two circles. The sea is nature’s cycle; the roulette is a designed cycle. A single tracking ring of light and the metallic roll on the sound bed place the cycles side by side. The audience’s heartbeat is pulled into entrainment between low-frequency surf and high-frequency steel. Immersive theatre isn’t about scents and props; it’s about rhythmic engineering — making your biological tempo lock to the narrative’s psychological tempo. That, in miniature, is why Zweig’s ethics-under-pressure keeps its voltage in the twenty-first-century black box.

The show keeps a crucial framing gesture from the novella: the public opinion chorus (the hotel guests, their tidy moral syllogisms) against which a woman lays down a private deposition. Whether compressed into a single voice or dissipated through surround sound and spatial shifts, the structure survives: chorus → confession → chorus again. We are drafted to the judge’s bench — not to deliver a verdict, but to feel how easily the bench could be a dock.

4 | When video splits the voice: live camera, dual projection, and putting the “second self” on screen

The production’s most striking formal gambit sits in the morning-after sequence. Mrs. C.’s original voice — husky with doubt and sudden, treacherous hope — floats without body while both white walls fill with her face. It is not sentimental coverage; it is a study: the slight smile that betrays the memory of rescue, the inch of breath she withholds before deciding to flee, or to stay, or to return that envelope of money.

Then the staging tilts. She climbs onto the long table and faces the camera-headed mannequin, as if offering her case to a tribunal that doesn’t speak back. The projection edits live — “out-of-body” sutures, a small chorus of selves arguing within the same skull. Reality and dream are not distinguished by filters; they bleed into one another, like the hour between night and morning when the body knows what the mind denies.

I’ve seen a similar live-camera grammar used elsewhere — famously in the West End stage show of Inside No.9 (Stage/Fright), where the second half flips into a theatre-haunting meta-narrative and the feed from onstage cameras becomes part of the fright. There the split served shock and reflexivity; here it serves psychological disclosure. Crucially, it isn’t a toy: the live feed is the monologue’s second brain. It separates strands of the same voice, gives the conscience a lens, and turns time into an editing problem — what do you cut, what do you keep?

The camera-mannequin also changes how we read the room. It is not a prop; it is a stand-in for the law of eyes: society’s gaze, the lover’s gaze, the self’s. When Mrs. C. later climbs again — this time toward a public catastrophe — the camera doesn’t flinch. It teaches us to watch our watching.

5 | How compassion slides into “love”: money, oath, and the problem of unfinished good

The easiest, laziest reading of this story is as a “fallen-woman” tale. The truer axis is compassion → love. When compassion heats near suffering, it conducts like a liquid metal: it moves like love — holds, lifts, gives, promises — without exactly being it. Zweig’s point is not that Mrs. C. is naïve. She is, by social metrics, reliably “steady” — widowed, composed, kind, observant. That is precisely why the fissure rings so loudly. She isn’t ignorant of the aftermath; she knows. And still, at that hour, she also knows “now I must.”

That is why money is the coldest object on the table. It is a lifeline and a certificate of shame. In this staging, the decisive handover is done almost without theatre: no swell, no new key light, no angle break — just a plain transfer. The ethics weigh more than the emotion. And then, good refuses to finish. The young man goes back to the table; the vow breaks under the hum of the wheel; the crowd looks, and looks away, and looks again. Zweig leaves us not with a redemption arc but with a life sentence: living with the fact that good did not complete under your watch.

And yet, this is not the cruelty of authorial judgment. It is the precision of conditions. Time in this world is not a line but a concentration index. We imagine that “restraint” is a trait; the play asks whether restraint isn’t often merely the absence of a sufficient variable. It is indecent to pretend otherwise.

That’s why the famous formula “twenty-four hours = a life” lands. A person can recognise a border in a short span. The rest of their years — whether luminous or dull — are essentially lived with that border, against it, or around it.

6 | How acting “acupunctures” an audience: breath, pause, gaze — and a closing note

Monodrama fails or succeeds on three small crafts:

• Breath maps the topography: declarative passages need long lines; shame needs in-breath held until it thins the air.
• Pause is never empty; it’s an invitation to the audience to supply what cannot be named yet.
• Gaze is invisible light: where the eyes settle, meaning lands.

Huang Xiangli needles all three. In the night-bench → shabby hotel → morning trilogy, her breath modulates like underscoring. The way she switches timbre when voicing other figures builds a choir within one throat, then lets the two-wall close-ups catch what the room might miss: the half-smile of pride at having saved him; the mortal wish to vanish before he wakes; the fatal re-decision to return and then leave and then return.

In this hall, the translation is almost mechanical: the metal in the sound, the pulse of light, the discipline of props (coins that never once fall off the table, like a dare), the raked plane that quietly steals balance from bodies. The result is not a lecture (no one is graded on their morals) but a mirror. Mirrors don’t give advice. They return your current face — including the hands you pretend not to see: hands that have held, pushed, given, demanded; hands that shook once, maybe just once, in a way you still don’t talk about.

You walk out and your fingers remember a minute of tremor. Time resumes — emails, trains, a phone-screen brightness you forgot to lower. But the density of that day remains somewhere in the body, like a thicker layer of air you part with your palm. If the hotel chorus keeps speaking in you on the ride home, that’s the point. Public opinion is an instrument; sometimes it plays you, sometimes you put it down.

Appendix: context the piece doesn’t over-explain (but you may care about)

• Zweig’s novella (Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau, 1927) is one of his tightest “sealed-room” moral experiments. Its afterlife — film and TV versions over the decades — speaks to the story’s portable core: compress duration, increase intensity, force a choice, refuse tidy closure.
• Live video on stage is not a novelty in itself; what matters is why. Here it acts as Mrs. C.’s auxiliary conscience and as a time-editing device. If you’ve seen Inside No.9's Stage/Fright, you know how a camera feed can turn spectatorship inside out. This show bends the trick toward psychic interiority rather than shock.
• Form/ethics coupling: the production’s most effective “immersive” aspects are not perfume or coins but tempo control. The sea/roulette dual loop isn’t a metaphor on paper; it is sound-light-breath plumbing. Once your physiology syncs, the ethics land kinesthetically, not just intellectually.

Disclosure

I purchased my own ticket and have no commercial relationship with the company or the venue. The brief reference to my novel above is for context and reader continuity; it does not alter the critical stance of this review.

If this piece resonated with you — whether in theatre, in literature, or in that single day of intensity we all carry — 
consider extending the dialogue:

👉 Read my novel Nowhere to Return
👉 Follow my Substack for poems & stage reflections
☕ Support my writing on Buy Me a Coffee

Your reading, sharing, and small gestures of support keep these reflections alive — between page, stage, and the quiet tremor of the hand.

In Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, language is both weapon and refuge. A young barrister — brilliant, swaggering, surgically precise — discovers that the legal grammar she has mastered cannot hold the messy facts of harm once the harm is her own. Watching the play (first in the theatre, then again via NT Live), I kept thinking about another room, another night, and a younger version of myself in London. The play keeps asking us to do exactly this: place the tidy logic of the courtroom beside the untidy logic of bodies, memory, and fear.

The play’s public journey is now familiar: a 2019 premiere in Sydney; a sold-out 2022 West End run at the Harold Pinter Theatre; a 2023 Broadway transfer that won Jodie Comer the Tony for Best Actress. Justin Martin’s direction sets one body loose inside Miriam Buether’s sleek, law-firm geometry; Natasha Chivers’s lighting slices the stage like cross-examination; Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design ratchets the pulse to closing-argument intensity; Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s (Self Esteem) score adds a cool, deliberate thrum. None of it is ornamental; all of it is argument. (The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, Tony Awards)

Critics have been unusually aligned about the show’s force. The Washington Post called Comer “everything you could ask for from an actor, alone on that stage for 100 minutes,” delivering the story “with the urgency of a report from the rim of an active volcano.” Entertainment Weekly praised the production’s double operation — “entertainment” and “education” — noting how the piece exposes the gaps in how courts approach sexual assault while still working as theatre. Even more sceptical roundups conceded that Comer’s performance “speaks more clearly than all that’s going on around her,” the rare star turn that deepens, rather than distracts from, the polemic. (The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Westernend Theatre)

Awards helped move the conversation beyond theatre pages. Comer took the 2023 Tony for Best Actress in a Play; in London, she won the 2023 Olivier for Best Actress and the play was named Best New Play. It’s easy to see awards as mere coronations, but here they also functioned as megaphones: this kind of testimony could occupy our grandest rooms and sell every seat. (The Guardian)

What the play does (and refuses to do)

Miller’s great dramatic choice is structural: she builds a motorway of momentum out of Tessa’s ferocious competence, then — after the assault — makes us feel the brake marks. In the first movement, evidence is choreography: timelines, phrasing, the tender places where a witness’s memory slips. In the second, those same techniques are turned on Tessa; the points of attack she once used become the points where she is made to “fail.” The effect hurts because it’s logical: we have engineered a system that confuses human response with legal weakness. On stage, that’s not an abstraction but a physical experience — Comer’s voice, breath, and pacing re-train the audience’s ear. (Entertainment Weekly)

It is also plain about ambiguity: consent misread, delayed reporting; the way shock freezes language even when the body is loud. In the wake of Prima Facie, Miller and Comer spoke about the flood of messages from women who felt recognised; outreach with the Schools Consent Project, and legal-sector conversations the production helped catalyse, have become part of its afterlife. Theatre doesn’t change statutes. It can change what feels sayable — and, crucially, how listeners are trained to hear. (WhatsOnStage, The Washington Post)

Where the audience sits

Arifa Akbar’s Guardian review of the West End run caught something essential: Comer “roars” through the first half’s legal swagger and then — without pleading for sympathy — makes you notice how the room changes when the witness is the same person who once wielded the knife. That pivot is the play’s moral engine. We realise, painfully, that “credibility” has a costume, and some of us were never measured for it. (The Guardian)

On Broadway, the same argument sharpened. Roundups noted how Martin’s staging loads the space with “experiential tension,” asking us not simply to agree with Tessa but to reckon with our own listening: what kinds of pauses read as lies to us; what kinds of tears as performance. That’s one reason the piece satisfies both as urgent social critique and as canny, commercial theatre: it gives the spectator a job and then checks your work. (Westend Theatre)

A parallel room: consent, hesitation, and a night in London

There’s a scene from my own life that rhymes with Miller’s play, though it isn’t the same story. Picture a London library in late afternoon; a casual message becomes a coffee, then a walk, then a door that opens on warmth too close. Inside, tempo outruns thought. Before I could name what I felt, my body registered off. The first refusal that reached my mouth was small and unornamented. It was complete. It was not treated as complete.

What I remember most are not “facts” that would satisfy a timeline but the granular details a courtroom seldom values: the stiff radiators, a stale tang in the air, the way the room’s acoustics made my own voice sound like someone else’s. I left without a speech, drifted through Soho, and steadied myself in a red-velvet cinema where a woman on screen quietly rearranged a room so it might love her back. By the time the projector wound down, my breathing had evened. Not catharsis — oxygen.

I’m careful not to confuse stories. My night was not Tessa’s. But Prima Facie sent me back to it because the play articulates a mismatch I had never managed to describe: the language of harm must travel across two incompatible clocks. The body’s clock freezes, loops, refuses sense. The court’s clock demands exactness: minute marks, labels, tidy cause and effect. When those clocks are set against each other, confusion gets misread as dishonesty; politeness as assent; survival tactics as compliance.

Private notes I wrote at the time — fragmentary lines about a mind “watching through glass,” about the odd relief of expiry dates because at least the world admitted things end — were my clumsy attempts to draft an affidavit for a room that didn’t exist. Prima Facie gives that room a blueprint. It doesn’t make the old night harmless. It makes it legible.

If you’re drawn to intimate, clear-eyed stories about consent and selfhood, this theme sits at the heart of my novel Nowhere to Return.

Read the chapter that echoes this review → [Chapter II: Z]

What Prima Facie did to my sightlines

For months after the show, I kept testing the questions the play throws back at us:

• When a person’s story arrives haltingly, can I resist the itch to neaten it for them — so that I can hold it more comfortably?
• When someone says, “I wasn’t ready; I didn’t know how to leave,” can I hear that as information, not evidence of weakness?
• When a first “no” is small, can I treat it as complete?

These are not theoretical exercises. They are the difference between being a witness and being a judge when you were never sworn in. Peter Marks’s “active volcano” line has circulated because it balances awe with accuracy; the heat here is channelled, not reckless. The overflow, for me, wasn’t the end speech (which some critics found didactic), but the scrupulous tracing of how power alters a room’s acoustics: who is allowed to pause; whose pauses get weaponised; who is taught that refusal must be pretty to count. (The Washington Post)

Aftershocks, on and off stage

The production’s footprint has been unusually civic. In London, the team partnered with the Schools Consent Project to drive consent education; law firms hosted screenings in support of the same work. NT Live’s capture became the highest-grossing event-cinema release since the pandemic, with box-office data underscoring that audiences would buy tickets to a night that asks them to listen harder, not just cheer louder. And the conversation has kept moving: features tracked the influx of letters to Miller and Comer from people newly able to name their own nights, and in 2025 a “one last time” tour for Comer was announced for 2026, designed to keep the dialogue in public view. (WhatsOnStage, ClearyGottlieb, Screen Daily, The Numbers, The Guardian)

Where this leaves me (and maybe you)

I don’t leave Prima Facie wanting to turn theatres into tribunals or reduce life to lesson. I leave grateful that a piece of art insisted on two simultaneous truths:

1. Procedure makes justice possible.
2. Procedure can make justice impossible — when we mistake tidy narratives for truth.

The night I left that London flat, I did not shout. I did not file. I watched a film. I breathed. In the years since, I’ve sometimes judged that girl for her quiet exit; I’ve sometimes judged her for walking in. Prima Facie didn’t hand me a retroactive verdict. It lent me a steadier vocabulary. It insists that “no” does not owe anyone volume; that memory’s blurred edges are not proof of invention; that the ask is not to become a perfect witness but to be met by better listeners.

If you see the play, pay attention to your own habits: where you lean forward; where you resist; which silences you fill with suspicion. That audit is part of the work the show is asking us to do. It’s not catharsis. It’s rehearsal — for the next time someone in your life gives you their small, unadorned “no,” and you choose to treat it as complete.

Prima Facie has already changed theatres and lives; its longer legacy depends on what we do after the curtain. For me, that means writing more precisely about desire and reluctance; letting the “Z” chapter in Nowhere to Return keep its awkwardness; resisting the temptation to make every scene cinematic. The body is not a neat argument. The law needs it to be. Between those two facts is a person. This play — at its best — keeps her at the centre and refuses to move.

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Credits & quick facts

• Writer: Suzie Miller. Director: Justin Martin. Set/Costume: Miriam Buether. Lighting: Natasha Chivers. Sound: Ben & Max Ringham. Original score: Rebecca Lucy Taylor (Self Esteem). (Entertainment Weekly)
• Awards: 2023 Olivier Awards — Best Actress (Jodie Comer) and Best New Play; 2023 Tony Awards — Best Actress in a Play (Jodie Comer). (The Guardian, Tony Awards)
• Impact & reach: NT Live highest-grossing event-cinema release since the pandemic; production partnered with the Schools Consent Project; further screenings and outreach sustained the conversation. (Screen Daily)
• National Theatre Live. Prima Facie — Official Promotional Poster. Prima Facie Official Website. Available at: https://primafacieplay.com/the-play (Accessed: 31 August 2025).

The billboard smiled.
The sky dimmed.
And for three minutes, I believed the apocalypse could be tender.

I went in blind — no trailers, no synopsis, just a weekday screening and a name that sounded like a memoir. Then the film’s first-presented section (the story’s third act in a backwards structure) cracked open like a quiet sci-fi: the internet falters, power grids wheeze, birds drop, strangers stare at the same dumbly cheerful message: “Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” The mood is not panic but hushed bewilderment. I watched a separated couple gravitate back toward each other, not out of plot logic but muscle memory — the gentle choreography of people who once knew how to make tea in the same kitchen. They stand beneath a dimming sky and, with that end-times softness, tilt their heads up as if stars might answer. It plays like apocalypse as chamber piece, an eerie, melancholic fade that several critics also flagged as the film’s most delicately executed movement.

Only later did I understand the sleight of hand: this crumbling world is Chuck’s, and what looks “global” is an intimate catastrophe — the universe closing like an eyelid on one ordinary life. I found the idea indecently beautiful and a little cruel: the world dies because someone does. A cosmic joke, a cosmic truth. The billboard’s politeness — “Thanks, Chuck!” — is obscene and moving at once, a retirement banner for existence. That contradiction is the film’s native temperature, and yes, its structure really does run in reverse from apocalypse to childhood, a choice many reviewers identify as central to how the story reframes our attention.

Absurdity that behaves like weather

Flanagan’s absurdism isn’t loud. It doesn’t stack oddities for sparkle; it lets banality curdle into omen. A news crawl hiccups. A call centre script fails. Someone waters the garden as the soil gives up. The result is the gentlest Beckettian dread: a comedy of manners trespassed by metaphysics. The Financial Times put it simply — the opening section is the strongest because it trusts mood over explanation and lets the world end at human scale. I felt that in my sternum.

And then — the dance.

The drum that found my pulse

For me, The Life of Chuck became mine the instant a woman’s drumline cut through the street noise. You know those ungovernable moments when sound trespasses on thought? A rhythm arrives from another life, and something inside you stands up. In the film, the beat finds Chuck. It finds me. It finds, maybe, a bookshop clerk in a red dress walking home after a bad breakup — someone who should keep moving, keep sensible, and yet stops because the rhythm has other plans. No lyrics. No speeches. Just tempo and bodies. Chuck’s suit loosens; the street makes room; strangers discover they’re tuned to the same key.

To some viewers, that sequence seems sentimental or disjointed; to me, it’s the wager that makes the film worth defending. It’s Camus’s yes with hips. It’s an argument for joy as appropriate to the absurd: not denial, not delusion — proportionate response. The scene’s divisiveness is well-documented in reviews, which call it either the film’s heart or its misstep. I know which camp I live in. I heard the drum and, embarrassingly, had to unclench my hands.

That moment also taught me what the movie is formally doing. Flanagan is not installing a twist so much as training attention. The street dance arrives before we know how the pieces fit; only later do we grasp it as a thesis in motion: communion without explanation. It helps that the film explicitly braids in Whitman — “I contain multitudes” — and builds Act titles around that idea in both King’s text and the adaptation’s framing.

If you’re enjoying this reflection, consider supporting my writing with a small gesture — like buying me a coffee☕️. It keeps these words (and me) dancing a little longer.

“39 Great Years” and the ethics of scale

The billboard is a joke with teeth. Its cheer flattens differences the way systems do — advertising, news, even eulogies. The dance argues the opposite: difference made radiant by rhythm. Between them — smile and drum — the film proposes an ethics of scale. When the world collapses to the size of one life, what matters is not spectacle but texture: how a hand hesitates on a door; how two once-lovers rediscover the grammar of standing side by side; how a stranger lets herself look foolish for the duration of a chorus. That’s why the opening section feels so potent and why some critics wished the film had trusted silence more and voiceover less. Nick Offerman’s narration — faithful to King’s prose and soothing on the ear — can, at times, explain what the images already sing.

Personal cosmology 101 (with Whitman in the margins)

When the chronology winds back to young Chuck — school corridors, an attic rumour, grandparents haloed by grief — the film tests its grandest claim at the smallest aperture: a child’s metaphysics. There’s an attic where ghosts appear before they die. There’s a boy beginning to sense that being a person is a serious thing. Here, the Whitman line stops being a slogan and becomes a cosmology: each life is an ecology of fears, jokes, private liturgies, stray songs. This is the section many critics single out as the emotional core; it’s also where the movie convinces me it’s not merely “feel-good King,” but earnest, difficult King — the kind that risks sincerity without armour.

Where I agree with the sceptics

Let me grant the countercase. There are moments when Chuck confuses accessibility with explication, where it tells me the abyss rather than letting me overhear it. The score swells just when my body wanted quiet; the voiceover tidies what might have hummed if left unresolved. TIME’s review calls out these “warm fuzzies” that the film works a little too hard to earn, and I felt that in the pit of my stomach once or twice. But I also think those choices are the cost of anti-cynicism in a year that treats tenderness as naivety. I’ll pay it.

What the performances teach us about tone

Tom Hiddleston plays Chuck with a curiosity that reads as mischief softened by kindness; he’s less a man explained than a weather system you notice changing your day. Around him, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan give us civilians adjusting to unreality with the pragmatic grace of people who still need to catch a bus. Mark Hamill, as the grandfather, armours tenderness with gruffness in a way that re-centres the film whenever it threatens to float away — several outlets have noted how decisively he grounds the childhood material. And yes, this is a real ensemble, more woven than star-vehicle; even AP’s review, cool on the whole, concedes that balance.

Absurdism that lets love breathe

What the movie ultimately argues is not that life is short — we know — but that meaning is textural, not propositional. You do not win an argument with the void; you keep rhythm until the body believes you. The absurd, in this telling, is not nonsense but excess sense — too much significance for any one frame to hold. That’s why the dance works on me as philosophy, not flourish: it invites a practice, a way to be available to the uncanny ordinary.

And yes, I cried a little for the divorced couple at the end of the world — not because they reconcile (they do) but because the film refuses to make their tenderness heroic. The apocalypse here is a clarifier: in the absence of alibis, what remains is how we behave. On that front, the FT’s take is fair: the film wobbles in tone, sometimes over-narrates, but when it breathes, it’s quietly astonishing.

What I carried out of the cinema

I left with a single, impolite urge: to dance outside. Not to celebrate, not to grieve — just to mark that I am here in a world that might, at any second, decide it is not. I kept thinking of that bookshop girl in red, the drummer whose beat found us, the polite obscenity of a billboard thanking a man as the sky goes dark. From the small to the vast in one cut, back and forth across the film’s backwards ladder, I felt what Whitman meant by containing multitudes. The movie’s reverse order matters for this very reason: it teaches re-reading as a moral act. You go back to the beginning (the “end”) with the after-knowledge of the “start,” and suddenly the texture of gestures — how someone reaches for a hand; how someone lets go — is the plot. Reviewers keep emphasising that backwards design and its Whitman spine; they’re right.

A note on reverence and risk

Flanagan’s fidelity to King — right down to the cushioning voiceover — will either endear you or keep you at arm’s length. For some, it reads like deference where cinema wants ellipses. For others, it’s a means of welcoming non-genre audiences into a metaphysical fable. I occupied both seats, sometimes in the same minute. But even where the movie over-explains, I felt its risk: imagining an end-of-the-world story without swagger, one that keeps the camera on sidewalks and faces, an “anti-spectacle apocalypse” more concerned with the quiet miracle of every single life than with grand destruction. If that sounds like your wavelength, there’s already a small chorus of critics nodding along.

Why this felt personal

There’s a reason my body answered the drum. In my own strange year, I’ve learned that resonance arrives uninvited — sometimes in a gallery, sometimes in a hospital corridor, sometimes on the walk home when the universe forgets its lines. The Life of Chuck understands that the most “philosophical” experiences rarely present as theories. They announce themselves as rhythm: a pulse that turns witnesses into part-time dancers, strangers into accomplices.

So yes, I loved the absurdity. I loved the cosmic rudeness of a billboard that thanks a man while the sky goes out. But what stays with me is smaller: a red dress finding time, a suit loosening into a grin, a drum that remembers me. If that’s not philosophy, it’s at least a way to live until the lights dim — attentive, available, a little foolish.

Credits & further reading

• The film’s reverse-chronology (apocalypse first, childhood last), its Whitman thread, and TIFF trajectory are well-documented in coverage and summaries. ([AP News], [Wikipedia])
• On the opening section’s power, the dance’s divisiveness, and voiceover concerns, see the Financial Times review.
• On critiques of sentimentality / “warm fuzzies,” see TIME.
• On the film’s “anti-spectacle apocalypse” emphasis on ordinary life, see AVForums.
• On ensemble notes — especially Mark Hamill anchoring the family strand — see SF Chronicle and AP News.

If this found you at the right beat, share the piece, drop a line about your unexpected “dance moment,” and let’s see how many multitudes we can gather in one comment thread

A photograph.
A pencil-skirt pose.
A teenage girl imagining freedom, framed by the standards of her era — and by a stranger’s gaze.

In The Years, Annie Ernaux distils the contradictions of post-war womanhood: desire entangled with discipline, pleasure with shame, self-discovery with social scripting.

Photographing Desire, Becoming “The New Girl”

Annie 2’s wry embodiment of the 1957 Yvetot photo arrests us: her hips angled outward to both accentuate and slim her thighs, light grazing cheekbone and chest — a performance of femininity in motion. “She’s probably thinking only of herself, of this photo that’s being taken of her, capturing the new girl she feels she’s becoming”. It evokes the post‑war New Look — cinched waists, soft curves, a carefully calibrated allure. Women’s magazines like Elle (founded 1945) shaped this ideal: by the 1960s, its circulation had swelled to 800,000, broadcasting a glamorous — and gendered — standard nationwide.

A Road to Freedom — And Conformity

In that era, securing a driver’s license symbolised autonomy. The vehicle was more than metal — it was a mobile identity. Yet, as much as it promised liberation, it also tethered women back to domestic ideals. The image of the modern woman behind the wheel sat comfortably alongside the image of the feminine ideal in pencil skirt and billowing hair — both celebrated by consumer culture, both circling the same societal orbit.

Sex, Shame, and Surrender

Annie’s first encounter with H is terse and brutal. When he says, “Take off your clothes,” she obeys instantly. It is obedience as instinct, layered with the dread and dissolution of self. She cries out, and he dismisses her pain: “I’d rather you came than kick up such a fuss!”. The performance of consent, without desire, chills the air.

Watching Annie stage this scene, I found myself aching with personal resonance. I wept — uncontainably — for eight minutes, not because I was an actor, but because I recognised that young body on stage as mine: not in detail, but in the choreography of compliance, the unspoken “should,” the flattened space between wanting and obeying.

The Rhythm Method: Regulating Womanhood

Her mind flickers to the Ogino‑Knaus rhythm method — a calendar used to avoid pregnancy by abstaining around fertile days. It represents the ultimate fusion of the sacred and the surveilled: female sexuality reduced to arithmetic, controlled by ecclesiastical norms disguised as science. In Annie’s mind, the rhythm calendar is not merely contraception — it is compulsion.

From Shame to Defiance

After being labelled “whore” by peers, Annie’s panic evolves into a faltering defiance. On the camp’s finis‑soirée, she follows H again — not to reclaim, but to locate agency in repetition. And yet, the result is unchanged: he declares, “I’m too big… Women often only cum after they’ve given birth.” Her pleasure remains irrelevant. Her silence remains the only permissible feedback.

Happiness in Transgression

Finally, she asserts, “When I leave the camp, I look back at the place where I am sure I have never been happier. Where I discovered parties, freedom, and men’s bodies.” This happiness is not delight but a breach of boundaries. It is laced with shame, yes — but also with a shudder of autonomy: an illicit, painful sense of self in motion, even if only in fragments.

Historic Threads Weaving Through the Narrative

Gendered Expectations in Post‑War France

Women’s magazines dictated that love and marriage were women’s ultimate goals — as if failing to attract a man meant personal failure. These publications encouraged women to subordinate individuality for romantic fulfilment [G1–G4].

French Youth Camps and Catholic Influence

Summer camps, often organised by Catholic “patronages,” were morally infused institutions teaching discipline, camaraderie, and national belonging via recreation — a context for Annie’s experience [Y1–Y4].

Catholicism and Moral Authority

Even as France slowly secularised, the Catholic Church’s moral frameworks persisted, regulating sexuality and youth around purity and obedience — especially in rural and camp settings.

Feminist Backdrop

The women’s liberation wave was still years away. While France had granted women the right to vote in 1944, meaningful representation in government remained scarce through the 1950s [F1–F4].

This passage of The Years refracts the anxiety and alienation of youth, shaped by gender, religion, and culture. Annie’s tale is not just personal — it is emblematic of a generation navigating the liminal space between innocence and social scripting. Her pain, her shame, her fleeting defiance — they ripple beyond the stage and into the quiet places of memory, urging us to feel, to witness, to remember.

References & Further Reading

G = Gendered Expectations in Post-War France
[G1] Hargreaves, Alec G. Post-War French Popular Culture. Oxford University Press, 2007. Link
[G2] “Représentations et images de la femme dans la presse féminine.” Clio. Women, Gender, History, 2002. Link
[G3] Timke, Edward. “Advertising and the Construction of Womanhood in Postwar France.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015. PDF
[G4] Colvin, Kelly Ricciardi. Gender and French Identity after the Second World War. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. PDF

Y = French Youth Camps and Catholic Influence
[Y1] Downs, Laura Lee. Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880–1960. Duke University Press, 2004. Link
[Y2] Metton, Bernard G. “FROM THE POPULAR FRONT TO THE EASTERN
FRONT: YOUTH MOVEMENTS, TRAVEL, AND FASCISM
IN FRANCE (1930–1945)” University of Michigan, 2015. PDF
[Y3] “Jacques Sevin.” Wikipedia. Link
[Y4] “Parochial patronage.” Wikipedia. Link

F = Feminist Backdrop
[F1] “Feminism in France.” Wikipedia. Link
[F2] “And My Frigidaire Is Here: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017. Link
[F3] Downs, Laura Lee. Childhood in the Promised Land. Duke University Press, 2004. Link
[F4]Timke, Edward. “Advertising and the Construction of Womanhood in Postwar France.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015. PDF

Some stages smell of antiseptic.
Some vows burn like fever.
Some curtains never close.

Three poems from another theatre — 
where anaesthesia feels like silk,
promises are made on burning ground,
and recovery is nothing but waiting.

Not a sequence,
not a script — 
just the body,
and what it carries back.

Painkillers Don’t Apologise

——from another theatre

Hey, darling — 
It’s okay.
Just take it.
It’ll pass…

Then a corridor — 
fluorescent glare — 
nurses’ steps — 
sliding doors to the theatre.
Anaesthesia smooth as silk,
promising oblivion.

You drift — 
The pain blurs.
At the edge of nothing,
you hear it:
beep… beep…
the monitor’s metallic lullaby.
A moan from the next bed — 
“Help… please…”
Your body reels,
unruly,
limbs and organs
no longer yours to guide.

Which ache is yours?
Which scream belongs to you?
You don’t know — 
just this:
you need to pee
on that cold bed.
No dignity remains.
No shame — 
only necessity.
One time, two times,
and then you stop noticing.

You lie naked — 
vulnerable — 
before strangers
whose eyes hold no desire,
only protocol.
Waiting to get a clean-cut scalpel.

A cannula:
morphine or antiemetic — 
warm venom coursing in.
Your head spins — 
a dizzying high
after agony — 
a vertiginous, ecstatic fringe
where pain and pleasure collide.

You slip — 
into a world
you cannot recall.
Voices — 
“Darling, are you still hurting?”
Ever polite, ever kind.
You nod.
You lie.
Exhausted patience
behind your eyes.

Waiting for the next dose — 
waiting for relief — 
tears breaking free
in the sterile hush.

You fall.
Not breaking — 
but freed.
A fractured breath — 
one last gasp — 
and you scream.

☕️If you’d like to keep the poems brewing,
buy me a coffee

It Began with Blue Lines

——She followed, but you never knew

Soft, vertical — 
they flowed with change,
and you followed,
shimmering,
living by their rhythm.

You said you would leave
for the one you loved,
not knowing
if you’d return.

She helped you pack,
gently warned you
of the dangers
on the red planet.

But she never stopped you.

Perhaps it was duty.
Perhaps it was fate.
Perhaps — 
an ideal.

The crimson ground
steamed with fire.
You didn’t know
she had come too,
to that land of suffering.

She had made a promise — 
one she would not break.
This was the vow
of a messenger
from Planet X7831:
never to break a promise.

She crossed the fire line alone,
clearing the road ahead for you.

In the end,
she fell — 
silently,
having fulfilled
her life’s vow.

Amid the heat and desolation,
she left the path ahead
less treacherous,
less unbearable.

But you never saw her again.

You returned
to the blue planet,
returned home.

All that belonged
to the red planet — 
and to her — 
faded like smoke,
as if
it had never happened.

Recovery Room

——a poem after germ cell cancer

Hey love,
you should wake up.

Your eyelids are heavy.
You were just talking to the very kind old man — 
he promised you’d have a beautiful dream.

Then something shifts.
Voices — soft, overlapping — 
you don’t know how many.
You don’t know who’s speaking,
but you sure someone is calling your name
and checking your date of birth.

They said you need to wake up.
said you’re being given painkillers.
The surgery went well.
The doctor will come see you soon.

Green, white, and blue.
Your throat is dry.
It’s hard to speak.
A few hours — gone from memory.

Oh, if you’re hungry, let me know.
I’ll go get you a sandwich
with tea or juice.

You can’t move just yet.
Your limbs are still remembering themselves.
Your eyes are still closed. Still resting.
Someone is calling your name.

She’s shivering.
Give her that blanket.
Time passes — 
you don’t know how long.
Until warmth returns to your skin.

You can call me anytime.
I’m right beside you.
A voice, soft as an angel’s,
echoes by your ear.

You’ll use so much courage — 
so much energy — 
just to move a little.

There’s a loneliness.
You watch time pass,
minute by minute.
You have nothing.
No phone,
no messages,
no greetings.
Only the angels in green
to speak with.

One o’clock.
Two o’clock.
Nine. Ten.
People come, people go
But most of the time,
no one knows where they’re going.

And they can’t be told.
Only recovering.
Only waiting.

Some wounds close.
Some stay open.
Some just learn to wait.

All poems originally published on Substack
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Three clicks into a life

First click: a sepia oval flashes up — 1946, Lillebonne. A six-year-old girl in Sunday best, round cheeks, serious, bodice tight over a small, proud belly.

Second click, 1949: the same girl lies back on a pebble beach, legs straight, face tilted to the sun as if warmth alone might let her wriggle free of her “little-girl” skin.

Third click, July 1955: two convent-school friends stand shoulder to shoulder; clouds pile up behind a brick wall, and a shaft of light skims the first swell of a breast.

In Eline Arbo’s English-language staging of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, every slide lands like a flash bulb, pulling us through bomb nights, ration bread and the jolt of first desire before we can blink. This essay — first in a three-part series — stays with childhood (1941–54) and the shock of puberty (1955–56), setting those French snapshots beside echoes from my own Chinese family.

1. 1941–48 | Memory begins with sirens

“The images that follow us all the way into sleep, real or imaginary…”

For young Annie, the Second World War isn’t scenery; it’s weather. She folds ration-coupon scraps into paper dolls while adults argue whether to flee the bombs or trust straw mattresses and luck. On stage, one actress lets out a raw air-raid siren — no recording could match the note that splits her throat. Children learn the sound of fear long before they can read a headline.

Frozen turnips, brick-heavy bread

Talk keeps circling back to food, or the lack of it. The winter of 1941–42 freezes turnips solid; corn bread sits in the stomach like a brick. French rationing started in 1940 and dragged on to 1949, so a child’s first sums are butter points, not times tables. Half a world away, my grandmother once queued at dawn for meat stamps during China’s Great Famine. Scarcity has many dialects, but the taste is the same.

Borrowed celebrations

Liberation brings lantern parades, funfairs, and circus tents in cratered streets. Grown-ups shout, “Life is outside!” The children sense the party belongs to survivors, not to them. Ernaux says her generation was “saddled with other people’s memories and a secret nostalgia for the time they’d missed by so little.” History, at six, is something you act out, not something you remember.

2. 1949–54 | Schoolroom drills & plastic miracles

Another slide: nine-year-old Annie on the Channel coast, feet together, shoulders stiff, but the frame can’t hold her ticking restlessness.

Obedience mapped out

The bell rings — line up. Teacher enters — stand. Questions are for adults only. Anyone raised in a mid-century classroom knows the drill, whether the blackboard quotes catechism or socialist slogans.

Sorting by sex

Boys fling chalk and swear; girls are pushed toward “quiet games” and told to long for breasts, pubic hair, the red badge of first menstruation. Politics isn’t for them; good manners are. Yet new products reshape the lesson. Ernaux recites a litany of post-war marvels: Bic pens (1950), Tampax (in French magazines by 1951), Formica tops, pears in syrup, “more chic” than fruit off a tree. Plastic and penicillin promise freedom — and draft new rules on how a modern woman should look.

The Church’s X-ray gaze

A travelling preacher warns that onanism brings “very serious accidents,” prescribing bromides and arsenic. Two Annies answer in chorus:

“In bed — or in the toilet — we masturbated while the whole society watched.”

Pleasure refuses to wait for permission.

3. 1955–56 | Desire takes the microphone

“The future is too immense to imagine; it is coming, that’s all.”

The play’s most audacious tableau begins when fifteen-year-old Annie slips off her “disgraceful” ankle socks and crawls beneath the kitchen table to masturbate, her silhouette projected three uninterrupted minutes. Around her, the other Annies chant a litany of current events:

• The August 1953 public-sector strike (four million workers walked out for several days).

• Stalin’s death, 5 March 1953, was announced on the morning radio.

• Mass smallpox vaccinations were still organised in town halls, though compulsory inoculation dated back to 1902.

• The catastrophic North Sea floods of 31 Jan — 1 Feb 1953, which killed over 1,800 people in the Netherlands.

• Rising casualties in Algeria, a “non-war”, French households preferred to ignore.

The juxtaposition is brutal and clarifying: geopolitical news drones on while a teenage girl maps her own pulse. Historians may track strike statistics; Ernaux tracks lubrication improvisations. Both datasets are necessary, but only the latter describes how history feels beneath the skin.

Friendly molestations

An uncle’s semi-sexual pat on Annie’s waist — “already looks like a little lady” — reveals how patriarchy cloaks assault in a compliment. The preceding masturbation scene has foregrounded bodily autonomy; the flippant touch lands like sulfur.

Colonial fog in the parlour

After dinner, the women dismiss Algerian violence with a shrug: “Algeria is France — exactly, like most of Africa.” Empire hides inside syntax, its brutality smoothed by domestic chat. Children soak it up as naturally as laundry steam.

Sputnik, saucers, sinless worlds

In an anachronistic but telling aside, the Annies wonder why “the Russians” will soon launch a satellite while the Americans lag behind; Sputnik 1 will indeed reach orbit on 4 October 1957, giving their speculation an uncanny prescience.

The scene ends in ecstatic release: Annie climbs onto the kitchen table and dances while others recall reading Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954) and smuggled copies of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Domestic timber becomes a stage; the home becomes a launchpad for rebellion.

4. Mirrors across oceans: a personal interlude

My mother keeps a grayscale portrait of her elder sister, who died undernourished before age ten. Ernaux’s line about dead children in every household could be lifted from any oral-history project in Henan or Normandy. Likewise, the school edict “don’t ask questions” mirrors my own Beijing classrooms, where deviation from the “standard answer” costs you ten points.

Ernaux teaches that memory is relational, “_pairing the dead with the living, dreams with history_.” When I recall my grandmother’s famine, I also recall Ernaux’s frozen turnips; the memories cross-pollinate.

5. Why begin here?

When summarising _The Years_, critics often race toward 1968 or neoliberal disillusion. Starting instead with ration coupons, school drills and reddening adolescence reveals how revolutions germinate. Before a woman storms barricades, she must first learn to salute the flag, to swallow shame, to swap ankle socks for silk stockings. Childhood is not prologue; it is the laboratory where future dissent ferments.

Pocket reading list (all under 300 pages)

Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse — the beach novel that let 1950s girls name their desire.

Claudia Goldin, Career and Family — story-driven data on how work reshaped womanhood.

Maria Stephanides, The Ration Book Diet— British memoir echoing Ernaux’s frozen-turnip childhood.

Reference

Eline Arbo (adapt.) & Annie Ernaux, _The Years_ — Almeida edition.** Nick Hern Books (2025). Purchase link: https://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/the-years

This is Part I of a three-part essay series on The Years.

Follow me here on Medium for the next chapters.

Some pictures blur. Others develop.

There is a kind of silence that isn’t peaceful.
It sweats. It aches. It waits to become something else.

This triptych moves through sweat, silence, and rhythm — a bodily map of what it means to keep becoming when nothing moves.

In Say Dying, we lie in the weight of a fevered July — stuck between naps, prayer, and the body’s strange ability to endure.

Becoming enters slowly — through books unread, mugs forgotten, and days that quietly unfold into strength.

Forever & ever doesn’t speak. It pulses. A stage without actors. A gesture that becomes flight.

This is not a resolution.
Only breath,
and the echo it leaves behind.

Say Dying

Sweltering July
The fourth nap of the day — 
Skin damp, breath shallow.

The sick bichon wheezes into sleep,
caught between drowsiness and wakefulness,
between climax
and collapse.

A migraine never truly heals.
It might be the end of me.
But sleep,
Or even death might cure it.

Silence
is scrambled eggs with chives,
sizzling without a flame.

Silence
is bare skin.
Sticky sweat,
a prayer too quiet to reach God.

S’il vous plaît,
Let the sun carry me away.
Let the night
melt me into the cave.

Becoming

You’re not late.
You’re not behind.
You’re not waiting
to be chosen.

You’re walking — 
sometimes through noise,
sometimes just through air.
A day full of motion
A day that won’t move.

Some mornings are windless.
Some nights never close.
But even silence has rhythm.
Even stillness takes shape.

Strength, perhaps — 
isn’t loud.
It steeps, like tea forgotten
in a chipped white mug.

Unread books pile quietly.
You don’t know when — 
but one day
you’ll open them.

No one sees the weight
stillness carries.
No one hears
how long becoming takes.

It’s not a race.
Just time,
unfolding — 
with or without us.

Forever & ever

It began in silence,
like a body remembering breath before the music.
Not performance — 
but pulse,
a softness unfolding between light and flesh.

I watched as the air thickened with meaning,
as red fabric fell like forgetting,
like a promise slipping from the shoulders of time.
The shells did not crash,

they surrendered — 
slow spirals toward the ground,
each gesture a question
posed in another language.

Lyrebirds did not sing.
They became flight.
They stitched themselves to the sky
and called it survival.

There was a rhythm inside the chaos,
a throb beneath the glittering disarray.
Every fall a step,
every step a bloom,
every bloom a breath that said, I am.

We moved without moving,
we’re drunk without drinking,
we listened without knowing what the sound was for.

Just thuds,
and thuds,
and thuds again.

The kind that echo inside the body
long after the stage goes dark.

Some silences bruise.
Some waiting ripens.
Some thuds echo long after the body has stilled.

This was not healing.
Not surviving.
Just becoming — 
again,
and again,
and again.

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These three poems were originally published at

• Say Dying
• Becoming
• Forever & ever

What lingers after the curtain falls?

Several months on, I’m still haunted — not by the storylines, but by what the bodies dared to do. These three London productions didn’t just perform; they asked a question I haven’t stopped answering: how far can movement take meaning?

Dance is a silent language. It vaults past text and timestamp, conjuring realities that feel both ancient and brand-new. Earlier this year I watched that wordless tongue twist itself into three contrasting shapes:

• Giselle… — François Gremaud and Samantha van Wissen’s one-woman deconstruction at Royal Ballet and Opera’s Linbury Theatre.
• The Little Prince — Anne Tournié’s dance-circus spectacular at the London Coliseum.
• Romeo and Juliet — Kenneth MacMillan’s diamond-anniversary revival for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden.

Taken together, they trace three vectors — deconstruction, visual spectacle and classical tradition — while circling the same insistent question: where are the edges of dance?

Giselle… — Dancing the story, telling the dance

The stage was almost empty: hard white floor, one wooden chair, a flautist, a sax, a violin and a harp off to the side. Out stepped Samantha van Wissen, part narrator, part medium. She began to speak the 1841 plot of Giselle — the rustic girl, the faithless aristocrat, the fatal heartbreak — but her body kept interrupting, annotating each line with flick-book gestures. One moment she sketched Giselle’s buoyant jetés; the next she mimed the wilis’ moonlit vengeance.

Gremaud’s title ends in an ellipsis — Giselle… — signalling an unfinished conversation. The Guardian admired the concept even while docking a star for “over-length”, calling the piece “an intelligent deconstruction, if a touch indulgent”. BalletPosition, by contrast, praised it as “a lesson in how to re-author a canonical ballet without resorting to parody”. The official Dance Reflections blurb bills the show as a “theatrical, musical and choreographic piece about Giselle, not of it” — a neat disclaimer for purists.

Van Wissen’s own surname supplies an extra layer. In Dutch, Wissen means “to erase”. Like Giselle’s spectral afterlife, the performer seems to hover between presence and deletion; she exists, almost, to vanish. That ambiguity deepens the work’s meditation on memory: what survives of a ballet once we strip away pointe shoes, gauze and corps de ballet? Luca Antignani’s re-orchestration helps, paring Adolphe Adam’s romantic sugar down to chamber bones — flute, sax, violin, harp — so that every gesture lands in forensic silence.

Watching months later in recollection, I’m less interested in how precisely the show retold Giselle than in how fiercely it defended the porous border between text and body. Gremaud asks us to toggle, moment by moment, between hearing a story and feeling its muscular imprint. That toggling lingers.

The Little Prince — A dream-dance among the stars

If Giselle… is a lecture-performance in minimalist whites, The Little Prince arrives like a roll of cosmic wallpaper. Anne Tournié’s adaptation — already toured through Paris, Dubai, Sydney and Broadway before hitting the Coliseum — folds dance, aerial harness work and wraparound video into a child ’s-eye odyssey.

Critics are split down the middle. BroadwayWorld dubbed it “plenty of eye-candy but little to feed the heart”, while The Times admired its “gravity-defying whimsy à la Cirque du Soleil”. The Stage called it “an oddity — at its best, a roller-coaster”. Even Wikipedia’s neutral summary can’t resist listing the production’s globe-trotting CV before conceding Broadway shuttered early due to uneven reviews.

Yet box-office resilience hints at another truth: for many spectators — especially those French families cheering beside me — the show’s scale matters more than choreographic subtlety. Planets wheel across a LED scrim, silk straps hoist dancers into zero-G spirals, and Chris Mouron’s gravel-voiced Narrator recites Saint-Exupéry’s French text while English surtitles drift overhead. As a Mandarin-speaker multitasking between two layers of subtitle, I felt momentarily remote — yet that very distance globalised the fable, freeing it from any single language root.

Does the piece advance the artform? Not really; its dance phrases rarely stretch beyond lyrical décor. But it does remind us that movement can hitch a ride on circus tech and still come down to earth with a theatrical jolt. And when Dylan Barone’s Little Prince skims a ribbon of starlight, you can almost forgive the dramaturgical thinness.

Romeo and Juliet — When tragedy turns epic

May brought me back to Covent Garden for the Royal Ballet’s 60-year-old war-horse, and I expected comfort food. Instead, I got a thunderbolt. Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 choreography may be canonical, but the 2025 revival felt newly oxygenated — in part because principal Marianela Nuñez (paired with William Bracewell the night I attended) delivered a Juliet of crystalline footwork fused to raw emotional risk. The Financial Times warned that certain cast pairings had “chemistry so combustible it poses a fire risk”; Nuñez and Bracewell proved the point.

Guardian critic Sarah Crompton awarded four stars to an earlier cast and marvelled at how MacMillan’s naturalism still “strikes like a match in dry tinder”. Seen and Heard International raved that the run provided “an astonishing company achievement”. And the Royal Ballet & Opera’s own season note calls the ballet “a modern classic celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2025” — company PR, yes, but accurate.

MacMillan refuses to prettify death. Verona jostles, sweats, draws steel; swordplay spills across Nicholas Georgiadis’s frescoed piazza. Juliet begins as a shy bourrée but grows ferocious: Nuñez shaped that arc with micro-gestures — a softened wrist here, a held breath there — until the crypt scene cracked open. When Bracewell’s Romeo dragged Nuñez’s seeming corpse across the stage, the house hushed; ballet’s usual weightlessness dissolved into something bruise-real. I found myself clutching the seat-back in front of me — a response I rarely bring to any three-act ballet.

Months later, that sensation outlasts the specifics of sword fights and Prokofiev fanfares. Classical form, far from constraining emotion, proved to be its amplifier.

Beyond the footlights: thinking about “boundaries”

Back in January, drafting my notes, I framed these productions as three answers to “where is dance’s border?” Re-reading that notebook now, I’d phrase it differently. Perhaps the question isn’t boundary-hunting at all but translation: how does movement translate emotion, narrative or philosophy across media, cultures and centuries?

• Giselle… translates a 19th-century ballet through spoken analysis and chamber-music transparency. Critics may quibble over pacing, but Gremaud’s device turns the stage into a live footnote, letting us watch the machinery of meaning rather than its final façade.
• The Little Prince translates literary nostalgia through the grammar of circus and projection. Its meaning lies less in choreographic phrase-building than in a childlike physics of weightlessness and zoom.
• Romeo and Juliet translates Shakespearean tragedy through the disciplined lexicon of classical ballet — proving yet again that strict form can carry molten emotion more potently than indulgent sprawl.

Seen together, the trio suggests that dance’s “limit” isn’t a line but a membrane: porous, stretchable, sometimes threadbare, always waiting for the next push.

What stays with me

Van Wissen’s voice faltering for a beat as she whispers the mad scene, then catching the rhythm again in her calves. Barone’s Little Prince leaning into a swallow-dive, body lanterned by stars.
Nuñez marking Juliet’s first kiss with a half-second freeze — time itself inhaling.

Those are three very different images, yet each survives the slow fade of memory because each nails an emotion wordless art can deliver better than prose.

Have you encountered a performance that bent — or erased — the rules of dance?
I’d love to hear what stayed with you.
On a stage, a street, or somewhere in between.

Want more of my stage ramblings?
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New essays, reviews, and quiet provocations — coming soon.

There is a door that never learned your name,
yet it opens whenever you remember how to breathe.

Home is not architecture.
It is the angle of a voice, the gravity of a scent, the pause before saying I’m okay.
These three poems drift around that invisible coordinate — 
where belonging lives even when walls collapse.

The first piece, The Jail, traces a reunion held together by silence. A name is never given; loss wears no uniform. There is only distance, the colour of waiting.

Home listens for small, practical devotions — pancake batter, pipes fixed, storms absorbed without applause — proof that love can be utterly mundane and therefore indestructible.

Home (II) dissolves into sensation: garlic sparking in hot oil, rain splitting the afternoon, a pink T-shirt catching stray light — an olfactory map no passport can stamp.

Not a chronology,
not a confession — 
just three rooms of air
where returning happens.

The Jail

It’s been two years.
I finally see you.

You’re thinner now.
I’ve grown taller.
You wear glasses — 
But your eyes, they look exhausted.

Through the lens, I see you clearly.
And yet — 
My own vision blurs.

We went to a friend’s wedding,
surrounded by familiar strangers.
None of them knew what happened to you.
They smiled, said “good” — 
as people do.

Only I knew this was brief.
You’d leave again.
You’d vanish — 
into that faraway place
you refused to name.

About time,
you only said:
“I’m okay.”

You asked me
to take care of her.
Told me — 
you still love her.
You never asked for forgiveness.

Later, we visited
that old amusement park.
Ten years ago,
you loved roller coasters.
I asked if you still did.
You said — 
“Of course.”
You missed the spinning,
the madness,
and the sweetness of ice cream.

I asked — 
why didn’t you come see me?

The white sheets.
The blue curtains.
The cannulas in my veins.
Painkillers never truly help.

You said,
you were busy.
Said I’d understand.
Said everything
will be okay, my darling.

And I said — 
don’t go.
Not this time.
Let’s run.
Let’s vanish.
You and me.
To the edge of the world.

You smiled.
Said we’ve already been there.
Still crowded.
Still loud.

Then I asked — 
what about a place
with no pain?

You didn’t answer.

Maybe
a place where
you never existed
is the only one.

Home
—to mum

Mama’s pancakes.
Mama’s love.
Mama’s lullaby — 
laced with the hush of snores.

Mama’s reminders.
her folded notes.
All of it grows
from the quiet soil we name as home.

“Fold the blanket — I love you.”
“Wipe the counter — I love you.”
“Pick up that stray hair — 
I’d still love you if you did it once more.”

When I asked her,
“What do you love about me?
Is it just because I carry your blood?”
She laughed,
“No. It’s just because you’re delightfully lazy.”

She’s nothing like the magazine’s iron lady.
But she snaps stubborn bottle caps,
fixes leaking pipes,
smooths family storms,
helps without applause,
dances with grace,
steals the mic at any party.

She is my mother.
The one and only.
Still my refuge,
even when I run.

I have lived under borrowed roofs,
in rented light;
But where Mama stands — 
that place feels right.

Home (II)
— the scent of being

Home has a scent.
Mostly,
it comes from her.

Fridge humming.
Washer thumping.
Wok clacking — 
oil and garlic in quick ping-pong.

A cuckoo calls,
frogs reply in kind.
Sparrow grips the wire.
The cat uncoils,
purring in the sun.

Mauve curtains lift.
A pink T-shirt
catches light
and folds it like an arm around the room.

Cicadas.
Sudden rain.
Lightning splits the sky.
Dad’s snore rises,
drops.
The TV quarrels on,
as oolong swirls warm in the air.

Books pile quietly
into towers no one dares to touch.
A dog barks — same spot,
same hour — by the door.

No weekdays,
only numbers on a fading calendar.

This is home:
still,
loud,
ours.

And nothing else smells quite the same.

There is a geography made only of moments:
wok-smoke, roller-coaster wind, a faded calendar square.
Step into it whenever the map forgets you.

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Two of the poems were originally published at

• The Jail
• Home