The elasticity of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit
If you’re a writer (of any form or discipline), and you’ve not been listening to Simon Stephens’ playwrights’ podcast for the Royal Court, then you should. Even if you hate theatre.
Listening to those brilliant people talk about their research and routine inspires in me the most visceral sense of identification. It is sometimes hard to hear stories of success for a writer who has had none, but these podcasts reveal the back-end on the process. To hear how others write their code, manage their lives and overcome their frustrations, anchors us together like a chain gang.
This, today, from Alistair McDowall, on his play Pomona:
I made Ned (the director) watch loads of, like, really really old Disney cartoons, black and white Disney cartoons. And I couldn’t really explain why… I was just like ‘These are in there’. And then I realised later it was because, if you watch like a really old Mickey Mouse cartoon, or even before that, ‘Oswald The Lucky Rabbit’ or whatever… These cartoons that are really primitive line drawings basically — these slightly creepy black and white cartoons — is that the characters have a kind of elasticity to them, and an elasticity in their morality as well as in their actual shape and character and what have you. So, like, Mickey Mouse might save someone, but he also might fire off a revolver and smoke a cigar. I loved that in those early cartoons there was always a simmering threat of violence. Pomona is the same world as that — there’s an elasticity to everything. Anything can happen at any point.
I’ve been watching a lot of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit today. I didn’t want to revisit early Mickey Mouse because my brain has mixed Mickey up with too many things, from the toy I had as a kid, to Disney’s Nazi sympathies. I’d never heard of Oswald though. Apparently he was becoming a huge hit but Disney didn’t own the rights to him. When he couldn’t take Oswald with him when he set up his own studio, he created Mickey Mouse instead. It’s kinda heartbreaking really. There’s an animation someone’s made and put on YouTube which shows Oswald squeezing through the bars in his contractual prison to go visit Walt; when he peers through the window, he finds Mickey in his place on the draughtsman’s desk. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
The first Oswald cartoon I watched today was Oh What a Knight, in which Oswald happens upon a beautiful (cat)maiden at the top of a tower, falls in love, and then attempts to rescue her from a beastly captor. To reach her balcony, he rides a wave made from rope; when he gets there, he stretches her arm three feet so he has more to kiss. Later, he will swim through the air to return to her.
Watching these old cartoons, when the tropes of cartoons were first being established, is kind of incredible. It makes me sound so jaded and backwards-looking, but it’s true that they don’t make ’em like they used to. Yes, we can laugh at the violence of them — I’m thinking of Itchy and Scratchy now — but the mix of that repercussion-free cruelty with such joyful naivety, and such ingenuity, is kind of astounding to me. I’m not sure where else we see worlds like this any more.
Which brings me to Pomona, the play that Ali McDowall was talking about. When I first saw it in 2014 I talked a lot about how I felt that it was a Mobius Strip. Y’know, one of those twisted paper circles that have one continuous side, but no end and no beginning. It felt like a Mobius Strip in structure, but also in its reference to the M60, Manchester’s ring road, and the ‘underbelly’ of the city. When I watched Stranger Things last year, I thought about Pomona again, in ‘The Upside-Down’. No surprise that both feature Dungeons and Dragons. I love the idea of those games as an invisible layer than we drop over our existing lives, like an augmented reality where, as Ali says, “anything can happen”. When Oswald The Lucky Rabbit lives his life, he can break all the rules: of physics, of biology… He can break them 15 times in a minute, then remake them and break them again. ‘Genre’ worlds these days seem to stick more rigidly to single principles of difference. This world is in the future, this world is in space, this world has robots. There remains little room for that elasticity.
McDowall is right; Pomona, and X, the play he had on at the Royal Court early last year, both had an Oswaldness to them. One thing became another became another. One time you’d fall, another you’d fly, another you’d swim through the air.
Absolutely beautiful.
