Performers work with sounds, bodies and movement, while the writer’s only tool is language. So writing about the performing arts is something of a challenge: how can one art form get across the essence of another? How can we use language to capture performance accurately, when performance speaks a language of its own?
It’s a challenge to which writers have always been drawn, in part, I imagine, because performers – who willingly expose themselves to risk and scrutiny – make such fascinating characters.
In my early 20s, I studied singing at a music college in London, and my novel, A Very Nice Girl, draws on my own experiences as a performer. It tells the story of Anna, a 24-year-old soprano training to be an opera singer at a London-based conservatoire. She’s living a life of sacrifice, discipline, and self-doubt, all for the ephemeral high of performance. In her life off stage, she’s insecure, uncertain about the role she should be playing, both with her opinionated female friends, and also with Max, the enigmatic older man she meets one night when singing jazz.
Books that include scenes of musical or theatrical performance often explore ideas of performance in a broader sense – the way we try on different identities or perform to conceal aspects of ourselves. The following 10 are some of my favourites.
1. The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
Erika, a failed concert pianist, teaches at the Vienna Conservatory while living under the thumb of her controlling mother. Her days are devoted to classical music, while her nights are spent visiting pornographic shows around the city. Jelinek emphasises the performer’s body when she writes about music, using the language of pain, dominance and control, and drawing a parallel between Erika’s musical discipline and her violent sexual fantasies. In the relationship between Erika and her student, Walter, she explores the blurred lines between performance and reality, as the sadomasochistic “script” that Erika wants Walter to perform begins to spiral out of her control.
2. At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald
A novel which mourns the possibility that good performance might be a dying art, At Freddie’s is full of brilliant details of the theatre world. Freddie’s, a drama school for child actors in the 1960s, is in danger of being shut down because its formidable proprietor won’t prepare her students for TV. Fitzgerald interweaves the narrative with theatricality – the boys “imitate silence”, small-part players “act the part of actors having nerves”, and child actor Jonathan utterly confuses Mr Blatt, a potential investor, by quoting Dombey and Son at him (“‘What is money?’ Jonathan asked. ‘Now look here, son,’ said Blatt, ‘you know what money is.’”). At its heart, though, At Freddie’s is a book about authenticity – a woman wanting to protect the integrity of her performers from the encroaching demands of capitalism.
3. Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf
Woolf’s final novel, by contrast, questions the power and purpose of art in a collapsing world. Set in a country house over one day in June 1939, the title hints at a looming “second act” of world war, and the novel is heavy with a sense of impending doom. It describes the performance of an annual pageant, a show that charts human history from the middle ages to the 1930s. The performance seems to suggest continuity, but there’s also a sense of chaos and fragmentation in its use of disparate quotations from the history of literature, and in the audience’s confused response.
4. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ryder, a famous pianist, arrives in an unnamed European city to perform in a concert that he can’t remember agreeing to. He’s meant to be following a strict schedule of obligations, but has misplaced it, and the narrative unfolds with the bizarre logic of a dream; everyone he encounters waylays him, divulging their secrets and demanding his help, while he pretends to understand what’s going on. Ishiguro explores the social performance of politeness, the way this stops us from speaking or acting on our desires – and the longing for connection that lies underneath.
5. Wedding Song by Naguib Mahfouz
“A play is just a play. Nothing more,” the producer of the Cairo-based theatre says in Mahfouz’s 1981 novel. But the theatre’s latest play, written by Abbas, seems to draw on real events, implicating Abbas himself in the murder of his wife. The play is a huge success and, night after night, the actors play fictional versions of themselves or people they know. In the meantime, Abbas has disappeared, leaving a suicide note, exactly like the hero in his play. Following an innovative four-part structure, with each section describing overlapping events narrated by a different character, Mahfouz examines the relationship between art and life, challenging the idea of objective truth.
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
A play feels like a bit of a cheat for this list, but it seems impossible not to mention Hamlet, a work similarly obsessed with performance and reality. From Hamlet’s anger at misleading appearances, to his own adoption of an “antic disposition”, Shakespeare continuously points to the slippery boundaries between what’s on the surface and what’s real. But the most striking performance in Hamlet is The Murder of Gonzago – the play within the play – which Hamlet uses to “catch the conscience of the king”, confronting Claudius with a theatrical version of his crime in the hope that it will spark a confession.
7. The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun
A novel that also explores the theatricality of identity, this was a bestseller in Weimar Germany on its publication in 1932, before it was banned by the Nazis. It’s about Doris, a young secretary who dreams of being an actor. After a brief stint in the theatre – a wonderful depiction of the bitchiness and narcissism of performers – Doris runs away to Berlin, hoping to become a movie star. Instead, she relies on her performing skills in a different way, manipulating men to survive.
8. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
This gripping family saga filled with tropes of acting and disguise, explores the relationship between identity and performance. In the 1950s, Stella and Desiree – twins from Mallard, a town established for light-skinned black people – run away to New Orleans. Fourteen years later, Desiree returns home, fleeing an abusive relationship. Stella, meanwhile, has disappeared – she has married a white man, and is living her life as a performance, secretly passing as white. Her daughter later becomes an actor – a job in which “you only show people what you want to”.
9. The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride
Eighteen-year-old Eily has moved from Ireland to go to drama school in London, where she meets Stephen, a 38-year-old established actor. Their relationship moves quickly from casual sex to intense love. McBride writes brilliantly about life as a performer, and the role of performance for both Eily and Stephen in processing trauma. Discussions about roles, scripts and the creation of characters suggest that growing into yourself is a creative process.
10. The Sopranos by Alan Warner
Warner also explores the performative aspects of constructing identity, in his hilarious and irreverent portrayal of Scottish teenagers letting loose. Set over one day, The Sopranos follows a group of Catholic schoolgirls who head to a big city for a choir competition. But the performance is the last thing on their minds. Temporarily freed from the constraints of small-town life, the girls see the trip as a chance to get dressed up, get blind drunk and try to get laid. Underneath their performative posturing, though, they’re vulnerable: one has terminal cancer, another struggles with her sexuality, another is living in extreme poverty. And then there’s the ever-present Catholic performance of morality and purity – a show determined to conceal the reality of the girls’ lives.
A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp is published by Bloomsbury. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
