A New Skin | My Brilliant Friend @ The National Theatre, London

The National Theatre commissioned me to write the programme article for their production of My Brilliant Friend, which runs until February 22nd.

Excerpt from A New Skin:

How poorly made we are…how insufficient’, observes Lila in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. She desires that the human body, especially hers and Lenù’s, be robust, resilient, and durable. Her efforts in this vein, to strengthen and reinforce their boundaries and to invent a resistance so inherent as to be cellular, will – directly and indirectly – shape both their lives.

Ferrante has written of the Mediterranean cultural myths that women must combat. Growing up in the impoverished aftermath of World War II, for Lila and Lenù these myths are cruelly compounded. To begin with, education – for girls – typically ceases after elementary school, following which they are ushered toward a path of marriage and procreation. Furthermore, such inequality is insidiously interwoven not only with domestic labour but with the illicit trades the neighbourhood runs on, and so they live in constant proximity to a violence that is meted out both in the streets and in their own homes. Ferrante has also described ‘the war with the shapeless’, a neutering quality assigned to the maternal body. This quality, shot through with  Roman Catholic symbolism, is borne from the logic that a woman cannot be both maternal and carnal. Once she has performed her biological destiny and given birth, she loses her shape—she begins to disappear.