2 Ennerdale Drive by Ainley Rosa

Author:Ainley, Rosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84694-560-1
Publisher: O-Books

Exhibit 5: A remarkable Hamlet

I’m on a mission for evidence, on the trail of the lost and forgotten. When I ask, nobody else in the family has ever seen this image or knew it existed. (What’s she going on about now?) I held on to the expectation that this picture would turn up in some arcane dimension of the internet or in a mouse-damaged corner, a musty collection of a trading-broke antiquarian business or in a forgotten cousin’s cupboard. The description of what I’m searching for develops into its own certificate of authenticity: it exists because I’ve decided it’s from a production of Hamlet. It’s a real piece of performance writing, a story for stage. It must be true. It must exist. The production details are verifiable. More details make it more true. For this train of thought to work, I only have to forget who it was who supplied the ‘more details’.

Flashbackwards. My brothers and I stand around together at home, outside a cupboard we’ve turned into a sort of picture store. It’s the early 1980s. We’re snorting with laughter over a framed cartoon we’ve found of our grandfather. It’s always been in our possession, carting our history around in boxes as we do, but we’ve only now got around to unwrapping it. We’re not laughing with him. We’re not kids anymore but it’s still pleasing somehow to hoot and snigger at this picture of an old guy in tights with a ridiculously oversized head.

What a good laugh. It may be a measure of the effectiveness of the caricature that it would have offered a particular reading to the people who saw it when the play came out and it’s still food for us to guffaw at. And 25 years after we were standing there it calls me, insists I find it. I have to find this picture because it’s another image in the public realm, an artwork based on a play and a performance and a reputation. Despite everything I’ve said, I spend a lot of time looking and thinking I’ll find it. Looking becomes the work, the end in itself: it’s the perfect diversion both from not finding and from writing.

It exists (still) because I’ve seen it. I discover that in this instance the dregs of memory can be wrung out to satisfy myself that this search has an object and a goal. I see an outsize, arrogant head on a strumpet body that disappears in a point like the genie effect on a Mac (the one I always turn off). And the body isn’t so much clothed, it’s more like it has been colored in, black felt-pen from the toes up, leggings to turtleneck or body stocking. The body is only important for its scale. Caricatures work when the subject has enough of a public profile within its scope of circulation to be recognizable in a distorted, exaggerated state, which then raises the profile further.

I’m tracking down the picture, the memory of a picture or a

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