#in9 meta

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i thought i may as well share my stage/fright transcript and scan of the programme

both are mainly just to help me with my meta writing but you can have em too... now i've got more time on my hands i want to maybe scrape some of my meta together into a more coherent whole so it helps to have these to hand

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it took rewatching to realise (and i totally left it out of my video on the subject) but nine lives kat is an essential some smart aleck episode 🤓 and extra interesting because obviously ezra's a writer so in that sense he's closer to steve himself than a lot of other characters

not that there is a formula or anything (see footnote 1), but. ezra's smug and condescending and arguably sadistic towards kat when he breaks the news to her. you don't get much of a sense from the screenshots but he is clearly relishing his control of the situation

she explicitly calls out the gender of it, which i think is REALLY interesting —

— and ties into this shot too, about which i am normal

smug bastard! he's even a straightforward snob!

AND THEN! he experiences all the exact same things he did to kat, including the same shot of sitting bolt upright in bed (eepy) (sleeping in his glasses)

AND THEN he gets cucked / emasculated!!! 🫠 sidenote robin weaver's delivery of "am i a lesbian now...?" is one of the funniest things ever. i think the 'lousy lay' line is really significant honestly i think the whole ep revolves around it + his emasculation

sad silly little boy, are the mean girls making fun of you? 🥺🤧

matilda joins in on making him look stupid, he tries to reassert his authority and she laughs at him 🥰

and finally he's reduced to begging for his life, before she drops him in the bottom drawer, exactly like he did to kat 🥰

footnote 1

so... i'm talking about this trope as if i've ever been able to articulate what it means... it truly is just a vibe... but some of the recurring vibe components i suppose, for my own clarity...

steve himself or steve characters

being sceptical / dismissive of the supernatural

being methodical / overanalytical / autistic

being conspicuously 'clever' or nerdy or knowledgeable

in an annoying / overbearing way

… especially in contrast to reece being more spiritual or ‘instinctive’

in positions of authority; abusing authority

being arrogant / smug / condescending

thinking he's got everything figured out

realising he doesn't, having his complacency shattered

being punished / humiliated :) especially in ironic, abrupt, bizarre, and/or violent ways :)

not that there is a set formula, just characters/stories that use any of these elements in different ways. and there's no set list of relevant episodes or anything. but i thought i'd make a list of the eps i used in aforementioned video plus a few extras that i wanted to mention (i won't highlight nine lives kat here cos i just talked about it)

séance time (lout)

s2 commentaries (steve)

the riddle of the sphinx (cruciverbalist, academic)

tempting fate (cleaner)

dead line (steve)

nine lives kat (writer)

the bones of st nicholas (historian)

the trolley problem ('therapist')

ctrl alt esc (escape room enthusiast)

curse of the ninth (lawyer)

la terreur de l'asile ('doctor')

stage/fright meta story (steve)

s2 commentaries — in as far as he thinks he knows better than reece, assumes authority over him ("say sorry") and is gruesomely punished for it. and i'm pretty sure he's also lightly haunted by reece's ghost

curse of the ninth — natalie dormer gets it pretty bad (dismisses supernatural, violently punished) and steve's character is kind of just her sidekick so worth a mention

la terreur de l'asile — again we don't really get the fulfilment of goudron's arc but the early signs are there (educated, authoritative, smug, condescending, sadistic; vengeful ghost wife)

stage/fright meta story — the reason i'm yapping about this in the first place! 💝

footnote 2

i don't currently have an easy way to share it, but i need to mention it anyway: jeremy's grim short story 'a slate roof in the rain,' from never trust a rabbit. it's about the world's most insufferable high school art teacher going through most of the above. i have rarely had such a clear and certain mental image of a character being played by steve. and because jeremy wrote it, well, maybe he was actually thinking the same thing! anyway i thought it was worth mentioning if you happen to have read it or have access to it i need to know i'm not the only one

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these unspeakable visions

let's number the main layers of reality in stage/fright, setting aside house divided & bcdr for now because we have enough on our plates as it is:

r0 — real life. you are here. s&r are alive and well. r1 — s/f's meta story. s&r both die in the theatre. r2 — la terreur company. vince & marcus etc are rehearsing a play. r3 — la terreur itself. goudron & hugo etc are at the asylum.

in this post, i talked about a certain gendered dichotomy in r1 and r2. there are different ways you could label that dichotomy: sceptic vs believer; steve vs reece. you could make a case for calling it Knowable (to men) vs Unknowable (to men). the implication being that women (... and reece) have access to ~mysterious ancient wisdom~ which men are just too logical to understand, & which they underestimate at their peril

anyway, i wanted to talk BRIEFLY about the same dichotomy in r3: la terreur itself, and from there, in the play as a whole

i'm not JUST going to rehash my feelings about goudron and his wife, but just in case: it bears repeating that goudron is a wonderful example of the masculine half of that dichotomy. formally educated, authoritative, very confident in his understanding of the world, able to impose his viewpoint on others through science and medicine and technology. this is why i am so obsessed with the ending of la terreur. we don't know what happens after the trepanning scene, but i like to think the vengeful ghost of goudron's wife (mme g) punishes him for his arrogance, and for his crimes

said crimes are mostly against women (mme g herself, claudette, suzette) and you could make the case that hugo is feminised too: on account of being insane, ie detached from the mainstream (scientific, masculine) understanding of the world; and on account of being so violently ejected from the masculine position of authority that goudron occupies

anyway, suzette has These Unspeakable Visions, you see. she has visions of mme g's decapitation and bleeding neck stump. her visions tell her what goudron has done to his wife and, in a deeper/less direct way, to claudette and his other patients. these visions are ambiguous & fall either side of the Knowable/Unknowable dichotomy:

in one (Unknowable, unspeakable) interpretation, suzette's visions (and other symptoms) are supernatural hauntings — the ghost of mme g, whose death was covered up, trying to bring herself back into the light. whereas in goudron's very confident interpretation, they are of course flashbacks caused by suzette's repressed traumatic memories (so science! very medicine!). this interpretation is highly Knowable and speakable; if there's one thing goudron knows how to do, it's talk. and it's in making this diagnosis and proposing to 'treat' it (in his own. rather elaborately fatal way) that he reframes the haunting to suit himself, just like marcus does in r2.

and the text supports the ambiguity. diegetically at the r2 level, suzette's vision is performed by the r2 character lisa. marcus calls lisa's character 'madame goudron,' but sherrie gleefully calls her 'the ghost of madame goudron.' sadly we never get to see the ghost in action at the r3 level, but it's implied that she has some role beyond suzette's initial vision — that her presence in the story does not die with suzette — therefore that her presence in suzette's visions is not necessarily wholly medical and mundane, despite goudron's attempts to rationalise it

so in the unseen bits of la terreur, when the ghost appears to goudron himself, does he try to rationalise/pathologise it the same way? does he cling to his medical worldview, turn it on his own visions and try to insist that it's all... trauma, fear of discovery, remorse? (vengeful hauntings — dead woman's only real answer to violent man — are really just the man's horror at discovering he has a conscience. maybe every ghost story really is just a guilt story!) like steve's reaction in r1 when his scepticism is challenged:

Maybe I've just had a bang on the head, and all this is a hallucination. 'Cause I was so desperate to see you again.

so, would goudron go so far as to drill a hole in his own head to cure himself, to stop having 'hallucinations' of his wife? or would he accept that his understanding of the world is incomplete, that he's powerless against the Unknowable? i sure would like to see his face at the moment he finally accepts it :)c

to go back to that idea: every ghost story is really just a guilt story. each level of reality inside the second half of the play (r1, r2, r3) is doing this in its own way: female or feminised forces of the unknown (ghosts) haunting men for revenge. belle and/or reece haunting steve; belle haunting marcus (via abby); mme g haunting goudron (partly via suzette)

the men are all fundamentally guilty of the same thing: appropriating and reframing the Unknowable to fit their own worldview, and to suit their own ends. as you dig down through deeper layers of fiction, their crimes get more severe and more overtly misogynistic: steve just makes fun of belle, and makes fun of reece for believing in her; marcus is abusive but not physically violent towards sherrie and abby; goudron maims, rapes and murders, and this is where we find the core of actual physical violence that's obscured by the other layers

la terreur is a nesting doll, the same basic story inside itself, with the same essential misogyny at the heart of it depicted more frankly the further you get from reality. this is why steve is sentenced to DEATH as punishment for some gentle ribbing. he failed to hashtag believe women and to take belle's trauma seriously. and it's not just the violence of belle's death echoing from the past, it's the violence of mme g and suzette's deaths echoing from inside the play that gets him.

maybe this is what marcus really meant when challenged about the content of la terreur (finally dug the programme out!):

It simply wouldn't be worth doing if the women killed the men. It has to be the other way round I'm afraid.

... though i'm actually not sure what he means by 'worth doing.' i'd thought he said something like 'it wouldn't make sense,' which would have made more sense, as a thing for him to say. but 'worth doing'...?

[silverview]

ohhh after writing this i suddenly had a thought about WHY s/f is (in my view) so concerned with these specific questions about exploitative entertainment (idfic if you will 🤪)

i was thinking about jeremy dyson and how his fiction makes it very clear that he feels, or at least has spent a lot of his life feeling, that he deserves or is going to be killed with hammers for his sexual proclivities

okay i think s/f is expressing something similar. i think on some level it’s reece and (maybe) steve working through the guilt/anxiety of enjoying these stories where women get tortured & killed. they get the thrill of depicting belle (just like marcus gets the thrill of depicting her — he explicitly admits he’s ‘getting off on it’) and then she murders them for it

to draw from the programme again, one thing i think is really relevant here is marcus’s feeble and embarrassingly realistic attempt to justify la terreur as having something modern & progressive to say about abuse of power etc. they’re clearly conscious and critical of the ways people dress up idfic as exposing and challenging violence rather than simply revelling in it, which reinforces that they are thinking on some level about the ethics of idfic itself

their excuse is the play within a play within a play, they’re not actually acting out suzette’s murder, they’re just poking fun at the idea, wouldn’t this be sleazy and bad, ha ha! BUT THEN the walls between the layers of fiction collapse and the violence returns to them anyway!!! their excuse does not protect them!! WORK AS GHOST!!!

— i’m using the term idfic here mainly as a reminder that i’m not taking a moral position against exploitation or violence etc in fiction here, neither am i defending it, i’m just analysing the play and doing some armchair psychology. this isn’t about what i personally think it’s okay to write about bc my ao3 can speak to that after all 🤪

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i can't be sure, but it seems like hugo as the go-to name for ventriloquist dummies started with dead of night. regardless. screams. hugo...... i have complete control over his mind and body......

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by the way, getting me thinking about sphinx again, i wanted to quickly bring up something i don't remember seeing discussed much, which is charlotte's canonical experience of learning that squires is her biological father

i think she's still alive when it happens, and it may be the last thing she experiences. we see her shedding a tear as tyler, the man she still thinks is her father, explains how he betrayed her...

after the truth comes out, squires wants to take her to hospital, suggesting he thinks she's still alive; tyler says "enjoy the time you have left together," suggesting that he thinks she's still alive. they probably don't know for sure. quickly after that exchange, tyler delivers his chekhov's gun quip, which in the script is immediately followed by:

SQUIRES sobs. NINA is probably dead by now.

so the question of how much she hears is left intentionally ambiguous, i think

i choose to believe she was alive for it, but only just. the last thing she experiences is finding out that her 'dad' has betrayed her + is not her dad, and that her biological father is actually the guy who drove her brother to suicide + sexually assaulted her moments ago. and in her literal dying moments, her daddy is cradling her and crying over her and trying to save her (:

obviously not everyone sets the same store by things like biological parentage, but the episode takes us into a world where these things matter a huge amount, where every character (except monica!) takes actions driven in some way by the idea that Blood matters. so yknow. poor charlotte

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hi!! i’ve only just stumbled across your blog but i’m so happy to see stagefright analysis and meta, i saw it in the original west end run and there was so little analysis at the time it made me feel crazy 😭

i’m running on memory from only seeing it once but something that really stuck with me was the underlying theme of female rage in the la terreur part, especially through bloody belle and her presumed possession of gabby, and the implications of marcus stringing her along / manipulating her into sex. i’m super curious to hear your thoughts on this or if you’ve already written analysis of it!!

hello!! ahh this makes me so happy, tysm for writing!! 🥰💕 sorry this may be a bit of a long post but i love to yap about s/f!!

it was hard to have a public conversation about it at that time (spoilers copyright etc) but since getting some distance, i've written quite a lot about it!

and yes, i think we are kind of on the same wavelength about the main/most interesting theme, especially in the second act! to take a long analysis scattered across many posts and cut it very short, i see it as being about female revenge for a very specific type of misogyny: men's depictions of female trauma in entertainment media. it asks, why are we (men) staging this? what is its relationship with real-world violence and misogyny?

by entering the 'real' world to punish marcus & steve & reece, belle literalises the impact of fiction, the porous boundary between reality and stories. character taking revenge on author — a recurring concern for s&r. marcus's sexual relationship with abby is one of the details that focuses our attention on gendered violence over violence in general.

here are most(?) of my analytical s/f meta posts, in order of posting, because they build on each other in a very disorganised & stream of consciousness way 😅

rational vs irrational

la terreur as nesting doll + labelling worlds

focus on the hare

belle's ascending metalepsis (and. vince thirst)

author guilt

misc notes including marcus and goudron

"it's like the omen"

and while we're here, brief notes on relevant things i haven't written up yet

further comments on marcus's programme interview — his general sexism, even beyond la terreur, is worth noting

steve said something at the phoenix, something like "revenge story. no, that's overdone, something else..." i need to listen & find it again, but that instinctive reaching for revenge and quick correction — as if revenge stories are a habit he's trying to break — sooo interesting. the plots in r2 and r3 are not primarily revenge stories — and yet they end up being about revenge ghosts after all, don't they. :}

i just watched paranormal activity for the first time & it had so SO much overlap with all this. girl's real trauma is boy's entertainment. hubristic tech-enabled attempts to master the unknowable. :)

so anyway!! thanks again for the ask, i hope that all made sense 😅 i would LOVE to hear your thoughts about the show in more detail, if you want to reach out or tag me i'd be thrilled to read your takes!! 💗

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RETURN OF ME YAPPING ABOUT S/F

marcus insists on the camera in the trepanning scene. it gives him greater control over the play, to frame the action and direct the audience's attention. he says it 'unlocks' the performances. he particularly wants to see sherrie's 'complex emotions' in her damsel in distress moment. (the final image of r2 is a closeup on belle — who also played suzette — screaming)

there's nothing you can meaningfully do in a closeup on your face like that. you can demonstrate emotion (fear) but the rest of your body is effectively out of commission, even if not literally restrained (which it is in the trepanning scene), it's out of the picture, you're a passive victim, you open your eyes real wide and you scream

i think marcus is a bad director for trying to rein in vince and maggie btw. if he wanted to keep it 'grounded,' he picked the wrong play. so much of the appeal of la terreur is in the big theatrical performances. and it's still like... scary...? the bits we see are shocking and disturbing as well as funny. whatever. also i've always thought the direction he gives sherrie before the trepanning scene is very bad! unclear and contradictory! anyway!

Slaughter’s threatening figure is exhibited in all its sordid glory. Conversely, his victims are more often presented in closeups showing their petrified faces. In such moments, spectators might model their emotional responses on those of the victim observed in close-up [...] But the guilty pleasure of horror is definitely created through the perception of Slaughter’s entire villainous physique shown on screen as it would appear on stage through cinematic theatricality. He exposes in full body shots, with astonishing disregard for realist restraint and understatement, his malevolence before his spectators both inside and outside the diegesis.

André Loiselle, Theatricality in the Horror Film p32

the decapitation vision that focuses on mme g is in closeup; the shadow vision of goudron's involvement shows almost his whole body (and obviously his whole literal body is also physically present, reenacting the story for "his spectators both inside and outside the diegesis" — or on all four diegetic levels in this case!). and the shadow vision at the top of act 2 shows reece's / marcus's / hugo's whole body — performing malevolence "with astonishing disregard for realist restraint and understatement"

i've talked vaguely about goudron being at home in steve's villain roster but at the same time, he might be genuinely the most evil character steve's ever played (only considering characters they wrote for themselves, i mean). both in the sense that he objectively does the most immoral things and in the sense that he performs villainy the most blatantly. it makes sense that they needed to go to a play within a play (within a play) to feel comfortable pushing both these sliders to maximum. not just because the mise en abyme permits a level of irony (see the devil of christmas) but also because the stage itself permits a level of exaggeration that they wouldn’t normally do on tv (see tlog are behind you)

and it's interesting to contrast goudron with adrian from to have & to hold. there's obvious similarities in their behaviour on paper but they are total opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of performance. adrian is necessarily a screen character, a very understated naturalistic closeup performance. and goudron is lol the complete opposite — the epitome of onstage full-body villainy. (do it, mademoiselle, i care not...! he should've told her 'try not to spill it' instead 🤦🏻‍♀️)

which is partly why he feels closer to squires than any other in9 character. their roles, mannerisms voices etc are similar, and their literal crimes are similar in nature if not in degree — but it's the thunder and lightning that really pushes it over the top. i really love that touch in sphinx, it is so theatrical. and they felt comfortable going there because as they say, it's one of the more 'stagey' episodes, one that feels more like a play than an episode of tv (the chekhov's gun reference is part of it too)

what am i getting at...? hmm. i do sort of understand why they might not have wanted to put it out on film, you know? i mean i still think they should have. but the whole cast, throughout the whole play, are giving stage performances that would never properly translate to screen. i say this as someone who lives for the NT's filmed she stoops to conquer but you know. i do get it even though i disagree with their decision