THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT 11/04/2010

THOMASINA But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for
all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! – can you bear it? All the lost
plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides – thousands of poems – Aristotle’s own library brought to
Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors? How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteenfrom Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which
will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers
who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be
picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very
short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so
nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up
piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures
for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries
glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not
suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the
great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

-from Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

1.

Swansea public library closed its doors for the last time in November 2007. Entering its courtyard tonight, an umbrella-wielding chorus in carnival
masques welcome us, strange songs juxtaposing complex arrangements and
haunting flute accompaniment with mundane lyrics that give a job
description for a librarian - ‘We make lists of everything you can
think of… that’s what we do… categorise’ – before recommending that we
are taken ‘down to the stacks.’ But librarians – and libraries – are
far more than stacks of books, like those neatly arranged sculptures
marking our path, and this collaboration between Volcano and Welsh
National Opera is a deep exploration of the library, not only this library.
A huge painting of Gladstone, who opened the library in 1887 and
stories of the use of the building as mortuary during the three-day
blitz on Swansea during the Second World War ensures a thread of
site-specific resonance. It is a theatrical companion piece to Alberto
Manguel’s critically acclaimed 2006 book The Library at Night, a title that would have perhaps been more evocative than the prosaic Shelf Life.

Like all good librarians – and he is certainly that (‘he lives in a fifteenth century presbytery near the Loire, where he spends a great
deal of time among his books in the 30,000-volume library of his
creation’) – Manguel loves lists. His collection of essays explores the
library as:

Myth

Order

Space

Power

Shadow

Shape

Chance

Workshop

Mind

Island

Survival

Oblivion

Imagination

Identity

Home

In its own way, this is the project of Shelf Lifetoo. We are, from the beginning, hailed as readers and invited to make our own individual journeys through the library and this promenade
performance. Librarians are notorious, at least in the popular
imagination, for their insistence on adherence to ‘the rules’; early
rules of Swansea’s library included ‘no animals, no smoking, no
spitting, no eating, no talking, no tracing pictures’ and ‘no striking
matches’. Children under 14 were not allowed in unless they had special
permission, and those who were caught selling or pawning a library book
faced prosecution for larceny. Tonight’s ‘readers’ were actively
encouraged to break all of these rules, at least in the script (signs
elsewhere warn parents of aspects of the performance that might be
unsuitable for children) and the performers themselves break perhaps
the ultimate library taboo, getting naked. Discovering the inspiration
for this act of bravery, one reacts with a scornful ‘D.H. Lawrence.
Typical!’ before delving into her own delicious memory of an encounter
inspired by Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Volcano’s strength is in disruption. Shelf Lifeis an atmospheric piece; Peter Swaffer Reynolds’ sumptuous score is only enhanced by sensitive lighting and design. But just when you are
being lulled into the kind of semi-oblivious bliss one experiences when
lost utterly in a really good book, the cast conspire to strip you of
this cosiness. The first time it happens is in the courtyard, where the
choral singing – a spellbinding mix of Welsh chapel and those odd
little songs evoking pre-industrial England that crop up in
Shakespeare’s comedies – is cut short by a well-choreographed fight
between a boy and a girl, as if a night out on Swansea’s infamous Wind
Street has spilled over into the library. A similar thing happens
later, when a heartfelt reading of Tony Curtis’ poem ‘Singleton’ is
followed by an impassioned rant about ‘disease, dying and grief’.

Shelf Lifeis multi-faceted, sometimes bewilderingly so. The starting point of my own journey through the show was listening to a man on a ladder
enthusing about the way books have been valued by the world’s great
religions. There is something of the television historian in the way
his words bring to life the peoples of the book, recounting Jewish and
Islamic traditions of book burial. ‘Do books have souls?’ he muses,
before ushering us toward two ‘literary doctors’ guarding the entrance
to the Stacks. Here we are ad-libbed prescriptions for various
ailments: a young man behind me claims impotence for which he is
prescribed some Norman Mailer, twice a day; for back problems, the
doctors recommend ‘a slim volume of poetry . . . Ted Hughes?’ For my
own part I tell them I have left my job. ‘Kerouac then, certainly.’

2.

The stacks have a ghostly quality. Row upon row of empty wooden shelves still retain that unique smell of old books, incense to a bibliophile.
Later, we are told of how, after its grisly emergency use during the
blitz, for years the books carried the faint whiff of burnt flesh.
‘People still borrowed them, though.’ There is something poignant about
the conflation of books and the dead. In the dim red light of this
dusty basement, one begins to feel the ghosts that reside here do not
only belong to the literal dead, whose bodies once were stacked among
these shelves, but also to all of those, remote in time and space, who
once filled this room with many millions of words, ‘each syllable…
chosen… in tenderness and terror.’

The deep connection between libraries and humanity, burial and death is also explored through frequent references to the Red Lady of Paviland,
a red-ochre covered Paleolithic skeleton found locally, on the Gower
peninsula, in 1823. The ochre is said to signify a ceremonial burial
29,000 years ago and the motif of the colour red – in the choir’s
umbrella’s, the tablecloth in the reading room and the lighting here in
the stacks – seems to symbolise the ritual send-off National Theatre
Wales are providing for the library before it passes permanently into
the hands of Swansea Metropolitan University.

3.

‘I think of the world as a library – a library that contains everything… not only the past and the present, but also the future,’ muses one
character, near the end. By now we have reached the reading room,
centrepiece of this grand old library and focal point of the
production. In ‘The Library as Shape’, Alberto Manguel insists on the
relationship between librarian and architect: ‘I know the mixed feeling
of expansion and containment, grandiosity and seclusion, that the
combination of square and circle grants such spaces.’ It’s a perfect
description of the high-domed room at Swansea; granted it isn’t the
British Library or the Bibliotheque de France, but with its
wrought-iron staircases and walkways and its burnished alcoves, it
would not be too grand to call this space a temple to the art of
reading.

‘We don’t read books in the same way sitting inside a circle or inside a square, in a room with a low ceiling or one with high rafters,’
contends Manguel. And the same could be said of plays. We don’t receive
drama in the same way sitting in the stalls of a Victorian playhouse as
we do in the open air or in a site-specific location like this one.
Here in the reading room, the old building works its magic. The
soundtrack to the final scenes is reminiscent of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine album
in its dark, haunting and malevolent beauty, and although at times the
fragmentary nature of what was clearly originally improvised dialogue
sometimes threatens to unravel, there is enough food for thought in the
room itself to leave the audience quiescent.

At the centre of the room is a large circular table, spread with a feast of fruit and bread and cheese. We are invited to help ourselves to a
grape; another rule broken. Around the edges are mounted boards, the
kind found in museums, outlining the history of libraries and this
library in particular. It is, according to one performer, ‘a wine
cellar of information’ and by now the audience are ever so slightly
drowsy from Volcano’s rich concoction of music, movement and words.
Near the ceiling, onto which are projected images of hands flicking
tentatively across pages, tracing lines of text, hang books on strings;
on the empty shelves that line the walkway are strategically placed
volumes from which we are encouraged to read. The Bible; A Little History of the World; Selected Poems of Philip Larkin.

When the production finishes, we realise we have been perfectly primed for the central message here. Shelf Lifeis an elegy for a library – ‘The death of a library is a mess, a degenerative disease’ – and a whole way of reading. Our generation
stands on the cusp of perhaps the greatest reading revolution since the
arrival of the printing press; digitization is seen as a threat to the
printed word, if not to the pleasure of reading itself. But, we are
told, ‘the new librarians of the digital age – the angels smile – are
you.’ With this, we sense great privilege and equally great
responsibility, but also that this is who the cast have been: these
strange ghosts of librarians past are angels.
And it seems appropriate to end this night at the library with a piece
of found text, a poem scribbled on a piece of paper, hidden among the
upper shelves of this wonderful old reading room:

The angels of the library

sit behind you,

hand on shoulder as you read.

The angels of the library

smile at your discoveries,

shudder at your persistent

clumsiness in the face of

such collected wisdom and beauty.