That bloody woman downstairs

What a brilliant show, it made me laugh, it made me cry. Left so much more informed about the struggle and loved the quirky jabs at John Key.

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Totally professionally run production and big ups to all concerned. My feet were tapping the whole way thru to the awesome lyrics. Movers Basement Theatre Theatre Reviews. Auckland Theatre Company production. Production Photos - Michael Smith. Carter writes with tremendous relish when describing skin, fur, fabric and snowcovered landscapes. To say she is wonderful at surfaces sounds a little disparaging, as if to say she is superficial.

No; she is good at surfaces as the Gawain poet is good at surfaces. The third cat story, "Puss-in-Boots", is utterly different from its predecessors. It is "the first story that I wrote that was supposed to be really funny, out-and-out funny", said Carter.

It is a precursor in its ribald cynical tone to her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, and in its turningaway from the Gothic mode towards the determinedly benign. The first-person narrator, the cat himself, is a witty raconteur and master of innuendo, proceeding mainly by rhetorical questions and exclamations. His language is a vivid mixture of Latinate elaboration and Anglo-saxon bluntness: The next three stories, at the centre of the book, fit less easily into this collection.

In each one of them, lovers are lethal, traditional romantic patterns kill, and sex leads to death. It is based on a variant of "Snow White", which the brothers Grimm collected but chose not to publish, in which Snow White's birth is a result of her father's desire rather than her mother's, as in the more familiar version of the story.

It started life as a radio play, Vampirella first broadcast in , so probably written well before the rest of this collection, which Carter said she wrote mostly during her time in Sheffield, where she was Arts Council Fellow from Carter, an avid reader of Anne Rice's vampire novels, said the idea for the radio play came to her when she was sitting idly trying to work and ran a pencil along the top of a radiator - "It was just the noise that a long, pointed fingernail might make if it were run along the bars of a birdcage.

Finally, three disparate werewolf tales work and rework the story of Red Riding Hood, borrowing variants from different centuries, compulsively circling the figures of the werewolf, the old woman and the young girl. The girl cuts off the wolf's paw, but finds that it is really her grandmother's hand.

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The old woman is stoned to death as a witch. Its first pages are given to a zestful atmospheric essay on the wolf, "carnivore incarnate", with vivid werewolf anecdotes. Not until over a third of the way into the story does the Red Riding Hood narrative begin.



The filmmaker Neil Jordan remembered: I suggested to her that we develop it into a Chinese box structure At the end of Perrault's familiar version of the story, she gets into bed with the wolf and is gobbled up. We must learn to cope with the world before we can interpret it. Last of all, "Wolf-Alice" returns to Gothic territory and the gloomy mansion of a werewolf-duke. The story also borrows from an early medieval Red Riding Hood analogue, De puella a lupellis servata, which tells the story of a feral child suckled by wolves. Again, there is a lice-borne rejection of disgust at animal nature in an evocation of "the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another's pelts".

When the werewolfduke is shot and wounded, Wolf-Alice saves him by tenderly licking the blood and dirt from his face.

Stage and Theatre

This image of blood being licked away returns the reader to the moment in "The Lady of the House of Love" where the young man kisses better the vampire's wound and so, inadvertently, kills her; it also recalls the ending of "The Tiger's Bride", where the licking leads to new life and animal fur; which in turn refers on to the man who is "hairy on the inside" in "The Company of Wolves". There are a myriad such musical echoes in this collection - herbivores and carnivores, death and the maiden, the image of a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another - while certain phrases like "pentacle of virginity" or indeed "the bloody chamber" crop up repeatedly from story to story.

Images of meat, naked flesh, fur, snow, menstruation, mirrors and roses fanged or otherwise recur fugue-like throughout, giving these stories an unmistakable family resemblance, different though they are from each other in approach and register. In , the year following publication of The Bloody Chamber, Carter said in an interview, "The short story is not minimalist, it is rococo.

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