August 16th Day Five In Edinburgh Highlights: 1. National Galleries of Scotland Modern One Gwen John: Strange Beauties (The Art Festival); 2. Traverse Theatre Supposing: (the Fringe). Very few ‘fictional worlds’ worth their creation and recreation would be ‘fun to vacation in’! Try the world of Cassandra under the threat of a Reform government.
The curators of Strange Beauties seem to have tried somewhat to diminish the bullish and mannish atmosphere of Modern One for the Gwen John exhibition by closing up the view into Paolozzi’s recreated studio usually always available in the gallery on the ground floor southmost room, but nothing stops Paolozzi’s Giant God dominating this Gallery and you have to confront him – head downwards, as you pass through the open gallery corridor between north and south of the first floor between the first and second halves of the exhibition; where, as always, is placed the artist’s timeline, but you can’t avoid looking away from it and down, where the Modern One tea-room is. Nothing could be more opposed to Gwen John’s vision than this giant. I don’t intend to talk about the show much here, though I loved it and it moved me immensely, because I have decided I need to write it separately at a later time. There is too much to say here, Nevertheless, there is room for some marginal discoveries, such as the picture of the John family below, with which I will start in the blog proper:
This painting is almost mythical in its narrative and scene making with Augustus John dwarfing the sisters. Augustus himself thought Gwen the more considerable artist, a judgement time has sort-of agreed with over fulsomely. What a morning.
It rained heavily ether side of our visit and we went home after lunch at Modern One. The next even was the play Supposing:, written and directed by Zinnie Harris (about whose trilogy of plays This Restless House, based on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia I wrote about in an earlier blog (use this link to see it). Zinnie Harris has a strongly interiorised sense of the Greek theatre I think, perhaps more in this play than in the trilogy, though there are overlaps in theme of being accursed and of the social malaise that feelings of psychic oppression often link to. In some senses this play is about the cursed feeling many of us have now about the possible, perhaps likely advent of a far-right Reform government, which the play is also about.
Yet, the main character, representing the accursed in this play, is partially Greek in genetic origin and begins to read about its Ancient Greek religion, ritual and drama, even starting her attempt at rehabilitation by learning about the use of libation, which we see her practising in the still below (from The Guardian) without the oil or wine but with a convenient tub of supermarket supplied salt, with which she encircles herself in an attempt at appeasing the Gods wronged by her ‘polluting’ sin, whatever it might be for she does not know.
Source: Supposing: review – only ancient Greek rage will suffice in our exasperating times | Edinburgh festival 2026 | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/aug/08/supposing-review-traverse-theatre-edinburgh
But this play is immersed in Greek religion and ritual and its link to Ancient Greek drama. In Greek religion the curse had a name, miasma (μίασμα, Ancient Greek for pollution), and linked to social, bodily and emotional disorder that showed itself networked to distortions of nature into which the supernatural intervened, with little differentiation between internal mental events and external ones in the physical or mental world.
For Harris the ‘Curse’ that pollutes is hard to locate for though she feels haunted by a chorus of 17 of the dead in her family, she rejects any possibility of family incest, murder and the usual Greek pollutants. If anything the Curse is only known by its effects- an ability to predict the future of individual.petsons but not of social events.
These prediction have awesome responsibilities attached to them that can be extensive. However, her eyes also begin to blur as if she were Tiresias, no longer able to see the external world because inner vision is so strong. But it has something to do with stereotypes of femininity, particularly those of anxious deregulation and intensity. Mark Fisher, reviewing the play in The Guardian says:
With a 17-strong Greek chorus in her head, nagging her like a guilty conscience, she reads up about satyrs and tragedies, portents and sacrifices, in case they have something to do with her. She even tries a bit of libation, with water, salt and wine, to make it all stop. Like Greek antecedents such as Medea, Clytemnestra and Penelope, she is getting intense. [1]
But I think he may here rather miss the point. Here is Sally herself about Greek models of such curses, in the wonderful.free verse characteristic of the writing: [2]
Sally places herself in the ‘fictional world’ of a play, see herself as if answering this prompt in testing if it is one to which she can relate. I think this metafictional characteristic of the play really important. The Curse starts when Sally falls inadvertently into a ‘pit’ that has been opened up outside a theatre and from which theatre the Chorus has fled. The theatre we are told, on the two visits to the Pit that Sally makes after her accident are playing first a ‘comedy’ and then a ‘musical’.
For Harris, I think, this amounts to the fate of modern theatre as its grasp of personal and social issues dissappears alongside the communities, or sections of them, choruses once represented and intensity of focus on both psychosocial worlds, and the sociocultural phenomenon in which they simultaneously manifest, love relationships, families, communities, nations and the world of humanity itself in the gaze of the supernatural. And this applied to Greek tragedy and comedy too, one reason there are subterranean references to choruses of singing frogs, a reference to Aristophanes very serious comedy, The Frogs 🐸, which has such a chorus in it.
Fisher doesn’t even mention Cassandra, perhaps because Sally dismisses the reference. Nevertheless the intensity of Cassandra and its cause is the best model of Sally in tbe play as she also inadvertently admits. Cassandra was cursed by Apollo to see the future but have her predictions always disbelieved. [3] Whichever of the myths of the curses’ origin (see note 3 below) you believe, her role in mythology is as a woman forced to wear the personal and cultural blame for messed up patriarchal icons.
Fisher is correct about ‘the relationship between actors Nicole Cooper and Richard Conlon:
– both excellent as they revolve around each other, desiring to get close but so often repelled, twisting apart because of the import of Sally’s revelation’.
Troubled times … Nicole Cooper and Richard Conlon in Supposing:. Photograph: Mihaela Bodlovic
However I thought myself that the excellence of both is that the demonstrated ancient dynamics that bring about the blaming of women for ills not at all of their making. Who is to blame then for the creation of ill-guarded ‘pits’ in our culture for women to stumble into, especially just outwith a theatre institution. Fisher sees Sally’s dilemma as entirely that of modernity not at all sex/gender in saying that she is:
this modern day secular woman, who does not believe in gods but in concrete facts, suffering some kind of mental collapse, or does her curse mean she can she really see the future? And if she can, what to do with the prophecies?
I tbink this is like taking the metaphoric framework of the play too literally and pretending that there may be no sex/gender difference to make. If anything, it looks at the paradigms implicit in the way responsibility is borne across sex/gender divide in three binary convention, with woman only having a duty to feel that responsibility, whilst men enact their duty objectively, a d with room for deception. For in my view, Colon is mag indigent because he fools himself about his stated feelings as much as he does his wife. Likewise Fisher could have made his point more femi ist in tje following statement, for the catastrophes he mentions yend to be those felt and not just mentalists by women:
The ancient heroines are a comically imperfect fit for Sally, an ordinary wife and mother, yet something in our own troubled times calls for the kind of full-blooded response that only the Greeks can provide.
Sally’s frequent references to pregnancies and miscarriages suggest there is a future, but an uncertain one. In a society beset by political extremism, she sees visions of a racist neighbour and an unknown refugee housed in accommodation targeted by rightwing protesters. In such exasperating times, perhaps only ancient rage will suffice. Or perhaps, as the play’s closing moments hint at, there is still a possibility of healing the fractures.
But Fisher is correct in his evaluation of the play and I may be wrong in my interpretation of it. Whatever, it is strong drama, brilliantly performed. See it if you can before August 30th. You may not feel like you would like to live in the fictional world it creates. Indeed, you may well feel you are already are living in a world equally cursed by inhumanity against which we sometimes feel powerless, with a Reform Government possible and the final demise of liberalism brought to an end with a cultural sledgehammer.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxx
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[1] Mark Fisher (2026) ‘Supposing: review – only ancient Greek rage will suffice in our exasperating times, Traverse theatre, Edinburgh’ in The Guardian (Sat 8 Aug 2026 17.09 BST Last modified on Sat 8 Aug 2026 17.11 BST) available at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/aug/08/supposing-review-traverse-theatre-edinburgh
[2] Zinnie Harris [2026:39] Supposing: London,Faber Plays.
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