little scratch: Shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2021

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This debut novel will I think be one of the most innovative I read in 2021 – and I would be not be surprised to see it featuring on both the Women’s Prize and Goldsmith Prize lists. The Goldsmith was of course won in its first year by Eimear McBride’s harrowing stream-of-consciousness novel “A Girl is a Half Formed Thing” which is the only time ever I have listened to an audiobook as a way of gaining entry to a book I had found it difficult to access in print (just for reference in a typical year I read around 150 novels and listen to 0 audiobooks) – allowing me then to read the novel. Some angry men have also been in touch. A typical response is anger at the passage when the narrator says: Recently, commenting on young England star Lauren James’s performance in a match, footballer Gemma Davison described it as “like going to the theatre”. So the comparisons continue. When football is played gorgeously, when our players do something inspired, we reach for the beyond to capture what we have just experienced, to assert that we have witnessed something more than just the simple formula in front of us. When we say football is like theatre, really, we are saying that there is something disguised within the game; something beyond itself. We are describing a live-ness: not the fact of being alive, but the thrill that sometimes being alive is unbelievable.

Folk aired on Radio 3 in May 2021 as part of the BBC’s Light’s Up series, which turned the spotlight on plays whose staging had been delayed by the pandemic. Sometimes it is best to close one's eyes and let yourself be carried away in the force of its current. But writer Miriam Battye, alongside Mitchell, doesn't make this easy. The script is washed in deliberate vagueness and often numbingly mundane descriptions of everyday existence. Somewhat formally indebted to Sarah Kane’s ‘4.48 Psychosis’ (albeit not as bleak) I suppose you’d call it a play for voices. It’s performed by four actors – Moronkẹ Akinola, Eleanor Henderson, Eve Ponsonby and Ragevan Vasan –who throw themselves into the role emotionally, but don’t do a lot of body acting, their most ostentatious movements involving creating sound effects from the variety of props scattered on the desks they stand behind. It is ultra-minimalist: there is no set designer, and reclaimed materials are used to craft what set there is. Mitchell’s usual sound designer Melanie Wilson is on hand to add atmospheric flourishes, notably an injection of ambient dread at the right moments and a few swish surround sound effects (Wilson’s design does a lot more heavy lifting than the foley-ish interventions of the actors, it has to be said). It would work almost as well on radio, although there’s something profoundly affecting about the way Bethany Gupwell’s lighting drops to almost total darkness during the last minutes. It’s a reaction against the often really messy way we talk about rape and sex. I wanted my protagonist to be able to differentiate them; separating the two is part of her ambition right across the day [over which the book unfolds]. I didn’t want rape to corrupt her sex life or sense of desire. It was an empowering position for her to take, and for me to take, to ensure that joy and desire remain, even though there’s not necessarily any resolution in the novel. ‘It’s a reaction against the messy way we talk about rape and sex’Left to right: Eve Ponsonby, Eleanor Henderson, Morónkẹ́ Akinọlá and Ragevan Asan in Watson’s little scratch at the Hampstead theatre, March 2021. Photograph: Robert Day Mitchell’s usual sound designer Melanie Wilson is on hand to add atmospheric flourishes, notably an injection of ambient dread at the right moments and a few swish surround sound effects.' Katie Mitchell will direct Miriam Battye’s compelling adaptation of little scratch. Adapted from Rebecca Watson’s debut novel, little scratch is a fearless and exhilarating account of a woman’s consciousness over the course of 24 hours. Morónkẹ́ Akinọlá, Eleanor Henderson, Eve Ponsonby and Ragevan Vasan will perform in this production from 5 November until 11 December.

Taking our seat and looking up at a simple set of microphone stands, lights overhead each one, immediately gives a sense of the context of this production - to be seen and to be heard is extremely important. As the show progresses, brilliant lighting design by Bethany Gupwell acts to reflect the changing energy and a subtle fading allows us to release a breath we didn’t realise we were holding. The play works almost like a literal depiction of a scatter-brain, of a scrambled head. We are grounded in this storm of rushing thoughts and emotions with a sense relatability. Throughout the duration of the play, you find yourself truly inside the mind of a women through thoughts that we unfortunately have to take into account sometimes in life, only this time the worst case scenario is real. Things that we, and undoubtably a number of other people in the room, saw and thought ‘I do that’, ‘I have felt that’, layered with a flipped perspective is a powerful combination. I love a circadian narrative and had heard interesting things about the experimental style used in this debut novel. I even heard Watson read a passage from it as part of a Faber online preview event and found it very funny and engaging. But I really should have tried an excerpt before requesting this for review; I would have seen at a glance that this wasn’t for me. I don’t have a problem with prose being formatted like poetry ( Girl, Woman, Other, Stubborn Archivist, the prologue of Wendy McGrath’s Santa Rosa), but here it seemed to me that it was only done to alleviate the tedium of the contents.Words are sent rippling up and down the line of actors, overlapping, chiming or bringing chilled silence.'