In Angel’s Trumpet Pollock again investigates the life of a woman who
struggles against a patriarchal regime, and questions the role in which
she has been cast by others. And she returns again to a theme that increasingly
preoccupies her works – the personal price exacted by “art.” Angel’s Trumpet
examines the fraught symbiotic relationship between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,
and its potential for artistic creativity and personal destruction. From
Nancy Mitford’s biography, Zelda (1970), Pollock has taken the outlines
of a love/hate relationship of a “beautiful and damned couple.” The play
interrogates “the nature of the ownership of a life and its transformation
into a literary (or dramatic) text, and whether one individual’s urge to
self-expression can be justifiably sacrificed if it’s deemed necessary
for the self-expression of a genius” (Pollock, programme notes). More importantly
for Pollock, it asks the question: where does the truth lie -- “In the
living of our lives, or in the multiple ways and means we have of recording
them?
05/25: 915