The House that Jack Built: Review of Lamanby at Durham Book Festival

Lamanby is based on Jacob Polley’s award-winning poetry collection Jackself (2016) – but is definitely not a straightforward poetry reading. The written collection has morphed into a live event that mingles music, film, sound, and poetry into one enchanting, disorienting, and at times disturbing experience, as Hannah Piercy found when she watched, listened, and imagined at Durham Book Festival.

In Lamanby, we enter a world of childish make-believe, disrupted and fractured by moments of violence and horror. Jacob Polley, who reads his own poetry-drama, speaks with the tone and expressiveness of a child telling a story that crosses between fiction and history, between imagination and experience. But this story is a dark one: it paints a picture of a world where monsters might lurk in the streams – or worse, within a family – and where the neighbourhood boys who go out to look for Jackself amongst the marshes might never come back …

Lamanby, the Cumbrian childhood home of Polley’s semi-autobiographical character Jackself, weaves in and out of the performance: it is a setting, a starting point, a history, and an imaginary world. From the beginning, Lamanby is introduced to us as a place of magic and mystery: ‘No house is ever truly empty’, Polley tells us, but we get the sense that this is somehow truer of Lamanby than of other homes. In Lamanby, ‘then is standing right here’ – the four-hundred-year-old history of the house crowds in on the present, and the selves of that past, with lives of their own, surround Jackself and his companions.

But Lamanby also has a reassuring side to it: the most disturbing episodes of Polley’s narrative happen outside of the house, and the other characters who live in Lamanby – ‘mudder’ and ‘muggins here’, Jackself’s parents – have a comforting practicality to them that provides a counterpoint to the horror and mystery of some of Lamanby’s other, darker, episodes.

The house of Lamanby is pictured on screen, but the locations we are shown are always peripheral: we see rooms that look like an attic, a shed, a cellar, but never a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom. The landscape shown on film more generally is impersonal: not the distinctive beauty of the Cumbrian mountains, but the flatlands of open fields and empty marsh, together with the depths of woodland. These may be the views of Bowness-on-Solway where Polley grew up, but they could be anywhere, prompting us to think, perhaps, of our own Lamanbys.

The film and sound effects blend together at times to create ambiguity, distortion. This was particularly effective when a group of schoolboys searching for Jackself were heard shouting his nickname (‘Pea wit’) over the speakers, their voices gradually blending into and lost beneath the sound of birds squawking and singing. This captured the blurring of the lines between nature and human, one person and another, which is frequently brought to the fore of Lamanby. Jeremy Wren becomes a wren, Jackself disintegrates into crab-apples, and Jeremy and Jackself at times seem to be one person. This is a world that is almost animistic – a world in which identities fluctuate like the flow of a river, or the fall of rain.

The interweaving of music, film, and poetry echoes the fluid nature of Lamanby. Live music, performed by John Alder, generally added a suitable background to the mythic quality of Polley’s performance. I was less keen on the first of two or three more rock-influenced pieces: the first, reacting to Jackself’s imposed isolation in school, felt overwrought and melodramatic. I won’t say any more about the later use of rock elements, but there I certainly felt the drama was justified.

While Lamanby has many dark moments, humour often hovers under the surface, sometimes emerging with a shock. Even the episode of the ‘monster’ is ultimately humorous in its final anti-climax, while elsewhere humour emphasises the boyish nature of this piece. Toilet humour, swearing, and experiments with alcohol were all part of this wide-ranging performance, which conveyed the experience of a real and imagined boyhood in the open, mythic landscapes of Cumbria.

This, then, is the house that Jack – or Jackself, or Jacob Polley and his collaborators – built: created not of bricks and mortar, but of words, film, and music; of friendship and sorrow; of memory and imagination; and of history and home.  This house is a thoroughway – to childhood memories, imaginary friends and monsters, and our human relationships with the world around us.

Lamanby will next be showing on Thursday 1st November at 7.15pm at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, Culture Lab and then on Saturday 10th November at 6pm at the National Centre for Writing, Dragon Hall, Norwich. Durham Book Festival ran from 6^th to 14^th October 2018.