Reviewed by Rebecca Foster
Tired of lockdown, hankering to see new places, and in desperate need of some sun: that describes most of us at this point. New in paperback, A Theatre for Dreamers offers the perfect armchair travelling to tide you over. Polly Samson’s fifth work of fiction, set in the expat artists’ colony on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, zeroes in on the married Australian authors Charmian Clift and George Johnston, Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen, his wife Marianne Ihlen, and an unknown young poet from Canada named Leonard Cohen.
We encounter all of these real-life characters from the perspective of a starry-eyed fictional narrator, Erica, a seventeen-year-old outsider. In a framing story set in late 2016, after she hears of Cohen’s death, Erica returns to Hydra as an old woman. Yet her first idyllic summer is still intensely alive in her memory. She decided to move to Hydra just before Easter in 1960, with her boyfriend Jimmy and her brother Bobby, because Charmian was once their late mother’s closest friend back in London. Erica knew that her inheritance would go far here: “people like us … can live for a year in the sun on what it’d cost us for a month in a dingy bedsit at home.”
Love triangles abound and emotions run high on Hydra. Gradually Erica learns that just about everyone has slept with, or is currently sneaking around with, someone they aren’t married to. Meanwhile, Bobby and his friends sleep late and paint, then party well into the night. While Erica acts as the responsible mother hen at their villa, seeing that everyone gets fed, she indulges her hedonistic side, too – going to every bash and spending half the day in bed with Jimmy.
Charmian becomes a kind of surrogate mother to Erica but remains spiky due to her jealousy over George’s greater literary success, while she has to care for the children and act as his amanuensis. “They’re the closest thing I have to a family,” Erica writes of Charmian and George and the wider expatriate circle. “I love them all: their banter and moods and tears and wild laughter, all of it, every chaotic bit of it.”
This is a novel dripping with atmosphere. The Royal Society of Literature’s £10,000 Ondaatje Prize is given “for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place,” and I’d be willing to bet that A Theatre for Dreamers will be shortlisted later this spring for its strong sense of place. You can feel the Mediterranean heat soaking up through your sandals; see the piercing sunlight reflecting off white-washed buildings; smell the ripening fruit and herbs and fresh-caught fish. There are dozens of evocative passages that could be quoted, but here is part of one of my favourites:
The port throbs with tourists and the street cats grow fat. The cicadas are busy breaking a hundred hearts with their songs. We pull our mattresses out to the terrace and sleep beneath the stars, wake with the sun … We pick over platters of fish at taverna tables, or drift from courtyard to courtyard with our records and poems, or take bottles of beer and eat bread and meatballs beneath the tumbling vines of the outdoor cinema … We have all become leaner, our legs muscled from the steps, Bobby and Jimmy’s shoulders almost amphibian from swimming. Sometimes we take a bag of peaches and a flask of coffee to the cave and grab a dip before the port is fully awake, other times we swim late at night and lie naked between the moon and the tide on the still-warm rocks.
To alleviate your cabin fever, I can’t recommend a trip to the Hydra of 1960 enough.
Rebecca Foster is a freelance proofreader and book reviewer who writes for the TLS and Wasafiri and blogs at Bookish Beck.
Polly Samson, A Theatre for Dreamers (Bloomsbury, 2021). 978-1526600592, 368 pp., paperback.
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Oh dear, I’m afraid I didn’t like this at all – I thought the attempts at evocative writing about place, like the one you quote, misfired badly, and there was little to distinguish the louche characters from each other, apart from the annoying Charmian and her unpleasant husband. Maybe I shouldn’t have read it in the chilly autumn.