Kate Laity

The third volume of Leonora Carrington’s writing published by Fage éditions (2022) includes the play Judith (1961), dedicated to her friend, the actor/director Leonora Cardiff with whom she worked on The Tempest in 1959, also a play full of magical transformations and hybridity. This is the time in her career when, as Susan Aberth notes, ‘a theatrical ambience enters into her painting…as well’ (97) no doubt influenced by her work with Cardiff, as well as the better known productions like Penelope with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Hawthorn’s Rappaccini’s Daughter with Octavio Paz. Unsurprisingly perhaps, these plays also deal with transformation and hybridity. In this play, Carrington mixes the apocryphal Old Testament story of Judith with Egyptian mythology, then adds few surprises of her own. She creates a new feminist mythology from the story that nonetheless retains the ancient heroine ‘wise in thought’ of ‘elfin beauty’ as immortalised in the Old English poem, characteristics that hint that she is more than human. At heart the element of hybridity is the key to a better future and a common obsession for the artist. The Old Testament heroine for all her exceptional abilities nonetheless upholds both the immediate patriarchal system and the patriarchal religion even if she uses her success in the endeavour to carve out a solo, independent space free from many of its restrictions. Carrington both reduces the scope of Judith’s actions and increases its resonances along with adding the element of hybridity, key to this transformation. Ritual ties it all together. My presentation will look at the play as a dramatic ritual which offers transformative power to escape a poisonous patriarchal system. It offers a balm for difficult times and an imaginative force for fuelling change within ourselves and our communities. I will show how the play connects to rituals in Carrington’s other works, too.

K. A. Laity is an award-winning author, scholar, filmmaker, critic, editor, and arcane artist. She has appeared on BBC radio and NPR talking about magic, witchcraft and surrealism. She has decades of experience reading tarot. Her creative workshops are offered through Visionary Fuel. Her podcasts include Surreal Noir, Is It Funny?, and Irreverent Tarot. Dr Laity’s current research includes medieval Scots, crime fiction & films, medievalism and the writings of Leonora Carrington. She was Associate Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose until its closure in 2024.

https://linktr.ee/katelaity