Shakespeare in Space - Part 1

It is hard to know [wrote the reviewer] whether or not Jameson, who ostensibly 'wrote' and 'directed' this appalling spectacle of theatre, has ever opened a history book concerning the subject matter of his play, or consulted an encyclopaedia, or indeed even a dictionary.

One wonders what possessed the man - whom, but for his very advanced age, might otherwise have been excused this cultural crime on account of youthful naivety - to pen a light-hearted comedy on the subject of the 1933 Ukrainian famine, in which up to 2 million people starved to death. It is known in that country as Holodomor, commonly rendered into English as "The Extermination by Famine", or to use Jameson's own translation - also the title of the play - "Hungry hungry Slavs". (Incidentally, both the promotional posters and the programme itself contained a misprint - one error, at very least, for which Jameson can presumably avoid blame - with the second "hungry" in the title spelt without an "r". Hungry hungy Slavs.)

In the same way that the agonies of starvation were surely a theme of sorts to the impoverished peasants of Kiev and Vennytsia in the early 1930s, so appalling slapstick is the abiding theme of Jameson's play. One memorable scene - not even, I regret to say, the most offensive - opens with protagonists Kasimir and Len by the roadside, mid-famine, each chewing on a lean, meaty drumstick. Kasimir takes a large bite, and then spits out his mouthful in disgust. "What is this, Len?" he demands to know, waving the dripping bone beneath his partner's nose. "Why Kasimir," replies Len, "it's only HP sauce!", and the script must have called for Len to pause at this moment for laughter, seven seconds which were met, in actuality, by a confused silence in the audience.

Confusion gave way quickly to horror as the 'punchline' was revealed: our heroes are in fact cannibalising the remains of their beloved friend Volodymyr, identifiable to the audience by his flat-cap, and whose death, whilst made doubly certain by his two hungry hungry friends, is never actually explained. The 'joke', I suppose, is that we - the audience - consider at first that Kasimir is disgusted to find he is eating a human (and his erstwhile companion no less) whereas in fact he is revolted by Len's choice of condiments. Comedy gold.

Nothing of the humour, I assure you, is lost in explanation. I suspect it was even less funny to witness it 'in the flesh', so to speak, and a lady in the row behind me actually vomited. The sight of her - pale and sweating, with stinking, half-digested mulch pooled in her lap, the remains of dinner - was nevertheless much more appealing than the sights on stage. In the interests of balance, I concede that Jameson's prop manager appears to know his business, for Volodymyr's jointed carcass was exceedingly realistic, right down to the stench of decay and teeth marks in the exposed white flank.

(In one of the more egregious of Jameson's scripting oversights, Volodymyr actually reappears in a later scene, joining Len and Kasimir on stage for a musical number about typhus and its deleterious effects on infant mortality ("Lice, lice, baby"). Is he real, or merely a spectral visitation? Either way, Kasimir and Len remain strangely calm in his presence, and if he sung a little badly - which he did - one can surely blame the fact his vocal chords were marinated in HP sauce and served as a kebab shortly beforehand.)

To describe this play as having low points would necessarily imply one or more downward trajectories, beginning at a relative high point. The fact is that it begins at rock bottom, with a clumsy gag about 'chicken kiev', and remains there until the end, some two hours later, with Kasimir's falsetto lament by the marshy banks of the Neman ("Crimea river").

For all its historical inaccuracies (Len possesses a fax machine, for example, some thirty years before they became commercially widespread) and geographical blunders (the River Neman flows through Belarus and Lithuania, not Ukraine, and certainly not the Crimean peninsula), one can at least say this is not Jameson's most poorly-researched work. Vying for that accolade must surely be his thought-provoking "Gay Gandhi", subject to an ongoing law-suit, and last year's "Abraham's Thinkin'", in which the assassination of President Lincoln by British Redcoats is depicted as having sparked the American Civil War...

The review continued in that same, uncharitable vein for a further half page. Why the Merton Gazette had seen fit to devote an entire pullout feature of their Sunday edition to poor reviews of his play, Mr Peter Reginald Jameson could not understand. It seemed unusually vindictive. Even the amateurish "hate rallies" of the local jihadist cell, the South Wimbledon Martyrs, received fewer column inches.

("The Merton Martyrs", snappy and alliterative, would perhaps have been a better name for the gang, and much more accurate given their headquarters were the above the opticians on Merton High Street. Then again, few of us are entirely innocent of engaging in a little post-code snobbery from time to time; one can devote oneself to promoting violent jihad and the downfall of Western Imperialism, but still want to appear closer to Wimbledon than Colliers Wood.)

The play, Hungry hungry Slavs, had opened on the previous Thursday evening in the main hall of the Downley Road community centre, to an audience of four people. Given the pullout contained no fewer than six reviews, noted Peter, ever sharp-eyed, with all six referring to the opening show, that meant at least two reviews had come from the cast and crew themselves. Alas, the cowardly pen-wielding assassins had elected to remain anonymous - that is, except for the Gazette's official theatre critic, the venomous Clarice Arthur.

Clarice and Peter were arch nemeses. Or at least, that is how Peter Jameson contemplated their arrangement. If truth be told, Clarice had little idea who Peter was. She thought, eying him from fifteen feet away during his somewhat audacious curtain call at the play's conclusion, that she recognised him. "Perhaps he's the council worker who picks up our recycling on Tuesdays," she said to herself.

But Peter was no council worker. In fact, he and the local council were sworn enemies (again, only in Peter's mind). He had recently canvased the neighbourhood to raise awareness of council inaction over "The Fox Question". The Fox Question, or "FTQ" as Peter sometimes called it, was the stirring quandary posed by the recent influx of vulpes vulpes, or "vulpes urbanus" as Peter sometimes referred to the creatures in his pamphlet. It was his view that the recent spike in numbers was no coincidence, but in fact had been deliberately engineered by some nefarious council committee in order to build support for the area's regeneration, support without which they could not access the requisite government grant. Peter Jameson liked the neighbourhood the way it was, and didn't want to see it gentrified. "Today it's a road without potholes," he liked to tell cashiers in the newsagent, "tomorrow they'll be bulldozing our community centre to build a McStarbucks outlet."

How had the council engineered the influx? Simply, claimed Peter, by moving the bin collection day from Monday morning to Tuesday morning. Weekend waste, which inevitably contains thrown-away foodstuffs, is invariably put out on a Sunday evening, if nothing else because individuals have the free time to do so. By delaying collection twenty-four hours, there was an extended window of opportunity in which foxes could attack the refuse bags for sustenance. With abundant nutrients came mass immigration. Soon enough, Merton households were feeding not only local foxes but also specimens from as far a field as Coulsdon, Tadworth and Worcester Park. A late night visitor to those dark, potholed streets bore witness to scenes of practically orgiastic abandon, with dozens of foxes eating, dancing and coupling by street-light; milling and mewling, some mangy and others magnificent, all neither quite feline nor quite canine. Funny, messy animals.

Problematically for Peter, by spelling out the conspiracy in his much-circulated and inadvertently very amusing pamphlet, he drew the attention of the locals to the possibility of regeneration funding, something which the ineffectual local MP had tried but failed to do. A month after posting his pamphlets through every door in a half-mile radius, he received a reply of sorts. One Clarice Arthur, "proud Mertonian of seven years' standing", had authored a pamphlet of her own (or a flier, more precisely; a mere one page of text compared to Peter Jameson's seven).

Making no reference to the crusade which had inspired it, Clarice announced that it had come to her attention that, with the right level of local support and lobbying, their modest corner of Merton, a little way off the high street, could benefit from smoother roads and upmarket retail franchises. Recipients of the flier were urged to write to or email their MP and certain council representatives forthwith, and Clarice even provided an address for her personal website, where a template for such a letter could be found. (Peter did not have the Internet at home, being unconvinced of its usefulness, and suspicious of its ubiquity.)

And thus, some six months after first raising The Fox Question, Peter found himself wandering through a much-changed neighbourhood. Potholes had been duly filled, and a well-known clothing chain had opened a modest store at the end of his road, closest to the high street. The chain specialised in casual apparel, but 'casual' in the middle-class sense. Non-team specific rugby shirts adorned mannequins in the window display, and on their feet they wore intentionally distressed-looking deck shoes. Nautical symbols abounded: an anchor badge sewn here, a porthole logo there. Peter had nothing against sea-goers, other than pirates of course, but he felt the shop's wares were out of place in landlocked Merton, and moreover a sign of the gentrification which he had long feared was coming.

Those prematurely aged deck shoes were the warning ripples of a much larger swell, now fast approaching. The sturdy seawall had been breached by a flier-shaped torpedo, with a warhead of civic pride and ambition, impact-detonating. And which villainous Kapitän zur See had piloted the U-boat, reflected Peter? It was none other than Clarice Arthur...

Part 2

In response to the critical rough-housing of his newest play, Peter Jameson fell into a rut of deep despair. It was a familiar rut, comforting in a way; a rut which over the years had been molded by the contours of his frequently falling body. He lay on his bed, and stared intently at the ceiling. Where did one go from here?

Peter lived in a one bedroom council flat, on the third floor of an unimposing five storey tenement block. What small living space there was had been eroded with the passing years by stacks of hoarded furniture, old newspapers and abandoned DIY projects.

Once upon a time, when Patty was alive, the flat was kept in an immaculate state, or "party ready", for Patty was gregarious, big-hearted and exceedingly popular. Each week she and Peter would entertain at least once, and sometimes even twice or three times: large, simple dinners of goat curry, or lasagna, or shepherds pie, to which a dozen guests would attend.

Peter and Patty had only four chairs, and the kitchen table only really sat six at most, but room was always made, somehow. Wives sat on their husbands' laps; husbands occasionally sat on their wives' laps. Once, even, the kitchen window was flung open on a warm evening in early Autumn to allow a guest to perch on the sill, with his feet in the sink. That dinner had seen no fewer than fifteen crowded into the little kitchen for a gigantic risotto, served from a large mop bucket which Patty had spent a fortnight sanitising for that precise purpose.

Patty, a lady of substantive girth, with personality and humour to match, was beloved by all in the neighbourhood, and her invitations were seized upon jealously. Everybody knew her. Peter, by contrast, was socially rather awkward, and although he enjoyed the dinners, the parties and the dinner parties (and also the party dinners, held annually for local paid-up Liberal Democrats, of whom there were sometimes one or two), he enjoyed them as an admiring wallflower in a greenhouse filled with elegant, creeping wisteria, and boisterous lily blooms.

With Patty's departure to that "banquet hall in the sky" (the version of the afterlife which she had propounded was a raucous, gluttonous affair, a sort of Valhalla for rotund social democrats), following a mercifully brief battle with complications arising from diabetes, the parties stopped. Peter had neither heart nor will to continue her legacy of entertaining, and retreated from public life.

Patty's other love, besides eating with company, was the theatre. Their first date, as giddy undergraduates of Leeds University, some thirty years before, had been to the West Yorkshire Playhouse to watch a production of Waiting for Godot, which Peter secretly found incredibly tedious. 

"They just wait!" he had complained to a friend the next day. "They literally stand around waiting for some fellow who doesn't turn up, and there are about three lines of dialogue repeated over and over...On the upside, the storyline is easy to follow because nothing happens." 

But over the years which followed, what had begun as a means of courtship became an adopted and authentic love of Peter's. Skepticism gave way to an appreciation of the theatrical art form. He became an ardent fan of Arden; a devotee of Dewhurst, and a tourist of almost every theatre of note in the country. The assiduously collected and annotated programmes piled up in towers, firstly in his bedroom, and at last in their bedroom.

An enthusiasm for all things thespian was likewise manifested in Peter's and and Patty's support for community amateur dramatics, the quality of which in Merton had a tendency to vary between very poor, and quite poor.

It was in the company of such motley dramatists that Peter was first inspired to pen a script himself, in the mid-1990s. His first attempt, a re-working of the traditional Easter Passion, in which the case against Jesus is thrown out of the Sanhedrin on a technicality, was dismissed by Charlie, his godson, who had offered to proofread it.

"The sacrilege is actually the least of its problems," explained Charlie, who worked in television. "The 'court scene' satire is quite laboured, and the storyline kind of fizzles out once we discover that Jesus's lawyer is actually the leper he healed two years before in Samaria."

Peter, whose attitude to criticism was healthy, and borne of much practice, asked what he might do to improve the script.

"Make it snappier - cut some of the dialogue. Sex it up a bit," replied Charlie. Peter was not familiar with the phrase 'sex it up', and took the advice quite literally. The re-re-worked Passion script now climaxed, in more ways than one, with a love scene between Jesus and Pontius Pilate.

Sacrilege now became the greatest of its problems, and the play was promptly and quietly jettisoned by the Church of the Holy Trinity from its Eastertide schedule. 

Patty had done her best to comfort Peter following the disappointment. If truth be told, she had had her own reservations about the subject matter of Peter's play, but had thought it best to not obstruct the creative process. She was firmly of the view that people should be allowed to make mistakes - for otherwise, how should they learn?  

It was, tragically, about that time when her own dietary mistakes came back to haunt her, and acute renal failure saw her movement drastically curtailed to wherever her dialysis machine could be dragged. Her death, months later, had a quite understandably profound impact on Peter. Gone was the joy from his life. But in another way, too, was he affected. Before her soul was plucked and carried off by Valkyries (unlike the pall bearers at her funeral they suffered no strain, for a soul - and an innocent one at that - weighs nothing) she had urged Peter, who kept a vigil at her hospital bedside, to persevere with his writing. Or that, at least, is how he interpreted her coded blinking.

"I'll make you proud, Patty," he promised her, fighting back tears and squeezing her enormous and beautifully soft hands. She died a short while later.

Soon after her funeral he began his relentless and somewhat ill-fated campaign to write and direct a masterpiece.

Part 3

"Peter, you've got to snap out of this." It was Charlie. Peter was still lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. 

"It was a bad review, Peter," he went on. "Everyone gets them."

Peter's eyes drew a focus. "This was different, Charlie," he said. "I really, really felt that 'Hungry hungry Slavs' was going to be my breakthrough. I know that some of the others were . . . a little premature, say, perhaps a little before their time . . . "

Charlie's thought of the Gay Gandhi lawsuit, rumbling on into its second year. It had been sheer bad luck that Peter had opened the play on the 15th August, India's Independence Day, and doubly unfortunate that officials from the London embassy had happened to be passing by the theatre and had spotted the billboards.

". . . But this one," sighed Peter, "this one I thought would be different."

"Tough break, old man," said Charlie, leaning forward to pat Peter's arm. "Come on, get your shoes on. Let's go for a pint."

And so they did. They headed to the nearby "Republican Oak" pub (previously the "Royal Oak" until new, and presumably anti-monarchic, management took over). It was increasingly fashionable at the time for London pubs, in an effort to be different, to offer customers a Thai food menu. Pub-goers otherwise staunchly occidental in their world view, and leery of Johnny Foreigners, could be found contentedly masticating on a hoisin duck spring roll in between mouthfuls of London Pride. 

The Republican Oak, in an effort to be different, offered customers a Chinese food menu; never mind that every building on the street, except the police station and the pub itself, was a Chinese takeaway. Commercial nous was never the manager's strong point.

And nor was catering, really. Eventually Peter's and Charlie's orders made it to their table, but via a mix-up with a lone diner on the other side of the pub, which saw the young woman receiving Peter's main course. A new one had to be cooked for Peter with much delay and fanfare.

Charlie washed down his chicken chow mein with a mouthful of dark and heavy ale. It was a uniquely disgusting combination, he reflected, as the two cultures waged chemical warfare on his palate.

"Here, look", he said, pointing at Peter's side-plate. "You haven't touched your cookie."

It was a cashew-shaped fortune cookie accompanying the bill, which the waiter had brought (unbidden) with the final course. Placing down his own ale, Peter took the cookie, broke in half, and pulled loose the tiny sheet of printed paper inside. He read it aloud.

FIND INSPIRATION IN THE WORK OF OTHERS

The words had an instantaneous and profound impact on him. It was as if some hermit-sage from the high Himalayas had reached out of his food and slapped him across the face. It was suddenly clear what he had to do.

"I shouldn't be a writer," he announced, to Charlie's relief. "No. My gifts never lay in the writing sphere. I see that now. I'm meant to use my directorial talents to enhance the work of others."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pub, a promising teenage song-writer was dining alone. She cracked open her fortune cookie and read quietly:

GIVE UP; YOU'RE SHIT

Devastating, right down to the precise and pointed semicolon.

Part 4

The following morning, upon his waking up, the thick, beery fug was pierced almost immediately by Peter's euphoric sense of creative rebirth. This euphoria was in turn pierced by the strain of his bladder, which he duly emptied after shuffling down the hallway to the bathroom. Empty-bladdered, the piercing euphoria returned.

There was a framed photograph of Patty which hung in the hallway. It wasn't objectively a flattering portrait; it depicted Patty, half out-of-frame, poorly lit, eyes closed, placing a Thai spring roll into her upturned mouth, like a hungry chick devouring a worm. The photo had been taken at the King's Head, before the change of management, and it was unfortunately one of the few photos Peter had of his dearly departed. (Charlie had recently offered to "photoshop" it, which was not a term Peter understood. It sounded mercantile and sinister.) This morning, Peter drew up beside the portrait and serenaded Patty with a joyous ditty, or at least he meant to - in the moment he could only recall the words to a Beach Boys song about promiscuity. Nothing, however, not even memory loss, could ruin his good mood.

"I'm going to make you proud, my love," he told her; stroking the image of her plump cheeks, bulging gloriously around that ravenous maw.

After breakfast, Peter read through his mail (bills; fliers; the usual selection of harassing notes from an anonymous local fox-lover; more bills), pulled on his shoes and headed out to the local library. His mission was to identify a playwright who had fallen from prominence, and whose plays could be revitalised with considerate staging and a bold new direction. 

It took Peter some time to get his own table at the library. Desk space was at a premium in that library, fought over hungrily by pensioners, tramps and the unemployed, who circled them like bull sharks around a lone canoeist, waiting for a moment to strike.

After several trips to the relevant bookshelves, he had before him a tower of screenplays and theatrical compendia, and began working his way through them, from top to bottom. The hours flew by, and many a circling tramp lost patience with his unceasing vigil. At 5 o'clock, when "last orders" were announced over the public address system (the chief librarian was both a humorist and a dipsomaniac), Peter's notepad was full from the margin to the edge of every page. The names of three playwrights were emphatically underlined: Edward Bond, John Osborne and Caryl Churchill.

As he left the library to walk home, he toyed with a number of ideas: Churchill's memorable and contentious Seven Jewish Children, perhaps, with the eponymous offspring emerging from the shadows over the course of the ten minute play, revealed to be wearing blackface and afro wigs - a subversive commentary on how one's racial and ethnic prejudices are involuntarily transmitted to one's children; or what about Osborne's Look back in Anger, with the actors delivering their lines from deckchairs on the edge of a pier, an allusion to the deckchair in which Osborne wrote the play, on Morecambe Pier in 1956...

He discussed his ideas the following day with Tariq, who worked in one of the few remaining independent local pharmacies. Tariq was formerly of the South Wimbledon Martyrs jihadist group, but disowned them when they declared X-Box to be haram in an issue of their quarterly magazine, Jihadi Life. That same issue, which led with a piece on beard-grooming and burqa fashion disasters, also declared haram frivolous Western art and literature, which Tariq, following the Sanskrit aphorism that my enemy's enemy is my friend, took it upon himself to learn and appreciate anew.

By the time of his cross-counter parley with Peter, he had worked his way from Apollinaire to Dryden, by way of Babbage, Bacon, and Calvino, amongst several dozen others. The X-Box gathered dust in his loft.

"...And so you see," explained Peter, "the seagull defecating on Jimmy in the final act is symbolic of John Osborne's wife fouling things up for him."

"Powerful imagery," Tariq agreed. "Although you don't consider Osborne may be too obscure for a Mertonian audience? The same could be said, I think, for Churchill and even Bacon."

"Obscure?" Peter asked. He stood aside to allow Tariq to serve a customer, an elderly gentleman purchasing toothpaste.

"Indeed," continued Tariq when the gentleman had left the shop. "You want your play to be a furnace, and every furnace must begin with a spark. A spark is bright, and white hot; it draws the eye. How can you draw the eye in the Merton Community Centre with a play such as Osborne's, which requires foreknowledge and context to appreciate its many layers."

"Yes, true. Well perhaps not Osborne then."

"And Bond neither," Tariq replied. "Let me tell you a story, Peter. The South Wimbledon Martyrs - fools to a man - once protested at Bond's Saved, being performed at a theatre in Putney Heath. Our sheikh declared it was obscene. But barely five people turned up to see the play, and since it was raining outside we congregated in the foyer to protest, and purchased refreshments for it was late in the day and we were famished. We discovered later that the theatre had realised a higher opening night profit on catering for protestors than from the play itself. Not long after that the Martyrs produced a list of obscene plays which our sheikh considered too obscure to be worth picketing."

"Golly," said Peter. "I must say I hadn't really thought of that. May I see the list?"

"I am not, thank God, a part of that group any longer, but unless arrangements have altered drastically since my departure, the list - along with a schedule for protests and a copy of the sheikh's sermons - can be accessed in a shared Internet folder."

"A what?"

"A shared Internet folder," Tariq repeated. "A webpage accessible to anybody, and from which one can download files. It was, I think, intended to be secret, but the sheikh does not understand about Internet security, and is not what you might call 'computer literate'. I think he's taking IT lessons at the library."

Peter felt a pang of sympathy with his brother Luddite, and did in fact recall having seen a thickly spectacled old man at the library the day before, glaring sullenly into the grimy glow of an ancient computer monitor. He was noteworthy on account of his being dressed like the villainous Jafar from Disney cartoon Aladdin.

Tariq went on to explain to Peter how he could access the shared folder, and he found himself back at the library that very afternoon, browsing the Inter-web in accordance with Tariq's guidance. Updating his MySpace profile on the device immediately adjacent was the sheikh, this time wearing a beret, some navy blue overalls and a red-white keffiyeh, which he had made himself by stitching together a number of his wife's kitchen towels.