An experiment:

“Hello.  I’m writing the heart-skewering ballad of a lonely sommelier working within the restaurant industry.  I was wondering if (insert ludicrously overpriced champagne conglomerate) would be interested in sponsoring the production.  The play has attracted interest from (insert B-list celebrity of pre-regional pantomime calibre) and also (insert Hollywood star last reported missing presumed dead) for the part of the dying father.” 

“Uh…I’ll put you through to marketing and finance.”

Cue an hour of fluent lying. 

“We’re pleased to tell you, mister (insert smugly satirical alias here), that if you can guarantee a display of the brand name and product throughout the performance, we’ll be happy to arrange a thousand pound investment and a range of complimentary stock for your theatre bar.”

Ah, our constant companion, advertisement.   

An everyday example:  18 pages of ads may be forgivable in a free paper, but in a 50 page broadsheet championing socialism it seems a sniff peculiar.  Is it all just dependent on how much has happened in the world on that particular day?  (“Quick!  Call Laura Ashley!  Turns out that revolution in Turkmenistan was a false alarm!”)  What if one day nothing happens?  Does the whole paper get plastered in the latest deals from Dell and John Lewis and other corporations that sound like characters from the Waltons?

Menopause the musical was bad, but worse was its perforation of M&S advertising.  Don’t get me wrong, if the National Trust offered to sponsor my musical on Henry VIII and his six wives, I’d hack away.  But M&S?  The price of their edame bean salad dwarfs equity minimum.   

There was a big scare a while back when someone suggested ‘live’ advertisements preceding West End performances.  I had to applaud this brave folly.  Can you imagine?  About to sit down to some infant-griddling cannibalism in Titus Andronicus… “but first, a word from our sponsors!”  …as some little tyke hops onstage, lisping adoration for honey-nut loops whilst his mother pats him fondly on the scalp.  No comedy need ever fear a cool reception with a warm-up act like that.

It is a sad necessity of the starving artist that the eventual termination that starvation leads to will (probably) put a cork in their artistic output.  If, ostensibly, an artist lives to create, then they must ensure their longevity by living, which in most cases goes against the act of creativity itself.  I’m not suggesting drama school graduates in telesales reading out hundreds of set-text customer questionnaires stunts creativity — I’m insisting it does. 

We need to keep at least one sacred cow of the arts brand-free.  If we really believe smothering our stages in Nike ticks or Pepsi swirls is the only way to finance our plays, then we’re bald-faced liars.  Something wicked that way comes.

By the way, I haven’t really written a musical about Henry VIII and his six wives.  Unless the National Trust are reading this.  In which case, Act III: Lady Jane turns Grey is coming along very nicely.

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 On the tube (have had to bid farewell to the trusty 171 — rehearsals are now commencing, somewhat ominously, in a freemason temple in Bethnal Green) two painter/decorators slump next to eachother, reading those sinister free papers that plague the afternoon rush hour like garish pterodactyls.  One reads the purple one, the other the yellow — it’s rival. 

“Apparently…in

Los Angeles…there’s a fella who’s died of eating too much aubergine.  Noxious fumes.” 

“Amazing.  There’s something here about a bloke who gassed himself in

California after an ‘eggplant buffet’.” 

“Wow.” 

“It’s like a bloody epidemic.” 

“And they say vegetables are good for you.” 

Now this is the worst kind of pickpaging.  These urban loo-papers echo eachother’s stories, barefaced and without invention.  I’m beginning to think they’re both owned by the same shadowy conglomerate anyway (and on that note, rationalizing their environmental perniciousness by telling yourself you’re giving someone a job to do clearing them all up is just plain wrong.  Economics does not in that way work).  Pickpaging in journalism is lazy and downright irresponsible.  In the theatre it’s an art-form. 

Yes, creative ‘borrowing’ is rife here on the off-west-end.  Even I am guilty on a few counts (a hushed breath falls across keyboards everywhere).  Writers are renownedly touchy about this business of pickpaging.  In a business based on sensitivity, the smallest similarity can be grounds for vicious provocation.  Unless you can summon up an entire world of artifice (I’ve tried, and it doesn’t enamour itself to the proofreaders, believe me), you’re usually in trouble with someone. 

I wrote a comedy based on a dinner party I’d been to and developed a, ahem, variation on a theme to propel it’s dramatic finale.  What I didn’t realise, and what they told me after, was that the invented third act revelation of the play was a practical word-for-word account what actually happened.  Awk-ward… 

And professional kleptocracy doesn’t perish off the page.  I’ll never forget my first starry-eyed pilgrimage to

Stratford-upon-Avon, only to witness a scrimmage between two burly actors appearing in Julius Caesar, one accusing the other of having stolen the voice he uses in Act IV!  I’ve never left The Dirty Duck feeling filthier about the profession. 

The music industry is far from inoculated either.  You can question the integrity of covering old songs, but likewise can argue that they’re simply handing down stories from generation to generation.  And for every three horrendous covers of brilliant songs, we’re beginning to get one inspired cover of a relatively awful song.  Now, if only they’d start doing that with movies. 

So try as you might, you can’t keep a secret in this business.  At it’s lowest form it becomes gossip; at it’s highest it exposes hypocrisy and reflects uncomfortable truths back at us in Hamlet’s Mirror. 

And to prove my point, I’ve stolen this week’s column.  That’s right, I admit it.  I’ve pilfered from the English language, raided a book of syntax and commandeered some fairly questionable semantics.  Kleptocrat and proud.  Happy pillaging.

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When I was at drama school, despite the continual outbreaks of Legionnaires Disease in the showers, I was routinely mesmerized by the toilet cubicles.  

They were lovingly and unfailingly inscribed each week —before being hastily painted over— with scorching satirical depictions of our teachers in continuing endeavours of hilarity.  The culprit was a mystery, but crowds would converge at these pre-Olivier dung-holes to worship the graven images carved thereupon and offer up their tittering reverence (a god with a sense of humour, poor deity, rare thing).

Indulging one day in the age-old recreation of skiving (the best pre-drama school training a bottle of talcum powder can buy), I retired to the plague-ridden toilets and their revered cartoonilith.  In walks an older student (with a reputation) and I scramble out.  As I do:

“Is it di-dum di-dum or dum-di-dum?”

“Sorry?”  I yelp.

“Di-dum di-dum, or dum-di-dum?”

“I never really read Alice in Wonderland—”

“Yambic thermometer.  ‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where’…Come on, I’m onstage in a minute.”

“Oh.  I think…di-dum di-dum?  ‘Ay, but to die’…emphasis on the… but…”

“Thanks, mate.”

He shakes off at the urinal, flashes a smile, checks the cartoons, pulls out a pen and adjusts the shading on one of the bald patches.  Our cartoonist then bounces onto the stage and gives a firecracker performance.  And if he doesn’t get a Bafta for his latest television role, I’ll eat my mildewing leotard.

Which just goes to show that —much to the chagrin of bitter scholars everywhere— mastery of the ‘yambic thermometer’ isn’t prerequisite for a heart-rattling Shakespearean performance.

But the cartooning is prevalent.  I can think of a dozen excellent actors, some illustrious, with a penchant for cartooning.  They know, much like cartoonists, how to spot the appropriate behavioural chink and exploit it. 

Today in rehearsals, as an experiment, I start drawing cartoons all over my script.  I begin to get into it, lacquering on a caliper, jellied hair, perhaps even monocles (two?)…And then I realise that the whole room is waiting for me to talk.  No amount of cartooning, evidently, can make up for good-old-fashioned speaking your lines. 

This year I’ve seen a polygamist without passion; a husband-terrorizing philanderer without charm; and a hired killer with all the menace of a Radio 4 presenter.  It’s very uncartoonish.  If the plot of the play is the rails of the train, the ride’s only as interesting as the ghosts that jump out at you along the way.  And those spooks we might call character.  Documentaries are dandy if you want reality — but theatre should be the reserve of the extraveritastical (cartooning infects to even the realm of words, alas).

So I’m off to draw a few more cartoons and see how my acting’s coming along.  I implore you to do the same.  Preferably in your place of work, or somewhere of equivalent authoritas.  A politely revolutionary pastime. 

And if nothing else, you’ll at least be keeping some little toilet skiver entertained.

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Apart from being one of my favourite words, folly is also my preferential implement in the petty dejeuner of life.  I’m writing this week’s column from a maze, and everyone here seems very pleased with themselves.  They’re all here of their own volition.  They knew what they were getting themselves into in the first place, and whether they’re here for ponderous sanctuary, a physio-sudokic challenge, or simply to philander with a lusty beau, they’re all up for a bit of folly.  And all power to them.  You’ll never see anyone looking unhappy in a maze, unless they’re taking it a bit too seriously, which belies a love of the maze experience in itself.

However.  Being put through the theatrical maze of Absurdism may fatigue anyone’s penchant for folly.

Recent absurdities of the London stage include Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Beckett’s Fragments, Camus’ Caligula, and depending on your opinion of antipodean culture, The Vegemite Tales.  Rhinoceros’ original fascism analogy doesn’t seem to stick — the translation’s brilliantly witty, the acting effortless, but as much it tickles, it doesn’t terrify, or move.  If Rhinoceros was initially written as a warning, what does it become when the audience leaves the theatre entirely unalarmed?  The same humanitarian decimation that put Absurdism out to play with its brothers (Nihilism and Existentialism, little scamps) after WWII is still hitting us today from the front pages.  But the game’s gotten old. 

It could be that today we’re not so desperate for meaning.  More communication means there’s more opportunity for someone to discover that it’s their heart’s fondest wish to become a tree surgeon, etcetera.  So if Absurdism was a reaction against the preachy moralistic and social dramas of the last century, then perhaps the next move is for theatre to turn away from all philosophical recommendation — theatre that moves and befuddles, much like a maze, but lets the audience stumble upon their own individual conclusions, rather than being led out procession-style down a well-lighted exit route.

The best play of the summer was Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, which, under its own steam, managed to be entirely absurd and achingly truthful.  The play was about man inflicting his follies on others, as opposed to a dramatist inflicting their follies onto a play, or a theatre onto its audience.  There was no blatant analogy or chorus-like choreography.  It produced something that reflected the absurdities of life, had larger-than-life characters (see next week), and ultimately, the thing which conventional absurdist theatre may be failing to do: it moved things around in our heart.  It changed us without telling us what to do, or by merely perplexingly amusing us.

Perplexual amusement, methinks, is best left to the mazes. 

And on that note, I leave you with a glorious little absurdist moment from the maze’s restaurant.  A pearl-uniformed lady asks the waiter what he thinks of the fishy paella.  He replies, wincing:

“Eh…to be ‘onest wis you mademoiselle, ah cannot recommend it.”

She smiles sweetly.

“Excellent.  I’ll have the paella.”  

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