MRS MAY, MR BECKETT AND THE BREXIT ENDGAME

"The negotiations for our departure are now in the endgame," said Mrs Theresa May on the evening of 12 November, at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in The Guildhall, a suitable occasion to celebrate the kamikaze-like devotion to a display of the splendor of British (or English) sovereignty. It came a day after the ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the end of "the war to end all wars". The BBC Radio 4 Now Show was more perfectly ironic in describing the Remembrance Day ceremony as honoring the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen who gave their lives in defense of Brussels.

But it was odd that May should choose a word recalling Samuel Beckett's play to describe the negotiations which would stretch until three in the morning that very morning, and which appear to offer very little to anyone. May's genius has been to divide her own party into three factions, one more than plagued Offshore Dave Cameron, which means that every aspect of the Brexit debate is now 'covered' by BBC by presenting all three sides of their national debate: that is, the Tory party: 'Irish Jake' Rees-Mogg and the errrggghhhh group of hard-line No Deal Brexiters; the Remoaners led by the latest opportunistic Johnson, JoJo, the one who gave Toby Young a job regulating university students, until someone noticed; and May's backers (the hapless Damien Green in the BBC Radio 4 Today knees-up I heard a few days ago) for whatever piecemeal 'deal' she manages to get in the end, hampered by the fact that Michel Barnier and the EU play chess while she plays Chequers. Put May, Mogg, Green and JoJo together and you could stage a production of Waiting For Go Now.

In Beckett, and much of Theatre of the Absurd, life is meaningless, and we cope with the existential anguish knowledge of that fact produces by engaging in rituals that create a sort of meaningful structure for our existence. As metaphors for May's Brexit Britain, you could much much worse.

Keeping that in mind, the endgame, as it were, of Endgame is instructive. Watch Clov's final speech again; you can find Michael Gambon's version here. "You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness"

DOTTER OF HER FATHER'S EYES

Mary Talbot's father, James Atherton, was one of the world's leading Joyce scholars, and when she was growing up his work took precedence over most other activity in their home. Alternating charm and anger, he drew out Mary's affection, then rejected it brutally. For the adult Mary, a chance encounter with an old ID card of her father's brings back a line from Finnegan's Wake, 'my cold mad feary father' and from that line comes this book.

Dotter Of Her Father's Eyes, another line from Joyce, has at its centre the tragic life of Joyce's daughter Lucia, and the parallels with their lives. There are the obvious ones: the father first struggling to support his family, both men as teachers, while doing creative work of great importance. The daughters relegated to the background, especially in Lucia's case where her younger brother received most of the encouragement. Both wanting some creative life of their own, and finding huge barriers of missing expectation in their paths.

Lucia Joyce spent years dancing, but at key moments of her possible career she would be held back by both her parent's traditional view of a woman's place—one strictly followed in the Joyce household, and a betrayal by Samuel Beckett, her father's secretary, more in love, in the end, with Joyce's work than his daughter. But the revelation at age 24, at just the time her dance career had finally crashed, that her parents were not married, that she and her brother were bastards, triggered something within Lucia. As if the radical modernist who was an upholder of prim bourgeois Irish Catholic propriety turned out to be a hypocrite all the while, at his daughter's expense. Lucia's behaviour became more erratic, suicidal, addicted to Veronal, and eventually, after the occupation of Paris ended, she was committed to institutions, where she died, on Mary's father's birthday.

It's a very sad and very dramatic story, and the parallels are never that strong or complete—though Mary's first dream was also to be a dancer. The nuns at her school are a close enough substitute for Nora Joyce, their strict disapproval aimed at filling her with low aspirations. The crucial difference is that Mary manages to break away from her father's hold, which Lucia was never able to do. She earns her PhD, still trying at 30 to impress her father, and at least partially succeeds. But she also, almost stumbling into the relationship, finds a husband and family of her own, and her husband is the artist who drew this book. And when her father dies, and she hears from students and Joyce scholars about his brilliant teaching, and sees her brothers carrying the coffin, laughing (which shocks her mother-in-law even as we think of Finnegan one last time) it is as if a circle has been broken. The ID card prompts memory, and the academic teams up with her comic artist husband to produce a work of great honesty, filled with pain and some hope. But at heart it is really, in the dizzying world of Joyce's imagination and language, a memoir grounded in dreams of dance and dancing reality, the legacy of our lives as we all emerge from shadows.

Dotter Of Her Father's Eyes

by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot

Jonathan Cape £14.99 ISBN 9780224096089

REMEMBERING CHOO CHOO COLEMAN

I noted with some sadness the other day that Choo Choo Coleman had died. Chooch was a catcher on the original New York Mets baseball team which became famous for its ineptitude, a quality magnified by the fact that it was located in America's media hub, and in effect trying to replace the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants in the hearts of New Yorkers.

Living in the New York media diaspora, but not a New York fan, I followed this with all the bemusement a 10 or 11 year old could muster, and the keen eye for baseball that was common place among kids of our day. Plus, for reasons that remain to this day a mystery to me, my best friend Bruce Bonessi became a die-hard Mets' fan, from the start a true believer, with all the attendant delusions such a fate implies.

Chooch was one of the iconic Mets, who came in two varieties. The first was the assortment of well-known stars recycled at Shea Stadium, mostly former  New York faces like Gil Hodges, manager Casey Stengel and Willie Mays, but also the likes of Philly's fvourite Richie Ashburn. They were past their primes, but they made good copy, especially Casey, whose crazy-smart aphorisms and mangled syntax became, with the hapless Mets instead of the dominant Yankees, like something from a Samuel Beckett play. It occurs to me that Beckett might have found the Mets a worthwhile subject.

 The second group were the Mets' original products, cast-offs from other teams whom they chose to fill out the roster, the most notable of whom had the kind of self-defining (if only in an ironic sense) nicknames that make the best athletes memorable. 'Hot' Rod Kanehl. The immortal 'Marvellous' Marv Throneberry. 'The Glider', Ed Charles. And Clarence 'Choo Choo' Coleman.

The most famous Chooch story, repeated in all his obituaries, happened when the Mets' wonderfully tongue-tied announcer, Ralph Kiner, a kind of Beckettian counterpoint to Stengel, was trying to fill time during a rain delay by interviewing Choo Choo. It went pear-shaped when Kiner asked how Chooch got his nickname and Chooch said 'I dunno'. Flailing for a response, Kiner asked 'Well, what's your wife's name, and what's she like?' Chooch replied: 'Her name Mrs. Coleman, and she like me, Bub.'

Many years later, Choo Choo would explain he got his nickname when he was a kid, because he was fast. Indeed, Casey said he'd never seen a catcher so fast 'chasing passed balls'. Roger Angell wrote that Choo Choo 'handled outside curve balls like a man fighting bees'.

But I got another Chooch story from Bob Miller, one of two Bob Millers who pitched without memorable nicknames for the Mets. I met him at some event while I was working for Major League Baseball, and the topic of those Mets and Choo Choo came up; I may have just read that story above in a baseball book. Miller said he could beat it.

He had come in to pitch relief, with a runner on second. Choo Choo called for a curve, which he threw, and the batter was waiting on it and drove it to the wall. The runner scored; the hitter was now on second with a double. Miller calls time and signals for Chooch to approach the mound. 'Chooch, we have to change the signs,' he says,  'they read that one, he knew the curve was coming'. 'OK Bub', Chooch says (he called everyone Bub, which was easier than recalling individual names, though Miller thought he might actually be saying Bob), and holds up 2 fingers. 'We take the second sign now'. He turns to go back to the plate but Miller calls him back. 'What's wrong Bub?' 'Chooch you just told 15,000 people we're taking the second sign.' Chooch 'thinks' about it for moment. 'You're right Bub.' He holds up his glove and whispers behind it, 'OK we take the third sign now'.

If you don't know baseball and can't follow this, the runner on second can see the catcher's signs to the pitcher, and signal the batter what kind of pitch is coming. So by flashing three signs (but only using, in this case, the third one) the catcher and pitcher can disguise what's coming from the opposition.

So Chooch goes back behind the plate and squats. He wants a fastball, so he puts down one finger, the universal fastball sign. Then he puts down one finger again. And then one finger for a third time. Miller said he laughed so hard he fell off the mound. He claimed it was called a balk by the umpire, and the runner advanced to third, but that might be apocryphal. After all, three number ones was good enough. RIP Chooch.

A SHORT MUSING ON 17 MARCH

So who was the greatest British novelist of the 20th century? Most of the millennial critics leaned toward James Joyce, which would be alright with me. The greatest poet? Less agreement there, but WB Yeats, who would be my choice, got some traction (the American TS Eliot got a bit more). If you were talking about the second half of the century, Seamus Heaney might get my shout out. The greatest playwright? More competition here, but my vote still goes to Samuel Beckett, who gets extra credit for his prose. George Bernard Shaw would top some lists.

My point being of course that all those writers, who are naturally assumed to be British (if not English) are actually Irish, and where would we be without them today? Happy St Patrick's Day.

IT'S A GIFT: W.C. FIELDS: AMERICAN ABSURD

If you follow Simon Louvish's essay carefully, you can see that It's A Gift is an important film for W.C. Fields, marking in a sense the end of his reliance on patching together vaudeville sketches. His later films would be more complete, if no more coherent, screen stories, in which he did the lion's share of the screenwriting himself. But as Louvish makes plain, the essence of Fields' films was Fields himself, and to some extent the character we associate with him was as much a product of vaudeville as the routines he left us on film.

This was one of the early entries in the excellent BFI Film Classics series, when it was at its best edited by Edward Buscombe. Louvish's massive and detailed biography of Fields, Man On The Flying Trapeze, would be published three years later, but this slim volume provides just enough information about the man to leave the decision whether to pursue his inner genius and inner demons further to you. Here, Louvish takes apart It's A Gift, analysing the set-pieces in terms of Field's stage acts, ending with the apotheosis, the back porch scene, which culminates in the brilliant exchanges with T. Roy Barnes' insurance salesman. This is Fields at his best, and Louvish not only draws out the background, but also allows the scene to play.

Dealing with the period leading up to It's A Gift, Louvish notes Fields' short, The Fatal Glass Of Beer, was his only box-office failure in the early 30s, calling it 'the most surreal movie ever made by a major studio'. But he's also just mentioned, in passing, International House, a surreal variety film in which Fields' presence alongside Bela Lugosi and Peggy Hopkins Joyce is almost literally surreal, but also in which he gets virtually all the good lines (apart from those reserved for George Burns & Gracie Allen, which come out of their routines). There are also very loaded double-entendres, usually at the expense of Joyce, who started in vaudeville too before moving on to a career as an international playgirl. I love International House, and Louvish makes the point that Fields didn't go off into 'never-never land' again until Never Give A Sucker An Even Break.But for me it also reinforces the most telling bit of Louvish's essay, in which he compares Fields to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

Louvish mentions Beckett's self-acknowledged debt to vaudeville, but what is worth noting is both the quality of the delivery—compare Bert Lahr in Waiting For Godot to Fields, the forced nature of even the most off-hand comment, the timid drifting off of sharp irony, and you'll see how true that is. No Theatre Of The Absurd without Fields is an exaggeration, but it does lead one to consider the basic psychological malfunction which Fields' characters find, primarily when faced with 'modern' American life.

Which was true of Fields himself. His companion of many years Carlotta Monti, once claimed Fields relative lack of stardom was down to, as director Eddie Sutherland told her, his not being liked by women. There is a misogyny to his character which influenced American sitcoms starting with Life Of Riley and The Honeymooners. Yet he was a brilliant Mr. Micawber, a role Dickens might have created for him.

He was an alcoholic, and Louvish's brief account of his facing the DTs in the period just after It's A Gift was made is particularly touching. His grandson Ronald produced a warts-and-all biography which made much of Fields' worries, about his eczema, his unattractiveness to women, and he may have had a huge fear of VD, which may have originated in his seeing a presentation about the dangers of promiscuity in the 1920s. At any rate, when asked by an interviewer if he'd ever been put at great risk he did answer, 'Yes, sitting on a toilet seat after Greg LaCava just got off.' Fields' was estranged from his wife and son, and had probably suffered a rough upbringing from his own father. In such things often lie the roots of humour, and of the neuroses which power the Theatre of the Absurd. And they certainly powered Bill Fields.

It's A Gift by Simon Louvish

BFI Film Classics (1994), no price listed, ISBN 0851704727

THE REHEARSAL, PLAYING THE DANE: Pan Pan's Egging Hamlet

Forty years ago, in my last semester at Wesleyan, I took a seminar in Hamlet with Prof. Sherman Hawkins—what I remember best about it is that I also got paid, in my capacity as a university building & grounds employee, to drive the class down to the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven to see the play, with a young Stacy Keach playing the lead. But we also covered a lot of the revenge tragedies that were so popular in Shakespeare's time, putting the play into a genre context to see how it transcended that genre, as it were.

I was reminded of that when I saw Pan Pan's production of The Rehearsal at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington last week. I have to say I was attracted as much by the poster, which played up the play's subtitle: Playing The Dane with a picture of a great dane wearing a huge Ruff collar. It suggested a certain playfulness with Hamlet, a promise which was only partially delivered. In their efforts to deconstruct Hamlet play, Pan Pan have created something that's more interesting than entertaining, often thought-provoking, but often failing to follow up on its own provocations.

The Rehearsal deconstructs Hamlet in two parts. In the first, three actors vie to play the lead role: they are put through audition paces by the director, a casting director, and an academic who has opened the play by reading an essay. The opening essay was delivered by Prof. Harry Ricketts of Wellington's Victoria University and presumably written by him—though the original Dublin production apparently used Trinity College prof Amanda Piese as the lecturer (and what may be a part of her lecture was included in the programme). It was so much not a part of the play itself that the theatre's 'no mobiles' and festival's promotional announcements came over the PA system after he'd finished, as if to cue that now the play itself would begin. It reminded me of Brecht, who liked the didactic because he didn't trust his audience to get what he was trying to say unless he laid it out for them—I'd argue that's because Brecht's plays don't always do what he wants to think they're doing, but that's a different essay. But if such a comparison, of Pan Pan's Shakespeare to Brecht, were intentional, it's not taken that much farther.

At the end of the act, the audience is invited to come on stage and vote for their preferred Hamlet by standing behind him. This is a little bit of theatrical fun which sadly doesn't continue into the second act—and doesn't really tell us much about whether the audience is sympathetic to the various prejudices exhibited by the director, the perceived talent of each actor, or indeed some deep insight into which approach might best suit the character of the brooding prince. But it does give a hint as to where The Rehearsal is going. Particularly when one of the aspiring Hamlets is asked to perform as if it were a play by Beckett.

The second act takes place on a gorgeous set lit by candles and filled with gleaming dustbins. The desk behind which those who cast the play sat is moved to the rear, and none of those characters play any part in the rest of the play, until the academic delivers a smaller essay to close it out. Their presence is hardly noticeable, unless you're expecting something from them, in which case you'll be disappointed. The set, with huge mirrors on each side, to a great extent overpowers the performance—at times it is far more interesting than what the actors are doing, as when they perform Hamlet's 'to be or not to be' soliloquy as a round. It makes its point: that it is not only Hamlet who faces such existential dilemmas, very well, but once made, the point is lost amidst the dustbins.

But like those giant mirrors, the scene reflects the uncertainties around the character, the way Shakespeare plays with language, and has Hamlet himself play with language; the way he deliberately renders insights into his nature uncertain. At one point there is reference to Hamlet in terms of the 'instability of being', and surely Shakespeare's point is that all being is unstable. Pan Pan's point may be more that all interpretation is unstable; in the second act there are a number of reflections on legendary performances, particularly Irish ones. It may be post modern commentary of our perception of the play through its adaptations, but it's also something that suggests the academic essay, or the pub debate, is somehow more memorable than the performance itself.

That the two failed Hamlets play Laertes and Horatio adds a sense of reflection to their characters as well—highlighting the parallels which Shakespeare has drawn into the play. When the traveling players arrive, they segue from playing The Murder Of Gonzago, the famous play-within-a-play, to doing Hamlet itself, thus making a play within a play within a play. This is acted out by local schoolboys, who were quite good in their roles but left me wondering if this device, like that of the local academic, was intended to show that anyone could perform Hamlet (in which case, why Pan Pan?) or maybe to providee a sort of local relevance with which to sell the play more easily to festival programmers around the world?

The one element of the play that becomes more certain is its treatment of Ophelia. Judith Roddy's sassy interpretation steals the show—the production leaves you in no doubt of the strength of Ophelia's character, and the way that strength is ignored, indeed repressed, by a particularly misogynistic set of attitudes from virtually all the male characters, including her brother, her father, and her lover. Given that Gertrude's presence is diminished greatly, this seems to me the most straightforward of the play's reinterpretations.

The least straightforward element is the play's failure to engage fully with the Beckett references it litters through its various Hamlets. That they are there shouldn't surprise coming from an Irish production, and given the other Irish references in the performance (aside: isn't it fascinating how the greatest 'English' novelist, poet, and playwright of the past century were all Irish?). But it was disappointing they weren't taken further, because once it started my thinking down those lines, seeing Clove and Hamlet together at last, the potential for re-evaluation seemed overpowering.

Because Hamlet is as much a prototype of Theatre of the Absurd as an apotheosis of revenge tragedy. In the Absurd, characters tend to be trapped by their neuroses, which are usually traceable to things buried in childhood, as in Freudian psychology. They are able to cope only by re-enacting rituals, often of a nature that seems ridiculous when we watch. It is not a perfect fit, but given that the undercurrent of the incest theme (as I mentioned, played down by Gertrude's diminshed role), and given Hamlet's almost ritualistic see-sawing, it makes a lot of sense (think too of the extreme Freudian interpretations many famous Hamlet productions have put forward). So when you have highlights from Hamlet performed on a giant Endgame garbage-can set, you'd expect the connection to be exploited more fully. And that, in the end, is the problem with The Rehearsal—it is indeed a rehearsal for ideas about Shakespeare's play, more than a working out of those ideas. It is content to end with another footnote from a professor, and leave us thinking. This is not a bad thing, it would just be so much more satisfying if the literal great dane on set had actually done something, if the play itself had finally come down somewhere, instead of all over the critical place.