The Spire at Salisbury Playhouse

Saturday 17th November

In the programme, Roger Spottiswoode is described as having ‘been interested in William Golding’s novel The Spire for many years’.   It’s an interest I’ve shared since studying it as a set-text for A’level in 1979.  Then, as a seventeen year old, the most vivid parts were the love affair between Goody and Roger Mason, obvious to Dean Jocelin as he sees a net holding them together, and the brutal murder of her disabled husband, Pangall, hunted down and sacrificed by the superstitious builders.

I re-read it in 2006, when I was working as writer-in-residence at Truro Cathedral – which incidentally has three spires.  Then I was struck less by the plot, than the extraordinary writing, especially the descriptions of light and sound and how they relate to the inner workings of Jocelin’s mind, whether in his dreams and visions or as he perceives 'reality'.

‘He blinked for a moment.  There had been sun before, but not like this.  The seeming most solid thing in the nave, was not the barricade of wood and canvas that cut the cathedral in two, at the choir steps, was not the two arcades of the nave, nor the chantries and painted tomb slabs between them. The most solid thing was the light.  It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation ....  the grains of dust … drifted cloudily, coiled or hung in a moment of pause, becoming in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral … the honey thickened into a pillar that lifted straight as Abel’s from the men working with crows at the pavement .’ (pp.9-10)

So much of the book works symbolically, sometimes farcically with the phallic spire standing for Jocelin’s repressed sexuality that it would seem a difficult book to dramatise.  Much of the action is internal, such as Jocelin perceiving the pain of his diseased back as the prescence of an angel and his own self-deception about his feelings towards Goody, Mason and God.

Another difficulty dramatically is that we know from the outset that the spire was built and still stands, so the scenes where Roger, the Master Builder and Father Anselm express objections, have little dramatic tension.

But  Gareth Machin’s production in Salisbury was a brilliant theatrical experience.  The set was on a grand scale with a replica of the tower, its crows nest and the gigantic capstone all suitably precarious, some great lighting and the monkish chanting automatically atmospheric.  The scene where the wedges were hammered out to allow the risky dropping of the capstone’s weight (which in spite of an explanation with a censer I didn’t quite understand in engineering terms) was genuinely thrilling.

There were lots of short scenes, perhaps reflecting Roger Spottiswode’s earlier screenplay, which didn’t always give the actors much scope.  The two women were strongest, perhaps because the three characters they played genuinely influence the action.  Vincenzo Pellegrino as Roger Mason had a powerful manly prescence, and Mark Meadows as Dean Jocelin moved from a rather New Labour reasonableness to genuine feeling.

The two intervals worked well with each of the first two acts ending with a death – the murder of Pangall, and Goody’s tragic miscarriage, both happening off-stage (and it wasn’t clear to my companion, who hadn’t read the book, that Pangall had died).  There was something overly-restrained about the beginning of the play, perhaps intended to highlight the crazier action later as men worked towards achieving the impossible.

One of the strongest scenes dramatically came near the end where Dean Jocelin and Father Adam confront the changes in their relationship as a result of Jocelin’s obsession in an exchange that was sad, touching and timeless.

Some of the reviewers talk about the play’s theme as being religious faith – I think that’s beside the point here.  In medieval times, God was just background, like air is now, and people’s experience of the machinations of the Church would be more akin to how we perceive local government rather than a question of faith and belief.  

The main themes to me seems to be vision and persistence and how one man explains himself to himself, and particularly the role of pride, both in Jocelin who thinks he’s chosen for this work and Roger Mason who has the skills to make bricks and mortar happen.

Well worth the trek from Canterbury to Salisbury.

Who's to blame?

Last of the Haussmans

11^th October 2012

I saw this play as a live broadcast from the Lyttleton to the Gulbenkein cinema on the last night of the run and wished I could have seen it again.

I agree with the reviews about its strengths and weaknesses, its Chekhovian atmosphere, Julie Walters’ and the others’ brilliant acting and the way it struggled to bring together the threads at the end.  I thought the set was overdone and dominated too much, but enjoyed the local references having lived briefly in the South Hams, among the millionaires, across the water from a Dimbleby, and down the road from relentlessly New-Age Totnes.

The family dynamics were fascinating.  Something not mentioned in any of the reviews is the influence of absent fathers.  I think the play is less about the legacy of the 1960s and more about parenting in general.  We learn that Libby and Nick were brought up by their grandparents whilst Judy carried on travelling, but nothing about their father, not even whether they had the same one.  Libby’s daughter, Summer, visits hers and falls in love with his orderly life – but that’s all off-stage.  Peter, the cringe-making trendy doctor, has a jealous wife but there is no mention of children.  Daniel, the sexy pool-boy has an invalid mother, but no father. 

Judy, the ‘unreconstructed hippy’, has a very clear morality and no regrets about her life.  She knows what’s important and her opinions are coherent. By contrast, her adult children are lost – Nick to addiction and Libby to unsatisfactory relationships.  Their desire to make it right with their mother struck me as slightly pathetic - perhaps there's a point here about my current generation who have largely replaced idealism with anxiety, to grow up and stop blaming what's gone before. Judy is still fully engaged with life in a way they can't be.

There appears to be hope for Summer who is weighing the different life options open to her and for Daniel, who as a kind of angelic observer, is able to make his own life.  The doctor, Judy’s generation, is hedging his bets – able to be a dope-smoking advocate of free-love  as long as his wife doesn’t find out but deep-down driven by a bourgeois interest in property and reverting to suit and tie when his life-style is threatened.  The ambiguity of his affections is complex and rings true.

The house as a plot device harks back to Chekhov – as a symbol of changing societies, the loss of wealth (of all kinds), and also as something that touched him personally when his childhood home was bought and demolished by a family friend.  The title of Stephen Beresford’s play with its pun, makes the house allusion key.  Houses, and their value, are one of the most divisive social issues in the West Country, writ especially large in the South Hams where no ordinary local person could ever hope to own property without inheriting it.

Judy may have been an ineffective mother to her children and the star of the show, but for me it is characters like Peter, moving into households where fathers, and all they represent, are absent, who are the more destructive, reminiscent of our current culture of late capitalism where the greedy can exploit the idealistic and damaged, under the guise of a dodgy paternalism.

Smile, not

Will Self makes jokes but doesn’t smile. We didn’t see his teeth even once, during a talk he gave last night at the University of Kent.  Darwin College Senior Common Room was full.  Students and one or two professors were sitting on the floor and there was a buzz of expectation that fell silent when Will entered, accompanied by Dave.  Dave seemed around the same age as Will, with black hair and black clothes, an aging rock star look. He was too relaxed to be the unhappy Dave of The Book  of Dave, but whether he was a mate, someone from the university or a minder, we were never told.  He sat in the easy chair looking at Will’s back, while the author sat on a hard upright chair, swinging and cantilevering his long, thin denim clad legs in the gap between him and the audience, seeming uncertain of the form of the event.

He began by reading us a short story called The Minor Character.  He stood up to read and, like an actor, switched on his charisma, his unmistakable voice taking on authority, conviction and polish.  

The piece is a witty and scathing portrait of wealthy, fifty-ish Londoners.  It introduces many minor characters who variously have dinner together, go away for the weekend to the country, have affairs and break-ups, come out as gay, develop cancer and finally, in the case of the most minor of minor characters, die alone at home.  The narrator of the story, a character called Will, of whom we learn hardly anything, decides to have nothing further to do with this circle and disappears himself, getting rid of mirrors to avoid looking into a void. Will challenged us to decide what the story was about no one ‘gets’ it. 

He then read a short extract from Walking to Hollywood with a more fantastical content,in which the ‘Self’ character, mildly insulted by someone in a shop, develops movie-like superhuman powers which enable him, literally, to stick all the sweets in the shop up the man’s arse, described in a wonderfully extravagant and surreal prose. 

There was Q&A and a couple of themes emerged.  One was aging and the body.  Will referred many times, both directly and indirectly, to the age of the audience compared to his own.  Walking to Hollywood in part, is about the loss of the shared culture of film that was part of Self’s youth, compared to today's‘Balkanised’ age of screen watching.  He mentioned how the death of his mother and birth of his first child in his late twenties helped him find his authentic writing voice. That was when he realised that he could no longer reinvent himself.  Excretion came up many times.  Will told us the ‘key’ to the first story was the narrator likening the back of a dustbin lorry to a filthy anus.  In Walking to Hollywood , he describes three bowel movements and then defends including them by saying, he had many more.  He became animated when complaining about how most characters in literature are disembodied, that the taboos on writing about bodily functions are still strong.  He described how, in his current writing, he reminds himself to include ‘minor ailments’ on every page. 

At this point, he suggested that obsessing about minor ailments are common to everyone of any age but, looking around the room, and including myself, only a couple of years younger than Will, I’d say, only up to a point.  There’s much material here that could be approached psychoanalytically, not least the way in which Will’s own relationship to his, incidentally attractive, body, has been destructive, suggesting what Freud might call an anally expulsive personality that has fed into his prodigous creativity.  But perhaps that’s better explored in a PhD thesis …

The other theme, of course, was writing.  One former student, hit the jackpot, correctly identifying that The Minor Character is about the writing of stories and the impossibility of capturing ‘character’.She came to this conclusion as there were ‘too many characters’ in the story.  He gave good advice to a stuck novelist to plough on through a first draft before thinking of editing.  He ranted about the eulogisation of Dickens as a way of preserving a certain picture of what literature is.  My own take on Dickens is that he is so highly rated because he’s televisual and we live in a televisual age.  Will has just written the screenplay for a TV version of The Minor Character which seems paradoxical as it’s a story about writing a story and we were told several times how the director and the ‘accountants’ who make up a TV production team, didn’t get it.

And so much more … This was an entertaining evening, hearing exciting prose in a beautiful voice.  I came away stimulated, with a variety of takes on the world, some insightful, others silly.  I wish he’d let himself smile, especially at his own good jokes.  And who on earth was Dave?