So, as I said in my last entry, a play unceremoniously crash-landed on my desk at the end of November. I say crash-landed because it was unbelievably bad. But it was addressed to me and intriguingly said 'For His Eyes Only' on the cover as if Ian Fleming had re-cast Bond from the after-life with me in mind. Fat chance. I hate vodka martinis and the only time I've referred to shaken not stirred was in the back row of the cinema with Maxine Thompson when I was fifteen and had a premature eruption when she had whistled inexpertly on my flute. Maxine seemed a bit discombobulated as her head reappeared and I'd said it in jest as she desperately scrabbled for a tissue. I think the exact line was 'that's what you get for shaking not stirring.' We were watching Dr. No at the time. No wonder a career in the theatre beckoned.
Anyway the play was addressed to me care of the Notso agency with, in brackets, 'formerly with Pattie Regan Associates' underlined - as if she was in the know about something - and then 'For His Eyes Only.' This remarkable piece of work - for it was remarkable in its awfulness - was entitled 'Is Vanity Fair and was Becky Sharp?' and had sod all to do with Thackeray.
The principal character was a student at an unnamed but prestigious university (I'm assuming Cambridge) called Becky Upton Monk (yes, acronyms abound in this piece) who had taken it upon herself to sharpen her wit (and, yes, the sorry point of half the title) by ridiculing masters and staff at the colleges who insisted on so many letters after their names to emphasise their importance. Thus 'Is Vanity Fair'. Geddit? If I was being generous I might say it strove to be a pastiche of Restoration Comedy except it was about as funny as a big toe with gout.
So in the Faculty of Underperforming Chumps and Kuckolds (sic) the head of the department was Fanny Forall, with the title Commander of the Union of Nerds and Twats, and under her (yes the piece is also replete with double entendres) was principal lecturer Raymond Clarence Deterred (fondly called R.C. or Arsy), Signatory of the Hepatic Idiosyncratic Teutonics (?) and nicknamed The Headmaster because of what he used to do to please Esmella Gasse (head, geddit?), Fellow of the Ale Regurgitating Team. Meanwhile Ineda Coq, Fellow of the Underwhelming Complement of Knights Meticulous and Exemplary is running backwards and forwards on campus trying to get attention with the refrain 'How many bangs do you want for your buck?' William Congreve it ain't.
Alarm bells usually ring for seasoned old gits like me who receive unsolicited works with half-clever pun-ish (sic) titles. They are often employed to disguise an awful lot of ills. Such as the author concerned can't write for toffee. This pretty much seemed to apply to our scribe, one Mary Barton, obviously a student who had a beef with her lecturers and didn't mind if her sad attempts at satire had poor William Makepeace doing an imitation of a spit roast in his grave.
It did have a couple of redeeming features though, one being the condemnation of the Covidian cult-like nature of universities and their genuflection to wokeness and the other being the character of the Vice Chancellor, one Diablo Lucia, who is really dark and, it is alleged, does unspeakable things to children. Bum's (and yes her fellow characters call her that) principal motivation, if she has one, is to uncover his dastardly deeds. It jars because it does not fit into the genre. Suddenly we're talking about child sexual abuse and it has a Satanic resonance. That's also about as funny as passing stools after a four hour haemorrhoidectomy. Bum's attitude to higher education is best summed up in her remark that Diablo's salary, as Vice Chancellor, is the only evidence in the entire universe that education does anything to boost your earning capacity. I suspect our undergraduate, Mary, is disillusioned enough to think much the same thing as evidenced by Bum exhorting Diablo to blow his brains since there's nothing up there for him to lose.
But despite its heart being in the right place, the play was awful, the plot virtually non-existent, and normally I would have sent back a standard email saying thanks but no thanks. However something was niggling at me and I liked the fact that Mary, as a student, was brave enough to be swimming very much against the tide of academic wokeness and the material, if it ever became public, was sufficient to get her cancelled - and probably thrown out as well. (I think they used to call it rustication, which always sounded to me like a weird sexual predilection.)
For all its awfulness, I applauded the anarchy and inventiveness of the piece and why shouldn't I at least encourage a young mutineer? We need all the people we can on our side and we are living in the strangest of times. Things are anything but normal so why should I do what I normally did? I resolved to phone her and make encouraging noises while at the same time counselling her against a career (at least not yet) in the dramatic arts. Besides, I was curious about what someone with a mind like that might be thinking of doing if they were lucky enough to run the gauntlet and graduate.
So I'm telling Sharon all this yesterday evening in The Bay Tree as we sit together at the end of a working week . The place is brimming and Sharon is behaving like we saw each other a couple of days ago to such an extent that I'm thinking the four month hiatus must have been a figment of my imagination. When I arrived she already had the drinks lined up and as I sat down she said simply 'How's work?'
'Erm, Sharon, why have you blanked me all this time?'
'How's work?'
'God knows how many messages I left you Shar. I was beginning to feel like a bereft schoolboy dumped by his first true love.' (Maxine Thompson flashed before my eyes as an aide memoire: for when she realised my premature activity had been stimulated by a scantily clad Ursula Andress emerging from the waves rather than her oral inexpertise she unceremoniously dumped me and I was back to do-it-yourself for the next twelve months.)
'How's work Anthony?' she said pointedly for a third time, necessitating the need for me to banish Maxine's two-nippled right breast from my memory. (Yes Maxine had two nipples on her right bosom which I thought must be par for the course so when I next encountered bare flesh underneath a brassiere I thought the owner had succumbed to a nipple-ectomy and asked her what had been wrong. Less than twenty four hours later that relationship found itself dead in the water too.)
Sharon was giving me such a I-don't-want-to-talk-about -my-stuff look as I negotiated myself out the muddy pathways of memory lane that I thought 'Okay, play up and play the game'. No sense in falling out with her again. She's pitched up like an early Christmas present dangling delicately from a Douglas Fir so it'd be self defeating bloody sabotage to cut the bugger down. Accordingly I told her about 'Is Vanity Fair?' and Mary.
'I see, was it any good? Are you about to have a new female writer on your books?'
I'd deliberately omitted my actual opinion of the work. If Sharon can leave out chunks of information, so can I. Thus I'm playing hard to get though how anyone needed to ask if Mary Barton's play was any good given the way I had just described it was beyond me.
'I actually had a lengthy phone call with her yesterday.'
Sharon staring at me, waiting to elaborate. But I'm not going to. Let her stew.
'So a potential new client then? You, after all these years. I know you've been trying to keep up Pattie's standards but an agency is defunct if the money's not rolling in.'
'No, not a new client. The play was awful.'
'Awful?' Sharon glaring at me, knowing I'm being difficult and challenging her to dig further. 'So why are you telling me?'
'You asked. How's work? Three times. You had the persistence of Peter denying Jesus.'
'In which case why did you speak to her? Since when do you talk to people you don't want to represent? Send them the standard rejection letter.'
'Well....' I procrastinated, continuing playing the tease. 'There were other elements in play.'
'Mind you, I'm rather surprised in this day and age that a student would have ever heard of Vanity Fair, let alone made a parody of it.'
This is Sharon all over. I'm playing hard to get so she's going to reverse the status (me high, her low) by not getting me to elucidate but going off on her own tangent.
'There's been films. And TV.' Me trying to hold the high position.
'Yeah, but I bet they didn't know who the author was. I doubt anyone under the age of fifty has ever picked up a Thackeray novel. And I don't suppose hardly anyone appreciates that the original Vanity Fair was a perpetual fair in the town of Vanity and comes from John Bunyan's ''Pilgrim's Progress.'' '
Attempt at status reversal.
'Not many people know that,' I said sarcastically.
'Are you being sarcastic Anthony?' she said knowing exactly where I'm at.
'Whatever do you mean?'
'Micheal Caine and the catchphrase from his little offering ''Not Many People Know that.'' '
'You can read me like a book Shar,' I conceded, tiring already of the status game.
'Yes, but only if it's not by Thackeray.'
'Another bloody vaccine pusher who's off my Christmas Card list.' I know, I can't help myself sometimes.
'Who? Thackeray?'
'Michael Caine. How does a bloody actor know something's safe and effective? Just another one of the government's useful idiots.'
'Let's not go there,' said Sharon waving her hand as if deflecting my comments. 'You know, Becky Sharp's supposed to be one of the great devious double-standard wheeler-dealers in literature but half my clients would make her look like an innocent abroad. An ingenue. God I hate this business sometimes.'
Sharon suddenly looked mournful and I sensed something was bothering her. And was that 'something' why she had got back in touch?
'Sharon, why did you phone - '
She interrupted me before I could finish. 'Come on then, so what was it that made you phone this Mary woman? If the play was so awful? What were the other elements you mentioned?'
'Sharon - '
'For God's sake Anthony, humour me!' Her eyes were nigh-on pleading. Almost as if she wanted me to take her mind off why she had actually got back in touch. 'She showed promise? You said to come back when she was older? Was she an undergraduate?'
Coup de grace: 'Oh God no, she's older than me.'
'What? Older than you?' Said as if it was impossible for someone to be older than me.
'Yes, she's a retired lecturer.'
'Retired lecturer?'
'From Cambridge.'
'Cambridge?'
'Yes. You know, the university.'
'The university?'
'Is there a parrot in the pub? Are you aware you keep on repeating me?'
'Repeating you?' She grinned, she was taking the piss now.
'No, repeating me.'
'So what made you phone her then?'
'I don't know. Intuition? Because I sensed that there was something more there? And I'm glad I did, because if I hadn't then Mr. Jung's synchronicity wouldn't have arisen. Or serendipity. Or both?'
I left it hanging.
'What synchronicity?' She said eventually when it was clear I wasn't going to be more specific.
'My turn now. So what was the spur that pricked the sides of your intent Sharon?'
'What?'
'What made you phone me.' Pointedly: 'After four months.'
'Why are you quoting the Scottish Play?'
The fact that I'd referenced Shakespeare allowed Sharon to wriggle off the hook of my question once again. It's one of the monologues I know by heart. I recite one or two when I'm worried I'm going senile. Usually on the second or third bottle of Chardonnay. 'Surprised you recognised it.'
'Act I Scene VII. My dad performed it many times. "If it were done when 'tis done." '
'You know, I always thought the superstition about saying Macbeth in the theatre was a load of bulshit and decided to prove it when I was a young, arrogant ASM in Salisbury rep and we were playing Hamlet. I shouted Macbeth about twenty times in the green room. The back flat of Elsinore Castle fell onto the actors during the graveyard scene. The first gravedigger rolled off the stage, Hamlet got a battlement on his head and Yorrick's paper maché skull rolled off the stage and ended up in the lap of the very pregnant wife of the chair of the Theatregoers Association sitting in the front row who promptly went into labour.'
'Did you get found out?'
'Yeah, Ophelia grassed me up. She was already dead and painting her nails black in the green room in readiness for a Hell's Angels party later that night.'
'Bet you were popular.'
'I was banished to prop hunting for the rest of the season which I loathed since it involved begging and borrowing from local traders.'
'Even handed justice. To quote the same speech from said Gaelic play.'
'So, speaking of the spur that pricked the side of your intent - '
'Let's get back to Mary for a minute.'
'Oh for pity's sake - !'
'Her play must have had some redeeming features. Otherwise you would have never read it to the end. I know you.'
'Yes it did, it's anti-establishment, anti-Covid, and anti-woke. She just can't write. Mind you I'd buy it any time over that execrable Paul Richmall offering at the Royal Court last month. That was a steaming turd which belongs in the sewers. '
' "The Plague Years?" I didn't see it.'
' ‘‘Journal of the Modern Plague Year.” With a nod towards Defoe. What is the Court thinking of these days? The piece was practically a homage to tyranny praising a government, albeit fictional, for halting a plague in its tracks by prompt and decisive action including locking everyone up in their homes. The allegory was hardly subtle and the dialogue was desperate. He even managed to shoehorn climate change into it. And there was a reference to transgender bulshit. I'd like to tell him something about climate change. There isn't any. Except sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn't. '
'The reviews were mostly good.'
'Hardly surprising. Bill Gates owns half the British media and there is a Gates-like figure featured offstage who is trying to save humanity. It's embarrassing. If Richmall could possibly have worked it, no doubt he would have squeezed Drag Queen Story Hour into the plot. He's such a poxy virtue signaller. And there's another thing: you can tell me that activity is legitimate when they're not exclusively going after little kids but are also going into old people's homes and telling stories to people with dementia. Old people like stories too. Unsurprisingly they're not doing that.'
'If you include this sort of stuff in your diaries you’re going to stir up a hornet’s nest in the theatre community.'
'I don't bloody care Sharon. The state of the British Theatre! The Royal Court was a hotbed of anti-establishment and revolutionary activity thirty or forty years ago. It’s bloody disconcerting, this genuflection to authority. I'd represent Mary Barton any day before the Paul Richmalls of this world.'
'So what transpired on the phone call with Mary?'
'Sharon, why did you get back in touch with me after four months?'
'I asked first! What did you guys talk about?'
I paused for dramatic effect. After all that's the business we're in.
'What it was like to teach Pattie Regan.'
'You? What did you teach Pattie Regan?'
'Not me. Her.'
'Her?'
'Yes, Mary.'
'Mary?'
'You're doing it again. That parrot thing.' I could hardly blame Sharon, it was a shock to me when I heard she taught Pattie.
'When?'
'She was her lecturer. At Cambridge.'
'At Cambridge?'
'Stop it!
'I'm sorry!’
'Yes. Pattie studied microbiology. With Mary. In 1973.'
Well, that’s quite a saucy entry.
Even if that play is a awful dramaturgical adventure, I’d still watch it. Not just for the awful punish laughs. But for the courage to take a stance in the woke theatre world which has completely fallen under the spell of performative schmakery.