Towards Better Democracy

Good words, well written, better the world. Good literature betters the world immeasurably.

18 December, 2010 • 4:17 pm 0

Edward Haliburton’s Door


Edward Haliburton’s door was purple
Well, no, not really purple
It would take a lexicon of artist’s colours to define the real colour.
It would take an instrument of the most delicate sort
A spectrograph worked by a dedicated scientist
Good at analyzing all the colours of the rainbow.

Because the Haliburtons painted their door every week
Roy purple would be mixed with some bright pink to produce lovat and finer shades in between
So that, actually, the purple lay somewhere toward the pink end rather than the Royal.

Anyway, there it stood in the Nash Georgian terraces of Edinburgh’s New Town
Amongst the blacks and browns and carefully created wood-grained varnishes
To proclaim to the sober elite of this elegant town
That this was the house of the Haliburtons

Edward Haliburton’s door beckoned to the Bohemia of Edinburgh
And in they streamed in the evening until the wee small hours
To party and make whoopee. To celebrate life or otherwise
And this in the town where churches abound and the only partying is done
Courtesy of state laws until 10.30 pm at the local pub.

Edward Haliburton’s door would open to no mornings
It closed at dawn. To exit the last few stalwart stragglers, drunker than most
To wend their unsteady way through city streets
To their own homes and duller doors.

Let it softly be observed that Edward Haliburton’s door
Was an object of much hatred at home. By one half
Because the other spouse would go there frequently.

Did I say frequently? No, let me correct myself. To every party
This spouse went every time Edward Haliburton’s door opened
You might say that this spouse was an habitue.

And the other spouse, the better half in this case, or the injured party, at the very least
(A different kind of party from those of Edward Haliburton’s, you understand)
Was very angry with Edward Haliburton’s door. It was an object of much derision.

With a colour like cerise (this week’s colour) you can quite understand this.
Cerise is a colour to get jolly angry with. Especially when your wife, who should be at home
Looking after your boys, and letting you get back to your typewriter, is there.

Edward Haliburton’s door was the subject of some envy and hatred amongst the neighbours
I mean, Edinburgh is the town of the Kirk. The Scottish Assembly Rooms are there.
And the Scots are not allowed to enjoy themselves. Well, not really. Only a serious attempt could
be permitted. But definitely no real jollity.

So the neighbours would complain nightly about Edward Haliburton’s door
And the police would come in their checkerboard hats to view for themselves the goings-on
That absented spouses from domestic bliss.

And eventually Edward Haliburton’s door had to be repainted
But this time it was not purple nor any colour near it.
You see Bohemia and Edinburgh do no mix

Wine has been banished from the Kirk along with the wafer at the call of John Knox
And anyway, Bohemia really belongs somewhere deep in Europe, God knows where
But certainly not in Edinburgh, where there is not room for Edward Haliburton’s door.

Filed under: Memoir,

12 December, 2010 • 9:50 pm 0

The First Time I Knew My Father


A Prose Poem 

The first time I knew my father was at seventeen.
We had lived continuously together in warfare since I was nine.
A battered, bitter battle till twelve, and a loud empty truce thereafter,
Mostly absent from the house.

The career officer at school was close to retirement,
As was most of the career information he possessed.
Airplane makers.
Those he knew were of the last war, names like
Handley Page, and Avro’s at Manchester.
Symbols of heroism. Pegasus and Hector.
Most went into demise in the post-war British industrial decline.

Armed with these few addresses, I wrote:

 

 

“Dear Sir,
I would like to serve as an apprentice in your company.
I have completed high school.
Enclosed is a drawing of an aircraft.” 

A company wrote back,

 

“Present yourself for interview on March 23rd inst.
Alight from the 44 Ribble bus at the Lytham Arms.
Looking forward to meeting you. Yours truly,”

The first time I knew my father was when I went to announce the interview,
To request permission to be absent from the trenches of the bitter home front.
The body went erect and soft,
The face, habitually a Greek mask when facing me, turns human,
The lips, lush, framed by the philosopher’s grey beard, said,

 

“Why did you never tell me?” 

“I didn’t think you were interested,” I said, feeling a man.


I had made this decision on my own.
In me the coward vanished, the whipped cur banished.

In a previous era I might have left home and run to sea.
For apprentice, read midshipman. An officer’s boy to a friendly captain.
Instead, I was going off to industry, to a new peace, to a war-pane maker.

 

“Didn’t you think I might have plans for you?” 

“You never told me of them.”

“I thought you might become a scholar, work in a library.”

From he who had never worked since I was seven,
This first recognition of the man who was my father
Looked at me in pride and kindness.
A kindness I had never seen.
Permission was granted. Independence was established.

But it was more a soldier leaving the King’s service.
A faithful retainer deserting.
King Lear left to moan and wail on the rocks alone.
Deserted by his court jester.
Because He could not bear to hear the truth,
His jester had been over-kicked.

The first time I knew my father was a brief moment.
There was no second time.

1987

Filed under: Memoir, , ,

7 December, 2010 • 12:40 am 0

Nancy


Nancy Munro, my aunt, was a funny woman. I don’t mean laughable. My father laughed at her but we did not. We found her strange. Possibly even slightly spooky. Though we never said so to each other.

I understand that she, in former times, was a ballet dancer, though I know that not for sure.

So there we were, my brothers and I, with my grandmother, my aunt and my father, all in the same house. At least until my father shipped his mother off to a nursing home. He drove his sister out of the house too, with his constant scorn of her.

All this time, my father never had a job. Made no attempt to find one, to my recollection. When there were no women left in the house, he would make vague excuses to us of how it wouldn’t be seemly for him, a single man, to have a woman in the house, as a caretaker for us.

A puzzle really. Why did not my aunt look after us and he get a job? I don’t know. She didn’t appear to like children much. Her most memorable activity in my memory was to buy us Sunday clothes and ship us off to church. Not that she went, At least, if she did, she did not go to the church she insisted we go to. Oh, and she would give us sixpence each. This was probably for the church plate, and not for sweeties, which is where it did go.

After she left the house, my father would send me to her workplace, to cadge money from her. She seemed kindly enough. She worked in the Blood Transfusion Unit of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. What she did there, I am not sure. She wasn’t a nurse, for I would remember her uniform. She probably kept the paperwork of the blood-bank. She would  show me the centrifuge, and explain to me how it worked. She would show me the blood phials and explain the blood types. She would show me the dried blood which looked like very fine sand. She would tell me about hemoglobin and all that.

Later, I don’t know why, I would visit her, sometimes in the company of my brothers, and sometimes not, at her home in Joppa on the Southeast side of the city. As far as I recall, she shared a house with some other women, similar in age and marital status to herself. Which is to say spinsters.

She had a man who would visit her while we were all still at Merchiston Avenue. He seemed to me, looking back, an impresario type. Coat, hat, scarf. Maybe she really had been a ballet dancer. She was thin, spindly. He didn’t last long, poor soul. Father drove him off. At least that is my impression.

I don’t suppose I should describe the fights between her and my father. But the urge is irresistible. It is comic, looking back after all these years, as it was to the three of us at the time. The fights were over my father helping himself to her cigarettes. My father was an inveterate pipe-smoker, so why he took her cigarettes eludes me. That combined with the fact that cigarettes made him cough dreadfully.

My father was a deplorable mocker. I say deplorable, because, nowadays, such behaviour would not be tolerated. He would reel with hearty laughter as he would regale us with his constant story of how she would, on discovering he had taken, oh, I don’t know, a cigarette or two, scream at him, “You fief, you fief.” And he would laugh heartily at the pleasure of the recollection.

When she died, I do recall we went to the funeral. Where we got the clothes from Heaven’s knows. I don’t recall my father coming with us. But, then he may have done.

Filed under: Memoir, , , ,

28 November, 2010 • 2:30 am 0

The Missing Narrative


It is Thanksgiving eve. Actually, it is one thirty in the morning and Thanksgiving eve is behind us. And here I am in bed making these notes…

I was reflecting during the course of the day, that is has been a strange day, for at one level, I have been living, alive and well, with my wife, celebrating in a non-celebratory way, Thanksgiving in 2010 here in the US. But at another level, I have been living – one can’t say at, in, on, or around 1954-1956, but in a way, yes, I have. As the previous posts, Absence and Presence, indicate, I have begun piecing together a narrative for those years.

And it is so strange at so many levels. As I street view googled 13 Rothesay Terrace, I could not enter the street. Google does not go in that close. So in effect, also in some strange way, even 50 or more years later, Rothesay Terrace is closed off to me.

I have puzzled over the hours of the day about this story, my upbringing. And what has had me go get my diary and make these notes, at this time of the morning, is that, somehow, somehow not yet clear to me, 13 Rothesay Terrace – curious number – is the key to the whole family narrative. The key lies in opening the door to those years.

From the day in 1950, or so, when we arrived at the empty house, prior to taking up residence there, with a huge black coal scuttle, or coal box, of about six feet square and some four or five feet high, inexplicably sitting there, at an angle of some 35 degrees to the square, in the center of the empty living room or entry hallway, – I don’t know which. A strange object indeed to have in an empty house. A strange greeting. To the point in 1954 or thereabouts – I was seven – when the Edinburgh city council, in the person of the child welfare service, or whatever its name was, came and removed us, my brothers and I, from my father’s care to a children’s home.

The story may not be the one that my wife envisioned when she encouraged to write of this gap in my life, and, since the years of 13 Rothesay Terrace remain shut to me, it seems the key to the whole story, The family narrative. With the entry made to those years, all else surely falls into place.

So I am not attempting, I do not attempt, I do not seek to open that door at this time of the morning, but simply to record what I feel, with every fibre of my being, is the Miss Havisham moment. That here is the centre of the Sargasso Sea.

I have the energy. I am wide awake. No calls are to be made upon my time tomorrow that I am aware of.

So what is the key? The key that opens the door to the memory of those years?

Vague memories of my time in the house are with me still. But they are vague.

What event during those years is the clarifying moment? Is it the moment when my father threw my mother out of the house? How did he announce it to us? In what way did he tell us? I know that any number of times later he justified his act to us. But what did he say to us at the time?

He threw her out of her own home, his home, our home, for what she did.

But what did he do? What act, or action, did he take that drove his wife to seek affection – an affection hungry woman – elsewhere? I think it could be fairly said, with the little knowledge that a son, the eldest son, might have on such matters, that mother could not live without men, without a man.

But wait a minute. In the timescale I have sketched out earlier, Absence, there is a key area: – My God, here it is: – Between the time, from when my father threw my mother out, to the when we were taken by the council to the children’s home to be rescued from there by my mother, during this period we would visit my mother. I know we would visit her, for the memories I have do not link to the time when we were staying with her.

How do I know that? Because my father’s voice is in the background of every visit we made to her, mocking and belittling everything about her.

There are two things to consider, so let’s pause for a moment to look at them.

One is that I am employing the language that was used at the time to describer the actions taken at the time.

That my mother “dumped” us on my father. Where does that particular expression come from? Who in this narrative used it first? My father? My brothers and I? Hmmm.

To use other language in the direct narrative of recounting the events of those years would not be honest.

If I I step back, as an adult, to comment upon these events, then surely another vocabulary is entirely appropriate, indeed is necessary.

The other deserves careful examination. Too strong a term? Perhaps, let’s see.

I think it is this brief period, of my mother being thrown out – let’s say MTOTD (mother thrown out the door) and us being retrieved by the council men (I don’t remember any women) and PIACH (placed in a children’s home);

So between MTOTD and PIACH is a brief period and the pause is to consider the effects of this and I am going to diagram it for clarity.

So there you have it. Let’s spell it out. What we have diagrammed is an untenable situation.

Put simply: you have two people whom you love equally. You love both. As a child there is no concept of being asked to choose on over the other. Of loving one more than the other. But that is not the correct formulation. Of being asked who do you love more? Of being challenged: why do you love your mother? why do you love your father?

There are no answers to these questions and the questions themselves are senseless to a child. You cannot choose.

Indeed, the questions are senseless to an adult. But to say they are senseless questions is not sufficient. That is not quite the case.

You, as a child, can be in the custody of one parent, and that parent can bad mouth the other parent to you, and indeed, demand that you respond, that you show your love (translate: loyalty) by disavowing your love for the other parent, and by affirming your love for the present parent, the one in front of you. You, as a child can cope with this situation. What, I think, cannot be coped with is if you have both parents making the same demand at the same time.

An adult in such a situation; it is a well known torture technique, will find it extremely difficult to cope with. If the situation is prolonged, it will drive most adults mad. We can find it in us to imagine such a situation.

A child is much more vulnerable than an adult in such a situation. Can even our imagination help us? No, it is not much use. What a child goes through in such circumstances defies comprehension, defies imagining. And it is perhaps best left that way.

Filed under: Memoir, ,

27 November, 2010 • 8:22 am 0

Presence


I have a horror of houses, of homes. Not the houses, homes that other people inhabit. Their homes, their houses are a pleasure to visit. No, the homes, the houses, I have a horror of are the ones I inhabit.

There has to be room for other people.

What struck me in writing Absence with the treated picture of Rothesay Terrace beside me is that a part of each of us that lived there is still locked up there. Most of us that did live there are now dead. My father, my mother, my one brother.

I have a brother that is still alive, though, for reasons I shall not go into here, I refer to him as the more dead than my dead brother.

So the insight is true for me. I still live. I am alive to look at the treated photograph. And the strange thing is that the treated photograph is more powerful in its treated form than the plain 2010 photograph of how Rothesay Terrace is today.

I took the photograph and treated it, subjected it to an effect available in a well known art software. A simple effect that transformed the photograph. Did that make it powerful? Yes it did. How much played a part in giving it a title: Rothesay Terrace as my mother might have painted it?

Writing the piece had a powerful effect on me. A friend arrived to the house to visit me and we went out for coffee and, in his company I could feel the cloak of the piece, the past, a swelling unconscious subsuming me. I felt drugged. I felt that if I talked about it that the feeling would dissipate. I did not talk about it. The feeling still nonetheless dissipated and I began to feel normal again. When I got home with my friend, I felt that claustrophobic feeling that being in house can bring upon me. I wanted to go out. To go anywhere. Just to get out, Into the open air. Houses have this effect upon me.

I go into a house and bring with me the ghosts that live invisibly with me. They inhabit the house with me. They are an unseen unspeaking presence.

My most vivid experience of this phenomenon with which I have lived for many years. Maybe we all live with it. Maybe each of us carries these ghosts of the past. The unresolved presences, the unresolved conversations, the unresolved issues. 

In South Africa, in Johannesburg, I sang with University of Witwatersrand Choir. The choir was led by a very nice fellow, Jimmy, a member of the Music Department faculty. He was aided in the running of the choir by his wife, Sandy. Sandy and Jimmy were going with their children out of town for a week, a fortnight, I don’t remember which, and they asked me to look after the house for them. They thought it would give me pleasure. They knew me to be single, to not have a steady girlfriend at the time. They knew I lived in a small bachelor’s pad. They thought that I would enjoy having the run of a house. I don’t remember if there were any pets to look after. If there were, then looking after them was effortless for I don’t remember that aspect.

What I remember vividly, as I say, is that I did not enjoy staying in that house. It is possible, is it not, that I am a sensitive, even oversensitive person and that the vibe that the regular inhabitants of the house had endued the house with was unpleasant? That is quite possible. But what is also possible is that I took in my own ghosts.

In the tiny little one room pad in which I lived in Rosebank, Johannesburg, there was no room for the ghosts. That in a single room I was much less aware of the presence of these unseen creatures. That in a large house there was room for these ghost to echo off the walls and into the other rooms.

So why do I say that something of each of us is locked in the house at 13 Rothesay Terrace? I say it because for a moment, for an undefined length of time, between 1950 or so when we entered the house and took up residence there, and 1954 when my parents split up, each of us was happy there. And it doesn’t really matter for how long it was, for happiness unites a family, gives it bonds unbreakable, will give each member of that family an undertow to which they will refer throughout the rest of their lives. Hatred, strife, these too bind a family. They do. But in quite a different way.

A single moment of happiness in any person’s life, especially if experienced in early years will echo down the years, will serve as a reference point by comparison of which all other experiences will be judged. That happiness cannot be created. There is no means by which it can be induced. It is a spontaneous joy that reaffirms the very essence of what it is to be human. And it is understood, regardless of age, position, wealth or lack thereof. A tiny child understands it as much as an old man or woman teetered on the edge of the grave.

The well from which that happiness springs is love. And yet love itself seems not sufficient in itself. Love, I would say is an essential, necessary but not sufficient. What else is required? I think the answer lies with why that happiness occurred at 13 Rothesay Terrace and not at 44 Constitution Street, Leith, our prior home.

I think the other requirement is security. It may be that I am speaking purely from a child’s point of view but I don’t think so. If I reflect for a moment on the moments of happiness I have experienced as an adult. Pure happiness. Not pleasure, such as the news of good exam results. The security of feeling free from immediate concerns, of immediate worries. Does wealth bring this sense of security. I don’t know. I am not wealthy. Those with wealth might better be able to address the question. Again, I don’t think so. I think that a home, that having a home, can bring that sense of security.

That we could be a family in the Amazon. That our home could be the open air. That we owned not a great deal if anything at all. I think that sense of security would come from each member of the family feeling it. That the father was capable and had to means to protect and defend. That the mother had, under the shield of the father, the capacity to love and to tend. That the children sensed and responded to the love offered with love and felt cared for and protected. That each member was fulfilling to the greatest extent that nature could provide the role to which nature had allotted each.

And so, I think, that for a while, at 13 Rothesay Terrace such a realm existed.

Then why do I say that for each of us, something remains locked indoors at 13 Rothesay Terrace? Because we were rent asunder. We did not leave freely.

A child, knowing a happy childhood will inevitably grow up. Will inevitably leave the nest. At least most children do. The transition is gradual, of childhood into adulthood. Few humans report a continuance of the happiness they have known as children to attend them in adult life. But the transition is gradual.

In the case of my family, we were all wrenched from Rothesay Terrace. My brothers and I, by being placed in a children’s home. A city department, a set of city officials made the decision to deprive my father of his rights, to father is own children.

My mother too was separated violently from her home, from our home. My father had come home to hear that my brother had witnessed my mother dancing naked upon the marital bed in front of a stranger. My father, the phrase goes, threw her out.

And my father, too, was violently separated from the home, his home, our home; evicted by the same city, different department, different officials. He was evicted for occupying, as a single person, a house that was intended and reserved by those same city officials for families. Such as we had been.

Did 13 Rothesay Terrace then become some sort of myth implanted in my mind, in the minds of my brothers, during the course of the years in which we spent in our father’s care. Entirely possible. Possible, but not probable. For why is that treated photograph of Rothesay Terrace in front of me so powerful? Why is it so evocative?

Why is its presence still felt?

Filed under: Memoir, , ,

25 November, 2010 • 2:05 pm 0

Absence


On the 6th of April 1965 the incoming British Labour government canceled the British Aircraft Corporation (now BAE Systems) TSR2 Mach 2 reconnaissance aircraft, then being developed at its Military Aircraft Division at Wharton in Lancashire, England. The Labour Government premised this decision on the Duncan Sandys Defence White Paper of 1957 which had predicted the demise of manned military aircraft for defence purposes.

In an effort to protect its trainees from the resultant drastic cuts in its work force, BAC farmed out its graduate and undergraduate apprentices, on a temporary basis, to its various other divisions, principally the Commercial Aviation Division in Bristol, in the west of England, and its Defence Avionics Division at Stevenage in Hertforshire, located about 30 miles outside London.

During my final year at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh, I had applied to, and had been accepted by, British Aircraft Corporation at its Military Aircraft Division for a Undergraduate Apprenticeship training programme. This allowed me to study for a degree under the auspice of BAC while at the same time to support myself from the small stipend paid to its undergraduate apprentices. I therefore joined BAC at the end of the summer of 1964.

Late in 1954, my mother had rescued my two brothers and myself from a children’s shelter where we had been placed by the city council after complaints from the neighbours that my father had been leaving us out in the streets until he returned home late at night.

In 1956, after eighteen months in her care, my mother decided to return us to the custody of our father, since she intended to leave the city to go to live in London.

Residence at 13 Rothsey Terrace, Edinburgh, had been contingent upon it being maintained as a family home. My father, therefore, was ejected from it and went to stay at his mother’s house in Merchiston Avenue, where he had grown up. Along with the separation from his wife, the loss of custody of his children, the loss of his home, my father now lost his job with the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Rothsey Terrace, Edinburgh, as my mother might have painted it

So, the man that my mother deposited us with in 1954 was unemployed and staying with his mother.

My father was born in 1904 in Newcastle Upon Tyne and met and married my mother just as he was being demobbed from the British Army at the end of World War 2 in Liverpool in England. It was at my mother’s mother’s home in Rockferry, Cheshire, that I was born in 1945.

With jobs and housing scarce in the immediate post war years, the family ended up in Abedour, Fife in Scotland where a second son was born in 1947. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Edinburgh where a third son was born in 1949. The family was now complete …at least until 1954.

My parents had agreed that my mother would leave us at the street door of the four-story set of flats in Merchiston and we that would go up the stairs to my father. This we duly did and knocked on the door of the flat. My father had always carried a beard. A large, full beard, in the style of learned Victorian gentlemen, reaching to his chest. The man that opened the door of that flat in Edinburgh on that day in 1956 was beardless and gaunt looking. The look my father gave me, without a word from either of us, had me dash back downstairs to my mother who was waiting for a signal from upstairs on a successful reunion.

“I want to come with you,” I said.

“I’ll come back and get you.” my mother replied, “Now, go back upstairs.”

My mother’s absence was punctuated by occasional tourist postcards from London and various places in Europe. More occasionally still, a display selection of fruit, complete with ribbon,rotten after is journey from London to Edinburgh through the care of the Royal Mail, would arrive.

From time to time, my father would say, “When the opportunity comes, you will go back to your mother.”

“No, no, I won’t,” I would reply, in an effort to display a loyalty I did not feel.

In Stevenage, I had with me one of my mother’s postcards from years earlier. On it was my mother’s London address. Several weeks into my stay in Stevenage, I traveled by train into London. Ladbroke Grove is a fine set of white faced Georgian buildings curved in a lovely crescent on the west side of London. At that time they were roughly divided into flats, two or more to each floor. I climbed up the steps to the front door and studied the list of occupants against the rows of white pushbuttons. Against one of them was my mother’s name. I pushed the bell button and waited.

A large woman of medium height with dark, shoulder-length hair appeared in the doorway. My mother looked like an older version of the woman who had left us with our father nine years previously.

“Hello, mother,” I said.

A small, pained, wistful smile winced its way across my mother’s face as she said,

“You’re my son?”

Filed under: Memoir, ,

21 October, 2010 • 7:11 am 0

Just Dangerous or Distinctly Lethal?


Over the years I have seen many theatre productions of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ master work, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, read more than one full translation of the novel, and seen both Steven Frears’ film version, which uses Christopher Hampton’s script, and Milos Forman’s film version.

None of these prepare you for Hampton’s script of Dangerous Liaisons.

Stripped of the movement and motion of a stage production, of the light and colour of film, and of the intervening narrative passages of the book, one is left face to face with the two central characters who prowl round each other like caged tiger and lion in ever tightening circles.

No fang or claw is left unbared. No snide remark held back. No sarcasm masked.

This is chess played with bloodsucker pieces. The poisonous Queen of Marquise de Merteuil playing against the almost equally poisonous Knight (Rook) of Vicomte de Valmont.

They hiss and slither across the finely wrought board of the aristocratic life in which each is so intensely entwined. The other characters are pawns in the play of the two ex-lovers.

At the same time, the two, Merteuil and Valmont, play the pieces on their board like perverse chess-players, playing not to win but to inflict damage.

In this game, the winner will happily drown with the loser, just as long as the loser drowns. This is a chess game out of Dante’s Hell.

And the reader is held close enough by Christopher Hampton’s script to sense the quiver of Valmont’s nostrils as he gives yet another thrust.

Hampton has stripped the novel to its essentials. Only the naked muscles of the novel’s workings are left to us.

We are held so close to the action of the play we are hypnotized by the smell of Merteuil’s rouge and powder as she oils yet another barb.

The artificiality of each of their lives is not stiff but has the suppressed, compressed power of a huge, tightly coiled spring. They each take turns to tighten the coil.

Who will be first to release the ratchet and allow the spring to release in an instant of almost unimaginable power?

This is backlash so swift as to be all but imperceptible in its movement. Equally though, as great as is the speed of the uncoiling spring, is the power of the spring unleashed.

The tension tightens and tightens, notch upon notch. Morality is stretched thinner and thinner to breaking point.

Merteuil. “That’s enough!”

(All of them, even Merteuil herself, are startled by the sharpness of this involuntary remark.
Merteuil hastens to paper over the crack, by adding a quiet explanation …)

“I think we should respect the sensibilities of our friend.” [p113]

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

When Merteuil finally triumphs, it is with the gallows laugh of the hangman. Today, Valmont’s neck is severed upon the block.

Does tomorrow for Merteuil start with a fresh round with some other ex-lover?

Or does tomorrow bring for her a series of endless tomorrows, where her wails of remorse, of loss, of longing, sheel and screech fit to drown out all other sound?

Is, finally, Merteuil’s grief every bit as utterly stupendous as were the sheer wanton acts of cruelty that Merteuil and Valmont stupefyingly inflicted upon each other?

If this was, during the course of the action, the sight of morals unleashed, this then, at the end, is truly the sound of retribution.

Posted 20 October 2010 as a review of Christopher Hampton’s script version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/126749699

Filed under: Memoir, , , , , ,

21 October, 2010 • 4:19 am 0

A Penny Theatre (Theater) and a Profound Play


Tales from the theatre – Three

While studying for a Masters in Theatre, I had a chance to work with Edward Albee.

Albee had been invited by the university to mount his latest play which had not yet seen public performance. Albee drew on the drama students to cast that play, and two others, presented with it.

Through working with Albee, I met Sam.

Sam had come from behind the Iron Curtain and was a lifelong fan of Edward Albee’s work.  Sam loved theatre but the repressive nature of the regimes in the Soviet block meant that he could not study the kind of theatre he liked. Most contemporary Western playwrights were viewed as decadent and, not only were performances of their plays disallowed, but the scripts themselves were held under lock and key.

As a result, Sam studied physics in which he obtained a doctorate.

He found to his amazement that the library he had access to held the scripts of the dreaded decadent Western plays which were denied the students of the Humanities. This is how he came to know of Edward Albee and many other Western playwrights.

Sam was very keen to direct, so I established a theatre company, registered as a 501(c)3, and all that.

As his first production, he wanted to put on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists.

I thought there was some irony in a physicist wishing to mount a play of such a title but withheld comment.

The Swiss community and the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce very kindly put up funding.  Through the latter’s good offices, we were put in touch with a Swiss teacher of graphics who had just given his students an exercise to design a poster for the play. Talk of being spoilt for choice.

We chose a simple dramatic design in black and white with a hand upon a locked wooden box. We worked with the designer to integrate our theatre logo and text for the production.

For anyone who has never been involved in producing theatre, let me assure you, an eternity spans between the inception and the final production, that span of time being filled with an endless minutiae of details.

The first night, the audience were impeded on their way to the theatre by a storm which pulled down trees in the neighbourhood. We were largely unaware of this since good theatre design has walls within walls to give good soundproofing. The second night offered no such impediment.

We had established the theatre on the premise of bringing unusual theatre to the city. Good theatre.  But that not normally produced within the 48 contiguous states.

We were, therefore, somewhat apprehensive about our choice. How would audiences respond?

We were more than gratified.

In the press of the foyer at the conclusion of each performance, audience member after audience member came up to us to tell us that this was their favourite play.

Who would have known?

Filed under: Memoir, , , ,

21 October, 2010 • 2:39 am 0

When Coloured Girls Were Not Allowed the Play


Tales from Theatre in South Africa  - Two

An astonishing aspect of South Africa under Apartheid was that theatre was completely multiracial. On stage and off. Players and audiences. For the truth of the onstage part, look at all those Athol Fugard plays with multiracial casts, or wholly black casts. Harold and the Boys came to Broadway with the original South African cast.

The Market Theatre in Johannesburg had been completely multiracial since its inception. Sometime during 1977, after the play had completed its Broadway run, the completely black cast at the Market Theatre had been rehearsing For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf for some weeks when word came through that the playwright had denied performance of the play.

Now this was probably a good thing. It is doubtful that anyone at the American end, including Ntozake Shange, the playwright, was aware of the circumstances of the situation in Johannesburg.

It was probably a good thing because of the outcome. The cast, although deeply disappointed, had developed a strong bond with each other and were truly a working ensemble. So, what they decided to do was to create their own version. The structure very loosely followed For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. The result was quite different from the choreopoem of Ntozake’s play. The cast used the play as an inspiration for an ensemble piece where each cast member brought to the stage a tale of life in the townships.

Now the townships for Johannesburg means the vast area known as Soweto; South Western Townships. If you had been following the 2010 World Soccer Cup in South Africa you will have heard mention of it.

So, back in 1977, the women each brought to the stage a moment from the incessant hardship of life in what were then referred to as shanty towns.

For any South African viewing the result, it was an intensely heart warming piece. Outside the theatre, the walls of Apartheid were very thick.

Years later, living in America, while studying for a Masters Degree in Theatre, I had an opportunity to take a play-writing class with Ntozake Shange.

I do not remember whether I mentioned the South African experience of the canceled rehearsals of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf or not. I may have felt too self-conscious.

On the other hand, if I did mention the experience, of watching the cast in Johannesburg rehearsing Ntozake’s play and then witnessing the enormous pride with which each cast member developed her own piece for the production they finally presented, I probably could not have done justice to it in relating it, for I do not remember her response.

Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa in Xhosa)

Filed under: Memoir, , , , , ,

19 October, 2010 • 5:41 am 0

The Night the Theatre Went Dark


Over this weekend I picked up a copy of Athol Fugard’s Plays One, published by Faber and Faber in 1998, with an introduction by the playwright.

Opening the book took me back to 1974 and Cape Town, South Africa, still  deep in the lock of Apartheid and a particularly poignant moment.  A  poignancy entwining the bright mimosa of theatre and the dark chocking  ivy of Apartheid’s officialdom

The theatre in question was the Space Theatre on Bloem Street right in the heart of the City of Cape Town.

The hard iron fist of the enforcing of South African separateness … well, we’ll get to that.

The Space Theatre (more fully The Space / Die Ruimte / Indawo Ye Zizwe,  representing three languages of the country) had been established by  Brian Astbury as a vehicle for his actress wife, Yvonne Bryceland.  The  theatre was defiantly multiracial from the start in a country where  everything was segregated in a fiercely draconian manner:  land,  business, housing schools, transport, restaurants, cinema.

The Space was a very brave place.

Early in the spring of 1974 Katriona, a friend, called me and said that she  had got involved in a project and wanted to meet with me to discuss it.   She needed my help.

Katriona was a very adventurous young woman of whom nothing would have surprised me.  However, this particular project did.

Katriona lived with her parents up behind Bellville at the end of the Cape Flats on the road to Parow.   She was studying for a degree in psychology at the University of Cape  Town. And she was fiercely political as only young people can be.

Katriona had somehow got a part time teaching job at a coloured school in the  Cape Flats, itself a brave thing to do for a young white South African  girl.  And the head mistress of the school had asked her if she would  mount a theatre production at the school using the school children. They  were aged ranging from middle school through high school.

Katriona and I had done community theatre together in the white suburbs  where we both lived and I suppose, somehow, Katriona’s previous theatre  experience had come out in conversation with the school headmistress.

So I got together with Katriona to find out more about her project.

Katriona sounded breathless and excited. She had decided to mount a production of Pygmalion,  by George Bernard Shaw, (the original stage version of the musical My Fair Lady, right!).

Inwardly I was a little amazed.  But I tried not to show it. How on earth  were we to take somewhat disadvantaged middle to high school children  and introduce them to the speech and mannerisms of late English  Victorian society?  Far less one of them to speak Cockney?

Katriona had already cast and was rehearsing.  Her Henry Higgins was the son  of a butcher who had chopped off his own hand at the age of seven   while helping his father in the shop.  Eliza turned out to be a petite,  demure little girl of Indian origin. Both children were utterly charming  as were the other cast members. And Katriona had chosen quite the largest  boy in the school to play Colonel Pickering.

Nonetheless, they were all as shy as could be in this new role and  needed a fair amount of coaxing. As rehearsals progressed and the children mastered their lines, their confidence drew immeasurably.

Performance night approached, the shyness vanished and the easy charm I had first seen returned.

Thus on stage, in set and clothed in costume, these little jewel  children, rotated and pirouetted with style, fit for any West End  production, if not Broadway.

The cast party after the performance, with parents and school mates present, was an uproarious affair, the joyous noise of which I am sure echoed across the Cape Flats.

The lead children had rehearsed three or four times as much as supporting cast members and had formed quite a tight little band.

Katriona and I looked round for some means of treating the leads for the effort they had put in.

So we booked tickets for eight, all that would fit in Katriona’s father’s Volkswagen van which I drove (you know, the style so popular for conversion into a camper).

The tickets were for a production opening the following Friday at the Space and we had booked for the Saturday.

I do not recall the play but it was certainly something like Sizwe Bansi is Dead by Athol Fugard, maybe The Island, something fiercely political.

The children were terribly excited to be going to a professional theatre. The play duly opened on the Friday and was promptly banned by  the government with no further performances allowed.

Disappointed we all certainly were. However, we were able to find a  restaurant in the city which, in defiance of Apartheid laws, allowed us all in.

Filed under: Memoir, , , , ,

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