The Motive and the Cue

Review by Will Self

Yeah.

In yer face theatre, yeah?

The Royal Court. For once, living up to the sort of Cavalier pretensions of its name with Roundhead Kings. Sarah Kane. Yeah? A lesbian, Right? A baby enters stage left. It is beheaded. A man gets raped by a man. A dog turns into a primary school teacher. The Bosnian War? Ugh, who are they again, mum. Gissanother Malteaser. Then. She committed suicide. Popped his clogs in Thatcher’s bedsit Britain. 

It was a rare, generational, coup d’grace that we were the ones to sort of drag the London stage towards its grim, Ibsenist schoolhouse; away from the naffness of its Neo-Rattiganesque nursery and the all too simple pieties of Angry Young Men (what about the Angry Young Women? Who are they when they’re at home Mr. Osborne huh huh huh). The arts? What’s that? Culture? Who he? These were the questions we didn’t even bother answering. Blood, guts, gore, sex. That’s what we wanted to see, with the only ‘knights’ being Dead. Yeah yeah yeah. Norman Tebbit. You can get up on that conference podium, mate but in the stands, at the Barbican, in the Almeida: they’re laughing at you mate. And at anal fixations and oral retentivness of Loadsmoney Britain you created. Mark Ravenhill. Shopping, yeah and Fucking. The end of history. A man. He’s gay. Get a grip Mary Whitehouse huh huh huh. 

 So it was with a sort of innocuous revanchism for the unameliorated victims of Tory Cuts that I met my mate Nick Cohen outside ‘Mr Flogg’s Tavern’ before joining the pseudo-serpentine queue already nibbling at the Noel Coward’s anus. 

“Yeah yeah Nick, how was the substack party, uh huh huh.”

“Yeah yeah buncha nutters.””

And here they all were, the ovisine, blubbery masses on their ‘night out’. Bussed in from Canada Water, Croydon and Bits of Surrey. Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells has always had a sort of leering, Pincheresque fascination with the taxidermy of dead Bohemia. The Daily Mail columnist and Conservative Association chair guiltily sample “Everyone’s Talking about Jamie.” before piling in on trans rights. I watched them; these Hezbollah hostage takers to whom Tory Austerity had ransomed English Arts as I sat waiting for the play to begin. 

But I’ve never been one to buy into the conspiratorial mythos of a pavonian Youth; the gleaming steel of atomized shopping trolleys, dumped and drowned in the otiose Lyotardian canals of declasse Hegelian cul-de-sacs. In the post-Boris moulting of Brexit Britain, I can’t help but locate in our adolescent rebellion the seeds of a dangerous insouciance towards the commercialisation of culture. Kane had stripped suicide of its absurd, kitsch individualism; and Ravenhill had gotten better from AIDS. Yet, there was always this sort of  “Third Force” of a Ballardian intruder, a sort of vatic Quisling, in Sam Mendes. Mendes. 

Me and Nick try to get a chant going: “Sammy Mendes, Sammy Mendes, whatcha gonna do with Starmer in the trenches.” Before negotiating the desultory purchase of a tub of Vanilla Ice cream with  Belgian Triple Choccie Bits. 

Yeah, he began at the Donmar. The Donmar, yeah? The Donmar Warehouse. And for a time presided as the sort of sacerdotal High Priest of English radicalism. An adaptation of Chekov where everyone’s called “Dave”. But then came the Wagnerian Nemesis of these Rites of Spring. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ill-gotten Argentine gold. O Sammy boy, yeah, the pipes, the pipes are calling. Cameron’s Hitler. Hitler’s Goebbels. Oliver. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A kind of Fallujah Biedermeier for the subprime affluence of collaborationist Middle England in Blair’s Britain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kids go free. Here’s yer ice cream. By the 2010s, Mendes had gone from a merely troubling, Journey to the End of the Night, to the active complicity of Trifles for a Massacre. The concentration camp guard of Bedroom Tax Britain. Odes for the Badger Cull. A masque for HS2. The rancid acme of this almost pathetic betrayal was the predictably sentimental and Duncan-Smithesque dreary 1917. Yeah. Not sure if you’ve heard of it mate but all the action was going on elsewhere, right, in that Finland Station. Better stick to the Northern Line, Edgeware Branch; huh huh huh. 

The only man who excites my passionate loathing more than the man who married Kate Winslet is the man who divorced her. 

“Yeah, its not a musical love, you don’t need to join in huh huh huh.” I croon over to a middle aged couple sitting next to us.

“How about some powder.” The Cohenator chirps up beside me. Yeah. Coke in a theatre. This’ll put the wind up Royston Vasey.

Nick takes out a carefully packaged assortment of antihistamines. Brilliant. 

Our protest would take the form of a dormant howl at the infantile crassness of Words in an Age of 140 characters. I settled into an agreeable routine. Doze. Wake up. Stare at Elizabeth Taylor’s breasts. Snooze. Breasts. Snooze. Triple Belgian minty choc ice cream. Breasts. Snooze. 

What was the use in a sort of perfunctory awareness when there was so little of it in the play? Not a single, mealy, historical reference to enable an easy review of the play by putting it in the context of childhood nostalgia. Not one miserable “that man Wilson”. Mendes’s 60s London is more blingin’ than swinging. The gauzy glory of Hollywood escapism. He seems to carry a Homaisian indifference to the fact there were Hippies and Panthers and Six Provinces occupied by British Soldiers outside those theatre doors. A sort of torpid intellectual aestheticism issued as a sort of almost apologetic blood money for years of Murdoch propaganda. 

But there was the hint here that the cathemeral embers of theatrical antinomianism still stirred beneath in the stolidly Tory, Mendes mantlepiece. A scene with a rent boy. Yeah. A rent boy. And Gielgud. He’s actually very vulnerable. “He’s gay! Yeah? Gay, this character is Gay?!” I bellowed at the stupid old biddy in front, whom I presumed to be a clot from Colchester but was, in fact, a governess of Henrietta Barnett. Yeah. Mea culpa. 

I also could not help but appreciate the play’s Artaudian denouement: subtitles on the little televisions, hitherto locked in sort of rebellious hibernation, informing us that the play was a Success. Yeah. No cheap bathos of suspense for this lot. You’d get some History with yer entertainment. 

How to tell the true theatre-goer-as-artist from those who merely want to be entertained? Look for the Flaneurs. Outside, the Brexit stormtroopers huddled and hurried towards Leicester Square station. But the Flaneur Hungers. My guts Gambolled towards Covent Garden. My lower intestines perched in front of innumerable Italian restaurants and ‘Gourmet burger’ joints. Yeah. Mate its shut.

“Its all shut Will.” Nick said, in a sort of Joycean preface to my inner monologue.

The moment he had said these words, an enthusiastic, well-endowed, yet oddly Grayson Perry blonde lady galloped up to us and beginning an impromptu discourse. This was not one of the discount stall Gammons. I sensed I was dealing with a darker quality. 

“Don’t you think its a DISGRACE that London closes at Midnight?”

“Yeah, yeah ugh huh huh.”

“And what about, what about people playing music on public transport? It is just physically impossible to ask them to turn it off. You just HAVE to sit in silence and tweet about it later.”

“Yeah. Skinheads.”

“And and and what about the Homeless People in Victoria Station. Why doesn’t the government just arrest every Homeless person in the world?”

“Yeah. Its simply… Beastly.”

“I’m EMILY HEWARTSON!” She screamed this non-sequitur at an ear-splitting pitch, several windows shattering along the deserted street.

Nick pipes up “..... who?”

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

A supersonic boom emanating from a dark corner knocks me straight off my feet. Two Extra Large American Bullies fly at March 5 towards Nick Cohen and immediately separate his legs from his body.

“SIDNEY! CARLOS! FEED!”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I SUPPORTED A TWO STATE SOLUTION AHHHHHHHHH I’M I’M SORT OF ON YOUR SIDE AHHHHHHHHHHH THEY CALL HIM YISRA IN THE KORAN AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

From my prostrate position, I watch in horror as the Large Bullies peel the skin from Nick Cohen’s skull: his naked eyeballs staring back at me from a crimson canvass of indescribable torment and ruptured nerves. 

He who fights and runs away. I am sitting on the Tube as it pulls into Finchley Central. Composing an obituary on the ‘Notes’ app. Yeah. He died of Rug Burns.