As much as I read, think, talk, exist and think some more, there is a part of my brain that I clearly can’t quite reach. Like the jar of nutella in the larder, surrounded by its bouncers of more rudimentary jams, marmalades and marmite, yet still visible to the little eye of the little person desperately stretching and straining to get their little hand around it before a growed up walks in bamboozles their sugar-heavy plan. So too is there a corner of my mind that, despite my efforts to stimulate and engage it in all manner of creative and intellectual activity, lies untouched and indifferent to my efforts. Until I see a play that is.
I cannot explain or rationalise how a play can so deeply stimulate me, yet nigh-on every film leaves me gasping for fresh air and mental stimulus like a fish rudely dragged out of its watery environs. I cannot explain or rationalise how a play can so deeply move me, yet even the most powerful and don’t-you-dare-put-me-down books (Kiterunner. Gulp) don’t quite have the same effect on me. Exhibitions, documentaries, talks, CDs, concerts – anything to stimulate the intellect. They all do, but just not this one part, right at the back, reserved for plays only.
On Saturday I saw Untold Stories – a double bill of Alan Bennett plays: Cocktail Sticks and Hymns. Alex Jennings played Bennett, and was every inch the retiring, pensive, considered Yorkshire man who penned the plays. The Boy had never seen a Bennett play before, yet, like many other people my age, knows his voice well, namely from an audio book of The Wind in The Willows. His cries of “POOP POOP! POOP POOOOOOOOP!” as Toady screams like a maniac through the country lanes in his new amore, his motor car, is as familiar to me as my parents’ voices calling after me as I darted off into the nearest largest crowd possible as a 5 year old.
(For the record, they didn’t call me “poop”, and nor was our relationship one that made me want to flee their grasps. I was simply a rather impressionable child who thought running headlong into big crowds without parental guidance was the surest way to end myself up in Narnia or the Goblin Kingdom or some other bewitching adventure.)
Anyway, back to Bennett. Two plays, forty five minutes or so each. But with a force that left me feeling as though I’d sat through Hamlet. What I love about Bennett, and what makes is autobiography so gratifying, is that his subject matter is simply him, but not in an inflated sense. In fact it is the opposite. It is his years spent in Yorkshire in a determinedly normal family, living a unquestionably average lifestyle, with no traumas, alarms or excursions. He takes a subject matter that is wholly uninteresting, but recounts it in a manner that is affectionate without being sentimental, and moving without being depressing. He centres on the bromidic nature of his upbringing, but nonetheless manages to see the wry humour in it: as a forty year old man he questions his mother as to where his childhood went, or if he even had one, a childhood full of issues and troubles that would, in later life, bestow him with reams of sterling writing material. In one measured swoop he taps into the belief that ‘good’ playwriting relies on a personal experience of pain, suffering and unhappiness, but at the same time rips the rug from its feet proving that not everyone needs to write about pain, suffering and unhappiness. Normality can be every bit as compelling and moving for the viewer as cliff-hangers and high-drama.
Whilst the plays certainly left me with a soft yet sincere smile, and in a state of intellectual satiation, a seed had been sowed by Cocktail Sticks. Bennett recounts the deaths of both of his parents, amongst other memories, and their presence on stage is either in a flashback or talking from the dead. That the play is about such pedestrian matters now serves to make it almost impossible to shy away from the realisation that what happens to them will happen to us. Will happen to me.
Next to me were my parents. And next to them The Boy.
The mind started to whirr, the eyebrow twitched anxiously. “I know ‘death is the only certain thing in life’, but it doesn’t mean I have to be okay with it. People gadding around claiming that dying doesn’t bother them because they’re enjoying life too much – surely that’s not possible? It’s a completely human reaction, it’s instinctive to be upset if something you love dearly, or are enjoying greatly is taken away from you. So, if life is so raucously fun and pleasing to you, death, which ends it all, will be a huge dampener on the party…
“Perhaps this is when people turn to religion. They somehow muster a blind faith in a religion that puts a stop to the endless questioning or looming fear of it all finishing. With religions come an explanation, answer, and hope for whatever comes next…but what religion doesn’t stand up well to is questioning or challenging. It relies on its followers accepting as answer to their queries ‘because God wills it so’, or ‘because He is love’, regardless of whether that is a relevant or poignant answer to their particular query.” Following a religion is an immensely personal matter, and one that I respect in others, but my head just does not stop whirring with answers like that.
It was like I had been hit, for the first time, with the realisation that death ends it all. As we walked back to the station, I wondered how long the people we passed on the street would live for…and then how long I would live for…and whether or not I would develop any health problems along the way and if they would impact my life dramatically…
By the time we got home I was well and truly wound up, but still it was a mix. There was the fatigued intellectual satisfaction, akin to pounding out a personal best, along with this rising and falling waves of panic about how simple and finite it all is – Life. Death.
And it is precisely this that I love about plays. They can move you in a manner that is so real and tangible, that you transplant ideas you’ve seen on stage into your own mind. I suddenly found myself thinking in the same bleak and mildly depressed terms as Bennett about life and death and what it might mean, and whether or not my life would be spectacular or the stuff of plays.
Films could never do that because you’re watching it on a screen. You know it’s been filmed, dubbed and edited. Ditto for TV. For books, if you begin to read something that cuts too close to a raw nerve, the mind may, subconsciously, put up a barrier to absorbing the information. Self-preservation in action.
But with theatres and plays, especially in the smaller venues, you find yourself exposed, prone and at the will on the players. Of course you can chose to switch off, or only engage at a surface level, but if you let yourself go, and if you are sucked in, there is an immense power in watching fellow-humans enact something right in front of you. There are no popcorn crunchers or lip-smackers to distract you. Like Alice, there’s a rabbit hole to fall into if you want to.
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