Well, he’d given enough warning that it’s his birthday today. I waited until Penny had settled down on all her eggs (including the one from Edna) and Cara had carried hers – and the parrot-cage - into the theatre after Rollo opened the front doors, so it was mid-morning before I glided down to land on the roof of ‘PLAYMAKER’, Oscar’s narrow-boat. Earlier this week, he exercised his signwriting skills on each side of the boat’s bows – sitting on the wharf-side while he renamed one side, then turning the whole boat round so that he could do the other – then he put on his shorts and plimsolls and stood in the water to do the stern, so we all sat in our different nesting places and laughed at him, but he didn’t care, just shivered. (Tsk-trak-tsk!!!)
But now it was a lovely springlike Saturday morning – perfect for his birthday. He sat on the stern deck with his mugga tea and his pipe. I waddled over to him, performing some deft footwork and picking up the rhythm of...
We gave ‘Salad Days’ its Press Preview on Thursday evening. As usual, it was a private performance for group-members and the reporters only. Everybody was delighted with it, they warmly congratulated Maureen and her cast, so it seemed natural to pick up one of the show-stoppers and entertain Oscar with it as a birthday treat. “Hey, look at me!” I sang telepathically and stepped out the rhythm, “Hey, look at me, I’m dancing...”, sure that he would love my little dance. Too late, I noted the aggressive tempo of his pipe-puffing, his clenched fist on the mug and his manically staring eyes.
“Just listen to that,” he snapped, drawing my attention to a voice quacking out of those two noisy boxes that are fixed high up on the galley wall.
“Just listen to that rubbish.” Obviously the good mood had not happened. “War, famine, disease, injury, industrial unrest and falling stock-markets.
“And that’s just the minutes of the theatre management committee,” I quipped.
“Don’t joke,” he said. “That’s life today. That’s what people have to live with”
“They don’t have to listen.”
“But what choice do they have? The same on TV, but with pictures to make the blood more bloody? A day under stress and pressure in the working situation? Enormous mortgages that force them to accept poor management? Stroppy kids whose behaviour can’t be corrected, not even when they start into drugs and all that that entails? Bank administrators and other money-grabbers tempting them into more debt? Everything they enjoy being pronounced unhealthy? No communities any more, except in the soap-operas... God, it’s not ten years since I wrote to ‘East-enders’ to point out that none of their characters was ever seen watching television and, within two weeks they had a family goggling at the haunted fish-tank the same as millions of other escapees from what they call normality. What IS normality? I’m sick of the manipulation of minds and lives, mostly for commercial gain?”.
“Erm...” I began, tentatively. “I was going to say ‘happy birthday’, but clearly it’s not. Has something happened to upset you?”
“Has anything happened to cheer me up?” he retorted. “Nice of you to remember, Jonah, but I’m a year older! Should that sad fact cheer me up?”
“Well,” I said, “your age IS divisible by thirteen now.”
“Oh yes,” he acknowledged, removing the pipe from between his lips and allowing the semblance of a lascivious smirk to faintly illuminate his features. “So it is.”
He knows that I’m partial to a sip of tea, so he beamed down at me and clasped the mug steady while I hopped onto its rim and bowed deeply to savour a beakful of its contents. “Lovely,” I murmured and took several more dips. “But, tell me, Oscar, what is it that’s upset you on this lovely sunny very special morning? You seemed so pleased the other evening when we were chatting: both of you welcomed back into active membership, Cara up to her old tricks running everybody ragged in the wardrobe, you being asked to design a production and help with it, then those two young trainee directors coming to you for tuition and assistance with their...”
“I know, Jonah!” he interrupted, “I know. We’ve got so much going for us at the moment. I was in despair after the stroke, but now it seems that life is starting all over again in so many different directions. But I’ll confide in you: it’s our daughter.”
“Do the same as us,” I advised him. “Kick them out to fend for themselves the very minute they’ve learned how to fly and hunt for themselves.”
“Very sensible,” he agreed. “Sensible and pragmatic, but...”
“But NOTHING!” I squawked, flitting up onto the tiller, where I could strut and state my case like the lawyers do on their picture box. “Kick ‘em OUT!”
“The thing is,” he rationalised. “We quackers have a different tradition that we sort of pursue without question. Even after twenty-odd years in our nest – even more in many cases these days – we never really stop caring for them and...”
“Too sentimental!” I admonished. “Kick ‘em out and forget ‘em. That’s what we do every year – and it WORKS! What’s her problem, anyway?”
“She’s fallen prey to academics.”
“Oh NO!” I howled. “And they’re trying to force her into thinking the only way they know how, like one of them? Is that it? Oh, you must go at once and rescue her!”
“No no no, Jonah,” he calmed. “It’s not as bad as that – oh, I know they’ve made me angry in the past with their habit of picking over the entrails of dead plays, just in case their predecessors have left something alive and interesting, but... but...”
“But what?” I flew back to take some more sips of tea.
“Well... the fact is, old chap, she’s studying for her Doctorate... sort of...”
“She either is or she isn’t.”
“And they’ve given her a vast selection of plays to read, all by intellectually acceptable playwrights. She rings me quite often and asks me what I know about them. I don’t mind, it doesn’t take long, but she told them that she wanted to see the plays performed whenever possible. Jonah, those academics warned her – they warned MY DAUGHTER...” as he spoke, his voice began to quaver, his colour deepened, he tore the pipe from his mouth and slammed it down with such force that the tea-mug leapt in the air “...that she was not to watch amateur performances because they would be sub-standard! Those self-absorbed, self-perpetuating eggheads told my daughter...”
Cara and I know that another stroke could kill this man and here he was veering ever so close to it, which would be jolly difficult to explain, especially on his birthday.
“Alright, alright, alright,” I said. “I get the picture: they offended your standards.”
He breathed deeply and passionately as he regained control over his emotions.
“Then she found a production of one of the plays. I was delighted when she rang me to ask if watching a performance would help her studies. O.K?”
That seemed alright so far. I even thought about dipping into the tea again.
“You see, the thing is, Jonah, that I get upset on behalf of all the ordinary people who need an escape from mundane, ordinary, depressing, boring ordinary life. The soaps just give them more mundanity, so it’s when the local theatre puts on something light, frothy, witty, whimsy and funny...”
“Something like our 'Salad Days' I suggested.
“Precisely. Or something exciting or stimulating AND all those things – it needn’t be JUST mere escapism...”
“Back to your daughter,” I directed. “And Cara’s daughter of course.”
“Of course. Well, it was a production by a company with which I have been involved in the past. They had been content with putting on little comedies or mystery thrillers and performing them for friends, but then they got a bit more ambitious, so they called in this old warhorse and offered inducements to teach them how the professionals did the job. I took them through five productions and confess to feeling rather proud of their achievements, so I felt confident to recommend them to my daughter and her teachers.”
“And?”
“And she rang me this morning. on my mobile, to wish me a happy birthday.”
“And?” I began slurping up the spillage from his previous tantrum.
“Well, she went to see their play.” He paused and frowned. “You have to understand, Jonah, that this is a lady of mature years who spent her own childhood in a house where Theatre dictated the tone of every minute. My whole life has been spent in quest of higher standards in Theatre, often Amateur Theatre; I see no reason for lowering the standards because the performers and technicians are giving their time and effort freely, rather the reverse: I think given time is infinitely more valuable than sold time. It should not be wasted in working to sloppy standards. But that’s just me.”
“I think many other practitioners of Theatre would agree with you.”
“Do you, Jonah? Do you really? If I told you that the director of the production she saw had been with me in two of those five productions I did for them, teaching as we went, would you expect his standards to be high. I know he’s tackled a couple of Shakespeare’s since then, and I don’t know what else in fifteen years...”
“The production she saw should have been magnificent.”
“When she went into the bar before the play began, she saw a crowd of people in strange clothes – many of them in black – gathered round a table glaring at Audience-members in a superior manner... it was the cast and crew in their show clothes, allowing themselves to be seen by the Audience, showing off before the play began. That was her first impression of the production that I had recommended against her tutors’ advice. Then the director – my old friend and, I thought, apprentice – joined the Audience for the performance, nothing wrong with that. Except that he saw himself as a claque of one; he had given himself the job of laughing loudly at every point in the text where he thought the Audience should be laughing, except that he was the only one who WAS laughing, but he did not stop when nobody else joined in with him, he just kept right on cackling inanely. My daughter went on to describe a poorly cast and poorly staged play that was poorly performed and poorly directed. That’s why you found me in the depths of depression.
“I thought I had given that theatre group something of myself that represented the perfectionism of British Theatre, and that it would survive the idle and arrogant attentions of supercilious bunglers, but clearly I was wrong.
“Can you wonder that you caught me depressed on my birthday?”
Jonah was a very experience director, teacher and writer who sadly passed away in February 2006. He was also the author of the highly successful "Playmaker - The Craft of Directing Plays (The Way I Seen It)".