The Kiln (23 page)

Also, the performance of the play has thrown him completely. He cannot understand at first what is wrong. Then he realises that all the actors are women. The jackets and shirts couldn't fool anybody and the voices are a dead give-away. He cannot imagine why this is the case. As the play progresses, it isn't only the haranguing voices around him that destroy the pleasure. One simple fact keeps intruding on his thoughts, defying his belief in the play. Bassanio has bigger tits than Portia.

A Streetcar Named Backfire

THE SCENE IS THE PALACE THEATRE IN GRAITHNOCK
. The time is evening on a Friday in 1955. Tam Docherty is one of a very sparse audience. A summer repertory company is in residence at the Palace. He has been coming most Fridays with
dutiful aestheticism and mixed feelings. He has seen
Night Must Fall, Dangerous Corner, The Admirable Crichton
and
Music at Night.
Tonight is more interesting but the audience remains intimately small. He feels he knows most of them by now. He sits in the same almost empty row as usual and the same middle-aged woman sits along from him. She always brings a bag of boilings with her. During the first few scenes, the sound of crunching sweeties accompanies the action like static on a radio. Then the play begins to come over loud and clear, for the woman is asleep, the poke of sweeties resting on her lap. Tam thinks that this is probably the only place she can find peace and quiet from the weans. He has developed an almost filial affection for her. Asleep, she looks like a vernacular version of an earth-mother, heavy body filling the seat comfortably, slightly tousled head gently askew on her neck. Awake, she has a face like a well-stoked fire. You feel warmed by its presence. Over the past few weeks they have been exchanging facial reactions at the end of each play - raised eyebrows, noddings. Her usual comment is. That wis good, son. Eh?' Presumably her critical criteria relate to the quality of sleep induced. Given some of the performances. Tam can see the validity of her terms. Tonight she has taken longer than usual to get to sleep and he wonders if that means a good review or a bad one. Does that mean that she is enjoying it so much that she is prepared to postpone sleep for a little or that the play is annoying her so much she can't
get
to sleep? The question is rendered irrelevant by her gentle silence. Tom is relieved, for a part of his mind, against his will, has been concerned about her critical insomnia. He has almost been tempted to tell the actors to keep their voices down. Now he can relax and enjoy the progress of the action. It holds him for scene after scene until—

She lurches to her feet. There is the deafening sound of scattered boilings crashing on the uncarpeted floor under the seats in front of her. They rattle ominously for seconds, like departing thunder. Combined with the electric tension on the stage, it is a genuinely heart-stopping moment. For Tam it has an almost supernatural feel to it, like being caught in a science-fiction film called
The Invasion of the Ball-Bearings.
His startled eyes catch sight of the woman already out into the passageway and heading for the exit. She freezes suddenly and blinks around, locating reality. The curtain has come down on that scene and is now going up on the next one. Tam observes the woman standing in the half-light and staring at the stage. She is checking things out.

The Ha-Ha seems to do it. Not many people say Ha-ha when they're caught in a conflagration. The woman tiptoes back to her place and begins to scrabble under the empty seats in front for her boilings. She manages to salvage a few. She seems calm now. She glances along at Tam, who has found her behaviour more riveting than the play, and hisses, ‘Christ, son. Ah thought the place was on fire there.’

Before the play ends, she manages another short nap. Tam tries to focus on the stage again. But the play is gone. He likes this play. He will always like this play. But tonight, for the last two scenes, he is seized by a prolonged paroxysm of the giggles. It reminds him of the time his Auntie Bella announced to the family that his Uncle Davie had broken his leg in two places trying to change a light-bulb and Tam thought he would die of laughter. He couldn't stop laughing even while his father skelped his head. He was sent outside until he could learn to behave like a human being. He went out the back and rolled around silently on the doorstep like an evil spirit unfit for human company. Later that evening, he heard his mother and father laughing between
themselves and his father was saying, ‘Wee bugger. Ah thought he was gonny set me off. Ah had tae send him out. Bella was that serious.’

Now he is again experiencing that worrying tendency in him to laugh at serious matters. It's like a neurotic reaction. Solemnity provokes hilarity. While Stanley Kowalski rapes Blanche Dubois and Blanche is led away to the nuthouse, he is crouched down behind the seat in front, heaving in an agony of suppressed laughter. Tears are running from his eyes. He is whimpering and moaning for mercy, praying for the play to end. He doesn't care if they all rape one another. Just so long as they let him out.

When the curtain finally comes down and rises again and the scattered onlookers are erect to applaud the cast, he cannot stand up. He is rocking in his seat in helpless laughter. A man and a woman a few rows ahead turn round and stare at him disgustedly. This makes him worse. He cannot explain to them that, much as he respects the actors' performances, they remain mere supporting players to his unofficial star of the evening, the woman who had performed so convincingly her own small drama
- Behaviour in a Theatre which is on Fire.
He notices that she hasn't wakened up yet. He manages to calm himself with deep breathing and moves along the row and touches her respectfully on the shoulder.

‘Excuse me, missus. That's it finished.’

The eyes click open brightly. That lovely warm face looks up at him.

‘Oh, thanks, son.’

He waits for her to get up and move out into the passageway. As he is passing her in the aisle, she speaks again.

‘No’ quite as good the night, son. Eh?'

He makes a muffled noise and keeps his head averted and stumbles out, starting to laugh again and finding it impossible to agree with her.

Buchanan

HE WOULD GO TO THE TRAVERSE THEATRE
and see the play. Like almost any impulse to act which he felt at the moment, no matter how simple, it became not so much a decision as the blueprint for a decision. The paralysis of the will he had been experiencing for some time meant that he found himself submitting anything he thought he might do to a kind of committee of motivations. His spontaneity had gone into coma. Just to keep alive the justification for doing anything, he seemed to need to have reasons beyond mere instinct, since his instincts were largely in suspension. The making of a cup of tea might be preceded by a complicated inner debate concerning whether he really wanted tea, how long it would take to make it, whether in the process he would lose the spoor of the past he was hunting in his head. The more reasons he could find, like tubes attached to a patient in intensive care, the better the chance he had of keeping himself functioning as more than a mind.

So, as he got ready to go out, he tried to work out why he was going out. He shaved with the last of his disposable blades and the soft flesh under his chin told him he had better buy a new pack. Grimacing in the mirror, he told himself that going to the play would be an act of homage to the fighting career of Ken Buchanan.

He had always admired Buchanan. He regarded him as the greatest professional boxer Scotland had ever produced, a man who had what only the great fighters have, the ability to enlarge in crisis, to ignite the reflexes under pressure, not to fold. Then, as he searched for the sweater that looked least in need of washing, he felt returning to feed on his small purpose the self-doubts his love of boxing had always had to deal with.

When he was twelve or thirteen, his father had taken him to Firhill in Glasgow to watch Peter Keenan win the European bantamweight title against Luis Romero of Spain. Something which he would often wish to disown had surfaced in him and was never quite to go away, a domesticated darkness, a barking black dog no logic could ever quite muzzle. That day encapsulated a continuing ambivalence in his nature.

Keenan had been brilliant. Romero was reputed to hit like a kicking horse and Keenan had no great power of punch. Yet for
fifteen three-minute rounds he neutralised Romero, displaying a stirring array of skills, like a man ballet-dancing among bombs without once losing his nerve or the grace of his line. There was something he had found too moving in that to be denied.

But the next fight had horrified him. It was between a blond man from the North of England and a black man from Nigeria. In the first round the black man had threatened to overwhelm the blond one, with the crowd shouting him on. From the second round onwards, until it was stopped in the fourth, the black man had been mercilessly beaten and the crowd bayed like an amphitheatre. Crouched far up in the stand and often staring at his feet, he didn't want to be there. Ever since then, his fascination with boxing had lived queasily between visceral thrill and a desire to distance himself from a part of himself.

He put on the black leather jacket to go with the black jeans. Clothes might not make the man but maybe they could hold him together. Still unsure about going out, he decided maybe he was testing himself against Michel's accusation of philistinism in relation to the performing arts.

Once in the theatre, he had to admit that he wasn't answering the accusation too effectively. The play seemed to him fair enough and the acting all right, although three people had walked out noisily, as if their departure were a significant comment. He could never do that. It seemed so hurtful to the actors. His method was simply not to come back in after the interval. (He was glad it was novels he had been ambitious to write and not plays. Authors didn't hear their books being slammed shut all over the country.)

While he could bear the play, he couldn't get excited about it. Maybe that was merely the way he was just now but he didn't think so. Very few plays had nailed him to his seat. He could remember a few at random - the original London production of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, productions of
The Crucible
and
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
, and an amateur production of
Oh What a Lovely War!
Their impact stayed with him.

And Stratford-upon-Avon was one of his favourite places. He had stood a lot of times at the interval on the outside balcony, overlooking the river. It had always been a soft summer evening. He would have a drink in his hand, talking with someone he wanted to be with and there would be ducks and swans on the
river and people boating. And they would be halfway through seeing
King Lear
or
Hamlet
or
Much ado About Nothing.
Perhaps happiness is only realised in retrospect, for those moments seemed to him suffused with a rich and quiet joy. He was in a good place with a good person, taking a long, slow drink, and he had just been enjoying the company of the writer who meant most to him in the world and in a few minutes there was more to come. He was poised between two great pleasures and the interim was a pleasure in itself. Perhaps he would go back to Stratford soon. Whatever the production was like, you couldn't miss with Shakespeare. You were bound to come out with countless arrows of perception lodged in the mind, to be pulled out at your leisure. Great theatre was a wonderful experience.

Bad theatre was as bad as bad art gets. You couldn't turn away from it like a painting or turn the volume down on the music centre or switch it off like the television or throw it across the room like a book. And on celluloid the actors couldn't be embarrassed. A bad play was a double torture. It trapped both the actors and the audience in it, to their mutual excruciation. He should know. He had once written a play which was put on at the Edinburgh Festival and which was so bad they should probably have issued a razor-blade with every ticket, so that the audience had a form of silent protest. He winced in the darkness. They always went out like corpses anyway.

(‘Author! Author! Right, there he is now. Let's get the bastard.’)

Sitting there, he knew why he had come out. The play was an excuse to be with people. It didn't matter too much in itself. Michel was probably right. He saw ‘art’, if you wanted to call it that, not as some purist abstraction but as an extension of companionship, a way to share the company of people you would never meet. Even a book was a special kind of social event. That must be why he had always enjoyed the moments that interrupted creative preconceptions with the unforeseen, the man from Porlock who had come to the door when Coleridge was writing ‘Kubla Khan’ and left him unable to finish it. He was always knocking at the door of every attempted poem or play or novel, demanding admission. Over the shoulder of every writer, some aspect of reality that
was being excluded was leaning perpetually, saying, ‘What about me?’

He remembered a night in Malta, when Gill and he were living for the summer with Don and Jennifer. That was before Megan was born. They all went one evening to an open-air production of
The Merchant of Venice.
It was performed in countryside outside Sliema, set among trees in the ruins of an old house, part of which provided a natural stage at the top of crumbling steps. Moths and cockroaches thronged the lighted air like unpaid extras. Animal sounds barracked the text constantly.