The Meaning of Recognition (34 page)

As dialogue, this was worse than updated, it was dysfunctional. Updatings disfigured almost every page of the text, but most of them were merely dreary. The phrase ‘chatting up the
chicks’ rang out. ‘Space cadets’ were referred to. ‘Stereo’ was rhymed with ‘brio’, even though the two words do not rhyme anyway. Most of this could be
ignored, and Mr Rea even had the sense to ignore one of his own lines. To chime with Cyrano’s interest in outer space, he had been given an echo of Captain Kirk: ‘to boldly go . .
.’ In the printed text Cyrano continues the line, but on stage the three dots were as far as Mr Rea took it, having sensibly decided that he had enough to deal with. Contemporary references,
as a means of jazzing a period text, made their first appearance in the opera house, where it has long been supposed that the libretto of a piece by Offenbach or Lehar can be brought back from the
dead if given a sprinkling of commentary based on current affairs. Since audiences for music will laugh at anything labelled as a joke, the case seemed proved, and the virus ensured that the same
assumption was transferred to the spoken theatre, where we are now regularly assailed with crassly updated scripts whose directors, unburdened with any sense of humour of their own, are under the
illusion that they can call in any catchpenny comic writer and get results that would have amazed Nestroy. They are right about that, but not in the way they think. Derek Mahon is not among the
gag-writing journeymen. He knows even less than they do about comedy, as his jokes prove, but he knows much more about the texture of language. He should have known enough not to make Roxane
sexually aware. ‘Real relations’ means sex, and Roxane is supposed to be thinking about love.

In the long run there might not be a lot of difference, but Rostand was writing about the short run, in which Roxane wants to be loved before she is touched, and Cyrano wants her to love him,
even though unromanticized sex is something he knows all about. The original Cyrano certainly did: syphilis was probably what he died of. Rostand himself was one of the great boudoir operators of
his time: among the actresses he conquered was Sarah Bernhardt, and among the illustrious women of the
beau monde
was the legendary Anna de Noailles. There is thus some warrant for
supposing that the thing sticking out of Cyrano’s face might be a phallic symbol, and one of Derek Mahon’s inspired updates – Cyrano’s claim that his nose is a popular
addition to his powers of cunnilingus – might not be without merit, although the way of putting it was sadly without grace. If Cyrano had rolled a condom onto his nose as a gesture towards
safe sex, it would have been no more anachronistic than a jasmine tree assembled with a spanner, and might even have made a point; but only if modern points are the kind you want to make; and there
is not much point in making those if they ruin the ones that are already there, and are essential to the plot.

One of the essential plot points is that Roxane, a woman young enough to be still thinking the way men think always, attributes all the virtues to Christian just because he is beautiful, even
though he is as dumb as they come. Some of the most beautiful actors in the world are of exotic origin, but Zubin Varla is not among them. He is more beautiful than I am, but at the rate his
temples are retreating he will soon have my hairstyle, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a knockout like Roxane would not fall for him at first meeting unless he spoke like Cyrano,
whereas the whole point is that she falls for him
before
he starts speaking like Cyrano. I am sorry to labour the obvious, but the virus has driven me to it. One thing you should be able
to count on with any theatre company, no matter how dedicated it might be to social engineering, is that if it wants to cast the role of a handsome, not very bright young man, there are plenty of
candidates available. Worse than not looking especially gorgeous, Mr Varla looked as smart as a whip. Miscasting is never an actor’s fault, so we should confine ourselves to observing that
here was a Christian with all the disqualifications, plus one more that Rostand would never have dreamed possible.

Christian turned out to be deaf. In the published text, wooing Roxane from below her scaffolding, he is merely hesitant when the hidden Cyrano prompts him. But during rehearsals somebody had a
better idea, and so we were forced to listen when Christian turned Cyrano’s every suggested line into a string of off-colour puns. The audience did not laugh much, but kindly decided not to
lynch him. Remarkably, Roxane decided not to either, and carried on listening as per the unjollified text, instead of parachuting off the back of the scaffolding and booking into the convent early.
Luckily that was the low point for Christian. Later on, at the Thirty Years War, he got the chance to die an heroic death in defence of the scaffolding, which the enemy was attacking with machine
guns. Those of us who had been hoping that it would be attacked with a Tomahawk cruise missile might have been disappointed, but for Christian, weak with hunger, it was time to climb the pipes, as
men weak with hunger so often do. Thus elevated, he was shot in the chest and dived to an early death. The less fortunate Cyrano was obliged to keep breathing until his belated demise among the
falling leaves. Luckily these were not represented by falling clamps and bolts. They were just words. In theory, words were all he had ever needed. Unfortunately he was never given the right
ones.

Lying there in the arms of Claire Price – not normally the worst fate a man can imagine – Mr Rea must have felt his false nose weighing like a lead balloon. He is all too aware that
in the 1983 Anthony Burgess version Derek Jacobi finished the evening with the audience pulling the walls in: men signed up for fencing class while women sobbed into each other’s
handkerchiefs. As Antony Sher reveals in his memoir
Beside Myself,
Jacobi’s performance convinced him that he had no chance to play it handsome plus false nose, but should follow the
lead set by his own looks, which he had never liked. He would observe the difference Burgess had drawn between ‘the visible soul’ and ‘the casual dress of flesh’. The
Burgess version had enough zing to set the actors and the audience on fire. Burgess kept the exactness of the couplets even when he opened the rhyme scheme into quatrains. Before him, Christopher
Fry had deftly done the whole thing in couplets. But for some reason we still think that strict rhymes mean restriction, and that to throw them away means freedom. Why?

Because it is true. In the English theatre, the norm of fluent speech was set by Shakespeare, who had all the technical skill to turn Chaucer’s narrative couplets into a viable dramatic
form, but chose to do otherwise. He went for blank verse instead, thus establishing an expectation beside which a latticework of spoken rhymes will always sound artificial. Not even Dryden was
powerful enough to put the expectation into reverse. For the French, the normal expectation has always been rhyming couplets. Corneille, Racine and Molière set a rhythm which rebellion could
never break, but only work within. The first riot on the opening night of Victor Hugo’s
Hernani
took place when he broke the rule of always putting the adjective and noun inside the
same hemistitch. The audience knew exactly what he was up to because they had been hearing classical couplets all their lives. Rostand could count on that universal expectation when he gave Cyrano
the energy of a wild animal. The wild animal is in a cage, and what a French audience hears is its repeated assault on the bars. (You could even call them scaffolding if you like, but in French you
would have to say
échafaudage.)
For Cyrano, however, his confinement does not mean prison. Without the fierce requirements of rhyme, his wit would never have been driven to its
dizzy height, just as, without the burden of his nose, he would never have been compelled to the nobility of his sacrifice. The great truth at the heart of the play emerges even from this
production: if we love someone we can’t have, but love them so much that we want them to be happy with someone else, it might not be as good as we’ll ever feel, but it’s probably
as good as we’ll ever be.

TLS
, 30 April 2004

The shock wave from the car-bomb outside the nightclub on Kuta Beach in Bali went all the way to Australia in a matter of minutes. As soon as the young Australian survivors
stopped trembling long enough to touch one button at a time, they were calling home to say they were all right. But there were some young Australians who did not call home, because they were not
all right. The Australian casualty list is lengthening even as I compose this opening paragraph, and by the time I reach a conclusion the casualty list will be longer still. I owe it to my dead,
wounded and bereaved countrymen to say straight away that I have no clear idea of what that conclusion will be. This is no time to preach, and least of all from a prepared text.

Some of Australia’s commentators on politics might already be realizing that. Now they, too, must feel their way forward: the bomb has done to their certainties what it did to the
revellers in the nightclub. Before the bomb went off, the pundits had all the answers about the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. In the year and a bit between September 11th 2001 and
October 12th 2002 they had, from the professional viewpoint, a relatively easy time. One didn’t question their capacity for sympathy: Australian journalists pride themselves on being a
hard-bitten crew, but most of them could imagine that being trapped hundreds of feet up in a burning building was no fit way to die. What one did sometimes question was their capacity for analysis.
A prepared text was rolled out, and went on unrolling.

According to the prepared text, the attack was really America’s fault, because of its bad behaviour elsewhere in the world. For insular Americans, the attack was a salutary illustration of
what the Australian pundit Janet McCalman called their ‘lowly place in the affections of the poor and struggling’. Australia, unashamedly America’s ally, was effectively an
oppressor too. If you took into account the behaviour of the Australian government when faced with the crisis engendered by the arrival, or non-arrival, of a Norwegian container ship full of Afghan
refugees, Australia was even more guilty than America. Australia (perennially a racist country, as John Pilger’s historical researches had incontrovertibly proved) was a flagrant provocation
to the wretched of the earth. Imperialist America was not only treating the helpless Middle East as its personal property, America had racist Australia for its lackey. No wonder al-Qa’ida was
angry. On Christmas Eve, in the Melbourne
Age
, another pundit, Michael Leunig, called for a national prayer for Osama bin Laden on Christmas Day. ‘It’s a family day,’
Leunig explained, ‘and Osama’s our relative.’ It is not recorded whether the aforesaid Osama, sitting cross-legged beside his Christmas tree somewhere under Afghanistan, offered
up a prayer for Michael. He might have done: after all, they were on a first-name basis.

The prepared text kept on unrolling. Bob Ellis, with whom I was once at university in Sydney, is famous in Australia as an engagingly erratic commentator still carrying a torch for the old
Australian Labor Party, the one that cared about the welfare of the workers until Bob Hawke re-educated it to care about the welfare of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer. Though Ellis’s torch
is a jam-tin nailed to a broomstick and fuelled with household kerosene, he carries it with a certain shambolic panache. The Australian descriptive term ‘rat-bag’ is often used of him
even by his friends, but nobody doubts that his heart is in the right place. Certainly he doesn’t. He was easily able to discredit President Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ by
pointing out that terrorism is everywhere, and is especially prevalent in the allegedly civilized Western democracies. A letter from a creditor, explained Ellis, can be a terrorist act.
(Considering what it must be like for a creditor trying to get Ellis’s attention, this might even be true.) A concept basic to the prepared text was that there could be no end to all this
deplorable but understandable Islamist outrage until the Palestinian matter was settled: a settlement which was in America’s power to bring about just by picking up a telephone and
instructing Sharon to back off. There was one conspicuous reason, however, why America would never do this: John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia. John Howard, sustained in his post by
nothing except a majority of the Australian electorate, was a fascist in all but name. The mere presence of John Howard in Canberra, instead of in his local gaol, was overwhelming evidence of
America’s global power to crush the hopes of the poor and struggling.

Such was the consensus before the nightclub in Bali turned into a nightmare. Consensus might be too large a word. There are publications in Australia that dissent from the standard view: the
magazine
Quadrant
is only one example, and so prominent a newspaper as the
Sydney Morning Herald
carries the opinion of several commentators who sing a different tune. Though they
might enjoy promoting themselves as lone voices, the lone voices add up to a considerable choir. But they must get used to wearing a sticky label: Right Wing. The consensus considers itself to be
left wing in the best sense. The appellation is one that an old stager like me is reluctant to grant, because the consequence of granting it, and then expressing dissent, is to be classified as
conservative. In my own case, the main thing I want to conserve is the welfare of the common people: in that regard I am plodding in Bob Ellis’s zig-zag slipstream as he carries his
ramshackle torch.

But let us allow for the moment that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible
construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism
is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or at any rate they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that
easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but
their virtues.