Not I

Samuel Beckett's Not I has to be seen in a theatre to be understood. The play takes the form of a nine-minute monologue performed by a disembodied mouth babbling in the darkness. The words, when spoken as quickly as Lisa Dwan does at the Court, are almost impossible to follow. Instead you take in the image and the whole experience. That experience is very emotional, perhaps extremely so. Oddly, I find myself watching this play physically aware of my spectatorship. Watching it I feel my skin crawling and a sense of sympathetic physical tension taking me over. Ironically, this play performed only by a mouth is a full-body experience. 

I first saw Not I  when I was 17 or 18, I think, at a study day about Samuel Beckett at the University of Birmingham, I think, or it may have been Reading. I'm fairly sure it was a student performer and there were presentations by James Knowlson and Gerry McCarthy about Beckett's work; there was, I vaguely recall, an extract from Godot too. I'd read Not I, as a bit of a Beckettophile teenager, but nothing really prepared me for the effect of seeing it live. First, the mouth is tiny; of course, it's a mouth. And even in a darkened theatre, unless you're very near, it denatures quickly, not looking much like a mouth, but variously, a pulsing point of light, a cat's eye; at moments it seemed to me that it has rotated 90 degrees and the jaws were moving sideways; throughout, the mouth seemed to drift within the proscenium, even though I knew that was not possible. The effect was exhilarating and nightmarish. When I described it to a friend that evening, he said I sounded like I'd been on a ghost train.

I directed the play at university. Liz Harris played the part and talking to her about it was extraordinarily interesting. I'd sort of thought of Beckett as a bit cruel to his actors, making them crouch (not sit or stand) in an urn for Play, burying them in sand up to their waist and then neck in Happy Days, and, in Not I, placing you high above a stage, head braced in one position forced to repeat a nine-minute text at terrifying speed. It has always stayed with me that when I mentioned this thought to Liz, she replied: 'oh no, I think he's very kind to his actors. There's a short series of screams that he gives us in Not I and when I get to that bit I always say "thank you, Sam' because without being able to scream, to let out the tension, Not I would be unbearable to do'. In fact, no one writes for actors like Beckett. Unlike most playwrights he writes for actors as bodies, not just mouths.

One of the things that strikes me is the way he aligns the play with the performance situation very closely. In Happy Days, Winnie is buried up to her waist in sand which is rising to engulf her but seems gaily unconcerned, perhaps even deliberately unaware of this awful situation. She distracts herself from her gradual annihilation with her memories expressed in repeated motifs ('what is that unforgettable line') and the contents of her handbag (including a revolver which it never occurs to her to use on herself). The actress, one might say, is also in a rather awful situation, having to handle a two-hour monologue virtually single-handed (her husband is on stage but not visible to the actress, and providing little significant interaction). The fear, I suppose, is of getting lost in the text, forgetting your lines, drying. Buried in that sand, there would be nothing to do but face the embarrassed stares of the audience. In other words, there is a precise alignment of the character, distracting herself from her predicament with props and catchphrases and the actor doing exactly the same. In Beckett's production notebooks for his own 1979 production he itemises all of the props and repeated verbal motifs, making it very clear how deliberately he reduces all of that in the second half, leaving the actress, buried up to her neck, facing her fear.

The tale that Mouth seems to be telling in Not I is about a woman, abandoned by her parents when young, lived a fairly uneventful - certainly rather silent - life until the age of 70 when, all of a sudden, while walking in a field, everything went dark; she could hear buzzing and was aware of a light; and she hears a voice and realises it is her own, a ceaseless babbling stream of language, and she begins to think she has being required to tell something but has no idea what. When an unseen interlocutor suggests that this woman is mouth herself she aggressively denies it in a way that only confirms that this is indeed her own story. 

But it's also, in many respects, the actress's own story. She too is sitting in the dark, babbling incoherently, and, if you perform it at the speed that Beckett asked Billie Whitelaw to do in his own production, the lines cannot be individually and consciously produced, but must be repeated from deep in the memory, bypassing, in a sense, conscious control. The play enacts its own experiment in trying to escape responsibility for one's own consciousness. The actress can get to a point of disengagement from the text, the brain just observing the mouth repeating it. If the actor feels they have to take conscious responsibility for the text, that may well get in the way of the performance and she'll dry.  The actress, too, has reason to wish that the mouth that is speaking is Not I. And because of the way the mouth will be illuminated, she will be aware of a light near her, a stage lantern that will be faintly buzzing.

Not I is, on one level, incomprehensible in performance. That is to say, its total effect is rich and complex but the detail of the lines will mostly be lost in the onrush of words. One catches snatches: 'merciful ... (brief laugh) ... God' 'old black shopping bag' 'lips... cheeks ... jaws ... tongue' 'tears presumably ... hers presumably' 'dull roar like falls' 'always winter some strange reason' 'start pouring it out ... steady stream ... mad stuff ... half the vowels wrong ... no one could follow' are some of the shards that embedded themselves in me this time. But the story is unlikely to be registered; it's the image, the sense of a person denying herself that we experience. The sheer difficulty of the task adds to the tension in the actress's voice that heightens the emotional intensity of the performance. Reciprocally, we appreciate the difficulty of the task which produces a certain tension in us. This tension is given focus and a certain existential dread because the image is so nightmarish: what is it? a brutally dissected bodily organ? a vagina dentata? an insane fellatrix? a voice of your conscience? (One tiny footnote: Not I opened at the Royal Court in January 1973; six months later, in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, came the premiere of The Rocky Horror Show; when Richard O'Brien came to film that show, he opens with a disembodied mouth singing the opening song [pictured]. Presumably not a coincidence? There are earlier precedents for the image, of course, including Dalí's Mae West Lips Sofa in 1937 or even John Pasche's 1970 Rolling Stones logo, but I'll bet Not I was the source.)

Lisa Dwan's performance is precise, beautiful and, surprisingly, funny. She gives it a much warmer sense of character than I've seen before, imbuing, for example, the location of Mouth's sudden change, Croker's Acres, with charm rather than the fury that Billie Whitelaw offered. This diminishes slightly the sense of the play as an experiment about how we might exist without consciousness, but it does allow us to enter into the world of the play with great generosity. Billie Whitelaw's performance was, by all accounts, astonishing but such a mindfuck that she got Big Sam to let her film it so that she would never have to do it again. The resulting film of Not I is just great and worth watching on a proper TV because at some point it will occur to you, even more nightmarishly, that your television has got a mouth. It reproduces some aspects of the theatre experience in that you oscillate between horrified experience of the overall image and a kind of horrified fascination with the mouth as an organ, Whitelaw's lips expanding, contracting, changing shape, several times a second and, at one moment, a blob of spittle forming on the lips (no time to lick, even) which then drops visibly onto the chin. It's a performance and a play that both seeks to escape the physical and shows us imprisoned by it; it also wants to escape consciousness but is imprisoned by it.

It's on at the Royal Court now, alongside a sepulchral Footfalls and surprisingly sad and compassionate Rockaby. Go go go.

Scotland 2014

What will happen on 18 September 2014, when Scotland goes to the polls to vote on independence?

The polls seem to be saying that they will reject independence by a majority, though perhaps not as clear a majority as once it seemed. Pretty much all the polls show between 25% and 35% planning to vote yes and between 40% and 55% planning to vote no. The large variations there should give us pause, though, as should the sizeable 'don't know' figures: 33% in the last poll I saw (December 2013). If those 'don't knows' convert to Yeses, then Scotland will be independent. There's only limited evidence that something like that could happen: so far, the polls broadly show that the lower the 'don't knows' the higher the 'No' lead, which suggests that there's most movement between 'don't knows' and 'No' voters.

Data taken from WingsOverScotland.com (2012)

Personally, I will take no particular pleasure in the failure of the Yes campaign. Not because I am a particular advocate of Scottish Independence: I think Scotland's influence in the UK is a fundamentally good thing, so I worry that we'd all become a worse, duller, more parochial, conservative and Conservative nation. One passionate advocate of Independence put aside these worries, saying that Scottish votes have never swung a UK election, but that's probably not true. As the table (left) shows, three times since the war, Labour would have been unable to govern without its Scottish MPs, though in 1964 it could perhaps have governed as a minority party, maybe after the 2nd 1974 election too (though that would almost certainly not have been called, given the revised result in February of that year). Now, as with all counterfactuals, we don't know how England would have behaved without Scotland, but those of us on the English Left have possible reason to worry about Scottish independence.

But that thought is selfish and no one on the Left should sacrifice the right of self-determination for the dream of a socialist England. As someone said, if the English are so worried about perpetual Conservative governments after Scottish Independence, all we have to do is stop voting for them. (I should also say, because someone is bound to raise this canard, that just because it is of course the Scots' legal right to determine their independence [or not], this does not mean that no one else is allowed to have or offer opinions about it, so don't bother trying to slap me down about that.)

The real reason I will take no pleasure in a No vote is the idiotic, scaremongering, unimaginative nature of the No campaign. For the last eighteen months, the No campaign has produced a non-stop series of dim-witted and preposterously false scare stories suggesting only inevitable catastrophe resulting from a Yes vote. Scotland will have to renegotiate 14,000 treaties! The Scots will be forced to join the Euro! Scottish phone bills will go up! And best of all, Scotland will have to give its pandas back!

They have offered nothing positive: there is no positive flesh on the bones of their positive slogan 'better together'. Why are we better together? In what sense will we not be together after independence? We in England will continue to benefit from Scottish culture in just the way that we benefit from French or American culture. Imagine the American "No" campaigner in 1773, worrying that they won't be able to use the pound and who will they put on their banknotes now? 

These thoughts are prompted again by this interview with David Greig, or, more precisely, by the extraordinary response to it in the comments below. I know, I know, never read the bottom half of the internet, but here you do see how the No campaign conducts itself almost entirely in ignorant bluster and, now, ad hominem insult: 'Well, well, well another separatist who's enjoyed an English education and success in London hoying his twopenneth worth of opinion in on what will be best for the "other" cities of England. Raging hypocrite springs to mind' writes one commentator; 'Who cares what the writer of the musical of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory thinks? Its a very patronising comment to campaign for Scotland to leave the UK and then tell England whats best for them. Arrogant twerp,' offers another. And what is Greig's crime? He is suggesting that Scottish independence might lead to a flowering of debate about the nature of English democracy. It would send a ripple through the system that says, things can change, we do not have to have the system that we have; we can do things differently. 

What is depressing is that the No campaign seem determined not to have that debate. Their approach is conservative, small-minded, blinkered. If it's characterised by anything, it seems to be a fear of even thinking about what change might be. It has whatever might be the opposite of imagination. In the very back of my mind is a thought so cynical that I mostly try to dismiss it as the product of some deep-seated misanthropy: could it possibly be that the Tories realise they will benefit from Independence and so have decided to conduct the worst campaign possible? I dismiss this pessimistic thought with an even gloomier one: no, they are conducting this campaign like this because this is the very essence of right-wing thinking: an aversion to the very possibility of change.

For what it's worth, if there's bad feeling after the referendum (assuming the No's have it), it will be because there was a moment for a debate and the No campaign won by refusing to have it.

Predictions, then: Labour will, if it has any sense at all, announce full support for Devo Max (full or substantial fiscal independence), perhaps at the Scottish Conference in late March. David Cameron will be cornered by this and will make half-hearted hints about listening hard to what the Scottish electorate will say. In May, the SNP will get a boost from the European Parliament elections, though this may in retrospect be seen as a guilty vote in anticipation of voting No in September. At the referendum, we will see a No majority, but slimmer than predicted. Finally, we will come to see this as a lost opportunity to reflect profoundly on who we are.

NOTE: I've just (1.30pm, 5 Jan 2013) revised this slightly, especially the table which was wrongly calculated. Thanks to Kieran Hurley for gently putting me right.

John & Paul

I'm reading Tune In, the first volume of Mark Lewisohn's projected three-volume biography of the Beatles, All These Years. It's a massive achievement; Lewisohn has spent his life in scholarly Beatlemania and this book seems to have tracked down every document, verified and disproved all the myths, and tells a compelling story, despite taking nearly 1000 pages to get to 'Love Me Do'. Well, maybe because it takes that long. 

Because the story is well known, it's fascinating to see it inching forward in such detail. It's also interesting because the slow route (I think this volume alone is close to half a milliion words, not including endnotes) gives a chance to revisit, rethink and, in this story, experience what happened as if it were not inevitable. The detail allows us not to treat the early Liverpool years as a prelude to the real thing; Lewisohn gives us a whole book on The Beatles before they became famous and it becomes so clear how contingent and peculiar their story was.

The first book I read on The Beatles was Philip Norman's biography, Shout! (1981). It's a decent enough narration of the story, but it is rather notorious for its animus against Paul McCartney who is presented as cold, calculating, and conformist, the man who broke up The Beatles for his own gain. It's fine to prefer John Lennon's songs or solo career to Paul McCartney's, of course, but, as a friend of mine recently put it, it's not a zero-sum game. You don't have to hate John to like Paul or vice versa.

One of the many aspects of the Beatles story that remains compelling is the tightly-locked structure of personalities in the group. I'd say most people could find an echo of their own personality somewhere in The Beatles. This may be what leads some people to venerate one Beatles to the exclusion of another. If you fancy yourself as an intuitive artist, a non-conformist rebel, a sarcastic, taboo-breaking misfit, you might align yourself with John. If you believe yourself to be a quiet dreamer, with inchoate spiritual longings, someone who waits in the background to surprise the world with your talent, you might feel drawn to George. And so on.

Of course, no one's personality is that clearly or cartoonishly drawn, though that didn't stop Philip Norman, yet there are archetypes visible here. In Tune In, there's a vivid and thrilling account of the Woolton Village Fete on 6 July 1957, famous as the day John and Paul met. (Dutifully, Lewisohn records conflicting accounts that suggest they may have previously met on a bus or outside a newsagent's, but this was certainly the first time they met as aspiring musicians.) For those who like the simple binaries, there's a snapshot of two very different attitudes:

As they paid their threppance admission they could hear the Quarry Men playing and went straight up to see them. Here, then, were Ivan's friend's - and right off, the singer had it. He looked strong and assertive, clearly the leader, cool in his checked red and white shirt. Paul, the keen guitarist, watched the fingers and couldn't work out what chords he was playing, not yet realising they were banjo chords. And also he noticed the song 'He was singing Come Go With Me, which I thought was fabulous until I realised they weren't the right words. He was changing them. 'Come go with me ... down to the penitentiary' - he was nicking folk-song words and chain-gang words and putting them into the Dell-Vikings song, a clever little bit of ingenuity'. (p. 128)

If you like your John Lennon as the improviser, the bricoleur, the cool rebel, here he is. And now, we go forward around 3 hours and John and Paul are hanging out. Conversation, obviously, turns to music:

Not one to hold himself back, Paul asked John for a go on his guitar [...] The way he held the instrument upside down prompted a few sniggers, but after a minute or two of fiddling  Paul suddenly stopped and burst into Twenty Flight Rock. Here, right away, was talent, already way out of John's league. And it wasn't just that Paul could get through the song from start to finish, singing with a strong rocking voice and playing the chords with confidence, it was knowing all the words. [...] After this, Paul went into full exhibition mode, showing off, confident of his ability and aware of his audience. He demonstrated one or two chords he thought the gathering might not have heard, and he played them some other numbers (Be-Bop-A-Lula was one, something by Elvis surely another). Then, showing real neck, he switched to piano and started belting out his Little Richard routine, yelling alone into the quiet of a cavernous church hall. (pp. 130-131)

And if you like your Paul McCartney as the natural musical genius, the multi-instrumentalist, the perfectionist, the showman, even as the show-off, here he is in full. It's a beautiful pair of capsule descriptions of what they would always be. But here's why you don't have to choose between them. This is what Paul thought of that first sight of John:

My [real] first impression was that it was amazing how he was making up the words. He was singing Come Go with Me by the Dell-Vikings and he didn't know one of the words. He was making up every one as he went along. I thought it was great. (quoted, p. 128)

And here's what John thought of that first sight of Paul:

It went through my head that I'd have to to keep him in the line if I let him join, but he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him. (quoted, p. 132)

In other words, they saw in each other their opposite and they loved it and that's why it's not a zero-sum game and you don't have to choose because we had both.