THE FRINGES OF EXISTENCE

I was sharing a house with six other people in Balham, South London, in the mid 1970’s. Hardly a “commune”, we had become friends and chose to share the chores, including rotation on cooking a meal every night for an (optional) household gathering. A couple of architects, two teachers, a self-employed clothes designer, a vegetarian social-worker and me, an unemployed “poet”, on the dole but working “under-the-table” weekends bar-tending at a local pub.

I was making the poetry-reading circuit, but finding it a little too un-animated, statically too print-and recitative-oriented. I never shared its’ apparent reverence for one day being “published” and therefore poetically affirmed. I couldn’t imagine delighting in my words not being attached to my voice. No more than delighting in my voice not being attached to my physical presence. Anything else would be a dilution. I’d given up television as soon as I graduated my parents’ house and rarely went to the cinema except as a social occasion. I really did seem to find life more fascinating when it was alive. Especially when you could feel close-up and unmediated it’s struggle to unearth and compose its deepest and truest vitality. Which is what attracted me onto the London “Fringe” theatre scene….

All manner of esoterica, slapdash silly, over-reverent experimentations in deranged linguistics and imagery, expressionist disfigurations of something amiss in the world, agit-prop pulpiteering, over-fraught neediness to say and do something that had never been done or said before, pretentiously assertive or deferentially baffled, very deliberate dramatic deficiencies of plot and characterization, efficiently failing to succeed or successfully and faithfully failing, paying their theatrical dues or damning their dues to the cowardly career-minded, integrity is next to honesty is next to not getting a paying-gig….…Sometimes I wasn’t sure which was which. But at least they were moving around without a script.. Tight-budgetary circumstances led me to favor one particular venue, a tiny store-front “black-box, on the Charing Cross Road, “The Almost Free Theatre”, pay-what-you-can-afford.

Till one night I turned up there with about two ponds plus small change in my pocket, figuring I’d give them ten shillings and have enough left over for take-out, subway tube-fare back home and to keep me till payday on Friday. But the guy at the box-office chair-and-a-stool insisted it was a ‘special” night tonight, a “special performance : one man’s probing into the mystery of the human condition through a contemporary evocation of the classical stylings of Kabuki. “Kabuki-Chu”, it was titled. Right up my personally probing alley, I thought.. I offered him a pound. but he wouldn’t especially budge. By now I knew it was too late to find anything else that night that would cost me less, plus the show as about to start (he insisted) so I succumbed to theatrical pressure and coughed up everything but my small change. It was a pleasant enough Spring night, I could walk the five or six miles home and settle for toast and marmalade…One day at a time….

I entered through a curtain into the black-box, a brick-walled high-ceilinged room, about 15-yard square, with an audience riser to one side, seating for tops twenty-to-thirty people, the stage was the floor. A middle-aged couple sitting in the second tier, I opted for the back row, didn’t interrupt their hushed conversation. There was no pre-show music playing, neither dramatically stimulating nor orientally contemplative. There were two flats, one placed strategically to mask the door either to the green-room or the bathroom, both adorned with somewhat amateurish scrawlings that I assumed was Kabuki symbolism. We sat in silence for five, ten minutes… Till the door behind the flat squeaked open and somebody or something scuttled in and settled pre-figuratively out of our sight. The guy from the box-office entered through the curtain, switched the house-lights off then back on again, retreated back to his cash-box. I suspected the show must now be underway. My suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later when a classically whitened-out face popped out from behind the flat, took lingering stock either of the infinite void or the scant audience occupying it….

Then the full figure emerged in slow precise motion, in black tail-coat, black tights and black work-boots, wearing white gloves. shifting slo-mo expressionless downstage center…. Reminded me of a taller version of the slapstick mimic comedian later turned Sam Beckett interpreter Max Wall… But even through the white-out plus accessories I couldn’t help thinking he’d just nipped down here from his day-job pots’ n ’pans hardware stall in Petticoat Lane. A suspicion all but confirmed when he finally opened his mouth and spoke in a broad matter-of-fact Cockney accent, as he gazed out into the brick-wall void behind my head : “I go to the door.” Pause. A slo-mo left turn towards the side brick-wall.. “I go to the window.” Then retraced his steps backwards across the full-length of the “stage”, turned to the other side brick-wall : “I go to the bathroom.”

A slight but somewhat suspenseful pause… This being experimental and me still naïve about the possibilities of breaking through to the other side of theatre, with no study of what contemporary Kabuki actors might be prepared to perform in their probings, I was somewhat relieved when he retreated back downstage center without actually relieving himself while he was in the “bathroom”. He gazed resolutely, defiantly (my perception) upward but without any demonstrable shift of gesture, he implored the Kabuki gods to “put out the light. And put out the light. Let’s all (pause) kip in the dark. Let’s all (more significant pause?) kip in the dark.” A moment’s contemplation, then retreated slo-mo backwards till he re-cast himself back behind the original flattened void he’d appeared from. The guy from the box-office re-emerged and turned the lights off then (with no pause whatsoever) turned them back on again, retreated to his administrative duties. And I’m thinking, well, that was mildly interesting, I wonder what he’s got in store for me next? Whitened face popped out and our Kabuki protagonist proceeded to repeat the sequence exactly as before.

After the third sequence, with no-end to repetition in sight, deciding I’d got the general gist, I followed the box-office guy / lighting director back to his cash-box and enquired if there was the possibility of at least a partial refund? He told me there were no refunds, especially as I had already seen the show. I argued that it wasn’t a show, I’d been neither entertained nor enlightened, he’s just doing the same thing over and over again. But my Almost Free host was adamant, no refunds. And by now he had to return for lighting duty. With no hope of any other experience that night, convincing myself I must be missing something and should give Mr. Kabuki another chance, I returned to my seat, just as he was about to “go to the door”.

A further twenty minutes of repetitions, then the house-lights went off and on apparently for the final time, as I heard the back-door squeak open and shut, unless he just needed to use the bathroom or was escaping out of the window for a change… I waited for the couple to finally make the commitment to exit, so I’d know that it wasn’t just an intermission and the show was truly over. For several minutes I sat there trying to digest, comprehend and evaluate what I and two other human-beings had just experienced. When I finally rose up and exited, the guy from the box-office had disappeared, and outside on the sidewalk I could see the couple in relatively animated conversation with Mr. Kabuki himself. I paused only long enough to decide I had no idea what to say to anybody at the moment, sidled silently past them and began my five or six mile trek back home to toast and marmalade.

Needless to say, as I’m still remembering and writing about this now, many years later, it left a vivid impression of something. Far more than any particular Shakespearean, Broadway, West End or regular proscenium spectacle, most of which (apart from Peter O’Toole in “Waiting for Godot”, though it’s his eyes I remember not any particular staging) …blend into slightly elevated show-biz generality. Max Wall’s performance of Beckett’s “Krapps Last Tape” left nothing of any post-probative value to me other than that I know I saw it. If after all these years Mr. Kabuki continues to amuse, baffle and fascinate me… That a man could remain so brazenly focused on negating any need to entertain or explicitly enlighten and require me to pay two pounds for the privilege of allowing him not to have to do it alone in his own front-room… Even as I ate my toast and marmalade that night I knew it was something I could never possibly do.

So what does this tell me about my life? Or at least my relationship to theatre…That the more remote or mediated a production is, the more rewarding it may be to the performer than the audience, except as social credit for being part of an “occasion”? Should paying one’s dues become paying the piper to play his pipes, one will need to consolidate one’s self-esteem on external accreditation, career-achievement, which will undoubtedly re-define the self altogether. Of course the contrary option is becoming so self-involved your esteem is of no relevance whatsoever to anybody else., a failure to connect with the world and humanity in general. The most definitely definable we allow our self to be in this world, the more willingly the world will allow us into its’ fold. The downside, the more folded we become into the world’s estimation, the less clearly our self will be defined.. The more likely we become but an image of our self. The more we have to lose, the less we can gain by un-defining ourselves as an unfinished product. This world rarely rejoices in the merely human. And if this doesn’t lead to idolatry, I don’t know what does. The psychic challenge of sustaining integrity in an evermore disintegrating matrix world of spectacular pixels and corporate media control is the defining motif of anyone not most definably involved in the bricks-and-mortar, silicone-chip-enabling, political. economic, militaristic business of this world.

And for this insight alone, I figure it was well worth the two pounds and no take-out….