Boos and catcalls
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
Mr Kenneth Onan, the distinguished dramatic critic and Theaterdirigent, for many years the enfant horrible of English Letters, is sometimes outspoken, often controversial, and always out- rageous. Here he returns to print with a wide- ranging and swingeing assault on all that we hold most near.
Working for the Observer at forty encourages a headlong retreat into privacy. For the intellec- tual writing in such a paper, prolonged exposure to immutable social realities may induce despair. Worse, it may induce a downright masochistic delight in being subjected to the immutable social realities of long self-indulgent dinner parties, drinks with the nobs, clobber from Twitties or the Magic Pant Boutique etc. etc. The bearded Castro within writhes and thrashes to escape from the well-fed public body, burn- ing to rip its way through the spangled chiffon and shout a four-letter word. Or make a thirteen-hour speech on libertarian activism. As it is all we've got is two columns in the Observer.
In his commentary on the chapter Historische Pseudomorphosetz in Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes, Edgelbert Humperdinck says: 'It is all falling to bits, baby doll. Either you sit back and accept it, eat yourself stupid and get stoned out of your mind or alternatively you get up off your butt and start kicking it to bits a bit faster. Either way it is quite dreary and you're liable for a dose of the Unhappy Consciousness, as Hegel has it.'
To escape that fate, we cling more and more tenaciously to the elderly angels of reaction we are wrestling with, demanding in strident voices that they should bless us before we throw them out of the window. Where should we be with- out them? Even in the last ten years they've got bloody thin on the ground. There's still the Lord Chamberlain, but what the hell happens when he goes? The wind blows chill round the revolutionary in power. * * * There has been a lot of rubbish written about Willibald Vogli's manual Auto-Eroiism Made Easy and the companion volume Self-Abuse in Seven Days (complete with the long-playing record of incidental music from Cashin and Hoppit at 12 gns). A lot of people seem to have taken offence at the various articles that have appeared demanding that the course should be made compulsory both at '0' and 'A' level in all state schools. This seems to me to be non- sense of the most dangerous kind. The funda- mental truth about such articles is simple. They are written with the express intention of induc- ing high blood-pressure and, if possible, cardiac arrest in the reactionary reader. If this is not successful some more permanent solution will have to be found.
Mugsi Pumpernickel, the twenty-five-stone road manager for Jean-Paul Boccarini and the Termites whom cindastes will remember falling through the glass dome in the last few feet of Lagnard's The City '68, is in London this week. He has high hopes for Boccarini and the Ter- mites' summer exhibition, opening at the Grahame Vaughn-Williams Gallery in Old Bond Street on 14 February, particularly after the riot the exhibition caused last week at the Petit Palais in Paris. Police armed with dustbin lids and objets bizarres wrestled with the demon- strators for almost three hours to the accom- paniment of Karlheinz Blockhausen's Suite for Moustache and Gramophone, and takings exceeded 75,000 francs.
Boccarini's London exhibition will centre round his controversial Nude on a Pogo Stick, which consists of a single sheet of white paper affixed to the floor with glue. He has collabo- rated with the Termites on the rather more representational Eggboxes, and the harshly un- compromising Smashed Up Car Sprayed with Coloured Paint and Going for Two Thousand Five Hundred to Any Mug with the Garage Space. The recent execution of the gallery's for- mer owner has added great cachet to the gallery already, and it will- obviously be social death not to be there on the fourteenth. * * The continuing arrogance of the censor never fails to appal me. Shout ***** in the average middle-class drawing room and no one will raise an eyebrow: whisper it on the stage and the censor goes ******* mad. I can write **** in the Observer, why should I not say **** in the theatre? I fail to understand why a liberal- minded public, always ready to call a **** a **** in private life, should submit to such out- rageous abuse of their liberties in a so-called place of entertainment. If audiences do not wish to listen to people saying ******** they should get out of the way of people who do.
A typical example bf this dictatorial oppres- sion was brought to my attention last week by Montague Dildo-Middlecombe, the young Old Etonian playwright whose one-act divertissement Roger was interrupted by the fuzz last year at Edinburgh. He now tells me that the censor has demanded 'substantial cuts' in his latest work, John, which was to have been performed at the National Theatre in repertory with Hamlet and Blithe Spirit during the coming summer. The play is basically about the human bladder. We watch the anonymous hero, a dumb and derelict hobo, as he wakes up, examines his condition in a pulverising mime of mute ges- tures, shambles to the front of the stage, and urinates over the cellist.
Robert Morley was very interested in the part. Sir Michael Redgrave was to have played the hero. Now it looks as though we shall never experience that particular moment of ecstatic release. The playwright on hearing the news very understandably kicked the censor in the crutch and withdrew the play. Perhaps in time the Lord Chancellor will learn to behave. One of these days I shall emigrate to Russia.
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