CRAIG RAINE
Last March, on the ski-bus from my hotel to the Kaprun ski-lift, I formulated one of life's great truths. Let me share it with you. This principle is called 'The cut on someone else's finger'. Three Germans, clearly friends, sat across the aisle — two of them facing a third. Their conversation was animated without being argumentative. As you know, the crucial thing about skis is their edge. The inside edge has to be sharp, otherwise turning is difficult, especially on ice. You may have noticed that ice-skaters protect their blades — the mot juste — with sheaths. Same principle. All three Germans had their skis between their legs, holding them in the middle, near the bindings, at the sharpest point. Suddenly, one of them gasped. Scheisse! There were gouts of blood the size of redcurrants on his finger. The others looked, tuttutted and went on with their conversation. The injured German took no further part in the discussion. He was staring at the island of blood seeping through his handkerchief.
Iwas reminded of this a couple of weeks ago in Spoleto, where I was giving a poetry reading as part of the festival. At the final concert, there were 2,000 people in the piazza in front of the cathedral's Romanesque facade. Rai Due television cameras on booms swooped then soared away like the swifts overhead. Richard Hickox conducted and perspired fluently. There was a choir of nearly 100. There was also a woman having a heart attack quite near the front, approximately in row D. Around her, a little eddy of chaos. Someone was pounding her chest — an improvised version of a defibrillator. Others whispered intensely into their mobile phones. Her legs were raised. You could see where her tights darkened at the upper thigh as they modulated into the more robust panty section. A cardinal at the edge of the proceedings, acting urgency, paced and turned in his dramatic clericals with the strange, camp air of someone modelling Vivienne Westwood. Paramedics, a nurse, a stretcher appeared. The heart-attack victim was tidied away — and the concert continued. In fact, the concert had never stopped. For perhaps 15 minutes, a considerable section of the audience — the hundred or so with a reasonable view — was distracted from the concert. Now they refocused their attention to the stage. The cut on someone else's finger. I thought of Jane Austen, who drily remarked after a battle, 'How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!'
At Westbourne Studios last Thursday, for the London premiere of Hideous Man, in which Bella Freud and John Malkovich continue their film/fashion collaboration.
Hideous man is a poet — aren't they all? — who is worshipped for his work by a bunch of the most amazingly beautiful women you have ever seen. (A poet myself, I know this is true.) Naturally, the likes of Saffron Burrows and Arielle Dombasle can hardly contain themselves at the prospect of a visit from the bard. However, Godot-like, he fails to show up, having been killed, with ironic appropriateness, in a trash-compactor. At his funeral, the models wear armbands — le cleaner cri — proclaiming 'Dead Upset', 'RIP' and 'VIP'. I thought it was HIP — deliciously shot in granular black-and-white, with female perfection reciting the dirtiest pastiche Beat poetry.
play by Nick Whitfield and Wes Williams, roadmovie, had two pre-Edinburgh Festival performances last week at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. Wes is my colleague at New College. When you have your portrait painted, you hope you like it enough to want to buy it. There is no truer compliment than writing a cheque. Any compliment short of the cheque book is inevitably grudging. Theatre is much the same. All compliments are suspect. 'Darling, you were marvellous' means tut the play was shit'. When my play 1953 was at the Almeida, I heard the ultimate version of this after a Saturday matinee: one pensioner turned to another and said, loudly, politely, quite as if she knew the author was within earshot. 'Well, I liked the music.' Recently I saw another friend perform a part as long as Hamlet. We watched several of our friends run away from the theatre in the interval. Afterwards, we went backstage. 'What are you going to say to her?' my wife asked. I wasn't sure. In the event, I said. 'Well done, you carried the whole evening.' 'Yes,' she replied, looking at her reflection with that beady intensity actors bring to the removal of make-up. 'And it was fucking heavy, I can tell you.' No need to lie.
Aroadmovie, Wes, the co-author, sits next to me. Blackmail. I resolve not to laugh unless I have to. I hate truckling theatre audiences, laughing to show they've got the joke. roadmovie is a one-man show, set, Nick Hornby-like, in a video-rental store whose personnel are all film wonks with pronounced critical positions. Somewhere between anoraks and cognoscenti, they will diss Sleeping in Seattle to potential customers and urge instead the merits of The Manchurian Candidate. Watching Catch-22, the hero notices sound-effects migrating to inappropriate bits of the narrative. This establishes a plot convention for the play itself. Film conventions bleed into the main narrative, giving the 'plot' deliberate surreal spin. The theme is Yeats's 'perfection of the life or art', summed up by the hero's own home-made video, Murderous Park Baby; which is E.J. Thribb as cineaste — inept jump cuts, hopelessly arhythmical reaction shots. An app etitlich pre-toddler crawls towards a woman reading on a park bench. She lifts up the kid — and is throttled by him. The kid then toys with her book, flicking the pages, holding it upside-down — over her dead body. Post-screening, the hero explains the lingering after-shots of the kid. They might look like paternal self-indulgence, he argues, but they take us on a conducted tour round the mindset of a pathological killer. 'Art' is obliterating reality, in other words. None of this would mean much without the kid, who is so scrummy that the father's other pretensions to creativity are seen in all their comic thinness. roadmovie is utterly charming, wittily conceived, and perfectly performed by Nick Whitfield — father of the nipper. 1 want to publish the text in my magazine Arete, but so much (rightly) depends on realisation. On that kid. In that film. Will the script work on its own?
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