A Comedy of Menace

My acting career, all based at schools, was mercifully brief. I started as Chicken Little at primary school (or was it Cocky Locky? I can no longer remember) and, wisely, was never cast in a major role again - at least not until my last year of secondary school.

The English teacher who was putting on the play chose me for the role of Bert Hudd in Pinter’s first play The Room, a weird-as-fuck pretentious vignette which, as far as I could tell, had absolutely no merit whatsoever, artistic or otherwise. It was an odd choice of play for 16 year olds, and I was an even odder choice to play Bert.

I still have no idea what the play is about, but I am told it is an example of something called a “comedy of menace”. Comedy? I suppose if you find nailing your testicles to a desk to be hilarious then I could see why you might find this appalling theatrical excrescence to be funny.

I feel that many of us have been like the audience in a play such as The Room over the last couple of years. We’ve gazed in horror at the unfolding of the absurd drama as governments, health bodies, and the general population have performed their hearts out following some strange and meaningless script.

Like The Room it has been anything but funny, anything but enlightening, and nothing like anything that makes sense. But, I suppose, like a lot of art, it isn’t supposed to make sense. I remember my friend describing watching a 5 minute mime of Hamlet performed by a single person dressed all in black except for white gloves. The spotlight lit the gloves, but nothing else.

We’ve all had those moments where, in the safety of a general hubbub, we open our mouths and say something quite pointed - only to realise the hubbub died down and everybody just heard what you said. My friend, Antony, had one of those moments after this, erm, version of Hamlet. “That was fucking shit” he intoned, at precisely the moment the applause died down. Of course, it’s an entirely appropriate and justified comment, but his description of the many horrified gasps and stares he received was interesting, to say the least.

What seemed to be a theatre-full of (presumably) rational, intelligent and mature human beings had entered into a kind of pretence that what they were watching was in some sense meaningful and worthy.

Now, I’ve watched performances where I’ve clapped enthusiastically. I cannot even begin to describe the horror of listening to the carol “Mary’s Boy Child” played, at quarter speed, by a primary school orchestra where every instrument was at least a quarter tone out of tune and a quarter step out of time, with everything else. But my daughter was playing cello (or determinedly scraping the bow across something vaguely cello shaped), and so I clapped enthusiastically.

Any foolish dream I might have had of my daughter being the next Jacqueline Du Pré died that day. To be fair, after having endured her practices, the dream was not on the strongest of foundations anyway. My daughter has many talents. Being a world-class cellist is definitely not amongst them.

With covid I don’t really know whether we’ve been watching The Room, or the surreal scrapings of a primary school orchestra. In both cases the performers are playing their hearts out - bless ‘em. In both cases the performance falls somewhat short of edifying.

One thing’s for sure though. In the case of a primary school orchestra, encouragement is a good thing. The last thing the morons who have been acting on the covid stage for the past 2 years need is encouragement.

The governments, the directors of the covid play, have all been following the same baffling script. It has been a “comedy of menace”. And it has been deeply damaging. At least with a shitty meaningless play we can walk out of the theatre and attempt to obliterate the experience with several shots of Tequila.

Not so with covid. Many people seem to have fallen for the pretence they were involved in something meaningful, actors in some great high drama where even the slightest of performative acts was seen as the height of morality and compassion. Those of us not on the stage, the audience, could not be induced to join the merry troupe of morons gaily signalling their virtue and superiority over us anti-panto people sitting in the stalls.

Me? I’m like Antony. I’m not sure whether the play is over, or whether we’ve just come to the end of an act, but my comment is the same as his

That was fucking shit

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