Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Saints and Superheroes

On Friday the 9th of September, 2005, I went along to the Battersea Arts Centre, to see a one-man show called Radioplay. I thought at the time of doing a review of the show, but, as often happens with this blog, other things claimed my attention, time passed, and after a while it was rather too late to give a proper review.



On Friday the 13th of October, 2006, I went along to the Battersea Arts Centre, to see a two-man show called Saints and Superheroes. The show was the work of Flywheel Productions, the same team responsible for Radioplay. Ed Gaughan, who was the one man in that one-man play, was one of the two men in this two-man play, the other being Andrew Buckley, familiar to some as Gobbler from Ricky Gervais' Extras. Respectively, Gaughan and Buckley were Brother Dominic and Brother Stephen, the resident monks of Trengwithey lighthouse (and monastery), just off the coast of Cornwall. The show began with an animated sequence projected onto a screen above the stage. We zoomed in to a revolving planet Earth to the accompaniment of dramatic string music that segued into warm and welcoming jazz as we found ourselves closing in on the island and then climbing the stairs of the lighthouse to the very top. And here was Brother Dominic, giving us, the audience, a guided tour. So began Saints and Superheroes and thus we were ushered into the world of Brothers Dominic and Stephen, who would, during the course of the evening, provide a particularly intimate guided tour of their lives. Whether or not we were to believe anything we were told was another matter.



We learnt, during the course of the evening, that Brother Stephen was sent in search of Brother Dominic by Saint Peter, who appeared to him in a vision outside the Hacienda in Manchester. Saint Peter, approaching the then doorman, Stephen, enjoined him in broad Mancunian to provide succour to Brother Dominic, who was in need of help. Brother Dominic was and is, indeed, in need of help. As Brother Stephen says to him at one point, in the guise of a comforting and motherly Joan of Arc (don’t ask), "Things do bother you, don't they?" Brother Dominic likes to "pretend" things. Early on he suggests to Stephen that they can pretend the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, with Dominic being Saint Francis and Stephen being "a bear, or a dove, or a pig". Dominic is a sensitive, frustrated and embittered fantasist. It is his envy of Stephen's vision, in fact, that leads Stephen to explain it to him - and us - in detail via the 'pretending' of which Dominic is so fond.

Pretending, in fact, is very important throughout. As mentioned, there are two actors in this show, but rather more characters, as the two Brothers become Saint Peter, Joan of Arc, a Satanist member of the Irish upper class and his New York wife, a blind crocodile judge who talks like Al Pacino - the usual suspects.

No doubt the above sounds a little confused, and I hesitate to give a plot synopsis because a) I'm not sure I can and b) you might want to go and see the show yourself when it returns to the stage. As a matter of fact, although there is a plot, in a way it's not the plot that seems important. Or rather, it's not the what-happens-next that's important so much as the what's-happening-now, which includes some fascinating and hilarious digressions, often in the form of Brother Dominic's outlandish flights of fancy. You might have thought that it would be unnecessary to even make such a caveat in our sophisticated age, but apparently ideas of beginning, middle and end are still tediously ingrained in the minds of many. I suppose I make this point because I have a certain amount of fellow-feeling here with those who produced this show. I prefer a story to be a fascinating labyrinth rather than a simple ride from A to B. And fascinating labyrinth is certainly what Flywheel Productions seem to do.

Now, if you read this blog a lot, you might know that I am acquainted with the two actors involved here. I realise that this might seem to make me biased, but, after all, it's not like the fellows are on trial or anything, and no one has asked me to write this. I mention my acquaintance because it does provide me with some behind-the-scenes insight. I was wondering how to describe, in broad, general terms, just what it is that these fellows do. Obviously it's theatre, and it's also comedy. There's music there, too. At this point it becomes rather more difficult to describe. We already know it's not stand-up, and I know that Ed's no great fan of so-called 'observational' comedy. There are characters here, but this is not exactly the comedy of impersonation, though that element is not entirely absent, either. Similarly, I'm not sure that Ed would appreciate the label 'surreal', although I can see many people being tempted to apply it. I must admit, I'm rather tempted, too, if only for the sake of convenience. But, after all, it is rather a lazy label. While pondering this question, I had the following thoughts: It's often said that comedy does not age well, that it's a mere ephemeral trick of language, and when one watches a comedy that is, say, thirty years old, often this proves to be the case. However, I have read novels by Dickens, well over a hundred years old, in which the humour seemed extraordinarily fresh and modern. Wondering to myself why this is, I came to the tentative conclusion that the humour in Dickens' novels retains its freshness because humour was not the sole purpose of those novels. It was an integral, living part of a larger whole. And I suppose I feel something similar about what is on offer here. Comedy seems the easiest way to label it, but the comedy is part of a larger whole. And perhaps all comedy really should be this way, but for the most part one finds that it isn't. For the most part comedy is presented to us in the form of a kind of gag industry.

I will take this idea a little further and say that what Flywheel Productions are doing is bringing art to comedy. I have no idea what the fellows themselves will think of such a statement, and I don’t mean to suggest any kind of stilted self-consciousness. Quite simply, I see this play as a purely creative piece of theatre. It happens to be creative in a playful sense, and thus it is comedy. But it does not seem part of the many professional genres of comedy that tend to offer mechanical templates for producing laughter. This notion came to me after I was watching one of those dreadful ‘top 100’ kind of programmes that have proliferated on television of late. The programme in question concerned the top 100 albums of all time. One of the many talking heads on the programme said of the Velvet Underground that they were the first band to bring art to popular music. Such statements – they were the first to, they were the last of – are generally not actually true, or at least highly debatable. Nonetheless, people sometimes find they help to focus our ideas about things. I remembered that the two Brothers had sung a hymn during the proceedings; the hymn was in fact the Velvet Underground’s Jesus. Perhaps, it occurred to me, Flywheel Productions are doing with (or to) comedy what Velvet Underground did to popular music. Hmmm.

There is something about the two-men-on-an-island situation that is intriguing in this play. It brings to mind a number of things. When I saw that Brothers Dominic and Stephen were going to share a bed (the former, of course, stealing all the bedclothes), I thought immediately of Morecambe and Wise, the kind of childish innocence of their comedy, in which two grown men could go to bed together each night without the audience thinking there was anything either sexual or strange about it. There must have been something in this instinct, because reference was later made to Eric Morecambe, and Brother Stephen adroitly waggled his glasses in the Morecambe manner. The childishness of this relationship is emphasised in many ways, not least of all by Brother Stephen’s reading of comics in the bed that they share, and by his preoccupation with superheroes.



I think also of the kind of loser double-acts that are part of comedic tradition – men who have been rejected by the world and found themselves together on that account. One of the earliest examples of this type is Laurel and Hardy, but the tradition is also to be seen in the likes of Bottom, perhaps reaching its apotheosis in Withnail and I, in which there is a kind of cathartic wallowing in failure on the part of the two friends. There is pain and consolation here. At one point Brother Dominic encourages Brother Stephen to drink some wine (or some pretend wine, since it is actually beer), and tells him he must sniff it first, and say what he smells. Brother Stephen begins to smell an English summer day, with cut grass, cricket and so on. His description becomes more and more detailed: “The sun begins to set and Fatty Jenkins watches Lillian, wondering if he will be able to pluck up the courage to ask the question.” However, the vision begins to turn sour. The skies darken. Clouds thicken. There’s a hint of coming violence. “Something is going to fall like rain, and it won’t be flowers”. (Larkin? No, Auden.) The beer has an aftertaste. Brother Dominic asks if Fatty Jenkins ever did ask Lillian the question. “I don’t suppose so,” he replies, “Do you?” And here is the pain that has brought them together to torment and console each other. Fatty Jenkins will never ask Lillian. That is life. Life is two men isolated in a lighthouse with their fantasies. As if to emphasise this fact, even the toaster seems to be against the two of them. When Brother Stephen decides to make some toast, Brother Dominic says bitterly, “Well, go on then, and see what happens.” What happens is, when the toast pops up, it defies gravity completely, as if by dint of some particularly cruel miracle, and goes directly up to meet the maker. “I haven’t had a slice of toast for eleven years,” says Brother Dominic in a voice of great pathos.

I know the feeling.

Pain and consolation.



However, the show does not end on a down but an up. Apart from the fact that we are treated to a dance routine (the audience voted between a dance routine and a lecture, and the dance routine won, much to Brother Dominic’s annoyance) in the Morecambe and Wise tradition, complete with spinning umbrellas, we are also given an ad-hoc moral of the story, delivered by Brother Stephen when Brother Dominic, relieving himself of responsibility, asks him to sum the whole tour/lecture/childhood-regression-primal-scream-session up: “Go on, you know. Tell them the… thing.”

I feel it would be spoiling things rather for me to reproduce that summing up here, but it is masterfully done by a nervous, extemporising Brother Stephen. The moral of the story, as such morals tend to do, verges on the sentimental, but just where the tightrope walker began to wobble he recovered. I could not fault it as a moral, and it’s just a pity that I cannot say here what it is. Only that it is a compassionate moral that I totally condone, and that it was extrapolated from Brother Stephen’s interpretation of the eighties film, Adventures in Babysitting.



More than that, now, I do not wish to say. I have a cold and I’m not feeling well. I intend to catch the show again when it returns to the stage. I would also urge others to do so. I’ll post any news on this blog. Also, please excuse me if I have misquoted at any point – which I almost certainly have – as I have had to write this all from memory.

One more thing: Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from the show, and as yet there are none online, so I've had to post pictures here that are related, vaguely or otherwise.