R2E Excerpt #50: Perfectly Miserable, and Miserably Perfect, in a London Theatre
Another life lesson from a very smart (fictional) guy. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
I RANG UP A TWO-FER of British stage greats by waiting in line practically forever to watch Nicol Williamson reprise his lauded role as Bill Maitland, in Inadmissible Evidence. It was just my cup of bitter tea, as John Osborne’s signature malcontent spews venom about his horrible law career separating warring couples while cheating his own wife with women who mean nothing to him.
He was perfectly miserable!
Osborne inoculated his play against criticism, when he penned this key bit of dialogue in Evidence: “Asking a working writer what he feels about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.”
And the critics laughed off the dog gibe: Inadmissible Evidence was a revival and a rave, which is why I plunked down a full £2.50 for seat D7.
Osborne and I had another thing in common, aside from our shared ill-temper among Londoners: He was a prolific private scribbler. And even after Look Back in Anger confirmed his position as Lamppost #1, to be only lightly pissed upon by post-War theater critics, he was still crabby as hell in his journals. (I wonder if he reached 6 million words; things actually happened in his life! He probably deserves the full 10 million to work it all out.)
Osborne wrote the following passage in 1957, a year after the premier of Anger: “I am governed by fear every day of my life. Sometimes it is the first sensation I have on waking … Fear in love. Fear of being deserted, fear of being involved … I am afraid of the dark hole and the pain that grips me every day. It is fear and I cannot rid myself of it. It numbs me, it sterilises me, and I am empty, dumb, ignorant and afraid.”
Perfect qualifications to write Inadmissible Evidence, wherein a barrister is called on by God to defend his own life. That’s a hanging judge, whether or not he exists. At one point the miserable Maitland is totting up his life’s balance sheet, and discerns a deficit: “I never wished to have anything more than the good fortune of friendship and the excitement and comfort of love and the love of women in particular," he complains. "I made a set at both of them in my own way. With friendship, I hardly succeeded at all. Not really. No … Not at all. With the second, with love, I succeeded. I succeeded in inflicting more pain than pleasure. I am not equal to any of it. But I can't escape it, I can't forget it. And I can't begin again. You see?”
Oh, I see, Bill, I see.
Declaiming personal misery is the pinnacle of self-centeredness, what with all the other misery visible with a turn of the head. But here was Maitland, on stage, and Moore, in seat D7, finding matching lint in our respective navels.
For instance, Maitland was profoundly anti-electric-razor. “There’s quite enough almighty racket going on in the world” he complains, on one of the vital issues of his era, “without tuning it into my chin the minute I wake up.” I didn’t need any kind of razor at that point, but I was all in on that crabby sentiment. And others. Osborne is just the guy if you’re pissed off at everything.
Après-play I looked back angrily over a pint at the Jonathan Swift house, under a painting of the satirist. The kitchen staff there might have had a lot of fun building a menu of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick.” (In short, by selling them to rich people, for dinner.) Off the top of my sick head, there’d be baby vegetables, orecchiette (little ears), angel-hair pasta, linguini (little tongues, in Italian), followed up by a dessert of lady fingers.
Instead of fast food, Swift food!
I should have become a menu writer.
[Note: no cherubim were harmed in the creation of this substack.]
*When the mood strikes, I run excerpts from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. Or check out my complete archive here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere. Then I went to England. Big mistake. But aren’t mistakes the first step toward anyplace worth going?
Meanwhile, the accounting department on The Road to Elsewhere informs me, that unless I land new paying subscribers, I shall have to consider taking a job as a hedge fund manager to supplement my income. Don’t let that happen to me! Or the world!
Love that image of the freaked-out angel-haired pasta as the parmesan cheese falls from the heavens!
Swift food.... I love it! 😅