My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  The musical can be many things: it can be stylish or sombre; epic or harrowing. There is no bar to it addressing Great Themes, or taking Specific Political Positions; it can break your heart or change your mind. But the thing at which it is absolutely unrivalled is cheering you up. And of all the many joyful, throw-your-hat-in-the-air, set-your-foot-tapping-and-send-you-out-into-the-cold-night-air-with-a-grin-a-mile-wide-on-your-face musicals ever written, The Pajama Game is pretty near the top of the pile. The story is satirical, in theory: it sends up labour relations in a pyjama factory in the Midwest in the 1950s. The protagonists are Sid, the Works Supervisor, and Babe, the Head of the Union’s Grievance Committee, so it’s also a kind of Romeo and Juliet story, love across the picket line. But what it really is, is a paean to life, a celebration of its young creators’ fertile inventiveness, and a non-stop triumph of theatrical panache. For all its craftsmanship, it has a kind of anarchic dynamism lending it an innocence which – despite all the grim historical evidence to the contrary – the 1950s still seem to us to possess: an exuberance, an optimism, a sense of liberation.

  The show has a sensational sequence of hit tunes – ‘Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes’, ‘Steam Heat’, ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ – unrivalled in the annals of musical comedy, except, perhaps by Guys and Dolls, whose composer, Frank Loesser, was the great mentor of the young hope-fuls, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, who wrote The Pajama Game. It is very much in the tradition of Loesser’s show – witty, snappy, vernacular lyrics, poignant ballads, streetwise and hip to the moment, bursting at the seams with sex. The action proceeds with a kind of zany anarchic freedom which owes something to vaudeville and everything to its original director and co-book-writer, George Abbott, who more or less single-handedly maintained the spirit of burlesque (in which he had grown up so many, many years before: he was already sixty-seven at the time of The Pajama Game and had another forty years’ active life ahead of him) into the post-war musical theatre. It is no accident that his work is full of clowns, male and female, and their extended comic routines, and that love at first sight is at the heart of the plots. The long and glorious tradition of popular comedy – celebrating the comeuppance of curmudgeons and the triumph of youthful sexual desire over the world’s strictures – the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte and the ancient Roman comedies, of Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd, of the Marx Brothers and Up Pompeii! – lives in The Pajama Game; not for nothing was Hines (the insanely jealous, drunk, ex-vaudevillian time-and-motion study man who is the show’s master of ceremonies) played in the first London production by Max Wall.

  Combining these strands – the political story, the love story, and the comic subplots – with the mastery born of long, long practice, Abbott created a late flowering of a genre whose thrust is above all optimistic: the wilful lovers come together while the zanies weave their mad patterns through everyone else’s life. What about the workers? They win. It is all very satisfying. It is a form of theatre that calls for freewheeling invention and rigorous craftsmanship, hard, hard work and a deep love of life. The extraordinary creative team of the present production has worked itself to the bone in the name of fun and they’re still smiling, which must mean something.

  My no doubt overebullient words were again seized on and savagely mocked by the critics, as was the whole venture. It was the biggest single disaster of my career. ‘Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire,’ said the critic of the Mail on Sunday, though the first-night audience had cheered to the echo, and the co-author, Richard Adler, not a man reckless with praise, had told me that it was one of the best evenings of his life. We ran for a month, and lost £3 million.

  I suspect that my love of popular theatre lies more with individual performers than with the musical theatre as such. No doubt it is something atavistic, some echo of my great-grandfather, which draws me to the idea of clowns, but the lure is irresistible. In childhood I idolised the great Coco; but in my youth, I was bitterly disappointed by what happened to the traditional clown. In middle-life I rediscovered my enthusiasm thanks to Slava Polunin, the reinventor of Russian clowning. His Snowshow distills the essence of circus clown, in a setting of the utmost poetry, turning the entire audience into children. A photograph of him and me together is among my most cherished possessions, staring at each other in mutual incomprehension, as all clowns do. I wrote this piece for my regular weekly Sunday Express column (rather oddly named The Outside Edge) in February 1997.

  I never expected to feel again in a theatre what I felt last Tuesday in the Peacock Theatre off Kingsway in London, and I am still reeling. The show is called Slava’s Snowshow and it counts among the two or three greatest things I have ever seen in a theatre.

  Slava Polunin is a Russian clown and his show is a loosely connected series of sketches to which I was drawn out of mere curiosity. I’m not a big fan of clowns, or of circuses. I like plays, and acting, and beautiful design. I had heard good things about the show, certainly. But nothing that I had heard remotely prepared me for the poetry, the anarchy, the hilarity and the human tragedy that this man and his colleagues unleashed on us all that night.

  His skill is supreme, but that’s not it. He performed the old routine of hanging a coat up on a rack and sliding one of his arms through the sleeve and caressing himself voluptuously with his own hand. He did it superbly, supremely well. The disembodied arm seemed to have a life of its own, to belong to someone quite different from his other arm. And we roared with laughter, we shouted and brayed until we were hoarse.

  But why were we crying, too? It was because we somehow knew this man, and knew his need for love, and knew, above all, about his terrible loneliness. The moment he walks on stage, we know him: he is us. Man, alone in the universe. And again and again through the evening, he made himself known to us – without a word, of course, with only a flick of the eye, a tiny gesture of the hands.

  Every emotion, every impulse was crystallised in a gesture. Gesture is the art of the actor, or it always was. We have been misled into thinking that emotion and external imitation are its essence: looking and feeling the part. It’s not. It’s the thought made flesh, and at this Slava is a genius. We see his shock at encountering another clown, we sense him being appalled and intrigued, we understand his amazement that such a grotesque could exist (even though the other clown is almost identical to him), we get Slava’s initial delight in the clown’s company, then his growing frustration, his resentment, even hatred, of the other clown, the other clown’s banishment, his delight at being alone again, then his sudden engulfing loneliness: this is the whole history of the human heart played out before us.

  His leaps of imagination are bold, but they are always rooted in reality. When he takes a train, he does so by running round in circles, with smoke pouring out of his stovepipe hat. I never saw a more train-like train. Towards the end of the show, snow starts to fall on stage, then, magically, it starts to fall in the auditorium too, onto the audience.

  The effect of this is extraordinary, moving in some ineffable way: one instantly becomes a child again. Then, as the opening of Carmina Burana pounds out, Slava whirls all the stage flats round till it becomes a great snowscape, while a battery of lights blazes into the auditorium, the stage cloths flap furiously before the wind machine, and Slava in the centre of it all turns round again and again and again, delirious with joy.

  How can I make you understand that this is the single most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a theatre in my life, that as I watched it I felt my eyes opening so wide they seemed about to fall out of my head, as my mouth opened wider and wider with amazement, while hot tears coursed down my face?

  That finale was of course, the end – but for one thing. From behind the stage now emerged three huge helium-filled beach balls looking like giant Christmas-tree baubles. Out into the audience they came and as if on cue, the audience stood up to bounce them, and they stayed bouncing them for ten, fifteen minutes; for all I know they are bouncing them still, players in the game no
w, no longer spectators. Solemnly, the clowns lined up on stage to watch them.

  This is theatre. Naïve and profound, childish, in one sense, but deeply human. Theatre is not really the place for ideas. It is a playground for the imagination, a gymnasium of the soul, the heart’s stadium. Every child in that theatre on Tuesday, and every adult too, now knows what theatre can be. Pray God they aren’t disappointed in it too often in the years to come, and forget.

  Since my early encounter with Max Wall I have been addicted to comedians, although there is some overlap between them and clowns, as in the case of Tommy Cooper, for example, about whom I directed a play called Jus’ Like That, the brainchild of my old friend from The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, Patrick Ryecart, and written by John Fisher. Jerome Flynn uncannily reincarnated Tommy, unleashing waves of laughter in the theatre quite as engulfing as those provoked by Tommy himself. I wrote about him for the Observer in 2003.

  Technically speaking, Tommy Cooper flourished after the music hall had died, but he embodies its spirit as almost no one else within living memory. Perhaps Max Wall with his simian presence was an even more characteristic expression of its world of extremes, but Cooper, the zany giant, fumbling magician and surreal raconteur, continues in a richer, more universal degree the great tradition of that comic Eden. It was the last flourish in the West of the immemorial carnival spirit, uniting all classes and degrees of men and women in a celebration of daily experience which was both life-affirming and highly subversive, obsessed with the bizarre and the odd, but endlessly asserting the common lot of all mankind. The comedy of the music hall was filled with a wild poetry, sometimes almost surreal, which had nothing elite about it, its laughter a transformation into prancing hilarity of the (on the whole) depressed and frustrated existences of both its artists and its audiences. The terms of reference are almost all mundane: everyday encounters with authority figures – doctors, policemen, lawyers; the difficulties encountered with fractious landladies and waiters in restaurants; the tyranny of objects; the treacherous mysteries of language; the never-ending caprices of the libido. It is a response to the exigencies of real life, but it is rarely topical. It creates another world, an upside-down image of life where everything is resolved in laughter. To be able to laugh at something is to be undefeated by it.

  All this Tommy Cooper embodies, baffled as he is by life in general, by the intransigence of his own body and by the magic tricks which he has so carefully rehearsed but which constantly rebel against him, even when he follows the instructions. The magic is a sort of metaphor of the unprivileged life: the doomed attempt to gain power, to be impressive, to dominate the world. No matter what you do, how much you spend on your tricks, how diligently you practise them, you will fail: they have a life of their own. And we in the audience can see that Tommy Cooper is the last man on earth who should ever have been allowed to pick up a wand; the very idea is gloriously preposterous. He knows it too. He is everyone in the audience who has ever entertained the notion of being a magician, of surprising and astonishing the family and the neighbours (as the instruction booklets so glibly promise). When one of his tricks succeeds, we rejoice for him as we would for ourselves. The magic has another function, though, within the canny mixture which constitutes Tommy Cooper’s act. It is a kind of a narrative, engaging our conscious minds, lowering our defences as we try to work out what has just happened and why, and allowing the comedy to attack us at the subconscious level, leaving us helpless to resist. In other words – T. S. Eliot’s, to be precise – the magic is the objective correlative of Tommy’s act. It functions like the bone the burglar throws to the dog of reason, keeping it happily engaged while the artist works his darker, deeper purposes, emptying the safe of the unconscious. Verbally, Tommy may not exactly be Shakespeare, but the flights of his imagination are no less wild. The result is that his comedy unhinges us, generating a kind of delirium which is extraordinarily restorative.

  There are of course other comedians who do this. Ken Dodd asks nothing more of an audience, he says, than to let him ‘muck around with their minds for an hour’. He represents another aspect of the halls when he breaks into mellifluous sentimental song; you will find no such thing with Tommy Cooper. If Tommy sings, it is to draw attention to his own lack of abilities in that department, but also, by extension, to the absurdity of singing. Mad as a snake though Dodd certainly is – Dodd the performer – and as compulsive a motor-mouthing, free-associating, stream-of-consciousness merchant as any Shakespearean clown, his personality lacks the grandeur of Tommy’s. Tommy is, as Carson McCullers might say, ‘afflicted’. He is doomed to failure at first sight. Our heart goes out to him. He is us. Dodd is a fool, a brilliant and obsessed madman, whereas Tommy plays the fool, because what else could he do? He is that person in every social group who takes it on himself to create laughter by stressing his own ineptitude. Just as his magic lets him down, so does his comedy. He offers a running commentary on the success or failure of his jokes. If necessary, he repeats them (‘I’ve got a cigarette lighter that won’t go out.’ Pause. ‘I’VE GOT A CIGARETTE LIGHTER THAT WON’T GO OUT.’). He doesn’t just give away the mechanism of his tricks; he exposes the tricks of his comedy, too. ‘More, more!’ he shouts behind his hand, fanning applause; he identifies the beginnings of a promising laugh: ‘Ripple, ripple, ripple.’ He eggs us on to greater heights with encouraging gestures. And then he roars with laughter at his own idiocy; he is his own best audience.

  All of this is deeply touching, which is not a necessary component of a great comedian, but is an essential one of a clown, which is what Tommy Cooper is, at heart. The invention of a clown is a great creative act, identical in sort to the great creations of literature, to a Falstaff or a Don Quixote, a Leopold Bloom or a Captain Grimes. Chaplin’s creation of The Tramp is a supreme example among comedians. Buster Keaton and Grock are others. And as such are they not susceptible of revival, just as you might have another go at playing Quixote or Bloom? It was the actor Patrick Ryecart, the co-producer of Jus’ Like That, who had the seminal thought that turned into the show: wouldn’t it be wonderful, he said, if we could sit in a theatre and be part of Tommy’s audience now. It was not a question of impersonation – one of the indices of the man’s enduring popularity is that virtually everyone in Britain who can speak can do their version of the man, if only to say ‘Jus’ like that’, with appropriate hand gestures – or even of reconstruction, but of tapping into the unique energy that Cooper generated. I suppose you could say we wanted to bring him to life again.

  That may be why they approached me to direct the piece. I have spent quite a large part of my working life being what Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities calls a ‘resurrection man’. As a biographer, but also as an actor, I have often been involved in trying to revive the dead (usually the great dead). In my time I have played Mozart, Handel, Schumann, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine, Rousseau, Juvenal, Dr Johnson, Napoleon, Galileo, Dickens. It has generally proved to be a rather emotional business. I am not of a mystical turn, but whenever I start to play one of these geniuses, I am aware of a curious sense of responsibility towards them, as if they expected me to give the best account of them I could, to plead their cause. They take hold of you, put a pistol to your head, and force you to tell their story the way they want it told.

  Working on Jus’ Like That has touched on some of these same emotions. Tommy was one of those few performers, a tiny handful, who go beyond being simply entertainers, helping to pass the time, but become part of our mental landscape, as known to us as family. Their very presence – their very existence, you might say – warms us and their gorgeously familiar routines never fail to unlock the accumulated tensions of our lives. They are as cheering and as crucial to our well-being as wine and food; they put us firmly back into the present moment, that split second at which the laughter breaks, and we surrender our rational defences, giving in to the riot of mental mayhem where nothing makes sense any more, nor does it have to. Everything one has be
en holding together collapses. This intellectual liberation – this temporary insanity – produces physical joy, and a sudden breakdown of barriers between individuals. Nothing melds people more swiftly. In the grip of this sort of laughter, it is nearly impossible to avoid catching one’s neighbour’s eye; sometimes it is essential to grasp him or her by the arm.

  Working on the show has been a curiously moving experience. Given a performer as deeply connected to Tommy Cooper as Jerome Flynn is, as skilled and as funny, it has been no surprise that the comedy and the magic work triumphantly. What has been extraordinary, and surprising to all of us, as we’ve toured around the country, is – beyond all the glorious gags and the tricks – the sheer affection in which Tommy was held, the delight in his grandeur of spirit and his great cosmic laugh. There is a feeling that someone has returned who should never have gone away; that his spirit is abroad again, that something very personal, something that belongs to them, has been restored to people. He is a genuine Folk Hero, and his return is as welcome as that of Robin Hood or John Bull. (But they never got a laugh in their lives, as Tommy would say.)