My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Even more than Frankie Howerd, Mrs Shufflewick played dangerously on the edge of what was acceptable to a heterosexual audience. I reviewed Patrick Newley’s monograph The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick for the Guardian in 2007.

  By the time I started going to the theatre, the music hall had long gone, except in the wretchedly bastardised form of television’s The Good Old Days, absurdly recreating the externals of the halls with an audience in fancy dress acting and performers ghoulishly attempting to exhume the great acts of the past. But every now and then someone would attempt to put together a bill of acts, which, if not technically of the music hall, were in the spirit of the thing. By amazing luck one evening in the early Seventies I caught one such programme at the Greenwich Theatre, seeing among others Max Wall, and the then to me totally unknown Mrs Shufflewick. Wall was a great grotesque, a cross between an ape and a concert pianist, and his comedy was surreally sublime, but Shufflewick was funnier, this tiny little man dragged up into the semblance of a faux-genteel cockney charlady, sitting at a slight angle to the table with her drink in front of her, generating and swelling and perfectly controlling laughter such as I have never heard before or since. The man next to me eventually tipped out of his seat and into the aisle, still roaring.

  It was absolute filth, but delivered with the utmost delicacy and a mastery of entendres, doubles, triples et quadruples, that created mayhem in one’s mind. ‘Do you like this fur, girls? It cost two hundred pounds. I didn’t pay for it meself; I met two hundred fellas with a pound each,’ starts one of the riffs usefully quoted in Patrick Newley’s deeply enjoyable little memoir/profile. ‘This is very rare, this fur,’ Shuff continues. ‘This is known in the trade as “untouched pussy” – which as you know is unobtainable in the West End of London at the moment. And I don’t think there’s much knocking around here tonight.’ That little sequence would last up to five minutes, the laughter teased out more and more by his comic genius, until you felt almost literally sick, throat aching from the delirium he provoked. It wasn’t just the timing. Shufflewick was one of those comic creations that are so complete that they seem always to have existed, to have sprung from that timeless place from which all deep comedy springs.

  In what he would certainly not have thought of as real life, the man who was Shufflewick was a foundling dumped on the steps of Trinity College Hospital in Greenwich, and adopted by a well-off couple from Southend called Coster, whose name he took. He had no particular ambition or talent, until, drafted into the RAF at the age of eighteen, young Rex Coster joined the famous Gang Show (at the same time as Tony Hancock) and proved an immediate hit. Where he learned his skills, as comic and singer, we are left to guess. Rex felt he had arrived in heaven, but not especially because of the job. ‘This is marvellous, this life,’ he said to himself, according to an interview, ‘getting pissed all the time and not having to turn up for work in the morning.’ Alcohol was already mother’s milk to him, so much so that when he had to change his name because of the success of the singer Sam Costa, he chose to rechristen himself after a famous brand of whiskey. After the war, he was discovered by the Bryan Michie Happy Hour Show which toured Granada Cinemas (part of the vanished world of post-war show business lovingly described by Newley) and swiftly prospered. He invented Shufflewick on the spur of the moment for BBC radio, whose moral guardians had rejected his vicar sketch the moment they heard its first line (‘Ah good evening to you my flock, and now you can flock off.’) Mrs Shufflewick’s much greater lewdness was less explicit, and she became a star, the interesting distinction of being radio’s first drag artist, or at any rate the first to drag up for the microphones.

  On the back of his radiophonic fame, he was hired by the Windmill for three years, at their top whack of £50 a week, doing six shows a day, on the hour every hour, alongside Hancock, Sellers, and Secombe. The marvellous sexual ambiguity of drag allowed for extraordinarily risqué material and the supposedly undeviatingly heterosexual audience of that establishment were hugely amused. ‘I was standing at the bar, minding my own business, and all of a sudden the door opened and this sailor walked in. I think he must have been in the Navy because he kissed me on both cheeks. And I was doing me shoelaces up at the time.’ Perhaps some of the audience literally failed to realise that the dainty little raconteuse with a mind like a sewer who was so royally entertaining them was actually a man: Shufflewick was always billed without reference to Rex. In the routines, sex is never far away but some of them verge on the surreal. ‘Last night – I must tell you this – I was sitting up in bed at about half past seven, mending a puncture. I had a blow-out. I was sticking this patch on when all of a sudden I had it coming on again. You know, one of me hot flushes. Do you get them? Ooh I do. I have to blow down my blouse on the buses.’

  Surprisingly, in the mid-1950s Shufflewick met with equal success on television, without significantly varying his repertoire. He triumphed both in the clubs and in big variety theatres; but by the mid-Sixties changing tastes and increasingly erratic professional habits brought him to the point where he was often performing for a bottle of whiskey, which he would anyway consume during the course of the show. It was then that the author, only twenty-five and with scarcely any experience in management, took him on and masterminded a revival which started with Shuff’s appearance on one of Dorothy Squires’s self-financed comeback nights at the Palladium. It was Rex’s night as much as hers, and from then on he earned a decent living, as a cult figure in gay clubs and from the sort of music-hall nights I saw in Greenwich, with names like Pure Corn.

  Newley, who had the heroic task of pouring him out of dressing rooms and on to the stage, writes affectionately of what must have been a nerve-racking relationship. He gives a vivid if depressing picture of Rex’s personal life – cottaging and bar pick-ups as well as a curious intense long-term partnership (apparently non-sexual, but highly volatile) with a labourer – and offers glimpses of his domestic life in a miserable tip of a flat in Kentish Town. As Newley says, he was as far from the popular idea of a drag queen as could be imagined. He read the Mirror and the Sporting Life, ate meals in greasy spoons, liked betting on horses and watching Carry On films, smoked Woodbines, wore a flat cap and bought his clothes in jumble sales. Part of his genius was precisely because of his rootedness in ordinary life, the world of pubs and buses and low-grade lust and unreliable bodily functions, to which he brought a fantasy which crept up on you slowly but ended up in the wildest realms of zaniness. He was like Ken Dodd in that, but more real: Dodd is a fool, a jester. Gladys Shufflewick (to give her her full name) was just an old biddy in the snug, ‘broad-minded to the point of obscenity’, to be sure, but entirely recognisable.

  Shuff finally shuffed off in 1983 on the way to the Theatre Royal Stratford East where she was due to top the bill, felled by the same booze which had been the real enduring love of her life. ‘I can’t find out what’s wrong with you,’ the doctor said. ‘I think it must be the drink.’ ‘Never mind, doctor, I’ll come back when you’re sober.’ Shuff never actually played the halls, but that gag alone is quintessential music hall. Patrick Newley has done us all a great favour by producing this admirably succinct memoir, with its rare photographs, outrageous anecdotes, transcribed routines and perceptive affection. One of the greatest comic geniuses of the last century comes alive all over again.

  Clowns, comedy and music hall coincide in Waiting for Godot, in which I played Pozzo for Sean Mathias, with Ronald Pickup as Lucky, and Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as Gogo and Didi, through the first half of 2009. Three years before, I had written in the Guardian about the play, which I had known since schooldays.

  Now that its influence has begun to wane, and it ceases to remind us of its imitations, we can again see the most influential play of the second half of the twentieth century for what it is. Waiting for Godot has lost none of its power to astonish and to move, but it no longer seems self-consciously experimental or obscure. With unerring economy and surgical precision, the play
puts the human animal on stage in all his naked loneliness. Like the absolute masterpiece it is, it seems to speak directly to us, to our lives, to our situation, while at the same time appearing to belong to a distant, perhaps a non-existent, past. In his subsequent plays, Beckett created a number of ineradicable images of the human condition, but it is his first performed play, which had its British premiere fifty years ago this year, which has joined the select stock of myths by which we understand ourselves.

  That Samuel Beckett should have chosen to write a play at all is something of a mystery. ‘You ask me for my ideas on Waiting for Godot and my ideas on the theatre,’ he wrote to Michel Polac on Godot’s publication a year before it was produced. ‘I have no ideas on the theatre. I know nothing about it. I never go. That’s reasonable. What is rather less so,’ he added, ‘is… to write a play, and then to have no ideas on that either.’ Despite a youthful fondness for the art theatre in his native Dublin, and for the variety theatre anywhere, he was no buff, and his writing up to this point, inspired by the example of his literary masters, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, had consisted of fiercely difficult novels, poems and short stories. True, in 1930, he had written Whoroscope, a verse monologue in the voice of René Descartes, but it was never intended for performance. After 1940, his work had undergone a radical change. If he was to write about impotence and ignorance, which he now conceived to be the essential experience of human life, he must, he said, abandon rhetoric and virtuosity. The English language having a natural propensity for both of these, he abandoned it, henceforward writing in clean and analytical French, swiftly writing three great novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable in his adopted language, each of them in the form of a soliloquy; none of them knew any immediate success, and indeed, it was almost impossible to find publishers for them. His decision to write for the theatre was, the Beckett scholar Lawrence Graver acutely noted, a part of this stripping away: in doing so, he eliminates the voice of the narrator.

  It seems that it was also partially the lure of immediate returns, however modest, from the box office that suggested to the impoverished Beckett that he might write plays. His first was Eleuthéria, a clumsy and overambitious experiment full of prefigurings of later Beckett – the hero is called Krap – which he immediately followed with Godot, in which his touch is infallible. The two plays were touted around unsuccessfully until Beckett’s friend Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil took them to a progressive actor-director, Artaud’s old associate Roger Blin, who plumped for Godot because it had only five actors and one tree. Characteristically, Beckett was delighted to find that Blin’s current production was playing to half-empty houses, which he took to be a guarantee of integrity. It took two years for Blin to raise the money and get a theatre; finally, when the play opened in January 1953, four years after it was written, at the nearly defunct Théâtre de Babylone in Montparnasse, it was greeted with a mixture of critical bewilderment, some active audience hostility, partisan enthusiasm from highly influential quarters (Jean Anouilh, the most successful French dramatist of the day, called it the most important theatrical premiere in forty years), and straightforward delight from the paying audience, who attended the show in ever-growing numbers. It was word of mouth that swung it.

  This curious paradox – the play’s ability to frustrate intellectual criticism with its apparent elusiveness while gripping with a vice-like hold those who neither know nor particularly want to know what the play means – was repeated in London and on Broadway. It is a remarkable fact that both in America and in England, commercial managers were keen to do the play; the problem here was that none of the great actors approached would commit to it. Sir Ralph Richardson was among them; he reproached himself for the rest of his life for turning down ‘the greatest play of my generation’. Instead, the young Peter Hall cannily picked the play up, doing it at his Arts Theatre with a young and unstarry cast. The overnight reviews were dismissive, whereupon the legendary play agent Peggy Ramsay, using the guerrilla tactics for which she was famous, persuaded Hall to send a copy of Beckett’s novel Watt to Harold Hobson, the powerful critic of the Sunday Times, before he wrote his review: the result was a panegyric, business built and eventually a successful West End transfer ensued.

  Of course, the play did not appeal to everyone: Peter Bull, the first English Pozzo, recollected a matinee at which, during one of his longer speeches, an elderly lady penetratingly observed to her companion in the fairly wide-open spaces of the stalls, ‘I wish the fat one would go.’ But by instinctive genius, the tyro playwright had produced a work of absolute originality which was so sure-footed in its theatrical sense that despite defying all contemporary expectations, it communicated effortlessly with audiences, distilling its truth with the simplicity and profundity of a great poet who was also a sublime humorist. Beckett’s informed love of the great vaudevillians – especially Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin – enabled him to produce a work which stirs the heart of anyone who has been moved to laughter or tears by clowns, who, like Vladimir and Estragon, oscillate between the dread of being alone and the horror of dependency. Eric Bentley remarked of the first New York production that ‘highbrow writers have been enthusiastic about clowns and vaudeville for decades, but this impresses me as the first time that anything has successfully been done about the matter.’ Of course, it helps if the actors playing Vladimir and Estragon are great clowns or vaudevillians themselves. Bentley saw Bert Lahr – the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz – in the role of Estragon, ‘the perfect execution,’ he said, ‘by a lowbrow actor of a highbrow writer’s intentions’; twenty years later, in Manchester and London, Max Wall performed the same service in the role of Vladimir. Such casting is a bonus but by no means essential: the play’s opening image, of a tramp/clown in his bowler hat, tugging at his boots, with a solitary tree behind him, shortly joined by his identically attired comrade, provokes the sort of deeply stirring emotion that the first sight of a great clown produces. These men – like all the great theatre images: Mother Courage with her cart, blind Gloucester, Falstaff wrapped around Doll Tearsheet – come from our dreams, from deep in our unconscious memories. We are them; they are us.

  There is indeed a good case for thinking of the play as a dream play in its repetitions, its circularity, its sudden absurdities, its arbitrariness, its nagging pursuit of unanswerable questions. Estragon can barely keep awake: and sleep is a blessed state because the sleeper is oblivious of life’s terrible reality: ‘He is sleeping. He knows nothing. Let him sleep on.’ The characters themselves seem to shift shape oneirically: out of the blue, Vladimir becomes an eloquent philosopher, quoting Latin tags; Estragon announces that ‘We are not caryatids’; for no known reason Pozzo is suddenly blind, Lucky suddenly dumb. An uneasy sense of unreality pervades everything: ‘You’re sure you saw me?’ Vladimir asks the boy. ‘You won’t come back tomorrow and say you never saw me?’ Just as in Strindberg’s Dream Play, where Agnes’s repeated cries of ‘Poor, suffering mankind!’ pierce the action, Didi and Gogo constantly cry out, apropos of nothing in particular, ‘What’ll we do! What’ll we do!’

  But perhaps the dream is the dream of theatre. Beckett’s play is as conscious of its own theatricality as any by Brecht, by Pirandello, or – the comparison is inevitable and apt – Shakespeare. Theatrical imagery pervades the play. Vladimir, shocked at Pozzo’s treatment of Lucky, accuses him of chucking him away ‘like a – like a banana skin’, to be stepped on, no doubt; when Pozzo delivers one of his lectures, he sprays his throat like an opera singer or a boulevard star; Vladimir and Estragon play-act to fill the void, doing old routines with hats; Vladimir takes on the role of Lucky, putting on his hat and walking up and down like a mannequin; when Estragon is terrified of being beaten up, Vladimir pushes him towards the auditorium: ‘There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go.’ Estragon recoils in horror, dreading the idea of becoming part of the audience, a fate worse than death. Even the twilight itself is, according to Vladimir, ‘nearing the end of its reperto
ry’. Instantly, Beckett, in his first performed play, understood every possibility of the theatre as metaphor. Slyly self-referential, he gives his tramps an exchange in which they say ‘Charming evening we’re having.’ ‘Unforgettable.’ ‘And it’s not over.’ ‘Apparently not.’ ‘It’s only beginning.’ ‘It’s awful.’

  His characters are as much of a mystery to Beckett as they are to us; that gives them a great part of their fascination. They are archetypes, who have emerged, ancient and novel, from tradition. No doubt, as James Knowlson perceptively observes in Damned to Fame, Beckett coloured their situation with his own wartime experience of living in the sticks, in Roussillon, waiting, waiting for the war to end before life could begin again. No doubt Pozzo has qualities of the concentration-camp capo. But the characters’ existence is beyond history, beyond logic. ‘I know no more about this play than anyone who just reads it attentively,’ Beckett wrote. ‘I don’t know what spirit I wrote it in. I know no more about the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them… everything I have been able to learn, I have shown. It’s not a great deal. But it’s enough for me, quite enough. I’d go so far as to say that I would have been content with less… Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, I have only been able to know them a little, from far off, out of a need to understand them. They owe you some explanations, perhaps. Let them unravel. Without me. Them and me, we’re quits.’

  Although I stand by everything I wrote about the play then, the experience of actually doing it proved, as always, completely unpredictable – an unimaginably difficult journey into the heart of this richest and most disturbing of plays. Playing Pozzo ranks as one of the most perfectly satisfying experiences of my career and one of the most intense rehearsal periods – to say nothing of the piquancy, for me, of the fact that I had sold tickets for each of my fellow actors; first, Ronnie Pickup at the National, then Ian McKellen at the Mermaid Theatre and finally Patrick Stewart at the Aldwych; I had known Sean Mathias since he was mere lad. I turned sixty, Ian seventy, during the production; Ronnie and Patrick were both about sixty-nine. We must have had the highest average age, per capita, of any West End cast, and for once were the approximate ages of the characters, which made a profound difference to the event. Rehearsals were incredibly hard for all of us, but I have never known a rehearsal room in which the actors’ egos were less prominent. We got on with it, like war-scarred veterans. The reward was extraordinary, first on the tour, then in the West End, where people queued for the front-row seats, which were held back, from three in the morning. Sometimes they were so tired when they got to their seats that they fell asleep. But they were the only ones sleeping. I wrote this programme note for the 2010 revival of the production in which Pozzo was played by Matthew Kelly and Vladimir by Roger Rees. I called it On the Road with Vladimir and Estragon.