by Alan Davies
Philoctetes had some similarities with the self-pitying Masha in The Seagull too, though, unlike her, he had sound reason. Chekhov had his characters moan like Philoctetes but with no good reason, which is where the comedy always came for me.
For Masha’s: ‘I’m in mourning for my life’, take this lament of Philoctetes:
‘Oh my country and you unsleeping Gods, if you have any pity still bring vengeance, vengeance, late though it be, on all my persecutors! Misery is my life, yet if I might live but to see them perish, I could believe my torture ended.’
That would make an amusing epitaph on a gravestone.
The pain that Philoctetes feels is of abandonment and loss. His terrible, oozing, unhealing sore comes to represent his inner torture as it becomes clear that the agony of his fate, alone on an island with only the hills and the rocks to talk to, is far worse to him than the physical injury that brought him there.
Which is harder to bear, a life of constant pain, or abandonment by friends and family? Sophocles poses the question and grants Philoctetes wonderful poetic speeches of anger to express his torment. The playwright dispenses with any other inhabitants on Lemnos, present in other versions of the tale, in order to emphasize the plight of Philoctetes.
If everyone bore their unseen emotional injuries physically, for the world to see, then many would wail and scream like Philoctetes, and be treated differently, perhaps worse, by those who knew them.
I made an effort to please Shirley Barlow by working hard on essays, even achieving a B++ for one which was good for me. The last essay I wrote for her I spent all night on (I imagined that I worked better at night), consequently sleeping in and, to my lasting regret, missing her final seminar.
When I told my tutor about how good Shirley Barlow had been, he told me to tell her, as she would appreciate that. I hadn’t thought of teachers being interested in the views of their students until then.
As dissatisfying to me as the course itself was the state of student drama, which had a deserved reputation for staging bad productions of well-known plays. No one was doing any writing of their own. There was no cabaret or revue. I wrote to the UKC Dramatics committee and suggested that we ought to be creating our own shows. They didn’t reply so I put some posters up saying that a new theatre company was to be formed and anyone interested should come to a meeting. Half a dozen curious drama students turned up and we found an empty seminar room to try and work in.
Clutching a copy of Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, I set about ineptly trying to run a ‘workshop’. After a while we were put out of our misery by the college porter, who threw us out of the room since we hadn’t booked it. UKC Dramatics had booked all the rooms in college that were available, for their rehearsals.
By now I was crosser and frowning more than ever. Undeterred, we decided to carry on by using whichever room we could until we were moved on.
I wanted to call the group Theatre Device, inspired as I was by The Stranglers’ song ‘Nuclear Device’. A couple of the others didn’t think much of that idea and proffered Ad-Lib Theatre Company. I had my own way in the end through the time-honoured tactic of the Sulky Huff, also known as the Huffy Sulk.
Theatre Device decided to devise a play to take to schools. We sat down to discuss a topic. Only one issue was ever on the agenda at the time and it was immediately decided that we should do a show about violence against women, principally the always thorny subject of rape. I approached a well-known campus feminist who I’d met in the first year to see if the university Women’s Group would help with any reasearch. After a day or two word came back that they would not talk to a man about rape and that they didn’t think any men should be involved with a show about rape. I suspected they subscribed to the All Men Are Rapists school of thought. We decided not to do a show about rape.
Settling on a show about racism, we then had to deal with the problem that we were all white Home Counties types. Could we have a white person pretending to be a black or Asian person enduring persecution?
This seemed out of the question so we came up with the idea of depicting a couple with an Eastern European surname being victimized during the McCarthy era witch-hunts in America. None of us had any knowledge of the extent to which people were unfairly hounded as suspected Communists at that time.
We wrote to schools in the East Kent area and were invited to take our show to one in Canterbury and one in Folkestone.
Copying Snap Theatre’s approach, as seen at Loughton College, we arranged the kids on four sides of a rectangle with entrances in the corners. The highlight of the show was the moment a brick comes through a window at the home of the couple with the surname that sounds like a Communist sympathizer’s. Crouching out of a sight with a pane of unwanted glass, donated by a Kentish glazer, concealed in a box, at the appropriate moment I’d drop half a brick on it. The kids loved that. It made them jump.
After they’d watched our short play about bigotry and victimization we sat down with them and conducted a debate about racism.
This was a struggle. Faced with a bunch of cocksure kids I heard a familiar question from my school days:
‘Why don’t they all go home?’
We spent some time bringing their own bigotry into the open, failed to give them answers that satisfied them, and left.
A few days later I received a letter, on Kent County Council Education Committee notepaper, which read:
It hadn’t occurred to me that the teachers would follow up with the kids the next day. Theatre Device had done something worthwhile. Whilst we were pleased with the response we immediately disbanded, due to artistic differences (the rest of them thought I was a control freak).
Diego Maradona
Watching the 1986 World Cup was going to be tricky.
Our damp and grimy student house in Whitstable, with its ice on the inside of the windows through the winter and its year round slug-farm kitchen, was equipped only with a tiny black-and-white portable telly that I’d brought from home.
Buying a colour TV licence was out of the question. Any spare cash we had (none) was converted to fifty-pence pieces for the electricity meter. Besides, my housemates (a couple, which makes for a horrible state of affairs for The Third Man in the house) were television snobs. If my girlfriend Jill had come over and we were watching TV they’d remark that we were ‘tellyheads’ as if we were missing the world around us which they, naturally, with their joss-sticks, ethnic fabrics and supercilious faux-casual manner, were at one with. If Jill went to make a pot of tea, the girl would mutter to the boy: ‘well-trained’, as if Jill was conditioned into servility by my caveman insistency. She wasn’t, she was from Yorkshire, where they love a cup of tea.
Despite the sneering hippies, I brought another portable down, from my bedroom in Loughton. The fine for not paying the licence fee was beyond our means, so the colour telly was used for England matches, with the proviso that I’d pay the fine if we were uncovered by the supposedly ubiquitous TV detector vans no one had ever seen. This never came up thankfully and the hippies, predictably, watched the games.
The ‘Mexico 86’ tournament was intended to be held in Colombia but that turned out to be a disastrous idea and it was switched late in the day. England, managed by Bobby Robson, were to play their first match against Portugal.
Still thriving in England at that time was the unshakeable certainty that the English were the best at everything. Our television was the best in the world. Our police force was the best in the world. Our army was the best in the world. As was our legal system, our parliament, our chips, our beer and all of our goalkeepers! ‘Best in the world’ was a very popular phrase, often heard. The Portuguese were small fry and we would brush them aside.
3 June 1986 Portugal 1 England 0.
Doubtless they were up all night in Lisbon but in England the disappointment was tangible. Fortunately, the next match offered a perfect chance to make amends. Morocco had drawn 0–0 with Poland but would surely be ‘put to the sw
ord’ to set England on their way.
6 June 1986 England 0 Morocco 0.
Bryan Robson, England’s glass-jawed Captain Marvel, fell over and dislocated his shoulder. Ray Wilkins, Robbo’s smooth-talking running mate with his perma-tan and apparent ability to play without perspiring, was sent off for chucking the ball at the ref. Now England would have to play Poland in their final group match with a hole in the heart of the team. Bobby Robson was forced into changes.
Trevor Steven and Steve Hodge played on the flanks. Peter Reid tackled everything in midfield and Glenn Hoddle was given a spot in the middle of the team at last, instead of being wasted on the wing. Hoddle was a cissy with vanity issues but his passes appeared to be guided by lasers. The manager’s beloved big number nine, Hateley, was dropped, as was the winger, Waddle, who was supposed to cross for the big number nine to head it in, as part of England’s 1930s tactical masterplan. Also picked, at last, was the best player England had found for years, Newcastle’s Peter Beardsley.
11 June 1986 England 3 Poland 0.
England were better balanced, with the ball on the ground more. Beardsley linked well with Gary Lineker, who scored a hat-trick by half-time. Our lads were sweltering but, against a Polish team reared on pig fat sandwiches and acid rain, the Mexican climate was not an issue, even though players lost pounds of fluid every game, as we were continually reminded.
The newspapers, who had wanted Robson quartered in Trafalgar Square, now hailed England as potential winners of the tournament, as the knock-out rounds began.
18 June 1986 England 3 Paraguay 0.
Lineker, who’d already scored once, was elbowed in the throat, off the ball. This confirmed everything we knew about South Americans (particularly those of us who had never been to South America or met any of its inhabitants), that they were dirty, cheating bastards.
‘Unquestionably deliberate,’ said Jimmy Hill on the BBC. ‘Lineker abused. Brutally, deliberately and cynically, by the South Americans.’
All South Americans, not just the one Paraguyan, the lot of them.
Beardsley scored while Lineker was off the field and then Goalden Gary scored again, putting England through to a quarter-final with some other South Americans.
Argentina had won the World Cup in 1978, playing in Buenos Aires. Just missing out on a place in their squad that year was a teenage wonder-kid who they had high hopes for. By the 1982 World Cup, Diego Maradona was twenty-one and part of their team. He had speed, close control, shooting power and a much-discussed low centre of gravity. His disadvantage was that he was about three feet high. He also had, as we found out in 1982, a blue touch paper personality, with a sense of injustice that probably kept him awake at night. He would go off at the slightest provocation. In a game against Brazil, having been denied a clear penalty and with Brazil winning comfortably, he planted his studs with maximum force into the crotch of Batista, who had just accidentally connected with another Argentinian’s head.
As he left the field following his sending off, he struck a defiant pose that told onlookers he would kill any man who pointed out he was about to cry.
England had not been drawn against Argentina in the 1982 World Cup, fortunately, with that tournament coming a few weeks after the Falklands conflict. Football had been affected, with Tottenham’s Argentine midfielder, Ossie Ardiles – who I had once collared for an autograph in a Loughton newsagent – having to buy sweets for his children in Paris for a few months as he was loaned to a French team out of harm’s way.
By 1986, those Malvinas/Falklands scars were not completely healed. England and Argentina fans mingled in Mexico with one much repeated sequence on television showing two rival fans at first guarded and then embracing each other. Off the field things were tense, with trouble in the stands; on it there was one question only, could England handle Maradona? Now his country’s talisman, he was the best player in the world, the captain of his team, its heartbeat and inspiration, a scorer and maker of goals, the player they would always look to. The match was played in front of 114,000 people in the heat of the day, at altitude, in Mexico City.
22 June 1986 Argentina 2 England 1.
It was 0–0 at half-time and looked too hot to bear. England had barely mustered a shot and looked to be evaporating on the pitch as a heat haze gave the pictures an otherworldly glare.
Watching with the scowling hippies and assorted other students, who were either indifferent, or who found the nationalistic tub-thumping of the pre-match build-up distasteful, I was finding it hard to concentrate.
Early in the second half, Maradona beat three men and tried a one-two. Fenwick intervened but sliced the ball back towards his own goal. Shilton came out but was beaten by a leaping Maradona, who had continued his run and adjusted to the trajectory quickest. He headed into the net. One nil.
Then we could see Butcher slapping the front of his wrist with his hand. Shilton was waving frantically at the ref. Fenwick too was protesting. They were all signalling handball.
‘Handball!’ I shouted.
The hippies had no idea what this meant.
‘It was handball.’ I said it as if I’d spotted it at the time, with my special football-eyes.
The referee gave the goal. The commentators began to question the selection of a Tunisian referee. How could he be au fait with the dirty tricks of the South Americans? Someone wiser to their ways should have been appointed, from a major footballing nation.
A few minutes later, Maradona, marked by Beardsley, received the ball in midfield, with Peter Reid, melting though he was, valiantly snapping after him. Maradona spun and twisted, sliding the ball away from Reid and past Beardsley before setting himself to face the England goal sixty yards away. He knocked the ball forwards with apparent violence but it stopped a few feet in front of him as he commanded it to. His method of control was unique, a range of chopping, cutting, jabbing moves, with his feet like the hands of a martial arts expert, only leather-clad and studded. The ball would spin and bounce around him, bemusing everyone else.
He accelerated as if powered by an inboard motor. First Butcher, then Fenwick put themselves between him and the goal but he slanted past them as if they were trees. Approaching Shilton, he feinted left, went right, and scored.
‘You have to say that’s magnificent,’ said Barry Davies disconsolately, as the little cheat ran and jumped and bounded away. He celebrated as if all the world would thank him for taking these English down a peg or two. Perhaps it would.
I grumbled about the handball goal. One of the hippies pointed out it was 2–0 now.
‘He’d never have scored the second without the first,’ I said.
There was no logic to that but it felt true somehow. It was as if Maradona was now motivated to do something stunning, by the change in atmosphere, by a guilty conscience, by the sheer releasing joy of taking the lead for Argentina. Something seemed to power him on that amazing run to score the best goal anyone had ever seen.
Two years previously, Watford’s John Barnes had scored a similar solo goal for England in a 2–0 friendly win at the Maracana in Brazil. Now Barnes was brought on and with ten minutes left he beat his man and chipped a cross on to Lineker’s head for England to score. Just before the end he did it again but this time Lineker was flattened by an Argentinian and there was no goal and no penalty.
Argentina won their semi-final against Belgium with two more goals from Maradona and then beat Germany in the final. No one has ever seemed more elated to hold a trophy than Maradona was. After being left out in ’78, and sent off in ’82, he was victorious. Asked about punching the ball into the net against England, he said it was: ‘The Hand of God’. The colour telly was switched off for the last time.
That summer, me and Jill went InterRailing across Europe. I persuaded her that we should start by going to Stockholm to watch Sweden play England. At the game one of the rogues’ gallery among England’s away support asked me where I was from.
‘London,’ I said, in my be
st mockney. Loughton had an 01 phone number and it was on the Central Line but it certainly wasn’t London.
‘Lunnun?’ he mimicked. I smiled weakly.
‘Where’d you come from?’ I asked.
‘Harwich,’ he said.
It took me months to realize that he’d boarded the ferry at Harwich and was mocking me.
England lost 1–0 and there was fighting in the town that night. We saw windows smashed at the railway station and heard the booming echo of hooliganism amplified by the cavernous terminal. I took a photo of a Swedish newspaper board the next day that mentioned English hooligans.
A year later Maradona turned out at Wembley stadium, playing for a Rest of the World team against a Football League XI. The League won 3–0, with two goals from the now repaired Bryan Robson and one from Norman Whiteside. The RoW team featured Michel Platini and Liam Brady but the focus was on Maradona. The Wembley crowd booed him throughout. It was merciless. His unique skill and talent was barely visible on a grey afternoon as the abuse weighed him down. An Italian, next to me in the stand, couldn’t understand the chants being directed at Maradona.
‘What is “wanker”?’ he said.
I did a little mime.
Rory Bremner
Pete Nettell was a graduate of Kent University’s drama department who stayed on for a further year to form the NATC. The New Adaptations Theatre Company. Clever and artistic, with flair and talent, Pete was also ambitious and planned to use our small drama studio to stage a promenade production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with a company of four men and four women. I volunteered, as did my good friend, the very handsome Andy Robinson. We were to rehearse for ten weeks, every night, in order to tackle the three hours of material. Pete wanted an athletic company so we had half an hour of aerobics each night. On all fours, waving my leg out behind me with a fellow student shouting, ‘Five, six, seven, eight!’ was the least appealing part of my day. After a few weeks, discipline slackened off. Jason Blake, who had become a good mate too, brought some cans of lager to a rehearsal and cracked a couple open. Pete was not best pleased.