Soliloquy for Pan

by Beech, Mark

  Originally spanning 126 acres, Barnes Common had been preserved for public use in 1886 and was owned by the Ecclesiastical Commission. Perhaps they knew something of the real reason the common was surrounded by churches at all points of the compass. Whilst the land had been gradually encroached upon by avaricious property developers and sports clubs, the heart of the common remained untouched as if an invisible borderline protected it from further trespass. Despite the glaring lights of the sports pitch, as soon as night fell, sensible parents quickly shooed their sweaty offspring into large ugly cars and tore off home. By day the commons was relatively benign, a good spot for a family picnic or a leisurely stroll but off the main path, an unusual and acutely prickly shrub once favoured by Victorian botanists impeded further exploration. One year, the peace was disturbed by an unexpected visit from the butcherbird, named after its ability to impale its victims on thorns and then devour them. A rare member of the shrike family, the grey plumed Vlad created a furore in the local bird watching community who descended paparazzi style, hoping to catch a glimpse of the vicious creature. It left almost immediately, much like the convoy of gypsies who set up camp by the abandoned cemetery that same summer. Rumoured to be haunted by a nun who floats above the gravestone of a lady murdered by her maid, the cemetery has long since fallen into dereliction. Acquired by the local council in the 1930’s, plans to improve the site were abandoned with no explanation, leaving behind a forlorn citadel of the forsaken dead. Nonetheless, from a traveller’s perspective, it should have been an ideal location, tucked out of sight from all but the occasional walker, yet within seven days they departed of their own accord. Ravines of heavy tyre tracks criss-crossing the sun blasted grass were the only evidence of their short stay. I did wonder if some Romany superstition forbade the proximity of the living with the dead.

  Solitary spots in the city often have an enduring folklore. In this most crowded of capitols, they are a rarity, but there is often a reason for their preservation, as the gypsies discovered. I liked to think of Barnes common as the last of Pan’s kingdom, a secret kept from those too busy to remember nature, who preferred their flowers in vases, not hedgerows and heath. The unkempt gullies provided shelter for foxes, voles and a legion of scuttling unseen critters. Nor was the mournful nun the sole spectre of the commons, as the outlaying area closest to the village is said to be haunted by the pitiful cries of The Weeping Woman’, sobbing after the man who abandoned her. Once, a friend reported hearing distant crying but he never discerned a ripple of melody. Perhaps it was my own tears he was anticipating when he took leave for another woman. Everything is recorded, somewhere in the breeze, on the gnarled limbs of trees, the imprint of memory, left behind on the blades of grass where lovers once lay. The more ancient and undisturbed an area, the better time is conserved, not that I ever caught sight of Spring Heeled Jack, another of the common’s most persistent characters. With a devilish visage and claw like hands, fire-breathing Jack leapt from the common and into the headlines of the Victorian papers, after scaring a local girl half-witless. More real than Varney the Vampyre, Jack became the scourge of the lonesome wanderer and evaded capture due to an uncanny ability to leap across rooftops with feline agility. Folk-devil or trickster, Jack’s unruly spirit is still discernible in the darkest turns of the common, as is the occasional evidence of pagan activity. Beneath the densest copse of trees, which huddle together like silent conspirators, burned down candles and crudely drawn symbols written in the ground, are to be found.

  Though I relocated to the area principally for the love of nature and a yearning for a peaceful outpost from the city’s din, the mysteries of Barnes Common were shown to me only later. There was a secondary reason for the decision to move here, however, based on childhood sentiment. Severed from the common by a narrow and particularly dangerous road is Gipsy Lane and it is here that devotees of Marc Bolan flock to the shrine known as ‘The Sycamore of Sorrow.’ Marc was the first of my pop deities and I’d always remained loyal to the pagan reveries his music conveyed. Sometimes I wondered if the charming leafy refrain emanated from the tiny bells and glass mobiles that people hung on the branches of trees around the little statue that had been erected in Bolan’s memory. The approach to Gipsy Lane is notorious, a jagged lightning fork that taken too sharply can be deadly, as was the case of Marc Bolan, who died instantly when the car that he was a passenger in smashed into a sycamore tree on September 16th, 1977. Whilst the Bolan shrine was undoubtedly melancholy, I was sure that his shimmering spirit remained in the last of Pan’s country, for he had lived on and off in the area over the years and would have known its peculiar enchantment. Marc Bolan understood the significance of paganism, an awareness of ancient rites suffusing his early material. As a bewitched eleven year old, I’d listened to a statement he’d made on a television programme that was to prove particularly resonant—“What I felt for England was rustic Gods or Pan. I related to Pan not as an evil God but as a pastoral deity and music is piped down to you from higher spheres.” Any charismatic figure who can lead a crowd to the brink of abandon via music is channelling Pan but none more directly than Marc Bolan who found his final repose in the faun’s leafy bower. Every glittering offering to Marc at the little wayside shrine was a gift to the woodland and I too would bring candles and trinkets once the devotees had departed. Oddly, the statue looked different at night, the darkness bestowing a more austere and regal aspect.

  In time, I became as isolated as the common, my hands taking on the gnarled quality of the trees. Friends spooked by the shadowy track that led to the train station tended not to visit as often or took their leave before the dusk. As the years passed, the woody lilt came increasingly often. Arthur, not so nimble now, remained transfixed, leaping excitedly as a kitten whenever he heard the refrain, only to fall into a deep slumber as the notes receded. We’d grown old together, him and I. Late one evening, when it was too hot to sleep, I at last heard the piper beneath my window. There was nothing to see in the shadows except for a slight ripple as if an unseen hand was playing the air itself. Some moments are waiting for you... the door opens, as if you’d always known but never quite understood. Arthur followed me out into the night and the compelling melody. It was mid-summer’s eve and Barnes Common was particularly busy, a profusion of night blooming flowers and creatures at play, the green orchestra at its wildest. Though the frenzied activity was invisible to the eye, I saw a faint kindling as if someone had lit a camp fire in the distance. Arthur bounded ahead at great speed for he knew the way. I could hear the weeping woman singing, her distress lifted in sorrow’s amnesty. Drawing back a curtain soft as cobwebs, the piper welcomed me in to the company of fauns and phantoms. The weight of a thousand hours lifted, the pain of solitude banished as the rites of the old Gods, the horned and magnificent were revealed at last.

  In Cypress Shades

  Mark Valentine

  “No heads.”

  “What?”

  “No heads.”

  “Oh, I should have thought...”

  “Well don’t.”

  It was true, then. He was as rude as they said.

  “I am not having my performers prance around like papier-mache puppets.”

  I remember thinking that his “my performers” was encouraging. If he was already regarding them in that way...

  “Quite,” I said quickly, “I understand”.

  “And no tails either”.

  “All right,” I said, “Heads, you win: tails, you win.”

  “We don’t want any whimsy.”

  It was getting better: he was speaking of what “we” wanted: so he was in, then, or almost.

  “Certainly not,” I agreed.

  He glowered at me, evidently suspicious that I was giving in so eagerly. He didn’t like being contradicted: but he also didn’t like anyone to be so passive; it wasn’t artistic. So I saw I had to challenge him, carefully.

  “So how would you convey the...?”

  “Artful make
-up. I know who we want for that. The cunningest in the business...”

  “They would have to be pretty good to...”

  “They are. Leave it to me. And the setting. I know exactly what it needs.”

  I nodded. If it had not been too grand a word, I was to be, I suppose, the impresario: he the director. He was worth indulging. What I wanted was a provocative production, nothing like the adult pantomime most directors serve up in the theatre these days. The choice of play—Comus, A Maske—mine, was already somewhat risky. It was neither here nor there, chronologically: it would not draw the playgoers devoted to the Tudor dramatists, the Jacobean tragedies, or the Restoration comedies. It was none of these.

  And Milton, once thought second only to Shakespeare in our literature, was definitely out of favour. Even those willing, or obliged, to study his work, might see Comus as a young creation, and not his worthiest. To me, however, it had always been a piece full of a strange glamour, and I had wanted to give it to the public, in a guise suited to its witchery, for some years. For that, I needed him: no-one else would do.

  We turned to money next. And here I had a surprise. He was barely interested, and soon closed with my terms. He didn’t invoke any agent—he may not have had one, just then, as he was known to go through them rather quickly. I could see that the silver I offered (there would never be any gold in the idea) was a trivial irrelevance, and his imagination was already forming his Comus—for it would be his Comus—in vivid detail.

  So we shook hands, and I stared with frank pleasure into his very brown eyes. I went home, and let my gaze wander over the little collection of editions of the masque I kept in a walnut bookcase, as if I could transfer the glitter I’d seen in his gaze onto the pages, as if each word could catch that sharp and sombre light. I stared at the lines until they were dimmed by the shadows of dusk.

  The next day I was more apprehensive. I wanted Robert Hobbes to be the director of my Comus, and I had expected him to want his own way, and to have strong ideas. He was renowned for his wonderful innovations in theatre, his ability to transform works so that they became fraught and powerful rites. But he was taking chances with the boldest scene in the play. Every artist who ever tried their hand at depicting the masque had to find their own way of handling this particular tableau: and often the success or failure of the entire performance depended upon what they did here. The Princess, lost in a wood at night, is lured to a glade where Comus and his troupe are feasting and sporting. Sorcery is in the air, for Comus is a demi-god, son of Bacchus and the enchantress Circe: the spells of Hecate are invoked. And all of his acolytes, though they are human in form below the neck, have animal heads. They are symbols, perhaps, of the passions and vices: lust, anger, avarice, envy. Thus, all their movements, though conducted in a stately way, for their gathering is also a ritual, are graceless and grasping.

  The heads that Hobbes emphatically did not want, which always look too unwieldy for the human bodies bearing them, help to convey that clumsiness and crudity. Without them, the make-up he was proposing to use instead would indeed have to be exceptionally effective. Still, I could tell this was an absolute condition for the director—he’d been very vehement about it, with a fierce look in his eyes—and I could see I must trust his judgement. We might also make a virtue of the approach, making it stand for a more subtle understanding of the masque.

  But Hobbes had not done with me yet. When I met him next, he had another demand.

  Every one of the players must, he said, be new to the audience: there were to be no veterans, no household names, no starlets, not even any actor familiar to them from much-loved bit parts.

  “A cast of unknowns?”

  “Yes. I will choose them.”

  “You mean amateurs? Students?”

  “Neither. Newcomers, that is all.”

  “But how...?”

  “I know where to find them.”

  “Why would anyone want to watch them?”

  “Because I shall direct them.”

  It was hard to argue with that. And, again, I could dimly see that we might be able to turn this into a positive attraction, something that seemed bold and innovative, fresh. It would certainly help to exclude the pantomime-type public, the playgoers who love to nudge each other when the actor from such-and-such comes on the stage. Those I would be glad to lose. So I nodded, though rather slowly, as if I was the one wearing one of the cumbersome heads, and probably a donkey’s. I felt, however, that Hobbes had not expected me to acquiesce so soon, and might therefore be ready to concede a point or two to me.

  “Music,” I began.

  “Not needed you know.”

  “Yes, needed,” I insisted.

  “Oh, all right.” He laughed: for a moment I had an image of bone dice rattling together. “Perhaps a woodland flute every now and then... after all, Comus is a sort of half-brother of Pan in some of the myths,” he allowed. It was as if he was throwing a titbit to an importunate pet.

  “No. An overture, some incidental pieces, and of course the dance. Had you forgotten that?”

  He bridled.

  “The dance could be a mime...”

  I shook my head slowly. We agreed in the end on some discreet chamber music. I had the sense that Hobbes only gave in because he didn’t really think it mattered.

  Our next skirmish was over the venue. We both agreed we did not want the masque to be performed in some provincial theatre or public hall. But there our convergence of views ended. I had seen a plain white chapel, one of the very few to be built during the period of the Commonwealth, and its Puritan austerity seemed to me entirely apt for Milton’s work. It was no longer in use, though not actually deconsecrated, but was looked after by a trust, and had already been used for concerts and lectures. But Hobbes vetoed this, on practical grounds: he said there was not enough room for the troupe to manoeuvre, and no back-stage facilities.

  I decided to press him somewhat, really just to see how he would respond, and to accumulate credit for when I eventually gave in. I was interested to see that he became quite vehement. Always his objections were technical—lighting, acoustics, and so on—yet I sensed some deeper aversion. I let this dispute play along for a little while longer, and asked him what he proposed instead. He had an answer to that, as I knew he would. The perfect venue, he said. The play could be performed in an open air woodland theatre he had found. He would meet me there, so that I would know it was just the setting we needed: and he would bring along some of the unknown actors he had in mind, so I could meet them and see he had chosen well.

  I made the obvious objection about open air performances. We would be relying on the unlikely benevolence of an English summer. We would have to cancel or find some public hall after all, if it rained. Either would add to the cost.

  “Indoors if wet,” I said, and then, to goad him a bit more before I agreed, I added, “just like a village fete”.

  “It won’t be wet,” he said, “The gods will have a better fate in mind for us, I’m sure.” And then there was that rolling-dice laughter of his again. I joined in, dutifully, acknowledging his little pun. The breath caught awkwardly in my throat, and my laugh became a grating wheeze: I felt donkey-ish again.

  It was certainly bright on the day Hobbes fixed for us to meet at the woodland theatre: a clear day in early Spring. It was located in a little spa town, which had never quite grown to be a full resort, and was now a sort of genteel backwater. The theatre had been one of the amenities the Edwardian proprietors had created to entertain those who came here. It had been allowed to fall into some disrepair, but a group, I had read, were working to reopen it, and some amateur performances had already been held.

  I was still uncertain about the plan, but willing to see for myself I followed the wooden fingerposts from the town centre, almost missing a few, and a track led through the trees. It brought me out to a clearing, where grassy banks in a sort of oval were what was left of the original woodland theatre. They had been enclosed w
ithin a bower of evergreens, box, laurel and cypress predominantly. There was no stage set—that was set up as occasion demanded—but to one side was a sort of pavilion for the actors and hands. I entered the open glade.

  It was shady, but the effect of sunlight through the dark leaves created a sort of green and golden haze, and where it fell strongest, I saw a group gathered around some wooden trestle tables. The light meant I could not make them out very well, just a sense of flickering forms. They were not in costume, just in everyday clothes but as I drew nearer I noticed that they had been made up: obviously Hobbes wanted me to see his maestro’s work. And he was right, of course: his artist was very skilful, very acute. He had accentuated the natural contours and angles of each face to bring out just subtle hints of the creatures in the masque. It was so deftly done that I could not see where the paint and their flesh met: I found it impossible really to distinguish where art and nature differed. The green-tinged sunrays through the trees added to the uncanny effect, as if they too were the work of a master craftsman, who knew how light should be used.