Book: HOW'S THAT FOR
TELLING 'EM, FAT LADY? by Simon Gray
A Short Life in the American Theatre
Review: Robert Sandall
Drink-sodden diary of an expert in petty revenges
If the fact that Simon
Gray has chosen to put out a second volume of diarised
memoirs mainly concerned with the staging of one of his
less rapturously received plays seems a bit perverse,
well, that is precisely the point. An unusually consistent
success in the eyes of the theatrical world, Gray likes to
entertain a rather different view of himself in prose as a
booze-ridden, chain-smoking wreck. This self-derogatory
theme, first broached in An Unnatural Pursuit, is
vigorously pursued again here in an account of his
involvement with three separate productions in America in
1986: two of The Common
Pursuit, in Los Angeles and New York, and one in
Dallas of Dog Days.
We do actually learn a lot about American theatrical
mores, the dramatic crafting of The Common
Pursuit, and especially Gray's anxious
wrestling with its particular demon, act one scene two.
But How's That For Telling 'Em, Fat Lady? is most
enjoyably read as a quirky update, in a theatrical
setting, of that crusty yarn, The Englishman Abroad.
Abroad is as usual pretty bloody. At Gray’s first stop,
the tiny Matrix theatre in Los Angeles there are immediate
language difficulties in the form of a director who
harangues the cast in impenetrable West Coast
gobbledegook: banging on about "the life muscle" and
abruptly plunging into incoherent rages.
The actors for their part are an unpunctual bunch of
drooling gluttons. "I have never seen so much eating going
on in my life before. All the time," Gray rages to
his diary. "Some of this food, or non-food, or
whatever it is, invariably falls out of their mouths and
dribbles down their chins, what they retain in their
mouths they eat with almost smacking noises." An expert in
the art of petty revenges, Gray has an answer for this. In
non-smoking theatreland he brandishes his cigarette like a
swordstick. "Whenever they eat I puff smoke into their
faces from whatever angle I happen to be at from them.”
Outside and stuck in the vast urban sprawl of LA
without a car, Gray, a non-driver, trudges about in search
of out-of-date English newspapers. Back at the hotel his
video recorder refuses to work. His private phone calls
are openly monitored by the staff. The food is terrible.
He is forced to resort to ever more liquid lunches,
breakfasts and dinners, and describes them all in bilious
detail. "The key word in all this," he concludes, "is
boring. Though sometimes I quite like it all.”
Of course he does. Abroad is no more chaotic and
slovenly than, by his own admission, Gray is himself. His
socks and hair go unwashed for weeks. He is hopelessly
enslaved by his addiction to nicotine and low-brow movies.
Perpetually drunk or hungover, he is far too
self-conscious a slob to take much pride or solace in his
work. "Dog Days," he declares at the end of an averagely
bad day, "is such a boring and repellent little play that
I'd rather not he associated with it."
It is more or less the same story, with
regional variations, even grimmer hotels and an
ever-increasing intake of alcohol, in Dallas and, later
that year, in New York. All three productions we learn,
almost en passant, are a resounding success. Yet success
leaves the author feeling "completely defeated by the
circumstances of life. What these circumstances are," he
adds, “I don’t know."
Lovers of the work of Amis père and Philip
Larkin should have no difficulty spotting the literary
game going on amid the ironic candour here. Though his
name is most often associated with that of his friend and
collaborator Harold Pinter, Gray is obviously a closet
devotee of those confessions of boozy, paranoid
misanthropy which first became the rage during his youth
in the 1950s. In his beguiling readable way Gray is now
styling himself as the crotchety and disreputable
anti-hero of modern fiction - a Lucky Jim of the theatre.