FORTY SHADES OF GREED

WHEN I WAS ABOUT 17 years old, my English teachers took me and the other members of our English Literature class off to see Waiting for Godot, by the Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett. I had not been to see many plays until then, although, curiously, I had written and directed quite a few. Watching these actors performing this absurd comedy in the Neptune Theatre in Liverpool was a revelation. A revelation in the sense that nothing would ever be the same again for me – you are expecting me to write that from that day on I have loved the theatre and spent all my hard-earned inheritance on watching plays, but this is not the case. I loved the performance and realised that very little could ever be as good. That was, as they sometimes say, as good as it gets, and I have more or less hated theatre since then.

BUT I MADE IT MY AMBITION to direct the play and make it just a touch better. The evening at the Neptune involved most of us getting a little bit drunk, but not drinking too much so we could not last a two-hour show with a fifteen-minute interval. As far as I remember, my teachers were also a little drunk, as were the five actors on the night, and as was Samuel Beckett, I imagine, when he wrote the play.

IN 1992 I DIRECTED THE PLAY and my production went on tour both in the United Kingdom and Europe, playing to full houses and making a lot of money. It was a crack. Some of you will not know the play, and will in fact at the moment be bored “shitless”, as I believe is the term used by people who are unable to read three paragraphs without losing the plot, so I should perhaps summarise what goes on in this literary pearl.

A COUPLE OF IRISH VAGABONDS are lazing about eking out an existence eating shoelaces and fish-bones, hoping and trusting that one day they will be saved by some miraculous benefactor; there appears a character who tends to fit into this definition, Pozzo, along with his servant, Lucky, who nevertheless is of little use to these Irish morons. But the Irish vagabonds are convinced that help is at hand. And so they wait, do nothing, and wait some more.

I AM NOT QUITE SURE WHY the unprecedented visit of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to the Republic of Ireland has brought this theatrical event back to my mind. But I suspect it is one of the most important moments of the play, when Pozzo says to his servant, “Will you look at the sky, pig!”