Actors are easily bored on long runs. Phoebe Waller-Bridge once revealed that she staged distractions in the wings to amuse her colleagues. On the last night of Hay Fever, egged on by another actor, she bent over ‘and showed [her] arsehole’ to the on-stage actors.
Nabokov’s plays are seldom performed. But he was alive to middling, mediocre dramatic clichés, fashions long-forgotten, but invaluably preserved in his 1941 lecture ‘The Tragedy of Tragedy’: ‘The next trick, to take the most obvious ones, is the promise of somebody’s arrival. So-and-so is expected. We know that so-and-so will unavoidably come…’ This is the lost convention, the stand-by that Beckett was frustrating in Waiting for Godot – with its tedious announcements and its adamantine disappointment.
John Osborne was a jobbing actor and therefore intimately irritated by the conventions of repertory drama. In Epitaph for George Dillon, co-written with another actor, Anthony Creighton, Osborne super-sizes the Act One curtain line. It is announced that George Dillon will be arriving as a temporary lodger. He arrives. It is intimated that he will replace Raymond, a son who has been killed in the war. He is exceedingly polite. But his curtain line, as he contemplates a framed photograph of Raymond, is ‘You stupid-looking bastard’.
As David Baron (his stage name), Harold Pinter was another disaffected thesp. Hence his brusque impatience with dramatic convention. The Caretaker begins by violating convention:
MICK is alone in the room, sitting on the bed. He wears a leather jacket.
Silence.
He slowly looks about the room, looking at each object in turn. He looks up at the ceiling, and stares at the bucket.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in