The Black Album

Have you ever seen anything so bad that it makes you genuinely angry? Not like a blind puppy being kicked down some stairs. In the right context that can be quite funny. But in an artistic sense. Some execrable dollop of irredeemable hatefulness, paraded before you by a troupe of talentless no-hopers who luxuriate in the unshakeable belief that they are doing anything other than securing themselves starring roles in your most demented, blood-soaked fantasies. Have you? Have you ever seen anything like that?

I have. It was a play at the National Theatre (the National bloody Theatre) called The Black Album. I saw this on Tuesday - two days ago - which is how long it's taken for me to condense the swirling, coal-black fog of derision into anything resembling a coherent critique. I hate this play. I hate it more than I hate the people singing in Trafalgar Square in the O2 advert, which is a lot. And I only dredge up its foul memory a final time, in order to write this review as a public service. If can save at least one person from going through the ordeal that I experienced, I will consider my job done.

So: The Black Album. Adapted from his own novel by Hanif Kureishi (which, by all accounts, is a fairly decent read) it follows the (boring) exploits of a young Muslim named Shahid, who travels to London and gets caught up in the conflict between liberal Western permissiveness and nutjob Islamic fundamentalism. Of course, this cultural schism is merely the background tableau, upon which the playwright cleverly constructs a complex interwoven narrative of interesting characters and sparkling dialogue. You'd hope. In fact, Shahid shambles around the stage, bumping into other 'characters' and exchanging pointless and torpid opinions, some of which lead him to become 'angry' (shout) but mostly allow him to remain on 'normal' (speak in monotone dirge.) There is a story of a sort, involving an affair with a tutor or some such, but there really is no point in my recounting it here. You wouldn't be interested. I wasn't interested, and I was there. In fact, I was so not interested that towards the end of the first half I began to forget that it was a play, and the experience was reduced to a dim awareness that there were people-shaped blobs moving around in front of me making noises.

It's difficult, really, when faced with something so across-the-board awful, to pinpoint the main culprits. Would the writing not seem so dire if it had been delivered better? Would a sharper script have given the actors something more substantial to work with? As far as I can remember, the only line that got a smattering of titters was 'we don't turn the other buttock', which turned out not, to my surprise, to have been lifted from the script of the far superior Short Circuit. But even this half-decent (I'm being polite here) gag fell still-born from the actor's mouth and lay shuddering its last on the stage floor. The audience giggled nervously, but solemn apathy soon regained hold. Add to this the clumsy, amateurish stage direction, the lack of any pace or rhythm, and the general stodginess of the whole performance, and you are left with a big blob of pulsating shoddiness that any sane person would immediately lock in the cupboard under the stairs and forget about for the rest of their lives.

If it's at all possible to be both incredibly angry and incredibly bored at the same time, then that's what I was during this production. Had it been some improvisational skit by first-year drama students, it would still have been rubbish, but forgivably so. But for someone to have the sheer gall to present it at an internationally-renowned theatre and charge people money t0 watch it, well, whoever that person is, he should probably start syphoning off some of that gall and donating it to family and friends. He clearly has too much.

I needn't really tell you, at this point, not to go and see this play, but I'm going to anyway, because it's just possible you thought I was joking up till now: Do not go and see this play. I cannot stress this enough. You will hate it, and if you don't, then you're not the sort of person who should be allowed to go to the theatre. Effortlessly, it has taken up pride of place as the worst play I have ever seen (ousting with ease Nigel Planer's abysmal On The Ceiling) and I can't see it relinquishing this spot any time soon.

Oh, and to Jane, who very kindly took me to the theatre, and paid for the tickets: If you're reading this, sorry. But I expect you hated it too, didn't you?

Literary Smart-Arsery

Just a modest, literary oddity that I knocked together at work today. Enjoy...



Every story, so they say, should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Well, not this one. No, sir! Why, the very prospect of being bound in such a prescriptive strait-jacket is, and should be, anathema to the creative artist. I refuse to be shackled in the stocks of literary dogma, to suffer the bombardment of stylistic presumption, hurled from the prosaic hand of the cosseted mediocrity. This story shall have no beginning. It shall be bereft of middle. It shall most certainly be wanting for conclusion. Only in this manner may a true visionary, such as myself, achieve the rarefied echelons of artistic endeavour that the gutter-dwelling journeymen might dream of, if only they were able.

And do not make the mistake, humble reader, of thinking that already I have stumbled unwittingly into a swamp of contradiction, for it is not so. My intellectual rigour remains steadfast. But have I not, the dry-lipped pedant might smugly point out, already denied my tale a beginning, while at the same time submitting one in the form of the previous paragraph? Ah, my dear fool. That was scarcely a beginning. It was merely a prelude, or an preamble. It was a foreword, or a preface. Or at the most some species of introduction. A beginning it was not.

Semantic quibbling, our bureaucratic friend might smirk, and even if he has a point, which he does not, it is academic in any event, since I have already decided to erase the previous two paragraphs before final draft. This radical manoeuvre will ensure that this work remains, as it was always intended to be, a cocked snook in the face of the emotionally moribund establishment. I maintain that this work shall not have a beginning, and am prepared to adopt such vicious self-censure in order to stay true to this guiding principle. And if my tireless critic musters the energy to look up from his soulless ledger one more time, and points out that the erasure of the previous writings does nothing more than to promote the current paragraph to the status of beginning, then I shall look him firmly in the eye, and inform him solemnly that even if this tale does have a beginning, as he so tiresomely insists, then this only redoubles my conviction that it shall definitely not have a middle or, Heaven forbid, an end.

With some dismay I see that, in my desire to quell the trivial objections of my detractors, I have let this tale meander rather further than I should have liked. While you will gladly admit that such precautions are laudable and entirely necessary to facilitate the maximum appreciation of my work, it is with a heavy heart that I once again hear the reedy voice of my adversary. I see his long, pale finger crooked in objection, and his face spitefully gleeful in the candlelight. But I am not done with yet. I know what he is going to say. He is under the impression that we have already, unwittingly, reached the middle of the story, and once again I must address him.

You may well find, should you take the trouble to scan to this end of this piece, that we do indeed appear to be at a mid-point, or meridian, insofar as there is as much text already gone than there is left to go. But oh, weary cynic, does this define our current position as being, if we must use a dullard’s phraseology, ‘in the middle’? What, after all, is a ‘middle’? I notice our nimble-fingered correspondent reaching for his dictionary, doubtless as a precursor to the mutterance of some stultifying ‘definition’. Perhaps: Middle – the part right after the beginning. If we are too give any credence whatsoever to such joyless literalism we may as well rip up our notepads, burn our libraries, and cast our literary aspirations upon the heavy pyre of industrial monotony. Are we to let the clerks and book-keepers dictate our creative trajectories? Need every sparkling fibre and strand of our imaginations be tallied and totalled by some insect-like civil servant?

If a definition we must use, then I would infinitely prefer something a little more suitable for our needs. Perhaps: Middle – the part right before the ending. And now we see we are no longer in difficulty. An imperious twirl of the artist’s wand, and grumbling logic vanishes as if it were no more than old smoke. Since this story has no ending (and positively will never have one), there can be nothing to precede it. Therefore, only a fool – and here I risk at glance at our beetle-brained critic – would suggest that our current position could ever be described as a ‘middle’. No sir, we are cast adrift, free in the sea of narrative, naked against the elements but all the more exhilarated for it. It is a sea that stretches forever. It has no beginning and no middle and no end, and the whoops of those who find themselves tossed wildly on its choppy waters are the cries of men who are free at long last from the tyranny of tradition. It is a wonderful place, a liquid desert of peace and hope and liberty. An endless oasis of wonder. A paradise.

But wait! Humble reader, do you sense as I do that we are not entirely out of the woods yet? Do you feel the presence of the pedant, as like that of the trapdoor spider, waiting with endless malevolence, somewhere in the darkness? I fear that, despite the heights we have reached, this ink-penned predator will make one last attempt to drag us back down. There is only one thing for it. It is time to bid our farewells before he has a chance to strike. And I should like to thank you, the unquestioning, for accompanying me on this journey. For allowing me to lead you to places that you may not have known existed. If it has been your honour, then so also has it been mine.

And now, hasten, before it is too late! Already I feel the cold jaws of rationality grinding around us. Once again, farewell! I shall face my foe alone, and no matter what spurious mendacity spills from his lips, I shall know the truth. This isn’t over. It can never be over. Just as there was no middle, there will be no end. Not here. Not now. Not then. Not then. Oh Lord, give thy subject strength…

Unbearable Snobbery

I was sitting in the grounds of Southwark Cathedral yesterday, reading a book about quantum physics. No, really I was. It was this book:

Now this post isn't actually about the book, but I feel I should mention it, as it is very excellent, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who is not an idiot. Which brings me to what this post is about: idiots. For as I sat on my park bench, with my lofty reading material, imagining that I was wearing a tweed jacket and some steel-rimmed spectacles, half-hoping that an elderly academic would come and sit beside me, perhaps with his sandwiches wrapped in brown paper, and spark up a conversation about the nature of reality, I became aware of another presence. Another soul, another sharer of my universe. I glanced up from my book.

It was, I discovered with some dismay, a pissed man. Now nothing necessarily wrong with that. It was after midday, so that's allowed. He did seem very pissed though, and I conjectured that the post-meridial nature of his inebriation was purely co-incidental. He was shouting things, too, in a strange, guttural howl, an aural melee from which occasional, comprehensible words and phrases emerged. At first I thought these ramblings were directed at the world in general, but then I noticed the headphone wires trailing from beneath his grubby baseball cap, and realised that he was on the phone. There was somebody on the other end of this. This wasn't just the drunken outpourings of a mentaller. This was a conversation.

Try as I might to return my attention to the finer points of the photoelectric effect (and the necessity of introducing quanta to explain the rate of electron dispersal), there was no getting away from the bestial hollerings of my fellow park-goer. So I had a listen. And it turned out, despite the volume of the exchange, the conversation was surprisingly banal. It was someone's birthday next week. He was meeting Tony later. Do you know where my mum is? Yeah, I'm in the park. No. What? Oh. Right.

There were quite a lot of 'fuck's in there too, which I have edited out in deference to my more sensitive readers (there might have been the odd 'cunt' as well), but on the whole it was just general chit-chat. And this, somehow, made it worse. It made the creature stumbling around in front of me even more pitiful. At least, I thought, at least have the decency, if you're going to get all pissed up and go to the park, to entertain the crowds with a paranoid, delusional, drunken monologue. Rail at the heavens, claw imaginary demons out of your hair, give stentorious voice to those half-formed, ineffable thoughts that hover so tantalisingly on the fringes of your subconscious. Intellectually vacuous it may be, but at least it's visceral. Nobody cares if you're meeting Tony later. We don't even know who Tony is.

Now I don't expect everybody in the world to be a model of erudition and wit. For heaven's sake, even I hadn't twigged that the photoelectric effect intrinsically necessitates the quantum division of electromagnetic energy until I read that book. So you can't accuse me of getting on some elitist high horse. We are all of us, to some degree, fools. But mostly fools that contain some basic elements of humanity. Something that makes us 'worthwhile'. And if you think I'm bending over backwards to include the manic tooth-gnashings of an alcoholic tramp in this, you couldn't be more wrong. I'm not even bending over forwards. I am remaining erect. Because however deluded or downright insane someone might be, a glimmer of awareness is all it takes. A glimpse of the appreciation of the privilege it is to be human. Then, to some small extent, you have justified your existence.

So the sad conclusion must be that my brief companion in the grounds of Southwark Cathedral is worse than foolish. Worse than alcoholic, deranged, morally corrupt, idiotic, tedious, violent, socially inept. Worse than all those things. He is worthless. And, without wanting to jump to conclusions, I expect Tony is too.