Bath time in the West Country
There is nothing like going to Bath for having one. Each time I visit the city I get drenched, and Monday was no exception. I spurned the taxi rank on arrival as the sun was out and a fair breeze blowing.
My plan was to deposit my bags in a friendly pub, the Old Green Tree, and walk round the Royal Crescent and Victoria Park before meeting up with my trusty chum Robert Gore-Langton — known to some of us as Rob Gore-Blimey on account of his common Etonian demeanour and crude sense of humour– for supper and the opening of Alan Bennett’s Enjoy.
All went to plan until half way round the Crescent and the heavens opened. My sailing weatherproof was insufficient to withstand the onslaught, but by cleverly dodging between avenues of trees and remaining resolute, I was fairly well dried out by the time the storm passed, the sun returned and I achieved the central destination of the Roman Baths and the hideous exterior glass walls of the new Thermal Spa. The last thing I needed was any more water, so I sipped a delicious beer in the Green Tree.
As for Enjoy, the audience lapped it up. Who’d have thought it, in Bath of all places? The ghastly main characters are surprised, as the stage directions read, “in the middle of a marriage;” a young man urinates through the letter box; the old boy, victim of a hit and run driver, passes out cold and entertains his wife and neighbour with an impromptu erection; and their house is knocked down at the instigation of their own son, a social worker disguised as a woman.
The play also contains one of my favourite lines in British drama. Dad is being silently interrogated by his own son on the qualities of his sex life. He volunteers that there’s not much foreplay, not much afterplay and “f— all” in between.
This is on a par with the critical protestation of the irate hotel manager in Ray Cooney’s Two Into One, who explodes in the middle of an orgiastic free-for-all on the second floor: “There’s far too much sex going on in this hotel, and I’m not having any of it!”
Fifteen, perhaps even ten, years ago, the Bennett play in Bath would have been met with disapporving froideur and probably even the sound Bennett knew only too well from taking his very first play, Forty Years On, to Brighton forty years ago — that of plush red seats springing back into the upright position when relieved of offended middle-aged posteriors.
Gore-Blimey’s theory when we discussed this later was that Bath people took the piece to be about ignorant Northerners, so what could you expect? I’m not sure this is correct. I think theatre audiences, especially older ones, are ready for anything these days and are much less offended by filth and “language” than perhaps we’d like them to be.
I recall a programme of short sex plays produced by Paines PLough in the Vicky Featherstone days — not all that long ago — that toured to the Salisbury Playhouse, of all places, and which covered the waterfront, to put it mildly, of explicit reference to the full gamut of sexual practices and undeleted expletives.
A mid-week matinee audience of OAPs, retired farmers, army types and respectable housewives took it all on the collective chin with scarcely a murmur, and no hint of complaint or walk-out.
So it is with Enjoy. The other thing, of course, is that the play is so beautifully written that the so-called excesses are offset, if not neutralised, by the dry humour of the dialogue.
And dry humour was the just the ticket for a wet evening. The Gore-Blimey supper went well in the upper room of the Raven, just round the corner from the theatre, where they serve excellent home-made pies and sausages with mash and gravy.
As I was staying overnight with Gore-Blimey in Bristol, I’d collected my bags from the Green Tree and deposited them at the stage door, never a good idea as the dangerous possibility of bumping into an actor one’s about to review is a real one.
So it proved, as David Troughton — who plays Dad — was signing in just as I was creeping out. A cursory greeting was in order. What I really wanted to say, of course, was how thrilled I was that his son Jamie — who plays cricket for Warwickshire and has had a mixed couple of seasons — has just gone to the top of the national batting averagas, after a big not-out innings last week of 138.
Jamie, who played a couple of one-day internationals in the early part of the Michael Vaughan captaincy era, has been overshadowed at Warwickshire by the rise of Ian Bell, but he’s now re-established in one of the strongest batting line-ups in the championship.
There was no point in asking Troughton how his son had done on that very day; cricket round the country had been rained off.