Will Self - Liver - A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

With each wobbly revolution and spring-heeled gyration, Terry Pierce called forth gales of laughter. Then, when he eventually closed in on the shapeless form centre stage and whipped away the sheet shrouding it to reveal Bolton in a dressing gown, stiff toque on his head, bloodstained handkerchief covering his features, the merriment faltered.

In the wings, the director of the piece was on his knees, a prayer on his lips, albeit a secular one — an adaptation, to suit these harrowing circumstances, of the playwright’s own aperçu concerning Hamm: that he was ‘The kind of man who likes things coming to an end but doesn’t want them to end just yet.’

Midway back in the stalls, strung out along the best seats in the house, sat the membership of the Plantation. They had already attracted whispery opprobrium in the bar, as they sucked up booze, spurted out smoke and cratered the haze with their ‘cunts’. Now, in the blacked-out auditorium, their purse-lipped critics discovered that the Plantation members not only looked off, they smelt it, too.

Very red face. Black glasses . Handkerchief removed, a reversal began the very instant the Extra spoke Hamm’s first line: ‘Me — ’ ( he yawns ) ‘ — to play.’ The Extra hadn’t needed much make-up at all to conform with Beckett’s instruction that Hamm have a ‘very red face’, and, while he may have been drunk, he was still an old trouper: he remembered his lines, and gave them a slushy, sibilant delivery that sent out small puffs of spume, clearly visible in the footlights.

Bolton’s fellow members — who, while possessing little culture themselves (with the obvious exceptions of Trouget and the Typist), none the less knew perfectly well how to be snobbish about it — were appalled by the levity with which their country cousins were responding to the crepuscular vision of the great dramatist. They tut-tutted, and the Poof even poked the eleven-year-old boy sitting next to him and hissed, ‘Shut up, you little prick.’

But then the hicks became transfixed by the Extra’s Hamm. He may have remained seated, but his performance was definitely a high-wire act. The unutterable pathos of the human condition, as revealed by the desperate, halting exchanges between Bolton/ Hamm and Pierce/Clov, fell heavily on them: a mighty weight crushing their bourgeois complacency. The mums and dads ceased chuckling; the teenagers stopped tittering; the smaller kids struggled on with their giggles for a few more minutes, but soon, flummoxed by the weirdness of it all, they, too, shut up and lapsed into that state of shocked boredom that Theodor Adorno characterized, vide Endgame , as the ‘gerontocracy of late capitalism’.

However, Very red face. Black glasses . Hamm, calling upon the dogged, hapless, slavish Clov to poison himself. Hamm, static unless wheeled; self-obsessed unless rebarbative. Nell and Nagg in their bins, the whitened after-images of human affection, condemned for ever to an atemporal realm in which they acted out, and acted out, and acted out the pathetic dependency they called love.

Very red face. Black glasses . It didn’t need Ken Tynan — the only individual who had known both mise en scènes intimately — to recognize that this set-up was uncannily like the daily psychodrama in the Plantation Club; nor to grasp that Hamm, as portrayed by the Extra, bore close comparison with Val Carmichael himself. By the time Bolton reached the line ‘Do you not think this has gone on long enough?’, and, worse, delivered it with an accurate imitation of Val’s whining croak, the overseer of the Plantation could bear it no longer and whined back, ‘It certainly has, you cunt.’

The Extra was too much of a pro to react to this, but Terry Pierce fumbled, then dropped the three-legged toy dog. Having got this off his sunken chest, Val had no intention of leaving; besides, he had wittingly planted an evil seed, and in the last half-hour of the play was delighted by its burgeoning, as, unable to control himself, Bolton began to gash Hamm’s gnomic utterances with more and more ‘cunts’.

Now it was the members’ turn to be convulsed, while the small town burghers sat — possibly as Beckett had intended — desperate for it all to end right away .

By the time the Extra glossed Hamm’s final weary remark thus: ‘. speak no more. Old cunt! You remain,’ they were shuddering with embarrassment, whereas Val was clucking with delight. Backstage, the director lay unconscious in a pool of his own tears.

The critic from Time Out declared Bolton’s Hamm to be a ‘masterful improvisatory tour de force’, restoring ‘a much needed contemporary bite’ to a piece that was beginning to petrify in the gorgon stare of academic eyes. Others were not so sure, and, although Endgame smouldered on at the Peacock Theatre for another sixteen performances — with most of Bolton’s expletives deleted — it was soon enough stubbed out by lawyers acting on behalf of its author, who, whether or not he may’ve been a total cunt, totally objected to any bowdlerization of his work.

However, that night at the Plantation — which Val, in an almost unprecedented move, had reopened — the Extra received a hero’s welcome. No Larry Olivier or Ralphie Richardson could have been more lauded. Val ordered Hilary to suck Bolton off in the toilet. Trouget loitered, standing everyone champagne for an hour or so, then slipped away. The Martian made good the deficiency, buying round after round — always triples for Val — and Val, pressing on with Hilary’s gavage , took care to pour a little of each V & T into his understudy’s glass.

The Poof mounted the piano stool and pounded out, over and over and over again, ‘(Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage) Mrs Worthington’, a ditty that, although risqué in its own day, took on a filthy contemporary tinge as the members bawled their heads off, adding ‘cunts’ in all the irrelevant places.

The Prince Consort, safety-pin nose-ring jangling, pogoed on top of the piano; Her Ladyship’s dewlaps jiggled; Bolton cut a wonky caper. By the till, Val Carmichael lit Embassy after Embassy, each from the tip of the last, while surveying the giddy pavane with a dangerous leer. The Cunt roared, His Nibs smiled sardonically, the Dog howled with drunkenness.

Some time after midnight, the Typist, who had long since concertinaed into blackout atop her stool, wet herself; but no one paid this the least attention, as they were all caught up in the whirling circularity of dervishes, who, as they spun faster and faster, became more and more abandoned in the devastation of their short-term memories, until they metamorphosed into figures with no more ability to think of the next move than a chess piece.

Each on its appropriate square, left to right at the bar: Val, the Dog and the Poof. In the second row the Cunt and the Extra; dumped on a stool her own colour, the queenly Typist; trapped at the end of the board, the Martian and Her Ladyship; taken by it all, slumped against the wall, His Nibs. And observing the whole scene, that silly goose, the Boy. Hilary, who on this dark night was granted a painful moment of not to be repeated clarity, and grasped that this was a zugzwang from which he could never escape.

A couple of years later they were all still on the same squares. Entire civilizations of dust mites had arisen, then fallen, while in the human realm nothing had changed, except that it was June, earlier in the day, and the Tosher was in. He stood by the door, diffident as ever; that was how Trouget made his way in the world: light as a fly sensing its way across a soufflé. Give him a tin of brown shoe polish and a bottle of vintage Taittinger, zip him into his Bell Star jacket and hand him a first-class plane ticket, and away he’d go with no thought to the morrow, intent on dropping ten, twenty, fifty grand on the tables at Biarritz or Monte Carlo.