A nice little story of Beckett and Havel.

Here's a nice little story for you.

At least I think it's a nice little story - but I haven't written it yet so what do I know?

First of all not everybody knows everything about everything – believe it or not they don't.

Some people have never heard of Donald Duck or even Bugs Bunny.

In this multi-cultural society it might seem strange to us that they don't.

In fact when I first went to America people there were amazed that I hadn't heard of Mister Ed.

When I saw the movie The Man With Two Brains with Steve Martin, I didn't get the joke when it turned out that Merv Griffin was the Elevator Killer; I'd never heard of him and neither had anybody in the rest of the world.

So let me explain; that man above, Samuel Beckett is probably, and by all accounts, the greatest playwright of the twentieth Century – that doesn't mean to say it's true, by the way, it's just a fact.

Personally I like Brian Friel and Harold Pinter.

Beckett wrote the classic play Waiting for Godot – which is a play that most people don't understand and because nobody understands it that makes it a great play.

It's also a great play because it was produced all over the world (and many other places) by people who didn't understand it, played by people who didn't understand it and watched by people who didn't understand it at all.

But the greatest thing about the play is, if you read it, read about it, then go and see it - you might understand it because it is a play about hope.

Of course the word Godot does not exist – or did not exist; it is, or was, a 'none word' that came to being when the play was written.

It's very close to the word God so maybe they're waiting for God.

Two of the characters in it have strange names – one is like Estrogen and the other like Vulva; they are, in fact (and I'll have to look up the spelling) Estragon and Vladimir. 

Oh well - close. 

The Americans say this made up word – Godot - that came out of the head of Becket, differently from the way the British do; the Americans say G'do and the British say Godo with emphasis on the first syllable GOD which is more to the meaning(less) of the play.

Neither pronounce the last 'T' inferring the word is French.

I suppose this was because Becket, an Irishman, lived in Paris.

Ah ha, I hear you say, but he wrote in French.

And indeed he did. And he lived in Paris because he was an acolyte of James Joyce when he lived there and moved there after the war.

So it is a play about hope and very entertaining it is too, with Irishmen making the best of the dialogue over the years as they did with every other Becket play.

The trouble with Becket's plays is that they, like the James Joyce works, have fallen into the wrong hands and sometimes are more trouble than they are worth to put on when you have to deal with awkward estates.

Thankfully, Joyce's estate is now free of this restriction.

Beckett was part of the Theatre of the Absurd movement of the fifties which included playwrights such as Ionesco, Max Fisch, Pinter and many more including some Americans like Edward Albee.

Their philosophy, if they had one, was to show life as meaningless with meaningless things happening but sometimes there was a subtext - as in Becket's plays.

If ever you get the chance to read, for example, The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, and ask a few 'whys' – why doesn't Mick do this, why doesn't Aston do that, it might all turn out because Davies (The Caretaker) doesn't do something else but if he does do that 'something else' Aston and Mick will have to do something they said they could do but can't.

Clear???

Of course not.

Beckett witnessed political upheaval on a grand scale; he saw the invasion of Hungary in the fifties and Czechoslovakia in the seventies. He wrote about it in his play Catastrophe.

The play is being presented at the Enniskillen Festival. This is the only play Beckett every wrote that he dedicated to anyone and that anyone is this man - 

and as you can see it's Václav Havel. 
He was a playwright too; a playwright, essayist, poet, philosopher, dissident and statesman and at the time Beckett dedicated the play to him, he was in prison in Czechoslovakia. The play was presented in Avignon in a festival dedicated to Havel. He heard of the festival and was moved

He was in prison because he was a dissident. You get plenty of dissidents over here and in America but they don't go to gaol. Sometimes they may get bumped off but they don't go to gaol.

Václav Havel used the absurdest technique in his plays and the authorities locked him up for doing it.

Simple as that, really.

They saw things in his plays which they thought were leading the populace to a place where they, the authorities, didn't want them to go.

He spent four years in prison at one point but used his plays to criticise communism and was a major influence in the successful Velvet Revolution.

Havel later wrote how moved he was to have a play dedicated to him and how inspired he felt.

He never got to meet Beckett but rose to be the first elected president of the then Czechoslovakia.

On the evening of his inauguration he couldn't sleep so stepped out for a walk around the streets of Prague; when he turned a corner he saw, spray painted on a wall the words, Godot Has Come.

He took it as a sign that all was well and that Beckett endorsed him. 

Godot Has Come 

Where have all the Bob Dylans gone?

Bob Dylan.

I have read that a lot of people describe themselves as bloggers and activists; I write this blog but that's not how I would describe myself. I write it to keep up to date with my typing and stringing a few words together and after this amount of time – 5 years – it's become a kind of habit.

What surprises me is the number of people who read it. Not who officially follow it, but those that actually hit it and, presumably go on to read it. 

Last week's post – My Secret Play – really surprised me; it's not like Matt Drudge's blog that must attract millions of hits but I'm satisfied with the people who read it. I have 16 faithful followers but lots more who dip in.

I wrote a post called My Teenage Love Story on February 12^th 2012 and within the last month 88 people read it; or one person read it 88 times – here it is if you want to see it http://storytelleronamazon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/my-teenage-love-story.html and here are my top five posts since I started:

Wake up and smell the coffee! Sep 14, 2011	8420
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and other BS. Dec 7, 2010, 6 comments	5085
Javier Barden and The Golden Globes. Dec 22, 2010	3781
Are the Royal Family Lizards? Jan 29, 2011, 2 comments	2812
In Flanders Field Nov 11, 2010, 3 comments	1607

Those posts won't be controversial as this is not a political blog because I leave that to the experts but do you know what's missing these days – a singer like Bob Dylan. And maybe Springsteen! Where are they? Where is the voice of youth these days? The voice of a generation?

Just where are the protest singers? Are there any? There's more turmoil these days than in those.

In those days (or doze daze) there was the Vietnam War and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; the Kent State shooting of demonstrating students by the state police and other things to complain about. The answer, of course, is blowing in the wind but the wind isn't coming my way.

We have image conscious politicians on the UK, they are so image conscious it's hard to imagine any of the UK political leaders in jeans. They're not exactly cool like Obama who apparently does it without effort.

I've never been much of a fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but give their song Ohio, written by Neil Young, a spin; it's been known to make listeners angry and when you consider the subject which was the mowing down of protesting students by Ohio National Guard, it's not surprising:

Kent State.

The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis; enough to make anybody angry especially the parents of the victims when they heard President Nixon call them 'campus bums;' he actually said 'You see these bums, you know, blowing up campuses storming around about the issue.'

None of those shot were bums - all were students in good standing at the university They were only protesting about the Vietnam War and the invasion of Cambodia and it caused a national reaction – they made the ultimate sacrifice as their generation were killing and being killed thousands of miles from America - but did it stop the war? Not for 5 years and the USA lost.

So all those young men with an average age of 19 died for nothing: it is said the people who look at the wall, and see all those names, usually shed a tear.

But what did the Vietnam War teach industry and governments? It taught them that war is money; President Eisenhower (a Republican President, no less) warned of the Miltary-Industrial-Complex; and what is the Miltary-Industrial-Complex?

This is the official answer from Wikipedia:

 The military–industrial complex, or military–industrial–congressional complex,^[1] comprises the policy and monetary relationships which exist between legislators, national armed forces, and the arms industry that supports them. These relationships include political contributions, political approval for military spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the industry. It is a type of iron triangle. The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the military of the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure.

Would anybody do that these days? Would they have the time to look up from their smart phones and Facebook and their 'it is what it is' attitudes and see.

100 years ago, this coming Christmas, German soldiers and British soldiers, on their own bat, decided upon a Christmas truce and played a football match against each other on Christmas Day; this was before America entered the great war – 2 or 3 years – and when the football match was over they went back over their lines – from their so called no man's land – and resumed the killing.

Pathetic isn't it – just following orders.

My secret play.

Marlene - why not?? It's a great picture.

I'm doing a little job at the moment to keep my instrument tuned; my instrument? My body.

All the things I have to use as an actor: my physique, voice, technique and – learning lines. How much am I getting for it? Not much, it has to be said, and I'm only doing it once which seems a tall order when there are so many lines.

The reason for this is that I like to do a bit of theatre every year which means I have to rehearse, learn lines and figure the play out – that is the most important thing – and as I was out of the picture waiting for my eye surgery I wasn't available for any casting. I didn't have many lines to learn for my short film but I do for this.

Now why am I being so coy about telling you what the play is? Because we are doing it without permission.

Because it is being done in a small private theatre and only for one performance I don't think we would have got it. But you know the most important part of mounting a production is the rehearsal period.

When an actor embarks upon a play in the theatre they know more about the play, just before the curtain goes up on opening night, than anybody and that, I'm afraid, usually includes the writer. The actor cannot do without the writer – unless he's written the play himself – but can without the director; just about.

It's a collaborative process; I remember I was doing a play with a director friend of mine (who reads this, I think) saying to a writer 'you didn't know you'd written that, did you?'

And the writer said, no.

The writer makes the skeleton, the director puts on the skin and the actors bring the thing to life.

Writers will get on to me but they really should be flattered. If they write from the 'heart' they will be doing things unconsciously from their inner self and a good director/actor will find that and bring it all to life.

If a writer just writes in beats and wants things done the way they wrote it, things may not be at their best – if only they rehearsed more in movies. That's why the best films are by directors who rehearse properly – Sydney Lumet, Elia Kazan, Martin Scorsese etc.

I was listening to an interview recently with a renowned writer – Sally Wainwright – who wrote the two series for BBC, Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax, and she was asked by the interviewer if she worked liked the Americans splitting her scripts into 'beats.'

'I've never heard of that' she said.

She has written at least 10 series for TV and quite a few TV Plays and films, and don't forget they don't have writing 'teams' over here with show runners etc – she's probably never heard of those either.

The point is she writes from the heart!

There are three people in the play I am doing. We never meet each other on the stage so I am being directed by one of the other actors and I am directing him. The other one was being directed by that actor, but he is away for July, so I am directing the other one too and it is a pleasure.

The place we are doing it and what it is?

It is a play and we are due to do it in a private theatre in – everybody invited which will mount to about 60 – 70 in the audience. I have 19 straight pages to learn – one speech and I have learned 5; but at least I've made a start.

And I can't tell you the title -

Last word on sOUNDz and thanks.

Thanks for coming along today, folks - I really appreciated it. Not exactly a full house but it was good of you to make the journey - some of you travelled miles.

As you will see I am selecting a few stills from the movie which makes it look more like having a title called 'Selfie' as opposed to sOUNDz.

Do you remember I mentioned when I first came back from America that someone said to me there that if you put two English actors together they would be talking about accents within minutes.

Well today I was waiting to go into the screening when I saw someone walking over D'Arblay Street and I called them (her). I asked her if she remembered working with me and she said 'Of course I remember you. I remember your soft accent. I know you don't think you have an accent but you do and I like it.'

So there we are - my pal in Los Angeles was right; but my accent is neither here nor there. I speak - the way I speak.

Hope you like the photos. I'm using a different accent in each one.

That's my last word on sOUNDz till it gets released next year from Amazon.

sOUNDz with Chris Sullivan

Hi folks: this week there is a screening of my short movie in Soho – details above.

It's only a short 20 minute piece but I would like to see and hear what the audience reaction is so I hope to see you there – then the two of us can go for a beer.

Get the tube to Tottenham Court Road Station on the Northern Line then when you come out of the station go west on Oxford Street till you get to Wardour Street, which is about 3^rd or 4^th on the left; go down there and the 2^nd on the right is D'Arblay Street.

'The Soho Screening Rooms' is up on the right.

Come along with a smile on your face and a song in your heart.

In case you can't read the blurb at the bottom it says:

Free Screening Thursday July 10th 2014, 1:00 pm

at

The Soho Screening Rooms, 14, D'Arblay Street, London, W1F 8DY

RUNNING TIME 20 MINUTES.