Dunster (4 page)

But about
Hamlet.
When the college society decided to do it in St Joseph's gardens at the end of the summer term, we asked Nan Thorogood to direct because of her new approach to Shakespeare. Now she stood among us, wearing a trouser suit and a black high-necked jumper, her hair scraped back and tied with some sort of bootlace, her high, pale forehead wrinkled with distaste for the wimpish Dane. I had wanted to hug her and vow eternal devotion when she selected me for the lead. Now my confidence ebbed away like tepid bath-water as she explained the reasons for her choice. It had nothing whatever to do with my modest success as Oswald.

‘Do you think Shakespeare thought of Hamlet as a hero? What's heroic about him? He can't cope with his relationship with Ophelia. He can't face up to the basically erotic nature of his feelings for his mother. What the hell is this guy? Is he just the failed central figure of Shakespeare's least successful play? Or is he a repressed homosexual? When he fails to stab his uncle while he's kneeling at prayer, is it just because he has a secret longing to stab him in some far more intimate and forbidden manner? Is that a line of thought we might dare to pursue during the rehearsal period?'

Oh, please, I thought to myself, let's not.

‘Oh, of course. Sure. Naturally. The inverted nature of Hamlet's psyche has become a cliché of contemporary interpretation. We all know that his pathetic inactivity is due to his failure to face the truth of his own sexuality. Years ago Jean-Louis Barrault played him as a guy in love with Horatio.' (This came as a surprise to me and greatly increased my anxiety about the whole enterprise.) ‘Balls!' Nan lit a Capstan full strength and let us into the secret of Hamlet. ‘He was in love with Laertes.'

‘But they hardly ever met,' I dared to remind her. The other actors seemed relieved that this novel thought would not affect the interpretation of their roles.

‘Of course they hardly ever met in the play. Except to kill each other. Don't you find that illuminating?'

We thought this over in silence for a while. Then a plump man called Benson, playing the first gravedigger, whispered to me, ‘Are you going to have to kiss Laertes, Philip?'

‘Of course he's not!' Nan Thorogood's hearing was exceptionally keen. ‘The drip would never do anything as positive as that, thank you very much. The point is – and this is something I'd like you all to think about – that Laertes is the real star of this clichéd revenger's tragedy. Laertes hears that his father's been killed, so what does he do? Doesn't hang about. Doesn't sit around talking to himself. Doesn't go through a rejection of his girlfriend – which is nothing more nor less than ritual rejection of all women. Gets on his bike and comes straight home to be revenged! In fact he behaves like a man and not a mouse in mourning. Oh, by the way, you won't be wearing black, Philip. Not in my production.'

I wondered, later, what I should be wearing. ‘You'll be dressed like you are. The typical undergraduate, growing up apologetically. That old tweed jacket, with leather patches, you've nearly grown out of will do. And a college scarf wound round your neck a few times. Oh, and don't forget your specs. Stick a bit of Elastoplast round them so they look as if you dropped them and forgot to get them repaired. You don't imagine you're going to camp about in doublet and hose, do you? Speaking the stuff as though it were
poetry?
'

Laertes, then, was the star part of this production and star parts are notoriously difficult to cast. Nan was still looking for the perfect brother to Ophelia, and in the early stages she read the part herself, a task she performed with virile intensity. Then she came up to me after rehearsal and spoke out of the corner of her mouth while lighting another Capstan, ‘I saw you crossing the quad this morning,' she said, ‘with a man I've never even met.'

When people say this sort of thing to me I always feel guilty, as though I were being accused of some serious but unconscious crime. I said, ‘Oh, did you?' as noncommittally as possible.

‘He
is
Laertes.'

‘Oh, no.' I was suddenly positive, ‘I'm quite sure he isn't.'

‘Dark. Rather good-looking, don't you think?'

‘It has never occurred to me.'

‘Chap who looks as though he knows exactly where he's going.'

‘I think we were going for breakfast.'

‘I'm damn well going to nobble him for Laertes.'

‘I honestly don't think you should do that.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘Well, to start with, he thinks that all acting's completely false.'

‘Wonderful!' Nan's eyes lit up as she blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘He sounds absolutely right for the part. Oh, what's his name, by the way?'

Not many boys from St George's got into Oxford in our year – only myself, Dunster and Porker Plumstead. As I have said, I had never found sums difficult. Dunster, in spite of his tendency to mutiny, had worked, as I always suspected, frenetically in secret. And Porker -? Well, of course, Dunster told me that Porker's father had put a large donation from Whittington's Bank at the disposal of the college library.

There had been times when I had secretly hoped that the end of my schooldays would be the end of my friendship with Dunster. I had fantasies of us drifting apart, meeting occasionally in the holidays, finding nothing much to say to each other and then forgetting to send a Christmas card. Although I had often longed for this outcome, I didn't believe in it and when I got to university Dunster was, as ever, at my side. He soon decided he didn't like Oxford. ‘Why the hell do we have to spend our youth shut away in medieval dungeons? First St George's, now this.' Our college was small, built in stone which went gold in the sunlight, with a quadrangle of bright green grass and a huge clock of doubtful accuracy. From my top-floor room I could see the domes of the Radcliffe Camera and the Sheldonian. Dunster's room was on the ground floor, often in shadow. He managed to get through each short term without entirely unpacking his suitcase, so he lived in a gloomy chaos which reproduced as accurately as possible his home in Camden Town.

‘Three years in a dungeon,' Dunster decided, ‘and the Master's an old faggot with a Marcelle wave.'

‘Dunster! You don't know that.'

‘Of course I do. I looked him up in
Who's Who
: “Sir Ninian Dobbs. Military historian. Hobbies: cooking and collecting miniatures. Unmarried.” What do you think unmarried means?'

‘It probably means he hasn't got a wife.'

‘Progmire, are you really a sort of Holy Fool? Or is it just the act you put on to save yourself the trouble of finding out about things?'

Sir Ninian Dobbs was a tall and distinguished figure whom we sometimes saw presiding over the high table in hall. He had an aquiline nose and admittedly carefully tended white, wavy hair. ‘I don't suppose he'll have much to do with us,' I tried to reassure Dunster.

‘With any luck. But if he starts inviting us to dinner, feign illness.' He often used expressions which were appropriate to the nineteenth century, which he was studying.

The college dramatic society was my escape route from Dunster. I began to behave, like all university actors, in the most actorish way possible. We thespians sat at the same table in hall and I was careful to join in with dialogue like ‘Did you see that girl from St Hilda's in the Christ Church
Duchess of Malfi.
It was absolutely
dire.
' Or ‘I thought of going up for
Bartholomew Fair
but now I'm not going to bother. They've got a guy from Wadham who couldn't direct traffic.' Or ‘Marcus Gravely thinks he's Pembroke's answer to Richard Burton. Someone should give him a paper bag and see if he can act his way out of it.'

Dunster, as I had suspected, couldn't take much of this and soon moved off to another table where the discussion centred on politics, economics and such subjects as Solzhenitsyn and the invasion of Cambodia. I felt released and happier than I had ever been. Dunster and I then met as equals and although he listened to my chatter about the dramatic society with a pale smile of contempt, he realized that I had vanished into a world where he couldn't follow me. And I became tolerant of his pursuits, complimenting him on the articles he wrote for an assortment of university magazines denouncing Oxford and all it stood for, although I often got no further than the first paragraph.

‘That weird woman in the trouser suit asked me to join the
actors
.' He emphasized the last syllable in what he thought was the way we talked.

‘Nan Thorogood? She said she was going to ask you to play Laertes.'

‘Who's he? Remind me.'

‘A very positive type of person. I'm Hamlet. You'd have to kill me in the last act.'

‘You mean pretend to kill you?'

‘Well. Yes.'

‘I told her straight out, old man, that the idea was absolutely ridiculous.'

In the end, Laertes was someone called Adams who read law. He had short, ginger hair, pointed teeth and a threatening smile. ‘Suitably vulpine.' Nan told us triumphantly. But in spite of his promising appearance, he was a dull actor and I didn't expect him to cause me much anxiety.

‘Going mad,' Ophelia said, ‘makes me so bloody hungry.'

‘I was thinking of eating in that Indian place in the Turl,' I lied casually. ‘I mean, why not join me? We could discuss our scene.'

‘I haven't got much money ...'

‘Don't give it a thought.' It was far into the term but I could manage a few curries by flogging my new copy of
One World Economics
in Blackwells' secondhand department; this would be particularly profitable as I hadn't yet paid for it.

When we arrived at the restaurant, although a sensationally thin girl, she seemed prepared to tackle examples of all the Star of Bengal's limited cuisine.

‘I don't know what your problem is,' she said when I confessed I still felt far from ‘getting' Hamlet. ‘You're marvellous in all the indecisive bits. By the way, why don't you have your glasses mended? I mean, the ones you wear in rehearsal?'

‘Nan thinks Hamlet should have broken glasses. Remember?'

‘Funny idea,' she said, meaning it wasn't.

‘Also she wants me to do it without letting the poetry show. She wants me to say, “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” in a sort of low moan. I don't think it's written as a low moan. You know what?' I had seen looks of envy from two men eating in a corner and felt full of courage, ‘I'm going to say the poetry on the night. When Nan can't do anything much about it.'

‘That's the spirit!' She smiled up at me from her prawn vindaloo. My Ophelia's name was Bethany Blair and it would have been very strange if I hadn't fallen in love with her. ‘But what's your problem with our scene?'

‘Hamlet rejecting Ophelia. I can't see why any man in his senses would reject you.'

‘He wasn't in his senses, was he? Anyway, he was pretending not to be.' There was a pause while she crackled a poppadum. ‘Actually you don't need to say things like that.' For an elated moment I thought this was encouraging, that she meant my compliments were understood without being spoken. Then my natural pessimism returned and I felt that my flattery had displeased her. It would take some time and a fair number of oriental dinners before I discovered what I felt to be the truth.

When I drove Tash to her tutorial college on the morning of the board meeting, which was the start of all our present troubles, she was only three years younger than Beth had been when I first met her. They could easily have been mistaken for each other. Drowned Ophelia has been painted, pale with her red hair floating, looking perfectly at home in the water, but naturally remote from the problems of everyday living. Both Natasha and Beth had this look, so that you felt you admired their beauty through clear water or plate glass. The appearance was largely deceptive. These withdrawn pre-Raphaelite beauties could be as uncomfortable as Tash was in the car that morning, or as crudely unnerving as Ophelia in madness.

I found out all I could about Beth and much of it was surprising. She was the only child of an army major who'd retired to a small farm in the West Country. She could skin rabbits, strangle chickens, shoot pheasants, aid the birth of lambs and perform many tasks which would show me up as hopelessly incompetent, not to say, squeamish. You might have thought the fact that she bore such a striking resemblance to the Ophelia seen through the sentimental eyes of Sir John Millais, RA would have ruined her chances of getting the part. Nan could have been expected to go for a North Country revolutionary Maoist, or for a butch, overweight Nordic art student with a secret passion for Gertrude. Unexpectedly she made the obvious choice, only insisting that Beth should dress as a hippy in flowing Indian scarves and a head-band, and carry a sitar. This was far removed from the character of the only daughter of Major Jaunty Blair, whose bedroom at home was decorated with the rosettes she had won at gymkhanas and whose family freezer contained a fox's brush, wrapped in newspaper, which had been presented to Beth out hunting and which she had forgotten to have mounted.

I had no doubt at all what I felt about Beth, and as little idea of what she felt about me. We sympathized with each other, praised each other, did our best to cheer each other up; but this was the way with all actors as the terror of the opening performance drew near. In this she behaved no differently to me than she did to the rest of the cast. She smiled at us all and often laid her hand gently on our arms while she was speaking to us.

When I took her back to her North Oxford college after our dinner, she gave me her cheek to kiss, offering it with a vague politeness which made me feel she was thinking of something else. This good-night happened in the college entrance. I thought that undated girls were peering down from the windows above us and I only wished that we were putting on a better show. I wondered who else bought Beth tandoori chicken and took her home to this public farewell – Laertes, Horatio, King Claudius, or even the gravedigger? We went out quite often, although there were always plenty of dates she couldn't manage. We talked all the time, about our fears, the other actors and the awfulness of Nan. I thought she was less obsessed with acting than I was. It was just one of many activities which included riding, hunting, dancing and a certain amount of rough shooting with her father, Major Jaunty. Acting, Beth said once, was something she got into because a friend asked her ‘and you might as well try everything'.