Faltering memory foggily insists, and Wikipedia confirms, that I once upon a very long time ago (in 1980 at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester to be precise - which memory again insists, and in this instance needs no wiki confirmation, was an in-the-round theatre of the old greek type) had the extreme pleasure, and undoubted honour, of experiencing at first hand the performance of a living (though at that time sadly fading) comic icon - the highly mannered, rubber faced, triple jointed, comic music hall actor Max Wall, in a production of Samuel Beckett's not so much era as epoch defining play Waiting For Godot, a play conceived of and written in Beckett's second language (French). The fact that Beckett habitually wrote in French is a matter of record. And a stray thought bubble contains the image of Bernard Manning at the nearby Embassy Club having his audience in stitches with jokes told in Spanish. Or Stewart Lee raising a laugh in his native English in any geographical setting. Neither of these would ever, obviously, have happened but would have been worth the price of admission to have seen them try. Or Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean being funny in any language at all? Not in a million years, although many swear by the supposed comic universality of the virtually mute, gormless, autistic, rubber faced clown's sociopathic antics. Be that as it may, Sam Beckett in his plays, and especially in this, his most will known effort, did indeed make them laugh in his second language.
Max had at that time, in the slipstream of an accelerated pop culture impatient for the future, been all but forgotten as a meaningful cultural figure, surviving (barely) in the public imagination mainly via impersonations of his signature strut by popular TV entertainers on high rating mainstream TV variety entertainment shows. I remember, if memory can be relied upon, as a pre-teen, wondering who on earth this fanciful and farcical figure was, and being slightly impressed when I found out that it was someone called Max Wall. Even then, it was obvious that "Max" was in these impersonations an avatar of Time Passed. Recognisable, even by those who didn't know who or what was being invoked, as an archetype of the id, priapic and anarchistic. And out of time.
1980 Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, UK was surely for Max, in career terms, a shortish drink in the last chance saloon. For those of us about to come of age, aficionados of the lately arcane as well as the newly minted, with our acute anticipation and appreciation of the probable iconic significance of the performance, it wasn't quite the equivalent of our fathers and mothers witnessing Stan and Ollie do their thing on their twilight 50s tour of provincial UK towns, but it was as near as dammit. Anyway, Max was Vladimir. Memory is no help at all in filling in the blanks as to who played Estragon, but wiki (again) allows the part to have been played by Trevor Peacock, whoever he is/was. Sorry Trevor and Trevor's family, but I just don't remember you. You can't have been on TV much.
A few years later, the more recognisable and more easily assimilated (for our generation) comedy duo of Rick Mayall and Ade Edmondson would play the two parts, to considerable critical acclaim. They shamelessly hammed it up by all accounts, as befits their growing and quite justifiable TV reputation as peerless physical (and comedically violent) clowns, a Tom and Jerry for the blank generation. I'd give a lot to have seen their interpretation. If only.
Time, at the time of it's passing, as Beckett's characters live it, and as we continue to experience it, proceeds at an apparently unremarkable and yet disturbingly accelerated pace, mostly in the present tense, and we/they don't think anything much of it. As we of advancing years will readily confirm, it really does accelerate, and it's easy for us/them to forget not just the ephemera of time past, but the real substance of half-remembered events, if they even happened at all. Time disappears, taking with it personality and/or character. We/they try to cling to those aspects of our/their essence that we/they imagine defines us/them, but in vain. The verbal incontinence of a typical Beckett character, hashing and rehashing, repeating and obfuscating, hoping and hoping against hope for a momentary respite from the horror of time passing, is the expression of entropy in action, the ephemerality of personality, and the naked horror of time present past and future. For Vladimir and Estragon, their defining and unifying characteristic, as the title of the play hints, is that they wait. But Time has no meaning for them. Today is just like yesterday, and tomorrow will be just like today. It's all the same.
On another distantly related hand, the stories of Robert Aickman, the great mid-late 20th century writer of self described "strange" stories (stories whose attenuated narratives have somehow slipped through the cracks that appear, through the brilliance of the writing, between the realistic and the hallucinatory) are often misdescribed by those who know no better as "horror" stories, a description which at least implies a sort of generic coherence. But such coherence is heavily circumscribed. The horror, as in the films of David Lynch, is the horror of the everyday juxtaposed and mixed with the only very slightly off-kilter, the tangibly inexplicable, the unfathomably mundane.
What's actually going on in any given story is always, or at least usually, just out of reach, something glimpsed in the visual periphery. Like in a dream. One of the most well-used blurbs to describe his work is from the writer Neil Gaiman, who muses that reading Aickman is like ".....watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully".
Thus, there's a passage in the short story Ravissante, available in one or more anthologies of that peerless author's collections of stories in which the protagonist, a painter, on a commissioned trip to Brussels, has a typically hallucinatory encounter. He's there to examine a collection of paintings, and after various animals, or animal-like entities, manifest themselves through the walls of the apartment in which the painting collection is housed, is invited to have curious relations with several items of her absent daughter's clothing by a bizarre, scarcely human old lady, the widow of the painter of the pictures who, if unwisely viewed through a Freudian lens, may or may not be a ghoulish manifestation of the protagonist's own neuroses. The story ends with the protagonist leaving the apartment with no clear idea who, or what, he now is. And the reader feels pretty much the same way.
In another story, The Stains, in which the outsider protagonist is seduced and brought to his eventual death by a kind of siren, an entity that is certainly not fully or even partially human, the protagonist remarks that to master time it is necessary to make time meaningless. The horror, as ever in Aickman, resides in the impossibility of ever mastering the unknowability of time. Falls wanking to the floor, indeed! Or, like Max, does a comedy strut, in big black boots and tight black tights.
While there's still time, I urge anyone unfamiliar with the works of Robert Aickman to familiarise themselves as soon as time allows. While not offering any immediate or tangible comfort, these stories will at least reassure the curious reader that he or she or they is/are not alone in finding the passage of time among the most horrific aspects of the human condition. And the same goes for the virtually unreadable prose works of Sam Beckett. And if you can find a dog-eared copy of his "Film", starring Buster Keaton, that other iconic archetype of inscrutability, so much the better. Or the unlikelihood of being in the vicinity of any current production of any of one his plays? Find the time!
PS Max Wall was a great talent - and his drummer was definitely very alert
David, chapeau bas and all that. Thank you for drawing my attention to Aickman. Keep the old pen going.