Larkin Treads the Boards
Before explaining my belief that Jack Nicholson is the only choice to play Philip Larkin on screen, I should pay tribute to how well Tom Courtenay plays him on stage. A one-man show that had the audience at the Comedy shouting its approval on opening night, Pretending To Be Me has a booby-trap for a title. When Larkin coined that phrase, he wasn’t saying that he was short of a personality. He only meant that he didn’t want to waste his time, effort and creative energy on making public appearances to bolster the career of the famous name he had accidentally become by writing poems quietly at home. (Now, post mortem, someone else is doing it for him: a paradox we might have to examine.) Luckily Tom Courtenay, the principal deviser of the show, is well aware that Larkin, whatever else he was short of, was never short of a sense of self. If he wound up as a reclusive curmudgeon, it was a role he chose for himself and studied with relentless application from quite early on: an act of assertion if ever there was one. With appropriate decisiveness if implausible aplomb, Courtenay’s Larkin is up there like Judy Garland at the Palladium. After the third encore, Judy would promise, or threaten, that the evening wasn’t over yet ("I could sing all night!") A two-hour monologue from Larkin, all of it drawn from his marvellous prose except when studded with his incomparable poetry: what could be more riveting? And what could be less likely?
There, of course, lies the show’s first and most glaring problem with verisimilitude. In real life, holding forth at length always rated high on the list of things Larkin could never be imagined doing. A weekend in Acapulco with Julie Christie: perhaps yes. But a long uninterrupted speech? Not a chance. The only reason he would ever talk for more than two minutes at a stretch was his fear that if you said something he wouldn’t understand it. He was deaf. The life that had begun with difficulties in speaking ended with difficulties in hearing. Courtenay retains a hint of the stammer, but uses it as a device for varying the pace and emphasis in a flow of speech that Larkin could never have contemplated. His prose gives us the sense that he could talk like that, but good prose always does, and great prose can almost be defined as the illusion of what can be said concentrated until it sings. Larkin wrote the way he did because he could never talk that way. So the piece rests on an anomaly: reticence on the rampage.
Luckily the theatre, despite Brecht’s best efforts, remains a place where we are content to fool ourselves by accepting the patently anomalous. The experimental writer B.S. Johnson once told me that he didn’t think Shakespeare’s plays were up to much, because real people do not speak poetry. B.S. Johnson is no longer with us, and Shakespeare remains the experimental writer that counts. Similarly, nobody in real life speaks continuously for hours on end unless he is Fidel Castro: but whereas Havana is full of people who wish he wouldn’t, and Miami full of people who wish he hadn’t, we wish that other people would. Larkin was already near the head of that wish-list before we first-nighters entered the theatre, some of us well armed with memories of every word he had written; but others, presumably, not.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)
There, of course, lies the show’s first and most glaring problem with verisimilitude. In real life, holding forth at length always rated high on the list of things Larkin could never be imagined doing. A weekend in Acapulco with Julie Christie: perhaps yes. But a long uninterrupted speech? Not a chance. The only reason he would ever talk for more than two minutes at a stretch was his fear that if you said something he wouldn’t understand it. He was deaf. The life that had begun with difficulties in speaking ended with difficulties in hearing. Courtenay retains a hint of the stammer, but uses it as a device for varying the pace and emphasis in a flow of speech that Larkin could never have contemplated. His prose gives us the sense that he could talk like that, but good prose always does, and great prose can almost be defined as the illusion of what can be said concentrated until it sings. Larkin wrote the way he did because he could never talk that way. So the piece rests on an anomaly: reticence on the rampage.
Luckily the theatre, despite Brecht’s best efforts, remains a place where we are content to fool ourselves by accepting the patently anomalous. The experimental writer B.S. Johnson once told me that he didn’t think Shakespeare’s plays were up to much, because real people do not speak poetry. B.S. Johnson is no longer with us, and Shakespeare remains the experimental writer that counts. Similarly, nobody in real life speaks continuously for hours on end unless he is Fidel Castro: but whereas Havana is full of people who wish he wouldn’t, and Miami full of people who wish he hadn’t, we wish that other people would. Larkin was already near the head of that wish-list before we first-nighters entered the theatre, some of us well armed with memories of every word he had written; but others, presumably, not.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)