L'avis (With apologies to Arthur Abromov)

All

Welcome to my latest experiment. You may have read in my latest post (if you got that far) about my trip to the National Theatre to see Peter Shaffer's Royal Hunt Of The Sun. Inspired, I dug out all of my drama texts from university, hit Amazon for more, and started to read. So far I have gone through Edward Bond (epic-scale settings, extreme violence and an on-stage autopsy), David Mamet (the decay of the American Dream, lots of swearing and an on-stage autopsy) and Samuel Beckett (bleak abstractness, gallows humour and an on-stage autopsy).

Not all of those descriptions may be truly accurate. But my renewed interest in theatre has bought me back to reading the Theatre of the Absurd. This was a school of drama, mostly French, that started as a reaction to the Victorian school of the "well-made" play and its hectoring insistence on a beginning, middle and end, plus moral. Ibsen's The Pillars of Society is a good example. The absurdists decided that instead a play should instead be as far from a didactic text as possible, and also, for preference, very difficult to stage. Ionesco's Chairs, for example, demands the stage be filled with about a hundred chairs and two actors talking to the invisible occupants of those chairs. Beckett put people in big jars and dustbins and Brecht didn't use scenery at all. This is just being awkward in my opinion, but it would save on nails and plywood at a time of post WWII austerity. Theatrical props were also in short supply, having all been melted down to build Lancaster Bombers.

How does this relate to me? Well, I have run out of ideas. I am serious when I say I have no opinions left. I doubt if anyone is interested in a recapitulation of my feelings towards Coca-Cola's World Cup marketing campaign, although just typing those words has made me grind another layer of enamel off my teeth in rage. Similarly, yes I had a nice weekend, but then so did a billion other people but only a small number decided to write it up in longhand, decorate it with pictures and then show it to people. Holiday snaps are inherently boring, and mine had a commentary. Two for the price of one, and I didn't even wait to be asked.

So I'm struggling. I need an angle to keep up the momentum to towards the day when I displace the gorgeous, pouting and unutterably inane Tila Tequila from the top of the MS blog rankings, and lacking as I do fantastic buns, I must do it with words alone. I am driven, ambitious and also, doomed.

For I was born middle aged, like Trevor Howard or Jeffrey Barnard. All I do is complain. I'd go on Grumpy Old Men, but Rick Wakeman is so much more photogenic. And anyway, one of the cheif gripes of the guests on that august show is the internet and their bewilderment at what it does, who uses it and why they can't do it. I am quite adept at this internet lark, am discerning enough to use Firefox instead of Explorer, can do some light HTML when required and so would be exiled from the curmudgeonly set as some kind of fifth columnist.

So not only must I do this with just words, I must do it alone. Perhaps I could do what those Hammer chaps are doing, and be fiercly critical of other people's blogs until I get a publishing deal with Random House (thus keeping it all within the Rupertocracy and only having to pay one set of solicitors fees). I dare say I can slag off some of MS's more modelly members because what are the chances of them

a) ever getting to my poison pen portraits through the millions of emailed photos of fraternity brother's penises and the unsolicited lurid sexual fantasies from wierdos that all women on MS get, and

b) understanding them.

Well, perhaps that's cruel. I have worked out however, that it is perfectly acceptable to call dessert90210 a pointless, air-headed cipher of a Pamela Anderson wannabe who'd be out of her intellectual depth in a puddle, if I make it clear that it's just conjectural and not an actual opinion. Which it was. No misunderstandings there, I hope. I bet she's lovely. Hello there!

In keeping with this, I could become bitter and twisted and berate society for its iniquities, God for allowing pain and suffering and girls for not wanting to go out with me. I could tear myself to pieces in a full-on Freudian deconstruction, but I've done that already and although everyone who replied was very nice, I doubt if they'd want to hear it all again. I could become reactionary and talk about nothing but the Queen and how much we all love her in the Commonwealth, but that'd be boring, pointless and also a lie. Or I could just descend into self parody and ramble endlessly about badminton, cooking and parking a car in Leicester. Choices, choices.

All this brings us back to the Theatre of the Absurd. Well, actually it doesn't, but I want to get lunch before three and so have to stop somewhere. It is my aim, then, in tribute to these brave, revolutionary and deeply pretentious playwrights of the 1920's to string together something like a thousand words and say nothing. A blog void of all content and empty of all meaning. What do we think? Perhaps this was a success, perhaps not. Perhaps that's the point, intellecutally speaking.

Mind you, it's all for naught anyway, as I heard on the radio this morning that half of all Europe's eggs are currently infected with salmonella and gastric death is mere hours away, except for vegans who are doubtless relishing the chance to be twice as smug as usual whilst the rest of us less awkward people fall dead in the streets from egg ague. I'll look out for it; until then I will be outside eating chocolate cake and smoking high tar cigarettes. That way I get to live forever.

Good Night, And Good Luck
Dougal