Theatre Review: Don’t You Leave Me Here (West Yorkshire Playhouse, until 18th October)

(NB: I interviewed the director of Don’t You Leave Me Here, Sarah Punshon, a couple of weeks before attending its opening night last Wednesday. The piece went in issue 205 of the Leeds Guide.)

The WYP’s Courtyard Theatre is suited to introspective plays. While spectacles are the stuff of the Quarry, it would seem incongruous for the narrow 350-seater beside it to host boisterous dramatic carnivals. The Courtyard needs plays that capitalise on its comparative frugality of leg room by dwelling on the minutiae of characters and events; ones that tunnel further and further inward. The ideal play for the Courtyard would be one in which nothing happens, and which is hence a trail of rambling, arcane musings about why nothing is happening (i.e. Waiting for Godot).

Don’t You Leave Me Here is only a speck less at home than would be that misty classic. It has just two characters, the early jazz musicians Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton and Tony Jackson, and consists of a series of conversations between them; Punshon, however, noted in our interview, that their music is effectively the third character. After sifting through barrels of folklore and thimbles of fact, writer Clare Brown concluded that the two men were periodically submerged in angst, which, given that Jackson was epileptic and homosexual and Morton ostracised by both the Black and White communities on account of being Creole, is not necessarily a melodramatic inference. The play is mostly a portrayal of their bleak private lives, away from the uplifting jazz culture that was sprouting around them. If all of this wouldn’t make them sufficiently so, the parts are rendered more demanding by the need for intermittent singing that has to be powerful but controlled, as well as some piano playing (although, as Punshon told me, “theatrical trickery” assists with the latter).

Giles Terera (Jackson) and Kelsey Brookfield (Morton) cope well, if not impeccably. Brookfield channels admirable amounts of energy into ensuring that his Morton has all the restlessness that one would expect from a teenager who has entered a world in which he is inevitably a misfit. It is doubtful that, in order to do so, releasing quite as much saliva as he does is entirely necessary, but even this is not devoid of dramatic effect – their relationship as envisioned by Brown exposes the vulnerabilities of both enough that for them to observe polite conventions like phlegm retention would seem inconsistent. There is, however, an outside possibility that Brookfield’s fertility in this respect is not a theatrical device, but an unfortunate side effect of his attempts to imitate an accent that he struggles with.

Terera has no such problems, and is strong in just about all respects. He communicates Jackson’s humiliation when Morton sees him suffer an epileptic fit, and when Morton discovers that he is homosexual, with desperate poignancy, and simulates the fits themselves with such vigour that you begin to wonder if he discovered whole new muscle groups during rehearsals – the violent quivering engulfs his whole body. Where his performance really excels, however, is in displaying Jackson’s complexity. The torment that Jackson experiences manifests itself in an untidy mesh of ways – shame, anger, reticence, confusion, retreating to his piano – and it is testament to Terera’s understanding of his character that he threads these strands together convincingly.

The script is manifestly the debut of a good writer rather than the later work of an average one. That a series of lengthy exchanges between two characters can stay compelling almost throughout is testament to the thoughtfulness and bravery of Brown’s writing, but this structure renders the play a series of anecdotes, which undermines its coherence somewhat and gives it an appearance of slight incompleteness. Furthermore, it means that the audience is left with a great deal to infer about the places and contexts in which the protagonists’ conversations take place; this is not only confusing, but distracting.

Yet you can’t help but admire Brown’s care. Both the public and media are hypersensitive to prejudices, especially racism and homophobia, so it’s very difficult to depict them without seeming tiresome, predictable or, worst of all, preachy. The combination of Brown’s witty writing and Terera’s immobilising shame, however, is genuinely discomfiting. For example, Morton’s attempt to explain Jackson’s unexpected firmness when they dance together as a capricious problem that “niggers” frequently suffer is grimly funny, but also touching (no pun intended), insofar as it avoids the clichéd assumption that judgment in the past was ubiquitously damning by giving an optimistic, if also degrading and mistaken, interpretation. Brown’s writing doesn’t make you think of laborious Equal Opportunities forms and Peter Tatchell growling at TV interviewers as though he’s forgotten that his sex life has been legal for the past thirty years – it shakes off the bureaucracy and indignant verbal treatises by portraying not prejudice itself, but its demoralising effects.

All of this, combined with a set consisting mostly of a collage of mirrors against a black curtain, and some sprinklings of autumnal piano work and warm baritone singing, makes for a play that evokes the infant New Orleans jazz scene vividly. You may well find your fingers reaching into your pocket to fish for a cigarette, such is the whiff of dimly lit, seedy bars, but I would advise against this, as your being forcibly removed from the theatre would merely suffocate this lovingly cultivated atmosphere. But although Don’t You Leave Me Here more than hints at events outside the draughty rooms in which Jackson and Morton spend many hours together, its narrowness is really its strength; a play for the Courtyard indeed.

Beard Review: John Lennon

The beard of perhaps pop music’s finest songwriter is not an easy one to review. The ‘60s were the original era of trends, and John Lennon’s position as one of the original trendsetters meant that his appearance never stayed the same for long. Like the other beatles, he never allowed his lower face to plateau.

Further complications are added by Lennon’s probable pool of motivations for growing, removing and adjusting his beard. During the early stages of experimentation, the beard probably served as a fashionable trapping and expression of interest in Indian culture and music. By the late ‘60s, however, it seems more likely that it became a side-effect of the sort of politically inspirational inactivity that prompted him and Yoko Ono to protest against the Vietnam War by remaining in bed for a week on their honeymoon, as though spending a honeymoon in bed were a novel idea.

It wouldn’t be ridiculous to argue that Lennon was the beard’s messiah, or, more plausibly, one of a number of them. After over half a century of constant widespread scorn toward even the most juvenile stubble, the impact of the world’s leading icon adopting something that was the serial murder to emerging stubble’s caution-worthy driving offence cannot be underestimated. In fact, along with the other beatles, Lennon was instrumental in establishing the fashion tenet that, for someone’s appearance to qualify as “rock’n’roll”, it must be found un-presentable by elder generations, to the extent that parents sometimes take household sanctions. This contributed to the demarcation of generations by their choice of dress that began in the ‘20s and was accelerated in the ‘50s.

It is, however, very difficult to distinguish the contributions of different ‘60s figures to the process. Seemingly, Lennon and George Harrison were the two beatles most interested in Indian culture, and hence also the religious elevation of beard cultivation that Hinduism and Sikhism encourage, since Lennon visited the suspect Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968 to take a transcendental meditation course under his tuition, and Lennon and Harrison’s songs display much more explicit Indian influences than those of McCartney (with Harrison going to the extreme of learning to play the sitar). However, when Revolver (the first Beatles record whose sound exhibited overt Indian elements) was released in 1966, neither Lennon nor Harrison was showing any sign of sprouting. The relationship between their interest in India and conversion to the sort of razor disenchantment associated with the country was evidently not a straightforward one.

Lennon’s covering seems to have evolved in four stages. These can be approximated as: moustache in 1967; fairly short beard in 1968; long, unkempt beard in 1969; return to the 1968 beard in 1970. It barely needs stating that he remained fastidiously smooth until growing a moustache, or that the short beard occasionally returned in the mid and late 1970s.

The physical differences between his shorter and longer efforts seem to have been largely quantitative rather than qualitative. He did not reserve the privilege of growth for certain follicles at all, and the shape in which his beard grew during each of its stints suggests that trimming, if indeed any took place, was minimal and administered inexpertly. It is noteworthy that, during its first incarnation, Lennon appears to have groomed the hair above it with at least enough care to maintain a rigid centre parting and something approaching a shape, with the beard contrastingly serving as a precursor of the studied disorderliness that his appearance was shortly to assume. By 1969, the anomaly had been resolved, as the beard and hair had learned to coexist with the sort of considerate harmony that Lennon was starting to publicly advocate for humanity with increasing conviction and volume. Moreover, whatever hypocrisy Lennon’s luxurious lifestyle was to betray, given his political message, no such symptoms of insincerity could be detected in the relationship between the respective communities of hair on each half of his head even when he cut both in 1970. His newly tuft-peppered, abruptly-fringed hair was matched impeccably by a beard sufficiently short as to appear patchy, and not distort the boundaries between fertile and arid areas.

The influence of Lennon’s beard on his music can easily be understated. While many of his songs subtly refer to his beard, he occasionally went as far as writing whole numbers exploring his nuanced and artistically fecund relationship with it. In ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey’, from The Beatles (1968), Lennon imparts the euphoric effect, one no doubt reminiscent of his experiences with hallucinogens, that growing his beard has on his mood to his listeners (“The deeper you go, the higher you fly”); captures its paradoxical ability to both conceal, in the case of his physical characteristics, and reveal, in that of his temperamental ones (“Your inside is out and your outside is in/Your outside is in and your inside is out”); and uses the metaphor of common evolutionary origins to express the candid transparency of his relationship with it (“Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey”).

Furthermore, in ‘Come Together’, from Abbey Road (1969), Lennon’s lyrics expose his unease at the memory of the recently resolved tension between his upper and lower regions of growth. Obviously the former is the “old flat top... grooving up slowly”, and the “holy roller” threatening to eclipse its rightful equal by trying to secure Lennon’s trust, as their rightful mediator, by telling him “’I know you, you know me/One thing I can tell you is you got to be free’” (i.e. to grow). The profound influence of the beard on Lennon’s life was, therefore, a source of much inspiration to him.

Although it was indiscreet of Lennon to compare The Beatles with Jesus in 1966, his remark showed precisely the kind of precocity that the band’s music was to become known for; for Lennon’s appearance was later to develop a strong resemblance to many visual depictions of Jesus, and this was due in no small part to his beard. Thus, whether or not it is exaggerative to call Lennon the messiah of the beard, we cannot deny him the accolade that is having had a beard akin to the messiah’s.

Beard Review: Charles Darwin

The nineteenth century was, to many, the golden age that the beard enjoyed before its swift decline in the early twentieth following developments in shaving technology. Although recalling quite how domineering the British imperialists of the era were can be somewhat embarrassing, it remains difficult to deny that it was also the golden age of Great Britain in many respects: as well as imperially, economically, politically, democratically (not only in the sense of incremental franchise extension, but also the emergent Feminism that underpinned the foundation of several women’s colleges in Oxbridge), culturally and intellectually.
Of all the emblems of Britain’s nineteenth century intellectual fecundity that might be cited, Charles Darwin’s beard is surely the most acute. No self-conscious desire to project an unjustifiable image of intellectual brilliance was at work in this follicular feat – Darwin was intellectually brilliant, and he grew the beard in 1862, between his two great works (On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)), largely because shaving was giving him recurrent facial eczema. His beard evidently served as a protective layer for his chin and cheeks, which, no doubt, had suffered terribly as a result of the persistent thoughtful rubbing that a mind as active as Darwin’s must have required. It was, therefore, not an attempt to cultivate a veneer of intellect, but the organic by-product of it.
The beard clearly embodies Darwin’s intellectual merits – especially the meticulousness that led him to develop his theory over a twenty-year period before giving it public exposure, and the dignified confidence with which he adhered to it in the face of criticism from an array of angles. Though not trimmed with pedantic precision, its overall symmetry and smooth inward curve indicate that it was maintained with care. The same is suggested also by the fact that he never allowed it to get too bushy. His confidence, on the other hand, is reflected in the beard’s fairly unusual length, which (like his theories), was capable of raising eyebrows, but (again, like his theories) was equally capable of withstanding all criticism convincingly.
Although Darwin’s own had little to do with vanity, he expressed full academic recognition of the colossal impact that beards exert on the fairer sex. By 1869, he diverged from Wallace, his fellow original proponent of the natural selection theory, over sexual selection in proposing a working list of various species’ characteristics that, since they confer no adaptive value, must have evolved purely to attract mates, and in which human beards were enumerated. In doing so, Darwin probably contributed to the belated acknowledgment of the elegance of beards that the nineteenth century brought, by rightfully placing them alongside what have now become clichéd examples of nature’s functionless splendour (for example, peacock feathers).
As much as Darwin’s beard radiates a sense of Victorian intellectual progressiveness and optimism, his writings on the subject of facial hair were amongst his more controversial. It cannot, for instance, have left the sensibilities of his readership unturned to hear that “the early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards” (The Descent of Man). Female emancipation and empowerment was, of course, an implied corollary of Darwin’s claim here; the logic of his female reader being that, since her sex had once been bearded too, it must possess equal intellectual prowess. It would be unrealistic, of course, to suggest that Darwin put more effort into instigating female emancipation than Mill. However, he did go much further towards that end in one sentence than Mill managed to in an entire treatise laden with in-depth anthropological argument.
It is deeply ironic that, although Darwin’s study of evolution led him to believe that his own ill health was attributable to an inadequate gemmule makeup (his notion of gemmules having been his theory’s equivalent to the twentieth century concept of genetics), his own beard proves conclusively otherwise. Quite simply, it was testament to his having been a magnificent physical specimen, and it is highly appropriate that the principle of natural selection was discovered by one so impeccably adapted to the environment in which he thought and wrote.