Spectator
Arts, media, sport
Distracted
Kenneth Roy on golf, Greta and God
During last weekend’s coverage of the women’s open at Sunningdale, I should have been concentrating on the scarily efficient orientals who monopolised the championship, the delightfully named Scottish amateur Krystle Caithness having failed to qualify. Instead I was distracted by thoughts of the Deep Blue Sea, whose heroine, played by Greta Scacchi in the recent West End resuscitation, was imagined by Terence Rattigan to have met her young lover in the clubhouse there while her buttoned-up bore of a husband was out on the course. I tried to think of a less auspicious setting for an adulterous first meeting than the clubhouse at Sunningdale and came up with the Cheery Cup in Ardrossan.
At the Vaudeville Theatre matinee some weeks earlier, I hadn’t had the women’s open to divert me. The curtain opened to reveal Greta Scacchi, apparently dead, in front of the gas fire in a seedy flat in west London. She was not dead, she was Greta after all and there were two and a half hours of this still to endure, but she played dead well, as actors do, recovering sufficiently to reject her stiff of a husband, the judge, whom she had forsaken in favour of the faithless Freddy, who in turn had forgotten her birthday, instead spending the day playing golf at Sunningdale or in bed with a girl. This approximately was the plot.
When Freddy returned, he did so with a full set of clubs, which remained on stage for the rest of the play. I fell to wondering if they might be John Letters Master Model circa 1952. What on earth did she see in this silly boy? That was my other main thought of the afternoon, apart from how poor some of the acting was. Oh, and then there was the woman with the fan. How annoying was she.
It was not especially hot in the auditorium, yet two rows ahead a middle-aged woman fanned herself throughout the performance, so distracting for those around her that one had to marvel at the infinite patience of the English. Then – anxious to find another distraction – I fretted for a bit about the cost of this unhappy experience: £40 for the ticket, including a £1 compulsory levy to upgrade the theatre, plus a £3 booking fee, £3 for the programme, and £3 for a tiny tub of ice cream I sat nursing, wondering what to do with it, as Greta threatened to commit suicide for the umpteenth time. Dare I discard the empty tub on the carpet? In the end I did. With so little change out of 50 quid, I felt only slightly guilty.
Greta, meanwhile, had been prevailed upon by a mysterious east European, a lodger upstairs, to go on living. The audience giggled nervously every time he spoke. There being nothing remotely funny about him, that became the mystery of the afternoon. I was running out of distractions, so I was reduced to speculating about the homosexual sub-text of Rattigan’s play. Was the Greta Scacchi character really a bloke? Was this some gender-confused working-out of the author’s own sexual longings? And where should we bury the result? At the bottom of the deep blue sea, perhaps.
The golf was longer still: it meandered on into the early evening. I went for a sleep in the middle of it, not something you can easily do in the Vaudeville Theatre, and found that nothing had changed in my absence. You will not be surprised to hear that I found my attention wandering back to the Deep Blue Sea. That east European upstairs…I mean…was he supposed to be God?
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