My clandestine night at the theatre

Spectator

3 days ago

Kenya
The poster for the Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company's production of Much Ado About Nothing had a hippie design, with flowers and psychedelic colours. 'In a false quarrel there is no true valour,' announced one flyer. Quite pointedly, I had not been invited to see the play, but I decided I should go and so when the Pleiades was low in the sky and an old lion was roaring in the valley, I set off from my farm in Kenya. First light rose over the Aberdares as bright-faced children hefting satchels ran alongside the road to school. In the Rift Valley I joined the suicidal game of driving in Africa, dodging matatu taxis and Congo-bound juggernauts, reaching the joyous mayhem of Nairobi hours later. I lounged about at the Muthaiga Club for the rest of the day, chatting with fellows at the bar about beef cattle. After the ritual humiliation of airport security, I settled down for the flights to Scotland.
Near Waverley station I checked into my Premier Inn room and sat for a while on the single bed, or stood at the window like Larkin's Mr Bleaney, watching the frigid wind tousling the clouds. What was needed, I decided, was a disguise. On the Royal Mile, I browsed 'See Ya Jimmy!' tam o'shanters, with attached ginger wigs and beards, plus tartan kilts and sporrans. An Indian shop sold fetching cowboy hats. On Cockburn Street I found huge dark glasses with mirror lenses. In the end, I settled for a big woolly hat, then wandered past bagpipe players all day, hoping not to bump into anybody who might recognise me.
I arrived at the Pleasance Theatre minutes before the curtain went up. The house thronged with undergraduates dressed for freezing Edinburgh New Town flats, loudly enjoying themselves before the play began. I sunk deeply into a seat right at the back of the auditorium, with the woolly hat pulled down over my ears and my coat collar raised. The production was staged not in Renaissance Sicily, but a hippie scene, like 1960s London – as if the guys in Withnail & I had finally met some women.
I sat with rapt anticipation, hanging on every line, not really because I like this play; I was searching for a different kind of meaning. I waited for Claudio – his every stage entry, his every line and all his silences. His expressions, his movement, were dearest to me and so familiar, since I had held him in my arms as my newborn son in the delivery room 22 years before. I had loved him as a baby, as a toddler with golden spun hair, the barefoot lad who got thorns in his toes on the farm, the youthful cross-country runner, and the young man who had been my closest friend.
During the interval, I slipped out, smoked a cigarette in the street, then ducked back in to catch the second half. As I strained my eyes across the length of the theatre, I saw my boy had changed in the months since I was last with him, his face altered by encounters, adventures and thoughts from which I had become remote – a change, I felt, that was hard to recognise and from which I was excluded. It made me unutterably sad, wishing I could reach out with long arms to embrace and kiss him. 'O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do,' said Claudio. All the dialogue had become a series of clues, of messages passing between us. We hadn't spoken since I broke up with his mother, you see, and I was now with another woman.
Before the applause had ended, I jammed the woolly hat down over my ears again, hunched into my overcoat and sped out into Edinburgh's night. I trod quietly down the cobbled streets back to the Premier Inn, where I ordered a burger and a pint. I felt a perverse sense of accomplishment that I had not been seen. Then I felt deep regret for the hurt I had caused him, this boy of mine playing Claudio at the end of his university days. And also my daughter, who would be seeing the play the next night.
Early next morning, heading for the train at Waverley station, I passed a glass screen on which I saw these words engraved for all travellers to see: 'O what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practise to deceive.' I nodded in agreement: 'Yes, you're right, Sir Walter Scott.' And then there was another of his quotes up there, speaking to me: 'Life is dear even to those who feel it as a burden.