Vanya

We went to see the National Theatre's Vanya yesterday (HD broadcast at the movie theater) -- a one person show with Andrew Scott playing every role.

Do you need to know the Chekhov? I don't know. But Scott is just amazing. The Times and Guardian missed the point (though they acknowledged that his performance was a tour-de-force. But what he did was essentially to land halfway between Chekhov and Beckett. "Thus play I in one person many people," says Richard II, and that's what he does. It brings home the loneliness of the world, just as Beckett will later. And it got me thinking about Beckett's dramatic career, how we go from several people alone (Godot, Endgame) to one person mostly alone and covering for her loneliness through an unending stream of cheerful and optimistic conversational gambits (Happy Days) to a person entirely alone, but talking to his past self (Krapp to the void-filling desperation of complete solitude in which the speaker is trying to create a simulation Not I. I hadn't quite thought of it as that kind of progression before, but now I see it. And Scott's Vanya belongs to that progression somewhere, both before and after it. He makes you see what Beckett is doing, and makes you see how Beckette makes you see what Chekhov is doing.

Sweets to the sweet

I've been loving, for a long time, the way Shakespeare uses the word sweet.  Two obvious instances.  In Richard II the Queen, puzzled over her own free-floating sadness, says:

                                                   I cannot tell
Why I should welcome such a guest as grief
Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest
As my sweet Richard.

And then Edgar's amazing, ambivalent lament:

                                 O our lives' sweetness
That we the pain of death would hourly die
Rather than die at once.

It's an amazing word for Shakespeare, and tends to come at times of sadness and need: "If you do love old men, if your sweet sway allow obedience, if you yourselves are old," Lear pleas with the heavens. Sweet sway.

And I've been thinking why it's such a good word: because it's great and ephemeral, the experience of tasting, not possessing, and the purer the sweetness the less it's about even the idea of something lasting. It's Ashbery's "charity of the hard moments," but without hardness or charity: the sweetness of the moment, as it "Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses." It's just for now, but that's pretty great, the way a play can be pretty great.