Ghosts (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Ibsen’s Ghosts was written and published in 1881 and did not get a professional production for two years. Bear in mind that his previous play A Doll’s House had made him the most talked-about playwright in Europe and beyond. But Ghosts was considered so revolting, so obscene, so repulsive in its dwelling on the seamier sides of slides that not only would theatres not stage it, even the printed edition was a flop with half the copies being returned from the shop. Like the freethinking pamphlets in Mrs Alving’s sitting room, Ghosts was not something to be seen in a respectable home. In January 1886, years after the play had been published, there was a performance of A Doll’s House at the Meiningen Theatre, Germany, and local students heard that there would be copies of Ghosts available to read and so they sat in the stalls passing the books from hand to hand reading Ghosts while A Doll’s House played on stage. When the play was first performed in London, a Daily Telegraph Editorial infamously described it as:

an open drain; […] a loathsome sore unbandaged; […] a dirty act done publicly; […] a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open.

Of course, now Ghosts is a cornerstone of the western dramatic canon, one of the most famous and widely-performed plays in the world. The current run at the Sam Wanaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe is the 15th production worldwide this year.

Classic status can be a prophylactic, coating and surrounding a play and rendering it harmless. Ghosts was intended as an irritant, to get under the skin. It feels like Ibsen was saying ‘you thought A Doll’s House was shocking? You fucking wait’. But it’s hard to retain that sense of shock when we are being handed something that we are told is a classic. Can classics ever really shock? We have the distance of time, the cotton wool bedding of cultural prestige, the cosiness of familiarity.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been teaching my university module on Naturalist Theatre. As you know, in universities we sometimes are encouraged to give content notes on work that we are requiring students to read. I should say, where I teach, we are not required to do this; it is academic judgment whether this is appropriate. I feel in two minds about it: it annoys me when content warnings act as spoilers; sometimes I feel like a focus on potentially triggering contents ignores context (Please note that the musical Oklahoma! contains references to drug use, prostitution, pornography, and sexualised violence - which it does but, really?). On the other hand, content warnings allow students who are dealing with serious traumatic experiences the opportunity to gather resilience to read work effectively. (This is important: content notes are to enable students to read, not to give students the option not to read.) With Naturalism, my ambivalence is particularly strong: (a) it can feel silly to put a content notice on a play as famous as Ghosts; but (b) this play really does deal with some shocking material and not to acknowledge that seems both disrespectful to the students and actually to participate in the neutering of this play.

So I was pleased to see that Shakespeare’s Globe have also given a content notice for this play.

Content Guidance: The play contains themes of incest, euthanasia and references to suicide.

…to which they could also have added ‘sexually transmitted disease, prostitution/sex work, blasphemy, and familial sexual exploitation’. What I was even more pleased about when I watched it last night is that the cluster of young people around me (not my students, but student age I’d say), were audibly shocked and horrified by what they were watching. There were gasps when it became clear that Engstrand was encouraging his daughter into sex work in the Sailors’ Home he was planning; jaws dropped when it became clear that Osvald has become a romantic and perhaps sexual relationship with his half-sister. There were shocked looks exchanged when they realised that Osvald was asking his own mother to end his life. And more.

And they were right. Partly because Ibsen’s play has confrontation and antagonism in its bones. But partly because Joe Hill-Gibbins’s adaptation and production has pushed the play’s challenge to the fore. He’s following the lead of Richard Eyre, whose own adaptation/production at the Almeida ran at 90 minutes straight through. Hill-Gibbins’s is 100 minutes (and the show was advertised at 2hrs20m with an interval so clearly some major surgery has happened recently). But it gives the play’s unfolding horror a great rush of energy. Hill-Gibbins has done his own version which makes the action of the play feel continuous (though I think there are meant to be time jumps) but puts some of the possible subtextual drivers of the characters more to the foreground: Manders appears to perv on Regine early on and throughout and Regine hints that she would like to become his mistress, for instance. Engstrand’s plans for the Sailor’s Home are underlined more forcefully. The incestuous Osvald-Regine relationship is made more confrontationally direct than I’ve seen before.

This version is sort of modernised? Actually that’s not clear to me: it’s kind of modern dress, though the costuming is kind of plausibly clothing that could have been worn in the 1880s and now (Mrs Alving’s velvet dress, Father Manders’s suit, Osvald’s cardigan) which means I’m not sure if it’s set in the present or modern dress but set in the 1880s, or maybe set in. some no-time between now and then. Rosanna Vize’s set is an open shaggy magenta carpet that suggests maybe coastal heather; at the back are full height (10 ft?) mirrors, which double ands ghost the action. The magnificent end of Act 1 of Ibsen’s play has the remembered flirtation with (or assault upon) a female servant repeated in Osvald’s flirtation with Regine; they see it happen in the mirror, as if it’s in the next room or even in their minds. The set is, as always in the Globe spaces, in dialogue with the theatre; the candelabras are part of the motif, being lit by a servant at the beginning and then horribly snuffed out at the end. I wasn’t sure about the set at the beginning but soon came to love it; the cast walked barefoot over that carpet, giving this very indoor space a rougher more open landscape. The louvred mirrors glittered and multiplied the candlelight which itself created pockets of concealment and revelation in this play of secrets revealed.

This is a great cast. Sarah Slimani plays Regine as a woman on the make but also someone with an edge of desperation who will do whatever she needs to survive. Greg Hicks’s Engstrand is an insinuatingly comic figure who implies everything and says nothing. Paul Hilton’s Father Manders is an oily moralist with slippery morals. Stuart Thompson’s Osvald is clear-sighted and clear-headed, until he isn’t, a figure of rage and desperation. And Hattie Morahan as Alving is superb: more youthful and more sensuous than she is usually played, she is our guide through the play, watching aghast as the hidden horrors unfold under her roof. She holds the whole thing together. A decade after she played Nora at the Young Vic, she is now the woman trying to keep the family from falling apart. Her slow realisation that her son is asking her to end his life was devastating to watch.

Joe Hill-Gibbins’s adaptation is sinuous and driving. At moments, I sensed his inexperience as a writer in that the psychological through lines of the characters seemed sometimes broken and discontinuous, the actors having to work too hard to maintain clarity of situation and purpose. But mostly, this is a glorious revival and a blissfully nasty 100 minutes to stay locked in this Lazar house with the doors and windows closed.

The Reckoning

The BBC has broadcast The Reckoning, a four part drama about the life and crimes of Jimmy Savile. It got some angry responses before it was on, with, for example, Pragya Agarwal writing in The Independent:

It […] feels insidiously callous and thoughtless that an organisation that played a role in glorifying a sex offender and profiting from him, while covering up his actions for many decades, are once again capitalising on his “brand” and the fascination that viewers have with monsters and true crime.

It is neither “sensitive” nor “complex”, but relatively simple. This series is a bad idea – and is being made at the emotional expense of all the people who were once abused by this very man. Their worst nightmares are being brought to life on screen, to be enjoyed by millions – and creating entertainment from the loss of their childhoods, dignity and self-respect.

Richard Morrison wrote in the Times that:

When a famous man (it’s overwhelmingly men) is exposed as a serial abuser on a vast scale, there’s an argument for saying that their names should be erased from human discourse as soon as possible, not memorialised in films and TV docudramas.

a view that Morrison endorses, urging ‘Tim Davie should think again about the BBC’s Jimmy Savile drama’, adding ‘I wish the BBC had never embarked on this sordid project’.

The series was made in 2021 and the BBC appears to have been uncertain about how to schedule it, hesitating before broadcasting it in 2022, pushing it back to 2024, then bringing it forward to last month. As it was going out, the BBC received more flack from commentators, for supposedly letting the BBC off the hook, even though the production was made by ITV Studios, precisely to avoid any accusations of a whitewash.

But it’s now out and I watched it. The first thing to say is that I think it’s a very serious piece of work, telling a horrific, upsetting and disturbing story with tact and restraint, making quite clear the horror of Savile’s crimes, but never dwelling unnecessarily on the acts themselves. The aim of the drama, I’d say, was to show how Savile organised his life, persona and reputation so that he could perpetrate so many crimes and get away with it. It also allowed us to speculate - because that is really all we can do - about his mental state, the things driving him, and how far he understood that he was doing wrong.

The keystone of the production is Steve Coogan. It’s hard to think of anyone else who could have pulled off this performance; Coogan started as an impressionist, including of Savile, but became a major comic actor. He has both the chameleon ability to become Savile and the power to manifest Savile’s unpleasantly malevolent charisma. He plays Savile as someone with impenetrable self-confidence that fractures only slightly in the later years though still remains a kind of iron fortress around his personality. Watching it I was very struck how the enormously eccentric performance of self that Savile’s maintained throughout his life - the peculiar hair, the catchphrases, the cigars, the jewellery, the tracksuits, the scrupulously maintained accent, the attitudes - were both a smokescreen and a distraction. There was so much noise to Savile’s signal; he seemed so weird that it was hard to spot his actual weirdness. (That said, when people who gave him a platform claimed to know nothing about his sexual secrets, I am reminded that in the playground, aged 10, it was widely said that Savile was a paedophile and we didn’t say that about every tv star, just him. How did we know that — if we did, strictly. know that — and his bosses not?)

And then the moral and emotional heart of the production are the survivors, a few of whom are given space and time to bear witness to their own awful treatment at Savile’s hands, both in first-person testimony and as figures in the drama, where we see them shattered by Savile’s reappearance on TV and finding themselves having to relive their abuse, some of them resolving finally to come forward. Those moments are perhaps a hint at another of the drama’s social ambitions. While Agarwal suggested - years before the broadcast - that such a drama would be merely triggering for the survivors, The Reckoning is maybe suggesting here that by laying bare the horrific strategies of an impenitent serial abuser, it might embolden survivors of other abusers to come forward. I hope that works.

This feels like a difficult time for drama-documentaries like this. We are, I would suggest, is a slightly fiction-averse world, where people, for various reasons, many of them good, wish to assert the right to tell their own stories and not have other people tell those stories for them. This is evidently a response to the way that stories by the marginalised have been taken and retold by the powerful in ways that perhaps misrepresent those stories. In particular people of colour have found their stories twisted into shapes that relieve white people of responsibility for their oppression, or tell those stories through white saviours, and so on. For those reasons, there is - rightly - a demand that people of colour should be given space to find ways of telling their stories. But this can also be generalised - wrongly, in my view - into a view that we can only ever tell our own stories, that all storytelling should be personal testimony (‘speaking my truth’), and that there is something monstrous about the very idea of fiction. Now, these views don’t seem to have stopped people making fictional films, TV, or theatre, though there’s been a lot more autobiographical work in the theatre than I remember from a decade ago. But where I think it does manifest quite significantly is in the uneasiness that people have about a show like The Reckoning, where there is a presumption - as witnessed by the two commentators who were able to form a judgment of the show before seeing it - that the very idea of making a drama-documentary about Jimmy Savile must be a ‘sordid project’.

I think this betrays a certain philistinism about art. The idea seems to be lurking here that there are certain topics that are too serious and important for art - implicitly frivolous and trivial - to address. And perhaps it is specifically fiction that is the concern here: creating fictions, telling tales, making stories, isn’t this all essentially lying? Hence the current wish to extract the poison of fiction by making everything authentically personal. Our Puritan history still bears on the present. But I think this massively underestimates the value, power and scope of dramatic storytelling and the insights, the complexity, the perspective that it can bring to any subject, any event, any horror.

I thought of this watching the final episode. The drama is called The Reckoning and it is in the final episode that we understand why. The walls are closing in around Savile; his protective celebrity is beginning to fray; he seems to lose control of his rigorous secrecy, almost, it seems, wanting to confess; accusations are made and he is interviewed by the police; and his interviewer (the drama is sort of threaded through a writer interviewing Savile for a biography) loses his patience with Savile’s evasions and Savile, desperate for attention, promises he will tell all but dies before he can make good on that promise. The impression given is that, before his death, Savile did know that his crimes would catch up with him, that the game was up.

The biography was written. Dan Davies’s In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (Quercus, 2014) was quickly acclaimed for its meticulous investigation of this deeply mysterious and unpleasant man. I read it soon after it came out and … well… I can’t say I enjoyed it, but it was a very powerful account that began to make sense of this terrifying enigma. Now, at least as I read it, Dan Davies was not nearly as heroic in confronting Savile as he appears in The Reckoning. In the book, it is clear that he did repeatedly challenge Savile about the circulating rumours (as did Louis Theroux, briefly, in his 2000 documentary), but in the TV show Davies loses his rag and announces that he’s had enough and is leaving, never to return. This, in turn, shocks Savile, who under the guise of holding court actually has a desperate need for attention, even maybe companionship and, humbled, old and broken, promises to tell his biographer everything. As far said I read the book, this never happened.

But is that wrong? Even if it did not happen, even if there is no proof that Savile ended his days a terrified, lonely man, desperate to confess, petrified of damnation, haunted by his thousands of evil acts, was The Reckoning not right to believe that the Catholic Savile must have seen death approaching with fear? Stripped of his celebrity, isolated by own misanthropy, dislikeability and fastidious peculiarity, are we not entitled to wonder if he was tortured by his own twisted memories? I know it’s easy to think that a man capable of committing those acts might have sufficient sociopathy to protect him from guilt, but that is maybe to fall into the trap that when we see these people as monsters because of their acts, we absolve ourselves of any need to understand them. If they are monsters, there is nothing to say about the. They are nothing like us. But isn’t it more terrible, more unsettling to acknowledge that Savile was a human being, like us? Even typing those words makes me shudder.

Which is why, when people say that reality is stranger than fiction, first I tend to think ‘then you haven’t been reading the right fiction’, but second, and more important, I really believe sometimes fiction can be more truthful than reality.

Now and Then

As you will know, a new, final Beatles song has been released. ‘Now and Then’ is based on a 70s Lennon piano demo. It was attempted during the ‘Threetles’ sessions of 1994-5 that also produced ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real; Love’, but abandoned because of the difficulties involved in extracting John’s voice from the cassette, his piano, and various background noises. It’s also said that George Harrison thought the song was ‘fucking rubbish’, though Paul now claims he was referring to the quality of the recording. Paul has always wanted to finish ‘Now and Then’ and has floated the idea several times in interviews. Now, using the AI technology that Peter Jackson used so spectacularly to clean up the sound for his Get Back documentary, Lennon’s vocal has been newly isolated. Paul has restructured Lennon’s affecting but meandering draft composition into something more musically robust. George’s acoustic guitar from the 1995 sessions was mixed with new bass, drums and vocal from Paul and Ringo, with Giles Martin adding a string arrangement.

It is worth observing that ‘do I like it?’ is sometimes the least interesting thing to say about an artwork. Whatever anybody thinks about this song, a new track featuring all four of The Beatles is a gigantic event in world culture. It has a very clearly and deliberately valedictory quality; Paul has overseen this as a way of placing a final bracket around The Beatles, made even clearer by placing (a new mix of) ‘Love Me Do’, The Beatles’ first single, on the b-side. This is the alpha and the omega, the now and the then, with everything in between implied.

It is also a song replete with signification. Despite the graphic that The Beatles have been using to promote the song (above), I gather that John did not give the song fragment a title. The title is Paul’s choice and undoubtedly resonates with the last words John spoke to him face to face ‘Think of me, old friend, now and then’. These words would tear Paul apart when, soon after John’s death, Carl Perkins presented Paul a new song called, coincidentally, ‘Now and Then’ and it prompted a whole new access of grief. For Paul, one senses, the song is John’s love letter to him.

But it is also, for Paul, his love letter to John. The whole labour of working on this song, keeping faith in it, lavishing care and attention, offering discreet buttressing and support to the song, without drawing attention to himself (no ‘Whatever happened to / The love that we once knew…’ middle-eight here, as there is in ‘Free as a Bird’), playing and singing with John’s voice in his ears, this is all a labour of love.

For us, it is also a song about The Beatles, our love for them and their thanks to us, but also a reflection on this moment.. It feels like a bittersweet acknowledgement that while they are back with new music they’re not really back. The song’s (in some ways) incoherent lyrical play with leaving and staying resonates with the ubiquitous presence of The Beatles and their regretted absence. The song itself is both an announcement that we’re back and this is the end.

I listened to it on a train to work a few minutes after 2pm on Thursday. I remember hearing ‘Free as a Bird’ when it was first broadcast on BBC Radio 1 in December 1995. (‘I have to say, that’s very disappointing’ intoned the forgotten DJ.) Now - as then - I am struck by how extraordinarily, bafflingly recognisable Ringoi’s drumming is. It’s the first thing you hear on ‘Free as a Bird’ and that heavy, powerful, slamming sound, but with elegantly surprising flurries and fills enlivens ‘Now and Then’ immensely. Ringo makes a track ‘The Beatles’ every bit as much as John’s voice.

And oh my, it is arresting how clear the voice is. Unlike ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ where the voice, wreathed in echo, the recording smothered in synth pads and a more self-consciously Beatlesy production from Jeff Lynne, floated spectrally above the song, here he feels almost upsettingly alive and present, right at the heart of the song. In ‘Free as a Bird’ Paul sounded, paradoxically, younger than John. Now Paul’s older voice sits quietly under John’s springy thirtysomething vocal (which sounds, somehow, younger than on ‘Love Me Do’).

Do I like it? Yes, very much. It’s a superb bit of craft by Paul, subtly repointing and sharpening the song, and the arrangement gives it purpose and drive. Giles Martin’s string arrangement is a sensitive Martin Family string arrangement. He has not tried to write something that sounds like his father’s work any more than he tries to sound like his father when he speaks; he just does, and it just does.

Some people have criticised the lyrics. They are simple, they say; sentimental, even trite; some of them seem to have a boilerplate quality that might have been fixed later had John taken it to the studio. All of this may be true, but The Beatles always knew that lyrics were parts of songs and it’s the overall effect that matters. Part of what Paul has done for John, a last fond favour, is to build the song so that these simple words seem Ruch and full. I detect something deliberate in the slightness of the lyrics: ‘now and then / I want you to be there for me / Always to return to me’ seems to me a rather affecting juxtaposition of the fleeting and the permanent, a mock-casual tone that masks deep feeling. Which could not be more John.

I am sure that, at some point, someone will be inclined to create more new Beatles tracks. There are more John demos. There are reputed to be things the Threetles worked on (‘Grow Old With Me’? ‘All for Love’?). There may be 60s fragments that could be finished. Generative AI might be involved; significant artists might be involved and, who knows, the results might even be good. But I am sure neither Paul or Ringo would want any part in it. This is too good an ending to spoil.

And that of course that’s why I can’t hear this without mourning. It has the quality of a last door closing;. It’s a new Beatles song that says there will be no more. It says hello, goodbye.

Robert Holman

Robert Holman

At this year’s TaPRA conference, in the Directing & Dramaturgy working group that I co-organise, we had a panel of two papers on Robert Holman. We agreed that I might give a slightly longer introduction to this panel, perhaps to situate Holman for delegates unfamiliar with his work and I thought I’d reproduce it here.

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Robert Holman, who died in December last year, was and is very much the playwright’s playwright. His writing life bears some of conventional marks of success: he was widely performed by two of our national companies, the Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare Company; there was a retrospective season of his work at the Royal Exchange. But he was never part of a movement and his mercurial work – both flamboyant and subtle, both deeply realistic and wildly, preposterously fantastical – is hard to describe, difficult to align clearly to the strongest currents of British playwriting. As such he was never thrust into the centre ground of British theatre culture.

Holman was born in 1952 and grew up on a farm in the Cleveland Hills near the market town of Guisborough, North Yorkshire. His early work was performed at the Bush, the Cockpit, the Traverse and Theatre Upstairs. In the 1980s, perhaps the peak of his productivity and centrality, he wrote prolifically for the Bush, Royal Court and RSC. Some of the plays he wrote in that decade – Other Worlds(1983), The Overgrown Path (1985), Making Noise Quietly (1987), and Across Oka(1988) – are, I think, among the finest plays written anywhere in the last hundred years. The third of those, Making Noise Quietly, is the only one of those that seems to have a secure position in the repertoire; there were major revivals by the Oxford Stage Company in 1999 and the Donmar in 2012. Meanwhile, its structure has been widely influential – it comprises three apparently separate short plays but with emotional echoes of fleeting encounters, shared pain, moments of understanding between strangers – and can be seen directly influencing 2000’s Under the Blue Sky by David Eldridge and 2011’s Wastwater by Simon Stephens. Both of those writers have acknowledged their admiration for Holman’s work and indeed all three collaborated on the apocalyptic A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky in 2010, the younger two, I thought, showing the most Holmanesque sides of their work in deference to the senior writer.

At a post-show conversation with Nick Hern after a performance of Bad Weather at the RSC in 1999, Robert Holman described his writing process like this. ‘I start writing every morning at 9.30. It can’t be before or after that or the day is ruined. And then I just start writing until one of my characters says something that surprises me’. I’m quoting from memory but I’m confident this is pretty accurate because, first, it resonated very strongly with my own fledgling experience of playwriting and, second, because it resonated very strongly with my experience of Robert Holman. Not least in scene 6 of Bad Weather itself where the young thug Luke suddenly, apparently out of nowhere, declares his sexual feelings for Agnes, the visiting septuagenarian nanny of his friend’s mother.

In Other Worlds, eighteenth-century Yorkshire folk, whipped up in fear of a Napoleonic invasion, find an ape washed ashore and hang it believing it to be a Frenchman. But in a moment of magical surprise, just before the ape is hanged, he turns and delivers a speech to us, giving a whole new life to the play and its world. Watching Rafts and Dreams Upstairs at the Royal Court in 1990 I watched breathless the minutely observed domestic drama of the first half between clumsy Leo and his variously phobic wife Hetty, helped to a new kind of accommodation with the world by their neighbour Neil. He helps them clear the garden and dig up an old tree root, beneath which they find an underground lake, the waters in which, by the second half, have risen and flooded the entire world.

These moments of surprise are breaks in the texture of his work that both exemplify the complexity of his vision of how the domestic and the imaginative entwine each other but also of why he is such an indefinable writer. Is he personal or political? Contemporary or traditional? Are these essentially quiet plays – or do they make noise? If he’s political, what are his politics? He seems very current in many respects, yet there are hints of writers like Rattigan in his work, particularly in the aching sense of emotional disconnect and the restrained hints at queer dissidence, in plays like A Breakfast of Eels from 2015. Holman remains in some ways a mystery; he is a writer that among playwrights, in my experience, inspires something close to awe, though he has attracted much less attention among academics.

But this afternoon, we’re going to change all that! To help us think about this remarkable writer we have two wonderful speakers, Dr Poppy Corbett and Dr Rachel Clements…

The Trials of Fred Kaps

Fred decides to walk.

Yesterday Bob had sent a car. They had only driven a couple blocks when the driver stopped. Fred thought they must be at a light and was still flicking a card around his fingers, lost in thought. He was embarrassed that the driver had to tell him they’d arrived. He got out of the car feeling like a zondaar. Three minutes that took and they sent a car! Today was clear and dry. The streets were busy but of course they were. It’s New York. It would take no more than five minutes to make the journey by foot. So today, Fred will walk.

He soon regrets it. He has a suit bag that he had slung awkwardly over his shoulder, worrying all the time about creasing his tuxedo and white shirt. He should have had the suit sent ahead. He also has a small briefcase which contains the magic. Trying to keep the bag in his left hand steady while balancing the suit bag makes him sweat. He always sweats. He feels an ache in his left arm. He rolls his shoulder cautiously, bringing the suit bag a little further forward, easing the strain on his arm muscle. The arm must be supple.

He tries to look insouciant, but his sense of the comic also means he can’t help allowing moments of annoyance and frustration flit across his face. As he walks along the road, he considers stopping to swap hands with the two bags. How would he do that, he wonders? Could he do it without putting either of the bags down? He imagines twisting his right hand laterally round to bring the suit bag in front of him, the fingers not hooked on the coat hanger scooping up the briefcase and relieving the left hand, placing the left hand fingers in a position to receive the hanger as it dropped from the right hand forefingers to the left, the two hands then going their diagonal ways, the left hand up to the shoulder and the right hand down to the side, holding the case, all one fluid motion of course. There’s something unbalanced about that last move, he thinks; the left hand requires an extra swirl to flip the bag over the shoulder while the right is dropping. What curlicue would misdirect the eye to the briefcase, to balance the flamboyance of the suit bag twirl?

He turns right at 53rd and 7th, within moments crossing Broadway. He looks up and down the avenue expectantly. He sees no theatres to the right and the theatre on the left has The Girl Who Came to Supper on its awning, which sounds to his ears like it might be a sex comedy. That’s what these Americans like, isn’t it? Sex and girls and screaming. Well that’s what they think they like, thinks Fred. But I have something quieter for them. It requires a bit of concentration. It repays concentration. The harder you look, the more silent you are, the more your own eyes will astound you.

Fred enjoys that thought and the briefcase in his left hand feels lighter and heavier at the same time. He is in command of it and if he is in command of it, he is in command of everything.

And he has arrived. He pushes through a large group of girls who are talking, obstructing the door, oblivious. He looks through the window and the doorkeeper sees him and buzzes the door. Fred pushes it open. Hey Michael. Good morning, Mr Kaps. Michael is Irish and Fred figures they are Europeans together so he stops for a moment to pass the time of day and also to rest the suit bag for a moment, placing it carefully across Michael’s countertop. He stretches his fingers as they talk.

Bit of a drama this afternoon, Mr Kaps. Oh why is that? Wells is here but only three of the four Fays. They’re combing the bars for Susie! Oh dear me, that won’t do. No indeed it won’t, Mr Kaps. Bob is beside himself. Wouldn’t you be, Michael? I dare say I would, Mr Kaps. I dare say I would.

In his dressing room he flicks the cards between his fingers and tries to suppress the mounting excitement he feels. Ken said he’d got the trick from Baue, but Baue puts no life into it. The trick should appear to baffle the magician, this is what Baue never saw. Baue is a technician. See what I can do, says Baue, and we see what he can do. But Fred mystifies everyone, even himself. That’s the light and shade, thinks Fred, and the card flicks around his fingers, over the index, under the middle, up around the ring, right over the pinkie and back. This card, then this card, then this card.

It’s a mixed bill. Good old-fashioned variety entertainment. There’s a husband-and-wife comedy duo, a pop group, the acrobats (including the missing Susie), and members of the cast of a musical based on Oliver Twist. Fred has seen this musical and he hopes they are on after him. It’s a good show; he took Nelly and she really liked it. She liked it more than he did but he trusts Nelly and so he wouldn’t like to go on after them.

He did two rehearsals the previous day and he doesn’t get into the tuxedo yet. He walks onto the studio floor and the floor manager shows him his marks and takes him through the order. He is relieved to see that he is separated from the musical cast by quite some way. The husband-and-wife duo follow him, which will be pleasant. He thinks he might stand in the wings, if he is permitted to do so, and watch them.

No Fred, you know what you are thinking and it is unworthy of you. It is variety. The audience will turn their attention from magic to comedy quite well and the husband and wife will not suffer from your card trick, no matter how superb it is. Do not expect too much, Fred. Expect everything, and anything will disappoint. Expect nothing and something will dazzle. A magician knows this better than anyone.

It’s a popular one tonight, Mr Kaps, says Jerry. Is it, Jerry? People have lost their minds about this show. 50,000 of them trying to get tickets. Fred shakes his head in agreement, though he understands it perfectly and is not surprised. It’s television. This is what entertainment is now. It’s democracy. Still, 50,000!

In his dressing room again, he unzips the suit bag. When he was thirteen, barely a month before his fourteenth birthday, his mother had come into his room and said, you know that noise last night, the banging, the booms. The knal, mama, yes. It’s all over for Rotterdam, she says, and for the mother country. And she cries right there. Young Fred sat on his bed and didn’t know what to do so he let her cry. And then she said something strange, that his cousin Meindert, who was in the army, well he will be coming home in a bag and she cries again. Fred doesn’t understand this but for the next few days he wonders about someone coming home in a bag and the thought troubles him. He imagined Meindert, who used to swing him round when he was seven, laughing, wearing a bag with holes cut out for the arms and legs, but he knows that wouldn’t make mama cry, so he thinks of Meindert in pieces, like a doll before it has been assembled, knocking about in a bag. And whenever he unzips his suit bag before a show, he flinches because he half-expects Meindert’s arm or head to fall out of it.

White tie and tails some people think they’re already history. But what does that even mean? Fashions come and they go. It’s a precise look and it says I have nothing to hide. It shows respect for the audience too. He flips two cards around his fingers one in each hand. He had passed the dressing rooms on his way back and he had stopped in to the cast from the musical and wished them luck. Young Davey had asked for his autograph and he’d given it. It’s going to be a magical night, kindest regards, Fred Kaps, he had written. You don’t know how magical, he had thought, but crushed it down. Susie had been located and so now the acrobats had their four Fays.

On the door of the biggest dressing room there is a star and the name of the pop group. Fred grimaces at the pun in the word ‘Beatles’. He doesn’t really enjoy pop. He acknowledges jazz and he admires the art of men like George Gershwin and Jerome Kern, because they are songsmiths. Songsmithery is craft made art by practice, arduous practice, he thinks as he turns the cards around his fingers, flashing this card, then this card, then this card.

A relay speaker from his dressing room plays the sound of the audience entering. They sound excited as so they should. This is The Ed Sullivan Show. Tens of millions of people watch this programme. Fred waits to see if this thought makes him tremble. It makes him smile, his iron resolve. He remembered the World Championship in Amsterdam, almost ten years ago. The decks stacked against him, everyone said, but what’s that to a magician, and he won the Grand Prix for the second time. He had his doubts before that but Nelly had run him a bath, he always remembered that kindness, she just ran him a bath and said she loved him and believed in him and he came out of that water a different man and he had no doubts. He produces a card and turns it.

There’s a knock on the door and Fred rises and adjusts his white tie and gathers a small bag of props, a salt cellar, a pack of cards. Perfectly ordinary items, of course, until they’re not. He concedes that he feels excitement. No, excitement is too strong a word. He feels a kind of pity for the audience who do not know yet that they are about to experience his new trick, because it is new; Baue used some of those moves, of course, but a pigeon and an eagle both flap their wings, the effect is quite different. He stands at the edge of the studio out of sight from the audience, protected both by the angle and a theatre curtain. Cameras move back into position. The floor manager speaks to an unseen producer through a microphone. An assistant checks that he has everything he needs. He nods solemnly. Yes, I have everything.

As an advertisement for a headache tablet plays out over the house band’s lively introductory music, Ed Sullivan, passing, grasps his upper arm and says you’re going to be swell, we’re glad to have you on, it’s a good crowd isn’t it? And before Fred can speak, Ed is announced and the curtains rise and he’s gone. Fred can hear him speaking to the audience but he can’t make out very much. He thinks he hears a mention of Elvis Presley, but the name provokes neither laughter nor applause from the audience. Fred is not surprised but he is saddened. It was inevitable that the mania would pass. It is, Fred reflects, built into the definition of a mania that it passes. A permanent mania could scarcely be understood as a mania. It would just be the way how things are now.

More advertisements. Fred senses an unusual mood in the audience. A wayward excitement, a peculiar kind of disattention, as if they might each be distracted by the slightest noise, a flash, even a pulse of emotion. There is a nervousness in the audience, in fact it seems to Fred that teeth are chattering everywhere.

Very well. He will have to redirect their attention to the small matter of the here and now. This card, then this card, then this card. He will control their laughter, make it his laughter. He looks forward to it. Fred has never concerned himself with those religious maniacs who believe magic immoral or evil. In fact he admits that he sees a certain value in the invitation to look anew at the world, to pay attention to detail, to search one’s own perceptions for the source of error. It would be too far to call this moral guidance but he is perhaps contributing to responsible citizenship.

The advertisements have finished and Ed Sullivan speaks again and he announces ‘… The Beatles’.

And the noise begins. Fred has not heard a noise like this except maybe at the airport, the sound of a jet engine roaring. For a moment he does not know where it is coming from and looks about him. But it is the audience. And then he hears that there is a kind of music playing, but it mixes with the screaming and he is not sure if the screaming is part of the music or the music is part of the screaming.

Fred Kaps stands still. He is not listening to the noise, only hearing it. The noise is incomprehensible to him. He is not breathing, Fred Kaps. He feels as if he is beaten back, as by a strong wind. He has an urge to step forward but dares not in case he finds he can not. He cannot hear what the noise means, if it is joyful or malevolent. The noise fills his head and he feels it disordering his careful routine. He turns over the cards in his mind, his hand rigid on the bag. The noise is without edges. It fills him to the edges of his horizons, it extends interminably into the future, it seems to erode the past, as there had been nothing before the noise. Fred feels himself drawn into the noise, not as its hearer but as more noise. His skin feels old because of the noise. His skin is wet. He sweats as he becomes noise. The noise builds, even when it seems to subside, it is still building. Even when the music stops and the screaming stops, it builds. The air is the noise now.

The pop group has stopped and the audience is not screaming but still the noise screams in the room, into the cameras, into the air, into Fred. He feels dry with noise, dusted with noise. The floor manager is talking to him, cupping his hand and shouting into Fred’s ear. Fred listens sightlessly. He adjusts his grip on the bag, the only readiness of which he feels capable. An advertisement promises something, something as Fred tries to smile, cracking thin lines in the noise that clings to his face. He clears his throat to dislodge some noise. As he steps forward he feels heavy with the noise clinging to his tuxedo, his shoes sticky with noise.

Ed is talking. A very amusing magician we saw in Europe. Fred’s shoes kick up small percussive clouds of noise. The crowd applaud, unnoisefully. Fred’s skills have no purchase here. He walks though. He walks.

This card, then this card, then this card.

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On 9 February 1964, The Beatles opened The Ed Sullivan Show, their first live performance on US television. The episode was reputedly watched by 78 million viewers at home and, in the studio, by over 700 mostly female fans whose screams became iconic. The evening was quickly recognised as marking a generational shift, an irreversible cultural transformation, a moment of history. Celebrated Dutch magician Fred Kaps was also booked on the show and he directly followed The Beatles.