Reconnected
Simon Gray’s programme note for the original production of Simply Disconnected
Twenty-five years ago (but not to the day) I wrote a play called Otherwise Engaged. It starred Alan Bates, Nigel Hawthorne, and the much missed Ian Charleson, and was about a man (the Alan Bates character) who tried to keep the world at bay by pretending that it didn’t really exist. The world nevertheless kept coming at him, in the form of his brother (Nigel Hawthorne), his lodger (Ian Charleson) and his wife (Mary Miller), demanding from his explanations for his brotherhood, husbandhood, his landlordhood, in other words an explanation for his existence. Why, all the other characters clamoured, do you dare to be here, demeaning us by making us feel compelled to make demands on you? We think we love you. Why, therefore, don’t you put on a show, at least, of loving us back? That’s the story of Otherwise Engaged. Quite a simple one, once you take into account that all the central character – Simon Hench (Alan Bates) – wants is to listen to a recording of Wagner’s Parsifal. His idea of a blissful afternoon.
So here we are, a quarter of a century on, looking at all these people again. Some who were off stage are now on-stage, others who were on-stage are now off-stage (in one, very important case, dead. In another, promoted into a major success at the BBC).
How did it all come about, this resurrecting of a very small, fractional even, English world that happened all those years ago.
How it came about is an exercise in self-pity, my intention being to keep that particular muscle, never under-used anyway, in powerful and ripping form. A year ago (although not to the day), I began to write a book about the events that led up to, and followed from, the abrupt and mysterious departure of a star from a play of mine that was currently being performed on a West End stage. The book was agony to write. But it seemed to be a necessary agony, as I believed that there were demons to be exorcised. Health was seriously at stake, and well-being would follow from publication. What in fact followed from publication was a bad back, followed by the consequence of what I insisted on pouring down my throat in the form of champagne, white wine, scotch, so forth; along with the consequences of what I sucked into my lungs at the rate of fifty to sixty a day: I would like to lay all the blame for this self-inflicted rubbish at the feet of the defecting star, but have to admit that the “self” comes into it somewhere. There is, after all, I suppose, choice, free will and other theological posturings.
Anyway, after finishing the book, crippled and self-destructing, I went off to a Greek island, where I probably cut, given my stoop and drunken lurch, a slightly simian figure. An Englishman at play, in his late fifties, a less frightening spectacle than an Englishman at play in his late twenties, if only through lack of energy. The spirit was willing, but the flesh – oh, the sad old flesh! Not even enough about the buttocks for a spot of “mooning” in restaurants, bars, and on the beach.
When I got back to England I decided that there was nothing for it but to stick myself into a clinic where I would be so massively dosed with drugs that I wouldn’t notice I wasn’t’ drinking. With luck, even that I wasn’t smoking. In fact I was smoking, but there was still joy in the fact that I didn’t notice it. Also my nerves needed a rest, my back needed attention. Within hours of my arrival, I was rendered virtually comatose. I floundered cheerfully about my little cell with its unlockable lavatory, received guests whom I scarcely recognized, conducted stupefied conversations on the telephone, and hazily congratulated myself on taking a step that would restore me to sanity, dignity, and an upright buy real xanax online posture.
The lack of an upright posture was to prove the source of my psychic unraveling. Dozy and inert, I was wheeled about the clinic for an X-ray, then wheeled back to my cell, where I had organized for my entertainment music and television sports programmes, etc, none of which could possibly impinge on my consciousness.
What did impinge on my consciousness, penetrated it like a well-aimed and poisoned arrow, was a young internee, Asianish, I think, though it was his lips rather than his complexion that caught my attention.
“You’ve got to have a lot more tests. We’re pretty sure you’ve got cancer. Though we don’t know which cancer it is.”
So to hell with his complexion. Christmas-cake white or curry-brown made no difference. The words – as in great poems and minor one – were what mattered. They certainly raised my level of self-awareness. “What he means,” I realized, “is that I’m going to die. And very soon.”
About the clinic I was wheeled in my wheel-chair. About and about. From this department to that. My eyes were no longer half-sealed by drugs. Full of drugs, I was nevertheless alertly, probingly full-visioned. I was stuffed down claustrophobic tubes and X-rayed; erected into unnatural positions and X-rayed; my blood tested and retested; my urine pored over. Each morning for five mornings in a row I was told that the cancer I was dying from wasn’t the cancer they’d hypothesized the day before, it was a different, more lethal form of cancer. I recall a tableau that has a Rembrandt-like majesty to it, The Nightwatch, or the post-mortem canvas. Five doctors were grouped around me as I sat slumped in a chair in my cell. One of these, my personal GP, was palely withdrawn, attempting concealement. Beside me was a boisterously South African dandy; next to him his personal assistant, another dandy and so regally camp that he must have been the Queen of the clinic; also in attendance an Oriental, smiling and Korean-looking. A hand from one of these was on my knee. A voice was whispering compassionately that I had possibly two years, but six months was more likely, to live. “We’ve got to face the reality of this,” said dandy, S.A., who didn’t have to face “the reality of this”, except by proxy. The Korean grinned. My own GP receded almost out of the room, by an act of will. And there, framed in Rembrandt, was I, facing the issue of mortality.
Well, they got it wrong. Two aneurisms is all they could come up with, along with the news that I could get all this disinformation and misdiagnosis free, on my health insurance. And why not? After all, I’d ceased to be simply a chain-smoking drunk, I’d been turned by their expertise into an immediate pre-mortem. When I came out of the clinic I contracted pneumonia, which a sensible and clear-voiced doctor informed me I’d probably picked up during the clinic’s enthusiastic foraging for cancer. “Clinics, hospitals – those are the places you usually catch something serious,” he said, “when you’re being treated for something not particularly serious Even if brought on by yourself.”
A short time after being reprieved from – But almost killed by – an illness I never had, I found myself coming back to where I began twenty-five years ago (but not to the day). The hero of Otherwise Engaged, whom I both respect and despise, refuses to answer any important questions about his life, including the central question of whether he wants to live or die. My last year’s experiences led me to wonder how Simon Hench would respond to the catastrophes and absurdities of life a quarter of a century on. Hence Hench again (and Alan Bates again), in Simply Disconnected. We’ll see how he makes out. Those of us who are prepared to buy tickets.
For myself, if it’s of any interest – I’m still drinking more than I should, smoking more than I should, but at least I’m presently immune from the worst health-hazard of my life: the medical profession.