And over breakfast at a nearby cafe the next morning she told me she was going to be leaving the publishing firm in a month to take up a part in a brief run of a new play being staged down in Cornwall.
She said it was being put on by a new repertory company rim by a wealthy theatrical auteur.
I can’t say that any of this was of great interest to me, and I asked in the spirit of polite enquiry, though I was genuinely curious, as to where it was going to be staged. There aren’t exactly a large number of playhouses in Cornwall and the most likely venue had already suggested itself to me. I had a Cornish cousin with a cottage down in Sennen Cove whom I visited once or twice a year, located only a mile or so from Porthcumo, the site of the Minack Theatre. Moreover, I was due to visit him when Celia Waters would also be in the area.
“Is it the Minack Theatre?” I asked her.
“Why, yes it I,” she replied. “Do you know it?”
This coincidence of our being in more or less exactly the same place at the same time gave an outside impetus to our continued association. Frankly, when she first told me she was leaving the publishing company I assumed our brief, unconsummated relationship would dissipate of its own accord, as they often tend to do with two people in their early to mid-twenties, neither of whom wants commitment.
I promised that I would come and see her in the play while I was down there, and she was keen for me to do so, presumably with a view to the idea of its being reported on favorably and published by the firm. I didn’t think there was much chance of that, since the business only really took on plays that benefited from a higher profile, but I didn’t voice the thought.
Still, I asked her to tell me about it.
“Well,” she said, “it’s all rather a mystery really at this point. We have had some formulaic rehearsals for the last couple of weeks here in a space above a pub. It’s all very ritualistic. But definitely cutting-edge and experimental.”
It sounded awful. Like something a group of students obsessed by Berkoff would try and put on.
Over the next few weeks I saw next to nothing of Celia Waters. We didn’t work in the same department; she was in the showroom on the ground floor and I was up on the second floor in the licensing department anyway, but we exchanged pleasantries whenever our paths crossed. I felt as if we had already disengaged from one another.
One day she wasn’t there at all. A director told me she had quit a week earlier than planned and had already gone down to Cornwall.
“Actresses, eh?” he said.
Back then even female actors themselves used the term.
I will admit that I didn’t really feel anything much about her having left early and without telling me. My only worry was whether or not I was still obliged to keep my promise to go and see her in that play at the Minack. I knew she was primarily interested in my being there for her own reasons, to the benefit of the play itself, but I decided to delay the decision until I was down in Cornwall myself.
Perhaps the most grueling thing about deepest Cornwall, if you are traveling from London, is the train journey itself. For some reason—and I had never shaken it off, despite several trips there—I had the feeling that it always took longer than one might reasonably expect from looking at a map. After four hours one gets to Exeter in Devon and from there one soon crosses the Tamar into Cornwall and imagines it can only be another ten or twenty minutes more to Penzance. It’s not, it’s another hour. And it’s this last hour that’s the most trying, because it seems so unexpected, as if the region itself extends time to fox outsiders. Of course one recognizes it’s an illusion, but it’s no less disconcerting even when one admits the fact. My cousin had an apposite phrase he would often use in jest and whose use he solemnly advised me marked out a true Cornishman. It was, when asked to do a thing, that a Cornishman would reply that it would be attended to “dreckly” which means not attended to directly at all, but rather in one’s own good time. I suppose, too, that this warping of time was brought to mind most noticeably when one returned to London from Cornwall, because it then seemed that everyone and everything in the metropolis rushed around insanely to no useful purpose.
After two days spent at the cottage in Sennen Cove, occupying my time with walks along the beach, cycling along sunken lanes to little villages like Sancreed and drinking in coastal pubs where Cornish fishermen still grumbled darkly into their cider about “English settlers,” my thoughts were turned again by an outside agency to Celia Waters.
It was while drinking in the local pub, The Old Success Inn, I noticed someone had posted up a flyer on its noticeboard which advertised a play and its performance dates at the Minack. The thing was shoddily produced, being a black-and-white photocopied sheet of A5 paper with what looked like a still from one of those 1920s silent German Expressionist films at its center. It was bordered with Celtic latticework. The cast were listed, amongst whom, was, of course, Celia Waters. And I now learnt the title of the play for the first time: New Quests for Nothing. The writer, director and producer was listed as one “Doctor Prozess.”
The first night was this evening at 7:30 p.m.
I looked at my watch. It was just after five.
I ordered another scotch and soda, trying to make my mind up whether or not to honor my promise.
By 7:25 p.m. I was seated at the Minack Theatre, rather the worse for drink. I had stuck to scotch and soda, with only one beer in between, so as not to fill my bladder during the play and perhaps suffer the awkwardness of having to wander out mid-performance in search of the public conveniences. But I wasn’t really used to drinking spirits and, one packet of crisps aside, the booze had worked on an empty stomach.
I had been to the Minack for the first time last year but the unique nature of it as the setting for a theatrical show impressed me just as much on this subsequent occasion. The venue is an amphitheatre carved into the side of a cliff with incredible views of the Atlantic stretching to the horizon. Huge gulls whirl and twist in the air currents, their cries echoing against the boom of the waves crashing on the rocks far below. And as the sun goes down one is hard pressed to keep one’s attention on events on the platform stage right at the bottom of the tiered open seating.
I had plenty of room to myself, with only one other person on the same row, and he was some fifteen yards away. I counted around thirty people inside, dotted here and there, which made for an atmosphere very much like the venue being empty given its large capacity. There was no buzz of conversation from the patrons before the show began, no rustle of programmes being consulted, and no real sense of anticipation whatsoever.
The effects of the bracing sea air and the half hour walk to get from Sennen Cove to the Minack had finally begun to sober me up when the four actors entered the arena and began their performance.
They were all in formal black tie and tails, as if at a dinner party, both the two men and two women. It was very difficult to tell them apart. They were also all caked in white face-paint with dark circles marked around their eyes and with their scalps closely shaven. I only barely recognized Celia Waters.
When she had described the play to me as an experimental piece I realized it had been an understatement. After some fifteen minutes of watching and listening to the actors I was still at a loss to know what was going on. Their dialogue was risible and incoherent, wandering from one subject to another with no definite purpose, and full of allusions and references that were never explained. They acted the piece in the stylized, melodramatic manner of the silent films of the 1920s with grand gestures and overwrought expressions. I wondered whether, quite deliberately, as with Brecht, the intention was to alienate the audience.