Eine kleine nacht spiel, part two: the what of it

And an evening round the Kleins (of St John’s Wood) is what the play is. It’s a three-hander, a revival, first performed at the National in 1988. Like a classical drama, it takes place in a period of less than 24 hours: an afternoon, an evening, a morning.

There’s Melanie Klein (the ‘great’ analyst, only 56 at the time but seeming far older, in the way that people then seemed to have done). There’s Melitta Schmideberg (her daughter, also an analyst, though not so great). And there’s Paula Heimann (yet another analyst, and greater than Melitta, though not as ‘great’ as Melanie).

In life and the play, Melitta falls out with her mother, challenges her psychoanalytic theories and (not in the play, this bit) doesn’t go to her funeral. (Freud didn’t go to his own mother’s, either. His excuse wasn’t good, either. Not even very convincing.) Paula Heimann became one of the great propagators of Kleinian thought — the end of the play is the beginning of her first analysis with MK.

So it’s the tale of a mother and two daughters, a real one (who fails her) and an acquired one (who helps cements her reputation). And, of course, it’s not pleasant stuff. There’s not much goodness on display.

This Melanie Klein is capricious, arrogant, self-centred, suspicious (she locks her drinks cabinet), patrician. Melitta is put-upon, flighty, almost as self-concerned, slightly histrionic in an Evelyn Waugh/drop-head coupe sort of way. Paula is, well, creepy. She is the woman who comes to dinner — and, once she’s got her feet under the table, doesn’t leave, of course. A poor Jewish immigrant analyst, she clearly sees MK as her main chance. Latch on to her and she’ll survive and prosper. Otherwise . . .

It’s a talkie, of course. No flying, gunplay or conjuring tricks (well, only verbal ones). No warning about strobe lighting on the door. It was a night out for the listening classes — an accident that night, at least, could seriously have damaged the productive capacity of the north London therapy industry.

PS Now this is something I would have included in my book, Filthy English, if I'd known about. But which schmuck should I thank, Mel Brooks or The Onion?

Next up A variant on: leaving that aside for the moment, what did you think of the play, Mrs Lincoln?

Eine kleine nacht spiel, part one: the where of it

A father and (younger) son outing to a mother-and-daughter evening: Mrs Klein, a play, at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. Oddly, although I go to the theatre quite a bit, I’d never been to the Almeida. Which, given its reputation, is even odder.

A regular — an enthusiastic regular — had described it to me as ‘a jewel’. He was right, of course. It’s a Lottery theatre, one of that turn-of-the-century generation of rebuilds funded by channelling the hapless dreams of the poor into bricks-and-brushed-steel arenas for dreams of the rich. From Lottery tickets to theatre tickets.

A century or so ago, Frank Matcham was responsible for creating something like two hundred theatres of a distinct type in Britain. (Hackney Empire, London Palladium, Buxton Opera House etc etc.) I reckon that, a hundred years from now, the Lottery generation of theatres — though not as numerous — will be seen similarly, through a prism of stylistic similarity.

With its amused joining of original building and modernist additions, the Almeida is happily typical of the type. Concrete access ramp meets classical columns — with bar and education facility. It also had the best-dressed and most attractive looking audience I’ve ever seen at the theatre. You really felt as if you were out for a night with Islington society.

First, I wrote ‘the great and the good’, then I typed it out. Not just, embarrassedly, because it was a lazy cliché. But because any notion of there being such an entity as ‘the great and the good’ could surely not survive the merest brush with Freudian thought, let alone an evening round the Kleins.

PS1 This is the first of five blogs about Mrs Klein and her two daughters, one a day for the rest of the week — kind of like a week of analysis.

Next up I get to the play — and the two daughters

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Party pris

Those of you who get my occasional blogmail update would have been invited to the launch party for my book, Filthy English. I thought those of you who couldn't make it might like to know who did . . .

I have learned that the best way to put an invite list together for a party is to do it the same way you'd prepare a bride's outfit - or, as I point out in the book, write a sexy blues. You mix something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

So, among the trades and professions represented were: journalist (of course), ceramicist (and hat-wearer), tax lawyer, editor, receptionist, architect (a brace, at least), psychoanalyst (more than one, in fact - a complex of them, perhaps), actress (too evocative a word to be collapsed into the sexless actor), record producer (currently working with the Pope), photographer, parent counsellor, publican, Indian hotel owner, Iranian golfer, pre-school teacher (several, in fact - they were quite unshocked by the language), travel agent, artist (from Warsaw), charity lobbyist (from Fulham), record company owner (from north Acton), astrologer (from Kentish Town), sex writer (see previous blog posting), teacher, therapist, research scientist, Shoreditch building owner, cartoonist, dance student, school administrators (German, English), press agent (three, at least), charity manager, university lecturer (retired), builder, kitchen designer, magazine designer, pop musician (French, English, Welsh), art teacher (retired), paratrooper (veteran), jewellery maker (and bike-racer), caterer, printer (from Bermondsey) and stilt-walker (one, stiltless).

PS1 You'll find more details of the party here on my publisher's blog site.

PS2 The word in the picture is spelled out in fairy cakes. They were made by my daughter. The photo was taken by this lot.

PS3 The Independent ran a big hunk of my book. It's about swearing on TV. Read it here.

Next up Those filthy English songs, in full.

Dis dissertation or dat dissertation?

In one of the very first lectures of my course, the lecturer said something like: 'Pay attention to the questions you ask and the thoughts you have now because very often they are what you will find yourself coming to when you do your dissertation.'

When she - I think it was a she, there were a lot of female lecturers, maybe a majority - said it, my first thought, of course, was: bollocks! How can she say that? The second was: well, she's been round this track before and she wouldn't say it if it didn't have history, would she?

So - for once - I did what I was told and thought about what I'd been told. What was in my mind? The lecture was about the aims of psychoanalysis. One thing mentioned was Freud's view of these aims. 'Love and work,' he said. That is, a capacity for both those two things was a working definition of both psychic health itself and the aims of his couch trip - by extension, all forms of talking therapies, too. Maybe, added the lecturer, Freud said this or maybe he didn't. No one seems quite sure.

I found myself thinking about this. My journalistic head asked: did Freud say it? if not, who did? There's a story there, surely. Maybe it would make a dissertation.

The trouble was that I felt I had already committed myself to a different subject for my dissertation. At the interview for the course, I'd been asked what I might be doing my dissertation on. Bit premature, I thought, but I said what had been on my mind: punk.

As someone who had been around punk as a writer, I'd long thought that there had never been much of interest written about its psychological character - let alone anything of substance viewed through the psychoanalytic prism.

There had been historical books and memoirs - I'd even written one myself. There had been sociological studies, feminist views and post-modernist structural analyses. God, have there been post-modernist structural analyses.

But there had been nothing specific on its psychology. The material was there and plentiful, I thought. The reconstruction of self by taking on new, often self-lacerating names - Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten etc. The fantastic - maybe even fantastical - anger. The dressing-up - ripped, torn, chains, self-mutilation. The rhetoric - dystopic, millennial.

Even more interesting was the fact that this stuff appealed so deeply to well-educated young men from comfortable backgrounds. The notion that punk was a working class thing was, of course, always so much, well, bollocks. Art class thing, perhaps. Working class thing, no.

More, I'd known some of the people first-hand and read many of the memoirs. I was struck by the painfulness and dislocations of so many of the main players' personal histories. There were a good number of familial suicides and alcoholic and junkie parents - enough that I'm surprised it's never drawn comment. There were also, of course, lots of alcoholics and junkies in the bands - and among the writers.

There was a lot of parental abuse, too - though not always presented as such. Johnny Rotten wrote about how his father broke his son's leg, twice. Once, by whacking his bed with a tyre iron. Twice, if my memory isn't tricking me, by running into him with a JCB. Both accidents, wrote Johnny.

I also remember seeing a lot of what I later came to know as self-harm. People burning themselves with cigarettes. One woman, in particular - a girl, really - slashing her belly with broken bottles, then claiming - without much conviction - that she had been attacked.

For my dissertation, I intended to explore the way the psychopathology of the punk 'elite' and its iconography found a home in the psyche of otherwise regular people - or, at least, the ones Freud elsewhere referred to as subject to no more than 'common unhappiness'. What echoes did punk's hysteria and 'madness' find in us all?

I think my title would have been a take on Richard Hell's t-shirt slogan: Please kill me now (the polite nihilism of punk). Or maybe on Leni Riefenstahl's Nuremburg romp: The triumph of the ill.

That seemed a good enough starting point to me. So when, over the first year, fellow students asked about my dissertation plans, that's what I told them I was doing. They seemed to think it was a good idea, too.

I did, though, sometimes also make a joke that my other idea was about love and work - no more than a joke really, based on an old gag about a pub sign painter and how you can get the word 'and' five consecutive times in one sentence. You can guess the rest.

Next up Dis or dat, I still have to write the bloody thing

Publish and be ******. (Or maybe even ******.)

Not only is my book, Filthy English, now out and for sale in all bookshops (good, bad and smelly) but it’s even had good reviews. Here is the one in The Observer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/18/filthy-english-peter-silverton

Thanks to all of you who got in contact about hearing me on the Today programme. Now I know what a good number of my friends and acquaintances get up to before breakfast on Saturday mornings. The IPlayer link to that show is no longer available but here is a link to what I wrote about it on my (wonderful) publisher’s blogsite.

http://www.portobellobooks.com/Comment-and-Blogs/On-Swearing/Me-John-Humphrys-and-the-Clusterbeep

Next up That dissertation, finally.

PS The book cover is actually blue but the jpg came out this strange pink colour (on my laptop anyway). I’m popping out for some technical advice. Be with you again soon.

Close encounter of a personal kind, three

So there I was in the part of Kilburn that now calls itself Brondesbury, with a plate of barbecue and a glass of red wine. Listening to the conversation around me, I realised that I was surrounded by a partyfull of psychoanalysts.

Which led me to thinking about what might be the correct collective noun for psychoanalysts. Not a partyfull, that’s for sure. The thought of a roomful of them dancing to, say, mid-period grime or deep crunk is not an enticing one.

(What would be their collective musical taste? Bach, mostly, I reckon, and for the pop pickers among them, I guess late Bob Marley. Oh, and I’m sure nearly all of them have a copy of the Buena Vista Social Club.)

So, if it’s a murder of crows, what is it of analysts? An anxiety? A doubt? A neurosis? A regression?

I fell to talking about this with the woman sitting next to me. She was an analyst, of course. One or other of us suggested a couch of analysts.

She asked me about myself. I told her I was doing the MSc course. She knew all about it. I added that all I had left to do was my dissertation.

‘It’s due sometime in mid-August,’ I added.

‘August 14,’ she said.

How could she know the exact date when I couldn’t remember it myself? The question must have been clear on my face. She told me the answer: one of her patients was one of my fellow students.

A listen of analysts?

(To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt. Was she betraying a confidence? She didn’t tell me who it was but still . . .)

Next up Work, love, dissertation