On Ray Doyle and Martin Shaw (among other things ...)
It's taken me quite a while to recover from this trip. Actually, it often takes me a long time to recover from traveling. The thing is, I'm not particularly ... resilient. I've spent much of my life fighting, with greater or lesser success, a tendency toward despair and hopelessness, fighting to keep from being sucked into the black hole. I have often felt like I am teetering on the knife edge of darkness, just barely holding myself together, keeping my head above water. Changes and transitions jeopardize that very precarious balance, that house of cards, and sometimes my hard-won stability threatens to come tumbling down around me. So I've always had a difficult time with travel - not with being elsewhere, but with the transitions - the process of leaving one place and going to another.
I've always been this way, always had a hard time with leaving and coming back (though not with being away). The college years were tough for me in this regard, though I also loved them: the constant change, complete lack of stability, took a psychological toll. These days my life is mostly good, and quite stable, and my mental state isn't so much a knife-edge - it's wider now, a balance beam, or maybe even a diving board. There's more beneath me, less danger of tipping over with the slightest breeze, and so the spectre of plunging into the abyss doesn't loom so large. Still, traveling - getting ready to leave, leaving, making the mental transition from one head-space to another - is tough for me, fills me with turmoil, stirs up thoughts and emotions I'd prefer to stay safely below the surface.
And this time, adding to that expected travel turmoil were the unsettled, unsettling, vaguely disturbing feelings aroused by the trip itself, and especially seeing Martin Shaw in A Man for All Seasons.
Originally I'd intended to fly straight home from Newcastle after Connotations and a few days in the northeast. But then I learned that the play was opening at the Theatre Royal in Windsor the week after Connotations, with Martin Shaw as Thomas More, and aerye and paris7am were coming to London to see it Friday night. So I decided to extend my trip by a few days.
The main reason I did this was to spend time - fannish time, Pros time - with aerye and Paris in London. I wouldn't have come to London on my own just to see Martin Shaw in a play. First, I'm just not much of a play person. I'm embarrassed to admit it, it seems so ... unintellectual or something, and a betrayal of my good Renaissance Woman liberal Ivy League education, but when it comes to the dramatic arts I think I am something of a Philistine. My movie tastes tend toward the plebeian - Titanic and Gladiator; I seldom appreciate or enjoy small arty films (though there are exceptions - one that comes to mind is a New Zealand film from the early '90s called "The Navigator." But that's entirely irrelevant!).
And I get bored at plays, even good ones. I start getting fidgety and antsy and wish they'd just end ... I can't remember ever getting carried away, getting so into a play that I didn't notice the passage of time. Part of the problem is that often it seems that High Art equals depressing - think Our Town. I don't like depressing things, be they stories or plays, books or movies, because I have such a hard time shaking off the mood they create; I can't always pull myself up after sinking so low. I've often heard it said of fanfic that the great thing is that you can always push the "rewind" button - you can read a death story and not be dragged down because there's always another, happier story - you can rewind and start over. But I can't do that so easily. The darkness leaves a shadow in my mind, and I don't need more shadows.
The other reason I wouldn't have come to London just to see MS is that when it comes down to it, I'm a Ray Doyle fan, not a Martin Shaw fan. I love MS as Ray Doyle - but Ray Doyle is a fictional character. He is not MS, and MS is not him, and the fact that I love Doyle doesn't mean I love Martin Shaw, or want to know anything about him, or - gah - meet him. I don't, particularly. I don't want to know if he's a jerk in real life, don't want to learn that he despises everything to do with the Professionals, don't want to hear that he hated every minute of working with Lew Collins. These things may or may not be true - but whichever, I don't want to know about it. I really want to, need to, keep MS and Ray Doyle separate in my mind.
So I went into this play with a little trepidation, not sure how I was going to react to seeing MS up there when he lives in my head as Ray.
And ... well, I had a very mixed reaction. On the one hand, it was about as enjoyable a play as any I've seen. The theater was gorgeous, and my pre-performance wee dram of Laphroig (with which I fell deeply in lust *g*) left me with a nice warm glow going into the performance. I don't know enough about the actors to comment on their performances - for that look to aerye's post. But once they got into their stride I found myself fairly absorbed, particularly in the second half. MS was, I thought, very effective as More - he brought to the character just the right mixture of passion and humility, wit and intelligence and humor and faith, humanity with just a hint of transcendence, to make him incredibly appealing to me. I also very much enjoyed the performance of Henry VIII; at first I had my doubts, but he grew on me immediately, a perfect combination of megalomania and charm, capriciousness and charisma. And the Common Man was simply brilliant - the key role for me, in fact, the one that gave perspective and kept me involved and slightly challenged, never complacent.
I was sorry aerye, Paris and I weren't sitting together, and though my seat was quite good, I think I'd have enjoyed more being much closer, even if that had impeded some of my view of the stage; I like being close enough to see the actors as "people," to see them breathe and watch their expressions. Other than those relatively minor quibbles, though, it was a surprisingly positive experience for me, as Entertainment.
But ...on the other hand, it was an incredibly, deeply unsettling experience. At first I couldn't figure out why, but it became clearer to me as the play progressed, and when I thought about it and chatted with aerye and Paris after.
It was because ...Martin Shaw is old.
Aerye wrote in her post that when we got back to our hotel room, the three of us watched A Hiding to Nothing "so that Justacat could remind herself that MS was once young and brash and sexy." But that's exactly the problem. Thinking of the character as MS, "reminding" myself of how MS was, brings home with a huge bang the fact that he's not young and brash and sexy anymore. And that, in turn, stirs up all my Issues about endings and ephemerality and the utter inevitability of loss and the meaninglessness of life and ... endings. And there is nothing more likely than traveling down that line of thought to send me plunging into hopelessness and fighting for my equilibrium....
How to keep - is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,...from vanishing away?
...
No there's none, there's none, O no there's none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay,
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
Hopkins may or may not have been talking about physical beauty only, but I'm definitely not - I'm talking more broadly about the relentlessness, remorselessness, implacability of the passage of time. "We can't jump the track we're like cars on a cable, and life's like an hourglass glued to the table; no one can find the rewind button boys, so cradle your head in your hands ...." The appeal of fiction for me, of fantasy, of all the things that form the basis for fandom, is largely that, unlike real life, it doesn't have to end. Ray Doyle lives in my head; he lives forever in my head, like Morgon of Hed and Alan of Isle and Baerd of Tigana and all the other fictional characters I've absorbed since first I opened a book lo these many years ago.
Up above I talked about how the "rewind button" in fanfic doesn't always work for me - but actually it mostly does. Characters can die in stories, true, and the stories may leave shadows behind in my mind. But in fanfic in particular, with its hundreds and hundreds of alternate realities, alternate visions of the same people, no death is permanent. Ray Doyle is never truly dead. He's always there waiting for me, in my imagination, just exactly as I want him to be - young and sexy and brash or stooped and gray-haired and pushing Bodie's wheelchair; he can be one thing this minute and another the next, with no regard for Time or the laws of nature; he is not a car on a cable, his hourglass isn't glued down, and while there's no rewind button anyone can find for you or me or Martin Shaw, there is one for Ray Doyle.
And ... call me neurotic, but I need to believe in that. I've been musing recently in my own head about the "spirituality" of fandom, something I haven't seen much written about. Not spirituality within fandom, but the spiritual aspect of being a fan, of fandom itself, as a community or set of ... beliefs?; of our - my - passions and fantasies. My thoughts are still preliminary now, and I'm certainly not about to start comparing my slash characters to deities, but it's interesting how I phrased that first sentence: my need to believe in something. I don't believe in much, have never been able to find much in the way of comfort or hope in traditional spirituality/religion...but I do turn for hope, for comfort, for sanity, to that place inside me where my characters live, where Bodie and Doyle are always together, linked by a bond that transcends the mortal constraints by which I may be bound, a bond that will in some ineffable, immutable way live on forever ... that "vision," if you will, that idea, that image, that hope, is almost sacred to me, as silly as it may sound. In the end, that's why I'm a fan, why I'm obsessed with fictional characters and relationships (though I know there's a chicken-and-egg thing going on there).
Conflating MS and Doyle threatens all of this. And seeing MS on stage made it much harder for me to keep the distinction sharp; it blurred the lines. Watching A Hiding to Nothing afterwards, the images were conflated; I was hard pressed not to see MS in Ray, to see the person, the actor, and to be acutely, painfully aware that the MS who was Ray Doyle is gone forever, never to return, never never never, despair despair despair. And if I think of Ray Doyle as MS, then that means Doyle - the Doyle I see on the screen - is gone forever. And that simply cannot be.
And now I fear I've gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Well, I suppose that if ridiculous it is, then ridiculous I am, for better or worse. Silly or no, the play left me feeling ... oh, I don't know the right words. Unsettled and uneasy, a bit shaken, confused, struggling to put Ray Doyle and MS in separate compartments in my brain, struggling to regain the sense of that very precious refuge that Bodie and Doyle are for me. I wonder if this is a highly unusual (read: weird) kind of reaction - I haven't heard about it from other fans, and certainly neither aerye nor Paris shared it; perhaps it's a (slightly embarrassing) manifestation of my own very individual neuroses regarding mortality and endings, loss and inevitability and hopelessness.
And yet, I've signed up to see the play again - I'm going back to London in late January, this time with shayheyred and przed as well as aerye, to see it in London itself, in the West End. Truthfully, I'm once again going more for the company and fannish camaraderie than for the play, and indeed I have some ambivalence about seeing the play a second time, but on balance I do want to - if for no other reason than to see if it hits me this way again.
Actually, it wasn't just the play that affected me this way. We spent some time visiting Pros sites in London on Thursday and Friday, and while this was great fun in some ways (report and pics to follow), comparing the present sites with the episode screencaps left me with a little of the same feeling: too much awareness of the weight of time, the utter permanence and irreversibility of its passage, the inevitability of endings and of change. It was fun, and I'd do it again, but again, it left me slightly wistful and unsettled and feeling a strong need to retreat into fanfic, into reading. In reading, I think, the characters are most divorced from physical reality (as compared with, say, episodes or vids), and that's what I needed. So I read voraciously all the way home on the plane Saturday and all day Sunday as I recovered from both jet lag and the emotional turmoil of travel. It was immensely comforting; felt like coming home in a way, to bury myself in stories.
But I find that in truth I'm not entirely without resilience. Here it is Wednesday, and I'm feeling mostly like myself again, ready to tackle archives and vids, beginning to feel the excitement build for ZCon, starting to get over the stiffness of riding again after close to two weeks off - and ready, perhaps, to be finished with the deep thoughts and talk about the simple fun of the trip, the food, the lodgings, the delight of the companionship, the talking and the laughing and the talking some more. But I'll save all of that for another post (assuming I make it through tomorrow ...I don't do well not eating! Must load up on fat tonight ... *g*)