The Stefan Golaszewski Plays: Great. But: Awkward!

Culture alert! It's only 7th January and already I have seen a play. This makes this, with extrapolation, the most highbrow year I've ever had, although my presence at a karaoke evening next week means that statistic is already tottering on the omnipresent ice.

The play that I saw last night was in fact a) two plays and b) not so much two plays as two one-man dramatic monologues. Hey! They have names, you know! The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved and Stefan Golaszewski Is A Widower; written and performed by Stefan Golaszewski, both a talented bloke and a boon to every theatre critic with a word quota to fill and few ideas to fill it. Stefan Golaszewski is someone I know through being one quarter of the Cowards - seek out their stuff on BBC4 if it is repeated again, although I know not if they still operate as a foursome due to their successful solo careers, which is a great shame for Coward-lovers who I will herefore refer to as Cowardly Custards because I am a linguistic genius - and also because Stefan Golaszewski is a college friend of a friend of mine, of which more later.

So, The Stefan Golaszewski Plays. (I'm sorry. I just love the challenge of typing his name. Try it! Stefan Golaszewski. It feels like your fingers are doing some kind of triple Salko) I can't give a particularly incisive review, seeing as the last time I saw a play I caught a lollipop thrown from stage by a cow, but I thought it was pretty damn good. The first play is the first-person description of an 18-year-old Stefan Golaszewski...OK, OK, SG...hopelessly falling for a gorgeous woman that wanders into his line of vision in a pub, eats his pork scratchings, inspires majestic poetry of the soul and then shits on his heart, as gorgeous women are wont to do. Having made every woman in the audience (ahem) fall madly in love with him, he returns after the interval as the 76-year-old SG - recently widowed, looking back on his life, in turns rueful, giddy with happy memories, and snarling with bitterness, with few flashes of the innocent, sensitive kid of the first play. And every woman in the audience (AHEM!) falls madly straight back out again. Some beautiful visual touches, too, in a mostly wordy experience. A suitcase full of yeses in various languages showered over the audience in response to the gorgeous woman asking for a kiss; an unending parade of parcels bought for a cold and distant wife, thrown to the ground in exasperation. The second play didn't get the critical acclaim of the first when they were performed separately, but I slightly preferred the second one, which probably shows how much I know.

So far so great. What about awkward? Well, this is a bit that both intensified and awkwarded-up the Stefan Golaszewski experience. As I mentioned, SG is acquainted with my theatre-going pal, let's call him The Bo, and due to the scrummy intimateness of the venue - The Bush Theatre in Shepherd's Bush, less a theatre and more a box with some benches on three sides - plus the popularity of the play and the lateness of our feet, we were left to sit right at the front, in full Stefan Golaszewski view. As he clocked The Bo, who he had not seen for a good long while, there may have been the teensiest of pauses, but an object of professionalism, SG ploughed on regardless. (Although what would he do? Fall to his knees sobbing? Angrily demand we get out? Thought not.) But as the plays went on, there were quite a few moments when he directed stuff straight at us. Both of us. Which included me. (Hang on, let me just put that narcissism alarm that's blaring on mute - it's gonna be going for a while...) He's quite the intense performer, is Stefan Golaszewski, and fantastic with it. But it did mean that as I stared, mesmerised, at him in full ranting flow, and he suddenly looked directly at me and screamed the killer line right in my face, it was...awkward. I didn't know what to do. I tried to hold his glare but I couldn't, so I dropped my eyes to the floor and twisted my paper yeses round and round until they were razor-sharp spears.

Then I poked his eyes out.

Obviously not. And obviously he wasn't looking at me, rather through me, and obviously it was just a coincidence of eyeline, but I do thoroughly recommend the front-row challenge, if you ever see The Stefan Golaszewski Plays. It meant it definitely made more of an impact on me than if I was tucked away in a corner. And obviously I am now composing a one-woman play about a freakish loon who goes to see a one-man play and sits at the front and reads far too much into the experience and ends up destroying the man's life, who then recovers his life by writing a one-man play about a woman who went to see his one-man play and *explosion of meta*

CONCLUSION: Play very good. Stefan Golaszewski fun to type. I still bit fruit-looped. End.


Update: just realised here, two days later, the massive inconsistency of my Stefan Golaszewskis. Goleszewski, Golaszewski. Let's call the whole thing off. Anyway, all misspellings now spelt correctly. I should probably fire myself.

Picture The Scene: Roaring Fire, Overflowing Bookshelves, Scent Of Slight Abuse Of Power

Good evening, class. Please come into my beautifully well-appointed study. Tonight we're going to pick up where we left last time, and consider what it is about writing that can so enrapture one's heart and muddle up one's rational thinking processes. Let's start by considering the words kindly left by M Bete de Jour. No, no, you can't see them sitting all the way over there. Come a little closer. Here, I'll shuffle up my lavishly overstuffed Chesterfield. But not quite enough for anyone's comfort except mine. Just let the tops of your thigh awkwardly rest against me. That's the way. Ahh, yes. That is definitely the way.

Anyway! Over to La Bete:

I think we fall for writers because writing is a short cut to the soul. Words are everything, aren't they? Most of the time. But sometimes we make mistakes, and sometimes writers lie. I don't mean the twists and tweaks that I (for example) perpetrate to keep myself hidden (although some people would count those as lies of a most dastardly order, I'm sure), but big emotional lies.... Actually, maybe writers lying isn't the problem - maybe it is just that we read them wrong. I mean, there's no way that Kurt Vonnegut, for example, who I think is one of the warmest and most decent human beings I've ever read - there's no way that he could have been a bad person in real life. I just don't believe that. But then there are other writers, who may be brilliant and outrageous and incendiary and inspiring even - no names mentioned, but maybe your David falls into this category - who in real life are wholly self-centred and utterly incapable of properly relating to other human beings or opening themselves up. Yet because we love their writing, we assume they're wonderful people. Maybe we just blind ourselves with our admiration.

OK. Let's all hold hands and turn to each other and laugh and run and gaily plunge right into the big 'un. Writing is a short cut to the soul. A distinction first, between fiction writing and the kind of stuff I want to refer to more, blogs, columns, confessional, personal stuff. Not that there might be much difference; it must be very easy for a person with a modicum of imagination (that's a standard scientific unit - 1 modicum equals 12,000 Boormans, and no, I will never let this grudge lie) to create a character purporting to be themselves that is every bit as fictional as the most heroic and sympathetic of imaginary folk. Assuming that there is no cynical manipulation, and what goes on the page or screen is them, it IS their soul bared in saucy textuality, is that the real them, or maybe a more polished, confident representation of the best of them, and is that what we fall for?

I mean, I dunno about other bloggers, but this is not what I sound like in real life. There's something about putting yourself and your experiences and sometimes your innermost, most boring thoughts onto a blog, then sharing them with potentially everyone with a working fucking laptop thanks very MUCH Dell with your stupid graphics card that literally can't stand the heat and blows up 2 weeks after warranty...excuse me, I must wipe the angry foam away before it leaks onto my little netbook and I am stranded from the land of the internet forever, clinking sadly like the Saucepan Man as the cloud moves away from the top of the Faraway Tree... Yes, sharing them with potentially anyone, that is paradoxically and simultaneously really cowardly and monumentally overconfident and arrogant. I don't have my real name anywhere near this, although most people who read it know me *waves maniacally till wrist snaps* because I'm petrified that someone I vaguely know will read it and think it's crap. And it will affect what they think of me in real life. That is cowardly. But also, I am not a gregarious sort, and there is no way I would ever go up to someone at a party (or indeed go to a party) and go "Hey! Wanna hear my views on Derren Brown? The G20? Earlsfield Library? Pull up a pew! It'll take hours and hours and hours!" But, and this is arrogant, I'm perfectly happy to do it on the internet. Maybe because I don't have to watch them going glassy-eyed with boredom, then glassy-faced with boredom-related death.

Point? Oh, must I? OK. Point. I agree that writing is a short cut to the soul. I think what comes out onto this blog is as close to me as anyone's ever gonna get, but a me that a lot of people in my real life don't see, a me that is confident, outgoing, shiny, and has absolutely perfect, and I mean heartbreakingly, angels weep, heaven itself is ripped asunder by the unending beauty of it all perfect, tits. And when I read other people's blogs and columns, I assume that's what's coming through too. (Not the tits. OK, mostly the tits.) So if the substance is there, the soul is there to be connected with, and all the crap of normal life that gets in the way, that makes you self-conscious and self-centred, closed and unresponsive, and frankly human, is not, it makes it very easy to think you're falling for someone.

OK, but can that ever be real? Wellllll. Not in my sorry experience. But maybe for someone, somewhere it will be. I hope so. That would be nice. Not me though.

Last thing, and then I promise I will never mention him again, cos, you know, as my sidebar will always state, OBSESS MUCH?! I made a trip into Big London today to the Big Foyles to buy Mr Cattermole's book. I found it, in a rare moment of Dewey Decimal System Hilarity, in the Relationships section surrounded by the lurid pinks and reds of various sexy sex sex SEX guides. I quite wanted to take a picture but a) woman in large army coat slightly flushed and sticky from brisk walk hanging suspiciously round the Kama Sutra? Not sure what impression that would beam out into the world but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the wrong one and b) there was a ridiculously well-adjusted couple giggling over the more salacious books, presumably before going and having a ridiculously well-adjusted shag that no mere written words could ever improve. Sod 'em. I'm sure they sod each other. Urgh. Anyway, I'm about three chapters in, and I highly recommend it, but possibly for not reading on a crowded train where you will laugh and people will peek and their peeking eyes will see extraordinary streams of filth and their noses will crinkle and their feet will shuffle away. Though, actually, more room. Yay! And I am looking forward to seeing if I will, by the end of the book, be utterly enamoured or merely completely infatuated. It's nice to have choices.