The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

Author:Quentin Crisp [Crisp, Quentin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Social Science, Gay Studies, Biography & Autobiography, General, Gay Men
ISBN: 9780141180533
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 1977-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

As the meteoric dust fell invincibly and insatiably on the early Caledonian Market furnishings of my room, I sat and waited for my call-up. Although I now had no work to do it was not hard to fill in the time. While other districts of the trembling city were busy fire-watching, learning first aid and digging incomprehensible trenches in London squares, Chelsea was occupied exclusively with amateur theatricals. Wearing steel helmets and gas-masks, air-raid precautionists and auxiliary firemen hastened along King's Road. If asked by anxious civilians what was up they said in tense voices that the pantomime rehearsal had been changed to half past six at the Town Hall. Apart from shows arranged with a jolly laugh by absolute amateurs there were also innumerable productions put on quite seriously by semi-professional actors in dim billiard halls in Notting Hill Gate.

Through a Miss Murison, who later knit her soul more permanently with the theatre by marrying Paul Holt, I became connected with one of these ventures. She asked me to write a revue. When I had finished it, I found the idea had been abandoned some time back by her co-directors in favour of a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel. As the stage of the theatre at which this play was put on was the size of a kitchen table (but not so strongly constructed), the great whirl of the ballroom scene was difficult to manage. Indeed the whole play suffered from its constricted setting. An exiled aristocrat entered through a doorway so narrow that she was compelled to hold down the wide brim of her hat against her ears. When first seen she appeared to be wearing a poke bonnet. A moment later, when she let go of her hat brim, she seemed to have on her head a great flapping bird that was finding it difficult to settle on a moving perch.

This ill-advised production was followed by a work called Fishing for Shadows. Acts two and three were still being translated while the first part was already in rehearsal. Miss Murison had asked the young man, a Russian, who was doing the play from French into English, for a comedy to 'take people's minds off the horrors of war'. She had received his word that this was just what Fishing for Shadows would do. Almost every page that he handed her contained another suicide. At length Miss Murison felt compelled to seek reassurance by asking, 'You did say it was to be a comedy, didn't you?' The young man indignantly replied, 'It's as funny as The Seagull.' Now that his reputation has reached its full scale we can assume, which no one dared to do at the time, that this was a joke. The translator's name was Peter Ustinov.

Except in the incompetence of their productions neither of these shows was typical of the output of the little theatres of that time, all of which had a more or less homogeneous policy. Before the rise of Joan Littlewood there

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