In ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin, the narrator sees put on a very short play he wrote, A BEAUTIFUL GOOD WHOLESOME GIRL, a curtain raiser to the first student production in Ireland of Samuel Beckett's ENDGAME.
The play was produced by DramSoc the student theatre at University College, Dublin. Beckett himself gave permission for the production and one might think he had taken a tiny ironic pleasure in this as he went to Trinity College, Dublin as his Protestant class background dictated while he well knew James Joyce had gone to this other college, founded by Newman and where Gerard Manley Hopkins taught classics and my little play was performed in the complex where the famous argument between the priest and Stephen takes place in A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
I did write another play which had come out of this little poem and the thought of my dead father: KICKING THE OLD MAN.
I showed the play to two people and one theatre. I never heard from the theatre and Roger Dixon, a classmate from Beloit who did direct dismissed it as psychodrama.
The play's second reader was John Benson who was a bartender at The 55, the bar on Christopher Street in NYC. He had had a small role in THE BLOB and directed summer stock. He thought the play funny and sad and well worth putting on... but of course where and and and...
I used a few pages from the play at the beginning and end of JUST LIKE THAT... another unpublished book that I think of as about THE end of the so-called Sixties of the last century. The Notre Dame Review some years ago published a section from this book centered upon the narrator's life encounter with Anthony Burgess
FOUR
down the street
down the street
as hard as you can
kicking the old man
kicking the old man
down the street
down the street
he knows and looks
kicking my old man
as hard as you can
down the street
down the street
laughing at you
laughing at you
kicking my old man
kicking my old man
as hard as you can
as hard as you can
kicking me
kicking me
with a smile
The play was produced by DramSoc the student theatre at University College, Dublin. Beckett himself gave permission for the production and one might think he had taken a tiny ironic pleasure in this as he went to Trinity College, Dublin as his Protestant class background dictated while he well knew James Joyce had gone to this other college, founded by Newman and where Gerard Manley Hopkins taught classics and my little play was performed in the complex where the famous argument between the priest and Stephen takes place in A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
I did write another play which had come out of this little poem and the thought of my dead father: KICKING THE OLD MAN.
I showed the play to two people and one theatre. I never heard from the theatre and Roger Dixon, a classmate from Beloit who did direct dismissed it as psychodrama.
The play's second reader was John Benson who was a bartender at The 55, the bar on Christopher Street in NYC. He had had a small role in THE BLOB and directed summer stock. He thought the play funny and sad and well worth putting on... but of course where and and and...
I used a few pages from the play at the beginning and end of JUST LIKE THAT... another unpublished book that I think of as about THE end of the so-called Sixties of the last century. The Notre Dame Review some years ago published a section from this book centered upon the narrator's life encounter with Anthony Burgess
FOUR
down the street
down the street
as hard as you can
kicking the old man
kicking the old man
down the street
down the street
he knows and looks
kicking my old man
as hard as you can
down the street
down the street
laughing at you
laughing at you
kicking my old man
kicking my old man
as hard as you can
as hard as you can
kicking me
kicking me
with a smile
1 comment:
Nice poem! Love the ending.
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