School Play: The Holy Grail

This year's school play has just finished its 'run'. At first sight, The Holy Grail must seem a somewhat bizarre choice, but by now we have got used to the risks which Daire Cunningham runs. It was a re-make, or perhaps re-furb might be the better term, of the film, Monty Python's Holy Grail, and it turned out, how could we ever have doubted, brilliantly.

Monty Python's Flying Circus was first televised when I was either in or entering the sixth form and it somehow touched the nerve of the times; it became at the same time wildly popular and a cult. Its sketches and catch phrases and performers infused the culture of the time and it was part of that mildly and very English anarchy of the sixties and early seventies, outrageous and yet somehow courteous. That was over forty years ago and the world of comedy has moved on. What I watch now on the TV offers an ambivalent pleasure: coarse, cruel, edgy, uncomfortable and, at times, occasionally, very, very funny. But not kind. How could Monty Python speak to this generation, a generation that doesn't even have the films, of whch in my opinion The Holy Grail is the peerless example, within its frame of reference.

I was wrong. The cast got it. Their timing, pace, relish, engagement showed that they understood what was going on at a deep and unconscious level and it was clear, my goodness how clear, that they loved it. Performance after performance showed the same confidence and possession of the stage; they related to each other and, above all, related to the audience without any apparent ambarrassment - and believe me, at times there might have been cause - or diffidence. In one sense, they had no help: there was no set and all the action took place on our black stage, which is, by the way, looking increasingly shabby. So the world they created was entirely in the imagination, which is the only place in  which it ever could exist. It was a triumph of theatre, a joyous collective experience. And it was silly, childishly, irredeemably silly.
Monty Python is one example of a long particularly English tradition of silliness which spans back to  Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in the nineteenth century. It passed through a golden age from the fifties to the early nineties largely thanks to the strange inspiration of Spike Milligan, the onlie begetter of The Goons, and a crop of radio shows which I loved: Round the Horne, together with Beyond our Ken, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, two shows on TV, Michael Bentine's It's a Square World and Twice a Fortnight, both now almost completely forgotten, more recently perhaps, Not the Nine O'Clock News. The only survivor of that time is, I suppose, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. There was, of course, a more cerebral silliness in the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, NF Simpson and early Tom Stoppard, but that emerged from an understanding that the world was at bottom meaningless and all our lives and efforts merely ways of passing time betwen the womb and the grave. The humour of Monty Python didn't need, possibly didn't want, such high seriousness. Its silliness, a rather male sort of silliness, had no reason to exist, it just was. Their humour, Milligan and Bentine's humour, Monty Python's, was crazy, utterly without logical narrative or character or situation, depending on surreal jokes in a world removed entirely from  gray reality.

I woke up on Friday morning last to the first business segment of Radio 4's frenetic news programme, Today. One of that seemingly endless line of formidably articulate business people or financial consultants and advisers was being interviewed, the director of a property company. What's the economic environment like? he was asked. He compared it to an endless English winter, gray, drab, drizzly, unexciting, miserable... His comments chimed with this week's weather, which I don't need to tell you has been rawly cold, windy, wet and dark. All an appropriate metaphorical environment for schools, who, in the last fortnight have been living in a nightmare, faced with deficts on a previously unimaginable scale, betraying their deepest, dearest values to produce balanced budgets and preparing for a world of unemployed teachers, larger classes, reduced choices, diminished opportunities.

So The Holy Grail was like water in the desert; in the purity and innocence of its nonsense, it shone like a good deed in a naughty world.