‘He needs to get out more,’ Lily thinks, swotting up on everything of his she can lay her hands on.
She is rereading Ibsen in Sorrento, Quaid’s first success outside Oxford. She calls it rereading but in fact she hasn’t read it before, only seen it. Twice. Once with her mother who went to see everything at the Almeida but in the interval told her daughter she wanted to go home; once with a passing fancy who couldn’t tell if it was meant to be funny. ‘Bit gloomy for me,’ he’d whispered, wondering if and when he dared touch Lily’s knee. ‘A play about Ibsen couldn’t really be anything else,’ Lily whispered in return. She didn’t much care whether her companion touched her knee or not.
‘But no one made him write about Ibsen,’ he replied.
Lily vowed never to go to the theatre with anyone again.
In the interval she conceded that Ibsen was a strange choice. Strindberg would have been more interesting.
‘Certainly hotter,’ the young man said, bringing her an ice cream.
If I give him my knee, maybe he’ll shut up, Lily thinks.
Reading it, she isn’t sure gloomy is the right word. But certainly claustrophobic. ‘My subject is the inside of people’s heads,’ Quaid wrote when the play first came out. ‘I don’t care much what happens anywhere else.’
What kind of lover will he be in that case, Lily muses. This is to jump the gun, but what will it feel like having him rooting around inside my brain?
Making allowances for the age of the playwright when he wrote it, Lily decides the play’s not bad in a knockabout, absurdist way: the sombre Norwegian dramatist, for whom love is tainted, incestuous and unsatisfying, succumbing little by little to the charms of scurrilous Neapolitans who don’t care what love is so long as they can sing about it. She likes the scene when he is taught the words of ‘Torna a Surriento’ – that soppiest of all soppy exilic songs – by Enrico Caruso who, if one wanted to be pedantic about it, was yet to be born when Ibsen lived there.
‘And Cleopatra couldn’t have played billiards with her eunuch because billiards had not yet been invented,’ she has found a recording of him snapping at an interviewer. ‘Take the matter up with the Bard.’
Shakespeare is his get-out-of-jail-free card. He takes it everywhere with him.
Lily has played the recording twice. He has a good speaking voice, she thinks. It has bitumen and sandstone in it. He is a man you graze your shins against. The wisdom is that he is too sarcastic for television. He has too superior an air. Not that that worries her. She has fixed many a superior air in her time. It’s all but written into her contract to do so.
She can see why he doesn’t want to do Ibsen in Sorrento for her series. Done is done. But imagining his singing voice being as good as his speaking voice she visualises a scene in which he performs a trio with the ghosts of Ibsen and Caruso. It’s part of the play’s spectral surrealism that it shows Ibsen finishing Ghosts in the Imperial Hotel Tramontano. As a rule she doesn’t favour tricksy directing but getting Quaid to come out of himself is a challenge she might relish.
Apart from anything else, it would be nice to be in Sorrento.
Eating pasta in the sun.
Laughing.
Talking.
In the Hotel Tramontano.
With the Very Devil.