Before we go any further, here’s Robert Frost’s half conversational, half beatific take on life, death and falling from (okay, swinging from) trees.
BIRCHES
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
A girl with hair swept down to dry: had I ever seen a bent birch, that now would be the only way I
could see it. But not having ice storms on our damp, mild island – which is basically a green and pleasant ship, surrounded by sea-weather – bent birches are not part of the landscape. I’d not even heard of ice storms until
The Ice Storm. (Which is still one of my favourite films. Its cold and wealthy 1970s suburbs, with cold and wealthy parents, were very like some of the places I knew in my early teens.) The poem's final image, of the tree dipping the speaker down to start again, is almost painfully moving. I always have this sense that trees would like to help us if they could.
Assuming you are actually falling out of the tree, though, and not just being gently returned to earth, you’ll need that notional famous person to break your fall. Two ways of going about it. Either they are strong and brave and kind, and catch you. Or they’re not, and you just flump down and squish them.
So, bearing that in mind – and also that I spent no more than an hour in the company of any of the people on the list – I would say, for Option A, hope for Meryl Streep. As warm as sunshine, open-hearted, outward-facing, thoughtful, humorous, engaged, interested in everything around her; I have every faith she’d see you were slipping and be ready down below with her arms open before you were half way off the branch. And once you were safely landed, she’d give you a hug.
Option B: Chiwetel. Such a good actor. On film. I was booked to do an interview with him in 2015, during a press junket. Junkets are the media version of a mass-market production line, a meat factory; boring and impersonal and repetitive and uncreative, they’re a horrible experience for journo and star alike. But as we were all in the same boat, most of us would at least try to make the best of the voyage. Not everyone, though. Chiwetel was, basically, fucked off that he had to talk to me, and rather than do the second, admittedly less rewarding part of the job of being a star – which is to tell the public, via the press, a story about your show/film/book/whatever – he sat scowling in his chair wearing an expensive, outsize and rather hateful turtle-necked jumper, and answered all my questions in about four words or less. Which made our half hour excruciating, embarrassing, and almost entirely pointless.
If you fell on him, I would, very discreetly, cheer.
Spoiler
This is what I ended up writing, for the bit of The Economist that used to be called Intelligent Life but is now 1843. It was meant to be an interview, but you’ll note that, due to the lack of a single useable quote from you-know-who, I ended up just reviewing the play.
Apr 30th 2015|3 min read
By Isabel Lloyd
What’s the point? Why are we alive? Does God exist, and does He care about us? The biggest questions of them all are posed repeatedly in the original “Everyman”, a medieval parable of a man trying to dodge death and account for his deeds. In the poet Carol Ann Duffy’s new adaptation, which opened last night at the National Theatre in London, at least one of those questions is turned upside down: as the show begins, God, a weary but patient Mrs Mop (Kate Duchêne), takes a break from the eternal job of cleaning up after humanity to ask why it is that man seems to care so little for Her.
It’s a typically fresh approach from Duffy, whose reworking of the original might be in verse but still has plenty of room for the demotic as well as the demonic: “Did your man just call me a cunt?” Dermot Crowley’s Irish-accented Death asks the audience, disbelievingly. And it gives Rufus Norris, now deep into his first season as the new head of the National, just the kind of loose, poetic, rhythmic material he likes. As directed by him, the first ten minutes were some of the most visceral I’ve seen at the theatre. A huge screen crackled with images of life lived; Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Everyman, undulating in a shiny petrol-blue suit, fell in heartbreaking slow motion from the full height of the flies into a pit at the back of the stage; then, as dance music thundered and drummed, a gang of masked grotesques, sharply choreographed by Javier de Frutos, pantomimed a coke-sniffing, tequila-slamming 21st-century debauch. It was adrenaline-pumping stuff; a moment when you got an exciting glimpse of where Norris’s National might be heading.
After that things got a little more everyday for Everyman. As he tried to persuade his friends, his family and (most allegorically and oddly) his worldly goods that they should help him defy death, the flow of the storytelling began to fracture and slow. And while Ejiofor was never anything less than compelling, it took some time to feel he was anything more than a cipher. This may be because the character of Everyman is, frankly, a bit of a crowd-pleasing, hand-wringing dick, and Ejiofor so rarely plays low status. (Even when grovelling in pain on a cell floor in “12 Years a Slave”, his moral authority ran through him like wire.) Still, by the time he reached his final speech—a long, defiant monologue celebrating his life in all its failings—he was absolutely a man, as well as all men. His final lingering, wondering, unsure repetition of the phrase “I think I have a soul” was an operatic dying fall, done with great skill and beauty.
Despite a few irritating weak spots erupting in the chorus whenever they stop dancing and start talking, Ejiofor is well supported by the rest of the cast, particularly Duchêne. Penny Layden’s Knowledge (would it have been more accurate to title her Self-Knowledge?) is an authentically genderless, toothless, wobbling drunk who sees all too well where Everyman’s emotions are heading, and offers him a consoling bottle of Smirnoff whenever things get too self-pitying. Most enjoyable, though, is Dermot Crowley, wry and relentless in a white boiler suit, chemical gloves and flame-embroidered woolly hat. After he’s despatched Everyman, and God has wept over the grave, he’s left alone on the stage. “Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo,” he says, stabbing a killer finger at the audience. “Who’s next?” Death gets the last laugh, on stage as well as off.
Everyman Olivier, National Theatre, London SE1, to Aug 30th
