I experienced sheer existential despair the other day for the first time and it was fucking wank. You might think anyone with enough time on their hands to feel sheer existential despair has probably only ever felt mildly uncomfortable at most, but it really was the pits I’m telling you. The reason I ended up there was because some professional medical person told me recently that I might be a bit clinically fed up boo hoo (how INCONVENIENT ), and I was thinking to myself, ‘All I need to do is get from A to B and come out from the in-between bit unscathed'; A = current situation, B = better situation.
But then, suddenly I thought, ‘But that’s all life is anyway. A to B. Birth then death and the bit in the middle. Oh man. When you look at it like that it hardly seems worth going on with.’ And then I felt really quite worried and upset and scared and had visions of a big black hole that wasn’t swallowing me up exactly but just lurking directly in front of me all the time saying ‘HELLO BLEAK MISERY IS EVER PRESENT’. It went away after a while, but it was quite something to see the fleshless bones of existence without any of the fancy embellishments like having a job and eating cake and going for nice walks and having interesting conversations and singing. When you break life down into the bare essentials it seems like all you really need to do is distract yourself from ever falling into this black existential despair pit from the time in between A and B. Simple really. Unless it’s not. Which it isn’t always.
With all this in mind, and sorry to get all Alan Bennett, but watching Ballyturk at the National Theatre recently felt like someone had looked into my head and performed exactly what was in it. It was the strangest mix of existential despair and utter, utter joy for living. It was one of the most exciting afternoons of my entire life. It said, how quaint and sad and admirable it is that we all get up in the morning and fight our way through each day, knowing we all end up alone, doing our little routines and having inconsequential conversations and managing not to think about it and what it’s all for. And sometimes there are moments that are real too and you might think they’re worth sticking around for. You might not. It depends how good you are at shutting down the white noise in your brain.
A lifetime of walking distances in the vain hope of making things that bit more fulfilling – of packing his times with experiences some of which will change him greatly and others with no consequence other than wasting a little more of his life.
If you don’t know about Ballyturk, it’s a play written by Enda Walsh. It’s two men (Cillian Murphy and Mikel Murfi) in a strange room with really high cupboards and no doors or windows, and all they do is draw pictures and dance to 80s music and act out different characters from the town of Ballyturk, which isn’t real. They’ve made it up. Later on another man (Stephen Rea) turns up and tells them some things that they don’t understand and makes poetic speeches about time and life and existence.
Lots of people on the internet are talking about WHAT IT ALL MEANS. I’ve read some interesting theories about how it could be two men who have been incarcerated in one of Ireland’s ‘institutions of shame’ or that Stephen Rea is a massive paedo and kidnapped them and locked them in a basement. I don’t necessarily know WHAT IT ALL MEANS but I don’t think it’s as literal as all of that.
To me, it feels like a much more abstract way of looking at a purgatorial state between childhood and adulthood. Do you ever feel that unique absolute dread and sadness that you’re not a child any more? That every time you look at a childhood photo it feels slick with nostalgia for a person who no longer really exists, for a time when you had a totally different brain and saw through entirely different eyes?
I remember when the most important things in the entire world were eating sweets and getting to go on the proper swing not the baby swing. I remember when the thought of there being a war used to scare me so much I couldn’t sleep; those atrocities are rationalised and minimised now.
There’s a faintly unresolvable sensation – ‘forebodance’, the men would call it – that your childhood is something you can never return to, a time when you were never really alone and everything always was okay even when it wasn’t.
I thought we knew everything there was to know. It feels like we may be less of what we were in a place we don’t know wholly now.
I don’t even know if the three characters in Ballyturk are separate individuals. I kind of think they’re all the same person. The way that Murphy and Murfi get up together in the morning in a bouncing synchronised burst of movement made me think they were an atomised whole. There are forces and feelings in your head that contradict each other and spur each other on: Murphy’s is the worry, the anxiety, the one who needs to make sense of it all. Murfi is the one saying we’re okay, let’s play a game, let’s tell a story, we’re safe in our own world. When they are playing at the characters of Ballyturk, and Murphy is suddenly gripped by the futility of it all and bangs his head against the wall until it bleeds, and Murfi resolutely keeps going with the silly voices and the funny faces, has there ever been a more literal representation of ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’? And Rea’s character, is perhaps not God, not death, but a representation of external pressure, reality, the voice saying, I know you’re shitting yourself but you’ve got to leave this behind and come back into the world which will be terrifying at times but living is better than hiding on the edges.
What’s fascinating and gripping and scary and exciting is the idea that these two men have temporarily opted out of the real world. They don’t do tax returns, they do dance routines. But they still need to recreate the banal mundanities of life in order to reassure themselves, making people up and giving them their own narratives to provide some control, some structure. The world, which is terrifying, where people go to the shops and talk about cancer and play bingo, is not one that they can ever really leave behind. It’s our only frame of reference to navigate and understand our lives. There’s no other way to think about being, that isn’t tarnished by our imperfect world full of disappointments and small talk and little brick buildings.
And so if these characters on the stage aren’t really three different people, but essences, we’re presented directly with the limitations of the body, the thing we can never escape from. The conversations they overhear outside their small room are always about decaying bodies: being riddled with cancer, alcoholics at a funeral feeling sick, the idea that the body is just a useful mode of transport. ‘Disembodiment is what I dream of,’ someone says. But yet, the only way these essences, these feelings, can be represented are by bodies, bodies which tell a story, give us a narrative, a vessel that exists ‘in a life that is so chaotically structured by nature’. But we can’t get out of our bodies, and we can’t get out of this world. Doomed for a certain term and all that.
Because even though you can exult in dancing about to ABC, and you can laugh with your friends, and you can go for a walk in the woods, sometimes just living is really really hard. There’s never any quiet, and if the white noise breaks in from outside and worms its way into your head, you have to scrabble around and work out how to live alongside it so it doesn’t deafen you. ‘If even in sleep we’re talkin’ the same thing – where’s the space!? Sleep is freedom!’ Murphy cries. I know.
It’s normal to feel nervous when you’ve lost yourself, it can happen but it passes.
How do you unite your self (not yourself), a complex being with with an intricately woven interior fabric, full of thoughts and feelings and memories, with a world that wants to impose rules and structure, that’s full of other complex individuals who also get up and walk around every day? A world that says a YELLA JUMPER (do an Irish accent) is ‘not normal in any sense’. A world where you have to keep going even if you don’t know how, where you can’t opt out of going to work if you feel like going to the seaside and you have to feed yourself properly and make sure you don’t die and just try and keep your chin up basically.
I know this all seems a bit glum and serious, but, the thing is, this play made me feel very very alive and alert and so full of the most intense joy. I thought my heart was going to burst. It was like when you’re reading something so brilliant that you can’t take the words in fast enough except this theatre does go fast, very fast. If Ballyturk confronts the difficulty of living, it also identifies that unique thing that we can only experience if we keep going, often by chance – that elusive joie de vivre. It made me legitimately want to lock myself in a toilet cubicle and cry afterwards because life is shit but also brilliant. Definitely going to try my best to stay alive just in case I get to experience something like this again ever in my life.
P.S. THANK YOU Gillian Anstey, without her generosity I would never have been able to see this play. And she has the most joie de vivre of anyone I know!
