Waiting for Judgement

 I have written a play and submitted it to a contest. It was a lot of fun. The first lines were scribbled in my room in Pavia during my (too) many idle hours, the thing got structured when I planned the scenes in a chalet in the Dolomites during my family week in the mountains, then, not feeling quite up to the task, I left it at that and enjoyed the rest of my summer holiday. Back in Brussels, however, sporadic breaks from the extended essay (that's Narratives of Time, not “if Time”, Chairman of the Board) were more than welcome, and once back in Oxford having discovered that the deadline for the Oxford University Drama Society New Writing Festival was in a month's time, the play was finished through storms of impassioned typing and to the sound of manic cackles, a pleasant change from the intellectual frowns and French swearing that accompanied most of my course work.

So the play was written to the great amusement of close friends – “Moi je croyais que ce serait une merde!”* one of these later confessed. Then it was put to the test by:

1) A reading by thespy friends (the line “Shut up you idiot!” had to be changed to “Shut up you dick!”)

2) A critical commentary from a good friend and cruel critic (“This is incredibly mature. It is the first good thing you've ever written. The rest is down there!”)

3) The choice of a title (an arduous task, where I ended up sticking to my instinct despite varying degrees of approval.)

The reading was wonderful: it turned out that the lines that made me cackle like an old witch when I wrote them had other people laugh out loud, while the characters' unhappy situations aroused more than one general: “Oh no!”. I started to believe that this play was actually quite good, and the final encouraging sign came when the friend who thought that the play would have been a “merde” and the critic of the double edged compliments got into a Skype conference argument over their opposed views on the main characters. Then came the more tense moment of printing it out, title, contact details and all, and submitting it. This last phase happened over Sunday and Monday.

And now, I wait.

If we refer ourselves to the teachings of Dante's ascent of Mount Purgatory, we must come to the conclusion that if I wrote a play, well, I have to thank God who made it possible for me to write a play and I have nothing to be proud of. Also, were this play to end up being one of the four finalists, that does not mean much, as worldly fame blows here and there like the wind and someone *COUGH* Dante *COUGH* will soon turn up and surpass me. Plus, Du côté de chez Swann back in the day had an absolute nightmare getting published, and Les Fleurs du Mal , as we all know, got censored, so critical acclaim does not really mean that much now, does it?

Monday night, after having submitted the play, I was having dinner in London with fellow blog journalist Westley Aubergine, my bastard-critic-adorable-friend and his girlfriend. The girlfriend asked me if I would send her the play, the critic's synopsis about its “incredible complexity yet undeniable simplicity” having sparked her curiosity. I took advantage of this turn of conversation to thank her boyfriend again for his exhaustive criticism. He replied: “Oh don't worry, it was great fun for me!”

“Really?”

“Yes! I keep thinking of when you'll be well-known and I can show off at parties.”

It was a pleasant vision. Not to say an extremely attractive one, and it did warm the heart to know that my friends believed in a future success. But I have been thinking about it a lot since and it has kept me tossing and turning in bed, repeating my characters' lines to myself like a Pirandellian lunatic. Here are some of the questions that have been agitating me, and the answers that were able to chase the voice in my head for a bit (but only for a bit) :

Could this play “make you famous”? It is possible. It is not probable, but that tiny possibility is there. Were you thinking of that possibility when you set about writing it? No, not really. To be honest, I didn't even know if I'd finish the thing, let alone get round to submitting it to a contest! Why did you write it? Well, I felt I had stuff enough to write about. So, what is there in those 44 pages? A lot, but in a few words, without the melodramatic rants you'd find on a diary page. The expression of a sense of cynicism which began when I was nineteen, my own insecurities and confusions as to the part literature should play in our lives, a merciless portrayal of human relationships in all their vanity. Nothing original, but it does get quite a lot of laughs. If it's not selected will you be upset? Well, obviously I will! Will you stop thinking it's any good? ...I'd like to think myself too arrogant for that. Will you still go on writing? That's a trickier question. I do think all writers write for someone, and imaginary someones aren't very chatty, they get dull after a while. In other words, until my friends have seriously had enough of me, I'll keep on writing. Plus, I guess I'd rather be a failed artist with an embarrassing anecdote or two, than a pompous academic with a string of strategically planned successes.






EPILOGUE
A few weeks later I found out that my play didn't make it. I am however still planning on seeing it staged and hopefully we shall take it to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Reg de Saint-Loup