At the end

of Ship of Fools Michael Dunn, the narrator/dwarf speaks to — and for — the audience when he says, ironically — “What has all this to do with us? Nothing.” This seems particularly prophetic right now, as Ship of Fools is one of director Stanley Kramer's noble cinematic rants against fascism — i.e. the same fascism that is ever so popular these days. It’s obvious, Adorno was right (‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’) and well-meaning artists who rail against evil are ultimately ineffective; mankind will continue to bumble along quite suicidally no matter what. What matters, though, in this endless film (it's 2 and 1/2 hours) are the performances. I was particularly taken with Oskar Werner (who was nominated for an Oscar) and Vivien Leigh (who wasn’t). Simone Signoret is lovely but she’s required to be sad all the time — although a gracious God did bless her with those ever-weeping eyes, which — when enhanced with black mascara -- make her into a veritable crying machine. Signoret plays a drug addict, but Leigh undoubtedly was one — certainly she was ‘mad’ —  described as such by her peers. Her performance here is heartbreaking -- a repeat of her character in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. After awhile it seems they only wished her to play the desiccated siren who has reached the bathetic, sordid nadir of her existence, and must avail herself of the services of paid male escorts. In her final gorgeous scene Leigh slaps on too much makeup and inquires of the mirror: ‘is this what men want?” Then she beats Lee Marvin furiously with her spike heels (apparently she accidentally did actually hurt him — quite seriously). I want to be Vivien Leigh. No! I am her.  I went to a party in Danville Sunday (I bet you don’t know where Dunville is!) in drag, and was reminded, fleetingly, again, of what it is like to perform. My appearance was ‘just for friends,’ but one darling man did ask me about a play I wrote (Toller), and I held forth at quite nauseating length re: my wonderfulness. As I now am possessed of the requisite leathery turkey-neck, I feel rather authentic as ‘old’, and it’s so much fun to play a sexually inappropriate, fading lady — forlorn and dissipated — and be pitied certainly -- but never ever scorned. It was harder I’m sure for Vivien Leigh to actually be that, but to some extent she was playing at it too; a role she had been given in life, as the discarded, unsuitable wife to the closeted Laurence Olivier. (When they divorced, Olivier married Joan Plowright —  who was not a drag queen like Leigh — and a much less likely ‘beard.' Rumour has it Olivier was having it off with Danny Kaye at the time. I imagine their sex was 'inventive'). Ship of Fools is an ‘invention’ by novelist Katherine Ann Porter in the tradition of an episodic tale — the screenplay bounces from couple to couple, each slightly more dysfunctional than the last. The film invokes a wise, Shakespearean melancholy in the audience —‘we’re ALL pretty much fools, aren’t we?” Indeed we are. But when this movie premiered (1965)  there was such a thing as reality, and movies were the opposite — a fantasy; Ship of Fools was heightened, attenuated, drama ‘four people being rude in a room’ as my friend David calls it. I’ve noticed that I mention my friends more and more in this blog. By name, even. I can’t resist, sorry, but I’m so lonely. The only place I live now is with my friends, really (and in this blog). They’re all in the theatre or I should say were of the theatre; all illusionists of some kind, they make things up - their lives, their loves, they don’t live much in the real world, but they are (as Vivien might say!) terrifyingly entertaining. I need them all so desperately right now and hate them for it -- because, with them, I do a lot of reminiscing about theatre; if we get drunk enough we can pretend we are back in the past, when there actually was theatre. When -- after a few drinks -- a theatre friend says goodbye, the curtain goes down, and I don’t quite know if I can stand it. The nice thing is that fantasy has taken the place of reality in all of our lives. Or perhaps I should say fantasy is now framed as reality, and reality bears no relationship to truth. Plays and novels must bear witness to righteousness, but the news is insane. We are all dying from an illness called COVID-19 (except that we are not), trans people claim they are being driven to self-immolation by our bottomless dearth of sensitivity to their agonised, tortured, victimhood — and when it comes to intersectionality we might as well give up, as we never will understand how deeply unhappy everyone is. Then there are those who have been driven by the insanity of the COVID-19 unreality to invent another unreality -- one which is far more entertaining — the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and George Soros (who is he again? It’s been explained to me so many times but I keep forgetting) are out to take over the world. It all has to do with the high price of steel and lumber and — gee, I get confused. But I do know that ‘they’ are programming something into our DNA with these vaccines. If I were you I wouldn’t trust anyone;  the ‘truth’ is officially as slippery as an eel and twice as messy. There was a time when one could feel safe in the day-to-day reality; now we walk down the street at our peril — it’s not the germs, it’s the homeless people living in tents and OD-ing, willy-nilly --with a kind of benign audacity, everywhere, every day, as if it mattered to anyone but themselves whether they lived or died. You can’t get properly sexually serviced anymore, nor can you get a phone plan that isn’t so complicated that it rivals Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or the Theory of Relativity.  Oh, for the days when life was mundane but made sense, and then we watched Ship of Fools and escaped, wistfully, guiltily to an artificial world of tinsel and sawdust. Now we are in that movie; we are the deluded mad lovers -- and if Lee Marvin broke into our cabin by mistake one night we would probably butcher him to death with that high-healed shoe.