Eddie de Waal reviews Simon Fortin’s one-man show ...Or Not To Be: How Shakespeare Could Change Your Death
(Auto & General Theatre on the Square, Sandton, 18-29 February 2020)
Simon Fortin finds Shakespeare, “the stage poet”, a “most enthralling conversation partner and a wonderful and humorous guide” on “this mysterious journey we call ‘being human’; starting with mortality”. Fortin presents an evening of tragic Shakespearean deaths, alternating with interpretations of the text, and with reminiscences and reflections thrown in. The performance is at times personal and at times very funny. The show’s sub-title suggests that Shakespeare could change one’s death – and, yes, an evening with Fortin can indeed be a strong starter for a debate on how Shakespeare could, perhaps, change the way you die.
In the early '80s, Fortin, alias Antony Marston, in a rehearsal on a Canadian stage, toasts misdeeds: “Here's to crime! I'm all for it!” He gulps his drink down. “... And he dies.” (This is a refrain in Fortin's performance.) He dies in Canada, in French, in “an awful Agatha Christie play”. The play's name (and some of its plot) was meant to reference Africa. The original title became offensive, and since the 1980s the play underwent several renamings finally to end up with an acceptable title: And Then There Were None. The play is about ten people punished for causing other people's deaths. They are harshly offed by one of the ten – a merciless character-director – but who? Fortin's father, a gentleman of the old school, is also one of the ten, and has reservations about his son's ars moriendi – or, to paraphrase, his son's ability to die well. He regards his son's first attempts at death as overdone.
In February 2020, Fortin, alias Cleopatra, declares in a performance: “I am fire and air.” He then turns the follow-up (“my other elements I give to baser life”) into a nonchalant, humorous aside, accompanied by a flick of the wrist and applies an asp to the breast. ... And he dies. He dies in South Africa, in English, in a great scene by Shakespeare. The scene is about the death of an African, and this play's name has never needed a change. This time there is no mystery, but like the killer in the Christie play, Cleopatra is a merciless character-director: “... now, from head to foot / I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine.” She is determined to off herself as theatrically as possible.
A death in the early ‘80s in Canada. A death in 2020 in South Africa. It has been an eventful flight from Canada to Africa. It has lasted 36 years, with quite a few mortifications and many deaths en route. At The Theatre on the Square, Fortin shares his reminiscences and insights.
Item: The personal mortifications of Simon Fortin himself. His mortifying memory of playing Othello, totally inadequately, as a teenager, and in blackface; the mortification of presenting an academic paper on Romeo and Juliet, with no effect, in Ireland, in a Belfast clinging to ancient grudges and new mutinies; the mortification of appearing in the very last episode of the very last season of Sex and the City, as a waiter, with one second of screen time and an off-screen line.
Item: The impressive deaths of actor Louis Fortin (Fortin père) and painter Mark Rothko. Louis Fortin dies, very much like Christie's Antony Marston, at a dinner, while talking, with a drink in his hand. He dies in such a spectacular way that the first, overdone attempts at dying by his son Simon pale in comparison. Almost like a stand-up comedian, Fortin junior’s first resource is his immediate family, and his audience is unsure of how to react – are we invited to laugh at his father's “exit, with unnecessary haste”? Mark Rothko dies in 1970 by his own hand, artistically, in a pool of blood that reminds one of his red canvases. At the beginning of Fortin's performance and at its end we are shown a Rothko canvas with delicate gradations of carmine, and Fortin suggests that perhaps we should not try to be adept at the art of dying well, perhaps we should rather die accompanied by art. He cites King Lear, Act 4 Scene 7, where the Doctor says, “Please you draw near. Louder the music there!” The Doctor argues that the music will help to heal Lear, whose “great rage ... is kill’d in him”. For Fortin, this music is an example of art that accompanies death.
Item: Insights into the deaths of Shakespeare's Mercutio, King John, Othello and Lear. Mercutio dies with a flash of insight, Fortin says, after initially not knowing why he must die: “I have it / And soundly too: your houses!” He dies as a character that realises the actual reason for his death. He also dies as an actor, borrowing Mercutio's rage, because he and the comedy in the play, which has tended to upstage the nascent tragedy, must make an exit right in the middle of the story. King John, poisoned by a kamikaze monk, demands help to die, because the toxin in his “burn’d bosom” requires that the bystanders “comfort [him] with cold”. (“... And he dies.”) In this, Fortin says, Shakespeare varies the manner of his heroes' deaths. Othello wants to set the record straight: “Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak / Of one that loved not wisely but too well.” He demonstrates how he stabbed a Turk that traduced the state. “... And he dies." Lear can make no last effort to make a good death. “He knows not what he says,” states Albany. Lear thinks he sees life in Cordelia: “Look on her, look her lips, / Look there, look there!” Fortin collapses over Cordelia’s lifeless body and lies quite still for two seconds. Then his head jerks up. He looks at the audience. He pronounces, from his prone position, the expected refrain, “And he dies.” Appreciative laughter.
If Fortin sees Shakespeare as “a most enthralling conversation partner and a wonderful and humorous guide”, then Fortin, too, is his audience's conversation partner, and he makes certain that with Shakespeare's death scenes he is a humorous guide. He lists euphemisms and softenings that we use when we refer to death – phrases like “passing”, “going”, “breathing the last”, “resting”, “going to a better place” and even “kicking the bucket”. The last phrase listed here presents a great insight. Humour is a euphemism that can thrust a huge cushion between empathy and death, and Fortin’s humorous, repeated line, “And he dies”, thrusts the cushion into every death scene. Humour in this performance is the actor’s go-to euphemism. But in his death scenes Fortin also tries to illustrate his theory that Shakespeare ignores the ars moriendi manuals (what we perhaps here can call the Elizabethan WikiHows on dying). We must pay attention to Fortin’s idea that Shakespeare ignores the manuals. The idea is not necessarily accurate, but it is a conversation starter. Does Shakespeare disregard the possibility of a good death? After all, ars moriendi did not for the Elizabethans mean “dying artistically”, but “dying well”, “making a good end”. And yes, Shakespeare's Lear, for instance, makes a realistic end but not a good one. The same applies to most of his great tragic figures – their deaths may be sloppy, may be well-deserved, may be the unfortunate closing of a long series of mistakes, may be (as with the suicides and according to the mores of the time) morally unacceptable. But in Shakespeare’s plays more than his own opinion on dying is involved. He has to present a tragedy and he uses a template in which the audience expects to be horrified at the trajectory that leads to the hero’s death.
Let us consider King Lear again. Lear dies sloppily, incoherently, denying Cordelia's death. On the other hand, at least two other characters die very well. Edmund first. Of course, we are unprepared for Edmund’s change of heart – there is no lead-up to it. It may not be sound drama, but it is there, and because it is there, we cannot say that Shakespeare disregards the ars moriendi. Edmund confesses his misdeeds and makes an honest attempt at restitution. The news of his death is “but a trifle here”, according to Albany – yet his death is exemplary. The second death is that of the First Servant. He sees Cornwall putting out Gloucester's eyes and objects. He fights Cornwall for Gloucester's sake and is murdered by Goneril because he does so. This is not done according to the prescriptions of any ars moriendi, but with the death of the First Servant, Shakespeare reminds us how good death can be. A man objects to injustice and dies for the sake of another. After that, his body is thrown on a dunghill. The aesthetics vanish into darkness and the ethics come right up to the footlights.
Fortin proposes that death should be accompanied by art, like Rothko's death. There is only beauty, and the only truth is the bare fact that Rothko is now dead. The Elizabethan ars moriendi tries to combine truth and beauty, and to an extent we see this combination in Edmund’s death. Perhaps Albany’s “That’s but a trifle here” is Shakespeare’s own comment on a worthless life suddenly beautified by moral choices. Nevertheless, the ars moriendi is not in itself denied a place.
But can it be that the moral choices, valour and the death of the First Servant teach us nothing and are only exemplary by accident and not by Shakespeare's design? Surely, for South Africans, the death of the First Servant in King Lear resonates with so many political deaths before 1994 – people dying for a principle, people dying for the sake of other people, people whose sacrifices for a time were unregarded. Surely the death of the First Servant resonates with whistle-blowers who must consider the danger they may be in, or with people called upon to imperil their own lives to defend the helpless. With such considerations, aesthetics – music, memorable canvases, poetry – are not to be organised by self-centred Cleopatras intent on death, but are to be created by the living to heighten our love for ethics. Perhaps Fortin might undertake a rewrite, to show future audiences – South African audiences, at the very least – that Shakespeare reminds us, reinforces in us, what dying well, dying ethically, can truly mean.