A Resounding Tinkle N.F.Simpson
In 2019 we recreated a (usually cut) scene from the first play of British absurdist playwright N.F. Simpson (1919-2011). Simpson’s play A Resounding Tinkle (1958) shares some interesting parallels with the ethos of the Uos Comedy and Performance Art Project, in that it contains provocations about the nature of Theatre, audiences, comedy and contains an act of artistic tricksterism in the playing of a deliberate joke upon its audience. A contemporary critic of the play noted that ‘the laugh will not be intended to be the final product of [its] sallies’ (Taylor, p.58) while, like The Comedy and Performance Art Project the practices it attempts offer a deliberate and unreliable provocation which does not shy away from producing ‘untheatrical’ responses such as bafflement, even irritation for the audience! As in Fluxus’ striving for ‘non-theatrical qualities of [a] simple natural event, a game or a gag’, there will be an adherence to Simpson’s words elsewhere that there will be no ‘breaking faith with chaos’ (Simpson in Russell Taylor, p. 64).
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A Resounding Tinkle (dir. Brainne Edge, 2019) with Julia Nelson; Ali Matthews; Wilkie; Malcolm Raeburn; Richard Talbot
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The ‘Author’ as a character makes the following direct address to the live audience:
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‘I think we have all been trying as hard as can reasonably be expected not to show our exasperation – I certainly have – because we do all like, naturally, to feel we’ve been provided with a meaning; something we can carry round with us like an umbrella for a few days. We all feel rather lost without a meaning to seize hold of; rather like a snake charmer in front of a boa constrictor and no flute. Or whatever they use’ (Simpson, 159).
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Four critics, Mustard, Salt, Pepper and Vinegar then come onto the stage and analyse the play that the audience have been watching up to this point. The critics discuss the piece at some length (i.e., for 15 very undramatic minutes), arguing about whether the play should be thought of as a ‘hotch potch’ or a gallimaufry’ and whether the author’s use of Brechtian
alienation is deliberate or accidental, before discussing the effectiveness of the ending of the play before it has happened.
During this sketch-within-a-play they also debate whether the piece should actually be called a comedy at all with Mustard ultimately deciding that ‘it is basically, a parody of a skit on satire that he’s burlesquing, and the farce is so to speak a by-product of that’. Mustard then goes on to say that ‘I don’t think he’s aiming at farce at all. The farce is in a sense what we, the audience, contribute’.
If Simpson is satirising anything – it is surely the Theatre and its attendees. As is true in the case of his almost entirely unreadable 1976 novel Harry Bleachbaker, where the sleeve note on the book jacket gleefully admits that ‘he has designed the book in a form which almost totally defies comprehension and is calculated to produce the maximum bafflement and irritation’ (see image).
We believe that the essence of Simpson’s intent in his creative art is akin to that of many comedy and performance art practitioners. Deliberately manufactured provocation for the spectator or reader as consciously engineered by a trickster creator.
