Rare Accidents
A new home for my theatre writing and other thoughts – I’ll aim to tell you about the shows which shouldn’t work, but inexplicably do.
Welcome! After many years of using Wordpress, I’ve finally lost patience with features disappearing from the free version every time I log in. Here I am with my tired, my poor, my huddled theatre reviews, seeking refuge.
The title, ‘Rare Accidents’, comes from a soliloquy in Henry IV Part 1. In Act I Scene I, we see Henry IV receiving news of the wars, and lamenting that his son is such a useless layabout. In Scene II, true enough, we see Prince Hal being a useless layabout. His favourite hobbies are drinking, making fun of Falstaff for being fat, and highway robbery.
Then he speaks directly to the audience. He says, Look. I know this looks bad. But trust me – getting drunk with my friends in Eastcheap and disappointing my father is actually all part of my genius plan. When I become king, and ditch these disgusting losers, everyone will be so surprised that I’m not a useless layabout after all. And then, their expectation will be so low, everyone will think I’m amazing!
It sounds so fake. It sounds like a massive cope. It sounds like he’s avoiding the proper duties of being a prince because he’s lazy, or easily distracted, and he’s come up with this clever rationalisation to convince himself that it’s somehow the smart thing to do.
But Hal, as written by Shakespeare is just psychopathic enough to pull it off. As soon as he inherits the crown, he banishes his former friends and adopts a kingly manner. The reaction is exactly as he predicted. In the opening scene of Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury says admiringly, “Never was such a sudden scholar made.”
Henry goes on to be a popular and virtuous king, in Shakespeare’s simplified narrative, launching a genealogically justified and wildly successful invasion of France. He then dies of dysentry at a young age, also while fighting a war in France. You can’t win them all.
When Hal says “Nothing pleaseth but rare accidents” in that soliloquoy, he means, Nobody gets excited by predictable happiness. It’s the unpredictable happiness that delight us. He knows about hedonic adaptation. He knows that a noble and dutiful Prince of Wales becoming a noble and dutiful King of England will not surprise or impress anyone. But a hard-drinking, ne’er do well Prince of Wales, suddenly a righteous king? That’s a narrative, and a great cause for celebration.
I’m hoping that Rare Accidents will be a good place to document exactly that – little moments of unpredictable happiness. With a bias towards fringe theatre, off-West End, and the upstairs rooms of London pubs – I’ll aim to tell you about the shows which shouldn’t work, but inexplicably do.
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Because this is my own newsletter, and nobody can stop me, I have reproduced in full below the full speech from Henry IV Part I. It’s a corker.
PRINCE HENRY
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.