Speaking of reading aloud, we did some play readings last Friday night. We managed to get through four plays, and the first was one which holds a lot of meaning for me: Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Rex (Ubu Roi). I first read this aloud to Ed, Jim and Rachel in Ed and Jim’s East Ham flat, circa 1990. Somehow I managed to come up with a different silly voice for each of the characters (well, perhaps not all the individual members of the Polish and Russian armies, but at least all of the speaking members) and I was actually able to remember these voices through to the end of the play and switch to the correct one when appropriate. This is something I’ve tried to do ever since when reading plays and stories, and I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded.

The play has all the more meaning because 10 years later Ed ended up marrying Anaïs, who is in some way related to Alfred Jarry (although I’ve never managed to determine their exact relationship). I was best man at their wedding and, in view of the number of French people present, I thought I should at least make an effort and say something in French as part of my speech. I scoured Anaïs’s French editions of the plays for inspiration, but soon got lazy. In the end, I wrote something in English and asked Anaïs to translate. It went something like “ten years ago, when I acted out Ubu Roi in front of Ed and his friends, little did I suspect that he would end up marrying one of the author’s descendents. I searched through the play to see whether I could find something suitable to say in this speech, but I got as far as the first word and decided this would perhaps not be appropriate for a wedding.” (the first word of the play is “merde”, or in the rather flakey English translation “pschitt”).

So, on Friday I got to loudly exclaim pschittapot over and over again, by my green candle, and O! what fun it was (even if I did only have to use one voice this time).