The unexpected ring at the doorbell is such a well-worked device that, as a theatre-going teenager seeing Waiting for Godot for the first time, I was quite astonished when Godot was a no show. I was so familiar with the notion of the surprise arrival who disrupts the status quo – in everything from Greek drama to Three Sisters to Pinter and Agatha Christie – that I expected characters unlisted in the programme to stroll on to the stage and destroy the hermetically sealed world that had been set up. I was often disappointed when they didn’t.
Watching The Boys in the Band at the Park theatre, I was struck by the way that it uses both expected and unexpected arrivals in a way that disrupts and inverts. For a long time it looks as if the birthday boy himself, Harold, is going to shy off, Godot-like, from his own party. When he does arrive, it has a galvanising effect – at least it does in Mark Gatiss’s brilliant entrance – and brings the tension and the drama alive in a play that may now seem old-fashioned but is smartly revived in a production that is going out on a UK tour.
Writer Mart Crowley offers two unexpected arrivals too: the young gay hustler who is Harold’s birthday present and, more explosively, the arrival of a straight man, Alan, amidst the gay friends. When staged in 1968, Boys was the first commercial play in which largely non-gay audiences were able to eavesdrop on gay men talking about their lives and, as John Clum has observed in Acting Gay, Alan is the outsider who “represents the audience on the other side of the fourth wall”. When he leaves, he is rejecting “the world presented on stage”.
More often, of course, the world on stage is so disrupted by an outsider’s arrival that at the very least it tilts on its axis. Sometimes it shatters entirely. The newcomer doesn’t have to be a stranger – it is their outsider status that brings about change, none more so than Blanche Dubois arriving at her sister’s home in New Orleans.
So here are three of my favourite examples of disruptive arrivals in theatre. Please do add your own (and don’t ruin The Mousetrap for anyone who hasn’t seen it).
An Inspector Calls
The mysterious Inspector Goole interrupts a smug family dinner party, originally in 1912 but updated to the period after the second world war in Stephen Daldry’s masterly rethinking which returns to the West End next month. He comes with news of a young woman’s suicide, and although members of the family initially deny all knowledge of her, it gradually becomes apparent that they are all implicated. Who is Inspector Goole? A real policeman? A member of the “Celestial Watch Committee” as critic JC Trewin suggested? Or perhaps conscience itself? Priestley was smart enough to leave both the family and the audience guessing, which is one of the reasons why the play has endured even though the initial London production in 1946 with Ralph Richardson as the Inspector was not a success.
The Bacchae
The puritanical King Pentheus has denied that Dionysus is a real deity so a vengeful Dionysus pops in to set him straight with violent consequences. “So Thebes, I’m back,” declared Alan Cumming’s Dionysus with not just bare-faced but bare-bummed cheek in John Tiffany’s 2007 revival at the Edinburgh festival. It’s undeniably one of the most memorable entrances in British theatre in the last decade, and one that set the tone for the orgiastic rituals that follow as the unfortunate, peeping Pentheus, disguised as a woman, is ripped apart by Dionysus’s frenzied followers.
The Sultan’s Elephant
Not a play but definitely theatre on a grand scale and one that played upon an expected arrival: in this case, that of a mechanical elephant the size of a double-decker bus, and a massive puppet girl, in the very heart of London. One of the most glorious theatrical events of the last 20 years, Royal de Luxe’s piece took place over a weekend in May in 2006 and not only disrupted the traffic but the very spectacle of everyday life. It did what all good theatre does and made you look at the world differently: in this case, the streets of London that became a playground for a million people who poured into the city. Maybe the elephant’s arrival made us rethink theatre itself.
