Beat the Devil
As Wrocław hits -13, I am also struck by a dreadful cold, and so, confined to my apartment, I began to write a play.
I’ve had the concept in my head for a couple of years but last Sunday, I realised that I was suddenly knew what I wanted to say and, more importantly, how to say it.
I wrote a play well before I wrote a novel. I didn’t actually know I could write until I was chosen to be in an outreach programme run by the National Theatre. I wasn’t one of those precocious children who wrote plays for them and their friends because I didn’t have any, but at seventeen I found myself surrounded by a group of like-minded people who wanted to write and perform a play with me.
To put it mildly, it was a strange chapter in my life, which has been blessedly scrubbed from the internet. It ended acrimoniously, but the artistic differences were there from day one. The group I worked with wanted a quirky musical about a Mephistolean character. I wanted Skylight 2.
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In 1995, Princess Margaret saw Skylight by David Hare. When asked if she found the play depressing, she replied, “It was a bit like one’s own life.”
I first saw Skylight in 2014 as a revival starring Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan. As Tom and Kyra reconcile the events and consequences of their affair, I was captivated by the play’s poignant message of wow, Bill Nighy is really attractive, and its devastating undercurrent of Carey Mulligan came out of the stage door dressed head to toe in black? I should dress head to toe in black too.
And, no stranger to commitment, I did, for all of July.
When I’ve looked back at the play I wrote at seventeen, which is rare, I’ve done so with only the keenest embarrassment. I see my only attempt at a medium I loved as a disaster, in which I tried to replicate something I lacked the emotional maturity to understand. I was young, stupid and ambitious, a child playing dress up. Afterwards, the passion I had for theatre quietly dimmed, and my eventual exeunt was without note.
But in quietly returning to playwriting, I see nothing of Skylight in this new project. I am older now, and I realise that another of David Hare’s projects has had a far greater influence on me. A monologue entitled Beat the Devil.
Beat the Devil.
Where does one even begin with Beat the Devil?
Probably the poster that I cannot look at without crying with laughter.
Do you remember when we all lost our minds during a pandemic, and this became an acceptable way to market a show?
No, me neither.
Even before it premiered, Beat the Devil achieved meme status on a very niche part of Theatre Twitter that drove itself rabid with intrigue; what did it mean to Beat the Devil? And whilst, I would ask you to refrain from making any jokes about beating off the Devil, there was actually a rumour that the show’s star, Ralph Fiennes, masturbated in it.
So of course, I went with my friend Vicky, where we sat in the front row, masked and socially distanced, ready to watch Ralphie-baby shine, blithely unaware it would be one of the most cursed theatrical experiences I have ever had.
Beat the Devil is a monologue told from the perspective of David Hare who contracted COVID before any lockdowns were implemented. Its conceit was that as Hare’s COVID worsened, so did the Government’s response to the virus. David Hare, I’m sorry to hear you got COVID yeah, I actually am, like obviously I’m going to be upset about that, but speaking as the spiritual successor to Kenny Tynan…I have some notes.
Firstly, I don’t think the show changed any people’s minds about the government’s mismanagement of COVID. The people who went to see Beat the Devil were there to support theatres when the government was refusing to provide the much-needed financial assistance to keep them afloat. Hare was preaching to the choir.
Secondly, the preaching was incredibly heavy-handed, with one critic describing it as having ‘echoes of the 10 o’clock news’. The jabs at the government were boomer mic drops tailor-made for the Richard Osman-reading, ‘You, Sir, have won the internet!” crowd.
As one unknown minister after another stutters and stumbles on the airwaves, people complain that this is a cabinet of mediocrities. But this does violence to the word. Mediocrity suggests middling ability. You and I are mediocrities. These people are incompetents.
There was an awful lot of this, and sadly not one second of masturbation.
Thirdly, the performance was interrupted by my friend Vicky running out of the auditorium to be sick. This wasn’t in any way David or Ralph’s fault, but it added to the atmosphere, in which I was left alone to suffer the tedium of a middle-aged man, pretending to be an older man, yelling into a socially-distanced void for another thirty minutes.
Vicky was asked if she wanted to watch the rest of the show from a monitor. She declined.
At the monologue’s conclusion, David is still suffering from the effects of COVID. His recovery is slow, though not slow enough to stop him from churning out a fifty-minute monologue.
Fatigued - we know he’s fatigued because Ralph spoke this with a little hitch in his voice usually reserved for a character that will tragically die of tuberculosis but hasn’t started to surreptitiously cough blood into a handkerchief yet - David muses on the banality of the actions he is capable of undertaking, and then delivers the final line.
“Right now, I can only do the simple things, but by doing simple things right, my plan is to beat the Devil.”
Fade to black.
So, who was the Devil? Was it the Conservative government and their mismanagement of COVID? No.
Was the Devil a particular government minister, like Matt Hancock or Boris Johnson, that David Hare wanted to beat by seeing them held accountable in a public forum? No.
The Devil was COVID.
And you have to understand that David Hare had written a fifty-minute monologue and didn’t feel the need to lay the foundations for this metaphor that was also the show’s title at any point. So Ralph Fiennes, Tony-winning, Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes, had to deliver this completely left-field denouement and when it evoked no response from the confused audience, he just had to wait for the stage lights to go down.
And then, because it was COVID and the government was refusing an arts bailout no matter how much we cyberbullied Oliver Dowden on Twitter, we had to clap vigorously and give it a standing ovation because there were like twenty people sitting two metres apart from each other in a theatre with a regular capacity of 900.
Maybe the monologue was the devil that the audience had to beat. Maybe it was all a godgame to Hare - making an audience of sit through an objectively bad monologue, but the socio-economic consequences of a Conservative government during a global pandemic meant that they had to pretend to enjoy it so they could leave with their lives intact. A crossover between No Exit and SAW, if you will.
The reviews were mixed. Critics praised the quality of Fiennes’ performance and commended the Bridge Theatre to be the first venue in London to host an indoor show with COVID-safe measures in place. They acknowledged that Director Nicholas Hytner had tried his best and that Bunny Christie's minimal set worked nicely. However, Hare’s writing was dismissed as slapdash and info-dumpy. To quote Ava Wong Davies for The Independent, “It seems sometimes like Hare is attempting to explain the situation to someone who has completely missed the pandemic – rather than engage with an audience who are living through it too.”
But the haters weren’t enough to stop the Beat the Devil train. It lives on, committed not only to print but as a film. A film I had to pay £3.49 to stream, which I can only pray will qualify as a business expense.
Beat The Devil: Da Movie
Adapting a play, sorry, COVID monologue to the screen is not a simple task, and as with any adaptation, there were some changes. In Beat the Devil’s case, it got worse.
Remember how the reviews said that Nicholas Hytner’s direction and Bunny Christie’s set were good and that David Hare’s writing was bad? Guess which two creatives didn’t work on the film?
Hare’s text was unchanged and still spoken by Ralph Fiennes, now wandering about the labyrinth of a harshly lit, messy study. It’s a nice study, but it’s such a confined space that lacks the theatrical production’s suspension of disbelief that no matter the change in lighting or angles, it’s much more difficult to hide that the entirety of the film is just Ralph Fiennes pacing, which in and of itself exacerbates another, far stranger problem.
This film contains a really bizarre choice that was notably not present in the theatrical show. When talking about real people, mostly politicians, Ralph Fiennes holds up full-page, freshly-printed A4 photos of them to camera. And I know these were freshly printed because he quite literally goes and retrieves them from the printer tray.
The issue here isn’t the assumption that we’d mercifully forgotten what Boris Johnson looks like. The issue is that it's insane. When my Mum had a very aggressive battle with COVID she admittedly ordered a Henry Hoover that she had no recollection of, but she never started printing out pictures of Priti Patel.
Let me ask, devoid of the context I have given you, does this man look well?
Now, do you see how the set dressing, particularly those posters tacked to the wall behind him only furthers the idea that he could start making a deranged conspiracy board at any given moment? Combine that with him pacing up and down a room for fifty minutes, talking to no one, and you get this deeply strange, unintentionally sinister tone.
Also, when's he's holding up the pictures, Ralph does a little impression of the person and they're all terrible. But unfortunately, there comes a moment when he has to recite a quote from James Baldwin, and…he does a voice.
The film also looks bad; it's flat, dull and reliant on natural lighting, a decision which can only really be described as 'a choice'. Compare this shot from Beat the Devil to one from Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which, much like ‘David Hare’, ‘Roald Dahl’ (also played by Ralph Fiennes) addresses an audience directly from the confines of his study. Note how much more professional the shot on the right looks - the warmth of the lighting, the evenness with which it is distributed across Ralph, how it draws your gaze to him and presents him as a gentle, omniscient authority, before you’ve even heard him speak a word.
Yes, but that’s Wes Anderson. Beat the Devil was probably some theatre director’s first foray into film, so what if they made mistakes? It was their first try, it was COVID, give them a break.
Wait, who directed Beat the Devil?
Right.
Well, it’s very brave to try something new at that stage of your career. Maybe Hare can't be blamed too much - he was probably given a tiny budget, you know, that’s what happens when you work with a small production company.
It was financed by Annapurna Pictures? The company behind Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Phantom Thread, but somehow not Licorice Pizza, which came out after Beat the Devil.
Oh, I get it now. David Hare blew all their money on printer cartridges for his little piccies of Robert Jenrick.
A Conclusion?
It was not my intention to write this much about Beat the Devil. When drafting this piece, I meant to make a couple of jokes about it and move on but once I started, I realised its profound impact on me as a writer, as a woman and as a human being. I am the Ancient Mariner, and Beat the Devil is my albatross. I cannot continue to live a life with it about my neck.
Watching it again, it is clear that Beat the Devil was written with the best of intentions and that it is, for all its faults, a deeply sincere piece. Unfortunately, I am not a sincere person, and to use a word of David’s Beat the Devil is mediocre, and its use of metaphor is confusing at best.
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I move on, past Skylight, past my seventeen-year-old self and I look at what I am writing now, with a keen certainty that it’s definitely better than Beat The Devil and that the Bridge Theatre should therefore stage it with immediate effect.
Well, maybe not immediately, for you see, I have this dreadful cold that jabs into my skull with its ferocious horns, as red in its aggression as the peeling skin around my nose. Right now, I can only do the simple things, but by doing simple things right, my plan is to beat the Devil.
Oh, you thought the Devil was my inability to forgive myself for something I did ten years ago when I was still legally a child? The idea that if I cannot make peace with my mistakes, I inhibit my potential for success?
No, it was a cold. The Devil was a cold.
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing or sharing with a link.
My special thanks go my theatre companion Vicky, Nikhil Vyas for all the Beat the Devil banter over the years, the woman at the National Theatre bookshop who actually got a copy of Beat the Devil off the shelves and dictated the last paragraph to me over the phone, and Mr Bill Nighy for being the sexiest to ever do it.
As I said, I’m £3.49 down, so if you would like to help redress this cosmic injustice, please do consider supporting me and my work, where you can get exclusive access to paid posts, like this week’s all about why I wouldn’t be a good spy.
See you next week! L x