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Des Marshall |
All at sea: notes from an urban Crusoe wash up at the theatre
An ambitious play based on Des Marshall’s darkly humorous book about the travails of living with depression is being brought to the stage, writes Simon Wroe
Journal of an Urban Robinson Crusoe is at Pentameters Theatre until October 24.
The book, by Des Marshall, is published by Saxon Books, £6.99
DES Marshall has an anxious, pessimistic friend called Robinson Crusoe.
Des doesn’t exactly like the fellow, but he’s known him for too long to cut him loose. There’s an extra complication too: Des and Robinson are the same person.
Marshall, 68, has struggled with depression since his early twenties. Between 1994 and 2001 he kept a makeshift journal of his personal battles, scribbling his dark, frank thoughts on scraps of paper either in his flat in Soane Court, some corner of the O2 Centre on Finchley Road, or in the outpatients’ cafeteria of the Royal Free Hospital.
These jagged edges were kept in an old plastic carrier bag and carried around publishing houses for a further two years before one brave soul – the ninth he approached – took a chance on the Journal of an Urban Robinson Crusoe.
This week, it is the turn of theatre director Harry Meacher to throw caution to the wind as he attempts to stage Marshall’s fascinating but entirely unstageable book in a three-week run at Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead.
Meacher has enlisted a cast of six, all acting as facets of Marshall, to convey the despair, exhaustion, homespun wisdoms and minute social abuses Marshall experiences on every page. Above all, he claims, he wants to show the comedy, black as pitch, which runs beneath these observations.
Marshall, a former stand-up comedian and Butlins redcoat who now lives in St Edmund’s Terrace, Primrose Hill, seems pleased by the suggestion of humour before the dress rehearsal on Monday. He says he laughed a lot while he was writing his book on depression, but became down once it got published.
“I wrote some things down,” he says, producing a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “I’m trying to make a point about the society I live in. It’s a subjective history. One in four people is mentally ill and there are millions of urban Robinson Crusoes walking around, lost. People isolated on their own little island, even though they live in society. You can tell by the way they look, the way they talk.”
“It’s not a play,” insists Meacher. “It’s a piece of theatre that reflects a large part of life. Every conversation I’ve had with Des I’ve never heard such tragedy – but I’ve never laughed so much. The poetry and the warmth and the heartache and the hope – everything is in there.”
As Meacher talks, Marshall studiously squeezes all the pips out of the slices of lemon brought with his tea.
He wrote the book, he says, because he was angry following the death of a close friend.
“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write down [but] I’ve always felt I had something to say,” Marshall explains. “It’s a kind of megolomania. Crusoe is my anxiety me. I get irritated with him, he’s my history, my childhood.”
When Marshall was two months old, his eczema and asthma were so bad that his mother, a housemaid, sent him to live in an institution for sick children, which she would visit once a month. Only after 10 years was he considered healthy enough to live with his father, mother and older and younger brothers at Rochester Court in Camden Town.
As a young man in the 1960s, he had dozens of menial jobs before he began touring the rough East End stand-up circuit, with a starter pistol for protection. But depression was a family business which would eventually catch up with him. His older brother has tried several times to commit suicide, and his father threw himself to his death in 1979. Marshall had to give up the comedy soon after.
Marshall describes visiting his father in hospital after an earlier suicide attempt: his dad turned away from him and accidentally pulled out the plug for his pulse monitor. “He thought he was dead!” giggles Marshall, mimicking his father’s panic at the prospect of having no heartbeat.
It is clear the adaptation is having an uplifting effect on Marshall. He still has scraps of paper in his pockets, but they have ceased suggesting he “disappear into himself and say goodbye to the world”.
As we get up to leave, he says: “I’ve got this fantasy. When people come to the theatre tomorrow I’ve got this fantasy about begging outside. I’ll tell them, ‘Oh Crusoe, I knew him. Strange bloke. I think he’s dead’.”
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