Near the beginning of his talk, Will Self said something to us along the lines of, ‘in a couple of hours you’ll look back at this and think it was all some sort of surreal dream’ (though he probably used a few longer words). And he was completely right. His talk (and seemingly his new book, Walking to Hollywood, from which he read a few excerpts) was a very entertaining, but for me quite disorienting, meld of fact and fiction. A sort of memoir that contained so much fantasy that it was difficult to keep a sure footing.
He came onto stage carrying a plate of sandwiches, and handed them out to the audience, so that was nice. He then got slightly distracted by the strangeness of clingfilm. How can a man still be interesting whilst talking about sandwich covering? I was impressed.
The problem I found was that I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at us all for being there in the first place. When asked for his thoughts about the state of theatre today, he told a story of going to see a play and being more impressed by the part played by the audience, who were more convincing than any of the actors on stage. They played their role as middle-class theatre goers with real passion. They applauded in all the right places. As did we. At the end of an extract we applauded, and Will Self said he’d like applause when he got out of bed in the morning. Was he laughing at us, a bunch of people playing the part of the audience, believing his readings were true until they would suddenly switch and he was fighting Daniel Craig’s body double? Is it possible to enjoy something and be made to feel quite intense self-loathing at the same time? I might go and read Walking to Hollywood to see if I can find any answers. Probably a pointless task. Sigh.
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