Did You See My Play About The Argumentative Kidneys?

Didn’t you? You should have. I was quite pleased with it. It was only one for two nights, both at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter, and consisted of two of the above, rather uterine gentlemen waiting to be chosen for a transplant. It went down quite well, the audience brushed by the gentle sounds of suplhur and bowel gas.

I have been told, more than once, that it (and much of my other writing) is rather like Beckett’s, and more specifically Waiting For Godot. This is rather embarassing as I had never read Beckett; he is one of those sentinels that I seem to refuse to look up and acknowledge. Well, consider yourself acknowledged, Sam. I bought your damn play.

I can see what people mean. The man was a little kernel of wit and genius, whereas my plays seem to be an increasingly wide forum on which to display my various anxieties and disabilities like some sort of maggoty buffet, but I could see what they mean. The non-sequiturs. The rambling speech intersected with totemic, repeating phrases. The centred action. My favouring of the duality.

And yet it reminded me more of something else. It reminded me of Frank.

If you have not had the pleasure of reading any of Jim Woodring’s comics, I can tell you now that they can be picked up for a very reasonable price pretty much anywhere, and you will be supporting a man who not only produces comics of earth-shaking absurdity and revelational dignity, but who uses crowd-sourced funds to build a fountain pen as large as he is. It should be pointless to say that he is an Important Person.

If you have read Frank, please be assured that I am not directly comparing Beckett’s work to that of Woodring’s, nor is there an academic point to be made, particularly; it would not strike me odd if Woodring was a fan of Absurdism and spirituality in the same way as the grumpy old man. But the atmosphere, as I was reading Godot, was not one that I could shake - I was brought back to Unifactor again and again.

The Unifactor is the world of Woodring’s silent, line-drawn comics; a place of hideous mystery, danger, transformation and the caco-grotesque. At times a Panic idyll, full of trees, lakes, rolling fields, and beautiful, Arabesque architecture; the home of Frank, a bipedal, mouse-like avatar of curiosity and humour, who wanders the land with his companion and demi-deity Pupshaw, exploring the creatures, dangers and lessons that they can learn. Often there is not a lesson, but merely pain and cruelty and death, often inflicted by cheery Frank himself. Yeah, Absurdism is a bit like that.

There are two other major characters, including Frank and Pupshaw; the tortured, stupid and cruel Manpig, hater of and churl to Whim, a daemon whose porcelain face is constantly dragged into a moulded, rictus grin. There is now a huge library of Frank’s adventures, and, as you can see in my little mutant paragraph above, they are rather hard to describe - I would suggest that you buy them and draw your own conclusions.

Perhaps you will also see these links that I found unavoidable to draw; Frank and Pupshaw seem to me a more innocent Estragon and Vladmir, held by the world and ruled by it, the road and the tree embodied in the entirety of the Unifactor. Their constant curiosity and wordless remarks on their situation are familiar, though Frank seems to pee a lot less than Vladimir. The absurdity of their surroundings are plain, but, as in Godot, there is “nothing to be done”; as they wait on the path for some unknown objective, so Frank’s motives are similarly shrouded; he seems created purely to take picnics, or read in bed, or ride great symmetrical souls through the sky. 

But when Pozzo and Lucky emerged, one driving the other, greased in stink and braying and crying, the pathetic plight of Manpig is mirrored almost painfully. Here is a character who is such a wretch that one almost wants to kick him, even more so when he bites Vladimir (or is it Estragon? It is late). Similarly, Manpig lashes out at everyone around him; at one point, he and Frank are locked in a cell with a gun - Manpig immediately tries to shoot Frank, a futile gesture, and when the gun goes off prematurely he cowers and seems to be soiling himself. A pair of stupid creatures indeed.

And yet what a transformation, for both of them! In Act II, Pozzo emerges blind and chained himself, Lucky walking upright, with some sort of dignity hanging from his newly raised shoulders. Within the Frank canon there is a tale of Manpig (as, you will see, there so often is) where is he taken in by a strange, sillouhetted man, taught to read, fed and bathed, his sores soothed, and begins to walk upright, a Darwinian progression within a single frame. He is still given to bouts of cruelty, but greets Frank as a brother, festooned in patterned robes and a fez. It is an incredibly affecting storyline, and one that reeks of Lucky.

And yet I have no clever conclusion. This is merely something that has been weighing on me for a few days, and I wanted to put it in words so that I can make sure it is not ridiculous. I don’t think it is, and hopefully it will make you buy a Frank book, or indeed Waiting For Godot, but to be honest I would rather see the giant pen finished and producing a similarly gigantic Frank story, all for me.