Theatre

‘I’ve always been a bit of a Cassandra. Expecting the worst. Unfortunately, I’ve usually been right.’ John Calder peers over his increasingly threadbare shelves with rueful blue eyes. His famous bookshop-theatre on The Cut faces an uncertain future after a rent hike. At 80 years old, he has decided that he cannot carry on with the enterprise. He wants to do his own thing, be it writing, directing or travelling. And well he might. He claims that he hasn’t had a day off since 1973. Over the years, he has been busily publishing some of European and American literature’s finest avant-garde authors, including Eugène Ionesco, William Burroughs, Henry Miller and Peter Weiss.
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But it is for his association with Samuel Beckett that he is best known. When Calder met Beckett – a partnership that took the Irishman from relative obscurity to literary fame – they discussed ‘life, its pointlessness, the cruelty of man to man’. Some 80 per cent of Calder’s list is now dedicated to Beckett. The poet Michael Horovitz describes Calder as a ‘sort of Beckett character himself, ploughing a lonely furrow’. The tiny theatre at the back of the shop houses The Godot Company, a specialist in Beckett’s work.

Calder added the little theatre in an attempt ‘to recreate something of the openness, originality and informality of the old Traverse [in Edinburgh] of the ’60s.’ He offered Thursday night performances, talks, lectures, and reminiscences on various themes from ‘Hell is Other People’ to ‘Who the Hell Was Shakespeare?’ The bookshop nights were ‘an attempt to add a little quality to the world, to obviate today’s dumbing down, to try to put lies right, to try to stop the rot, to pursue what I believe in for a better world.’

Calder’s plight is shared by a number of London’s independent bookshops. Shops such as Gay’s the Word – the UK’s only dedicated lesbian and gay bookshop – and the socialist bookshop Bookmarks are struggling to compete with internet booksellers, supermarkets, chain bookstores and high rent. The big chains, meanwhile, are notoriously skimpy on drama. Most Waterstones have a solitary bookcase which stocks European classics and few modern plays, which look paltry in comparison with a heaving Film and TV section. Surely the combination of ‘theatre’ and ‘independent bookseller’ is an anathema in the current market?