The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice

by Robert Calvert

[a production of the Pentameters Theatre, London]

Wind cries Jimi
STARS THAT PLAY WITH LAUGHING SAM'S DICE

by Tom Foot

Shane Chester (as Jimi Hendrix) photo by Conrad Blakemore

THE STARS THAT PLAY WITH LAUGHING SAM'S DICE

by Jason Best,
Thursday 1. Sept. 2005

It is 1962 and a potentially explosive standoff is looming in the hold of a US army plane between a veteran white sergeant and a callow black paratrooper in Robert Calvert’s play, a speculative recreation of an episode from the early life of one of the most iconic figures in 20th century popular culture.

The young private who has provoked his sergeant’s ire by declining to jump is James Marshall Hendrix; in four years time will come his apotheosis as rock star Jimi Hendrix. Now, though, it is not fear or insubordination but a premonition that is stopping him from launching himself from the plane. As envisaged by Calvert, who died in 1988, he is hesitantly poised on the edge of a jump into a future as a musician that will bestow him with "money, fame and chicks".

poster for the premiere-staging of THE STAR... in 1976 at the Pentameters Theatre

THE STARS THAT PLAY WITH LAUGHING SAM'S DICE
Pentameters Theatre,
Hampstead (London), 31st August 2005

by Jon Jarrett

Robert Calvert's play about Jimi Hendrix--a fair collection of rockstar credentials in one phrase there, but Calvert was in no doubt about who was the greater it seems. Nonetheless, this play uses Jimi as a vehicle for what must have been Calvert's own feelings and fears about the experience of stardom, crystallised in one episode in the young guitarist's life.

Set in Jimi's time in the 101st Airborne, which he joined when he was seventeen, the stage set at Pentameters was minimalist and functional. The original production used a set by Barney Bubbles; one can sadly only imagine what that was like as to the best of the producer's knowledge there are no photographs of it. The action, such as it is--the short play is mostly dialogue--takes place inside a trrop transport plane from which Jimi refuses to jump. This is the crux of the play right at the beginning, and why he refuses is the rest of it.

In this production, differently from the original, the opening scene is Sergeant McNulty (Robert G. Slade) seated at an office desk stage right (below a Stars and Stripes in the centre of which is hung a picture of JFK), reading Calvert's Hendrix tribute poem, `Voodoo Child'. From this contemplative opening the lights go down to come up again with McNulty
centre stage standing at the door of the plane, in full shouting Sergeant mode, seeing out paratroopers in what one of my companions described as "Full Metal Jacket" style. The parachutes (whose owners the audience is left to imagine) are counted as they open far below the imagined aircraft, and McNulty finds one short, eleven where there should be twelve. "Where's the twelfth man?" McNulty demands, apparently of the world at large, and is answered with a rising of the lights at stage left and the languid voice of Private Jimmy Hendricks (Shane Chester) admitting his presence.

From here on the question, at the immediate level of the action, is whether or not Jimi will jump. The Sergeant begins with yelling and threats of court-martial, but when asked why he won't jump, Jimi says it's because of a vision. The vision, which he explains to psychedelic lights played on the screen which occupies the aircraft door and phased excerpts from his `later' recordings, is about being a rock star. The jump becomes stepping out onto the stage, but he fears what will happen; in the event he steps out only in his astral body, soars unexpectedly upwards but even as he climbs, knows that there must at some point come the top of the curve and the fall into the `steel claws' of the voices of the audience, to be (it is implied but never stated) destroyed by their demand for him. The allegory with Calvert's own fractured experience of stardom and occasionally slippery grasp on sanity is obvious, but to Calvert's credit he never makes Jimi that fearful; Jimi is just *uncomfortable* about jumping and thought that he wouldn't.

The Sergeant scoffs, but as Jimi remains relaxedly obdurate (and visionary) he softens and shows a human side, including a past as a musician (tenor sax) himself. But when the guy who played trumpet with him had his head blown off right next to McNulty in their new career as soldiers, he sold his saxophone next leave. "I got a hundred and twenty-five dollars for it. All it was worth." This is the alternative to stardom? The audience can understand why Jimi hesitates before making his jump. But McNulty becomes more and more persuasive--it's not just that he doesn't understand what Jimi is saying, it's that he actively challenges and discards it, having made the same choice himself, and he has a good stock of American Dream cliches to put in its place with increasing rhetorical effectiveness, matched with the threat of what will happen if Jimi does disobey the order and fail to jump; court-martial, shame on his family and so on. The scene in the plane closes with Jimi poised in the doorway and the Sergeant's "Go!" ringing in the audience's ears.

Lights go down, and come up again on the Sergeant again at his desk, finishing off Jimi's record of service; "seventeen jumps; on the last one he broke his ankle and was hospitalised for two weeks; discharged from the army 4F, and landed in his new career as a rock-and-roll star." He shakes his head in wonderment, and the play is over.

Most of the meat of the play is therefore in the dialogue between the Sergeant and Jimi. Jimi's fears of stardom are balanced with exultation about playing, the soul that enters into the dead wood of the guitar when a musician breathes his skill into it, and generally there is a lot of waxing lyrical about guitar-playing, while the Sergeant's relentless hard-headedness is sweetened unexpectedly by the revelation of his previous jazz ambitions. The moments where the two find mutual musical heroes are warming, but the Sergeant never loses sight of his purpose and the unhappy fates of a lot of these young musicians (Robert Johnson most obviously) is turned into a point in his argument, a point with especial resonance for the audience and their hindsight. We know that Jimi will eventually make the jump that lands him in stardom, and pay the price he foresaw. Meanwhile, in the play, he touches the earth but lightly: there is a prolonged exchange in which the Sergeant refuses to believe he's never had any grief about his colour, but Jimi insists, "It doesn't affect me." The audience is meant to take away that Jimi is in the grip of forces bigger than himself--the word `destiny' is used a lot--but in the end the accusation of the premonition remains, that it's the audience themselves who destroy the rock stars. I suspect that this might be the clearest slant of Calvert through the play--I doubt Jimi thought about it like that--but it works all the same.

The words are all good, though we expect no less from Calvert really; a lot of them are familiar, too, several Hawkwind and other lines make brief cameo appearances, which I thought weakened the power of the parts as much as it hooked the audience. But beyond that, the building and relaxing of tension and the new background of the Sergeant that keep the dialogue interesting show a master wordsmith at work.

The actual production I think suffered a bit much from its minimalism. The psychedelic gateway to the sky was a nice touch, as was the wooden guitar-shape that Jimi occasionally fondles but that has his rifle making up the neck and centreline. That particular prop could have been made a lot nicer to look at however, as it was it was just a half-finished, unpainted, device and seemed oddly amateur given the deliberation that the rest of the stage seemed to show. Also, the background tape of aircraft noise had a perceptible silence at the end of the loop, which was difficult not to notice as it stopped and restarted. But these are fairly minor flaws. The space was well-used, and the acting good--Slade better than good, he made what could easily have been a wooden part come to life, whereas the much younger Chester seemed a little outdone by the boots into which he was being asked to step. The drawl he had just right, but the confidence perhaps not; on the other hand, how confident was a seventeen-year-old Hendricks, before the dazzling clothes and the change of spelling? So perhaps this is fair enough. However, whereas I'd go to see something Slade was in just for that, I'm not so sure I would for Chester.

For this reviewer, a big part of the fun of going to this was getting to talk to people who'd known Calvert at the time of the first production and were pleased to meet his fans; for a non-muso drama fan this might have precious little to stop the attention wandering even if Hendrix's iconic status would guarantee some catching of references. The target audience is pretty obviously fans of both Calvert and Hendrix, and it's perhaps just as well, although still sad, that few others are likely to go and see it. All the same, there's craft and skill in this production both in the acting and stage set-up and of course in the words.