“England, 932 A.D., a Kingdom divided …” If you’ve seen the musical “Spamalot” — and, going by box office figures, there’s a good chance you have — then you’ll know what comes next. A fish-slapping dance, a sextet of high-kicking medieval Laker Girls and a quest for the Holy Grail. Along the way there will be tauntingly flatulent Frenchmen, the Black Knight — limbless but indomitable — and some advice about how to succeed on Broadway which teeters, dazzlingly, on the very edge of bad taste. But taste, in the words of the show’s original director, Mike Nichols, is the enemy of art.
Review by Dennis Duncan
The musical was written by Eric Idle and John du Prez, taking its inspiration — or as the theatrical poster put it, “lovingly ripped off” — from the 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” one the most celebrated productions of Idle’s erstwhile troupe. In the new book “The Spamalot Diaries,” Idle recounts the show’s creation from its first tentative read-throughs in early 2004 to its triumphant Broadway opening a year later.
There are one or two hints — a “presciently” or an “as it will turn out” — that Idle has not been able to resist working things up after the event. Mostly, however, we can be grateful for the diaries’ candor. Idle hasn’t suppressed his moments of preciousness — a complaint about having to fly coach — or the resentment he feels when cast members accidentally congratulate him on a script that is “just like the movie”: “It isn’t just like the movie,” he replies. “It is assumed that the script is by Python and that it achieved this adaptation by parthenogenesis.”
At the core of “The Spamalot Diaries” is the tension between Idle as a creative individual and as a member of the all-conquering Python collective, the frustration of the solo artist forever seen through the prism of his old band.
We also see at least three instances of Idle storming out of rehearsals when creative decisions have not gone his way. Here one thinks of the “Run Away!” song or of Brave Sir Robin, played by Idle in “The Holy Grail” (“When danger reared its ugly head,/ He bravely turned his tail and fled”). We realize that these songs are really a reflexive sendup of Idle himself, the making-safe of a shameful instinct by exaggerating it until becomes ridiculous, then putting it onstage and inviting people to laugh at it.
This is perhaps the book’s most striking and moving insight: that the Pythons’ humor is the expression of fundamental aspects of their respective personalities. “I did realize this morning that the Grail is essentially about the Pythons: each knight’s character is a reflection of our own,” Idle observes. King Arthur (Graham Chapman) sweetly, perpetually baffled; Lancelot (John Cleese) a bully “who attacks everyone”; Galahad (Michael Palin) the sexual deflector, “sorely sexually tempted by the maidens but must resist,” and so on. It is moments like these that elevate “The Spamalot Diaries” from being just a lot of musical-nerd detail about B-sections and sitzprobes.
As opening night approaches and the stakes start to become clear — really, the possibility of the show becoming a serious hit — Idle becomes increasingly introspective. “Michael Viner a long time ago accused me of not having the character for success, and I think at the time he was right,” he reflects, adding that this is a fundamental difference between the British and American temperaments: “It’s an English thing to prefer failure, and to somehow associate it with good character.” There is something of the Shakespearean soliloquy as Idle girds himself for acclaim, acknowledging his habit — acquired while negotiating the slings and arrows of boarding school — of seeking out disappointment: “Somehow I have to find the character to face with dignity the people praising me, instead of the fear of having it all snatched away.”
It is a moving scene, even if we know how it ends. “Spamalot” will win the 2005 Tony Award for best musical and run for years, with productions in London, Las Vegas and Melbourne. A recent revival has recently closed after several months on Broadway, and a touring production is planned to travel the United States next year. Meanwhile, rumors of a “Spamalot” film are perennial.
Idle, one suspects, is ambivalent about this. “I’m not lying when I say it is the process that enthralls me, not the success,” he writes, and reading the diaries one can readily believe him. The day after the show’s rapturous first night in New York, Idle is ready to return to his family in L.A. “Time to go home and be normal. It’s hard to pretend an emotion everyone is foisting on you.”
Still, it is hard not to feel some satisfaction at his success. Or perhaps, more precisely, at his success in facing up to his success, and in finding a way to be both a part of and separate from the group that made him famous. Taking a bow on the show’s opening night, he calls his old friends onstage: “I pulled up the Pythons who apparently all made obeisance behind me which I never saw because I was looking at my daughter’s face on the front row and smiling at her.”
Besides, for these English friendships, with their roots in the class system and boarding school archetypes, a certain scratchiness is somehow inescapable. Musing on the fact that “Spamalot” has earned an awful lot of money not just for Idle but for the other Pythons too, the ever-wise Steve Martin delivers the killer insight: “They will never forgive you for this.”
Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London and the author of “Index, A History of the.”
The Spamalot Diaries
By Eric Idle
Crown. 208 pp. $25
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