Gavin Millarrrrr writes: from "Monty Python's Big Red Book"  (new hardback 
edition)           
 
Gavin Millarrrrrrrrrr [John Cleese] writes:
 
Neville Shunt's latest West End Success, "It all Happened on the 11.20 from
Hainault to Redhill via Horsham and Reigate, calling at Carshalton Beeches,
Malmesbury, Tooting Bec and Croydon West," is currently appearing at the Limp
Theatre, Piccadilly.  What Shunt is doing in this, as in his earlier nine
plays, is to express the human condition in terms of British Rail.
 
Some people have made the mistake of seeing Shunt's work as a load of rubbish
about railway timetables, but clever people like me who talk loudly in
restaurants see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a
mechanised mansion.  The points are frozen, the beast is dead.  What is the
difference?  What indeed is the point?  The point is frozen, the beast is late
out of Paddington.  The point is taken.  If La Fontaine's elk would spurn Tom
Jones the engine must be our head, the dining car our oesophagus, the guards
van our left lung, the cattle truck our shins, the first class compartment the
piece of skin at the nape of the neck and the level crossing an electric elk
called Simon.  The clarity is devastating.  But where is the ambiguity?  Over
there in a box.  Shunt is saying the 8.15 from Gillingham when in reality he
means the 8.13 from Gillingham.  The train is the same, only the time is
altered.  Ecce homo, ergo elk.  La Fontaine knew its sister and knew her bloody
well.  The point is taken, the beast is moulting, the fluff gets up your nose.
The illusion is complete; it is reality, the reality is illusion and the
ambiguity is the only truth.  But is the truth, as Hitchcock observes, in the
box?  No, there isn't room, the ambiguity has put on weight.  The point is
taken, the elk is dead, the beast stops at Swindon, Chabrol stops at nothing,
I'm having treatment and La Fontaine can get knotted.