PETER CRAWLEYon the game of the name
In 1948, Arthur Miller had a great idea for a play and a rubbish idea for a title. Initially, he had little prepared for what would prove to be his masterpiece other than its opening lines – "Willy?" "It's all right, I came back" – and its basic premise. It would be about a travelling salesman who dies at the end. So he called it . . . The Inside of His Head.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," says Juliet. But would her words have been as memorable if they belonged to a play called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, as Tom Stoppard once imagined? Miller's play might have gone down a very different road, with nothing but obscurity at its end, if he'd stuck
to his original title. It's hard to imagine The Inside of His Headas a modern classic, performed somewhere in the world every day, lingering in the memories of everyone who's seen it. That honour falls to the snappier Death of a Salesman.
There's an art to constructing play titles. Some clash with their subjects; others chime. Some are teasingly ambiguous; others give too much information. Shakespeare's actual title, for instance, is The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, which is the play's plot, genre and marketing department rolled into one. Death of a Salesmanannounces itself as a tragedy, not a suspense thriller. When the ending is no surprise, the important thing is how we get there.
If there's any ambiguity over the fate of the title character in Samuel Beckett's 1958 play, currently on in the Gate Theatre, listening to recordings of himself made through the years, the name on the marquee brings a sobering and shivering clarity: Krapp's Last Tape.The title is remarkable, not just because it's heavy with fatalism but because it lays such a deadly trap for a column writer prone to easy puns.
Incidentally, to judge by titles alone, the Gate seems to be on a particularly morbid streak. After it clears away the Krapp (Aargh! See what I mean?) it precedes Death of a Salesmanwith Tom Stoppard's Arcadia;originally named Et in Arcadia Ego("Even in Arcadia, there I am"), a memento mori spoken by, you guessed it, Death. Why did Stoppard change it? "Box office sense prevailed," he confessed.
Many playwrights have become similarly self-conscious about the name game: Hugh Leonard with self-reflexive breeziness ( Love in the Title), Edward Albee with "what-it-says- on-the-tin" simplicity ( The Play About the Baby), and Beckett with irreducible essentials ( Play).
Lately, though, there's been a fun trend for the unwieldy, few better than THEATREclub Stole Your CLOCK RADIO What the FUCK You Gonna Do About It?Unlike Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnestor Synge's The Playboy of the Western World,whose titles reassuringly form the closing words of their plays, THEATREclub'stitle never features in performance without causing major complication.
Still, like all good titles, it’s oddly memorable, its author beginning with the question that an audience should never ask twice: what do you call it?
