Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads - University of Hull

38
David Wheatley
Cat Head Theatre
On YouTube I watch a short ‘Cat Head Theatre’ clip of Hamlet, in
which an animated feline gives a passable performance as the Prince
of Denmark. Guildenstern and Rosencrantz also feature, alternating
between speaking their lines and chasing flies in the background.
Cats are a large part of my life, and if called on to create a Cat Head
Theatre clip of my own I know all too well both the play and the
felines to which I would turn. The play would be Waiting for Godot
and in the role of Vladimir I would cast Percy, sage and sleek, while
Estragon would be his heavier and earthier helpmeet-brother Sam.
Pozzo would be recreated (from beyond the grave) by our
neighbours’ cat Rimmel, a large-bottomed and often bad-tempered
beast still to be seen on Google Earth, where she perches on a
recycling bin outside our front door. Lucky would be Hobo, a feline
who died at the estimated age of 25 in 2011, but who up to very
shortly before his death was still coming in through the flap to
devour the treats and pouches with which he would be
ceremoniously presented, for how could we refuse him anything,
estimable old gent that he was. There was something of the toilet
brush about his appearance in later life, it must be said, and to touch
his fur was to be left with a peculiar amber-like residue, to be no
more specific than that. The boy can be a cross-dressed Fifi,
Rimmel’s equally fat-arsed replacement. As for Godot, he is Snowy,
otherwise, Mr White, who sits in another neighbour’s window, stalks
the tenfoot, appears suddenly and shockingly on downstairs
windowsills, and on rare and treasured occasions appears in the
kitchen. Being deaf, Mr White inhabits, I imagine, a profoundly
solitary and private universe. He is perhaps the most elusively
beautiful creature on the street. I go to the window and a cat is
strolling among the bins. I go to the garden and another is lolling
on the bench. I leave the house and another is on my step, and yet
another sitting in a bush. Two of the cats I mentioned above are dead