This article by Tom Sharpe appeared in the Evening Standard Hot Tickets magazine, 13-18 August 1999.
It will be very interesting to see how this new dramatisation of the short stories and monologues by Saki works. I’ve been fascinated by Saki since childhood. When I was at school there was a very good master who read us Saki, all these savage, brilliant stories about things like a polecat killing an aunt, and how the boy celebrates afterwards and reveres the animal like a god.
The play should be worth seeing because it also looks into Saki’s life. And what a life. Saki – real name Hector Hugh Munro – was gay. He had a frightful childhood. His father was in the Burma police. Anyway, he was sent home like Woodhouse and Kipling and all these other poor devils, and brought up by two awful aunts. For the rest of his life (before he was killed in the First World War, where his last words were, ‘Put out that match…’) Saki was clearly very bitter and it is there in his writing. He clearly felt terribly about the treatment that children get.
This fascination with Saki stayed with me into adulthood. There is a very nasty streak in his writing – I’ve got one too. In 1975 I wrote the introduction to a collection of his short stories. There had been so many introductions (including one by Noel Coward, which I don’t like) that I didn’t know what to write. Except the name Saki puzzled me, because it doesn’t fit in with what he wrote. His sister, who became guardian of his papers and burned many of them, presumably because of his homosexuality, said he took the name Saki from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, where the name is mentioned. This got me thinking. A Saki is also a South American monkey. It looks charming, except that it has a very nasty temper – rather like Saki. So I invented this supposition that he wasn’t talking about the Rubaiyat but this monkey. More than a coincidence?
The Beastly Chronicles Of Saki, opens Tue 17 Aug, Jermyn Street Theatre, 16B Jermyn Street, SW1 (0171- 287 2875).