ALAS, POOR André. I see the former pianist André Tchaikowsky will not be part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamletwhen the production transfers to London, despite a starring role in the recent Stratford run. His consolation, I suppose, is that by appearing in the show at all, he has achieved a long-standing ambition.
When he died in 1982, Tchaikowsky left a fairly standard will, except for a bit at the end: "I hereby request that my body or any part thereof may be used for therapeutic purposes including corneal grafting and organ transplantation or for the purposes of medical education or research [. . .] and in due course the institution receiving it shall have [it] cremated with the exception of my skull, which shall be offered by [. . .] to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical performance." The role he had in mind, of course, was Yorick, whose skull becomes a bleakly humorous conversation piece between Hamlet and a gravedigger in Shakespeare's famous play. The Polish-born pianist loved Hamlet, but thought the use of fake plastic skulls always ruined the scene. He determined that when he himself had shuffled off this mortal coil, he would remedy the situation personally.
Unfortunately, it didn't prove quite that simple. First the funeral directors refused to remove his head, thinking this illegal, until the British Home Office ruled otherwise. But even after the necessary arrangements had been made, and the skull found its way into the RSC's props department, there was marked reluctance to use it.
Part of the fear was practical. A real skull might be too brittle for the rough treatment given to it by Shakespeare's careless gravedigger. Partly it was the taboo. Actors did not like disrespecting human remains, even to respect the wishes of the remains' former owner. It also didn't help that Tchaikowsky was well known, so that actors were seeing him instead of Yorick.
A quarter of a century would pass before the skull finally made its stage debut, earlier this year and at first unbeknownst to Stratford audiences. Then the actor playing Hamlet (David Tennant) revealed his co-star's true identity, and it was the audiences' turn to be distracted. Too much so for the company's liking: with the result that the skull has now been stood down.
Still, as I say, Tchaikowsky has at least achieved part of his dying wish. For the West End run, the role of Yorick will now presumably devolve to an understudy.
HAMLETIS only a play, after all. But I was in a real graveyard at the weekend - the one in Inniskeen where Patrick and Peter Kavanagh are buried - and witnessed the evidence of a true-life drama, tragic in its own way. The row that began when the poet's wife died in 1989 smoulders on; and now as a result, both brothers' graves have, one way or another, been defiled.
Before last year's Kavanagh Weekend, I suggested naively that it was time for everyone involved to right a decade-old wrong and restore some memorial to Katherine Kavanagh, who had been written out of history since Peter (as he later admitted in a book) removed and destroyed her grave's headstone in 1998.
A heroic supporter of his brother, Peter was also prone to be overzealous in defence of the poet's reputation. He never came to terms with Patrick's late marriage, which was not mentioned in the poet's letters to the US and which Peter only learned of afterwards. Following Patrick's death came a long-running dispute over the estate, and an animosity that eventually led to Peter smashing the headstone erected in Katherine's memory.
But by 2007 Peter had passed on, having first made his peace with Inniskeen's Kavanagh Centre, housed in the former church whose cemetery now contains both brothers' remains, in separate plots. The hope was that with all the protagonists now dead, compromise on a memorial could be reached.
Instead, sometime after last year's graveside commemoration, Peter's memorial disappeared too. Nobody knows who took it, except the person or persons involved. But the upshot is that Peter Kavanagh now shares Katherine's posthumous anonymity. Of the trio, only Patrick is commemorated: by the small cross and inscription that originally adorned his grave and was restored after the first attack.
The centre itself is an unfortunate bystander in all this, since the graves and their memorials are essentially private family matters.
But there is an element of public ownership too. Thousands of Kavanagh fans visit the cemetery every year and the story of the missing headstones strikes a rather sad note.
In his poem Epic, Patrick Kavanagh humorously dramatised the territorial dispute between two Monaghan neighbours over "who owned that half a rood of rock, a no-man's land/Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims". Now he and his brother occupy small neighbouring plots in the stony grey soil. And the theme appears to have followed them into the grave.