Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  It was a time when much was being made in fiction and social commentary of the gulf that higher education opened up between working-class parents and their studious offspring. It was one of Dennis Potter’s early themes and is the central concern of Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden’s Education and the Working Class, a book, judging from my pencilled notes on the end papers, that I seem to have studied quite carefully when I was in New York with Beyond the Fringe in 1962, partly, I suppose, because it was also a breath of home.

  There seemed to be agreement that a working-class child educated at university found it difficult thereafter to come to terms with – relate to if you like (which I didn’t much) – his or her parents who looked on bewildered at this graduate cuckoo they had reared in their back-to-back nest. I never found this the case … or my case anyway.

  University was my sphere, home was theirs, and far from wanting my parents to adapt their way of going on to my ‘university outlook’ (whatever that was), what I wanted, once I’d stopped being embarrassed by them, was that they should remain the same as they had always been, or as I imagined them to have been. That this was as false in its own way as wanting them to defer to my newly acquired sophistication I did not yet see. I just knew I wasn’t like the characters I read about in novels – Sons and Lovers I suppose a classic example – or some of the disillusioned graduates in Jackson and Marsden.

  Once upon a time, as I say in the play, I had longed for my parents to be socially accomplished and anonymously middle-class, unfazed by the occasional glass of sherry or, when coming to Oxford, going out to supper at the Randolph as other parents did. University – and more significantly show business – meant that I had changed tack and, being more socially at ease myself, what I was requiring of them now was that in a parody of conservation they should preserve their old-fashioned down-to-earth character as I recalled (and sometimes imagined) it from when I was a child.

  Thus my letters home from Oxford and later from New York were written in a self-consciously homely tone which revived the extremes of dialect and ‘Leeds talk’ long after my parents had begun to discard them themselves. It’s true that Dad for instance used to refer to the August bank holiday as ‘Banky’ as in ‘Where are we off for Banky?’ but that had been in the forties and casual conversation. To find the phrase resurrected and set down in one of my letters in the sixties together with other similar outmoded expressions seems self-conscious and condescending. To read my letters home now is shaming. What can they have thought? I had been seven years at Oxford and was now appearing on Broadway, and yet I still affected to address them as if we were all in a dialect farce.

  It must have been around this time, too, that I stopped bothering about my Northern accent. I never had much, though I’d made some attempt at Oxford to iron out its worst excesses, with vowels always the problem, though whether one said ‘bath’ or ‘barth’ of less moment (and less of a giveaway) than if you came out with ‘batcher’ instead of ‘butcher’.

  But of course accents didn’t matter any more – not because the class structure had altered; it hadn’t particularly – it was thanks, in large measure, to the Beatles. By the mid-sixties a provincial accent (with the possible exception of Wolverhampton) had become not unfashionable, an attribute one need not strive to get rid of or even tone down. Sexual intercourse may have begun in 1963 but so did freedom of speech.

  By this time I was performing on the stage in Beyond the Fringe and beginning to write, though I detect there a progression in my writing voice corresponding to that of my speaking one. My first play, Forty Years On (1968), was entirely metropolitan and not written, any bit of it, in the voice with which I’d been born and brought up, but in the one which I had (if a little patchily) acquired. Set in a public school, the play provided a potted cultural history of England from 1900 to 1940, seen through the eyes of an upper-class couple in an air-raid shelter in Claridge’s, a far cry from the streets of Upper Armley where I’d spent the war and even further from the streets of Tong Road. My second play, Getting On, was metropolitan too, though less lofty, and it was not until 1971, ten years after I’d first gone on the stage, that with my first TV film, A Day Out, I began to write plays in the voice with which I’d been born.

  That I should have ended up in the theatre hardly seemed to surprise my parents. ‘Folks did clap,’ Mam said, after they had seen the opening performance of Beyond the Fringe in Edinburgh in August 1960, but there was no surprise in the remark, theatre, like university, another sphere in which they could not nor wanted to follow me. It had never been one of my own ambitions, though I’d been going to the theatre since I was a small child, taken there first by my grandmother who every year would give us an outing to the pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Lands Lane. It was never the Grand or the Empire, still less the much more disreputable City Varieties. It was always the blue and gold Theatre Royal where, long after Christmas, and even in May, the panto would still be running and we would toil up the scrubbed wooden stairs and come out on what at first seemed the almost sheer face of the gallery.

  Invariably produced by Francis Laidler, it seemed a spectacular show and would, I think, seem so even today with transformation scenes, a flying ballet and a troupe of Tiller Girls. The star of the show would be a famous name from the music hall – Norman Evans, Frank Randle or Albert Modley – and these were always the bits Grandma enjoyed best.

  These early visits to the pantomime stopped with the death of Grandma and the demolition of the Theatre Royal which came not long afterwards. My theatregoing then was confined to Saturday afternoons and the matinees at the Grand, nowadays the home of Opera North. By London standards it was a huge theatre and, sitting in the gods and already short-sighted but still without glasses, I could never see the actors’ faces (nor even knew that one was meant to). And they were distinguished actors too, as in those days shows toured before and after they went into the West End still with their original cast. So I saw Edith Evans in James Bridie’s Daphne Laureola, Flora Robson playing a troubled shoplifter in Black Chiffon, Eric Portman as a Labour colonial governor in His Excellency and dozens of plays where the furnishings were by the Old Times Furnishing Company and the cigarettes were by Abdulla and nylons by Kayser Bondor.

  Cracks began to appear in this safe little world when later in the fifties I saw Waiting for Godot here, Olivier in The Entertainer and Dennis Lotis in the pre-London try-out of Osborne’s The World of Paul Slickey. Even Olivier didn’t draw the crowds, the theatre virtually empty, but so the theatre always was on a Saturday matinee and I took this as a matter of course, theatres like churches not meant to be full.

  It was a shock when in 1951 I went to my first London theatre, the shortly to be demolished St James’s. I could not get over how small it was. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were alternating Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra and I saw the Shaw, remembering now only my wonder that, though I was in the cheapest seats, for the first time in my life I could see the faces of the actors.

  There was no difficulty in that department the first time I appeared on the London stage, as it was in Beyond the Fringe at the Fortune, one of the smallest (as well as the steepest) of the London theatres and opposite the stage door of Drury Lane where My Fair Lady was still playing. We met everybody at that time and I wish I’d kept more of a diary, though it would just have been a list of celebrities who had come backstage and who I dutifully listed in my weekly letters home.

  Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, came to be harangued by Peter Cook, imitating Harold Macmillan on the stage. In Washington we were taken along to the press conference when President Kennedy first revealed the existence of the Cuban missiles. My chief recollection of which is how briskly Kennedy strode to the podium and got on with the proceedings and how he flirted with and charmed the older women journalists.

  The Cuban crisis was brewing all the time we were on tour with the revue, and the night it opened on Broadway was the night the Soviet ships wer
e intercepted and turned back. At one point during the first night a siren sounded and the audience went utterly silent, only for it to turn out to be just a fire engine. And I remember lying awake at night listening for the sound of breaking glass, because it was thought if war were going to come the first signs of it would be looting and rioting in the streets.

  In due course after the crisis, the Kennedys themselves came to the show, the red telephone was installed in the box office and backstage thronged with Secret Servicemen, who, ironically in view of what was to happen the following year, were deeply suspicious of the wooden rifle we used in one of our sketches. The Kennedys came backstage, as did Adlai Stevenson along with fabled stars of the movies, but I’ve no memories of anything that was said. Like so many occasions in one’s life, including some of its most intimate moments, one would like to have been there without being actually present, a fly, as it were on one’s own wall, just watching.

  So much of Cocktail Sticks is to do with class, it’s appropriate I should end fairly high up the social scale in Downing Street. Several years after Beyond the Fringe, when Harold Wilson was prime minister, I was invited to a dinner at Downing Street for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. It was during the period when Harold Wilson imagined himself an English Kennedy, and when figures from the world of show business and entertainment began to be allowed in at the front door.

  My welcome wasn’t all that auspicious. Mr and Mrs Wilson were lined up with Prime Minister Trudeau at the top of the stairs, and when Trudeau asked me what I did, I said I was a playwright, but had started off as an actor, in revue. Mary Wilson frowned. ‘I hope it wasn’t one of those revues where there is no scenery and they just wear black sweaters and so on.’ I had to admit that it was, in fact, Beyond the Fringe. Now it was Mr Wilson’s turn to frown. He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Beyond the Fringe? But you weren’t one of the original four.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I don’t remember you. Are you sure?’ So, feeling like Trotsky must have felt when he was cut out of the history of the Revolution, I then went in to dinner, where the guest opposite, a noted London publisher, had the seating altered so that he could be opposite someone of more importance, and at a later stage in the meal one of the legs of my chair came off.

  September 2012

  Introduction to People

  I sometimes think that my plays are just an excuse for the introductions with which they are generally accompanied. These preambles, while often gossipy and with sidelights on the rehearsal process, also provide me with a soapbox from which I can address, sometimes more directly than I’ve managed in the play itself, some of the themes that crop up in the text. In The History Boys it was private education; in The Habit of Art biography; in People, though, I’m not sure.

  Rehearsals aren’t just for the actors; they are also a first opportunity for the author to hear the play and find out what he or she has written. But since this introduction is being put together in August 2012, nearly two months before rehearsals begin, I am still to some extent in the dark about the play or what (if anything) it adds up to.

  Some plays seem to start with an itch, an irritation, something one can’t solve or a feeling one can’t locate. With People it was a sense of unease when going round a National Trust house and being required to buy into the role of reverential visitor. I knew this irritated me, but, like the hapless visitors whom Dorothy confronts as they are leaving, I still found it hard to say what it was I had expected to find and whether I had found it.

  National Trust guides more conventional than Dorothy (and for whom I almost invariably feel slightly sorry) assume that one wishes to be informed about the room or its furniture and pictures, which I don’t always. Sometimes I just want to look and occasionally (eighteenth-century porcelain, Chinoiserie and most tapestries) prefer to walk straight through. Sometimes I actively dislike what I’m seeing: yet another table massively laid for a banquet, for instance, or massed ranks of the family photos ranged on top of a grand piano with royal visitors given some prominence. Even when I am interested but want to be left alone with the pictures or whatever, I have learned not to show too much interest as this invariably fetches the guide over, wanting to share his or her expertise. I know this is bad behaviour and it’s another reason why I’ll often come away as dissatisfied with myself as I am with the house.

  The first stately home I can remember visiting was Temple Newsam, a handsome early sixteenth-century house given to Leeds by the Earl of Halifax. We often used to go on outings there when I was a child, taking the tram from outside the City Market up through Halton and past the municipal golf course to the terminus at Temple Newsam House. An adjunct of Leeds Art Gallery, it had a good collection of furniture, a long gallery without which no country house was complete, besides housing some of the city’s collection of Cotman drawings and watercolours. While aged nine or ten I didn’t wholly appreciate its contents, I saw Temple Newsam as a wonderfully ancient and romantic place, which it wasn’t really, having been heavily restored and remodelled in the nineteenth century. Still, it gave me a lifelong taste for enfiladed rooms and for Leeds pottery (particularly the horses) neither of which life has enabled me to indulge. As a boy, though, for me its most numinous holding was a large felt hat reputed to be that of Oliver Cromwell with a bullet hole in the crown to prove it.

  Visiting Temple Newsam was always a treat, as it still is more than half a century later. Back in 1947, though, with the country in the throes of the post-war economic crisis, the push was on for more coal, and the whole of the park in front of the house was given over to open-cast mining, the excavations for which came right up to the terrace. From the state rooms you looked out on a landscape as bleak and blasted as a view of the Somme, an idyll, as it seemed to me then, irretrievably lost, and young though I was I knew this.

  But of course I was wrong. It wasn’t irretrievable and to look at the grounds today one would have no idea that such a violation had ever occurred. And it had occurred, too, with even greater devastation at other country houses south of Leeds: Nostell Priory was similarly beleaguered, as was Wentworth Woodhouse, both, like the Stacpooles’ house, smack in the middle of coal-bearing country and where the notion as in the play of a country house with a mine in the immediate vicinity is far from far-fetched.

  Nostell Priory is full of Adam furniture, and both Nostell and Temple Newsam have Chippendale desks like the one referred to in the play, that at Temple Newsam bought by Leeds Corporation from the Harewoods at Harewood House – another outing from Leeds, and a mansion, incidentally, that was once on the National Trust’s wish list but which happily still remains with the family that built it. It is, though, one of those reprobate mansions cited by June in the play, Harewood having been built from the profits of eighteenth-century sugar and slaves … from one of whom is descended one of the National Theatre’s noted actors, David Harewood.

  Previous productions of my plays at the National Theatre have generally been accompanied by a Platform evening, very often shared with Nicholas Hytner, when we talk about the play and answer questions from the audience. We did one of these evenings in 2009 after the opening of The Habit of Art, and at the end of the session Nick thanked the audience, saying that my plays seemed to turn up (and be put through his letterbox) at roughly four-year intervals. He felt this was a bit long to wait and if the audience agreed and wanted something sooner he asked them to put their hands together. This they gratifyingly did. It was a Tinkerbell moment, and not having known what he was planning to say I found myself uncharacteristically choked up. But it did the trick, this play clocking in at three years after its predecessor.

  When I first showed it to Nick he remarked that it wasn’t like anything else I’d done … or anything else I’d done with him. The play, though, that does have hints of it is Getting On (1971), which, like People, is what has since become known as a ‘play for England’, sort of, anyway. In those days when I had less compassion for the audience (and for the actors) I went in for
much longer speeches than I would venture to do nowadays. But some of the diatribes I put into the mouth of George Oliver, a right-wing Labour MP, are echoes of the complaints more succinctly expressed by Dorothy in People, the complaints generally being about ‘England’.

  Enjoy (1980) is another play with which People has similarities in that both, while ostensibly contemporary in setting, have a slightly fanciful notion of the future. At least I thought of it as fanciful, but what I was writing about in Enjoy – the decay and preservation of a working-class quarter in a Northern town and the last back-to-back in Leeds – all came true much quicker than I could have imagined in the decades that followed. The same threatens to be the case with People.

  Privacy or at any rate exclusivity is increasingly for hire, instances of which make some of Bevan’s proposals in the play not even outlandish. I had written the play when I read that Liechtenstein in its entirety could be hired for the relatively modest sum of £40,000 per night. Around the same time I read that Lancaster Castle, which once housed the County Court and the prison that often went with such institutions, was up for sale. That it had also hosted the execution of condemned prisoners probably increased the estimate. At one point in 2011 the Merchant Navy War Memorial at Tower Hill was to have been hired out for some banker’s junket. That a Methodist church in Bournemouth has been bought and reopened as a Tesco is hardly worth mentioning. So what is? Everywhere nowadays has its price and the more inappropriate the setting the better. I scarcely dare suggest that Pentonville or Wormwood Scrubs be marketed as fun venues lest it has already happened.