by David Hare
Recreations of the period mislead by their lack of diversity. In musicians’ memoirs, descriptions of outrageous behaviour are justified with the formula ‘Hey, it was the sixties.’ But for every person who loved drugs there was another, like me, who distrusted them. Yes, the party – often beginning on Saturday night at 10 p.m. and ending on Sunday long after dawn – was always the unit of currency, the common building block of the period. But even before becoming a dramatist, I had the instincts of a voyeur, and still do. I’m always happiest at the side of the room, watching. I didn’t respond well to drugs. Their effect mainly was to make me paranoid and to stoke my insecurity. They sent me the message that everything was not all right. When I took them, the universe never seemed to cohere, nor to impart meaning. So I seemed condemned to spend a certain number of evenings per week watching other people drift away peaceably. To me, it seemed axiomatic that one person was going to be more interesting than many. I preferred to go deep than wide. The image of those first London years would always be of closing the door and slipping away early before the dope, already a fog, became a blanket. I was invariably more interested in who I might leave the party with than with anything that happened during it.
The work at Pathé was fun. The office was at 142 Wardour Street, so I could walk there in five minutes. Richard Dunn was an ideal boss, and my fellow researcher was Charlie Gillett, who knew everything about rock and roll. In the early 1960s, Charlie had suggested to the Observer that he might write a column for them about popular music. They had replied by saying that not only did they not want his column, but that they found it unimaginable that the Observer would ever run any column about pop music, because pop wasn’t, and never could be, art. Charlie, with his defiantly short haircut, was indifferent to the fashion of the times. A keen sprinter, he was as lean as James Dean and dressed like him in jeans and plimsolls. Later, it was Charlie who wrote rock’s first and best history, The Sound of the City. He also discovered Ian Dury and managed him in the early days when, before the Blockheads, he led a pub band called Kilburn and the High Roads. It was typical of Charlie that when Dury was approached by another manager, Charlie let him go, telling him to do whatever was best for the music.
There were to be two sets of films, supposedly pilots for an intended series, one on War and Society, and the other on Sex and Society. Charlie had arrived before me. He had shrewdly calculated that there would, in a newsreel archive, be a great deal more footage of the first than of the second. He had bagged War. I was left with Sex. My search for any usable Dionysian material became so desperate that I ended up making Sex and Society Part One: The Duke of Windsor, on the unlikely grounds that at least there was film of him. I watched it so often that from memory I can still do a passable imitation of Edward VIII’s resignation speech. But much as I was relishing the chance to sit at a Steenbeck and learn how to cut film, I suffered from a bothering sense of urgency. At last I was free. It had taken long enough. But what was the point of freedom if you didn’t use it? Both Tony and I had perfected our contempt for the English theatre as we believed it to be. Without having seen it, we thought everything was rubbish. We had both wanted to go into film because film was modern and theatre wasn’t. But one afternoon, having a cup of tea in Earlham Street, I asked him why we couldn’t start a new company from scratch. How about a different kind of theatre that didn’t play to the old audience? Tony looked at my small wireless in the kitchen and said, ‘Why shouldn’t theatre be portable? Like that radio?’
Seeking a blessing from the country’s leading stage director appeared to be a necessary rite of passage for anyone with new ideas. So we wrote to Peter Brook, who invited us to his luxurious, rather formal house in Kensington. It was that easy. We sat down next to the grand piano. Six years previously Brook had directed an unforgettable King Lear with Paul Scofield at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which we’d all visited from school, but lately he was moving into a more experimental period, growing closer, in spirit at least, to a nascent alternative theatre than he was to the mainstream. Forced out of his Paris quarters in Les Gobelins by the événements of May ’68, he had come to the Roundhouse with an international company and staged some beautiful fragments from The Tempest. In their jazzy and carefully improvised feeling these scenes very much chimed with the kind of theatre Tony and I aspired to. The afternoon we visited him, Brook took us to a local comprehensive to see a school play which had been written by his friends Albert Hunt and Adrian Mitchell. And then when we sat down to talk, he asked why we were even beginning to think about finding a base. What was the point? Brook said he had just spent ten years on the National Theatre’s building committee, helping to plan what would become Denys Lasdun’s brutalist fortress on the South Bank. He had become convinced that they were going about things the wrong way round. All the energy was going into bricks and mortar. How much better to stick to our original idea, a theatre called Portable. Why not do the work first, then find out later what sort of building might one day accommodate it? Further, he added, the only way of discovering your identity was by starting. Young directors, he said, always had a list of plays they imagined they wanted to do. They planned something by Kleist or Schiller, and to stage, as they believed, what would be a revelatory production of a Webster, inevitably The Duchess of Malfi or, even worse, The White Devil. But soon enough, he said, if a theatre company were remotely original, it would find its own direction. At that point, Webster and Kleist could go hang.
This was perfect advice from someone we admired. It was also yet more high-octane fuel for a process which was already moving at the speed of a good idea. Tony handed me a copy of Kafka’s diaries and suggested we dramatise them. A cheerful friend from Warwick University, Gus Hope, joined us and laughed when we gave her the title of administrator. The three of us worked out a simple system. We foresaw employing five actors, each of whom would get one tenth of the take. We three would get a further tenth each, and the remaining two tenths would go to the expenses of running the company. It was socialist and it was fair, even if it would turn out to be incompatible with making a living. Gus wrote to Olympia, who responded by giving us a free electric typewriter, and the three of us signed a letter of appeal to Volkswagen, who responded by giving us one of their classic nine-seater camper vans. Young people trying the same route today are disbelieving when told how simple we found it in 1968. The main reason? So few others had thought to do it.
Asked why she went on the stage, Tallulah Bankhead replied, ‘To get out of the audience.’ In the following twenty years, more than seven hundred theatre companies were formed all over the UK, as if small-scale plays – confrontational, angry, direct – might somehow reach a gap in an audience’s concerns that nothing else was filling. For popularity drama could never compete with music. But it could articulate a timely kind of discontent, and thereby release discontent’s paradoxical energy. By a freak of timing, Portable Theatre was there almost at the start. We went first to Jim Haynes at the Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane. Tony and I told him we wanted to put on a show we were writing together, drawn from Kafka and entitled Inside Out. Jim said, ‘Sure. When do you want to do it?’ Jim, an American ex-serviceman who had founded the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1963, was one of the two inspirational theatre leaders in London who were happiest saying yes. The other was Peter Oliver, who was the warden of Oval House in Kennington, a boys’ club set up by Christ Church, Oxford, to welcome local youths. It had originally been skewed towards sport, but Peter had turned it into a rough performance space which was open to anyone who felt they had something to contribute. From the start, Portable Theatre relied on the patronage of these two extraordinary men, even though we hoped our long-term future might involve taking theatre where it had never been before. Our thinking was simple: only by changing the places of performance could we also change the audience. Change the audience and you will change the character of the theatre experience.
Such ambitions are common in the twenty-first century.
Plays presented outside playhouses today have to groan under the ugly name of ‘site-specific’. It’s become a genre, and, like all genres, constrained. But in those days, when Jerzy Grotowski invited us all to trek out to a disused film studio in southwest London to see Akropolis, it was just something he wanted to do. In the years of its existence, Portable Theatre would eventually play in army camps, in village halls, in libraries, on canteen floors, in churches and chapels, and even in people’s front rooms. A repertory which was uncompromising, at first in the height of its brow but later in the extremity of its analysis, made for some uncomfortable evenings. We walked a fine and occasionally smug line between affront and cackhandedness. We were happy to judge our impact not by the length of the applause – sometimes there wasn’t any – but by the level of shock we achieved. A night in Workington when we had packed the van and driven away beyond the city limits before the audience even got up from its seats came to represent the epitome of everything we were trying to achieve. Go in, shake them up and get out. Occasionally, driving home on the empty motorways there would be magical incidents. At two o’clock one morning on the M1 we drew out to overtake a black stretch limo with Count Basie, also returning from a gig, in the back. We travelled alongside him long enough to scrawl a message on a piece of card which we held up to the window. ‘You’re great’. The Count smiled and toasted us with his glass of whisky. Then we sped on. In our first year of work we would drive our Volkswagen more than fifteen thousand miles.
In 1997, a year before his death, Ted Hughes astonished me at dinner in the open air one summer evening in Malvern by saying how much he envied me my life. ‘You chose the theatre. I wish I had.’ Perhaps he was right. Theatre’s highs may be infrequent, but they are peculiarly pure. In those first weeks, it didn’t take Tony and me long to find a few brave actors willing to risk a punt. Hilary Charlton, William Hoyland, Neil Johnston, Maurice Colbourne and Nicholas Nacht became a company which would stay together on short rations for several months. In no time at all Tony and I were rehearsing in the living room of an unoccupied house, sharing the direction as we had shared the writing. By October, we had begun performing in the Arts Lab where J. G. Ballard had hung the walls with pictures of car crashes. Not long after, we were touring. Tony was all the time on the lookout for playwrights who might give us something unexpected. He had a left-field idea to premiere Lawrence Durrell’s unperformed play An Irish Faustus. But when we went to meet the author at eleven o’clock one morning in a Covent Garden pub, we were more put off by Durrell’s pervasive melancholy than we were by his already having drunk a Pernod with a Fernet Branca chaser before we arrived. His own gloomy view of the play coloured ours. Tony seemed on a safer track with John Grillo, a droll actor, and with Snoo Wilson, an eccentric and highly charged student who was still at the University of East Anglia. Snoo had a shock of unruly brown hair, as if someone had just given him fifty volts. He also had an uncontrollable laugh, in-turned, most often at his own jokes, and an ability to make sentences which came out like pearled, intricate cadenzas. Tony and I had gone to Norwich earlier in the year to see his dramatisation of Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Tony was a much more far-seeing producer than me, with an uncanny nose for potential, so when he insisted the play was talented, I believed him, although I had not understood large swathes of it. But when, not far into 1969, Snoo calculated that the completion of his degree course was more important to him than delivering a ramshackle touring company the new play he had promised, I realised there was only one thing to do. Tony and I were already drivers, stage managers, lighting designers and sound operators. I decided I might as well hyphenate into playwriting too.
Tony insists that I was encouraged in this decision by the fact that I had at the end of 1968 become literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre. This had happened largely by accident. My old friend Christopher Hampton had written an adolescent play about the confusion of a young man who desires his best friend but ends up in a relationship with his best friend’s mother. It was first performed at Oxford University, then later for a couple of Sunday nights at the Court. In 1966 When Did You Last See My Mother? transferred to the Comedy Theatre for a three-week season, and Christopher, aged twenty, became the youngest dramatist in modern times to be performed in the West End. The music of the dialogue was derived from John Osborne, but the power of the feeling was Christopher’s own. On leaving university, he had become the Court’s literary manager, in charge of dealing with submitted scripts and advising on the repertory. Fairly soon he had found he had no time to write plays. So he had suggested to the artistic director, William Gaskill, that I take over the reading in order to free him up for the writing. Becoming the Royal Court’s literary manager at the age of twenty-one did not seem in any way remarkable or precocious. No one else wanted the job. My office, the size of a broom cupboard, also served as a corridor to the lavatories. For a three-day week, the wage was £7.50.
In Tony’s preferred version of events, I spent a lot of my time in the Portable van, as we cruised along the motorway from one far-flung engagement to the next, with my head in my hands, groaning. According to him, I would sit there flipping the pages of one of the thousand new plays the Court received every year, occasionally looking up to say, ‘I can do better than this.’ But my own recollection is much more stark and practical. It was only on a Wednesday that Tony and I reluctantly accepted that Snoo’s repeated postponements did indeed mean he was not going to deliver. We had a gaping hole in our touring programme which had to be filled in time for rehearsals the following Monday. We couldn’t afford to renege. And so I was forced to write my first play in just four days by perching a small typewriter on my knee as we sped from gig to gig. I tried it out, line by line, on Tony. The result, a one-act satire on the way left-wing politics were feeding off media celebrity, was unfeeling and obvious. But when I put the Roneoed typescript in the actors’ hands, they didn’t look unhappy. At some basic level, the page looked right. There was a rhythm. It turned out I could write dialogue before I could write plays.
By now the company itself had changed. Neil and Maurice had left us to go and join the Freehold, a physical theatre group which, like us, was performing at the Arts Lab. One of the noticeable things about histories of the fringe is how completely the women get written out. But they were just as formative as the men, and sometimes more so. Beth Porter, an American actress, had arrived in London inspired by the example of Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Theatre in New York, and formed a company called the Wherehouse. It was Nancy Meckler who transformed Beth’s Wherehouse group into the Freehold, which, alongside the wildly musical Pip Simmons Group and the People Show, two other fringe favourites, eventually toured to some of the same venues as us, including the ever reliable Mickery Theatre which, in the early days, was in the middle of Amsterdam. Portable was already unusual – some would say obstinate – in those experimental times for never losing its faith in the power of the word. At first, we presented a repertory in which Strindberg, Kafka and Genet were strongly featured. We were still in love with the European avant-garde. See the work which had seemed to us contemporary, the nouvelle vague cinema of Malle, of Truffaut, of Godard, of Varda and of Resnais, and you will be amazed at how literary it is, how steeped in great writing. But among companies closer to America, language was commonly said to be dead, a hopelessly corrupt form of communication which could no longer convey essentials. The future of performance lay in rock music, in video, in mime and in puppetry. The dominant mode was a sort of galleried performance art which relied more on multimedia than it did on any ancestry in literature. If Portable still walked round muttering neurotic European texts, the majority of our fringe contemporaries preferred to stand in vests sweating on one another’s shoulders to the sound of rock.
The word ‘influential’ is today invariably attached to the name of Portable Theatre. Tony Bicât and I both realised quickly that a theatre’s influence may well be directly disproportionate to the size of
its audience. Influence may be spread as much by firing up the distant imaginations of people who never see the work as it is by inspiring those who do. Nothing wrong with that. But if Portable Theatre was influential, it was also unrepresentative. How Brophy Made Good opened at Oval House in March 1969 to no particular acclaim. Why should it? It wasn’t very good. When we went to the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, I got my first professional review as a dramatist: ‘The most pointless evening I have ever spent in the theatre.’ Things could only go up from there. Tony had begun directing my sixty-minute effort with a cast made up from two of our original company, joined by Ian McCulloch and Moris Farhi, a young Turkish actor who was also a novelist, poet and aspiring television writer. His six episodes of Doctor Who in which the Doctor would have met Alexander the Great had just been rejected. The cast unsurprisingly tended to turn towards me to ask questions of a highly unorthodox choral text. ‘What on earth did you mean by this?’ ‘Why do you put it like that?’ So after a couple of weeks, Tony had taken me out for a drink and said, ‘You’re obviously itching to direct it yourself. Why don’t you?’ Although Tony had sky-high ambitions for Portable Theatre, he had few for himself, and they weren’t conventional. As he said, we were working towards a kind of theatre which didn’t exist, or rather which existed only in his mind. He defined it as rough theatre with fine detail. He would make it happen any way he could. So I largely took over directing my own play. When it opened, my primary feeling was one of relief.