The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  One of the most intriguing things about any artwork is how its destiny is only slowly revealed. Up an alley at the end of West Street, just a hundred yards from the Brighton seafront, lay the Combination, a sixty-seat Victorian schoolhouse. It had a cafe serving the characteristic food of the period, carrot cake, muesli and bread pudding with raisins. The coffee came in those little rounded Perspex cups which had been all the rage in Soho in the days of Tommy Steele. For me, the Combination was the most heady of all sixties theatres, the nearest place in Britain, as one founder said, to San Francisco. If there ever was an acid dream that wasn’t a nightmare, it was here. The theatre had been started by a group of friends, Ruth Marks, Jenny Harris and Noel Greig, who had all been at London University together and all of whom were to die too young. It was fiercely collective. Whenever Portable visited we were invariably made welcome and regarded as friendly neutrals in long-running disputes. However, we were aware that our week-long visits provided the resident company with a welcome break to redouble the vigour of its own internal arguments. There was absolutely no assumption, be it theatrical or political, which went unchallenged at the Combination. It was typical of the place that one of their most successful productions was played under the memorable title Don’t Come. It was an injunction which the loyal audience of strays and hippies was more than happy to disobey. It was packed. It involved, in my memory, a group of naked actors walking around clucking like chickens and reading the Communist Manifesto. The British theatre, or at least our part of it, was already prone to these agonised crises of conscience which were to become so common in the next ten years. Artists were finding art inadequate. Only direct action would do.

  Those of us still wanting to persist with putting on plays recognised that the Combination was one of those accidental, magical spaces, like Peter Brook’s later Bouffes du Nord in Paris, which make everything seem better. I was learning that one of the most surprising rewards of theatre is to marvel at how a play may gleam at a different angle according to where and when it’s presented. The thoughts and feelings with which the audience arrive are half the story. On the road, bruised by travel and slapped down in hostile environments, my writing had seemed, at best, knowing and pretentious. The play came across as a sort of metropolitan sneer which didn’t bother to explain what it was sneering about. The author seemed to live in a cocoon of superior attitudes which, without reason, he assumed the audience shared. But the moment How Brophy Made Good arrived in Brighton, it unexpectedly began to cohere. As Tony put it, the pervading smell of cold newspaper and wet pizza somehow oozed creativity. What, on the road, had spluttered like damp timber responded to friendly winds and caught fire. In Brighton an audience were waiting who were already steeped in the generous anarchy of the Combination, and who warmed to the inchoate anger of the young man who had written this week’s unexceptional show. Under their gaze, the play acquired a purpose and depth which not even the most partial spectator would have been able to detect during its tour. They roared with friendly laughter at the ridiculous insanity of left-wing self-regard in screwed-up right-wing Britain.

  It was into this invigorated atmosphere that Margaret Matheson stepped on a Sunday night. It was our last performance in Brighton and as we were packing up the stage to go home, a very conspicuous young woman, with a boyish haircut, tall and beautiful in a long tweed coat, with a thick Scottish scarf and gloves, stayed on when everyone else had gone to tell me how much she had enjoyed the performance. It was a change to see something which made you laugh. She had come down specially from London by train, because she had liked the sound of the play when she had read about it in an obscure professional newspaper. It had never occurred to her that the trip might actually be worthwhile. She worked as a secretary, she said, for the well-known socialist agent Clive Goodwin, who besides representing some of the most political dramatists of the day was also one of the founders of the revolutionary newspaper The Black Dwarf. In late afternoons, she told me, sometimes while smoking a companionable joint, they would discuss expanding the client list which already included Fay Weldon, Dennis Potter and Simon Gray. Clive had encouraged Margaret to establish a list of her own. Trevor Griffiths had been her first signing. I was to be her second.

  Her boss took to me as fast as Margaret had done, and claimed me as his own. For some reason, at that moment in his life, which at that point was as thoroughly tragic as it would continue to be, Clive was tickled pink by the idea of me. He had a spacious flat on the Cromwell Road where he both worked and lived and where the offices of the Black Dwarf had originally been. It was hung with sumptuous canvases by his wife, ‘the Wimbledon Bardot’, Pauline Boty. She was already something of a legend, both as a beauty and as an artist, and was believed to be the model for Liz, the liberated woman played in suede coat and with swinging handbag by Julie Christie in Billy Liar. Boty, who coined the best ever definition of pop art – she called it ‘nostalgia for now’ – was the only radical feminist in that movement and, as such, way before her time. She and Clive had been married for only three years when she died of cancer in 1966, at the age of twenty-eight, having refused the chemotherapy that would have had the side-effect of killing her unborn child. Dressed in expensive velvet trousers by Yves St Laurent, I guess, the still-grieving widower Clive was in his mid-thirties, laid-back and lugubrious, dark circles bringing out the light of his Lothario eyes. He was a working-class boy from Kensal Rise who had already been repertory actor, television presenter, magazine editor and newspaper proprietor. On first encounter Clive told me that it was a small miracle that somebody had arrived on the left with a sense of humour. How rare was that? He had, he said, sent my modest jape to Michael Codron, the West End’s most prominent straight-play producer. It was Michael who had staged Harold Pinter’s first work, The Birthday Party, in its famous five-day outing at the Lyric Hammersmith. By return of post, Michael had written back to say he liked my writing as much as Clive did. He would like to commission a full-length comedy from me. Did I have a subject? Clive asked. I certainly did, I replied. What was it? Feminism. Perfect, said Clive, rubbing his hands.

  It would be fair to say that my life was heading fast in a direction for which I was not at any level prepared. Sure, I had been swimming in the waters of contemporary theatre, but my private self-esteem was no higher than when my mother had questioned me about an old man in an overcoat accosting me on the Downs. I was a novice director. I did not consider myself a writer, let alone a potentially commercial one. My literary job for three days a week at the Royal Court had inculcated in me the belief that being a dramatist was a serious calling. The house playwright was John Osborne, but the house god was Samuel Beckett. The image of Beckett’s admonishing high-mindedness as an artist was in striking contrast to his gentleness as a man. I always found him easier in the pub than on a plinth. At the time when I’d arrived at the end of 1968, the old Sloane Square powerhouse which had given the world John Arden, Ann Jellicoe and Arnold Wesker had hit a particularly low moment in its fortunes. A stranger to today’s vogue for programming subsidised theatres with an emollient eye on the box office, the artistic director, Bill Gaskill, had characteristically scheduled three plays in a row about child murder. The last of them, Life Price, had emptied the theatre more completely than the others. So, not above risking a PR wheeze when it presented itself, the formidably ascetic Gaskill had inaugurated something to which he gave the high-flown name of Free Theatre. Because nobody was volunteering to pay money to see this particular play, Gaskill had resolved to give the seats away for nothing. Needless to say, this innovative policy had attracted a large, grateful and broad-based audience, and brought welcome life into the auditorium. But it had also sent the Arts Council of Great Britain into a full-blown existential breakdown. If a flop wasn’t a flop, what was it? They were furious, feeling that their bluff was being called. If the Court got away with it, so would everyone. The arts bureaucrats certainly did not share the high artistic belief which was current at the Royal Cour
t, best put by the pianist Charles Rosen: ‘From our artists and entertainers we expect originality, and then resent it when we get it.’

  The immediate response of the board of the Royal Court to this funding crisis had been to insist that Gaskill, hitherto the lone artistic director, whose widdershins championship of the plays of Edward Bond had already taken the theatre to the edge of survival, in future be shored up by the company of two old colleagues. From 1969, the theatre was to be run by three people, each of whom was variously formidable and cantankerous – though, to be fair, they argued as ferociously with each other as they did with anyone else. Their savage disapproval of each other’s work was something to behold, as they swanned round telling everyone within earshot not to attend each other’s productions. One new arrival was Anthony Page, by far and away the most congenial of the three, who had briefly assumed the horrible task of succeeding George Devine when the theatre’s founder, after declaring that ‘the weight of this edifice has driven me into the ground up to my neck’, had died aged fifty-five from overwork in 1966. And the other was Lindsay Anderson, an abrasive iconoclast with the profile of a Roman emperor, whose feature films This Sporting Life and If . . . had a political bite and confidence more or less unique in British cinema.

  I had joined the Royal Court Theatre happy with my place way down the food chain and knowing in advance that I was out of synch with some of its aims and ideals. My short theatrical experience was of a free fringe movement in which what mattered most was what you were saying. There was a directness about it which to us signified urgency. The Royal Court, with its close ties to a more mainstream aesthetic – Peggy Ashcroft and Laurence Olivier had both acted there – was far more concerned with the beauty of the saying. In particular, the theatre was proud of a hallowed form of social realism about which not a bad word might ever be said. So it would never have occurred to me to mention to anyone at my place of legitimate employment that I had, on the sly, written a short play, which had even been staged. Lindsay, much loved by his intimates such as the actresses Rachel Roberts and Jill Bennett, was, to those of us who loved him less, the very definition of the man Oscar Wilde was referring to when he remarked, ‘He is so loud that one cannot hear what he says.’ He spent the day standing in corridors, usually in beige socks, rapping out orders like a sergeant major happiest when dressing down recruits. He had such definite opinions on everything that you longed occasionally to be refreshed with the soothing words ‘I don’t know’. Lindsay did briefly seem human one evening when he came to a Christmas Eve script meeting – his idea, not ours – with a frozen chicken from Mac Fisheries in the King’s Road, which, he said, he intended to thaw overnight and share for Christmas lunch round his place with Rachel Roberts next day. He also carried a small, un-Christmassy packet of Birds Eye frozen peas. Gaskill, on the other hand, had fought bloody battles for the abolition of theatre censorship and had, thanks to a defiant court appearance, contributed to ending the 230-year reign of the Lord Chamberlain. Bill, often from behind his desk in a biker’s studded black leather jacket and jeans, could chill you in a far deeper way. He was given to long staring silences, in which he seemed to be considering, in great visceral depth, whether what you had just suggested was the stupidest thing he had ever heard in his life.

  My lack of confidence about becoming a dramatist, engorged in the sweltering hothouse of defensiveness and paranoia which was the Royal Court, was reinforced in a much more positive way by meeting Howard Brenton. Of all the successive strokes of luck which make up the history of Portable Theatre, Howard was the most timely. Tony had known him as a friend for a while after talent-spotting him for the very first play he wrote. That was why Tony invited him to an Arts Lab performance of Inside Out. There was believed to be a long-standing Equity rule that if there were more people on the stage than in the audience, the performance should be cancelled. So the three of us had repaired to a Drury Lane pub, where I was charmed by a large man who, in his conversation and in his benign, looming presence, had a distinctive mix of sweetness and intensity. I noticed on first meeting that his conversation, punctuated by tremendous emphases, as if the sustain pedal on the piano were being repeatedly banged down, nevertheless always headed towards a point. It made him rewarding to talk to. Howard was working at the Royal Mint by day in order to make a living, and firing off plays from his basement in Notting Hill through the night. Tony or I had come up with some stupid idea that Portable should in its second season present a history of evil, which, we suggested, should take us from Judas Iscariot to the present day. At our suggestion Howard set off on writing some kind of Chamber of Horrors pageant play, but quickly decided that his real interest lay in only one evil person, a wartime Special Police Constable, also from Notting Hill, who had killed at least eight women before being hanged for murder in 1953. The moment Howard delivered the script of his seventy-minute shocker, Tony and I knew that we had reached that moment which Peter Brook had predicted. We had been handed something so good that from this point on, we would know what Portable was for.

  If you read it today, Christie in Love remains a brilliant play. Set in a pen made of chicken wire and filled with old newspaper, it dramatises the police’s exhumation of the corpses of John Reginald Christie’s victims from their burial places in his house and back garden. It plays with the controversial notion that when Christie practised necrophilia, assaulting his dead women, he was, in his own eyes, expressing a kind of love. With torches used for lighting, and with Christie rising from his own grave with a huge papier-mâché head, it was a stunning kind of punk theatre before the word was invented. At the time it was presented, Richard Fleischer had not yet made his dutiful film with Richard Attenborough muttering his way through the part, so the case was mainly remembered by lawyers and campaigners against the death penalty for the fact that Christie had first succeeded in helping to get the wrong man, Timothy Evans, executed for at least one of his murders. But rather than write a simple miscarriage-of-justice play, Howard had burrowed deep into the character of Christie himself, contrasting the strangeness of his deeds with the shocked incomprehension of the police. Howard’s own father had been a policeman before moving on to serve as a Methodist minister. As the play’s chosen director, I felt an unmistakeable anticipation. This was going to be good. If we had started out close to Godard, now, had we but known it, we were closer in spirit to Fassbinder, who, for his own very similar Munich theatre group, was at the same moment writing a play on the Moors Murders. From now on, there was no question of Portable doing old plays.

  On 4 July 1969 Tony and a few others of us set off together in high spirits driving the Portable van to Greece, which when I had gone there two years earlier represented a special kind of freedom. In the restaurants, you went straight into the kitchen to look at what was cooking. It summed the country up. There was no such thing as a menu. Leaving central London at 3 a.m. we bought an early copy of the Daily Mirror and saw, from the vivid photograph on the front page, that Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones had been found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool. The Stones’ concert in Hyde Park planned for the Saturday would now be dedicated to Jones’ memory. Tony and I briefly debated whether this was an important enough event to detain us, then sped down all the way to the deserted island of Skiathos, where a friend was lending us a cottage on an isolated hill, normally shared between a farmer and his pigs. We had a full month off, a lot of it spent poking our donkey with a sharp stick to get it to move. Rather like dealing with the Arts Council, Tony said. Since I had broken up in mutually disreputable circumstances with Diane, my private life had been rackety, to say the least. There had been a cluster of sometimes concurrent relationships which had flashed on and off like ill-phased Christmas lights. A lively companion had joined me in Greece, setting the hills and tavernas alight with her indifference to custom and costume. But when we returned from Greece, tired of being cramped off Cambridge Circus, I had moved with her into new quarters below Portable’s offices in Colvi
lle Place, just off Charlotte Street. So when it became clear to her as much as to me that we were not going to survive as a couple back in London for many more hours, it was I who, in a gentlemanly way, offered to move out.

  It was, once more, pure chance that I was due to have lunch with Margaret Matheson on the morning that the abrupt ending of a liaison had rendered me homeless. I had only seen Margaret in passing a couple of times since the agency had put me on its books, and she had called to say it was time we caught up. We had lunch in Au Fin Bec, just behind Sloane Avenue, and by the time lunch was threatening to merge into tea, we agreed it would be a good idea if instead I moved in with her. The complete change in my way of life was as fulfilling as it was sudden. That night I took my things down to the far end of Battersea Park Road, where Margaret had an astonishingly cheap and spacious flat above a draper’s shop. There was plenty of room for both of us, though when, for my convenience in running a theatre group, we tried to get the telephone moved from the far corner of the living room, we were told by the telephone company that the only person in Britain who was allowed a telephone cord more than six foot long was Princess Margaret.

  Howard’s play went as well as expected, thanks in good part to the detailed and disturbing performance of William Hoyland in the central role. Snoo had joined us from university as a roadie and was preparing a production of his own play Pignight, a prophetically environmental attack on the practices of factory farming. Years before its time, it was set on a pig farm and involved a certain amount of offal being fried on stage. We all relished a performance of the play in a school chapel which was interrupted by a Basil Fawlty of a headmaster getting up, appalled, to say, ‘Right. All forms below the Sixth to leave at once.’ Because we were getting on so well, Margaret was beginning to regret her plan to join her friends Sonny and Gita Mehta in Delhi at Christmas. I couldn’t join her, first because I had many Portable miles to cover, but also because I had to work on my promised comedy. But I persuaded Margaret she shouldn’t pull out. How often would she get the chance to go to India? In those days people rarely made transcontinental calls, so that during her absence in December her news came only occasionally and on the same blue airmail paper my father had always used. She had left her Indian friends, she said, to travel across to Benares. She had been accompanied by another friend of Sonny’s who was also visiting from England, or rather from Scotland where apparently he worked as a theatre director. His name was Richard Eyre, and he was director of productions, though not artistic director, at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. At first she had found the trip hard going, because her companion, although eupeptic and well-meaning, was far too shy to speak. But once Margaret had settled into the idea, she had found it comfortable for them to stand in silence together watching the burning of the bodies on the ghats.