The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  In the 1969 film of Bill Naughton’s play Spring and Port Wine, Hannah Gordon is finally willing to give in and surrender her body to Keith Buckley for the first time when she is shown that he has painted the walls of their future apartment white. No dramatic scene so perfectly evokes the period. Margaret and I prepared our new house in Clapham and, like so many of our generation all over the western world, sought to wipe out the past by whitening the walls and laying down hessian. It was only hippies who adorned and complicated, everyone else stripped. The floor sander became the totem object, often handed on between neighbours, just like the airing cupboard- warmed yoghurt cultures couples regularly shared. To 10 The Chase, revealed thus from top to toe, Margaret added a sapling magnolia tree which is still there today, glorious. Margaret and I had made a pact that if I failed my driving test for the third time on the day before, we would take it as an omen and cancel our wedding. But I passed, so at the beginning of August we went to a seafood lunch for family only and on to the Wandsworth Registry Office. Lastly we held a wedding party in the Parsons Green house of Caroline Younger, Margaret’s best and oldest friend. Caroline was something of a minor heiress, the daughter of an Edinburgh beer magnate, and loved by all for her instinctive gift of hospitality. The Hares and Mathesons mingled among our contemporaries, who were mostly in floral shirts or blouses and sporting Victorian amounts of hair. The bride wore Laura Ashley and the groom had sideburns which reached down to his jaw.

  As we left to go on our honeymoon weekend, the sky darkened to blackness and there was an apocalyptic thunderstorm. For weeks afterwards, guests would ring us, ostensibly to tell us how nice the wedding had been, but more urgently to ask where the dope had come from, and where might they buy some more? We made a few calls but never found out. After we went to sleep in the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, I woke in the night to find my face blown up like a football to around twice its regular size. I had forgotten to mention to my bride that I suffered from asthma. In the nine months I had lived with her, the subject had never come up. Margaret assumed that I was dying on our wedding night. Had she but known, all I needed was to work off my reaction to the lobster lunch by going to Brighton Hospital to have my veins opened. Next day, while playing clock golf on the seafront, I was stung on the end of my finger by a bee.

  The reason we could only take a single weekend was because I had to hurry back to London for rehearsals of the two plays which Portable was due to stage next. I had rushed off a ragged one-act play about William Blake, which took me some steps backwards towards my student enthusiasms, while Howard had pressed in the opposite direction with a coruscating play called Fruit, about a disabled osteopath who sees right the way through the politicians he manipulates. He was performed with infectious abandon by Paul Brooke. Tony directed my play, I directed Howard’s. If Christie in Love was Portable’s most far-reaching achievement, Fruit was in some ways its most emblematic. Howard had fallen in love with a French intellectual movement called situationism. Its adherents argued that although capitalist society seems solid, it is in fact only a spectacle. Direct action can disrupt that spectacle, just as when a bottle is thrown through a cinema screen. The film continues, but the tear in the fabric is a permanent reminder to the audience that the picture is not real. Howard’s resulting play managed in the space of an hour to generate anger, mirth, bewilderment and outrage in equal parts.

  When we took Fruit and What Happened to Blake to the Theatre Upstairs, the press was lying in wait for us, desperate to choke off any source of artistic vitality which they had not sanctioned. But, in this matter as in others, Bill Gaskill had taught us too well. As its original director, Bill had eventually managed to get Edward Bond’s play Saved accepted as a classic in the face of what had been determined and often hysterical opposition. But Saved was only the fourth of the defining post-war works which had been abused on their first outing with only a few distinguished dissenters. It had joined Waiting for Godot, Look Back in Anger and The Birthday Party in a dismal line of incomprehension. Who, asked Bill, could possibly take critics seriously? How could a group with such an impeccable record of being wrong in the past have the immodesty not to imagine they were going to be just as fallible now? Bill, to the predictable outrage of the newspapers, had even stopped giving free tickets for the Theatre Upstairs to the Spectator’s critic, Hilary Spurling, pointing out that since she never enjoyed anything she saw there, she might as well not bother to come. It had led to a glorious public dogfight about free speech with all parties stretched right up onto their hind legs.

  True, when Lindsay Anderson had arrived at the Royal Court, his highly tuned fascination with reputation meant that a more propitiative tone had briefly taken hold. The press representative, a beautiful young ex-model called Gloria Taylor, was dispatched to have dinner with one or two of the enemy and to explain to them, preferably by candlelight, why the show they had been watching was not so complete a failure as they seemed to think. At one such dinner, in a restaurant a couple of streets away from the Court and at two o’clock in the morning, Milton Shulman, the enamelled reviewer on London’s main paper, the Evening Standard, responded to Gloria’s entreaties by saying, ‘Yes, but you see, I only go to the theatre now in the hope of cunt. If a play doesn’t have a cunt in it, I’m not interested.’ On Christmas Eve later that same year, I saw Shulman bullying a young shop assistant on the perfume counter in Peter Jones to the point of tears. At that point my attitude to theatrical criticism, already sceptical, hardened into something steelier. I have not read much since to change my mind.

  The Arts Council, however, was a different matter. From the outset, they had been far more understanding towards us, perhaps relieved that at least two of the people working on the untameable fringe had been educated at a university whose name they knew. They had funded us show by show, insisting on reading scripts in advance. We wanted to put things on a more reliable footing with the award of an annual grant. To this end, Tony and I had been invited in to see Lord Goodman, who as well as being Chair of the Arts Council had a certain fame as Harold Wilson’s most formidable fixer. When I started the meeting with a predictably self-righteous monologue – ‘Aren’t you worried that all this important work is going to be lost?’ – Goodman interrupted me with the perfect line for someone who has seen it all before. ‘Let’s get this clear before we start. I’m not worried about anything. If I worried, I wouldn’t sleep at night.’ The encounter thereafter was swift and effective. ‘Give these people what they want,’ he said to an official, and it was done.

  Secretly, although we didn’t care to say so out loud, daily touring was beginning to exhaust us. As we moved into our third year on the road, I found myself in the back of the van working obsessively on illustrating a nationwide map of service stations, each neatly marked with names like Forte or Granada. It was a sign. More seriously, one night in Wales when Tony was driving five actors home after a show, a Mini pulled out in front of him. The Volkswagen went into a slide and tumbled the actors round as though in a spin dryer. Mercifully nobody was seriously injured, but it marked perhaps the end of the days when Tony and I thought of running a theatre company as fun, as a lark. As other groups like ours also became better known and stronger, so a familiar circuit of arts centres sprouted up all over the country, ready to take anything recognised names offered. I directed a new play by an unfamiliar author. During rehearsals, the play fell apart in my hands. When we saw the result, then, in Tony’s words, ‘We both hated to see a play done by Portable where people just got up from desks and put things in filing cabinets: the dull texture of TV naturalism.’ We were both becoming discontent with our own creation. We wanted to move onto a larger scale and to make our impact more political, but we had, as yet, no real idea how to do so.

  I was in this itchy mood when the Royal Court decided to host some anaesthetic conference on the Future of New Writing in its auditorium. As someone who thought that the future of writing probably lay in writing, not in talking, I impul
sively invited anyone who would like to write a new play to join me in the stalls bar, while we left non-joiners to opine. It was not the most inspired action of my life, but it may have been the most typical. About twelve people came to the bar, and I suggested we reassemble the following Wednesday. When seven of the twelve, including Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, Stephen Poliakoff and Snoo Wilson, did indeed turn up, I had found a room which I had hung with wallpaper. To each of the playwrights I issued a different coloured crayon and over a series of lively sessions in the following six weeks, we wrote a whole play on the wall. It was based on a cutting from the previous week’s Sunday Times about a case of oral rape in a van on the motorway. It featured a cast of characters who belonged in a lost British underbelly which was rarely, if ever, represented in drama. Inevitably, Lay-By was heavily male in its point of view. When it was read thirty-five years later at the Royal Court by a group of women dramatists hoping to emulate our original methods for group writing, most found it repulsive, though some loved its honesty. For better or worse, it had represented the first attempt by anyone in the British theatre seriously to address the subject of pornography.

  Nothing in his previous behaviour, or indeed in anything he had ever said, prepared me for the moment early in 1971 when Bill Gaskill, more than normally forbidding, called me into his office and said that the theatre had no suitable new play to put on in a few months’ time. There was, he said in a tone which suggested both exhaustion and despair, no alternative but to plug the unfortunate gap in the schedule with a revival of my own play Slag. Sad, but there it was. An admission of defeat. Naturally, he said, the Court couldn’t contemplate transferring a production from a lesser venue, so there would have to be a new one, to be directed by Max Stafford-Clark, the lively young boss of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, who had never worked at the Court, but whom Bill admired as a free thinker and source of unspoilt energy. Also, he said, since Christopher Hampton was leaving after the deserved transfer to the West End of his play The Philanthropist, I might as well take over Chris’s position as resident dramatist.

  After a couple of frustrating years in the job, I was more than happy to stop being literary manager. I don’t think I could have kept my sanity and gone on reading countless plays with titles like Mend My Shoe, Tell It to the Bees or Fame Hath No Pity. Christopher himself had always been needlessly kind to me, going out of his way to act as a loyal and calm intermediary in what were often bruising differences of opinion. I had found myself in the position of a futile lobbyist, trying to get the three artistic directors to stage work by writers for whom they had no sympathy. I had succeeded in getting Howard Barker played at the Court, but to my other suggestions the powers remained stubbornly and often rudely resistant. Their intransigence came to be reflected in my own. When, against my counsel, the three had insisted on mounting an indifferent prison play of Frank Norman’s to open their autumn season, I had slipped out of the eventual production at half-time, knowing I didn’t need to see any more to feel vindicated. But Lindsay, observing my empty seat for the second half, had next day called me in and, in barking Anglo-Indian tones, given me an imperial dressing down. It climaxed in my sacking. It was, he said, unforgivable disloyalty for a literary manager to walk out of a first night in his own theatre. What sort of behaviour was that? But when at the end of the week I went to collect my little green packet of wages from the huts at the back, the accountant laughed and said no one had mentioned my being terminated to him, so why didn’t I just carry on? When I next saw Lindsay, he seemed unsurprised that I was still around.

  Now I had no opportunity to respond to my unexpected promotion to resident dramatist with a new play because I was already kicking myself for agreeing to do an English version of Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game, which Anthony Page had bravely asked me to adapt for the National Theatre. Awed as I was to be allowed into a rehearsal room with Paul Scofield and Joan Plowright, I was aware that my own contribution was downright poor. I had just enough technique to handle my own view of the world, but sorely lacked it when handling someone else’s. Scofield, who on his day was as fine an actor as ever lived, was never well cast when jealousy was the motor. It wasn’t in his nature. While at university, I had taken a summer job tearing tickets as an usher at the Old Vic, and had watched the National Theatre’s embryonic company of actors in productions of The Recruiting Officer, Trelawney of the Wells and Love for Love. Now, only a few years later, here I was with my director in casting sessions with Laurence Olivier, of whom I was frankly terrified. He had recently been very ill so his neck was enclosed in an alarming salmon-pink brace. If you spoke, he would choose to answer by turning his whole body in your direction and fixing you with the famous gimlet stare. I learned to stay silent. Everyone always claims that when he was off stage Olivier looked like a bank manager. But with this apparatus he looked more like a creation of Frankenstein’s. He might as well have topped the whole thing off with a bolt through the neck. When Anthony tentatively proposed the name of an actor he was thinking of employing, Olivier, demented, gave the four of us in the tiny room the full back-of-the-circle command performance. ‘I will not have that man in my theatre. He is a rank amateur!’

  Although youth is much the greatest asset anyone can bring into a theatre, it is not a cure-all. When the pit pianist at the Theatre Royal Newcastle, where we were doing a try-out, asked me what sort of play The Rules of the Game was, I stupidly replied, ‘Italian’. To his obvious dismay, Paul Scofield walked out at the first performance to the strains of ‘Poppa Piccolino’. When we got to London, we were one production in a doomed programme of expansion for the National into the New Theatre in the West End. The season, which saw off both Scofield and Christopher Plummer, was only later redeemed when Olivier was talked into playing James Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. There was nothing the old actor-manager liked better than coming to the rescue when others had failed. Selfless, we paved the way for him. But any disappointment I might have felt was balanced out by events in Sloane Square, where, throughout the run of Slag, the sun always seemed to be shining. I loved sitting on the steps and watching the House Full sign being put out. Nothing had ever excited me more than having my photograph taken with John Osborne, whom I regarded as the gatekeeper, the person who had made things possible for so many others. I had been far too nervous to address a word to him. One week after another, I got ravishing glimpses of what the upside of being a playwright might be. As Michael Cunningham would later write in his novel The Hours, I thought what I was feeling was the beginning of happiness. In fact, it was happiness.

  Not only had Max turned up from Edinburgh in his E-type Jag to do a beautifully accomplished production, but the three actresses, Lynn Redgrave, Barbara Ferris and Anna Massey, had an upbeat approach. The play was already proven. Their job, they said, was to make it sparkle. I enjoyed their company as much as I enjoyed their acting, and nothing made me cheerier than stepping out with the three of them for an Italian lunch in the King’s Road. They were all as witty off stage as on. Anna became another close friend, someone with whom to be solid in the darkest days, hers or mine. When Noël Coward came to see Anna in the play, we all lined up in the foyer to greet him afterwards, and he shook my hand. ‘Ah, the playwright,’ Coward said, summing up the evening in a way with which I couldn’t disagree: ‘Five good scenes and one terrible one.’

  Part of the charm of Chelsea was that it was full of unexpected people, especially American actors and directors who had come to escape the pitiful contraction of the Hollywood they had once loved. Sometimes there seemed to be more of them than us. If it was one of those days when you didn’t pass Ava Gardner coming down Sloane Avenue, then never mind. You’d still pass Lee Remick. One day, on my way to rehearsal through Eaton Square, my heart stopped when Henry Fonda loped by, his walk as distinctive as his radiant blue eyes. James Baldwin, believing Fonda must be black, had written of him, ‘White men don’t walk like that.’ He was in blue jea
ns and a brown fringed suede jacket and clearly lost in thoughts of times and places miles away from SW3. It stopped again when the phone rang and it was, of all people, Stanley Donen, asking me to write his next picture. It turned out that the world’s finest director of musicals lived in Montpelier Square in a private house with its own lift. After a short upward journey, I met a man whose dour demeanour did little to evoke the carefree gaiety of Gene Kelly or of Debbie Reynolds. The script he asked me to reorder was a mournful hand-wringer, derived from Fellini’s 8½, about an over-privileged director who is having trouble getting himself together for his next film. It was called One. It ended with the director spurning his shoot and heading instead for a desert island. My heart sank. I had been hoping for Singing in the Rain.