The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  As far as our company was concerned, it was also the last. Experimental theatre companies, like literary magazines, need patrons. It had become clear that Tony and I would never have the resources, and perhaps lacked the resolve, to do the kind of work we wanted on our own terms. So henceforth it looked as if we would have to do such work on other people’s, or not at all. What lay ahead was some sort of accommodation with the existing British theatre, for which I was ready but Tony wasn’t. During our absence the original Portable Theatre, whose name had been pointlessly changed to Paradise Foundry, had not prospered in the hands of our appointed successor. The Arts Council had insisted on putting in a professional administrator to take over from Gus Hope. The outcome, for whatever reason, was insolvency. Although we were no longer running the company, Tony and I were still responsible for it. We had not had the sense to take our names off the notepaper.

  The result, as the writer Rob Richie all too fairly observed, was that ‘the company that often seemed to have a bizarre fixation with the English police force found itself in court’. Tony and I were both telephoned early one morning and ordered to appear that same afternoon in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, which was then in Mortimer Street, by chance a stone’s throw from the old Portable offices. After a fortifying German lunch at Schmidt’s on the corner, we were both put in the dock and offered no defence on the charge of failing to pay National Insurance contributions. Having been charged with a crime I did not know I had committed, and with no idea of the appropriate punishment, I felt a satisfying identification with Kafka, whose diaries had first got us into all this. The magistrate announced that we were going to be fined. Later, Tony paid off the company’s lawyers and I paid off the National Insurance. The accountants waived their fees. The two of us soon tried to calculate whether we had, overall, put more money into Portable Theatre than we had taken out.

  The outstanding personal benefit of our years on the road came from the necessity to sit through our own work. There was no way out. Because we were, in the early days, operating the lights or the sound, sometimes stage-managing and even acting, so night after night I would have to watch and listen as speeches, passages, scenes and, on occasions, whole plays lost the battle for attention. Every cough, misplaced laugh and heavy eyelid would strike me to the heart. I would go cold, feeling the audience’s collective attention wander off my inventions and onto their dinner. Samuel Beckett never had the courage to attend a performance, regarding the play’s public exposure as an irrelevance. Even when he was directing the production he left town after the dress rehearsal, abandoning the actors he had helped lead. But as a dramatist who, to the contrary, was committed to believing that the audience’s response might well be as significant as the play, I was given a brutal education. It has never left me. Ever since, on any individual evening, in any country in the world, whatever the language, I am reluctant to deceive myself about the evening’s progress. I know from bitter experience how porous audiences are.

  Unexpectedly, within some months, a couple of talented new producers with fresh energy would be trying, without any luck, to get Portable going again. But by then we had largely lost Tony to film and television. Henceforth I would much miss his salty commentary on the crushing failures of hope which give theatrical life its distinctive flavour. When in September 2001 Al-Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center, I rang Howard Brenton to say, ‘Look what they’re doing. They’re tearing a hole in the fabric. They want capitalism never to look the same again.’ Howard replied, ‘Yes, but somehow I don’t think those young men had read the situationists.’

  8

  I Saw Her Today at the Reception

  Margaret and I had begun to live like young bourgeois. If we had known of Flaubert’s injunction to be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work, we would have said we were obeying it. We had dinner parties with three courses, all of them cooked, nothing bought in, and afterwards we played bridge. In 1973 our part of Clapham was still a lower-middle-class dormitory. Only one house in ten had been gentrified. We would go out in the evening, sometimes with friends, to restaurants like the Great American Disaster for what was London’s only halfway edible hamburger, or to the Horse’s Head in the Fulham Road for meat pies. We would think nothing of driving all the way to Limehouse to go to the Young Friends because, again, a decent Chinese was almost impossible to come by. The Ganges in Gerrard Street was the best place for Indian, its excellence chiming with its politics. The Bengali owner ran it as a co-operative with the staff. We even drove to Eastbourne one night for what we realised would be one of the historic last chances to catch music hall: the great male impersonator Hetty King, then aged eighty-eight, captivating as she did her rolling walk, smoked her pipe and sang ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’.

  Admittedly, there were occasional unexpected incidents. The schizophrenic girlfriend of a Portable actor climbed the drainpipe of our house, got in through a window and started a squat. Another actor, a lodger, fell asleep under a sun-lamp and woke up with her skin coming off in strips and as blind as Tiresias, before we took her to hospital. When Billie Whitelaw needed, for the storyline’s sake, to be painted topless for a television play Margaret was script-editing in the series Sextet, she would only agree if the painting was done in our front room, so that we would be close by in the case of any advantage being taken. And when a play of Snoo’s needed a goat, the animal lived in our back garden all day, before we pushed her at six o’clock every evening into the back of a Citroën 2CV to go to the Royal Court, where she climbed the seventy stairs to the Theatre Upstairs, leaving behind her a trail of pungent small raisins. Our next-door neighbours, the Hollands at No. 12, introduced us to a charming Bulgarian friend called Georgi Markov, with whom we had an enjoyable dinner, shortly before he was assassinated on Waterloo Bridge with the tip of a poisoned umbrella. But these were small bohemian detours along a smooth domestic track. At twenty-five, Margaret and I were living lives of premature calm. Yes, like so many people we knew, we had wanted to get away from our homes at the first possible opportunity. But in no time at all we had built homes of our own.

  By bad luck, our friend Richard Eyre had for the second time got himself into a slightly ambiguous pickle. For someone who was so charming and diffident, Richard had developed an annoying habit of being appointed, but not quite. It was to happen to him for a third and final time at the National Theatre in the 1980s, when after his acclaimed production of Guys and Dolls he was the most plausible successor to Peter Hall as artistic director. On that occasion, he was made to act as a sort of theatrical Prince Charles for five years, during which he became understandably shirty. But in 1973, something similar happened with the Nottingham Playhouse. This theatre had originally been one of the jewels of the post-war repertory movement. John Neville, who still radiated the glamour of his partnership with Richard Burton at the Old Vic in the mid-1950s, had forsaken his screaming stage-door admirers in 1963 to go instead and join Frank Dunlop and Peter Ustinov running the snazzy new building in Wellington Circus. More recently it had been in the hands of Stuart Burge, a director at that point well into his fifties, who was telling Richard that he wanted to leave. Or did he? At the same time, he was warning that the theatre’s board, under the chairmanship of the formidable local councillor Cyril Forsyth, was not yet ready to take on a younger artistic director, even if anointed by Stuart himself. Better, he was saying, for Richard to behave as if he were artistic director in all but name, but to leave the breaking of the formal news to a moment of Stuart’s choosing. He promised to hang around for a while to give Richard cover.

  This was a highly unusual arrangement, and one calculated to make everyone jittery. So when Richard came and asked me to be the provisional literary manager at the Nottingham Playhouse – to be the provisional artistic second-in-command to his own provisional directorship – he also explained that, should I accept, I would not actually be able to tell anyone. Further, Richard ad
ded, it would be wiser if for some time I didn’t visit the city of Nottingham, since my physical presence in the building and my assumption that I had a job there would only create confusion among the staff. But in the same degree that Richard’s status was bizarre, so were his plans blazingly exciting. He was planning a repertory in which new plays would predominate over old. A natural fan of a whole batch of writers who had found current managements arduous and hostile, Richard planned to blow open the doors. He believed that if newer names were given the opportunity to write for Nottingham’s epic stage and large auditorium, they would rise to the occasion.

  Needless to say, I loved the prospect. It was tailor-made for the change in my thinking. Sure, I had yet to confirm to myself that I was a professional playwright. I was envious of the vocational certainty that, working closely with them, I had felt emanating from Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths. As far as I was concerned, I was a director who occasionally wrote, often with the aim of filling in the obvious lacunae in subject matter which distinguished an inward-looking theatre culture. But I had at least grasped something important about my character. For better or worse, I was always happiest when I had a cause. From daily contact with so many, I had come to realise that, because of the nature of public performance, being a dramatist took a toll. It was in the nature of the job. You were telling several hundred people every night that you were worth listening to. ‘In the theatre,’ wrote Iris Murdoch, ‘the audience is a court against which there is no appeal.’ I could see from the often grouchy public characters of older warriors like John Osborne and Harold Pinter that this struggle on your own behalf could be conducted at huge expense to your peace of mind. Playwriting is combative: for every one yes in Shakespeare there are seventeen nos. So, for me, it had been a source of considerable comfort to be part of a company, as I had been at Portable. That way I would find myself fighting not just for my own writing but for others’ as well. It was something more than safety in numbers. It was a group. A movement. An idea.

  Richard’s phantom status in Nottingham seemed symbolic of what was happening more generally in the theatre at large. A new crowd was taking over in all but name, providing most of the energy and the ideas. And yet the old folk were clinging on, unwilling to admit publicly to the scale of the change. My sense of generational grievance had been reinforced by the bumpy reception afforded to the manuscript of my latest play, which I had finished in the first week of the new year. Against my wishes Michael Codron had been rash enough to offer the finished draft of Knuckle to Oscar Lewenstein. Oscar was a sometime communist who had hit gold producing the Woodfall film of Fielding’s Tom Jones. It had made millionaires of everyone involved. Oscar had recently surrendered the chairmanship of the Royal Court board in order to step in as stopgap artistic director to replace the exhausted triumvirate, who some time in 1972 had disappeared quarrelling into the distance. On first reading, Michael was reluctant to put what he said was a challenging play straight into the West End. Oscar, predictably, gave him a dusty answer. This sort of thing was not what he was looking for at all. As the son of immigrants whose lives had been saved by their acceptance into Britain, he disapproved of this new fashion for anti-British drama. Although Oscar had claimed on his appointment that he saw Royal Court writers as being like his own children, I was one offspring he was more than happy to leave out on the pavement. But with my own agent I had a far more delicate problem. In the first week of January I had handed the play over to Clive Goodwin. Light the blue touch paper and retire. Clive was deeply unimpressed. ‘David, I took you on as a comic writer. That’s what you are. Now you’re trying to be serious. It’s not going to work.’

  We had met together to have a lunch at which Clive had not pulled his punches. Knuckle was, among other things, a loving pastiche of an American thriller. A tough-guy style, in conscious tribute to Ross Macdonald, the author of The Moving Target, was used to tell a story set, with deliberate inappropriateness, in the British home counties. To help make a living during the Portable years, I had agreed to write a column in the Spectator, a monthly review of crime novels of all sorts – police, detective, spy – and had come to appreciate how supple the form could be. Because of his feel for the abandoned provinces and for the overlooked, Georges Simenon had long been one of my favourite writers. W. H. Auden’s recommendation that Raymond Chandler’s books ‘should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art’ made no sense to me. Thrillers were works of art. But although the top layer of style in my play was satirical, the content was very far from it. I was transposing film noir to the stage in order to tell an intimate story about an arms dealer who comes home from travelling abroad to search for his sister who has disappeared. In doing so, he falls for his sister’s best friend. The play had, in the manner of these things, a hugely complicated plot, most of it off stage. But ultimately it was about who ends up deserving approval and who doesn’t. The play was moral. Clive, sitting back and getting into his stride, told me repeatedly that this was not the sort of thing I was good at. Why on earth had I written it? The joy of my stuff, he said, was that it didn’t buy into anything. That was why it was funny. It was refreshing. But if I abandoned satire, he insisted, I would become one more dreary playwright lecturing the world on how to behave. Surely I, of all people, should know there were enough of those already? Although Clive’s indictment became tougher as he built his case, his tone remained airy and nonchalant throughout. He shrugged a lot, as though there were not much anyone could do faced with such an obvious misdirection. By the time coffee came, he suggested, much more in sorrow than in anger, that I should face up to the fact that I’d taken a wrong turn. Best put Knuckle back in a drawer.

  I think I had already decided long before the lunch that Knuckle was the best thing I’d ever written. No, more than that: I felt it was the first thing I’d ever written. But even if I didn’t believe it before lunch, I certainly believed it after. Here was something which, on first reading, one of my most committed supporters was telling me to tear up. As I left the restaurant, I knew I’d reached a fork in the road. I was no less insecure than I had ever been. But on this occasion I was determined to be more resolute. I had already stumbled across Cocteau’s timeless artistic advice: ‘Whatever they criticise you for, intensify it.’ And I was finally ready to take it to heart. I went home, stewed for a while and then rang Clive and asked if he would mind if I showed the play to another agent. Just to check. After all, there might be more than one possible opinion about it. Clive said he could hardly stop me. Why, though, did it have to be another agent? He sounded alarmed. Surely I wasn’t thinking of leaving? I rang Christopher Hampton, who was represented by Peggy Ramsay, at that time by far the most celebrated and formidable play agent in London. Christopher arranged for the manuscript to be sent over that afternoon. At six the next morning, fast asleep next to Margaret, I got a loud call.

  Bill Gaskill was once asked how he defined a great actor. He mischievously replied, ‘One who knows their lines on the first day of rehearsal.’ But if you asked me today how I defined a great agent or a great producer, I would still say, ‘One who reads the script overnight.’ As I stirred before daybreak on the pillow, I recognised the voice of the woman who, when I was a student, had told me not to be stupid when I asked to be allowed to produce one of her client’s plays. This time, a different tone. ‘I haven’t woken you, have I? I’m so excited, I’ve been up all night and I just had to ring.’ ‘How did you get my number?’ ‘Oh, I just rang Christopher.’ ‘Did you?’ I thought immediately of a playwright in another part of London also being woken at six and, what’s worse, for another playwright’s number. ‘I couldn’t wait to speak to you.’

  By the time I was having a second lunch with a second successive agent in two days, I was feeling that my feet were never again going to touch the ground. Peggy was in her early sixties, a mutable woman, the very opposite of Clive, usually dressed in expensive clothes of an indefinable but definitely bygone era. W
here she found them I don’t know, but on one occasion, years later, she admitted she was wearing an original by Leon Bakst, who had designed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It came complete with diamanté skull cap. She was at all times given to hugely theatrical gestures with fluttering hands, and startling swoops of volume and pitch in her voice, like a wonky radio. Not someone to whom you would ever knowingly confide a secret, unless you wanted it bruited around, she could electrify the ears of everyone in a large restaurant while supposedly being discreet. But she could also go from nine-words-a-second to total silence at the blink of an eye. She repeatedly crossed and uncrossed her legs for emphasis, often while recounting intimate personalia. Clear evidence remained of her early career as a singer in the Carl Rosa Opera Company, and also, in her reddenings and distant stares, of a romantic history which she herself used to label ‘indiscreet’. Among her lovers had been not only the Romanian dramatist Eugène Ionesco but also the virtuoso violinist Jascha Heifetz, who, she claimed, could not play unless she was in the hall. ‘And let me tell you, when you hear it repeatedly, the violin makes a remarkably ugly noise.’

  Underneath the extravagance of her manner, Peggy was fierce, shrewd and unsentimental. Not long after the war she had discovered a talent for imagining the impact of a play in production merely by looking at it on the page. Because this gift for reading drama like a musical score was so rare, Peggy had been set up in business by a couple of managers called Dorothy and Campbell Christie, who did not, however, share her enthusiasm for what they called ‘the new intellectual drama’. But her agency had grown strong thanks to a binding mix of the artistic and the commercial. Muriel Spark and David Mercer may have provided fibre, but Robert Bolt, with what she called his chocolate-box David Lean pictures such as Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, was there to balance things out with soothing applications of cash. It was Bolt who said of Peggy that although she despised success, she was deeply suspicious of failure.