The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  That day we fell to talking about her one-time client Joe Orton, whose plays she had championed from the outset. An original comic dramatist, beholden to no one, he had been murdered by his professionally jealous boyfriend, Kenneth Halliwell, who had hammered Orton’s skull, then killed himself. Peggy had been one of the first people to go round after the discovery. At lunch she stressed to me how quickly you become used to horror. Initially she had entered the room backwards, but in no time at all, she said, she had forgotten that the scene around her was meant to be ghastly and was simply finding it a little bit inconvenient to have to step round Halliwell’s body to answer the door. She told me, in a comparison that brought me up short, that I reminded her of Joe, because, as with him, there weren’t any precedents. With tremendous emphasis, she said, ‘Thank God. You haven’t been influenced.’ When I started explaining that I didn’t understand the idea of influence, because surely if another writer was really good and you admired them, you would obviously do everything you could to get out of their shadow, not shelter under it, she just looked bored and said that was obvious.

  Peggy’s attention was prone to wandering, especially when someone told her something she already knew. Or something she thought limp. Or simply not daring enough. Repeatedly she would tell you, ‘Talent is a matter of courage,’ and for her the two things were more or less interchangeable. She held in vivid contempt certain well-known dramatists who in her view lacked the guts to look deep inside themselves and tell the truth. But that day she was extraordinarily focused. She voiced not a word of reservation. Knuckle was one of the most important plays she’d ever read. It was at once romantic and anti-romantic in a way which she would never have thought possible. ‘And that ending!’ she kept saying. ‘The ending! The boy doesn’t get the girl! I love it!’ She had already reread the play several times, and could command every detail of the complicated plot. She even had strong ideas about what colour the set should be and drew something on a paper napkin to show me. At first light, she had rung Michael Codron, who had long been her closest friend and colleague, and told him that for the first time in her professional life she was planning personally to invest in a play. There was no question, she said, of this play being tucked away in the subsidised theatre, a sector of which, by and large, she was thoroughly contemptuous. It was full, she said, of people who were spoilt and took no risks. No, Knuckle must go straight into the West End in a proper commercial production.

  No sooner had she proposed this than she flirtatiously retreated. ‘Of course it’s not up to me. That’s a decision you must make with your agent.’ She said the word ‘agent’ as though it were dirty, like ‘condom’. I told her that my present agent did not care for the play, and I was wondering whether she would agree to represent me. At this, Peggy simulated outrage. ‘Please. I have never in my life stolen a client from another agent. I would never do that. I never poach.’ I made my own retreat, saying, of course, no, that was not what I was suggesting. But on the other hand, if I found myself without an agent, would she take me on as a client? ‘Ah well,’ she said, as if fluttering a fan beneath her chin, ‘in those circumstances . . .’

  In no time at all I was off like a rabbit down the Piccadilly Line. In Clive’s office in South Kensington I explained to him that I could tell from the reaction thus far that Knuckle was going to be a deeply divisive play. It was going to make any battles my work had so far engendered seem tame. It would be unbearable for me to be defended by someone who was not in good faith. Clive rallied at a flattering level of hurt. As an agent, it was inevitable that you didn’t like all your clients’ work, he said, but he intended to represent this play professionally like any other. He felt that he was being punished for being honest. What was he meant to do? Pretend? I said there was no blame or punishment. Again, how could there be? You can blame people for what they do, but you can’t blame them for what they are. Clive was a person who disliked Knuckle. More seriously, he had spoken to me of the play as an aberration, a mistake, something I’d come to regret. I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as the direction I wanted to take in future. I was onto something. With any luck, there’d be more like this.

  For the next twenty years, admittedly, the full flush of Peggy’s passionate representation would not be an unmixed blessing. When she took to waking me regularly between six and seven with a mixture of scandal, gossip and hard theatrical news, I found myself one morning putting the phone down and saying, puzzled, to Margaret, ‘It’s as if she’s in love with me.’ This was met with a derisive response. ‘As if? As if? And what exactly is the difference between “as if” and “being”? Do you really think a forty-year age gap means anything to Peggy?’ Understandably my new status went down no better with Peggy’s existing clientele than it did with my wife. Other authors took to crossing the room specially to tell me how tired they were of hearing my name. ‘Why can’t you be more like Hare?’ ‘Hare doesn’t write like this.’ Whatever the ostensible subject of a conversation, they reported, Peggy would drag it round to the qualities of her new enthusiasm. As in the days of Mr G–––, I was back to being teacher’s pet, with all the hostility that role attracts. Some of my peers couldn’t wait for me to fail. But although Peggy’s powers of persuasion had stiffened Michael Codron’s resolve to present Knuckle straight off in the West End, they were ineffective in persuading the most fashionable leading actors of the day, some of whom lost no time at all in refusing the central role. We did at least acquire a director, the laconic Australian Michael Blakemore, who had spent the previous few years basking in the sun as Laurence Olivier’s loyal lieutenant at the Old Vic. The play’s sixteen scenes, switching between locations, presented exactly the kind of complex technical challenge to which Michael invariably rose. But it had also become clear that, absent a star, it would be some time before anyone could mount a production. It would turn out to be a full year of waiting.

  Luckily, I had plenty to get on with. Howard Brenton and I were both intrigued by an overripe local government scandal which was fighting Watergate for newspaper space as the leading story of the day. It was known as the Poulson affair. John Poulson, soon to be taken to trial, was a corrupt civic architect who in the previous fifteen years had developed a nationwide network of compliant civil servants. In return for cash in hand, they had been willing to look favourably on his applications for lavish development contracts, such as the Aviemore ski centre. Poulson operated closely with the Newcastle city boss T. Dan Smith, who had tried to create what he called the Brasilia of the North. From his initial eagerness to remove the genuine social evils of slum housing, Poulson had grown, step by step, into a full-scale criminal. He was proud of it: ‘I took on the world on its own terms and no one can deny I once had it in my fist.’ But what struck Howard and me was how extraordinarily small that world was. There was something pathetically British, and therefore rather moving, about how local councillors, local authority officials, civil servants and even Westminster politicians were eager to sell out for so little. Some surrendered their independence and their futures for a weekend for two at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. For others, it was £50.

  When he was released from prison in 1985, T. Dan Smith was ready to draw a political moral which resonated with me at least: ‘Thatcherism . . . could reasonably be described as legalised Poulsonism. Contributions to Tory funds will be repaid by the handing over of public assets for private gain.’ From the 1980s onwards, notions of public and private, kept separate for so many years after the war, would become disastrously intertwined. Politicians of both leading parties would be seen as people with no other function but self-interestedly to hand what belonged to the taxpayer over to private profiteers, always at way less than market value. They were facilitators, nothing else, for people who grabbed more money than they did. The reputation of electoral politics would thereby nosedive. It was hardly surprising. If democracy didn’t care to defend what was owned in common, what was it for? With foreign policy meanwhile outso
urced to Washington, the profession of politics in Britain would soon have a catastrophic identity crisis of its own making.

  Even in the 1970s, the notion of writing a play about collusion between developers and local government held particular appeal in Nottingham, precisely because it was one of many big British cities to have been threatened post-war by a noxious combination of local business interests and lousy architecture. But the subject also had dangers, most of which we ignored. Now that I have had a lifetime’s experience of handling topical material, it seems extraordinary that Howard and I ripped so gaily into our parody without pausing to consider the legal implications. All right, we gave our central characters a light fictional covering. The events which had inspired the play were strategically disguised. We invented the setting, a nonexistent Midland city called Stanton, to which our hero Alfred Bagley, posing as a witless old tramp, arrives in 1945. Like aniseed across the trail we threw in some casual mockery of Harold Wilson’s poetry-writing wife Mary, with her character reciting a terrible poem which begins: ‘Stanton wakes. The milkman calls.’ But even so, by the time we sent the play out to actors, Poulson hadn’t even been formally arrested. And by the time he was sentenced, our play was done and dusted. We did at one point make a light-hearted visit to get the text approved by a notably relaxed lawyer in London, but by and large Richard encouraged us to get on and write what we wanted. This was like England’s Ireland, only better.

  To make quicker headway, Howard and I retreated for a month to Hawick. Margaret’s parents had gone off to Italy for the spring of 1973, so we decided to lock ourselves away in the deep Scottish countryside and write. Since marrying Margaret, I had rather taken to gumboot life. She had a large horse-loving family, including a likeable elder sister, Sarah, who had been a friend in need to many grateful students at the Royal College of Art. They found in her a good sense and human practicality which their tutors often lacked. Early on in the process of getting-to-know-you, Margaret’s father, Pat, had asked me casually, as some sort of initiation rite, if I could possibly do him a favour and kill eleven chickens. I was determined not to be fazed, so I had gone out in the driving rain and wrung their necks, one by one, with the Matheson dogs all barking excitedly at the sight. When Howard arrived in the Borders, he too responded to the blossoming surroundings which alternate the barren and the lush in a way which is quickly addictive. Unsurprisingly, animal imagery began to infiltrate the dialogue. When, at the end of the first act, Bagley gives the mad wedding speech during which he has a heart attack and dies, he alarms the guests by beginning to caw like a crow. We took inspiration from the big black fellows on the lawn outside our writing room in Hawick.

  At various points, Margaret came to check that we were all right. The sound of our laughter was so raucous that she had become alarmed, thinking we must be ill. Howard was a pleasure to write with, mainly because he woke up cheerful every morning. Unusually, he explained to me, he had never known depression. He simply didn’t know what it was. Howard and I had both recently read Angus Calder’s important work of history The People’s War and been inspired by its analysis. Calder proved that the rejection of Churchill by the British electorate immediately after the end of the Second World War had not been an inexplicable act of ingratitude towards a victorious war leader. Rather, it had been the popular expression of a growing nationwide sentiment, both in the army and at home, that in no circumstances must Britain go back to how it had been before the war. Howard and I rooted our dynastic satire deep in that post-war idealism. As we worked, we swapped control of the typewriter, sticking to an early rule that a line of dialogue would only go in if we both approved. But as the play gathered pace, we noticed that it seemed to be in a style which neither of us recognized as our own. A mysterious third person had entered the room, whom we nicknamed Howard Hare, and who, very definitely, was the owner of a fuck-it, scabrous kind of voice which was new and weirdly independent, wilful even.

  Richard, still serving lengthy probation, had asked me to join him for auditions back in the White House Hotel in Earls Court Square to help form the new Nottingham company for the coming autumn. Howard and I had revelled in our freedom to write something as large-scale and panoramic as we wished, so we needed an astonishing twenty-four actors, plus a live horse, to play the result in repertory with The Taming of the Shrew. The young Jonathan Pryce, who had already electrified the stage of the Liverpool Everyman, was committed, and we built around him. Richard and I held open house together until the final day of meetings, when a young drama-school graduate came in and did a Charles Wood monologue, cutting the air occasionally with his hand. He took our breath away. It was the best general audition I’d ever seen. We were forced to explain to him that all the proper parts had gone, but that if he cared to join us and play as cast in little one-line roles as they arose we would be very happy. He said he’d love to. His name was Geoff Wilkinson, but later he changed it to Tom. Tom Wilkinson, like Jonathan Pryce and Zoë Wanamaker, became a stalwart of the company, one of those people it was always a pleasure to see walk onto the stage.

  Not long after, I joined Richard in Nottingham, just as the dexterous Stuart Burge finally disclosed to the board that they had unknowingly acquired a new director. Since the news had been equably received, it was my firm intention to stay and help carry on building the repertory. Richard, in preparation, was moving into a Georgian house in the Park, in the very centre of Nottingham, accompanied by Sue Birtwistle, whom he had just married. Sue, tall and confident, was going to run the Theatre in Education company, which in the 1970s was such an important feature of any rep. I went to live as a lodger in their house. They were so generous that it was impossible to be anything but amused when Richard, running back in for something he’d forgotten, left Margaret’s Renault 8 on the top of a hill with the handbrake off, with the inevitable consequences. Together Sue and Richard became the most hospitable couple in the East Midlands, handing out huge quantities of food and drink nightly to a shifting cast of guests – actors, writers, directors, designers and musicians – who would gather, usually after a show, to laugh and make music long into the night. Not even my transient obsession with Carly Simon, which was driving everyone else in the house nuts – I played the same tracks twenty times a day – could prevent this from feeling like lift-off. Richard was about to do something new and revolutionary. He was about to transform a regional theatre given over to high art to one which did eleven new plays in his first season. It was unheard of.

  John McGrath had suggested the name Brassneck for our tale of civic greed. Whether as one word or two, it meant ‘effrontery’. Howard and I had seized it eagerly. Richard, as producer, had never made any secret of his jealousy that I was getting to direct. He fancied the play for himself. He astonished me on the first day of rehearsal when he introduced me to the company by saying, ‘David’s going to be directing the play, but it’s his first production in a big theatre, so don’t worry, I shan’t be far away.’ The company looked as stunned as I did. One of the actors said to me later, ‘It was my first job, so I assumed that’s how everyone behaved in the professional theatre.’ In the previous few months I had come to think Richard was my friend – after all, we’d done everything together – and now here he was, cutting my legs off at the knees by publicly telling everyone I might be incompetent. Once I got to know Richard better, I began to recognise this kind of change in temperature as part of his make-up. He had a gift which made him an outstanding producer. He would always take one step back to get a better view of the scrum. Artistically, I had to be right in the middle.

  In the event, Richard’s white charger stayed safely locked up in the stable. Brassneck could hardly have gone better. The board of the theatre weren’t too keen on an early scene which, thanks to a smuggled document we had obtained, accurately recreated the secret rituals of Freemasonry, with everyone rolling up their trousers and talking gibberish about the Great Architect. They didn’t like it when the audience laughed. There were more
than a few walk-outs. And not everyone was convinced by a third act in which the Bagleys, the prototypical entrepreneurial family, move from construction into the ultimate capitalist product, heroin. In the days before whole western economies came to depend on black markets in the stuff, it was all thought to be a little far-fetched. There was a disapproving air of ‘Come on, boys, a joke’s a joke.’ Capitalists dealing in drugs, indeed! But you would have needed to be a very cold fish indeed to resist the fizz of the play, its zest. It was brazen. Brassneck had an infectious, strongly narrative drive as it set about portraying a family who crashed straight through the pieties of respectable British life. For once, public corruption was ripped into in public and with a will. From where I sat in the first row of the balcony, you could watch the smiles spread through the auditorium. Paul Dawkins, as Alfred Bagley, the conniving patriarch of the dynasty, gave the performance of his life. The third act began with a recording of the Rolling Stones singing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, and I’ve rarely known a song create such a thrill of expectation. To this day, every time I hear that perfect opening couplet, ‘I saw her today at the reception/A glass of wine in her hand’, I have memories of the heady oxygenated kind of theatrical happiness which comes only when you know that a nail is being hit bang on the head.

  Having planned to stay on at Nottingham, I then didn’t. In an ungainly panic that I was about to commit myself to something I would do very badly, I changed my mind. I was aware that in walking away so soon I was letting Richard down. It was unforgivable. In what prospered over the subsequent thirty years as a close theatrical partnership, in which Richard went on to direct six of my plays, I had occasionally to remind myself that retreats happened once or twice on both sides, but they were from thoughtlessness, nothing more. By achieving a play which got Richard’s regime off to such a popular start, I had served him far better than I ever would have done by hanging around. I hadn’t guessed that I would be so uncomfortable running a large theatre. I took it too personally. When one of the stage carpenters impregnated an usherette, I went running across to Richard in his office to ask, ‘What are we going to do?’ He very reasonably looked at me and replied, ‘Nothing.’ He looked even more bewildered when I said, ‘But she’s terribly upset.’ I wasn’t cut out for the regular institutional mish-mash of unexpected events and hurt feelings, whereas Richard was. He was able to sail above it. When he saw the usherette later that day, he knew exactly the right thing to say to her and I didn’t. After Nottingham, in particular when Richard went on to run the National Theatre throughout the 1990s, I felt I was able to be more practical use to him by not being a brochured part of his team. I got used to the phone ringing on my work desk every morning at 9 a.m. It was always Richard, calling for fifteen minutes’ perspective from a different angle of view. I was more than happy to act as his confidential consigliere. It meant that we would discuss whatever was most annoying him without it going any further. I would never claim to have contributed to any of the innovative and bold decisions, not least to premiere Angels in America and to introduce multiracial casting, which made the period of his artistic directorship a benchmark. But I did stop him doing the odd stupider thing.