The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  Some time during the summer, while I had been away in Nottingham, Edward Fox had been cast in the leading role of Curly Delafield in Knuckle. Edward was showbiz aristocracy, without yet having a name that promised to fill theatres. He was the eldest son of the exceptionally handsome agent Robin Fox, who had done so much to help ensure the survival of the Royal Court in its early days. Edward was also the brother of James, who had contrived to star in at least two of the best British films of the previous decade. And his younger brother, Robert, would one day in the 1990s take over as my trusted producer. Edward himself was enjoying a period of fame and prosperity, thanks to an implacable performance in Fred Zinnemann’s expert film of The Day of the Jackal. To my excitement, the great cinema actor James Mason, long a favourite of mine, was offering to play the role of Curly’s stockbroker father. But Mason’s insistence that, for tax reasons, he could not leave Switzerland for more than two months meant that Michael Codron would not even consider him. What were we meant to do? Rehearse in Lausanne? At the time, when theatre was less conciliatory than it is today, short seasons were frowned upon by powerful managements. It was a decision I would come bitterly to regret, because Mason’s presence would have got the play off to the charged start it turned out to require. Instead, after being turned down by Donald Sinden, who preferred to do a shaky Rattigan play at the Duchess – he said to a disbelieving Codron, ‘Yes, I know it’s shit, but at least it’s shit about me’ – the part was to be taken by Douglas Wilmer, who, while dealing in antiques, at the same time had a solid reputation as television’s own Sherlock Holmes.

  The most urgent question waiting on my return, however, was who should play Jenny. Although the arms dealer, Curly, is the play’s protagonist, its moral pivot is the young woman who has been best friend to Curly’s sister, and who works in the Guildford club which I had copied closely from my Cranleigh outings. In thriller terms, she’s Barbara Stanwyck, smarter than anyone else in the town and more desirable. I had not been available when a young actress from the Bristol Old Vic had auditioned. In that theatre town, the purity of her ambition had attracted the resentment of other actors, who were accustomed to more English strategies of disguise. But now in audition she had managed to bowl over both the Michaels, Codron and Blakemore. They were insisting that I meet her as fast as possible, before anyone else whisked her away. It would be her first appearance in London. So on the day after Brassneck opened in September, I got off the train at St Pancras and went straight with my luggage to what looked like an upmarket call girl’s apartment on Curzon Street, just yards away from Shepherd Market. The flat next door even had a red neon sign. Kate Nelligan lived in a tiny, thickly carpeted space with her older boyfriend, the television director Mark Cullingham. It turned out she was a working-class Irish Canadian from London, Ontario. Her real name was Patricia. She had suffered polio as a child. She had played Gertrude at university, liked the feeling, and decided to come to England because acting was better understood in London, Eng., than London, Ont. Her father was an ice-rink attendant and some of her family were priests. Meeting her for the first time, I was struck by how Kate seemed in some way not contemporary. There was nothing of the hippy about her. She was dressed stylishly in clothes from somewhere solid, like Jaeger. The effect was of timeless elegance, unexpected in somebody so young. She already seemed like one of those mature French women who know what to put together in a perfect picnic, how to sail a boat, how to make an omelette that’s brown on the outside but runny in the middle, and where to buy the best binoculars for a day at the races. With perfect maquillage and a chic coif, if she reminded me of anyone, it was Stéphane Audran. Since the principal quality any actress had to bring to the role was poise, the casting seemed to me within minutes of my arrival open and shut. At twenty-three, Kate Nelligan had as much composure as anyone I’d ever met.

  The hour we spent together did not seem life-changing. When I caught sight of her looking shifty on TV in a naval bodice-ripper called The Onedin Line, I simply thought she belonged to that group of actors who don’t prosper in rubbish. Margaret and I were off to Vietnam in a couple of months, both of us certain that it was time to break the regular rhythm of our lives before it strangled us. We saw the opportunity and we were going to take it. But first Tony Bicât and I had to deal with an approach from Max Stafford-Clark and David Aukin, who, much to our surprise, wanted to take over the remains of Portable Theatre. We imagined they wanted to pick up a shell company which already existed because it was less effort than creating a new one. Max, who had just given up running a workshop company at the Traverse Theatre, probably wanted to get his hands on our grant. But no, when we met up at David’s house in St John’s Wood they told us that they had heard we were fed up. They really did want to inherit what they saw as Portable’s permanently inspiring mission to get radical theatre out and about. Our initial surprise had been because David was already married to Nancy Meckler and administering her company. The Freehold’s strict belief in the physical and the non-verbal had been employed by hardline fringe fans as a strong rebuke to Portable’s vestigial loyalty to the word. When I put this to David, he just laughed. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It’s been like a holiday. But everyone knows, to get anything changed we have to go back to language.’

  At the meeting, Tony said lightly, ‘I never want anything to do with the theatre again.’ It was not what he meant. Court appearances and lawyers had worn him down, and he was being flippant. But not knowing Tony as well as I did, David and Max made the mistake of taking him at his word. When they later discovered that because of Portable’s maladministration in our absence it was easier to start a new company than rejig a troubled old one, they asked me to join them. The founding idea was that we should all have a ready facility for any of the three of us to use as we wished. After my discomfort at Nottingham, I said I would only join on the condition that I wouldn’t have any responsibilities for the day-to-day running. Because Max was a railway enthusiast, we discussed whether to call the company Rolling Stock or Joint Stock, without my truthfully understanding the difference. It was something to do with carriages on the old North British line that made us plump for Joint Stock. Max had been impressed by two acts of The Three Sisters which the Freehold had presented in various rooms up and down Nancy and David’s house. So much so that he wanted to kick things off with a promenade production drawn from a Heathcote Williams book about the men and women who spoke on soapboxes at Hyde Park Corner. The audience would wander from speaker to speaker listening to whomever they fancied. Max had already begun a series of workshops, which, to my amazement, he was co-directing with Bill Gaskill. Bill and Max, priest and hedonist, had fallen in unlikely artistic love. My old boss was now technically my employee.

  Before leaving England at the end of 1973, I managed to infiltrate a Snoo Wilson play, The Pleasure Principle, into the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court. It was the last time Snoo and I would work together. Snoo, like Caryl Churchill around the same time, was feeling that property ownership was defining attitudes in the renascent urban middle class. His madcap assault, complete with fireworks and George Fenton, the future composer of the score for The Blue Planet, running around in a gorilla suit, had arrived as a text in Snoo’s usual state of uberous disarray, covered with scrawls and crossings- out and extra dialogue bubbles dribbling away down the margins and sometimes even over the page. The manuscript, with a lot of green ink, looked like one of Proust’s, only more so. After fitting the play out with an expert comedic cast which included Dinsdale Landen, Julie Covington and Brenda Fricker, I helped Snoo winnow the action down to a comprehensible point where he enjoyed what was for him an unusually smooth popular and critical success. The theatre was packed for the run and people liked it. The goat was excellent throughout. But although at the end of the process Snoo didn’t actually say so, I could tell he thought his director had unintentionally defanged him. He had been tamed, but at a price. As Tony put it, trying to fit Snoo into a category was like trying t
o stuff a large duvet into a small drawer. By providing his audience with something they could enjoy and understand as a social comedy, I am not sure Snoo felt I had done him a service.

  The Pleasure Principle opened on a Monday late in November, and by the Wednesday Margaret and I were on a short hop to Paris, to pick up a much longer UTA flight to Saigon. One of Margaret’s sisters, Nina, was married to a diplomat who had just become Australian ambassador to South Vietnam, where, in some luxury but also some isolation, they were beginning to bring up their young family. Living behind high white walls in the Rue Pasteur, surrounded by palm trees and servants, they were more than happy to see us. The Paris Peace Accord had been signed in January of the same year. The old US war criminal Henry Kissinger, who had survived satirical immolation in Dr Strangelove, had only five years previously brought about civil war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge by dropping 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia illegally. He had represented one of two equally dishonest parties. Unlike his opposite number in the North, Le Duc Tho, who refused the Nobel Peace Prize, Kissinger was now in the process of accepting it, he said, ‘with humility’. I should hope. He was the author of a farce. There wasn’t a single person in Vietnam, North or South, who didn’t know that Kissinger’s peace was phoney. Neither side had the slightest intention of sticking to the so-called agreement. But it was, for the Americans, serving its expedient purpose of giving them the excuse they desperately needed to fulfil Richard Nixon’s electoral promise to get out of an ever more costly and damaging war. Some 550,000 American troops had been withdrawn, and the South left to its own devices. In a pattern we would see repeated many times, Nixon, lately mired in Watergate, had talked of peace with honour. But, like Bush, like Obama, Nixon was more than happy to settle for peace with shame if it meant he survived.

  At the very moment everyone else was fighting to get out of Vietnam, Margaret and I were determined to get in. For the month we spent there, there was an extraordinary atmosphere. Ten years later I would write a television film whose themes were classically Chekhovian. Stephen Frears directed it. It was called Saigon: Year of the Cat, and it would detail the story of a middle-aged English woman, played by Judi Dench, who has worked for years in a Vietnamese bank and doesn’t want to leave when the end is near. As in a Russian play, a whole society knows that change is inevitable but chooses to pretend it doesn’t. Wherever you go, there is a haunting disparity between the official version of the future and what everyone, in their heart, knows the future to be. In Saigon, during the phoney peace, it wasn’t just that the whole city was waiting for the day when the Vietcong would inevitably come screaming down the hill. You could also tell from the mysterious explosions in the night – oil dumps going off in another part of the city – that the threat came not just from outside but from inside as well. There were salaried employees setting fire to their own workplaces. Things had reached a saturation point where you couldn’t tell your enemy from your friend. When the end came in 1975, it only needed the lightest of pushes for the whole thing to topple. Saigon was already eaten away.

  Against all advice, Margaret and I took the chance to travel. We never felt in any serious danger. We were warned that the roads were not safe by night, because the Vietcong controlled certain routes once darkness fell. But by day the greatest problem was that the cramped and crowded buses were built for Asian frames, not for lanky English playwrights measuring six foot one. Getting all the way up to the hill resort of Dalat was particularly painful. When we got there, we stayed in the Grand Hotel, right by the lake. It was almost completely unoccupied, except by the rats which scurried self-importantly across marbled floors, with free play to hurry on to their pressing business. They might as well have carried briefcases. Our suite, the size of a bowling alley and hung with dusty mosquito nets and crumbling curtains, evoked Miss Havisham’s quarters. We went via Da Nang all the way up to Hué, which was eerily quiet, as though the 1968 Tet Offensive had stunned it into silence. Underneath the beautiful city’s Swiss calm, with the wide river flowing imperturbably on, you had the sense of people who had endured one unimaginable catastrophe and who knew that the arrival of the next was only a matter of time. Its serenity was charged with fear.

  Back in Saigon for Christmas, we enjoyed a life of privilege, with caddies throwing diplomats’ golf balls discreetly back onto the fairway should they regrettably land in the rough. The French ambassador, using Vietnamese fighter pilots, flew us all out on a hair-raising journey to an uninhabited island, where, at the third attempt, we made a landing in strong cross-winds. Waiters in white jackets and white gloves were already attendant behind long trestle tables set out on the beach. The tables groaned with champagne and fresh seafood. It was like the scene when the great press baron gives a picnic in Citizen Kane. After lunch, Margaret and I watched as the foreigners laughed, splashed and flirted, speculating in many languages as to who had the smallest bikini, the tightest trunks. Oh what larks! We felt free to mock a whole class who couldn’t admit their lives were about to change. I had no presentiment that my own was too, and no less radically.

  9

  Cream and Bastards Rise

  We returned to a Britain which was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Life had already begun to feel different in October 1973 when OPEC, the oil producers’ cartel, had used the occasion of the Yom Kippur War to hike up prices by seventy per cent and deliberately to fix the supply. Our plane back from Saigon was three-quarters empty because airline fares had shot through the roof. No one was travelling. We lay out across three seats, and were given complimentary dry Martinis at 7 a.m. in a bid to re-attract our custom. Back home, sensing that the oil shortage would give coal miners a welcome new bargaining power, and with inflation running at twenty per cent, the National Union of Mineworkers had put in for a whacking pay rise for their members. Edward Heath, never even in his more confident moments the most secure or cogent of leaders, was in nervous and sometimes secret negotiation. For one reason or another he had decided that the coal workers’ aims were political, not economic. Heath later claimed that he had asked Mick McGahey, the leader of the Scottish miners, ‘What is it you want, Mr McGahey?’ and that McGahey had replied, ‘I want to see the end of your government.’ Whatever the truth of this story – and to a dramatist’s ear the dialogue rings false – Heath had taken up residence in the bunker, believing he was heading for a definitive showdown with the unions.

  Rehearsals for my new play began on 31 December in a church hall in a basement next to St James’s, Piccadilly. The next day, the prime minister announced the three-day week. The purpose, he said, was to avoid power cuts and to ensure continuity of supply. But the effect, unsurprisingly, was to create a superfluous sense of crisis. Blackouts became a regular feature of daily life, and television shut down at 10.30 p.m. The previous summer the director of Knuckle, Michael Blakemore, had invited me to his seaside house in Biarritz so that we could put our heads together. In the late afternoons he used to go down to the wide Atlantic beach and show off his native prowess, standing straight as a pencil on a speeding surfboard. Over dinner one evening he had voiced a widespread sentiment which I was to hear many times in different forms. Michael said that when he had arrived in Britain from Sydney in the 1950s the country had admittedly been awful, but basically it had worked. Now, he said, it was less awful but it didn’t work. I argued the opposite, paraphrasing Raymond Williams: ‘If people cannot have justice officially then they will have it unofficially.’ The fact that British citizens had lately become so much more militant was surely to the good. It was a disputatious time, certainly, but that’s because there were important things to dispute. If people were today demanding their rights, well, wasn’t that a sign of vitality? And if they also chose to question archaic social structures because governments had lost all touch with the electorate, was that not better still? An element of disruption was a small price to pay, even if the direction of change was still not clear. Yes, there was an apocalyptic air in the country th
ese days. Portable Theatre had been predicting social breakdown for years. But to me it was quiescence which was unnatural, not protest. It still is. I find the sullen state of affairs forty years later in which everyone is resigned to put up with social injustice and do nothing about it far more spooky and unnatural than the roller-coaster days of the mid-1970s.