The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  At rehearsals Michael used to start every day by laying out a disorienting assortment of pills on the little table in front of him from which he directed. Since he always seemed to be in pretty robust health, and had cut a more than plausible figure on the rollers in the Bay of Biscay, I had no idea what purpose this neurotic forest of orange tubs served. As a companion, Michael had been so sceptical and caustic that it was a little shocking to see that he appeared to be a willing martyr to hypochondria. Presumably still not adjusted after a mere twenty years to the un-Australian climate, he remained wrapped in his coat and scarf throughout rehearsals, pulling them tighter as the weeks went on. Somehow this added to my feeling that things weren’t ever quite going to settle. I quickly appreciated the degree to which subsidised theatre creates a common culture, usually involving at least a few people who’ve worked together before. Even if they haven’t, they’ve worked with other people who have. But this bunch were liquorice allsorts, with no shared history. For all the nostalgia generated by present-day producers talking of better times when serious plays were supposedly abundant, Knuckle was the only new play to originate from a commercial management in the West End in the whole of that year. All the others were transfers, blown in by favourable reviews. With lights and heating going on and off at regular intervals, no wonder everyone felt a little exposed.

  Coming from the Old Vic, Michael’s approach to directing was initially technical, instructing actors to pick up particular props at particular moments and to put them down again at another moment that pleased him. A lot of the stage picture was already prepared in his head, with moves to a degree predetermined. He allowed freedom, but within limits. Michael began from the outside in, believing that if only he could get the tram in the groove it would begin to speed. Again, this method might have suited a group who were already well known to each other. But with actors from such different traditions, it reinforced the feeling that everyone was in a different play. Malcolm Storry, playing the unpleasant role of Sarah’s old boyfriend Max, had come directly from the fringe theatre, so directly that Michael Codron had installed a telephone in his flat because Malcolm had never been able to afford one. With his background as a teacher Malcolm would clearly have been happier with more discussion, while Douglas Wilmer, retreating ever deeper into his script and sighing a lot, seemed happier with none at all. Edward Fox, never a natural fan of directors, had developed a clever strategy of echolalia, always repeating the last two or three words of whatever Michael had just said to him – ‘Go downstage, yes. Pick up the bottle, yes. Not too quickly, no’ – without ever really intending to do any of it.

  I am not quite clear when it was exactly, probably around the third week, that I decided that Kate Nelligan was the greatest actress of our time and that she was fulfilling the needs of my play more completely than I had ever imagined possible. I think it was at the first run-through. Everyone else was stumbling around, forgetting lines and saying ‘Sorry’ and ‘Oh, where am I meant to be now?’ And here was this extraordinary actress, sitting in the middle of the rehearsal room, very calm, very still, smoking so gently that little wreaths adorned her, already in total command of my text and of her character. She had a way of floating a line so that it hovered like the smoke, weightless, in the air. I had no clue how she did it. All eyes went to her. But I do very clearly remember the moment when I realised that my feelings of gratitude and admiration were reciprocated. After one such run-through, Kate took my arm as we were all crossing Piccadilly to go for a good French lunch in the upstairs room of Edward’s favourite Le Petit Café in Stafford Street. Somehow the gesture said everything, and we both knew it. But just in case I’d missed its meaning, as we went past the Royal Academy, Kate added that she couldn’t believe her luck. ‘You’re a great writer.’ We walked on in silence. Since we continued to work together until 1983, this mutual feeling, finally expressed between us, made the pair of us both insufferable for years. But it probably created work of an intensity neither of us would have achieved apart.

  When we got to Oxford, where we were due to open a two-week out-of-town run on 29 January, the Playhouse Theatre looked shuttered and dead. Paul Scofield, at lunch during the rehearsals of The Rules of the Game, had told me a long story about how he once couldn’t find the place when he was acting there during the war because it was so dark, and had been shocked by US servicemen throwing a beaten-up black colleague out of the back of a truck onto the pavement in Beaumont Street. Now I knew how he felt. It turned out we were all staying in the rambling Randolph Hotel just down the road. By an unhappy quirk of design, it had its kitchen grills so placed in the catacombs below that a smell of rank lamb fat hung over the whole place twenty-four hours a day and even crept into the heavy drapery in the bedrooms. Candles placed strategically on the stairs added to the air of nineteenth-century decay. My inept dramaturgy, alternating far too often between short scenes in the same places, like bad television, had lured John Napier, the future designer of Cats and Starlight Express, into a premature attempt at innovative technology, though sadly on nothing like the budgets with which he would later make his whizz-bang reputation. On either side of the stage were switchback metal arms of the kind you see at fairgrounds, which were used to deliver overcomplicated sets from the wings. Inevitably, most of the three days of technical rehearsal was spent with actors standing watching as the production crew put their hands on their hips or scratched their heads. Once the machines did work, the effect was both unexciting and repetitive.

  It was consoling, then, to open on a freezing Tuesday night to a reasonably warm response. Later, when I understood a good deal more about directing, I would come to believe that any director’s first and most important responsibility is to explain to the audience what kind of play they are watching. When we see a fresh production of a classical play, Hamlet, say, or Tartuffe, and we exclaim, ‘It’s as if I had never seen the play before,’ that is because the director has somehow managed to mediate the experience, to relax the audience’s understanding to a point where they can open themselves up to everything the actors want them to see and hear. For myself, I was to give up directing plays in the late 1980s precisely because I felt I had failed to do this. Twice in succession, audiences could not feel where exactly a play which I had directed was meant to be pitched. The task for Michael Blakemore on this occasion was almost impossible. There were so many warring plays fighting under the single title Knuckle that it would have been hard for any director to know which one to highlight. The text alternated between being violent and political, prosaic and poetic in a way which was both highly original and almost impossible to control. The only fault with Michael’s loyal production – if it could be called one – was that it was too true to what he was given. If, as V. S. Naipaul says, ‘Plot is for those who already know the world; narrative is for those who want to discover it,’ then clearly there was too much of one and too little of the other. In such circumstances it’s hard to see how anyone could have done better than Michael, who was by now reacting to the closure of power stations by wearing more coats and scarves than ever. When you chanced upon the posed photos in big frames outside the theatre, Knuckle looked like standard boring West End fare. Today I have friends who once walked past it on exactly those grounds. Admirers of the play would say that it was far too complex to be simply conveyed. Its detractors would say it was far too confused.

  The unexpected bonus was that the Oxford audience, much of it made up of students, relished the layer of thriller pastiche but also could see through to the underlying subject. In the history books, it is Margaret Thatcher who is credited or blamed with adjusting the country to a new, more ruthless kind of capitalism where no one has any responsibility except to look after themselves and their own families. It was Thatcher, they say, who blew away the claims of a previous generation of Tory grandees who, as a result of wartime experiences fighting side by side with men from working-class backgrounds, still cherished a more socially responsible kind of Conse
rvatism grounded in notions of the common good. She called them ‘wets’ and never missed an opportunity to say how little their consideration meant to her. But if this version of history is correct, it is very hard to see how by 1974, five years before Thatcher’s election to power, a casual dramatist had already written a play which turns on the very argument which would come to transform Conservatism. Thatcher may indeed have overseen the triumph of the unsparing new philosophy, but she was not its author. It had been simmering away among renegades for a long time.

  In Knuckle, Curly’s father, Patrick Delafield, is a stockbroker, whose allegiance is to quiet, calm, respectability and order. Curly himself is an arms dealer, an unabashed market supplier, whose love is for making noise as much as for making money. He sees his father as a hypocrite, while his father sees him as a lout. It was clear at the first performance that the young audience were already primed for this standoff. From their reaction, you knew some of them had lived it and were pleased to see it laid bare. Casting directors would curse me for years to come because they said every second applicant actress used it as her audition speech – it would become a cliché – but when, with side-light hitting her at the front of the stage, Kate first launched into the barbed monologue ‘Young women in Guildford must expect to be threatened’, you could feel a shiver of excitement throughout the audience. Although there were too few people to create the momentum for anything you could call a hit, there was definitely a thoughtful atmosphere which gave us real grounds for hope. Peggy wrote me a note after the first performance: ‘I have never seen a production of a play which so absolutely reproduced the promise of a text. Everything you conceived and Michael and I read is either fulfilled or will be fulfilled.’

  Inevitably, during the first week together, Kate and I grew close. Within a day or two Michael Blakemore, as alert in these matters as in all others, found us out in some minor inconsistency. We were meant to be in one place and were obviously in another. Our stories mismatched. We hardly needed discovery to make us cautious. We were cautious enough already because both of us could feel, with our shared feelings of embattlement – Kate against England, where she felt disliked, and me against the English theatre where I felt hugely disliked – how incendiary a mix we would make together. We fired up each other’s feelings of anger and isolation in a way which was both heady and dangerous. Having been brought up in Bexhill, I had formed a poor opinion of unfulfilled desire. I had seen its casualties all around me. But I was not blind to the dangers of fulfilled desire either. For both of us, with partners in place, love was a catastrophe. Kate and I were completely obsessed with each other without necessarily being made for each other. She was already rightly enjoying a thrill of discovery around her performance as Jenny. In Oxford, during that fortnight, we both felt we were standing on a little spit of dry land which was unlikely to stay dry much longer.

  In the second week of performances we were still rehearsing and even making a few cuts, though not many. The American notion of ‘fixing’ a play had thankfully yet to cross the Atlantic. Producers trusted their own judgement. A play was what it was. Some people would like it and some wouldn’t. There was no proleptic imperative to answer criticism before it was made. Of course you wanted to make sure that everything, including the writing, was as polished as possible, but you would never seek to change the nature of the play itself. Michael Codron had admittedly asked me to stop using the word ‘capitalism’ in interviews. He said it was uncommercial and off-putting. The word stopped people coming to the box office, because it made the play seem dull. When I asked him what name I was meant to give to the system under which we currently lived, Michael smiled ingenuously and said, ‘Call it life.’ So it was lucky that he was at rehearsals in person to see the results of some minor tinkering on the final Thursday, when news arrived that Edward Heath had stopped agonising, pulled himself together, looked over the cliff edge and declared a general election. He was, he said, going to the country with the question ‘Who runs Britain?’ We were all thrown for a loop. With the miners out on strike and power outages a nightly possibility, Codron made the only decision available to him. It was pointless to try and go ahead with our scheduled mid-February opening at the Comedy Theatre in London. It would be commercially disastrous because nobody’s mind could fairly be on it. We must hold off, going into a frustrating kind of standby, idling until early March.

  This departure from the prepared schedule unnerved me. I was in a personal mess but at least we had all been moving towards some sort of professional resolution. Now everything was suspended. A yawning gap of time was opening up, in reality only a few weeks but in the circumstances endless. Disoriented, I was overwhelmed by a feeling that my life was about to fall apart like pick-up sticks. Years later, I would read Lucien Freud: ‘There is no such thing as free will. People just have to do what they have to do.’ Kate and I returned home to our partners, both of us enchanted prisoners of the other. I tried to pretend to Margaret that nothing was happening. So Kate did to Mark. Peggy, who, like a nurse watching over a dangerously injured patient, had attended many of the Oxford performances, sensed a disturbing change in my mood and, fearful, packed me off to a tiny little vertical one-up one-down which she kept for writers near her home in the back streets close to Brighton station. When I got there she took to lecturing me by post, addressing me in Thomas Mann’s phrase as ‘Life’s Delicate Child’:

  Yes, failure is POSSIBLE – so what? J Joyce failed, Beckett starved, Carmen flopped, Proust was turned down by Gide. Dostoevsky starved; all the early Tchechovs and Ibsens failed ignominiously. Just pin your ears back and let Michael Cod operate . . . Your work is far more important than you are, because it is what everybody can actually hear and see. The only way you will get failure is to deliberately bring it on yourself.

  But I still paced the promenade every night, the wind and rain lashing my face, feeling a riptide had picked me up and was carrying me, powerless, towards disaster. Suddenly I had turned into one of those explosive, mystifying adults who used to bewilder me when I was a child.

  We started previewing Knuckle two days before the election. The Comedy Theatre, since renamed the Pinter, is a gloomy playhouse at the best of times, placed as it then was along from London’s most depressing vegan restaurant in a meaningless street off Leicester Square. On the Tuesday, it was immediately apparent that the warmth extended to us by Oxford students would not reach down to the traditional West End audience. In the first week, with the election campaign bubbling along, there was scarcely any audience at all. Inside the auditorium a chill wind whipped round the ankles of the few spectators, while in the foyers the bar staff, theatre haters to a man, did their best to make sure that any concentration the actors might be able to generate would be ruined by clattering crates and shattered mixer bottles. We were losing an uneven war against Schweppes. In the pub opposite I first met the film director Stephen Frears, who in a year or two would become one of my closest friends and among my most valued. He was coming to the play but his pre-theatre conversation was entirely about an actress, Anne Rothenstein, with whom he was hopelessly in love. I said nothing. On the Thursday, Heath was told by the nation that the answer to his question ‘Who runs Britain?’ was a resounding ‘Not you, sailor.’ Labour had 301 seats, the Conservatives had 297. But in a manoeuvre as undignified as it was doomed, a sulky Heath tried desperately to cling on, calling the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, in to Downing Street to try and persuade him to help fiddle a mandate he had not earned.

  While boxing at prep school I had learned to forestall the blow by anticipation. I prided myself on it. But at this crucial moment my footwork had failed and I was taking the blow full in the face. On Monday 4 March Heath conceded, Labour came to power, and Knuckle opened. Harold Wilson’s third administration would quickly settle with the miners and end the phoney war. But no such settlement was available to me. Over the weekend I had told Margaret what was happening between me and Kate. We decided to sell the house an
d to separate. Neither of us wanted to continue in a relationship which was insincere. On Monday, going to my first night, I walked down Panton Street to the Comedy alone. At this point as mad as a pork chop, I stuck up a poster backstage on which I had scrawled in black Pentel a quotation from Ross Macdonald, whose books had started me off on the path to Knuckle. It read: ‘The bottom is littered with good guys/ Only cream and bastards rise.’ It wished the company good luck. When I went in to see the actors in their dressing rooms, Douglas Wilmer thanked me for my best wishes. He then summoned up a perfect timing he had not always manifested on stage to look me in the eye and declare, ‘If this play runs, I’m leaving show business.’ By the time I went on to visit Edward, I had been shocked into realising how selfish I had been. Absorbed in my own problems, I had ignored the toll the mixed reception for the play was taking on everyone else. It was an exposing piece. For Edward in particular, cinema’s current golden boy, it was an extraordinary test of nerve to know you would have to walk out every night and give a fine performance in a play which large parts of the audience were determined to make clear they did not want.

  I sat in the pub during the performance, getting drunk on a lethal combination of Guinness and champagne. Peggy would always insist that things actually went quite well. ‘I wish you’d have heard the hush with which the first-night audience listened to your play. I was swept overboard by it. I shall go and see it continuously,’ she wrote to me afterwards. But as I walked back to the stage door to see the actors after the curtain call, I bumped straight into Clive Goodwin coming out of the theatre. From his point of view, he’d had a very good evening. ‘I told you it didn’t work, and it doesn’t.’ Next morning, I bought a new notebook and got on a train at St Pancras. I had already made the day’s most important decision. I was a playwright. Since I was experiencing all the unhappiness that goes with the calling, why go on denying it? Why had I been so scared? Was it just fear of failure? If so, the tactic was a write-off. Determined that the hysteria of the last few weeks was not going to silence me, I scribbled down the first line for my next play. ‘Oh fuck, I forgot the child.’ A rock band would play a set, go off to enjoy themselves and then realise they had left their one-year-old baby behind. At once, I loved the idea – the band on stage, the tiny child abandoned. But in the notebook I also wrote down two rules which I intended to follow in this new manifestation. First, I would never write a play if I had nothing to say. And second, I would never write a word for money.