The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  Tom wrote back as follows:

  Dear David,

  The one thing in your letter I couldn’t let go by was ‘I think this made me a pretty unpleasant person.’ I hated the thought of you settling on such an idea of yourself. We’re all being continuously ‘described’ by a nexus of people’s angled view of us. If you say so, you, for whatever reasons at whichever occasions, wouldn’t accommodate. Pretty unpleasant! But that’s not a truth about you in isolation; there’s always an axis. The work is a child who never becomes self-reliant. The parent has to look out for it. I accommodate too much. I don’t think you do . . . About the axis: I had a nightmare actor in rehearsal and flagged him up as selfish, arrogant etc. When I called him on it, nervously, he said ‘Don’t you realise I’m terrified?’ I hadn’t.

  You know who you are. If you were different the plays would be different. Actually they simply wouldn’t be . . . In the end, it doesn’t matter what one thought about Harold’s uncomfortable anger. It was himself saying ‘This is what matters, it’s fucking serious!’ And he wrote what he wrote. I think you both made your rough weather by it mattering to you. As a spectator, I don’t regret it of either of you . . . It sometimes got combative, which I can understand. I can’t regret your reluctance to accommodate, your crusading if you want to call it that. We write what we are.

  Any play which occasioned two such beautiful letters, even separated by such a long time-span, cannot, I believe, have been wholly worthless. But I knew that my writing was, at a technical level, incompetent. Too much speech, reported and otherwise. It could never quite pass Valéry’s test of ‘giving the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance’. As a matter of principle I have refused all subsequent offers of stage revival, even though, or perhaps because, the memory of what we all went through on the first production is indelible. In a way, some of us who climbed on that particular boat at that particular time have never quite climbed off. Now, whenever someone comes along with a gleam in their eye thinking they alone have worked out how to release the fish from under the ice, I always say no. A British television version with Emma Thompson and Tim Roth did nothing to persuade me I was wrong about my own incompetence. Nor did an American television version, reimagined in Los Angeles, with Gretchen Corbett and Michael Cristofer.

  Some time later, Irving Wardle of The Times sought nobly to perform the trickiest of all Olympic fixtures for the critic: the retrospective volte-face, the hands-up hands-down, I-got-it-wrong mea culpa, the swallow dive into the empty pool of error. He admitted that he had not been able to take in Knuckle, the play, because he had been so angered by Knuckle, the event. It had infuriated him and his fury had blinded him. Wardle had admired Portable because it played at what he called ‘virgin addresses’. But the subsequent appearance of a play by someone of my age – just twenty-six – and my political views in the West End had brought back to him all the primal sense of betrayal he had felt as a young man when John Osborne first of all inveighed against the Establishment, then, in Wardle’s view, was seen to join it. Wardle said he had attacked my play so strongly not as a work but as a foreshadowing of what he expected to be a pattern. A rebellious dramatist would eventually stop rebelling and move to embrace the very things he or she had rebelled against. Wardle wasn’t going to fall for it. He was not willing to be pulled round that same track twice. But if that was indeed the grounds of his hostility, Wardle was right to recant. It would soon become clear how wrong he had been.

  A certain theme had been introduced into my life in the last three months, played at first quietly, on the piccolos perhaps. But soon, as in a symphony, the violins would come in, and then, unmistakably, the whole string section would take up the tune.

  10

  Spilling the Sacrament

  It wasn’t long before Margaret discovered that she was pregnant. The rightness of having returned to her was reinforced. Usually, the less you notice happiness, the greater it is. This was the best thing that could have happened. In the summer of 1974, the prospect of a child brought us both a redeeming sense of purpose. I was able to settle back down to work and find a rhythm. And so was she.

  Looking back, it would seem bittersweet that although Michael Blakemore and I remained firm friends the most lasting effect he would have on me professionally was to bring me together with Peter Hall. Two years later, after Michael had presented a paper criticising the way Hall ran the National Theatre – Michael claimed less as a public service, more for his own benefit – these two men were to have a public falling-out which would rankle with them both for the rest of their lives. But in the days when they were getting along, Michael had mentioned to Peter that he was collaborating with a playwright he might like. Peter summoned me to lunch in one of those crepuscular restaurants which were just beginning to siphon up the new middle class’s new wealth. He was bursting out of one of what I would come to recognise as a series of tailored velvet suits, always buttoned under impossible pressure at the waist, and all in the strange half-colours which would one day soon provide the queasy palette for the carpets and seats at the new National Theatre on the South Bank. Peter understood that I was interested in touring. In the process of taking over from Olivier at the Old Vic, he felt that the moment for the National to have its own small-scale touring programme was long overdue. A proper National Theatre should be on the road, and not just in traditional venues. He would be very pleased if I would direct one of its first productions.

  In later years, I would find that face to face almost nobody resembles their reputation. Whatever you have gleaned from gossip is generally wrong. The on dit turns out to be the on ne sait rien. Over and again, on meeting someone I have only heard about, I have been confounded. To Peter’s name the word ‘Machiavellian’ was stubbornly attached, perhaps because of his lynx eyes and papal looks. At that first encounter I was peering round corners to see from what crooked angle of approach he could possibly be coming. But, face to face, on that afternoon in Covent Garden, Peter and I had the first of countless conversations in which he was honest, direct and to the point. I had been warned by others mentally to ask of Peter the question ‘What does he really mean?’ but I stopped asking it as soon as I realised that the answer was invariably ‘Exactly what he says.’ On occasions, as in the 1980s when he chose to shut down the Cottesloe, the smallest of the three auditoria on the South Bank, in order, he said, to shame the government into funding it properly – as though shame were a unit of currency in which Margaret Thatcher ever dealt – then, yes, I did find him overly political, and oddly naive. Peter, like Harold Pinter, had been foolish enough to vote for Thatcher in the first place. He could hardly complain about the outcome. But in his individual dealings he was beyond reproach. When he said to me that Trevor Griffiths’ play The Party, about the British left’s response to the revolutionary demonstrations in Paris in May ’68, had not benefited from a souped-up production at the Old Vic, and might be seen to better advantage on a smaller scale and in places where it would find an audience more attuned to its politics, he was speaking nothing other than the truth. It had played only thirty-six times. Laurence Olivier had given his last stage performance as John Tagg, the Glaswegian Trotskyite, who was modelled on Gerry Healy, a notoriously unbending leader of the Socialist Workers Party. On the night I had seen the play, the actor had seemed distracted and ill at ease, like a lifelong gambler who’d been thrown off his game by knowing he was likely playing his final hand. He had stumbled badly at various places in the first act. But Olivier would not be small-scale touring. I was free to restart with a fresh slate.

  Before we got up from the table Peter told me he was also interested in me as a dramatist. When it opened in a year’s time, he was very keen to attract people like me and Howard Brenton into the new National Theatre. It was important, he said, to open the doors to the young. What was I planning to do with my next play? Thinking nothing of it, I told Peter that he was too late because I was already committed to my own touring company, Joint Sto
ck. Had he heard of it? He had. Had he seen Max and Bill’s adaptation of Heathcote Williams’ The Speakers when it had played a short season at the Institute of Contemporary Arts earlier this year? He had indeed and it was wonderful. Well, I explained, that production had come out of a new workshop process which Max and Bill were pioneering. Over a long period of time, they had explored the material at leisure, allowing the actors a significant amount of input. This rare openness meant that the actors were seen to have much more invested both in their characters and in the event. To prepare for The Speakers, they had even been sent out to beg on the streets of London. Only in the last few weeks had the whole thing been pulled together with conventional rehearsal. The directors had created Hyde Park Corner by upturning a few boxes and letting the audience wander from speaker to speaker. Because the result had a spellbinding mixture of surface and depth, I had decided that I wanted to find out more.

  By chance, they had approached me first. Pauline Melville, who had done assorted jobs including, in the early days of the National Theatre, working as casting director at the Old Vic, would later be known as the author of a collection of short stories about her native Guyana, Shape-shifter. Recently she had returned to college, and found that a book called Fanshen was being passed from hand to hand among her fellow students. It was written by a Pennsylvania farmer, William Hinton, who had been in China for six years as a tractor technician. He had been sent out by the US government after the Second World War to help supervise agricultural innovation in backward rural areas. There he had witnessed the land reform programmes which Mao’s revolution instituted in the 1940s. Pauline had given the book to Bill, telling him it was a promising subject for a play. When I read it I found that it began with vivid descriptions of the terrifying feudal conditions which Chinese peasants, particularly the women with their bound feet, had endured well into the first half of the twentieth century. Within that first 150 pages were countless possible stories of cruelty and exploitation. They detailed the violence both of the landlords’ regime and of its overthrow. But as a playwright I was already as resistant to dystopias as I was to utopias. They had no appeal for me. I found myself much more excited by the post-revolutionary parts of the book, in which the peasants, in imposed collectives, were encouraged by their political masters to adopt a system of control called ‘Self-Report, Public Appraisal’. At ceaseless meetings, peasants were expected to report on their own shortcomings and to correct the failings in their behaviour, at work and away, by group discussion. Leaders as much as peasants were intended, in theory, to be held to account. It was when the book turned into a frank questioning of whether there ever can be such a thing as true democracy, or whether all societies maintain the same hidden systems of control, that the book became much more complicated and knotty. It was in these agonising shades of grey, rather than in the melodrama, that I found the potential for a play a thousand times more stimulating. How interesting to investigate what happens when you claim to involve everybody in society’s decision-making processes. How marked a contrast from the society we were living in.

  When, recently, I have described to acquaintances how forty years ago a group of white middle-class actors set out on the fringes of Chelsea to play Chinese peasants, they have smiled as though the whole idea were condescending and ridiculous. All I can say is, it did not seem so at the time. Nor did it seem so to the many audiences all over the country who came to be fascinated by it. At that moment in England, what choice did we have? As Pauline remarked, after two successful miners’ strikes and the uprising of the shipworkers led by Jimmy Reid on the Upper Clyde, the concerns of the play seemed timely. Workers’ control was on the agenda. By doing a play about China, we were opening up a whole area of history of which the British knew little. When Fanshen became, as it did, one of the best-remembered fringe productions of the 1970s, it was partly because the subject matter had been so original, but also because the acting and direction had an integrity which carried all before it.

  On the first day of the summer workshop, before a word had been written, and when we all just had a daunting seven- hundred-page blue paperback in our hands, there was a certain amount of grumbling. One actor, who had been in the plays of Edward Bond, said, ‘Oh my God, it’s not one of those plays where you have to hoe, is it?’ But once we had all gorged ourselves on Chinese peasant jokes we settled to a fruitful period of experiment, individual actors researching individual areas like eating habits or prostitution. Bill, in particular, focused down, seeking to find a suitable style while often answering actors’ reasonable questions with his familiar dead stares. I was almost fond of them by now. ‘YP,’ he used to say sometimes when an actor asked for help. It turned out to mean ‘Your problem.’ But it became plain over the weeks why Bill had become known as the outstanding Brechtian director of his day. His defining priority was at all times to do justice to the suffering of the peasants. For him, this was a matter of immense gravity. His criterion for examining any representation was to ask whether it was adequate to the experience the peasant had undergone. Directing became a searching form of moral enquiry which eliminated the irrelevant and the shallow. Combined with Max’s extraordinary gift for detail, it made for a formidable combination. Once Bill laughed when he was telling me that he had grown tired of people praising the amazing clarity which marked his productions. ‘They say to me, “Oh but it was so clear.” I always want to reply, “How would you prefer it? Muddy?”’

  The method of work evolved as we did. There was never a conscious moment at which we all decided at the workshop to adopt the discussion methods used by the peasants. It just happened. One of the first things the Chinese had to do when working towards equality was to classify their current status – landlord, rich peasant or poor peasant. One day, as we walked back from lunch to the Pimlico rehearsal room, Bill suggested that it should not be the landlords who got the workshop going that afternoon. We should simply wait until one of the actors suggested we start. I think we sat for about ninety minutes before one of the actors took control. But eventually he did. Once everyone was given the right to run rehearsals, most of them enjoyed it. Pauline was particularly inspiring. Similarly, it was my idea that for once the production team should not talk about the actors behind their backs. On every play I had ever worked on, directors and writers had retired to the bar, or upstairs to theatre offices, to complain about the actors, just as, I am sure, actors sat in pubs complaining about us. On Fanshen, I proposed that Max, Bill and I should only ever say to each other what we were willing to say directly to the actors. Abandoning this subtle form of distancing made for a refreshing experience. When, in 1975, the finished play went into rehearsal, the directors no longer gave formal notes. Instead they improved the production by a time-consuming process of letting actors volunteer their own failings.

  ‘Fanshen’ means ‘overturning’, but there was one overturning which I, as writer, was not prepared to contemplate. I took part in improvisations, trying self-consciously to be an actor. I was more than happy, in return, to let actors make up scenes as we went along. But never for a moment did I doubt that I had skills distinctive from theirs. Once the workshop was over, I went off like any regular dramatist to sit in my room and write the play. It took me four months of sweat and all the gifts of analysis and précis I had to clear a path through such a massive book. The narrative became my responsibility and so was the thinking. This was a revolution of method, but not of function. Never did I imagine that the writing of a play of Fanshen would have been enriched by collective effort. Nor, in their heart, did anyone else. At the cinema, I am bewildered by films in which actors improvise individual lines, as though the first thing that came into an actor’s head when he or she turned up on a film set were likely to be somehow more expressive than dialogue a writer had thought about for months. ‘Wow,’ said an actor at the climax of a recent film in which his character had just been told the boy he believed to be his son was not really his. ‘That’s a real slap in the fac
e.’ Improvisation, when deployed by a master like John Cassavetes, is a revelatory technique. But it’s a technique which takes months of care and preparation. Serious improvisers refine their methods, just as a writer does. The current fashion among American actors for putting the script to one side and wandering who cares where off-piste is producing a cinema of approximation, with all television’s vices and none of its virtues.

  At times while writing Fanshen I was forced to break off to prepare my production of The Party, which, in recreating the world of the fashionable left in 1968, was taken by those who knew to be set in a fictional version of Clive Goodwin’s flat. By coincidence, I was back recreating an environment from which I had exiled myself. But the element of social satire which had made the experience arch and self-conscious in the Old Vic was the aspect of the play which interested me least. What I loved was its rippling rhetoric. For all Trevor’s deft handling of socialist ideas, there was also underneath his writing, as underneath that of Raymond Williams, a basic working-class instinct of generosity, common in life, but rare in the theatre, which made the play soar with a music which reached right into the hearts of its audience.