The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  As it happened, The Party was the occasion of my growing up as a director. It came about through an actor using a chance phrase. In some of the featured roles I had cast several inexperienced players, so I was getting far too habituated to a process in which I teased out performances conforming to an idea that already existed in my head. In the first weeks, there was an awful lot of the director saying, ‘Please do this, please don’t do that.’ The fact that six of my cast had themselves been directors at one time or another only made things more decisive. But in the two central roles were veterans who both merited a far different approach. Jack Shepherd, a highly nuanced graduate of the Royal Court who had been outstanding in the plays of Edward Bond and David Storey, was playing the drunken writer Malcolm Sloman. His climactic speech in the second act argues that revolution will not happen from the strategies of any political party, but will come about spontaneously from the people themselves. And as John Tagg, whose life’s contrasting ambition has been the building of exactly the kind of controlling revolutionary party Sloman loathes, I had cast Fulton Mackay. Fulton would later be hugely popular as the prison officer Mackay in the Ronnie Barker series Porridge. But, unknown to the English television audience, he already had a long and treasured place at the heart of Scottish theatre, not least at the Citizens’ in Glasgow to which my mother had taken me in the mid-1950s.

  There was one afternoon in the rehearsal room when I was chopping but the chips weren’t flying. Fulton, ever ingenious, found some crafty new way of beginning the twenty-minute monologue which forms the sinewy centrepiece of the first act. ‘I’ll, erm . . . take issue with our comrade’s, er . . . analysis and model presently.’ When Fulton had finished the first fifteen lines, I was thrilled. So I began, like an idiot, to describe what he had just done in words of my own and to comment how expressive it was of his character. But no sooner had I started praising it – ‘And what was so good was . . .’ – than Fulton shut me up with some words which were eventually to change my whole idea of the job. ‘David, whatever you do, don’t spill the sacrament.’

  I was taken aback. It was the painter Jean Dubuffet who said that art was no use if it was simply the act of declaring ten per cent of things in the world beautiful and ninety per cent ugly. In the same way, I realised that directing was pointless if it was simply the act of deciding that ninety per cent of acting was bad and ten per cent good. It was particularly destructive to summarise to actors in words what they were conveying far more eloquently in spirit. When I had first started writing plays, I had discovered the mystery of writing. Why had I imagined that acting was any less of a mystery? It was not that I had become an overly controlling director. I hope I had always allowed actors freedom to experiment and find their own way. But I had been overly literal and reductive. Fulton, in one resonant metaphor, reminded me of the genius of what good actors do. The most powerful elements of theatre will always be beyond description. They’re there in the moment and then they’re gone. When Fulton told me not to spill the sacrament, I stopped being a clumsy schoolteacher and became a collaborator. From that day on, I knew that any ability or understanding I had when dealing with actors was firmly rooted in Fulton’s rebuke.

  When the play went out on tour, in theory we were back to the ideals of Portable Theatre, but with one big difference. Hayden Griffin had designed a stage which could be put down in any environment. Portable had just blown in to the latest place where it was due to perform, made some obvious decisions, hung up some lights and got on with it. Fassbinder, in his films, believed that weird accidents of light and movement could be far more beautiful than anything that Hollywood expensively calculated. In the theatre, so had Portable. The casualness was the whole point. We had a strong conviction that if we ignored the finer points of presentation the audience would concentrate instead on what we were saying. The work would seem urgent precisely because we couldn’t be bothered to normalise it, to smooth it down to conventional expectations. But my mind in these matters was changing. I was beginning to believe that Portable, by nixing aesthetics, had denied itself some of the theatre’s full eloquence. Hayden’s platform, designed not just for my production but for a whole forthcoming policy of touring, meant a degree of control undreamt of in fringe days. It was an empty square with bare sanded boards, built over a metal-sprung cage. You could then add whatever scenery you liked. Actors reported that it was a pleasure to stand on, and for most actors confidence grows from the feet up. In performance, the stage looked like a big table, tipped towards the audience. The relationship was always just right. You could assemble the whole thing in an hour or two. It had already served for a production of Romeo and Juliet and it would serve just as well for The Party. On every single touring date, whatever the overall space, you could give things an identical definition which meant that the look and the feel were much more polished. We had lost some of Portable’s roughness, but with a cast like this, and with Jack and Fulton blazing on every cylinder, Trevor’s lament for the impotence of the British left struck home all the harder for its precision. The arrow flew true every night.

  Hayden himself was an obstreperous South African with a contrary attitude which expressed itself most of the time in a kind of half-audible angry muttering. More or less everything pissed him off, though you couldn’t usually quite hear why. The only things he really liked, apart from a well articulated stage, were deep-sea diving and liquor. I took to him at once. He had left his home country and was forbidden by the apartheid regime to go back, for reasons which were not entirely clear but which I gathered from more angry muttering were something to do with active participation in the activities of the ANC. He’d been a courier, I think, though a courier of what exactly I never cared to ask. With the charming and gifted Rory Dempster as lighting designer, we became a natural team whose principles and feelings chimed. We had all entered the theatre at the same time and been exposed to a group of ideas which derived from Brecht, and in particular from his productions for the Berliner Ensemble, which had visited London in 1956. The instinct of directors at the Court, just like those of middle-class home-makers in Clapham, had been to strip everything away. The aim was to refine things down to essentials. Hayden, Rory and I had all approved of the desire to clear the stage of junk. We saw that aim as political. Everything that was on the stage had to be there for a purpose. It had to matter. Light was there for the actors’ faces, not to make pretty effects. But, for political reasons again, we had come to feel that black-box austerity had itself become a cliché, a way of avoiding meaning rather than expressing it. In the wrong hands, it seemed to be a way of not taking decisions. Austerity was fine, and nothing was ever going to come between us and our passion for an empty space. But like fashionistas who had only worn black, we wanted to start risking colour. More than anything, we wanted the freedom to make images again. The Party, a naturalistic play set in one room and proceeding in real time, allowed us little of the licence we craved. The question was where and when we were finally going to be allowed to let rip. Having for so long tried either to ignore or to crash the question of style, I felt I was now ready to pioneer it.

  By the time the holidays came and the tour was over, Margaret was about to give birth. My parents came to stay with us at the Oval in expectation of becoming grandparents. Dad had retired at sixty and had settled into the unaccustomed business of living with his wife. He had always promised her that on retirement they would take a world cruise together. But soon after they reached Australia Dad had to be taken off the ship and flown home with a clot on his leg. It was yet one more anticlimax on a long list, and a sign of an increasing frailty which would mark out Dad’s last twenty years. For Mum, marital proximity, so long delayed, was threatening to turn into a nursing job. The thing to which she’d been most looking forward had been taken away. But I noticed that the impact of at last living with her partner was beginning to change her. Dad’s absence had played on her neediness, but his presence had made the playing field much more level. S
he had become a touch tougher and more self-certain. It was as if for all those years she’d been in need of abrasion, of interaction, and now she had it. The pining cat at last had a scratching post.

  Mum’s wider attitudes were changing as well. In May 1973 Edward Heath’s energy supremo Lord Jellicoe was revealed to have been using the services of call girls from a company with the unimaginative name of Mayfair Escorts. It was, by Conservative standards, a minor sex scandal, a shrivelled squib after the Roman candles of Profumo and Lambton, yet for some reason it was the occasion of my mother making a final decision. It was the last straw. She was sick of them. When she made her ruling it reminded me of the tone she had used to exile Mr G____ from my life. She was never going to vote Tory again.

  Mum and Dad had arrived on Christmas Eve. Margaret woke at four the following morning, and I drove her along the deserted streets hanging with river mist to St Thomas’s hospital. Nothing moved on the icy landscape except us. There was a bit of a panic at nine thirty when it looked as if the birth might have to be induced, but the very threat of forceps, brandished but never employed, produced our son. Because he was the first child to be born in Lambeth that day, all the nurses from the hospital came to sing carols round his crib. A less level-headed boy than Joe might have his head turned by such a greeting. Margaret went back to the ward, where a group of women had concealed a festive vodka bottle in a waste-paper basket. They all saw the five days you had to stay in hospital as a welcome holiday from family life, so I left the reclining mothers preparing to party. When I got home at lunchtime, I drank a single glass of whisky, a drink I normally can’t stand. For the only time in my life, alcohol did what it’s advertised to do: it filled me with pure euphoria. I ate Christmas lunch alone with my parents.

  Nothing prepared me for my radical change in feeling. I spent the next week in a daze. Perhaps because of my experiences with my own father, I was thrilled to be a father myself and was doubly determined to do better. In the middle of January I had to go off for a week to New York, where Perry King and Kitty Winn, through no fault of their own, were about to star in an inept production of Knuckle. My first contact with it was dismaying. The founder of the Phoenix Theatre, T. Edward Hambleton, tamped down his pipe, lit up, then fell fast asleep at the beginning of the rehearsal-room run-through, waking a couple of moments before the end to declare the whole thing first-class. His snores had punctuated the playing throughout. It was my first visit to New York since I’d been there as a student with Roger Dancey. In 1971 the most radical producer in America, Joe Papp, had rung from the Public Theater – ‘Hi, it’s Joe Papp here’ – to tell me he was about to mount the American premiere of Slag. He had then rung to tell me it had opened to general praise. And he’d rung for a third time a few weeks later to say it was closing. Each time he was courteous and energetic, telling me how hilarious my play was, and how refreshing it was that at last there was a young writer who wanted to put women on stage. ‘Good for you, David.’ But at no point had he invited me over.

  Now that I had returned after so long, it was predictable that I found myself, with Knuckle, in a familiar mess. The pattern had been established in childhood: whatever happened was going to be my fault. Either I could let the production pass, just mark it down as a stinker and take my punishment, or I could make myself unpopular by trying to do something about it. As usual, I chose the latter. By the time I’d given the director a four-hour talk on everything that was wrong with his production, I could see him heating the branding iron in the flames of his resentment to singe the word ‘Impossible’ on my forehead yet again. Backing off, he asked me to go away for a few days during which, he said, he would put my notes into practice. Fat chance. Digging in deeper, I said I didn’t think this would be a practical solution. I’d give him twenty-four hours.

  In New York, I was carrying with me some early pages of the new play I’d started on the train the day after Knuckle opened in London. It had developed a little from the first idea, but not very far. A rock band would be playing a couple of sets on the lawns at a Cambridge May Ball and you would see both the performances they would give that night and, in between, the wild, shocking disarray they happened to be in offstage. It was a blindingly simple notion. It would not be a musical, but nor on the other hand would it quite be a play. Kicking my heels, I wandered down to SoHo, which was still in the early days of having its industrial premises taken over by painters, film-makers and fashion designers. Something in the atmosphere hit me strongly. I hadn’t been in the area since 1965, and clearly everybody thought they were very bohemian, colonising a part of the city which had been written off as unlivable in. But if you listened to what they were talking about, people had moved from hippy to yuppie without passing through action.

  I went to the Broome Street Bar to have a beer. In such bars, the talk had once been of civil rights, of Vietnam and of revolution. These days, to judge from what I was overhearing, it seemed to be exclusively about yourself. Here, as everywhere, were hung Andy Warhol’s images of boring personalities from the past. America was looking backwards, turning into a place of myth and memory. I sat there for most of an evening listening to people talking ever more loudly about their relationships. A woman on a payphone was screaming at the top of her voice, ‘Don’t write me, don’t phone me, I never want to see you again.’ At no point did anyone in the bar seem to discuss anything which was happening in the non-relationship world. It struck me that the rolling stone really had rolled on down the hill and come to a complete stop. Whatever promise of insight had once been held out in the injunction to have a good time had long been snuffed out. The project was no longer to make the finest possible society. It was to gild the finest possible cage. I had given up on bands like the Beatles years previously when they had started wittering ‘Let It Be’. But now it was like the weather had changed for good. Publications such as the Village Voice and Oz had looked outwards. It was only a matter of time till there was a magazine called Self.

  In the conception of any play or film there is always a moment of blinding excitement, and this was it. The visual image had long been in my head – the contrast between the grungy band and the privileged surroundings, even if the original idea of the abandoned baby had dropped away. But how would it be, I thought that evening, to conceive of a heroine who refused to go down the path my own generation seemed to be taking? What if I created a rock singer who would do anything, literally anything, rather than see her horizons shrink to those of the Broome Street Bar? I started writing with such pleasure that it ceased to matter to me what happened to the errant production of Knuckle. I did go back once and found it little improved. My input had been futile. I decided to leave town early before the audience passed judgement. By a blissful coincidence, my plane from JFK to London took off by an unusual flight path, so that we circled midtown Manhattan before heading off over the Atlantic. I could actually look out of the window and see down to the theatre below where at that very moment – 8 p.m. – the curtain was going up on a travesty of my play.

  On my return, I persuaded Tony Bicât to write the lyrics for the new play and his younger brother Nick to write the music. Nick, a gentle and soft-spoken man with an effortless access to melody, had often added kick at Portable and at Nottingham by writing incidental music. He was that rare kind of composer, like Alex North, who loves and understands non-lyric theatre. Unleashed to do more, he relished the chance to come up with a proper rock ’n’ roll score. Both Nick and Tony thought that my portrait of a humorous, exhausted and drug-taking band on the road was influenced by our own time with Portable. The jokes brought back memories. And fairly soon the three of us were flying, far too preoccupied with our night of stage debauchery and mayhem to take much notice when in February the Conservative Party elected a female leader. It didn’t seem an event of much significance. By the middle of April I had a new play which I couldn’t wait to put on. Luck was with me, because it was to be speeded into production with almost indecent haste. Earl
y in 1974, the Royal Court had rediscovered its soul and purpose with three Athol Fugard plays, two of them starring John Kani and Winston Ntshona. In their indictment of the way the black population was being treated in South Africa, they took political theatre in London to a superb new level of accomplishment. Nobody could sit in the audience and not be cheered both by Fugard’s writing and by Kani’s dazzling acting. As a result, the will existed to hand artistic control of the Royal Court over to two younger directors, Nicholas Wright and Robert Kidd, who arrived, refreshingly, with no scores to settle and no grudges held. Nick, in particular, had produced the Rocky Horror Show while running the Theatre Upstairs. So now his first priority was to try and win back all the writers the Royal Court had managed to alienate.

  The directors had already planned their first season, which was to open in late August and to include new plays by Howard Barker and Edward Bond. But in an uncharacteristic default, Christopher Hampton, Bob Kidd’s regular collaborator, had failed to deliver his expected play, Treats, on time. There was an ominous gap. One day my rock play Teeth ’n’ Smiles was finished, next day it was scheduled. I insisted, without too much argument, on directing it myself. ‘Are you sure?’ they asked. But I was. Since 1971, with Max Stafford-Clark, Richard Eyre and Michael Blakemore, I had enjoyed a charmed run of directors. I had no reason on the grounds of achievement to forgo any of them. But I had developed a suspicion that the tendency of any director when faced with a new voice is to hunt around for parallels. Searching for a tone, they direct in the style of what it reminds them of. Rightly or wrongly, I believed my voice was original. At whatever loss of quality, I needed to take charge of making that clear. The popular notion, put about by directors, that writers shouldn’t direct is nonsense. At any point in the British theatre there are always dozens of bad directors. Only a handful of them are writers.