The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  With Michael Codron’s blessing, after a quick holiday with Margaret and Joe on the Greek island of Rhodes, I set to work with the Court’s vibrant new casting director, Patsy Pollock. It was a case of the right person at the right time. Patsy had been born to a hardscrabble life in the East End and had moved on through the fashionable world of sixties advertising to work as a stylist for Alan Parker and David Puttnam. I had shown the play to my old colleague Charlie Gillett, who had corrected some of its most obvious errors of tone. But Patsy’s background meant that she also knew the culture of music inside out. She’d grown up with it. Patsy was as passionate as I was about the task of putting together a company of actors who needed to be able to play musical instruments and act at the same time, but who also, crucially, looked as if they might belong in rock ’n’ roll’s attractive, degenerate world. I can’t remember a period of preparation I enjoyed so much, with Patsy, outspoken, diligent, hilarious, serving as a blast of working-class fresh air blowing the cobwebs off my preconceptions, as all sorts of human jetsam – actors, musicians, and God knows who – washed up in unending waves on the shores of the tiny Royal Court casting office.

  Our outstanding challenge was to find someone who could play Maggie. My lasting hatred of the word ‘self-destructive’ stems from the fact that I have no idea what it means. Or rather, it’s in such common and lazy use as to have no meaning at all, except presumably to convince you that the user somehow knows what they’re talking about. When a politician takes no care to hide the fact he is sleeping with his research assistant, the word for what he does is ‘stupid’. When a rock singer dies in a pool of their own vomit, the word for them is almost certain to be ‘addict’. In my play, the central character, Maggie, is fond of a drink, and is also in a state of violent revulsion at what she sees her world becoming. As she keeps intoning satirically, ‘The acid dream is over, let’s have a good time.’ But there is a purpose to her antics. Under the ragged surface of chaotic abuse, her ex-boyfriend, the lyricist Arthur, can detect a certain iron control. For the role of Maggie, Patsy and I therefore needed an actress who was too intelligent to buy into the newspaper myth of self-destruction. She had to be able to scare the living daylights out of every man she met, but also to amaze them with her acumen. There was only one candidate. But the problem we had was that Helen Mirren couldn’t sing.

  Like many first-rate teachers of music, Nick Bicât holds to the idealistic principle that there is no such thing as a non-singer. We can all sing, we’ve just been taught wrong. In four switchback weeks of rehearsal, Nick certainly made his point. Helen was such a good actress that, standing in front of a flat-out rock band and fixing you firmly in the eye, she could make you believe she could sing by the mesmerising power of her presence, even though the actual notes she was hitting were occasionally John o’Groats to the tune’s Land’s End. At the time she came to us, Helen had been travelling round Africa with Peter Brook and was very much a believer in onstage spontaneity. She had an insouciant approach which included telling stories about the unhappy effects of imagining she could enliven her appearance in a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of The Wars of the Roses in Stratford with a few spliffs. Helen’s ways of not listening to direction were far more sophisticated than those of anyone I had previously encountered. Once she received me naked for a notes session in her dressing room. She discarded the Evening Standard which had briefly obscured her, clearly with the aim of putting me off my stride. She succeeded. Helen’s fondness for hanging loose was fine by me – it was so unselfconscious and natural, and on stage it fed into the character – and it was also fine with Jack Shepherd, who was playing Arthur. He was an old hand who had dealt with far trickier people than Helen. He loved going out and jazzing according to whatever Helen threw at him that night. She was so accomplished that, whatever she did, she never let go of the play’s intent. But her freedom, both professional and personal, did not go down so well with Dave King, the more senior actor who was playing Saraffian, the band’s manager.

  By the time of the play Dave was in his fifties, but in his day he’d been the only British song-and-dance man ever to hold down a prime-time show on American television. Like Perry Como or Dean Martin, he’d sat on a lounge lizard stool, often in a shiny suit and thin tie, singing standards and telling jokes. He’d had a massive hit with ‘Memories Are Made of This’. But he’d been thrown off the network after going to a bash for the programme’s commercial sponsors and informing them over lunch that their product was crap. He was perfectly cast as a mohair-coated impresario whose happiest times had been in Tin Pan Alley in the fifties, before the middle classes got hold of pop music and made it meaningful. At the climax of the play, his speech in defence of the wartime looting of the bombed-out Café de Paris was beautifully delivered. But Dave also had a sense of physical threat about him which came through on stage and gave his performance a dangerous edge which was not entirely a matter of acting. Perhaps because his two teenage daughters, on whom in the days of his US stardom he had bestowed Cherokee names, were giving him a bad time at home, Dave did find Helen, a modern woman with a justified sense of her own value, an almost impossible threat.

  After the first preview, Nick Wright made me laugh when he told me he had greeted a famous novelist coming out of the theatre aghast. When he had asked her whether she had enjoyed the evening, she had replied, ‘Oh no, not at all. It was horrible. It was all sex and jokes and rock and roll.’ As Nick said, to his ears it sounded like the recipe for a perfect evening. Just before the play’s press night, Patsy Pollock went down the King’s Road to visit Sex, the clothes shop just renamed by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. The slogan in its window read ‘Rubberwear for the Office’. Patsy came back with a hot-off-the-press punk T-shirt, lemon-yellow, ripped right down the middle and scrawled with thick black handwriting, as my first-night present. On one side: ‘Things We Like’. On the other: ‘Things We Don’t’. It seemed appropriate. When you see Teeth ’n’ Smiles today in revival, it seems far more punk than hippy, catching the particular moment at which musical joy turned to musical fury.

  For a couple of months afterwards, my social circles briefly expanded. I was asked to a party by Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin, not someone I’d previously have expected to hear from. Because he was a friend of one of the cast, Keith Moon, the dissolute drummer of the Who, drove his Rolls-Royce into the side of the Royal Court Theatre, staggered through the stage door and walked downstairs to the stage where, in the middle of a performance, in full view, he greeted his old friend Karl Howman. Karl coped heroically while the audience treated Moon’s appearance as an unpublicised but welcome add-on to the evening. Moon said later, ‘Karl asked me to come and see the play. So I did.’ And then Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller approached me with an eye to asset-stripping the play and replacing the music with some of their own. They wanted to take the result to America. Since their library of songs already included ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Stand by Me’, everyone told me I was mad to turn them down. But, for me, Nick and Tony’s contribution was as vital to the feeling of the evening as my own.

  Personally I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. I adored my son, who sometimes seemed to look back at me as if he knew that he was, in some small aspect, a satirical version of myself. I was commuting up to the Yorkshire Dales where Margaret, on behalf of David Susskind, was producing the second of two cinema films about a vet, written by a man who called himself James Herriot but whose real name was Alf Wight. Once more, in between, I was back sitting on the steps outside the theatre in Sloane Square. After all those battles, it did seem to be where I belonged. If there was an artistic problem with the play itself, it was identified by the critic Ronald Bryden, who wrote an exceptionally perceptive review:

  Everything in the play is a little too clever, too funny, too articulate to be true . . . The evening works too well as theatre, allows itself too much dazzle and enjoyment to put over satisfactorily the serio
us point it is trying to make . . . One can see why in the bleak and austerer chapels of the theatrical Left, Hare is mistrusted for his excessive brilliance and success. There is a kind of over-willed, show-off quality to his writing, an intrusion of himself on his creations by trying too hard to be magisterial, which distorts Teeth ’n’ Smiles even more than Knuckle and brings to mind the young Auden of The Dog Beneath the Skin . . . All the same, it is the personal tensions in his talent, the tug between popularity and politics, display and distaste for his own cleverness which have made Teeth ’n’ Smiles for all its impurities a success. Rage as it may, the far theatrical Left has nothing to teach him until it has realised that, without success, political purity is as impotent as cheap music.

  1975 was the first of two successive blazing summers which bathed the whole country in luxurious sunshine. In 1970, before air conditioning was installed at the Royal Court, a man at a matinee of David Storey’s play Home had keeled over dead in the fourth row from a heart attack brought on by the stifling heat. John Gielgud had cried with laughter when showing us all a letter from a sympathetic member of the public seeking to reassure the actor that the corpse being carried from the stalls had, in his opinion, not spoiled the audience’s enjoyment of the play one bit. In 1971, Anna Massey, Barbara Ferris and Lynn Redgrave performing Slag had made me feel that theatre could be tremendous fun. And now I was feeling it again. The old building was shaking behind me, plaster falling off the ceiling to the sound of Nick’s music, and a young audience were pouring through the doors to hear Helen rip into lines like ‘America is a crippled giant. England is a sick gnome.’ An exceptional cast including Cherie Lunghi, Hugh Fraser, Mick Ford and Antony Sher, making his first appearance in London as a medical student who carries a dismembered finger in his pocket, were having a blast, while back at Hampstead, after four months of touring, Fanshen was doing a second London season. The BBC were even planning to transmit the play in full. We had done one performance already for agricultural workers at a farm in Tring and been gratified by their response. Now it was to be filmed specially on another farm at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. But I was facing what Edward Heath laughably used to call the problems of success. Fanshen had acquired a reputation, and in response the original author was threatening to withdraw permission for the play to continue unless I agreed to radical changes.

  William Hinton did not hide his surprise that my play caught on. It was only because it was so widely noticed and gaining a significant audience that its tone began to bother him. Previous dramatic versions of the book, of whose existence I had never even heard, had disappeared without being widely seen. But now Kenneth Tynan and Shirley MacLaine, as unlikely a couple of producers as you could imagine, were asking to present the play off Broadway. Alarmed, Hinton had submitted my script both to his daughter, who was a Red Guard, and to the Chinese embassy in Washington for their approval. Not surprisingly, such consultations had resulted in Hinton insisting on 110 specific changes to my text. Often it was a question of terminology. The word ‘murdered’ should not be used. The correct term is ‘executed’. You don’t ‘summon’ people. It’s too commandist. A peasant would never say, ‘I hate China.’ It was unimaginable.

  The BBC flew me over for a weekend of negotiation on his Pennsylvania farm. I could hardly deny that from his point of view Hinton was right to be concerned. He had discerned, quite correctly, that the play was indeed not saying the same thing as his book. As a Marxist and passionate believer in the Chinese revolution, Hinton had intended his account to be a ringing endorsement of land reform. As a non-Marxist, I had considerable reservations. I had aimed instead to write a classic play which opposed two points of view. I believed that in any society there will always be one political faction in government which will lay stress on the importance of production. They will argue that encouraging people to produce is the key to the good society. But another opposing faction will want to put more urgent stress on the fair distribution of that production. They will insist that no society can be good unless it is also just. Interestingly, when Fanshen was revived by the National Theatre in 1988 after nine years of the Thatcher ascendancy, it did not seem remotely dated. Rather, it seemed more pressing than ever. Whatever the political climate of the time, however we frame society’s priorities, the abiding argument between plenty and justice is one that will never go away. The language of ideology changes, or, as today, seems to lose definition. But the fundamental dispute about whether abundance is more important than fairness does not. Thatcher argued, in her famous gloss on the parable of the Good Samaritan, that people could only do good if they first had money. Her opponents asked by what means of exploitation they had acquired that money in the first place.

  The sessions I had with Hinton were warm but attritional. Understandably, he did not accept my terms of reference. As a Marxist, he found my use of the word ‘justice’ meaningless. Whose justice, he would say? In class terms, what does the word ‘justice’ even mean? I did believe that Mao had liberated millions of peasants from servitude. But I also had read enough evidence, even by the mid-1970s, to suspect Mao had delivered them into a different, more ambiguous kind of slavery. At the end of every scene, Hinton wanted an upward tick. Although he was ready to agree that my representation of what had happened in the Chinese village of Long Bow was indeed accurate and true to his own gruellingly thorough record, he always wanted to add a line, as false as anything Hollywood might come up with, which effectively said, ‘But in spite of all this, things continued to get better.’

  As my work reached a larger public, I would grow used to the pressures for censorship, offered for the best of exemplary reasons. When people tell you they value political art, what they often mean is that they enjoy political propaganda which corroborates what they already think. All kinds of groups, including socialists and feminists, would ask me to reconfigure work in order to show what ought to happen rather than what does. I grew used to having to argue to the literal-minded that drama is not and cannot be a cartoon form of exhortation. It is about people, it is not about types. Shakespeare did not intend Macbeth to be an indictment of Scottish monarchy. Nor is the characterisation of Lady Macbeth misogynist. The idiotic language of role models would take hold and grow like a creeper to try to stifle the life out of art and reduce it to sociology. For so many people making a living out of culture, playing with cultural politics turned out to be much better sport than the challenge of seeing and listening to what was being conveyed in actual works of art. With that rising tide of programmatic wordsoup which would threaten the vigour and authenticity of theatre in the new century, I would have no patience. Work, when fully achieved, seemed to me a more powerful manifesto than manifestos. Nor, on the other hand, was I willing to take credit when equally passionate interest groups sought to congratulate me on showing things in ways which, by sublime coincidence, just happened to flatter positions they already approved. But my arguments with Hinton were different, because they were on a much more understandable moral basis. He was the author, after all. More than that, he was the witness. On his return from China in the early 1950s during the frenzy of anti-communism, Hinton had twice had his notes seized, first by the US Customs, again later by the Senate. I did well to remind myself that the writing of his book had cost Hinton a long legal struggle and fifteen years of hard work. The adaptor had given barely six months.

  At the end of the weekend, we had come to some decent compromises. Some of my favourite lines had gone from the play, but I had not been forced to include any substitutions. It was an elegant truce, and the play held up, unspoiled. The structure was so secure that it did no damage when a bit of plaster was knocked away. The writer who wanted the audience to understand had made peace with the writer who wanted them to believe. In 1975, none of us at Joint Stock realised how lucky we were still to live in a culture in which the principal public broadcaster would think nothing of devoting a whole evening on one of its two major channels to the political details of t
he Chinese agrarian revolution. I’m not saying we took such seriousness for granted. We didn’t. But nor did we appreciate just how quickly fashion would change.

  11

  007

  On 15 October 1974 a group of artistic directors from all over the country, including Joan Littlewood and Richard Eyre, signed a letter to The Times in which they warned of the threat posed by the new National Theatre. They were concerned, they said, that when the organisation moved to its future home on the South Bank, not only would the newly expanded theatre with its three auditoria take up a disproportionate share of the Arts Council’s budget, but, by the sheer scale of its ambitions, it might suffocate smaller and regional playhouses artistically as well. ‘Mr Hall has said he wants to make the National Theatre “the nation’s theatre”. This is an effective slogan: but the nation has many good theatres already. Big is not always beautiful. The size and status of the new National Theatre must not be allowed to drain and enfeeble the other theatres of the nation. This, we suggest, is now a dangerous possibility.’

  Anyone who had followed the National Theatre’s story from the very beginning of the twentieth century was well used to routine attacks from the private sector. Even during Olivier’s tenure, when Henry V himself was giving the enterprise some much-needed cover, there had been press outrage about the scandalous cost to the taxpayer of Robert Stephens’s contact lenses in a play by Lope de Vega. Ralph Richardson’s shoes for Ibsen were similarly rumoured to be overpriced. But as construction deadlines went by and the completion of the South Bank theatre was postponed too many times to count, so a new front was opened, this time from the left. Since the founding initiatives of George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker, the idea of a national theatre had been held to be progressive. Liberating theatre from the obligation to be commercial and giving it the immunity of art was felt to be an enlightened ambition. It was something every forward-thinking person had argued for. But now that a National Theatre was to be a reality, the left, for some reason, was doing a collective volte-face. The cause was being declared reactionary.