The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  It made no sense to me. For a start, Peter Hall was planning to put on new plays. He was not interested in creating a fusty old Comédie Française, its sole mission to perpetuate the classical idiom of the past. At the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter had given Harold Pinter the same stage and the same status as Shakespeare. He intended to do the same again. The doubters were saying that it would be wrong for writers and actors from the fringe to join what was bound to be an establishment theatre. I took a far less defeatist view. I couldn’t understand: why not join it and shape it? Did the opponents really believe that their own ideals were so feeble, their own convictions so shallowly held that they would be corrupted and softened the moment they came into contact with a larger organisation? Did they feel themselves that powerless? The South Bank would only become an establishment theatre if non-establishment artists turned down the chance to work there. And what exactly would be the profit in that? Why would we who had believed in a national theatre want to hand it over to the very people who believed in it least? There was no suggestion from Peter that he was, in any way, planning to inhibit anything we intended to say. We could write the plays we wanted and stage them in the ways we wanted. Why on earth would you refuse the chance to address as many people as possible? Howard Brenton said that for years he’d been playing pub piano. Now at last he was getting his hands on the Steinway.

  Normally during this decade of no-holds-barred dispute, you could at least see your opponent’s point of view. Since childhood, my automatic assumption had been to fear that, if people said so, I must be in the wrong. At school and at university, I had paid the price of a psychological deformity which had me secretly tending to credit my enemies before I credited my friends. But in 1976 the widespread odium Howard and I attracted by becoming the first playwright and the first director to have a production originate in the new Lyttelton Theatre mystified me. I could feel it – God knows, I could feel it everywhere I went in the British theatre – but, try as I might, I could not understand it. Least of all did I know why old comrades were using the word ‘traitor’. Traitor to what, exactly? The case seemed to me open and shut. I could see that if you still held to the idea of a rough aesthetic, the plush seats might be wrong for you. A certain nostalgia might even hold you back. You might say, ‘I love the fringe and I don’t want to leave.’ If you still believed in touring as strongly as I did, the National Theatre’s ready abandonment of Hayden Griffin’s sprung platform after we had done The Party was a depressing portent. For the following forty years, the National’s neglect of the rest of the country would be a largely unremarked scandal. But why should those of us who believed that the best place to be radical was at the centre be declared to be wrong? We felt differently, maybe, from those who wanted to stay out. But we were not wrong. The fight I had just endured to take an anti-capitalist play into the capitalist theatre had given me much the most bruising experience of my life. But I had not finished up thinking it misguided. Arguments about purity had always bored me stiff. I’d heard too many such at Cambridge. There they had been about literature. These days they were about politics, or, worse, tribe. They were the very arguments which had disempowered British intellectual life for years.

  To his many critics at the other end of the spectrum, Howard was presenting a dismayingly tricky target. The organised right knew an enemy when they saw one, but try as they might, they couldn’t quite get their hooks into Howard. His poetry of regret for the ideals of the organised left confused them, and his desire to reanimate those ideals drove them nuts. Clearly a socialist, Howard had never written a single word in favour of Soviet communism. Nor, for that matter, had I. They combed our work, sentence by sentence, looking for incriminating evidence, and found none. It enraged a whole slew of prominent British journalists formed by the Cold War that younger writers should so smoothly uncouple socialism from dictatorship. How could we do that, when for years their own self-certainty as writers had depended on the pretence that such a feat was impossible? Howard had written a play, Magnificence, in 1973 for the Royal Court, effectively about the Angry Brigade, in which a domestic terrorist with a plastic explosive accidentally kills both himself and an MP. It ended with a moving coda from his best friend: ‘Jed. The waste. I can’t forgive you that . . . What I can’t forgive you, Jed, my dear, dear friend, is the waste.’ Howard’s understanding towards the violent, combined with his unequivocal disapproval of their violence, had sent Fleet Street’s opinion factory into a spin.

  Now, for the National, Howard had written a new play which I was to direct. After my production of The Party, Peter had offered me a flattering carte blanche. I could do what I wanted. But I was only interested in Howard’s play. Weapons of Happiness took its title from the Serbian poet Vasko Popa: ‘All the bright weapons of happiness wait only for a sign.’ The story is centred on the real-life figure of Josef Frank, who was one of the Czech communists executed by the Russians after the Prague Show Trials in 1952. Frank was accused of being in what was called at the time ‘a Titoite–Trotskyite–Zionist conspiracy’. The play imagines what might have happened if he had survived. Howard has Frank living in South London and working in an everyday job in a crisp factory, trying at night to suppress his memory of the Soviet horrors he has endured. When his fellow workers try to involve him in a sit-in against the hopeless factory management, there is a lovely dramatic contrast between the scale of the two different fights. In the early 1950s, Frank is watching great forces of history at work as Stalinism tears into the whole of Eastern Europe at terrifying human cost. In the 1970s, we have only the pathetic British spectacle of exhausted industrial squabbles signifying what looks like terminal economic decline. The violence of one struggle is pitched against the absurdity of the other. In his writing Howard spared us neither the full power of Stalin’s terror nor the ignominy of British class-bound union–management relations. But, more than that, in alternating between two superbly imagined worlds, he offered Hayden and me the perfect visual opportunity to create the kind of epic imagery of which we’d been dreaming.

  Hayden and I started discussions, preparing a decor which would put to full use all the amazing resources of the new National Theatre. During the intervening time I had seen little of Kate Nelligan. We had the shared sensation of being loyal friends for life without actually ever seeing each other. In the circumstances, both of us generally thought it best to keep apart. Early in 1975 Kate had appeared with my friend Anna Massey and Eileen Atkins in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House at the Old Vic. Uncertain of the director, Kate had asked me to attend the first preview, as someone she trusted, to give her informal acting advice on her performance as Ellie Dunn. I’d been amused to see that some of the other principal actors had asked their friends along as well. By chance, we were all sitting in a row, somewhere in the middle of the stalls, like sports coaches, comparing notes but each with our individual charges. It was that kind of production. I’d given what help I could – truthfully, she needed very little – and thought no more about it. Kate and I would chat on the phone occasionally about a script she was reading, or, more often, about a director she was finding impossible. Then, one afternoon in the spring of 1976, we ended up having tea together. Kate, still with her boyfriend Mark, had moved to live in Stockwell in a pretty pink-painted house, less than a mile away from my own family quarters in Richborne Terrace. We were in her front room and I was describing a television play I had written about a British black propaganda unit in the Second World War. I was relishing my disbelief at having stumbled on such an extraordinary subject when, with no notice, Kate burst into tears.

  It was a mark of my young selfishness that, not just in affairs of the heart, I had always assumed that other people suffered less than I did. An essential part of a dramatist’s job is to identify with others, to see things their way round. But because you do it all day, the danger is that you lose practice at doing it in the evening. As it turned out, in this particular case, Kate’s tears had nothing to do wi
th me or with the memory of our time together. They sprang from her deepening fear that as a foreigner she would always be disliked and misunderstood in England. But in a careless way I had unthinkingly assumed that after us both being thrown for such a loop, Kate would have regained her equilibrium much more quickly than me. She had seemed stronger. And after all, it was she who had insisted we end our relationship. But the strange thing was that, thanks to Joe’s existence, I had slid into happiness without even noticing. On the occasions when I had chatted with Kate on the phone, I had been too insulated to detect that our moods had been going in opposite directions. Sitting there watching Kate cry, I realised how completely happiness may cut you off from everyone else.

  In the outside world, there was by now a certain hysteria attending Kate’s fame. You couldn’t have missed it. Kate was one of those people who, innocent of jealousy themselves, thereby bring it out more violently in others. Even on Knuckle, before she was widely known, I had noticed that the temperature tended to rise when she walked into a room. In her presence men’s voices went up a note or two. They often became subtly unnatural, laughing too loudly or telling long stories which had no point. Some women, meanwhile, became defensive or fell silent. But by rumour things had been getting worse. The wife of one famous actor who was working with Kate had gone to the lengths of hiring a private detective to make sure her husband was involved in no irregularity for the whole of the theatrical run. The detective reassured the client by giving Kate a blameless all-clear, but nevertheless it added to her reputation as a transatlantic Lola Montez. Her refusal to make any secret of the fact that she dreaded the life of an English actress, skating around in the classics and wearing long skirts, did not make her any more popular with her peers who would have been grateful for half her chances. They called her spoilt. When she had been approached to be a Bond girl, she had laughed. She wasn’t going to vamp and smoulder, however well paid. Inevitably, the word ‘difficult’, always more freely bestowed on actresses than on actors, and less deservedly, had become a sort of honorific permanently attached to her name.

  It was when Kate was crying across the tea-table from me that I first thought it would be interesting to cast her in Licking Hitler. She was not perhaps the most obvious choice. While I had been writing the film, the idea had never occurred to me. Anna Seaton is a young woman with no experience of life who is sent into the English countryside in 1941 to work in a fake radio station which broadcasts damaging and sometimes obscene disinformation to the Germans. She arrives at a specially commandeered country house not knowing how to make a cup of tea, a detail I had picked up from reading about the similarly upper-class Jessica Mitford, who, in ignorance of even the most basic practicalities of life, had eloped with Esmond Romilly to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Kate was working-class, Canadian and sophisticated. Playing Anna, who was aristocratic, English and innocent, would be a stretch. But after her performance in Knuckle, I was bound to feel that the foreign edge she might bring to these very British roles gave them a sharp perspective not accessed so easily by natives.

  Licking Hitler was the first properly achieved television script I had written. In the 1970s, television was regarded as a uniquely important medium. No playwright would dream of condescending to it, or of not giving it their very best work. Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play had initiated the practice of good dramatists and actors setting out to tell truths about the lives of all the people watching at home. Often socially engaged, many first-class plays and films, like Cathy Come Home or Trevor Griffiths’ disturbing play about breast cancer, Through the Night, were shown to audiences not only much larger but also much more diverse than those in the theatre or cinema. It was noticeable that writers like David Mercer seemed happier to show a warmer side to their character. In his stage plays, Alan Bennett was barbed and clever, as though on his guard, bristling against attack. But when he wrote for television, usually with Stephen Frears directing, his guard dropped and his heart was on his sleeve. The size and spread of the audience provoked in dramatists a sincerity which, for depressing reasons, they were nervous to risk in the theatre.

  After I had written Slag, I had at once been approached by producers wanting me to write for the medium. I was keen but I was also incompetent. My first attempt was a prescient satire on society’s increasing dependence on prescription drugs. But by insisting on calling the play Mandrax, the name of a then popular sleeping pill, I gave the BBC a perfect excuse to reject it. They seized it eagerly, explaining that they couldn’t go to air with a play sporting the name of a proprietary drug. It was against the rules of their charter. I felt nothing but relief. That was why, to their bewilderment, I refused to change the title. I had followed Mandrax quickly with another studio play, which did get made in 1973. It was directed by Alan Clarke. Alan was to die from cancer at the age of fifty-four, unaware that he was about to become one of a handful of British film-makers whose influence has grown until it reaches all over the world. He would have been amazed by his posthumous celebrity. He was a scruffy Liverpudlian with abundant charm, who lived like an indigent and drank like a fish. His apparent casualness in the rehearsal room disguised the amount of intense preparation he had done before the first day. Alan was the living proof of my own belief that you could only achieve freedom through discipline. You could only throw everything out when you had worked exhaustively to know why it was there in the first place. Normally Alan only took on working-class subjects. He felt very strongly about this bias, and for good reasons. But for once he was stimulated by a dramatist who came at the middle class from a route which was at least unfamiliar. Alan did everything he could to make my unseasoned apprentice writing look good. Originally called Trailblazers, but with its title changed at the BBC’s anodyne suggestion, Man above Men was a half-domestic, half-social play about the isolation of judges and the cost of their ignorance, both on their families and on the accused who came before them. He cast Gwen Watford and Alexander Knox, another long-standing cinema favourite of mine, and gave them the emotional detail and social accuracy which marked Alan out from other gifted contemporaries in the old doughnut-shaped factory in Wood Lane. But in the end, the unwieldy process of a studio play, with video cameras swishing around the polished dance floor just like outsize versions of the vacuum cleaners I’d once failed to sell, left me convinced that tape was a doomed medium. Next time it had to be film.

  A year or two later, Howard and I had conceded after some argument and agreed, against our better judgement, to Brassneck being made half on film and half on tape. We both knew that a television version made in such a bastard way was likely to be a bugger’s muddle, but the chance to offer a play about civic corruption at 9.25 p.m. on BBC1 was too good to resist. The result, put out to a huge audience, was bang in the middle of the great traditions of public broadcasting. Brassneck played well with an electorate desperate to mix mockery of their rulers with some invigorating spite and anger. Its broadcast opened up a groundbreaking subject for television fiction. But things had got off to an embarrassing start when we were allocated a director sunk in personal despair and without a sense of humour. Since the play was meant to be a comedy, we had requested of the BBC that he be replaced. He was furious. Displaying a level of vitality he had not evidenced hitherto, he stormed to the producers and demanded angrily, ‘Oh, writers are in charge now, are they?’ – as though that were self-evidently such a terrible idea. Luckily we acquired Mike Newell as his replacement. Technically adept, Mike brought to the subject an enormous horse-laugh as well as the panache it needed. But under the pressure of time, the impossible ambition of attempting such a mammoth epic overwhelmed him, and we authors disgraced ourselves further when, in the general panic, we broke the first rule of author–director etiquette and gave a few notes to some actors without the director present. This branded us once more as thoroughly bad people. My abiding memory of the whole experience is of Mike running hours over schedule, at one in the morning in the studio gallery over
looking the action, with six cameras at his command and shouting at them like dodgem cars: ‘Go in, Number One, anything you can get.’ When I went down to the studio floor to thank one of the more senior actors who had completed his role, he shook my hand and said, ‘Just to let you know: I didn’t believe a word of it.’

  My approach to Licking Hitler was thankfully proving to be much more peaceable. The idea had occurred to me because at some stage I had been working on an unfulfilled project to make a film about Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Austrian Holocaust survivor who had become the public face of post-war Nazi-hunting, without perhaps being too careful about where else credit for the most significant achievements in that field might properly belong. I had been sitting researching in the Wiener Library in Devonshire Street, off Portland Place. It had an old-fashioned reading room, with proper leather seats and open shelves, and was dedicated principally to literature documenting the experience of the Jews in the Second World War. As I worked, in the opposite chair there wheezed an asthmatic old man in a grey three-piece suit, hair plastered down, surrounded by piles of books. He was the very image of the elderly scholar, complete with watch chain and National Health spectacles. Without introduction, he looked up and said, ‘You do not know who I am, but I have sat as close to Adolf Hitler and to Winston Churchill as I am to you now.’

  Such a magniloquent line of introduction must, I suppose, have been rehearsed many times. But I was the leaping fish who loved the hook. The man told me his name was Sefton Delmer. In the 1930s he had been the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Express. Coming back to England as a fluent German speaker, he had been recruited by the Political Warfare Executive to pioneer their first steps into black propaganda. As we fell to talking for an hour or more, Delmer implored me to read his book Black Boomerang, which gives an account of all the wicked things his fake radio station got up to in the space of two years. Its plausibility depended on German soldiers believing that they were accidentally overhearing the casual, indiscreet conversation of two German officers. Not only did the operation take on obvious tasks of enemy demoralisation. As you would expect, it relished broadcasting military disinformation and general pessimism about the outcome of the war. It exaggerated Allied advances and denied their setbacks. It sought to sow dissent between conservative elements in the German army and the radicals whom they distrusted in the Nazi party. By pretending to support Hitler, it sought to undermine him. But it also stretched further, taking on more doubtful work. Among other things, it targeted specific soldiers and officers, undermining their morale with obscene gossip about their wives having sex back home while they were at the front. Broadcasts took special pleasure in inventing outbreaks of venereal disease among named individuals.