The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  Learning of the scale, malice and extreme pettiness of this work was, for me, like the opening of a door. All my life I had suspected that the Second World War had been misrepresented in fiction. Almost nothing I had seen at the cinema had smelt right – or convincing. What I had watched as a child was not art but propaganda. Yes, of course defeating Nazism had been a good cause, perhaps the last military cause Britons were ever to agree on. But the ridiculous piety surrounding the way in which we’d licked Hitler had made me suspicious that there were corners of Allied behaviour which weren’t going to hold up too well to scrutiny. Now here, after all the years of puffery, was proof. The same people who had allowed or run black propaganda during the war had gone on to high office in Whitehall and government afterwards. The moral nullity of this bizarre operation seemed to illuminate what in the film I would call ‘the national habit of lying’. In my view, it reflected as much on life after the war as during it.

  The extra anticipation I felt was at the opportunity to put a woman’s experience at the centre of a war story. This was important to me. In 1950 Herbert Wilcox had directed his wife Anna Neagle in an analgesic film, Odette, about the special agent Odette Sanson, who had flown into France to liaise for the Special Operations Executive. In 1958, there had been a rather better film, Carve Her Name with Pride, with Virginia McKenna playing Violette Szabo. But these were about exceptional women who’d both had exceptional wars. In 1975 my old prep-school friend Christopher Hudson had scripted a story about D-Day which had proved to be a welcome antidote to the ‘Chocks away’ school of film-making. Overlord followed the random story of a hapless young recruit sacrificed on a Normandy beach. I too wanted to draw on common experiences. I wanted to portray that special wartime phenomenon: violent juxtaposition. Dissimilar people from different backgrounds had to learn to adjust to each other far more quickly than in civilian life. As Alan Ross observes in his book The Forties, it was ‘the unbearable partings and comings together in dark confined places’ which compensated for ‘the suffering and boredom and fear of war’. But it wasn’t just the content of the film which excited me. At university I had never wanted to make a life in theatre. When I started, it had been second best. Here, at last, was my chance to hear my own clapsticks for the first time.

  Before I could find someone willing to make Licking Hitler, I first had to revive Teeth ’n’ Smiles in the West End. It turned out less than happily and taught me a painful lesson about how easy it is to mislay magic. I made a total mess of it. In 1975 our season at the Court had played to full houses, and we had wanted to transfer straight away. But Helen Mirren was already committed before we started rehearsals to spending the winter in a long run of a new farce by the octogenarian Ben Travers. She had reluctantly agreed that when she had finished, she would come back and do mine again. But by the time she returned, Helen was understandably exhausted and had misplaced her zeal. She had the air of not wanting to revisit old work. Whereas at the Court she had been able to hypnotise an audience into believing she could sing, at Wyndham’s with a far cooler audience Helen seemed much more exposed. Nick Bicât began to mutter darkly that everyone can sing but only if they have the will. Jack Shepherd had left the venture and something of the play’s soul had gone with him. His casual delivery had given the production much of its ambling charm. As if that were not enough, I had compounded our problems by imagining it was a good idea to give a reporter from the New Musical Express free access backstage to do a prominent four-page story on this unusual attempt to bring the cultures of rock music and theatre together. When it was published I knew that I’d made a mistake. It quoted Dave King in his dressing room referring to Helen Mirren as ‘that cunt’.

  Even in those days I had learnt enough to recognise that a director is always in trouble when having to assume the role of schoolmaster. When actor/director turns into pupil/teacher the outcome cannot be anything but doomed. In the 1980s, at Joe Papp’s request, I would even fly the Atlantic to try and get a couple of warring actors who were at daily loggerheads to reconcile. ‘But, David,’ one of them said, oblivious of my three-thousand-mile journey, ‘you don’t understand. We don’t want to get on.’ Dave was the same. When I asked him if he wanted to come out for a drink and talk about his problem with Helen, Dave replied in words which were henceforth etched on my heart: ‘Not very much.’ Later I would read Samuel Johnson: ‘Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.’ Never going to be fond of Helen, Dave was doubly determined not to be kind. The production closed in six weeks, with no trace of the abundant feckless joy it had spread so effortlessly at the Court.

  Worse still, it marked the end of my professional relationship with Michael Codron. Today I regard myself as the lucky beneficiary of an enlightened system. Not only did the state contribute to the cost of my education, the government also intervened through the Arts Council to subsidise me at the moment when I most needed help. I was, briefly, welfare-dependent and proud of it. In return, I and many others like me were to compensate the taxman many times over. The state’s later earnings from my plays and films would prove the wisdom of their decision to volunteer to jumpstart me. But such a narrative excludes the contribution of my first producer. In the 1990s, because he was serving on the board of the National Theatre, Michael was, for sound ethical reasons, disqualified from transferring my plays which originated there. I felt bad. Michael had believed in me at a time when few others did. I was his discovery. He had gone out on a limb, capitalising my flops without complaint. Michael would no doubt feel that virtue was its own reward. But, when the hits came, he deserved some of the other kind as well.

  Four days after opening Teeth ’n’ Smiles, I was rehearsing Weapons of Happiness. Like Knuckle, it had not been easy to cast. Alec Guinness, Paul Scofield and Max von Sydow had all turned down the central part of Josef Frank. Most of all, I wanted to complete a childhood circle and approach Dirk Bogarde, but he had not been on stage since 1958, when two weeks’ Anouilh in Oxford had nearly carried him away with pleurisy. Bogarde had turned down the chance to open the Chichester Festival Theatre, and was unlikely to want to open the Lyttelton. Warily, I went instead to Frank Finlay, whose most celebrated performance had been as a chippy Iago to Olivier’s more extravagant Othello. Frank seemed happy to take on this original new play, though perhaps as suspicious of a young director as I was of such a well-established actor. For once, the actor auditioned the director. In the event we got on fine, and as Howard observed, Frank made the character of the wrecked old man curiously elegant. Opposite him I put Julie Covington, whom I had known since she was nineteen and training to be a teacher. As the factory workers I brought in a fine company of young actors, whose authentic London accents would try the Lyttelton Theatre’s acoustics to destruction and, in the case of American tourists, beyond. There would be a lot of complaints. Hayden had finished designing a spectacular set which had an entire London factory being replaced by Soviet tanks rolling into Prague. Towering light-boxes of Stalin swept by to make way for the dome of the London Planetarium. Rough theatre this was not. On this occasion, I believed, the spectacle matched the play’s breadth and helped it breathe.

  After so many years of delay it was inevitable there would be problems once we got inside the building. Of the three theatres, the 890-seat proscenium house, the Lyttelton, opened first. The rest of its early repertory transferred from the Old Vic, like an off-the-peg succession of touring shows, road-tested and ready to go. Peggy Ashcroft and Ralph Richardson were having no problems at all. But it was the lot of Weapons of Happiness to be the first show to open afresh and, as luck would have it, the most ambitious, pulling right back to the massive steel dock doors and revealing the whole stage. For several days in the middle of July we sat in agony in the darkened stalls watching as machinery failed. Hayden’s complicated design, intended to exploit the fabulous new facilities, had simply exposed them. It was clear nothing worked. By two o’clock on the afternoon we were due to give our first preview, we had n
ot even got through the play on stage, let alone set it or lit it. Having consulted Peter Hall, I called the company together and told them that sadly we would have to cancel our first preview. But minutes after I announced this decision Peter appeared in person in the stalls. He said he had no wish to undermine me, and of course such an important question must be answered by a company decision, but did we realise that it would be a gift to a hostile press if an audience were turned away? Nothing could do the reputation of the National more harm. He accepted that the actors had been tested beyond endurance, but even so, he felt that on this occasion they should put the good of the whole National Theatre first.

  Actors in the theatre respond much better to appeals to public-school sentiment than they do on a film set. It was therefore only a matter of minutes before all the actors agreed with Peter that they must put on some sort of show that night, however poor. The house was going to be packed – this was a big opening, after all – and they wanted to show that they were troupers. But in response to what I regarded as blackmail from a management which had let me down, I felt betrayed. I had made the only sensible professional judgement and been ignored. However, as the afternoon dragged on and as large pieces of scenery failed to move sideways, upwards or forwards, morale sagged and actors began to sidle up to me unobserved to tell me they were having second thoughts. It would do huge damage both to them and to the play to open when we were unlikely to be able to get through. They had changed their minds. Eventually they stopped work and formed a delegation. Could I go upstairs and please tell Peter we were calling the performance off?

  Needless to say, when we did get to preview, one day late, we were all full of foreboding. There had indeed been the predicted bad publicity in the right-wing press. Journalists were eager to insist that our failure to open on time was emblematic of the lavish inefficiency of the whole enterprise. The foyer was packed with rubberneckers, come to see the scene of the crash. Lindsay Anderson, as if called into a disaster zone by sonic whistle to act as the very opposite of an emergency service, was standing in the bar on the second night declaring to anyone who would listen that the National Theatre was going to be a fiasco. He had always said it and – hey! – he was right. But when we finally got to present it, the play cast its spell, and the performance ended with an image which was unanswerable. The failed organisers of the factory sit-in leave town and head for the Welsh hills. For this last tentative utopia, Hayden had designed a staggering white snow-cloth which covered the whole enormous area. After all the characters had gone and the hillside was left empty, very slowly, from the high fly tower of the Lyttelton there came a fall of snow, intermittent at first, and then in a thick curtain which drifted down and settled silently on the floor. The audience were still happily gasping in disbelief as, relieved, I bolted backstage to talk to the actors. But as I came through the pass door, Peter Hall was already lying in wait in the wings. He said he needed to give me some notes about what he saw as the dangerous inadequacy of Frank Finlay’s performance. He had ideas on how to improve it. I told him, after the week I had just been through, this was hardly the time. I was listening at him rather than to him. Unforgivably, as Peter persisted, I lost my temper, wrongly imagining that he was trying to pay me back for having given him a bumpy twenty-four hours. As far as I was concerned, Peter had done his best to wreck the opening of the show by intervening with the actors, more in the interests of public relations than of art. Why the hell should I now listen to him? I think I may even have told him to get out of my way.

  It was certainly one of the more shaming episodes of my life, for which there is an explanation but no excuse. For some time I had been living on my nerves. A pack of Pepto-Bismol rarely lasted me a day. A yoga teacher would have located my centre of gravity in my larynx. Although, as for many lucky sufferers, asthma and eczema were leaving me in my late twenties, they were being replaced by a toxic mix of indigestion and indignation. Peggy had rebuked me after Knuckle, saying that my harshness with myself was ‘all inverted conceit, in an odd sort of way’. But lately my hypertension had developed physical symptoms. My lasting memory of my first ten years at the National Theatre is of sticking my head down the lavatory to rack the terror out of my guts yet again. Once during technical rehearsals, when someone came into the empty auditorium and asked where I was, Rory Dempster looked casually at his watch and said, ‘Oh if it’s seven o’clock, you’ll usually find David being sick in the Gents.’ A jangly physical state was made worse by a quite unnecessary paranoia which my artistic team did nothing to discourage. My plastic security pass for the new building was numbered 007 and might just as well have added ‘Licensed to Whinge’. Hayden’s choleric muttering had reached the point where it could be heard from the Thames. He and Rory were being given such an impossible time by technical departments unable to deliver on their promises that, to keep our spirits up, we had resorted to disloyal rhetoric, calling ourselves Charabanc Productions. The company’s motto, we liked to say gaily, was ‘Just Passing Through’. At the end of the week the Lyttelton’s technical manager, who was, after the theatre’s opening weeks, little more than a human shadow, was removed by ambulance to have rectal surgery under merciful anaesthetic. He stayed in bed for a week.

  Whatever the pressures, this had been a poor way for me to reward my benefactor. To his credit, Peter never seemed to mind. He’d had an awful lot of rows in the wings with an awful lot of people by then. But more seriously, it meant that the entirely justified message he had wanted to give me – that after all our technical gridlock my attention should be redirected to Frank’s performance – went overlooked. I was further thrown after a couple of previews by a typically mischievous visit from Laurence Olivier, who, rather to my surprise, was enjoying the show. Never much of a man for politics, he was nevertheless gifted with a matchless sense of occasion, and, no question, this seemed to be an occasion he liked. He greeted me in the interval by raising his arms above his head and saying, ‘Success! Success! I smell it in the air.’ I waited nervously. ‘Wonderful play! And Frank!’ he said, ‘Frank! Never been better. It’s the performance of his life.’ I agreed, saying Frank was indeed on the way. But I knew Olivier well enough to be sure that he would have a kicker up his sleeve. I waited. ‘Only one problem with Frank, you know.’ Sucked in now, I had no choice but to reply. What was the problem with Frank, I asked. Olivier smiled, content. ‘Frank? Can’t do it on first nights.’

  Olivier walked away from the conversation even happier than when he arrived. It turned out unsurprisingly that he was right, and Frank was indeed not at his best when the press were in. But it didn’t matter. For the general audience the play survived and prospered, and, once the machinery worked, Hayden’s decor set standards of fluency and beauty to which all designers subsequently aspired in that large, rather cold proscenium house. As Kate, who had never met Howard Brenton, commented after standing at the back for a performance, ‘Listening, you knew you were in the presence of someone profoundly generous.’ But for those within the profession in search for a peg on which to hang the anger of their coming disillusionment, Weapons of Happiness represented a perfect spike. Its mix of poetry and despair about the unlikeliness of British revolution was calculated to bring out the worst in those who were about to feel the most pain. Political plates were beginning to shift throughout the western world. Socialism, had we but known it, was heading for the rocks, and so the wounds of disagreement about a mere play chosen, as it happened, to open a new theatre in South London ran deeper than you could possibly believe. Those who had invested all their hopes in the word ‘alternative’ were looking for a new word and it wasn’t ‘national’.

  One director who ran a radical theatre in the East End told me that after the play she had stood weeping on Waterloo Bridge, because she had experienced exactly the same feelings as when Joan Littlewood had seen Harry H. Corbett, a treasured member of her East London company, playing on television in Steptoe and Son. The working-class actors this director most
loved were betraying their provenance by appearing on the National Theatre stage in a play which, because it was anti-Soviet, she regarded as giving comfort to the enemy. It was, for her, a symbolic moment: the miserable death of a great theatrical movement, killed from within by its own foot-soldiers. For me, her attitudes smacked of a snobbery with which, coming from my background, I was never going to sympathise. Justifying his refusal to denounce Stalin’s purges, Sartre had notoriously remarked, ‘Il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt’ – which you can loosely translate to mean ‘Never lower the workers’ morale by telling them the truth.’ Needless to say, I felt the opposite. The truth strengthens us. But Ken Tynan, who was still fighting to get Fanshen performed off Broadway, wrote in his diary that Weapons of Happiness was ‘an insulting evening which moved me to boo for the first time in a decade . . . The mixture of arrogance and condescension was impossible to stomach. It almost made me long to be a critic again.’