The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  Back in London, a wake was held at the Essoldo Cinema on 4 December, organised by Clive’s friends and defiantly secular in tone. Margaret and I went with Joe. We all wore jeans. There were performances by radical poets and singers. In books about the 1970s, often written by people too young to have lived through them, the period is represented as one of chaos and decline. History belongs to the victors. I can only say that’s not how it felt at the time. But for all of us on the left gathered in the King’s Road that day to remember the bright spirit of a friend who had been killed at the age of forty-six by being mistaken for a drunk, there was a strong foreboding that Clive had left us before our best hopes came crashing.

  13

  The Underlining

  Clearly I was driving for a wall. The question was if and how I was going to avoid it. Early in 1977 I’d read that to celebrate the bicentenary of the founding of the United States, fellowships were to be offered for five American artists in different fields to come to the UK, and for five British artists to go to the US. It occurred to me once again that a change of air was what I needed. I could hardly go on as I was, betraying my wife and unable to accept the limits of a relationship with a woman who was secreted in the English countryside rehearsing Shakespeare. But once I had applied successfully and the date of my departure at the end of April 1978 drew near, I realised I was sending myself into exile. I was dealing with my problems by the unlikely expedient of dodging them. I was going to be away for a year.

  In my heart I was convinced that, artistically, Plenty was an underlining. For the first time in ten years as a dramatist, I had not the slightest idea what I would do next. Evelyn Waugh said that ‘At forty every English writer starts to prophesy or acquire a style.’ I was just thirty, but once Plenty was finished I was sure it was the play for which I’d long been heading, the one that would somehow accommodate much of what I had to say about the country I’d grown up in. I’d lived through a certain period of history, and now here it was. I’d managed to transport the feel of it onstage. The story of one woman’s disillusionment provided as powerful a metaphor as I’d hoped. Furthermore, the fleet-footed style of cinema-as-theatre which I had struggled with in Knuckle was this time under proper control. I’d written a play whose effects were achieved by juxtaposition: the aim of all epic writing.

  A few years earlier, it had been Bill Gaskill who taught me one of the most valuable theatrical lessons of my young life. He had been to see a successful production about the threat of renascent British fascism. It was a play I had enjoyed a good deal for its general exuberance and courage. But Bill returned dissatisfied. In particular, he said, there was a short scene in which the central character had to make a phone call. A stage manager had carried on a small table in order to help him do so. On it was a telephone, and hanging from the telephone was a short piece of wire, which tapered out and clearly went nowhere. ‘Now that’, said Bill, ‘is not what I call political theatre.’ His point struck home and has stayed with me ever since. Nobody should imagine art has much to do with good intentions. The job of the playwright is to cast the material in a way which is potent and beautiful. The mark of your sincerity will not be in the righteousness of your thinking, but in your ability to transform your thinking so that it truly belongs in the medium you’re working in. For Bill, the ugliness of a dangling wire was a sign that the playwright wasn’t properly engaged. The scene was not playable, because the practicalities of staging it revealed that it had not been thought through. With Plenty, after nearly a decade of apprenticeship, I felt some correspondence between my intentions and the means with which I had realised those intentions.

  I had known for a long time that my private behaviour had become deeply dishonourable but I was beginning to apprehend a little of the reasons behind it. Margaret had always been ahead of me, emotionally tuned and aware in a way I had never been. After our decision on the sofa in Battersea, way back in 1970, when she and I had first discussed getting married, we had both woken the next day discomforted. But I could now see that my uneasiness at least had been down to the uncertainty of my motives. My professional wish had been to free myself up for the adventure of becoming a playwright. When I was young I was so self-critical that I had assumed I was also self-aware. Wrong. I had blithely mocked a friend who argued that self-knowledge was the purpose of life. Self-knowledge, I had said, was simple. Knowing how to act on that self-knowledge was what was difficult. Wrong, again. In some obscure part of myself, I had imagined that by at last putting my private life in better order, I would unclutter myself to get on with my work. Although the strategy had been at all times unconscious – as though that were an excuse – the idea that I would undertake one thing principally in order to undertake another was a crime against the person I married. And in the way of things, it had had the very opposite effect. By a vicious generational irony, I was as guilty of trying to contain desire as my parents had been. Today everyone who had come close to me was paying the price.

  Up till this moment, I’d shown a well-founded dislike of artistic theorising. When Pip Simmons, Howard Brenton and I had attended an international theatre shindig in the early 1970s in Florence, the official conference report, coming through our letter boxes months later, had noted that the British delegation seemed happier drinking wine and lolling in the Tuscan sunshine than discussing the coming crisis in European theatre. It was true. Writing plays was hard. Talking about what shape you would like unwritten plays to take was easy. The more deeply I fell in love with the difficulty of art, the more I despised the laziness of art-talk. But I had begun to feel that my break with the governing pieties of fringe theatre needed to be made explicit. I was so widely suspected for what I was assumed to believe that there didn’t seem any harm to be done by confirming those suspicions. Perhaps then my many critics on the left might realise that my dissent from orthodoxy was not down to bad character but to sound reasoning. They had done me damage behind my back. Who knows? Maybe the time had come to confront. If I found most people on the right shitty in their attitudes, I had also discovered that too many people on the organised left were shitty in their behaviour.

  I spent a lot of time constructing a considered talk for a spring theatre conference in Cambridge. Because I had always hated these kind of events, I took care to prepare as thoroughly as possible. In the lecture, entitled ‘The Play Is in the Air’, I presented a series of propositions which ought to have been self-evident but which, for good reasons, in the feverish atmosphere of the time, were not. A play, I argued, is never what happens on stage. It’s what happens between the stage and the audience. The excitement and fun of theatre is never in the play itself but in the transaction. Unless that transaction is live and suggestive, you might as well write a pamphlet. Why bother detaining hundreds of people for up to three hours to drive them towards a conclusion which is already known? It was no longer sensible, as Marxists did, to demand of an artist that they must ‘declare their allegiance’. Throughout my whole time as a writer I had been told that the purpose of art was to raise consciousness. But, I pointed out, ‘Consciousness has been raised in this country for a good many years now and we seem further from radical political change than at any time in my life.’ The question we had to answer was why.

  Audiences, I argued, have minds of their own. They are not passive consumers who walk away from the auditorium, lesson learnt. Discerning playgoers arrive with preconceptions which they test from their own experience against what they see on the stage. Of any play, the audience asks, ‘Is this how it is? Is this true? Am I convinced?’ It was worse than pointless to offer a didactic evening. It was actually counterproductive. Using the theatre either to lecture or to parade your virtuous beliefs excludes the audience and leaves them with nothing to do. They hate you for it, because it insults their intelligence. Worse, it insults their experience of life. A good play is there not to close minds but to open them.

  Such notions, you might imagine, ought to have been unexceptionable. But e
ven as I laid them out on paper I knew they represented a break from the Germanic mode into which fashionable thinking had fallen in the previous ten years. Rehearsals for Plenty were already in their second week back in London when an unwieldy group consisting of me, Margaret, Kate and Joe all piled into a car together to go and stay for the weekend with Reg and Annette Gadney in their house in Wendy, not far from Cambridge. We passed a cold Saturday night in one of those country vicarages where, when you woke in a gabled bedroom, the ice was as likely to be on the inside of the windows as on the out. Reg was an ex-Guards officer who, when not writing excellent thrillers, taught general studies at the Royal College of Art. By chance, he had been house manager at the National Film Theatre on the afternoon in 1968 – I was in the audience – when Jean-Luc Godard, detained in the Paris uprising, failed to appear and instead sent a telegram ordering the British Film Institute to give his £100 away to the first poor person they saw in the street. ‘Talk to him of images and sound. You will learn much more from him than from me.’ Reg had been one of my most supportive friends, but because he knew me so well he warned me at supper: ‘David, you’re fine when you feel the audience is friendly, but with a hostile one you go to pieces. Don’t go to pieces.’

  Small wonder, then, that driving in on Sunday after a vigorous morning’s walk felt like travelling towards an execution. Reg says today that he feared for me even before we arrived, because I already looked like a starved dog. When we got out at King’s College, the audience waiting for my lecture could hardly have been worse suited. Some of them came from street theatre groups and were still in costume, fresh from playing cartoon capitalists, with top hats, masks and painted faces. Over their shoulders, they might as well have carried bags marked ‘Swag’ and filled with dollar bills. Others were still dressed as clowns, complete with baggy trousers and spotted tops. There were a good many attendees from the world of marionettes and mime. It had never been my intention to tell believers in the fringe that the party was over. I was making a subtler point: if political theatre were to enjoy more impact in the future than it had in the past, the nature of the party would have to change. It was a defence, not an attack. I had not lost my political faith, I was seeking to reconsider how best to deploy it. But among an audience who had come to celebrate themselves rather than to think, I was faced with no choice but to bear Reg’s admonition in mind and to plough on saying unpopular things in an unpopular way. I tried to keep my eye fixed on Annette, Kate and Margaret since they alone looked friendly. I was half-heartedly interrupted a few times, but otherwise received in more or less abject silence.

  A dragon in shallow waters is the sport of shrimps. The conference organiser asked for comments, but the feeling in the hall was that nobody was much interested to jump over the bar. They all went under it. One virulent objector shouted the question ‘Did Piscator die for this?’ – surely one of history’s more erudite heckles – before walking out without waiting for a reply. The heckler was apparently unaware that a good part of the German theatre director’s radical career had been spent, like too many others’, in the vain search for a Broadway hit. A few people joined in, taking advantage of my presence more broadly to disparage what they felt to be the general failings of my work. There was an overwhelming consensus that whatever questions I had posed, no one was in the mood to join in the hunt for answers. My sense of isolation, already strong, was further reinforced. Journalistically, I would be represented as having broken with a movement I’d helped to create. The academic historian Catherine Itzin noticed that the lecture ‘left many members of the political theatre movement reeling as if from an unexpected, undeserved blow’. And yet in the following decade, as the climate of the country moved sharply rightwards, the questions of effectiveness I had raised would seem more urgent, not less. Under the pitiless scrutiny engendered in an antagonistic political climate, the whole subsidised theatre, underprepared, would be alarmed by the urgent need to find answers. Looking back, my analysis had only one thing wrong with it. It was premature.

  The time I had spent meanwhile preparing Plenty had been educational. Many years later, having seen Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep and Kate Nelligan play Susan Traherne, Mike Leigh would ask me bad-temperedly when he was going to see an English actress play the role. I gave him no answer because I had none. But with the seasoned advice of Gillian Diamond in the National Theatre’s casting department, I had for the premiere assembled a first-rate team. Lindsay Duncan was to make her London debut in the second act, in the small but valued part of Dorcas, a self-confident young girl looking to fund an abortion, while, much to everyone’s surprise and to some people’s dismay, Julie Covington had agreed to play Alice, Susan’s bohemian best friend. Just a year earlier, every bar and radio station had vibrated to the sound of Julie’s unequalled recording of ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’. Her thrilling timbre had made the song a worldwide hit. As usual, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber had put out an LP of Evita to familiarise the audience with the songs before they followed up by presenting the show on stage. They had taken it for granted that Julie would move on to take the lead. But rather than sing out in defence of a South American dictator, Julie had chosen instead to play second banana to Kate Nelligan in a stroppy new play at the National Theatre. She had, she said, ‘trouble with Evita’s politics’.

  It takes courage to refuse such a certain pathway to stardom and I felt both grateful and, in some way, responsible. After all, it was my play Julie had preferred. I owed a debt to her. It had better be good. But I felt equal gratitude to Stephen Moore, who was joining to play the part of Brock, the young diplomat who meets Susan in Brussels after the war and who marries her in England some years later when he fears for her sanity. I was becoming used to what was already a familiar problem. For as long as I continued to write central female roles, casting the lead presented little difficulty. The scarcity of such opportunities guaranteed that the greatest actresses of the day would queue up in Europe and in America to play them on film or in the theatre. For years to come, I would be super-served. But male actors, to the contrary, were spoiled and correspondingly reluctant. They were unused to the idea that on occasions the conventional power relationship might be reversed. It was not just a question of the size of the part or indeed of the billing. It was about the way I portrayed the world. I once asked the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz to put his head in a woman’s lap. Afterwards Bruno was smiling. I asked him why. The posture implied submission. ‘I’m fine with it, David,’ he said, ‘but I’m amused because you know full well no American leading man would agree to do such a thing.’

  Perhaps Kate resented my excessive sense of gratitude to the two other players. She was certainly extremely impatient in rehearsal when Julie was struggling with her elusive and slightly underwritten part. For whatever reason, something of my hitherto perfect artistic accord with Kate was starting to fray. Sporadically we fought, in a way which was no less toxic for being a matter of tone. Kate had endured a torrid time at Stratford, unhappy in a preconceived As You Like It in which Rosalind had been required to slot in as little more than a suede-clad puppet. Used to the full and proper collaboration which is routine on new plays, Kate had been far too independent to climb into the half-timbered straitjacket of the RSC house style. She hated herself for doing what she called ‘leafy acting’. Although I had frequently visited her in her rented cottage outside town, she had forbidden me to attend. She had also, to the understandable disappointment of the management, declined to take up a contract for a projected London season. She was their star and she was leaving early. During her time away, she had broken up with her longstanding companion, Mark Cullingham. Mark wanted to try his luck as a television director in Los Angeles. Together they had sold their house in Stockwell, and so, for the time she was doing Plenty, I had found Kate a room to live in with Caroline Younger, who by now had moved to Notting Hill. Kate was happy not to be tied down by property or indeed by anything else.

  I was forced to concede
that for various people at the National Kate seemed, in the time since we had done Licking Hitler, to have crossed a line from being rumoured to be difficult to actually becoming it. A part of my day was spent going round the costume shop, the publicity department or the stage management smoothing ruffled feathers. I was used to it. In those days I ruffled feathers myself. ‘It’s just her manner,’ I’d say. ‘Take no notice.’ Those who backed Kate’s cause called her ‘intense’. As she said in an interview later, it was not her ambition which made her unusual. All actors are ambitious. It was her ability to focus her ambition. But the blame for rehearsals sometimes becoming scratchy lay just as much with me. Probably more so. My moodiness began to answer hers. I was becoming aware that as an artist, whatever my shortcomings, I had always been free. Richard Eyre had remarked on one occasion that as a director I was the most reckless he’d ever produced. Sometimes he’d had to hold himself back from interrupting because, he claimed, I was never frightened to say anything to anyone, regardless of the consequences. I scared him. Now, moving towards doing a play which meant so much to me, I felt at a disadvantage. I was no longer free, because my heart was in hock to the leading lady. At some level I resented the loss of control. Rehearsing Plenty, I had begun to feel constrained, and to chafe at that constraint. At times, I even took my anger with myself out on the precipitator of that anger. It was understandable, but it was also disgraceful. On any shared artistic endeavour, achieving one clear agenda is hard enough. To have a second is always disastrous.