The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  Neither of us, I think, would look back nostalgically to that rehearsal period. It was sometimes bad-tempered, and progress was in fits and starts. Probably Kate and I were both at our worst: Kate, because for the first time in her professional life she was really scared. She was facing the challenge of being the first person to play as demanding a leading role as exists in the repertory. And me, because I was panicking as my romantic life closed in unhelpfully on my professional. But in the last couple of weeks, as we were able to pull the tendons of the story tighter, the play began to cohere. We woke up one day, without warning, to find that the play was lifting the whole company up. You looked about you and everyone was smiling. A few people invited from upstairs at the National Theatre to come and see run-throughs in the rehearsal room left thoughtful and silent. When we went into the theatre and saw the decor arrive, we began to work with a quiet concentration which marks out people who know they’re about to do something good. In 1999 the designer Maria Björnson tried to reconceive the play for a new generation, but she told me that the images of Hayden’s original vision were still so clear to her that she could do nothing to improve them. They were stuck in her retinas, and all she could do was summon them up once more, this time with slight variations. The moment when Susan lies back on the bed with a joint in her hand in a hotel room in Blackpool, and the walls around her fly away to reveal the sunlit fields of France stretching away for miles, was as perfect a visualisation of a theatrical idea as I’d ever seen. Although the route to achieving the play had been uncomfortable, the moment we could all surrender to it made everything worthwhile.

  From the first preview of the play it was clear that a section of the audience would never accept it. We had never imagined how personally parts of a British audience were going to take the play’s analysis. You could feel that the public were at war the moment the play began. Lindsay Duncan’s hilarious performance as a girl too bone-headed to realise the moral implications of termination had had us all in stitches in the rehearsal room. But when she walked out into the Lyttelton she was received in appalled silence. Depressingly, during the West End revival twenty years later, there were men as loudly offended by the scene in which Susan uses a man to get herself pregnant as they were in the late 1970s. But less obviously sexist objections to Plenty centred on the feeling that the play was moralistic, the work of a man who believed himself superior to other people. Perhaps in the first production Kate and I, both gung-ho for Susan and her indictment of post-war Britain, did press her case a little too hard. On occasions the production became overly strident. Our shared anger showed through to a degree which alienated those who were not on Susan’s side. Balanced properly, Plenty is a play which presents as equally costly all choices in a society which is institutionally hypocritical. Yes, you will suffer if you accept society’s hypocrisies and endure them without complaint. But you may well suffer an even higher price, as Susan does, for spending a life in permanent dissent. Already I had met enough people who had become victims of either course, and I knew no right way to proceed. For any intelligent audience, Plenty indicts its own author long before it indicts anyone else.

  From when I had first presented Plenty to him, Peter Hall had been broadly approving. But when he came to see it at the first preview, his response changed. Next morning, in his office, Peter told me that in performance Plenty had revealed itself as one of those landmark plays which serve as a permanent point of reference. He said simply, ‘Well done. This one’s going to last.’ He told me he could not have been more proud. I casually reported his approval to the actors – ‘Peter likes it’ – and thought no more about it. I had no inkling at that moment of just how crucial Peter’s support was going to become. He, like me, was dismissive of people who, as a way of rejecting the play, were already muttering that Susan Traherne was ‘unlikeable’. What did it mean? As Peter said, audiences pretended to be shocked on stage by behaviour which was frequently nowhere near as bad as their own. A cheerful double standard obtained. Adultery and deceit were greeted with frowns of disapproval by people who themselves were strangers to neither in real life. And if Susan was formidable, so what? So was Hedda Gabler. So was Medea. Were they ‘likeable’? Why were men so frightened of a strong woman?

  On the South Bank, with its policy of a rotating repertory, plays had only four previews before they opened to the press. Almost as soon as I walked into the foyers on the first night, my stomach lurched. I was sure that the cards were going to be stacked against us. When the play began, it was clear that if anyone wanted to give themselves over to the flow of the story, they were going to have to ignore a certain stratum in the audience. It was April already but high society seemed to be in the grip of a devilishly targeted flu which at times bordered on laryngitis. In selected parts of the house there was a listlessness, not uncommon in the Lyttelton, which made everyone else conscious they were watching some very small figures shouting at the far end of a very big room. How on earth could I have imagined that Plenty would be welcomed by the very people it was about? The disconnection appeared complete. When Susan launched into her unsparing satire about the national shame of Suez, you could feel some spectators wanting to get up from their seats and wring her neck. When the smoothie British diplomat Charleson argued the importance at all times of good manners over truthfulness, you could feel a moment’s widespread relief that there was one person in the play who talked sense. Yes, I had been convinced that the stage of the National Theatre would be the ideal place from which to address the nation. But what if the nation, or that section of it which patronised the National Theatre, was determined not to listen? Peter’s horror at the tenor of the evening resulted in him ordering that the schedule of names for complimentary first-night tickets be comprehensively redrawn. No author or actor in future would have to endure the resentful crowd of political fixers who felt entitled to attend because they had long ago contributed a word of support to the building of the theatre. But for Plenty the cleansing of the establishment list came too late. I walked away from the theatre furious and disbelieving. How could any play so destined to go right go so miserably wrong?

  There were only five days left until I was due to fly to Washington DC to begin my year of absence. Margaret and Joe, we agreed, would follow later. In advance, I had made no practical arrangements. I had a visa and a bank account and nothing else. I was stepping into a void. I had always been addicted to a quick exit, but this was ridiculous. How could I be running away at what was, for Kate and me, the most dangerous moment of vulnerability? What on earth had I been thinking? On the Monday after opening the play I had a farewell lunch with Kate to lick our wounds. Advance bookings were poor. She knew that in response to scepticism towards the play on the first night she had overcompensated. As a result her performance as Susan had turned a touch too febrile and rattled. In several passages she had looked short of technique. But in the restaurant I found her calm and defiant, looking forward to the run and confident that once there was a rhythm to the performances the play would soon find its public. It was too good not to, she said.

  By Thursday of the same week, I was down in Chapel Hill teaching young boys and girls, check-shirted, fresh off the land, about the history of the British theatre. It was blossom time in North Carolina, the most exquisite time of the year, and the air was scented with bougainvillea. Colleges and dormitories glowed with colour. My pupils all looked about fifteen, with piercing blue eyes and tufts of sprouty blonde hair shooting straight up from suntanned faces. They were intensely well-mannered, keeping up a polite and gratifying interest, as if they knew that it was the only time they would hear a word about the subject before they returned to their farms. The English professor, Kimball King, who had invited me on campus because he knew as much about modern theatre as anyone alive, said the pupils were young but they were also impossible to fool. He was right. My week at the university was my only scheduled commitment in return for the full year’s fellowship. The bicentenary fellowship didn�
�t oblige me to do anything. The other fifty-one weeks gaped ahead, unfilled.

  I went down to a Chapel Hill car lot and, for $1500, randomly bought a 1964 Ford Galaxie, a monstrous gas-guzzler which sat on the road like an ocean liner. The average car wastes ninety-nine per cent of its energy propelling itself. Only one per cent propels the passengers. This one drove as if it wasted ninety-nine point nine per cent. Its fins stretched to infinity but it comfortably sat two. The salesman had the sense of humour to say, ‘Good choice.’ On the flight over, I had conceived an absurdly bad idea for a film. It was to be called Stella and it was about a woman working in government who discovers, when he turns up in a car crash in the wrong state, that her husband is a bigamist, leading one life with her in Washington at weekends and another while working on the NASA space programme during the week in Cape Canaveral. For that reason I decided, when my week’s teaching was up, to drive south to Florida, and take a look at one of the film’s potential locations.

  To give them their flavour, road movies, especially American ones, tend to stress the romance of life on the road. But what I valued was the tedium. I loved it. I was never happier than glazing over, surrendering to an impotent, pointless rage about the unspeakable unfairness of things. What was the point of writing? Nobody wanted to hear from me. After so many years of apprenticeship and maddened purpose, it was pleasant to sit in a Ford Galaxie and stare for days at an unvarying road, with nothing but a steady rise in humidity to make me feel I was getting anywhere at all. As I wound down the window, I listened to the radio and began to wonder whether, in the time I’d been away, the whole continent had been infantilised. When exactly had Can Do turned into How To? There were tips all day on How To enjoy yourself, or How To choose a holiday, as if American citizens were no longer capable of doing anything without first being given a manual. Worse, there was a complete contrast between the USA’s founding philosophy and a new fearfulness which seemed to be stressing that life was really dangerous, so watch out. The national motto had once been Take Risks. Now it was Take Care. When I got to Daytona Beach, where I based myself in a massive empty concrete hotel, I found there were no doors on the toilet stalls in Dunkin’ Donuts. That was because people liked to go in there to shoot up. It would be a couple of years before Michael Mann would make his superb cinema debut, Thief, in which James Caan dies discovering how completely the lone entrepreneur has had their heart kicked out by the corporate. But for now there was no work of art to make sense of things. It was impossible to work out, in my general gloom, whether it was America which had changed or me.

  Daytona owed its prosperity to the hundred thousand students who used it for spring break. But that was March. This was May. It counted as out of season. Occasionally I would say something, like ‘Can I have some coffee please?’ or ‘Can you tell me where there’s a bookshop?’ But otherwise I was pretty well silent from the start of the day to the end. It didn’t bother me. I had no hankering to speak. Some days, serving myself in an automat, I didn’t open my mouth at all. It occurred to me that perhaps I was having a nervous breakdown, walking the wide, breathtaking twenty-three miles of beach or staring at the typewriter in despair. I’d always had a goal, a task. Now I had none. Tom Stoppard says that being blocked is not a question of not being able to write. It’s a question of never being satisfied with anything you do write. By that standard I was blocked, and would remain so for the rest of the year. Stella was one idea so lifeless, so terrible that not even Kael’s ‘treacherous power of art’ could do anything to transform it. I knew less than nothing about America. Why on earth did I think I could write about it? But, worse, how on earth could I write at all when the last play that I’d written looked certain to be ignored?

  I honestly don’t know how long I stayed in Florida, paralysed by self-pity, wondering whether anyone would one day come to rescue me. At every important junction in my life, a Bexhill boy, I had always gone back to stare at the sea. Well, this was the moment when it finally came home to me that I had done everything wrong. How could I have been so stupid? Back in London Margaret and Joe were getting on with their lives. How could I have come this far without realising how selfish I had been? Peggy had often told me that the people she despised most in life were those who were unwilling to pay the bill. ‘Do what you want to,’ she would say. ‘But then pay the bill.’ I had deceived myself into believing that my aim was to balance out the love I felt for two women to whose loyalty and brilliance I owed so much. But in seeking to please everyone, I had satisfied no one. On the contrary. I was plummeting down and pulling down everyone with me. When I drove back up the East Coast to New York to stay with my cousin Rosi, my legs gave way. I parked the car in a midtown lot and was walking up Sixth Avenue when the pain became so great that I was incapable of moving. Maybe this mysterious paralysis was physical, the result of driving for five days, or maybe it was psychosomatic. Who knows? Whichever, I sat down on the edge of one of the low brick walls outside the Time-Life building and stayed there for several hours, hoping the pain would pass. Next day, I still couldn’t walk.

  Rosi lived with her witty but volatile husband Pierre, who had taken over the Marlborough Gallery following the shakedown from an expensive lawsuit brought by the estate of Mark Rothko against Pierre’s uncle, Frank Lloyd, who was now exiled in the Bahamas. The daughter of my uncle Bumper and aunt Eileen, Rosi was one of those clever women who’d looked round England when she was young and got out as fast as possible. She’d become personal assistant to Ted Rousseau, who was curator in chief at the Metropolitan Museum. Pierre and Rosi lived on the Upper East Side and had a spare room in which I could sleep at nights and work by day while they were out. The room’s only disadvantage was that right beside the bed was a massive Francis Bacon depicting what looked like someone being sick in the lavatory. I woke to this vast canvas every morning. Pierre couldn’t sell it, so he’d dumped it in the spare room. When I nervously remarked to Pierre that it wasn’t very good, he just shrugged and said, ‘Everyone knows. Francis can’t paint women.’

  As a guest, I felt compelled to do a reasonable job of dissembling. I didn’t want my problems to show because I didn’t want to discuss them. Besides, I knew from my time at school that I enjoyed occupying other people’s lives. For a while, I ate what was given and went where I was told, in the company of Pierre and Rosi’s friends. After what felt like a lifetime of wrong choices, it was pleasant to make none. But in June I had to fly briefly back to England for two reasons. Margaret was pregnant again. She had been to the hospital, where they had pointed to a black dot and said, ‘Look, do you see the child?’ In reply, she had said indeed she did see it, but what was that other black dot? In response, the scan operator had vanished for fifteen minutes. She had gone to get a doctor, it turned out, because she was under instructions not to tell mothers they were expecting twins, for fear of a bad reaction. Margaret had anyway been feeling that her time at the BBC was not going to run much longer. There had been executive interference on a couple more films. With two children on the way, it was important we were all together all the time. Margaret asked me who I thought should take over running Play for Today. I pointed out that our friend Richard Eyre was signing off from his superlative tenure at the Nottingham Playhouse with a group-written play, ten years before its time, about the unscrupulous methods used by powdered milk manufacturers to sell their doubtful products to perfectly healthy mothers in Africa. Why didn’t Margaret press his cause?

  My second reason for returning was, of course, Plenty. From Florida, I’d become anxious, picking up only the vaguest indications. Now I heard the full story. The board of the theatre, and in particular its chairman, Max Rayne, had been alarmed to find what poor business the play had been doing since its opening. It was a flop, he said. Take it off. But Peter had dug in his heels, insisting that an important point of principle was now at stake. He was prepared to accept that when the National did work which it considered bad, it was reasonable to shorten its run. Of cours
e. But Plenty was work which everyone in the theatre believed in. If they couldn’t now stand up for things which were either ahead of their time or uncommercial, what on earth was the point of a National Theatre? Unless your values were seen to be demonstrably different, you might as well stick with the commercial. Peter confided to me that he’d be able to protect the play by presenting it just seven times a month, rather than ten, and by playing it mostly at weekends. If he nursed it, he said, he was sure its fortunes would change.

  By now I was in such a state that I’m not sure I even heard what Peter said. I certainly didn’t guess that Peter’s readiness to put his job on the line on the play’s behalf would be the turning point of my professional life. Margaret and I installed Kate to house-sit in our absence from Richborne Terrace, then flew back with Joe to Cape Cod, where I planned to continue my purposeless fellowship by renting an A-frame on the beach at Wellfleet. We stayed there for a month, me all the time bashing away in a futile bid to animate a dead screenplay. When the stately Galaxie got bogged down in a rainstorm in the sand and we spent hours digging it out with spades, it seemed all too apt. In July we started slowly to move westwards, taking four weeks to cross America. When we broke the speed limit in Colorado, a creepy policeman was willing to let us off if Margaret sat with him in his police car for five minutes. In the mountains we fed on the plentiful pink trout fishermen would otherwise have thrown back. We were heading for Los Angeles with the idea of spending the rest of the year there, mainly because I had been happy in LA thirteen years earlier and Margaret was interested to see it. But nobody had explained to us that in the late seventies it was impossible to find living space in LA if you had a child. Nobody was willing to rent. There were signs everywhere – ‘no dogs, no children’ – and estate agents told us not even to try. So it was a paradox that the only place willing to accommodate a doubly pregnant woman, her husband and our three-year-old son was a swingers’ apartment block in a dockside village in Marina del Rey.