by Alan Bennett
Hilary Well, there’s a pistol in that drawer.
Bron I don’t know. Maybe you ought to get a dog.
Hilary I believe some people commit suicide out of sheer curiosity. Certainly if one were to cut one’s throat I think the first thought as blood spurted through one’s fingers would be, ‘Goodness! It works!’ Exclamation mark. Now Duff, what about my books?
Duff I foresee no difficulty. They will be home almost as soon as you are.
Hilary That’s what I’m worried about. I think I ought to leave them here.
Duff It would please the British Council. The Embassy is barren of books.
Hilary I wasn’t thinking of the Embassy. I was thinking of Eric.
Duff Eric?
Hilary Someone must. You see it’s all here, Eric. Horizon, the parish magazine. Scrutiny, the school chronicle. All the nice distinctions, careful cross-bearings and distances on the pedometer. Relief maps of anxiety, the contours of small depressions. Get well cards and invites to funerals. Notes under the general heading of amelioration. Deaths in vicarages and (Little) Venice. Bottles of Jordan water and basinfuls of the warm south. School and the trenches, good talk and good wine and the never-ending siege of the country house. Messages from an unvisited island. What would the Ambassador want with all that? He is a cultivated fellow. He can take it as read. But it’s just what Eric wants.
Eric I don’t read.
Hilary It will be something to do.
Olga He doesn’t want the books.
Eric Yes, I do.
Bron Why? Crosswords, anagrams. Detective stories. English nonsense.
Hilary Why do you think I don’t want them? It’s Toad Hall.
Bron It’s all very well never to do what is expected of you, but what do you do when the unexpected is what people have come to expect?
Hilary Then you do the done thing.
Veronica Make one person happy. Pa.
Duff I imagine the telephone is cut off, is it?
Olga Yes.
Duff Pity.
Hilary Here we are again. A country house. The telephone out of order. The road blocked. A group of disgruntled people waiting for … what? Deliverance, is it? Judgement?
Bron Will there be photographers at the other end? Press?
Duff I can’t give you an absolute assurance on that. I hope not. I don’t know.
Olga The cars are here.
Duff Good, good. This time on Tuesday we shall be in Wiltshire.
Duff shepherds Bron and Veronica out. Olga waits. A car horn sounds, two short notes.
Eric I don’t want the books. I don’t want the bloody books.
Hilary takes no notice. The car horn sounds again.
Hilary Poop-poop. Poop-poop.
The chair is still rocking as Hilary leaves, followed by Olga. Eric watches them from the verandah, the books still in his arms.
Curtain
AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD
Characters
Burgess
Coral Browne
Tolya
Tailor
Shop Assistant
An Englishman Abroad was first performed at the Royal National Theatre, London, on 1 December 1988 as part of a double bill entitled Single Spies. The cast was as follows:
Coral Browne, Prunella Scales
Guy Burgess, Simon Callow
Tolya, Paul Brightwell
Tailor, Alan Bennett
Shop Assistant, Edward Halsted
Director, Alan Bennett
Designer, Bruno Santini
Lighting, Paul Pyant
A projection screen hides the set. Stage right of the screen is a bentwood chair. The screen glows red and projected on it is the head of Stalin as we hear a record of Jack Buchanan singing ‘Who stole my heart away?’.
The song fades as Coral Browne enters stage right. She is a striking woman, tall and elegant, and carries a luxurious fur coat.
Coral Stalin died in 1953. I was in Affairs of State at the time, a light comedy that had a decent run at the Cambridge. Stalin had had a decent run too, though I’d never been a fan of the old boy, even during the war when he was all the rage. It wasn’t so much the cult of personality that put me off (being in the theatre I’m no stranger to that); it was the moustache. One smiles, but more judgements than people care to admit are grounded in such trivialities, and when you’re just a fool of an actress like me you don’t mind coming out with it.
After Uncle Joe’s death they played with the understudies for a bit, then brought in a cast of unknowns in something called The Thaw. Soviet experts in the West (what nowadays would be called ‘experienced Kremlin-watchers’) thought that this show was going to run and run, predicting – poor loves – that the Iron Curtain was about to go up and stay up. Ah well. Incidentally, don’t let any of this deceive you into thinking I took any sort of interest in Soviet affairs. Actresses are excused newspapers much as delicate boys used to be excused games; the only paper I see regularly is The Stage, and its coverage of the comings and goings in the Politburo is, to say the least, cursory.
Still, there were repercussions, even on me. When peace breaks out suddenly, as it did then, culture is first on the menu, actors and musicians sent in ahead of the statesmen like the infantry before the tanks. We had the Red Army Choir; they got the Stratford Memorial Theatre in Hamlet. Michael Redgrave was the eponymous prince, and notwithstanding I was scarcely five minutes older than he was, I played his mother.
Guy Burgess enters stage left. He is in his early fifties, a man who has once been handsome but is now running to seed.
Burgess Hearing that Stalin had died one cheered up no end. It wasn’t just that I was glad to see the back of the old bugger, though I was, but for the first time since I’d come to Moscow in 1951 I found I’d something to do. Death always means work for somebody, and one was suddenly very busy reading the papers, monitoring news broadcasts, collating and analysing Western reactions to the Marshal’s somewhat overdue departure. However, in no time at all, they had him tucked in beside Lenin on Red Square, and life returned to what I had come to regard as normal – doing The Times crossword, the Statesman competition, reading Trollope and Jane Austen. A gentleman of leisure. Of course the most accomplished exiles are, and always have been, the Russians. They’re tutors in it practically. So, in a sense we had come to the right place.
What made it harder to bear was that no one in what one couldn’t help thinking of as the outside world actually knew we were here. For the first few years of our sojourn we were kept very much under wraps – no letters, no phone calls, nothing. It made Greta Garbo look gregarious. I say ‘we’, meaning my colleague Maclean, with some diffidence. It’s dispiriting to find oneself yoked permanently to someone who was never meant to be more than a travelling companion (besides having been a fellow travelling companion, of course). Now it was ‘we’, handcuffed together in the same personal pronoun.
Quarantine or honeymoon, our period of probation ended when we were revealed to the world’s press in Moscow in 1956. After that, though we never exactly hit the cocktail party circuit and still had to mind our ps and qs, there was less – shall we say – skulking. (Burgess exits left.)
Coral Dissolve to my dressing-room in the Moscow Art Theatre one night after the performance. I am sitting there, applying the paint-stripper, when I hear a commotion next door. Suddenly Hamlet bursts in. Someone is being sick in his dressing room, would I assist?
Now vomiting is not childbirth. If one is having a baby a helping hand is not unwelcome. If one is having a puke, one is best left alone to get on with it. Remembering always that nausea requires patience. One of the few lessons I have learned in life is that when one is sick it is always in threes. Judging by the state of the carpet this was a lesson this particular gentleman had yet to learn. When his face came out of the basin I found I knew it, though not by name. The moment for introductions was long since past and Redgrave did not make them. I cleaned the man up, noting that he was
English, he was upper class, and he was drunk. It was only later that night when a note was slipped under my door at the hotel that I found out he was also Guy Burgess. (Coral has put on her fur coat and she takes a note from the pocket.) ‘Bring a tape measure.’ Bring a tape measure?
The motif of Stalin has faded from the screen and as we hear Burgess singing the screen rises to reveal his very untidy flat. There is an easy chair, a sofa and a small table, several bookshelves filled to overflowing with (English) books and papers and at the rear of the flat a kitchenette. Through an alcove is a double bed, unmade and the sheets unwashed and stage left is a pianola.
Burgess (singing off)
Oh God our help in ages past
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home.
Burgess wanders in, shaving.
Before the hills in order stood
Or earth received her frame
The doorbell rings.
From everlasting Thou art God,
It’s open.
Through endless years the same.
Burgess hurriedly clears some dirty clothes from a chair and as an afterthought flings the heaped contents of an ashtray under the sofa, as Coral enters through the hallway stage right.
Burgess (to Coral) Hello.
Coral (puffed) The stairs!
Burgess I know. I’m sorry. Recover. What a splendid coat. Let me take it. (He buries his face in the grand fur coat before dropping it, pretty unceremoniously, on the sofa.) Mmm. Have a drink.
Coral Please.
Burgess I’ve just been tidying up. (He sweeps some stuff to the floor and removes his soap and towel.)
Coral One moment. My soap. This is my soap.
Burgess It is. It is. ‘Palmolive – for that schoolgirl complexion.’
Coral So it was you who took my cigarettes?
Burgess One wasn’t well. (He hands her a glass, which she surreptitiously cleans on her skirt. He pours her a drink.)
Coral My Scotch?
Burgess smiles.
Burgess One should have asked. Coral You even took my face powder.
Burgess I know. One is such a coward. Still. You came. I thought you’d chuck. (He raises his glass in a toast.)
Coral I nearly did. I seem to have trekked halfway across Moscow. Is there something in the Communist Manifesto against taxis? One never sees any. And that woman on the door downstairs!
Burgess I know. How did you get past her?
Coral I gave her my lipstick.
Burgess I can’t think what she’ll do with it. I’m always struck by her pronounced resemblance to the late Ernest Bevin. They could be sisters.
Coral Did you enjoy the play?
Burgess What play?
Coral Our play. Hamlet.
Burgess Loved it. Loved it. I liked the look of Laertes. He goes rather well into tights.
Coral That’s what he thinks.
Burgess He looked as if he’d put a couple of King Edwards down there. That apart, of course, such a pleasure to hear the language so beautifully spoken.
Coral I was told you were asleep.
Burgess No. Though one did have a tiny zizz. After all, one has seen it before. Are there still a couple of music-hall comedians on the wireless called Nat Mills and Bobby?
Coral I don’t know them.
Burgess Their catchphrase was, ‘Well, why don’t you get on with it?’ I always feel they would have come in handy in Hamlet. Still. The comrades lapped it up. But they do, of course, culture. How do you like Moscow?
Coral Loathe it, darling. I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about. It gives the play a very sinister slant.
She walks about the flat.
Burgess It’s hardly luxury’s lap, I’m afraid. A pigsty, in fact. I used to live in Jermyn Street. Tragic, you might think, but not really. That was a pigsty, too. By their standards it’s quite commodious. Palatial even. One is very lucky.
Coral What is that smell?
Burgess Me probably.
Coral No. Besides that. If it’s our lunch, it’s burning.
Burgess Oh. Now. It might be. (He gets up unhurriedly and goes into the kitchenette.) Yes, it is. It was stew. (He peers into the pan.) One could salvage some of it? (He shows it to Coral.)
Coral Hardly.
Burgess Perhaps not. (He returns to the kitchen with it.) However. All is not lost. I managed to scrounge two tomatoes this morning, and … quite a talking point … a grapefruit. Shall we perch? I generally do.
He draws Coral’s chair to the table and himself sits on the arm of the easy chair.
Coral (faintly) Treats.
He puts a tomato on her plate and eats his like an apple.
Burgess Garlic?
Coral No, thank you.
Burgess I love it. (He eats several cloves.) Yum yum. Now. Tell me all the gossip. Do you see Harold Nicolson?
Coral I have seen him. I don’t know him.
Burgess Oh, don’t you? Nice man. Nice man. What about Cyril Connolly?
Coral I haven’t run into him either.
Burgess Really? That must be quite difficult. He’s everywhere. You know him, of course?
Coral As a matter of fact, no.
Burgess Oh. One somehow remembers everyone knowing everyone else. Everyone I knew knew everyone else. Auden – do you know him? Pope Hennessy?
Coral (manfully) The theatre’s in a terrible state.
Burgess Is it?
Coral Three plays closed on Shaftesbury Avenue in one week.
Burgess That’s tragic. Some ballet on ice is coming here. The comrades are all agog. I’m rather old-fashioned about ice. I used to direct at Cambridge, you know. That’s how I know your star, Mr Redgrave. I directed him in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. It was an average production, but notable for a memorable performance by Arthur Marshall as Lady Cicely Waynflete. Happy days. One thinks back and wonders, did one miss one’s way. What would have happened had one gone into the theatre? Nothing, I suppose.
Coral Who knows, you might just have been Kenneth Tynan’s cup of tea.
Burgess Oh, do you think so? Do you know him?
Coral Slightly.
Burgess He happened after we came away. You’re not eating your tomato.
Coral I’m not hungry.
Burgess I am. (He takes it.) This garlic!
Coral Do you see many people here?
Burgess Oh yes. Heaps of chums. You don’t know what you’re missing with this tomato.
Coral There’s your other half, I suppose.
Burgess What? Oh yes. He’s taken up the balalaika. We play duets.
Coral Maclean?
Burgess No. Oh no. Not Maclean. (He bursts out laughing.) Taking up the balalaika! Maclean’s not my friend. Oh, ducky. Oh no, not Maclean. He’s so unfunny, no jokes, no jokes at all. Positively the last person one would have chosen if one had had the choice. And here we are on this terrible tandem together – Debenham and Freebody, Crosse and Blackwell, Auden and Isherwood, Burgess and Maclean. Do you know Auden?
Coral You asked me. No.
Burgess (going over to the kitchenette) Sweet man. Don’t look. The seeds get inside my plate. (He swills his teeth.) People ask me if I have any regrets. The one regret I have is that before I came away I didn’t get kitted out with a good set of National Health gnashers. Admirable as most things are in the Soviet Socialist Republic, the making of dentures is still in its infancy. (Pause.) Actually, there’s no one in Moscow at all. It’s like staying up in Cambridge for the Long Vac. One makes do with whoever’s around.
Coral Me.
Burgess No, no. And in any case I asked you here for a reason. Did you bring a tape measure?
Coral I did. (She produces it.)
Burgess Good. (Burgess puts on his jacket. His suit is well cut but shabby, the knee of the trousers darned and darned again.) I want you to measure me for some suits. From my tailor. I only have one
suit. It’s the one I came away in and I’ve fallen down a lot since then.
Coral But I shan’t know where to start. What measurements will he want?
Burgess Measure it all. He’ll work it out. He’s a nice man.
He gets her pencil and paper. She draws the figure of a man on the paper.
Coral Won’t your people here get you a suit?
Burgess What people?
Coral The authorities.
Burgess Oh yes, but have you seen them? Clothes have never been the comrades’ strong point. Besides, I don’t want to look like everybody else, do I? (He bends his arm for her to measure.) I seem to remember doing this.
Coral Your arms can’t have altered.
Burgess I never cared tuppence for clothes before … Measure me round here … I was kitted out in the traditional garb of my class. Black coat, striped trousers. Pinstripe suit and tweeds for weekends. Shit order, of course. Always in shit order. But charm, I always had charm.
Coral (measuring away) You still have charm. She said through clenched teeth.
Burgess But not here. Not for them. For charm one needs words. I have no words. And, short of my clothes, no class. I am ‘The Englishman’. ‘Would you like to go to bed with the Englishman?’ I say. Not particularly. One got so spoiled during the war. The joys of the black-out. London awash with rude soldiery. (He says a Russian phrase.) Skolko zeem, skolko let.
Coral What does that mean?
Burgess Skolko zeem, skolko let? It means the same as our ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ Nostalgia, you see, knows no frontiers.
Coral Do you speak Russian?
Burgess I manage. Maclean’s learned it, naturally. Swot. I haven’t. I ought to, simply for the sex. Boys are quite thin on the ground here. I can’t speak their language and they can’t speak mine, so when one does manage to get one it soon palls. Sex needs language.