Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1

by Alan Bennett

  Seeing this production of my play without having attended the rehearsals or had anything to do with it until I actually saw it on stage is like going to see a relative who has been confined in an institution. A parent in a home. A son at boarding-school. Their hair is cut differently, they are wearing strange clothes; they have a routine with which one is not familiar, other friends, other jokes. Yet the features are the same. This is still the person I know. But what have these people done? What right have they to dress him up like this, cut off his hair, put her in that shapeless garment. This is my child. My mother.

  All I was complaining about was that it had been turned into ‘a lovely evening in the theatre’.

  There was a comic side to all this. Getting On is set in George Oliver’s North London home and furnished in a style that was becoming generally fashionable in the early seventies. I knew the style well, having parodied it as part of a TV series in 1966 Life in NW1. This was a period when stripped pine was in its infancy and the customary objects of such a household – the jelly moulds, the cane carpet beaters, the Seth Thomas clocks and Asian Pheasant plates – were not so readily available as they have since become. Attics were still unexplored, tallboys unstripped and the nightdress potential of Edwardian shrouds not yet fully exploited. My own house was of course stuffed with such objects. Rather than scour the junk shops of Brighton and Portobello Road, it seemed easier to transfer my own possessions onto the set. But I was barred from the theatre. So while a look-out was kept for the star rehearsing on the stage I smuggled in my precious objets trouvés at a side door.

  The question will, of course, be asked: what was the director, Patrick Garland, doing during all this? It was a question that kept occurring to me at the time, when I felt betrayed by him and by the management. In retrospect I think that by concentrating on Kenneth More and leaving my feelings to take care of themselves, Patrick probably did the right thing, though I found it hard to take when it was happening. A leading actor is like a thoroughbred horse, to be coaxed and gentled into the gate. One false move and his ears are back and he’s up at the other end of the paddock. With a West End opening large amounts of money are involved and where there is money there is always bad behaviour. In films, where more money is at stake, the behaviour is much worse, and the writer traditionally gets the mucky end of the stick. Nor should one ever underestimate the courage required of actors. To go out in front of a first-night audience bearing the main brunt of a new play is a small act of heroism. Actors must always have a sense that they are there to do the author’s dirty work. He may have written it, but he doesn’t have to go out there and say it. They are in the trenches, he is back at base.

  In the event, the play won an Evening Standard Award for the Best Comedy of 1971. It had never seemed to me to be a comedy and at the ceremony I said it was like entering a marrow for the show and being given the cucumber prize. Kenneth More is dead, dying courageously and very much in the mould of the parts he liked playing. I still think that he could have been, if not a better actor than he was given credit for, certainly a more interesting one. He wasn’t the simple, straightforward good-natured guy he played: he was more complicated than that. But because he wanted so much to be liked he left a large tract of his character undeveloped. Acting is a painful business and it’s to do with exposure, not concealment. As it is, the play still remains uncut. It’s far too long, too wordy, and probably reads better than it performs: a good part but a bad play.

  The third play in this collection, Habeas Corpus, was written in 1973. It was an attempt to write a farce without the paraphernalia of farce, hiding places, multiple exits and and umpteen doors. Trousers fall, it is true, but in an instantaneous way as if by divine intervention. I wrote it without any idea of how it could be staged and rehearsals began with just four bentwood chairs. The big revolution occurred after two weeks rehearsal when the director, Ronald Eyre, decided we could manage with three. Remembering Getting On I had worked hard on the text beforehand and together we cut it to the bone before rehearsals started. The bare stage specified in the stage directions is essential to the bare text. Re-introduce the stock-in-trade of farce (as the Broadway production tried to do) and the play doesn’t work. There is just enough text to carry the performers on and off, provided they don’t dawdle. If they have to negotiate doors or stairs or potted plants or get anywhere except into the wings, then they will be left stranded halfway across the stage, with no line left with which to haul themselves off.

  Neither Getting On nor Habeas Corpus is what Geoffrey Grigson called ‘weeded of impermanence’, a necessary condition apparently if a play or a poem is to outlast its time. Topical references are out. Of course plays don’t become timeless simply by weeding them of timely references any more than plays become serious by weeding them of jokes. But the jokes in Habeas Corpus about the Permissive Society do date it and some of the othei jokes make we wince. Still, Habeas Corpus is a favourite of mine if only because it’s one of the few times I’ve managed not to write a naturalistic play. It’s also the only one of my plays to be done regularly by amateurs. I can see why. It’s cheap to put on, there are plenty of good parts, mostly out of stock _ henpecked husband, frustrated wife, lecherous curate, ubiquitous char _ and everyone is slightly larger than life, which helps with the acting. But it’s not altogether farce. Death doesn’t quite lay down his book and poor Dennis ends up doomed. The original production ended on an even blacker note, explaining what to anyone who didn’t see the original production must seem a mysterious stage direction: ‘Wicksteed dances alone in the spotlight until he can dance no more.’ The original version of the play had no dance and ended with the quip:

  Whatever right or wrong is

  He whose lust lasts, lasts longest.

  Putting music to the play was the idea of Ronald Eyre. Carl Davis recorded some rumbustious incidental music on a fair-ground organ and, hearing it, Alec Guinness wanted to add a coda to the play. In top hat and tails he begins a debonair dance number, which slowly shudders to a halt as the spotlight dwindles, a real dance of death. It was the idea of this dance that helped him to reconcile the otherwise uncongenial character of Wicksteed to his own. It was a great bonus to the play and the exact opposite of what had happened in Getting On, an actor adding something to the play, enlarging it to accommodate his talents. I can’t imagine anyone else bringing off that dance, or how to describe it in a stage direction. I imagine most amateur productions turn it into a knees-up, which is very different but no bad way to end.

  Sometime in 1989 I read in the Guardian that the Victorian school at Burley Woodhead in Yorkshire was to be taken down stone by stone and re-erected in Bradford Museum, where it is to be visited by, among others, patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, in the hope, one presumes, of jogging their memories. This school transport came handily at the end of the decade to remind me of the last play in this collection, Enjoy, which I wrote as the decade opened and which had predicted just that.

  The title is possibly a mistake; Endure would probably have been better, though hardly a crowd-puller, or even, despite the implicit threat of chorus girls, Look on the Bright Side. Still, Enjoy it was and I can’t change it now.

  It’s the story of an old couple who live in one of the last back-to-backs in Leeds. Mam’s memory is failing and Dad is disabled. While he lands up in hospital, the end of the play sees Mam still happily living in the back-to-back, now lovingly reconstructed in a museum. The fact that one of the social workers who affect this transformation is their long-lost son in drag may have had something to do with the less than ecstatic reception the play received, but, that apart, the whole notion of the play was dismissed at the time as far-fetched, expressionistic even. A back-to-back in a museum! I was told in future to stick to the particularities of dialogue and the niceties of actual behaviour that I was supposed to be good at, and leave social comment to others.

  Of course, there are things wrong with the play _ the title certainly; the drag
maybe, particularly since it persuaded some critics that I cherished a shamefaced longing to climb into twinset and pearls. James Fenton, I was told, even referred to the drag character as ‘the writer’. Mr Fenton’s subsequent abandonment of dramatic criticism to become the Independent’s correspondent in the Philippines was one of the more cheering developments in the theatre in the eighties, though when President Marcos claimed to be a much-misunderstood man, I knew how he felt.

  However, if only in a spirit of ‘I told you so’, I noted in the course of the eighties various news items, like the reconstruction of the school at Burley Woodhead, which bore out the central thesis of the play and proved it to have been, though I say so myself, prophetic. For instance, a room was created in 1984 at Park Prewett Hospital in Basingstoke furnished as it would have been forty years ago in order to assist elderly patients in ‘reminiscence therapy’. There was the exhibit, also in 1984, at the Miami Zoo of urban man in his natural habitat: a man in a sitting-room in a cage. There was the proposal, later abandoned, to reconstruct part of the Death Railway in Thailand as a tourist attraction. Most pertinent of all (and, of course, this is the cutting I have lost, so you will have to take my word for it) was the devoted reproduction in a museum somewhere in England of the last of the prefabs, with the couple who had lived in it doing a regular stint as curators.

  Whether or not I got it right, I still like the laying-out scene in Act Two because it is one of the few occasions when a character of mine has done what characters in plays and novels are supposed to do, namely, taken on a life of their own. Until the two women started to lay Dad out I had thought Mr Craven was dead and his erection (on the typewriter) took me as much by surprise as it did them. It is such a farcical scene it perhaps belongs to a different play, though the setting and the atmosphere of it owe something to Peter Gill’s season of D. H. Lawrence plays which I saw in the seventies at the Royal Court.

  With the exception of Habeas Corpus all these plays are too long – well over an hour each way, which is all I can ever take in the theatre – and in performance they should be cut. As Churchill said, ‘The head cannot take in more than the seat can endure.’ I recently took a child to see The Wind in the Willows. He first of all asked how long it was likely to last, and then, ‘How many are there of those things when they let you out for a bit?’ ‘Intervals? Just one.’ ‘Oh. Those are the bits I like best.’

  Alan Bennett

  January 1991

  FORTY YEARS ON

  To my mother and father

  CHARACTERS

  THE HEADMASTER

  FRANKLIN, a housemaster

  TEMPEST, a junior master

  MATRON

  MISS NISBITT, the Bursar’s secretary

  HEAD BOY and LECTERN READER

  THE ORGANIST

  The Play Within the Play

  FRANKLIN plays HUGH

  MATRON plays MOGGIE

  MISS NISBITT plays NURSIE

  THE HEADMASTER and TEMPEST play various parts

  All other parts are played by the boys of Albion House School. These boys should be on the stage wherever possible. Even when they take no direct part in the action they should be ranged round the gallery as onlookers. Any scene shifting or stage setting should be done by them.

  The first performance of Forty Years On was given at the Apollo Theatre, London, on 31 October 1968. It was presented by Stoll Productions Ltd and the cast was as follows:

  HEADMASTER John Gielgud

  FRANKLIN, a housemaster Paul Fddington

  TEMPEST, a junior master Alan Bennett

  MATRON Dorothy Reynolds

  MISS NISBITT, the Bursar’s secretary Nora Nicholson

  THE LECTERN READER Robert Swann

  ORGANIST Carl Davis

  SKINNER Anthony Andrews

  SPOONER (horn) Roger Brain

  CARTWRIGHT (flute) Andrew Branch

  FOSTER William Burleigh

  WIMPENNY Philip Chappell

  WIGGLESWORTH (trumpet) Thomas Cockrell

  TREDGOLD (guitar) George Fenton

  CHARTERIS Freddie Foot

  LEADBETTER Paul Guess

  GILLINGS Dickie Harris

  DISHFORTH Peter Kinley

  LORD Robert Langley

  BOTTOMLEY (alto) Stephen Leigh

  SALTER Denis McGrath

  MACILWAINE Keith McNally

  JARVIS (treble) Stephen Price

  CRABTREE Colin Reese

  RUMBOLD Merlin Ward

  MOSS (violin) Neville Ware

  TUPPER Alan Warren

  The play was directed by PATRICK GARLAND and designed by JULIA TRAVELYAN OMAN. lighting was by ROBERT ORNBO. music arranged and directed by CARL DAVIS.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The text here printed differs in some small details from that first performed on the stage at the Apollo Theatre. In performance certain sections of the play were thinned down and odd lines cut in order to reduce the playing time. In the printed version these sections have been restored.

  I would like to thank Collins and Co. for permission to quote from Sir Harold Nicolson’s Diaries and Letters 1930–39, Sir Osbert Sitwell for the quotation from Great Morning and Mr Leonard Woolf for the quotation from Downhill All The Way.

  ACT ONE

  The Assembly Hall of Albion House, a public school on the South Downs.

  The Assembly Hall is a gloomy Victorian Gothic building, with later additions, a conglomeration of periods without architectural unity. It is dingy and dark and somewhat oppressive. A gallery runs round the hall, and on the gallery stage right is an organ. Staircases lead up to the gallery stage right and stage left. At the head of the staircase stage right is a lectern and below it is a hymn board. To the rear of the stage is a War Memorial, with lists and lists of names which run the whole height of the set. This War Memorial consists of two sliding doors and behind these doors is a back-projection screen. Whenever a scene takes place in Albion House these doors remain closed as at the opening of the play. During the Claridge’s scenes they are opened to reveal a photograph of the relevant period of the Second World War. During the memoirs (i.e. all scenes preceded by a reading from the lectern) the screen shows a photograph relevant to the subject of the memoir. It should be emphasized that the screen is used for decorative purposes rather than to provide information essential to the understanding of the play. I have not indicated where these doors are opened to reveal the screens or the photographs projected, except for the T. E. Lawrence Lantern Lecture and at the end of Acts One and Two.

  When the curtain rises the stage is dark. We hear the sounds of school, a chapel bell, the sound of a cricket match and boys repeating by rote in class. An organ plays softly. A boy enters and switches on the lights.

  Another boy enters with a hand-bell which he rings across the stage and off it, and as the sound fades away the boys of Albion House School enter singing a processional hymn. They form up at the front of the stage, followed by FRANKLIN, MATRON, TEMPEST and MISS NISBITT. When they have all taken their places the HEADMASTER enters.

  HEADMASTER: Members of Albion House, past and present.

  Parents and Old Boys. It does not seem so many years since I stood in this hall on November 11, 1918, to hear the headmaster declare a half holiday on the occasion of the Armistice. That was my first term at Albion House as a schoolboy, and now I am headmaster and it is my last term. It is a sad occasion…

  (A jet aircraft roars overhead temporarily drowning his words, and he waits.)

  … it is a sad occasion, but it is a proud occasion too. I can see now some of the faces of my school-fellows on that never-to-be-forgotten November morning, many of them the sons of old boys who, proud young trees for the felling, fell in that war. And in many a quiet English village there stands today a cenotaph carved with their names, squire’s son rubbing shoulders with blacksmith’s boy in the magnificent equality of death. Scarce twenty summers sufficed to weather those names before England must needs take up arms in a Second Wo
rld War.

  (Another aircraft passes.)

  (FRANKLIN is visibly impatient during this speech. Occasionally he blows his nose, or stares at the ceiling.)

  And now that too has passed into history. None of you boys are old enough to remember that Second War, nor even some of you masters. Yet I remember them both. I can still see myself standing at that window one summer day in 1918 and listening to the rumble of the guns in Flanders.

  (FRANKLIN blows his nose loudly.)

  I stood at that window again in June 1940 to see a lone Spitfire tackle a squadron of the Luftwaffe. Those times left their mark on Albion House. Some of the older ones among you will remember Bombardier Tiffin, our Corps Commandant and Gym Instructor, lately retired. The more observant ones among you will have noticed that one of Bombardier Tiffin’s legs was not his own. The other one, God bless him, was lost in the Great War. Some people lost other things, less tangible perhaps than legs but no less worthwhile-they lost illusions, they lost hope, they lost faith. That is why … chewing, Charteris. That is why the twenties and thirties were such a muddled and grubby time, for lack of all the hopes and ideals that perished on the fields of France. And don’t put it in your handkerchief. Hopes and ideals which, in this school, and in schools like it all over the country we have always striven to keep alive in order to be worthy of those who died. It was Baden-Powell I think –

  (FRANKLIN clears his throat.)

  – I think it was Baden-Powell who said that a Public Schoolboy must be acceptable at a dance, and invaluable in a shipwreck. But I don’t think you’d be much use in either, Skinner, if you were playing with the hair of the boy in front. See me afterwards. A silent prayer.