Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  The last day’s discussion, following the successful model of the previous year, was on the forms that the theatre might take in the future, and in advance I had asked a number of playwrights to let me have short examples that could be performed. Joan Littlewood, whose controversial Oh, What a Lovely War!, was running in her East End theatre, enthusiastically agreed, but I had to restrain her. She wanted, as part of her demonstration, to bring in workmen with drills to rip up the floor of the hall. She engaged a model, who was to appear nude, although that she never told me. Joan had much to say in the first few days. Her cartoon, by Coia, appeared in the Scotsman, and she was fêted in a town she already knew well. But problems emerged during the week with her London production, and she had to cancel her “demonstration”, returning to the conference only on the day when it would have been performed. In the meantime Albee had agreed to write a piece and intended to use the model, but he had writer’s block, as did the next candidate. It was ultimately Ken Dewey, whom I had brought from Paris, who took over Anna Kesselaar, who normally posed for art classes, to put her into his “Happening”. Others had also agreed to do something for the last day, among them René de Obaldia and Roland Dubillard, who worked out a sketch which they would perform themselves, in French.

  The final briefing session on Saturday, before the last session of the conference, on what was also the last day of the Edinburgh Festival, was broken into two parts. While Tynan and I discussed with more than a hundred theatre professionals the order of the day and who was to be on the panels and have priority to state their views, those who were putting on demonstrations were rehearsing in the hall itself. I could not be in two places, so I never saw the rehearsals. All week long, Tynan and I had been disagreeing, sometimes in private, sometimes at the briefing sessions, but after the fiasco of the first day with its bad press, I had the upper hand, and Harewood was too busy with the many events under his control to be appealed to – and even if he had, I think that now he would have agreed with me. Tynan’s desire for private sessions had been scrapped. The Drama Conference was intended to be and had become both an entertainment and a tool for educating the public, in the hope – my hope anyway – that the public would take a greater interest in international theatre and serious thought-provoking plays, wherever they came from and whenever they were written. The “Angry Young Men”, the “Theatre of the Absurd”, the “Epic Theatre” and “Total Theatre”, as imagined by Artaud, Barrault, Brecht, Piscator, Reinhardt and many others, the expressionist theatre and the surrealist, the modern classics of Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov and just a little of the Brecht school of post-war (much of it pre-war) drama, were just then between them, taking attention away from Binkie Beaumont’s West End sureties, Coward, Maugham and Rattigan, and becoming known and recognizable to new audiences that were hungry for something different and relevant. The new upstarts from the red-brick universities were making waves, but the theatre-going traditional middle classes, who patronized Shaftesbury Avenue, didn’t like them on both class and entertainment grounds. I wanted to educate, whereas Tynan wanted a forum for his chums, and an elitist prestige for himself. The better I knew him, the less I took him seriously, compared to Harold Hobson, eccentric and mischievous, but always right where it mattered.

  Harold Hobson had been there all week, listening but not talking. While the Saturday briefing session was going on, he was sitting in the main hall, watching everything, in particular Ken Dewey’s rehearsal. He could not be there in the afternoon, because he had to write his piece for the Sunday Times that day and return to London. I myself had no idea of what was going to happen. I trusted Ken Dewey and knew that he had roped in many participants for his demonstration.

  Lord Harewood came to my last session, and I asked him to join the platform, which he did. The BBC Monitor programme, whose producer was David Jones, was filming that day as it had the previous one. The hall was a little more than half full, the numbers having risen during the previous few days, but only a little from the lows of Tuesday and Wednesday. The level of debate had risen day by day, as had the press coverage, but that too was much less than the previous year. Ken Tynan was alone in chairing the final session. After a few statements on the main subject from different persons present, the demonstrations began.

  Early on came the Obaldia-Dubillard dialogue between two writers at a conference in Edinburgh, who every time they emerge from the hall find that there is nothing to eat or drink, an experience that many festival artists, before and since, have undergone. This was followed by another short sketch, and then came the Dewey piece, but it was unannounced.

  First Charles Marowitz came to the microphone and began to give a pseudo-lecture on Beckett. He was interrupted by actors placed in the audience, and he argued with them. Then a variety of things happened: strangely clothed creatures began to crawl around the aisles of the downstairs seats toward the stage. At the top of McEwan Hall was a large dome with six side windows. These opened, and commedia dell’arte figures appeared through the window apertures shouting at each other and at the audience below. Carroll Baker, dressed in a clinging leopard-skin costume, began to climb, like a large cat, across the empty seats from the back of the hall, her eyes glued to the stage as if her prey were there, sometimes pushing members of the audience aside. The model, Anna Kesselaar, then appeared at one end of the organ gallery that ran behind the platform where the conferencees sat. She was hanging on to a BBC lighting trolley and was wheeled around the gallery by a BBC technician, naked, but within the law, as she was not moving, but being moved. She was a buxom blonde, but the railing covered the lower part of her body, so that only her head and breasts were visible and only for perhaps thirty seconds. What was seen by the audience was also seen that night on television. Then came the wailing of the bagpipes, as a single piper walked as he played around the back of the public gallery behind the audience. This was greeted with much laughter by the whole audience. Carroll Baker now reached the stage and climbed onto it. The audience was by then in stitches. Then suddenly – for the space underneath the organ gallery had been hidden that day by heavy velvet curtains – the curtains fell, revealing dozens of heads, hairdressers’ dummies, perched on shelves. Ken Dewey, as he soon explained, called his Happening “Big Head”, a reference to much of the pretentious nonsense that had been heard during the week, especially on the first day.

  Then came the debate over what we had seen. Tynan was outraged. Theatre was about commitment to political change, he said. He asked for those on the platform who considered themselves socialists to raise his hand. Not a single Russian or artist from Eastern Europe did. Dewey was asked to explain his Happening, and he did so with much applause. He was after all doing what Artaud advocated, shaking the audience’s sense of reality and making them realize that the world is an uncertain place where anything can happen. That was an important function of the theatre. This infuriated Tynan even more. Allan Kaprow came in to defend Dewey, but he needed no defending, having most of the platform and virtually all of the audience with him. He had amazed them, frightened them a little, but above all had made them laugh and given them a new perspective on the possibilities of the theatre.

  The debate went on for some time, and was certainly the liveliest of the week. Then Kaprow announced that the audience would be involved in another “happening” on the way out, as they left the building. It was now six o’clock. Trying to leave, everyone found their exit impeded by mounds of second-hand tyres that had been placed around the building during the afternoon. To get out one had to climb over them. I think that the final difficulty in leaving may have annoyed some of the audience.

  The press, which had been massively present that day, had taken Anna Kesselaar backstage, where they photographed her in more provocative poses than the public had seen, but we knew nothing about that at the time. They had also given lurid accounts of the Happening to the Lord Provost, who had, knowing nothing at all about the conference other than its prese
nce in the Festival brochure, condemned it on their sensationalized report.

  Sheila Colvin had been a tower of strength all through the week, doing exactly what she was asked to do with great competence. Both Tynan and I, as mentioned above, had offered her a job, post-Festival. But by the end of Saturday afternoon, she was in a state of exhaustion. I had arranged a final party for that night, not in Edinburgh but at Ledlanet, and had hired two buses to take the entire conference there. Sheila just wanted to go to bed. I told her she couldn’t. She was needed. I had some Benzedrine tablets, which I took occasionally in those days – my doctor prescribed them when I asked – but never took a whole one: when tired I had found that a nibble off the edge of a tablet kept me going for an hour or two, and I took more if needed later. I gave Sheila one, told her to nibble it, and when fatigue returned, to nibble a little more. She came on the first bus and helped dispense drinks.

  Attewell, at Ledlanet, had organized a great buffet, with champagne, wine and everything else. I had invited about a hundred of the local gentry in order to combine my two lives, that of a newly arrived county laird and of an arts impresario and successful publisher. I had been prominent on the best-seller list that year with Tropic of Cancer and other books that had done well. It was my apogee of confidence. Two coaches were bringing about a hundred, perhaps more, people who had been at the conference. In each bus I had set up a kind of minibar, because the journey would take over an hour. It was a bad night and getting worse. We arrived at Ledlanet very late; the other guests had been invited for seven o’clock, but it was well past eight when I arrived on the first bus with fifty or so others. They were standing around in dinner jackets and evening dresses, looking embarrassed. They were holding their glasses of champagne, but had not yet touched any of the buffet of whole salmon, barons of beef and many delicious other things which Attewell had temptingly laid out.

  Actors, playwrights and theatre directors now mingled with the local gentry of Kinross, Fife and Perth, many of them not yet knowing me, although at this juncture I was fairly notorious, and would be even more so in a few hours. I changed quickly into a dress kilt and went around to greet everyone and encourage them to attack the buffet. The second bus arrived, on which Tondi Barr had been playing barmaid on the way. By now it was black night with heavy rain, but indoors at Ledlanet chandeliers sparkled, the conversation flowed with the champagne, other wines were produced, and the food on the tables gradually disappeared. All the downstairs rooms were in use, my guests strolling from one to the other, and as the night progressed, pairs of lovers found empty bedrooms upstairs. Bettina had been there to play hostess from the beginning, but she retired to bed at about eleven o’clock.

  A telegram arrived from Lord Harewood congratulating me and everyone else on an exciting and entertaining end to the Drama Conference. I went to the top of the stairs and read it out to the crowd below. Gradually the locals left, and at about midnight the first bus set off for Edinburgh. I packed Eugène Ionesco and his wife Rodica into it, trying to shelter them from the driving rain, and most of the older and more important theatrical figures were on it. I was gathering up the remaining guests to get ready for the second when a bedraggled and soaking-wet group, led by Tondi, began to arrive on foot. The first driver had taken advantage of all the drink on offer, was drunk, and had run into a ditch in the dark. Except for a few who remained on the bus, a group of forty or so other passengers had walked some two and half miles back, including a steep climb up the half-mile drive to the house, which my great-grandfather had constructed almost vertically up the hill.

  The arrival of the wet newcomers reanimated the party, which started all over again. Towels and dry clothes were found; some wrapped blankets around themselves, new bottles were produced, and soon everything was again in full swing. The second bus did leave at about three o’clock, and the AA succeeded in getting the first back on the road as dawn was breaking. There were still a few people around, and they fell asleep on sofas or beds.

  It was a beautiful dawn. The storm had stopped, and a brilliant sun came over the horizon; the air was fresh and getting warmer. Andrew Boddy, the Edinburgh doctor who had put up William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi the previous year, went off for a walk in the woods with Joan Littlewood. When they returned, many hours later towards noon, they looked radiantly happy. Finding myself alone at about seven in the morning with Sheila Colvin in the gun room, I kissed her and the kiss was returned. Suddenly I had a pain in the ankle and found that from sheer exhaustion I had sprained it. Later on Doctor Boddy bound it up for me. I slept for about an hour and then returned to my duties, organized cars to get the stragglers back to Edinburgh and lunch before that, and I telephoned to make sure that both buses had returned their passengers to their various accommodations.

  Then in the afternoon I drove Joan Littlewood, Boddy and one or two others to Edinburgh, using the ferry. The new Forth Road Bridge was under construction: from each bank of the Forth the great metal structure was emerging, but a great gap of several hundred yards lay in the middle. Standing on the deck of the ferry, Joan looked at it. “It’s a perfect sculpture,” she observed. “They mustn’t do any more. Leave it just like that.”

  We arrived at the airport, where the waiting room was full of the faces I had been seeing for the past week. There was some delay, and someone asked why. “They’re waiting for Calder to bring a drunken pilot,” said Ken Tynan.

  * * *

  The Sunday newspapers were full of us. The Lord Provost, Duncan Weatherstone, knowing only what he had been told by the Scottish Daily Record – that a nude had been produced at the Drama Conference which had shocked everyone present – condemned the whole conference, saying that three weeks of glorious festival had been ruined by this terrible event. The whole Happening had been seen by the BBC television audience, and not a single protest was received. The serious newspapers gave much discussion space, apart from their critical coverage, to the validity of the “happenings”, a word soon in common use. But the popular press made a meal of it. The Scottish Daily Express, always a pillar of ignorance, prejudice, pretended puritanism and reaction, called for the sacking of Lord Harewood as well as the organizers of the Drama Conference, Kenneth Tynan and myself. This went on for weeks. I made many radio and television appearances, wrote letters to the press, gave more talks to Rotary Clubs and other groups who wanted to hear me, and generally was the centre of a scandal that was totally artificial.

  Two friends came to stay at Ledlanet: Jacques Chaix, who had arrived on the last day of the conference, and Alex Stefanović, who had been present throughout it. We roamed over my grouse moor, shot some birds and ate them. I was now preparing for my own minifestival, which I called, unpretentiously I hope, Ledlanet Nights. A Dunfermline printer produced a publicity brochure for me, designed by John Martin, an Edinburgh designer and artist, and I worked out all the logistics of an event over two weekends. The leaflets were scattered around hotels, art centres and restaurants over a wide area, and I placed a few ads. Reginald Attewell planned most of the catering. We borrowed a big spit from the local Conservative party (about which I had a bad conscience, being no Conservative) to roast a sheep and rented a marquee to put on the lawn in front of the house. Then I went to Yorkshire for the weekend.

  In order to get John Arden to come to Edinburgh, I had promised to visit his festival. This was in Kirkbymoorside, not far from my old school Gilling Castle, and now I was keeping my promise. For a month John had put on some event every night, some form of music, a play or poetry reading, or simply a discussion in his cottage. He had filmed the life of the village, interviewed on camera young people talking about their elders, old people talking about youth and what was wrong with it, plumbed the depth of local discontents and brought out opinions, prejudices and attitudes, some of them ugly. Then he had shown the film on a small screen in his cottage. Young people crowded in, the old ignored it – although some came to look through the win
dows at their own faces and gestures. I arrived on a sunny Saturday morning. The small Arden children, cherubic crawlers and toddlers, some able to run, were all naked, playing in the dust near a main road with no fences and fast traffic. I kept picking them up and bringing them back to the cottage, but John and Margaretta D’Arcy were unconcerned.

  I met several folk musicians and poets there, some of whom had been entertaining the village for days or weeks. It had been an extraordinary month in a small village in Yorkshire where normally nothing ever happened and where the young people were usually bored out of their wits except when they could go to a larger town for an evening. The Ardens had kept them talking and entertained, had developed their talents for acting, singing or just discussing an issue. It was the last day of the month. The Ardens would be leaving soon, and there was no one with the organizing power to keep something going in the future. I saw the last showing of the film, read something aloud out of some book and talked to some of those who had been coming every night. Then I went back to my London office.

  Shortly afterwards Ledlanet had its festival. The first weekend was a double bill of Rossini’s Soirées musicales, a group of Neapolitan-style songs with four singers and a piano accompaniment, and a short opera called Moonflowers by Richard Arnell. The songs were cheerful, tuneful and easy on the ear, and were given in the new drawing room, where we seated sixty. Ande Anderson, the producer, had Attewell dressed up as an eighteenth-century major-domo with a staff throughout the first piece, for which the star singer was Josephine Veasey, who a month earlier had sung at the Edinburgh Festival’s opening concert. She was Ande’s wife, but would not remain so much longer.