by David Hare
DAVID HARE
Plays One
Slag
Teeth ’n’ Smiles
Knuckle
Licking Hitler
Plenty
Introduced by
the Author
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Slag
Characters
First Performance
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Teeth ’n’ Smiles
Characters
First Performance
Epigraph
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Scene Eight
Knuckle
Characters
First Performance
Epigraph
Act One
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Scene Eight
Act Two
Scene Nine
Scene Ten
Scene Eleven
Scene Twelve
Scene Thirteen
Scene Fourteen
Scene Fifteen
Scene Sixteen
Licking Hitler
Dedication
Characters
First Performance
Licking Hitler
Plenty
Characters
First Performance
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Scene Eight
Scene Nine
Scene Ten
Scene Eleven
Scene Twelve
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Introduction
The editors at Faber and Faber talk to the author about the plays in this collection.
Q: Was Slag the first full-length play you wrote?
Yes. I wrote it in 1969, with the typewriter on my knees, while travelling in a van with an itinerant theatre group Tony Bicât and I had founded called Portable Theatre. I’d started the company one year earlier, as a director in fact. A playwright let us down and we were left with a gap in our programme, so I was forced to write a one-act play at short notice. The piece was as silly as you’d expect of something concocted in four days by someone who’d never really thought about writing a play before. It was a primitive satire on the unlikelihood of revolution in Britain – this was the late sixties, remember – but it did attract Michael Codron’s attention. He immediately asked me to write a full-length play. Slag was produced originally at Hampstead in 1970. It was then revived a year later by the Royal Court who had a gap in their programme. They therefore picked it up and put in a starrier, though equally excellent, cast. Michael went on to be involved with my first four plays.
Q: You could also call Slag a satire.
Oh certainly. By one of those coincidences of timing that have been a feature of my life as a writer, I had started reading some of the wilder feminist writings of the period, and in between the time when I began writing the play and its subsequent production the whole subject of women’s liberation had become hotly topical. Germaine Greer had been clever enough to corral some of the ideas that were in the air and impose her extraordinary intellectual discipline on them to write The Female Eunuch. It was both a wonderful and a popular book. This meant by the time the audience reached the theatre, they were, if you like, ready for the fun.
Q: You have said Slag is about your own schooldays.
The most useless advice any writer can be given is: write about what you know. How can a writer do otherwise? Perhaps a better injunction might be: write about what you know, but make sure you transform it. Fiction is only interesting if it involves a true act of imagination. Noël Coward made me laugh when he described Slag as five very good scenes and one bad one. I’m afraid he was being generous. But what dreamlike vitality the play does have is entirely from my imagining something about which, by definition, I can know nothing: what it’s like to be in an all-female community.
Q: Did you imagine at that time you were going, primarily, to be a comic writer?
I honestly didn’t think about it. In all the plays I wrote in the seventies there is a powerful element of scorn. Scorn, I’d say, rather than anger, because I was impatient with an old England which had transparently collapsed, and yet the illusion of which still gripped our thinking and feeling. And, of course, scorn is best expressed comically. I love satire because I think it’s so good for you. Derisive public laughter is powerfully democratic. I was delighted with a recent humourless academic publication, claiming to be about my plays. It reviles them on the wonderful grounds that they’re full of jokes. I loved that. Nothing threatens the ivory tower more than a good laugh. But it was a confusion about whether I was indeed a satirist or something else which led to my meeting Peggy Ramsay, who became my agent, and, I would say, the formative influence on my play writing life.
Recently, I’ve read Harold Bloom’s book, The Western Canon, which asserts that any serious writer belongs consciously to a tradition and feels him or herself to be in some sort of direct dialogue with the great Western writers. I must admit I have no sense of this. When I am asked to name playwrights who have been an influence on me, I am stumped to name any. If that seems immodest, then I can only say, on the contrary, I admire plenty of playwrights – and a good many among my contemporaries – yet it seems to me the more you admire a writer, the less you want to imitate them. The least attractive part of Shaw or Joyce or Tolstoy is the part that feels itself in competition with Shakespeare. And indeed those playwrights in my lifetime who have sought, say, a deliberately Shakespearian dimension to their work seem to me to have gone alarmingly astray. What influences me in my writing is not literature but life. And nobody has ever given me more courage to write than Peggy.
Q: What do you mean by that?
Well, I wrote three plays – all satires – before I wrote Knuckle. Admittedly it’s still pastiche. It’s based on the idea of re-setting an American thriller in the deepest Home Counties of England. Nevertheless, it does have, distinctively, the first stirrings of a slightly different voice, a voice which is in earnest. The play has a morality. The hero doesn’t get the girl precisely because he behaves badly. My first agent, who had taken me on in the hope that I would rip merry hell out of contemporary society, was horrified by the play. He told me that I should stick to writing jokes. It was his reaction that impelled me to give the play to Peggy Ramsay. Peggy was an ex-opera singer – very brilliant, very forthright. In the fifties she had started a literary agency which was run with a carefree kind of vigour and enthusiasm which was unique in theatrical London. When she read Knuckle she was so excited she broke her lifetime rule. She put her own money into a client’s production. It was a play she was determined to fight for.
I have to make clear I think Peggy the most impassioned and literate fighter of the post-war British theatre. Alongside Joan Littlewood, John Osborne and George Devine, she is one of its unequivocal heroes, though perhaps the least known. There are at least a dozen writers, the most famous of them Joe Orton, who owe a good part of their prosperity to her championship. She was never better, or livelier, than when defending an author who was ahead of public taste. So when Knuckle finally opened, disastrously, in
the week after Edward Heath’s election called to decide ‘Who Runs Britain’, it was Peggy who steadied my nerve and kept me writing through the distinctly choppy months that followed.
Q: The critics hated it?
Not entirely. It had one or two powerful advocates, including the late Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times. One or two critics, like Irving Wardle, who then wrote for The Times, were kind enough later publicly to admit that they’d misjudged the play on first viewing. But there’s no doubt that the whole venture of producing a play which attacked the capitalist system in a West End theatre had a symbolic significance which somewhat obscured the text. It evoked responses which were, shall we say, not entirely literary. Through all the resulting disappointment, it was Peggy who constantly reassured me that it’s not finally very important how any individual play in a writer’s life is received. The long run is what matters. She always told me she believed I would still be writing in twenty years’ time. If I am, it is, in part, thanks to her. She had a perspective and a sang froid which I entirely lacked.
Reading it now, of course, the play does seem modestly prophetic. It is organized round the two types of British capitalism which ten years later were to clash so violently: the paternalistic kind with its old social networks and its spurious moralizing, and the new aggressive, shameless variety which would gain such ascendancy in the 80s.
Knuckle is a director’s piece and is still revived all over the world by directors who imagine they can solve its stylistic demands. They’re usually wrong. The stagecraft is immature. There are too many scenes and too many of them are set in the same places. The only excuse I have for its clumsiness is that I was writing with such political urgency I neglected the craft. Or maybe I just didn’t possess it in the first place. Anyway, the cliché that is always advanced about my work is that I try to use the language of the cinema in the theatre. It’s not true. Any such aim would be doomed. More properly, when writing epic plays, you should try to develop a theatrical language which parallels the cinema’s freedom, but which necessarily uses different techniques. You have to find equivalents. Too much of Knuckle is in mid-shot.
Q: Teeth ’n’ Smiles was a much less contentious play.
Indeed. I’ve been involved in a couple of these ephemera – plays which seem to have their success because they are mysteriously in touch with the mood of a particular time. They then just disappear into the theatre annuals. Certainly I haven’t heard of anyone doing Teeth ’n’ Smiles in the last ten years. I directed this one – as I now did all my plays for the next ten years – and I remember it as one of the really blessed times I’ve had in the theatre. 1975 was a very hot summer. This wonderful rock music was pounding out of the Royal Court Theatre into Sloane Square. Malcolm McClaren had just opened the boutique Sex some way down the Kings Road. And, somehow, everything was set fair for a sloppy, dirty, funny play about hippies behaving badly through a long night in Cambridge. I think Peter Brook says somewhere that theatre is partly fashion and anyone who doesn’t accept that is going to get their heart broken. But, on the other hand, anyone who, having accepted it, doesn’t then instantly forget it, is going to be a bad playwright. He’s right.
Q: It has a very original use of music.
I had hated the way the theatre tried to emulate pop music in the sixties. Theatre people envied its popularity, so they tried to hitch a ride on pop music’s vitality. ‘Oh if only the theatre could be like rock music’, they’d say. Whereas I liked both. But I liked them because they were different. I’ve never been a great fan of the musical theatre. Only the very greatest musicals avoid generality. Most of them just jump straight in to trying to yank at your emotional levers without doing the work of involving you in the first place. Opera, on stage at least, leaves me cold. Dramatically, it’s so slow. But in Teeth ’n’ Smiles we had the idea that the music would actually be part of the drama, that it would develop character, that it would tell a story. In other words, it would be justified naturalistically. And I think the idea works.
Q: Knuckle had introduced Kate Nelligan to the West End stage and she went on to appear in several other of your plays – Licking Hitler, Plenty and Dreams of Leaving.
There’s an interesting remark by Evelyn Waugh where he says that at the age of forty every British writer either becomes a prophet or finds a style. For me, it was when I was approaching thirty that I began to realize that the rhythm in which you write is as important as the apparent meaning – that the rhythm indeed is part of the meaning. By rhythm, I don’t just mean rhythm of dialogue, but the sense of the beat both in the language itself and in its interplay with the action. It was at the time that I was beginning to tighten and refine the tension of my dialogue – I wanted it as distinctively strung and taut as I could make it – and at the same time it happened that I had the great good fortune to meet Kate.
I’ve worked with some actors, good actors – in other peoples’ work I’ve seen them to be excellent – and yet somehow they instinctively don’t hear my lines. Sadly, these actors might as well go home on the first day. They’re in for weeks of torture. Because, frankly, you either hear the music or you don’t. Kate had not just a faultless ear for my lines, but a very extraordinary tension in her physicality as well. This made her the near-perfect player of my work. She was always compelling. The fact she was Canadian also gave her an edge in playing these very English plays. People used to think I wrote parts for her, which I never did. But undoubtedly her fearlessness and her ambition helped me to develop my ambition as well. I like to think we grew together.
Q: The TV film, Licking Hitler, is based on a real operation?
I discovered by chance about the Black Propaganda Units which had done their best to disorient the German war effort with highly personalized disinformation. I wouldn’t say they had remained a secret after the war. After all, there was a book by the man who had run them, Sefton Delmer, called Black Boomerang, which is some sort of record of his peculiar work. But nobody before had quite seized on the significance of what these units were up to. I was inspired in this idea of re-thinking some parts of the war effort by Angus Calder’s great book, The People’s War. This pointed out that it was the Second World War itself which educated the people towards the great Labour victory of 1945. The rejection of Churchill was not the anomaly or betrayal of popular, patriotic history. Far from it. It was the logical result of an army coming home and expressing their feelings about their own experiences by demanding change.
A lot of people were kind enough to write to me, asking how I had so accurately imagined events which had happened before I was born. They thought it was eerie. But I’ve often said guesswork is the writer’s basic skill. If you can’t guess, don’t write. Immediately after Licking Hitler, there was a flood of films and plays, as if a lot of other writers suddenly realized what fun this business of re-interpreting the war was going to be. Yet when I watch Licking Hitler today, there is, both in the script and the playing, a mixture of hurt and bewilderment and downright innocence which I don’t think any of its imitators either caught or understood.
Q: And Plenty, presumably, was written at the same time?
That’s right. They’re twin works. I just remember writing in my diary the words ‘A woman over Europe’, and then having the visual image of a woman sitting in an overcoat on a packing case, rolling herself a cigarette, with her husband lying naked at her feet. It all grew from there.
Q: It took some time for Plenty to catch on?
Although I had worked at the National Theatre since 1971 in one capacity or another, Plenty was my first play to be done there. This was 1978. The board asked Peter Hall to take it off after several weeks on the grounds that it was not playing to full houses. Peter said if they could not play work they believed in, then there was no real point in having a National Theatre. Thanks to his loyalty, the play stayed on. The audiences grew, and as the run went on, the play began to sell out and to acquire the reputation which moved it to Broadway, and which l
ed eventually to the movie being made. In America, it’s still the play by which I’m best known. As the National Theatre has gone on to produce ten of my plays, I always think of Peter’s faith in the play in its early days as something which turned out to be crucial in my life.
Q: Did you feel it was the play towards which you’d been working since you became a playwright?
Most certainly. It has the balance I want. It shows a woman, Susan Traherne, choosing to live her life in dissent. And it allows that dissent full range. It revels in her power. But it also shows the price she pays. What’s more, it shows the effect of her anger on another person’s life. In this way, two choices are contrasted. Susan chooses dissent, but Brock chooses assimilation. The audience is left to consider the advantages and drawbacks of both. It sets me off on what I suppose became the intention of a great deal of my later work: to show the way moral decisions in real life involve far more complex motivations and effects than are usually allowed in fiction. I ceased trying to bully the audience’s reactions to what I portrayed, to demand a particular response from them, and instead let them decide for themselves what their feelings about the characters and their choices were.
Q: Is that your ideal?
My ideal is to create a tension. Theatre is a moral form. In telling a story it is almost impossible to stop the audience drawing moral implications. You can fight it as hard as you like. Some of our most distinguished playwrights – like Wilde, like Beckett – are seen to try and avoid that moment at which the audience inevitably asks, ‘So what’s he trying to say here?’ I fully understand their irritation with that question, because I too hate plays where the author offers too easy a diagram. I hate to see the real difficulties of life programmatically reduced – as they are, say, in melodrama. Yet on the other hand, audiences do draw moral conclusions from plays. They just do. And anyone who frustrates the audience’s needs by lack of clarity equally quickly comes to grief.
Q: But Plenty, for instance, provoked a whole variety of reactions. It can’t be reduced to one meaning.