by Simon Callow
Another unexpected outcome of the publication of Being an Actor was that I was asked by Claire Tomalin, who had just read the book, if I’d like to review books for her at the Sunday Times. I said I would; and I’ve reviewed books more or less uninterruptedly since then (1984). The second one I did for her was a book by Simon Gray, An Unnatural Pursuit, in 1985.
Simon Gray is one of those writers whose popular image bears little resemblance to his work. One goes to the theatre expecting a Simon Gray Play, urbane, incestuously bitchy, with a central star role which knocks every one else into the ground. Instead one gets extraordinarily complex ensemble pieces full of surreal humour and devastating visions of loneliness, defeat and despair. It is true that the social world and the overall tone of the pieces, with a couple of exceptions, remain the same from play to play, though no more and no less than those of Chekhov – with whom his finest play, Quartermaine’s Terms, can well stand comparison. In the same manner, and almost equally fine, is his latest play, The Common Pursuit, whose pro duction by Harold Pinter is the ostensible subject of the present volume. In fact, the lasting impression of An Unnatural Pursuit is of the author himself, with a brilliant cameo portrait of Pinter, and a number of sharp and savage observations about the business of putting on a play thrown in as a bonus.
The bulk of the book is a work-journal. He starts with the completion of the play (‘I numbered the pages, packed and shaped them into a completed-looking pile, toasted myself with a further gulp of whisky and a few more cigarettes, gloated. This, for me, is the only moment of pure happiness I ever experience in the playwriting business…’), then follows its career through the stages of casting, rehearsal, performance, failure to transfer, and closure. It’s a vivid picture of those particular horrors, the sad series of compromises as you decline from your initial bright dream of the play: not being able to get this theatre, that actor, those dates; the mysterious failure of companies to gel, of rhythms to quite take hold; the wilful blindness of certain critics and the regrettable tendency of the public to listen to them; the terrible brevity of the run if the play doesn’t transfer – so much talent and work and passion squandered. All this is accurately and wittily described. But the book is more remarkable than mere reportage. For one thing, the playwright’s-eye view is a unique and inherently frustrating vantage point; second, the playwright in question is Simon Gray. By the end of the book we come to know him very well indeed.
‘Actually, he’s not nearly such a pain as his self-portrait would have you believe,’ says Pinter in his Foreword. No indeed, but pain is nevertheless exactly the word: not that inflicted on others, that undergone by himself. The wildly funny accounts he offers of his paranoia, power-mania, anxiety and doubt simply heighten one’s sense of it. Smoking like a beagle, his veins throbbing with booze, he pours his nightly confessions into the tape recorder, a haunted, haggard, positively Dostoevskian figure. En passant, he offers much lucid analysis of his play and the processes that are leading to its realisation. But at any moment, in the midnight stillness of his study, speculation is liable to run riot: why are his actors behaving like talentless buffoons and/or obstreperous Marxists? Why does Harold Pinter wish to exclude only his photograph from the programme? ‘I do actually feel very passionately that the play was written by me, I am the author, and yet the only people who are going to appear in the programme are the actors and the director, with the author, the only begetter, not visible.’ After a restless night, he becomes convinced that one of the actors has acquired a lisp. ‘I formed a plan to watch Nick Le Prevost’s lips like a hawk, and the moment I saw or heard the lisp, to alert Harold to it. He could take it from there… I do think the chap who plays Stuart shouldn’t have a lisp. Or a club foot or a hunchback. At least without giving me a chance to rewrite the text.’ This is madness, of course, but it is the divine madness that makes the author of Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Quartermaine’s Terms an infinitely darker, more passionate, less rational artist than the waspish boulevardier of the critics’ report.
There are two areas of legitimate interest to which the book doesn’t address itself: the actual writing of the play; and why, given an excellent cast and a masterly director, it didn’t quite work. Mysteries, both, no doubt. What you do get is the lowdown on the playwright’s relation to the production, and a full-length soul-sketch of one of the best living practitioners of that art: in the second section of the book, the Gray of the work-journal is supplemented by the even darker Gray of My Cambridge, one of the occasional pieces reprinted in the present volume. (The other pieces are the classically hilarious Flops and Other Fragments; an appreciation of Leavis; and two pieces about cricket, upon which I am neither qualified nor about to comment, except to be duly awed by the figure of Lopez, the infant off-spin bowling wizard.)
My Cambridge is an astonishingly bleak account of the author’s academic career, culminating in his years at Cambridge, where his ambition, triumphantly achieved on his own admission, was to be the very thing his harshest critic might accuse him of, ‘a fluent fraud’. Every anguished and hilarious word of this piece and indeed the whole book refutes that accusation. Death and demons swarm over its pages, held off by fags and booze and love and many, many wonderful jokes. But the sombre note echoes through: even Lopez killed himself, in the end.
When I wrote the review, I had just met Simon, and that was another result of the publication of Being an Actor. I wrote about our friendship in the Guardian after his death in 2008.
It seemed to many of us who loved Simon Gray – and perhaps it even seemed to him – that he might perhaps be indestructible. God knows, he had tried hard enough to destroy himself, but his body survived savage assault after savage assault as he returned, reckless and debonair, to the attack. When I saw him a couple of weeks ago for what I now know with infinite sadness to have been the last supper (rather a good title for a Gray diary, come to think of it), he looked as well as I’ve ever seen him look: bonny, clear-skinned, relaxed, with a little Greek sun still sitting on him. Some years ago, when he had just emerged from intensive and very much touch-and-go multiple surgery, we had dined together at his then favourite restaurant – there was always a favourite restaurant, adhered to with passionate loyalty, until it fell, as inevitably it must, from favour – and there he sat, at the exact table, in fact, where he had so recently collapsed after taking the sip of champagne that his doctor had expressly forbidden and from which he had been rushed to hospital. Some few weeks of intensive care and several near-death experiences later, he looked wonderfully well and fresh and youthful, and I had commented on this. ‘Where it really shows is in your eyes,’ I said. ‘You mean you can see them now,’ he replied, and surrendered to wheezy paroxysms of yelping laughter.
Those were the days, of course, of unbridled smoking, an activity out of which a great deal was now demanded, now, that is, that drinking was off the menu. As far as I know, he never once touched a drop of alcohol after the operations on his kidney and liver: the connection between drinking and mortality had been vividly demonstrated to him, and he had no desire to die. But like some mad scientist, he refused to believe in the destructiveness of anything until he had seen its results with his own eyes, proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. And I’m not sure that he ever fully believed that cigarettes were his undoing. His relationship to them, so well and hilariously documented in the diaries, was not sensuous, like Ken Tynan’s, nor emotional, like Pinter’s, but somehow intellectual. Popping the cigarette in and out of his mouth, he seemed to be having a querulous conversation with it, testing it, challenging it: like many of the conversations we had over the years, where he would pick at some proposition one had lightly advanced, prodding it, probing it, becoming exasperated, outraged, appalled, before eventually collapsing into helpless hilarity in which all controversy dissolved and disappeared.
In earlier years, when he was still fuelled by unimaginable levels of alcohol – mostly champagne, but after a certain point all comers were welcome
– the laughter didn’t always materialise. Ignition point could be very low. At our very first meeting, after he had written me a disarmingly generous letter about my first book, I had ordered the wine before he arrived, and said that I hoped that Gamay would do. ‘No it will NOT do,’ he said, with alarming force, ‘as it happens I think Gamay is the most disgusting, repulsive wine in existence. I loathe Gamay.’ After this thorny matter had been settled, with some difficulty, he immediately became funny, generous, easy. But it was a sticky moment. On another, much later occasion, after an out-of-town preview of his own production of one of his plays, we had supper with our mutual friend, the play’s producer. Simon was not happy because an important cue had gone wrong in the first scene of the play, after which he had repaired to the house manager’s office to brood and smoke and drink (and write: a new play, in fact), so supper afterwards was somewhat electric. He asked for comments, which both the producer and I were careful to pad with entirely genuine praise, slipping in the odd reservation like a Bob Martin’s tablet embedded in a pound of steak for a dog. There was a sex scene which was not going too well. We both commented on this, and I wondered whether this or that or the other might not be tried. ‘There’s no point, because the actor has no sexuality.’ I questioned this, at which he snarled, ‘We all know about your sexuality – all too fucking much about it, in fact.’ I stammered that I intended no sort of criticism, that the show was, in fact, quite brilliant, but in certain small ways – unimportant ways – it could, perhaps, be better. ‘Everything could be better,’ he raged. ‘King Lear could fucking well be better.’ At which he said he had had enough, and abruptly left the restaurant, to be driven furiously off to London. The next morning he called and said that he thought he might have been a little intemperate the night before and that, by the way, there was a screenplay in the post with a role in it that he’d like me to play.
It turned out to be that television masterpiece Old Flames, in which Stephen Fry played a father-to-be hallucinating, as he waited for the birth of his child, about a school contemporary (me) whom he had once bullied. Though it was not at the time seen as typical of his output, the weirdly morphing screenplay was quintessential Simon Gray. He was thought of, especially in the 1980s, as a sort of high-level boulevardier, the Marc Camoletti of the Common Room. But though he was indeed a master of sophisticated dialogue (in life as much as in his plays), the phantasmagoric held a central place in his life and in his work. This propensity was, initially, perhaps liberated and even exacerbated by alcohol, but it outlived the alcohol, and in fact came triumphantly to centre stage in his great sequence of diaries, which reveal his almost Dostoevskian capacity to descend at an instant into delusion and paranoia: except that of course, Simon being Simon, the nightmare, though hatefully real, is always wildly comic. It was the phantasmagoric element in his idol Dickens that he valued above all others, the endlessly transmogrifying metaphors, the fantastical distortions, the elements of the grotesque, all underpinned by a great central humanity: and this was what characterised so much of Simon’s work – in a different key, of course, from Dickens’s, and on a different scale, but still recognisably the same. It was what we both loved in Dickens, and what I loved above all in Simon and his work. Conversation with him was often free-associatingly surreal, hilarious and slightly dangerous.
It was this dimension that was so rarely explored in productions of his work. Of course, there were in his output straightforwardly well-made plays, but many more of them were predicated on an awareness of the oddity of things when viewed from another angle. Dickens had a word for it: ‘mooreeffoc’, which is simply ‘coffee room’ seen from the other side of a glazed door. I believe I introduced Simon to this coinage, but he jumped on it: it was what he was about. His sense of the sheer strangeness of things was acute; perhaps the greatest character he ever created, Quartermaine, so sublimely incarnated by Edward Fox in the original production, is a kind of Holy Fool, hardly able to connect with the outer world. Often this perception lent a dark dimension to his thinking. Insanity often beckons his characters. I acted in his play The Holy Terror, which is the most extreme example of dislocation in his work, in which not only the protagonist but the play itself seems to be having a nervous breakdown; it was universally detested by critics, though it still seems to me to be a fearlessly exploratory and deeply felt work.
The other side of his disorientation was his acute sense of wonder at simple things, which is again a common thread in the diaries, some of whose most remarkable pages stem from loving, even enraptured contemplation of the ordinary, culminating so movingly at the end of the last one in his joy at being given an extension of life by his surgeon. Though outwardly a typical, cricket-loving, somewhat fogeyish, doggedly non-PC middle-class Englishman of his generation, he never quite felt himself to be entirely part of the normal, the ordinary world. Before that first meeting of ours, describing himself as a ‘topographical imbecile’, he had asked for a map of where we dining. The restaurant in question was in New Row, off St Martin’s Lane, in the very centre of the West End where so many of his plays had been triumphantly performed, but despite the map he had the greatest difficulty in finding it. In truth, he entirely lacked a map for the world in which he worked, and was never a member of any of the unofficial clubs which are the central organising principle of British society. He had no skill at self-promotion. He raged against this, but he was resigned to it.
Friendship was his mainstay, and his life was genuinely blighted by the loss, at regular intervals, of some of his greatest friends, many of them well before their allotted span. The early death of Alan Bates grieved him profoundly. Alan was his thespian alter ego, and they adored each other; often at the end of a meal I was having with Simon, Alan would drop in for coffee or a brandy just for the sheer pleasure of spending a few extra minutes with him, and it was extraordinary to hear the two men in duologue, like a man’s conversation with himself. Though Simon was not necessarily the first person you’d go to if you were in trouble, he was unstinting in his interest, enthusiasm, appreciation and advice about any professional matter, always the first person to read anything I ever wrote, likewise sending me everything he ever wrote, draft after draft, characteristically typed with triple spaces, manuscripts monstrous to handle, but irresistible to read. His last dramatic masterpiece, Little Nell, about Dickens and Ellen Ternan, was given short shrift by the critics, but it will come back and be properly recognised, in all its dark, nightmarish complexity, its sense of things falling apart and the centre not holding, as will his as yet unproduced but entirely extraordinary Dionysian fantasia Hullabaloo, and then perhaps he will at last be understood for the truly original figure that he was, both in life and in art.
The last and most completely unpredictable result of publishing my anti-directorial jeremiad (as it was now perceived), Being an Actor, was an invitation to direct an opera, Così Fan Tutte, in Luzern. I had already directed in the theatre: it started more or less by accident in 1983 when my old friend Snoo Wilson (whose play The Soul of the White Ant I had acted in at the Bush, as described elsewhere) lost the director for his latest play, Loving Reno, also at the Bush. He suggested that he might direct it himself, but for some reason this made them nervous, so I proposed that we co-direct it, which we did, with very happy results (we were nominated by the Sunday Times critic James Fenton as the Best New Directors of the Year). As it happens, it was virtually the end of Snoo’s career as a director, and the beginning of mine. It was apparent that he had no appetite for the multiple roles that a director has to perform – sergeant major, psychoanalyst, perfect audience, problem-solver, team leader, cheerleader, seminar-leader, leader – and he gradually sat back in the trance-like state adopted by most writers in rehearsals (half reliving the writing of it, half longing for it to be the way they imagined it would be, impatient of and bewildered by its present transitional stage), while I got on with it. It was the beginning of a long working relationship between us, which I described in an art
icle in the Sunday Telegraph on the occasion of the first night of my production of Snoo’s play HRH in the summer of 1997.
Snoo Wilson is one of the great unregarded originals of the British theatre. His work is rarely, too rarely, seen in the great subsidised theatres, though it is often epic in scale and richly deserves an outing; audiences there don’t know what they’re missing. Ideas and history are his territory, and he takes them several rounds in the ring. If Tom Stoppard is the intellectual ping-pong champion of the world, Wilson plays rugby football with the mind. He is quite incapable of writing an ordinary play. (Or an ordinary novel. I, Crowley, his latest, is a piece of brilliant self-deconstruction, the Great Beast explaining himself in lapel-grabbing prose; it comes complete with goat’s tail dangling from the book’s spine.) He is the least autobiographical of writers; or if he is, I’d rather not be his psychiatrist. It could be said of all his plays that whatever their nominal location, they really take place inside the skull of the human race.
There the conscious and the unconscious intermingle, and time itself exists in simultaneous strata, crackling across the synapses. Historical figures – Aleister Crowley, John Dee, Conan Doyle – co-mingle with ancient Babylonian gods and blokes who’ve come to fix the plumbing. He has no interest in imitating the surface of life; instead the work grows out of his restless pursuit of history and ideas. Historical personages rise up before him, blocking his path. Dodging nimbly about, he throws his net over them, finally encaging them, kicking and shouting, within one of the idiosyncratic structures that he calls his plots. There they are debriefed of their ancient wisdom and forced to confess their wickedness; often they are confronted with similar creatures from another age or culture.