by Simon Callow
While I was doing Faust at Hammersmith, the National Theatre had asked me to direct Alan Bennett’s new play, which was a double bill called Spy Stories, consisting of An Englishman Abroad, his classic television play about Guy Burgess and Coral Browne in Moscow, lightly adapted for the stage, and a new play, A Question of Attribution, about Anthony Blunt and a character called HMQ. I was to play Burgess and direct A Question of Attribution, while Alan would direct Englishman Abroad and play Blunt. This offer did not require deep reflection on my part.
The National additionally wondered whether I had any ideas for a title, because the present one seemed uninspired. I pulled the Penguin Book of Quotations off the shelf, turned to Shakespeare, found Hamlet, and there the new title was, staring at me in the face: Act IV, Scene V, line 75: Claudius: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ I felt I had just won a treasure hunt. I phoned Alan, who was neither here nor there about it – ‘I’ve never been any good with titles’ – and then Richard Eyre, director of the National, who was very pleased indeed. I felt awfully smug, and still do. The cleverness of it! They were spies, they were single (as were the plays), and they came in battalions. Alan and I were an odd couple, Eeyore and Tigger, and no prizes for guessing which was which. I suspect that I was, as he says of someone in a book of his, ‘too cocky for my taste’, alarmingly ebullient for someone of his fastidiousness and self-discipline. It is to my credit, however, that, overruling his fastidiousness, I saved a wonderful line in the play, HMQ’s observation that ‘if Francis Bacon painted one, one would be a Screaming Queen’, which Alan had thought rather obvious and camp and wanted to cut. I wrote about him in a review of his autobiographical collection, Untold Stories, in 2006.
There are times – rare, very rare – when as an actor or director you find yourself holding a piece of new writing which you know to be pure gold. It happened to me with a double bill of plays called Single Spies. The author was Alan Bennett, who would also appear in both plays and direct the other one, and it was clear that the central scene he had written between Blunt and the Queen – quite apart from any element of lèse-majesté – was going to create a sensation. It was a sublime piece of comedy which touched on a number of profound questions, the most penetrating that of authenticity, which, as it happens, is the central concern of Untold Stories, Bennett’s magisterial and largely autobiographical compendium, sequel to the immensely successful Writing Home. The present volume is much the more revealing of the two, offering a comprehensive insight into a figure who, perhaps to his own surprise, has become a defining feature of the national landscape, part of what it is to be British – ‘as British as Alan Bennett’, as one might say.
He and I had a very successful working partnership, despite the anomaly of my directing the author in his own work while acting with him, a situation which Alan seemed to find perfectly normal.
Once the play had opened and transferred to the West End, we were gratifyingly successful, celebrities beating a nightly path to the stage door, but Alan couldn’t bear any of it, and, safety helmet on head, he would escape, unrecognised, to his bike and thence home to supper by the television. He hated the socialising, which is not unknown in the acting profession, but he didn’t much care for the acting either, which is rather less common. He would sit in the dressing room encircled with gloom. And yet as Blunt he was quite brilliant, and astonishingly consistent, provoking the same roars of laughter night after night. Sharing a stage with him was like sharing a stage with Paul Scofield: one feels a bit of a gooseberry. The public’s lust for him knows no bounds. Perhaps that is what persuades him to appear so frequently before them, in one guise or another; he writes of himself as ‘someone who has had to stand on stage [and read Larkin]’; had to, Alan? The ageless physiognomy is endlessly photographed, the subject an unwilling but stoical victim.
Untold Stories has little to say about him as a performer, but it is the last word about him as a writer, and as a man; he now speaks in unmediated form about his life. ‘You do not put yourself into what you write,’ he says, marvellously, ‘you find yourself there.’ But Bennett the writer offers the same paradox as Bennett the performer: a private man who is determined at all costs to go public. And we certainly want to know about him. The present volume both satisfies that appetite and explains it. Something in us wants to reach out to the boyish figure who he tells us is seventy but who to us is always that mop-topped egghead, spikily brilliant but somehow needy: he has described his late start, anatomically, not maturing physically till he was eighteen, a circumstance that has lent a quality of perpetual precocity to everything he does, seeming to warrant special admiration as if it were a wonder that he’d done it at all. His remarkable writing here about his parents – Mam and Dad, as he invariably refers to them – reveals the extent to which he is still their lad Alan. Their sense of the home as a fortress, their horror of attention-seeking, their rejoicing in their ordinariness, is shared by Bennett: he also shares his parents’ disdain for the enterprise, the ebullience, the sheer extroversion of Mam’s shop-assistant sister, Myra, and her ‘desire to be different, to be marked out above the common ruck and to have a tale to tell’. One is inclined to warm to Aunty Myra but Bennett’s – and Mam’s and Dad’s – disapproval is implacable. At the same time, without endorsing Myra, he seems tentatively to disapprove of the censorious person that he was; it seems to have taken him a lifetime to escape his parents’ values – for most of us it takes a lifetime to appreciate them.
The book begins with an account of his mother’s depressive illnesses which is unsparing both of her circumstances and gradual decline and of his attitude to the woman she had become: his coldness, impatience, indifference – and his sense of duty. He charts his frustrated rage with her delusions, determinedly trying to hike her back to reality, until eventually she dwindles into the sort of touchy-feely creature she would have been horrified by when she had her wits; he is dismally aware that the breezily generalised manner of the nurses probably suits her more than his attempts to communicate. He offers tart and pertinent comments on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, protesting against the general indifference to the plight of the routinely depressed, unless they present sensational symptoms: ‘Mistake your wife for a hat and the doctor will never be away from your bedside.’
A thread of family insanity runs through the book, and the suicide of his grandfather looms large. But the precision, detail and pithiness of his writing – whose sententiousness owes as much to Yorkshire as it does to Oxford – plucks celebration from what might otherwise be merely depressing. There is a pervading wistfulness well expressed in his remark (not collected in the book) that he saw himself as an outsider, ‘not in the Colin Wilson sense, more other people having fun and me not’; the prose too frequently has a dying fall: ‘I have no nickname as there has never been any need for one.’ This sometimes tips over, forgivably, into self-pity in the diaries, where, for example, he finds it impossible to believe that there will be any sort of gathering in his honour when he dies; in fact, though the diaries – five years’ worth of them – fail to avoid a certain querulousness, they add up to a serious chronicle of our time, a valuable corrective to the babble of current affairs and opinion programmes. Sometimes he is unintentionally hilarious, as when citing reasons for being cheerful: ‘Well, at least it’s not Stalingrad. It’s warm – I don’t have lice.’ And always he remains a great phrasemaker: the Queen, after Diana’s death, is forced to go ‘mournabout’.
The book is a house of many mansions, celebrating his enthusiasms and focusing sharply on what he deplores: he remains an Attlee boy, and can only see modern life as a dégringolade (especially under the present ‘Labour’ government, as he parenthesises it). His account of his own illness is strikingly restrained and all the more powerful for that, utterly eschewing sentimentality. In fact, what emerges from the book, and is perhaps the key to why he is so cherished, is a man who refuses to be anything other than wh
o he is. He describes how, when he failed to become an officer during National Service, he identified himself: ‘What I was not was a joiner. And so in due course not a CBE, not a knight.’ Elsewhere he tells us that he is ‘reluctant to be enrolled in the ranks of gay martyrdom, reluctant, if the truth be told, to be enrolled in any ranks whatsoever’. Except, of course, that he has joined the ranks of the non-joiners. Beyond all his varied brilliance, the wisdom and the profundity of so much of his work, it is his insistence on refusing to be other than who or what he is, that has made the British people take him under its wing. He is his own man. He sees the hilarity, however, when the National Gallery makes him a trustee on the grounds that he represents the man in the street. If only.
Alan was extraordinarily easy to work with, which, when you consider that he was being directed in his own play by the actor he was acting with, is remarkable. His only day of anxiety came at the technical rehearsals when the paintings that hung in the corridor of Buckingham Palace were first brought on. They were in an unfinished state, and Alan was told so, but he flew into a state of terrible agitation, all the more alarming because hitherto he had never once so much as raised his voice. No matter how often I explained to him that they would be hugely better very soon, he remained agitated to an almost medically troubling degree. Richard Eyre was sent for, and, talking him down very calmly, eventually restored his equilibrium. Later Richard told me that on Kafka’s Dick, which Richard had directed at the Royal Court, Alan had become obsessed by the suit which Jim Broadbent (Kafka’s father) was wearing, until he had finally gone to Savile Row and bought him a new one with his own money. ‘Displacement anxiety,’ Richard said. A great artistic director; and a remarkable and somewhat unexpected man. I wrote this review of Eyre’s diaries, National Service, in 2003.
Richard Eyre is a strikingly handsome man, compact and perfectly groomed. He is physically and intellectually elegant at all times, unfailingly courteous and searchingly intelligent; whatever he says is perfectly phrased and shot through with self-irony; he is both fastidious and ascetic. His quiet authority is unmistakable, his kindness palpable; power and sensitivity are present in equal quantities. It would not surprise you, on meeting him, to discover that he was Head of the Foreign Office, a clinical psychologist, or an internationally acclaimed architect. In other ages, he might have been the personal confessor to a Bourbon monarch, or the master of a great medieval college. Sanity, balance, control are at his core.
So how did this man come to confide these words to his diary: ‘I’ve started a course of an antidepressant, Prozac. I feel as if my brain has a number of compartments, like dog traps, out of which wild things emerge – insects, spiders, frogs, snakes and wolves, surrounded by a gnawing cold damp wind that permeates everything. The drug has closed these traps and I feel that sand, or snow, is piling up outside them. I’m not happy, just not in pain.’ How did that man write those words? Why, because of the theatre, of course; more precisely because of The Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, that century-old dream turned into concrete nightmare. Eyre ran it for an extraordinary ten years, and for a large proportion of that time, he felt overwhelmed by the task. Coming across a list of the symptoms of depression, he ticks off four: insomnia; feelings of worthlessness; diminished ability to think; recurrent thoughts of suicide. Not that anyone would have known. ‘I have to clam up at the theatre. Don’t give the game away.’ He kept a diary ‘to remind myself that what is unbearable today will be bearable tomorrow’.
Running any theatre is a challenge, but the National is in a class of its own, both in itself and emblematically. When they were looking for a successor for him, David Hare briskly listed the three tasks of its director: 1 – plan a repertoire of seventeen shows a year; 2 – run the building; 3 – be a spokesman for the British theatre. The first of these demands, which seems perhaps the most straightforward, is, as Eyre puts it, like ‘three-dimensional chess in the dark’. He describes the process to his board; they are, understandably, horrified and awed: ‘Here’s the equation: three theatres, three shows in repertoire in each theatre. If you want to play your successes and nurse your failures you need total freedom of manoeuvre, but if you cast an actor in two shows you restrict your freedom of programming, and if you cast one in another auditorium, you’re scuppered. As you are if you want to tour a show. Or have an unusually complex set. Or stage a musical. You have to guess at the number of performances for each show, i.e. predict your successes, or worse, your failures. And if you want to transfer a show to the West End you have to anticipate getting an option on the actors. And the freedom to change the repertoire according to demand is restricted by the three-month print deadline of the brochure. If you shorten that you diminish the advance booking and therefore prejudice your cash flow. And so it goes…’
Why, he asks himself, did he ever take on the task? He lists the obvious motives: ambition, vanity, hubris, finally – conclusively – ‘because it was there’. But when it comes to it and he is appointed to the job, at the press conference he feels as if he’s ‘performing a character called Richard Eyre about whom I don’t have enough information to give a credible performance’. But this is temporary. He knows that at a deeper level ‘I like danger. I like the feeling of having a gun pointed at my head: dance, perform, live a bit.’ This is a very striking phrase, the theatre as an antidote to respectability, normality, complacency – safety, perhaps. Theatre as bungee jump. Well, if he wanted a gun at his temple he certainly got it: the daily dread of failing, both personally (in his own productions) and in his responsibilities to his company and his audience. Rarely has a director so nakedly described the panic that attends every production, the hopes, the fears, the minute-by-minute anxiety about the piece, the actors, his own work. He had a number of brilliant successes during his tenure at the National – Richard III, David Hare’s trilogy, King Lear with Ian Holm – but an equal number, by his own account, of abject flops. It’s hard enough under any circumstances to live with failure but when you’re running an organisation, and everything hinges on your judgement, to have to face your colleagues and find the necessary self-respect to continue to articulate policy with any authority is a very particular test of character.
Eyre’s solution to the challenge is the only possible one, but rarer in practice than hen’s teeth: ‘The most important attribute for anyone who runs a theatre is generosity: you’ve got to be prepared to enfranchise people who are more talented, more successful, and just different from yourself.’ This he did, consistently, during his tenure. It was harder to be generous with himself: ‘I’m a Catholic in everything but religion – I believe in guilt, I believe in suffering as the cost of happiness, failure as the cost of success.’ Public service is in Eyre’s genes: his sense of duty exceeds every other impulse, and he was deeply loved by his colleagues for it. He worked unceasingly to balance the books, to maintain and exceed standards, to tame and liberate the beastly building itself (in the teeth of the uncomprehending resistance of its vainglorious architect Denys Lasdun and the Lasdunites who openly called him ‘a barbarian’). He knew every one of his fellow workers by name (a feat not achieved by every director of the National Theatre); he forged a team.
This had been his first ambition for the theatre when he was appointed: ‘to encourage a sense of community, a sense of family, a desire to share a common purpose: in short, to make the NT into something that was more than the sum of its parts’. Like many people in the theatre, he has sought to create in his working life what he never knew in his childhood. His magnificently awful father dies during the course of Eyre’s time, but not before having finally manifested the tenderness he was incapable of showing when Eyre most needed it; his mother, too, is at last liberated from the twilight zone of Alzheimer’s syndrome where she has dwelt for too long. He becomes an orphan, and sits with his wife and daughter reading King Lear by candlelight, finally grasping its meaning: ‘I’m no longer prepared to judge, everyone’s to blame, everyone can be forgiven
.’ The fine production of Lear for which this was preparation and by which it was so profoundly informed was his last at the National; released from his chains, he feels bereft, but at his farewell party, he quotes William Shawn: ‘Whatever our roles we did something quite wonderful together. Love was the controlling emotion; we did our work with honesty and love.’
Everything Eyre did for the National and at the National, he did with honour and distinction. Intelligence and taste informed all his actions; his decisions were shrewd and often innovative. And of his love of the theatre, its processes and its denizens – actors, writers, designers, technicians, publicists, caterers – there can be no doubt. The man who emerges from these diaries, however, does not quite seem to belong to the theatre himself. He is like the very finest kind of colonial administrator who has fallen in love with the land he administrates and with its people, learnt the language to perfection, knows its history better than they do, and never wants to be anywhere else till the day he dies. But the people themselves have an emotional energy which is irrational, ancestral and dangerous, and this energy is not in his blood. He writes superbly about it: ‘That’s the true actor: the true professional – experiencing the state of possession, enduring passion and yet, like a firewalker, remaining untouched by the experience.’ He quotes with approval a magnificent letter sent to him by that great beast of the jungle, Mike Gambon, raging against an attempt to make the National a no-smoking zone: ‘A theatre isn’t a place where you can impose rules on people, it’s a dirty radical place where an actor can work with a fag in his hand, a place where someone like me or you if you felt the need can piss down the staircase… surely these people should go and work at IBM or Shell… screaming at night from the stage about the plight of mankind and the world would be ridiculed in a building where you can’t smoke. The stage is like a war game and some wounded people have to smoke.’ Exactly, says Eyre, but you won’t catch him pissing down the stairwell.