My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  My Fair Lady should have all the attack, all the brilliance, all the fun and wit, all the fresh beauty of that original production. But the theatre has changed, and so have we. We need new ingenuities to tickle our fancies, new jokes to make us laugh, a new kind of beauty to gasp at. My collaborators and I have tried to treat My Fair Lady as if it were a script that had just fallen through the letter box. And an astonishing script it is to read; we’ve tried to wipe off the patina time has put on it. The show is about all kinds of important things – class, language, independence, feminism, love – but it’s always told by its multiple authors, Lerner, Loewe, and, of course, Shaw, with sharp, elegant wit. That’s what we’re after. Oh, and of course, we hope you’ll have a little cry, too.

  I was determined to break the mould established by the original production, but the new elements I had assembled – Fielding’s witty sets, Conran’s trenchant costumes, Sacks’s offbeat and joyful steps – didn’t quite add up by the time we opened. We needed more time: we weren’t remotely ready. The production manager walked out, cursing the management from the stage before he did so: ‘It’s all your fucking fault!’ The lighting designer had a nervous breakdown when it was discovered that he hadn’t been noting down the lighting cues as he plotted them. Edward Fox, resentful of being amplified, ripped his microphone off and threw it into the pit. Because of the glamorous conjunction of Edward and Jasper, the national papers had insisted on reviewing (badly) the excruciating, faltering first preview in Manchester. One critic, Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph, to his undying credit refused to go, whereupon his editor, Max Hastings, told him that if he didn’t, he’d be out of a job. Charles went, and gave the show an entirely undeserved rave review. Before long, with constant work (always more difficult once a show has opened), things got better, and the individual elements started to cohere rather brilliantly, but a big show, once it’s running, is like an ocean-going liner: turning it round is a massive undertaking. Finally, in Southampton, after four not-at-all unsuccessful months, financially speaking, and now attracting properly deserved rave reviews, the exhausted management decided to pull the plug, and the boat sank without trace – apart from the hats, which, from time to time, surface in costume houses across the land. For the first time in my career as a director, I had felt not entirely in command of the actors, who were an oddly disparate, wayward bunch who never gelled into a company. On the last day in Southampton, there was a farewell party, at which some of chorus had got up a satirical cabaret in which the stars and the creative team were none too affectionately sent up. I got a mention: ‘Ah, the director – was there a director on the show?’ How I laughed.

  A pattern was now establishing itself: I’d direct a show, then act in a film. Acting on stage was becoming the exception. On one rare, and mistaken, occasion, I directed myself in a play, Larry Kramer’s autobiographical AIDS drama, The Destiny of Me. The plan was to open in Leicester and then transfer to London. We had a superb cast: Ann Mitchell, Gary Waldhorn, Jason Durr, Patti Boulaye, James Kennedy, Peter Woodward. Rehearsals were rather exhilarating, although one day the author mysteriously absented himself and was never heard from again. After a moving and funny final run in the London rehearsal room, we moved to Leicester in high spirits. I was a little taken aback when, during the technical rehearsals (unusually taxing when you’re in the play and directing it), the artistic director of the theatre asked if he could have a word with me. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that you and the company won’t be too upset if nobody comes to see the play.’ ‘I think we might,’ I said. ‘Why won’t anybody come?’ ‘Because they never do,’ he said. ‘They never come to plays?’ ‘No’. ‘So why do you do them?’ I asked, not unreasonably, it seemed to me. ‘Because the Arts Council likes it if we do.’ ‘What do they come to? Musicals?’ The theatre had a deserved reputation for doing musicals. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Well, what do they come to then?’ ‘Compilations.’ Kramer never had a chance. But the hardy few who came were deeply moved by what is a deeply felt, if poorly written, play by a man who, working flat out on the front line, must have saved, by his ceaseless and cussed proselytising, thousands and thousands of lives. To coincide with the play’s opening, in the spring of 1993, I wrote this piece for the Independent (whose critic, incidentally, hated the show). The piece was called The Theatre of Plague.

  Recently, I was amazed and delighted to be asked to play the part of a middle-aged gay man who dies, not from AIDS, but from a heart attack induced by excessive Scottish dancing. It happens in a film called Four Weddings and a Funeral which will appear next year, and from a political point of view it is a very positive demise. Homosexuality has in the last ten years so become synonymous with illness and early death that it has begun to seem impossible not to allude to these things in the depiction of gay men. Just at the point when gay men and women were slowly beginning to be perceived as simply part of life’s rich pattern, different but essentially made of the same common clay from which the rest of humankind is formed, we have suddenly become A Problem again.

  For most gay men under thirty, the moment at which they discovered the existence of AIDS is for them the equivalent of Kennedy’s assassination. I remember a supper, a little more than ten years ago, with my friends the playwright Martin Sherman and the actor Rupert Everett. Martin had just come back from New York and he said: ‘There’s a terrible disease sweeping through New York. It’s a sort of cancer that only gay men get.’ Rupert and I laughed. Nervously. It seemed absurd; a paranoid reflex of the puritan conscience, or else something medieval, some echo from a savage past. As Martin spoke, giving more and more disturbing details, a great weariness overcame us all. For the first time in living memory, gay women and men were beginning to be able to stop apologising, stop hiding, stop lying about themselves. And now, we thought, that day, it’s all going to be spoiled. We’re not going to be able to explore our new freedom, be allowed to make our mistakes, slowly mature from licentiousness into liberty. And so it proved. Gay people galvanised themselves and others into trying to deal with this disease. People gave up their entire lives to fight it. The immediate impact was luridly highlit by the prominence given to instances of the disease among the famous; it seemed that the arts were being singled out for the virus’s scythe. The theatre’s cruel losses were starkly embodied in the emaciated, pain-racked form of Ian Charleson, playing his unforgettable Hamlet at the National Theatre while the final ravages of the disease worked their way through his body. AIDS had finally made a personal appearance on the stage.

  Theatre writers were initially winded by the new phenomenon. AIDS had the same impact on gay theatre-writing as Mrs Thatcher had on left-wing drama generally: impossible to write about, impossible not to write about. How do you write a play about illness, anyway? Terminal illness is terminal illness, gay or straight. It is not, so to speak, a fit subject for the drama. There are the dying and those who look after them; there is anger and resignation, courage and fear, hope and despair. Novelists, poets and short-story writers, Paul Monette, Thom Gunn, Adam Mars-Jones, have written brilliantly on the subject; but the emotional oscillations of the deathbed can scarcely be translated into theatre without descent into a static sort of sentimentality. There is the possibility of AIDS as a metaphor (in defiance of Susan Sontag’s insistence that disease must never be viewed as anything but disease), though this has not yet really been attempted; and finally there is the political play. AIDS, unlike, say, cancer, or multiple sclerosis, has an intensely political dimension in that it predominantly afflicts – in the West, certainly – a section of the community unloved of the establishment. Why was so little done to find a cure? Why is so little still being done? A plot to let the gay population die off, or at the very least be exploited financially? More sinisterly, a form of chemical warfare deliberately engineered to wipe us out? All or none of these scenarios may be true; they are fuelled by the desperate, heartbreaking rage of individuals inexplicably struck down at incomprehensibly young ages for no cause
other than ignorance of the workings of their own bodies and the seemingly Manichean workings of a universe inhabited by inexhaustibly mutating viruses bent on our obliteration. Were the God of Love not well and truly dead, buried at the Somme, Katyn, and Dachau, AIDS would surely have finished Him off.

  This sense of apocalypse is behind the two major political theatre-writers on AIDS, Tony Kushner and Larry Kramer. Kramer was first on the scene with The Normal Heart, a unique piece of theatre in that it is a from-the-barricades account of the struggle by the leading – the founder – member of the American AIDS activist movement. Passionate, wordy, angry almost to point of incoherence, it is as if Daniel Cohn-Bendit had written a play about Paris 1968. Virginia Woolf maintained that ‘one can never write in anger’. Larry, a sort of dramatist-pamphleteer, can never write in anything else. It may not be art, but it is certainly theatre. Kushner’s Angels in America, a sort of apocalyptic soap opera, broadens the canvas, homing in on the bizarre figure of Roy Cohn, the gay-bashing gay lawyer at the very heart of the American political machine, while telling various interlocked stories of love in a time of AIDS. Kramer, continuing in his autobiographical vein, has now written The Destiny of Me, both prequel and sequel to the earlier play. The author is now HIV-positive himself, and his theatrical alter ego, Ned Weeks, checks into hospital at the start of the play to avail himself of a promising new technique for dealing with the disease. There he finds himself invaded by memories of himself when young. As the memories insist, he begins to piece together, in a sort of psychoanalytical detective thriller, the clues that may help him to understand who he is, what made him. Extraordinarily bold in theatrical technique, it is an instance of the mournful necessity in these terrible times for so many young and middle-aged men prematurely to take stock, to ask, as Ned does in the play, ‘Does it make any sense, a life?’ Encompassing fifty years and three generations, the play, the author insists, is not about AIDS; it is about the tenacity of human life during a plague, and thus becomes a celebration.

  The protagonist himself seems doomed, however, lending the play an air of elegy, as he finally and spectacularly detaches himself from the continuing indignity of unavailing medical treatment. In the haunting words of ‘the doleful ditty to the lute / That may complain my near-approaching death’ from Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, also written at a time of plague, bubonic, in this case:

  Haste therefore each degree

  To welcome destiny:

  Heaven is our heritage,

  Earth but a player’s stage,

  Mount we unto the sky.

  I am sick, I must die:

  Lord, have mercy on us.

  As I note at the beginning of the foregoing piece, I had acted in Four Weddings and a Funeral shortly before. It is worth remembering that that delicious and seemingly imperishable romantic comedy was written against a background of AIDS, and that the film’s quest for a perfect mate in life was a symptom of the new monogamy that was being increasingly adopted – for a while, anyway – by people of all sexual persuasions. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time quite what a remarkable thing it was of Richard Curtis to have placed a gay couple at the very centre of his film. John Hannah’s exquisitely acted funeral oration for Gareth (on which I am often congratulated, though of course I wasn’t there) was up to that date the most outspoken affirmation of the authenticity of gay love ever to appear in any mainstream film.

  Movies – and television, of course – no doubt have a much greater direct social influence than theatre, and since Four Weddings and a Funeral, the situation has changed out of all recognition. I wrote this Foreword to Out at the Movies in 2008.

  As Steven Paul Davies notes in this fascinating volume, we live in interesting times as far as the gay presence in cinema is concerned. For him, Brokeback Mountain is the great breakthrough into the mainstream, and though some of us may quarrel with his interpretation of the movie itself, there can be no doubting the enormity of the leap it represented. For some of us, it stands in the long and by no means dishonourable homosexuality-as-problem tradition in the movies; indeed, it is arguably a film about the difficulties of bisexuality. But the fact that in a mainstream film two highly bankable and impeccably butch actors are shown making passionate love to each other, and that no moral judgement is made on this, and that the actors’ careers were greatly advanced by appearing in it (one of them, of course, subsequently tragically curtailed but not remotely in connection with his work on the film) is a quite remarkable development, inconceivable to me thirty-five years ago when I started acting, much less when I started going to films fifteen years before that.

  In those distant days, every homosexual was an expert decoder, as skilled as anyone at Bletchley Park. Messages were being sent to us, and we learned to read the signs, to infer the hidden communications, to sniff out the double meaning. This was not without its thrills, but it’s no way for grown men and women to experience their lives. Little by little, things began to change. It had started already in the theatre, where illicit kisses had been exchanged, tortured psyches examined and what was now known as gay humour freely flaunted. The movies, as well documented by Mr Davies, began to deal with the troublesome matter of same-sex attraction with increasing subtlety and truthfulness to life: it is hard to describe how powerful was the impact on the gay community of films like Schlesinger’s masterpieces Sunday Bloody Sunday and Midnight Cowboy. Nonetheless, the prevailing mood was summed up by a line from Mart Crowley’s seminal – if I may so express myself – play, then film, The Boys in the Band: ‘Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.’ The notion of depicting the normal homosexual man or woman (as, by definition, most homosexual men and women are) was still thought of as dangerously radical. It must be said that perhaps homosexuals themselves contributed to this: the drama of being gay is central to many gay people’s identities. And indeed it took major social changes before gay lives could in any way be described as normal.

  Not that ‘normal’ was what all gay men wanted to be. It was one of the great debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Was homosexuality inherently radical? Was it of the essence of being gay that one was consciously distancing oneself from heterosexual norms? Were gay people born crusaders against conventional society, glorying in their otherness? Or was it our demand, indeed our right, to be accepted as part of society, just another strand of human existence, different in orientation but not in emotional experience, equal in the right freely to express our loves and desires, but not in any way superior? Militantly gay films are few, but many of the films described in this book fall naturally into one or other of two camps: those of a specifically gay sensibility, and those which attempt to depict gays as part of the general human situation. The specifically gay ones by no means necessarily advocate a separatist gay position, but they do insist on a viewpoint that sees the world differently, with homosexual eyes. The other kind of film seeks to integrate gays into the world at large. I appeared in what I suppose is one of the most important films of this kind, Four Weddings and a Funeral. Gareth, the character I played, was flamboyant but not camp; he belonged to no stereotypical category; and he died, not of AIDS, which was at that time ravaging the gay community, but of Scottish dancing.

  When I read the script, it was immediately evident that this was a new kind of a gay character in films: not sensitive, not intuitive, kind and somehow Deeply Sad, nor hilarious, bitchy and outrageous, but masculine, exuberant, occasionally offensive, generous and passionate. He was also deeply involved with his partner, the handsome, shy, witty, understated Matthew. In the original screenplay, they were glimpsed at the beginning of the film asleep in bed. In the final cut, the film-makers removed this sequence, in order to allow their relationship to creep up on the audience. They were right to do so: before they knew it, viewers had come to know and love them individually, and were hit very hard, first by Gareth’s death and then by Matthew’s oration (with a little help from another splendid bugger, W. H. Auden)
. Perhaps the most important moment in the film from a gay perspective was Charles’s remark after the eponymous funeral that while the group of friends whose amatory fortunes the film follows talked incessantly about marriage, they had never noticed that all along they had had in their midst an ideal marriage, that of Gareth and Matthew. It almost defies belief, but in the months after the release of the film, I received a number of letters from apparently intelligent, articulate members of the public saying that they had never realised, until seeing the film, that gay people had emotions like normal people. (I also had a letter from Ian McKellen saying how much more important Four Weddings was in gay terms than the simultaneously released Philadelphia, with its welter of chaste histrionics.)