My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Biggins is particularly good at teasing the audience, stepping in and out of character, or rather in and out of the characters of Biggins and Widow Twankey. His interviews with the children, though always kindly, carry a slight air of disapproval. His questions concern their homes and what Santa will bring. One child confidently declares that this year Santa will bring him a toilet. The embarrassment of the child’s parents and the crowing of other parents in the audience are full of the anxiety which lies behind all comedy. When John, the chap who lost his overcoat in the first half, comes back up to get it (dry-cleaned, Biggins assures him, though it is no such thing), Biggins announces ‘And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for: John will sing “Show Me the Way to Amarillo”,’ and he does, but only with the rest of us as part of the curtain call. The audience is made to get on its feet, and there was never a show when I wasn’t moved almost to tears by the sight of them all on their feet, belting out this corny old rouser, all the generations, all the ages, all the races – more than once I saw a large Indian family in the front rows who were obviously utterly captivated by the whole thing, beaming at everything with great dazzling smiles, and it occurred to me that it must be like the Kathakali drama with its gods and demons, desperate lovers and pesky old parents. Or perhaps just Bollywood. Whatever else it is, it’s like nothing else in the theatre. It is the last remnant of the Commedia dell’Arte, the final refuge of the music hall, the ultimate flourish of burlesque. It depends on strong, clear plots, larger-than-life characters, surreal verbal comedy. It can allude to television, but it cannot be of it. It is the theatre theatrical in all its living glory.

  A couple of years later, I did Peter Pan – or rather Peter Panto. But despite the vaudevillian elements, and the fact that Peter was played by a girl (that living legend, Bonnie Langford), the show kept a great deal of Barrie’s text, even managing to retain something of the play’s dark mystery. The play itself, not just the part of Hook, is full of terror and anxiety. It is a unique example of what might be described as profound whimsy, full of a dark playfulness which sometimes seems to foreshadow the magnificently offhand brutality of Roald Dahl’s world. Peter’s famous cry – ‘To die would be an awfully big adventure!’ – is a startling sentiment to find at the heart of a children’s play. The play is, of course, a dream, and as dark and as liberating as only dreams can be. ‘It has something to do with the riddle of his being,’ says Barrie’s profound final stage direction. ‘If he could only get the hang of this, his cry might become “To live might be an awfully big adventure!” but he can never quite get the hang of it, so no one is as gay as he is. With rapturous face he plays on his pipes… he plays on until we wake up.’ I loved doing Pan, despite sixteen shows a week and an entrance singing Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ which threatened to destroy my larynx for ever.

  Pantomime is famously the only thing that can never fail in the theatre. For a moment one glimpses a sort of theatrical Garden of Eden, a prelapsarian world where the contract between audiences and actors still obtains. Something like it still obtains on tour. I went on the road with Equus for eighteen weeks, to every major theatre in the country. The tour – like the play – was specially targeted at young people, and the effect on them was thrilling. They’d shuffle resentfully into the auditorium, and then, thanks to Shaffer’s unerring sense of theatre, the moment the lights went down and the four horsemen strode forward to put on their silver horse heads, they’d be gripped in an iron grasp. As one trudges around the country, getting tireder and tireder, the greeting that almost without exception awaits one on checking in to theatre, and the kindness and generosity of local audiences, makes one feel involved in a very ancient relationship. ‘My lord, the actors are come.’ ‘Buzz buzz.’

  I played Garry Essendine in a production of Present Laughter directed by Michael Rudman, which similarly toured for quite a long time and which set every theatre where it played on a roar. Except Birmingham, that is, where the mournful press officer asked me how the first preview had gone. ‘Not many in,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘Birmingham doesn’t like Coward.’ ‘Why, then,’ I asked her, ‘are we doing three weeks here?’ ‘That’s what we’re all asking ourselves,’ she replied, in that uniquely melodious accent of the Midlands.

  Rudman dug into Coward’s play and found unsuspected seams of truth in it. I had been nervous about working with him: we were friends, and that is not necessarily the best basis for a working relationship. We all know from bitter experience that some of the warmest social relationships can come to grief on the floor, so to speak. He asked me to be present at all the auditions, which was a good way of getting the hang of each other’s approach, and I always found myself agreeing with him, but still…

  The moment we started rehearsals, I knew that everything was not just going to be all right: it was going to be wonderful. Without even noticing it at first, I found that something rather good was happening to my acting. Michael, always laconic, never didactic, was, by means of languid jokes and wicked anecdotes, adumbrating an approach to acting which was the perfect antidote to all my latent tendencies of bombast and energetic overkill. His blocking made it virtually impossible not to look at the person one was addressing, which was immediately a liberation. Everything suddenly had a very specific focus. He would say, drily, ‘I’m not against shouting. Shouting can be very effective. But choose your shouts.’ Or, ‘Let’s see how quietly we can play this scene. Just out of interest.’ No theory; no big stick. Everything done with a sprinkling of excellent and often self-deprecating anecdote. We both became deeply interested in the speed of thought at the heart of the play. One fine day he proposed that we play a scene we were struggling with as quickly as humanly possible and the play immediately yielded up all its laughs and all its truth. The delight and approval of a man naturally given to ironic understatement were peculiarly gratifying. As we padded around the country with the show, the reviews everywhere said the same thing: ‘This play is much better than anyone gives it credit for.’ I can’t think of more satisfying praise. It was entirely due to Michael. He trusted the play; he trusted us. Whenever he came to see the show on the tour – which was almost everywhere; I think he only drew the line at Milton Keynes for his own mysterious reasons – he would work it a little further and our game would improve. I began to realise that his aim was a very simple one: to get the production – and the acting, which, in an important sense, for him WAS the production – as good as possible. This is a surprisingly rare objective in the theatre. People have all sorts of agendas, but not often that one.

  I by now knew that I had found that rare thing: a director with whom I had an almost perfect rapport. After his pastoral visits he and I would dine together and chew over the show, and I realised more and more that under that raffish and languid exterior beat the heart of a true theatre romantic. This also is rare – too rare. Among directors there are visionaries, ten-a-penny; there are careerists, ditto (often the same people, oddly enough). But there are few who deeply and tenderly love the theatre and love actors. Our conversations often summoned up shades of actors and of productions gone, and Michael’s love and knowledge of them was comprehensive and profound. This was a strong enough bond, to be sure, but it turned out that our sympathy was based on something even greater than that. I shyly disclosed one day that I am an Honorary Citizen of Texas, a sublime honour bestowed on me in an absent-minded moment by the Mayor of Austin, on the last day of shooting of The Ballad of the Sad Café; Michael is a native of Dallas. It is as Texans that we approached the work of Noël Coward, and as Texans that we will approach all our future work, which I trust will be voluminous.

  As we toured, by odd coincidence, I was writing a television screenplay for HBO about Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. In time-honoured fashion it was shelved just before we started shooting: guess what? Too expensive. Who could have imagined that a film about two of the biggest theatre stars of the 1930s and ’40s would cost money? But my fascination for Coward grew and g
rew. I wrote a review of his letters for the Guardian.

  Noël Coward, who had a very vivid sense of his own significance, might nonetheless be slightly surprised at the hold that not only his work (which is never off the boards) but also the minutiae of his life continues to hold on the English-speaking public. The monumental Theatrical Companion to Coward, four interesting biographies (one of which, by Philip Hoare, probes very deep indeed), the autobiographies, the Diaries and now the Letters mean that we know as much about him as he did about himself – maybe more so, since he preferred not to dig too deep into his inner self, or anyone else’s, for fear, as his childhood friend and playwriting collaborator Esmé Wynne-Tyson remarks in one of many striking letters in Barry Day’s riveting edition of the correspondence, that it might ‘interfere with your way of living, or alter your attitude towards life… I used to think,’ she adds, ‘your habit of evading a logical issue to an argument through abuse or humour was weakness. I’m now convinced it’s a protective armour.’

  Day’s inspired decision to include other people’s letters to Coward as well as his to them has resulted in a richly complex portrait of the man across the whole of his astonishing career. (A slightly less inspired decision, perhaps, was the creation of epistolary cul-de-sacs within the chronological progression. Thus the whole of Coward’s formative relationship with Wynne-Tyson – it is their passionately stormy friendship, not the one with Gertrude Lawrence which is the inspiration for Private Lives – is examined over its whole forty-year course immediately after her first mention; we then resume where we were when she entered his life.) He was, as John Osborne famously noted, his own greatest invention, and as often with such people, the invention was so successful that it masks the sheer oddity of the man. Certainly his achievements have no parallel in their diversity: revue artist, actor, director (both film and stage), playwright, screenwriter, novelist, composer, lyricist, even – for a couple of hair-raising performances – conductor. In all of these spheres he achieved the utmost distinction. Nor was he confined to any one genre: he wrote sketches, songs, operettas, musical comedies, epics (Cavalcade attempts no less than a history of the British Empire from 1899 to 1930, which also happens to be the exact span of his own life up to the point that he wrote it), sentimental comedies, wartime adventure stories; he wrote the songs that rallied Britain during the war; and a half-dozen of his plays rank among the best of the twentieth century. He was a peerless performer, who eventually mellowed into a superb actor; above all, perhaps, he was a unique and uniquely charismatic personality.

  All of this is to be found in the handsomely produced pages of this book. The vividness and urgency of the epistolary form, his triumphs and setbacks, are revealed in all the immediacy of the circumstances that gave rise to them. Day offers a detailed running commentary on the events and individuals concerned and provides a potted history of Coward’s life and times. This last is sometimes a little genuflectory; though Day is not uncritical of the work, he backs off describing some of the uglier episodes – the catastrophic Broadway revival of Tonight at 8.30, starring his then boyfriend Graham Payn, for example, or Coward’s unrelenting pursuit of a young heterosexual actor at a late stage of his career. Sex, though it was a major pastime of Coward’s, doesn’t get much of a lookin (as far as can be discerned, the only reference to it in the letters is ‘I managed to get one satisfactory bit of nuki’): Day approvingly notes that ‘To the end of his life… he remained private in his private life, a decision,’ he adds, ‘that one wishes today’s gay community would honour,’ a particularly idiotic remark as a response to A Song at Twilight, Coward’s last play, whose entire point is the terrible price to be paid for living in the closet. In fact, though he spared us the anatomical details, Coward was, for the time, remarkably brave in not pretending to be anything other than what he so clearly was, one of the many anomalies of his career.

  His appeal to middle England was immediate and visceral; even at his most frivolous he seemed to speak for England: what he found absurd, they found absurd, and satire from his pen – ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, for example, or ‘Don’t Make Fun of the Festival’ – seemed to appeal to the most dyed-in-the-wool Disgusted of Surbiton, while his overt patriotism galvanised the nation. One wonders whether these admirers would have laughed so heartily if they thought that they were being entertained and stirred by a homosexual atheist of the most militant kind: a letter to his mother on the early death of his brother out-Dawkins Dawkins: ‘I’m saying several acid prayers to a fat contented God the Father in a dirty night gown, who hates you and me and every living creature in the world.’ More benignly but equally dismissively, he tended to refer to the Almighty as ‘Doddie’. Coward’s letters to his mother occupy a good slice of the book. They are not always the most interesting – for the most part he writes to her like a schoolboy – but they are a striking testimony to his absolute devotion to her and their sense of solidarity against the world, nowhere more vividly expressed than in the wartime letter she sends him wishing that she could line the whole of the Allied Government up against a wall and shoot them because of their slighting treatment of his attempts to make a serious contribution to the war effort.

  The question of ‘how best to employ my brittle talents in the cause’ exercised him greatly; he took it very seriously, becoming enamoured of the phrase ‘something rather hush-hush’. The whole of this extraordinary interlude during which Coward, Cary Grant and various other luminaries were trained up as spies is an hilarious, almost surreal episode; it got as far as Coward having serious personal briefings with Roosevelt. Coward’s outraged feelings, his bitterness at the position he had been put in and his contempt for the ‘stupidity’ of the government agencies are vividly expressed in letter after angry letter; in the end, of course, he got on with doing what he did best, as Churchill had rather roughly suggested to him he should from the beginning. He did heroically, acting in three new plays one after another, making the quintessential rallying film of the war, In Which We Serve, delivering heroic speeches and comic songs across the war zones of the Middle and Far East. He had a private supper with Churchill a day or two before VE Day at which he and his fellow guests stood up to toast the great man; but it was Churchill who, on the grounds of a minor and involuntary currency offence, blocked his knighthood.

  The section of the book that follows the war charts his increasing disaffection with England and with his own public (‘Idiotic public for letting me down. They ought to have known better’), his return to popular acclaim as a cabaret artist, the rediscovery of his early plays and, finally, the knighthood; he was dead three years later, safe in the knowledge of his own immortality. The letters give report of his daily life, his many voyages, his frustrations and his disappointments, his falsely raised hopes and his cruelly dashed spirits. Above all, they are a record of his friendships. Notoriously, he knew everyone, from Virginia Woolf to T. E. Lawrence to Anthony Eden to Lionel Bart, and wrote to them all. Perhaps the most amusing letters are those to his secretary Lorn Lorraine, often in verse (‘Pretty pretty Lorn / Timid as a haunted faun / This engaging little rhyme / Merely serves to pass the time’), and to Alexander Woollcott, full of nonsensical playfulness (‘The bluebells are out and I sometimes throw myself among them laughing’). In his self-elected role as ‘psychiatrist and nurse governess’ to his friends, he wags his finger, more often than not telling them, as he does an anguished Marlene Dietrich, ‘Snap out of it, girl!’ Dietrich paints an unforgettable portrait of abject infatuation (with Yul Brynner, whom they nickname Curly): ‘Thank God I am German or I would have jumped out of the plane.’ Bemoaning her linguistic incompetence, she offers a superb definition of amitié amoureuse: ‘Friends who use lovers’ tactics.’ Garbo writes perfectly Garboesquely: ‘That fluttering, tired and sad heart of mine has been in such a peculiar state…’ Among the richest exchanges in the book are with the young radical writers of the Fifties and Sixties whom at first Coward denounced but then came to respect: Wesker,
Pinter, Albee, Osborne. His enthusiasm for Pinter – ‘I love your choice of words, your resolute refusal to explain anything, and the arrogant, but triumphant demands you make on the audience’s imagination’ – gives a clue as to Coward’s continuing vitality today. He may have marginally outlived his own talent, but he slipped away with all his instincts intact, including that of a well-timed exit: ‘I’ve never wanted to be the last to leave any party,’ he said.

  The truth is, I suppose, that nothing theatrical is alien to me, though my taste for showbiz – or perhaps my gift for it – is severely limited, as I realised when I directed The Pajama Game. I tried, as I had tried before with My Fair Lady, to reproduce the circumstances of the original production, in the case of The Pajama Game the fascinating combination of modern dance, vaudevillian skills, and political radicalism; I felt, too, that musical revivals of 1950s shows needed to get away from irony and archness. The Fifties, it seemed to me and my producer, Howard Panter, were, from a visual point of view, all about joyful abstraction; musically they were about liberation from old forms. So, without any difficulty and in a very short space of time, we recruited that supreme saxophonist and musical explorer John Harle to arrange the piece, David Bintley, of the Birmingham Royal Ballet and a passionate aficionado of musicals, to choreograph it, and Frank Stella to design it. Frank Stella! After Howard and I left his studio in New York we literally hugged each other, and went and found the largest bottle of champagne money could buy. Exhilarated by the work, and quite forgetting what had happened after my effusion on the subject of Les Enfants du Paradis, I wrote a note for the programme book.