Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  About the NT building itself I’ve always had reservations. It’s better inside than out with the foyers, in particular, interesting and lively and even living up to those fanciful illustrations in which architects populate their constructions with idly gossiping creatures who seem to have all the time in the world. They always have oval heads and are wholly intent on using the space the architect has so thoughtfully provided. Oval heads apart, the foyer of the National is a bit like that and works, just as Denys Lasdun envisaged it should.

  Nor are the three theatres too bad, with the Olivier, to my mind, the best. From an actor’s point of view (or that of someone with a weak bladder) the huge central block of seats of the Lyttelton is daunting. The Olivier is more broken up, though that, too, has its drawbacks and it’s said that Michael Gambon got so accustomed to playing the vast space that even in private conversation he would still slowly move through the necessary arc.

  The outside of the building, though, I’ve never much cared for, which is harder to admit since I was impressed by Denys Lasdun talking about it on television not long before he died. The first truly modern architecture I saw as a boy in 1951 was the Royal Festival Hall, which I’ve always found exciting, light, airy and playful, which the National isn’t at all. I don’t like stacked horizontals, which Denys Lasdun plainly did as they figure in the National and in his Royal College of Physicians building in Regent’s Park. Moreover the back parts of the theatre seem to me both depressing and inadequate. Actors are used to slumming it, particularly in the West End, but there was no excuse for treating the backstage as if it were the servants’ quarters.

  That said, though, I’ve no doubt that the building will grow in the public’s affections. The appeal of most modern buildings slowly diminishes over a period of fifty or sixty years at which low point they stand in greatest danger of demolition or substantial alteration. If they survive that then they begin to acquire a period charm and their future is assured and so, I imagine, it will be with the NT.

  A few years after the building had opened the late Ronald Eyre, having directed one or two productions here, said that it would be better for all concerned if the National Theatre could straight away close again and be converted into an ice rink and/or dance hall… the Olivier, I suppose most suited for the ice rink, the Lyttelton for the palais de danse. Then, after twenty years or so, when the corners had been rubbed off the building and it had acquired its own shabby and disreputable history, all the cultural stuffing long since knocked out of it and every breath of Art dispersed, it would be time for it to be reclaimed for the theatre. As it was it was too much of a temple for him and altogether too worthy; somewhere ordinary was what he wanted and with no pretensions.

  It’s certainly true that audiences (and critics in particular) come to the National Theatre in a different frame of mind from when they go to see a play on Shaftesbury Avenue. They’re more reverential, more inclined to invest what they’re seeing with significance (or deplore its absence). It’s all in capital letters: Art, Theatre; it’s never just a play. I first noticed this twenty-five years ago in the Lyttelton. It was the second night of the opening week and the play was John Osborne’s Watch It Come Down. It wasn’t one of his best but as always with Osborne even when I disliked the play I found his tone sympathetic. I was in a minority. To give a flavour of the audience, Edward Heath was sitting in front, Alec Douglas-Home behind and the rest looked as if they’d come on reluctantly after the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Of course, audiences were bound to get better and broader and they have but there’s still a feeling that this is Something Special; it’s not yet the community-minded place that subsidised theatres (those that survive) manage to be in the provinces.

  Nor is it particularly comforting. When I was acting in Single Spies I never got over the nightly walk along the corridor from my dressing-room, pushing through the swing doors and suddenly being hit by the amplified roar of the audience. They were just chatting before curtain up but to me they sounded like the crowd at the Colosseum waiting for the massacre to begin.

  Mind you, this is not peculiar to the National Theatre. All theatre is theatre of blood. I once had to give a talk at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and was accosted on my way in by two sabre-toothed pensioners:

  ‘It had better be good,’ warned one of them. ‘We’re big fans of yours.’

  Still, whatever its shortcomings or the fear that stalks its corridors, the bleakness of the building has always been compensated for by the cheerfulness of the staff and I have never felt other than welcome here. This is particularly true at the stage door and in the visiting directors’ office, run in my time by Ghita Cohen and Sharon Duckworth. It was a cosy spot where you could always drop in for gossip and a not always loyal verdict on current productions. Royal visit nothing, Ghita’s retirement party last year was one of the most distinguished occasions the theatre has seen in all its twenty-five years.

  Ghita could always procure house seats even for the most sought-after shows though one didn’t always need them. One of the inestimable privileges enjoyed when working at the National is the use of the directors’ boxes at the back of the stalls of both the Lyttelton and the Olivier. Both are entered not through the auditorium so that one can slip in and see an act of a play then slip out again, much as one could at a Victorian music hall. As a playwright I perhaps ought to deplore such bite-size theatre but it suits me no end. The boxes are also soundproof so one can even groan aloud.

  With all my grumblings, I am thankful to have had a small part in the National’s history. The Wind in the Willows and The Madness of George III, both directed by Nicholas Hytner, were two of the happiest plays I’ve worked on and when I recall the ending of the first part of Wind in the Willows with the snow coming down and the mice singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and the wonderful bravura opening of The Madness of George III when the whole cast comes over the crest of the hill and down onto the stage, I am glad to have been at least the occasion for such spectacle.

  Of Single Spies my memories are only less fond because the cast was quite small and looming up at the end of rehearsal there was the awful prospect of having to go on stage and do it. Also, though the technical side of it wasn’t particularly complicated, things did tend to go wrong. In the scene in Buckingham Palace where the Queen comes upon Anthony Blunt hanging a picture, there were two console tables trucked in from stage left and stage right. On the tables were various objets d’art which the Queen would pick up and comment on as she chatted to her Keeper of Pictures. These tables had a life of their own, only occasionally trucking on submissively as they were meant to do, but more often coming on, taking one look at the audience then retreating shyly into the wings. This meant that Prunella Scales, playing the Queen, instead of idly fingering an object and discoursing on its origins (‘This ostrich egg was a present from the people of Zambia’) had instead to dive off stage, locate the item in question and fetch it on for Sir Anthony to admire, so that she looked less like the Monarch than one of those beady ladies queuing up with their treasures on the Antiques Roadshow.

  The History Boys

  I have generally done well in examinations and not been intimidated by them. Back in 1948, when I took my O levels – or School Certificate, as it was then called – I was made fun of by the other boys in the class because on the morning of the first paper I turned up in a suit. It was my only suit and already too small, but to wear it didn’t seem silly to me then as I thought the examination was an occasion and that I must rise to it accordingly.

  Ten years or so later I took my Finals at Oxford and dressed up again. This time, though, nobody laughed as we were all dressed up in the suit, white tie, mortar board and gown that were obligatory for the occasion. This was, I suppose, the last and most significant examination in my life, and it was in this examination that I cheated, just as I had cheated a few years before to get the scholarship that took me to Oxford in the first place.

  I was not dishonest; I kept to the rule
s and didn’t crib, and nobody else would have called it cheating, then or now, but it has always seemed so to me. False pretences, anyway.

  I was educated at Leeds Modern School, a state school which in the forties and early fifties regularly sent boys on to Leeds University but seldom to Oxford or Cambridge. I don’t recall the sixth form in my year being considered outstandingly clever but in 1951, for the first time, the headmaster, who had been at Cambridge himself, made an effort to push some of his university entrants towards the older universities. Snobbery was part of it, I imagine, and by the same token he switched the school from playing soccer to rugger, though since I avoided both this had little impact on me. However, there were about eight of us sixth-formers who went up for the examinations and we all managed to get in, and some even to be awarded scholarships.

  Though that’s a situation which seems to mirror that of The History Boys, the play has nothing to do with my contemporaries, only a couple of whom were historians anyway, but it does draw on some of the pains and the excitement of working for a scholarship at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were as daunting and mysterious to me as to any of the boys in the play.

  The first hurdle, more intimidating to me than any examination, was having to go up to Cambridge and stay in the college for the weekend. I had seldom been away from home and was not equipped for travel. I fancy a sponge bag had to be bought, but since at seventeen I still didn’t shave, there wasn’t much to go in it; my mother probably invested in some better pyjamas for me, but that was it. A stock vision of an undergraduate then (gleaned from movies like Robert Taylor in A Yank at Oxford) was of a young man in dressing gown and slippers, a towel round his neck, en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t reassured but there was a limit to what my parents could afford.

  It all seems absurd now, but not then. For all I knew someone who went to the baths in a raincoat and his ordinary shoes might not be the sort of undergraduate the college was looking for. And droll though these misgivings seem, then they were more real than any worries about the examination itself, and they persisted long after examinations were over, my social and class self-consciousness not entirely shed until years after my education proper was finished.

  December 1951 was sunny but bitterly cold, and though there was no snow the Cam was frozen and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost; coming to it from the soot and grime of the West Riding, I had never seen or imagined a place of such beauty. And even today the only place that has enchanted me as much as Cambridge did then is Venice.

  It was out of term, the university had gone down and apart from candidates like myself who had come up for the examination there was nobody about. But then that was true of most English country towns in the early 1950s, when tourism was not yet an option. I walked through King’s, past Clare, Trinity Hall and Caius, and then through the back gate of Trinity and out into Trinity Great Court, and thought that this was how all cities should be. Nothing disconcerted this wondering boy, and I even managed to find the smell of old dinner that clung to the screens passage in the college halls somehow romantic and redolent of the past. And in those days one could just wander at will, go into any chapel or library, so that long after dusk I was still patrolling this enchanted place. Starved for antiquity, Hector says of himself in the play, and that was certainly true of me.

  Gothick rather than Gothic, Sidney Sussex, the college of my choice, wasn’t quite my taste in buildings, but I was realistic about what I was entitled to expect both architecturally and academically, and (with Balliol the exception) the nastier a college looked the lower seemed to be its social and academic status. You had to be cleverer than I was or from higher up the social scale to have the real pick of the architecture.

  It was unnerving to be interviewed by dons who had actually written books one had read. At Sidney it was the historian David Thomson, with whose face I was familiar from the back of his Penguin. What surprised me, though, was the geniality of everyone and their kindness, though I’m familiar with it now, even as recently as this play. Being interviewed for Cambridge is not unlike being auditioned, only now my role is reversed. I hope I am just as genial and twinkling with our would-be performers as David Thomson and R. C. Smail were with me.

  If the dons were genial, some of my fellow candidates were less so. That weekend was the first time I had ever come across public schoolboys in the mass, and I was appalled. They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy.

  I had always found eating in public a nervous business, the way one was supposed to eat, like the way one was supposed to speak, a delicate area. I had only just learned, for instance, that the polite way when finishing your soup was to tip the plate away from you. I soon realised that this careful manoeuvre was not a refinement that was going to take me very far, not in this company anyway. Unabashed by the imposing surroundings in which they found themselves or (another first for me) being waited on by men, these boys hogged the bread, they slurped the soup and bolted whatever was put on their plates with medieval abandon. Public school they might be, but they were louts. Seated at long refectory tables, the walls hung with armorial escutcheons and the mellow portraits of Tudor and Stuart grandees, neat, timorous and genteel, we grammar schoolboys were the interlopers; these slobs, as they seemed to me, the party in possession.

  Like Scripps in the play, on Sunday morning I went to Communion in the college chapel, and in the same self-serving frame of mind, though in those days I would go to Communion every Sunday anyway and sometimes mid-week too. Asked in the interview what I was intending to do with my life, I think I probably said I planned to take Holy Orders. This was true, though I’m glad to say none of the dons thought to probe the nature of my faith, or they would have found it to be pretty shallow. And clichéd too, which Scripps’s faith is not, besides being far more detached and sceptical than mine ever managed to be.

  On the foggy way home I changed trains at Doncaster, where in a junk shop I bought my mother a little Rowlandson print of Dr Syntax pursued by bees. It was 7s. 6d. and is probably not worth much more now, but it still hangs in the passage at home in Yorkshire, a reminder of that memorable weekend. A few days later I got a letter offering me a place at Sidney Sussex after I’d done my two years’ National Service. It didn’t work out like that, but at the time it all seemed very satisfactory. I was going to Cambridge.

  At school I never had a teacher like Hector or like Irwin. My own history master was solid and dependable, his approach factual and down to earth, much as Mrs Lintott’s. What drew me to him, though, was a hint of some secret sorrow. Mr Hill – H. H. Hill, the alliteration also a plus – was rumoured to have had some Housman-like breakdown at university when, having been expected to get a First, he had scarcely passed at all. That was as far as the Housman comparison would stretch, though, as he was happily married and fond of golf. An ironic and undemonstrative man, he was not temperamentally suited to the role of mentor or sage; still, he never made me feel a fool, which is high praise.

  With other masters the secret sorrow was probably just that of middle-aged teachers in a not particularly good school with nothing to look forward to but retirement. Huddled at the bus stop waiting for the four-fifteen to Horsforth, they looked a sad and shabby lot.

  Once in a slack period of the afternoon when we were being particularly un-bright, the French master put his head down on the desk and wailed, ‘Why am I wasting my life in this godforsaken school?’ It was not a question to which he expected an answer, and there was an embarrassed silence and a snigger from one of the less sensitive boys, much as there is in the play when Hector does the same. The incident stuck in my mind, I suppose, because it was a revelation to me at the time – I was fourteen or so – that masters had inner lives (or lives at all). Teaching French, he looked French in
a rather M. Hulot-like way, but was far from being an apostle of Continental abandon. Not long before he had shepherded the class to a school showing of Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, one of the earliest French films to be shown in Leeds after the war. Mystifying to me, it had deeply shocked him, and he had warned the class that those who led lives like the circus people in the film (fat chance) were likely to end up blind or riddled with disease. This just made me want to go back and see the film again, as I felt there must have been something that I’d missed.

  That there were schoolmasters who were larger than life, whose pupils considered themselves set apart, only came home to me after I’d left school and was doing National Service. It was then, too, that I began to mix with boys who were much cleverer than I was and who had been better taught, all of us having ended up learning Russian at the Joint Services School. This, delightfully, was based at Cambridge, and while we officer cadets didn’t quite lead the lives of undergraduates, service discipline was kept to a minimum in order to facilitate our Slavonic studies; we did not have to wear uniform or take part in parades, and in lots of ways it was a more easeful and idyllic existence than I was eventually to enjoy at university proper.

  It was a heady atmosphere. Many of the others on the course were disconcertingly clever, particularly, I remember, a group of boys from Christ’s Hospital – boys whose schools had been a world as mine never was; and when they talked of their schooldays there was often in the background a master whose teaching had been memorable and about whom they told anecdotes, and whose sayings they remembered: teachers, I remember thinking bitterly, who had presumably played a part in getting them the scholarships most of them had at Oxford and Cambridge. To me this just seemed unfair. I had never had such a teacher and had had to make my own way, which may be one of the reasons why I’ve been prompted to write such a teacher now.