Most of what we know about the molly houses comes from court records of prosecutions for the “detestable crime,” which you could use to write a harrowing play about the oppression and marginalisation of gay men. Mark hadn’t written it. In Mother Clap he appeared to be channelling the celebratory bawdy of the early eighteenth century. Blithely thrusting himself back to the 1720s, Mark extolled not just sex, but the money his heroine was able to make out of it. In the second half, he intercut the molly house with a contemporary sex party. The modern gays were soulless sensation-seekers, and the contrast with the joyful communion of mollies was not to their advantage.
Over the twelve years I ran the National, I was responsible for producing more than a hundred new plays. I admired all of them, but I sometimes went ahead with plays I didn’t particularly like. I suspect Mother Clap wasn’t Trevor Nunn’s cup of tea, but he embraced it without hesitation. His enthusiasm was an example I carried with me throughout the next twelve years.
Mother Clap was scheduled to open at about the same time the National’s board was due to choose its new director. A play in which a wily old brothel keeper decides that “arse will always triumph over cunt” became part of my job application.
The Winter’s Tale went into rehearsal six months before Mother Clap, and I was in more familiar territory. I was keen to move on from what I found unsatisfactory about the Shakespeare I’d recently directed in New York. At Lincoln Center Theater, the world for Twelfth Night was exotic, unreal and seductive. I was swept away by the miraculous reconciliation of the twins Viola and Sebastian at the end of the play, which seems always in performance to offer a glimpse of numinous perfection. I thought I could capture it in the way the play looked.
Though many of the performances were touching and true, Bob Crowley’s amazing set turned out to be the best thing about the show. Throughout my career, it often has been: Bob’s poetic imagination is matched by his perspicacity, so he’s been the perfect friend and confederate. But on Twelfth Night, I failed to perform one of the most basic Shakespearean balancing acts: there is no act of grace in any of his plays that is not rooted in the here and now. Instead, I made a world in the image of the lovesick Orsino:
Away before me to sweet beds of flowers:
Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.
It wasn’t that I failed to recognise how self-indulgent Orsino was, or how lacking in self-knowledge. Paul Rudd nailed Orsino’s vanity with the alluring wit that has since made him a movie star. But the production was too eager to match his absurd high fantasy. The play’s tough scepticism was present only in theory. In practice, it was swamped by the show’s glossy exterior.
I was determined not to repeat the same mistakes with The Winter’s Tale, a play even keener in its intimations of grace than Twelfth Night. In its final scene, the dead Hermione, the object of her husband Leontes’s violent and irrational jealousy, is resurrected from the dead in a scene of transcendent benediction.
Except she isn’t. She never died in the first place. She pretended to be dead for fourteen years, hidden by her friend Paulina from her husband. When Paulina presents Leontes with a lifelike statue of Hermione that miraculously comes to life, it isn’t a miracle at all: it’s a scam. None of this is to deny that the effect is miraculous, nor to pretend that the tale the play tells isn’t fantastical: it taps into a profound, unconscious longing for reconciliation. But in 2001, impatient with the gorgeous extravagance of the world I’d imposed on Twelfth Night, it seemed that the secret of The Winter’s Tale was that it located the possibility of the supernatural in concrete reality.
It starts with Leontes’s sudden and crazy descent into murderous jealousy. In an unexplained flash, he’s convinced that his wife has been having an affair with his best friend, Polixenes, and that the child she’s carrying isn’t his. Some commentators offer this as the play’s first implausibility, evidence that the playwright is no longer interested in the psychological exactitude he once brought to the jealousy of Othello. They see it as a problem that needs solving, maybe by inventing a fanciful stage world where mad jealousy coexists with an abandoned baby, storms at sea and “Exit, pursued by a bear.” But jealousy doesn’t seem to me to require explanation. It can happen as instantaneously as it happens to Leontes, just because. It can be, maybe usually is, mad.
I asked Alex Jennings to play Leontes, and told him I thought it might be a play about the kind of people we knew, in the kind of world we knew, which was where we’d try to find magic. We didn’t, of course, know any kings or queens; and in the world we knew, nobody had power over life and death. Every production of Shakespeare asks its audience to make an imaginative leap between what it sees and what the play is asking it to take on trust. If you put on stage, as we did, a marriage and a home that are reflections of the modern audience’s own world, you’re asking them for a free pass on a power structure more familiar to its original audience; though even in 1611, you would have had to be well over seventy to remember the last time a king of England put his wife on trial for her life.
Alex, Claire Skinner as Hermione and Julian Wadham as Polixenes, all in early middle age, all of them parents or about to be, approached the emotional and psychological maelstrom of the first half of The Winter’s Tale as if it was something that might happen to them. I asked the audience to believe that a happy marriage in our world can spiral out of control in a second; Alex and Claire brought terrifying lucidity to its collapse, so it wasn’t a stretch. Then I asked them to believe that a husband in our world can have his wife hauled off to jail, which was awkward, though it was made easier by the furious incredulity of Deborah Findlay’s performance as Paulina. I would return to the challenge of bridging the gap between Shakespeare’s world and our own repeatedly during the next twelve years. The solutions can only ever be partial.
Many audiences come to Shakespeare seeking secret harmonies; I do too. But I think he is a less sentimental playwright than the one those audiences want. The apparent resurrection at the end of The Winter’s Tale cannot fail to move. It suggests another life where our sins are forgiven, our mistakes are put right and the dead are restored to us. Just before Paulina unveils her fraudulent statue, she urges her spectators:
It is required
You do awake your faith.
I envy those who hear in this an affirmation of their own religious faith. But Hermione’s resurrection is in fact a carefully prepared work of performance art. And after fourteen years, she can’t quite manage a replay of what she was before she apparently died. When Leontes first sees the statue, he says:
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.
And when he finally touches her, he gasps: “O, she’s warm!” The play insists on the reality of flesh and blood, and on the damage time does to them, which I find infinitely more affecting than an exhortation to believe in miracles.
Nothing about The Winter’s Tale felt like a last word. As soon as I’d done it, I wanted to argue with it. But I headed straight for the molly house, where Mark Ravenhill turned out to be nothing like his photo. Sweet-natured and quick-witted, he didn’t bother with the guarded mating dance that is almost mandatory for a playwright and a director who are new to each other. We got on immediately. Some playwrights have written their last word before they let anyone read their play. Pinter, famously, was exact to the last comma. But Mark was wedded to nothing in the first draft of Mother Clap. He rewrote it, and went on changing it until the last preview.
Rehearsing a play is an act of imagination, but I’m often taken aback by the range of experience of even the smallest company of actors. The contemporary sex-party scenes seemed hardcore to me, but none of the actors, most of them straight, turned a hair at the stage direction: Phil is fucking Josh over the sofa. Josh sniffs from a bottle of poppers. There is a porn video playing. Josh was Dominic Cooper, not long out of drama school. Phil was Con O’Neill. Neither was embarrassed, though Dom was vaguely i
nterested in whether the sofa would conceal the business end of the action. It did, mostly.
In 1980, the National had staged Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain. In its most famous scene, a Roman soldier raped a young Druid priest. Its director, Michael Bogdanov, found himself at the Old Bailey, the subject of a private prosecution by Mary Whitehouse, the champion of so-called moral rearmament, for “procuring an act of gross indecency.” The judge threw the case out after the trial descended into farce: something to do with a prosecution witness mistaking a thumb for a penis. But it was no joke that Michael Bogdanov might have gone to prison.
The fleshy, consensual pleasures of Mother Clap, where the sex scenes were actually about sex, had little in common with The Romans in Britain, where rape was a metaphor for colonial oppression. But a mere twenty years later, it never occurred to me that I’d be put in the dock, though I had no idea how the National’s audience would respond either to the sex in Mother Clap, or to its sexual politics. It was way ahead of the game in its delight in sexual and gender fluidity. It seemed blithely unbothered by promiscuity.
“Oh, Ma, I get bored so easily,” says the most loved-up of the mollies as he’s getting ready to cheat on his current boyfriend. “Do you think that’s bad? Am I a bad ’un?”
Debbie Findlay, censorious in The Winter’s Tale, was now all indulgence, the mother everyone wishes they had. “No, love. In’t none of Mother’s children bad. I in’t here to judge.”
Here, if the audience was up for it, was a vision of forgiveness as encompassing in its way as the last scene of The Winter’s Tale. But towards the end of the play, Mother Clap wearies of the relentless partying, and she retires to the country with a straight transvestite called the Princess and two of the mollies. In 2001, it felt like the play was throwing down a gauntlet: in the new century, it said, we don’t just want to love in any way we choose, we want our own marriages too, and our own families.
“As a nation we think we know who we were, but we need to find out what we’re becoming,” I finally wrote to Chris Hogg, “so it’s a tremendous time to be a national theatre.” The possibility of rejection is gruesome to theatre directors, who spend their careers doing the rejecting, and I’d never run anything more complex than a rehearsal room; but I thought I knew what the National Theatre should be, so I came off the fence and told the board I wanted to run it, and what I’d do with it.
We talk passionately about renewing our audience; we wonder how we can attract a more heterogeneous crowd. We worry about marketing, ticket prices, image. It all matters, but in the end it’s only on our stages that we can galvanise new audiences.
A colony of playwrights emerged in the 1990s, many of them finding ferocious life in diverse corners of their own communities. What they had in common was an unabashed desire to reach out to their audience and entertain them. We must challenge them now to paint on a larger canvas.
None of this is to deny our responsibilities as a classical theatre; but after twenty-five years on the South Bank, it’s hard to think of many unarguably great plays, particularly from the English repertoire, that haven’t been done here. We’ve arrived at a place where we can start to trudge through the canon again with a weary sigh, or we can dedicate ourselves to its rediscovery in the context of our overarching curiosity about what makes the classical repertoire speak now.
I’m urged on by the example of the first theatres to make the move to the South Bank, not to occupy a site of national importance but to escape one of the periodic crackdowns by the city fathers on “the uttering of popular, busy and seditious matters.” And yet our theatre was never so national as it was 400 years ago: a whole society gazing hungrily into the poets’ mirror, an “inordinate haunting of great multitudes of people, specially youth, to plays, interludes and shows,” everyone in London having a really good time.
The self-confidence of the Elizabethan theatres was nothing to do with their official status—they were daring, disreputable and sceptical of authority. We share with them an audience thirsty for adventure, anxious to discuss what it means to be part of a society that’s in a state of permanent reinvention, and looking for a really good time.
This was fine as far as it went, and the rest of this story is bound to reveal a shortfall between the intention and the execution. But even as I sat down to write it, I was aware that if audiences didn’t have a really good time at Mother Clap, the egg would be hard to scrape from my face. At the dress rehearsal, around fifty people sat silent as the grave in the circle, so the omens weren’t good. But I cheered up as I watched the crowd gather for the first public preview. They looked right for the play: young, funky, a lot of them gay, and they seemed to have a ball. Mother Clap seemed to point the way towards a carnival of provocative, enjoyable new shows. Maybe I had underestimated the allure of the conjunction of bodice and hairy chest, but as one molly lured another from the path of virtue, the show struck a universal chord. How wonderful it would have been, everyone thought, to have discovered the ways of the world with these mollies! Or maybe that was just me.
A week after Mother Clap opened, I was interviewed by the National Theatre’s board. There were five other candidates for the job. I remember nothing of the interview. I do remember that Chris Hogg called me the same evening to offer me the job.
2
Imaginary Forces
2002
At the press conference announcing my appointment, someone asked why the National Theatre’s board had selected as its director yet another white, male Cambridge graduate. I came pre-armed with a sound bite: “I’m a member of several interesting minorities.” It got a laugh, but it didn’t bear examination: I had only two minorities in mind (gay, Jewish), and they both flourish in the performing arts. So I turned the spotlight on the audience, accusing it of being too white, middle-aged and middle class. Furious letters poured in from patrons who had no problem at all with the idea that the theatre should be run entirely for the benefit of the white, middle-aged middle classes, many of them pointing out that I was guilty of being all three.
Nick Starr was appointed executive director four months later. His predecessor, Genista McIntosh, had agreed to stay on long enough to ensure that I had a say in who succeeded her. She knew as much as there was to know about the National, and left us with a comprehensive analysis of what needed putting right. It boiled down to: the current operating model isn’t working; the audience isn’t there anymore for the traditional repertoire of high-minded classics and groundbreaking new plays; and we’re dependent on frequent and uninterrupted runs of Broadway musicals, which are the only reliable way of filling the house, almost invariably with the white, middle-aged middle classes. This didn’t seem to her, or to us, what the National was for.
The idea of a British national theatre on the continental model was proposed first by the critic William Archer and the playwright George Bernard Shaw at the end of the nineteenth century. There were many false starts; even sixty years later it wouldn’t have got off the ground if Laurence Olivier hadn’t been willing to sacrifice his film career for the vision of a company dedicated to the kind of repertoire that was standard in the great European state theatres.
In the absence of a purpose-built house for the first thirteen years of the National Theatre’s existence, Olivier took temporary occupation of the Old Vic, a Victorian music hall, its bricks and mortar steeped in the rough and tumble of popular entertainment. The Old Vic was inherited in 1912 by Lilian Baylis, an idealist who was partly motivated by the desire to get the working man out of the pub and into the theatre, where she felt the works of Shakespeare would set him on the path to sobriety. In this she was certainly deluded, but her way of thinking still dominates public policy on the arts. The great work of the past is performed not for its own sake, but instrumentally, as a means to an end. The end changed several times during my twelve years: economic regeneration, social diversity, international prestige, whatever bee was in the government’s bonnet, though it was
never, as it was for Lilian Baylis, fewer drunks on the street at closing time. God helped her run the Old Vic. She would tell an actor wanting to play Romeo that God preferred to see him as Tybalt. God wasn’t keen on actors who asked for wage rises, so she turned most of them down. Despite, or maybe because of, her relationship with the Almighty, the work she produced, without government support, was by all accounts of an astonishingly high standard. She kept ticket prices low and attracted the best actors of her day, Olivier included.
When Olivier accepted the invitation to lead the National Theatre at the Old Vic, he brought to it his experience both of Lilian Baylis’s instrumental populism and his own seasons as a commercial actor-manager in the West End, where he’d given many of his most celebrated performances. And he appointed as literary manager Kenneth Tynan, the Observer’s theatre critic, to help him identify the kind of plays that you might find in a French or German state theatre.
The National had no charter. There is no founding document that announces what kind of work it should do, and who it should do it for. The nearest they had in 1963 was a handbook, published in 1908, by the playwright and director Harley Granville Barker, in which he proposed a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre that would:
keep the plays of Shakespeare in its repertoire; revive whatever else is vital in English classical drama; prevent recent plays of great merit from falling into oblivion; produce new plays; produce translations of foreign works both ancient and modern.
Nearly a century later, this still described the repertoire I’d proposed in my application, though I would have added to it the aspiration that the National Theatre should examine the constituent parts of its title, and explore both the state of the nation and the boundaries of the theatre.
Balancing Acts Page 4