There are three lost boys on stage, Hodge, Posner and Hector, and it seems as if Hardy has written about all of them.
“ ‘Uncoffined’ is a typical Hardy usage,” continues Hector. “A compound adjective, formed by putting ‘un-’ in front of the noun. Or verb, of course. Un-kissed. Un-rejoicing. Un-confessed. Un-embraced.” Richard and Sam sit either side of a classroom table, unrejoicing, unembraced, and they have pulled the audience in so close that they need do no more than think and feel. They have stopped acting. Richard continues:
The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
For a moment, it seems as if Sam might take Richard’s hand. He reaches out in a gesture so tentative that in any other scene, in any other play, nobody would notice. Tonight, nine hundred people share Alan’s “way of looking at things,” and they hold their breath; but Hector is locked in a world where the only possible fellowship is with dead poets, so the moment passes, though not before Richard, Sam, Alan and Thomas Hardy have embraced the Lyttelton audience in a fellowship of the lonely. It’s one of the reasons they come to the theatre, to know what the Banished Duke in As You Like It tells Orlando: “Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy.”
(Alan later gets a letter from Hardy’s biographer Claire Tomalin, who points out that Hector gets “Drummer Hodge” wrong. Hodge was the generic name for common labourers, a little like Joe Bloggs, and Hardy uses it not to individualise Hodge but as an ironic commentary on the way soldiers like him are tossed into common graves, the forgotten casualties of war. Alan comes clean about his mistake in the London Review of Books, though I think that I’d have said to Claire Tomalin: well spotted, of course Hector gets it wrong, that was the whole idea. By misreading the poem, he allows us a glimpse of his soul.)
At the end of The History Boys, the eight boys sit in a line and Mrs. Lintott talks us through their futures, most of them “pillars of a community that no longer has much use for pillars.” Dakin is happy enough as an international tax lawyer. Timms has put together a chain of dry-cleaners and takes drugs at the weekend. Rudge builds affordable homes for first-time buyers. Seven of the eight of them are just about OK, and they aren’t complaining, but their energy is gone: it’s as if they’ve grown another skin, and they are keeping their secrets, suppressing their disappointments. They have grown up, and it’s not as great as they thought it was going to be. They stare blankly at us and we know them to be us, and we’re relieved to be them because otherwise we’d be Posner, who hasn’t grown up, so life has defeated him.
Earlier in the play Sam hit the comedy bullseye with:
I’m a Jew.
I’m small.
I’m homosexual.
And I live in Sheffield.
I’m fucked.
But Posner really is fucked. He never needed E. M. Forster to tell him who he was, but his self-awareness hasn’t saved him. His life hasn’t gone well, the way many lives don’t, and even the luckiest of us know how close we’ve been to the abyss. Defeated, disappointed and generally fucked as we all feel ourselves at least sometimes to be, we can only be grateful to the fucked who people Alan’s plays.
The first preview of The History Boys is the most euphoric night I will ever spend at the National. By the time the official opening arrives a week later, we all feel unstoppable. An hour before the show goes up, someone smokes a secret cigarette in the Lyttelton flies, and the sprinklers go off. The stage is drenched and the lighting system goes down. By seven, when we’re due to start, water is still dripping heavily from the flies. We ask the audience to wait in the foyer, and give everyone a free drink. The lights go back on, but the program that controls them from cue to cue has lost its memory. Mark Henderson, the lighting designer, agrees to relight the show as it happens. At seven thirty we give the audience a second drink while the stage crew finishes the salvage operation, and at eight we let them in. I come on to explain the delay, and tell them the entire cast has been mopping the stage for the last two hours, which is an outrageous lie, but as they’ve all had a couple of drinks too many, they buy it. And the image of Richard Griffiths on his hands and knees with a towel does no harm to the way they receive the play.
Two and a half years later in New York, the eight history boys and three teachers commemorate the dead Hector for the last time at a Sunday matinee on Broadway. In the final seconds, Hector’s ghost returns to haunt them, and I know the words Richard speaks will haunt all of us too, because they remind us of what we’ve all learned from each other, and of why we decided to spend our lives in the theatre in the first place.
Pass the parcel.
That’s sometimes all you can do.
Take it, feel it, and pass it on.
Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day.
Pass it on, boys.
That’s the game I wanted you to learn.
Pass it on.
Alan first mentioned The Habit of Art on a flight to New York: we were on our way to catch up with The History Boys company. He imagined a meeting in Oxford between W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten about the opera Death in Venice. Before Britten arrives, the young Humphrey Carpenter, who would later go on to write fine biographies of both, arrives in Auden’s rooms at Christ Church hoping to interview him. Auden is expecting a rent boy.
AUDEN: Take off your trousers.
CARPENTER: What for?
AUDEN: What do you think? Come along, it’s half past.
CARPENTER: What am I being asked to do?
AUDEN: You aren’t being asked to do anything. You’re being paid. This is a transaction. I am going to suck you off.
CARPENTER: But I’m with the BBC.
AUDEN: Really? Well, that can’t be helped. Ideally I would have preferred someone who was more a son of the soil, but it takes all sorts.
After he’s cleared up who’s who, Auden says to Stuart, the real rent boy, “You are a rent boy. I am a poet. Over the wall lives the Dean of Christ Church. We all have our parts to play.” And all of them are worth the playwright’s attention, Auden might have added.
In the play about the rehearsal of the play about Auden and Britten, the author was Elliot Levey, whose nimble wit always endears him to his colleagues. He channelled the resentments of every angry young playwright he’d ever seen in a rehearsal room. He was nothing like Alan, but Alan kept telling me how much he liked him, so maybe the suppressed fury of his performance struck a chord.
The best scene in the play was a confrontation between Britten and Auden about sexuality and art, literature and music, creativity and inspiration, self-restraint and letting it all hang out, old age and persistence. Both composer and poet have the habit of art. They keep going.
“Still hanging on then?” said Linda at the stage door when Alan turned up for the first day of rehearsals for his next play, People. And still practising the habit of art. Word leaked out before People opened that it was an attack on the National Trust, which it wasn’t, but it was set in a single room in a large and derelict country house in the middle of Yorkshire, occupied by two old ladies: Lady Dorothy Stacpoole and her companion, Iris. The National Trust turns up in the person of Lumsden.
LUMSDEN: Forgive me if I enthuse, but I see this house as a metaphor. Tell a child the story of England and it is all here.
DOROTHY: Yes. I would be deceiving you, Mr. Lumsden, if I said I had not heard such twaddle before.
I particularly abhor metaphor.
Metaphor is fraud.
England with all its faults.
A country house with all its shortcomings.
The one is not the other…however much the Trust would like us to think so. I will not collaborate in your conceit of country. It is a pretend England.
Alan ha
s always denied he deals in metaphor: “It’s about the madness of George III.” But never averse to having his cake and eating it, he has Dorothy rent out the house as a location for hard porn, before succumbing to the Trust and handing it over. People was the consummation of Alan’s creative relationship with Frances de la Tour, who played Dorothy, and a sardonic return to the secret garden in Forty Years On, though it didn’t seem to share the headmaster’s nostalgia for what it was like before the crowds found the key to the door. Much better to make porn in the garden than yearn for it to be something that it never was.
While we were working on People, Alan showed me a short radio play called Cocktail Sticks, and wondered whether there was anything we could do with it. It was straightforwardly autobiographical, a portrait of his parents. In a small masterpiece of self-reproach, it charted the distance that gradually opened as he outgrew them. I said we’d be happy to do something with it.
Most actors can do Alan. Alex Jennings caught not just his voice and mannerisms, but his wry melancholy and boundless empathy.
“He’s uncanny,” said Maggie Smith about Alex when she came to see it. She also said how peculiar it was that for such a shy man, Alan was so ready to put himself centre stage.
“Can you remember why we never made the movie of The Lady in the Van in 1999?” I asked Alan.
“I didn’t think Maggie wanted to do it,” said Alan.
“I bet she did,” I said, “and even if she didn’t then, I bet she’d do it now, if Alex played you. You know how much she loves him. And you, of course.”
Which is how we decided to make the movie of The Lady in the Van. But I couldn’t have made The Lady in the Van if I hadn’t made The Madness of King George, and I couldn’t have made The Madness of King George if Alan hadn’t insisted whoever made it had to employ me as its director and Nigel Hawthorne as the king. In that, as in everything else we’ve done together since Richard Eyre introduced us, Alan Bennett has been the best luck I’ve had.
6
Knowing Nothing
MOVIES
Samuel Goldwyn Junior was the opposite of everything you’d ever heard about the brazen original. Sam was soft-spoken, cultured and self-effacing. He was more interested in the ideas and talents of other people than anyone I have ever met in the movie business. He was also a passionate Anglophile, which may have partly explained his determination in 1994, long before I started to think about running the National Theatre, to finance The Madness of George III. It didn’t occur to him that the king could be played by anyone other than Nigel Hawthorne, and he was sanguine about putting me behind the camera.
“It’s easy,” he said. “Tell the director of photography how you see it. He’ll do the rest. You won’t have a problem.”
I knew only one director of photography, Andrew Dunn, whose former girlfriend had been in a play I’d directed.
“He’s good,” said Sam. “Ask him. And who will design it?”
“It should look like Barry Lyndon,” I said, aiming high. Ken Adam, designer of Dr. Strangelove and all the early James Bond movies, had won an Oscar for it.
“So ask Ken Adam,” said Sam.
“Ken Adam won’t be interested in working with me. He works with Kubrick.”
“What’s the worst he can say? No?” said Sam, a question I’ve asked many directors since.
I tracked Ken down to a hotel in New York and turned up in his room with the screenplay. “Alan Bennett?” said Ken. “I’d very much like to do it.”
“I know nothing about making movies,” I said apologetically.
“Don’t worry,” said Ken, “I probably know enough to get us started.”
“You only direct your first film once,” said Andrew Dunn. “Next time, you’ll know too much. You’ll be worrying about where they’re going to put the honeywagons. Ask for everything that occurs to you. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s impossible.”
I knew so little that I didn’t know that a honeywagon is a trailer full of toilets. I didn’t know that it’s generally a bad idea for a film unit to be constantly on the move, dragging the honeywagons in its wake, so it’s as well to stay in each location for as long as possible and find several different uses for it.
Ken Adam wasn’t interested in impossible. He had watched the Reichstag fire, fled Berlin with his family in 1934, joined the RAF and flown long-range bombing missions over Germany, the country of his birth. He designed the war room for Dr. Strangelove and Fort Knox for Goldfinger. He insisted on exactly the right grand house for every scene, and he seemed to know all their owners. “I’ll just knock on the door and see if Johnny Arundel is at home.” The honeywagons were never off the road.
Ken, Andrew and the editor Tariq Anwar were my film school. Tariq sternly took me through each day’s rushes and showed me where I’d gone wrong. The most depressing difference between rehearsing a scene for a play and shooting one for a movie is the moment in the shower the following morning when you realise how you should have been doing it all along. You can go back to the rehearsal room and fix a play. You’re lumbered with what you shot for eternity.
One of Alan’s stage directions, later cut, asked for the mad king to be followed by the petrified court like something from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Even Ken Adam was daunted by that, though he’d have done fine on an Eisenstein set. Knowing nothing, but surrounded by people who knew a lot, I made a better movie than I ever did when I knew more.
Sam Goldwyn knew how to sell it, too. “Outside England, nobody knows who George III was,” he said. Americans know him only as King George, the Tyrant, unfit to be the ruler of a free people. So we gave the film a new title: The Madness of King George. Someone reported that Sam had changed it because he was a vulgar Hollywood mogul who didn’t want the dumb American audience to think that The Madness of George III was the sequel to The Madness of George 1 and The Madness of George 2.
“It’s a great story,” said Sam, and made no attempt to deny it. The TV networks picked it up, and it was all over the evening news. The movie sold tickets. It was nominated for four Oscars. The night before the ceremony, Sam gave a dinner at the Beverly Hills house he inherited from his father. The first Sam Goldwyn remortgaged the house every time he wanted to make a new movie. “And when the movie made money, he paid off the mortgage, and threw a party,” said Sam. He was urbane and elegant, but he was his father’s son. I still wonder whether he planted the sequel story himself.
Some years later at an official function, a young RAF officer, an equerry at Buckingham Palace, asked me whether I was the Madness of King George chap. I said that I was.
“Absolute godsend!” he said. “How did you know?”
How did I know what?
“When I got this job, I knew nothing about it, nothing about what was expected, so I asked them about the etiquette, the bowing and nodding and backing out of the room and so forth; was there a handbook, was there someone who could teach me? And they said: rent the DVD of The Madness of King George and watch it like a hawk—it’s all there. So I did, terrific film, marvellous acting and so on, and all the etiquette absolutely tremendous. How did you know?”
“We made it up,” I said.
“You’re joking?” said the equerry, stricken.
“It’s kind of what we do in the movies—make things up.”
Actually, I’d taken quite a lot of care when we did the play to find out about the bowing and scraping, but nobody looks for documentary reality in stage ceremonial, so it acquired a life of its own. And nobody comes to the theatre looking for an instruction manual. I’m always amazed by the assumption that film shows you the thing itself.
After The Madness of King George, boxfuls of scripts arrived. “You should move to Hollywood. You’ll be surrounded with love,” said one Hollywood producer with terrifying sincerity. The script that set my pulse racing was Arthur Miller’s own screenplay for The Crucible, which was sent by Twentieth Century Fox, where Sam Goldwyn’s right-hand man Tom Rothma
n had just moved. Tom is as cultured and shrewd as Sam, but much, much louder. He’s still my best friend in Hollywood.
I visited Arthur Miller in his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. He was dubious. Over the years, directors had come and gone and The Crucible had never been made. He asked what I wanted to do with the language. I didn’t want to do anything with the language: why would I want to mess with his flinty Puritan prose? He thawed a little. The last director who’d made a pitch for it had told him he’d need to contemporise the archaic dialogue for the multiplex audience.
I knew nothing then about how or why Hollywood movies got the go-ahead. The Crucible would never have been made in 1995 if Daniel Day-Lewis hadn’t said he’d play John Proctor. He read it, we met to discuss it, he said he’d do it. The phone rang all day with congratulations from agents and executives. It seemed so easy.
Arthur asked me to spend a few days with him in his house in Connecticut. The Crucible flashed green on the screen of an IBM computer in the hut where he’d written since the early 1950s. I told him how I saw the film, and he tapped away at the keyboard. It was like giving Shakespeare notes on Macbeth. He asked me about casting. I told him that Paul Scofield wanted to play Danforth, the deputy governor who presides over the witch trials. I could have said nothing that would have better pleased him: his respect for the leading actors of the British theatre was limitless.
He knew none of the young Americans who wanted to play seventeen-year-old Abigail Williams, “a strikingly beautiful girl…with an endless capacity for dissembling.” She is the principal accuser in the witch trials, and it gradually emerges that she and John Proctor have been lovers; Proctor’s shame surges through the story.
Balancing Acts Page 15