This victim’s account of being gassed was by Adolf Hitler. I even doodled with a song for Hitler. There was first a chorus of what I called the ‘reassembled men’, for which I was going to use the conjuror’s device of the ‘sphinx box’ invented by Thomas Tobin in 1865. I even worked out, with Ali Bongo, my magic consultant, a way of bringing on a chorus of blown-off heads which sang! The sphinx boxes contained various heads of those blown apart by explosives. Fritz Haber conducted their song.
Having caught a bomb and been beheaded
the head blown several yards from all the rest
with never any chance of reuniting
I’d say explosives are the weapon to be dreaded
and death Professor Haber’s way is best
and I’d prefer it any day to Maximiting.
I’d sooner live but if it’s fated then I pray
Lord send me death Professor Haber’s way, etc., etc.
Then there was a kind of counter-chorus of gassed men, their bodies intact, but like the line of men with bandaged eyes in the painting by Sargent in the Imperial War Museum. One of these reveals himself as Adolf Hitler, who reprises the lines of the first chorus:
I’ll rule my country and one day I’ll slay millions Professor Haber’s way.
Then the ghost of Clara Haber, the scientist wife of Fritz, who killed herself through shame at his actions, sang:
Fritz never lived to see his fellow Germans use his form of killing on his fellow Jews.
A song by Adolf Hitler reminded me too much of ‘Springtime for Hitler’, in the film The Producers, and it was soon stifled, though I believe many round me were thinking that Square Rounds would be the perfect sure-fire vehicle for the Zero Mostel/Gene Wilder theatrical investment scam where all the investors lose their money! Only Clara’s song survived.
Another victim of mustard gas in the Battle of the Marne in 1918 was the father of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, ‘Stormin’ Norman’, in charge of Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War. I was particularly interested in this, as not only did his father’s experience greatly influence the son’s rigorous anti-chemical weapon drills, but also because General Schwarzkopf was a keen amateur magician whose speciality was pulling flags or multicoloured silk napkins out of his mouth!
III
It was a photograph of Sir Hiram Maxim standing above the then Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, who is trying out the Maxim machine gun, that first made me think of magicians. They are both wearing the top hat and tails of the traditional conjuror. Top hats were an early addition to the emblems with which I was juggling. The image of the inventor (in Fritz Haber’s case, the successful fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere was likened to plucking bread from the skies) was close to that of the conjuror bringing novelties from his top hat. And from the top hat came silks, as from the mouth of General Schwarzkopf. It so happens that the dyes that created the most colourful silks, like violet, could be used as the base of phosgene gas, which was more poisonous than chlorine. And as William Moore tells us in his book Gas Attack! Chemical Warfare 1915–1918 (1987), ‘In the First World War the German chemists switched from making dyes to mustard gas and back with extraordinary rapidity.’ It is true that most First World War gases could be manufactured in bulk using the same methods and machinery that were normally used in making dyestuffs, and as Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman point out in A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare (1982), ‘the chlorine that poisoned our grandfathers at Ypres [was] available thanks to our grandmothers’ desire for brightly coloured dresses’. At the start of the war, Germany produced 75 per cent of the world’s dyes. From these facts it was an easy step to imagine silks of various colours representing poisonous gases produced from the top hat of their inventor. Silk and top hats became a basic metaphor of the piece.
A chemist who had learned much in dye factories was Fritz Haber, though he left the job as soon as he could and only took it in order to escape another job where Justus von Liebig’s process of making fertiliser from dissolving bones in sulphuric acid made what Haber called ‘a little known town in Galicia’, Poland, pungent and repellent. Although in another early draft I allow Fritz Haber to mention that he learned his chemistry at his father’s dyeworks, in the final draft I do not allow this Jewish inventor of poison gas to unearth the dreadful irony of the place of his previous employment. I did write it, though:
FRITZ HABER
After leaving university it was hard to get a start.
I think that anti-Semitism played a major part.
My first job was in a distillery in Budapest
making Schnapps from apricots, a drink that I detest.
Then more appropriate work but in a place much too remote
in Galicia, called Auschwitz, a town of little note
except that it possessed, ever since von Liebig’s time,
a factory for synthesising phosphates of lime
by the fertiliser process he was first to pioneer.
The work was menial. I left Auschwitz in a year.
The work was not what men with doctorates do
and I quit Auschwitz in 1892.
Most chemistry, I do admit, is likely to offend
the nostrils but Auschwitz was the end.
Bones in sulphuric acid being rendered down
sent out a stinking pall that choked the town.
Both jobs were so frustrating I ended trying
to work with my father in merchandising dyeing.
I think this was one of those cuts, and there were many, that occurred when I would see out of the corner of my eye my assistant and stage manager Trish Montemuro making vigorous scissor movements with her fingers. She was usually right, but if the composer Dominic Muldowney ever writes the full-blown opera of Square Rounds he keeps promising, I think the almost too terrible irony of Haber’s early employment will have to be reinstated, as maybe the aria for the blinded Hitler, and the square rounds of coalition cluster bombs.
IV
Fritz Haber claimed that he created the nitrogen-fixation process to make the world greener, more fertile, and it was others who used the nitrates to manufacture deadly explosives:
HABER
NH4NO3 and (NH4)2SO4
fertilisers, Clara, not materials of war.
Duality reigns. It wasn’t my decision
to have my ammonia turned into ammunition.
Think of fire, you fire pots with it, you bake
a crusty loaf with it, a Christmas cake.
You keep warm with it in winter, cheer the night
with the controlled glow of candlelight,
but when a building or a city goes up in flame
the destructive element is chemically the same.
Did Prometheus think he was giving man the means
for blowing the world up into smithereens?
And it was probably budget that forced me to jettison a notion and its speeches involving another use for nitrates, apart from fertiliser and explosives: namely as film. Hudson Maxim also made a film, called The Battle Cry of Peace, based on his book Defenseless America (1915), to encourage the USA to arm. Film is another nitrate composition, and can as it decomposes be explosively volatile. It was another element I had wanted to use, to recreate the film with my women actors. So I wrote a song for Hudson Maxim boasting of the effect of his film on the USA and its showing in London, but regretting that the cellulose in it was now too volatile to use. Only the first three stanzas of the following survive in the final draft.
HUDSON MAXIM
What Fritz Haber’s done, that ingenious Hun,
Europe’s first ammonia synthesiser,
is to create a supply of nitrate
for the bullets and shells of the Kaiser.
The German supplies are now on the rise
when they’d almost dwindled to zero
when the Brits’ naval forces blocked Chilean sources
conjuring nitrates
made Haber a hero.
Because his side got a boost from the nitrates produced
from the endless supply in the air
it’s the year that I say to the USA
wake up, get armed and prepare.
My eloquence on the theme of defence
soon got my countrymen scared.
I made them aware that they should prepare
and, after my book and my film, they prepared.
If nitrates from the skies both fertilise
and make TRINITROTOLUENE
the stuff also goes into cellulose
and puts movies that warn on a screen.
And just down the road your Government showed
the film that first terrified the USA
in the open air in Trafalgar Square
and when they saw it they joined up right away.
When the Germans invade us it shows that the raiders
would kill all the menfolk first
then after that slaughter every mom, wife and daughter
would be subjected by Huns to the worst.
Once they’d had a good gander at my propaganda
they soon wanted to arm for the fight.
I couldn’t have been prouder of my smokeless powder
when they stocked up with my Maximite.
And I must mention my brother’s invention
the greatest thing ever for saving of life.
You’ll bless my brother when Huns lecher your mother
or turn lustful eyes on your wife.
I’d like to replay that old film today
that you used as recruitment aid
but what scared the US is a volatile mess
and the film it was made of’s decayed.
Best not to get too close to that cellulose
or you might well end up blown apart.
But the US of A is so armed today
thanks to Hudson Maxim’s eloquent art.
I don’t wish to boast but I’ve done the most
of any to win you this war.
I was the one got the Yanks on the Hun
with a film fifty millions saw.
And my book did impress the entire US
just how grave the matter could be
and once properly prepared war was declared
and if anyone’s to be thanked then it’s me!
Maximite, Maxim gun, will demolish the Hun
when the full might of the States attacks him,
He won’t stand a chance once the Yanks get to France
and they’re coming to France thanks to Maxim.
V
Once I had entered into the imagery of conjuror and magician, I thought of a performer I greatly admired, and wanted him to bring his unique skills to the idea of transformation as a basic image of chemistry. He was Arturo Bracchetti, the Italian quick-change genius. In Italian the art of quick change is called Fregolismo, after its star practitioner, Fregolo, who used to do an act with an orchestra conductor’s podium, and who would appear instantly transformed into, say, Beethoven or Wagner, whenever their music was playing. I have only found one example in English music hall, and that was a woman known as ‘the Incomparable Vonetta’, who flourished in the halls between 1906 and 1914. A poster of the period announcing ‘Mademoiselle Vonetta, the Only Lady Illusionist, Protean and Quick Change Artiste’ shows a long queue of male and female figures in various costumes and uniforms, all instant transmogrifications of the Incomparable Vonetta. Arturo Bracchetti had carried the art of quick-change to incomparably brilliant heights.
The piece was performed by a Chorus of Munitionettes who were ‘transformed’ by visiting the WC cabinet into the male scientists. It was meant as the kind of transformation that happened in the chemistry that was the core of the theme. But also behind it, apart from the fact I like cross-gender playing, was the idea that all the men had gone to the front, so that there were none left to play the male characters. The only men were the old, as with Sweeper Mawes, who opens the play, and those who had returned from the trenches seriously traumatised, as in the character I wanted Arturo to play. I wanted him to change from the shell-shocked man into the soldier he had been at the front, and then into a woman in the black clothes and veil of the widow. The shell-shocked man inhales laughing gas from the top hat left by Justus von Liebig, rushes behind a pile of crates and emerges immediately as a soldier, who then runs towards the audience, and as he does so, is metamorphosed into a widow. I got everything I’d asked for, except that Arturo added, for good measure, a lighted candle in the hand of the widow. When I saw the final result I could scarcely believe its brilliance. And for the finale he devised a spectacle of instant transformation of what were meant to be clouds of poisonous gas in the sky into Chinese silk costumes. I still think of it as one of the most beautifully theatrical things I have ever seen. He is an artist I humbly salute.
VI
And I can’t write an introduction to Square Rounds without saluting my treasured collaborator of twenty years, the designer Jocelyn Herbert, who died on 6 May 2003. She was utterly essential and utterly supportive in our work on Square Rounds, as she had been on all ventures from the Oresteia (1981), The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1988), The Kaisers of Carnuntum (1995), The Labourers of Herakles (1995), the feature film Prometheus (1999) and Fire and Poetry (Theatre Olympics, Shizuoka, Japan, 2000), to my next work for the National Theatre, as yet uncompleted, which we were discussing up to an hour before she died.
I had been thinking about Square Rounds and collecting material for about twenty years, and as with any long and layered project, it needed a bold simplification to resolve its tensions and contradictions. There was no one better to talk to at this stage, before even the workshop text had been written, than Jocelyn. She had an ability to share a vision, and without making it conventional, to find physical images to earth the lightning. She was extraordinarily patient with my crude sketches and kindergarten collages. I bombarded her with images of men in top hats: the gentleman ‘inventor’ removed from the bloody action he contributes to; the conjurors producing silks from their top hats; the formal funeral director; Vesta Tilley; Burlington Bertie. What resulted was a beautifully formal black circle on a white floor, with three screens on which were projected images of blasted trees which could have been from the shell-shattered landscapes of the First World War or from the acid-rain-wasted landscapes of polluted Europe. I thought she made the Olivier look as beautiful as it had ever looked. Whatever else it was, I believe that Square Rounds produced one of the best designs Jocelyn had ever done.
After long periods of despair about finding a style, we had workshops which involved Jocelyn, the magician Ali Bongo and Arturo Bracchetti, the Italian quick-change genius. She warmed to their inventiveness and painstaking practicality, which she recognised as close to her own, and the style of Square Rounds emerged from the month in the NT studio and long subsequent sessions at her own studio before the beautiful model that she always made for a production. I loved these visits to Princedale Road, sitting for hours with a glass of her favourite Pouilly-Fumé or retsina, moving the cut-out figures stabilised with blobs of plasticine about the modelled Olivier stage. Even before the text was finalised, this process helped me to clarify the quite complicated things I wanted to explore. It was for me a deeply important process because behind it I detected, in both designer and poet, a need to make (or remake) the theatrical process more organic, to rescue the actor and text from the suffocation of naturalism or from being dwarfed by high tech. I felt in those sessions that it was possible to create a new poetic theatre that drew from the past, but which looked straight into the depths and disturbance of our own times.
There were two ‘eureka’ moments in Square Rounds that I celebrate. One was when we were poring over albums of photographs in the Imperial War Museum. We were looking at pictures of Munitionettes for costumes and factory routines, and we also looked at the sections on Gas. I was struck by the variously improvised gas ala
rms: a gas sentry striking a bell hung from three lashed poles in Fleurbaix in June 1916; another picture of three lashed poles, but with a dangling iron bar to be struck in the event of gas; a soldier using a frying pan as a gas alarm; a gas sentry with a large gas gong in Combies in March 1917; an improvised gas alarm made from a metal oil drum struck with a large stick; a giant metal triangle for gas alert; large metal tubes of various sizes hung in different ways; a gas-alarm horn; bells of various sizes, including church bells used as gas alarms; a bell hung from a structure like those I’d seen in Japanese temples. The Chinese invented, developed and perfected tuned bells in about 600 BC. I proposed to Dominic Muldowney, the composer, that we combine all these sounds into a chaotic crescendo of panic, which then gradually turns into Chinese music to introduce a Chinese finale in which all the inventions boasted of by Maxim and Haber had been thought of over a thousand years before in China. This gave my Italian quick-change genius Arturo Bracchetti his greatest opportunity.
The second ‘eureka’ moment was after a very long session in Jocelyn’s studio with the model, going through scenes over and over, when she put up the scene where the invention of gas for use in mass destruction is represented by beautifully coloured silks falling from the flies over the black circle in succession. These suddenly beautiful silks produced from the ‘top hat’ were, paradoxically, the poisonously lethal gases from chlorine to Zyklon B, and they would hang there until Arturo Bracchetti, as the Chinese conjuror, would redeem them in the costumes he transformed them into for himself and the chorus of Chinese Dancers. It had the qualities I had hoped for, that I had seen in my mind’s eye but couldn’t see before my very eyes until Jocelyn’s vision and practical patience had given it substance. I was very moved by what I saw because I also knew that it was inspired by the Matisse of the late collages, an artist we both adored.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 31