by Stephen Fry
'As a matter of fact,' said Richard, 'it is the copy that came back from the Lord Chamberlain. There is a French's acting edition, but what you are holding is, as far as I am aware, the version closest to the original text as performed in the Victoria Palace that there is in existence. I'd like you to read it. And then I would like you to consider rewriting it.'
The French's acting edition of Me and My Girl.
I tottered upstairs and read the foolscap typescript in bed that night. It was almost impossible to understand. The hero was a Cockney costermonger called Bill Snibson who turns out to be the rightful heir to an earldom. That I could make out. Bill arrives at Hareford Hall, the ancestral home, to take up his position and in a series of mysterious scenes is alternately seduced by an aristocratic vamp, taught his family history and soaked for loans by his wastrel connections. Throughout it all runs the thread of his attempts not to lose Sally, his girl of the title. She is an honest Cockney with a noble heart as, au fond, is he.
I describe it as almost impossible to understand and I call the scenes 'mysterious' because of the incomprehensible 'bus' that was appended to almost every line of liberally exclamation-marked dialogue.
BILL: What you talking about, girl? (bus)
SALLY: Bill, you know very well! (bus)
BILL: You come here! (bus)
Or:
SIR JOHN: (taking book) Here! Give me that! (bus)
BILL: Oi! (bus)
And so on. Every now and then, throughout the script, there were blue pencil marks in a strong hand that read No! Absolutely not. Rewrite. Wholly unacceptable! and other furious expressions of crazed disapprobation.
At breakfast the next morning, Richard was keen to know my opinion.
'Well,' I said. 'It is quite a period piece ...'
'Exactly! Which is why it needs to be updated for an eighties audience.'
'That Cockney rhyming slang stuff seems a bit ... well, a bit old hat ...'
There had been a scene of several pages in which Bill laboriously took the family through the principles of rhyming slang.
'Ah, but you see it was Me and My Girl that first introduced the British theatre-going middle-classes to rhyming slang,' said Richard. 'Up until then, it had never strayed beyond the East End.'
'Ah, right. I see. But tell me, did the original producer really hate the script?'
'What do you mean?'
'All those comments. "Unacceptable", "cut this" and so on. What were they about?'
'I told you,' said Richard. 'This was the Lord Chamberlain's copy.'
My blank expression revealed the unpardonable depths of my ignorance.
'Until 1968 all plays performed in London had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain.'
'Oh, so he was the censor?'
'Effectively. The copy you have shows the cuts he, or rather his office, insisted upon in order to grant Me and My Girl its licence in 1937. You will notice they blue-pencil words like "cissy".'
'Literally blue-pencil.'
'Quite so. But what did you make of the script otherwise?'
'Gosh, it's tremendous but ... well ... I have to say I don't quite understand what the bus is doing there.'
'The bus?'
'I thought perhaps it was like the old word for to kiss, you know, to buss? But they can't keep kissing each other all the time. And besides there's often a bus in scenes between two male characters.'
Richard looked very puzzled for a moment and then a smile spread across his face. 'Ha!' His laugh always started with a whipcrack 'ha!' and then finished with a noise between his teeth that was half-way between the American 'sheesh!' and an attenuated, falsetto 'siss!'
I had passed the typescript over to Lorraine Hamilton and I now stabbed my finger down at a 'bus'. 'There!' I said. 'Do you understand it?'
'Well,' said Lorraine. 'I'm not quite sure ... it does seem rather odd. Perhaps ... mm, no, I can't think ...'
Richard looked from one to the other of us with mounting amusement. 'Business, you imbeciles!'
'Sorry?'
'Bus is short for business.'
I am not sure that we looked any the wiser.
'Bill was played by Lupino Lane. Lupino Lane was from a music-hall dynasty. He was the finest physical comedian of his day. A huge part of his success came from the remarkable knockabout routines he devised. His business with the cloak in Me and My Girl became one of the most famous sights on the London stage.'
Well, I shan't take you through every twist and turn of the story of how Noel Gay's musical came to be reworked for the 1980s. Richard, who acted as producer, secured Mike Ockrent to direct and as a co-producer he brought in David Aukin, who ran the Theatre Royal, Leicester, where the show was to be mounted. If it was a success there, the plan was to bring it into the West End. There was talk of Robert Lindsay for the lead role of Bill and Leslie Ash for Sally. Meanwhile it was up to me to rewrite the script from that Lord Chamberlain's copy.
'By the way,' Richard had said. 'Do feel free to add any of my father's other songs that you think might fit.'
The script of a musical is divided into three departments: music, lyrics and book. The book might be considered everything that isn't music or lyrics - the dialogue and story in other words. Nobody goes to a musical because of the book, they go to straight plays for that. On the other hand, the book is the spine of a musical. Like a spine it is only noticed when it goes wrong and like a spine, the book supports the entire frame and transmits the signals, messages and impulses that allow the body to feel, move and express itself. The great composers, Sondheim, Rogers, Porter and the rest, always insisted - indeed such insistence is one of the cliches of musical theatre - that everything starts with the book. The audience does not sing the book, nobody gasps and claps and delights in the book, but without it there is nothing. That is certainly not a complaint, by the way. There are plenty of essential jobs in the world of which people take little notice, and writing the book of the musical is amongst the least arduous and best rewarded of all of them.
In 1983 I didn't know a book from a ball-change or a torch song. In fact I knew nothing about musicals at all. I was in my mid-twenties, just a year and a half out of university. I could talk nonsense all day about Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett or Tennessee Williams as required. I was sound on the history and heroes of radio and television comedy, which was after all, despite the dismal public reception to Alfresco, my profession. I had a good knowledge of cinema, especially Warner Brothers films of the thirties and forties and British cinema of the forties and fifties. My knowledge of the classical musical and opera repertoire was fair, and I knew the songbooks of Porter, Kern and Gershwin very well. But few of the musicals for which most of those songs were written had I ever seen. The secret truth was that I rather looked down on the whole genre. I made exceptions for Cabaret, My Fair Lady, West Side Story and Guys and Dolls, which I knew as films and records and rated highly. Singin' in the Rain, Mary Poppins, Oliver! and The Sound of Music I knew and valued only as films and ... well, that was about it, give or take the occasional Sunday-afternoon screening of a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly classic on BBC2. Cats had been running in the West End for a year and a half, but I hadn't seen it. Still haven't. Must get round to it. Ditto Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon and all the others that have come and gone and come back again since. I don't doubt that the loss is mine.
The director, Mike Ockrent, who had made his name with the presentation of new theatre writing mostly in the fringe venues of England and Scotland, knew the world of musicals even less well than I did. But we soon discovered, as we worked on the script of Me and My Girl, that we had here a project that owed nothing to Broadway and Hollywood and everything to music hall. Whether the revival succeeded or failed would depend on how ready a modern audience might be for the slapstick, silliness and cheeky bounce that the late music-hall style embodied.
As I went from draft to draft, David Aukin provided me with an invaluable lesson. For many
years he had presided over the Hampstead Theatre, where he had nurtured Mike Leigh's legendary Abigail's Party as well as new plays by Dennis Potter, Michael Frayn, Harold Pinter and many others. When he saw my first draft, fresh from the daisy-wheel printer, he smiled.
'Your job is to try and do yourself out of a job. The shorter the distance between musical numbers, the better.'
'There's just too much dialogue, isn't there?' I said.
'Far too much.'
In the end I cut and cut and cut. I read, on somebody's recommendation, The Street Where I Live, Alan Jay Lerner's superb memoir of a Broadway lyricist and book writer's life and work. When it is time for an emotional or narrative transformation in the action of a musical, Lerner maintained, that moment should be expressed not in spoken words, but in song or in dance, otherwise why are you creating a musical show in the first place and not a play? In a good musical the action doesn't stop for a song - the songs are the action. I read this manifestly sound prescription, looked at my script thus far and realized that I had written nothing but a stop-start drama in which everything important happened in scenes of spoken dialogue that were from time to time halted for song and dance numbers. Douglas Furber and Arthur Rose, who had written the original book and lyrics, came from an era that preceded the Lerner manifesto. The stagecraft of the time allowed for chorus lines to shuffle on in front of a front-cloth while the scene was shifted behind. Modern theatre demanded visible changes that used trucking and flying and floating and other magical machine-driven techniques. Here Mike Ockrent was fantastically encouraging. He had read physics at university, briefly been an inventor and had a fine engineering mind.
'Write the most extravagant and outrageous scene changes you can think of,' he said. 'We'll make them work. But don't write to save money. Between us the production designer and I will make it happen.'
For the next draft then, I went crazy. The show opened with a number called 'A Weekend at Hareford'. I tweaked the lyrics a little and wrote stage directions that were, on the face of it, absurd. I described country-house weekenders singing the song in open chauffeur-driven cars as they made their way out of London, into the countryside, through the gates of Hareford Hall and up to the massive frontage, which would revolve and transform into an interior which the guests would enter to be greeted by the household servants. It was easy enough for me to write; let Martin Johns the designer and Mike Ockrent make of that what they would.
I cut dialogue as drastically as I could. The idea was to jump, as David Aukin had suggested, from musical number to musical number with as little dialogue as possible, but also to treat certain comic scenes - like the Lupino Lane cloak business to which Richard had alluded, as well as a seduction scene involving cushions and a sofa - as kinds of numbers in their own right. I also added two other well-known Noel Gay songs, 'The Sun Has Got His Hat On' and 'Leaning On a Lamp-post'.
Mike visited me in Chichester to work through his notes on this draft. He relished every over-ambitious, absurd and impossible demand I had made on his ingenuity.
'More,' he said. 'Let's go even further!'
But why, you will be wanting to know, was I in Chichester?
Chichester 1
Early in 1982 Richard Armitage took me and Hugh to L'Escargot in Greek Street for lunch.
'So that I get an idea of how best to shape your destinies,' he said, 'each of you should now tell me whose careers you most admire and whom you would most want to emulate.'
Hugh wondered if there was someone between Peter Ustinov and Clint Eastwood. Maybe with a hint of Mick Jagger thrown in.
Richard nodded, made a note in his black leather Smythson notebook and turned to me.
'Alan Bennett,' I said. 'Definitely Alan Bennett.'
I was too young to have seen Bennett's television comedy On The Margin, the tapes of which the BBC had shamefully wiped within weeks of transmission, as was the practice in those days, but I had an audio recording of highlights, which I knew off by heart, as I did the sermon in Beyond the Fringe and his cottaging sketch from The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. I had read but never seen his play Habeas Corpus and had once owned, then subsequently lost, a cassette tape of Forty Years On, in which he played a schoolmaster called Tempest. Those were enough for me to think him a hero. Talking Heads, A Private Function, An Englishman Abroad, The Madness of George III and The History Boys all lay many years in the future.
'Alan Bennett, eh?'
Was it paranoia, or did I sense that Richard found my answer disappointing? Peter Cook and John Cleese were greater comedy stars with their almost rock and roll status and charisma, but Alan Bennett's miniaturism, his frailty combined with his verbal touch and literary, almost academic, frames of reference appealed to me more as a role model. History has, of course, shown that his kind of career path was as unattainable for me as Cook's and Cleese's, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
A year after this lunch, round about the time Gossip was getting into financial trouble and I was working on the first drafts of Me and My Girl in between sweaty bouts of not coming up with Alfresco 2 material with Hugh, Richard called me up.
'Ha!' he said. 'You're going to like this. Be at the Garrick Theatre on Thursday afternoon at half past three to audition for Patrick Garland and John Gale. Prepare the part of Tempest in Forty Years On.'
'W-w-w-w ...?'
'It's for the Chichester Festival next April.'
'P-p-p-p-p ...'
'Good luck.'
Alan Bennett's very own part. And to be directed by the same man who directed the original production in nineteen sixty-whenever it was. I leapt for the bookshelf. I knew I had a copy somewhere, but it must have been in a box in my parents' house in Norfolk or in that indeterminate place where lost teenage property goes, all those favourite records, wall-posters and pullovers that you never see again. I streaked over to John Sandoe's, where the assistant was quite sure they had a copy if only he could lay his hands on it, now just let him think ... I almost screamed with impatience as he hunted with maddening deliberation and cheerfulness.
'Here we are. Our only copy. A little grubby I'm afraid - you can have it for a pound.'
I spent the next few hours reacquainting myself with this, Alan Bennett's first full-length dramatic work. Forty Years On is set in a fictional school called Albion House, which is mounting its annual school play, this year a specially devised pageant performed by staff and boys called 'Speak for England, Arthur'. This play-within-a-play takes a family through the World Wars by way of a dazzling series of sketches, monologues and parodies that manage to combine, in that uniquely Bennett way, the joyously comic with the mournfully elegiac. The original production, which starred John Gielgud as the headmaster, Paul Eddington as the senior master and Alan Bennett as the drippy junior master Tempest, was a huge success from the very beginning. The school's name, Albion House, alerted the audience to the possibility, never overstretched, that it might perhaps stand as a symbol of England itself.
I learned off by heart Tempest's 'Confirmation Class', in which he attempts to give a lesson on the facts of life.
TEMPEST: Those are called your private parts, Foster. And if anyone ever touches them, you are to say, 'Those are my private parts and you're not to touch them.'
FOSTER: Those are my private parts and you are not to touch them.
TEMPEST: It doesn't apply to me, Foster! It doesn't apply to me!
I also committed to memory a monologue in which Tempest plays a rather precious and faded literary figure recalling the great days of Bloomsbury.
With these and other scenes safely in my head I made my way by bus and Tube to the Garrick Theatre in the Charing Cross Road. I found the stage door, where I was greeted by a friendly young man who led me backstage to a little green room.
'My name's Michael,' he said. 'You're a little early, so perhaps you wouldn't mind waiting here while we just see some other people?'
I looked at my watch and saw that
it was ten to three. Perhaps the appropriateness of the number of minutes early I was could be read as a good omen.
Forty minutes on I walked nervously on to the stage, a hand shading my eyes as I strained to see down into the auditorium.
'Hello,' said a neat, friendly and delicately precise voice, 'I am Patrick, and this is John Gale, who runs the Chichester Festival Theatre.'
'Hello,' boomed a rich baritone from the dark.
'And this,' continued Patrick, 'is Alan Bennett.'
The high tenor song of a cheery and attenuated Yorkshire 'Hello' floated up from the stalls and into my unbelieving ears. Alan Bennett? Here! At the audition! Every organ in my body screamed. A hammering came into my ears, and my knees turned to water. Alan Bennett?
I remember not one minute or second of the half hour that followed. I know I must have recited or read some scenes and I do recall stumbling through the London streets in an agony of despair and disappointment, so I must have said goodbye and left the theatre in some manner or other.
Richard Armitage called me up at the flat that evening. 'How did it go, m'dear?'
'Oh Richard it was awful, I was terrible. Appalling. Monstrous. Unspeakable. Alan Bennett was there! In the theatre.'
'I don't doubt it. Is that a bad thing?'
'Well, it never occurred to me he'd be present. Never. I was tongue-tied, struck dumb. So nervous I could barely speak. Oh God, I was dreadful.'
'I'm sure you can't have been as bad as all that ...' He made the series of soothing and clucking noises that agents make to calm hysterical clients. They failed to console me.
The next day Lorraine rang. 'Darling, could you go to the Garrick again at three o'clock for a recall?'
'A recall?'
'It means they want to see and hear you again.'
'You mean they haven't ruled me out?'
I arrived at the Garrick bang on the hour determined at least to try to override my nerves. Michael greeted me like an old friend and led me straight through to the stage. The house lights were up, and I looked out and could clearly see Patrick Garland and John Gale in the stalls but this time no Alan Bennett. A great wave of relief swept over me.