The Blue Touch Paper (19 page)

Early that summer, Margaret and I decided to get married.
Because he couldn't bear to keep it, Clive had given Margaret the chaise longue on which Pauline Boty spent her last days. We were sitting on it one evening when I suggested marriage, and Margaret agreed. Next day we both woke up independently thinking, ‘We don't believe in marriage.' But we'd already told our families, and it seemed embarrassing to ring and say, ‘We've changed our minds.' More to the point, we were incredibly happy living together. Why on earth did we want to endanger that happiness? Margaret was a Matheson from Jardine Matheson, a firm who in the nineteenth century were partly responsible for the opium wars in China. But Margaret's grandfather had frittered away the family fortunes because all he wanted was to play the violin. Margaret's parents had ended up with nothing but a small farm in tussocky countryside near Hawick in the Scottish borders, where they managed to keep warm drinking Scotch diluted by huge amounts of water. Margaret's father, Commander Matheson, was the second of two brothers to whom her mother had been married successively, following the death of the first in battle. Since the Bible expressly forbids such a thing, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the best Anglican tradition, had had to sign a special form saying that in the circumstances of the Second World War it was fine. Go ahead. A tall sandy-haired Scot whose everyday mildness sometimes erupted into inarticulate rages all the more ferocious for their rarity, Pat had run the farm at a consistent loss since he had returned from the war. For a couple of years, he and Jean had been retired.

Margaret herself had been too posh to be ambitiously educated. She had been sent to the kind of school where there was more Greek dancing than physics. Full of initiative, she had briefly been a debutante, then gone on a secretarial course and
put herself into the BBC typing pool. From there she had transferred to work for one of the very best drama producers, Ken Trodd. Throughout the 1970s Margaret would have a zigzag career, choosing to leave when an employer refused to offer her new opportunities. Because she had been a secretary she had a revealing and sometimes caustic view of the people she later dealt with as equals. She'd seen them from the bottom, looking up, and often not much liked what she'd seen. There was a splendid abandon about her behaviour, or there would have been had she given the smallest damn about ensuring her own future in show business. But she didn't. She was already chafing at Clive's employment, and was about to head back to be a story editor at the BBC in the very department which, only a few years previously, had refused to promote her. After a brief diversion to Manchester to be a reporter on Granada TV's evening news programme, Margaret would soon be helping to plan a series in which Glenda Jackson played Elizabeth I. Her parents were clearly a little bit surprised by her impetuous decision to marry someone from so different a background, but they were never less than warm and welcoming. Hardened to the unexpected, they took everything in their stride. For my wedding present they gave me the writing desk on which I still work. My mother took to Margaret too, though she told me I was far too young to get married. She feared for me. She was right. I was twenty-three.

In the 1969 film of Bill Naughton's play
Spring and Port Wine
, Hannah Gordon is finally willing to give in and surrender her body to Keith Buckley for the first time when she is shown that he has painted the walls of their future apartment white. No dramatic scene so perfectly evokes the period. Margaret and I prepared our new house in Clapham and, like so many
of our generation all over the western world, sought to wipe out the past by whitening the walls and laying down hessian. It was only hippies who adorned and complicated, everyone else stripped. The floor sander became the totem object, often handed on between neighbours, just like the airing cupboard- warmed yoghurt cultures couples regularly shared. To 10 The Chase, revealed thus from top to toe, Margaret added a sapling magnolia tree which is still there today, glorious. Margaret and I had made a pact that if I failed my driving test for the third time on the day before, we would take it as an omen and cancel our wedding. But I passed, so at the beginning of August we went to a seafood lunch for family only and on to the Wandsworth Registry Office. Lastly we held a wedding party in the Parsons Green house of Caroline Younger, Margaret's best and oldest friend. Caroline was something of a minor heiress, the daughter of an Edinburgh beer magnate, and loved by all for her instinctive gift of hospitality. The Hares and Mathesons mingled among our contemporaries, who were mostly in floral shirts or blouses and sporting Victorian amounts of hair. The bride wore Laura Ashley and the groom had sideburns which reached down to his jaw.

As we left to go on our honeymoon weekend, the sky darkened to blackness and there was an apocalyptic thunderstorm. For weeks afterwards, guests would ring us, ostensibly to tell us how nice the wedding had been, but more urgently to ask where the dope had come from, and where might they buy some more? We made a few calls but never found out. After we went to sleep in the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, I woke in the night to find my face blown up like a football to around twice its regular size. I had forgotten to mention to my bride that I suffered from asthma. In the nine months I had lived with her,
the subject had never come up. Margaret assumed that I was dying on our wedding night. Had she but known, all I needed was to work off my reaction to the lobster lunch by going to Brighton Hospital to have my veins opened. Next day, while playing clock golf on the seafront, I was stung on the end of my finger by a bee.

The reason we could only take a single weekend was because I had to hurry back to London for rehearsals of the two plays which Portable was due to stage next. I had rushed off a ragged one-act play about William Blake, which took me some steps backwards towards my student enthusiasms, while Howard had pressed in the opposite direction with a coruscating play called
Fruit
, about a disabled osteopath who sees right the way through the politicians he manipulates. He was performed with infectious abandon by Paul Brooke. Tony directed my play, I directed Howard's. If
Christie in Love
was Portable's most far-reaching achievement,
Fruit
was in some ways its most emblematic. Howard had fallen in love with a French intellectual movement called situationism. Its adherents argued that although capitalist society seems solid, it is in fact only a spectacle. Direct action can disrupt that spectacle, just as when a bottle is thrown through a cinema screen. The film continues, but the tear in the fabric is a permanent reminder to the audience that the picture is not real. Howard's resulting play managed in the space of an hour to generate anger, mirth, bewilderment and outrage in equal parts.

When we took
Fruit
and
What Happened to Blake
to the Theatre Upstairs, the press was lying in wait for us, desperate to choke off any source of artistic vitality which they had not sanctioned. But, in this matter as in others, Bill Gaskill had taught us too well. As its original director, Bill had eventually
managed to get Edward Bond's play
Saved
accepted as a classic in the face of what had been determined and often hysterical opposition. But
Saved
was only the fourth of the defining post-war works which had been abused on their first outing with only a few distinguished dissenters. It had joined
Waiting for Godot, Look Back in Anger
and
The Birthday Party
in a dismal line of incomprehension. Who, asked Bill, could possibly take critics seriously? How could a group with such an impeccable record of being wrong in the past have the immodesty not to imagine they were going to be just as fallible now? Bill, to the predictable outrage of the newspapers, had even stopped giving free tickets for the Theatre Upstairs to the
Spectator
's critic, Hilary Spurling, pointing out that since she never enjoyed anything she saw there, she might as well not bother to come. It had led to a glorious public dogfight about free speech with all parties stretched right up onto their hind legs.

True, when Lindsay Anderson had arrived at the Royal Court, his highly tuned fascination with reputation meant that a more propitiative tone had briefly taken hold. The press representative, a beautiful young ex-model called Gloria Taylor, was dispatched to have dinner with one or two of the enemy and to explain to them, preferably by candlelight, why the show they had been watching was not so complete a failure as they seemed to think. At one such dinner, in a restaurant a couple of streets away from the Court and at two o'clock in the morning, Milton Shulman, the enamelled reviewer on London's main paper, the
Evening Standard
, responded to Gloria's entreaties by saying, ‘Yes, but you see, I only go to the theatre now in the hope of cunt. If a play doesn't have a cunt in it, I'm not interested.' On Christmas Eve later that same year, I saw Shulman bullying a young shop assistant on the perfume counter in Peter Jones to
the point of tears. At that point my attitude to theatrical criticism, already sceptical, hardened into something steelier. I have not read much since to change my mind.

The Arts Council, however, was a different matter. From the outset, they had been far more understanding towards us, perhaps relieved that at least two of the people working on the untameable fringe had been educated at a university whose name they knew. They had funded us show by show, insisting on reading scripts in advance. We wanted to put things on a more reliable footing with the award of an annual grant. To this end, Tony and I had been invited in to see Lord Goodman, who as well as being Chair of the Arts Council had a certain fame as Harold Wilson's most formidable fixer. When I started the meeting with a predictably self-righteous monologue – ‘Aren't you worried that all this important work is going to be lost?' – Goodman interrupted me with the perfect line for someone who has seen it all before. ‘Let's get this clear before we start. I'm not worried about
anything
. If I
worried
, I wouldn't sleep at night.' The encounter thereafter was swift and effective. ‘Give these people what they want,' he said to an official, and it was done.

Secretly, although we didn't care to say so out loud, daily touring was beginning to exhaust us. As we moved into our third year on the road, I found myself in the back of the van working obsessively on illustrating a nationwide map of service stations, each neatly marked with names like Forte or Granada. It was a sign. More seriously, one night in Wales when Tony was driving five actors home after a show, a Mini pulled out in front of him. The Volkswagen went into a slide and tumbled the actors round as though in a spin dryer. Mercifully nobody was seriously injured, but it marked perhaps the end of the days
when Tony and I thought of running a theatre company as fun, as a lark. As other groups like ours also became better known and stronger, so a familiar circuit of arts centres sprouted up all over the country, ready to take anything recognised names offered. I directed a new play by an unfamiliar author. During rehearsals, the play fell apart in my hands. When we saw the result, then, in Tony's words, ‘We both hated to see a play done by Portable where people just got up from desks and put things in filing cabinets: the dull texture of TV naturalism.' We were both becoming discontent with our own creation. We wanted to move onto a larger scale and to make our impact more political, but we had, as yet, no real idea how to do so.

I was in this itchy mood when the Royal Court decided to host some anaesthetic conference on the Future of New Writing in its auditorium. As someone who thought that the future of writing probably lay in writing, not in talking, I impulsively invited anyone who would like to write a new play to join me in the stalls bar, while we left non-joiners to opine. It was not the most inspired action of my life, but it may have been the most typical. About twelve people came to the bar, and I suggested we reassemble the following Wednesday. When seven of the twelve, including Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, Stephen Poliakoff and Snoo Wilson, did indeed turn up, I had found a room which I had hung with wallpaper. To each of the playwrights I issued a different coloured crayon and over a series of lively sessions in the following six weeks, we wrote a whole play on the wall. It was based on a cutting from the previous week's
Sunday Times
about a case of oral rape in a van on the motorway. It featured a cast of characters who belonged in a lost British underbelly which was rarely, if ever, represented in drama. Inevitably,
Lay-By
was heavily male in its point of view.
When it was read thirty-five years later at the Royal Court by a group of women dramatists hoping to emulate our original methods for group writing, most found it repulsive, though some loved its honesty. For better or worse, it had represented the first attempt by anyone in the British theatre seriously to address the subject of pornography.

Nothing in his previous behaviour, or indeed in anything he had ever said, prepared me for the moment early in 1971 when Bill Gaskill, more than normally forbidding, called me into his office and said that the theatre had no suitable new play to put on in a few months' time. There was, he said in a tone which suggested both exhaustion and despair, no alternative but to plug the unfortunate gap in the schedule with a revival of my own play
Slag
. Sad, but there it was. An admission of defeat. Naturally, he said, the Court couldn't contemplate transferring a production from a lesser venue, so there would have to be a new one, to be directed by Max Stafford-Clark, the lively young boss of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, who had never worked at the Court, but whom Bill admired as a free thinker and source of unspoilt energy. Also, he said, since Christopher Hampton was leaving after the deserved transfer to the West End of his play
The Philanthropist
, I might as well take over Chris's position as resident dramatist.