The Blue Touch Paper (27 page)

I reached Nottingham and told Richard nothing of what was going on. Having abandoned my position formally, I was more than happy to help him as best as I could with some of the first-rate new work he was already planning. For twenty-four hours I pretended to concentrate on what we were doing, reading plays and talking about them, while inwardly seething at my own stupidity. I went into a hopeless slump of self-pity, telephoning Peggy at regular intervals to blame everyone in sight, but most of all myself, for leading my play into such a perfect ambush. How could I have been so stupid?

Back in London a day later, I moved into the empty basement of Tony Bicât's new house in a crescent in Chalk Farm. He
and a young theatre designer, Jenny Gaskin, who had trained with Howard Hodgkin and then done a couple of Portable's best stage sets, had recently married and had their first child. I found on my return a letter waiting for me, typed, but covered in scrawls from a familiar hand.

I would remain grateful for this letter for the rest of my life.

Dear David,

This is written from home at 6 am on Wednesday the 6th – a time of day when truth stares one in the face
.

Now, you either believe that the theatre is important or you don't. If you do, then you tell the truth on the stage and
expect to be listened to
. Your play attacks capitalism and says that the City is corrupt. You say that England is a place of dishonour. You say this in the heart of the West End, to people who have all had to compromise or sell out to get where they are – the rich first-nighters and the British
press
.

When you find that these people
don't
want to let other people hear what you are saying, you and the rest of us say it's because the play isn't ‘commercial' and should have been tucked away in a small out-of-the-way hall. Hampstead! Royal Court!! It's like a revolutionary who has the opportunity of blowing up Parliament saying
if only
he'd blown up Dewsbury Town Hall he'd have got away with it
.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for what you write and you must take the consequences. You have said things in the West End which have never been said and you expect to have notices which greet a well-made play with French windows. Of course the men who are hired by our National Press are going to consider their own jobs. They are hired helps of perhaps the most disgusting Press we have ever had
.

You are writing a play attacking what that audience and that Press
live by
. They do their best to get the play removed by typical means – they ignore the message and savage the package. The attack you make
is total
. Then you disappear to Nottingham having refused to sit through the first night. David, you have to face the firing squad if you want to change the world
.

. . . Max [Stafford-] Clark is, of course, right when he says ‘Why didn't you attack in Dewsbury? or in the
permitted
area of Hyde Park where orators are allowed to speak revolution.' The capitalist system of the theatre paid for your attack. The only person who is running away
is the author
. But you can't run away, because you have
written the words
which can be heard
8 times a week
.

Let's all be calm and try and keep the play going. You have to live
through
the pain, David, and you'll come out on the other side. So Gide tells one
.

Peggy

In fact, although the play had been devoured and expelled by most of the critics, it had also become clear that Kate, in contrast, had enjoyed a triumph in the role of Jenny. Various experts with long memories had lost no time in acclaiming her performance the most impressive West End debut since the war. She and I laughed together at what we called ‘if only' reviews. Those who were prepared to countenance the play at all had said it was worth seeing ‘if only' for Kate Nelligan. Not long after the opening, Peggy surprised me by ringing to say that one particular critic, Harold Hobson from the
Sunday Times
, felt that a historic wrong had been done to the play itself. He would very much like to have lunch with its author. Hobson had already
written one supportive review, swimming proudly against the tide, in the same direction he had swum before for Beckett and Pinter. Peggy reported that Hobson was ‘distressed' – Hobson's word, I have it in a letter – by his colleagues' reaction and he might be willing to follow up with a second review the following Sunday when he had been freshly briefed. Oh, and one suggestion. Was there any chance? Mr Hobson would very much like to meet Miss Nelligan too.

Hobson was one of the longest-serving and at that time best-known of the British drama critics. He enjoyed an influence which today would be unimaginable, not solely because of his position but also because of the unpredictability of his views. He had been born severely disabled and felt his life transformed at the age of ten by sight of a Bible in the illuminated window of a Christian Science church. At a time when playhouses made no special arrangements, Hobson had to be carried like a baby from his wheelchair and put in the seat he demanded on the far right side of the front row. At dress rehearsals before London openings the most junior assistant was deputed to sit in that seat throughout to see ‘what the play was going to be like for Harold'. When Edward Fox, Kate and I assembled with Peggy and Michael Codron at Prunier to meet him we were anticipating an ordeal. But Hobson's pleasure in spending time with Kate was so obvious, and in some strange way so entirely innocent, that the exquisite meal passed like a flash. He just liked being with actresses. Kate dealt with him sublimely, like a practised sales assistant able to reassure the customer that they had made a perfect purchase. For once in my life, my A level in Divinity proved to be of some practical use as, over the lustrous sole, Harold and I traded quotations from the Thoughts of St Ignatius, traces of which Hobson believed he had detected in
Knuckle
. I was more than happy to let him entertain the idea. But there was no doubt about his more urgent field of interest. Edward beamed throughout, like a proud father. Sure enough, the following Sunday a second lengthy encomium to
Knuckle
's unique theatrical power struck another blow against the common wisdom.

After Oxford, it was hardly surprising that I had entered a period of free fall, with no sense of my mood from one moment to the next. Kate at least had the theatre to go to every night. I'd meet her afterwards and we'd go to Manzi's to eat spanking fresh halibut and chips off red-squared tablecloths. But in all the important ways I had simply surrendered to circumstance. Peggy wrote to me, ‘Both you and Margaret have a group of people who would do anything to help you and encourage you both – if you stay together, or if you decide to stay apart. We liked it when you were together, but that's up to you both.' Anyone who has been through such an experience tends to say that it is the only time they have felt they were alive. But they often also say that they have no wish ever to go through it again. Both things may well be true at the same time. Everything that I discovered about Kate in the following six weeks was delightful. In private, she was good-natured, relaxed and sharp as a knife. She had come to Britain with no idea of what to expect, and had been bewildered by the natives' reserve, their recessive refusal to say what they meant. Life, first at Central School, then at Bristol, for someone unused to English guile, had been tough and damaging. Her inability to hide her intelligence had not helped. She had begun to feel that she would never survive. The script of
Knuckle
had arrived through the post as a sort of tourist guide-book to the emotional topography of the district. The moment she read it, something had clicked. She felt less
alone. She wasn't mad, someone else understood, someone else treated England as a foreign country. When she met the author, the feeling had been confirmed.

It would be wrong to say we were happy together. How could we be? In a play,
Skylight
, which I wrote twenty years later, I coined the phrase ‘Happy like murderers, perhaps'. There was a level of excitation and of volatility at which I'm not sure I could ever have lived. Some time in early April Kate turned to me and said the only possible thing either of us could do at this point was to go home. The prospect of not going home was too terrible to contemplate. Her boyfriend Mark had been exceptionally kind to her in Bristol when she had believed herself to be having a breakdown. Now Mark was so unhappy that she, in turn, feared for him. Every moment she failed to reconcile, she felt bad. Further, she had no wish to be a home-wrecker, to break up what had been my own hitherto contented and supportive marriage. A bond had been established between her and me, she said. It would always be there. The best thing both of us could do was trust that bond and get on with our lives.

In the circumstances, it was impossible to argue. I was not sure that I had the strength of mind to continue at this level of tension. Peggy loved to repeat her favourite saying that nothing could be achieved by will alone. It turned out to be as true in matters of the heart as I knew it to be in matters of the pen. The speed with which Margaret and I realigned ourselves suggested a return to normality, as though what had happened was a disruption, nothing more, like a wind that had blown through our lives and then passed. The threat of chaos had gone. Margaret had kept faith and as a result our love, though not unaffected, had held strong. It was too late to save our house, which had already been sold to somebody unable to believe their luck.
Clapham was a coming area, and it had been snapped up. But we could easily enough buy another, this time in a handier but shabbier quarter, Richborne Terrace, near the Oval, where prices were low because of a torture chamber recently discovered in the basement of a neighbouring house. We were moving eastwards like crabs across South London. Impatient, Margaret had yet again left the BBC, where she'd ended up story editing some prominent series, and gone to work as a talent scout for David Susskind, the American chat-show host, whose hunched back and albino hair gave him a mildly satanic air which wasn't misleading. He had a production company which was planning to make television drama and films in the United Kingdom. At the theatre, my play, if not prosperous, was at least still playing. We were all happy to operate on the Weightwatchers principle that maintaining is gaining. For as long as we were on at least we weren't off.

Thanks to Codron's loyal management,
Knuckle
was eventually to last for four months, a perfectly respectable run, though usually to tiny houses, and with Edward a lasting hero in my eyes, not just for the growing subtlety of his performance but also for the stoic tenacity of his character. He never faltered. To thank him, I would take him for suppers after the show down his natural beat, the King's Road – him dapper in his cavalry twills, radiating charm, and every waitress's eye shining at his heartfelt compliments. Kate, too, was astonishingly good every night, becoming, like Claridge's, one of the London sights every American producer had to visit. The play's commercial survival was down to an unlikely intervention. John Sutro, a longstanding theatre angel of impeccable right-wing pedigree who still wore evening dress and a white silk scarf to first nights, had rung Michael Codron to tell him he was willing to go on putting
money in because he thought it so important that
Knuckle
continue to be available. As far as he was concerned, the West End would be a lesser place without it. He didn't mind how much he lost. I believe there were others. For those who cared,
Knuckle
became that kind of cause.

Having heard such violent arguments about the play, all sorts of interesting people were turning up in Panton Street to see it. One of them was John Boorman, who had already directed Lee Marvin in
Point Blank
and had made the cornpoke classic
Deliverance
just two years earlier. Now, it turned out, he wanted to make a film of
Knuckle
with a screenplay by his old friend from Bristol, Tom Stoppard. They had been looking for something to do together and here it was. I thought the whole thing an improbable prospect. After all,
Knuckle
was a stage parody of film noir. Were they going to take out the parody or go with it? The play's techniques were already cinematic. What would cinema add? However, if two such gifted people wanted to have a go, it was up to them.

At the Royal Court, we had been taught that a condition of club membership was equal disapproval of Tom Stoppard and of Harold Pinter. Perhaps that's why I never joined. In person, whenever I had bumped into Tom I had found him good company, a fountain of fresh jokes and common sense. Uniquely among domestic intellectuals, he disdained to deploy his principled anti-communism as a surrogate means of pursuing a more spiteful, more personal animus against the British left. He had integrity. But Tom was, we were told, the embodiment of everything to which the Court was opposed. Lindsay, who spat bullets irregularly from his teeth all day, emptied a whole magazine whenever Tom's name was mentioned. He called him a university wit: this despite the fact Tom had
never been to university and Lindsay had. From the perspective of today's doggedly careerist theatre in which it's a breach of
omertà
for any theatre practitioner publicly to speak ill of another, it's interesting to notice that just as the country was fiercely disputatious in the 1970s, so too was the culture. Never for a moment did anyone make the mistake of even pretending that we were all in this together. Directors and writers thought nothing of swinging an axe and hacking bits off their enemies. And, make no mistake, they really were enemies. Psychologically, the game was being played for keeps. Theatre was pitched against theatre, with none of today's ecumenical mumbling. As a communist Joan Littlewood despised the CND liberals at the Court for being ‘middle-class and proper'. Without evidence, she accused George Devine of being an anti-Semite. As literary manager at the Court, it had been my job to visit every theatre in the country to find new plays. My bills for travel and for my tickets were paid uncomplainingly. But when I put in a chitty for seeing a new play at the Royal Shakespeare Company, payment was firmly refused. Bill Gaskill relished telling me that the Royal Court was never going to pay for anyone to visit the work of that appalling company. If I wanted to go, that was my business. But I must pay for myself.