The Blue Touch Paper (28 page)

Violence of speech was so common that nobody was exempt. Of one playwright whose plays I recommended, Bill responded, ‘He should be buried in a hole in a field.' I had even jumped back in the
Knuckle
rehearsals when I had felt that Malcolm Storry was feeling unhappy and had suggested to the mild-mannered Michael Blakemore that he might like to take him out for a drink and a chat. ‘I'm not doing any of that Royal Court rubbish of interfering in actors' lives,' he had responded with a sharpness that betrayed unexpected rancour. So perhaps
it was not unusual that when Tom sent me his finished script I turned the rhetorical ratchet up way too high. In my own defence, it was a difficult script to get through. Tom told me to my satisfaction that search as he might – and he was a student of thrillers, like me – he had not been able to find any flaws in my complicated plot. It was watertight, he said. So it puzzled me why on earth he had chosen to overcomplicate matters still further. What was already a long play with masses of irritating offstage action had been turned into a film twice the length. The whole thing even ended with an animated sign-off, ‘That's All Folks', in imitation of the old Warner Brothers cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. I sent off a letter to Peggy telling her I thought the script was terrible and that I didn't think it would ever get made. Understandably, since Boorman never rang again, I thought no more about it.

Nothing had prepared me, therefore, thirty-six years later in August 2010, for the unannounced publication of the text of my letter. Unsurprisingly, I had forgotten that I had written such a thing. After her death in 1991, Peggy Ramsay's estate had bequeathed all her correspondence to the British Library with a standard embargo on sensitive material. But a curator had sought publicity by tweeting that she had in her possession a sensationally rude letter by one British playwright about another. She strayed further by releasing it to the
Sunday Times
, who gobbled it up and inflated it across a whole page. I felt compelled to write to Tom, apologising for the behaviour of my younger self. I was ashamed. I explained that over the years I had come to find a dramatist's obligation to crusade on his or her own behalf embarrassing and demeaning, and that I admired Tom for his contrasting equanimity. I mentioned that fond as I was of our mutual friend Harold Pinter, I found
his hair-trigger touchiness increasingly ridiculous. Harold was, with justice, numbered among the most famous and praised dramatists on the planet. He'd hardly been dealt a bad hand and yet he insisted, right until the end, on pretending that he was the victim of some organised conspiracy to do him down. Nothing, I said, could excuse my own youthful combativeness, which was as jejune as Harold's. But at least Tom might understand that because of the rough water my early plays had been through, I had at times found it difficult to accommodate. For a long time, I'd turned into a pretty unpleasant person.

Tom wrote back as follows:

Dear David,

The one thing in your letter I couldn't let go by was ‘I think this made me a pretty unpleasant person.' I hated the thought of you settling on such an idea of yourself. We're all being continuously ‘described' by a nexus of people's angled view of us. If you say so, you, for whatever reasons at whichever occasions, wouldn't accommodate. Pretty unpleasant! But that's not a truth about you in isolation; there's always an axis. The work is a child who never becomes self-reliant. The parent has to look out for it. I accommodate too much. I don't think you do . . . About the axis: I had a nightmare actor in rehearsal and flagged him up as selfish, arrogant etc. When I called him on it, nervously, he said ‘Don't you realise I'm terrified?' I hadn't
.

You know who you are. If you were different the plays would be different. Actually they simply wouldn't
be
. . . In the end, it doesn't matter what one thought about Harold's uncomfortable anger. It was himself saying ‘
This
is what matters, it's fucking serious!' And he wrote what he wrote.
I think you both made your rough weather by it mattering to you. As a spectator, I don't regret it of either of you . . . It sometimes got combative, which I can understand. I can't regret your reluctance to accommodate, your crusading if you want to call it that. We write what we are
.

Any play which occasioned two such beautiful letters, even separated by such a long time-span, cannot, I believe, have been wholly worthless. But I knew that my writing was, at a technical level, incompetent. Too much speech, reported and otherwise. It could never quite pass Valéry's test of ‘giving the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance'. As a matter of principle I have refused all subsequent offers of stage revival, even though, or perhaps because, the memory of what we all went through on the first production is indelible. In a way, some of us who climbed on that particular boat at that particular time have never quite climbed off. Now, whenever someone comes along with a gleam in their eye thinking they alone have worked out how to release the fish from under the ice, I always say no. A British television version with Emma Thompson and Tim Roth did nothing to persuade me I was wrong about my own incompetence. Nor did an American television version, reimagined in Los Angeles, with Gretchen Corbett and Michael Cristofer.

Some time later, Irving Wardle of
The Times
sought nobly to perform the trickiest of all Olympic fixtures for the critic: the retrospective volte-face, the hands-up hands-down, I-got-it-wrong
mea culpa
, the swallow dive into the empty pool of error. He admitted that he had not been able to take in
Knuckle
, the play, because he had been so angered by
Knuckle
, the event. It had infuriated him and his fury had blinded him. Wardle
had admired Portable because it played at what he called ‘virgin addresses'. But the subsequent appearance of a play by someone of my age – just twenty-six – and my political views in the West End had brought back to him all the primal sense of betrayal he had felt as a young man when John Osborne first of all inveighed against the Establishment, then, in Wardle's view, was seen to join it. Wardle said he had attacked my play so strongly not as a work but as a foreshadowing of what he expected to be a pattern. A rebellious dramatist would eventually stop rebelling and move to embrace the very things he or she had rebelled against. Wardle wasn't going to fall for it. He was not willing to be pulled round that same track twice. But if that was indeed the grounds of his hostility, Wardle was right to recant. It would soon become clear how wrong he had been.

A certain theme had been introduced into my life in the last three months, played at first quietly, on the piccolos perhaps. But soon, as in a symphony, the violins would come in, and then, unmistakably, the whole string section would take up the tune.

10

Spilling the Sacrament

It wasn't long before Margaret discovered that she was pregnant. The rightness of having returned to her was reinforced. Usually, the less you notice happiness, the greater it is. This was the best thing that could have happened. In the summer of 1974, the prospect of a child brought us both a redeeming sense of purpose. I was able to settle back down to work and find a rhythm. And so was she.

Looking back, it would seem bittersweet that although Michael Blakemore and I remained firm friends the most lasting effect he would have on me professionally was to bring me together with Peter Hall. Two years later, after Michael had presented a paper criticising the way Hall ran the National Theatre – Michael claimed less as a public service, more for his own benefit – these two men were to have a public falling-out which would rankle with them both for the rest of their lives. But in the days when they were getting along, Michael had mentioned to Peter that he was collaborating with a playwright he might like. Peter summoned me to lunch in one of those crepuscular restaurants which were just beginning to siphon up the new middle class's new wealth. He was bursting out of one of what I would come to recognise as a series of tailored velvet suits, always buttoned under impossible pressure at the waist, and all in the strange half-colours which would one day soon provide the queasy palette for the carpets and seats at the new
National Theatre on the South Bank. Peter understood that I was interested in touring. In the process of taking over from Olivier at the Old Vic, he felt that the moment for the National to have its own small-scale touring programme was long overdue. A proper National Theatre should be on the road, and not just in traditional venues. He would be very pleased if I would direct one of its first productions.

In later years, I would find that face to face almost nobody resembles their reputation. Whatever you have gleaned from gossip is generally wrong. The
on dit
turns out to be the
on ne sait rien
. Over and again, on meeting someone I have only heard about, I have been confounded. To Peter's name the word ‘Machiavellian' was stubbornly attached, perhaps because of his lynx eyes and papal looks. At that first encounter I was peering round corners to see from what crooked angle of approach he could possibly be coming. But, face to face, on that afternoon in Covent Garden, Peter and I had the first of countless conversations in which he was honest, direct and to the point. I had been warned by others mentally to ask of Peter the question ‘What does he really mean?' but I stopped asking it as soon as I realised that the answer was invariably ‘Exactly what he says.' On occasions, as in the 1980s when he chose to shut down the Cottesloe, the smallest of the three auditoria on the South Bank, in order, he said, to shame the government into funding it properly – as though shame were a unit of currency in which Margaret Thatcher ever dealt – then, yes, I did find him overly political, and oddly naive. Peter, like Harold Pinter, had been foolish enough to vote for Thatcher in the first place. He could hardly complain about the outcome. But in his individual dealings he was beyond reproach. When he said to me that Trevor Griffiths' play
The Party
, about the British left's response to the
revolutionary demonstrations in Paris in May '68, had not benefited from a souped-up production at the Old Vic, and might be seen to better advantage on a smaller scale and in places where it would find an audience more attuned to its politics, he was speaking nothing other than the truth. It had played only thirty-six times. Laurence Olivier had given his last stage performance as John Tagg, the Glaswegian Trotskyite, who was modelled on Gerry Healy, a notoriously unbending leader of the Socialist Workers Party. On the night I had seen the play, the actor had seemed distracted and ill at ease, like a lifelong gambler who'd been thrown off his game by knowing he was likely playing his final hand. He had stumbled badly at various places in the first act. But Olivier would not be small-scale touring. I was free to restart with a fresh slate.

Before we got up from the table Peter told me he was also interested in me as a dramatist. When it opened in a year's time, he was very keen to attract people like me and Howard Brenton into the new National Theatre. It was important, he said, to open the doors to the young. What was I planning to do with my next play? Thinking nothing of it, I told Peter that he was too late because I was already committed to my own touring company, Joint Stock. Had he heard of it? He had. Had he seen Max and Bill's adaptation of Heathcote Williams'
The Speakers
when it had played a short season at the Institute of Contemporary Arts earlier this year? He had indeed and it was wonderful. Well, I explained, that production had come out of a new workshop process which Max and Bill were pioneering. Over a long period of time, they had explored the material at leisure, allowing the actors a significant amount of input. This rare openness meant that the actors were seen to have much more invested both in their characters and in the
event. To prepare for
The Speakers
, they had even been sent out to beg on the streets of London. Only in the last few weeks had the whole thing been pulled together with conventional rehearsal. The directors had created Hyde Park Corner by upturning a few boxes and letting the audience wander from speaker to speaker. Because the result had a spellbinding mixture of surface and depth, I had decided that I wanted to find out more.

By chance, they had approached me first. Pauline Melville, who had done assorted jobs including, in the early days of the National Theatre, working as casting director at the Old Vic, would later be known as the author of a collection of short stories about her native Guyana,
Shape-shifter
. Recently she had returned to college, and found that a book called
Fanshen
was being passed from hand to hand among her fellow students. It was written by a Pennsylvania farmer, William Hinton, who had been in China for six years as a tractor technician. He had been sent out by the US government after the Second World War to help supervise agricultural innovation in backward rural areas. There he had witnessed the land reform programmes which Mao's revolution instituted in the 1940s. Pauline had given the book to Bill, telling him it was a promising subject for a play. When I read it I found that it began with vivid descriptions of the terrifying feudal conditions which Chinese peasants, particularly the women with their bound feet, had endured well into the first half of the twentieth century. Within that first 150 pages were countless possible stories of cruelty and exploitation. They detailed the violence both of the landlords' regime and of its overthrow. But as a playwright I was already as resistant to dystopias as I was to utopias. They had no appeal for me. I found myself much more excited by the post-revolutionary
parts of the book, in which the peasants, in imposed collectives, were encouraged by their political masters to adopt a system of control called ‘Self-Report, Public Appraisal'. At ceaseless meetings, peasants were expected to report on their own shortcomings and to correct the failings in their behaviour, at work and away, by group discussion. Leaders as much as peasants were intended, in theory, to be held to account. It was when the book turned into a frank questioning of whether there ever can be such a thing as true democracy, or whether all societies maintain the same hidden systems of control, that the book became much more complicated and knotty. It was in these agonising shades of grey, rather than in the melodrama, that I found the potential for a play a thousand times more stimulating. How interesting to investigate what happens when you claim to involve everybody in society's decision-making processes. How marked a contrast from the society we were living in.