The Blue Touch Paper (29 page)

When, recently, I have described to acquaintances how forty years ago a group of white middle-class actors set out on the fringes of Chelsea to play Chinese peasants, they have smiled as though the whole idea were condescending and ridiculous. All I can say is, it did not seem so at the time. Nor did it seem so to the many audiences all over the country who came to be fascinated by it. At that moment in England, what choice did we have? As Pauline remarked, after two successful miners' strikes and the uprising of the shipworkers led by Jimmy Reid on the Upper Clyde, the concerns of the play seemed timely. Workers' control was on the agenda. By doing a play about China, we were opening up a whole area of history of which the British knew little. When
Fanshen
became, as it did, one of the best-remembered fringe productions of the 1970s, it was partly because the subject matter had been so original, but also
because the acting and direction had an integrity which carried all before it.

On the first day of the summer workshop, before a word had been written, and when we all just had a daunting seven- hundred-page blue paperback in our hands, there was a certain amount of grumbling. One actor, who had been in the plays of Edward Bond, said, ‘Oh my God, it's not one of those plays where you have to hoe, is it?' But once we had all gorged ourselves on Chinese peasant jokes we settled to a fruitful period of experiment, individual actors researching individual areas like eating habits or prostitution. Bill, in particular, focused down, seeking to find a suitable style while often answering actors' reasonable questions with his familiar dead stares. I was almost fond of them by now. ‘YP,' he used to say sometimes when an actor asked for help. It turned out to mean ‘Your problem.' But it became plain over the weeks why Bill had become known as the outstanding Brechtian director of his day. His defining priority was at all times to do justice to the suffering of the peasants. For him, this was a matter of immense gravity. His criterion for examining any representation was to ask whether it was adequate to the experience the peasant had undergone. Directing became a searching form of moral enquiry which eliminated the irrelevant and the shallow. Combined with Max's extraordinary gift for detail, it made for a formidable combination. Once Bill laughed when he was telling me that he had grown tired of people praising the amazing clarity which marked his productions. ‘They say to me, “Oh but it was so clear.” I always want to reply, “How would you prefer it? Muddy?”'

The method of work evolved as we did. There was never a conscious moment at which we all decided at the workshop to adopt the discussion methods used by the peasants. It just
happened. One of the first things the Chinese had to do when working towards equality was to classify their current status – landlord, rich peasant or poor peasant. One day, as we walked back from lunch to the Pimlico rehearsal room, Bill suggested that it should not be the landlords who got the workshop going that afternoon. We should simply wait until one of the actors suggested we start. I think we sat for about ninety minutes before one of the actors took control. But eventually he did. Once everyone was given the right to run rehearsals, most of them enjoyed it. Pauline was particularly inspiring. Similarly, it was my idea that for once the production team should not talk about the actors behind their backs. On every play I had ever worked on, directors and writers had retired to the bar, or upstairs to theatre offices, to complain about the actors, just as, I am sure, actors sat in pubs complaining about us. On
Fanshen
, I proposed that Max, Bill and I should only ever say to each other what we were willing to say directly to the actors. Abandoning this subtle form of distancing made for a refreshing experience. When, in 1975, the finished play went into rehearsal, the directors no longer gave formal notes. Instead they improved the production by a time-consuming process of letting actors volunteer their own failings.

‘
Fanshen
' means ‘overturning', but there was one overturning which I, as writer, was not prepared to contemplate. I took part in improvisations, trying self-consciously to be an actor. I was more than happy, in return, to let actors make up scenes as we went along. But never for a moment did I doubt that I had skills distinctive from theirs. Once the workshop was over, I went off like any regular dramatist to sit in my room and write the play. It took me four months of sweat and all the gifts of analysis and précis I had to clear a path through such a massive
book. The narrative became my responsibility and so was the thinking. This was a revolution of method, but not of function. Never did I imagine that the writing of a play of
Fanshen
would have been enriched by collective effort. Nor, in their heart, did anyone else. At the cinema, I am bewildered by films in which actors improvise individual lines, as though the first thing that came into an actor's head when he or she turned up on a film set were likely to be somehow more expressive than dialogue a writer had thought about for months. ‘Wow,' said an actor at the climax of a recent film in which his character had just been told the boy he believed to be his son was not really his. ‘That's a real slap in the face.' Improvisation, when deployed by a master like John Cassavetes, is a revelatory technique. But it's a technique which takes months of care and preparation. Serious improvisers refine their methods, just as a writer does. The current fashion among American actors for putting the script to one side and wandering who cares where off-piste is producing a cinema of approximation, with all television's vices and none of its virtues.

At times while writing
Fanshen
I was forced to break off to prepare my production of
The Party
, which, in recreating the world of the fashionable left in 1968, was taken by those who knew to be set in a fictional version of Clive Goodwin's flat. By coincidence, I was back recreating an environment from which I had exiled myself. But the element of social satire which had made the experience arch and self-conscious in the Old Vic was the aspect of the play which interested me least. What I loved was its rippling rhetoric. For all Trevor's deft handling of socialist ideas, there was also underneath his writing, as underneath that of Raymond Williams, a basic working-class instinct of generosity, common in life, but rare in the theatre, which
made the play soar with a music which reached right into the hearts of its audience.

As it happened,
The Party
was the occasion of my growing up as a director. It came about through an actor using a chance phrase. In some of the featured roles I had cast several inexperienced players, so I was getting far too habituated to a process in which I teased out performances conforming to an idea that already existed in my head. In the first weeks, there was an awful lot of the director saying, ‘Please do this, please don't do that.' The fact that six of my cast had themselves been directors at one time or another only made things more decisive. But in the two central roles were veterans who both merited a far different approach. Jack Shepherd, a highly nuanced graduate of the Royal Court who had been outstanding in the plays of Edward Bond and David Storey, was playing the drunken writer Malcolm Sloman. His climactic speech in the second act argues that revolution will not happen from the strategies of any political party, but will come about spontaneously from the people themselves. And as John Tagg, whose life's contrasting ambition has been the building of exactly the kind of controlling revolutionary party Sloman loathes, I had cast Fulton Mackay. Fulton would later be hugely popular as the prison officer Mackay in the Ronnie Barker series
Porridge
. But, unknown to the English television audience, he already had a long and treasured place at the heart of Scottish theatre, not least at the Citizens' in Glasgow to which my mother had taken me in the mid-1950s.

There was one afternoon in the rehearsal room when I was chopping but the chips weren't flying. Fulton, ever ingenious, found some crafty new way of beginning the twenty-minute monologue which forms the sinewy centrepiece of the first act.
‘I'll, erm . . . take issue with our comrade's, er . . . analysis and model presently.' When Fulton had finished the first fifteen lines, I was thrilled. So I began, like an idiot, to describe what he had just done in words of my own and to comment how expressive it was of his character. But no sooner had I started praising it – ‘And what was so good was . . .' – than Fulton shut me up with some words which were eventually to change my whole idea of the job. ‘David, whatever you do, don't spill the sacrament.'

I was taken aback. It was the painter Jean Dubuffet who said that art was no use if it was simply the act of declaring ten per cent of things in the world beautiful and ninety per cent ugly. In the same way, I realised that directing was pointless if it was simply the act of deciding that ninety per cent of acting was bad and ten per cent good. It was particularly destructive to summarise to actors in words what they were conveying far more eloquently in spirit. When I had first started writing plays, I had discovered the mystery of writing. Why had I imagined that acting was any less of a mystery? It was not that I had become an overly controlling director. I hope I had always allowed actors freedom to experiment and find their own way. But I had been overly literal and reductive. Fulton, in one resonant metaphor, reminded me of the genius of what good actors do. The most powerful elements of theatre will always be beyond description. They're there in the moment and then they're gone. When Fulton told me not to spill the sacrament, I stopped being a clumsy schoolteacher and became a collaborator. From that day on, I knew that any ability or understanding I had when dealing with actors was firmly rooted in Fulton's rebuke.

When the play went out on tour, in theory we were back to the ideals of Portable Theatre, but with one big difference.
Hayden Griffin had designed a stage which could be put down in any environment. Portable had just blown in to the latest place where it was due to perform, made some obvious decisions, hung up some lights and got on with it. Fassbinder, in his films, believed that weird accidents of light and movement could be far more beautiful than anything that Hollywood expensively calculated. In the theatre, so had Portable. The casualness was the whole point. We had a strong conviction that if we ignored the finer points of presentation the audience would concentrate instead on what we were saying. The work would seem urgent precisely because we couldn't be bothered to normalise it, to smooth it down to conventional expectations. But my mind in these matters was changing. I was beginning to believe that Portable, by nixing aesthetics, had denied itself some of the theatre's full eloquence. Hayden's platform, designed not just for my production but for a whole forthcoming policy of touring, meant a degree of control undreamt of in fringe days. It was an empty square with bare sanded boards, built over a metal-sprung cage. You could then add whatever scenery you liked. Actors reported that it was a pleasure to stand on, and for most actors confidence grows from the feet up. In performance, the stage looked like a big table, tipped towards the audience. The relationship was always just right. You could assemble the whole thing in an hour or two. It had already served for a production of
Romeo and Juliet
and it would serve just as well for
The Party
. On every single touring date, whatever the overall space, you could give things an identical definition which meant that the look and the feel were much more polished. We had lost some of Portable's roughness, but with a cast like this, and with Jack and Fulton blazing on every cylinder, Trevor's lament for the impotence of the
British left struck home all the harder for its precision. The arrow flew true every night.

Hayden himself was an obstreperous South African with a contrary attitude which expressed itself most of the time in a kind of half-audible angry muttering. More or less everything pissed him off, though you couldn't usually quite hear why. The only things he really liked, apart from a well articulated stage, were deep-sea diving and liquor. I took to him at once. He had left his home country and was forbidden by the apartheid regime to go back, for reasons which were not entirely clear but which I gathered from more angry muttering were something to do with active participation in the activities of the ANC. He'd been a courier, I think, though a courier of what exactly I never cared to ask. With the charming and gifted Rory Dempster as lighting designer, we became a natural team whose principles and feelings chimed. We had all entered the theatre at the same time and been exposed to a group of ideas which derived from Brecht, and in particular from his productions for the Berliner Ensemble, which had visited London in 1956. The instinct of directors at the Court, just like those of middle-class home-makers in Clapham, had been to strip everything away. The aim was to refine things down to essentials. Hayden, Rory and I had all approved of the desire to clear the stage of junk. We saw that aim as political. Everything that was on the stage had to be there for a purpose. It had to matter. Light was there for the actors' faces, not to make pretty effects. But, for political reasons again, we had come to feel that black-box austerity had itself become a cliché, a way of avoiding meaning rather than expressing it. In the wrong hands, it seemed to be a way of not taking decisions. Austerity was fine, and nothing was ever going to come between us and our passion for an empty space.
But like fashionistas who had only worn black, we wanted to start risking colour. More than anything, we wanted the freedom to make images again.
The Party
, a naturalistic play set in one room and proceeding in real time, allowed us little of the licence we craved. The question was where and when we were finally going to be allowed to let rip. Having for so long tried either to ignore or to crash the question of style, I felt I was now ready to pioneer it.

By the time the holidays came and the tour was over, Margaret was about to give birth. My parents came to stay with us at the Oval in expectation of becoming grandparents. Dad had retired at sixty and had settled into the unaccustomed business of living with his wife. He had always promised her that on retirement they would take a world cruise together. But soon after they reached Australia Dad had to be taken off the ship and flown home with a clot on his leg. It was yet one more anticlimax on a long list, and a sign of an increasing frailty which would mark out Dad's last twenty years. For Mum, marital proximity, so long delayed, was threatening to turn into a nursing job. The thing to which she'd been most looking forward had been taken away. But I noticed that the impact of at last living with her partner was beginning to change her. Dad's absence had played on her neediness, but his presence had made the playing field much more level. She had become a touch tougher and more self-certain. It was as if for all those years she'd been in need of abrasion, of interaction, and now she had it. The pining cat at last had a scratching post.