The Blue Touch Paper (30 page)

Mum's wider attitudes were changing as well. In May 1973 Edward Heath's energy supremo Lord Jellicoe was revealed to have been using the services of call girls from a company with the unimaginative name of Mayfair Escorts. It was, by Conservative
standards, a minor sex scandal, a shrivelled squib after the Roman candles of Profumo and Lambton, yet for some reason it was the occasion of my mother making a final decision. It was the last straw. She was sick of them. When she made her ruling it reminded me of the tone she had used to exile Mr G____ from my life. She was never going to vote Tory again.

Mum and Dad had arrived on Christmas Eve. Margaret woke at four the following morning, and I drove her along the deserted streets hanging with river mist to St Thomas's hospital. Nothing moved on the icy landscape except us. There was a bit of a panic at nine thirty when it looked as if the birth might have to be induced, but the very threat of forceps, brandished but never employed, produced our son. Because he was the first child to be born in Lambeth that day, all the nurses from the hospital came to sing carols round his crib. A less level-headed boy than Joe might have his head turned by such a greeting. Margaret went back to the ward, where a group of women had concealed a festive vodka bottle in a waste-paper basket. They all saw the five days you had to stay in hospital as a welcome holiday from family life, so I left the reclining mothers preparing to party. When I got home at lunchtime, I drank a single glass of whisky, a drink I normally can't stand. For the only time in my life, alcohol did what it's advertised to do: it filled me with pure euphoria. I ate Christmas lunch alone with my parents.

Nothing prepared me for my radical change in feeling. I spent the next week in a daze. Perhaps because of my experiences with my own father, I was thrilled to be a father myself and was doubly determined to do better. In the middle of January I had to go off for a week to New York, where Perry King and Kitty Winn, through no fault of their own, were about to star
in an inept production of
Knuckle
. My first contact with it was dismaying. The founder of the Phoenix Theatre, T. Edward Hambleton, tamped down his pipe, lit up, then fell fast asleep at the beginning of the rehearsal-room run-through, waking a couple of moments before the end to declare the whole thing first-class. His snores had punctuated the playing throughout. It was my first visit to New York since I'd been there as a student with Roger Dancey. In 1971 the most radical producer in America, Joe Papp, had rung from the Public Theater – ‘Hi, it's Joe Papp here' – to tell me he was about to mount the American premiere of
Slag
. He had then rung to tell me it had opened to general praise. And he'd rung for a third time a few weeks later to say it was closing. Each time he was courteous and energetic, telling me how hilarious my play was, and how refreshing it was that at last there was a young writer who wanted to put women on stage. ‘Good for you, David.' But at no point had he invited me over.

Now that I had returned after so long, it was predictable that I found myself, with
Knuckle
, in a familiar mess. The pattern had been established in childhood: whatever happened was going to be my fault. Either I could let the production pass, just mark it down as a stinker and take my punishment, or I could make myself unpopular by trying to do something about it. As usual, I chose the latter. By the time I'd given the director a four-hour talk on everything that was wrong with his production, I could see him heating the branding iron in the flames of his resentment to singe the word ‘Impossible' on my forehead yet again. Backing off, he asked me to go away for a few days during which, he said, he would put my notes into practice. Fat chance. Digging in deeper, I said I didn't think this would be a practical solution. I'd give him twenty-four hours.

In New York, I was carrying with me some early pages of the new play I'd started on the train the day after
Knuckle
opened in London. It had developed a little from the first idea, but not very far. A rock band would be playing a couple of sets on the lawns at a Cambridge May Ball and you would see both the performances they would give that night and, in between, the wild, shocking disarray they happened to be in offstage. It was a blindingly simple notion. It would not be a musical, but nor on the other hand would it quite be a play. Kicking my heels, I wandered down to SoHo, which was still in the early days of having its industrial premises taken over by painters, film-makers and fashion designers. Something in the atmosphere hit me strongly. I hadn't been in the area since 1965, and clearly everybody thought they were very bohemian, colonising a part of the city which had been written off as unlivable in. But if you listened to what they were talking about, people had moved from hippy to yuppie without passing through action.

I went to the Broome Street Bar to have a beer. In such bars, the talk had once been of civil rights, of Vietnam and of revolution. These days, to judge from what I was overhearing, it seemed to be exclusively about yourself. Here, as everywhere, were hung Andy Warhol's images of boring personalities from the past. America was looking backwards, turning into a place of myth and memory. I sat there for most of an evening listening to people talking ever more loudly about their relationships. A woman on a payphone was screaming at the top of her voice, ‘Don't write me, don't phone me, I never want to see you again.' At no point did anyone in the bar seem to discuss anything which was happening in the non-relationship world. It struck me that the rolling stone really had rolled on down the hill and come to a complete stop. Whatever promise of insight
had once been held out in the injunction to have a good time had long been snuffed out. The project was no longer to make the finest possible society. It was to gild the finest possible cage. I had given up on bands like the Beatles years previously when they had started wittering ‘Let It Be'. But now it was like the weather had changed for good. Publications such as the
Village Voice
and
Oz
had looked outwards. It was only a matter of time till there was a magazine called
Self
.

In the conception of any play or film there is always a moment of blinding excitement, and this was it. The visual image had long been in my head – the contrast between the grungy band and the privileged surroundings, even if the original idea of the abandoned baby had dropped away. But how would it be, I thought that evening, to conceive of a heroine who refused to go down the path my own generation seemed to be taking? What if I created a rock singer who would do anything, literally anything, rather than see her horizons shrink to those of the Broome Street Bar? I started writing with such pleasure that it ceased to matter to me what happened to the errant production of
Knuckle
. I did go back once and found it little improved. My input had been futile. I decided to leave town early before the audience passed judgement. By a blissful coincidence, my plane from JFK to London took off by an unusual flight path, so that we circled midtown Manhattan before heading off over the Atlantic. I could actually look out of the window and see down to the theatre below where at that very moment – 8 p.m. – the curtain was going up on a travesty of my play.

On my return, I persuaded Tony Bicât to write the lyrics for the new play and his younger brother Nick to write the music. Nick, a gentle and soft-spoken man with an effortless access to melody, had often added kick at Portable and at Nottingham
by writing incidental music. He was that rare kind of composer, like Alex North, who loves and understands non-lyric theatre. Unleashed to do more, he relished the chance to come up with a proper rock 'n' roll score. Both Nick and Tony thought that my portrait of a humorous, exhausted and drug-taking band on the road was influenced by our own time with Portable. The jokes brought back memories. And fairly soon the three of us were flying, far too preoccupied with our night of stage debauchery and mayhem to take much notice when in February the Conservative Party elected a female leader. It didn't seem an event of much significance. By the middle of April I had a new play which I couldn't wait to put on. Luck was with me, because it was to be speeded into production with almost indecent haste. Early in 1974, the Royal Court had rediscovered its soul and purpose with three Athol Fugard plays, two of them starring John Kani and Winston Ntshona. In their indictment of the way the black population was being treated in South Africa, they took political theatre in London to a superb new level of accomplishment. Nobody could sit in the audience and not be cheered both by Fugard's writing and by Kani's dazzling acting. As a result, the will existed to hand artistic control of the Royal Court over to two younger directors, Nicholas Wright and Robert Kidd, who arrived, refreshingly, with no scores to settle and no grudges held. Nick, in particular, had produced the
Rocky Horror Show
while running the Theatre Upstairs. So now his first priority was to try and win back all the writers the Royal Court had managed to alienate.

The directors had already planned their first season, which was to open in late August and to include new plays by Howard Barker and Edward Bond. But in an uncharacteristic default, Christopher Hampton, Bob Kidd's regular collaborator, had
failed to deliver his expected play,
Treats
, on time. There was an ominous gap. One day my rock play
Teeth 'n' Smiles
was finished, next day it was scheduled. I insisted, without too much argument, on directing it myself. ‘Are you sure?' they asked. But I was. Since 1971, with Max Stafford-Clark, Richard Eyre and Michael Blakemore, I had enjoyed a charmed run of directors. I had no reason on the grounds of achievement to forgo any of them. But I had developed a suspicion that the tendency of any director when faced with a new voice is to hunt around for parallels. Searching for a tone, they direct in the style of what it reminds them of. Rightly or wrongly, I believed my voice was original. At whatever loss of quality, I needed to take charge of making that clear. The popular notion, put about by directors, that writers shouldn't direct is nonsense. At any point in the British theatre there are always dozens of bad directors. Only a handful of them are writers.

With Michael Codron's blessing, after a quick holiday with Margaret and Joe on the Greek island of Rhodes, I set to work with the Court's vibrant new casting director, Patsy Pollock. It was a case of the right person at the right time. Patsy had been born to a hardscrabble life in the East End and had moved on through the fashionable world of sixties advertising to work as a stylist for Alan Parker and David Puttnam. I had shown the play to my old colleague Charlie Gillett, who had corrected some of its most obvious errors of tone. But Patsy's background meant that she also knew the culture of music inside out. She'd grown up with it. Patsy was as passionate as I was about the task of putting together a company of actors who needed to be able to play musical instruments and act at the same time, but who also, crucially, looked as if they might belong in rock 'n' roll's attractive, degenerate world. I can't remember a period of
preparation I enjoyed so much, with Patsy, outspoken, diligent, hilarious, serving as a blast of working-class fresh air blowing the cobwebs off my preconceptions, as all sorts of human jetsam – actors, musicians, and God knows who – washed up in unending waves on the shores of the tiny Royal Court casting office.

Our outstanding challenge was to find someone who could play Maggie. My lasting hatred of the word ‘self-destructive' stems from the fact that I have no idea what it means. Or rather, it's in such common and lazy use as to have no meaning at all, except presumably to convince you that the user somehow knows what they're talking about. When a politician takes no care to hide the fact he is sleeping with his research assistant, the word for what he does is ‘stupid'. When a rock singer dies in a pool of their own vomit, the word for them is almost certain to be ‘addict'. In my play, the central character, Maggie, is fond of a drink, and is also in a state of violent revulsion at what she sees her world becoming. As she keeps intoning satirically, ‘The acid dream is over, let's have a good time.' But there is a purpose to her antics. Under the ragged surface of chaotic abuse, her ex-boyfriend, the lyricist Arthur, can detect a certain iron control. For the role of Maggie, Patsy and I therefore needed an actress who was too intelligent to buy into the newspaper myth of self-destruction. She had to be able to scare the living daylights out of every man she met, but also to amaze them with her acumen. There was only one candidate. But the problem we had was that Helen Mirren couldn't sing.

Like many first-rate teachers of music, Nick Bicât holds to the idealistic principle that there is no such thing as a non-singer. We can all sing, we've just been taught wrong. In four switchback weeks of rehearsal, Nick certainly made his point.
Helen was such a good actress that, standing in front of a flat-out rock band and fixing you firmly in the eye, she could make you
believe
she could sing by the mesmerising power of her presence, even though the actual notes she was hitting were occasionally John o'Groats to the tune's Land's End. At the time she came to us, Helen had been travelling round Africa with Peter Brook and was very much a believer in onstage spontaneity. She had an insouciant approach which included telling stories about the unhappy effects of imagining she could enliven her appearance in a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of
The Wars of the Roses
in Stratford with a few spliffs. Helen's ways of not listening to direction were far more sophisticated than those of anyone I had previously encountered. Once she received me naked for a notes session in her dressing room. She discarded the
Evening Standard
which had briefly obscured her, clearly with the aim of putting me off my stride. She succeeded. Helen's fondness for hanging loose was fine by me – it was so unselfconscious and natural, and on stage it fed into the character – and it was also fine with Jack Shepherd, who was playing Arthur. He was an old hand who had dealt with far trickier people than Helen. He loved going out and jazzing according to whatever Helen threw at him that night. She was so accomplished that, whatever she did, she never let go of the play's intent. But her freedom, both professional and personal, did not go down so well with Dave King, the more senior actor who was playing Saraffian, the band's manager.