The Blue Touch Paper (34 page)

Needless to say, when we did get to preview, one day late, we were all full of foreboding. There had indeed been the predicted
bad publicity in the right-wing press. Journalists were eager to insist that our failure to open on time was emblematic of the lavish inefficiency of the whole enterprise. The foyer was packed with rubberneckers, come to see the scene of the crash. Lindsay Anderson, as if called into a disaster zone by sonic whistle to act as the very opposite of an emergency service, was standing in the bar on the second night declaring to anyone who would listen that the National Theatre was going to be a fiasco. He had always said it and – hey! – he was right. But when we finally got to present it, the play cast its spell, and the performance ended with an image which was unanswerable. The failed organisers of the factory sit-in leave town and head for the Welsh hills. For this last tentative utopia, Hayden had designed a staggering white snow-cloth which covered the whole enormous area. After all the characters had gone and the hillside was left empty, very slowly, from the high fly tower of the Lyttelton there came a fall of snow, intermittent at first, and then in a thick curtain which drifted down and settled silently on the floor. The audience were still happily gasping in disbelief as, relieved, I bolted backstage to talk to the actors. But as I came through the pass door, Peter Hall was already lying in wait in the wings. He said he needed to give me some notes about what he saw as the dangerous inadequacy of Frank Finlay's performance. He had ideas on how to improve it. I told him, after the week I had just been through, this was hardly the time. I was listening at him rather than to him. Unforgivably, as Peter persisted, I lost my temper, wrongly imagining that he was trying to pay me back for having given him a bumpy twenty-four hours. As far as I was concerned, Peter had done his best to wreck the opening of the show by intervening with the actors, more in the interests of public relations than of art.
Why the hell should I now listen to him? I think I may even have told him to get out of my way.

It was certainly one of the more shaming episodes of my life, for which there is an explanation but no excuse. For some time I had been living on my nerves. A pack of Pepto-Bismol rarely lasted me a day. A yoga teacher would have located my centre of gravity in my larynx. Although, as for many lucky sufferers, asthma and eczema were leaving me in my late twenties, they were being replaced by a toxic mix of indigestion and indignation. Peggy had rebuked me after
Knuckle
, saying that my harshness with myself was ‘all inverted conceit, in an odd sort of way'. But lately my hypertension had developed physical symptoms. My lasting memory of my first ten years at the National Theatre is of sticking my head down the lavatory to rack the terror out of my guts yet again. Once during technical rehearsals, when someone came into the empty auditorium and asked where I was, Rory Dempster looked casually at his watch and said, ‘Oh if it's seven o'clock, you'll usually find David being sick in the Gents.' A jangly physical state was made worse by a quite unnecessary paranoia which my artistic team did nothing to discourage. My plastic security pass for the new building was numbered 007 and might just as well have added ‘Licensed to Whinge'. Hayden's choleric muttering had reached the point where it could be heard from the Thames. He and Rory were being given such an impossible time by technical departments unable to deliver on their promises that, to keep our spirits up, we had resorted to disloyal rhetoric, calling ourselves Charabanc Productions. The company's motto, we liked to say gaily, was ‘Just Passing Through'. At the end of the week the Lyttelton's technical manager, who was, after the theatre's opening weeks, little more than a human shadow, was removed by ambulance
to have rectal surgery under merciful anaesthetic. He stayed in bed for a week.

Whatever the pressures, this had been a poor way for me to reward my benefactor. To his credit, Peter never seemed to mind. He'd had an awful lot of rows in the wings with an awful lot of people by then. But more seriously, it meant that the entirely justified message he had wanted to give me – that after all our technical gridlock my attention should be redirected to Frank's performance – went overlooked. I was further thrown after a couple of previews by a typically mischievous visit from Laurence Olivier, who, rather to my surprise, was enjoying the show. Never much of a man for politics, he was nevertheless gifted with a matchless sense of occasion, and, no question, this seemed to be an occasion he liked. He greeted me in the interval by raising his arms above his head and saying, ‘Success! Success! I smell it in the air.' I waited nervously. ‘Wonderful play! And Frank!' he said, ‘Frank! Never been better. It's the performance of his life.' I agreed, saying Frank was indeed on the way. But I knew Olivier well enough to be sure that he would have a kicker up his sleeve. I waited. ‘Only one problem with Frank, you know.' Sucked in now, I had no choice but to reply. What was the problem with Frank, I asked. Olivier smiled, content. ‘Frank? Can't do it on first nights.'

Olivier walked away from the conversation even happier than when he arrived. It turned out unsurprisingly that he was right, and Frank was indeed not at his best when the press were in. But it didn't matter. For the general audience the play survived and prospered, and, once the machinery worked, Hayden's decor set standards of fluency and beauty to which all designers subsequently aspired in that large, rather cold proscenium house. As Kate, who had never met Howard Brenton,
commented after standing at the back for a performance, ‘Listening, you knew you were in the presence of someone profoundly generous.' But for those within the profession in search for a peg on which to hang the anger of their coming disillusionment,
Weapons of Happiness
represented a perfect spike. Its mix of poetry and despair about the unlikeliness of British revolution was calculated to bring out the worst in those who were about to feel the most pain. Political plates were beginning to shift throughout the western world. Socialism, had we but known it, was heading for the rocks, and so the wounds of disagreement about a mere play chosen, as it happened, to open a new theatre in South London ran deeper than you could possibly believe. Those who had invested all their hopes in the word ‘alternative' were looking for a new word and it wasn't ‘national'.

One director who ran a radical theatre in the East End told me that after the play she had stood weeping on Waterloo Bridge, because she had experienced exactly the same feelings as when Joan Littlewood had seen Harry H. Corbett, a treasured member of her East London company, playing on television in
Steptoe and Son
. The working-class actors this director most loved were betraying their provenance by appearing on the National Theatre stage in a play which, because it was anti-Soviet, she regarded as giving comfort to the enemy. It was, for her, a symbolic moment: the miserable death of a great theatrical movement, killed from within by its own foot-soldiers. For me, her attitudes smacked of a snobbery with which, coming from my background, I was never going to sympathise. Justifying his refusal to denounce Stalin's purges, Sartre had notoriously remarked, ‘
Il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt
' – which you can loosely translate to mean ‘Never lower the workers' morale by
telling them the truth.' Needless to say, I felt the opposite. The truth strengthens us. But Ken Tynan, who was still fighting to get
Fanshen
performed off Broadway, wrote in his diary that
Weapons of Happiness
was ‘an insulting evening which moved me to boo for the first time in a decade . . . The mixture of arrogance and condescension was impossible to stomach. It almost made me long to be a critic again.'

I did not yet know of the German saying ‘
Viel Feind, viel Ehr
' – many enemies, much honour – but if I had, I would have regarded myself as one of the most honoured workers in the British theatre.

12

Birmingham University

Arriving at the Royal Court in the last days of 1968, I had not just been young, I had been naive. For all my surface attempts at worldliness, the simplest remark caught me off guard. On my very first morning, the director Peter Gill had observed how much he was looking forward to his forthcoming lunch with the actress Jill Bennett. Hopelessly innocent, I replied, ‘Jill Bennett? Oh, is she nice?' Peter looked at me as if I were from Mars and said dismissively, ‘No, of course Jill's not nice. But she is fun.' I was twenty-one, and the idea of choosing to eat with anyone who was not nice had never occurred to me. But it was an early statement of Bill Gaskill's which struck me harder. In his office one day he was speaking about his closeness to the young Harold Pinter. Pinter had been a struggling actor working under the name of David Baron when the two of them had been best friends. They had done everything together – that is, until Harold became a playwright. I asked him why they were no longer friends. Bill shook his head, as though the sadness of the years were beyond reach. ‘I can't explain. You're too young. All I can tell you: it becomes impossible.'

It was the example of living among such quarrels, spoken or unspoken, which made me determined to remain loyal to my friends. Not that it needed much determination. It was simple. I admired them: that's why they were my friends. It had been an early principle of Joint Stock that each of the founding members
was going to maintain an active role, so when the others insisted that it was time that I took my turn to direct, I wanted to make sure I was continuing the relationships which were most important to me.

The company, which had started out with just one producer, one director and one dramatist, had been transformed by its production of
Fanshen
into an unwieldy co-operative with long communal meetings to decide policy and practice. The process was proving to be time-consuming and exhausting. Understandably, it was beginning to get on everyone's nerves. Some of us longed for the day when we might be allowed to do something without talking it to death before we began. When John Osborne read that the company was preparing a play about horse-racing, he mocked us for our approach. In the 1950s, he said, all actors would have
gone
to the Derby. The last thing they'd have done was go to
research
it. The very triumph of
Fanshen
– it would soon have to be revived yet again with yet another new cast – had created its own problem of identity. None of us could ever quite decide whether we were a theatre group who had done a show about collectives, or a collective theatre group. But whatever the aggravations, nobody could deny that the method worked. Edward Bond named us ‘the Royal Court in exile', but truthfully we had discovered a distinctive approach to the creation of new plays which few companies could afford or emulate.

Fanshen
had been followed by a piece of reportorial theatre, group-written and authentic. The actors had talked to a bunch of British mercenaries on their return from fighting in the civil war in Angola. The resulting show,
Yesterday's News
, pioneered what would one day become the increasingly popular form of verbatim theatre – a play made up of other people's words. It
was riveting. And next had come an original Caryl Churchill project called
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire
, which took us back into the territory of radical politics. It was about the Ranters, that most extreme of English movements who were on the far wing of Cromwell's republican revolution in the seventeenth century. They believed that all things should be held in common, and they lived their beliefs. To our surprise, it was the first time Caryl had seen actors' exercises or improvisations. For her, the experience was eye-opening, like being a child, she said, taken to their first pantomime. Caryl adhered to what, by trial and error, had become the regular Joint Stock schedule. First, there was a workshop, packed with research to which the actors contributed freely. This was followed by a lay-off period during which the playwright was sent away to write alone before formal rehearsals began. When I was press-ganged into directing, I was keen to see what happened if we applied this technique to a play not drawn from written source material. I wanted a change from documentary. Why not for once try to write straight from the human imagination? For this purpose, I turned to my first colleague, Tony Bicât.

By now Tony's feelings were almost entirely for film. For the BFI, he had made a Howard Brenton short,
Skinflicker
, about an English group of terrorists, and was these days working in television on a sharp contemporary series called
Second City Firsts
. He was frankly sceptical about theatre ever moving on to accommodate the kind of dreams we had had when we started Portable. Like so many people in so many other fields in the late 1970s, he was beginning to feel that a particular moment for change had been lost. Tony was further reluctant to write for Joint Stock because he believed neither Max nor Bill had any respect for his work. I didn't care. I felt a debt
to Tony which I wanted to pay back. Both Howard Brenton and I had prospered in good part thanks to Tony's selflessness. Now I wanted to do something for him. From this mixture of motives came
Devil's Island
, ambitiously set in 1937, 1977 and 1997. Three men and three women evolved, becoming different people at different times, starting in the Spanish Civil War. Tony was an early fan of J. G. Ballard, spotting him way before his cult eminence. He aimed to write a technically innovative, futuristic piece about a Britain in which all the most unacceptable citizens would be exiled together to a devil's island. The play set out to challenge the director's ingenuity. Of all 1970s dystopian works about the hopeless future ahead, this was, underneath, the most uncompromising. When, a couple of years later, Caryl Churchill deployed the same structural idea – people from one period become different people in another – in another Joint Stock show,
Cloud Nine
, the satiric effect was intentionally far gentler.