The Blue Touch Paper (36 page)

Given our proximity and our joy in the filming, Kate and I held off from each other for a reasonably long time. My wife had trusted me to work with my former girlfriend and the moment came when I betrayed that trust. Kate and I were artistically in love, and the other kind became a formality. After perhaps ten days of fulfilling work, we fell into each other's arms as if we'd never been away. It was completion. I was back on my favourite drug: intimacy with someone whose dreams were even bigger than my own. The end of the shoot passed in a blaze, partly because we knew we were making a good film, but also because we were together again. Both things seemed natural and both things seemed natural together. If we couldn't have happiness, we could at least have pleasure. But this time there was a subtle difference, a fault-line which would widen over time and cause everyone caught up in the damage more distress than at times it would seem possible for any of us to handle. Second time round, Kate never for a moment imagined she and I had a future together. I might be her passion but I was not going to be her partner. Whereas, over the next few years, as things got worse for myself and for my family I became incapable of imagining any future at all.

It was inevitable that as soon as I called ‘Cut!' for the last time on
Licking Hitler
, I would want to cast Kate as Susan
Traherne in
Plenty
. The play I'd been writing in such excitement was, after all, a companion piece to the film. At the end of
Licking Hitler
, which is mostly devoted to a young woman's war, the story flashes forward in a coda to her experiences in the peace that follows. In contrast,
Plenty
disposes of a young woman's war in a scene or two, and chooses to concentrate instead on the disappointment she feels in post-war Britain. I had been fired up by reading a book about the Special Operations Executive, which had flown British agents behind enemy lines. Among them had been a great many women. But, fascinatingly, over seventy per cent of those women had divorced in the years after the war. It was as if their own gallantry and that of their colleagues had given them impossibly high expectations. Nothing could live up either to the intensity or to the nobility of what they'd been through. Everything thereafter was a disappointment.

When I'd finished a draft of the play in March, I'd given it to Peter Hall and asked if we might do it at the National. The first scene of the play is set in 1962, before the action winds back to restart in 1944. In his enthusiasm Peter had rung Harold Pinter to tell him that David Hare had given him a play which began at the end. In panic, Harold had come running into the theatre and grabbed a script. He had begun writing
Betrayal
, his play which works backwards, running entirely from finish to start. He couldn't believe that another dramatist might have got there before him. Harold was reassured to discover that
Plenty
is bookended by only two scenes out of order. Meanwhile Peter and I had started discussing directors. He wanted John Schlesinger. I didn't, because, still a complicated prig, I'd disliked his thriller,
Marathon Man
, which I saw as lurid and exploitative. It had disgusted me. There was one of those
brief periods of theatrical confusion during which Diana Rigg appeared to be cast in the leading role, and when Bill Gaskill, at my wish, appeared to be about to direct. But when, walking together down the middle of the Mall, Bill confided that perhaps he wasn't too keen on the play after all, I decided I might as well direct it myself. Why not? In the intervening time, Diana Rigg's husband had declared the prospect of sharing his life with somebody playing a stage role so driven and discontented unbearable. So it was no great problem, as soon as I had a spare moment from filming, to put it in an envelope and send it to Kate.

In my notebook some two years earlier I'd written the four words ‘A woman over Europe', and had that insane jag of excitement you get when you know you're in business. By coincidence, at roughly the same time both Fassbinder in Germany with his film
The Marriage of Maria Braun
and Diane Kurys in France with
Entre Nous
would have similar ideas of telling post-war history through the eyes of a woman who had survived the war. Today Cate Blanchett likes to say that she has played Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, she has played Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and she has played Susan Traherne in
Plenty
, so as far she's concerned, she's played the three best female roles in the repertory. Certainly there is something in the play's technique of skipping through an eighteen-year period of a woman's life, without too laboriously explaining what has happened between each scene, which presents an actress with almost unique opportunities and challenges. Yes, there's the full range of emotion from rage to humour that you'd hope to find in any grand leading role. There is the expected succession of bravura moments. But what makes Susan different is that I aimed for a half-filled-in quality which would be deliberately
suggestive and which would give the actress particular freedom to take the role in any direction she chose. As always, in the right hands what is not shown can be as powerful as what is. I had started with a painterly image. A woman is sitting on some packing cases in an empty room with light coming in from behind her through high windows. She is rolling a cigarette, and a naked man, smeared with blood, is lying at her feet. Expectation is the most overlooked element in the arts and the least understood. If you achieve it, there is a way of whetting an audience's appetite, rarely used, which can set a bar high from the first moment.
Plenty
is a play which sets out on a long journey to explain its opening scene.

Kate wrote back to me in response to reading
Plenty
because she had already gone off to Stratford, where she was due to play Rosalind in
As You Like It
. It was a job which she was approaching with some foreboding. It represented the kind of respectability which she most dreaded. She felt that the first act, during which Susan is comparatively sane, was special, ‘so much more and different from other plays'. But she also felt that the second act, more given to Susan's madness and sedation, tailed off. ‘I think the end is not worthy of the beginning . . . It becomes like other plays.' I knew that if I cast Kate I was going to have to rewrite a bit anyway, because she was a few years too young for the range of ages as I had them originally. But my artistic love affair with Kate had long mutated into a mission. Her words ‘I can only say now that it is by far, by a long way the best play you have written' fired me up to do whatever was necessary.

One way or another, there were at least three other reasons why 1977 was turning into a distinctive and interesting year. Some time previously, on the trip to New York which had done
so much to determine the texture of
Teeth 'n' Smiles
, I had tried to go to the Public Theater to see a play by a writer I had never heard of called Wallace Shawn. Unable to get in because the box office had wrongly told me it was full, I'd asked Peggy for a script on my return.
Our Late Night
was so original, both in its humour and method, that I'd shown it to Caryl Churchill and to Howard Brenton, both of whom liked it as much as I did. It turned out that Wally, unable to make a living, was struggling to survive as a playwright at all, so he and his girlfriend Deborah Eisenberg had been astonished to find not just that Peggy wanted to represent him – he had never dreamed of such a thing – but also that in Britain at least he had a devoted following among his fellow playwrights. Isolated in the American theatre and regarded as waywardly avant-garde, Wally was thrilled when he visited England to be greeted by an admiring fan club of his peers who seemed to have no trouble with the supposed difficulties of his work at all. Max Stafford-Clark liked both him and his writing as much as I did. We had resolved that whatever else Joint Stock did, it would premiere Wallace Shawn in England.

The immediate problem we had was that his next play was a triple bill. The first and third plays were unexceptionable and beautifully written, but in the middle was a riotous sex farce about an orgy at the YMCA. Not just sexually explicit,
Youth Hostel
was also, at least in my opinion, the only unembarrassing piece of pornography ever to be written for the stage. Hitherto Max and I had spent our time pushing at political boundaries. This time we would be pushing at the erotic as well. No New York producer had yet been brave enough to take it on. When it opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Max's hilarious production, the ceaseless frenzy of coupling and
uncoupling spread infectious laughter. One of the four actors calculated that they averaged seven orgasms each in thirty-five minutes. But at the centre of all the high jinks was a moving young woman whose true, unspoken feelings for one of her fellow orgiasts were being hideously damaged. Moral enough, you might think, but not enough apparently to satisfy the press, who at once tried to drag the play into one of those insane feeding frenzies which make British journalists and politicians feel they're alive. They reacted like old women in Bexhill faced with Marty Wilde. The
Evening Standard
refused to name any of the actors ‘because their parents might come along and spank them', and the
Daily Telegraph
reported that the play ‘was as likely to give offence as anything I have ever seen in the theatre . . . There is no attempt at anything that could be called artistic endeavour.' But it was
The Times
's revelation that ‘Unveiled in standing, lying or canine positions, orally fondled and stimulated by a vibrator, here are the most generous portions of erectile tissue yet slapped on the London fringe stage' which caused Michael Alison, a Conservative shadow Home Office minister, to call on the Attorney General for a public prosecution. He also threatened that, should a public prosecution fail, he had friends who would be only too happy to bring a private case. There followed in the House of Lords a debate in which the arts minister, Lord Donaldson of Knightsbridge, was forced to defend the whole principle of subsidy to the arts against what would in the following decade become increasingly crude and political attacks.

Many years later, Wally would claim that it was a playwrights' letter to the newspapers which I organised in defence of the serious purpose of his play which gave him the will and courage to go on writing. Since he went on to produce, over
the next twenty years, some of the best American plays of the twentieth century –
My Dinner with Andre, The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon
and
The Designated Mourner
– then, if it's true, it remains one of the things I'm proudest of in my life. The gutless ICA, by contrast, caved in quickly, perhaps frightened of losing their Arts Council grant but also under the influence of their founder, Sir Roland Penrose. As Picasso's biographer, Penrose, husband to the exceptional war photographer Lee Miller, was a self-proclaimed big skittle in the surrealist movement and therefore by elective category unshockable – before his reincarnation as pillar of the British art establishment, at least. But Penrose's public announcement that he had prudishly cut his links with the organisation he had founded after the war for the dissemination of avant-garde art helped persuade the ICA to shorten the run of the play, even though sales at the box office had, for ignoble reasons, gone through the roof.

It was deeply depressing to find there were rebels-turned-blimps wanting to turn back the advances they had championed. It was even more depressing that there was anyone willing to listen to them. But there was also a redeeming element of farce which made these shenanigans hard to take seriously. As in Mary Whitehouse's attempts in the early 1980s to prosecute the director of Howard Brenton's play
The Romans in Britain
, it was almost impossible for the so-called moral guardians even to describe the reasons for their horror without sounding ridiculous. Their cause was discredited the moment they opened their mouths. But later in the year, Margaret found herself taking on a parallel but far more serious fight, which seemed to foreshadow an ominous change of mood in government. On taking over at
Play for Today
she had found on the shelf a script which had been gathering dust since 1975. She made its realisation her
most urgent priority. Roy Minton's
Scum
, directed with towering integrity by Alan Clarke, brought to mind the James Cagney film
Angels with Dirty Faces
. It belonged in a tradition of tough but big-hearted cinema. A young recruit, badly wronged in his last place of detention, arrives in a borstal and, rather than give in either to the screws or to the most powerful inmates, fights his way to the top of the tree, where he imposes a new and healthier order. The portrayal of the borstal was unflinching but true, the violence not overstated. Yet just two weeks before the film was due to be transmitted, Margaret and Alan were told that there were questions about whether it would ever be allowed to go out. The head of BBC1, Bill Cotton, hated it, and the BBC's managing director of television, the authoritarian Alasdair Milne, liked and understood it even less.

In 1956, after the national humiliation in Egypt, Clarissa, the wife of the prime minister Anthony Eden, is said to have remarked that ‘For the last few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez canal were flowing through my drawing room.' It was not so different for us. For those few months at the turn of 1977, almost everything Margaret and I did was aimed towards getting
Scum
shown. For a while, we thought about little else. Margaret was fighting as hard as she could within the building, managing at least to get a hearing from the Chairman of the BBC governors, Michael Swann. And it fell to me to fight outside the building, providing a public face for a campaign in which I passionately believed. The fact that the film was, in the words of the
Observer
, ‘one of the finest pieces of work ever made by the BBC Drama Group' counted for nothing. In matters of censorship, Milne had form. One of those dangerous people who mistake ruthlessness for efficiency, he had always loved banning things. He had already stopped Dennis Potter's
harmless comedy
Brimstone and Treacle
being broadcast on the grounds that it was ‘nauseating' and ‘quite simply diabolical'. But the special piquancy of the threat to
Scum
was that the borstal system being criticised in the film was run by the Home Office. By something less than a coincidence, it was the Home Office which was also responsible for the licensing of the BBC.