The Blue Touch Paper (37 page)

You didn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to know that this was political censorship of the most blatant kind. It was hard to say which would be worse. It was possible that
Scum
was being banned because of a direct order from the Home Office, which didn't approve of what it saw. But even if there were no such order and the BBC was doing its master's business unprompted and banning the film out of sheer cowardice, what did that say about the craven character of those in charge? What, indeed, did it suggest about the future independence of public broadcasting? Unable to attack the film's basic veracity – even their ‘expert advisers' told them that everything that happened was perfectly plausible – Milne and Cotton took instead to attacking its compression, saying that because so many unflattering things were shown to happen in such a short space of time, the film gave a misleading impression of the daily life of a borstal – just as, presumably, they would have said
King Lear
gave a misleading impression of the daily life of a king. Further, they claimed to be worried that because the film was shot in realistic style, a lot of it hand-held, the audience might be confused into thinking they were watching a documentary. Dishonest snobs,
they
knew it was a fiction. But would the great unwashed? It all added up to one charge:
Scum
was too good to be shown.

Any objective observer would say that it was a rare and extraordinary achievement to make a work of art of which society's guardians were frightened. This, after all, is what political
art is meant to do. But you could hardly ask Alan Clarke or Margaret to leave it at that. As Alan said on a discussion programme when asked what he wanted for Christmas, ‘I'd like a television transmitter.' After screening the film for the press, and finding it acclaimed as ‘one of the most polished and most compelling pieces of film-making that television has ever sired', both producer and director were in despair, but also determined not to let the row become, as it threatened to, the defining event of their lives. When the campaign to transmit the film ended in failure, Milne, tone-deaf to anything at a human pitch, had the nerve to send Margaret a message reading, ‘I admire your courage but not your judgement. You have had your fun. Now get back to work.' I'm not sure that even Milne would have had the nerve to send such a message to a man. It was at this moment that Margaret began to feel that her own stay at the BBC might turn out to be brief. She had gone there because, above all, she valued the freedom. Under a different regime, producing
Play for Today
had been the best job in television. But the BBC's egregious refusal, in the case of
Scum
, to assert its independence from government had created a disastrous precedent which would license nothing but trouble in the coming thirty years.

The sense that times were changing decisively was reinforced by an incident at the end of the year in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Clive Goodwin had gone to Los Angeles to negotiate terms with Warren Beatty for his client Trevor Griffiths to write the film
Reds
. It was about the American journalist John Reed, who had been swept up in the Russian Revolution and written his account,
Ten Days that Shook the World
. On 14 November Clive returned to the hotel from a lunch at which he'd had one glass of wine. In the lobby, he
began to have a blinding headache. He told the hotel receptionist that he was feeling very ill. When he began to vomit and fell to the ground, hotel security decided that Clive was drunk. Not bothering even to smell his breath, they called for the police to have him taken away. The cops handcuffed Clive, dragged him through the lobby and laid him out on the pavement, then drove him to the Beverly Hills police station, where they threw him in a cell for drunks. He was found dead in there the next morning. When a leading actor threatened to sue the LA police for the murder of an innocent man who'd been having a brain haemorrhage, he was told that if he brought his suit, every cocaine-using film star in Hollywood would be busted.

Back in London, a wake was held at the Essoldo Cinema on 4 December, organised by Clive's friends and defiantly secular in tone. Margaret and I went with Joe. We all wore jeans. There were performances by radical poets and singers. In books about the 1970s, often written by people too young to have lived through them, the period is represented as one of chaos and decline. History belongs to the victors. I can only say that's not how it felt at the time. But for all of us on the left gathered in the King's Road that day to remember the bright spirit of a friend who had been killed at the age of forty-six by being mistaken for a drunk, there was a strong foreboding that Clive had left us before our best hopes came crashing.

13

The Underlining

Clearly I was driving for a wall. The question was if and how I was going to avoid it. Early in 1977 I'd read that to celebrate the bicentenary of the founding of the United States, fellowships were to be offered for five American artists in different fields to come to the UK, and for five British artists to go to the US. It occurred to me once again that a change of air was what I needed. I could hardly go on as I was, betraying my wife and unable to accept the limits of a relationship with a woman who was secreted in the English countryside rehearsing Shakespeare. But once I had applied successfully and the date of my departure at the end of April 1978 drew near, I realised I was sending myself into exile. I was dealing with my problems by the unlikely expedient of dodging them. I was going to be away for a year.

In my heart I was convinced that, artistically,
Plenty
was an underlining. For the first time in ten years as a dramatist, I had not the slightest idea what I would do next. Evelyn Waugh said that ‘At forty every English writer starts to prophesy or acquire a style.' I was just thirty, but once
Plenty
was finished I was sure it was the play for which I'd long been heading, the one that would somehow accommodate much of what I had to say about the country I'd grown up in. I'd lived through a certain period of history, and now here it was. I'd managed to transport the feel of it onstage. The story of one woman's disillusionment
provided as powerful a metaphor as I'd hoped. Furthermore, the fleet-footed style of cinema-as-theatre which I had struggled with in
Knuckle
was this time under proper control. I'd written a play whose effects were achieved by juxtaposition: the aim of all epic writing.

A few years earlier, it had been Bill Gaskill who taught me one of the most valuable theatrical lessons of my young life. He had been to see a successful production about the threat of renascent British fascism. It was a play I had enjoyed a good deal for its general exuberance and courage. But Bill returned dissatisfied. In particular, he said, there was a short scene in which the central character had to make a phone call. A stage manager had carried on a small table in order to help him do so. On it was a telephone, and hanging from the telephone was a short piece of wire, which tapered out and clearly went nowhere. ‘Now that', said Bill, ‘is not what I call political theatre.' His point struck home and has stayed with me ever since. Nobody should imagine art has much to do with good intentions. The job of the playwright is to cast the material in a way which is potent and beautiful. The mark of your sincerity will not be in the righteousness of your thinking, but in your ability to transform your thinking so that it truly belongs in the medium you're working in. For Bill, the ugliness of a dangling wire was a sign that the playwright wasn't properly engaged. The scene was not playable, because the practicalities of staging it revealed that it had not been thought through. With
Plenty
, after nearly a decade of apprenticeship, I felt some correspondence between my intentions and the means with which I had realised those intentions.

I had known for a long time that my private behaviour had become deeply dishonourable but I was beginning to apprehend a little of the reasons behind it. Margaret had always been ahead
of me, emotionally tuned and aware in a way I had never been. After our decision on the sofa in Battersea, way back in 1970, when she and I had first discussed getting married, we had both woken the next day discomforted. But I could now see that my uneasiness at least had been down to the uncertainty of my motives. My professional wish had been to free myself up for the adventure of becoming a playwright. When I was young I was so self-critical that I had assumed I was also self-aware. Wrong. I had blithely mocked a friend who argued that self-knowledge was the purpose of life. Self-knowledge, I had said, was simple. Knowing how to act on that self-knowledge was what was difficult. Wrong, again. In some obscure part of myself, I had imagined that by at last putting my private life in better order, I would unclutter myself to get on with my work. Although the strategy had been at all times unconscious – as though that were an excuse – the idea that I would undertake one thing principally in order to undertake another was a crime against the person I married. And in the way of things, it had had the very opposite effect. By a vicious generational irony, I was as guilty of trying to contain desire as my parents had been. Today everyone who had come close to me was paying the price.

Up till this moment, I'd shown a well-founded dislike of artistic theorising. When Pip Simmons, Howard Brenton and I had attended an international theatre shindig in the early 1970s in Florence, the official conference report, coming through our letter boxes months later, had noted that the British delegation seemed happier drinking wine and lolling in the Tuscan sunshine than discussing the coming crisis in European theatre. It was true. Writing plays was hard. Talking about what shape you would like unwritten plays to take was easy. The more deeply I fell in love with the difficulty of art, the more I despised
the laziness of art-talk. But I had begun to feel that my break with the governing pieties of fringe theatre needed to be made explicit. I was so widely suspected for what I was assumed to believe that there didn't seem any harm to be done by confirming those suspicions. Perhaps then my many critics on the left might realise that my dissent from orthodoxy was not down to bad character but to sound reasoning. They had done me damage behind my back. Who knows? Maybe the time had come to confront. If I found most people on the right shitty in their attitudes, I had also discovered that too many people on the organised left were shitty in their behaviour.

I spent a lot of time constructing a considered talk for a spring theatre conference in Cambridge. Because I had always hated these kind of events, I took care to prepare as thoroughly as possible. In the lecture, entitled ‘The Play Is in the Air', I presented a series of propositions which ought to have been self-evident but which, for good reasons, in the feverish atmosphere of the time, were not. A play, I argued, is never what happens on stage. It's what happens between the stage and the audience. The excitement and fun of theatre is never in the play itself but in the transaction. Unless that transaction is live and suggestive, you might as well write a pamphlet. Why bother detaining hundreds of people for up to three hours to drive them towards a conclusion which is already known? It was no longer sensible, as Marxists did, to demand of an artist that they must ‘declare their allegiance'. Throughout my whole time as a writer I had been told that the purpose of art was to raise consciousness. But, I pointed out, ‘Consciousness has been raised in this country for a good many years now and we seem further from radical political change than at any time in my life.' The question we had to answer was why.

Audiences, I argued, have minds of their own. They are not passive consumers who walk away from the auditorium, lesson learnt. Discerning playgoers arrive with preconceptions which they test from their own experience against what they see on the stage. Of any play, the audience asks, ‘Is this how it is? Is this true? Am I convinced?' It was worse than pointless to offer a didactic evening. It was actually counterproductive. Using the theatre either to lecture or to parade your virtuous beliefs excludes the audience and leaves them with nothing to do. They hate you for it, because it insults their intelligence. Worse, it insults their experience of life. A good play is there not to close minds but to open them.

Such notions, you might imagine, ought to have been unexceptionable. But even as I laid them out on paper I knew they represented a break from the Germanic mode into which fashionable thinking had fallen in the previous ten years. Rehearsals for
Plenty
were already in their second week back in London when an unwieldy group consisting of me, Margaret, Kate and Joe all piled into a car together to go and stay for the weekend with Reg and Annette Gadney in their house in Wendy, not far from Cambridge. We passed a cold Saturday night in one of those country vicarages where, when you woke in a gabled bedroom, the ice was as likely to be on the inside of the windows as on the out. Reg was an ex-Guards officer who, when not writing excellent thrillers, taught general studies at the Royal College of Art. By chance, he had been house manager at the National Film Theatre on the afternoon in 1968 – I was in the audience – when Jean-Luc Godard, detained in the Paris uprising, failed to appear and instead sent a telegram ordering the British Film Institute to give his £100 away to the first poor person they saw in the street. ‘Talk to him of images and sound.
You will learn much more from him than from me.' Reg had been one of my most supportive friends, but because he knew me so well he warned me at supper: ‘David, you're fine when you feel the audience is friendly, but with a hostile one you go to pieces. Don't go to pieces.'

Small wonder, then, that driving in on Sunday after a vigorous morning's walk felt like travelling towards an execution. Reg says today that he feared for me even before we arrived, because I already looked like a starved dog. When we got out at King's College, the audience waiting for my lecture could hardly have been worse suited. Some of them came from street theatre groups and were still in costume, fresh from playing cartoon capitalists, with top hats, masks and painted faces. Over their shoulders, they might as well have carried bags marked ‘Swag' and filled with dollar bills. Others were still dressed as clowns, complete with baggy trousers and spotted tops. There were a good many attendees from the world of marionettes and mime. It had never been my intention to tell believers in the fringe that the party was over. I was making a subtler point: if political theatre were to enjoy more impact in the future than it had in the past, the nature of the party would have to change. It was a defence, not an attack. I had not lost my political faith, I was seeking to reconsider how best to deploy it. But among an audience who had come to celebrate themselves rather than to think, I was faced with no choice but to bear Reg's admonition in mind and to plough on saying unpopular things in an unpopular way. I tried to keep my eye fixed on Annette, Kate and Margaret since they alone looked friendly. I was half-heartedly interrupted a few times, but otherwise received in more or less abject silence.