Theater of Cruelty (36 page)

The king is not unlike another famous English character Bennett adapted for the stage: Toad, in Kenneth Grahame’s children’s story
The Wind in the Willows
. Toad is the lord of Toad Hall, located in a place called River Bank. Its denizens include Badger, and Mole, and Rat. Toad, wearing a loud tweed suit and huge round glasses, is a braggart, an idler, a spendthrift, and mad about cars, which he drives recklessly and very badly. The “poop, poop” of his horn is usually the prelude to an accident. Toad, in other words, sounds like a Wildean fantasy of the eccentric aristocrat to whom the rules of social convention don’t apply. He does what he likes: “I live wholly for pleasure; pleasure is the only thing one should live for.”

Bennett has a more unusual take on Toad.
⁴
He speculates that Grahame had meant Toad to be Jewish. As he writes: “[Grahame] had endowed him with all the faults that genteel Edwardian anti-Semitism attributed to
nouveaux riches
Jews.” He is, in any case, not an unsympathetic character. Grahame, like Bennett, or should I say
Bennett
, was an example of the timid English writer who felt excluded by his own inhibitions from life’s pleasures, and so invented characters, like Toad, who could let their hair down. The love of bad jokes and nursery naughtiness, shared by Bennett, runs like a constant stream through English life and letters. So does the love of dressing up, of playing charades, of a kind of innocent campery. Only in Victorian or Edwardian England is it possible to imagine a
senior army officer (the Chief Scout, Baden-Powell, say) getting up in front of his troops to dance in drag—without a thought of homosexuality crossing his mind.

The world of Toad, Badger, Rat, and Mole is like that: they are all confirmed bachelors; they don’t much like women; they—or at least Toad—camp it up like mad; and it was all written for children. Bennett is of course not an Edwardian, and his jokes are not those of an innocent. Near the end of the play, Toad is kissed by the young girl whose clothes he wore to escape from jail: “It’s rather becoming, don’t you think?” Toad then kisses Rat:

Whether the “one” who might imagine includes many children is open to doubt. Bennett explains why the play (produced quite beautifully, by the way, by Nicholas Hytner) caught his imagination: “Keeping it under is partly what
The Wind in the Willows
is about. There is a Toad in all of us or certainly in all men, our social acceptability
dependent on how much of our Toad we can keep hidden.” Perhaps part of Bennett’s intemperate dislike of Mrs. Thatcher is to do with her tendency to keep our Toads down too forcefully.

Finally, inevitably, since every fairy tale must end, Toad is tamed, like King George, though not as violently. After his escape from prison, he learns how to tone down his act, to behave modestly. Toad Hall will become a more genteel place. Chairman Badger suggests it might be converted to a nice mix of executive apartments, offices, and a marina to attract the tourists. Something vital will be lost:

King George’s reversion to normality is equally dramatic. In the film, the scenes of his madness are shot in cold rooms or in a wintry fog. The final cure takes place in a sunny garden. The king is reading
King Lear
, with Thurlow, the cynical lord chancellor (John Wood), playing Cordelia. The king, much moved by the play, orders Thurlow to kiss his cheek. Thurlow does so with acute embarrassment, but observes that the king suddenly seems more himself. The king: “Do I? Yes, I do. I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. That’s the important thing. I have remembered how to seem. What, what?”

This is all beautifully done, but Bennett seems to have had trouble with the ending. This is perhaps because his attitude is never preachy, or strident, but usually ambivalent. Ambivalence does not make for conclusive endings. The play ends with the dismissal of Dr. Willis on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral: “Be off, sir. Back to your sheep and pigs. The King is himself again. God Save the King.” In his preface to the play, reprinted in
Writing Home
, Bennett gives us an alternative ending, which he discarded, but it is very funny. The king and queen, sitting on the cathedral steps, draw lessons from the king’s treatment of doctors. They conclude that kings and rich men fall victim to too many conflicting interests. The fortunes of too many doctors, too many politicians, too many courtiers rise and fall with the king:

The film ends—in my view less successfully—with a comment on the modern monarchy. Waving regally at the adoring crowds, the king talks to his bored and disillusioned son about the royal family being a model family, of a model country: “Let them see that we are happy. That is what we’re here for.”

Model family, model country, Britain as a homogenized theme park, like Toad Hall, with its offices and its marinas. Bennett has been there before, in different plays. A rather maligned play, entitled
Enjoy
,
⁵
is about an elderly couple living in genteel poverty in a
northern English town. Connie Craven, or Mam, knows the neighborhood has taken a bit of a dive: “It used to be one of the better streets, this.” Wilfred Craven, or Dad, has a steel plate in his head, as a result of an accident. He recalls that he was somebody during the war: “I had six men under me.” Their daughter, Linda, is a prostitute. Mam and Dad insist she is a personal secretary.

The Cravens, desperate to keep up appearances, have been left behind. Their street is to be demolished. They no longer know their neighbors. Their old way of life is obsolete. And they are to be taken away by social workers, who call them by their first names (Mam and Dad are obsolete too). But they are to be taken to a very special home, a theme-park home, which tourists will pay to visit. Their old way of life will be preserved, as a living museum, a place where neighbors still stop and pass the time of day, coal fires burn cozily—during opening hours only—and “on certain appointed days soot will fall like rain, exactly as it used to.”

Bennett clearly does not like what happened to Toad Hall, and Mam and Dad’s street. He has written warmly about the Leeds of his youth, with its fine Victorian buildings (many of them demolished in the 1960s) and its civic pride. Yet to call him nostalgic would be to misread him. Nostalgia is part of the problem with contemporary England, where culture has come to mean Heritage, and tradition is equated with theme parks. However much he plays up his north country roots, in his work and his public performances, he does not wish to go back. He writes in
Writing Home
: “I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.”

And yet, like the late John Osborne, a very different playwright, Bennett is a romantic about England, a merrier England that once
might have been. In a review of Osborne’s autobiography, Bennett writes how much he (Bennett) enjoyed the “frozen embarrassment” of the National Theatre audience that greeted one of Osborne’s new plays. He writes: “I often disagree with his plays, but I invariably find his tone of voice, however hectoring, much more sympathetic than the rage or the patronizing ‘Oh dear, he’s at it again’ he still manages to provoke in an audience.” One difference between Bennett and Osborne is that Bennett never provokes rage. I’m not sure Bennett would take this as a compliment.

Osborne adored the cheekiness of pre-war music-hall acts; above all he loved the Cheeky Chappie himself, Max Miller, the comic in the flashy suits who cracked blue jokes with a wink and wicked leer. Very much of a Toad, Miller’s humor was a blow against everything that was mean and pinched and boringly respectable. Yet Miller was also, in Osborne’s words, “traditional, predictable and parochial.” It is a combination Bennett would appreciate as well. Osborne’s hatred of Britain’s modern decline into shoddy, standardized Americana expressed itself in a yearning for eccentric aristocracy. He became a bit of an Evelyn Waugh figure, a country squire, firing off slightly mad articles to
The Spectator
. It was part of his act: one way to protect yourself from a gossip-hungry public is to turn yourself into a character.

Bennett has no time for
The Spectator
and is hardly an Evelyn Waugh figure. His politics are of the decent, liberal-minded left. Yet his attitude toward England is close to Osborne’s. It is, as always, an ambivalent attitude, reflected in some of his most successful characters. Bennett’s portrayal of Guy Burgess, the spy, in
An Englishman Abroad
, is brilliant because there was something of the music hall in Burgess. His services to the Soviet Union are hard to excuse. He spied for Stalin but, as people said at the time, with bags of charm. He was a Cheeky Chappie, a Toad—“he was fond of luxury and
display, of suites at Claridges and fast cars which he drove abominably.”
⁶

Bennett’s screenplay
⁷
is based on the true story of Coral Browne, the actress, meeting Burgess in Moscow in 1958, during her tour with the Old Vic theater company. Browne, already ill with cancer, plays her younger self in the film. Bennett, the director John Schlesinger, and the actor Alan Bates get the frayed charm of Burgess in Moscow just right. Without condoning what he did, they show some sympathy for the old queen playing his Jack Buchanan record, trading on yesterday’s gossip, and ordering Old Etonian ties from London. In the movie, and no doubt in life, Burgess in Moscow comes across as a shipwrecked Englishman from a vanished age. He had done his best to undermine the British government, yet he loved England with a passion. It is hard to imagine Bennett, or Osborne, as Soviet spies, but their work is fueled by a similar brew of love and subversion.

Bennett’s first play in the West End was entitled
Forty Years On
. It is a play within a play. The setting is a boarding school called Albion House. The headmaster (John Gielgud in the original production) is about to retire. The school is no longer rich, except in memories. The headmaster points out: “We don’t set much store by cleverness at Albion House so we don’t run away with all the prizes. We used to do, of course, in the old days.”

The play, put on by the boys, is entitled
Speak for England, Arthur
(a reference to Arthur Greenwood, the Labour Party leader who was asked to speak out against Chamberlain on the eve of World War II). Its humor is something between
Beyond the Fringe
and Max Miller: a sequence of music-hall jokes, puns, and parodies of English memoirs
(suggested by, among other things, Harold Nicolson’s diaries). The play—and the play within the play—pokes fun at such English institutions as the empire, the monarchy, and war heroes: “I met one of them tonight, down at the House. A very gallant young man. Everything that a hero should be. Handsome, laughing, careless of his life. Rather a bore, and at heart, I suppose, a bit of a Fascist.”

The headmaster is a marvelous creation, one of the best of Bennett’s many shipwrecked Englishmen, stranded in the past, befuddled by and disapproving of the modern world. As part of the play within the play, he quotes Baden-Powell and makes speeches about Lawrence of Arabia, without quite realizing their satirical intent: “Speaking fluent Sanskrit he and his Arab body servant, an unmade Bedouin of great beauty, had wreaked havoc among the Turkish levies.” But he knows “there’s an element of mockery here I don’t like.”

Boarding schools, headmasters, war heroes, these were of course precisely the targets of satirists, cartoonists, filmmakers, and novelists in the 1960s. In
Beyond the Fringe
, Bennett was celebrated for his parodies of vicars and Battle of Britain pilots. He is still proud of his turn as Douglas Bader, the RAF ace who lost his legs when he was shot down. But as in all parodies, mockery was mixed with affection. The fashion in Swinging London for nineteenth-century army uniforms was an expression of irony, but perhaps also of nostalgia for a grander, more dramatic age. It is not so surprising, then, to find the headmaster of Albion House making a speech at the end of the play that echoes Bennett’s own feelings about his country:

The school matron then laments the fate of old people tidied up into tall flats. But the headmaster has not finished: