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It is the ignorance rather than the arrogance of this last remark which annoys me: as well say that a parody of Shakespeare is open to action by the Society of Authors. I swallow my irritation and write back pointing out that parody springs ultimately from affection and offer to remove the offending phrase. (This did not satisfy them, and they demanded much more extensive cuts in the script. I was therefore forced to substitute a cod extract from Sapper.) In the month that sees the final abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s licence, this form of censorship seems especially dubious. If a book has been published it has been launched into the public domain. Whatever happens to that book, short of piracy, is no concern of literary agents or literary executors. [The Buchan family, whom I met subsequently, were delighted by the play and appalled at the agent’s officiousness.]

We have other difficulties with the Sapper-Buchan parody because Dorothy [Reynolds] has great difficulty in capturing the idiom of it. She is Sandy Clanroyden, who appears in the parody disguised as a maid. She is a woman playing a man playing a woman. Not surprisingly she is uncertain how to do it. I am scant help. ‘Just find the voice,’ I say, ‘and don’t bother
about the rest.’ But that is the short cut of a revue performer and actors don’t work like that.

6
September, Her Majesty’s
. The papers are full of a fat contract landed by Millicent Martin. During a lull in rehearsal I come across John G. at the back of the stage, dancing round by himself, singing, ‘Who cares about Millicent Martin? Oh, who cares about Millicent Martin?’

14 September, Her Majesty’s
. Nora Nicholson, who is nearing eighty, refers to death in a most unmorbid way. ‘I will do it’, she says, when offered a film part, ‘if I am still here. I’ve just moved into a flat with a three-and-a-half-year lease. That should just about see me out.’ She first appeared with John G. when he acted a butterfly in
The Insect Play
, and was herself in Benson’s company. When she auditioned for Benson he inquired what parts she had played; she couldn’t think of any and went home disconcerted, only to remember that she’d played Juliet. She is the nanny in the play, and had a nanny herself, who, when anyone laid an uninvited hand on her arm, would say, ‘Don’t touch me there; something might form.’ Today the management takes us out to lunch at Rules. Speculating on what might be under a monster dish cover, Nora says, ‘I hope it’s not boiled baby. Still, I’d rather have boiled baby than boiled mouse.’ As I leave her in the King’s Road, she shouts after me, ‘And remember to buy me a very big wreath.’

18
September
. Patrick telephones tonight asking whether he can come over, refusing to talk on the telephone. I thought it was over a fit of temper I threw at the end of the rehearsal over the obstacles being put in the way of the designer, Julia Oman. It is much worse. Mrs Vinogradoff, the daughter of Lady Ottoline Morrell, has got wind of the sketch about her mother and wants
it removed. Patrick recalls the conversation – the pain she has suffered from the portraits of her mother in the memoirs of the period, in the novels of Huxley and Lawrence, the autobiographies of Spender and Bertrand Russell, all those accounts, in fact, that I have read and through which I know her. Can we find it in our hearts, she asks, to give her more pain? Patrick is sympathetic. I am not. If the section dealing with her is cut it will destroy the end of the first act. We decide to change the name to Lady Sibylline Quarrell and hope that the storm will pass over. Those who know of her will realize it is Ottoline Morrell. Those who don’t will be mystified anyway. It adds another ten cigarettes to the day’s quota.

23
September,
Donmar
Studios
. A good day today, the first on the set, which has been put up in a studio near Seven Dials so that we have a week to get used to it before we open in Manchester. The boys adapt themselves to it splendidly and play with a new freshness and spontaneity which pulls the whole thing together.

They will find it hard to retain this freshness in the five weeks left before the London opening. They will lose it, then gradually regain it, or the semblance, the practice of it. That is why first readings are often so much better than what comes after, until gradually one regains through technique what one first did spontaneously.

25
September,
Donmar
Studios
. Gielgud telephones at 9.30 to say he has flu. We rehearse without him. It is a bloody day. The boys are restless and thunder about the set, drowning the dialogue and irritating the principals. George Fenton, the biggest and gentlest of the boys, is sick. He lies down on the child’s bed we use in the nanny scene, and as we go off to lunch he is fast asleep with a gollywog cradled in his arms. It is the one nice thing about the day.

At lunch Patrick and I argue with Toby about publicity. Stoll are worried because the advance booking in Manchester is only £500, despite large adverts in the papers. They believe it is because there is no national publicity, no gossip, no tittle-tattle. They want articles about the show before it opens in London – gossipy, taste-whetting pieces, all the silly paraphernalia of showbiz which I loathe.

We stand firm on this. I am gambling on the show being a success and think it more likely to be so if it is a surprise. The management want to hedge their bets, get some advance booking through extensive pre-publicity so that, whatever the reviews, they will have some cash in hand. It is an understandable point of view commercially, but artistically it is wrong.

We have a bad run-through in the afternoon in which I several times lose my temper and nearly clout some of the kids. It is getting too like school. One realizes how important John G.’s presence is: he is always impeccably polite, and any slight flurry of temper is followed by an instant apology. His modesty and good behaviour infect everyone else.

26
September, Dress Rehearsal
. Prince Littler comes in the afternoon to see a run-through, the last before the dress rehearsal in Manchester, where we open. He is the Chairman of Stoll, who own all the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘I see we’ve got the bricks and mortar in,’ mutters Dorothy Reynolds as we make our first entrance.

Littler is a round, innocent-looking man who sits bland and expressionless throughout. He laughs once, at a joke about Edward VII. All too soon the boys realize he is not laughing, and they begin to giggle. This is what always used to happen on a bad night of
Beyond the Fringe
: the laughter on stage was inversely proportional to that from the audience. John G. struggles under a heavy cold, his eyes swollen and racked by
sneezes, while the assistant stage manager follows him round with a box of Kleenex. It worries me that we open in Manchester in three days and he is still a long way from knowing his words.

30
September, Press Conference, Manchester
. ‘How many boys did you audition?’

‘About a hundred and seventy.’

‘I’ve got seven hundred.’

‘No, it was nearer two hundred.’

‘I’ll put down seven hundred – it sounds better.’

No it doesn’t, I long to say. Facts are what you want.

I talk to another reporter, who is anxious to make me say that writing is an agony. ‘No, it’s not really. I quite enjoy it. More sometimes than others. It’s like anything else.’ In the paper that night my few jokes are made to sound like Pascal’s
Pensées
, wrung from aeons of nameless suffering. He was also surprised by how young I look. But since he gives my age that night as forty-three it is not so surprising.

The Palace turns out to be a cavernous theatre, far bigger than my worst imaginings. It has been closed all summer and we are to reopen it. ‘You won’t fill this place,’ the stage doorman says to Gielgud. ‘
Ken Dodd
doesn’t fill this place.’ In the afternoon we have a disastrous technical rehearsal with a few actors from Michael Elliott’s 69 Theatre in the audience. They laugh a lot in the first half, then fall silent. I presume they have left, and it is only when the house lights go up that I see they are still there: it’s just that they have stopped laughing. I go out before the first performance and find George Fenton and Roger Brain, the horn-player, elbow-deep in muck, rubbing their rugger boots up and down the streaming gutter in the pouring rain. Julia Oman had thought they looked too new. Waiting for the curtain, I talk to Mac, John G.’s dresser. He is in his eighties
and was dresser to another Sir John (Martin-Harvey) and before that to Fred Terry.

Gielgud rises splendidly to the presence of our first audience, but we all feel lost in this barn of a theatre. The doorman had been right: even on a first night it’s less than a third full. And again the same thing happens: halfway through the second act we lose the audience.

1
October, Manchester
. The
Guardian
, albeit only a second-string critic, is very sour: my intention has been simply to write a fat part for myself. It also deduces some message about the barrenness of English public and literary life, which is precisely the opposite of my intention. Others are complimentary, but with phrases of dubious value like ‘a bellyful of laughs’, ‘all the makings of a very big hit indeed’. As always with criticism, I discount the praise and remember only the slights. I sit writing this on the dressing-table in front of the mirror and see I look older …

There follow three days of cumulative disappointment. A succession of thin and unappreciative audiences erodes our confidence. On Thursday evening it is a particularly bad performance. Michael Elliott sees it that night. He is very helpful and says it will be all right. Jonathan Miller also sees it and doesn’t like the back-projections.

After the performance, Jonathan, Peter Cook and I go to speak at a symposium at the 69 Theatre. The subject is ‘This England’ and revolves around nostalgia. I say little and observe how the seven years since
Beyond the Fringe
have hardly altered the relationship between us. We still retain much the same characteristics we had when we first worked together, only in an intensified form, Jonathan is voluble and lucid, Peter seizes opportunities for laughs and delivers good cracking insults, while I make occasional heartfelt but dull remarks. The
difference between 1961 and 1968 is that all feeling of competition between us has gone. In 1961 I cared very much more. I longed to be witty, to keep my end up, make impromptu jokes like Peter and stunning comparisons like Jonathan. Now I know I can’t and am content not to.

2
October, Manchester
. I go at six o’clock to do a live interview for Granada. Mr Budd, the company manager, goes with me, hopefully to ensure that I stress what a comic show it is. The management are always terrified that a serious discussion will lead the public to suppose that the show is serious. The producer of the programme is just coming out as we arrive and an assistant whispers my name.

‘Who?’

‘Alan Bennett.’

He seizes Mr Budd’s hand warmly. ‘Hello, Alan, I’m so glad you could be with us.’

It is straight out of
A Face in the Crowd
.

The interview is a boring and pointless exercise. The interviewer hasn’t seen the show, and nothing of value emerges. The studio is unaccountably full of triplets, and the atmosphere subtly different from the BBC – more fraught, less confident, nastier.

4
October, Manchester
. John G. is still far from knowing his words. The opening speech is full of names. He often confuses these and the boys are called by masters ‘names, masters by boys’. Though he never actually stops, and audible prompts are rare, it must leave the audience with a peculiar impression of the play. I
think
. The truth is an audience accepts whatever it sees on the stage as meant. Though an audible prompt embarrasses and withers any laughs in the immediate vicinity, provided one can just keep going an audience will assume everything is as it
should be. What is surprising about John G. is that, even when it is plain to the audience that he has forgotten his words, the last person to be embarrassed is him. He treats this fortnight in Manchester like an open rehearsal to which the audience are admitted by courtesy. If the show isn’t all it should be, that is their look-out. I don’t agree with this, but when the curtain goes up night after night on only thirty or forty people I begin to think he’s right. And even with such sparse audiences it’s noticeable that if they like him and laugh at his jokes then his confidence grows and his memory improves. But this first week has been very rough, and on one evening he so far loses his nerve that he begins the play addressing the boys with his back to the audience.

Tonight my parents come. They have obviously been a bit mystified by the play, and sit in my dressing-room in awkward silence as my dresser, a veteran of the music halls, puts away my stuff. After he’s gone, it transpires they thought
he
was Sir John Gielgud and was ignoring them deliberately because he was unhappy with the play.

8
October, Manchester
. Gradually the show is being carved into a slimmer, simpler shape. Gielgud is a very humble man. He can be wayward, obstinate and maddeningly changeable, but one can forgive all these because he sets so little store by his own reputation. He is entirely without malice or
amour
propre
, and in a succession of gruelling rehearsals he never once loses his composure. Today I find myself telling him how to deliver a line in order to get a laugh, and I begin to apologize. But he pooh-poohs the apology and begs me to go on. He will not be shielded by his own reputation or allow it to intrude between him and his fellow actors.

9
October, Manchester
. The boys are gradually emerging as the
best thing in the show, and as a result we bring them more and more into it, and even when they have nothing particular to do Patrick ranges them round the gallery to look on. They are quick on the uptake and add business of their own, though rarely so as to distract. They disprove all the stock maxims about children on the stage. They are imaginative and articulate – more so perhaps now than they will ever be again in their lives – and yet they don’t have a couple of ‘O’ levels to rub together.