Writing Home (51 page)

Behind the war memorial one looks across the Plateau to the Waterloo Monument and a perfect group of nineteenth-century buildings: the Library, the Walker Art Gallery and the Court of
Sessions. Turn a little further and the vista is ruined by the new TGWU building, which looks like a G-Plan chest of drawers. A blow from the left. Look the other way and there’s a slap from the right – the even more awful St John’s Centre. Capitalism and ideology combine to ruin a majestic city.

Tony Haygarth plays Pohlmann, the kindly clerk in Kafka’s office. In his period suit he is hanging about the steps at lunchtime, wanting company. ‘I’d like to go over to the pub, you see, but in this outfit I’d feel a bit
left-handed
.’

28 July, Cunard Building
. Kafka was once standing outside the Workers Accident Insurance Institute watching the claimants going in. ‘How modest these people are,’ he remarked to Max Brod. ‘Instead of storming the building and smashing everything to bits they come to us and plead.’ We film that scene today, with the injured workers thronging up the steps. Most of them are made up to look disabled, but a couple of them genuinely are – a fair young man with one arm who plays one of the commissionaires and a boy with one leg and a squashed ear who, like the lame boy in the Pied Piper, comes limping along at the tail of the crowd. Without regarding the disabled as a joke, I have put jokes on the subject into the script. ‘Just because you’ve got one leg’, shouts an official, ‘doesn’t mean you can behave like a wild beast.’ Though the intention is to emphasize the heartlessness of the officials and the desperation of the injured workpeople, the presence of these genuine cripples shows one up as equally heartless. I can’t imagine, have not tried to imagine, what it is like to have a limb torn off or have half an ear. ‘You say you understand,’ says Franz in the film, ‘But if you do and you do nothing about it then you’re worse than the others. You’re evil.’ This is an echo of Kafka’s own remark that to write is to do the devil’s work. And to say that it is the devil’s work does not excuse it. One glibly despises the photographer
who zooms in on the starving child or the dying soldier without offering help. Writing is not different.

28
July
. It is nine o’clock and still light, and I go looking for a restaurant to have my supper. I walk through the terrible St John’s Centre. It has a restaurant, set on a concrete pole (may the architect rot); now empty, it boasts a tattered notice three hundred feet up advertising to passing seagulls that it is
TO LET
. I pass three children, the eldest about twelve. They are working on a shop window which has
CLOSING DOWN
painted on it. Spelling obviously not their strong point, they are standing back from it puzzling how they can turn it into an obscenity when I pass with my book. The book takes their eye and there’s a bit of ‘Look at him. He’s got a book.’ ‘What’s your book?’ I walk on and find myself in an empty precinct. The children have stopped taunting and seem to have disappeared. I look round and find that the trio are silently keeping pace with me. In an utterly empty square they are no more than three feet away. I am suddenly alarmed, stop, and turn back to where there are more people. I have never done that before in England, and not even in New York.

30
July, St George’s Hall
. Bob the gaffer is giving one of the sparks directions over a faulty lamp. ‘Kill it before you strike it,’ he says. It is a remark that could be called Kafkaesque did not the briefest acquaintance with the character of Kafka discourage one from using the word. But he lives, and goes by public transport – at a bus-stop today the graffiti: hope is
FUCKING
HOPELESS
.

31
July, St George’s Hall
. Happy to be drawing towards the end of the shoot, I have come to dislike Liverpool. Robert Ross said that Dorsetshire rustics, after Hardy, had the insolence of the
artist’s model, and so it is with Liverpudlians. They have figured in too many plays and have a cockiness that comes from being told too often that they and their city are special. The accent doesn’t help. There is a rising inflection in it, particularly at the end of a sentence, that gives even the most formal exchange a built-in air of grievance. They all have the chat, and it laces every casual encounter, everybody wanting to do you their little verbal dance. One such is going on at hotel reception tonight as I wait for my key. ‘You don’t know me,’ says a drunken young man to the receptionist, ‘but I’m a penniless millionaire.’ You don’t know me, but I’m a fifty-one-year-old playwright anxious to get to my bed.

1
August, Examination Schools, University of Liverpool
. In St George’s Hall we had been insulated against noise. The vastness of the building meant that even a violent thunderstorm did not interrupt filming, the only problem the muffling of its huge echo. This final location is different. Outside three roads meet, and the bus station is nearby, so that traffic makes filming almost impossible. As chairman of the tribunal, Geoffrey Palmer has a long, passionate speech, his only scene in the film. Traffic noise means that we go for take after take before we get one that the sound department thinks is even passable. Then, between buses, we re-record the scene sentence by sentence, sometimes even phrase by phrase. It is an actor’s nightmare, as all feeling has to be sacrificed to achieve consistency of tone. Entitled to get cross, Geoffrey remains good-humoured and in complete control, and when the speech is edited there is no hint of the conditions under which it was recorded. A splendid actor with an absolutely deadpan face, he is an English Walter Matthau.

5
August
, The guard, an elderly and distinguished-looking West
Indian, announces over the Tannoy that this is the 16.45 from Leeds to Kings Cross, the estimated time of arrival 19.15. He adds, ‘May the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you and keep you always if you will let him. Thank you.’ Nobody smiles.

9
August, London
. Dr Macgregor sends me for an X-ray to University College Hospital, and I go down to Gower Street to make the appointment. I stand at the Enquiry Desk while the plump, unsmiling receptionist elaborately finishes what she is doing before turning her attention to me.

‘Yes?’ She glances at my form. ‘Second floor.’

I long to drag her across the counter and shake her till her dentures drop out. ‘Listen,’ I want to say, ‘you are as essential to the well-being of this hospital as its most exalted consultant. You can do more for the spirits of patients coming to this institution than the most skilful surgeon. Just by being nice. Be
nice
, you cow.’

I sit upstairs waiting for the next receptionist and realize that this is what we have been acting out, playing at, these last two weeks in Liverpool. Here I am with my form, queuing with my docket in UCH in 1985 as we have filmed the claimants queuing with theirs in Prague in 1910. I note that even when we were filming and playing at bureaucracy we fell into its traps. I never had much to do with the extras for instance. I mixed with the actors, who were known to me and who played the officials, the named parts, but kept my distance from the throng of claimants, none of whose names or faces I knew. Indeed I resented them just as the real-life officials must have done, and for the same reasons: they crowded the place out, mobbed the coffee urn, and generally made life difficult. Well, I reflect, now I am punished.

It is a feature of institutions that the permanent staff resent
those for whose benefit the institution exists. And so it will go on, even beyond the grave. I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.

Sir John Gielgud is seventy-five. To hear him talk or watch him on the stage he seems much younger, whereas his recollections of the lions of the Edwardian theatre ought to put him well past his century. It’s an elastic life because baby Gielgud was so quick off the mark, the famous nose soon round the edge of the pram observing the odd behaviour of his Terry uncles and aunts. He had instantaneous success as a young actor and put his popularity with audiences to good effect, bringing Shakespeare and Chekhov to the West End. As an actor manager between the wars he ran what was virtually a national theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. In the fifties new directions in the theatre led him to flounder for a while, but in the last ten years he has found his place again. Adjectives like ‘spry’ and ‘vigorous’, indicating the subject is past it, are here inappropriate. His powers show no sign of diminishing, nor his enterprise. He has come a long way. As a juvenile his ‘ambition was to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully cut suits lounging on sofas in French− window comedies’. Fifty years later ‘I was asked to put suppositories up my bottom under the bedclothes and play a scene in the lavatory which I confess I found somewhat intimate.’ Knighthoods nothing: actors should be decorated for gallantry.

This book has been put together from conversations recorded by John Miller and John Powell for the BBC. They
were delightful broadcasts: talking off the cuff, Gielgud rambled backwards and forwards over his life; he rarely paused, and then needed only the gentlest nudge to set him off again, bowling down the years. Put together into a book, the talks come much closer to his tone of voice than previous writings. The only thing one misses is the sound of his laughter: in the broadcasts, a narrative would begin seriously enough, then he would start to snuffle, the snuffle became a giggle and the whole episode would end on a snort of laughter − the object of the joke as often as not himself. It’s a winning characteristic, and an artless one; few public figures can be less concerned with the presentation of self, less calculating of the effect produced. Hence the famous gaffes.

The foot went into the mouth quite early. At a first night of
Romeo and Juliet
in 1919, Ellen Terry’s last professional appearance, the Terry family was out in force, Gielgud’s grandmother, Kate Terry, and her sister Marion were both given a round of applause as they made their separate entrances into the auditorium. ‘In the interval I said in a loud voice to Marion, “Grandmother had a wonderful reception,” and Marion replied “Yes, dear. I expect they thought it was me.”’ To compare even implicitly the popularity of two actresses (let alone in a ‘loud voice’) is to invite disaster, but the joy of the story is that even sixty years afterwards Gielgud doesn’t seem to realize that his aunt wasn’t just being witty but that he had put his foot in it.

There were still giants to be glimpsed in the streets of Edwardian London. He saw Sir Squire Bancroft walking every morning to his bank, ‘where he would demand a slip with the amount of his current balance, which he would diligently examine before proceeding to lunch at the Garrick’. Bancroft was scrupulous about attending funerals and memorial services, ‘and was heard to remark on his return from a cremation service,
in those days something of a novelty: “A most impressive occasion. And afterwards the relatives were kind enough to ask me to go behind.”’ Gielgud’s language still retains a flavour of those days. He can talk of ‘bounders’, of someone being ‘out of the picture’ or ‘caddish’ even. ‘She was jolly and red-faced,’ he says of a costume-designer, ‘like an admiral’s daughter.’

In his own person he retains a visible characteristic of that less inhibited generation in his ‘Terry tears’. He has ready access to his emotions and, like Churchill, he weeps with unaffected ease. On the stage he will produce a wonderfully effective tear seconds after telling some ribald story in the wings, and in full flood his tears are a remarkable phenomenon. I saw him once giving the address at a memorial service − one of those gatherings that seem to occur more frequently in the theatrical profession than in any other, generally in the Covent Garden area. This was a service for the old Bensonian actress Nora Nicholson. Nora had had a happy life and was eighty-one when she died, so the service was by no means a gloomy one. Sybil Thorndike, herself ninety-two and crippled by arthritis, sat enthroned in the front pew, surrounded by a posse of ladies who were scarcely younger. At a given moment, these attendants slid along the pew, got their frail shoulders under Dame Sybil and slowly hunched her into a standing position, remaining massed behind her like an aged rugger scrum while she recited the Twenty-Third Psalm in wonderful ringing tones. The contrast between Dame Sybil’s physical incapacity and the undimmed beauty of her voice set Gielgud off crying. By the time he stood up for his memorial address he could scarcely speak, the tears splashing on the chancel steps in a display of grief which, if it was disproportionate, was not inappropriate. It was a sight both moving and funny, and much appreciated by the congregation.

Gielgud is dispassionate about his own talents, and generous about those of others. The publishers are said to have had a hard
time preparing this book, with the gentle knight anxious to tone down any remark that might offend. None do, but the anxiety is typical − and so is the hard time, as he’s notorious for changing his mind. In fact the only person who does get any stick is young Mr Gielgud. ‘I had little idea at that time of playing a part with any originality,’ he says, and dismisses many of his youthful efforts as just ‘showing off’. There have been many failures, particularly as a director. ‘I am feather-headed,’ he says, ‘not really thorough.’ True, but he is also conscientious in hidden and unexpected ways. Like many actors, from time to time he tapes books for the blind. It’s a one-off job which most do without much thought. Once in his dressing-room I picked up a book which he was due to record: he had scored and stressed and underlined it as if for a Command Performance.

Methodical, however, he is not, particularly as a director. His production of
Don Giovanni
, which opened the newly restored Coliseum in 1968, was a disaster (though that’s not surprising, as opening productions generally are − why anybody ever consents to open a theatre I do not understand). At the last dress rehearsal some members of the chorus had still not been placed. A final dress rehearsal in the theatre is done properly, behind closed doors. Opera dress rehearsals seem slightly busier than the first night − grand and populous, with all the members of the board on view. There are titled patrons and their ladies, and crowds of discreet functionaries discreetly function in an atmosphere of hushed reverence. This is Art with a capital S. The opera was well under way when Gielgud suddenly noticed the hitherto undirected members of the chorus uneasily wandering about the stage. He rose from his seat and rushed down to the front of the stalls to call a halt while he told them what to do. But operas are not so easily stopped as plays, and the orchestra ploughed on relentlessly, with Gielgud trying to make himself heard. Suddenly his voice rose above the din in an
anguished wail: ‘Oh, do stop that awful
music
.’

His has been a fabled and fabulous life, and the book is a stream of anecdotes and vignettes. ‘I am Mrs Sabawala,’ an Indian admirer announces. ‘My house on Malabar Hill is a sermon in stone. Lunch with me tomorrow’ He takes part in a gala at the Foreign Office to celebrate the visit of the French President in March 1939: ‘It was a tremendous affair, the last of its kind before the war and I could not help referring to it afterwards as the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball.’ Sacha Guitry was to appear with Seymour Hicks in a not very funny sketch they had written, adorned but not improved by Guitry’s latest wife, Genevieve Sereville, an extremely pretty girl. ‘At rehearsal Mlle Sereville was dressed in a very short skirt and her stockings were rolled below her knees like a footballer’s, showing a considerable expanse of thigh.’ Sounding unaccountably like Ralph Lynn in an Aldwych farce, Gielgud ventured to remark to Hicks, ‘I say, sir, that’s a remarkably attractive girl with M. Guitry, don’t you think,’ and was rewarded with the trenchant comment ‘Try acting with her, old boy. It’s the cabman’s goodbye.’

In one respect, however, this anecdotal style does him less than justice. One would not gather from these pages the nature of the role Gielgud played in the theatre between the wars, nor the extent to which he has been a pioneer. ‘It was not until the Thirties,’ he writes, ‘that by a lucky chance I was able to bring Shakespeare back to the West End as a commercial success.’ This ‘lucky chance’ occurred in a period of theatrical history vividly re-created by Irving Wardle in his biography of George Devine. Devine brought Gielgud to Oxford to direct the OUDS production of
Romeo and Juliet
in 1932. He had never directed before, though he had played Romeo at the Old Vic. Gielgud has always been interested in stage design − he had at one time considered going into the theatre in that capacity − and
it was at his suggestion that three unknown designers were brought in to do the costumes. These were Elizabeth Montgomery and her two partners Margaret and Sophia Harris − the Motleys − who specialized in producing stunning effects with the cheapest materials. The OUDS
Romeo and Juliet
entranced all who saw it and was the trial run for the triumphant version Gielgud directed at the New Theatre in 1935, when he and Olivier alternated Romeo and Mercutio. In this and his other productions in the thirties, Gielgud was able to put into practice some of the lessons he had learned from Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic, and through Harcourt Williams from Granville-Barker. These were simple productions with continuity of action and unity of design, and were entirely modern in feeling. Wardle quotes Tyrone Guthrie as saying that Gielgud’s production of
The Merchant of Venice
at the Old Vic ‘made Maugham and Coward seem like two nonconformist parsons from the Midlands’.

It must have been an exciting time to be in the theatre, and some of Wardle’s best pages are about the early days of Motley. They had taken as a studio Chippendale’s old workshop behind St Martin’s Lane, where a gang of actors, led by Gielgud, could generally be found sitting around, gossiping, discussing productions, and having tea. With a tea bill that sometimes came to
£
100 per week, it sounds cosy, cliquey and not the stuff of theatrical revolution, and this is the way Gielgud tells it − casually, with lots of anecdotes about Komisarjevsky and Michel Saint-Denis, both of whom he backed. What he does not say is that to design and direct productions in this way brought a gust of fresh air into the English theatre. He made Shakespeare a commercial success twenty years before the Royal Shakespeare Company. Through Komisarjevsky and Saint-Denis he put the English theatre in touch with a European tradition twenty years before the Royal Court. It cannot have been easy to bear that
when the Court’s day did come his pioneering work had been forgotten. Out of sympathy with Beckett and Brecht, he missed the bus to Sloane Square and it was a long time before another one came along. But when he did begin to take part in modern plays again it should be remembered that it was a return, not a departure.

Gielgud’s greatest success in the fifties was his one-man show
The Ages of Man
, adapted from George Rylands ‘anthology. It was a
tour de force
, a showcase for his talents and also a copybook exercise in which he could demonstrate as no one else how Shakespeare should be spoken. He did it superlatively well, and he did it everywhere. It was something he could fall back on to earn money and to wipe out the memory of less successful enterprises, of which in the fifties and sixties there were quite a few. But if
Ages of Man
was a
tour de force
it was also a cul-de-sac. It typed him in the eyes of younger theatregoers as grand, solemn and remote. He was the Voice Beautiful. Not to mention the Voice Imitable. And it was not theatre: ‘I toured it for so many years I feared I would be out of practice when it came to acting again with other people. Also eight performances a week all by myself and sitting alone in a dressing-room between the acts was a very lonely and depressing business.’

I had always assumed that this fairly bleak period in his life came to an end with his portrayal of Lord Raglan in Tony Richardson’s
The Charge of the Light Brigade
in 1967, and then his success in
Forty Years On
the following year. It was certainly clear from Richardson’s film that Gielgud was beginning to act in a different way. Indeed, he was hardly acting at all, allowing much more of his own personality to be seen. In many ways he was like Raglan, absent-minded, impulsive, out of touch. The Headmaster in
Forty Years On
was the same sort of man, and I had thought it was the succession of the two parts that broke the mould. But this is to forget Peter Brook’s National Theatre
production of
Oedipus
, which intervened between the film and my play.

Gielgud had had a glorious season at Stratford in 1950 in which he had done
Measure for Measure
with Brook. But this was Brook ‘when he was still young and approachable and jolly’, not the legend he had since become. On
Oedipus
he would walk into the rehearsal room and bark, ‘No newspapers.’ Deprived of his beloved crossword, Sir John was made to do exercises. ‘It was rather like being in the army and I dreaded it; but at the same time I knew I wanted to be part of such an experiment.’ Brook even tried to alter his voice: ‘I had to go into the voice and manner of the blinded Oedipus, trying to produce my voice in a strange, strangled tone which Peter had invented at rehearsal with endless experiment. Technically one of the most difficult things I had ever done in my life … very good, I suppose, for my ego.’ That ‘I suppose’ hides the doubts, the sense of humour suspended, the abject subjection and the outlawing of common sense that working with Brook now seems to entail. If the experiment comes off, as it did with his production of
A
Midsummer
Night’s
Dream
, the result is magical. If it doesn’t (and it didn’t with
Oedipus
), it is just embarrassing.