Writing Home (64 page)

In 1966, after eighteen months ‘sketch-writing for Ned Sherrin’s
Not So Much A Programme
and
The Late Show
, I put together a television comedy series of my own,
On The Margin
, for BBC2. A regular spot in these programmes was
Life and
Times in NW
1
, a saga of the dilemmas – moral and aesthetic – encountered by a young media couple, the Stringalongs. (’But darling,’ I hear Joanna breathe − ‘aren’t a moral and aesthetic really the same thing?’)

Like me, the Stringalongs had taken up residence in Victorian Camden Town and, along with so many other buyers of the still relatively cheap former rooming-houses, had ‘knocked through’ their basements to make a commodious kitchen/dining-room, shoved the au pair in the attic, and crammed the house with collectable items gleaned from the many junk stalls of the neighbourhood.

Rather sooner in life than they had expected, and not altogether in accordance with their liberal principles, the Stringalongs suddenly found themselves property-owners.These days the process is called gentrification and involves no soul-searching (few troubled consciences in Docklands, I imagine) but we were genuinely uneasy about it − or there would have been no need for jokes − and, though our unease could be handily recycled into resentment of those who bought into the area later than we had, there was a definite sense that we
were shoving the indigenous population out.

A nice instance of this came one evening in 1965 when a dinner party in one of our newly knocked-through kitchens was interrupted by an old man, not quite a tramp, who rang at the door asking for the landlady. The last time he had been in London he had rented a room in this house, and was there one available now? It was hard to explain how things had changed, and it was again bad conscience that made us put him in a car and tour round Camden Town looking for a rooming-house that had retained its integrity and was still a going concern.

Later I wrote a sketch based on the incident which we filmed for one of the Sherrin programmes, coarsening it in the process, with the old man becoming quite definitely a tramp and my Mini a Rolls Royce (partly, though, to accommodate the camera-crew) and the social implications nowhere. Still, it was this that gave me the idea for
Life and Times in NW
1
, no episodes of which now survive (nor any from
On the Margin
either), as in those days programmes were wiped as easily as dishes, and scarcely had the series been transmitted before it was obliterated.

The Stringalongs, though, did have a continuing life thanks to the late Mark Boxer, who in 1967 was trying out a cartoon strip for the
Listener
and asked if he might develop my characters. The Stringalongs became so associated with Marc’s cartoons that I would be reluctant to mention it, feeling as if I’m stealing flowers from his grave, had not he himself always been careful and gracious enough to acknowledge their origins. I only wish I could have invested them with as much life and wit as he did.

This sketch did not appear in the original
On The Margin
but was written for
Tatler
.

I seldom go to the theatre nowadays. I used to go quite often, but these days I hardly go at all. Plays are very much as they were, so I generally pretend it’s the cost. ‘Six pounds for a stall. It’s highway robbery. I just won’t pay it.’

There’s a handy Yorkshire expression ‘to thoil’, a tight little parcel of a verb meaning to be able to afford an object, but to feel guilty spending the money on it. ‘I don’t dislike that candlewick bedspread,’ a Leeds woman might say, ‘but I couldn’t thoil to pay that price.’ I feel the same way about a theatre ticket. And yet, if I’m honest, I know that that isn’t what keeps me away.

Is it then the box office, that Checkpoint Charlie one has to negotiate to pass from the cold world of reality into the free world of art? Getting out of Czechoslovakia is a cinch compared with getting into see Penelope Keith. Maybe it’s because it’s an opening like a kennel, but certainly the staff tend to model themselves on the Dobermann Pinscher, and even those box-office ladies who don’t take your arm off at the elbow still have that air of ‘We have far better things to do than sell tickets.’ Why aren’t they gutting haddock for a living, or de-beaking chickens? How come they have missed their way? For these, after all, are the doorkeepers to the halls of art.

I am speaking now of the West End, but things are exactly the same on the fringe – though, of course, different. On my last visit to a fringe theatre the child selling tickets had quite plainly
drowned several days before, displaying so little animation she made the corpse of Emily Brontë seem like something out of
No, No, Nanette
.

But ’twas ever thus, and hardened playgoers take all this in their stride. It is part of the magic of theatre. So what else is it that keeps me away? I will tell you.

As one grows (imperceptibly) older, the list of actors and actresses with whom one has worked naturally lengthens: a playwright builds up an acquaintance among actors much as a villain does among fences. So it is seldom nowadays that I settle in my seat, dispose my Dairy Box and consult the cast list without finding that there is at least one member of the company personally known to me. Not that finding the cast list is the falling off a log it used to be. Theatre programmes haven’t yet got into two volumes but they’re well on the way, and it can’t be long before they come with an index. As it is, one searches among advertisements for low-level bathroom suites and clinics anxious to remove one’s unwanted hair, and nowhere is there a list of who’s in the play. Instead there is a lengthy essay on the issues purportedly touched on in the production. If it’s a revival of an unpretentious domestic comedy from the thirties there is likely to be a photomontage of the dole queues to emphasize The Other Side of the Picture, and any play that uses words (and some of them still do) is as like as not accompanied by a thumbnail sketch of the life and loves of Wittgenstein, just to put the critics in the proper frame of mind. And, worst of all, the actors themselves are nowadays encouraged to set down their thoughts not only about their roles but also about Life in General. I love the company of actors, but reading these effusions it’s hard not to feel that when they are not required on the stage actors should be kept in their place – namely a locked wardrobe, and ideally with adhesive tape over their mouths.

However, the cast list once located, there one finds, as I say, at
least one actor or actress with whom one has worked.

‘Oh,
she
’s in it. I filmed with her once. In Hartlepool. Everybody else had gone home for the weekend and we had a curry together on Sunday afternoon.’ Memories are made of this. ‘And
him
. He was in a play I did in Morecambe. But was he Boring Man at Bus-Stop or Man with New False Teeth in Café?’ The precise circumstances are unimportant. What is important is that you know each other. Slightly. Which could be quite pleasant. One ought to be able to sit there, smug in the knowledge that the acquaintance concerned was rather better in your piece than he is being in whatever it is you have just laid out a small fortune to see. You could spend the evening bathed in complacency and self-congratulation – a real tonic in fact – but for one thing, one thought, a thought that haunts you every minute of the play and makes the evening torture.

You will have to Go Round.

To Go Round means to visit an actor or actress in the dressing-room after the performance, and I am not sure whether it is a ceremony peculiar to the theatre. Do clergymen, worshipping in alien churches, feel it incumbent upon them to go round to the vestry afterwards to congratulate the vicar on his conduct of the service? ‘The litany had me on the edge of my seat! And that canticle! I was on my knees.’

Are judges in their underpants surprised by colleagues who rush into the robing-room in ecstasies over the summing-up or the severity of the sentence? Do dons go round after lectures? Or footballers after a match? I think not. It only happens in the theatre. And it is one of the great advantages television has over the theatre that with television you never have to go round. Or if you do all you find is dust, an old copy of
Gardeners Weekly
and the vertical hold.

Which is actually slightly more rewarding than what you find at the back of a theatre. If, that is, you can find it. In the West
End stage doors are obscurely situated, often in streets so distant and unrelated to the front of house it almost pays to take a bus.

Like the box-office staff, the stage doorman is seldom a lover of the performing arts. Persons wishing to see an actor or actress are invariably regarded with hostility or regaled with the doorman’s memories of Dan Leno. Of the two, the first is preferable.

Once past the stage doorman you start to look for the dressing-room of the actor or actress, and at this point I think I must stop saying actor or actress every time and for conciseness’s sake just stick to actor. The gender of actors is in any case a fairly murky area, and they are often pretty vague about the matter themselves. But as you scour the bare stone corridors for the right dressing-room you very soon realize that backstage of most theatres is a hell-hole. It is cold. It smells. And it is a labyrinth. In this labyrinth the situation of a dressing-room varies inversely with the status of the actor. The grander the actor, the lower and therefore nearer the stage his dressing-room will be.

Suppose you are lucky enough to be going round to see one of the principals. You knock on the door and are told to come in. You do so and find someone extremely famous in a state of Considerable Undress. It is a fact that very few leading actors are in the least bit self-conscious. Speaking as one who can scarcely remove his tie without first having a police cordon thrown round the building I find this unselfconsciousness very disconcerting. An actor can conduct a conversation heedless of the fact that he is removing not only make-up and costume but also elastic stockings, corset, even his false teeth. He is standing without a stitch on and you do not know where to look. All in the public view. There will be people who will tell you that since an actor leaves the real person on the stage he regards the rest as so
much scaffolding. This is fanciful. It may be that he is just brass-faced. Which is probably why he is an actor.

However, do not be so stricken by the sight of the actor in his smalls that you fail to embark on your compliments as soon as you have thrown open his door. Or, better still, before. Begin your enthusiasm coming down the stairs. Feel unable to control it. Let it bear you bubbling into the room. Because this is what you are here for. You have Come Round. He has performed. It is now your turn.

For that is what it is, Going Round: a performance. A performance which, if it is to convince, has to equal and indeed surpass the one you have just seen on the stage. And whatever you thought, even if you slept through the whole of the second act, you have to go in there saying it was all marvellous. Marvellous. It was
marvellous
.

The actor is properly gratified. But he is also suspicious. Other friends have been round on other nights who have not performed as well as you are doing. So he has his doubts. Actors are very uncertain creatures. And he is particularly uncertain because some well-wishers have gone round and told him he was terrible. Whereas here you are saying he was marvellous. And going on saying it. Which you
must
. Marvellous, marvellous, marvellous.

He stops you. ‘But tell me,’ he says, ‘what did you really think?’

Take
no
notice. And, above all, don’t tell him.

‘Marvellous, marvellous, marvellous.’

So far, so good: he thinks you thought he was marvellous. But wanting (you fool) to introduce a note of reality into the proceedings and, by implying a criticism of someone else, to enhance how truly marvellous he has been, you add, ‘But, I’m curious: what made you choose
this
play. I mean, who persuaded you?’ And has the person concerned (though you do not say
this), has he been forthwith committed to an institution for the criminally insane?

He is on to you like a rat.

‘Why, didn’t you like it?’

You instantly realize your mistake and recover.

‘
Like
it? I thought it was marvellous.
Marvellous
. You were marvellous. The play was marvellous. I’ve had a marvellous evening.’

He probes.

‘What did you think of her?’

‘Her? Well I thought she was marvellous too. She was marvellous.’

This is a mistake. Actors never like praise to go to anyone but themselves. Unless, of course, they are saints. And if they are saints they are in a damp vault below the south aisle after a life of exemplary devotion. If they are actors they are in a damp vault below Shaftesbury Avenue after a not so exemplary performance of
Private Lives
. The damp vault is about all they have in common. But now his face has fallen. You thought she was marvellous. This must mean you did not think he was as marvellous as she was. Or as marvellous as you have been saying he was. It is, after all, well known that there is a limited quantity of marvellousness in the world. And someone else is getting a share. It is tragic.

Some visitors, thinking they have given the actor his due, now make the mistake of switching the conversation to topics other than the play: the furnishings of the dressing-room, for instance; the whereabouts of the loo; the air-conditioning in the theatre or absence of same; the other members of the audience or absence of same. This is fatal. ‘They came round’, he will go home and say, ‘and never said a single word about the play.’

Whereas the single word you have to say is ‘marvellous’.

Never stray too far from that.

But I have no room to talk. For on those occasions when I find I have actually enjoyed a play and
want
to go round and make my feelings known, then I invariably say the wrong thing. Or say the right thing, but in such a diffident way (wanting to be thought honest and not one of those frightful people who go round and just say ‘Marvellous’) that I end up convincing the actor I hated him. Honesty is not easy to perform. Iago’s is the longest part, but Othello’s is the hardest.

And make no mistake about it: the actor knows. He knows you didn’t like him, even if you did. He heard you not laughing. He saw you not crying. He knows, and in his heart of hearts he knows too that nothing you can say will help. The only thing that will help will be doing it again tomorrow night.

But when you have closed the door and thankfully departed he is left. And if he has given a bad performance he knows, and there is nothing one can say. So often Going Round is like trying to comfort the bereaved. Except, when an actor thinks he has died a death, deceased and bereaved are one.