Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  21 October. Lynn has some firewood delivered – around thirty neat boxes, panniers almost which, stacked in the hall, look so tidy and pleasing they might be an installation or an art object. These thirty or so boxes apparently constitute a cord of wood (128 cubic feet), which is how wood is still ordered in this old-fashioned city. I doubt if it is in London, and certainly not in rural Yorkshire.

  Language: Disabled Toilet in America becomes Handicapped Bathroom.

  22 October. We pick up a cab at Lincoln Center tonight and drive to Nineteenth Street. The cab-driver says into a small microphone, ‘The fare is five dollars fifty. Would you please pay the cashier?’, whereupon a white rabbit, presumably a glove-puppet, appears in the interconnecting hatch and makes a bow. Lynn pays the rabbit, the rabbit bows again, the cab-driver says, ‘Have a good evening,’ and off he goes.

  31 October. At the bottom of the moving walkway in the local Marks & Spencer’s there often lurks a security man. He will be squinting under the plastic partition at the upper floor, keeping an eye on putative shoplifters (or, at any rate, their ankles). This particular corner of the store is where they sell underwear, the theft of which is, I suppose, more common and more of a thrill than nicking the broccoli, say. The security men wear beige uniforms, short-sleeved shirts and peaked caps with that steep neb which I still associate with redcaps, the military policemen who, when I was in the army, were one of the hazards of mainline stations, always lying in wait for timid and slipshod soldiers like me. The other paramilitary force in Camden are the parking wardens, who are also kitted out in peaked caps, theirs having scarlet ribbons. Though inoffensive-looking, there’s something not quite right about them either. They remind me of the forces of the wicked Regent in films like The Prisoner of Zenda: decent enough, but misled.

  12 November. The judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues in Nigeria properly outrages world opinion. Quite apart from the merits of his case, the death of this writer has more readily caught the public imagination for a very simple reason – the euphonious nature of his name. Ken is a good ordinary start, but with Saro-Wiwa the name takes flight and, unlike many African names, is both easy to say and brings with it an almost incantatory pleasure. So in the last few days many people have been enjoying saying his name. Not, of course, that this did him any good.

  28 November. Cycling down to the West End, I’ll often cut out the boring windswept stretch of Albany Street by going the back way along Stanhope Street, through the council estate that was built in the fifties over what was once Cumberland Market. The tower blocks are named after beauty spots: Derwentwater, Dentdale – all of them (I see the connection now) places in what was Cumberland. Between two of the blocks is a grass plot, and in the far corner of it a curved concrete screen about ten foot high with a doorway opening on either side, this screen, and the slightly raised platform on which it stands, converting the unkempt patch into a kind of auditorium. There’s no sign that it’s ever used as such, but I imagine that this is what it was intended for – part of some vision for this estate back in those still-hopeful days after the war. Did the architect, I wonder, in his presentation to the planners, sell this podium as a place where pageants could be held, bonny babies paraded, or even Shakespeare performed? Probably, as architects fleshing out their bleak vision are ever sanguine and never modest. Nowadays this little Epidaurus off the Hampstead Road looks a touch forlorn; the scrubby grass is strewn with litter and matted with dog-dirt, the shops opposite operate behind steel shutters, the estate is riven with racial conflict, and nobody takes the stage.

  8 December. Trying to find someone a Meccano set for Christmas, I’m reminded of a couple, friends of Russell H., who had a son of twelve or so who they were worried might be growing up gay. However, they were greatly heartened when the boy said that what he wanted for Christmas was a Meccano set. Delighted by what they saw as an access of butchness, they bought him the biggest set they could find; it was a huge success, and he took it to his room and played with it for hours. The day came when the boy asked to show them what he had been making, and they were made to wait with their backs turned while he manoeuvred it carefully into the room. When they turned round, the boy stood there shyly peeping at them from behind a vast Meccano fan.

  * I was told at the time I was wrong about this and that she hadn’t supported the Serbs. I felt (and feel) pretty unrepentant about this, accuracy never having been Lady Thatcher’s strong point either.

  Prefaces to Plays

  Forty Years On and Other Plays

  In 1969 I had a letter from a producer in BBC Radio saying he’d fished out an old script of mine from the pool and thought it might have possibilities for a radio play. I liked the idea of a producer at Portland Place dredging up drama from a pool of old paperwork, but he was six months too late and I smugly wrote back to point out that the play in question, Forty Years On, was already running in the West End.

  In fairness, the version of the play put on at the Apollo in 1968 was very different from the one I’d submitted to the BBC two years before. There was no mention of Albion House, the run-down public school which is the setting for the play, nor of the Headmaster, whose retirement is the occasion for the presentation of‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of Τ. Ε. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script, and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memoirs of Hugh and Moggie, an upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of Claridge’s. The transitions in time and the representation of memory, which are hard to bring off on the stage, are the stock-in-trade of radio, but I’m thankful now that the BBC put this first script on the discard pile, thus forcing me to rewrite it in the version eventually produced on the stage. What the letter did remind me of was the struggle there’d been to find the play a shape.

  To begin with, most of the parodies in the play I’d written separately and stockpiled, hoping vaguely to put together a kind of literary revue. When I began to think in more narrative terms these parodies proved a stumbling-block, as I found I had to create characters who could conceivably have had memories of, say, the age of Oscar Wilde, Lawrence of Arabia and Bloomsbury. Hence the Claridge’s couple, Hugh and Moggie. When I subsequently hit on the (fairly obvious) idea of a school play, with the school itself a loose metaphor for England, it resolved much that had made me uneasy. It had all been too snobbish for a start, but once in the context of the school play, which guyed them just as much as it celebrated them, Hugh and Moggie and Nursie, their nanny, became more acceptable. They’re still quite snobbish, of course, and certainly not the common man. But to put a play within a play is to add another frame which enables one to introduce more jokes, and also more irony as references within the play find echoes outside it. Jokes like the Headmaster’s ‘Thirty years ago today, Tupper, the Germans marched into Poland and you’re picking your nose’; ironies like Churchill announcing peace in Europe in 1945 just as the boys in the present day fling themselves into a fierce fight.

  The play enshrines some terrible jokes. One way of looking at Forty Years On is as an elaborate life-support system for the preservation of bad jokes. ‘Sandy will accompany you, disguised as a waiter. That should at least secure you the entrée.’ One of the boys is called Lord. It’s true that there was such a boy at Giggleswick School, from whose prospectus I pinched some of the names, but he’s only so called in order to furnish the Headmaster, wandering about holding his empty coffee cup, with the blasphemous exchange ‘Lord, take this cup from me.’ The child does so. ‘Thank you, Lord.’ But I like bad jokes and always have, and when an audience groans at a pun it’s often only because they wish they’d thought of it first, or at any rate seen it coming in time to duck.

  Besides, these bad jokes were the survivors; even worse jokes had bit the dust along the way. When the play opened in Manchester it included a piece about the first London visit of the Diaghilev ballet in 1911.

/>   A boy got up as Nijinsky, dressed as the faun in L’Après-Midi, dances behind a gauze, while downstage the practice pianist reminisces: Ah yes. Nijinsky. I suppose I am the only person now able to recall one of the most exciting of his ballets, the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other. It was the only detective story in ballet and was called The Inspectre de la Rose. The choreography was by Fokine. It wasn’t up to much. The usual Fokine rubbish.

  Ordinarily, good taste in the person of the Lord Chamberlain would have put paid to that last joke. But this was 1968, and Forty Years On was one of the plays on his desk when the Lord Chamberlain’s powers expired and stage censorship was abolished.

  There were other jokes, equally bad but more ‘satirical’. At one point Field Marshal Earl Haig strode on, in bright red gloves: ‘As you all know, I have just this minute returned from the First World War. Indeed, so recently have I returned I haven’t had time to wash my hands.’ And much more in the same vein. The play was such a ragbag I even considered including a story about Earl Haig at Durham Cathedral. The Field Marshal was being shown round by the Dean when they paused at the tomb of the Venerable Bede. Haig regarded it thoughtfully for a moment, then said, ‘Of course. Bede. Now he was a woman, wasn’t he?’ It’s a good example of scrambled memory, but the laborious explanations that I had to go into with the cast decided me against inflicting it on an audience.

  Hugh and Moggie were suggested by – but not modelled on – Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In 1968 Nicolson’s diaries had just been published, with his passionate account of the fight against Appeasement in the thirties and how, come the war, appeasers like Chips Channon conveniently forgot to eat their words about Germany and pretended they’d been right all along.

  The play is stiff with quotations. The readings from the lectern enable actual quotations to be incorporated into the structure of the play, but there are umpteen more, some lying about on the surface in mangled form and others buried in shallow graves. ‘Patience is mine: I will delay saith the Lord.’ ‘They are rolling up the maps all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Some quotations I have lost track of. I thought I’d invented the phrase ‘snobbery with violence’ to describe the school of Sapper and Buchan (and Ian Fleming, for that matter), but then I was told it had been used before, but where and in what circumstances I have forgotten.*

  The form of Forty Years On is more complicated than I would dream of attempting now. It is a play within a play in which the time-scale of the first play gradually catches up with the time-scale of the second, one cog the years 1900–39, the other 1939–45, and both within the third wheel of the present day. What doesn’t seem to have worried me at the time is what kind of educational institution it is that would mount such a production. This didn’t seem to worry the audience. After all, it is only a play. Or a play within a play. Or a play within that. Plenty of jokes anyway (too many, some people said), and it’s hard to fail with twenty-odd schoolboys on the stage. I’ve a feeling they (and the set) came via a Polish play, The Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord, that I saw in the World Theatre season at the Aldwych in 1967, in which choirboys sang above a screen that ran across the stage. I saw Zigger Zagger that year, too, with the stage a crowded football terrace, which made me realize how theatrical a spectacle is an audience watching an audience.

  Because Forty Years On employs a large cast, and also because it is as much a revue as a play, it seldom gets performed. Schools do it from time to time, and ironically, in view of the Headmaster’s strictures, sometimes find it necessary to cut the confirmation class. This raises the dizzy possibility of the pretend headmaster rushing on to the stage to put a stop to ‘this farrago of libel, blasphemy and perversion’ only to find the real headmaster hard on his heels, bent on putting a stop to him putting a stop to it.

  Forty Years On had been such a happy experience that when, in 1971, I wrote my second play it was natural that Stoll Theatres, who’d put the first one on, should want to keep the winning team together. Accordingly, we had the same director, Patrick Garland, and the same designer, Julia Trevelyan Oman, and the management even contrived that we should begin rehearsing on the same stage, Drury Lane, and on the same day, August Bank Holiday, as three years before. In some cultures they would have slit the throat of a chicken. In view of what was to happen it would have been just as effective.

  Getting On is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, George Oliver, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a self-esteeming joke. Nowadays one would just say, ‘Oh, you mean he’s a man,’ and have done with it. But in 1971 the beast was less plain, the part harder to define, and casting the main role proved a problem. The script was turned down by half a dozen leading actors, and I had begun to think there was something wrong with the play (there was: too long) when Kenneth More’s name came up. Kenneth More was, to say the least, not an obvious choice. As an actor and a man he had a very conservative image, and to many of my generation he was identified with one of his most famous parts, that of Douglas Bader in the film Reach for the Sky. It was one of the films we were making fun of in the Aftermyth of War sketch in Beyond the Fringe.

  I had a pretty quiet war really. I was one of the Few. We were stationed down at Biggin Hill. One Sunday we got word Jerry was coming in, over Broadstairs, I think it was. We got up there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells and the sun glinting on the river, and I remembered that last weekend I’d spent there with Celia that summer of ’39.

  Suddenly Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of cloud. I let him have it, and I think I must have got him in the wing because he spiralled past me out of control. As he did so … I’ll always remember this … I got a glimpse of his face, and you know … he smiled. Funny thing, war.

  Some nights, greatly daring, I would stump stiff-legged around the stage in imitation of Douglas Bader, feeling priggishly rewarded by the occasional hiss. Douglas Bader, that is, as played by Kenneth More; and here we were casting him as a Labour MR. It seemed folly. But was it? A veteran of many casting sessions since, I have learned how the argument goes. When all the obvious choices have been exhausted, a kind of hysteria sets in as more and more unlikely names are suggested. The process is called Casting Against the Part, and it’s almost a parlour game; a winning combination would be, say, Robert Morley as Andrew Aguecheek.

  All of which is to do an injustice to Kenneth More, who was a fine naturalistic actor, and, although he had never stepped outside his genial public stereotype, Patrick Garland and I both thought that if he could be persuaded to do so it might remake him as an actor. The example of Olivier and Archie Rice was invoked, with high-sounding phrases like ‘taking his proper place in the modern theatre’. In retrospect it seems silly, conceited and always futile. Kenneth More had no intention of remaking himself as an actor. Why should he? His public liked him the way he was. It would be much simpler to remake the play, and this is what he did. However, all this was in the future. We had lunch, he was enthusiastic about the play, seeing it as a great opportunity, and so the production went ahead, with Mona Washbourne, Gemma Jones and Brian Cox in the other parts.

  I didn’t attend many of the rehearsals. I still wasn’t certain that one should. The question had not arisen in Forty Years On, since I was there anyway as a member of the cast. Practices differ. Some playwrights attend the first read-through (and sometimes do the first read-through), then aren’t seen again until the dress rehearsal. Others are at the director’s elbow every day. There is something to be said for both. When one only puts in an occasional appearance the actors tend to think of the author as the Guardia
n of the Text, an uncomfortable and potentially censorious presence before whom they go to pieces. On the other hand, a playwright who is at every rehearsal soon ceases to be intimidating but has to exercise a corresponding tact. The temptation to put one’s oar in is strong. Actors come to a performance slowly; blind alleys have to be gone down, toes slid gingerly into water. To the playwright (the brute) the cast seem like small boys stood shivering and blowing into their hands on the side of a swimming-bath. Why don’t they just dive in and strike out for the other end with strong and perfect strokes? After all, it’s perfectly obvious to the playwright how to do the play. He could do it himself if only he could act.

  It seemed easiest to keep away, which is what I did. When I’m asked these days why I invariably go to rehearsals and on location with films, I have some nice answer ready. But if I’m honest it’s because that autumn with Getting On I made a wrong decision. I wrote in my diary:

  The saddest thing about this production so far is that it is getting on quite well without me. I go down to the theatre from time to time, sneaking into the auditorium without being seen in case my presence should make the actors nervous. If they do see me they ply me with questions about the text. ‘Would he say this?’ asks Kenneth More, pointing to an inconsistency. ‘No, he wouldn’t,’ is what I ought to say, ‘but I would.’ Instead I construct a lame theory to justify the inconsistency. ‘What is she doing upstairs at this time?’ asks Gemma Jones. ‘Why did you send her off?’ Why indeed? Because I’d run out of things for her to say, probably. ‘Maybe she’s putting the children to bed,’ is what I answer. When a play’s being cast it might be as well to pick someone to play the author too for all the help he can give them.