Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  Even with the final dress rehearsals no alarm bells rang. The play was too long, admittedly, and ought to have been cut in rehearsal or, better still, beforehand, which is another lesson to be learned: if there are to be cuts, get them over with before rehearsals begin. But there was still a fortnight’s tour in Brighton when all this could be done. No panic.

  Now Brighton is a dangerous place. It is the home or the haunt of many theatricals, who take an entirely human pleasure in getting in first on plays bound for the West End. They come round, proffer advice, diagnose what is wrong, and suggest remedies. That is one section of the audience. The other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up like pistol shots throughout the performance so that, come the curtain, there were scarcely more in the audience than there were on the stage. On the other hand, Forty Years On had done well. Brighton was where Gielgud had got his second wind and the play came into focus. But that was familiar ground. Audiences at Brighton like what they know and know what they like, and one person they did like was Kenneth More.

  Until he was actually faced with an audience Kenneth More was scrupulous about playing the part as written (and sometimes overwritten). It’s true he flatly refused to say ‘fuck’ since it would ruin the matinées, but this didn’t seem to me to be important, so long as he continued to play George Oliver as the kind of man who did say ‘fuck’ (the play maybe just happening to catch him on a day when he didn’t). Kenny himself, of course, said it quite frequently in life, but that was neither here nor there. The first night in Brighton didn’t go well, and I was surprised (it is evidence of my own foolishness) how nervous the audience made him. Nothing in his debonair and easy-going exterior prepared one for the vulnerable actor he became that night. It was plain he had been expecting the audience to love him, and when they didn’t he felt lost.

  That first week the Brighton audience lapped up the jokes but yawned at the bits in between. We made some cuts, but found it hard because it was now plain that Kenneth More saw the piece as a comedy while I was trying to keep it a serious play. At the beginning of the second week in Brighton, and without there having been any warning or disagreement, he called a rehearsal to cut the play to his own taste, while instructing the management not to allow me into the theatre until this had been done. The following day I found myself barred from the theatre altogether, and in fact never saw the play in its entirety from that day until it closed in the West End eight months later. When it was playing at the Queen’s I’d sometimes slip in to see how it was going, find he’d introduced more new lines to make his character more acceptable to the audience, and come away feeling the piece had nothing to do with me at all. The younger members of the cast were fine, but there seemed to be an alliance between Kenneth More and Mona Washbourne to make it all nice and palatable, and with no ambiguity. I’ve always felt the play is too plotty, but it wasn’t plotty enough for them. George is meant to be so self-absorbed that he has a diminished sense of the existence of others. Finding it unbearable that he should be playing a character who doesn’t care that his mother-in-law may be dying, Kenny had inserted his own line: ‘I’ll go and see her doctor tomorrow.’ I wrote in my diary at the time: ‘It’s as if after Tuzenbach’s death in Three Sisters Irena were to come on and say, “I have three tickets for the 11.30 train to Moscow tomorrow. I have rented us a beautiful apartment and I already have my eye on several possible husbands.”’ But not really, because, alas, it isn’t Three Sisters. I took it all very seriously. Two more diary entries:

  It has been my experience that when directors or management start talking about the importance of the text it is because they are about to cut it. In the same way the people who talk most about the sanctity of human life are the advocates of capital punishment.

  Seeing this production of my play without having attended the rehearsals or had anything to do with it until I actually saw it on stage is like going to see a relative who has been confined in an institution. A parent in a home. A son at boarding-school. Their hair is cut differently, they are wearing strange clothes; they have a routine with which one is not familiar, other friends, other jokes. Yet the features are the same. This is still the person I know. But what have these people done? What right have they to dress him up like this, cut off his hair, put her in that shapeless garment. This is my child. My mother.

  All I was complaining about was that it had been turned into ‘a lovely evening in the theatre’.

  There was a comic side to all this. Getting On is set in George Oliver’s North London home and furnished in a style that was becoming generally fashionable in the early seventies. I knew the style well, having parodied it as part of a TV series in 1966, Life in NW1. This was a period when stripped pine was in its infancy, and the customary objects of such a household – the jelly moulds, the cane carpet-beaters, the Seth Thomas clocks and Asian Pheasant plates – were not so readily available as they have since become. Attics were still unexplored, tallboys unstripped, and the nightdress potential of Edwardian shrouds not yet fully exploited. My own house was of course stuffed with such objects. Rather than scour the junk shops of Brighton and Portobello Road, it seemed easier to transfer my own possessions on to the set. But I was barred from the theatre. So while a lookout was kept for the star rehearsing on the stage I smuggled in my precious objets trouvés at a side door.

  The question will, of course, be asked: What was the director, Patrick Garland, doing during all this? It was a question that kept occurring to me at the time, when I felt betrayed by him and by the management. In retrospect I think that, by concentrating on Kenneth More and leaving my feelings to take care of themselves, Patrick probably did the right thing, though I found it hard to take when it was happening. A leading actor is like a thoroughbred horse, to be coaxed and gentled into the gate. One false move and his ears are back and he’s up at the other end of the paddock. With a West End opening large amounts of money are involved, and where there is money there is always bad behaviour. In films, where more money is at stake, the behaviour is much worse, and the writer traditionally gets the mucky end of the stick. Nor should one ever underestimate the courage required of actors. To go out in front of a first-night audience bearing the main brunt of a new play is a small act of heroism. Actors must always have a sense that they are there to do the author’s dirty work. He may have written it, but he doesn’t have to go out there and say it. They are in the trenches, he is back at base.

  In the event, the play won an Evening Standard award for the best comedy of 1971. It had never seemed to me to be a comedy, and at the ceremony I said it was like entering a marrow for the show and being given the cucumber prize.

  Kenneth More is dead, dying courageously and very much in the mould of the parts he liked playing. I still think that he could have been, if not a better actor than he was given credit for, certainly a more interesting one. He wasn’t the simple, straightforward good-natured guy he played: he was more complicated than that. But because he wanted so much to be liked he left a large tract of his character undeveloped. Acting is a painful business, and it’s to do with exposure, not concealment. As it is, the play still remains uncut. It’s far too long, too wordy, and probably reads better than it performs: a good part but a bad play.

  The third play in this collection, Habeas Corpus, was written in 1973. It was an attempt to write a farce without the paraphernalia of farce – hiding-places, multiple exits and umpteen doors. Trousers fall, it is true, but in an instantaneous way as if by divine intervention. I wrote it without any idea of how it could be staged, and rehearsals began with just four bentwood chairs. The big revolution occurred after two weeks’ rehearsal, when the director, Ronald Eyre, decided we could manage with three. Remembe
ring Getting On I had worked hard on the text beforehand, and together we cut it to the bone before rehearsals started. The bare stage specified in the stage directions is essential to the bare text. Reintroduce the stock-in-trade of farce (as the Broadway production tried to do) and the play doesn’t work. There is just enough text to carry the performers on and off, provided they don’t dawdle. If they have to negotiate doors or stairs or potted plants or get anywhere except into the wings, then they will be left stranded halfway across the stage, with no line left with which to haul themselves off.

  Neither Getting On nor Habeas Corpus is what Geoffrey Grigson called ‘weeded of impermanence’ – a necessary condition, apparently, if a play or a poem is to outlast its time. Topical references are out. Of course plays don’t become timeless simply by weeding them of timely references, any more than plays become serious by weeding them of jokes. But the jokes in Habeas Corpus about the permissive society do date it, and some of the other jokes make me wince. Still, Habeas Corpus is a favourite of mine if only because it’s one of the few times I’ve managed not to write a naturalistic play. It’s also the only one of my plays to be done regularly by amateurs. I can see why. It’s cheap to put on, there are plenty of good parts, mostly out of stock – henpecked husband, frustrated wife, lecherous curate, ubiquitous char – and everyone is slightly larger than life, which helps with the acting. But it’s not altogether farce. Death doesn’t quite lay down his book, and poor Dennis ends up doomed. The original production ended on an even blacker note, explaining what to anyone who didn’t see the original production must seem a mysterious stage direction: ‘Wicksteed dances alone in the spotlight until he can dance no more.’ The original version of the play had no dance and ended with the quip:

  Whatever right or wrong is

  He whose lust lasts, lasts longest.

  Putting music to the play was the idea of Ronald Eyre. Carl Davis recorded some rumbustious incidental music on a fairground organ and, hearing it, Alec Guinness wanted to add a coda to the play. In top hat and tails he begins a debonair dance number, which slowly shudders to a halt as the spotlight dwindles, a real dance of death. It was the idea of this dance that helped him to reconcile the otherwise uncongenial character of Wicksteed to his own. It was a great bonus to the play, and the exact opposite of what had happened in Getting On, an actor adding something to the play, enlarging it to accommodate his talents. I can’t imagine anyone else bringing off that dance, or how to describe it in a stage direction. I imagine most amateur productions turn it into a knees-up, which is very different but no bad way to end.

  Sometime in 1989 I read in the Guardian that the Victorian school at Burley Woodhead in Yorkshire was to be taken down stone by stone and re-erected in Bradford Museum, where it is to be visited by, among others, patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, in the hope, one presumes, of jogging their memories. This school transport came handily at the end of the decade to remind me of the last play in this collection, Enjoy, which I wrote as the decade opened and which had predicted just such an event.

  The title is possibly a mistake: Endure would probably have been better, though hardly a crowd-puller, or even, despite the implicit threat of chorus girls, Look on the Bright Side. Still, Enjoy it was, and I can’t change it now.

  It’s the story of an old couple who live in one of the last back-to-backs in Leeds. Mam’s memory is failing, and Dad is disabled. While he lands up in hospital, the end of the play sees Mam still happily living in the back-to-back, now lovingly reconstructed in a museum. The fact that one of the social workers who effect this transformation is their long-lost son in drag may have had something to do with the less than ecstatic reception the play received, but, that apart, the whole notion of the play was dismissed at the time as far-fetched – expressionistic even. A back-to-back in a museum! I was told in future to stick to the particularities of dialogue and the niceties of actual behaviour that I was supposed to be good at, and leave social comment to others.

  Of course, there are things wrong with the play – the title certainly; the drag maybe, particularly since it persuaded some critics that I cherished a shamefaced longing to climb into twinset and pearls. James Fenton, I was told, even referred to the drag character as ‘the writer’. Mr Fenton’s subsequent abandonment of dramatic criticism to become the Independent’s correspondent in the Philippines was one of the more cheering developments in the theatre in the eighties, though when President Marcos claimed to be a much-misunderstood man I knew how he felt.

  However, if only in a spirit of ‘I told you so’, I noted in the course of the eighties various news items, like the reconstruction of the school at Burley Woodhead, which bore out the central thesis of the play and proved it to have been, though I say so myself, prophetic. For instance, a room was created in 1984 at Park Prewett Hospital in Basingstoke furnished as it would have been forty years ago in order to assist elderly patients in ‘reminiscence therapy’. There was the exhibit, also in 1984, at the Miami Zoo of urban man in his natural habitat: a man in a sitting-room in a cage. There was the proposal, later abandoned, to reconstruct part of the Death Railway in Thailand as a tourist attraction. Most pertinent of all (and, of course, this is the cutting I have lost, so you will have to take my word for it) was the devoted reproduction in a museum somewhere in England of the last of the prefabs, with the couple who had lived in it doing a regular stint as curators.

  Whether or not I got it right, I still like the laying-out scene in Act 2, because it is one of the few occasions when a character of mine has done what characters in plays and novels are supposed to do – namely, take on a life of their own. Until the two women started to lay Dad out I had thought Mr Craven was dead, and his erection (on the typewriter) took me as much by surprise as it did them. It is such a farcical scene it perhaps belongs to a different play, though the setting and the atmosphere of it owe something to Peter Gill’s season of D. H. Lawrence plays which I saw in the seventies at the Royal Court.

  With the exception of Habeas Corpus, all these plays are too long – well over an hour each way, which is all I can ever take in the theatre – and in performance they should be cut. As Churchill said, ‘The head cannot take in more than the seat can endure.’

  * It is the title of a book by the New Zealand eccentric, Count Potocki de Montalk, for whom see The Diary of Virginia Woolf (ed. Bell) vol iv, p. 76n.

  An Englishman Abroad

  A few years ago a stage play of mine, The Old Country, was running in the West End. The central character, Hilary, played then by Alec Guinness, is an embittered, ironic figure living in the depths of the country. Visitors arrive, and in a small coup de théâtre halfway through the first act the audience suddenly realize that the country is Russia. Hilary is a traitor, a former Foreign Office official now in exile. At the end of the play he is induced to return home and face the music.

  The play had some success, with Hilary being understandably, though to my mind mistakenly, identified as Kim Philby. Indeed soon after the play opened the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Moscow found himself sitting next to Philby at the opera and mentioned the play. The spy said he’d been told about it, but that it didn’t sound at all like him. This wasn’t surprising, since if I’d had anybody in mind when writing the play it was not Philby but W. H. Auden, the play seeming to me to be about exile, a subject that does interest me, rather than espionage, which interests me not a bit. Still, Philby or Auden, the play ran, and who was I to complain? It should perhaps be said that this was a couple of years before the unmasking of Professor Blunt and the great spy boom.

  During the run of The Old Country, as happens, friends and well-wishers would come round after the performance to greet Alec Guinness, often with personal reminiscences of Philby and of his predecessors, Burgess and Maclean. Hints would be dropped as to the identity of spies still ensconced in the upper reaches of the Foreign Office or the Diplomatic, and when I next dropped into the theatre I would be given a précis of thes
e titbits, though necessarily at second hand. I remember feeling rather out of it; I may not be interested in espionage, but I am a glutton for gossip.

  Happily, I did get to hear one story at first hand. Coral Browne came to the play, and afterwards Alec Guinness took us both out to supper at the Mirabelle. I mention the restaurant only because the mixture of Moscow drabness and London luxe was a part of the telling of the tale, as it is a part of the tale told. It was over a meal very like the one that concludes An Englishman Abroad that Coral told me of her visit to Russia with the Shakespeare Memorial Company in 1958, and the particular incidents that make up this play.

  The picture of the elegant actress and the seedy exile sitting in a dingy Moscow flat through a long afternoon listening again and again to Jack Buchanan singing ‘Who Stole My Heart Away?’ seemed to me funny and sad, but it was a few years before I got round to writing it up. It was only when I sent the first draft to Coral Browne that I found she had kept not merely Burgess’s letters, thanking her for running him errands, but also her original notes of his measurements, and even his cheque (uncashed and for £6) to treat her and one of her fellow-actors to lunch at the Caprice.

  I have made use of Burgess’s letters in the play, but another extract deserves quoting in full. His first letter, dated Easter Sunday 1959, begins: ‘This is a very suitable day to be writing to you, since I also was born on it … sprung from the womb on April 16 1911 … to the later horror of the Establishment of the country concerned.’ Coral had apparently urged him to visit Paul Robeson when the singer visited Moscow: