Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  KING: The real lesson, if I may say so, is that what makes an illness perilous is celebrity. Or, as in my case, royalty. In the ordinary course of things doctors want their patients to recover; their reputations depend on it. But if the patient is rich or royal, powerful or famous, other considerations enter in. There are many parties interested apart from the interested party. So more doctors are called in, and none but the best will do. But the best aren’t always very good, and they argue, they disagree. They have to, because they are after all the best and the world is watching. And who is in the middle? The patient. It happened to me. It happened to Napoleon. It happened to Anthony Eden. It happened to the Shah. The doctors even killed off George V to make the first edition of The Times. I tell you, dear people, if you’re poorly it’s safer to be poor and ordinary.

  QUEEN: But not too poor, Mr King.

  KING: Oh no. Not too poor. What? What?

  * When the play was put on in America the line only worked when altered to ‘four more years’.

  The Madness of King George

  The first draft of The Madness of King George (then called The Madness of George III) was prefaced with this note:

  The Windsor Castle in which much of the action takes place is the castle before it was reconstructed in the 1820s. The eighteenth century wasn’t all elegance, and there should be a marked contrast between the state rooms, in which the King’s life was largely spent, and the back parts of the building, those tiny rooms and attics, cubicles almost, where, because the court was so crowded, most of the courtiers had to lodge. This was certainly the situation at Versailles and, I imagine, at most of the courts of Europe. Greville is lucky to have a little room to himself, and the pages sleep stacked in a cupboard like a scene from Alice in Wonderland.

  It’s not simply a contrast between public opulence and private squalor. I don’t imagine the living-quarters of the court, cramped though they were, to have been particularly squalid; I think of them as being long boarded passages lined with doors, with narrow staircases and abrupt changes of level – accommodation not unlike that in the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge or on the top floors of country houses. But, scrubbed and white-painted as these quarters may have been, cramped they certainly were and often situated behind and adjacent to the state rooms and grand corridors where the ceremonial life of the court was led. Access to these back parts is through doors flush with the panelling or covered in camouflaging wallpaper; when Greville, say, comes on duty it’s as if he’s threading his way through a complicated backstage before coming out on to the set.

  There should be a sense too that what happens to the King in the course of his illness is reflected in the topography of the castle. His behaviour, previously geared to the public and state rooms, gradually becomes inappropriate for such settings; when he periodically escapes into the back parts of the castle (as when he is looking for the Queen, for instance), it’s comparable to his escape into the back parts of his personality, the contrast between what he seems and what he is echoed by that between the state rooms and the attics.

  The notion of courts as overcrowded places I took from Nancy Mitford’s The Sun King, with its vivid account of conditions at Versailles. Not to be at court in France was social death, and the aristocracy were prepared to put up with almost any inconvenience to avoid having to reside on their estates. In order to cope with the demand, rooms in the palace were divided and divided again, the elegant state apartments of the palace backing on to a labyrinth of poky lodgings and what were, in effect, bedsitters.

  While the social set-up was different in England – the court never quite the same magnet – nevertheless here too conditions must have been pretty cheek by jowl, particularly in unreconstructed Windsor. Formality there was (too much of it, the courtiers complained), but with a crowd of well-to-do people crammed together in a tight place etiquette was always under strain, and once the door closed on the King and Queen the relief must have been as palpable as it is in the film: the royal brothers sink thankfully on to the vacated thrones and take off their shoes, and poor pregnant Lady Townsend is at last permitted to sit down. In the first version of the script I wanted to emphasize the unbuttoning that occurred once the King and Queen left the room, by having Fitzroy unexpectedly return: the court is suddenly stunned back into silence and immobility, thinking Their Majesties are about to come back; however, Fitzroy is only retrieving a shawl the Queen had left, so the hubbub resumes. Revising the script, I could see that there would be no time for such underlining and it was an early cut.

  ‘No time’ is, of course, always the problem. Film is drama at its most impatient, ‘What happens next?’ the perpetual nag. One can never hang about, thinks the writer, pertulantly. There’s a bit more leeway on stage, depending on the kind of story one’s telling, and more still on television, where the viewers are so close to the characters as not to mind whether they dawdle a bit. But meandering is out of the question with film: it has to be brisk, so most of my atmospheric backstairs stuff never made it to the final version – so little, in fact, that I wonder now how I could ever have thought it would, and was that preamble to the script just a sales pitch?

  Not really, as the odd glimpses of life behind the scenes that did make it to the screen do pay off. There is the cupboard in the wall opened by the distraught King to reveal his three pages sleeping stacked on shelves one above the other (like the Fettiplaces on their monument in Swinbrook church in Oxfordshire). The King dashes along a vaulted corridor (Broughton Castle), bursts in upon a sleeping lady-in-waiting, and demands her chamber-pot. ‘Do it, England,’ he adjures himself, ‘do it.’

  But time and the budget put paid to much of the rest – no back corridors thronged with courtiers, still primping and titivating themselves as they hurry down to the opening concert; no shot of the same corridors silent in the small hours as one by one the doors open and sleepy courtiers stumble out en déshabille to listen to the distant howling of the King. The loss of such scenes was a sacrifice, but they were cut with resignation and general agreement, the telling of the King’s story always taking priority and so edging out some of these nice vignettes.

  Besides, the screenwriter’s hopes for his film must always be a little fanciful. I’d have liked (who wouldn’t?) the scene (later cut) where the King, gone suddenly mad, is followed at a discreet distance by the wondering court to have had some of the suspense and trepidation of a similar scene in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. I may even have put that daunting note in the stage directions. It can’t have helped; I might as well have said, ‘If it can be arranged, I’d like this film to be masterpiece.’

  Earlier in life I used to revel in the break from my routine that filming provided, while feeling myself as scriptwriter to have as necessary a role as the Make-Up department or Costumes. The scene often needed tweaking, for instance, to adapt it to the chosen location; the dialogue might have needed tweaking too, particularly if it was a Northern piece. So I used to take my place in that ritual dance that unfolds before the shot: the production assistant calls for ‘final checks’ and, as the camera assistant runs out the tape to determine the focus, Make-Up and Costumes dart in to powder a nose or straighten a tie, while the author (director, of course, permitting) has an earnest word with the actor about some emphasis or other.

  That this hands-on authorship has loosened is partly due to age. Happy enough to sit around on the set all day if I’m acting, when I’m in attendance as scriptwriter I feel it’s not a proper investment of time. Besides, many of the cast knew this piece better than I did, having played it on the stage off and on for two and a half years. So, whereas once upon a time I’d have been able to give a day-by-day account of the shooting of the film, my visits during the summer of 1994 to the unit on The Madness of King George were quite sporadic. Here are my notes on some of them:

  8 July, Thame Park, Oxfordshire. First day of shooting George III. Twenty-two years since I first went on location (to Halifax in 1972 for A Day Out). Th
en I was full of jokes and enthusiasm, watching every shot and fussing over how my precious words were spoken. Today it’s raining and I’m full of aches and pains and can scarcely bother to trail along the track to the pigsty, which is the first set-up of the film – and Nicholas Hytner’s first set-up ever. As always, even on a modest film like ours, the sheer size of the operation depresses: a dozen vans, two or three buses, half-a-dozen caravans, rows of cars, and dozens and dozens of people, all of whom have good reason for being there except me, who started it all.

  I watch the first shot – Nigel Hawthorne as George III on the brink of madness, talking to a pig – marvelling between takes at some wonderful run-down eighteenth-century barns with intricate grey-beamed roofs and sagging tiles. Nick H. seems happy enough and has at least got round the obstacle which always stopped me directing films – namely, having to say, ‘Action!’ My instinct would be to say, ‘Er, I think if everybody’s agreeable we might as well sort of start now – that is, if you’re ready.’ Today Mary Soan, the first assistant, says the dread word, Nick simply Making Decisions about the Shot.

  28 July, Thame Park. From the outside the house looks pleasantly dilapidated, with a handsome eighteenth-century front, behind that a Tudor house which in its turn incorporates the quite substantial remains of a medieval priory. It’s a country house out of a novel, in its lost park scattered with ancient oaks an easy metaphor for England.

  And maybe it still is, because until ten years or so ago it was lived in by the descendants of the original owners; then at the height of the Thatcherite boom it was bought by a Japanese consortium to be turned into a country club. So step inside and one finds all the period features intact – a magnificent staircase, fine fireplaces, the original doors – but all so spick and span and squared off they might have been designed by Quinlan Terry. And (the metaphor still holding) work is at a standstill: having done a radical conversion job, the consortium ran out of money and now the house is empty, just rented out from time to time for films such as ours or as a setting for commercials.

  In yesterday’s morning mist, when we started shooting, it must have looked like the park and mansion in Le Grand Meaulnes, but Ken Adam, our designer, has had a hard job taking the new look off the interior. The house is standing in for Kew Palace, where George III was briefly confined during his illness. The requirements of the script mean that it should look cold and uncared-for, so the air of dereliction the Japanese so ruthlessly banished is being just as ruthlessly reintroduced, our painters still hard at work distressing the walls and pasting on peeling wallpaper. Incurious, careless, mildly destructive, the crew isn’t much concerned about the house; and, though Thame Park isn’t Brideshead, film units nowadays are not unlike the units of a different sort that were billeted in such places fifty years ago.

  5 August, Oxford. Most of the cast of the stage play are taking part in the film, though some of them in much smaller roles just for old times’ sake. I have been given the part of a loquacious MP who happens to be addressing the Commons when news arrives that the King, whom everyone believes still to be mad, is actually outside in Palace Yard. The House rapidly empties, leaving the MP (MP 2, as he’s known in the script) addressing the empty benches with only the Speaker left. Eventually the Speaker tiptoes out too.

  The House of Commons has been set up in Convocation, with the adjoining Divinity School representing the Lobby. Coming on to the set, with Pitt and Co. on the front bench and the place crammed with two hundred extras, I am struck, as one often was in the stage production, by how like an eighteenth-century illustration it looks.

  ‘Do you do much extra work?’ says my neighbour on the back benches. ‘Not really,’ I say, and am thankful for it, as it’s swelteringly hot and more humid inside than out because of the vapour machine pumping out steam to make the scene more photogenic and blur its edges a bit. The extras – some of them undergraduates, others local amateurs – are far more tolerant and unprotesting than their professional London counterparts. Despite the heat, they seem actually to be enjoying themselves, strolling about between takes in the Sheldonian quad, showing off their costumes and being photographed by Japanese coach parties, who maybe think that this is all a normal part of university life.

  Between shots I sit around chatting with the actors, John Wood, Geoffrey Palmer, Jim Carter and Barry Stanton, whiling away the day in a fashion I still find powerfully seductive.

  6 August, Oxford. Today is cool and grey (‘Shakespeare in the park weather,’ someone says), which is perhaps fortunate as we have to get through eighteen or so set-ups in the day (the normal quota for a feature film being some five or six). Still, everybody is greatly encouraged from having seen last night a rough assembly of what has been shot so far, the snow scenes at Thame looking particularly good, with no hint that these were filmed on the hottest day of the year. Nor had I expected the change-over to much more muted colours as the King’s madness takes hold, Kew (Thame Park) almost in black and white, with the bearded King in his black cloak looking especially dramatic. At the moment, though, we don’t have enough money to finish the shooting at Thame, where we needed an extra day, just as we really need an extra half-day in Oxford.

  The unit base is in the grounds of the Dragon School, and after lunch I walk across the playing-fields to look at the war memorial, a cross by the cricket pavilion on the bank of the river. Names of boys virtually cover the cross, and not listed in an impersonal fashion, with surname and initials, but with the boy’s first name (and sometimes his nickname) written out in full, with no indication of the rank he attained or the service in which he died. After the rain there are mushrooms dotted about the field, and two of the ground staff are marking out the football pitch for next season. I have a pee behind the sight-screen, as the school lavatories have no locks on the doors (though at least they have doors), the bleak dressing-rooms and showers making me thankful it’s not a childhood I had to go through.

  10 August, Eton. Eton is standing in for the Palace of Westminster and the exteriors of the State Opening of Parliament at the start of the film. We film first in the cloisters, the walls of which are studded with memorial plaques to the dead of two world wars – the First War particularly. There are bronze plaques so dark as to be indecipherable, ceramic panels that look quite festive, a memorial to all the Etonians who died in the Grenadier Guards, and umpteen tablets besides, some in self-conscious Latin to masters as well as boys, the conclusion of many of them ‘Floreat Etona.’

  A dolly mounted with a ramshackle light-screen trundles the camera round the cloisters with the actors rushing along behind as the King argues with the Prince of Wales and the courtiers scurry after them, trying to keep up. What I hope we capture is how wanting in proper ceremony the eighteenth-century monarchy was, how slipshod and unmanaged were its public appearances, with, whatever the flummery, not much dignity about it at all. Then we shift to School Yard, where the MPs mass on the staircase by the chapel, watching the departure of the royal party. I sit by the statue of Henry VI (a pigeon feather caught on his nose) as the coaches wheel about the yard and Janine Duvitski as Margaret Nicholson rather shyly tries to assassinate the King.

  Afterwards I wander down the immaculately preserved High Street. Here are Coutts Bank and some smart tailor’s, established in the eighteenth century; there’s a grand photographer’s that looks as if it was established not long after, and other smart and elegant shops are hangers-on and camp− followers of the school. The message is plain: these boys are rich. And I hate it, and feel the worse for hating it because the school has been so helpful and cooperative over the film. I can see, though, that to be educated here isn’t an unmixed blessing and that afterwards it could, as in Cyril Connolly’s case, be downhill all the way, even the most lustrous Oxford or Cambridge college something of a comedown after all this.

  I go back to the filming to find Greville on camera, knocking at a door covered, as is most Eton woodwork, in ancient graffiti. Some of it, though, is not quite
so ancient (or not ancient enough for us), and it’s only when we view the rushes that we see the date 1862 large and plain on this door at which he is knocking in 1788.

  3 September, Broughton. Drive in grey drizzle to Banbury. Feel, even just passing through the town, the rootless anonymity that has swamped the place, the centre still intact and even handsome, but ringed by superstores and huge drive-in centres that service the acres of fuck-hutch estates that house its expanded population. ‘Thriving’ as I suppose it’s called.

  Broughton, a mile or two away, could not be in sharper contrast: the most beautiful of houses, medieval in a sixteenth-century or seventeenth-century shell with Gothick additions, entered across a moat and through a gatehouse – almost a standard kit for an idyll. There are a formal garden, great plush borders along the old ramparts, and cows and sheep grazing in the water meadows beyond, and overlooking it all this rambling honey-coloured house.

  On to this rural paradise the film unit has descended like an invading army. Twenty or so vans have ploughed up one of the meadows, thirty cars are parked under the trees; there are half a dozen caravans and two marquees, and the sodden ground is rapidly turning into a quagmire. Churning up the edges of the perfect lawns, company cars ferry the actors to and from the location in the house, where the sparks, who have seen it all before, lug their lights and tripods down the superb vaulted corridors.

  Seemingly unaffected by all this is the lady of the house, Mariette Saye – really Lady Saye and Sele (only nobody is quite sure whether one says Saye and Sele or just says Saye; say nothing the simplest). She’s tall, cheerful and wonderfully welcoming, happy to show anybody round the house, which is as magical inside as out, handsome rooms lined with linenfold panelling, and a splendid drawing-room overlooking the moat. My wonder at the place makes me foolish, and I’m sure I gush – though it’s partly to offset the unimpressed one-location-very-much-like-another behaviour inseparable from film crews, who congregate at the door, having coffee and a cig and trampling on yet another bit of lawn.