Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  Finally, as the royal family go up the steps of St Paul’s for the Thanksgiving Service, at the close of the film, the King urges his family to smile and wave and pretend to be happy, because that is their job. These scenes would, I hope, have rung a bell with the late Erving Goffman, the American sociologist, whose analysis of the presentation of self and its breakdown in the twentieth century seems just as appropriate to this deranged monarch from the eighteenth century.

  The Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s did not have to be invented: it’s a nice conclusion to the King’s illness and needed no departure from historical truth. Beginning my career as an historian, I find it harder to take liberties with the truth than someone whose upbringing has been less factually inhibited. I have to be forced into departures from history by the exigencies of the drama, the insistence of the director and sheer desperation. Had Nicholas Hytner at the outset suggested bringing the King from Kew to Westminster to confront the MPs, I would have been outraged at this adjustment to what had actually happened. By the time I was plodding through the third draft I would have taken the King to Blackpool if I thought it would have helped.

  Filming and Rehearsing

  Forty Years On

  Forty Years On was my first play. It is set in Albion House, a run-down public school on the South Downs, where the Headmaster is about to retire. To mark the occasion, staff and boys devise an entertainment, ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, which is set during the Second World War and looks back over the period 1900–1940. I had put the play together in 1967 and sent it to the National Theatre. It came back pretty promptly, with a note from Ken Tynan saying that it wasn’t their cup of tea but might have commercial possibilities. With a cast of nearly thirty it seemed unlikely. I showed it next to Frith Banbury, who suggested to Toby Rowland, a director of Stoll Theatres, that they should present it. I wrote a second draft, and the play eventually went into pre-production in March 1968. The director was to be Patrick Garland, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman, and with what at that time seemed to me great presumption, Toby Rowland sent the script to Sir John Gielgud. Would he like to play the Headmaster?

  These are some extracts from my diary of the months that followed.

  24 May. Patrick and I have supper at Toby Rowland’s house in Smith Street to meet Gielgud. He is taller, squarer than he seems on stage. I am very nervous, knowing that if it comes to ‘selling’ the play I won’t be able to say much. Not to worry, as Gielgud talks all the time, telling story after story, head back on the sofa, famous nose in profile. He recalls a tour of India during the war, remembers Oxford, unspoiled in the 1920s as Waugh describes it in Brideshead, and the OUDS production of Richard II he directed at the Playhouse with Florence Kahn, Beerbohm’s wife, playing the Duchess of Gloucester, while Max sat shrinking with embarrassment in the stalls.

  He is currently appearing at the National in Peter Brook’s production of Oedipus, which I don’t let on having seen. Stories are rife of the indignities to which the actors have been subjected – some, representing plague-stricken Thebans, being tethered to pillars in the auditorium, where latecomers regularly take them for programme-sellers. The cast are dressed in matching sweaters and slacks in a tasteful shade of tan, and look like a Bulgarian table-tennis team. Gielgud is very loyal to Brook over all this, saying simply that, while it has been hard going, he is sure the difficulty and embarrassment of it have done him good.

  I am beginning to be conscious that nothing is being said about the play when suddenly, disconcertingly, Gielgud starts straight in on what is wrong with it. His first target is the twenty-five boys we have decided would be the minimum requirement for the school. He would prefer none at all: they will fidget, they will distract, surely cardboard cut-outs would be better? He is not put out when one opposes such suggestions, but he does not abandon them easily. (A few months later, when the play is happily running in the West End, this suggestion of cardboard boys will become a huge joke, but this evening it seems to augur a very rough ride.)

  At eleven we break off to watch a trailer for Patrick’s television programme on Dr Johnson. The sound doesn’t work and the aerial is faulty. We sat gazing at this grey, silent pantomime, with Gielgud getting steadily more bored and irritated. Patrick is seemingly unaware of this, and we are stuck there until luckily the set breaks down altogether and we get back to the play.

  A quarter of an hour before he leaves, Gielgud announces that he does not intend to commit himself until the final draft of the script is finished, and at 12.30 he strides off into Chelsea as fresh as when he arrived. ‘Don’t be shy,’ he says as he shakes hands. ‘It is very funny.’ I take this to mean he has decided against it.

  20 June. A second meeting with Gielgud, lunch at The Ivy. He is now reconciled to the boys, but, having seen John Lennon’s In His Own Write at the National, he is worried about the back-projections. More stories. Of Emerald Cunard, who summoned him to dine at the Dorchester during the Blitz. ‘And a very dull meal it was – chicken and ice-cream. Emerald surveyed the table and rang for the butler. “And where is the butter?” “There is no butter, ma’am.” “No butter? But what is the Merchant Navy doing?”’ He returns to the play. ‘I am not sure about singing “Forty Years On”. After all, it was Churchill’s favourite song. And he is dead. And everyone knows that. I think it’s terribly dangerous.’

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t.’

  ‘Isn’t it? No, I suppose not.’

  And off he goes again on his ever-rolling stream of anecdote.

  Many of the figures featured in the play he has met – Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Τ. Ε. Lawrence, Ottoline Morrell. There is a parody of a lantern lecture on Lawrence which I had earmarked for myself. Gielgud makes no bones about wanting to do it. I point out primly that it wouldn’t fit in with the character of the Headmaster to deliver it. He pooh-poohs this. I’m in no position to disagree, and besides he will do it far better than I could, but I’m thankful, as I see a large chunk of my part disappear, that I’m the author of the piece, not simply an actor in it.

  Once this is settled he gives his final approval to the script and we get down to casting.

  9 July. Yesterday and today are spent auditioning boys at Her Majesty’s. When I first arrive at the stage door I am put at the end of the line. Since we had advertised for boys of fifteen to eighteen this flatters me, until I see that many are considerably older – and seem increasingly so as the day draws on: by the time five o’clock comes round I would not have been surprised to see Lewis Casson walk out on to the stage.

  We are looking for public schoolboys, and find very few. They have regional accents, which they do not attempt to disguise. Had one advertised for public schoolboys, fifteen or twenty years ago they would have come in neat flannel suits with plastered-down hair. They wouldn’t have been any better as actors, but at least they would have looked the part. Nowadays the fashion in looks and the fashion in actors has changed. They turn up in matador pants, turtle-neck shirts, a few rings on each hand. We ask them to read a passage from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography Beginning Again. ‘Who am I supposed to be, then?’ asks one kid with golliwog hair and velveteen pants. ‘Leonard Woolf?’

  Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood – youth, gaiety, innocence – have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation’s youth like the 1914–18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.

  Often I am aching with silent laughter, which I hide by writing endless notes on my list. ‘Too old.’ ‘Too common.’ ‘Sly face. Fat arse. Possible.’

  ‘I was at drama school,’ says one, ‘near Doncaster.’

  We need not only actors, but also musicians. ‘Do you play any musical instrument?’ ‘Not quite.’

  One is called Lionel Barrymore.

  Another, explaining the fact that he has not been working, says cryptica
lly, ‘You see, I damaged my leg.’ ‘Perhaps somebody pulled it,’ murmurs Toby.

  In the afternoon, when we have been going for about an hour, there is a quavering voice from the upper circle: ‘Could you tell me when you’re going to start, please?’ It is an old lady who has come for the matinée of Fiddler on the Roof on the wrong day.

  We see over a hundred boys in two days. Sixteen are possible. We find a horn-player, a trumpeter and a flautist and a boy whose voice has broken but who has retained a lovely high treble voice besides.

  At the start I had wondered how one would ever tell whether they were suitable or not. But it is just like marking scholarship papers at Oxford: the boys with vitality and enthusiasm walk in; the painstaking ones are put straightaway on one side.

  We arrange to advertise in The Times in an effort to tap new non-showbiz sources. It’s a thin bag, but the agents say that all the likeliest boys have already been snapped up for the musical of Mr Chips.

  26 August, Stoll Theatres. A reading of the play this evening in Prince Littler’s boardroom. It had been set for the previous Friday, but the management felt that Gielgud would be so upset by the bad reviews of Don Giovanni, his production at the Coliseum, that they had put it off. In fact he is quite perky. ‘Bloody but unbowed,’ he murmurs, ‘bloody but unbowed.’ I meet three of the players – Dorothy Reynolds, Nora Nicholson and Robert Swann – for the first time.

  Patrick is nervous and makes a fatuous opening. ‘We’re just going to read the play and I think the best thing for us to do would be to … read it … starting at the beginning.’

  Gielgud starts in on his opening speech at a furious speed, occasionally breaking off to say, ‘That’s wrong, isn’t it? You can cut that. That’s too long.’ We come to the end of the play. Gielgud reads the last speech superbly, and there is a long silence. It is broken by the Stoll company manager, Rupert Marsh. ‘You’ll have to do it quicker than that. We can’t be late closing the bar.’

  In the subsequent discussion Gielgud sits silent and detached while everyone talks round him. He doesn’t like the beginning of the play within the play. It is a parody of Oscar Wilde set in 1900. ‘They weren’t playing Wilde in 1900,’ he says. ‘They didn’t revive The Importance until 1911.’ I don’t think this matters. ‘But the audience won’t understand. It’s too sudden. Couldn’t you do something about the Wilde case? I remember my mother saying she wasn’t allowed to read the papers during the trial.’ This doesn’t seem to me to be particularly useful, and I don’t want to get involved in all the tiresome Wilde business. But in the end Gielgud proves to be right, and not until Wilde’s name is actually introduced before the parody does it really take off.

  27 August, Gstaad. Fly to Switzerland for five days’ holiday before we start rehearsals. It is only the fourth time I have flown and the first time by jet. I am scared but, as usual, more of making a fool of myself than of actual disaster. Will I be able to fasten my seat belt or will I have to ask the air hostess? Where do I hand in my baggage?

  I wander about the terminal waiting to be called, and only at the last minute realize I have to go into the departure lounge. Denis Healey sits alone in the first-class section, returning to Switzerland after the Czechoslovakia debate. ‘Whenever I can I fly Air India,’ says the young executive on my right. ‘People think it’s a wog airline, but it’s actually first-rate.’ I try to discern the ratio of condescension to compliment in this remark and hope that the handsome Persian on my left hasn’t heard. But he has. I keep an idiot smile of universal benevolence on my face for the rest of the flight in order to indicate my dissociation from such sentiments.

  At Geneva I get on the wrong train, which stops every five yards at stations all along the lake. I change to a faster train at Nyon, and as it draws into Lausanne I see that the manuscript of the play, with all my pencilled-in alterations, has gone from my grip. The train from Montreux potters up the mountains through back gardens and farmyards to Gstaad, while the passengers rush from side to side, gazing at the peaks and pinnacles and the view over Lac Leman. I think only of my precious folder, peered at and pawed over by some foul porter at London Airport and thrown into an Uxbridge dustbin.

  2 September, Drury Lane. Bank Holiday Monday and the first rehearsal on stage at Drury Lane, in the shadow of Sean Kenny’s enormous Four Musketeers set. The principals rehearse upstairs and the boys below stage in the Ballet Room. Paul Eddington, who plays the Housemaster, is a man after my own heart, brooking no interference with physical comfort: he is greatly put out that due to the holiday there is no coffee. Eventually tea is procured in the cracked cups belonging to the stage-hands. Gielgud doesn’t want it, nor Nora Nicholson, the old nanny in the play. They don’t like interruptions.

  In the morning the plotting goes ahead slowly, with Gielgud sitting apart doing his eternal crossword. I have heard stories that he is apt to fill in any old word that is the right length. I sneak a look and am disappointed to find this a myth. He learns his script by writing it out in a neat hand on the page opposite the text. ‘I am a very bad study. After fifty, one gets much worse.’

  He is full of ideas for his own part and for the play, many of them good, some cock-eyed. The cock-eyed ones take a lot of getting rid of. He is quite frank about this, saying that when he directs he always warns the actors he will come up with a dozen ideas, only one of which will be of any help. At the close of the afternoon he wants to scrap the whole of the ceremonial opening we have spent hours blocking, in which the boys enter singing round him. Why not make it just a quiet chat on stage?

  ‘I think I should speak to the audience,’ he had said at the first reading. ‘I am very good at that. I like singling people out.’

  ‘I can’t bear speaking to the audience,’ he says this afternoon. ‘And it’s so old hat, singling people out. I can’t bear that.’ (The job of persuading him to address the audience will turn out to be the biggest problem Patrick has to face. But when, in the nick of time, Gielgud is persuaded and begins to do so it transforms the whole production.)

  Patrick and I go down to the Ballet Room to listen to the singing. Carl Davis, who has arranged the music and is to play the organ on stage, has already got the boys looking and sounding like a group. A lot of them smoke furiously, as if afraid of being caught. The singing sounds well – solid and moving and better in this echoing room than it will sound on stage.

  In the evening I go through the cuts, taking out a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Man Born to be King, lest it should be thought simply a revue sketch, which it is. We lose some good jokes.

  5 September. The text of Forty Years On includes several short extracts from the works of Osbert Sitwell, Leonard Woolf and Harold Nicolson which are used in a documentary way. So far I have had no difficulty in getting permission for the use of these. But there is also one extract from Sapper, and today there comes a letter from the literary agents who act for Sapper’s executors, A. P. Watt Ltd, saying that they will not grant permission while the offensive references to Sapper, Buchan and Dornford Yates remain in the script. This refers to my collective description of these novelists as ‘the school of snobbery with violence’. They add that they are also agents for the Tweedsmuir estate and that any parody of Buchan’s characters might well be pursued in the courts.

  It is the ignorance rather than the arrogance of this last remark which annoys me: as well say that a parody of Shakespeare is open to action by the Society of Authors. I swallow my irritation and write back pointing out that parody springs ultimately from affection and offer to remove the offending phrase. (This did not satisfy them, and they demanded much more extensive cuts in the script. I was therefore forced to substitute a cod extract from Sapper.) In the month that sees the final abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s licence, this form of censorship seems especially dubious. If a book has been published it has been launched into the public domain. Whatever happens to that book, short of piracy, is no concern of literary agents or literary executors. [The Buchan
family, whom I met subsequently, were delighted by the play and appalled at the agent’s officiousness.]

  We have other difficulties with the Sapper-Buchan parody because Dorothy [Reynolds] has great difficulty in capturing the idiom of it. She is Sandy Clanroyden, who appears in the parody disguised as a maid. She is a woman playing a man playing a woman. Not surprisingly she is uncertain how to do it. I am scant help. ‘Just find the voice,’ I say, ‘and don’t bother about the rest.’ But that is the short cut of a revue performer and actors don’t work like that.

  6 September, Her Majesty’s. The papers are full of a fat contract landed by Millicent Martin. During a lull in rehearsal I come across John G. at the back of the stage, dancing round by himself, singing, ‘Who cares about Millicent Martin? Oh, who cares about Millicent Martin?’

  14 September, Her Majesty’s. Nora Nicholson, who is nearing eighty, refers to death in a most unmorbid way. ‘I will do it’, she says, when offered a film part, ‘if I am still here. I’ve just moved into a flat with a three-and-a-half-year lease. That should just about see me out.’ She first appeared with John G. when he acted a butterfly in The Insect Play, and was herself in Benson’s company. When she auditioned for Benson he inquired what parts she had played; she couldn’t think of any and went home disconcerted, only to remember that she’d played Juliet. She is the nanny in the play, and had a nanny herself, who, when anyone laid an uninvited hand on her arm, would say, ‘Don’t touch me there; something might form.’ Today the management takes us out to lunch at Rules. Speculating on what might be under a monster dish cover, Nora says, ‘I hope it’s not boiled baby. Still, I’d rather have boiled baby than boiled mouse.’ As I leave her in the King’s Road, she shouts after me, ‘And remember to buy me a very big wreath.’