Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  18 September. Patrick telephones tonight asking whether he can come over, refusing to talk on the telephone. I thought it was over a fit of temper I threw at the end of the rehearsal over the obstacles being put in the way of the designer, Julia Oman. It is much worse. Mrs Vinogradoff, the daughter of Lady Ottoline Morrell, has got wind of the sketch about her mother and wants it removed. Patrick recalls the conversation – the pain she has suffered from the portraits of her mother in the memoirs of the period, in the novels of Huxley and Lawrence, the autobiographies of Spender and Bertrand Russell, all those accounts, in fact, that I have read and through which I know her. Can we find it in our hearts, she asks, to give her more pain? Patrick is sympathetic. I am not. If the section dealing with her is cut it will destroy the end of the first act. We decide to change the name to Lady Sibylline Quarrell and hope that the storm will pass over. Those who know of her will realize it is Ottoline Morrell. Those who don’t will be mystified anyway. It adds another ten cigarettes to the day’s quota.

  23 September, Donmar Studios. A good day today, the first on the set, which has been put up in a studio near Seven Dials so that we have a week to get used to it before we open in Manchester. The boys adapt themselves to it splendidly and play with a new freshness and spontaneity which pulls the whole thing together.

  They will find it hard to retain this freshness in the five weeks left before the London opening. They will lose it, then gradually regain it, or the semblance, the practice of it. That is why first readings are often so much better than what comes after, until gradually one regains through technique what one first did spontaneously.

  25 September, Donmar Studios. Gielgud telephones at 9.30 to say he has flu. We rehearse without him. It is a bloody day. The boys are restless and thunder about the set, drowning the dialogue and irritating the principals. George Fenton, the biggest and gentlest of the boys, is sick. He lies down on the child’s bed we use in the nanny scene, and as we go off to lunch he is fast asleep with a gollywog cradled in his arms. It is the one nice thing about the day.

  At lunch Patrick and I argue with Toby about publicity. Stoll are worried because the advance booking in Manchester is only £500, despite large adverts in the papers. They believe it is because there is no national publicity, no gossip, no tittle-tattle. They want articles about the show before it opens in London – gossipy, taste-whetting pieces, all the silly paraphernalia of showbiz which I loathe.

  We stand firm on this. I am gambling on the show being a success and think it more likely to be so if it is a surprise. The management want to hedge their bets, get some advance booking through extensive pre-publicity so that, whatever the reviews, they will have some cash in hand. It is an understandable point of view commercially, but artistically it is wrong.

  We have a bad run-through in the afternoon in which I several times lose my temper and nearly clout some of the kids. It is getting too like school. One realizes how important John G.’s presence is: he is always impeccably polite, and any slight flurry of temper is followed by an instant apology. His modesty and good behaviour infect everyone else.

  26 September, Dress Rehearsal. Prince Littler comes in the afternoon to see a run-through, the last before the dress rehearsal in Manchester, where we open. He is the Chairman of Stoll, who own all the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘I see we’ve got the bricks and mortar in,’ mutters Dorothy Reynolds as we make our first entrance.

  Littler is a round, innocent-looking man who sits bland and expressionless throughout. He laughs once, at a joke about Edward VII. All too soon the boys realize he is not laughing, and they begin to giggle. This is what always used to happen on a bad night of Beyond the Fringe: the laughter on stage was inversely proportional to that from the audience. John G. struggles under a heavy cold, his eyes swollen and racked by sneezes, while the assistant stage manager follows him round with a box of Kleenex. It worries me that we open in Manchester in three days and he is still a long way from knowing his words.

  30 September, Press Conference, Manchester. ‘How many boys did you audition?’

  ‘About a hundred and seventy.’

  ‘I’ve got seven hundred.’

  ‘No, it was nearer two hundred.’

  ‘I’ll put down seven hundred – it sounds better.’

  No it doesn’t, I long to say. Facts are what you want.

  I talk to another reporter, who is anxious to make me say that writing is an agony. ‘No, it’s not really. I quite enjoy it. More sometimes than others. It’s like anything else.’ In the paper that night my few jokes are made to sound like Pascal’s Pensées, wrung from aeons of nameless suffering. He was also surprised by how young I look. But since he gives my age that night as forty-three it is not so surprising.

  The Palace turns out to be a cavernous theatre, far bigger than my worst imaginings. It has been closed all summer and we are to reopen it. ‘You won’t fill this place,’ the stage doorman says to Gielgud. ‘Ken Dodd doesn’t fill this place.’ In the afternoon we have a disastrous technical rehearsal with a few actors from Michael Elliott’s 69 Theatre in the audience. They laugh a lot in the first half, then fall silent. I presume they have left, and it is only when the house lights go up that I see they are still there: it’s just that they have stopped laughing. I go out before the first performance and find George Fenton and Roger Brain, the horn-player, elbow-deep in muck, rubbing their rugger boots up and down the streaming gutter in the pouring rain. Julia Oman had thought they looked too new. Waiting for the curtain, I talk to Mac, John G.’s dresser. He is in his eightiesand was dresser to another Sir John (Martin-Harvey) and before that to Fred Terry.

  Gielgud rises splendidly to the presence of our first audience, but we all feel lost in this barn of a theatre. The doorman had been right: even on a first night it’s less than a third full. And again the same thing happens: halfway through the second act we lose the audience.

  1 October, Manchester. The Guardian, albeit only a second-string critic, is very sour: my intention has been simply to write a fat part for myself. It also deduces some message about the barrenness of English public and literary life, which is precisely the opposite of my intention. Others are complimentary, but with phrases of dubious value like ‘a bellyful of laughs’, ‘all the makings of a very big hit indeed’. As always with criticism, I discount the praise and remember only the slights. I sit writing this on the dressing-table in front of the mirror and see I look older …

  There follow three days of cumulative disappointment. A succession of thin and unappreciative audiences erodes our confidence. On Thursday evening it is a particularly bad performance. Michael Elliott sees it that night. He is very helpful and says it will be all right. Jonathan Miller also sees it and doesn’t like the back-projections.

  After the performance, Jonathan, Peter Cook and I go to speak at a symposium at the 69 Theatre. The subject is ‘This England’ and revolves around nostalgia. I say little and observe how the seven years since Beyond the Fringe have hardly altered the relationship between us. We still retain much the same characteristics we had when we first worked together, only in an intensified form, Jonathan is voluble and lucid, Peter seizes opportunities for laughs and delivers good cracking insults, while I make occasional heartfelt but dull remarks. The difference between 1961 and 1968 is that all feeling of competition between us has gone. In 1961 I cared very much more. I longed to be witty, to keep my end up, make impromptu jokes like Peter and stunning comparisons like Jonathan. Now I know I can’t and am content not to.

  2 October, Manchester. I go at six o’clock to do a live interview for Granada. Mr Budd, the company manager, goes with me, hopefully to ensure that I stress what a comic show it is. The management are always terrified that a serious discussion will lead the public to suppose that the show is serious. The producer of the programme is just coming out as we arrive and an assistant whispers my name.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Alan Bennett.’

  He seizes Mr Bud
d’s hand warmly. ‘Hello, Alan, I’m so glad you could be with us.’

  It is straight out of A Face in the Crowd.

  The interview is a boring and pointless exercise. The interviewer hasn’t seen the show, and nothing of value emerges. The studio is unaccountably full of triplets, and the atmosphere subtly different from the BBC – more fraught, less confident, nastier.

  4 October, Manchester. John G. is still far from knowing his words. The opening speech is full of names. He often confuses these and the boys are called by masters ‘names, masters by boys’. Though he never actually stops, and audible prompts are rare, it must leave the audience with a peculiar impression of the play. I think. The truth is an audience accepts whatever it sees on the stage as meant. Though an audible prompt embarrasses and withers any laughs in the immediate vicinity, provided one can just keep going an audience will assume everything is as it should be. What is surprising about John G. is that, even when it is plain to the audience that he has forgotten his words, the last person to be embarrassed is him. He treats this fortnight in Manchester like an open rehearsal to which the audience are admitted by courtesy. If the show isn’t all it should be, that is their look-out. I don’t agree with this, but when the curtain goes up night after night on only thirty or forty people I begin to think he’s right. And even with such sparse audiences it’s noticeable that if they like him and laugh at his jokes then his confidence grows and his memory improves. But this first week has been very rough, and on one evening he so far loses his nerve that he begins the play addressing the boys with his back to the audience.

  Tonight my parents come. They have obviously been a bit mystified by the play, and sit in my dressing-room in awkward silence as my dresser, a veteran of the music halls, puts away my stuff. After he’s gone, it transpires they thought he was Sir John Gielgud and was ignoring them deliberately because he was unhappy with the play.

  8 October, Manchester. Gradually the show is being carved into a slimmer, simpler shape. Gielgud is a very humble man. He can be wayward, obstinate and maddeningly changeable, but one can forgive all these because he sets so little store by his own reputation. He is entirely without malice or amour propre, and in a succession of gruelling rehearsals he never once loses his composure. Today I find myself telling him how to deliver a line in order to get a laugh, and I begin to apologize. But he pooh-poohs the apology and begs me to go on. He will not be shielded by his own reputation or allow it to intrude between him and his fellow actors.

  9 October, Manchester. The boys are gradually emerging as the best thing in the show, and as a result we bring them more and more into it, and even when they have nothing particular to do Patrick ranges them round the gallery to look on. They are quick on the uptake and add business of their own, though rarely so as to distract. They disprove all the stock maxims about children on the stage. They are imaginative and articulate – more so perhaps now than they will ever be again in their lives – and yet they don’t have a couple of ‘O’ levels to rub together.

  I find this very heartening. Moreover, they have great kindness and consideration and are quick to notice if one is glum or out of sorts and go out of their way to cheer one up. I am far more shy than they are; they come up and ask about the play and talk sensibly about it. I could not have done that at fifteen.

  Supper with Sidney Bernstein in his penthouse on top of Granada TV. J. G., Patrick, Denis For man and Gordon McDougall. A nice Mark Gertler, some silver in a bureau, and lots of what look like steakhouse Turners but I’m sure aren’t. A lovely Gielgud remark: he asks me whether I couldn’t write a Noel Coward parody for the second act: ‘You know the sort of thing – lots of little epigrams, smart witty remarks. It wouldn’t be at all difficult.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly’

  ‘Why not? It’s terribly easy. Noel does it all the time.’

  It is after midnight when they begin to talk seriously about What Must Be Done With The Play. To start with they have seen it on a depressing night, and Sidney Bernstein, though kind and charming, is slightly deaf and hasn’t caught all the dialogue. He also has the defect, peculiar to high television executives and editors of popular newspapers, of thinking the public stupider than it is. He doesn’t think the Bloomsbury parody will work, for instance, because nobody will have heard of Virginia Woolf. Denis Forman, however, makes one valuable suggestion, which we later adopt, namely that the Headmaster should formally take his leave at the end.

  John G. is still anxious about the opening. ‘All that terrible organ music, the slow march and the hymns. Oh, those hymns,’ he wails. ‘It’s just like school.’

  ‘But it is school.’

  ‘Oh yes. I suppose it is.’

  They talk on until three in the morning, but by half past two I can stand it no longer and walk out. The cardinal rule in such circumstances is to be sure beforehand that one’s exit is clear. Mine isn’t, as I don’t have a key to the executive lift. I hang about in the lobby feeling foolish until Denis stumps out after me and we go awkwardly down through the dark and empty building, and I walk back to the Midland through the wet streets of Manchester.

  11 October, Manchester. A group of the boys have written a pop song on themes arising out of the play, and in gaps of rehearsal they orchestrate it with the help of Carl Davis. This afternoon they sing it over to me. George Fenton and Anthony Andrews singing in high altos above the guitar and organ accompaniment: ‘In a boater, in a bowler, in a boat, We were drifting away, Never expecting the day, When we wouldn’t have our tailors, our servants and our sailors, And our old boys playing cricket on the green.’ I sit in the Tea Centre in Manchester’s Oxford Road, working on the lyrics with George Fenton and Keith McNally, and I see suddenly how I shall look back on this time as very happy.

  15 October, Theatre Royal, Brighton. All the time we were in Manchester the management would encourage us by holding out the prospect of Brighton – glittering, sophisticated, metropolitan audiences in a bandbox of a theatre, an ideal setting for a play like ours. I was sceptical. I had been here before in 1961 with Beyond the Fringe. It was the week before we went to London, and we played to a handful of old ladies, most of whom had left by the interval: the seats were going up like pistol shots throughout the performance. Brighton is a difficult place to play and can make or mar a production, infested as it is with theatricals who offer advice and scent disaster. ‘We loved it, darlings,’ they told us in 1961, ‘but don’t, whatever you do, take it in.’ However, the first night is good, the audience solid and responsive, and the next day we have a perceptive notice from the Brighton critic, Jack Tinker. After the performance Diana Cooper, Enid Bagnold and T. C. Worsley come round, with Worsley being especially helpful.

  It is odd to see Diana Cooper standing in my dressing-room, friend and contemporary of figures who are legends to me. She had apparently been in tears during Gielgud’s memoir of the Lost Generation, an imaginary visit to a country house on the eve of the First World War. ‘How did you know to choose all those names?’ she asks vaguely, eyeing herself in the glass. ‘They were all my lovers.’

  At last we seem to be coming out of the wood and producing the sort of reaction we have been after, the transition from nostalgia and genuine regret to laughter and back again, without the one destroying the other.

  19 October, Brighton. The boys are a problem. If they are too rigidly disciplined then they lose the spontaneity that is part of the charm of the play. More experienced actors would counterfeit spontaneity, but these can’t. So every night they whisper, fight and fart – behave, in fact, like a classful of kids. To an actor with a speech to make this is a nightmare, as the attention of the audience is subject to constant distraction. Few leading actors would risk this, let alone put up with it, but it never bothers Gielgud. He is completely confident of his ability to hold the stage and the attention. What is going on behind him he treats as an irrelevance. The result is we get the best of both worlds. As for talking directly to the audience there is n
ow no stopping him. He leans far out over the footlights, shading his eyes with his mortarboard, ostensibly searching for his straitlaced sister Nancy, but in reality seeing whether there’s anyone in that he knows. Audiences who have grown accustomed to him as a somewhat remote and awesome presence obviously find the change delightful. He even starts waving.

  He completely lacks pretension. The most moving and magical part of the play is the visit to the country house at the end of the first act. John G. is off-stage at the start of this scene, and as like as not in the middle of a story. He tears himself away from the joke, steps out on to the stage, and within seconds he is wreathed in tears and the audience is in the palm of his hand. The curtain comes down and he turns round and finishes the story. He is not a sentimental man.

  After the Saturday matinée I bump into Cyril Connolly coming in at the stage door. I have never met him before and assume he is going to see John. ‘No. It is you I want to see. I want to show you how tall I am.’ He is referring to a passage in the memoir of Virginia Woolf. ‘She was one of the tallest writers I have ever known. Which is not to say that her stories were tall. They were not; they were short. But she did stand head and shoulders above her contemporaries, and sometimes of course much more so. Cyril Connolly, for instance, a man of great literary stature, only came up to her waist. And sometimes not even there.’ It is Connolly’s own descriptions of himself in The Unquiet Grave that have led me into error. I promise to change it (to Dylan Thomas), but I think he’s slightly disappointed. He’d rather have me keep his name and change the joke.

  29 October, Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. Two days in London and already the close-knit feeling of the cast is beginning to dissolve. Friends reappear, one slips back into old routines, and the sense of being part of a group fades. From now on it will just be work, and we will come together for a couple of hours each night and then go our separate ways and lead our separate lives. The best part of the play is over, over before it has even started. I go home after the first preview and have some baked beans on toast.