Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  JOANNA: But why the hell isn’t there more of a part for her to throw herself heart and soul into? Pru.

  SIMON: My wife, again, I’m afraid. She is a bit upset, yes. I imagine from the cast list that you’re filling out the gospel story a little. Icicles hanging by the wall, Dick the Shepherd blowing his nail and so on? What about Dick the Shepherd – has that part gone? She’d probably do that rather well. There is a distinction between sucking her thumb and blowing her nail, but only a purist would know the difference. Dick’s gone? Pity. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway. If she had a part in which she had to suck her thumb and was applauded for it, which knowing Jessica she would be – her Bethlehem housewife stopped the show, I remember – it might undo all the good work done by her remedial teacher. Now who else is there in the gospel story?

  JOANNA: (seizing the phone again) Who the hell’s playing Mary?

  SIMON: Sorry. Who is playing Mary as a matter of interest? Tracy Broadbent!

  JOANNA: Tracy Broadbent? Jesus!

  SIMON: Yes, we do know Tracy as a matter of fact. Her mother used to clean for us, after a fashion. I have a vivid memory of Tracy as Herod in last year’s offering. The performance was obviously modelled on Wolfit and it was not good, Pru. Tracy Broadbent was not good at all. Way over the top. I frankly couldn’t believe in her. No. Tracy’s Herod didn’t work for either of us. You also must remember Tracy comes from a one-parent family and that one parent, her mother, goes out to work and therefore won’t be able to attend the performance. So, let’s face it, from a box-office point of view Tracy Broadbent is a no-no. She is a Big Nothing, Pru. You aren’t going to get a line round the block with little Tracy. Whereas with Jessica in the role you’d sell half a dozen tickets on her name alone. Her granny would come with one or two of her more mobile friends, Ulla, our au pair, Ignaz, Ulla’s Turkish boyfriend – I mean it’s house-full notices practically before the box office opens.

  JOANNA: (bitterly) Besides, Tracy Broadbent was the one who bit Jessica in the bottom.

  SIMON: My wife has just reminded me that Tracy bit little Jessica in the bottom. That’s hardly my idea of the Virgin Mary. The Mother of God didn’t go round biting people in the bottom, or if she did the gospels are silent on the point. Well I agree, Pru: Tracy probably is disturbed, but do you want a disturbed child in the role of the Blessed Mother? You do? I should have thought calm was the keynote. Oh, I see. Mary is being played as a battered wife. And baby Jesus as a battered baby. So what does that make Joseph? Gay. I was a fool to ask.

  JOANNA: Is he cast?

  SIMON: My wife inquires if Joseph is cast. Jessica can play gay, I’m sure. No. She wouldn’t object to dragging up. Oh, I see. He’s going to be black. Well she could black up. You don’t seem to understand, Pru: this is an adaptable little girl.

  JOANNA: Skip it. Ask her about the Three Wise Men.

  SIMON: What about the Three Wise Men? There are no Three Wise Men? Not as such. So what are they? Three Social Workers of Camden. I see. So as I understand it the story-line is this: Herod is the Chancellor of the Exchequer making swingeing cuts in the social services. This puts battered baby Jesus at risk, but he is rescued by the Three Social Workers of Camden. It’s uncanny how it all fits in. The potency of myth, I suppose. But no role for little Jessica. Let’s get back to this icicle, the part for which you’ve got her pencilled in. Where is it hanging from? I see. The bloated body of capitalism. (JOANNA shakes her head vigorously.) I’m not sure that we are wholly in agreement with that, Pru. Mrs Stringalong’s father is quite prominent in wholesale floor coverings and I think we would feel that if little Jessica was going to be involved in making a direct political statement, even if it’s only by dripping in silence, then we might well have to keep her at home. No, Pru. We are not just talking about a nativity play. We are talking about the most precious thing in the world, a child’s mind.

  JOANNA: Scrub it.

  SIMON: No, I’m sorry. That is final. Pickets? What sort of pickets? (To Joanna.) There’s a part as a picket.

  JOANNA: Are they speaking pickets?

  SIMON: Speaking pickets and flying pickets. Like flying ballet, you mean. That sounds wonderful! What’s the scene? A hotel in Bethlehem. Trust House. Yes, yes. Go on. Catering staff on strike, yes, yes. I get the picture. An enraged guest, played by Rhoda Allnatt, comes out of the hotel and says ‘What’s happened to Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All Men?’ And Jessica shouts out ‘Scab!’ That sounds marvellous. What do you say, Joanna?

  JOANNA: Does she get billing?

  SIMON: Would she get billing at all? I don’t think we’d want anything special … ‘And Jessica Stringalong as The Picket’ would be ideal. I don’t think you’ll regret it, Pru. I mean, all those exciting things happening and Jessica just stood there, dripping her little heart out. No, ‘Scab!’ is better. And if I know Jessica she’ll really throw herself into it. I’ll see she gets down to learning it at the earliest opportunity. Goodbye.

  Going Round

  I seldom go to the theatre nowadays. I used to go quite often, but these days I hardly go at all. Plays are very much as they were, so I generally pretend it’s the cost. ‘Six pounds for a stall. It’s highway robbery. I just won’t pay it.’

  There’s a handy Yorkshire expression ‘to thoil’, a tight little parcel of a verb meaning to be able to afford an object, but to feel guilty spending the money on it. ‘I don’t dislike that candlewick bedspread,’ a Leeds woman might say, ‘but I couldn’t thoil to pay that price.’ I feel the same way about a theatre ticket. And yet, if I’m honest, I know that that isn’t what keeps me away.

  Is it then the box office, that Checkpoint Charlie one has to negotiate to pass from the cold world of reality into the free world of art? Getting out of Czechoslovakia is a cinch compared with getting into see Penelope Keith. Maybe it’s because it’s an opening like a kennel, but certainly the staff tend to model themselves on the Dobermann Pinscher, and even those box-office ladies who don’t take your arm off at the elbow still have that air of ‘We have far better things to do than sell tickets.’ Why aren’t they gutting haddock for a living, or de-beaking chickens? How come they have missed their way? For these, after all, are the doorkeepers to the halls of art.

  I am speaking now of the West End, but things are exactly the same on the fringe – though, of course, different. On my last visit to a fringe theatre the child selling tickets had quite plainly drowned several days before, displaying so little animation she made the corpse of Emily Brontë seem like something out of No, No, Nanette.

  But ’twas ever thus, and hardened playgoers take all this in their stride. It is part of the magic of theatre. So what else is it that keeps me away? I will tell you.

  As one grows (imperceptibly) older, the list of actors and actresses with whom one has worked naturally lengthens: a playwright builds up an acquaintance among actors much as a villain does among fences. So it is seldom nowadays that I settle in my seat, dispose my Dairy Box and consult the cast list without finding that there is at least one member of the company personally known to me. Not that finding the cast list is the falling off a log it used to be. Theatre programmes haven’t yet got into two volumes but they’re well on the way, and it can’t be long before they come with an index. As it is, one searches among advertisements for low-level bathroom suites and clinics anxious to remove one’s unwanted hair, and nowhere is there a list of who’s in the play. Instead there is a lengthy essay on the issues purportedly touched on in the production. If it’s a revival of an unpretentious domestic comedy from the thirties there is likely to be a photomontage of the dole queues to emphasize The Other Side of the Picture, and any play that uses words (and some of them still do) is as like as not accompanied by a thumbnail sketch of the life and loves of Wittgenstein, just to put the critics in the proper frame of mind. And, worst of all, the actors themselves are nowadays encouraged to set down their thoughts not only about their roles but also about Life in General. I love
the company of actors, but reading these effusions it’s hard not to feel that when they are not required on the stage actors should be kept in their place – namely a locked wardrobe, and ideally with adhesive tape over their mouths.

  However, the cast list once located, there one finds, as I say, at least one actor or actress with whom one has worked.

  ‘Oh, she’s in it. I filmed with her once. In Hartlepool. Everybody else had gone home for the weekend and we had a curry together on Sunday afternoon.’ Memories are made of this. ‘And him. He was in a play I did in Morecambe. But was he Boring Man at Bus-Stop or Man with New False Teeth in Café?’ The precise circumstances are unimportant. What is important is that you know each other. Slightly. Which could be quite pleasant. One ought to be able to sit there, smug in the knowledge that the acquaintance concerned was rather better in your piece than he is being in whatever it is you have just laid out a small fortune to see. You could spend the evening bathed in complacency and self-congratulation – a real tonic in fact – but for one thing, one thought, a thought that haunts you every minute of the play and makes the evening torture.

  You will have to Go Round.

  To Go Round means to visit an actor or actress in the dressing-room after the performance, and I am not sure whether it is a ceremony peculiar to the theatre. Do clergymen, worshipping in alien churches, feel it incumbent upon them to go round to the vestry afterwards to congratulate the vicar on his conduct of the service? ‘The litany had me on the edge of my seat! And that canticle! I was on my knees.’

  Are judges in their underpants surprised by colleagues who rush into the robing-room in ecstasies over the summing-up or the severity of the sentence? Do dons go round after lectures? Or footballers after a match? I think not. It only happens in the theatre. And it is one of the great advantages television has over the theatre that with television you never have to go round. Or if you do all you find is dust, an old copy of Gardeners Weekly and the vertical hold.

  Which is actually slightly more rewarding than what you find at the back of a theatre. If, that is, you can find it. In the West End stage doors are obscurely situated, often in streets so distant and unrelated to the front of house it almost pays to take a bus.

  Like the box-office staff, the stage doorman is seldom a lover of the performing arts. Persons wishing to see an actor or actress are invariably regarded with hostility or regaled with the doorman’s memories of Dan Leno. Of the two, the first is preferable.

  Once past the stage doorman you start to look for the dressing-room of the actor or actress, and at this point I think I must stop saying actor or actress every time and for conciseness’s sake just stick to actor. The gender of actors is in any case a fairly murky area, and they are often pretty vague about the matter themselves. But as you scour the bare stone corridors for the right dressing-room you very soon realize that backstage of most theatres is a hell-hole. It is cold. It smells. And it is a labyrinth. In this labyrinth the situation of a dressing-room varies inversely with the status of the actor. The grander the actor, the lower and therefore nearer the stage his dressing-room will be.

  Suppose you are lucky enough to be going round to see one of the principals. You knock on the door and are told to come in. You do so and find someone extremely famous in a state of Considerable Undress. It is a fact that very few leading actors are in the least bit self-conscious. Speaking as one who can scarcely remove his tie without first having a police cordon thrown round the building I find this unselfconsciousness very disconcerting. An actor can conduct a conversation heedless of the fact that he is removing not only make-up and costume but also elastic stockings, corset, even his false teeth. He is standing without a stitch on and you do not know where to look. All in the public view. There will be people who will tell you that since an actor leaves the real person on the stage he regards the rest as so much scaffolding. This is fanciful. It may be that he is just brass-faced. Which is probably why he is an actor.

  However, do not be so stricken by the sight of the actor in his smalls that you fail to embark on your compliments as soon as you have thrown open his door. Or, better still, before. Begin your enthusiasm coming down the stairs. Feel unable to control it. Let it bear you bubbling into the room. Because this is what you are here for. You have Come Round. He has performed. It is now your turn.

  For that is what it is, Going Round: a performance. A performance which, if it is to convince, has to equal and indeed surpass the one you have just seen on the stage. And whatever you thought, even if you slept through the whole of the second act, you have to go in there saying it was all marvellous. Marvellous. It was marvellous.

  The actor is properly gratified. But he is also suspicious. Other friends have been round on other nights who have not performed as well as you are doing. So he has his doubts. Actors are very uncertain creatures. And he is particularly uncertain because some well-wishers have gone round and told him he was terrible. Whereas here you are saying he was marvellous. And going on saying it. Which you must. Marvellous, marvellous, marvellous.

  He stops you. ‘But tell me,’ he says, ‘what did you really think?’

  Take no notice. And, above all, don’t tell him.

  ‘Marvellous, marvellous, marvellous.’

  So far, so good: he thinks you thought he was marvellous. But wanting (you fool) to introduce a note of reality into the proceedings and, by implying a criticism of someone else, to enhance how truly marvellous he has been, you add, ‘But, I’m curious: what made you choose this play. I mean, who persuaded you?’ And has the person concerned (though you do not say this), has he been forthwith committed to an institution for the criminally insane?

  He is on to you like a rat.

  ‘Why, didn’t you like it?’

  You instantly realize your mistake and recover.

  ‘Like it? I thought it was marvellous. Marvellous. You were marvellous. The play was marvellous. I’ve had a marvellous evening.’

  He probes.

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  ‘Her? Well I thought she was marvellous too. She was marvellous.’

  This is a mistake. Actors never like praise to go to anyone but themselves. Unless, of course, they are saints. And if they are saints they are in a damp vault below the south aisle after a life of exemplary devotion. If they are actors they are in a damp vault below Shaftesbury Avenue after a not so exemplary performance of Private Lives. The damp vault is about all they have in common. But now his face has fallen. You thought she was marvellous. This must mean you did not think he was as marvellous as she was. Or as marvellous as you have been saying he was. It is, after all, well known that there is a limited quantity of marvellousness in the world. And someone else is getting a share. It is tragic.

  Some visitors, thinking they have given the actor his due, now make the mistake of switching the conversation to topics other than the play: the furnishings of the dressing-room, for instance; the whereabouts of the loo; the air-conditioning in the theatre or absence of same; the other members of the audience or absence of same. This is fatal. ‘They came round’, he will go home and say, ‘and never said a single word about the play.’

  Whereas the single word you have to say is ‘marvellous’.

  Never stray too far from that.

  But I have no room to talk. For on those occasions when I find I have actually enjoyed a play and want to go round and make my feelings known, then I invariably say the wrong thing. Or say the right thing, but in such a diffident way (wanting to be thought honest and not one of those frightful people who go round and just say ‘Marvellous’) that I end up convincing the actor I hated him. Honesty is not easy to perform. Iago’s is the longest part, but Othello’s is the hardest.

  And make no mistake about it: the actor knows. He knows you didn’t like him, even if you did. He heard you not laughing. He saw you not crying. He knows, and in his heart of hearts he knows too that nothing you can say will help. The only thing that will help will
be doing it again tomorrow night.

  But when you have closed the door and thankfully departed he is left. And if he has given a bad performance he knows, and there is nothing one can say. So often Going Round is like trying to comfort the bereaved. Except, when an actor thinks he has died a death, deceased and bereaved are one.

  Acknowledgements

  The original text of ‘The Lady in the Van’ was first printed in the London Review of Books in 1989, and was published in book form by LRB Ltd in 1990. ‘Uncle Clarence’ (1986), ‘Kafka at Las Vegas’ (1987), a number of book reviews (‘Gielgud’s Achievements’, ‘Forms of Talk’, ‘Bad John’, ‘The Wrong Blond’, ‘Alas! Deceived’) and extracts from the Diaries also first appeared in the London Review of Books.

  Other articles were first printed in the Independent on Sunday (‘The Treachery of Books’, 1990), the Listener (‘Tit for Tatti’, 1971; ‘The Pith and its Pitfalls’, 1981) and the Tatler (‘Christmas in NW1’, 1979). ‘Leeds Trams’ appeared as the Foreword to Leeds Trams since 1950 (Silver Link Publishing, 1991). ‘Say Cheese, Virginia!’ (1977) was written for BBC2’s The Book Programme, and ‘Going Round’ (1981) for Radio 4.

  The Prefaces to Plays were written for the Faber editions. The production diaries (in the section entitled Filming and Rehearsing) for The Insurance Man (1985) and for the television plays broadcast by LWT in 1978–9 (‘The Writer in Disguise’: Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf; All Day in the Sands; One Fine Day; The Old Crowd; Afternoon Off) were also included in the Faber editions of the plays.

  Index

  A. see Davies, Anne

  À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Proust) 1 see also Remembrance of Things Past

  Abbey National 1, 2