Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  I felt my freelance career was going well. It was certainly giving me a life of rich variety and interest as well as a considerable income, and my decision to retire from university teaching seemed thoroughly vindicated. Nevertheless I was still vulnerable to anxiety and depression provoked by the setbacks and disappointments which are inevitable in the kind of life I was leading. I had made regular visits over the past few years to a counsellor, a lady in Bromsgrove who specialised in the control of stress, and I had two projects for the year ahead which ensured that I would continue to need her support. One was Paradise News, which I hoped to finish by the end of the year, and the other was the Birmingham Rep’s production of The Writing Game which was due to open in May.

  As the play was being produced near my home, I was able to observe and participate in every stage of its development up to its public performance. I had enjoyed an unusual amount of access to the making of the TV serial of Nice Work for the same reason, but the writer of a stage play has a contractual right to be involved in casting, rehearsals and matters of design, and so feels more personally responsible for the end result. John Adams, like every producer I worked with subsequently, began the casting process at an unrealistically ambitious level, ‘offering’ the major parts to star actors, and was eventually forced to audition less well known ones who liked the play and were willing to spend eight weeks in Birmingham on the very limited pay the Rep’s budget allowed. John Adams, sharing Mike Ockrent’s view that Leo ought to be played by an American, tried several American actors with Broadway reputations at first, predictably without success. I accompanied him to the auditions, which usually took place in London, either at the premises of Spotlight (the indispensable reference guide to actors) or at the Actors’ Centre, situated over a store in Tottenham Court Road called the Reject Shop, which must have been disheartening to the hopeful actors who made their way up its bleak stone staircase to the third floor. I found the auditioning process fascinating and exhausting, because so much was at stake for everyone concerned. Eventually we cast Lou Hirsch as Leo and Susan Penhaligon as Maude. Lou was a Jewish American working in England, more of a character actor than a lead actor, but we thought the authenticity he would bring to the part would compensate. Susan was a ‘name’ people would recognise, best known for her work in TV drama, but with considerable theatre experience. We were lucky to get her, because she had been taking a break from acting to look after her young son, but the play intrigued her as it offered something different from her usual roles. For the third main character, the flamboyant Simon St Clair, I suggested to John that we should audition Patrick Pearson, who played Robyn’s yuppie brother Basil in Nice Work. He did an excellent reading for us, and was signed up. Patrick became enraptured with the part and I was glad to have finally made amends for our unfortunate first encounter. The two minor roles of Jeremy the administrator and Penny the young aspiring novelist were filled very satisfactorily by John Webb and Lucy Jenkins.

  The cast assembled at the Rep for the first read-through on 17th April, four weeks before the first previews. John sat at one end of the table and I at the other, with the designer Roger Butlin and the Assistant Stage Manager also present. We had a tea break after Act One at which John looked thoughtful. ‘There are times,’ he said to me, ‘when you know after the first read-through that all you need do is refine and polish it; and times when you think, “Hmmm.”’ This occasion was evidently one of the latter kind. He proposed that instead of starting rehearsals immediately the cast should read through the text using a method devised by the director Max Stafford-Clark called ‘Actions’, in which the actor prefaces each line with a statement of what the character is trying to do to another character. For example, the first line of the play, ‘Here we are!’, when Jeremy leads Leo into the converted barn from outside, has to be prefaced by the actor with some formula like ‘Jeremy shepherds Leo.’ This exercise fascinated me with its similarities to speech-act philosophy and pragmatics in linguistics, and it definitely enhanced the actors’ rendering of their lines once we got into proper rehearsals. It also made each of them question me about their character’s behaviour and motivation. Susan for instance wondered how Maude could be as coolly promiscuous in her sexual life as I had made her appear, and it prompted me to rewrite some lines in the play to give more definition and complexity to her character.

  Words spoken in a public space are much more potent than words read silently on a page, and I was concerned that Lou’s reading of his Polish story in Act Two should treat the subject of the Holocaust sensitively. The reading has to be shocking, because it provokes some of its imagined audience to walk out, but acceptable to the real audience. I spoke to John about this and he relayed it to Lou, encouraging the actor to draw on his own Jewishness to get the right tone. When we rehearsed the earlier scene in which Leo tells Penny about his story, and says of the main character, ‘He’s Jewish, you see, like me’, he gave a little shrug which was immensely expressive. Lou’s performance seemed to deepen from then on. Another sensitive issue was the wordless ending of Act One, when Maude leaves the door of the bathroom open while she is showering. Leo, looking up from his computer, shows that he is wondering whether this is an invitation to join her, prompted by a conversation they have had earlier about such situations in their own fictions. He decides that it is and enters the cloud of steam coming from the open door. John was anxious to avoid giving the impression that Leo was taking advantage of Maude. The debate about this came to a head during the last dress rehearsal, on the day of the play’s first public performance, when it became evident that the bathroom door was a problem.

  Roger had designed a sliding door of frosted glass that was opaque in daylight but provided a blurred image of the occupant when lit from within, so when Susie went in and switched on the light it was obvious that she was undressing. John had directed this scene so that Leo approaches the slightly open door tentatively, then throws it open and enters the steam. The sound of the shower is amplified to a crescendo and the act ends with a blackout. This was dramatically effective but too heavy for the play – too much Marlon, not enough Woody, to use one of John’s own favourite phrases. Susie wasn’t happy about it and mentioned that her contract hadn’t required her to take off her clothes. John ordered the technicians to put a layer of opaque plastic on the glass door, but when we tried the scene again next day at a second dress rehearsal, it gradually unpeeled and the stagehands had to stick it back while the action continued. There was a heated discussion afterwards. In the script the telephone in the barn rings just after Leo goes into the bathroom and closes the door, and since all the calls before have been from Maude’s husband Henry, the audience were meant to laugh. I suggested it would be more effective if the phone rings just as Leo, halfway across the room, moves towards the door; he hesitates, looks back at the phone, and gives a shrug as if to say, ‘Tough luck, Henry’, and then enters the bathroom. John liked this but wanted to keep his heavy sound effects. I pointed out that then the audience wouldn’t hear the phone ring. The cast supported me, and John became angry. ‘All right, you direct it!’ he said to me. I declined. Gradually John calmed down, and when we ran the scene in ‘Woody’ style he approved it. I went home to have a meal and freshen up before the first preview that evening, relieved that a crisis had been averted at the last possible moment.

  The Rep usually has two previews, on a Saturday and Monday, before the Press Night on Tuesday. John had warned us that there would probably be only about 300 people in the audience for the first preview, but in fact there were 500, which bolstered the cast’s confidence and created an atmosphere conducive to comedy. The audience laughed a lot in the first act, and applauded in the blackouts between scenes, something that in my experience happened very rarely at the Rep. Leo’s entry into the bathroom worked well, and got just the amused response we wanted. The technicians had managed to make the bathroom door permanently opaque, and Susie had added a useful bit of business – she closed the door behind
her and then opened it again an inch or two, unobserved by Leo, making her intentions clear to the audience. At the interval John was generous enough to tell me, ‘You were right and I was wrong.’ All three readings went well, Patrick’s rendition of ‘Instead of a Novel’ being now polished and sharpened to a fine edge, but I was particularly pleased with Lou’s performance throughout. I realised that because Leo was an American, and played by one, his language was less shocking to the audience than it would be if uttered by an English actor, and they could laugh at it. Laughter is the oxygen of comedy for actors and, inhaling confidence from it, the cast enjoyed themselves. There were several curtain calls and morale was high backstage afterwards.

  By tradition the Rep’s staff are invited, with their families and friends, to the second preview. The theatre was nearly full on Monday night – an awesome sight – and the audience was as enthusiastic as Saturday’s. Both previews had inevitably revealed some minor flaws in both text and performance to John and me, but we thought we had fixed them in time for the Press Night. Basically we were convinced that the play worked and could hold its own on a stage anywhere, including London. But John did drop one word of warning: that actors were sometimes intimidated by the presence of critics, so did not give their best performance, and this unfortunately turned out to be the case. The first scenes didn’t get anything like the number of laughs as in the previews, and this unsettled the actors. My agent Leah, who had come up to see the show, told me in the interval that this sometimes happens at Press Nights because the audience feel they are under examination too, and restrain themselves. Certainly the lady sitting beside me was continually quaking with suppressed merriment. The cast gradually recovered their confidence and were warmly applauded at the end, and the evening was by no means a disaster, just somewhat disappointing after the heights of the second preview. Now we had to wait for the reviews.

  They were, as the saying goes, ‘mixed’. During the week there were negative ones in The Times and Independent, but a favourable one in the Telegraph which said the play should move to London. On Friday there was a rave in the Guardian, but the Birmingham Mail, the local evening paper which had an influence on ticket sales, carried a damning review by their populist drama critic who, John told me, had never given him a good one. The two Sunday papers which we took at home cast a pall over breakfast with Mike and Marian Shaw, who had seen the previous evening’s performance and stayed with us overnight. John Peter was harshly dismissive in the Sunday Times (‘wobbly motivations, arthritic dialogue and plodding stagecraft’) while Irving Wardle in the Independent on Sunday, though impressed by the dialogue, found the narrative structure old-fashioned and unconvincing. But on my way home after putting Mike and Marian Shaw on their train to London, I bought the Observer and was greatly cheered to find Michael Coveney predicting that ‘with some fine tuning and smart recasting it will become a West End hit’. When we totted up all the reviews later they were almost equally divided, pro and con. There was still a possible future for the play in London.

  I went to see it numerous times during the run, partly because I was fascinated by the slight variations in each performance and in the audience’s reactions; and partly because a number of friends and relatives and people who had been involved in its development, like David Aukin, Mike Ockrent and André, came to see it. One night a large party of the Writers’ Lunch regulars came and we had a jolly supper afterwards at a nearby Spanish restaurant. Dad came up to see the show and enjoyed the experience, especially when I took him backstage afterwards to meet the actors, though he found the play hard to follow because of his deafness. Mary’s sister Margaret brought their mother to Birmingham for the same purpose, and I was apprehensive that this devout Catholic widow of eighty-eight years would be shocked, but fortunately she nodded off for most of the play’s duration. Malcolm and Elizabeth had arranged to stay with us and see the play on their way to the Hay Festival, but unfortunately the date clashed with the Royal Television Society’s annual awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. Nice Work had been nominated for Best Drama Serial, and I didn’t want to miss the event. The Bradburys were very understanding, and Mary accompanied them to the theatre, while Chris Parr and I were driven down to London in a limousine. As Mary was not available and Anne Devlin was abroad, we invited Haydn Gwynne and Janet Dale (who played Marjorie Wilcox perfectly in the serial) to be our guests. Happily, Nice Work won the award, and we managed to celebrate victory with them and have a brief whirl around the dance floor before we were driven back to Birmingham, arriving at about 3.30 a.m. Mary had accidentally locked me out, and I had to throw gravel up at our bedroom window from the back garden to wake her without disturbing the Bradburys.

  In those weeks I lived in a state of perpetual excitement, and found it difficult to sleep. The play was always in my mind, even when I abstained from seeing it. I had to go to the last night, of course, and the cast gave their best all-round performance of the run to a wonderfully responsive audience. After they had taken their curtain calls and the house lights came up, a man in front of us rose from his seat and said loudly to his companion, in the kind of accent Vic Wilcox would have had, ‘Well, I really enjoyed that. It was in English, and you could understand it.’ I was not sure what plays he was, by implication, comparing with mine, but I appreciated the compliment. There were drinks with the cast but no party afterwards, since most of them were anxious to get back to London, so it was a slightly melancholy farewell between a group of people who had been closely involved for two months in a common endeavour. I wrote in the diary I kept at that time, ‘It is no exaggeration to say that participating in the production of The Writing Game has been the most intensely interesting experience of my literary career to date.’

  For the Rep it was their most successful production of the past twelve months in terms of audience figures, apart from the Christmas show, and the most successful new play in the main house for many years. Several producers came up from London to see it, and one of them, Nathan Joseph, who ran a small company called Freeshooter, expressed interest in moving the Rep production, suitably recast, to London, and eventually optioned the play. He then began the same frustrating search for suitable star actors that had hampered previous attempts by others. I let him get on with it while I turned my attention back to Paradise News.

  At this point I had the essential elements of the story and a narrative structure in place, and had written drafts of the first few chapters. The main character is Bernard Walsh, a forty-year-old member of a London Irish family, who had been a Catholic priest but lost his faith and left the priesthood and the Church following a disastrous sexual relationship. At the beginning of the story he is leading a depressed and solitary life as a temporary teacher at a liberal theological college in Rummidge, when he receives a telephone call from his aunt Ursula, who lives in Hawaii and has been out of touch with the family for years. She is terminally ill and in hospital, and begs him to come to her help, if possible bringing with him her brother Jack, Bernard’s father. Her motive for the latter plea is revealed later. Bernard agrees and persuades his reluctant father to accompany him. He finds that the cheapest way to travel is to take a package holiday, and the first chapter describes father and son checking in at Heathrow with a number of more typical tourists who cross Bernard’s path knowingly or unknowingly throughout the novel, and an anthropologist studying tourism called Sheldrake who regales Bernard with his theories on the subject during the journey. Ursula is in a care home so Bernard and Jack stay in her apartment in Waikiki, but on the morning after their arrival Jack is knocked down by a car when he steps into the road looking the wrong way for American traffic, and is taken to hospital with a fractured pelvis. Bernard must spend the rest of his time in Honolulu shuttling back and forth between his two incapacitated elderly relatives. The driver of the car is a woman of Bernard’s age called Yolande, whose reaction to the accident is confrontational at first, but becomes friendlier when Bernard admits that it was
Jack’s fault. Soon afterwards she invites Bernard to supper at her home in the hills above Honolulu to assure herself that he does not intend to sue her, and he learns that she is separated from her husband who has left her for a younger woman. After some initial awkwardness a relationship develops between them.

  Although I had a full notebook about my previous research trip to Hawaii, it didn’t contain the kind of information I needed to fill out this scenario. Would the police be involved, and if so how? What would be the procedure for calling an ambulance for Jack and admitting him to a hospital? What kind of treatment would he require, and would the package holiday insurance cover it? Would he have to prove ability to pay for it before being admitted? What kind of life would Yolande, a permanent resident in Hawaii, live? What kind of job would she have? And so on. I had one source of information near at hand: I discovered that a professor of banking, Max Fry, recently appointed to a new chair at Birmingham in the Faculty of Commerce, had come from the University of Hawaii and was living very near us in Edgbaston with his wife and family. I made contact with them, and they quickly became friends. Celia Fry was very helpful in answering my questions about domestic and family life in Hawaii, but it was inevitably an expat’s view. I felt I needed more – and luckily an opportunity to revisit Oahu arose just at the right time. My editor at Viking, Paul Slovak, wrote to propose that I did a book tour in September to promote the US Penguin edition of Nice Work, beginning in San Francisco and Berkeley, then proceeding to Chicago, Washington, Boston and New York. I agreed readily and arranged to spend five days in Hawaii before the tour began.

  At the start of the journey from San Francisco to Honolulu a member of the cabin crew welcomed us over the intercom to ‘this Delta flight to Paradise’. On arrival I checked into a cheaper Waikiki hotel than last time, and set about my research. I took notes on ambulances and interviewed hospital administrators and lawyers, quizzed friends like Marian Vaught and Nell Altizer about ‘Rock fever’ (the feeling of entrapment that sometimes overcomes people living on an island two thousand miles from the nearest land mass) and other aspects of life on Oahu, looked at some of the sites and sights I had missed on previous visits, and made a day trip to the island of Kauai which I sent Sheldrake on in the novel. One day I walked the length of Waikiki’s main drag with a pocket cassette recorder and muttered into it names and descriptions of the hotels, shops, restaurants and other features my characters might notice. I had decided to make Yolande a therapist specialising in helping couples, and investigated how and where she might practise. I wanted to work some themes from the history and culture of Hawaii into the novel, so visited the Bishop Museum, a rich source of such information; and from there I drove straight to a bar with topless go-go girls on a catwalk, where I intended to send one of the British minor characters. I discovered later that I was still wearing a ‘Bishop Museum’ sticker on the lapel of my jacket, probably a first for patrons of that establishment.