Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  In Meantime, Mark and Colin, his slow-witted younger sibling, live in the domestic hell of a cheap housing estate. Colin is a humiliated, cowering figure, whose only gesture of defiance against his bleak existence is to shave his head to look like the local skinheads. Mark has taken out his own frustrations on Colin throughout the film. But now he strokes his brother’s bald head, in a gesture of solidarity. “Kojak,” he says. And for the first time in the movie, we see Colin smile. In Grown Ups, family life is a mixture of mayhem and smoldering rows, yet Dick and Mandy decide to have a baby. In High Hopes, the elderly mother is mistreated by her coarse and selfish daughter, and family relations are catastrophic, but still her son, Cyril, a working-class romantic who worships at Karl Marx’s tomb, and his girlfriend, Shirley, want to start a family of their own.

  And so it goes on. People persist in getting married, in having families, even though the chances are that it will all end in misery. But there is one thing sadder than connecting badly with other people, and that is not connecting at all. Leigh’s first feature film, Bleak Moments, made in 1971, offers an interesting parallel to his most recent one. Both films are about failing to connect. In Naked the sex is loveless and brutal, in Bleak Moments the sex is suppressed. Both films show how people use language without being able to communicate feeling, except in song (hence, perhaps, the British fondness for community singing).

  The main characters in Bleak Moments are a typical Leigh cast. Sylvia and Pat work as secretaries at an accountant’s office. Hilda is Sylvia’s mentally retarded sister. Norman is a hippie from Scunthorpe, and Peter a schoolteacher. Pat is unattractive, but disguises her unhappiness behind a veil of hysterical good cheer. Sylvia is attractive but repressed. Norman is so shy, he can only express his feelings by singing folk songs atrociously. Hilda is emotional but cannot talk at all. And Peter, who fancies Sylvia, is as tight as the white collar around his neck. It is as though middle-class English life has made all these people, except Hilda, emotionally constipated.

  In one marvelous scene, they are all gathered for a cup of tea in Sylvia’s house. None of them knows what to say to the others. They are all too embarrassed to talk. Like an English Bergman or Dreyer (there is something Scandinavian about the English affinity for unhappiness), Leigh trains his camera on their faces, one by one: Peter, anxious, disapproving, jaws working, lips pursed; Sylvia, unsure, unhappy, eyes darting about the room; Pat, embarrassed, sucking a chocolate; Norman, catatonic, fidgeting; Hilda, close to tears.

  That same evening, after an excrutiating meal in a local Chinese restaurant, Peter and Sylvia return to her house. Desperate for some connection, physical, mental, or preferably both, Sylvia forces Peter to drink sherry with her. After a great deal of embarrassment, they kiss. Sylvia breaks away and asks Peter whether he would like a cup of coffee. “That would be very nice,” he says. End of love scene.

  Peter had spoken before about the problems of language. He tells Sylvia how difficult it is for him to communicate with Hilda. “I never know what to say to her,” he says. Sylvia tells him to say anything he likes. Yes, he says, but “I mean that the usual conversational gambits don’t seem to be any use.” Sylvia looks at him and says, “I’m not sure conversational gambits are ever of any use. They seem to me to be an evasion of what is going on.”

  This is the key to all Leigh’s work: conversation as a form of evasion. One could say it is the key to English manners too. It is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Leigh. Like other wholly original artists, he has staked out his own territory. Leigh’s London is as distinctive as Fellini’s Rome or Ozu’s Tokyo. These are of course products of the imagination, cities reinvented for the movies. Leigh’s England is personal as well as a local product. And yet it is universal too. For Vernon and Graham and Candice Marie, and the many others, are not just Leigh’s people, not even just British people; by creating them, he has shown us a glimpse of ourselves.

  18

  THE GREAT ART OF EMBARRASSMENT

  SYDNEY AND LINDA are characters in a play by Alan Bennett, entitled Kafka’s Dick.1 Sydney, like Kafka, is an insurance man. He is interested in books, or, more precisely, in the people who write them. He likes biographies: “I’d rather read about writers than read what they write.” Linda, his wife, does not share her husband’s literary interests. But she has picked up one or two tidbits; she knows that Auden wore no underpants, and that “Mr. Right for E.M. Forster was an Egyptian tramdriver.” Some day, she says, she’ll read and “learn the bits in between.” Sydney, exasperated by his wife’s obtuseness, explains why she has missed the point: “This is England. In England facts like that pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect.”

  Two years ago the book at the top of the British best-selling lists was Alan Clark’s Diaries, a banquet of social and political gossip. The best-selling book last year was Writing Home, a collection of Alan Bennett’s diaries, articles, and notes.2 This was also the pundits’ first choice in the annual lists of best books of the year. The second choice was a new biography of Evelyn Waugh. Sydney was right: the thirst of the British public for gossip is unslakable. The popular press thrives on sensational tittle-tattle about the private lives of public figures. The more upmarket papers publish ever more “profiles.” And British publishers produce an endless flow of letters, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies. There is no life in this nation of rather diffident and private people that is not worth prying into.

  What makes Bennett’s stylish and witty diaries so remarkable is that this ostentatiously diffident and private playwright has turned himself into a public act. Alan Bennett is having a fantastic success playing Alan Bennett. His act is studied but also intimate. As a man who, in his own words, “can scarcely remove his tie without first having a police cordon thrown round the building,” he tours the country, from bookshop to bookshop, reading, quite beautifully, his private thoughts to a huge audience. He has created a person, in his diaries, his television appearances, and his readings, who is both real and entirely theatrical. As well as being a playwright, Bennett is a fine actor, who started his career in 1960, as a member of the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. His public rendering of his private thoughts is far from being an exercise in “letting it all hang out.” With Bennett, self-deprecation is a form of self-control.

  Bennett’s public role happens to be one the British adore: the most successful playwright of his time as a nebbish with bicycle clips. Public envy, so easy to ignite, is undercut by his self-presentation as a socially crippled eccentric in tweeds and owlish glasses. Here he is, remembering his early days in Beyond the Fringe (you must imagine a pair of doleful eyes and a plaintive delivery, the demeanor of a man always stuck in the back of any queue):

  20 August. Watching Barry Humphries on TV the other night I noticed the band was laughing. It reminded me how when I used to do comedy I never used to make the band laugh. Dudley [Moore] did and Peter [Cook], but not me. And somehow it was another version of not being good at games.

  Here he is, in Hollywood, attending the screening of a film he wrote:

  Mark [the producer] is introduced first, the spotlight locates him, and there is scattered applause; then Malcolm [the director] similarly. When my turn comes I stand up, but since I am sitting further back than the others the spotlight doesn’t locate me. “What’s this guy playing at?” says someone behind. “Sit down, you jerk.” So I do. The film begins.

  If the modesty seems contrived, well, as Kafka says in Kafka’s Dick: “All modesty is false, otherwise it’s not modesty.” And if it isn’t actually modesty so much as an envious disposition, always thinking others are ahead, that is a tendency with which many British people can identify. So much about Bennett is quietly reassuring: his soft Yorkshire accent, his humble yet respectable background as the son of a butcher in Leeds, and his taste for saucy music-hall jokes. Even the edge of confirmed bachelorhood is softened by confessions of l
ove for his (female) housekeeper, comfortably installed in a cozy country cottage.3

  In Kafka’s Dick, Kafka rises from the dead, to turn up in Sydney and Linda’s house. His biographer Max Brod is there too. Only Kafka is not aware of his fame, for he still thinks Brod burned all his manuscripts. In Brod’s words: “He knows he’s Kafka. He doesn’t know he’s Kafka.” Which reminds me of the girl who finally got to sleep with Mick Jagger. When she was asked the next morning what he had been like, she said, “Great, but he was no Mick Jagger.” Bennett knows he’s Bennett. What makes his private/public diaries so clever is that he not only performs himself but comments on his own performance.

  He admits that he sometimes takes his background “down the social scale a peg or two,” claiming for example that he hardly ever read a serious book until he was in his thirties. This, he writes, “conveniently forgets the armfuls of books I used to take out of Headingly Public Library—Shaw, Anouilh, Toynbee, Christopher Fry.”

  Bennett’s finest performances as Bennett have been on television. He wrote and presented two superb documentaries in which he appears as a kind of social spy, wandering through an art gallery in Leeds and skulking around the corridors of a hotel in Harrogate. He eavesdrops on conversations in the lobby or the tearoom, he observes local worthies at official luncheons, he overhears people’s comments as they shuffle past the paintings, and as he discreetly snoops from room to room, gallery to gallery, he tells us the story of his own life, and especially the panoply of “embarrassments,” “awkwardnesses,” and “discomforts” he has suffered. He remembers how his father always had trouble tipping the room boy, and how his mother struggled all her life not to appear “common.” As a coda to his stay at the hotel in Harrogate, he recounts an embarrassment, experienced on the train back to London. He had paid a special weekend fare. The ticket collector took one look at his ticket and told him to move to the compartment for weekend travelers. “You don’t belong in here,” he said. “This is for the proper first-class people. Out.”

  It is a class act. But Bennett is more than a cuddly performance artist. In his plays, he has turned his private embarrassments into the core of his art. Self-consciousness, the gap between our private selves and our public roles, between the way we are and the way we want to be seen, this is the running theme of Bennett’s drama. Nowhere is this more explicitly so than in The Madness of King George, the play and now the movie directed by Nicholas Hytner.

  At the beginning of the film, we see the king being dressed for his public performance, at the opening of Parliament: the robes, the crown, and Handel’s music blaring away in the background. Then we see the court of George III, in all its stuffy formality. And we see the king, rushing about, hither and thither, as “Farmer George” patting the rump of a pig to the delight of one of his farmers; as the caustic sovereign signing documents for William Pitt, the prime minister; as the disapproving father of the foppish Prince of Wales; and as the fond husband (“Mr. King”) to his dowdy Queen Charlotte (“Mrs. King”). He is bluff and hearty, an eccentric autocrat. Yet he is never wholly at ease. He is in fact a shy man playing a boisterous public role, ending his sentences with a “hey, hey,” or a “what, what.”

  Nigel Hawthorne plays the part to perfection, both on stage and in the film. Helen Mirren is also good as the solicitous queen. Rupert Everett is a less happy choice as George, the Prince of Wales. He does not look right, for a start. For George is “Fat George,” the glutinous idler, scheming to gain a public role for himself. Everett is thin. Lolling about, with his stomach padding slipping almost down to his knees, he looks like a cake that has not risen. On the whole, however, the casting is inspired, with Julian Wadham as the buttoned-up Pitt, and Ian Holm as Dr. Willis, who breaks the king’s will through the force of his own. The smaller parts are splendid too: the doctors, looking like grotesques in a Hogarth print, the smirking courtiers, the greedy politicians—hard-drinking Whigs around the prince, and slippery Tories hanging on to the king’s ermine.

  My main complaint about the movie is that Bennett’s script seems flatter and less subtle than his original play. Many of the funniest lines have been cut. The film is nice to look at and the message comes across, but there are fewer laughs. Not that the film is solemn, but it’s as if facial contortions, in the manner of Everett’s Prinny, have to make up for the pruning of the text. Perhaps the play is too literary to translate well into film. Perhaps Hytner’s inexperience as a film director is the problem. Other screenplays by Bennett, such as Prick Up Your Ears, directed by Stephen Frears, and An Englishman Abroad, superbly directed by John Schlesinger, have worked very well.

  King George’s mania nonetheless remains an affecting spectacle. His problem may have been caused by a disease called porphyria, which produces chemical changes in the nervous system. It is suggested in the Bennett version that the madness was made worse by the king’s incompetent and querulous doctors, who tortured him with various painful cures. But the heart of the story is that very Bennettian preoccupation, embarrassment, or rather the lack of it. As a result of his dementia, the king loses his self-consciousness. In the words of Baker, one of the king’s physicians, “His tongue runs away with him. Thoughts that a well man keeps under he just babbles forth.” Gone are the hail and hearty manner, the what, whats and the hey, heys. Instead, the king talks dirty, and assaults the queen’s mistress of the robes, whom he had always eyed but never touched, for the king was unusually monogamous. Now, he keeps nothing under. He has lost control of himself. The question is, Who is “himself”?

  Bennett, the man who cannot take off his tie without a police cordon, has always been fascinated by people who lose control of themselves. His diary entries include trips to New York, where he stays with a friend in a SoHo apartment. A mad, eighty-two-year-old woman called Rose shouts obscenities up the stairs day and night. Bennett remarks: “In England, where eccentricity is more narrowly circumscribed, Rose would have been long ago in hospital herself; but here in New York, where everyone is mad, she is tolerated.” To keep control is to enjoy the dignity of one’s public role; to lose it is to risk embarrassment, or worse. Old people in Bennett’s plays live in terror of being “taken away” to special homes, where they will be patronized by social workers and lose their dignity. Yet to court embarrassment, by flouting conventions, can seem admirable, especially to a playwright who feels unable to do so himself (or so he says).

  Writing Home includes a gem, entitled “The Lady in the Van.” It is an extraordinary account of Bennett’s relationship with Miss Shepherd, a bag lady on the far side of eccentricity who lived in a van, which she parked in front of Bennett’s house in London. Bennett describes Miss Shepherd in detail. He also examines himself, his way of life (“timid”), his motives for getting involved with the lady, his attitudes, and even his politics. He is not easy on himself. He admits to a combination of liberal guilt, fear of confrontation, and inertia. And there is the usual fine nose for the nuances of embarrassment:

  May 1976. I have had some manure delivered for the garden and, since the manure heap is not far from the van, Miss S. is concerned that people passing might think the smell is coming from there. She wants me to put a notice on the gate to the effect that the smell is the manure, not her. I say no, without adding, as I could, that the manure actually smells much nicer.

  But there is a tender fascination too. He admires the lady’s boldness. He is a kindly voyeur. He has looked and held out a hand where others would look away.

  This same tenderness, for a man who defies the conventions of his role, even if this defiance is the result of a sickness, makes The Madness of King George such a moving story. The scenes of the ranting king, sitting half naked in his own excrement, at the mercy of his ghastly doctors, are the best in the film. The king, like the bag lady, is living in squalor. The filter of decorum no longer operates. His dignity as the king is destroyed. It is not a pretty sight: reduced to his raw instincts, no man ever is. It is a relief to see him cured
. And yet … the man who cures him, Willis, the former clergyman, is depicted by Bennett as a mixture of a male nanny and rather sinister social worker. The mad king is a kind of rebel, and the sane king, however eccentric in his habits, is a conformist; he has been tamed.

  The king is not unlike another famous English character Bennett adapted for the stage: Toad, in Kenneth Grahame’s children’s story The Wind in the Willows. Toad is the lord of Toad Hall, located in a place called River Bank. Its denizens include Badger, and Mole, and Rat. Toad, wearing a loud tweed suit and huge round glasses, is a braggart, an idler, a spendthrift, and mad about cars, which he drives recklessly and very badly. The “poop, poop” of his horn is usually the prelude to an accident. Toad, in other words, sounds like a Wildean fantasy of the eccentric aristocrat to whom the rules of social convention don’t apply. He does what he likes: “I live wholly for pleasure; pleasure is the only thing one should live for.”

  Bennett has a more unusual take on Toad.4 He speculates that Grahame had meant Toad to be Jewish. As he writes: “[Grahame] had endowed him with all the faults that genteel Edwardian anti-Semitism attributed to nouveaux riches Jews.” He is, in any case, not an unsympathetic character. Grahame, like Bennett, or should I say Bennett, was an example of the timid English writer who felt excluded by his own inhibitions from life’s pleasures, and so invented characters, like Toad, who could let their hair down. The love of bad jokes and nursery naughtiness, shared by Bennett, runs like a constant stream through English life and letters. So does the love of dressing up, of playing charades, of a kind of innocent campery. Only in Victorian or Edwardian England is it possible to imagine a senior army officer (the Chief Scout, Baden-Powell, say) getting up in front of his troops to dance in drag—without a thought of homosexuality crossing his mind.