The Blue Touch Paper (38 page)

A dragon in shallow waters is the sport of shrimps. The
conference organiser asked for comments, but the feeling in the hall was that nobody was much interested to jump over the bar. They all went under it. One virulent objector shouted the question ‘Did Piscator die for this?' – surely one of history's more erudite heckles – before walking out without waiting for a reply. The heckler was apparently unaware that a good part of the German theatre director's radical career had been spent, like too many others', in the vain search for a Broadway hit. A few people joined in, taking advantage of my presence more broadly to disparage what they felt to be the general failings of my work. There was an overwhelming consensus that whatever questions I had posed, no one was in the mood to join in the hunt for answers. My sense of isolation, already strong, was further reinforced. Journalistically, I would be represented as having broken with a movement I'd helped to create. The academic historian Catherine Itzin noticed that the lecture ‘left many members of the political theatre movement reeling as if from an unexpected, undeserved blow'. And yet in the following decade, as the climate of the country moved sharply rightwards, the questions of effectiveness I had raised would seem more urgent, not less. Under the pitiless scrutiny engendered in an antagonistic political climate, the whole subsidised theatre, underprepared, would be alarmed by the urgent need to find answers. Looking back, my analysis had only one thing wrong with it. It was premature.

The time I had spent meanwhile preparing
Plenty
had been educational. Many years later, having seen Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep and Kate Nelligan play Susan Traherne, Mike Leigh would ask me bad-temperedly when he was going to see an English actress play the role. I gave him no answer because I had none. But with the seasoned advice of Gillian Diamond
in the National Theatre's casting department, I had for the premiere assembled a first-rate team. Lindsay Duncan was to make her London debut in the second act, in the small but valued part of Dorcas, a self-confident young girl looking to fund an abortion, while, much to everyone's surprise and to some people's dismay, Julie Covington had agreed to play Alice, Susan's bohemian best friend. Just a year earlier, every bar and radio station had vibrated to the sound of Julie's unequalled recording of ‘Don't Cry for Me, Argentina'. Her thrilling timbre had made the song a worldwide hit. As usual, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber had put out an LP of
Evita
to familiarise the audience with the songs before they followed up by presenting the show on stage. They had taken it for granted that Julie would move on to take the lead. But rather than sing out in defence of a South American dictator, Julie had chosen instead to play second banana to Kate Nelligan in a stroppy new play at the National Theatre. She had, she said, ‘trouble with Evita's politics'.

It takes courage to refuse such a certain pathway to stardom and I felt both grateful and, in some way, responsible. After all, it was my play Julie had preferred. I owed a debt to her. It had better be good. But I felt equal gratitude to Stephen Moore, who was joining to play the part of Brock, the young diplomat who meets Susan in Brussels after the war and who marries her in England some years later when he fears for her sanity. I was becoming used to what was already a familiar problem. For as long as I continued to write central female roles, casting the lead presented little difficulty. The scarcity of such opportunities guaranteed that the greatest actresses of the day would queue up in Europe and in America to play them on film or in the theatre. For years to come, I would be super-served. But
male actors, to the contrary, were spoiled and correspondingly reluctant. They were unused to the idea that on occasions the conventional power relationship might be reversed. It was not just a question of the size of the part or indeed of the billing. It was about the way I portrayed the world. I once asked the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz to put his head in a woman's lap. Afterwards Bruno was smiling. I asked him why. The posture implied submission. ‘I'm fine with it, David,' he said, ‘but I'm amused because you know full well no American leading man would agree to do such a thing.'

Perhaps Kate resented my excessive sense of gratitude to the two other players. She was certainly extremely impatient in rehearsal when Julie was struggling with her elusive and slightly underwritten part. For whatever reason, something of my hitherto perfect artistic accord with Kate was starting to fray. Sporadically we fought, in a way which was no less toxic for being a matter of tone. Kate had endured a torrid time at Stratford, unhappy in a preconceived
As You Like It
in which Rosalind had been required to slot in as little more than a suede-clad puppet. Used to the full and proper collaboration which is routine on new plays, Kate had been far too independent to climb into the half-timbered straitjacket of the RSC house style. She hated herself for doing what she called ‘leafy acting'. Although I had frequently visited her in her rented cottage outside town, she had forbidden me to attend. She had also, to the understandable disappointment of the management, declined to take up a contract for a projected London season. She was their star and she was leaving early. During her time away, she had broken up with her longstanding companion, Mark Cullingham. Mark wanted to try his luck as a television director in Los Angeles. Together they had sold their house in Stockwell,
and so, for the time she was doing
Plenty
, I had found Kate a room to live in with Caroline Younger, who by now had moved to Notting Hill. Kate was happy not to be tied down by property or indeed by anything else.

I was forced to concede that for various people at the National Kate seemed, in the time since we had done
Licking Hitler
, to have crossed a line from being rumoured to be difficult to actually becoming it. A part of my day was spent going round the costume shop, the publicity department or the stage management smoothing ruffled feathers. I was used to it. In those days I ruffled feathers myself. ‘It's just her manner,' I'd say. ‘Take no notice.' Those who backed Kate's cause called her ‘intense'. As she said in an interview later, it was not her ambition which made her unusual. All actors are ambitious. It was her ability to focus her ambition. But the blame for rehearsals sometimes becoming scratchy lay just as much with me. Probably more so. My moodiness began to answer hers. I was becoming aware that as an artist, whatever my shortcomings, I had always been free. Richard Eyre had remarked on one occasion that as a director I was the most reckless he'd ever produced. Sometimes he'd had to hold himself back from interrupting because, he claimed, I was never frightened to say anything to anyone, regardless of the consequences. I scared him. Now, moving towards doing a play which meant so much to me, I felt at a disadvantage. I was no longer free, because my heart was in hock to the leading lady. At some level I resented the loss of control. Rehearsing
Plenty
, I had begun to feel constrained, and to chafe at that constraint. At times, I even took my anger with myself out on the precipitator of that anger. It was understandable, but it was also disgraceful. On any shared artistic endeavour, achieving one clear agenda is hard enough. To have a second is always disastrous.

Neither of us, I think, would look back nostalgically to that rehearsal period. It was sometimes bad-tempered, and progress was in fits and starts. Probably Kate and I were both at our worst: Kate, because for the first time in her professional life she was really scared. She was facing the challenge of being the first person to play as demanding a leading role as exists in the repertory. And me, because I was panicking as my romantic life closed in unhelpfully on my professional. But in the last couple of weeks, as we were able to pull the tendons of the story tighter, the play began to cohere. We woke up one day, without warning, to find that the play was lifting the whole company up. You looked about you and everyone was smiling. A few people invited from upstairs at the National Theatre to come and see run-throughs in the rehearsal room left thoughtful and silent. When we went into the theatre and saw the decor arrive, we began to work with a quiet concentration which marks out people who know they're about to do something good. In 1999 the designer Maria Björnson tried to reconceive the play for a new generation, but she told me that the images of Hayden's original vision were still so clear to her that she could do nothing to improve them. They were stuck in her retinas, and all she could do was summon them up once more, this time with slight variations. The moment when Susan lies back on the bed with a joint in her hand in a hotel room in Blackpool, and the walls around her fly away to reveal the sunlit fields of France stretching away for miles, was as perfect a visualisation of a theatrical idea as I'd ever seen. Although the route to achieving the play had been uncomfortable, the moment we could all surrender to it made everything worthwhile.

From the first preview of the play it was clear that a section of the audience would never accept it. We had never imagined
how personally parts of a British audience were going to take the play's analysis. You could feel that the public were at war the moment the play began. Lindsay Duncan's hilarious performance as a girl too bone-headed to realise the moral implications of termination had had us all in stitches in the rehearsal room. But when she walked out into the Lyttelton she was received in appalled silence. Depressingly, during the West End revival twenty years later, there were men as loudly offended by the scene in which Susan uses a man to get herself pregnant as they were in the late 1970s. But less obviously sexist objections to
Plenty
centred on the feeling that the play was moralistic, the work of a man who believed himself superior to other people. Perhaps in the first production Kate and I, both gung-ho for Susan and her indictment of post-war Britain, did press her case a little too hard. On occasions the production became overly strident. Our shared anger showed through to a degree which alienated those who were not on Susan's side. Balanced properly,
Plenty
is a play which presents as equally costly all choices in a society which is institutionally hypocritical. Yes, you will suffer if you accept society's hypocrisies and endure them without complaint. But you may well suffer an even higher price, as Susan does, for spending a life in permanent dissent. Already I had met enough people who had become victims of either course, and I knew no right way to proceed. For any intelligent audience,
Plenty
indicts its own author long before it indicts anyone else.

From when I had first presented
Plenty
to him, Peter Hall had been broadly approving. But when he came to see it at the first preview, his response changed. Next morning, in his office, Peter told me that in performance
Plenty
had revealed itself as one of those landmark plays which serve as a permanent point
of reference. He said simply, ‘Well done. This one's going to last.' He told me he could not have been more proud. I casually reported his approval to the actors – ‘Peter likes it' – and thought no more about it. I had no inkling at that moment of just how crucial Peter's support was going to become. He, like me, was dismissive of people who, as a way of rejecting the play, were already muttering that Susan Traherne was ‘unlikeable'. What did it mean? As Peter said, audiences pretended to be shocked on stage by behaviour which was frequently nowhere near as bad as their own. A cheerful double standard obtained. Adultery and deceit were greeted with frowns of disapproval by people who themselves were strangers to neither in real life. And if Susan
was
formidable, so what? So was Hedda Gabler. So was Medea. Were they ‘likeable'? Why were men so frightened of a strong woman?

On the South Bank, with its policy of a rotating repertory, plays had only four previews before they opened to the press. Almost as soon as I walked into the foyers on the first night, my stomach lurched. I was sure that the cards were going to be stacked against us. When the play began, it was clear that if anyone wanted to give themselves over to the flow of the story, they were going to have to ignore a certain stratum in the audience. It was April already but high society seemed to be in the grip of a devilishly targeted flu which at times bordered on laryngitis. In selected parts of the house there was a listlessness, not uncommon in the Lyttelton, which made everyone else conscious they were watching some very small figures shouting at the far end of a very big room. How on earth could I have imagined that
Plenty
would be welcomed by the very people it was about? The disconnection appeared complete. When Susan launched into her unsparing satire about the
national shame of Suez, you could feel some spectators wanting to get up from their seats and wring her neck. When the smoothie British diplomat Charleson argued the importance at all times of good manners over truthfulness, you could feel a moment's widespread relief that there was one person in the play who talked sense. Yes, I had been convinced that the stage of the National Theatre would be the ideal place from which to address the nation. But what if the nation, or that section of it which patronised the National Theatre, was determined not to listen? Peter's horror at the tenor of the evening resulted in him ordering that the schedule of names for complimentary first-night tickets be comprehensively redrawn. No author or actor in future would have to endure the resentful crowd of political fixers who felt entitled to attend because they had long ago contributed a word of support to the building of the theatre. But for
Plenty
the cleansing of the establishment list came too late. I walked away from the theatre furious and disbelieving. How could any play so destined to go right go so miserably wrong?

There were only five days left until I was due to fly to Washington DC to begin my year of absence. Margaret and Joe, we agreed, would follow later. In advance, I had made no practical arrangements. I had a visa and a bank account and nothing else. I was stepping into a void. I had always been addicted to a quick exit, but this was ridiculous. How could I be running away at what was, for Kate and me, the most dangerous moment of vulnerability? What on earth had I been thinking? On the Monday after opening the play I had a farewell lunch with Kate to lick our wounds. Advance bookings were poor. She knew that in response to scepticism towards the play on the first night she had overcompensated. As a result her performance as Susan had turned a touch too febrile and rattled. In
several passages she had looked short of technique. But in the restaurant I found her calm and defiant, looking forward to the run and confident that once there was a rhythm to the performances the play would soon find its public. It was too good not to, she said.