Timebends (100 page)

But the power this idea had in my deepest consciousness was dramatized for me most clearly long after I had finished my term as president, when I went with Inge to China for the first time in 1978. One of the first people we met there was an expatriate left-wing American lawyer who had spent more than twenty-five years as a translator in Beijing and now, faced with the recent passing of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, was trying to orient himself not only to the mysterious present and unknown future but, of necessity, to the past with its almost total destruction of the very notion of law itself.

I had thought myself reasonably informed about China by the American press and American sympathizers until it dawned on me that we had been meeting writer after writer who replied with virtually the same line whenever I asked what he was working on now: “I am not ready to start writing again—it has been so long.” Why had it been so long, and why for all of them? It was perplexing.

Of course my angle on China had been laid down in the late thirties by Edgar Snow's account of the Long March and the heroism of the revolution, and so the real life of the later era had never entered my dreamworld. It was a hard shock to learn that every one of the two dozen or more writers, stage and film directors, actors, and artists we met in the first week of our stay had been either imprisoned or exiled to some distant province to feed pigs or plant rice, for as long as twelve years in some cases. Many had lost spouses to torture in those years, and they were a mere handful out of thousands.

It was all succinctly put by an English-speaking Chinese who happened to sit beside us on a train, a man who got caught in Connecticut by the outbreak of the revolution in 1949 and had been forbidden by the State Department to return until now, nearly thirty years later. A physics professor, he had come back with the resolve to reorganize the department at Beijing University.

We could not believe that there was no physics department at Beijing University, but so it was.

“The Red Guards dispersed the staff ten years ago,” he said sadly.
“I am traveling around to find some of the older men who were demoted to various low-grade positions and see whether I can gather them so that they can begin to form a department.” But there were hardly two hundred and fifty thousand university students left in the whole country now—fewer than on Manhattan Island, probably—and it would take some time to get things started again. “And of course the physics they know here is very much out of date. China in some fields is ten, twenty, thirty years behind the times …”

It was still very bad form for Westerners to report the Maoist catastrophe, but in
Chinese Encounters
I described a talk with the American lawyer in his Beijing home. I asked whether any new legal measures were contemplated to guarantee against future explosions of self-righteous (and ambitious) fanaticism masking itself as militant revolution. He did not think that necessary, although he did look a bit uneasy when he said, “The Party knows what it must do and is going to prevent it ever happening again.”

But had there been a legal system independent of the Party, a nonpolitical court of appeal—might it not have saved China these decades of lost development?

I felt a mixture of compassion and disgust with him in his situation. We all protect our spiritual investments, and he had put a lifetime into a China where classes had supposedly been abolished and level equality reigned, and he could only say now—even now—“A so-called independent judiciary implies that the Party can perpetrate injustices; this implies that it is a separate ruling class imposing its will on the people. But the Party
is
the people and cannot oppress itself, and therefore there is no need for lawyers or the Western idea of a separate body of professionals to protect the innocent.”

A rationalist, Marxist materialist, he was intoning a hymn of denial poetry nearly incredible now after millions of Chinese had been displaced, “put down,” murdered, or jailed with almost total arbitrariness by the very Party he was ready to rely on to insure that such insanity would not recur. What ideology, I wondered, was not based on a principled denial of the facts?

Back in China again in 1983 to stage
Salesman
at the Beijing Peoples' Art Theatre, I stood in the courtyard of the building with actor-director Ying Ruocheng, my Willy, who pointed out the place where one day, more than a decade earlier, a troop of Red Guards had lined up all the dozens of actors in the company to watch as they began hectoring sixty-year-old Lao She, the famed
author of many plays and novels (including one,
Rickshaw Boy,
that had been a success in America back in the early forties); cuffing him and calling him a bourgeois counterrevolutionary, they looked as though they were about to beat him severely then and there, when a passing policeman intervened, pretended to put the vile writer under arrest, took him around the corner, and let him loose. Next morning Lao She was found at the edge of a shallow pond. In his widow's opinion, they had held his head under, for his shoes were dry, but others believed he had ended his own life in total despair.

Memory keeps folding in upon itself like geologic layers of rock, the deeper strata sometimes appearing on top before they slope downward into the depths again.

Inge and I left the Gorbachev meeting for London to see two of my plays, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of
The Archbishop's Ceiling
at the Barbican Pit, and Peter Wood's of
The American Clock
at the National Theatre's Cottesloe. Despite Margaret Thatcher's budget cuts, these subsidized theatres were alive with a spirit of artistic engagement and adventure refreshingly different from the tense semi-hysteria of New York's cash-blighted fear of every shadow.
The American Clock
at the National had a live jazz band and a real crowd onstage when they were needed (already half a million dollars in costs on Broadway), and with scheduled limited runs, the whole success-flop terror was muted, lending artists psychic room to imagine and stretch before the broad British public rather than a narrow cult of initiates. As always when actors are free, the audience was swept up and into the fantasies of the play. And it didn't hurt their aesthetic pleasure that they were able to afford their tickets.

It was already over a decade since I had written
Clock,
and seeing Wood's version, I felt the happy sadness of knowing that my original impulse had been correct in this work; but as had happened more than once before, in the American production I had not had the luck to fall in with people sufficiently at ease with psychopolitical themes to set them in a theatrical style, a challenge more often tackled in the British theatre. I had described the play as a “mural” of American society in the Depression crisis, but the very word
society
is death on Broadway, and as with
The Archbishop's Ceiling,
I had hopelessly given way and reshaped a play for what I had come to think of as the Frightened Theatre. In the
end, as always, I would only blame myself, but I had felt despairingly alone then and was persuaded to personalize what should have been allowed its original epic impulse, its concentration on the collapse of a society.

Both plays in England were done in their early, uncontaminated versions, more or less fresh from my desk. Both were hard-minded attempts to grasp what I felt life in the seventies had all but lost—a unified concept of human beings, the intimate psychological side joined with the social-political. To put it another way, I wanted to set us in our history by revealing a line to measure from. In
Clock
it was the objective facts of the social collapse; in
Archbishop,
the bedrock circumstances of real liberty. For what seemed to pervade almost all the arts then was a scattered, amusing, antic, taunting surrealism, but with its original post-World War I rebelliousness tamed and made chic, a form of gay naturalistic reportage of life's crazed surfaces, with no moral center. In short, it was a style of mere escape from a confrontation with our destiny, which is always tragic but always waiting to fall into pathos when shorn of social context. We had come to prize and celebrate in our art disconnection for its own sake, but this was not at all the same as tearing apart the givens of experience in order to recreate a fresh unity that would inform us newly about our lives. Our surrealism was naturalism disguised, and as incapable of projecting alternatives to what we were doing and why as naturalism had always been.

But the unity I had in mind is suspect in our theatre, where, when it does appear, it is more likely to be credited as artistic the more exotic its sources. Athol Fugard's fiercely partisan imagination and social commitment, for example, would hardly have been as welcome as it was on Broadway if his scene had been black Newark or Philadelphia or Harlem; then, lacking the romance of distance, it would have dangerously flashed the menace of its racial anger—a message that Americans, like most other people, are far more able to admire comfortably from afar than up close.

Peter Wood, who as a very young man had directed
Incident at Vichy
in London nearly twenty years before, now had his own acting group within the National, artists with whom he had a very intimate directorial connection. And rather than plunging blindly into
The American Clock,
he first asked me my feelings about how to treat this script, which after all had failed on Broadway. (More precisely, it had closed to nearly full houses a few days after opening, when the producer did not have a cent left with which to advertise its existence, such was the brutal inanity of Broadway.)

Wood's question threw me back to my initial vision of the play. What I had been after, I told him, was an epic style, like a mural. In painting, I thought of the mural as a profusion of individual images woven around a broad social or religious theme—Picasso's
Guernica,
and Rivera's work or Orozco's, or more subjectively Hieronymus Bosch's, as well as innumerable religious paintings. These often compress into one scene the Virgin, Christ, and a few saints, intermixed with the faces of the artist's patron or of his friends and enemies, and sometimes his own, all of it organized around some sublime theme of resurrection or salvation. From up close you can make out individual portraits, but they are subordinated to or swept along by the major doctrinal statement, which is overt and undisguised. In acting terms, the play should have the swift panache of vaudeville, a smiling and extroverted style, in itself an irony when the thematic question was whether America, like all civilizations, had a clock running on it, an approaching time of weakening and death. This, of course, was the question the Great Depression raised until the Second World War solved the unemployment-consumption problem at a stroke.

“At the play's end,” I said, “we should feel, along with the textures of a massive social and human tragedy, a renewed awareness of the American's improvisational strength, his almost subliminal faith that things can and must be made to work out. In a word, the feel of the energy of a democracy. But the question of ultimate survival must remain hanging unanswered in the air.”

Here were two plays of mine that at home had been branded null and void; but the London theatres were packed—
The American Clock
had to be moved to the Olivier, the largest of the three National Theatres, and was nominated for the Olivier Award as best play of the season. It was significant that though the reviews had not been uniform at all, no one critic in Britain was powerful enough to lower the curtain on a show and keep it down. Within a few months the National Theatre would produce
A View from the Bridge,
directed by Alan Ayckbourn, with Michael Gambon as Eddie Carbone (it later moved to the West End), and that made three of my plays on at the same time in London, all of them originally either condemned or shrugged off in New York over the previous thirty years.

Perhaps interviewers would now stop asking what I had been doing through the seventies and start looking into whether a significant number of worthwhile American plays had been chewed up and spat out by that lethal New York combination of a single
all-powerful newspaper and a visionless if not irresponsible theatre management, some sectors of which had, yes, profiteered to the point where the whole theatrical enterprise was gasping for air and near death while a handful of men grew very rich indeed.

In the sense that we lack any real awareness of a continuity with the past, we are, I think, a country without a theatre culture. I—as only one example—have gone through years when my plays were being performed in half a dozen countries but not in New York. Thus, when George Scott did
Salesman
in New York and Tony LoBianco
A View from the Bridge
on Broadway and then Dustin Hoffman
Salesman
again and Richard Kiley
All My Sons,
and a score of other major productions of my plays were mounted in and around the big cities, I seemed to have been “revived” when in fact I had only been invisible in my own land.

There are occasional painful reminders of our condition. To play Adrian, one of four fairly equal roles in the 1986 Royal Shakespeare Company production of
The Archbishop's Ceiling,
Roger Allam gave up the leading role as Javert in the monster hit
Les Misérables
because he had done it over sixty times and thought my play more challenging for him at that moment of his career. Nor did he consider his decision a particularly courageous one. This is part of what a theatre culture means, and it is something few New York actors would have the sense of security even to dream of doing. Perhaps an analogy lies in the medical culture, in which scores of researchers and practitioners simultaneously work on various lines of investigation, competing for excellence and fertilizing one another's ideas. That most of their results will not be commercially viable goes without saying, but it is equally obvious that the few great breakthroughs are all but impossible without a surrounding yeast of inquiry and false starts. The problem is not that the American theatre has no place for great plays but rather that it doesn't support good ones, the ground from which the extraordinary spring.