Molly Fox's Birthday (7 page)

Some years earlier I had been on a tram in Munich when I noticed that a man standing near to me was holding in his arms what I at first took to be a large rabbit and then realised was a hare. The man, who was in his forties, was wearing a brown flecked jumper with a hole in the elbow and a ravelled cuff. He was unshaven and looked tired; I remember that the knuckles of his right hand were skinned raw. He was holding the hare cuddled to his chest as one might carry a baby, and it concealed most of the upper part of his body, for the creature was massive. Apart from its size, the thing that struck me most about it were its strange ears, folded along the length of its back, and the curious shape of its head. The skull looked as if it had been crushed, and had a big brown eye on either side. It made me think of tropical fishes, as flat as coins, and I wondered what its field of vision must be. Its fur was mottled and neutral, so that it blended in with the colour of the man's jumper. I could understand how in its natural habitat – in open bogland, for instance – it would be superbly camouflaged, even when it was moving. It carried to the heart of the city a sense of wild places, of exposed moorland where there was heather but no trees, where there were small dark reedy lakes swept by the wind and rain. It reminded me of home. The hare was completely still in the man's arms. At no point did it attempt to struggle or wriggle, and they were both still on the tram when I got out at Marienplatz.

I knew that the man and the hare were the trigger for the play that I was going to write. That is not to say that it would be about them. They would not appear in it, would in all likelihood not be described or even mentioned. But I
knew that by going through them, by grasping imaginatively something about them, I would be able to get at what I needed to know and then I would be able to write the play.

This had been going on for several weeks now, and a kind of panic was beginning to settle on me. I tried not to think too much about the fact that this would be my twentieth play, for it gave me no comfort. Sitting at Molly's desk, there were times when I felt I had never before written a line in my life, and the idea of my producing a work that any professional company would wish to stage struck me as an absurdity. My past experience counted for nothing. This feeling was in itself a normal part of the process of writing: I knew this. I also knew that for the act of writing to become increasingly difficult rather than easier with each work was logical. It would have been easy to repeat things that had been successful, to slip into stale and formulaic writing. But I wanted every time to do something new, something that would surprise the public, something that would perhaps surprise even me. I wanted to do something of which I hadn't, until then, known I was capable. And this too was a normal part of the process. While it sometimes got me down, it was also usually what got me out of bed in the morning. It was a challenge, and I loved it.

No, there was a particular reason why getting to grips with my twentieth play was such a struggle and it was this: my nineteenth had been an unprecedented disaster.

Looking back on it now – something I still try to avoid – it appears to me as an accursed inversion, as a reflection in a dark mirror, of having my first play produced. Then I had found in Molly, the leading actor, a friend for life. In
the director of my most recent work, I had made a mortal enemy who I felt was probably still poisoning my reputation about the place, even as I sat there, gazing down at the fake cow. I had written
Summer with Lucy
in a headlong rush of confidence, certain of what I was about. Nothing before or since had come so easily to me; at times it had been like taking dictation. My only problem had been to keep up with the flood of dialogue and incident that rushed through my mind, day after day.

Halfway through writing
The Yellow Roses
I fell ill. It was quite serious and lasted several months, leaving me drained and devitalised. When I was finally well enough to start work again, I found I had lost all interest in the play; but because of the time and effort I had already invested in it, and for want of another immediate project, I felt I had to at least try to crank up some enthusiasm and keep going. Although I was heartily sick of it by the time I finished it, it was, I still believe, a fine play, as good as anything I've written, or I would never have delivered it for production. Indeed at that stage the signs were all positive, and I thought that my luck had turned. The text was well received by those who read it, and I was surprised and delighted when Stuart Ferguson said he wanted to direct it.

Stuart was the latest theatrical marvel. When barely out of college he directed a stunning
Medea
– I had seen it myself – that had made his name. He followed this with outstanding productions of
The Cherry Orchard
and
Measure for Measure
and then a successful film; and all this was accomplished well before his thirtieth birthday. My play was to be the first contemporary work he had tackled for the stage. Our initial meeting, over coffee in a
central London hotel, was perfectly cordial, with much mutual admiration expressed. What I had seen of his work had greatly impressed me. He was clearly keen to direct the play, and what he said to me about it made me believe that he had grasped its central idea, that he understood it. But after we had shaken hands and I walked off through the wet grey streets of a London dusk, under all my relief at having found a gifted director for my new play there was, I knew, something unwanted and unpleasant, hard and dry as a pip: dislike. I didn't like Stuart and I suspected that he didn't much like me.

I have asked myself many times since that day why, so late in my professional life, did I make such a basic mistake as to go against my instincts, to ignore Dislike (ignoring, too, Dislike's sinister little brother, Distrust). My illness and the subsequent struggle to complete
The
Yellow Roses
had unnerved me. I was rattled, worn out. I needed the energy and confidence, the charmed magic of success that I didn't feel in myself but that I believed Stuart could bring to the production. In this I was forgetting about my own considerable reputation which was, I suppose, why Stuart swallowed his own dislike of me and wanted to direct the play.

I found him false. His origins were not dissimilar to my own. We both came from modest farming backgrounds, in a remote boggy part of Tyrone, mountainous and wild, in my case; a croft in the Scottish highlands in his. Stuart held the world that had produced him in contempt. Apart from the accent, which he'd decided to keep, he'd made himself over completely. In itself, I wouldn't have had a problem with this. Andrew had done the same thing and I'd found it admirable. The difference was that with
Andrew I always felt that he had become something he needed to be, something that he was but that had been denied to him until he had the courage to accept it. Stuart was just a phoney.

For all that, agreement was reached, dates fixed, actors cast and contracts signed: Stuart and I were locked into working together. Molly thought that a certain degree of tension between us might be no bad thing. She told me that she had on occasion done good work with people she didn't much care for, whom she'd found abrasive or hostile. Even if it was dark energy that was being generated it was still energy, and if it could be converted and channelled into the work it would make for a powerful production. ‘You're not going to live with this person,' she pointed out. ‘You don't have to be their friend.' Her argument persuaded me, because I realised that I had experienced the opposite situation many years earlier, when a cast, director and technical people had been so fond of each other, such good mates and so uncritically admiring of each other's efforts, that the end result had had all the edge and power of a school play.

And so we went into rehearsal.
The Yellow Roses
was about an Irish couple, Ellie and Lorcan, who had moved to London in their twenties, she a nurse, he a labourer, where they met and married. Now in retirement, Lorcan wants to go back to live in Connemara again, while Ellie insists she wants to stay in London. The conflict between them about this, together with the input from their doctor daughter and schoolteacher son, formed the substance of the play. It was a work that dealt with the nature of home, how it was often a state of mind as much as a place.

After I left my family to go to university, I never again lived in the north, but it has remained a constant in my life, a touchstone, the imaginative source of so much of my writing. Even this new play I was struggling now to write in Molly's house was connected with it: the hare's world was also mine. I have always believed that I know who I am, no small thing in the shifting dream that is contemporary life. I put this down to my background, my identity as solid as the mountainside on which I grew up. With Stuart and the actors we talked in rehearsal about home, about returning. I said that the person in the play with whom I most closely identified was Lorcan. I told them that although I too had lived in London for most of my adult life my plan was that eventually I would live in Ireland again.

‘But you can't,' Stuart said. ‘You can never go back. Never' – and when I gently protested against this, he became more vehement, scornful even. Our discussion quickly moved from being a valid exploration of something to help us in the production of the play to personal acrimony. I suppose I had known that going back was as much a wish as a plan, and writing the play had been a way for me to deal with it, to let myself down gently. I knew Stuart was probably right, and he knew that I knew, that was the worst thing. ‘And anyway, why would you want to go back?'

‘I do!' I cried, petulant as a child. ‘I just do!' He laughed and turned away, changed the subject. He'd rattled me in front of the cast, got under my skin, and I realised then that this was how he operated.

In the following days and weeks he worked his way steadily through everyone involved in the production,
systematically sowing conflict and dissent, setting people up and playing them off against each other. By instilling a sense of fear and insecurity in everyone, he wanted to get the upper hand. I could see how this tactic might work. Doubtless it had contributed to his rapid rise and early successes; but to deliberately create tension and unease in an enterprise as fragile as a theatre production is a high-risk strategy, and on
The Yellow Roses
his luck ran out. We all eventually realised that he was an arch manipulator, but by then the damage had been done.

I remember watching him the night before the first preview as he berated the young actor who was playing the daughter. Had this happened early in rehearsal I would have got involved myself and tried to get him to back off. Now I realised that this was exactly what he wanted and that I would most likely have ended up arguing with the actor while Stuart withdrew, amused and in control. I kept my own counsel and studied him from the far side of the room. His accent, the expensive casual clothes he wore, the small leather-bound books in which he made notes while he worked and the black fountain pen with which he made them: all of this I held in disdain. What was he running away from? I asked myself. And what did he think he was running towards? I loathed social ambition as much as I approved of artistic ambition, of making the work as good as it could possibly be; and Stuart was a shameless social climber, always dropping names, always sucking up to the famous and powerful.

By the time the first night came, I thought that if
Summer with Lucy
had been the glorious start to my career then
The Yellow Roses
might well mark its ignominious end. I couldn't help hoping for a miracle, of the
kind that does sometimes happen in the theatre. Was it possible that all the ill-will generated, all the bad feeling rife in the company, might by some strange means be converted into that good energy of which Molly had spoken, that it might transform and electrify the production?

No. There was to be no miracle. The first night did not go well and we all got mauled in the press the following day, every last one of us: the cast, the set designer, the wardrobe people, the musicians; but the most scathing and dismissive responses were aimed at the writer and the director. I read the reviews the following morning with that strange, flesh-crawling sensation, that sudden brief flush of a chill, nauseous feeling that goes with being on the receiving end of a bad press.
This tedious play …
lacklustre production … yellow roses that have faded and
lost their bloom … banality … inept … truly dreadful
… It was like being mugged. By some weird means the critics divined the bad feeling between Stuart and myself and cranked it up.
There's no knowing what possessed
Stuart Ferguson to make his contemporary directing
debut with this lazy play, from a writer whose best work
is long past
. Lazy? Christ Almighty! Now I was ready to mug the mugger. I pushed the newspapers away from me and with that the phone rang.

‘You must be bitterly disappointed.' It was Molly. That marvellous voice was charged with all the power that those two words were capable of carrying, the bitterness, the disappointment, and yet to hear it made me feel better, as if she was able to articulate for me the pain that I could only feel. ‘Yes, Molly,' I said, ‘I am.'

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing of all was that my ignominy coincided exactly with her greatest triumph.
She had opened in
The Duchess of Malfi
a fortnight earlier, and already it was being called a performance that would define the role for a generation. If my play had also been a success, how we would have celebrated together! If I had been as I was now, quietly engaged in writing a new work, I would have been energised and fired up by her success. Instead, we both had to face at the end of that week a newspaper column giving an overview of current theatrical offerings: