The Blue Touch Paper (15 page)

Tony believed that I had hated Cambridge because I thought it resembled the real world – i.e. a series of uptight English institutions – whereas Tony hated it because he knew it didn't. Why, then, did I make a slapstick attempt to join ITV's rival, the BBC, as a general trainee? Invited before a kidney-shaped board of dark-suited men and women for one of their coveted fast-track entry positions, I was presented with a series of moral dilemmas which apparently exercised the minds of the Corporation's finest. I was asked to imagine a situation in which I was directing a broadcast at Heathrow airport for the arrival of the Queen's plane, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a full jet-load of passengers crash-landing and being incinerated on the opposite runway. What would be my priority be? To turn
the cameras and get exclusive, live pictures of a news story? Or to self-censor, in order to spare the audience the sight of living people being burnt to a crisp? I replied that there would be no question. I would cover the news. There was a rustle of shock and discontent. The Chair, who was looking like a snail which had just been salted, asked me whether, in that case, there was anything at all which I would not consider showing on television. Too readily, I replied that of course there was. I hoped to leave it at that. But the Chair persisted, asking to say what that thing would be. I hesitated and said that surely he didn't want me to say. Oh, but he did. ‘Very well,' I said. ‘Cripples making love.'

If only I had known it, I had begun what would become an unappealing habit of leaving things before it was time. Because I could see a way out, I took it. As far as Cambridge was concerned, I had, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, ‘had the experience but missed the meaning'. My restlessness in my last year meant that I spent more and more time jumping onto trains to London, even if the BBC, aghast at the summoning of a physical image they had clearly never before contemplated, were unlikely ever to consider me as suitable officer material. I had put on my beige elephant cord suit from John Stephen in Carnaby Street in April 1967 to go to the
14 Hour Technicolor Dream
at Alexandra Palace and had stood disbelieving as Yoko Ono climbed a pair of steps and stood on top, cutting up pieces of paper which covered a naked model. The event, attended by ten thousand entranced young people and featuring as many happenings as bands, was the first swallow of a spring whose weekly rites would be held in clubs like Middle Earth at Covent Garden and the UFO in the Tottenham Court Road. I went many times, often more like an anthropologist than a person. People of my
age were beginning to divide, with overlaps naturally, between those who wanted to change the world and those who wanted to have a good time. The interactions between the two tendencies would eventually create all sorts of interesting frictions, as the claim that by doing the second you might thereby do the first grew less plausible with time. But there were also those like me who stood at the side, watching both groups and liking both, and yet not having that necessary sense of utter belonging that I saw on the abandoned faces of the stoned dancers and in the deep convictions of the revolutionaries.

I did join in a few times, particularly when called back to Cambridge to graduate. The Master of the college, a classicist called Denys Page, made a dreadful speech in which he said 1968 had been a year of militant student protest, but that mercifully such protest had not lapped onto the shores of Jesus College. I was among a small but noisy group who booed him heartily. He had the grace to look surprised.

6

Don't Come

A new phase of my life began in Earlham Street, just off Cambridge Circus, in the summer of 1968. For £15 a week, split three ways, Christopher Hudson, a medical student at St Bart's called Richard Gillette and I found a room each and a shared kitchen in a tiny apartment on the second floor of Nos 5–7, in a lively market street that ran down to Seven Dials. The Australian owners were going to Ibiza. Inside, you could barely turn round. But the moment you stepped out the door, you had the advantage that you were in the centre of the West End. Soho, still filthy dirty, belonged to the alcoholics and the prostitutes. Men in heavy overcoats swilled Pernod with shaky hands in the French pub, while milk-white girls in slacks, heels and improvised turbans rushed busily from club to club. A filling lunch at Jimmy's, the Greek basement, was chicken livers and chips. On Sunday mornings, apart from the odd milk-cart, you had the place to yourself. When Tony Elliot visited, notebook and pen in hand, to collect details of the events he was listing in the first ever edition of his new pocket-sized magazine
Time Out
, he perched on the edge of my bed. There was nowhere else to sit. As the last great smog turned the air thick and wet at the end of the year, I was still sucking down God knows how many cigarettes a day. One morning I woke up with bronchitis, as if a damp cloth were being held over my nose and mouth, and was grateful that the Charing Cross Hospital, housed in
the pepper-pot building just off Trafalgar Square, was not far down the road. It was scarcely visible as I approached. A man in the next bed with a collapsed lung was still allowed to smoke a pipe in the designated lung ward, as we all watched
Elmer Gantry
on one bright colour television shared between thirty. When I woke at 3 a.m. from my opiate sleep to find nurses putting screens round the bed of another man in the very last moments of choking to death, I resolved to give up the cancer-sticks. And did.

Recreations of the period mislead by their lack of diversity. In musicians' memoirs, descriptions of outrageous behaviour are justified with the formula ‘Hey, it was the sixties.' But for every person who loved drugs there was another, like me, who distrusted them. Yes, the party – often beginning on Saturday night at 10 p.m. and ending on Sunday long after dawn – was always the unit of currency, the common building block of the period. But even before becoming a dramatist, I had the instincts of a voyeur, and still do. I'm always happiest at the side of the room, watching. I didn't respond well to drugs. Their effect mainly was to make me paranoid and to stoke my insecurity. They sent me the message that everything was not all right. When I took them, the universe never seemed to cohere, nor to impart meaning. So I seemed condemned to spend a certain number of evenings per week watching other people drift away peaceably. To me, it seemed axiomatic that one person was going to be more interesting than many. I preferred to go deep than wide. The image of those first London years would always be of closing the door and slipping away early before the dope, already a fog, became a blanket. I was invariably more interested in who I might leave the party with than with anything that happened during it.

The work at Pathé was fun. The office was at 142 Wardour Street, so I could walk there in five minutes. Richard Dunn was an ideal boss, and my fellow researcher was Charlie Gillett, who knew everything about rock and roll. In the early 1960s, Charlie had suggested to the
Observer
that he might write a column for them about popular music. They had replied by saying that not only did they not want his column, but that they found it unimaginable that the
Observer
would ever run any column about pop music, because pop wasn't, and never could be, art. Charlie, with his defiantly short haircut, was indifferent to the fashion of the times. A keen sprinter, he was as lean as James Dean and dressed like him in jeans and plimsolls. Later, it was Charlie who wrote rock's first and best history,
The Sound of the City
. He also discovered Ian Dury and managed him in the early days when, before the Blockheads, he led a pub band called Kilburn and the High Roads. It was typical of Charlie that when Dury was approached by another manager, Charlie let him go, telling him to do whatever was best for the music.

There were to be two sets of films, supposedly pilots for an intended series, one on War and Society, and the other on Sex and Society. Charlie had arrived before me. He had shrewdly calculated that there would, in a newsreel archive, be a great deal more footage of the first than of the second. He had bagged War. I was left with Sex. My search for any usable Dionysian material became so desperate that I ended up making
Sex and Society Part One: The Duke of Windsor
, on the unlikely grounds that at least there was film of
him
. I watched it so often that from memory I can still do a passable imitation of Edward VIII's resignation speech. But much as I was relishing the chance to sit at a Steenbeck and learn how to cut film, I suffered from
a bothering sense of urgency. At last I was free. It had taken long enough. But what was the point of freedom if you didn't use it? Both Tony and I had perfected our contempt for the English theatre as we believed it to be. Without having seen it, we thought everything was rubbish. We had both wanted to go into film because film was modern and theatre wasn't. But one afternoon, having a cup of tea in Earlham Street, I asked him why we couldn't start a new company from scratch. How about a different kind of theatre that didn't play to the old audience? Tony looked at my small wireless in the kitchen and said, ‘Why shouldn't theatre be portable? Like that radio?'

Seeking a blessing from the country's leading stage director appeared to be a necessary rite of passage for anyone with new ideas. So we wrote to Peter Brook, who invited us to his luxurious, rather formal house in Kensington. It was that easy. We sat down next to the grand piano. Six years previously Brook had directed an unforgettable
King Lear
with Paul Scofield at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which we'd all visited from school, but lately he was moving into a more experimental period, growing closer, in spirit at least, to a nascent alternative theatre than he was to the mainstream. Forced out of his Paris quarters in Les Gobelins by the
événements
of May '68, he had come to the Roundhouse with an international company and staged some beautiful fragments from
The Tempest
. In their jazzy and carefully improvised feeling these scenes very much chimed with the kind of theatre Tony and I aspired to. The afternoon we visited him, Brook took us to a local comprehensive to see a school play which had been written by his friends Albert Hunt and Adrian Mitchell. And then when we sat down to talk, he asked why we were even beginning to think about finding a base. What was the point? Brook said he had just
spent ten years on the National Theatre's building committee, helping to plan what would become Denys Lasdun's brutalist fortress on the South Bank. He had become convinced that they were going about things the wrong way round. All the energy was going into bricks and mortar. How much better to stick to our original idea, a theatre called Portable. Why not do the work first, then find out later what sort of building might one day accommodate it? Further, he added, the only way of discovering your identity was by starting. Young directors, he said, always had a list of plays they imagined they wanted to do. They planned something by Kleist or Schiller, and to stage, as they believed, what would be a revelatory production of a Webster, inevitably
The Duchess of Malfi
or, even worse,
The White Devil
. But soon enough, he said, if a theatre company were remotely original, it would find its own direction. At that point, Webster and Kleist could go hang.

This was perfect advice from someone we admired. It was also yet more high-octane fuel for a process which was already moving at the speed of a good idea. Tony handed me a copy of Kafka's diaries and suggested we dramatise them. A cheerful friend from Warwick University, Gus Hope, joined us and laughed when we gave her the title of administrator. The three of us worked out a simple system. We foresaw employing five actors, each of whom would get one tenth of the take. We three would get a further tenth each, and the remaining two tenths would go to the expenses of running the company. It was socialist and it was fair, even if it would turn out to be incompatible with making a living. Gus wrote to Olympia, who responded by giving us a free electric typewriter, and the three of us signed a letter of appeal to Volkswagen, who responded by giving us one of their classic nine-seater camper
vans. Young people trying the same route today are disbelieving when told how simple we found it in 1968. The main reason? So few others had thought to do it.

Asked why she went on the stage, Tallulah Bankhead replied, ‘To get out of the audience.' In the following twenty years, more than seven hundred theatre companies were formed all over the UK, as if small-scale plays – confrontational, angry, direct – might somehow reach a gap in an audience's concerns that nothing else was filling. For popularity drama could never compete with music. But it could articulate a timely kind of discontent, and thereby release discontent's paradoxical energy. By a freak of timing, Portable Theatre was there almost at the start. We went first to Jim Haynes at the Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane. Tony and I told him we wanted to put on a show we were writing together, drawn from Kafka and entitled
Inside Out
. Jim said, ‘Sure. When do you want to do it?' Jim, an American ex-serviceman who had founded the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1963, was one of the two inspirational theatre leaders in London who were happiest saying yes. The other was Peter Oliver, who was the warden of Oval House in Kennington, a boys' club set up by Christ Church, Oxford, to welcome local youths. It had originally been skewed towards sport, but Peter had turned it into a rough performance space which was open to anyone who felt they had something to contribute. From the start, Portable Theatre relied on the patronage of these two extraordinary men, even though we hoped our long-term future might involve taking theatre where it had never been before. Our thinking was simple: only by changing the places of performance could we also change the audience. Change the audience and you will change the character of the theatre experience.

Such ambitions are common in the twenty-first century. Plays presented outside playhouses today have to groan under the ugly name of ‘site-specific'. It's become a genre, and, like all genres, constrained. But in those days, when Jerzy Grotowski invited us all to trek out to a disused film studio in southwest London to see
Akropolis
, it was just something he wanted to do. In the years of its existence, Portable Theatre would eventually play in army camps, in village halls, in libraries, on canteen floors, in churches and chapels, and even in people's front rooms. A repertory which was uncompromising, at first in the height of its brow but later in the extremity of its analysis, made for some uncomfortable evenings. We walked a fine and occasionally smug line between affront and cackhandedness. We were happy to judge our impact not by the length of the applause – sometimes there wasn't any – but by the level of shock we achieved. A night in Workington when we had packed the van and driven away beyond the city limits before the audience even got up from its seats came to represent the epitome of everything we were trying to achieve. Go in, shake them up and get out. Occasionally, driving home on the empty motorways there would be magical incidents. At two o'clock one morning on the M1 we drew out to overtake a black stretch limo with Count Basie, also returning from a gig, in the back. We travelled alongside him long enough to scrawl a message on a piece of card which we held up to the window. ‘You're great'. The Count smiled and toasted us with his glass of whisky. Then we sped on. In our first year of work we would drive our Volkswagen more than fifteen thousand miles.