The Blue Touch Paper (16 page)

In 1997, a year before his death, Ted Hughes astonished me at dinner in the open air one summer evening in Malvern by saying how much he envied me my life. ‘You chose the theatre.
I wish I had.' Perhaps he was right. Theatre's highs may be infrequent, but they are peculiarly pure. In those first weeks, it didn't take Tony and me long to find a few brave actors willing to risk a punt. Hilary Charlton, William Hoyland, Neil Johnston, Maurice Colbourne and Nicholas Nacht became a company which would stay together on short rations for several months. In no time at all Tony and I were rehearsing in the living room of an unoccupied house, sharing the direction as we had shared the writing. By October, we had begun performing in the Arts Lab where J. G. Ballard had hung the walls with pictures of car crashes. Not long after, we were touring. Tony was all the time on the lookout for playwrights who might give us something unexpected. He had a left-field idea to premiere Lawrence Durrell's unperformed play
An Irish Faustus
. But when we went to meet the author at eleven o'clock one morning in a Covent Garden pub, we were more put off by Durrell's pervasive melancholy than we were by his already having drunk a Pernod with a Fernet Branca chaser before we arrived. His own gloomy view of the play coloured ours. Tony seemed on a safer track with John Grillo, a droll actor, and with Snoo Wilson, an eccentric and highly charged student who was still at the University of East Anglia. Snoo had a shock of unruly brown hair, as if someone had just given him fifty volts. He also had an uncontrollable laugh, in-turned, most often at his own jokes, and an ability to make sentences which came out like pearled, intricate cadenzas. Tony and I had gone to Norwich earlier in the year to see his dramatisation of Virginia Woolf's last novel,
Between the Acts
. Tony was a much more far-seeing producer than me, with an uncanny nose for potential, so when he insisted the play was talented, I believed him, although I had not understood large swathes of it. But when, not far into 1969,
Snoo calculated that the completion of his degree course was more important to him than delivering a ramshackle touring company the new play he had promised, I realised there was only one thing to do. Tony and I were already drivers, stage managers, lighting designers and sound operators. I decided I might as well hyphenate into playwriting too.

Tony insists that I was encouraged in this decision by the fact that I had at the end of 1968 become literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre. This had happened largely by accident. My old friend Christopher Hampton had written an adolescent play about the confusion of a young man who desires his best friend but ends up in a relationship with his best friend's mother. It was first performed at Oxford University, then later for a couple of Sunday nights at the Court. In 1966
When Did You Last See My Mother?
transferred to the Comedy Theatre for a three-week season, and Christopher, aged twenty, became the youngest dramatist in modern times to be performed in the West End. The music of the dialogue was derived from John Osborne, but the power of the feeling was Christopher's own. On leaving university, he had become the Court's literary manager, in charge of dealing with submitted scripts and advising on the repertory. Fairly soon he had found he had no time to write plays. So he had suggested to the artistic director, William Gaskill, that I take over the reading in order to free him up for the writing. Becoming the Royal Court's literary manager at the age of twenty-one did not seem in any way remarkable or precocious. No one else wanted the job. My office, the size of a broom cupboard, also served as a corridor to the lavatories. For a three-day week, the wage was £7.50.

In Tony's preferred version of events, I spent a lot of my time in the Portable van, as we cruised along the motorway from
one far-flung engagement to the next, with my head in my hands, groaning. According to him, I would sit there flipping the pages of one of the thousand new plays the Court received every year, occasionally looking up to say, ‘I can do better than this.' But my own recollection is much more stark and practical. It was only on a Wednesday that Tony and I reluctantly accepted that Snoo's repeated postponements did indeed mean he was not going to deliver. We had a gaping hole in our touring programme which had to be filled in time for rehearsals the following Monday. We couldn't afford to renege. And so I was forced to write my first play in just four days by perching a small typewriter on my knee as we sped from gig to gig. I tried it out, line by line, on Tony. The result, a one-act satire on the way left-wing politics were feeding off media celebrity, was unfeeling and obvious. But when I put the Roneoed typescript in the actors' hands, they didn't look unhappy. At some basic level, the page looked right. There was a rhythm. It turned out I could write dialogue before I could write plays.

By now the company itself had changed. Neil and Maurice had left us to go and join the Freehold, a physical theatre group which, like us, was performing at the Arts Lab. One of the noticeable things about histories of the fringe is how completely the women get written out. But they were just as formative as the men, and sometimes more so. Beth Porter, an American actress, had arrived in London inspired by the example of Ellen Stewart's La Mama Theatre in New York, and formed a company called the Wherehouse. It was Nancy Meckler who transformed Beth's Wherehouse group into the Freehold, which, alongside the wildly musical Pip Simmons Group and the People Show, two other fringe favourites, eventually toured to some of the same venues as us, including the ever reliable
Mickery Theatre which, in the early days, was in the middle of Amsterdam. Portable was already unusual – some would say obstinate – in those experimental times for never losing its faith in the power of the word. At first, we presented a repertory in which Strindberg, Kafka and Genet were strongly featured. We were still in love with the European avant-garde. See the work which had seemed to us contemporary, the
nouvelle vague
cinema of Malle, of Truffaut, of Godard, of Varda and of Resnais, and you will be amazed at how literary it is, how steeped in great writing. But among companies closer to America, language was commonly said to be dead, a hopelessly corrupt form of communication which could no longer convey essentials. The future of performance lay in rock music, in video, in mime and in puppetry. The dominant mode was a sort of galleried performance art which relied more on multimedia than it did on any ancestry in literature. If Portable still walked round muttering neurotic European texts, the majority of our fringe contemporaries preferred to stand in vests sweating on one another's shoulders to the sound of rock.

The word ‘influential' is today invariably attached to the name of Portable Theatre. Tony Bicât and I both realised quickly that a theatre's influence may well be directly disproportionate to the size of its audience. Influence may be spread as much by firing up the distant imaginations of people who never see the work as it is by inspiring those who do. Nothing wrong with that. But if Portable Theatre was influential, it was also unrepresentative.
How Brophy Made Good
opened at Oval House in March 1969 to no particular acclaim. Why should it? It wasn't very good. When we went to the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, I got my first professional review as a dramatist: ‘The most pointless evening I have ever spent in the theatre.'
Things could only go up from there. Tony had begun directing my sixty-minute effort with a cast made up from two of our original company, joined by Ian McCulloch and Moris Farhi, a young Turkish actor who was also a novelist, poet and aspiring television writer. His six episodes of
Doctor Who
in which the Doctor would have met Alexander the Great had just been rejected. The cast unsurprisingly tended to turn towards me to ask questions of a highly unorthodox choral text. ‘What on earth did you mean by this?' ‘Why do you put it like that?' So after a couple of weeks, Tony had taken me out for a drink and said, ‘You're obviously itching to direct it yourself. Why don't you?' Although Tony had sky-high ambitions for Portable Theatre, he had few for himself, and they weren't conventional. As he said, we were working towards a kind of theatre which didn't exist, or rather which existed only in his mind. He defined it as rough theatre with fine detail. He would make it happen any way he could. So I largely took over directing my own play. When it opened, my primary feeling was one of relief.

One of the most intriguing things about any artwork is how its destiny is only slowly revealed. Up an alley at the end of West Street, just a hundred yards from the Brighton seafront, lay the Combination, a sixty-seat Victorian schoolhouse. It had a cafe serving the characteristic food of the period, carrot cake, muesli and bread pudding with raisins. The coffee came in those little rounded Perspex cups which had been all the rage in Soho in the days of Tommy Steele. For me, the Combination was the most heady of all sixties theatres, the nearest place in Britain, as one founder said, to San Francisco. If there ever was an acid dream that wasn't a nightmare, it was here. The theatre had been started by a group of friends, Ruth Marks, Jenny Harris and Noel Greig, who had all been at London University
together and all of whom were to die too young. It was fiercely collective. Whenever Portable visited we were invariably made welcome and regarded as friendly neutrals in long-running disputes. However, we were aware that our week-long visits provided the resident company with a welcome break to redouble the vigour of its own internal arguments. There was absolutely no assumption, be it theatrical or political, which went unchallenged at the Combination. It was typical of the place that one of their most successful productions was played under the memorable title
Don't Come
. It was an injunction which the loyal audience of strays and hippies was more than happy to disobey. It was packed. It involved, in my memory, a group of naked actors walking around clucking like chickens and reading the Communist Manifesto. The British theatre, or at least our part of it, was already prone to these agonised crises of conscience which were to become so common in the next ten years. Artists were finding art inadequate. Only direct action would do.

Those of us still wanting to persist with putting on plays recognised that the Combination was one of those accidental, magical spaces, like Peter Brook's later Bouffes du Nord in Paris, which make everything seem better. I was learning that one of the most surprising rewards of theatre is to marvel at how a play may gleam at a different angle according to where and when it's presented. The thoughts and feelings with which the audience arrive are half the story. On the road, bruised by travel and slapped down in hostile environments, my writing had seemed, at best, knowing and pretentious. The play came across as a sort of metropolitan sneer which didn't bother to explain what it was sneering about. The author seemed to live in a cocoon of superior attitudes which, without reason, he assumed the audience shared. But the moment
How Brophy Made Good
arrived
in Brighton, it unexpectedly began to cohere. As Tony put it, the pervading smell of cold newspaper and wet pizza somehow oozed creativity. What, on the road, had spluttered like damp timber responded to friendly winds and caught fire. In Brighton an audience were waiting who were already steeped in the generous anarchy of the Combination, and who warmed to the inchoate anger of the young man who had written this week's unexceptional show. Under their gaze, the play acquired a purpose and depth which not even the most partial spectator would have been able to detect during its tour. They roared with friendly laughter at the ridiculous insanity of left-wing self-regard in screwed-up right-wing Britain.

It was into this invigorated atmosphere that Margaret Matheson stepped on a Sunday night. It was our last performance in Brighton and as we were packing up the stage to go home, a very conspicuous young woman, with a boyish haircut, tall and beautiful in a long tweed coat, with a thick Scottish scarf and gloves, stayed on when everyone else had gone to tell me how much she had enjoyed the performance. It was a change to see something which made you laugh. She had come down specially from London by train, because she had liked the sound of the play when she had read about it in an obscure professional newspaper. It had never occurred to her that the trip might actually be worthwhile. She worked as a secretary, she said, for the well-known socialist agent Clive Goodwin, who besides representing some of the most political dramatists of the day was also one of the founders of the revolutionary newspaper
The Black Dwarf
. In late afternoons, she told me, sometimes while smoking a companionable joint, they would discuss expanding the client list which already included Fay Weldon, Dennis Potter and Simon Gray. Clive had encouraged
Margaret to establish a list of her own. Trevor Griffiths had been her first signing. I was to be her second.

Her boss took to me as fast as Margaret had done, and claimed me as his own. For some reason, at that moment in his life, which at that point was as thoroughly tragic as it would continue to be, Clive was tickled pink by the idea of me. He had a spacious flat on the Cromwell Road where he both worked and lived and where the offices of the
Black Dwarf
had originally been. It was hung with sumptuous canvases by his wife, ‘the Wimbledon Bardot', Pauline Boty. She was already something of a legend, both as a beauty and as an artist, and was believed to be the model for Liz, the liberated woman played in suede coat and with swinging handbag by Julie Christie in
Billy Liar
. Boty, who coined the best ever definition of pop art – she called it ‘nostalgia for now' – was the only radical feminist in that movement and, as such, way before her time. She and Clive had been married for only three years when she died of cancer in 1966, at the age of twenty-eight, having refused the chemotherapy that would have had the side-effect of killing her unborn child. Dressed in expensive velvet trousers by Yves St Laurent, I guess, the still-grieving widower Clive was in his mid-thirties, laid-back and lugubrious, dark circles bringing out the light of his Lothario eyes. He was a working-class boy from Kensal Rise who had already been repertory actor, television presenter, magazine editor and newspaper proprietor. On first encounter Clive told me that it was a small miracle that somebody had arrived on the left with a sense of humour. How rare was that? He had, he said, sent my modest jape to Michael Codron, the West End's most prominent straight-play producer. It was Michael who had staged Harold Pinter's first work,
The Birthday Party
, in its famous five-day outing at the
Lyric Hammersmith. By return of post, Michael had written back to say he liked my writing as much as Clive did. He would like to commission a full-length comedy from me. Did I have a subject? Clive asked. I certainly did, I replied. What was it? Feminism. Perfect, said Clive, rubbing his hands.