The Blue Touch Paper (24 page)

Not long after, I joined Richard in Nottingham, just as the dexterous Stuart Burge finally disclosed to the board that they had unknowingly acquired a new director. Since the news had been equably received, it was my firm intention to stay and help carry on building the repertory. Richard, in preparation, was moving into a Georgian house in the Park, in the very centre of Nottingham, accompanied by Sue Birtwistle, whom he had just married. Sue, tall and confident, was going to run the Theatre in Education company, which in the 1970s was such an important feature of any rep. I went to live as a lodger in their house. They were so generous that it was impossible to be anything but amused when Richard, running back in for something he'd forgotten, left Margaret's Renault 8 on the top of a hill with the handbrake off, with the inevitable consequences. Together Sue and Richard became the most hospitable couple in the East Midlands, handing out huge quantities of food and drink nightly to a shifting cast of guests – actors, writers, directors, designers and musicians – who would gather, usually after a show, to laugh and make music long into the night. Not even my transient obsession with Carly Simon, which was driving everyone else in the house nuts – I played the same tracks twenty times a day – could prevent this from feeling like lift-off. Richard was about to do something new and revolutionary. He was about to transform a regional theatre given over to high art to one which did eleven new plays in his first season. It was unheard of.

John McGrath had suggested the name
Brassneck
for our tale of civic greed. Whether as one word or two, it meant ‘effrontery'. Howard and I had seized it eagerly. Richard, as producer,
had never made any secret of his jealousy that I was getting to direct. He fancied the play for himself. He astonished me on the first day of rehearsal when he introduced me to the company by saying, ‘David's going to be directing the play, but it's his first production in a big theatre, so don't worry, I shan't be far away.' The company looked as stunned as I did. One of the actors said to me later, ‘It was my first job, so I assumed that's how everyone behaved in the professional theatre.' In the previous few months I had come to think Richard was my friend – after all, we'd done everything together – and now here he was, cutting my legs off at the knees by publicly telling everyone I might be incompetent. Once I got to know Richard better, I began to recognise this kind of change in temperature as part of his make-up. He had a gift which made him an outstanding producer. He would always take one step back to get a better view of the scrum. Artistically, I had to be right in the middle.

In the event, Richard's white charger stayed safely locked up in the stable.
Brassneck
could hardly have gone better. The board of the theatre weren't too keen on an early scene which, thanks to a smuggled document we had obtained, accurately recreated the secret rituals of Freemasonry, with everyone rolling up their trousers and talking gibberish about the Great Architect. They didn't like it when the audience laughed. There were more than a few walk-outs. And not everyone was convinced by a third act in which the Bagleys, the prototypical entrepreneurial family, move from construction into the ultimate capitalist product, heroin. In the days before whole western economies came to depend on black markets in the stuff, it was all thought to be a little far-fetched. There was a disapproving air of ‘Come on, boys, a joke's a joke.' Capitalists dealing in drugs, indeed! But you would have needed to be a very cold fish indeed to
resist the fizz of the play, its zest. It was brazen.
Brassneck
had an infectious, strongly narrative drive as it set about portraying a family who crashed straight through the pieties of respectable British life. For once, public corruption was ripped into in public and with a will. From where I sat in the first row of the balcony, you could watch the smiles spread through the auditorium. Paul Dawkins, as Alfred Bagley, the conniving patriarch of the dynasty, gave the performance of his life. The third act began with a recording of the Rolling Stones singing ‘You Can't Always Get What You Want', and I've rarely known a song create such a thrill of expectation. To this day, every time I hear that perfect opening couplet, ‘I saw her today at the reception/A glass of wine in her hand', I have memories of the heady oxygenated kind of theatrical happiness which comes only when you know that a nail is being hit bang on the head.

Having planned to stay on at Nottingham, I then didn't. In an ungainly panic that I was about to commit myself to something I would do very badly, I changed my mind. I was aware that in walking away so soon I was letting Richard down. It was unforgivable. In what prospered over the subsequent thirty years as a close theatrical partnership, in which Richard went on to direct six of my plays, I had occasionally to remind myself that retreats happened once or twice on both sides, but they were from thoughtlessness, nothing more. By achieving a play which got Richard's regime off to such a popular start, I had served him far better than I ever would have done by hanging around. I hadn't guessed that I would be so uncomfortable running a large theatre. I took it too personally. When one of the stage carpenters impregnated an usherette, I went running across to Richard in his office to ask, ‘What are we going to do?' He very reasonably looked at me and replied, ‘Nothing.' He
looked even more bewildered when I said, ‘But she's terribly upset.' I wasn't cut out for the regular institutional mish-mash of unexpected events and hurt feelings, whereas Richard was. He was able to sail above it. When he saw the usherette later that day, he knew exactly the right thing to say to her and I didn't. After Nottingham, in particular when Richard went on to run the National Theatre throughout the 1990s, I felt I was able to be more practical use to him by not being a brochured part of his team. I got used to the phone ringing on my work desk every morning at 9 a.m. It was always Richard, calling for fifteen minutes' perspective from a different angle of view. I was more than happy to act as his confidential
consigliere
. It meant that we would discuss whatever was most annoying him without it going any further. I would never claim to have contributed to any of the innovative and bold decisions, not least to premiere
Angels in America
and to introduce multiracial casting, which made the period of his artistic directorship a benchmark. But I did stop him doing the odd stupider thing.

Some time during the summer, while I had been away in Nottingham, Edward Fox had been cast in the leading role of Curly Delafield in
Knuckle
. Edward was showbiz aristocracy, without yet having a name that promised to fill theatres. He was the eldest son of the exceptionally handsome agent Robin Fox, who had done so much to help ensure the survival of the Royal Court in its early days. Edward was also the brother of James, who had contrived to star in at least two of the best British films of the previous decade. And his younger brother, Robert, would one day in the 1990s take over as my trusted producer. Edward himself was enjoying a period of fame and prosperity, thanks to an implacable performance in Fred Zinnemann's expert film of
The Day of the Jackal
. To my excitement, the great cinema actor
James Mason, long a favourite of mine, was offering to play the role of Curly's stockbroker father. But Mason's insistence that, for tax reasons, he could not leave Switzerland for more than two months meant that Michael Codron would not even consider him. What were we meant to do? Rehearse in Lausanne? At the time, when theatre was less conciliatory than it is today, short seasons were frowned upon by powerful managements. It was a decision I would come bitterly to regret, because Mason's presence would have got the play off to the charged start it turned out to require. Instead, after being turned down by Donald Sinden, who preferred to do a shaky Rattigan play at the Duchess – he said to a disbelieving Codron, ‘Yes, I know it's shit, but at least it's shit about me' – the part was to be taken by Douglas Wilmer, who, while dealing in antiques, at the same time had a solid reputation as television's own Sherlock Holmes.

The most urgent question waiting on my return, however, was who should play Jenny. Although the arms dealer, Curly, is the play's protagonist, its moral pivot is the young woman who has been best friend to Curly's sister, and who works in the Guildford club which I had copied closely from my Cranleigh outings. In thriller terms, she's Barbara Stanwyck, smarter than anyone else in the town and more desirable. I had not been available when a young actress from the Bristol Old Vic had auditioned. In that theatre town, the purity of her ambition had attracted the resentment of other actors, who were accustomed to more English strategies of disguise. But now in audition she had managed to bowl over both the Michaels, Codron and Blakemore. They were insisting that I meet her as fast as possible, before anyone else whisked her away. It would be her first appearance in London. So on the day after
Brassneck
opened in
September, I got off the train at St Pancras and went straight with my luggage to what looked like an upmarket call girl's apartment on Curzon Street, just yards away from Shepherd Market. The flat next door even had a red neon sign. Kate Nelligan lived in a tiny, thickly carpeted space with her older boyfriend, the television director Mark Cullingham. It turned out she was a working-class Irish Canadian from London, Ontario. Her real name was Patricia. She had suffered polio as a child. She had played Gertrude at university, liked the feeling, and decided to come to England because acting was better understood in London, Eng., than London, Ont. Her father was an ice-rink attendant and some of her family were priests. Meeting her for the first time, I was struck by how Kate seemed in some way not contemporary. There was nothing of the hippy about her. She was dressed stylishly in clothes from somewhere solid, like Jaeger. The effect was of timeless elegance, unexpected in somebody so young. She already seemed like one of those mature French women who know what to put together in a perfect picnic, how to sail a boat, how to make an omelette that's brown on the outside but runny in the middle, and where to buy the best binoculars for a day at the races. With perfect maquillage and a chic coif, if she reminded me of anyone, it was Stéphane Audran. Since the principal quality any actress had to bring to the role was poise, the casting seemed to me within minutes of my arrival open and shut. At twenty-three, Kate Nelligan had as much composure as anyone I'd ever met.

The hour we spent together did not seem life-changing. When I caught sight of her looking shifty on TV in a naval bodice-ripper called
The Onedin Line
, I simply thought she belonged to that group of actors who don't prosper in rubbish. Margaret and I were off to Vietnam in a couple of months, both
of us certain that it was time to break the regular rhythm of our lives before it strangled us. We saw the opportunity and we were going to take it. But first Tony Bicât and I had to deal with an approach from Max Stafford-Clark and David Aukin, who, much to our surprise, wanted to take over the remains of Portable Theatre. We imagined they wanted to pick up a shell company which already existed because it was less effort than creating a new one. Max, who had just given up running a workshop company at the Traverse Theatre, probably wanted to get his hands on our grant. But no, when we met up at David's house in St John's Wood they told us that they had heard we were fed up. They really did want to inherit what they saw as Portable's permanently inspiring mission to get radical theatre out and about. Our initial surprise had been because David was already married to Nancy Meckler and administering her company. The Freehold's strict belief in the physical and the non-verbal had been employed by hardline fringe fans as a strong rebuke to Portable's vestigial loyalty to the word. When I put this to David, he just laughed. ‘Oh no,' he said. ‘It's been like a holiday. But everyone knows, to get anything changed we have to go back to language.'

At the meeting, Tony said lightly, ‘I never want anything to do with the theatre again.' It was not what he meant. Court appearances and lawyers had worn him down, and he was being flippant. But not knowing Tony as well as I did, David and Max made the mistake of taking him at his word. When they later discovered that because of Portable's maladministration in our absence it was easier to start a new company than rejig a troubled old one, they asked me to join them. The founding idea was that we should all have a ready facility for any of the three of us to use as we wished. After my discomfort
at Nottingham, I said I would only join on the condition that I wouldn't have any responsibilities for the day-to-day running. Because Max was a railway enthusiast, we discussed whether to call the company Rolling Stock or Joint Stock, without my truthfully understanding the difference. It was something to do with carriages on the old North British line that made us plump for Joint Stock. Max had been impressed by two acts of
The Three Sisters
which the Freehold had presented in various rooms up and down Nancy and David's house. So much so that he wanted to kick things off with a promenade production drawn from a Heathcote Williams book about the men and women who spoke on soapboxes at Hyde Park Corner. The audience would wander from speaker to speaker listening to whomever they fancied. Max had already begun a series of workshops, which, to my amazement, he was co-directing with Bill Gaskill. Bill and Max, priest and hedonist, had fallen in unlikely artistic love. My old boss was now technically my employee.

Before leaving England at the end of 1973, I managed to infiltrate a Snoo Wilson play
, The Pleasure Principle
, into the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court. It was the last time Snoo and I would work together. Snoo, like Caryl Churchill around the same time, was feeling that property ownership was defining attitudes in the renascent urban middle class. His madcap assault, complete with fireworks and George Fenton, the future composer of the score for
The Blue Planet
, running around in a gorilla suit, had arrived as a text in Snoo's usual state of uberous disarray, covered with scrawls and crossings- out and extra dialogue bubbles dribbling away down the margins and sometimes even over the page. The manuscript, with a lot of green ink, looked like one of Proust's, only more so.
After fitting the play out with an expert comedic cast which included Dinsdale Landen, Julie Covington and Brenda Fricker, I helped Snoo winnow the action down to a comprehensible point where he enjoyed what was for him an unusually smooth popular and critical success. The theatre was packed for the run and people liked it. The goat was excellent throughout. But although at the end of the process Snoo didn't actually say so, I could tell he thought his director had unintentionally defanged him. He had been tamed, but at a price. As Tony put it, trying to fit Snoo into a category was like trying to stuff a large duvet into a small drawer. By providing his audience with something they could enjoy and understand as a social comedy, I am not sure Snoo felt I had done him a service.