The Blue Touch Paper (26 page)

It was consoling, then, to open on a freezing Tuesday night to a reasonably warm response. Later, when I understood a good deal more about directing, I would come to believe that any director's first and most important responsibility is to explain to the audience what kind of play they are watching. When we see a fresh production of a classical play,
Hamlet
, say, or
Tartuffe
, and we exclaim, ‘It's as if I had never seen the play before,' that is because the director has somehow managed to mediate the experience, to relax the audience's understanding to a point where they can open themselves up to everything the actors want them to see and hear. For myself, I was to give up directing plays in the late 1980s precisely because I felt I had failed to do this. Twice in succession, audiences could not feel where exactly a play which I had directed was meant to be pitched. The task for Michael Blakemore on this occasion was almost impossible. There were so many warring plays fighting under the single title
Knuckle
that it would have been hard for any director to know which one to highlight. The text alternated between being violent and political, prosaic and poetic in a way which was both highly original and almost impossible to control. The only fault with Michael's loyal production – if it could be called one – was that it was too true to what he was given. If, as V. S. Naipaul says, ‘Plot is for those who already know
the world; narrative is for those who want to discover it,' then clearly there was too much of one and too little of the other. In such circumstances it's hard to see how anyone could have done better than Michael, who was by now reacting to the closure of power stations by wearing more coats and scarves than ever. When you chanced upon the posed photos in big frames outside the theatre,
Knuckle
looked like standard boring West End fare. Today I have friends who once walked past it on exactly those grounds. Admirers of the play would say that it was far too complex to be simply conveyed. Its detractors would say it was far too confused.

The unexpected bonus was that the Oxford audience, much of it made up of students, relished the layer of thriller pastiche but also could see through to the underlying subject. In the history books, it is Margaret Thatcher who is credited or blamed with adjusting the country to a new, more ruthless kind of capitalism where no one has any responsibility except to look after themselves and their own families. It was Thatcher, they say, who blew away the claims of a previous generation of Tory grandees who, as a result of wartime experiences fighting side by side with men from working-class backgrounds, still cherished a more socially responsible kind of Conservatism grounded in notions of the common good. She called them ‘wets' and never missed an opportunity to say how little their consideration meant to her. But if this version of history is correct, it is very hard to see how by 1974, five years before Thatcher's election to power, a casual dramatist had already written a play which turns on the very argument which would come to transform Conservatism. Thatcher may indeed have overseen the triumph of the unsparing new philosophy, but she was not its author. It had been simmering away among renegades for a long time.

In
Knuckle
, Curly's father, Patrick Delafield, is a stockbroker, whose allegiance is to quiet, calm, respectability and order. Curly himself is an arms dealer, an unabashed market supplier, whose love is for making noise as much as for making money. He sees his father as a hypocrite, while his father sees him as a lout. It was clear at the first performance that the young audience were already primed for this standoff. From their reaction, you knew some of them had lived it and were pleased to see it laid bare. Casting directors would curse me for years to come because they said every second applicant actress used it as her audition speech – it would become a cliché – but when, with side-light hitting her at the front of the stage, Kate first launched into the barbed monologue ‘Young women in Guildford must expect to be threatened', you could feel a shiver of excitement throughout the audience. Although there were too few people to create the momentum for anything you could call a hit, there was definitely a thoughtful atmosphere which gave us real grounds for hope. Peggy wrote me a note after the first performance: ‘I have never seen a production of a play which so absolutely reproduced the promise of a text. Everything you conceived and Michael and I read is either fulfilled or will be fulfilled.'

Inevitably, during the first week together, Kate and I grew close. Within a day or two Michael Blakemore, as alert in these matters as in all others, found us out in some minor inconsistency. We were meant to be in one place and were obviously in another. Our stories mismatched. We hardly needed discovery to make us cautious. We were cautious enough already because both of us could feel, with our shared feelings of embattlement – Kate against England, where she felt disliked, and me against the English theatre where I felt hugely disliked – how incendiary
a mix we would make together. We fired up each other's feelings of anger and isolation in a way which was both heady and dangerous. Having been brought up in Bexhill, I had formed a poor opinion of unfulfilled desire. I had seen its casualties all around me. But I was not blind to the dangers of fulfilled desire either. For both of us, with partners in place, love was a catastrophe. Kate and I were completely obsessed with each other without necessarily being made for each other. She was already rightly enjoying a thrill of discovery around her performance as Jenny. In Oxford, during that fortnight, we both felt we were standing on a little spit of dry land which was unlikely to stay dry much longer.

In the second week of performances we were still rehearsing and even making a few cuts, though not many. The American notion of ‘fixing' a play had thankfully yet to cross the Atlantic. Producers trusted their own judgement. A play was what it was. Some people would like it and some wouldn't. There was no proleptic imperative to answer criticism before it was made. Of course you wanted to make sure that everything, including the writing, was as polished as possible, but you would never seek to change the nature of the play itself. Michael Codron had admittedly asked me to stop using the word ‘capitalism' in interviews. He said it was uncommercial and off-putting. The word stopped people coming to the box office, because it made the play seem dull. When I asked him what name I was meant to give to the system under which we currently lived, Michael smiled ingenuously and said, ‘Call it life.' So it was lucky that he was at rehearsals in person to see the results of some minor tinkering on the final Thursday, when news arrived that Edward Heath had stopped agonising, pulled himself together, looked over the cliff edge and declared a general election. He was, he
said, going to the country with the question ‘Who runs Britain?' We were all thrown for a loop. With the miners out on strike and power outages a nightly possibility, Codron made the only decision available to him. It was pointless to try and go ahead with our scheduled mid-February opening at the Comedy Theatre in London. It would be commercially disastrous because nobody's mind could fairly be on it. We must hold off, going into a frustrating kind of standby, idling until early March.

This departure from the prepared schedule unnerved me. I was in a personal mess but at least we had all been moving towards some sort of professional resolution. Now everything was suspended. A yawning gap of time was opening up, in reality only a few weeks but in the circumstances endless. Disoriented, I was overwhelmed by a feeling that my life was about to fall apart like pick-up sticks. Years later, I would read Lucien Freud: ‘There is no such thing as free will. People just have to do what they have to do.' Kate and I returned home to our partners, both of us enchanted prisoners of the other. I tried to pretend to Margaret that nothing was happening. So Kate did to Mark. Peggy, who, like a nurse watching over a dangerously injured patient, had attended many of the Oxford performances, sensed a disturbing change in my mood and, fearful, packed me off to a tiny little vertical one-up one-down which she kept for writers near her home in the back streets close to Brighton station. When I got there she took to lecturing me by post, addressing me in Thomas Mann's phrase as ‘Life's Delicate Child':

Yes, failure is POSSIBLE – so what? J Joyce failed, Beckett starved, Carmen flopped, Proust was turned down by Gide. Dostoevsky starved; all the early Tchechovs and Ibsens failed
ignominiously. Just pin your ears back and let Michael Cod operate . . . Your work is far more important than you are, because it is what everybody can actually hear and see. The only way you will get failure is to deliberately
bring it on yourself
.

But I still paced the promenade every night, the wind and rain lashing my face, feeling a riptide had picked me up and was carrying me, powerless, towards disaster. Suddenly I had turned into one of those explosive, mystifying adults who used to bewilder me when I was a child.

We started previewing
Knuckle
two days before the election. The Comedy Theatre, since renamed the Pinter, is a gloomy playhouse at the best of times, placed as it then was along from London's most depressing vegan restaurant in a meaningless street off Leicester Square. On the Tuesday, it was immediately apparent that the warmth extended to us by Oxford students would not reach down to the traditional West End audience. In the first week, with the election campaign bubbling along, there was scarcely any audience at all. Inside the auditorium a chill wind whipped round the ankles of the few spectators, while in the foyers the bar staff, theatre haters to a man, did their best to make sure that any concentration the actors might be able to generate would be ruined by clattering crates and shattered mixer bottles. We were losing an uneven war against Schweppes. In the pub opposite I first met the film director Stephen Frears, who in a year or two would become one of my closest friends and among my most valued. He was coming to the play but his pre-theatre conversation was entirely about an actress, Anne Rothenstein, with whom he was hopelessly in love. I said nothing. On the Thursday, Heath was told by the
nation that the answer to his question ‘Who runs Britain?' was a resounding ‘Not you, sailor.' Labour had 301 seats, the Conservatives had 297. But in a manoeuvre as undignified as it was doomed, a sulky Heath tried desperately to cling on, calling the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, in to Downing Street to try and persuade him to help fiddle a mandate he had not earned.

While boxing at prep school I had learned to forestall the blow by anticipation. I prided myself on it. But at this crucial moment my footwork had failed and I was taking the blow full in the face. On Monday 4 March Heath conceded, Labour came to power, and
Knuckle
opened. Harold Wilson's third administration would quickly settle with the miners and end the phoney war. But no such settlement was available to me. Over the weekend I had told Margaret what was happening between me and Kate. We decided to sell the house and to separate. Neither of us wanted to continue in a relationship which was insincere. On Monday, going to my first night, I walked down Panton Street to the Comedy alone. At this point as mad as a pork chop, I stuck up a poster backstage on which I had scrawled in black Pentel a quotation from Ross Macdonald, whose books had started me off on the path to
Knuckle
. It read: ‘The bottom is littered with good guys/ Only cream and bastards rise.' It wished the company good luck. When I went in to see the actors in their dressing rooms, Douglas Wilmer thanked me for my best wishes. He then summoned up a perfect timing he had not always manifested on stage to look me in the eye and declare, ‘If this play runs, I'm leaving show business.' By the time I went on to visit Edward, I had been shocked into realising how selfish I had been. Absorbed in my own problems, I had ignored the toll the mixed reception for the play was taking on everyone else. It was an exposing piece. For Edward in
particular, cinema's current golden boy, it was an extraordinary test of nerve to know you would have to walk out every night and give a fine performance in a play which large parts of the audience were determined to make clear they did not want.

I sat in the pub during the performance, getting drunk on a lethal combination of Guinness and champagne. Peggy would always insist that things actually went quite well. ‘I wish you'd have heard the hush with which the first-night audience listened to your play. I was swept overboard by it. I shall go and see it continuously,' she wrote to me afterwards. But as I walked back to the stage door to see the actors after the curtain call, I bumped straight into Clive Goodwin coming out of the theatre. From his point of view, he'd had a very good evening. ‘I told you it didn't work, and it doesn't.' Next morning, I bought a new notebook and got on a train at St Pancras. I had already made the day's most important decision. I was a playwright. Since I was experiencing all the unhappiness that goes with the calling, why go on denying it? Why had I been so scared? Was it just fear of failure? If so, the tactic was a write-off. Determined that the hysteria of the last few weeks was not going to silence me, I scribbled down the first line for my next play. ‘Oh fuck, I forgot the child.' A rock band would play a set, go off to enjoy themselves and then realise they had left their one-year-old baby behind. At once, I loved the idea – the band on stage, the tiny child abandoned. But in the notebook I also wrote down two rules which I intended to follow in this new manifestation. First, I would never write a play if I had nothing to say. And second, I would never write a word for money.

This second prescription turned out less idealistic than it may have seemed. In my own case, it was intensely practical. I would stumble on a paradox: by caring exclusively about vocation, I
would find myself free-gifted a career. In the subsequent forty years, I have never had to waste time agonising over what to write. Decisions which bother some of my colleagues about whether to consider this offer or that have never detained me for long, since my criteria for choosing remain so simple. In some way, I envy anyone who writes for different reasons, to feed their family, say, or to blaze their name. For them, writing is a means, not an end, and therefore not so killingly important. If the only thing you care about is what you aim to say, it leaves you especially vulnerable. Even on the train that day, I remembered that Margaret had always said she loved two things about me. I had never claimed the privileges of an artist. I had never said, ‘Oh I can't do the washing up, I'm a dramatist.' But secondly, she said, she knew that my self-hatred was so deep that it would act as a kind of regulator, a shut-off device which closed the whole system down whenever I was in danger of believing any praise that came my way. I was aware, as I closed my notebook, that at least the first of these two reasons for loving me would no longer obtain.