The Blue Touch Paper (33 page)

A year or two later, Howard and I had conceded after some argument and agreed, against our better judgement, to
Brassneck
being made half on film and half on tape. We both knew that a television version made in such a bastard way was likely to be a bugger's muddle, but the chance to offer a play about civic corruption at 9.25 p.m. on BBC1 was too good to resist. The result, put out to a huge audience, was bang in the middle of the great traditions of public broadcasting.
Brassneck
played
well with an electorate desperate to mix mockery of their rulers with some invigorating spite and anger. Its broadcast opened up a groundbreaking subject for television fiction. But things had got off to an embarrassing start when we were allocated a director sunk in personal despair and without a sense of humour. Since the play was meant to be a comedy, we had requested of the BBC that he be replaced. He was furious. Displaying a level of vitality he had not evidenced hitherto, he stormed to the producers and demanded angrily, ‘Oh, writers are in charge now, are they?' – as though that were self-evidently such a terrible idea. Luckily we acquired Mike Newell as his replacement. Technically adept, Mike brought to the subject an enormous horse-laugh as well as the panache it needed. But under the pressure of time, the impossible ambition of attempting such a mammoth epic overwhelmed him, and we authors disgraced ourselves further when, in the general panic, we broke the first rule of author–director etiquette and gave a few notes to some actors without the director present. This branded us once more as thoroughly bad people. My abiding memory of the whole experience is of Mike running hours over schedule, at one in the morning in the studio gallery overlooking the action, with six cameras at his command and shouting at them like dodgem cars: ‘Go in, Number One, anything you can get.' When I went down to the studio floor to thank one of the more senior actors who had completed his role, he shook my hand and said, ‘Just to let you know: I didn't believe a word of it.'

My approach to
Licking Hitler
was thankfully proving to be much more peaceable. The idea had occurred to me because at some stage I had been working on an unfulfilled project to make a film about Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Austrian Holocaust survivor who had become the public face of post-war
Nazi-hunting, without perhaps being too careful about where else credit for the most significant achievements in that field might properly belong. I had been sitting researching in the Wiener Library in Devonshire Street, off Portland Place. It had an old-fashioned reading room, with proper leather seats and open shelves, and was dedicated principally to literature documenting the experience of the Jews in the Second World War. As I worked, in the opposite chair there wheezed an asthmatic old man in a grey three-piece suit, hair plastered down, surrounded by piles of books. He was the very image of the elderly scholar, complete with watch chain and National Health spectacles. Without introduction, he looked up and said, ‘You do not know who I am, but I have sat as close to Adolf Hitler and to Winston Churchill as I am to you now.'

Such a magniloquent line of introduction must, I suppose, have been rehearsed many times. But I was the leaping fish who loved the hook. The man told me his name was Sefton Delmer. In the 1930s he had been the Berlin correspondent of the
Daily Express
. Coming back to England as a fluent German speaker, he had been recruited by the Political Warfare Executive to pioneer their first steps into black propaganda. As we fell to talking for an hour or more, Delmer implored me to read his book
Black Boomerang
, which gives an account of all the wicked things his fake radio station got up to in the space of two years. Its plausibility depended on German soldiers believing that they were accidentally overhearing the casual, indiscreet conversation of two German officers. Not only did the operation take on obvious tasks of enemy demoralisation. As you would expect, it relished broadcasting military disinformation and general pessimism about the outcome of the war. It exaggerated Allied advances and denied their setbacks. It sought to sow dissent
between conservative elements in the German army and the radicals whom they distrusted in the Nazi party. By pretending to support Hitler, it sought to undermine him. But it also stretched further, taking on more doubtful work. Among other things, it targeted specific soldiers and officers, undermining their morale with obscene gossip about their wives having sex back home while they were at the front. Broadcasts took special pleasure in inventing outbreaks of venereal disease among named individuals.

Learning of the scale, malice and extreme pettiness of this work was, for me, like the opening of a door. All my life I had suspected that the Second World War had been misrepresented in fiction. Almost nothing I had seen at the cinema had smelt right – or convincing. What I had watched as a child was not art but propaganda. Yes, of course defeating Nazism had been a good cause, perhaps the last military cause Britons were ever to agree on. But the ridiculous piety surrounding the way in which we'd licked Hitler had made me suspicious that there were corners of Allied behaviour which weren't going to hold up too well to scrutiny. Now here, after all the years of puffery, was proof. The same people who had allowed or run black propaganda during the war had gone on to high office in Whitehall and government afterwards. The moral nullity of this bizarre operation seemed to illuminate what in the film I would call ‘the national habit of lying'. In my view, it reflected as much on life after the war as during it.

The extra anticipation I felt was at the opportunity to put a woman's experience at the centre of a war story. This was important to me. In 1950 Herbert Wilcox had directed his wife Anna Neagle in an analgesic film,
Odette
, about the special agent Odette Sanson, who had flown into France to liaise
for the Special Operations Executive. In 1958, there had been a rather better film,
Carve Her Name with Pride
, with Virginia McKenna playing Violette Szabo. But these were about exceptional women who'd both had exceptional wars. In 1975 my old prep-school friend Christopher Hudson had scripted a story about D-Day which had proved to be a welcome antidote to the ‘Chocks away' school of film-making.
Overlord
followed the random story of a hapless young recruit sacrificed on a Normandy beach. I too wanted to draw on common experiences. I wanted to portray that special wartime phenomenon: violent juxtaposition. Dissimilar people from different backgrounds had to learn to adjust to each other far more quickly than in civilian life. As Alan Ross observes in his book
The Forties
, it was ‘the unbearable partings and comings together in dark confined places' which compensated for ‘the suffering and boredom and fear of war'. But it wasn't just the content of the film which excited me. At university I had never wanted to make a life in theatre. When I started, it had been second best. Here, at last, was my chance to hear my own clapsticks for the first time.

Before I could find someone willing to make
Licking Hitler
, I first had to revive
Teeth 'n' Smiles
in the West End. It turned out less than happily and taught me a painful lesson about how easy it is to mislay magic. I made a total mess of it. In 1975 our season at the Court had played to full houses, and we had wanted to transfer straight away. But Helen Mirren was already committed before we started rehearsals to spending the winter in a long run of a new farce by the octogenarian Ben Travers. She had reluctantly agreed that when she had finished, she would come back and do mine again. But by the time she returned, Helen was understandably exhausted and had misplaced her zeal. She had the air of not wanting to revisit old work. Whereas
at the Court she had been able to hypnotise an audience into believing she could sing, at Wyndham's with a far cooler audience Helen seemed much more exposed. Nick Bicât began to mutter darkly that everyone can sing but only if they have the will. Jack Shepherd had left the venture and something of the play's soul had gone with him. His casual delivery had given the production much of its ambling charm. As if that were not enough, I had compounded our problems by imagining it was a good idea to give a reporter from the
New Musical Express
free access backstage to do a prominent four-page story on this unusual attempt to bring the cultures of rock music and theatre together. When it was published I knew that I'd made a mistake. It quoted Dave King in his dressing room referring to Helen Mirren as ‘that cunt'.

Even in those days I had learnt enough to recognise that a director is always in trouble when having to assume the role of schoolmaster. When actor/director turns into pupil/teacher the outcome cannot be anything but doomed. In the 1980s, at Joe Papp's request, I would even fly the Atlantic to try and get a couple of warring actors who were at daily loggerheads to reconcile. ‘But, David,' one of them said, oblivious of my three-thousand-mile journey, ‘you don't understand. We don't
want
to get on.' Dave was the same. When I asked him if he wanted to come out for a drink and talk about his problem with Helen, Dave replied in words which were henceforth etched on my heart: ‘Not very much.' Later I would read Samuel Johnson: ‘Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.' Never going to be fond of Helen, Dave was doubly determined not to be kind. The production closed in six weeks, with no trace of the abundant feckless joy it had spread so effortlessly at the Court.

Worse still, it marked the end of my professional relationship with Michael Codron. Today I regard myself as the lucky beneficiary of an enlightened system. Not only did the state contribute to the cost of my education, the government also intervened through the Arts Council to subsidise me at the moment when I most needed help. I was, briefly, welfare-dependent and proud of it. In return, I and many others like me were to compensate the taxman many times over. The state's later earnings from my plays and films would prove the wisdom of their decision to volunteer to jumpstart me. But such a narrative excludes the contribution of my first producer. In the 1990s, because he was serving on the board of the National Theatre, Michael was, for sound ethical reasons, disqualified from transferring my plays which originated there. I felt bad. Michael had believed in me at a time when few others did. I was his discovery. He had gone out on a limb, capitalising my flops without complaint. Michael would no doubt feel that virtue was its own reward. But, when the hits came, he deserved some of the other kind as well.

Four days after opening
Teeth 'n' Smiles
, I was rehearsing
Weapons of Happiness
. Like
Knuckle
, it had not been easy to cast. Alec Guinness, Paul Scofield and Max von Sydow had all turned down the central part of Josef Frank. Most of all, I wanted to complete a childhood circle and approach Dirk Bogarde, but he had not been on stage since 1958, when two weeks' Anouilh in Oxford had nearly carried him away with pleurisy. Bogarde had turned down the chance to open the Chichester Festival Theatre, and was unlikely to want to open the Lyttelton. Warily, I went instead to Frank Finlay, whose most celebrated performance had been as a chippy Iago to Olivier's more extravagant Othello. Frank seemed happy to take on this original new play, though perhaps as suspicious of a young
director as I was of such a well-established actor. For once, the actor auditioned the director. In the event we got on fine, and as Howard observed, Frank made the character of the wrecked old man curiously elegant. Opposite him I put Julie Covington, whom I had known since she was nineteen and training to be a teacher. As the factory workers I brought in a fine company of young actors, whose authentic London accents would try the Lyttelton Theatre's acoustics to destruction and, in the case of American tourists, beyond. There would be a lot of complaints. Hayden had finished designing a spectacular set which had an entire London factory being replaced by Soviet tanks rolling into Prague. Towering light-boxes of Stalin swept by to make way for the dome of the London Planetarium. Rough theatre this was not. On this occasion, I believed, the spectacle matched the play's breadth and helped it breathe.

After so many years of delay it was inevitable there would be problems once we got inside the building. Of the three theatres, the 890-seat proscenium house, the Lyttelton, opened first. The rest of its early repertory transferred from the Old Vic, like an off-the-peg succession of touring shows, road-tested and ready to go. Peggy Ashcroft and Ralph Richardson were having no problems at all. But it was the lot of
Weapons of Happiness
to be the first show to open afresh and, as luck would have it, the most ambitious, pulling right back to the massive steel dock doors and revealing the whole stage. For several days in the middle of July we sat in agony in the darkened stalls watching as machinery failed. Hayden's complicated design, intended to exploit the fabulous new facilities, had simply exposed them. It was clear nothing worked. By two o'clock on the afternoon we were due to give our first preview, we had not even got through the play on stage, let alone set it or lit it. Having consulted Peter
Hall, I called the company together and told them that sadly we would have to cancel our first preview. But minutes after I announced this decision Peter appeared in person in the stalls. He said he had no wish to undermine me, and of course such an important question must be answered by a company decision, but did we realise that it would be a gift to a hostile press if an audience were turned away? Nothing could do the reputation of the National more harm. He accepted that the actors had been tested beyond endurance, but even so, he felt that on this occasion they should put the good of the whole National Theatre first.

Actors in the theatre respond much better to appeals to public-school sentiment than they do on a film set. It was therefore only a matter of minutes before all the actors agreed with Peter that they must put on some sort of show that night, however poor. The house was going to be packed – this was a big opening, after all – and they wanted to show that they were troupers. But in response to what I regarded as blackmail from a management which had let me down, I felt betrayed. I had made the only sensible professional judgement and been ignored. However, as the afternoon dragged on and as large pieces of scenery failed to move sideways, upwards or forwards, morale sagged and actors began to sidle up to me unobserved to tell me they were having second thoughts. It would do huge damage both to them and to the play to open when we were unlikely to be able to get through. They had changed their minds. Eventually they stopped work and formed a delegation. Could I go upstairs and please tell Peter we were calling the performance off?