The Blue Touch Paper (21 page)

In those days, my facile anger was as often burning against distant things as close. The lordly feelings of betrayal which inspired some of the satire in
The Great Exhibition
came from a growing conviction that everything that was collective and worthwhile about Britain was being shipped out to sea. When Raymond Williams had warned us, at the election of Wilson's second administration in 1966, not to believe in Labour governments because they invariably let their supporters down, we students had dismissed him as a despairing old cynic. But now, six years later, watching the hard-won achievements of the immediate post-war period running away into the gutter, and a hapless Edward Heath government struggling to implant a makeshift culture of managerialism, I was faced with a much more difficult question. If social democracy could no longer deliver betterment, and yet revolutionary socialism
was a dangerous illusion, then what exactly was it that I did believe in?

In such circumstances there was inevitably an apocalyptic strain in a lot of fringe theatre to which Tony and I were vigorously contributing. But whatever the contradictions of our politics, our artistic belief in the short life of collaboration was genuine and principled. In our view, the chief vice of the British theatre was its continuing insistence on clinging to institutions which had long outgrown their purpose. Any company which was vital didn't last long. Nevertheless we were reluctant to throw away an admittedly small Arts Council grant which had taken so much determination to get. So we handed Portable Theatre to a new artistic director and told him to get on and do whatever he wanted, with the sole condition that it be different from what we had done. Tony and I went back to the Arts Council and asked them to fund a new company which we had decided to call Shoot. The time had come, we said, for something much bigger and much more ambitious: a large-scale touring company dedicated to the production of new and topical plays. The Arts Council, not exactly fine-tuned to the notion of permanent revolution, refused us at first sight, but did say they would return to helping us project by project. The desperation of our politics surely underlay some of our recklessness. Steadier hands would have held course. But we were also moved by a proper and admirable impulse which said that if we didn't move on, we would get stuck. We had done nearly four years with Portable and that was enough.

We decided to devote Shoot's first, and, it turned out, only show to what was happening in Ireland. From 1967 onwards, the Troubles, always rumbling, had flared with renewed vigour, first through a campaign of civil disobedience against injustices
suffered by the Catholic minority at the hands of the Unionists in the North, then more directly through paramilitary confrontation on both sides. Reginald Maudling, my fellow Harewood old boy, when appointed home secretary in 1970, had got on the plane to return to London after his first visit to Northern Ireland and said, ‘For God's sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.' The killing of fourteen unarmed civil rights protestors by the British Army on Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, had brought things to a head. Direct rule from Westminster was soon to follow. Yet about these events, the British theatre had kept a cowardly and shameful silence. What more important task could there be for any new theatre company than to tackle this subject of which everyone else appeared to be frightened?

It was obvious that no single writer could fulfil this commission. So we asked the original
Lay-By
writers to forge another joint-authored play, though this time not to be written on a wall. Most were up for it. Why not? It was time someone did it. And what was the worst that could happen? We could only fail. The core group was this time strengthened by the addition of Tony himself and of David Edgar, who had been working as a journalist in Bradford, and who brought some reportorial vim to the group. We rented a sodden pebbledash bungalow in south Wales for a week. One of our number arrived, put some beer-laden Sainsbury's bags down on the kitchen table and loudly started the proceedings by demanding, ‘Now there's not going to be any nonsense, is there? We are pro-IRA, aren't we? No messing about?' Understandably, in a week of hectic dispute, interrupted by muddy, rain-lashed walks across stumpy hillsides, things never really calmed down from there. There were a couple of Marxists among us, but my own state of political
turmoil slowly percolated into the finished play. Probably I was representative. Most of us didn't believe violence was going to deliver justice for the Catholics. We thought, rightly, that once mayhem had started it would gain a criminal momentum which would make it almost impossible to stop. But on the other hand we didn't believe that things could have remained as they were. If there was any viewpoint uniting the seven of us, it was the feeling that what was going on in Ireland was a deeply
English
problem. That was the reason we called the play
England's Ireland
. Mainland Britain's claim to be acting as some sort of impartial referee between two warring tribes was risible, and, more importantly, destined to end in tears. How could any British government expect to have its claims to neutrality taken seriously when it had itself been implicated in so many crimes in the territory?

All of us went over for some barricaded weeks in Belfast, which we found to be in an improvised state of civil siege, half town, half army camp. Some of us stayed longer than others, and some got further into the opposing camps. But none of us pretended to be experts. Nor did the play make us out to be. Indeed, if the evening had certain strengths at that time very unusual for a British play, they came from the refreshing honesty of its viewpoint. But as we started pulling the text together, it became clear that it was going to be difficult to find anywhere to put the play on. We wrote fifty-four letters to theatres up and down the country and got three replies. We were being frozen out. To its credit, the Arts Council were as annoyed as we were. When pressed for a reason, various venues produced the usual excuse that they were not – perish the thought! – fearful for themselves, but they could not responsibly put their audiences in danger with such incendiary material. One particular scene,
the strongest in the play, had everyone worried. An IRA man appears and talks to the audience in direct address while holding the bloody limbs of one of his victims in a plastic bag. Well, asked the theatres, with such provocation, how did they know they wouldn't get bombed?

Snoo and I decided to co-direct. Since the writing had been shared, why not the direction too? It was an arrangement which worked surprisingly well, although when we started rehearsals with a cast of twelve and a terrifying weekly wage bill of £600, we had almost nowhere in prospect to present the play in the UK at all. Ritsaert ten Cate, the Dutch hero of the British fringe, had invited us to play a few introductory weeks in his new Mickery Theatre. It was typical of his courage, but his wooden playhouse, set among misty, silent canals in the Utrecht village of Loenersloot, twenty minutes outside Amsterdam, was hardly at the epicentre of the Irish problem. Up till the last day the text was still being rewritten. Some of our seven writers saw it through, some didn't, but Tony and his brother Nick were always there, taking advantage of the presence of exceptional singers like Tim Curry and Dennis Lawson to contribute songs which were often inspired by the tattered book of ballads they had found in a Belfast second-hand bookshop. The cast was equally divided between Irish and English actors. The cultural differences were apparent in rehearsal and beyond. Often, giving notes at the end of a run-through, you would find the two nationalities had arranged themselves silently on opposite sides of the rehearsal room. When socialising, the Irish would drink themselves into passionate arguments at daybreak, usually revolving round what someone had or hadn't said in Dublin fifteen years earlier. The Brits, on the other hand, preferred to stay serene and drift away on dope. When Sunday evening
came and we were left out among the overflowing ditches of the Low Countries with nothing to do until Tuesday, some of the company would drop acid to help pass the time. I do remember thinking, as I spent too many medical Mondays talking actors down from bad trips, that I had not gone into the theatre to become a nurse.

When in 2013 Snoo died from a heart attack, aged sixty-four, running for a train after tending to his beloved bees in Dungeness, his obituarists were right to play up the fertile anarchy of his comedy. His dramatic voice was his and his alone. But they underplayed the fact that in his private dealings with his colleagues he was an unfailing gentleman. Considering the ferocity of his imagination, Snoo was, like Howard Brenton, as courteous a person as you could hope to meet. How else could we two directors, both with strong views, have worked without acrimony? How else could we have smoothly delivered a living play by Caesarean operation? When, for my own part, I too had to find ways of passing the actors' empty hours, I continued working on a stubborn and intractable new idea of my own. When I had reached page 25, I absent-mindedly left the manuscript in the theatre overnight. When I came back next morning, it was gone. It had been cleared away as rubbish and already mulched at ten o'clock by the local garbage men. In panic, I started retyping as best I could, from memory. This gave the opening scenes of the new play a flow and potency they had never possessed in the original. From the beginning, I knew I had a great title.
Knuckle
.

One night, well into the run of
England's Ireland
, Margaret and I took a train from Amsterdam and arrived in Paris in time, we hoped, to see Brigitte Fossey in a dress rehearsal of the French premiere of
Slag
. It had sets by René Allio, and such was
the general classiness that even the poster was by Lila de Nobili. Behind me in the otherwise empty stalls at the Théâtre Michel, as we waited past midnight for the run-through to begin, were two men I recognised as Louis Malle and Costa-Gavras. I asked them what on earth they were doing. Oh, they said, they had dropped by because they had heard the play was going to be interesting. I nearly passed out. I had queued at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge to be transported by
L'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
and
Le Feu follet
, by
The Sleeping Car Murders
and by
Z
. Significantly, the fact that these two foreign film-makers were waiting to see my play meant more to me than any recognition that might come my way back home.

We followed our rural Dutch season with two Sunday nights at the Royal Court. The first was attended by some representatives of the IRA, who childishly drew attention to themselves by talking throughout and trying to put their legs over the seats in front of them. Partly as a result of a hellacious review in the
Observer
by the American critic Robert Brustein, which accused us of lacking the humanity to keep the ideological animal at bay – ‘I find it virtually impossible to exercise the task of dramatic criticism in regard to such a work . . . If the Irish question had never existed, certain English writers would have felt compelled to invent it. They . . . help the bloody butchers at their work' – the subsequent few weeks of Roundhouse performances filled up with a large public eager to know what the fuss was about. Not many seemed to come out sharing Brustein's view that our endeavour could be justly compared with that of Goebbels. We could have stayed at the Roundhouse much longer and indeed were asked to. But with Portable's usual disregard for the main chance, we resolved instead to fulfil a promise to the Glasgow Citizens to do two nights there, because they had been decent
enough to ask us in the days when nobody had wanted us. We were all on fire. During these weeks, a political play was put where it belonged, in large public spaces, with all doors open, all comers welcome.
England's Ireland
was a seed box. In my own mind, it was a bell which couldn't be unrung. Sure, its craft fell short. No wonder. It was our first attempt.

As far as our company was concerned, it was also the last. Experimental theatre companies, like literary magazines, need patrons. It had become clear that Tony and I would never have the resources, and perhaps lacked the resolve, to do the kind of work we wanted on our own terms. So henceforth it looked as if we would have to do such work on other people's, or not at all. What lay ahead was some sort of accommodation with the existing British theatre, for which I was ready but Tony wasn't. During our absence the original Portable Theatre, whose name had been pointlessly changed to Paradise Foundry, had not prospered in the hands of our appointed successor. The Arts Council had insisted on putting in a professional administrator to take over from Gus Hope. The outcome, for whatever reason, was insolvency. Although we were no longer running the company, Tony and I were still responsible for it. We had not had the sense to take our names off the notepaper.

The result, as the writer Rob Richie all too fairly observed, was that ‘the company that often seemed to have a bizarre fixation with the English police force found itself in court'. Tony and I were both telephoned early one morning and ordered to appear that same afternoon in Westminster Magistrates' Court, which was then in Mortimer Street, by chance a stone's throw from the old Portable offices. After a fortifying German lunch at Schmidt's on the corner, we were both put in the dock and offered no defence on the charge of failing to pay National
Insurance contributions. Having been charged with a crime I did not know I had committed, and with no idea of the appropriate punishment, I felt a satisfying identification with Kafka, whose diaries had first got us into all this. The magistrate announced that we were going to be fined. Later, Tony paid off the company's lawyers and I paid off the National Insurance. The accountants waived their fees. The two of us soon tried to calculate whether we had, overall, put more money into Portable Theatre than we had taken out.

The outstanding personal benefit of our years on the road came from the necessity to sit through our own work. There was no way out. Because we were, in the early days, operating the lights or the sound, sometimes stage-managing and even acting, so night after night I would have to watch and listen as speeches, passages, scenes and, on occasions, whole plays lost the battle for attention. Every cough, misplaced laugh and heavy eyelid would strike me to the heart. I would go cold, feeling the audience's collective attention wander off my inventions and onto their dinner. Samuel Beckett never had the courage to attend a performance, regarding the play's public exposure as an irrelevance. Even when he was directing the production he left town after the dress rehearsal, abandoning the actors he had helped lead. But as a dramatist who, to the contrary, was committed to believing that the audience's response might well be as significant as the play, I was given a brutal education. It has never left me. Ever since, on any individual evening, in any country in the world, whatever the language, I am reluctant to deceive myself about the evening's progress. I know from bitter experience how porous audiences are.