The Blue Touch Paper (23 page)

Underneath the extravagance of her manner, Peggy was fierce, shrewd and unsentimental. Not long after the war she had discovered a talent for imagining the impact of a play in production merely by looking at it on the page. Because this gift for reading drama like a musical score was so rare, Peggy had been set up in business by a couple of managers called Dorothy and Campbell Christie, who did not, however, share her enthusiasm for what they called ‘the new intellectual drama'. But her agency had grown strong thanks to a binding mix of the artistic and the commercial. Muriel Spark and David Mercer may have provided fibre, but Robert Bolt, with what she called his chocolate-box David Lean pictures such as
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Doctor Zhivago
, was there to balance things out with soothing applications of cash. It was Bolt who said of Peggy that although she despised success, she was deeply suspicious of failure.

That day we fell to talking about her one-time client Joe Orton, whose plays she had championed from the outset. An original comic dramatist, beholden to no one, he had been murdered by his professionally jealous boyfriend, Kenneth Halliwell, who had hammered Orton's skull, then killed himself. Peggy had been one of the first people to go round after the discovery. At lunch she stressed to me how quickly you become used to horror. Initially she had entered the room backwards, but in no time at all, she said, she had forgotten that the scene around her was meant to be ghastly and was simply finding it a little bit inconvenient to have to step round Halliwell's body to answer the door. She told me, in a comparison that brought me up short, that I reminded her of Joe, because, as with him, there weren't any precedents. With tremendous emphasis, she said, ‘Thank God. You haven't been
influenced
.' When I started explaining that I didn't understand the idea of influence,
because surely if another writer was really good and you admired them, you would obviously do everything you could to get out of their shadow, not shelter under it, she just looked bored and said that was obvious.

Peggy's attention was prone to wandering, especially when someone told her something she already knew. Or something she thought limp. Or simply not daring enough. Repeatedly she would tell you, ‘Talent is a matter of courage,' and for her the two things were more or less interchangeable. She held in vivid contempt certain well-known dramatists who in her view lacked the guts to look deep inside themselves and tell the truth. But that day she was extraordinarily focused. She voiced not a word of reservation.
Knuckle
was one of the most important plays she'd ever read. It was at once romantic and anti-romantic in a way which she would never have thought possible. ‘And that ending!' she kept saying. ‘The ending! The boy doesn't get the girl! I love it!' She had already reread the play several times, and could command every detail of the complicated plot. She even had strong ideas about what colour the set should be and drew something on a paper napkin to show me. At first light, she had rung Michael Codron, who had long been her closest friend and colleague, and told him that for the first time in her professional life she was planning personally to invest in a play. There was no question, she said, of this play being tucked away in the subsidised theatre, a sector of which, by and large, she was thoroughly contemptuous. It was full, she said, of people who were spoilt and took no risks. No,
Knuckle
must go straight into the West End in a proper commercial production.

No sooner had she proposed this than she flirtatiously retreated. ‘Of course it's not up to me. That's a decision you must make with your agent.' She said the word ‘agent' as
though it were dirty, like ‘condom'. I told her that my present agent did not care for the play, and I was wondering whether she would agree to represent me. At this, Peggy simulated outrage. ‘Please. I have never in my life
stolen
a client from another agent. I would never do that. I never
poach
.' I made my own retreat, saying, of course, no, that was not what I was suggesting. But on the other hand, if I found myself without an agent, would she take me on as a client? ‘Ah well,' she said, as if fluttering a fan beneath her chin, ‘in those circumstances . . .'

In no time at all I was off like a rabbit down the Piccadilly Line. In Clive's office in South Kensington I explained to him that I could tell from the reaction thus far that
Knuckle
was going to be a deeply divisive play. It was going to make any battles my work had so far engendered seem tame. It would be unbearable for me to be defended by someone who was not in good faith. Clive rallied at a flattering level of hurt. As an agent, it was inevitable that you didn't like all your clients' work, he said, but he intended to represent this play professionally like any other. He felt that he was being punished for being honest. What was he meant to do? Pretend? I said there was no blame or punishment. Again, how could there be? You can blame people for what they do, but you can't blame them for what they are. Clive was a person who disliked
Knuckle
. More seriously, he had spoken to me of the play as an aberration, a mistake, something I'd come to regret. I didn't see it that way. I saw it as the direction I wanted to take in future. I was onto something. With any luck, there'd be more like this.

For the next twenty years, admittedly, the full flush of Peggy's passionate representation would not be an unmixed blessing. When she took to waking me regularly between six and seven with a mixture of scandal, gossip and hard theatrical
news, I found myself one morning putting the phone down and saying, puzzled, to Margaret, ‘It's as if she's in love with me.' This was met with a derisive response. ‘As if?
As if?
And what exactly is the difference between “as if” and “being”? Do you really think a forty-year age gap means anything to Peggy?' Understandably my new status went down no better with Peggy's existing clientele than it did with my wife. Other authors took to crossing the room specially to tell me how tired they were of hearing my name. ‘Why can't you be more like Hare?' ‘Hare doesn't write like this.' Whatever the ostensible subject of a conversation, they reported, Peggy would drag it round to the qualities of her new enthusiasm. As in the days of Mr G–––, I was back to being teacher's pet, with all the hostility that role attracts. Some of my peers couldn't wait for me to fail. But although Peggy's powers of persuasion had stiffened Michael Codron's resolve to present
Knuckle
straight off in the West End, they were ineffective in persuading the most fashionable leading actors of the day, some of whom lost no time at all in refusing the central role. We did at least acquire a director, the laconic Australian Michael Blakemore, who had spent the previous few years basking in the sun as Laurence Olivier's loyal lieutenant at the Old Vic. The play's sixteen scenes, switching between locations, presented exactly the kind of complex technical challenge to which Michael invariably rose. But it had also become clear that, absent a star, it would be some time before anyone could mount a production. It would turn out to be a full year of waiting.

Luckily, I had plenty to get on with. Howard Brenton and I were both intrigued by an overripe local government scandal which was fighting Watergate for newspaper space as the leading story of the day. It was known as the Poulson affair. John
Poulson, soon to be taken to trial, was a corrupt civic architect who in the previous fifteen years had developed a nationwide network of compliant civil servants. In return for cash in hand, they had been willing to look favourably on his applications for lavish development contracts, such as the Aviemore ski centre. Poulson operated closely with the Newcastle city boss T. Dan Smith, who had tried to create what he called the Brasilia of the North. From his initial eagerness to remove the genuine social evils of slum housing, Poulson had grown, step by step, into a full-scale criminal. He was proud of it: ‘I took on the world on its own terms and no one can deny I once had it in my fist.' But what struck Howard and me was how extraordinarily small that world was. There was something pathetically British, and therefore rather moving, about how local councillors, local authority officials, civil servants and even Westminster politicians were eager to sell out for so little. Some surrendered their independence and their futures for a weekend for two at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. For others, it was £50.

When he was released from prison in 1985, T. Dan Smith was ready to draw a political moral which resonated with me at least: ‘Thatcherism . . . could reasonably be described as legalised Poulsonism. Contributions to Tory funds will be repaid by the handing over of public assets for private gain.' From the 1980s onwards, notions of public and private, kept separate for so many years after the war, would become disastrously intertwined. Politicians of both leading parties would be seen as people with no other function but self-interestedly to hand what belonged to the taxpayer over to private profiteers, always at way less than market value. They were facilitators, nothing else, for people who grabbed more money than they did. The reputation of electoral politics would thereby nosedive. It was hardly
surprising. If democracy didn't care to defend what was owned in common, what was it for? With foreign policy meanwhile outsourced to Washington, the profession of politics in Britain would soon have a catastrophic identity crisis of its own making.

Even in the 1970s, the notion of writing a play about collusion between developers and local government held particular appeal in Nottingham, precisely because it was one of many big British cities to have been threatened post-war by a noxious combination of local business interests and lousy architecture. But the subject also had dangers, most of which we ignored. Now that I have had a lifetime's experience of handling topical material, it seems extraordinary that Howard and I ripped so gaily into our parody without pausing to consider the legal implications. All right, we gave our central characters a light fictional covering. The events which had inspired the play were strategically disguised. We invented the setting, a nonexistent Midland city called Stanton, to which our hero Alfred Bagley, posing as a witless old tramp, arrives in 1945. Like aniseed across the trail we threw in some casual mockery of Harold Wilson's poetry-writing wife Mary, with her character reciting a terrible poem which begins: ‘Stanton wakes. The milkman calls.' But even so, by the time we sent the play out to actors, Poulson hadn't even been formally arrested. And by the time he was sentenced, our play was done and dusted. We did at one point make a light-hearted visit to get the text approved by a notably relaxed lawyer in London, but by and large Richard encouraged us to get on and write what we wanted. This was like
England's Ireland
, only better.

To make quicker headway, Howard and I retreated for a month to Hawick. Margaret's parents had gone off to Italy for the spring of 1973, so we decided to lock ourselves away in the
deep Scottish countryside and write. Since marrying Margaret, I had rather taken to gumboot life. She had a large horse-loving family, including a likeable elder sister, Sarah, who had been a friend in need to many grateful students at the Royal College of Art. They found in her a good sense and human practicality which their tutors often lacked. Early on in the process of getting-to-know-you, Margaret's father, Pat, had asked me casually, as some sort of initiation rite, if I could possibly do him a favour and kill eleven chickens. I was determined not to be fazed, so I had gone out in the driving rain and wrung their necks, one by one, with the Matheson dogs all barking excitedly at the sight. When Howard arrived in the Borders, he too responded to the blossoming surroundings which alternate the barren and the lush in a way which is quickly addictive. Unsurprisingly, animal imagery began to infiltrate the dialogue. When, at the end of the first act, Bagley gives the mad wedding speech during which he has a heart attack and dies, he alarms the guests by beginning to caw like a crow. We took inspiration from the big black fellows on the lawn outside our writing room in Hawick.

At various points, Margaret came to check that we were all right. The sound of our laughter was so raucous that she had become alarmed, thinking we must be ill. Howard was a pleasure to write with, mainly because he woke up cheerful every morning. Unusually, he explained to me, he had never known depression. He simply didn't know what it was. Howard and I had both recently read Angus Calder's important work of history
The People's War
and been inspired by its analysis. Calder proved that the rejection of Churchill by the British electorate immediately after the end of the Second World War had not been an inexplicable act of ingratitude towards a victorious war
leader. Rather, it had been the popular expression of a growing nationwide sentiment, both in the army and at home, that in no circumstances must Britain go back to how it had been before the war. Howard and I rooted our dynastic satire deep in that post-war idealism. As we worked, we swapped control of the typewriter, sticking to an early rule that a line of dialogue would only go in if we both approved. But as the play gathered pace, we noticed that it seemed to be in a style which neither of us recognized as our own. A mysterious third person had entered the room, whom we nicknamed Howard Hare, and who, very definitely, was the owner of a fuck-it, scabrous kind of voice which was new and weirdly independent, wilful even.

Richard, still serving lengthy probation, had asked me to join him for auditions back in the White House Hotel in Earls Court Square to help form the new Nottingham company for the coming autumn. Howard and I had revelled in our freedom to write something as large-scale and panoramic as we wished, so we needed an astonishing twenty-four actors, plus a live horse, to play the result in repertory with
The Taming of the Shrew
. The young Jonathan Pryce, who had already electrified the stage of the Liverpool Everyman, was committed, and we built around him. Richard and I held open house together until the final day of meetings, when a young drama-school graduate came in and did a Charles Wood monologue, cutting the air occasionally with his hand. He took our breath away. It was the best general audition I'd ever seen. We were forced to explain to him that all the proper parts had gone, but that if he cared to join us and play as cast in little one-line roles as they arose we would be very happy. He said he'd love to. His name was Geoff Wilkinson, but later he changed it to Tom. Tom Wilkinson, like Jonathan Pryce and Zoë Wanamaker, became a stalwart of
the company, one of those people it was always a pleasure to see walk onto the stage.