The Blue Touch Paper (25 page)

The Pleasure Principle
opened on a Monday late in November, and by the Wednesday Margaret and I were on a short hop to Paris, to pick up a much longer UTA flight to Saigon. One of Margaret's sisters, Nina, was married to a diplomat who had just become Australian ambassador to South Vietnam, where, in some luxury but also some isolation, they were beginning to bring up their young family. Living behind high white walls in the Rue Pasteur, surrounded by palm trees and servants, they were more than happy to see us. The Paris Peace Accord had been signed in January of the same year. The old US war criminal Henry Kissinger, who had survived satirical immolation in
Dr Strangelove
, had only five years previously brought about civil war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge by dropping 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia illegally. He had represented one of two equally dishonest parties. Unlike his opposite number in the North, Le Duc Tho, who refused the Nobel Peace Prize, Kissinger was now in the process of accepting it, he said, ‘with humility'. I should hope. He was the author of a farce. There
wasn't a single person in Vietnam, North or South, who didn't know that Kissinger's peace was phoney. Neither side had the slightest intention of sticking to the so-called agreement. But it was, for the Americans, serving its expedient purpose of giving them the excuse they desperately needed to fulfil Richard Nixon's electoral promise to get out of an ever more costly and damaging war. Some 550,000 American troops had been withdrawn, and the South left to its own devices. In a pattern we would see repeated many times, Nixon, lately mired in Watergate, had talked of peace with honour. But, like Bush, like Obama, Nixon was more than happy to settle for peace with shame if it meant he survived.

At the very moment everyone else was fighting to get out of Vietnam, Margaret and I were determined to get in. For the month we spent there, there was an extraordinary atmosphere. Ten years later I would write a television film whose themes were classically Chekhovian. Stephen Frears directed it. It was called
Saigon: Year of the Cat
, and it would detail the story of a middle-aged English woman, played by Judi Dench, who has worked for years in a Vietnamese bank and doesn't want to leave when the end is near. As in a Russian play, a whole society knows that change is inevitable but chooses to pretend it doesn't. Wherever you go, there is a haunting disparity between the official version of the future and what everyone, in their heart, knows the future to be. In Saigon, during the phoney peace, it wasn't just that the whole city was waiting for the day when the Vietcong would inevitably come screaming down the hill. You could also tell from the mysterious explosions in the night – oil dumps going off in another part of the city – that the threat came not just from outside but from inside as well. There were salaried employees setting fire to their own workplaces.
Things had reached a saturation point where you couldn't tell your enemy from your friend. When the end came in 1975, it only needed the lightest of pushes for the whole thing to topple. Saigon was already eaten away.

Against all advice, Margaret and I took the chance to travel. We never felt in any serious danger. We were warned that the roads were not safe by night, because the Vietcong controlled certain routes once darkness fell. But by day the greatest problem was that the cramped and crowded buses were built for Asian frames, not for lanky English playwrights measuring six foot one. Getting all the way up to the hill resort of Dalat was particularly painful. When we got there, we stayed in the Grand Hotel, right by the lake. It was almost completely unoccupied, except by the rats which scurried self-importantly across marbled floors, with free play to hurry on to their pressing business. They might as well have carried briefcases. Our suite, the size of a bowling alley and hung with dusty mosquito nets and crumbling curtains, evoked Miss Havisham's quarters. We went via Da Nang all the way up to Hué, which was eerily quiet, as though the 1968 Tet Offensive had stunned it into silence. Underneath the beautiful city's Swiss calm, with the wide river flowing imperturbably on, you had the sense of people who had endured one unimaginable catastrophe and who knew that the arrival of the next was only a matter of time. Its serenity was charged with fear.

Back in Saigon for Christmas, we enjoyed a life of privilege, with caddies throwing diplomats' golf balls discreetly back onto the fairway should they regrettably land in the rough. The French ambassador, using Vietnamese fighter pilots, flew us all out on a hair-raising journey to an uninhabited island, where, at the third attempt, we made a landing in strong cross-winds.
Waiters in white jackets and white gloves were already attendant behind long trestle tables set out on the beach. The tables groaned with champagne and fresh seafood. It was like the scene when the great press baron gives a picnic in
Citizen Kane
. After lunch, Margaret and I watched as the foreigners laughed, splashed and flirted, speculating in many languages as to who had the smallest bikini, the tightest trunks. Oh what larks! We felt free to mock a whole class who couldn't admit their lives were about to change. I had no presentiment that my own was too, and no less radically.

9

Cream and Bastards Rise

We returned to a Britain which was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Life had already begun to feel different in October 1973 when OPEC, the oil producers' cartel, had used the occasion of the Yom Kippur War to hike up prices by seventy per cent and deliberately to fix the supply. Our plane back from Saigon was three-quarters empty because airline fares had shot through the roof. No one was travelling. We lay out across three seats, and were given complimentary dry Martinis at 7 a.m. in a bid to re-attract our custom. Back home, sensing that the oil shortage would give coal miners a welcome new bargaining power, and with inflation running at twenty per cent, the National Union of Mineworkers had put in for a whacking pay rise for their members. Edward Heath, never even in his more confident moments the most secure or cogent of leaders, was in nervous and sometimes secret negotiation. For one reason or another he had decided that the coal workers' aims were political, not economic. Heath later claimed that he had asked Mick McGahey, the leader of the Scottish miners, ‘What is it you want, Mr McGahey?' and that McGahey had replied, ‘I want to see the end of your government.' Whatever the truth of this story – and to a dramatist's ear the dialogue rings false – Heath had taken up residence in the bunker, believing he was heading for a definitive showdown with the unions.

Rehearsals for my new play began on 31 December in a
church hall in a basement next to St James's, Piccadilly. The next day, the prime minister announced the three-day week. The purpose, he said, was to avoid power cuts and to ensure continuity of supply. But the effect, unsurprisingly, was to create a superfluous sense of crisis. Blackouts became a regular feature of daily life, and television shut down at 10.30 p.m. The previous summer the director of
Knuckle
, Michael Blakemore, had invited me to his seaside house in Biarritz so that we could put our heads together. In the late afternoons he used to go down to the wide Atlantic beach and show off his native prowess, standing straight as a pencil on a speeding surfboard. Over dinner one evening he had voiced a widespread sentiment which I was to hear many times in different forms. Michael said that when he had arrived in Britain from Sydney in the 1950s the country had admittedly been awful, but basically it had worked. Now, he said, it was less awful but it didn't work. I argued the opposite, paraphrasing Raymond Williams: ‘If people cannot have justice officially then they will have it unofficially.' The fact that British citizens had lately become so much more militant was surely to the good. It was a disputatious time, certainly, but that's because there were important things to dispute. If people were today demanding their rights, well, wasn't that a sign of vitality? And if they also chose to question archaic social structures because governments had lost all touch with the electorate, was that not better still? An element of disruption was a small price to pay, even if the direction of change was still not clear. Yes, there was an apocalyptic air in the country these days. Portable Theatre had been predicting social breakdown for years. But to me it was quiescence which was unnatural, not protest. It still is. I find the sullen state of affairs forty years later in which everyone is resigned to put up with social injustice and
do nothing about it far more spooky and unnatural than the roller-coaster days of the mid-1970s.

At rehearsals Michael used to start every day by laying out a disorienting assortment of pills on the little table in front of him from which he directed. Since he always seemed to be in pretty robust health, and had cut a more than plausible figure on the rollers in the Bay of Biscay, I had no idea what purpose this neurotic forest of orange tubs served. As a companion, Michael had been so sceptical and caustic that it was a little shocking to see that he appeared to be a willing martyr to hypochondria. Presumably still not adjusted after a mere twenty years to the un-Australian climate, he remained wrapped in his coat and scarf throughout rehearsals, pulling them tighter as the weeks went on. Somehow this added to my feeling that things weren't ever quite going to settle. I quickly appreciated the degree to which subsidised theatre creates a common culture, usually involving at least a few people who've worked together before. Even if they haven't, they've worked with other people who have. But this bunch were liquorice allsorts, with no shared history. For all the nostalgia generated by present-day producers talking of better times when serious plays were supposedly abundant,
Knuckle
was the only new play to originate from a commercial management in the West End in the whole of that year. All the others were transfers, blown in by favourable reviews. With lights and heating going on and off at regular intervals, no wonder everyone felt a little exposed.

Coming from the Old Vic, Michael's approach to directing was initially technical, instructing actors to pick up particular props at particular moments and to put them down again at another moment that pleased him. A lot of the stage picture was already prepared in his head, with moves to a
degree predetermined. He allowed freedom, but within limits. Michael began from the outside in, believing that if only he could get the tram in the groove it would begin to speed. Again, this method might have suited a group who were already well known to each other. But with actors from such different traditions, it reinforced the feeling that everyone was in a different play. Malcolm Storry, playing the unpleasant role of Sarah's old boyfriend Max, had come directly from the fringe theatre, so directly that Michael Codron had installed a telephone in his flat because Malcolm had never been able to afford one. With his background as a teacher Malcolm would clearly have been happier with more discussion, while Douglas Wilmer, retreating ever deeper into his script and sighing a lot, seemed happier with none at all. Edward Fox, never a natural fan of directors, had developed a clever strategy of echolalia, always repeating the last two or three words of whatever Michael had just said to him – ‘Go downstage, yes. Pick up the bottle, yes. Not too quickly, no' – without ever really intending to do any of it.

I am not quite clear when it was exactly, probably around the third week, that I decided that Kate Nelligan was the greatest actress of our time and that she was fulfilling the needs of my play more completely than I had ever imagined possible. I think it was at the first run-through. Everyone else was stumbling around, forgetting lines and saying ‘Sorry' and ‘Oh, where am I meant to be now?' And here was this extraordinary actress, sitting in the middle of the rehearsal room, very calm, very still, smoking so gently that little wreaths adorned her, already in total command of my text and of her character. She had a way of floating a line so that it hovered like the smoke, weightless, in the air. I had no clue how she did it. All eyes went to her. But I do very clearly remember the moment when I realised
that my feelings of gratitude and admiration were reciprocated. After one such run-through, Kate took my arm as we were all crossing Piccadilly to go for a good French lunch in the upstairs room of Edward's favourite Le Petit Café in Stafford Street. Somehow the gesture said everything, and we both knew it. But just in case I'd missed its meaning, as we went past the Royal Academy, Kate added that she couldn't believe her luck. ‘You're a great writer.' We walked on in silence. Since we continued to work together until 1983, this mutual feeling, finally expressed between us, made the pair of us both insufferable for years. But it probably created work of an intensity neither of us would have achieved apart.

When we got to Oxford, where we were due to open a two-week out-of-town run on 29 January, the Playhouse Theatre looked shuttered and dead. Paul Scofield, at lunch during the rehearsals of
The Rules of the Game
, had told me a long story about how he once couldn't find the place when he was acting there during the war because it was so dark, and had been shocked by US servicemen throwing a beaten-up black colleague out of the back of a truck onto the pavement in Beaumont Street. Now I knew how he felt. It turned out we were all staying in the rambling Randolph Hotel just down the road. By an unhappy quirk of design, it had its kitchen grills so placed in the catacombs below that a smell of rank lamb fat hung over the whole place twenty-four hours a day and even crept into the heavy drapery in the bedrooms. Candles placed strategically on the stairs added to the air of nineteenth-century decay. My inept dramaturgy, alternating far too often between short scenes in the same places, like bad television, had lured John Napier, the future designer of
Cats
and
Starlight Express
, into a premature attempt at innovative technology, though sadly on nothing like
the budgets with which he would later make his whizz-bang reputation. On either side of the stage were switchback metal arms of the kind you see at fairgrounds, which were used to deliver overcomplicated sets from the wings. Inevitably, most of the three days of technical rehearsal was spent with actors standing watching as the production crew put their hands on their hips or scratched their heads. Once the machines did work, the effect was both unexciting and repetitive.