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I ended up making the play the story of a group of friends, with the emphasis on Mole. He is the newcomer who takes us into this world of water and woods and weasels, and whose education is the thread that runs through it all.
The Wind in the
Willows
is Mole’s
Bildungsroman
. Mole is the only one of the characters I have allowed to have doubts. He doubts if he is having a good time, doubts if he is happy with Rat. He likes Toad as he is, and when the old show-off reforms it all seems rather dull – have they done the right thing by taking him in hand? Rat and Badger have no doubts, but at the finish, Mole is still wondering.

Jokes apart, the only element in the production that I brought up to date was the Wild Wooders. In the book, they are an occasional presence, but for the play Nicholas Hytner felt that they should be a constant threat, lurking in the background even at the most idyllic moments, and at one point going so far as to carry off a baby rabbit for their supper – an incident that shocked adults in the audience more than it did children.

In Grahame’s day the Wild Wooders were taken to represent the threat to property posed by the militant proletariat – a view, whatever one’s political persuasion, that it would be hard to maintain today. Our Wild Wooders ended up as property speculators and estate agents, spivs and ex-bovver-boys, who put Toad Hall through a programme of ‘calculated decrepitude’ in the hope of depressing its market value. Their plan is to turn it into a nice mix of executive dwellings and office accommodation, shove in a marina and a café or two, and market it as the ‘Toad Hall Park and Leisure Centre’ – ‘The horror! The horror!’ groans Badger. But the reformed Toad’s vision of his ancestral home as a venue for opera, chamber concerts and even actors’ one-man shows does not commend itself to Badger either. ‘Actors!’ he moans, and we know that, before long, he will be loping back to the Wild Wood.

Albert the horse is a nod in the direction of A. A. Milne. Grahame has a horse in the book to pull Toad’s caravan, but he does not give him a name or a voice. In
Toad of Toad Hall
, the horse is called Alfred and is a bit of a pedant. I have made him, in another nod to Milne, extremely lugubrious – Eeyore’s Wolverhampton cousin. Toad can never remember his name and keeps calling him Alfred, which is not surprising as he is probably remembering him from the other play.

In the blurb written for his publishers, Grahame said that his book was ‘clean of the clash of sex’. What this means is that women do not get a look in. There are only three of them to speak of – the washerwoman, the bargewoman and the gaoler’s daughter – and only the last is seen in a kindly light. One reviewer of the play described these three as ‘coarse human females, coarsely characterized; they seem to come from another production.’ No, just from the text, much as Grahame wrote it, where the female sex is generally rubbished. One of the indictments against Toad is that, owing to his car crashes, he had to spend weeks in hospital ‘being ordered about by female nurses’. In addition, he has been ‘jeered at, and ignominiously flung in the water – by a woman, too!’ Even Toad, who rather fancies the gaoler’s daughter, joins in the game. ‘You know what
girls
are, ma’am,’ he says to the bargewoman. ‘Nasty little hussies, that’s what
I
call ’em.’

Toad is pretending, but not so Rat, Mole and Badger, all of them confirmed bachelors. Bachelordom is a status that had more respect (and fewer undertones) in Grahame’s day than it has now, and certainly he seems to have regarded it as the ideal state from which he had disastrously fallen. Of course, some bachelors are more confirmed than others, and the bachelor-doms of Mole, Rat and Badger differ – or I have made them differ. Mole is a bachelor by circumstances, taking his cue from his surroundings. Rat is a single creature and so Mole is happy
to be single, too, and set up home with his new friend – though as properly as Morecambe with Wise or Abbott with Costello. But had Mole popped up on that spring morning and found Rat in a cosy family set-up he could have fitted in there just as well. Judging by the way he makes himself readily at home at Rat’s and then at Badger’s, Mole is a natural
ami de maison
.

Rat is solitary by circumstance but also by temperament. He could be played like Field Marshal Montgomery, and, as with Monty, there may once have been a great love in his life that he has had to bury. He is certainly a romantic, but his rules and rigidities protect him – have perhaps been devised to protect him – from his own feelings. He’s not quite a Crocker-Harris, but certainly a Mr Chips.

Badger has something of the old schoolmaster about him, too. He’s less buttoned up than Ratty and, because not repressed at all, more innocent. All he gets up to is pinching Mole’s cheek and rubbing his little toes – behaviour that was quite commonplace in old gentlemen when I was a boy, when such things were not thought to matter much and were shrugged off by the recipient as just another of the ways that grown-ups were boring.

To fans of the book, even to discuss these well-loved characters in such terms might seem, if not sacrilege, at any rate silly. But an adapter has to ask questions and speculate about the characters in order to make the play work. If presented on stage in the same way as in the book, Rat, Mole and Badger would find it hard to retain an audience’s attention, because they are so relentlessly nice. Badger is a bit gruff, and Rat can be a little tetchy, but that is as far as it goes; all the faults that make for an interesting character are reserved for Toad.

I felt that the atmosphere of the River Bank had to be less serene, and that, while retaining their innocence and lack of insight into themselves, Rat and Mole – and to a lesser extent
Badger – should be prey to more complicated feelings, particularly jealousy. Thus Mole’s arrival on the River Bank to become Rat’s new friend is not quite the untroubled idyll it is in the book. It is not long before Mole wants to meet Badger, and of course he turns out to be a big hit there too. So now Mole is Badger’s friend as well as Rat’s, and we go into a routine of ‘He’s more my friend than he is yours – and anyway, I met him first!’ It is a routine children are accustomed to, and it is not unknown to grown-ups, particularly in some of life’s backwaters – and the River Bank, despite Rat’s protestations, can be a bit on the dull side. Newcomers there are eagerly gobbled up, as newcomers always have been in novels of provincial life, from Jane Austen to Barbara Pym.

Toad presents a different problem, and as much for the actor as for the dramatist. It is not that, like Mole and Rat, he is too nice, though Grahame is at pains to emphasize that he is nice and, for all his boasting, a good fellow underneath. It is just that we are told before he appears that he is conceited, a show-off and a creature of crazes; then, when he does arrive, he is all these things and goes on being all these things, with none of his disastrous adventures resulting in any disillusionment at all, still less self-knowledge. Finally, and suddenly, at the end of the book he is confronted by the trio of friends and overnight becomes a changed character.

Now this is no use to the dramatist at all, and no pushover for the actor either. Characters in a play need to go on a journey, even if it’s only from A to B. Mole’s journey is a graduated schooling at the hands of Rat in the ways of the River Bank; Rat’s journey (in my adaptation) is an emotional schooling at the hands of Mole; Badger’s journey is from solitude to society. But Toad does not go on a journey at all – he goes on his travels, but he does not go on a journey. Until his transformation, he is the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning; life has
taught him nothing. But, unchanging as he is and in defiance of all the rules of drama, children love him, and, since Toad has so much of the action, even adults don’t mind, until by the end, nobody – adults or children – wants him to change. Nor does he in my version – he just learns to keep it under.

‘Keeping it under’ is partly what
The Wind in the Willows
is about. There is a Toad in all of us, or certainly in all men, our social acceptability dependent on how much of our Toad we can keep hidden. Mole, by nature shy and humble, has no trouble fitting in; Toad, with neither of these virtues, must learn to counterfeit them before he is accepted. It is one of the useful dishonesties he might have learned at public school (where it is known as ‘having the corners knocked off’). Humphrey Carpenter says of Toad that one could imagine him having a brief spell at Eton or Harrow before being expelled – too soon to have learned the social lie that the play teaches him.

When I first read the book it seemed to me that Grahame meant Toad to be Jewish. He had endowed him with all the faults that genteel Edwardian anti-Semitism attributed to
nouveaux-riches
Jews. He is loud and shows off; he has too much money for his own good and no sense of social responsibility to go with it, and this sense of social responsibility is another lesson he has to learn. The fact that whenever Grahame has the animals discuss Toad’s character they end up saying what a decent fellow he is underneath it all only seemed
to confirm this analysis, and I thought that Grahame must have been thinking of characters like Sir Ernest Cassel and the Sassoons, the friends and financiers of Edward VII, who moved at the highest levels of society but were still regarded as outsiders. So when I read
The Wind in the Willows
for the BBC I gave Toad something of a flavour which if not Jewish, was at least exotic – trying to make his r’s sound like Tom Stoppard’s, for instance. I expected some criticism for this (not from Tom Stoppard), but none came, and now, having adapted the book for the stage, I am less sure anyway. The text is so full of inconsistencies. Grahame himself may not have known – ‘He is and he isn’t’ as so often the proper answer to such questions.

The nearest Oscar Wilde got to the River Bank was his remark about ducks. ‘You will never be in the best society,’ he had a mother say to her ducklings, ‘unless you can learn to stand on your heads.’ In Toad there are echoes of Wilde, and not only in his disgrace and imprisonment. Many of Wilde’s epigrams would not be out of place at Toad Hall – ‘If the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?’ or ‘I live wholly for pleasure; pleasure is the only thing one should live for.’ I am not sure that Toad thinks of himself as an artist (though he has been told that he ought to have a salon), but if he did, it would only be as a motorist (‘Is motoring an art?’ ‘The way I do it, yes.’) Occasionally he manages an epigram of his own that is worthy of Wilde. ‘I have an aunt who is a washerwoman,’ says the gaoler’s daughter. ‘Think no more about it,’ replies Toad consolingly. ‘
I
have several aunts who
ought
to be washerwomen.’ But then Toad’s gaol cannot have been far from Reading.

At the finish I have the gaoler’s daughter kiss Toad, who does not turn into a prince but straightaway wants Rat to taste the joys of kissing, just as he had once wanted him to share the joys of caravanning. Rat, of course, is reluctant, but finds to his
surprise there may be something in this kissing business after all, and, generous animal that he is, he wants Mole initiated too. So the play ends with a hint of new horizons. It is a large departure from the text, of course, where all four of our heroes are left in bachelor bliss, but this alteration is not entirely without justification, echoing as it does the course of Grahame’s own life. Courtship and marriage were late joys for him, too – and not such joys either – but that’s another story and, as I said at the start, not one that I managed to tell.

My additions and alterations to The
Wind in the Willows
are, I am sure, as revealing of me as the original text is of Grahame. Grahame knew this very well. ‘You must please remember,’ he wrote:

Peculiarities or not, I imagine most writers are gratified that there is an invisible clothes line, if only because it suggests there are things going on in their heads that they are unaware of. Who knows, these unintended recurrences might amount if not to Significance then at least to Subtext. The only other piece of mine that has been performed at the National Theatre was my double bill
Single Spies
in 1988. However, it was not until I was adapting
The Wind in
the Willows
that I remembered that Guy Burgess, the protagonist of
An Englishman Abroad
, had, in his
final rumbustious days at the Washington Embassy, acquired a twelve-cylinder Lincoln convertible in which he had frequent mishaps. ‘He drove it’, said Lord Greenhill, a fellow diplomat, ‘just like Mr Toad.’ Poop-poop.

I’ve always had a soft spot for George III, starting all of forty years ago when I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s
The Whig Inter
pretation of History
, which took the nineteenth century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions. On the Whig interpretation, historical characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view Butterfield had helped to discredit, so a question on George III was thought likely to turn up in the Cambridge examination, which it duly did. Sitting in the freezing Senate House in December 1951, I trotted out my Butterfield and, though I didn’t get a scholarship, counted myself lucky to be offered a place at Sidney Sussex – that Christmas when the college letter came the best Christmas of my life.

Before university, though, there was national service to be got through, regarded at best as a bore, but for me, as a late developer, a long-dreaded ordeal; it was touch and go which I
got to first – puberty or the call-up. I served briefly in the infantry, then, like many university entrants at that time, was sent on the Joint Services Language Course to learn Russian, first at Coulsdon, then at Cambridge. So what I had dreaded turned out a happy time and, although I didn’t realize it till later, far more enjoyable than my time at university proper. However, I began to think that, since I was now spending a year at Cambridge studying Russian, the gilt was off the gingerbread so far as Cambridge was concerned and I might get the best of both worlds if I were to go to Oxford. This wasn’t altogether the beady–eyed career move it might seem, in that I had a hopeless crush on one of my fellow officer cadets, who was bound for Oxford – that his college was Brasenose, then a mecca of rowing and rugger, somehow exemplifying the futility of it. Still, I suppose I ought to have been grateful: he might have been going to Hull – or even back to Leeds.

So now in the evenings, after we’d finished our Russian lessons, I started to read for a scholarship again, biking in along Trumpington Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second entrance. Sometime that autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of
George III
and the Politicians
by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of eighteenth-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I mugged it up. Like the good examinee I always was I realized that to know one book well is a better bet than having a smattering of several. A year in the army had made me more flash too, so this time I did get a scholarship, to read history at Exeter College, where I went when I came out of the army six months later.

The Oxford history syllabus takes in the whole of English history, beginning at ‘the Beginnings’ and finishing (in those days) at 1939. This meant that one didn’t get round to the eighteenth century until the middle of the final year. Seeing that Pares, of whom I knew nothing other than his book, was lecturing at Rhodes House, I went along to find only a sparse attendance, though, curiously for a general lecture, I saw that quite a few of the audience were dons.

When Pares was brought in it was immediately plain why. Propped up in a wheelchair, completely paralysed, nodding and helpless, he was clearly dying. Someone spread his notes out on a board laid across his knees and he began to lecture, his head sunk on his chest but his voice still strong and clear. It was noticeable even in the eight weeks that I attended his lectures that the paralysis was progressive and that he was getting weaker. I fancy that in the final weeks, as he was unable to turn his head, someone sat beside him to move his notes into his line of vision.

Now, the eighteenth century is not an inspiring period. Whether by the Whig interpretation or not, there are none of those great constitutional struggles and movements of ideas that animate the seventeenth and dramatize the nineteenth. The politics are materialistic, small-minded, the House of Commons an arena where a man might make a name for himself but where most members were just concerned to line their pockets. That Pares, with death at his elbow, should have gone on analysing and lecturing on what I saw as such a thankless time made a great impression on me – the lesson put crudely, I suppose, being that if a thing is not worth doing it’s worth doing well. As it was, these must have been the last lectures Pares gave – he died the following year – and, when I found I was able to stay on after taking my degree to do research and teach a little and possibly become a don, the memory of those lectures cast for me
a romantic light on what is a pretty unromantic profession.

Pares kept cropping up in subsequent years. As the memoirs and letters of the twenties began to be published, it turned out that as an undergraduate he had been one of the group round Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. But, whereas most of that charmed circle went down without taking a degree, Pares turned his back on all that, took a First in Greats and was elected a fellow of All Souls. Thirty years later, in December 1954, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford:

My vision of myself pursuing an academic career did not last long, though as a postgraduate I was supervised by the medieval historian Κ. Β. McFarlane, who had, incidentally, shared a flat with Pares when they were both drafted into the Civil Service during the war. McFarlane was a great teacher, and yet he scarcely seemed to teach at all. An hour with him and, though he barely touched on the topic of my research, I would come away thinking that to study medieval history was the only thing in the world worth doing. McFarlane himself had no such illusions, once referring to medieval studies as ‘just a branch of the entertainment business’, though when with the onset of
Beyond
the Fringe
I eventually abandoned medieval studies for the entertainment business this did not make him any less displeased. Still, it meant that when a couple of years ago I began to read about George III it was the first systematic historical work I’d done in twenty years.

In the meantime I found that George III’s rehabilitation had
proceeded apace. No longer the ogre, he had grown altogether more kindly – wiser even – and in his attachment to his people and his vision of the nation over and above the vagaries of politics he had come to seem a forerunner of a monarch of the present day. But it was a joke that made me think of writing about him – just as when a few years ago I thought of writing about Kafka what started me off was a joke that Kafka had made on his deathbed. Less poignant, George III’s joke also occurred during his illness. He had an equerry, Colonel Manners, who, bringing him his dinner one day, discovered the King had hidden under the sofa. A Jeeves before his time, Manners imperturbably laid a place for His Majesty on the carpet and put down the plate. He was retiring discreetly when the King said (still
sous bergère
), ‘That was very good … Manners.’ The pun was thought to signal a further stage in the King’s recovery. The anecdote hasn’t found its way into the play, but it did make me think that George III might be fun to write about.

My interest in the King’s story had also been rekindled by reading some of the medical history that was being published in the eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me
The Royal
Malady
by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also read
George III and the Mad Business
by the mother-and-son partnership Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, who first put forward the theory that the King’s illness was physical not mental and that he was suffering from porphyria. I found it a difficult book to read, convincing about George III himself but less so about the other historical cases the authors identify, the slightest regal indisposition being seized on to fetch the sufferer under porphyria’s umbrella.

From a dramatist’s point of view, it is obviously useful if the
King’s malady was a toxic condition, traceable to a metabolic disturbance rather than due to schizophrenia or manic depression. Thus afflicted, he becomes the victim of his doctors and a tragic hero. How sympathetic this would make him to the audience I had not realized until the previews of the play. I had been worried that the climax came two-thirds of the way into the second act, when the King begins to recover, and that there was no real dramatic development after that. What I had not anticipated was that the audience would be so wholeheartedly on the King’s side or that when he does recover it would prove such a relief of tension that the rest of the play, in which little happens except that various loose ends are tied up, would go by on a wave of delighted laughter. ‘The King is himself again’ means that the audience can once more take pleasure in his eccentricities and enjoy the discomfiture of the doctors until in a nice sentimental conclusion Mr and Mrs King are united in regal domesticity.

Having been working on the play for a year or so, I had eventually got it into some sort of order by April 1991, when, knowing it was far from finished, and in some despair, I put it through Nicholas Hytner’s door. Coming away from the house, I felt rather like one of those practical jokers who arrange for an unsuspecting victim to be landed with a load of slurry. That Hytner was then enthusiastic about the script and with him the Director of the National Theatre, Richard Eyre, cheered me up so much that I forced myself to reread it. No, I had been right: slurry at that moment it was. Later I discovered that Hytner had a gap in his schedule and Richard Eyre had a gap in his, so that the script had come as the answer to both their prayers.

Reading the play for the first time and knowing only a little of the period, Nicholas Hytner had been surprised when the King recovered. With this in mind, his first suggestion was that I should make the play more of a cliff-hanger, relying on the fact
that most people would know there was a Regency without quite knowing when it began or that the Prince of Wales would have to wait another twenty years before he finally got his hands on the government. This was just the first of many invaluable suggestions he made, and in the course of the next three months the play was completely reshaped. The role of a director at this stage of a play is more like that of an editor, and directors who can fill this role are few and far between.

Though it began and ended much as it did in the finished version, the original manuscript meandered about quite a bit, so the two rewrites I did between April and August cut out a good deal in an effort to make the progress of the King’s illness and his recovery more clear. In August 1991 a reading of the text was set up in the National Theatre Studio, actors working at the National taking the various parts almost on a first-come-first-served basis, the purpose being for us to hear the text and see how it played. The only actor already cast was Nigel Hawthorne, and it was plain from his reading how he would transform the part. That said, to sit and hear the play read, knowing it was unfinished, was both depressing and embarrassing, and I fear that some of the actors, who seldom see a play at this stage, must have wondered why we were bothering. But I then began a third rewrite, which solved many of the problems the reading had thrown up and gave the play more dramatic thrust: this was the script we began to rehearse at the end of September.

That we were able to rehearse for ten weeks was a great luxury, and one only possible in a subsidized company. However, in that time Nicholas Hytner had also to rehearse the new production of
The Wind in the Willows
, so it was Pitt and Fox in the morning, Rat and Mole (and Fox) in the afternoon. When at the end of the seventh week we were able to run the play, it was immediately clear that, while the course of the King’s
illness and recovery was plain and worked dramatically, the political crisis it brought with it lacked urgency. So the final bout of rewriting was only a couple of weeks before the play went on stage. I have never worked on a play where so much reconstruction has been required. That it was unresented by the actors, who by this stage in rehearsal are naturally anxious for a finished text, says a good deal both for their forbearance and for the atmosphere in which the rehearsals were conducted. Not since
Forty Years On
, which is, I suppose, my only other historical play, have I enjoyed rehearsals so much.

One casualty of the rewrites was strict historical truth. In the early versions of the play I had adhered pretty closely to the facts: the Prince of Wales, for instance, was originally a more genial character than presented here, and more reluctant to have it admitted in public or in the press that his father might be mad. However, the play works only if the antipathy between father and son, never far below the surface with all the Hanoverian kings, is sharpened and the Prince made less sympathetic. In the original Fox, too, was a more ambiguous character, much troubled by his own lack of scruple, and the votes in the Commons were not so narrow, the government majority never as low as ten. In other respects, though, events needed no sharpening, the King’s recovery, for instance, being only slightly less dramatic than it is in the play; certainly it took the politicians by surprise. This was because the King’s illness was such a political football that no one was quite sure what information was to be trusted. Even when the King was plainly on the mend the doctors could not guarantee that he would maintain the improvement (and there were some alarming lapses).