My Life in Pieces (35 page)

Guinness’s very publicly affirmed religion has always been a source of fascination and some merriment – ‘a certain very holy person’, wags called him – with a suspicion of some faint hypocrisy somewhere. But it seems to me, and it seems to O’Connor, that he was fighting a lifelong struggle for mastery of his soul, and that Catholicism helped him in that struggle. Not many actors engage with that battle. Whether organised religion is a useful way of working on the inner spirit is not for me or for anyone to say, but at least Guinness acknowledged that his immortal soul was the very stuff of his acting. The translucency of so many of his performances is evidence of it, but his awareness of the dark, the engulfing dark within him, is equally responsible for the crushing power that he so often brought to his work. Garry O’Connor’s openness to this aspect of Guinness has resulted in a theatrical biography which goes far beyond the reach of most such books, and is his best book so far.

Another unexpected outcome of the publication of
Being an Actor
was
that I was asked by Claire Tomalin, who had just read the book, if I’d like
to review books for her at the
Sunday Times
. I said I would; and I’ve
reviewed books more or less uninterruptedly since then (1984). The sec
ond one I did for her was a book by Simon Gray,
An Unnatural Pursuit
, in
1985
.

Simon Gray is one of those writers whose popular image bears little resemblance to his work. One goes to the theatre expecting a Simon Gray Play, urbane, incestuously bitchy, with a central star role which knocks every one else into the ground. Instead one gets extraordinarily complex ensemble pieces full of surreal humour and devastating visions of loneliness, defeat and despair. It is true that the social world and the overall tone of the pieces, with a couple of exceptions, remain the same from play to play, though no more and no less than those of Chekhov – with whom his finest play,
Quartermaine’s Terms
, can well stand comparison. In the same manner, and almost equally fine, is his latest play,
The Com
mon Pursuit
, whose pro duction by Harold Pinter is the ostensible subject of the present volume. In fact, the lasting impression of
An Unnatural
Pursuit
is of the author himself, with a brilliant cameo portrait of Pinter, and a number of sharp and savage observations about the business of putting on a play thrown in as a bonus.

The bulk of the book is a work-journal. He starts with the completion of the play (‘I numbered the pages, packed and shaped them into a completed-looking pile, toasted myself with a further gulp of whisky and a few more cigarettes, gloated. This, for me, is the only moment of pure happiness I ever experience in the playwriting business…’), then follows its career through the stages of casting, rehearsal, performance, failure to transfer, and closure. It’s a vivid picture of those particular horrors, the sad series of compromises as you decline from your initial bright dream of the play: not being able to get this theatre, that actor, those dates; the mysterious failure of companies to gel, of rhythms to quite take hold; the wilful blindness of certain critics and the regrettable tendency of the public to listen to them; the terrible brevity of the run if the play doesn’t transfer – so much talent and work and passion squandered. All this is accurately and wittily described. But the book is more remarkable than mere reportage. For one thing, the playwright’s-eye view is a unique and inherently frustrating vantage point; second, the playwright in question is Simon Gray. By the end of the book we come to know him very well indeed.

‘Actually, he’s not nearly such a pain as his self-portrait would have you believe,’ says Pinter in his Foreword. No indeed, but
pain
is nevertheless exactly the word: not that inflicted on others, that undergone by himself. The wildly funny accounts he offers of his paranoia, power-mania, anxiety and doubt simply heighten one’s sense of it. Smoking like a beagle, his veins throbbing with booze, he pours his nightly confessions into the
tape recorder, a haunted, haggard, positively Dostoevskian figure.
En pas
sant
, he offers much lucid analysis of his play and the processes that are leading to its realisation. But at any moment, in the midnight stillness of his study, speculation is liable to run riot: why are his actors behaving like talentless buffoons and/or obstreperous Marxists? Why does Harold Pinter wish to exclude only
his
photograph from the programme? ‘I do actually feel very passionately that the play was written by me, I am the author, and yet the only people who are going to appear in the programme are the actors and the director, with the author, the only begetter, not visible.’ After a restless night, he becomes convinced that one of the actors has acquired a lisp. ‘I formed a plan to watch Nick Le Prevost’s lips like a hawk, and the moment I saw or heard the lisp, to alert Harold to it. He could take it from there… I do think the chap who plays Stuart shouldn’t have a lisp. Or a club foot or a hunchback. At least without giving me a chance to rewrite the text.’ This is madness, of course, but it is the divine madness that makes the author of
Butley
,
Otherwise
Engaged
and
Quartermaine’s Terms
an infinitely darker, more passionate, less rational artist than the waspish boulevardier of the critics’ report.

There are two areas of legitimate interest to which the book doesn’t address itself: the actual writing of the play; and why, given an excellent cast and a masterly director, it didn’t quite work. Mysteries, both, no doubt. What you do get is the lowdown on the playwright’s relation to the production, and a full-length soul-sketch of one of the best living practitioners of that art: in the second section of the book, the Gray of the work-journal is supplemented by the even darker Gray of
My Cam
bridge
, one of the occasional pieces reprinted in the present volume. (The other pieces are the classically hilarious
Flops and Other Fragments
; an appreciation of Leavis; and two pieces about cricket, upon which I am neither qualified nor about to comment, except to be duly awed by the figure of Lopez, the infant off-spin bowling wizard.)

My Cambridge
is an astonishingly bleak account of the author’s academic career, culminating in his years at Cambridge, where his ambition, triumphantly achieved on his own admission, was to be the very thing his harshest critic might accuse him of, ‘a fluent fraud’. Every anguished and hilarious word of this piece and indeed the whole book refutes that accusation. Death and demons swarm over its pages, held off by fags and booze and love and many, many wonderful jokes. But the sombre note echoes through: even Lopez killed himself, in the end.

When I wrote the review, I had just met Simon, and that was another
result of the publication of
Being an Actor
. I wrote about our friendship in
the
Guardian
after his death in 2008.

It seemed to many of us who loved Simon Gray – and perhaps it even seemed to him – that he might perhaps be indestructible. God knows, he had tried hard enough to destroy himself, but his body survived savage assault after savage assault as he returned, reckless and debonair, to the attack. When I saw him a couple of weeks ago for what I now know with infinite sadness to have been the last supper (rather a good title for a Gray diary, come to think of it), he looked as well as I’ve ever seen him look: bonny, clear-skinned, relaxed, with a little Greek sun still sitting on him. Some years ago, when he had just emerged from intensive and very much touch-and-go multiple surgery, we had dined together at his then favourite restaurant – there was always a favourite restaurant, adhered to with passionate loyalty, until it fell, as inevitably it must, from favour – and there he sat, at the exact table, in fact, where he had so recently collapsed after taking the sip of champagne that his doctor had expressly forbidden and from which he had been rushed to hospital. Some few weeks of intensive care and several near-death experiences later, he looked wonderfully well and fresh and youthful, and I had commented on this. ‘Where it really shows is in your eyes,’ I said. ‘You mean you can see them now,’ he replied, and surrendered to wheezy paroxysms of yelping laughter.

Those were the days, of course, of unbridled smoking, an activity out of which a great deal was now demanded, now, that is, that drinking was off the menu. As far as I know, he never once touched a drop of alcohol after the operations on his kidney and liver: the connection between drinking and mortality had been vividly demonstrated to him, and he had no desire to die. But like some mad scientist, he refused to believe in the destructiveness of anything until he had seen its results with his own eyes, proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. And I’m not sure that he ever fully believed that cigarettes were his undoing. His relationship to them, so well and hilariously documented in the diaries, was not sensuous, like Ken Tynan’s, nor emotional, like Pinter’s, but somehow intellectual. Popping the cigarette in and out of his mouth, he seemed to be having a querulous conversation with it, testing it, challenging it: like many of the
conversations we had over the years, where he would pick at some proposition one had lightly advanced, prodding it, probing it, becoming exasperated, outraged, appalled, before eventually collapsing into helpless hilarity in which all controversy dissolved and disappeared.

In earlier years, when he was still fuelled by unimaginable levels of alcohol – mostly champagne, but after a certain point all comers were welcome – the laughter didn’t always materialise. Ignition point could be very low. At our very first meeting, after he had written me a disarmingly generous letter about my first book, I had ordered the wine before he arrived, and said that I hoped that Gamay would do. ‘No it will NOT do,’ he said, with alarming force, ‘as it happens I think Gamay is the most disgusting, repulsive wine in existence. I loathe Gamay.’ After this thorny matter had been settled, with some difficulty, he immediately became funny, generous, easy. But it was a sticky moment. On another, much later occasion, after an out-of-town preview of his own production of one of his plays, we had supper with our mutual friend, the play’s producer. Simon was not happy because an important cue had gone wrong in the first scene of the play, after which he had repaired to the house manager’s office to brood and smoke and drink (and write: a new play, in fact), so supper afterwards was somewhat electric. He asked for comments, which both the producer and I were careful to pad with entirely genuine praise, slipping in the odd reservation like a Bob Martin’s tablet embedded in a pound of steak for a dog. There was a sex scene which was not going too well. We both commented on this, and I wondered whether this or that or the other might not be tried. ‘There’s no point, because the actor has no sexuality.’ I questioned this, at which he snarled, ‘We all know about
your
sexuality – all too fucking much about it, in fact.’ I stammered that I intended no sort of criticism, that the show was, in fact, quite brilliant, but in certain small ways – unimportant ways – it could, perhaps, be better. ‘Everything could be better,’ he raged. ‘
King Lear
could fucking well be better.’ At which he said he had had enough, and abruptly left the restaurant, to be driven furiously off to London. The next morning he called and said that he thought he might have been a little intemperate the night before and that, by the way, there was a screenplay in the post with a role in it that he’d like me to play.

It turned out to be that television masterpiece
Old Flames
, in which Stephen Fry played a father-to-be hallucinating, as he waited for the birth of his child, about a school contemporary (me) whom he had once
bullied. Though it was not at the time seen as typical of his output, the weirdly morphing screenplay was quintessential Simon Gray. He was thought of, especially in the 1980s, as a sort of high-level boulevardier, the Marc Camoletti of the Common Room. But though he was indeed a master of sophisticated dialogue (in life as much as in his plays), the phantasmagoric held a central place in his life and in his work. This propensity was, initially, perhaps liberated and even exacerbated by alcohol, but it outlived the alcohol, and in fact came triumphantly to centre stage in his great sequence of diaries, which reveal his almost Dostoevskian capacity to descend at an instant into delusion and paranoia: except that of course, Simon being Simon, the nightmare, though hatefully real, is always wildly comic. It was the phantasmagoric element in his idol Dickens that he valued above all others, the endlessly transmogrifying metaphors, the fantastical distortions, the elements of the grotesque, all underpinned by a great central humanity: and this was what characterised so much of Simon’s work – in a different key, of course, from Dickens’s, and on a different scale, but still recognisably the same. It was what we both loved in Dickens, and what I loved above all in Simon and his work. Conversation with him was often free-associatingly surreal, hilarious and slightly dangerous.

It was this dimension that was so rarely explored in productions of his work. Of course, there were in his output straightforwardly well-made plays, but many more of them were predicated on an awareness of the oddity of things when viewed from another angle. Dickens had a word for it: ‘mooreeffoc’, which is simply ‘coffee room’ seen from the other side of a glazed door. I believe I introduced Simon to this coinage, but he jumped on it: it was what he was about. His sense of the sheer strangeness of things was acute; perhaps the greatest character he ever created, Quartermaine, so sublimely incarnated by Edward Fox in the original production, is a kind of Holy Fool, hardly able to connect with the outer world. Often this perception lent a dark dimension to his thinking. Insanity often beckons his characters. I acted in his play
The Holy Terror
, which is the most extreme example of dislocation in his work, in which not only the protagonist but the play itself seems to be having a nervous breakdown; it was universally detested by critics, though it still seems to me to be a fearlessly exploratory and deeply felt work.