My Life in Pieces (36 page)

The other side of his disorientation was his acute sense of wonder at simple things, which is again a common thread in the diaries, some of whose
most remarkable pages stem from loving, even enraptured contemplation of the ordinary, culminating so movingly at the end of the last one in his joy at being given an extension of life by his surgeon. Though outwardly a typical, cricket-loving, somewhat fogeyish, doggedly non-PC middle-class Englishman of his generation, he never quite felt himself to be entirely part of the normal, the ordinary world. Before that first meeting of ours, describing himself as a ‘topographical imbecile’, he had asked for a map of where we dining. The restaurant in question was in New Row, off St Martin’s Lane, in the very centre of the West End where so many of his plays had been triumphantly performed, but despite the map he had the greatest difficulty in finding it. In truth, he entirely lacked a map for the world in which he worked, and was never a member of any of the unofficial clubs which are the central organising principle of British society. He had no skill at self-promotion. He raged against this, but he was resigned to it.

Friendship was his mainstay, and his life was genuinely blighted by the loss, at regular intervals, of some of his greatest friends, many of them well before their allotted span. The early death of Alan Bates grieved him profoundly. Alan was his thespian alter ego, and they adored each other; often at the end of a meal I was having with Simon, Alan would drop in for coffee or a brandy just for the sheer pleasure of spending a few extra minutes with him, and it was extraordinary to hear the two men in duologue, like a man’s conversation with himself. Though Simon was not necessarily the first person you’d go to if you were in trouble, he was unstinting in his interest, enthusiasm, appreciation and advice about any professional matter, always the first person to read anything I ever wrote, likewise sending me everything he ever wrote, draft after draft, characteristically typed with triple spaces, manuscripts monstrous to handle, but irresistible to read. His last dramatic masterpiece,
Little Nell
, about Dickens and Ellen Ternan, was given short shrift by the critics, but it will come back and be properly recognised, in all its dark, nightmarish complexity, its sense of things falling apart and the centre not holding, as will his as yet unproduced but entirely extraordinary Dionysian fantasia
Hullabaloo
, and then perhaps he will at last be understood for the truly original figure that he was, both in life and in art.

The last and most completely unpredictable result of publishing my anti-
directorial jeremiad (as it was now perceived),
Being an Actor
, was an
invitation to direct an opera,
Così Fan Tutte
, in Luzern. I had already
directed in the theatre: it started more or less by accident in 1983 when
my old friend Snoo Wilson (whose play
The Soul of the White Ant
I had
acted in at the Bush, as described elsewhere) lost the director for his lat
est play,
Loving Reno
, also at the Bush. He suggested that he might direct
it himself, but for some reason this made them nervous, so I proposed that
we co-direct it, which we did, with very happy results (we were nomi
nated by the
Sunday Times
critic James Fenton as the Best New Directors
of the Year). As it happens, it was virtually the end of Snoo’s career as a
director, and the beginning of mine. It was apparent that he had no
appetite for the multiple roles that a director has to perform – sergeant
major, psychoanalyst, perfect audience, problem-solver, team leader,
cheerleader, seminar-leader,
leader
– and he gradually sat back in the
trance-like state adopted by most writers in rehearsals (half reliving the
writing of it, half longing for it to be the way they imagined it would be,
impatient of and bewildered by its present transitional stage), while I got
on with it. It was the beginning of a long working relationship between
us, which I described in an article in the
Sunday Telegraph
on the occa
sion of the first night of my production of Snoo’s play
HRH
in the summer
of 1997.

Snoo Wilson is one of the great unregarded originals of the British theatre. His work is rarely, too rarely, seen in the great subsidised theatres, though it is often epic in scale and richly deserves an outing; audiences there don’t know what they’re missing. Ideas and history are his territory, and he takes them several rounds in the ring. If Tom Stoppard is the intellectual ping-pong champion of the world, Wilson plays rugby football with the mind. He is quite incapable of writing an ordinary play. (Or an ordinary novel.
I, Crowley
, his latest, is a piece of brilliant self-deconstruction, the Great Beast explaining himself in lapel-grabbing prose; it comes complete with goat’s tail dangling from the book’s spine.) He is the least autobiographical of writers; or if he is, I’d rather not be his psychiatrist. It could be said of all his plays that whatever their nominal location, they really take place inside the skull of the human race.

There the conscious and the unconscious intermingle, and time itself exists in simultaneous strata, crackling across the synapses. Historical
figures – Aleister Crowley, John Dee, Conan Doyle – co-mingle with ancient Babylonian gods and blokes who’ve come to fix the plumbing. He has no interest in imitating the surface of life; instead the work grows out of his restless pursuit of history and ideas. Historical personages rise up before him, blocking his path. Dodging nimbly about, he throws his net over them, finally encaging them, kicking and shouting, within one of the idiosyncratic structures that he calls his plots. There they are debriefed of their ancient wisdom and forced to confess their wickedness; often they are confronted with similar creatures from another age or culture.

The spectacle can be terrifying and pitiful. It is always very funny. And it is wholly novel, always challenging the limitations of what can be attempted in a play. For this reason his work has not, till now, anyway, entered the mainstream. He has not been fashionable. His plays do not express the Zeitgeist, they do not present recognisable mirror images of our life and times. To their critics, they are tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury (plus a few jokes), signifying nothing.

To those of us who love them, they are magical mystery journeys, laced with wisdom and poetry, deeply farcical, releasing wild laughter and sometimes tears; through them stride strange mutant figures, crazed, amorous monsters, puffed up with vanity, abject with desire. They are the creations of a man who has gone burrowing into some pretty odd tunnels, and come back, covered in mud, with golden nuggets between his teeth. They come from the Other Side. Snoo is the fully paid-up shaman of the Theatre Writers’ Union. I first met him in 1975 when I was cast in his play
The Soul of the White Ant
. I had been doing a West End show called
The Plumber’s Progress
with Harry Secombe; the moment I read Snoo’s play, tasteless, recklessly imaginative, essentially theatrical, I knew it was the perfect antidote. But it wasn’t just outrageous. Somewhere, behind the ribaldry, was a huge and rather moving compassion.

The central character of the play, Mabel, played by a young and brilliant Lynda Marchal (now Lynda La Plante, world-beating author of
Prime
Suspect
), had killed her houseboy, with whom she had been having a somewhat unusual affair: thinking it wrong to consummate with a married man, she has had him relieve himself on the other side of the room into Tupperware containers which she has been dutifully storing in the fridge behind the bar.

Enter Eugene Marais, the famous South African anthropologist (and author of,
inter alia
,
The Soul of the White Ant
), long dead, but now
resurrected into this obscure bar, a walking cadaver, covered in mud, eyes staring out of their sockets, worms wiggling out of his pockets and ears. He makes for the jukebox, which bursts into a spontaneous rendition of Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’, after which, somewhat revived, the corpse sits down at the bar and engages in largely incomprehensible conversation with the phrenology-obsessed journalist Pieter de Groot. He disappears, and the murder of the houseboy is covered up, but meanwhile the girlfriends of de Groot and his police chum Van der Merwe, having taken a dip in the river at the very point where the men have emptied the semeniferous Tupperware, have fallen pregnant. Re-enter Marais, now impeccable in a white suit. As before he makes for the jukebox; again ‘Blueberry Hill’ sings out. As Marais passes the girls, he touches their stomachs. Their periods start. Curtain. It was hilariously, outrageously amusing; but it was also full of mystery and tenderness and a most unexpected sense of pain. Once seen, it was not easily forgotten.

The author, on acquaintance, was perfectly normal to look at, though there was something odd about him. Tall, but seemingly planned on an even larger scale, he had the look of someone on whom a hod of celestial bricks had fallen at an early age, and he was still trying to work out what had happened. His hair was green, red and yellow. In physiognomy almost Ancient Roman, heroic in profile, his handsome features betrayed, as they still habitually betray, an expression of intense attention to inner voices speaking in strange tongues. This rapt concentration on aetheric communications was broken from time to time by explosions of nearly orgasmic mirth, wave on wave of spluttering delight. ‘What? What?’ he would gasp as the joy spread. Our relationship was informed, at that time, by mutual wonder: neither of us could believe that the other had gone quite so far out on a limb in our respective arts. His writing and my acting fitted each other like a glove; we were both then intent on exploring the wilder reaches of the human condition.

I started my career as a director seven years later with his play
Loving
Reno
, a saga of Chilean incest and bad magic. We co-directed it, though after a while he lost interest in the mechanics of staging and the processes of actors and contented himself with offering guidance and inspiration. It was a wonderful partnership, and we dubbed ourselves not co-directors but Co-Optimists (after the great end-of-pier troupe of the Twenties). The latest Co-Optimistic venture is
HRH
,
or
,
David and Wal
lis in the Bahamas
, an account, scurrilous but scrupulously researched,
of the wartime misadventures and Nazi fraternisation of the ex-King and his American bride, events which have until very recently been suppressed; it is at the same time a deconstruction of the Greatest Love Story of the Century, and a hellish vision of two people trapped in a sort of time-lock with nowhere to go and nothing to be. It is wickedly funny and somewhat tragic and as tight as a drum, Snoo in Racinian mode, strictly adhering to the unities, Aristotle meets Agatha Christie. It addresses, as everything he has ever written does, history, in this case a particularly murky moment in the story of our times, and indeed that of the House of Windsor. This is Co-Optimism at its world-beating best and will, I believe, at last introduce Wilson to the wider world.

Alas,
HRH
didn’t quite hit the jackpot, despite the witty elegance of
Amanda Donohoe as Wallis Simpson and a bagpipe-playing, ukelele-
strumming Corin Redgrave as the Dook. (In my account of Snoo, I omitted
to mention his thespian gifts: he gave a definitive performance as the Dol
phin in Virginia Woolf’s
Freshwater
, in which the other roles were played
by Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. Snoo was
effortlessly at ease with this group.) At the time of
Reno
, I was conscious
of the cynical smile on people’s faces when I announced my new career as
a director, so much so that when I returned to the fray, at the Offstage The
atre in Chalk Farm, in 1985, I felt obliged to explain myself. The piece is
rather innocent, my first excited impressions of directing.

I never said we could do without directors. Honest, I never did. In
Being
an Actor
I wrote, rather movingly, I thought, about what one demands from the director, how much one needs him, and how little he can expect in return. It was his power that I denounced, the structure – which I called the directocracy – that places him at the summit of the theatrical process, and ensures that the art of the theatre becomes, by means sometimes subtle and sometimes naked, the execution of his will. Everything would be different, quoth I, if the economic relationship were to change, and the actors hired him rather than the other way round.

And so it comes about that I am directing
The Passport
by Pierre Bourgeade at Buddy Dalton’s Offstage Theatre. My friend, the gifted actress Anna Korwin, came to me with the play, we sent it to Buddy, and
then we set about casting the other role (and luckily got the quite remarkable Peter Bayliss). I then gave an account of what I thought the play was. In a sense, I auditioned for the actors. Had they not agreed with me about the nature of the play we would have parted: that is to say, I would have gone. In the event, they bought my vision, which was not exactly what leapt off the page. Most people who read the play have been critical of certain aspects of it: what I proposed was that – as seems to me not infrequently to be the case – the apparent weaknesses of the piece were actually its essence and its chief attraction.

All too often, directors, it appears to me, go to great lengths to achieve unity where diversity is the very nature of the work, or to rationalise what is essentially non-consequential. In brief, I felt that the play was a kind of nightmare: the characters are trapped in the twists and turns of a capricious plot. To realise this view of the play, an excursion into the murky realms of Symbolism and maybe even Expressionism (dread thought!) was required. Expressionism is a word which brings a prayer to the lips of the pious and has become merely pejorative. It takes fearless actors rich of resource and bold of means to bring it off; Anna and Peter were two such.