My Life in Pieces (42 page)

The Ballad of the Sad Café
was shot in 1989. But already in 1986, my
career as a director seemed to be taking over from my life as an actor.
After
The Passport
I directed my old friend Angus Mackay in an oddly
haunting little play called
Nicolson Fights Croydon
, which we put together
from Harold Nicolson’s diaries and letters. It concerned his unexpected but
successful candidature for the seat of Croydon East on a Labour Party
ticket, done in a theatre so small that we were able to do it without using
any stage lights at all, using only local light on the set – a table lamp, the
light in the wardrobe, the shaving light and so on. It resulted in a kind of
hyper-realism, and cast a curious spell, helping to make Angus uncannily
convincing as Nicolson: his son Nigel came to see the play and said that he
had felt unnervingly as if he were in his father’s presence again. (Nicol
son’s old friend James Lees-Milne came too. ‘V. well done,’ he wrote in
his grumpy diary. ‘Resemblance to H not bad, though he was too smartly
dressed and unable to catch H’s slurry voice.’) Having now directed three
small-scale plays (plus
Amadeus
in Mold), I took a very deep breath and
took on
The Infernal Machine
at the Lyric Hammersmith with Maggie
Smith as Jocasta. Robert Eddison played Tiresias, Lambert Wilson Oedipus.
I had translated the play while acting in
A Room with a View
in Florence,
happily immersing myself in the work of a desperately unfashionable
writer for whom I feel great affinity. The following is a piece I wrote about
Cocteau for the programme of Sean Mathias’s very successful production
of
Les Parents Terribles.

Jean Cocteau is one of those few creative artists who seem more substantial after his lifetime than during it. Now that the noise of his tireless self-advertisement has died away, he can be seen to be both more impressive than, but also quite different to, the star of a thousand photo-calls who alternately vexed and charmed his contemporaries. Never was a writer more omnipresently public (unless it be George Bernard Shaw, who in some unexpected ways he rather resembles): Cocteau talking about his work, Cocteau writing about his work, Cocteau posing in front of his work, Cocteau, like a Zelig of the arts, present at all the important events of the twentieth century, clinging proprietorially to the great man or woman at the centre of them. We know, it seems, everything about him: his views, his vices, his romantic passions, his religious aspirations, his sexual fantasies. He concealed nothing; he made art out of his impulses and his experiences almost as they were happening, clothing them in gorgeous verbal garments which were nonetheless quite transparent. He is everywhere in evidence in his own work, which, like Goethe’s, consists of autobiographical fragments, barely transmuted. He was perfectly frank about this: Yvonne in
Les Parents Terribles
, he said at the time, was an amalgam of his mother and Jean Marais’. Not only do we know all about him, we are on first-name terms with him, too: his signature – that spindly ‘Jean’, with a star dancing above it, or beneath
it, sometimes trailing behind – is written all over the work, quite literally, as often as not. And yet, by a paradox that he loved to enunciate, the more we know of him, the more invisible he becomes. ‘Jean’ was, of course, a mask, or rather a series of masks, designed to liberate his impersonality. It was a means of making himself a vehicle for inspiration. ‘Acute individualism is the highest form of collaboration.’ He was curiously available to being taken over completely by a more potent individual, whether a lover or a fellow artist. He was compulsively drawn towards great creative figures; in their presence he became an unashamed groupie. His offerings to them – the scenario of
Parade
for Picasso and Satie; the text of
Oedipus Rex
for Stravinsky; numerous scenarios for Diaghilev – were naked attempts to ingratiate himself with them, but equally to allow himself to be suffused with the source of their inspiration. The somewhat equivocal response of these great ones to his advances did not faze him in the least. ‘To admire is to efface yourself. To put yourself in someone else’s place. Unfortunately so few people know how to get outside themselves,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘In the presence of certain performances, I no longer exist. To be what I see and hear.’

Aesthete and dandy though he seemed, the supremely sophisticated master of the calculated pose, he worked desperately hard at preserving his spontaneity, his amateur’s love of the medium. This enthusiastic innocence is at the heart of everything he ever did, a sort of dazzlingly complex naïveté, mingling grave myth with fun and nonsense. It is the work of a wise and witty adolescent determined to reveal his insights and himself in as many ingenious ways as possible, expressing his relatively simple experience polysyllabically, prestidigitatiously, and sometimes preposterously, but never failing to bring an affectionate smile to our lips, while what he says somehow sticks in our minds. The innocence is partly a side effect of his spontaneity: for all its self-consciousness, both his writing and his drawing are instinctive and unrevised: ‘If tempted in the least to think, to try to make a correction with the aid of his reason – he was sure that his drawing would be a failure, that it would not live that life of its own without which a work of art is not a success,’ wrote Edouard Dermit of his graphic work. Entirely untrained in any medium, Cocteau made himself into a uniquely responsive conduit: ‘Only intensity matters. Talent – either you have it or you don’t. Intensity must be our one study.’ He even dismissed his own cleverness. ‘Intelligence has been granted to me in the form of intuition and sudden flashes. Which makes me seem
intelligent though I am no such thing. Which gives me the disadvantages of intelligence without the advantages. I am not bright enough and I have the reputation of being too bright.’ His acting out his life as a piece of theatre proved to be a cunning diversionary tactic: all the while, he was consciously shaping himself to receive messages from the unconscious. Stopped dead in his poetasting youth by Diaghilev with the fierce command ‘
étonne-moi
’ – ‘astonish me’ – he accepted that it was an artist’s task to disturb, not merely to divert.
Parade
,
Le Boeuf sur le toît
,
Le
Potomak
, accordingly outraged and baffled contemporary audiences. He became the personification of the avant-garde. It was another jolt, this time from his young lover and protégé Raymond Radiguet, that taught him that the systematic pursuit of novelty was as deadly as stale repetition, and that existing forms were apter vehicles for poetic truth. It was Radiguet’s sudden death from typhoid at the age of twenty which gave Cocteau’s life as an artist one final decisive new direction: he became an opium addict, nearly killing himself but at the same time putting him directly in touch with the deepest levels of his subconscious. Under its influence he created many of his most characteristic works:
Orphée
,
Le
Sang d’un Poète
,
La Machine Infernale
,
Opium
(of course) and
Les Par
ents Terribles
, which was written in eight drugged days.

The surprise is that Cocteau’s work itself proves on examination to be filled not only with invention, fantasy, paradox and pain, but above all with innocence, and its concomitant, mystery. It is typically Coctelian that he should see his opium habit as a route to innocence. ‘Children carry a natural drug within them… all children possess a magic power of
chang
ing
themselves into whatever they want. Poets, in whom childhood is prolonged, suffer greatly from the loss of this power. This, no doubt, is one reason poets resort to the use of opium.’ Perhaps, as Maurois suggested when welcoming him to the ranks of the Académie Française, Cocteau’s
personnage
had protected his
personne
. The bobby-dazzling style was not meant to distract from a lack of content, as it had often seemed at the time, but to lure the audience into an intuitive state where they might experience awe and deep tenderness. The torrent of language is a sort of cataract out of which springs a rainbow. The language itself rarely tells us what he is saying. Another paradox: the great manipulator of words, stringing them together dexterously like beads on a necklace, was only interested, finally, in the ineffable. It is the final and cleverest cleverness of this very clever man that behind the glittering surface of
his work was nothing; or rather, nothing that could be expressed in words. ‘Often young foreigners write to poets apologising for reading them so badly, for knowing our language so poorly. I apologise for writing a language instead of simple signs capable of provoking love.’ On another occasion, striking the same suddenly grave note, he defined poetry as ‘a machine for manufacturing love’.

‘From the age of fifteen,’ he said, ‘I’ve never stopped,’ and it is this sense of
perpetuum mobile
that is the overwhelming impression made by his life and work. He turned his hand to every conceivable form: plays, films, novels, verse, philosophy, theology, drawings, sculpture, murals, paintings, fashion design, stage design, opera libretti, ballet scenarios, masks. He described all this vast output with one word: poetry. It was poetry of film, poetry of painting, poetry of theatre. Not poetry in the theatre; poetry
of
the theatre, Cocteau insisted. Nor did he speak of texts, but of
pretexts
: the structure of words, characters and situations was merely a device, like Eliot’s bone which the burglar gives the dog while he opens the safe, to occupy the conscious mind and facilitate the release of the unconscious. It was natural that he should reach for myth in trying to engage with those secret areas of the human heart, but for him myth was not confined to the Olympian gods (though they fascinated him too); there were divine creatures nearer to hand. It may be said of Cocteau that if he reduced the gods to boulevardiers, he made up for it by apotheosising the boulevard.

He was in love with the theatre from the earliest age, with an almost morbid sense of its power and splendour: ‘Since childhood and the departure of my mother and father for the theatre, I have had red-and-gold sickness. I’ve never got used to it… as time goes by, the theatre in which I work loses none of its prestige for me. I respect it. It intimidates me. It fascinates me. I split in two when I am there. I live there, and I become the child that the ushers admit to Hell… the theatre is a furnace. Anyone who doubts that will be consumed by it in the end, or go up in smoke on the spot.’ His view of the denizens of the stage was essentially heroic; heroically childish. ‘I see the actor or actress exhaust himself for us and lose – like an animal fatally wounded by destiny – this pale blood of the boards, lose it and hold it with full hands, hold it in and “hold” until the final bow on which the curtain falls, each evening, like the guillotine. The crowd adores them, hates them and longs for them to stumble, and to enjoy them, it is necessary to cultivate and rediscover the childhood that
poets prolong to their death and that grown-ups in the town boast of having lost.’ His sacred monsters, with whom he wished to be associated in life and whom he delighted to depict, were equally heroic: ‘the thing that distinguishes them from others, that makes them stars, derives less from any striving for uniqueness than for a struggle against death, and that pathetic struggle gives them greatness – differentiates them from simple caricatures to just the same degree that that gentleman over there, carrying a parasol and walking along with tiny footsteps, is different from an acrobat who does exactly the same thing on a high wire.’ Cocteau could scarcely have invented a more precise image of himself, though perhaps his essentially paradoxical existence, in which nothing is as it seems, is even better summed up by a little aphoristic tale he called
Sur
prise at the Court of God
: ‘A little girl steals some cherries. Her whole long life is spent making up for this fault with prayers. The devout old woman dies and goes to heaven. GOD: You have been chosen because you stole cherries.’

As I looked round the extremely colourful cast of
The Infernal Machine
on the first read-through, I had an odd premonition that it was going to be
a nightmare, but that it would be worth it. Right on both counts.
Rehearsals, technical rehearsals and previews were riven with problems
from beginning to end, but, as in backstage movies, everything came won
derfully right on the first night. The reviews were splendid, Bruno Santini’s
superb sets, which had been such a source of despair to the technicians,
finally worked triumphantly and Maggie gave a masterly performance
which in the last act ascended to the sublime. Even Cocteau came out of
it very well, though Lambert Wilson’s father, the late Georges Wilson,
French actor and director, wondered when he came to see the show
whether it was a good idea to have a homosexual production of a homo
sexual play. Whether it was or not, on the strength of it, the producer Bob
Swash, by one of those leaps of imagination that are rarer and rarer in
today’s theatre, asked me to direct the West End premiere of Willy Rus
sell’s masterpiece,
Shirley Valentine
, the best one-person play I know of,
its greatness consisting precisely in its being a play and not merely a show.
Pauline Collins inhabited Shirley to the last wrinkle of her nose. But it was
by no means a foregone conclusion: at the last run-through in the
rehearsal room Willy had said, ‘She’s good, but she’s not Shirley.’ I said:
‘Wait till we get into the theatre, Willy.’ At the technical rehearsal, it was
immediately apparent that Pauline was no longer playing Shirley; Shirley
was playing Pauline. After the first night in London, it was impossible to
get through the foyer because of the queue of very distinguished ladies
waiting to get into the loo so they could repair their make-up. When we
did the play on Broadway, women openly broke down in the stalls, while
their husbands turned sternly away, lips aquiver.