My Life in Pieces (44 page)

Such unabashed idealism is uncommon in writing about the theatre. It is not simply fine talk: it irradiates every moment of the work produced by his company. Many British actors and directors subscribe equally wholeheartedly to Dodin’s convictions, but to no avail, given the prevailing circumstances of production in this country. His genius is to have evolved a process which makes his glorious sentiments flesh. It costs a great deal of money, and a massive commitment of time, energy and, as he says, ‘human substance’ on the part of the company. Its existence is already threatened in Putin’s Russia. But
Journey Without End
shows what can be done in the right conditions. The first half of the book is a classic of the twentieth century. The second half, his close analysis of
Platonov
, is specialised and, frankly, a little dull; it might perhaps have been better to publish the first half on its own as a slim volume of major importance, which without question it is.

As it happens, the reviews for
Faust
were rather good, as was business,
especially for those days when we did both
Part One
and
Part Two
, seven
hours in all. Whatever my reservations about the unplumbed depths of
the play, it was a revelation for many people to see the work so central to
European intellectual history laid out as a whole before them. (Of course
we cut large chunks of it: when Peter Stein did the whole text a decade
later, it lasted twenty-four hours.) Simon Rattle came to see our version,
and at supper afterwards he said, ‘Now I know how to conduct
Beethoven.’ He also started conducting Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the
second part of which is, of course, a setting of the end of
Part Two
of the
play. My personal notices were on the whole good, though – such is the
morbid oversensitivity of actors – I can remember only one of them,
Michael Billington’s in the
Guardian
: in his review of
Part One
(a mere
three hours), during which I started at the age of a hundred, suddenly
became twenty-five, engaged in a savage sword fight, plunged into a vast
cistern of water, leaped all over a climbing frame and swung on ropes
with a lot of witches, all the while haemorrhaging rhyming couplets, he
observed of my performance: ‘Simon Callow, as Faust, neatly manages
the transition from age to youth’. And that was ALL.

My parallel career as an all-purpose director, meanwhile, continued to
bowl
joyously along. I went to the Los Angeles Theatre Center in down
town Los Angeles to direct my translation of
Jacques and his Master
by
Milan Kundera (he wrote it in French, I hasten to say), and was given a
superb cast among whose number were a Caribbean black actress, a Chi
nese-American one, an African-American actor, a blond mid-Westerner
of Lutheran stock, a Jewish comedian from the Bronx and Irving Thal
berg’s great-niece. They embraced Kundera/Diderot’s eighteenth-century
world with joy and wit, learned that melancholy and depression weren’t
the same thing, and collaborated with me on amending the script, which
I had translated with slavish accuracy to the French original, but with
British inflexions. Having heard them read it, I suggested that we should
only change it where strictly necessary – where a choice of words might
be actually confusing to an American audience. One of the more impor
tant such changes was made in a line which troubled one member of the
cast (the Bronx comedian). ‘It says here, “That night I got assholed.” How
did he feel about that?’ ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘it was great.’ ‘Huh. Just “great”? I
mean, did it hurt?’ ‘Not at all. Not at the time. The next morning he might
have had a hangover.’ ‘A hangover?’ ‘Well, yes, if you get drunk, you get
hungover, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, but, even if he was drunk, if a guy puts his –
you know – his schlong up –’ Suddenly I saw. I explained what arseholed
meant to a Briton. ‘But what should we say instead?’ I asked. ‘Pissed.’
‘Plastered.’ Too genteel I said. Then the Chinese-American woman spoke:
‘I got it: shit-faced.’ ‘Shit-faced?’ I said, aghast. ‘Yeah, shit-faced. That’s
what we say. That’s what it’s like, isn’t it?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s obvious you
and I go to very different parties.’ So shit-faced it was. Big laugh.

Back home, Scottish Opera asked me to do
Die Fledermaus
, one of those
many musical masterpieces of the operatic stage saddled with an almost
impossible book. What I wanted to do – what I always want to do with
the plays I direct – was to reproduce in the audience the feelings that the
first-night
audience at the very first performance would have had, when
the piece was unknown. In this case, they would have seen themselves
being wickedly sent up. I accordingly transposed the piece to contempo
rary Glasgow, with which the parallels with the Vienna of 1874 were
striking: a newly rich entrepreneurial class (yuppies, in 1989), a country
without political power but considerable economic clout, a pervasive cul
ture of hedonism. Kit Hesketh-Harvey of Kit and the Widow wrote the
outrageously funny book and lyrics, and the singers (among them the sub
lime Amy Burton as Adèle and Omar Ebrahim, fabulously decadent as
Prince Orlovsky) took to it with gusto, except for the tenor, the fragrantly
named Justin Lavender, who thought it was ‘crap, really’, as he explained
to me one afternoon, but he got his laughs just the same, and clearly
enjoyed them. The leading soprano in the revival was something else. She
rehearsed with abandon. Then, when we came to the dress rehearsal, for
each act she found a place on the stage in which she was comfortable and
stood there, stock still, and released her golden tone into the auditorium
(actually it was made of rather baser metal). Afterwards I said, ‘What
happened, Cynthia?’
[
Not her real name
]
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘rehearsals were
fun, but this is the performance. Now my loyalty is to –’ here, imitating
an action I had been longing to perform all evening, she placed her hands
round her neck – ‘
la voce
.’

While I was doing
Faust
at Hammersmith, the National Theatre had asked
me to direct Alan Bennett’s new play, which was a double bill called
Spy Stories
, consisting of
An Englishman Abroad
, his classic television play
about Guy Burgess and Coral Browne in Moscow, lightly adapted for the
stage, and a new play,
A Question of Attribution
, about Anthony Blunt
and a character called HMQ. I was to play Burgess and direct
A Question of Attribution
, while Alan would direct
Englishman Abroad
and play
Blunt. This offer did not require deep reflection on my part.

The National additionally wondered whether I had any ideas for a title,
because the present one seemed uninspired. I pulled the
Penguin Book of Quotations
off the shelf, turned to Shakespeare, found
Hamlet
, and there
the new title was, staring at me in the face: Act IV, Scene V, line 75:
Claudius: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in
battalions.’ I felt I had just won a treasure hunt. I phoned Alan, who was
neither here nor there about it – ‘I’ve never been any good with titles’ –
and then Richard Eyre, director of the National, who was very pleased
indeed. I felt awfully smug, and still do. The cleverness of it! They were
spies, they were single (as were the plays), and they came in battalions.
Alan and I were an odd couple, Eeyore and Tigger, and no prizes for
guessing which was which. I suspect that I was, as he says of someone in
a book of his, ‘too cocky for my taste’, alarmingly ebullient for someone of
his fastidiousness and self-discipline. It is to my credit, however, that,
overruling his fastidiousness, I saved a wonderful line in the play, HMQ’s
observation that ‘if Francis Bacon painted one, one would be a Screaming
Queen’, which Alan had thought rather obvious and camp and wanted to
cut. I wrote about him in a review of his autobiographical collection,
Untold Stories,
in 2006
.

There are times – rare, very rare – when as an actor or director you find yourself holding a piece of new writing which you know to be pure gold. It happened to me with a double bill of plays called
Single Spies
. The author was Alan Bennett, who would also appear in both plays and direct the other one, and it was clear that the central scene he had written between Blunt and the Queen – quite apart from any element of
lèse-
majesté
– was going to create a sensation. It was a sublime piece of comedy which touched on a number of profound questions, the most penetrating that of authenticity, which, as it happens, is the central concern of
Untold Stories
, Bennett’s magisterial and largely autobiographical compendium, sequel to the immensely successful
Writing Home
. The present volume is much the more revealing of the two, offering a comprehensive insight into a figure who, perhaps to his own surprise, has become a defining feature of the national landscape, part of what it is to be British – ‘as British as Alan Bennett’, as one might say.

He and I had a very successful working partnership, despite the anomaly of my directing the author in his own work while acting with him, a situation which Alan seemed to find perfectly normal.

Once the play had opened and transferred to the West End, we were gratifyingly successful, celebrities beating a nightly path to the stage door, but Alan couldn’t bear any of it, and, safety helmet on head, he would escape, unrecognised, to his bike and thence home to supper by the television. He hated the socialising, which is not unknown in the acting profession, but he didn’t much care for the acting either, which is rather less common. He would sit in the dressing room encircled with gloom. And yet as Blunt he was quite brilliant, and astonishingly consistent, provoking the same roars of laughter night after night. Sharing a stage with him was like sharing a stage with Paul Scofield: one feels a bit of a gooseberry. The public’s lust for him knows no bounds. Perhaps that is what persuades him to appear so frequently before them, in one guise or another; he writes of himself as ‘someone who has had to stand on stage [and read Larkin]’; had to, Alan? The ageless physiognomy is endlessly photographed, the subject an unwilling but stoical victim.

Untold Stories
has little to say about him as a performer, but it is the last word about him as a writer, and as a man; he now speaks in unmediated form about his life. ‘You do not put yourself into what you write,’ he says, marvellously, ‘you find yourself there.’ But Bennett the writer offers the same paradox as Bennett the performer: a private man who is determined
at all costs to go public. And we certainly want to know about him. The present volume both satisfies that appetite and explains it. Something in us wants to reach out to the boyish figure who he tells us is seventy but who to us is always that mop-topped egghead, spikily brilliant but somehow needy: he has described his late start, anatomically, not maturing physically till he was eighteen, a circumstance that has lent a quality of perpetual precocity to everything he does, seeming to warrant special admiration as if it were a wonder that he’d done it at all. His remarkable writing here about his parents – Mam and Dad, as he invariably refers to them – reveals the extent to which he is still their lad Alan. Their sense of the home as a fortress, their horror of attention-seeking, their rejoicing in their ordinariness, is shared by Bennett: he also shares his parents’ disdain for the enterprise, the ebullience, the sheer extroversion of Mam’s shop-assistant sister, Myra, and her ‘desire to be different, to be marked out above the common ruck and to have a tale to tell’. One is inclined to warm to Aunty Myra but Bennett’s – and Mam’s and Dad’s – disapproval is implacable. At the same time, without endorsing Myra, he seems tentatively to disapprove of the censorious person that he was; it seems to have taken him a lifetime to escape his parents’ values – for most of us it takes a lifetime to appreciate them.

The book begins with an account of his mother’s depressive illnesses which is unsparing both of her circumstances and gradual decline and of his attitude to the woman she had become: his coldness, impatience, indifference – and his sense of duty. He charts his frustrated rage with her delusions, determinedly trying to hike her back to reality, until eventually she dwindles into the sort of touchy-feely creature she would have been horrified by when she had her wits; he is dismally aware that the breezily generalised manner of the nurses probably suits her more than his attempts to communicate. He offers tart and pertinent comments on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, protesting against the general indifference to the plight of the routinely depressed, unless they present sensational symptoms: ‘Mistake your wife for a hat and the doctor will never be away from your bedside.’

A thread of family insanity runs through the book, and the suicide of his grandfather looms large. But the precision, detail and pithiness of his writing – whose sententiousness owes as much to Yorkshire as it does to Oxford – plucks celebration from what might otherwise be merely depressing. There is a pervading wistfulness well expressed in his remark
(not collected in the book) that he saw himself as an outsider, ‘not in the Colin Wilson sense, more other people having fun and me not’; the prose too frequently has a dying fall: ‘I have no nickname as there has never been any need for one.’ This sometimes tips over, forgivably, into self-pity in the diaries, where, for example, he finds it impossible to believe that there will be any sort of gathering in his honour when he dies; in fact, though the diaries – five years’ worth of them – fail to avoid a certain querulousness, they add up to a serious chronicle of our time, a valuable corrective to the babble of current affairs and opinion programmes. Sometimes he is unintentionally hilarious, as when citing reasons for being cheerful: ‘Well, at least it’s not Stalingrad. It’s warm – I don’t have lice.’ And always he remains a great phrasemaker: the Queen, after Diana’s death, is forced to go ‘mournabout’.