My Life in Pieces (63 page)

A couple of years later, I did
Peter Pan
– or rather
Peter Panto
. But despite
the vaudevillian elements, and the fact that Peter was played by a girl
(that living legend, Bonnie Langford), the show kept a great deal of Bar
rie’s text, even managing to retain something of the play’s dark mystery.
The play itself, not just the part of Hook, is full of terror and anxiety. It is
a unique example of what might be described as profound whimsy, full
of a dark playfulness which sometimes seems to foreshadow the mag
nificently offhand brutality of Roald Dahl’s world. Peter’s famous cry –
‘To die would be an awfully big adventure!’ – is a startling sentiment to
find at the heart of a children’s play. The play is, of course, a dream, and
as dark and as liberating as only dreams can be. ‘It has something to do
with the riddle of his being,’ says Barrie’s profound final stage direction.
‘If he could only get the hang of this, his cry might become “To live might
be an awfully big adventure!” but he can never quite get the hang of it,
so no one is as gay as he is. With rapturous face he plays on his pipes…
he plays on
until we wake up
.’ I loved doing
Pan
, despite sixteen shows a
week and an entrance singing Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ which threatened
to destroy my larynx for ever.

Pantomime is famously the only thing that can never fail in the theatre.
For a moment one glimpses a sort of theatrical Garden of Eden, a prelap
sarian world where the contract between audiences and actors still
obtains. Something like it still obtains on tour. I went on the road with
Equus
for eighteen weeks, to every major theatre in the country. The tour 
– like the play – was specially targeted at young people, and the effect on
them was thrilling. They’d shuffle resentfully into the auditorium, and
then, thanks to Shaffer’s unerring sense of theatre, the moment the lights
went down and the four horsemen strode forward to put on their silver
horse heads, they’d be gripped in an iron grasp. As one trudges around
the country, getting tireder and tireder, the greeting that almost without
exception awaits one on checking in to theatre, and the kindness and gen
erosity of local audiences, makes one feel involved in a very ancient
relationship. ‘My lord, the actors are come.’ ‘Buzz buzz.’

I played Garry Essendine in a production of
Present Laughter
directed by
Michael Rudman, which similarly toured for quite a long time and which
set every theatre where it played on a roar. Except Birmingham, that is,
where the mournful press officer asked me how the first preview had
gone. ‘Not many in,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘Birmingham doesn’t like Cow
ard.’ ‘Why, then,’ I asked her, ‘are we doing three weeks here?’ ‘That’s
what we’re all asking ourselves,’ she replied, in that uniquely melodious
accent of the Midlands.

Rudman dug into Coward’s play and found unsuspected seams of truth in
it. I had been nervous about working with him: we were friends, and that
is not necessarily the best basis for a working relationship. We all know
from bitter experience that some of the warmest social relationships can
come to grief on the floor, so to speak. He asked me to be present at all the
auditions, which was a good way of getting the hang of each other’s
approach, and I always found myself agreeing with him, but still…

The moment we started rehearsals, I knew that everything was not just
going to be all right: it was going to be wonderful. Without even noticing
it at first, I found that something rather good was happening to my acting.
Michael, always laconic, never didactic, was, by means of languid jokes
and wicked anecdotes, adumbrating an approach to acting which was the
perfect antidote to all my latent tendencies of bombast and energetic
overkill. His blocking made it virtually impossible not to look at the person
one was addressing, which was immediately a liberation. Everything sud
denly had a very specific focus. He would say, drily, ‘I’m not against
shouting. Shouting can be very effective. But choose your shouts.’ Or, ‘Let’s
see how quietly we can play this scene. Just out of interest.’ No theory; no
big stick. Everything done with a sprinkling of excellent and often self-
deprecating anecdote. We both became deeply interested in the speed of
thought at the heart of the play. One fine day he proposed that we play a
 
scene we were struggling with as quickly as humanly possible and the
play immediately yielded up all its laughs and all its truth. The delight and
approval of a man naturally given to ironic understatement were pecu
liarly gratifying. As we padded around the country with the show, the
reviews everywhere said the same thing: ‘This play is much better than
anyone gives it credit for.’ I can’t think of more satisfying praise. It was
entirely due to Michael. He trusted the play; he trusted us. Whenever he
came to see the show on the tour – which was almost everywhere; I think
he only drew the line at Milton Keynes for his own mysterious reasons –
he would work it a little further and our game would improve. I began to
realise that his aim was a very simple one: to get the production – and the
acting, which, in an important sense, for him WAS the production – as
good as possible. This is a surprisingly rare objective in the theatre. Peo
ple have all sorts of agendas, but not often that one.

I by now knew that I had found that rare thing: a director with whom I
had an almost perfect rapport. After his pastoral visits he and I would dine
together and chew over the show, and I realised more and more that under
that raffish and languid exterior beat the heart of a true theatre roman
tic. This also is rare – too rare. Among directors there are visionaries,
ten-a-penny; there are careerists, ditto (often the same people, oddly
enough). But there are few who deeply and tenderly love the theatre and
love actors. Our conversations often summoned up shades of actors and
of productions gone, and Michael’s love and knowledge of them was com
prehensive and profound. This was a strong enough bond, to be sure, but
it turned out that our sympathy was based on something even greater
than that. I shyly disclosed one day that I am an Honorary Citizen of
Texas, a sublime honour bestowed on me in an absent-minded moment
by the Mayor of Austin, on the last day of shooting of
The Ballad of the Sad Café
; Michael is a native of Dallas. It is as Texans that we
approached the work of Noël Coward, and as Texans that we will
approach all our future work, which I trust will be voluminous.

As we toured, by odd coincidence, I was writing a television screenplay
for HBO about Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. In time-honoured
fashion it was shelved just before we started shooting: guess what? Too
expensive. Who could have imagined that a film about two of the biggest
theatre stars of the 1930s and ’40s would cost money? But my fascination
for Coward grew and grew. I wrote a review of his letters for the
Guardian.

Noël Coward, who had a very vivid sense of his own significance, might nonetheless be slightly surprised at the hold that not only his work (which is never off the boards) but also the minutiae of his life continues to hold on the English-speaking public. The monumental
Theatrical Companion
to Coward,
four interesting biographies (one of which, by Philip Hoare, probes very deep indeed), the autobiographies, the
Diaries
and now the
Letters
mean that we know as much about him as he did about himself – maybe more so, since he preferred not to dig too deep into his inner self, or anyone else’s, for fear, as his childhood friend and playwriting collaborator Esmé Wynne-Tyson remarks in one of many striking letters in Barry Day’s riveting edition of the correspondence, that it might ‘interfere with your way of living, or alter your attitude towards life… I used to think,’ she adds, ‘your habit of evading a logical issue to an argument through abuse or humour was weakness. I’m now convinced it’s a protective armour.’

Day’s inspired decision to include other people’s letters to Coward as well as his to them has resulted in a richly complex portrait of the man across the whole of his astonishing career. (A slightly less inspired decision, perhaps, was the creation of epistolary cul-de-sacs within the chronological progression. Thus the whole of Coward’s formative relationship with Wynne-Tyson – it is their passionately stormy friendship, not the one with Gertrude Lawrence which is the inspiration for
Private Lives
– is examined over its whole forty-year course immediately after her first mention; we then resume where we were when she entered his life.) He was, as John Osborne famously noted, his own greatest invention, and as often with such people, the invention was so successful that it masks the sheer oddity of the man. Certainly his achievements have no parallel in their diversity: revue artist, actor, director (both film and stage), playwright, screenwriter, novelist, composer, lyricist, even – for a couple of hair-raising performances – conductor. In all of these spheres he achieved the utmost distinction. Nor was he confined to any one genre: he wrote sketches, songs, operettas, musical comedies, epics (
Cavalcade
attempts no less than a history of the British Empire from 1899 to 1930, which also happens to be the exact span of his own life up to the point that he wrote it), sentimental comedies, wartime adventure stories; he wrote the songs that rallied Britain during the war; and a half-dozen of his plays rank among the best of the twentieth century. He was a peerless performer, who eventually mellowed into a superb actor; above all, perhaps, he was a unique and uniquely charismatic personality.

All of this is to be found in the handsomely produced pages of this book. The vividness and urgency of the epistolary form, his triumphs and setbacks, are revealed in all the immediacy of the circumstances that gave rise to them. Day offers a detailed running commentary on the events and individuals concerned and provides a potted history of Coward’s life and times. This last is sometimes a little genuflectory; though Day is not uncritical of the work, he backs off describing some of the uglier episodes – the catastrophic Broadway revival of
Tonight at 8.30
, starring his then boyfriend Graham Payn, for example, or Coward’s unrelenting pursuit of a young heterosexual actor at a late stage of his career. Sex, though it was a major pastime of Coward’s, doesn’t get much of a lookin (as far as can be discerned, the only reference to it in the letters is ‘I managed to get one satisfactory bit of nuki’): Day approvingly notes that ‘To the end of his life… he remained private in his private life, a decision,’ he adds, ‘that one wishes today’s gay community would honour,’ a particularly idiotic remark as a response to
A Song at Twilight
, Coward’s last play, whose entire point is the terrible price to be paid for living in the closet. In fact, though he spared us the anatomical details, Coward was, for the time, remarkably brave in not pretending to be anything other than what he so clearly was, one of the many anomalies of his career.

His appeal to middle England was immediate and visceral; even at his most frivolous he seemed to speak for England: what he found absurd, they found absurd, and satire from his pen – ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, for example, or ‘Don’t Make Fun of the Festival’ – seemed to appeal to the most dyed-in-the-wool Disgusted of Surbiton, while his overt patriotism galvanised the nation. One wonders whether these admirers would have laughed so heartily if they thought that they were being entertained and stirred by a homosexual atheist of the most militant kind: a letter to his mother on the early death of his brother out-Dawkins Dawkins: ‘I’m saying several acid prayers to a fat contented God the Father in a dirty night gown, who hates you and me and every living creature in the world.’ More benignly but equally dismissively, he tended to refer to the Almighty as ‘Doddie’. Coward’s letters to his mother occupy a good slice of the book. They are not always the most interesting – for the most part he writes to her like a schoolboy – but they are a striking testimony to his absolute devotion to her and their sense of solidarity against the world, nowhere more vividly expressed than in the wartime letter she sends him wishing that she could line the whole of the Allied Government up
against a wall and shoot them because of their slighting treatment of his attempts to make a serious contribution to the war effort.

The question of ‘how best to employ my brittle talents in the cause’ exercised him greatly; he took it very seriously, becoming enamoured of the phrase ‘something rather hush-hush’. The whole of this extraordinary interlude during which Coward, Cary Grant and various other luminaries were trained up as spies is an hilarious, almost surreal episode; it got as far as Coward having serious personal briefings with Roosevelt. Coward’s outraged feelings, his bitterness at the position he had been put in and his contempt for the ‘stupidity’ of the government agencies are vividly expressed in letter after angry letter; in the end, of course, he got on with doing what he did best, as Churchill had rather roughly suggested to him he should from the beginning. He did heroically, acting in three new plays one after another, making the quintessential rallying film of the war,
In Which We Serve
, delivering heroic speeches and comic songs across the war zones of the Middle and Far East. He had a private supper with Churchill a day or two before VE Day at which he and his fellow guests stood up to toast the great man; but it was Churchill who, on the grounds of a minor and involuntary currency offence, blocked his knighthood.