My Life in Pieces (64 page)

The section of the book that follows the war charts his increasing disaffection with England and with his own public (‘Idiotic public for letting me down. They ought to have known better’), his return to popular acclaim as a cabaret artist, the rediscovery of his early plays and, finally, the knighthood; he was dead three years later, safe in the knowledge of his own immortality. The letters give report of his daily life, his many voyages, his frustrations and his disappointments, his falsely raised hopes and his cruelly dashed spirits. Above all, they are a record of his friendships. Notoriously, he knew
everyone
, from Virginia Woolf to T. E. Lawrence to Anthony Eden to Lionel Bart, and wrote to them all. Perhaps the most amusing letters are those to his secretary Lorn Lorraine, often in verse (‘Pretty pretty Lorn / Timid as a haunted faun / This engaging little rhyme / Merely serves to pass the time’), and to Alexander Woollcott, full of nonsensical playfulness (‘The bluebells are out and I sometimes throw myself among them laughing’). In his self-elected role as ‘psychiatrist and nurse governess’ to his friends, he wags his finger, more often than not telling them, as he does an anguished Marlene Dietrich, ‘Snap out of it, girl!’ Dietrich paints an unforgettable portrait of abject infatuation (with
Yul Brynner, whom they nickname Curly): ‘Thank God I am German or I would have jumped out of the plane.’ Bemoaning her linguistic incompetence, she offers a superb definition of
amitié amoureuse
: ‘Friends who use lovers’ tactics.’ Garbo writes perfectly Garboesquely: ‘That fluttering, tired and sad heart of mine has been in such a peculiar state…’ Among the richest exchanges in the book are with the young radical writers of the Fifties and Sixties whom at first Coward denounced but then came to respect: Wesker, Pinter, Albee, Osborne. His enthusiasm for Pinter – ‘I love your choice of words, your resolute refusal to
explain
anything, and the arrogant, but triumphant demands you make on the audience’s imagination’ – gives a clue as to Coward’s continuing vitality today. He may have marginally outlived his own talent, but he slipped away with all his instincts intact, including that of a well-timed exit: ‘I’ve never wanted to be the last to leave any party,’ he said.

The truth is, I suppose, that nothing theatrical is alien to me, though my
taste for showbiz – or perhaps my gift for it – is severely limited, as I
realised when I directed
The Pajama Game
. I tried, as I had tried before
with
My Fair Lady
, to reproduce the circumstances of the original
production, in the case of
The Pajama Game
the fascinating combination
of modern dance, vaudevillian skills, and political radicalism; I felt, too,
that musical revivals of 1950s shows needed to get away from irony and
archness. The Fifties, it seemed to me and my producer, Howard Panter,
were, from a visual point of view, all about joyful abstraction; musically
they were about liberation from old forms. So, without any difficulty and
in a very short space of time, we recruited that supreme saxophonist and
musical explorer John Harle to arrange the piece, David Bintley, of the
Birmingham Royal Ballet and a passionate aficionado of musicals, to
choreograph it, and Frank Stella to design it. Frank Stella! After Howard
and I left his studio in New York we literally hugged each other, and went
and found the largest bottle of champagne money could buy. Exhilarated
by the work, and quite forgetting what had happened after my effusion
on the subject of
Les Enfants du Paradis
, I wrote a note for the programme
book.

The musical can be many things: it can be stylish or sombre; epic or harrowing. There is no bar to it addressing Great Themes, or taking Specific Political Positions; it can break your heart or change your mind. But the thing at which it is absolutely unrivalled is cheering you up. And of all the many joyful, throw-your-hat-in-the-air, set-your-foot-tapping-and-send-you-out-into-the-cold-night-air-with-a-grin-a-mile-wide-on-your-face musicals ever written,
The Pajama Game
is pretty near the top of the pile. The story is satirical, in theory: it sends up labour relations in a pyjama factory in the Midwest in the 1950s. The protagonists are Sid, the Works Supervisor, and Babe, the Head of the Union’s Grievance Committee, so it’s also a kind of Romeo and Juliet story, love across the picket line. But what it really is, is a paean to life, a celebration of its young creators’ fertile inventiveness, and a non-stop triumph of theatrical panache. For all its craftsmanship, it has a kind of anarchic dynamism lending it an innocence which – despite all the grim historical evidence to the contrary – the 1950s still seem to us to possess: an exuberance, an optimism, a sense of liberation.

The show has a sensational sequence of hit tunes – ‘Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes’, ‘Steam Heat’, ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ – unrivalled in the annals of musical comedy, except, perhaps by
Guys and Dolls
, whose composer, Frank Loesser, was the great mentor of the young hope-fuls, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, who wrote
The Pajama Game
. It is very much in the tradition of Loesser’s show – witty, snappy, vernacular lyrics, poignant ballads, streetwise and hip to the moment, bursting at the seams with sex. The action proceeds with a kind of zany anarchic freedom which owes something to vaudeville and everything to its original director and co-book-writer, George Abbott, who more or less single-handedly maintained the spirit of burlesque (in which he had grown up so many, many years before: he was already sixty-seven at the time of
The Pajama
Game
and had another forty years’ active life ahead of him) into the post-war musical theatre. It is no accident that his work is full of clowns, male and female, and their extended comic routines, and that love at first sight is at the heart of the plots. The long and glorious tradition of popular comedy – celebrating the comeuppance of curmudgeons and the triumph of youthful sexual desire over the world’s strictures – the tradition of the
Commedia dell’Arte
and the ancient Roman comedies, of Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd, of the Marx Brothers and
Up Pompeii!
– lives in
The
Pajama Game
; not for nothing was Hines (the insanely jealous, drunk,
ex-vaudevillian time-and-motion study man who is the show’s master of ceremonies) played in the first London production by Max Wall.

Combining these strands – the political story, the love story, and the comic subplots – with the mastery born of long, long practice, Abbott created a late flowering of a genre whose thrust is above all optimistic: the wilful lovers come together while the zanies weave their mad patterns through everyone else’s life. What about the workers? They win. It is all very satisfying. It is a form of theatre that calls for freewheeling invention and rigorous craftsmanship, hard, hard work and a deep love of life. The extraordinary creative team of the present production has worked itself to the bone in the name of fun and they’re still smiling, which must mean something.

My no doubt overebullient words were again seized on and savagely
mocked by the critics, as was the whole venture. It was the biggest single
disaster of my career. ‘Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire,’ said the critic of the
Mail on Sunday
, though the first-night audience had cheered to the echo, and the
co-author, Richard Adler, not a man reckless with praise, had told me that
it was one of the best evenings of his life. We ran for a month, and lost
£3 million.

I suspect that my love of popular theatre lies more with individual
performers than with the musical theatre as such. No doubt it is something
atavistic, some echo of my great-grandfather, which draws me to the idea
of clowns, but the lure is irresistible. In childhood I idolised the great Coco;
but in my youth, I was bitterly disappointed by what happened to the
traditional clown. In middle-life I rediscovered my enthusiasm thanks to
Slava Polunin, the reinventor of Russian clowning. His
Snowshow
distills
the essence of circus clown, in a setting of the utmost poetry, turning the
entire audience into children. A photograph of him and me together is
among my most cherished possessions, staring at each other in mutual
incomprehension, as all clowns do. I wrote this piece for my regular weekly
Sunday Express
column (rather oddly named
The Outside Edge
) in
February 1997.

I never expected to feel again in a theatre what I felt last Tuesday in the Peacock Theatre off Kingsway in London, and I am still reeling. The show is called
Slava’s Snowshow
and it counts among the two or three greatest things I have ever seen in a theatre.

Slava Polunin is a Russian clown and his show is a loosely connected series of sketches to which I was drawn out of mere curiosity. I’m not a big fan of clowns, or of circuses. I like plays, and acting, and beautiful design. I had heard good things about the show, certainly. But nothing that I had heard remotely prepared me for the poetry, the anarchy, the hilarity and the human tragedy that this man and his colleagues unleashed on us all that night.

His skill is supreme, but that’s not it. He performed the old routine of hanging a coat up on a rack and sliding one of his arms through the sleeve and caressing himself voluptuously with his own hand. He did it superbly, supremely well. The disembodied arm seemed to have a life of its own, to belong to someone quite different from his other arm. And we roared with laughter, we shouted and brayed until we were hoarse.

But why were we crying, too? It was because we somehow knew this man, and knew his need for love, and knew, above all, about his terrible loneliness. The moment he walks on stage, we know him: he is us. Man, alone in the universe. And again and again through the evening, he made himself known to us – without a word, of course, with only a flick of the eye, a tiny gesture of the hands.

Every emotion, every impulse was crystallised in a gesture. Gesture is
the
art of the actor, or it always was. We have been misled into thinking that emotion and external imitation are its essence: looking and feeling the part. It’s not. It’s the thought made flesh, and at this Slava is a genius. We see his shock at encountering another clown, we sense him being appalled and intrigued, we understand his amazement that such a grotesque could exist (even though the other clown is almost identical to him), we get Slava’s initial delight in the clown’s company, then his growing frustration, his resentment, even hatred, of the other clown, the other clown’s banishment, his delight at being alone again, then his sudden engulfing loneliness: this is the whole history of the human heart played out before us.

His leaps of imagination are bold, but they are always rooted in reality. When he takes a train, he does so by running round in circles, with
smoke pouring out of his stovepipe hat. I never saw a more train-like train. Towards the end of the show, snow starts to fall on stage, then, magically, it starts to fall in the auditorium too, onto the audience.

The effect of this is extraordinary, moving in some ineffable way: one instantly becomes a child again. Then, as the opening of
Carmina Burana
pounds out, Slava whirls all the stage flats round till it becomes a great snowscape, while a battery of lights blazes into the auditorium, the stage cloths flap furiously before the wind machine, and Slava in the centre of it all turns round again and again and again, delirious with joy.

How can I make you understand that this is the single most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a theatre in my life, that as I watched it I felt my eyes opening so wide they seemed about to fall out of my head, as my mouth opened wider and wider with amazement, while hot tears coursed down my face?

That finale was of course, the end – but for one thing. From behind the stage now emerged three huge helium-filled beach balls looking like giant Christmas-tree baubles. Out into the audience they came and as if on cue, the audience stood up to bounce them, and they stayed bouncing them for ten, fifteen minutes; for all I know they are bouncing them still, players in the game now, no longer spectators. Solemnly, the clowns lined up on stage to watch them.

This is theatre. Naïve and profound, childish, in one sense, but deeply human. Theatre is not really the place for ideas. It is a playground for the imagination, a gymnasium of the soul, the heart’s stadium. Every child in that theatre on Tuesday, and every adult too, now knows what theatre can be. Pray God they aren’t disappointed in it too often in the years to come, and forget.

Since my early encounter with Max Wall I have been addicted to comedi
ans, although there is some overlap between them and clowns, as in the
case of Tommy Cooper, for example, about whom I directed a play called
Jus’ Like That
, the brainchild of my old friend from
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
, Patrick Ryecart, and written by John Fisher. Jerome Flynn
uncannily reincarnated Tommy, unleashing waves of laughter in the the
atre quite as engulfing as those provoked by Tommy himself. I wrote about
him for the
Observer
in 2003.

Technically speaking, Tommy Cooper flourished after the music hall had died, but he embodies its spirit as almost no one else within living memory. Perhaps Max Wall with his simian presence was an even more characteristic expression of its world of extremes, but Cooper, the zany giant, fumbling magician and surreal raconteur, continues in a richer, more universal degree the great tradition of that comic Eden. It was the last flourish in the West of the immemorial carnival spirit, uniting all classes and degrees of men and women in a celebration of daily experience which was both life-affirming and highly subversive, obsessed with the bizarre and the odd, but endlessly asserting the common lot of all mankind. The comedy of the music hall was filled with a wild poetry, sometimes almost surreal, which had nothing elite about it, its laughter a transformation into prancing hilarity of the (on the whole) depressed and frustrated existences of both its artists and its audiences. The terms of reference are almost all mundane: everyday encounters with authority figures – doctors, policemen, lawyers; the difficulties encountered with fractious landladies and waiters in restaurants; the tyranny of objects; the treacherous mysteries of language; the never-ending caprices of the libido. It is a response to the exigencies of real life, but it is rarely topical. It creates another world, an upside-down image of life where everything is resolved in laughter. To be able to laugh at something is to be undefeated by it.