It’s certainly true that audiences (and critics in particular) come to the National Theatre in a different frame of mind from when they go to see a play on Shaftesbury Avenue. They’re more reverential, more inclined to invest what they’re seeing with significance (or deplore its absence). It’s all in capital letters: Art, Theatre; it’s never just a play. I first noticed this twenty-five years ago in the Lyttelton. It was the second night of the opening week and the play was John Osborne’s Watch It Come Down. It wasn’t one of his best but, as always with Osborne, even when I disliked the play I found his tone sympathetic. I was in a minority. To give a flavour of the audience, Edward Heath was sitting in front, Alec Douglas-Home behind and the rest looked as if they’d come on reluctantly after the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Of course, audiences were bound to get better and broader and they have but there’s still a feeling that this is Something Special; it’s not yet the community-minded place that subsidised theatres (those that survive) manage to be in the provinces.
Nor is it particularly comforting. When I was acting in Single Spies (1988) I never got over the nightly walk along the corridor from my dressing room, pushing through the swing door and suddenly being hit by the amplified roar of the audience. They were just chatting before curtain up but to me they sounded like the crowd at the Colosseum waiting for the massacre to begin.
Mind you, this is not peculiar to the National Theatre. All theatre is theatre of blood. I once had to give a talk at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and was accosted on my way in by two sabre-toothed pensioners.
‘It had better be good,’ warned one of them. ‘We’re big fans of yours.’
Still, whatever its shortcomings or the fear that stalks its corridors, the bleakness of the building has always been compensated for by the cheerfulness of the staff and I have never felt other than welcome here and with all my grumblings, I am thankful to have had a small part in the National’s history. The Wind in the Willows (1990) and The Madness of George III (1991), both directed by Nicholas Hytner, were two of the happiest plays I have ever worked on and when I recall the ending of the first part of Wind in the Willows with the snow coming down and the mice singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and the wonderful bravura opening of The Madness of George III when the whole cast comes over the crest of the hill and down onto the stage, I am glad to have been at least the occasion for such a spectacle.
Of Single Spies my memories are only less fond because the cast was quite small and looming up at the end of rehearsal there was the awful prospect of having to go on stage and do it. Also, though the technical side of it wasn’t particularly complicated, things did tend to go wrong. In the scene in Buckingham Palace where the Queen comes upon Anthony Blunt hanging a picture, there were two console tables trucked in from stage left and stage right. On the tables were various objets d’art which the Queen would pick up and comment on as she chatted to her Keeper of Pictures. These tables had a life of their own, only occasionally trucking on submissively as they were meant to do, but more often coming on, taking one look at the audience and then retreating shyly into the wings. This meant that Prunella Scales, playing the Queen, instead of idly fingering an object and discoursing on its origins (‘This ostrich egg was a present from the people of Zambia’) had instead to dive offstage, locate the item in question and fetch it on for Sir Anthony to admire, so that she looked less like the monarch than one of those beady ladies queuing up with their treasures on Antiques Roadshow.
The success of The History Boys (2004) was wholly unexpected. We’d had such a good time rehearsing it I don’t recall ever wondering how well it would go down. Nicholas Hytner has said that on first reading the script he thought it would perhaps make eighty performances. As it was the reception of the play at its first preview took us both by surprise. It wasn’t so much the laughter – though at least twice it brought the show to a halt – but it was the hush in the audience just before the curtain when the boys talk of their future lives and Hector comes back from the dead to give them his last message. When the curtain came down there was a moment’s silence and then the house went up like a furnace.
Which is an unfortunate image in the circumstances as days later, half an hour before the curtain was due to go up for the press night in the Lyttelton, a fire was discovered in the flies. It wasn’t a serious blaze but the sprinklers flooding the stage was what held the job up. After twenty-five years at the National I still get lost backstage so when I came across a lone fireman wandering the corridors who said, ‘Where is this Lyttelton theatre?’ I knew what he meant.
After the success of The History Boys I found my next play much harder to write. This was The Habit of Art, an account of an imaginary meeting between Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden, and it was only when I set it as a rehearsal of a play that it began to work. It takes place in Rehearsal Room 2 in the National, the room reproduced so exactly by Bob Crowley that one had to keep reminding oneself this was not the real thing.
Playing Britten, Alex Jennings was well placed to perfect an imitation of me, which I suspect he had long been doing on the quiet but which he was able to put to legitimate use in Hymn and Cocktail Sticks (2013), two short autobiographical pieces which began life in the Platform slot before transferring to the Duchess. Prior to this, though, was People (2012), a tour round the question of conservation and which, when the National Trust laid on tours of the Big Brother household, turned out to be mildly prophetic; art as so often limping way behind life.
Nobody would call the National Theatre a homely place but it has been my artistic home for twenty-five years and for that I count myself very lucky. I have met nothing but kindness and co-operation not least, of course, from Nicholas Hytner but at every level. It has enabled me to go on working much longer than I could have imagined through turning up with a play every three or four years. I am happy not to have acquired any dignity in the process. When I came in for the first rehearsal of People someone at the stage door said, ‘Oh hello. Still hanging on then?’
First published in the Observer, Sunday 20 October 2013.
On Nicholas Hytner
‘Don’t worry. Just write it and I’ll make it work.’
This was Nicholas Hytner, whom I’d not previously met when, in 1989, I was baffled by The Wind in the Willows which, at Richard Eyre’s suggestion, Nick was asking me to adapt. And for the next twenty-five years ‘Just write it, I’ll make it work’ has stood me in good stead and given me the confidence I always need.
I don’t know how Nick works with other playwrights – typically he hasn’t ever said – but special to me is his ability to gauge the encouragement one wants and the degree of criticism. Too much enthusiasm on his part means I don’t feel there’s much more to do; too little and I feel it’s not worth doing anyway. I’m not sure if this makes him my muse but certainly in the early stages what matters to me is his approval. Putting a script through his door in Primrose Hill, I’m like a pupil turning up with his homework.
To a playwright, what immediately commends him is the amount of work he puts in. Directing can be quite a lazy profession with the play once roughed out and in preview left to coast along or settle down. Not with Nick; he never lets up. Nor does he just direct the principals; he directs around the edges with no one left out. And he likes actors (it’s surprising the directors who don’t) and he’s loyal to them. Nor is the production a stage on which to play the virtuoso director. He’s never the star of his own productions. Modest and unassuming, he often goes unrecognised in his own foyer.
Some thoughts:
His rehearsals are sometimes lessons; they are never lectures.
He has no sense of entitlement. As Director of the National Theatre he has found himself drafted onto prestigious committees and in quite august company. He doesn’t take this as his due but is delighted by it.
He likes risk and is always up for it. The dodgiest parts of my stuff – the talking furniture in The Habit of Art, the porn scene in People – are what g
ets him going.
He delights in spectacle and is not afraid of being popular. I’m not sure if I said this or someone else (I hope a well-wisher) but there is in his character an iron streak of tinsel.
And he gives lovely parties and is, I imagine, a very nice uncle.
I will always be grateful to Richard Eyre, who brought Nick and me together. It’s been twenty-five years of fun and fellowship with so many moments I will never forget: the end of the first part of Wind in the Willows with the snow falling and the field mice singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’; George III clamped into the restraining chair just as the chorus bursts out with ‘Zadok the Priest’; and the silence at the end of The History Boys as Mrs Lintott calls up the boys one by one and tells us what will become of them.
At the end of the Fiftieth Anniversary Gala in 2013, the actors who have played at the National came forward year by year and took their bows, followed by the backstage staff and everyone who works here who could crowd onto the Olivier stage. It was a scene that might have taken days to rehearse but Nick had put it together in the brief gap between the end of the dress rehearsal and the half-hour call. There was, of course, a tumultuous reception, but I don’t even know whether he was himself on the stage.
First published as a National Theatre programme note, January 2014.
Introduction to Denmark Hill and The Hand of God
Both these scripts, Denmark Hill and The Hand of God were casualties of my own way of working. I have been lucky … some might say spoilt … in that I have generally been able to write on spec and as the fancy takes me. I have seldom had to write on commission and when I have the pleasure I get from writing has drained away and writing has turned into work. This has meant, though, particularly with films and television that occasionally something I have written hasn’t found a market. Denmark Hill was written, I think, for Lindsay Anderson with whom I had worked but who didn’t care for it so I put it away in a drawer and got on with something else. The Hand of God was written for John Schlesinger but it wasn’t what he was wanting … his next film starred Rupert Everett and Madonna … so that, too, went into a drawer. This would have been around 1990 when I was just beginning to work at the National Theatre and possibly to write in a different way. My adaptation of The Wind in the Willows was done on commission and at the request of Nicholas Hytner and I found I was able to do it without it ever becoming a burden. Though the plays I have written since have all been on spec (and put through Nicholas Hytner’s letterbox) they have benefited from his encouragement and reassurance which is all I have needed to keep me on track.
Denmark Hill
The idea for Denmark Hill came from the troupe of actors … though there may have been several similar groups … who in the early 1980s could be hired to come and perform plays in the home. Maybe such companies still operate though I have never seen, still less hosted, such a performance, but it set me thinking about yet another take on Hamlet with the players not only performing The Murder of Gonzago as they do for the play within the play but Hamlet itself, which, performed in the home in the play becomes another play within the play. Still if it appealed to me it didn’t appeal to anyone else and I forgot about it.
Cut to 2012 when together with a load of other finished and unfinished stuff Denmark Hill found itself banged up in the Bodleian Library where on a fishing expedition it was discovered by my friend Tristram Powell. That is the version printed here. Tristram then adapted it for BBC Radio where it was broadcast on Radio 4 on 27 September 2014 with the following cast:
NARRATOR
Alan Bennett
HARRIET
Bryony Hannah
GWEN
Penny Downie
FRANK
Geoffrey Palmer
GEORGE
Robert Glenister
CHARLES
Samuel Barnett
ROGERS
Malcolm Sinclair
GILLIATT
Stephen Critchlow
NICOLA
Cathy Sara
CANON EVEREST
Geoffrey Palmer
with other parts played by members of the cast.
Director
Tristram Powell
Producer
Marilyn Imrie
Script Editor
Honor Borwick
The Hand of God
When the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was being restored in the 1990s I spoke to several art historians who had gone up in the lift in the chapel to see the cleaning and restoration work at close quarters. One or two also claimed that they had witnessed the work on what nowadays would be called the iconic moment of God reaching out to touch and give life to Adam and even to have touched the hand of God themselves. It was a good story which I didn’t always believe but it gave me the idea for the opening of the film and the drawing, supposedly by Michelangelo, around which the plot revolves.
When the script was rejected I felt I didn’t want to abandon it entirely and a few years later used it and the title in the second series of Talking Heads. The drawing of the hand surfaces in an oddments box in an antique shop run by Eileen Atkins who, to her everlasting regret, doesn’t recognise it and sells it for a song.
When I was writing the screenplay in the early nineties the most likely parties in the running for such a sought-after drawing were American or Japanese. These days they would more likely be Russian. There would be other changes too … (as there would in Denmark Hill) … more laptops, more computer records and even though iPads figure I’m sure the auction house would be more at the forefront of technology than I have made it. But I have left it much as it was when I wrote it feeling, too, that the script’s central message, Marriott-Smith’s ‘Bonham’s, Sotheby’s, Christie’s … we are all barrow boys’ is as true today as it was then.
Denmark Hill
SCENE 1: GARDEN ROOM/BEDROOM/STAIRS
Music, birdsong.
NARRATOR
An Edwardian house in South London. Spring, the daffodils and suchlike are out and upstairs where a window is open a curtain shifts gently in the breeze.
Music ends.
Downstairs French windows give access to the lawn and in the garden room a schoolgirl of fifteen or so sits doing her homework. She is a plain and old-fashioned child. And is writing an essay. Gwen, her mother, a pretty middle-aged woman comes through with some secateurs and even a trug.
Door opening, footsteps.
GWEN
Flowers for Daddy!
NARRATOR
She does an elaborate performance of being quiet as, finger to her lips, she tiptoes into the garden. The schoolgirl, whose name is Harriet, ignores her.
HARRIET
My mother. Flowers are hardly top of my dad’s list but he’s had pneumonia with everybody thinking he was going to die so it was getting quite interesting. Except now he’s on the mend. I have to write an essay for Miss McArthur on Shakespeare’s view of the family. It’s a bugger.
NARRATOR
Upstairs in the bedroom, Frank, Gwen’s husband, lies in bed, breathing with difficulty. George, a man of the same age but very much in the pink, stands at the window watching Gwen in the garden.
GEORGE
No, Frank.
FRANK
Be a sport.
GEORGE
Sorry, my son. More than my life’s worth.
Frank laughs.
Listen, old man. You’re doped to the eyeballs. You’d go out like a light.
FRANK
We’ll cross that T when we come to it.
Bedroom door opening and furtive footsteps. Appropriate sounds of cistern lid, water, etc., to accompany narration.
NARRATOR
George comes furtively out of the bedroom. He listens, then goes next door to the toilet. He lifts the lid of the cistern and fishes out a bottle. As he emerges from the lav, Gwen is coming upstairs so he hides the bottle behind his back.
GEORGE
Just paying a call.
&nbs
p; GWEN
Dear George. He’s so much better. I think Dorset may be back on the cards.
Music.
SCENE 2: LANDING/BEDROOM
NARRATOR
Gwen, George and Harriet are waiting on the landing, George with a comforting hand on Gwen’s shoulder.
GEORGE
Bear up, old girl. It’s nobody’s fault.
The bedroom door opens and Dr Patmore comes out, grave faced. He shakes his head slightly and Gwen bursts into tears. Harriet goes into the bedroom, stares fixedly at her dead father and takes a snap.
Digital click of mobile phone camera.
HARRIET
Miss McArthur says that as a society we try to sweep death under the carpet. Whereas in her view it’s as much a part of life as birth is, and often less distressing. She says that if we get the chance of seeing a dead person we’re to jump at it.
GWEN
(off)
Harriet.
Harriet leaving room and shutting door.
GWEN
He’s gone, precious. You can’t bring him back.
SCENE 3: HALLWAY
Music under.
Gwen, George and Harriet going downstairs.
NARRATOR
As Gwen, George and Harriet come downstairs, the door into the hall opens and, silhouetted in the doorway, stands a boy of nineteen.
Key in front door and door opening. Gwen’s quickened footsteps and embrace.
GWEN
Charles! Charles, Charles, oh Charles.
NARRATOR
It is Charles.
SCENE 4: BEDROOM