15 October. The Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert, has died. I met him only once in July 1974 when I had to do a Kilvert recital in the Double Cube room at Wilton. He was charming and easy but it didn’t go well for all sorts of reasons, some sad, some comic. The evening was to have been introduced by Cecil Beaton, but earlier that week he had had a stroke and this overshadowed the proceedings. Princess Alexandra was the guest of honour but being Kilvert there was quite a bit about little girls’ bottoms and suchlike so HRH put rather a damper on things as royalty often does, or did in those days anyway. I was wearing a new velvet suit and it was only afterwards I found that my flies had been open throughout. ‘Never mind,’ said the lighting assistant. ‘The spot was on your face.’
The story wouldn’t be worth telling except that nearly twenty years later when The Madness of George III was playing at the National, Henry Herbert wrote to me about the Lady Pembroke who figures in the play. This was a lady of mature years to whom in his derangement George III takes a fancy; she was a woman of some dignity who did not in the least reciprocate his attentions, which were something of a joke at Court. Herbert’s letter filled in the family tradition about this ancestor with an anecdote told him by his father:
Lady Pembroke’s husband, Henry, was charming but he was also a shit and the King was so incensed by the Earl’s behaviour towards his wife that he demanded to know what possible excuse he had for treating her so badly. To which the Earl replied: ‘Sire, if you had a wife whose cunt was as cold as a greyhound’s nostril, you would have done the same.’
Twenty years after the Kilvert recital we went back to Wilton to film part of The Madness of King George, by which time Richenda Carey, who had played Lady Pembroke on the stage, had had to give way to the less matronly Amanda Donohoe, star of Castaway and more what Hollywood thought audiences were entitled to expect in a fancy woman, and one unlikely to be suffering from her historical counterpart’s genital hypothermia.
19 October. Watch the second part of ITV’s Henry VIII with Ray Win-stone as the much married monarch. It’s no better than the first half and as wilfully inaccurate, the Dissolution of the Monasteries presented as if it were some Viking raid, with troops riding down the fleeing monks, hacking them to death as they try to rescue the monastic treasures. It’s a far cry from the peaceful retirement on a small pension that was the lot of most of the monks and nuns, with the actual dismantling of the fabric and selling off of the furnishings far more interesting (and far more interesting to watch) than these silly melodramatics.
Aske, the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace (played by Sean Bean), is pictured being hauled up outside Clifford’s Tower in York, with the wicked Duke of Norfolk ordering that he be left to hang for three days, presumably to die of exposure. This is picturesque nonsense. Aske was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered and though there’s seldom much to be said for Henry VIII in the clemency department he did at least agree to Aske’s request that he be hanged and allowed to die before the rest of the sentence was carried out.*
In the same programme Thomas Cromwell is pictured being inexpertly despatched by a novice executioner, Cromwell’s face contorted in agony as the first two blows fall, his head only cut off by the third. This, too, is fanciful. Certainly there must have been many botched beheadings, but Cromwell’s was not one of them, the executioner (whose name is known) taking off his head at a stroke.
In a programme as poor as this it might seem pedantic to be concerned about such details. But there is more than enough savagery in the reign of Henry VIII without adding to it.
4 November. Passing through Cambridge, we pay a ritual visit to Kettle’s Yard. It’s a house that never fails to delight and though there are features I don’t like, it’s a place I could happily live in. The attendants are mostly elderly and many of them seem to have known Jim Ede, whose house it was and who gave it and its art collection to the University in the 1970s.
One particularly sparky old lady recommends a video display running in the big room downstairs. At first it simply seems to be a slightly blurred record of a domestic interior: a kitchen, a sitting room with on the floor some toys including a couple of model planes. Suddenly one of these planes takes off, then another lands and soon the kitchen and dining room have turned into a busy international airport, planes crossing the room, landing on tables, taking off from work surfaces and all in total silence. They negotiate the narrow chasm of a slightly open door, deftly avoid a light fitting or a bowl of fruit and it’s so absurd and silly I find myself grinning like a child. The artist, whose name I forget to write down, is Japanese and it’s the last thing I’d ever have chosen to watch or expected to find in the austere surroundings of a house like this, but it’s a delight.
15 November. Around nine I go out to put some rubbish in the bin to find someone curled up on the doorstep. I say someone because, swathed in an anorak, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a man or a woman; he/she doesn’t speak and when shaken just moans a little. He/she is surrounded by half a dozen plastic bags, most of them empty and not the carefully transported possessions of the usual bag lady, if it is a lady. So, having talked about it, we eventually ring 999, where the Scotland Yard operator is quite helpful and within ten minutes (on a Saturday night) a squad car comes round with two policemen. They’re sensible and firm with what turns out to be a young man. He’s filthy, his hands so black he might have been shifting coal, and is no help when they try to get him on his feet, moaning still and saying he has an abscess.
Now an ambulance arrives, and it’s this that seems to bring the young man round. He plainly doesn’t want to go to hospital and, abandoning whatever possessions he has on our doorstep, vanishes into the night. One of the policemen comes back and explains that, because among the rubbish is a squeezed-out lemon, he is likely to be an addict, the juice used to purify the drugs. He counsels caution when we’re clearing up the mess lest there be any needles about and then says, ‘Actually I can do it,’ goes to the car for some gloves and tidies everything away himself and in such a sensible, straightforward way it seems genuine goodness.
It makes me ashamed of my habitual prejudice against the police when here is one dealing with what for him is presumably a regular occurrence and going out of his way just to be helpful. I think what a dispiriting job it must be night after night coping with the thieves and addicts of Camden Town and how hard it must be not to despise respectable folk who call them in to solve what for us is just a problem of hygiene. With a final instruction to swill down the flags, he goes off in the squad car, I go up and have my bath and then we sit down to our shepherd’s pie.
Among the contents of the bags that constitute the young man’s possessions were part of a safety belt, presumably used as a tourniquet, a candlestick with a stub of a candle, a packet of Yorkshire puddings and, unaccountably, some rosemary.
21 November. I see from the paper this morning that while I was trudging up Whitehall past the end of Downing Street on the second anti-war march Tom Stoppard was in Downing Street having lunch with Mrs Bush. While she was there, apparently, they watched some children doing Shakespeare. I would have felt uncomfortable about this for various reasons, not least because it comes so close to a playbill done the night before at the Royal Court. This included an extract from Tony Kushner’s next play in which Mrs Bush visits a school and talks to the children about literature and (slightly improbably) about Dostoevsky. As she chats to them she slowly realises that all the children are dead. In the same programme there’s another playlet, Advice to Iraqi Women by Martin Crimp. I’d dearly love to have written both of them and it would have done more good, I’m sure, than going on the march.
15 December. As I’m correcting the proofs of this diary the news breaks of the arrest of Saddam Hussein. It ought to matter, and maybe does matter in Iraq; it certainly matters in America. But here? Whatever is said it does not affect the issue. We should not have gone to war.
It has been a shameful year.
2004
3 January. Alan Bates dies on 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes.
It’s all of an hour before we reach the church and everyone has gone in, the undertakers with a policeman looking on just shouldering the coffin. Since the bill is £40 I feel I need a receipt but while the driver ransacks his cab for pad and pencil the policeman saunters over: ‘The body is waiting to go in, sir.’
We make an undignified dash for the church where, hearing the door open, the congregation begin to rise, thinking we’re the coffin, then sink back disappointed as, laden down with bags and both with backpacks on, we are ushered down the centre aisle to seats in the chancel. It looks like the most upstaging of showbiz entrances, the only consolation being that the deceased would have been the first to laugh.
It’s a rather wandering service with plenty of time to reflect that, as always, it will be the jokes one will most miss and how at the regular suppers we used to have at L’Etoile we always told each other the same stories. They were generally of Alan’s romantic escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and left.
Alan’s languid phone calls were often to do with professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved to learn that for our London debut the director has elbowed the offending cunnilingus and replaced it with a walk-down in kingly garb. While this might seem a radical change it is, I suppose, only the difference between coming down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. Goodbye.’
15 January. We now have a Home Secretary who, on being told one of the prisoners in his care has committed suicide, says he feels like pouring himself a drink. This is a statement deplorable on so many levels they’re too wearying to list. But it will delight the Sun and the Daily Mail, which is its intention.
27 January. A reading of the latest draft of The History Boys at the NT Studio gets off to a bad start when half the cast are found to be reading from a first draft and the rest from the revised version. It’s a scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing, too, as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely sketched in and the plot often nowhere. ‘It’ll be better than this,’ I keep wanting to say. ‘And shorter.’
10 February. I go through the play dealing with Nick Hytner’s comments, worrying that some of them are too literal: e.g. sixth-formers wouldn’t do PE, even in the 1980s when the play is set, thus ruling out the gymnasium scene I quite wanted. Nick backs up his judgment by asking the younger people at the National what went on at their schools. Which is fine, though I can’t counter with a constituency of my own, as the only person I know who was at school in the 1980s is R. and he never set foot in the gym anyway. But the imagination can’t be subject to plebiscite. Take a poll of all the playwrights at the National and you wouldn’t find one whose lover had shredded their masterpiece, fed it into the stove and then gone out and shot themselves. But that doesn’t rule out Hedda Gabler. Still I can see Nick is right to this extent, that once the audience starts thinking, ‘But school isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook.
20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps, the religious boy, and doesn’t even bother to mention that he plays the piano; Andrew Knott from Wakefield, who comes in like the wind has blown the door open and knows the scene off by heart, as do several of the others.
This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this would have to be discounted when assessing their ability. Nowadays because competition is so fierce actors come knowing the audition scene by heart and so it’s much easier to gauge what they can do. It’s noticeable, though, that many of the boys from RADA and LAMDA and the other drama schools are middle class (two of our applicants are Etonians). I imagine this is because, grants being so hard to come by, places go to students whose parents can support them, a situation not different from that prevailing at Oxford and Cambridge. The History Boys has nothing to say about this as I felt it was another play entirely, and also, I suppose, because I have no experience of it.
25 February. With Nick Hytner and the designer of the play, Bob Crowley, to the London Nautical School in Stamford Street just behind the National. It’s a naval school in origin, one of several set up after the sinking of the Titanic to improve standards of seamanship, and the boys still wear naval jerseys and a navy-blue uniform.
Coffee with the headmaster first, who talks, as I imagine most heads of institutions do nowadays, about his financial problems. Then we watch the boys at break, the playground situated behind the old gate of Bethlem Hospital. My main impression is how burdened the boys are, humping all their possessions with them wherever they go so that they’re slung round with coats, togs, books and bags, none of them seemingly having their own locker or desk. R. tells me later that this was beginning to happen when he was at school, though backpacks then were thought to be nerdy and he, of course, the odd boy out, had a little attaché case.
We sit in on a history class of thirteen-year-olds, who are well behaved, alert and attentive, though not always getting it right. They are doing the changeover from the domestic system to factory working in the Industrial Revolution: ‘If they couldn’t get enough money from work at home,’ asks the teacher, ‘what did they do?’
Up goes a hand. ‘Take in lodgers?’
Next is an English class of fifteen-year-olds, all of them past puberty and so less submissive, more anarchic and all over the place, though there is one self-contained boy who is neat, smart and prematurely sophisticated, a boy out of Saki.
Finally the sixth form: half a dozen boys and one girl. Except not boys: one has a full-grown beard and though destined for Cambridge looks less like an undergraduate than a fully fledged lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker from the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written.
1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew Turnbull’s reproving letter to Clare Short for breaching cabinet confidence, nobody has commented on his use of the word ‘disappointed’. The head of the Civil Service wasn’t dismayed by Ms Short’s revelations nor was he disconcerted; he didn’t say he disapproved (though he did); no, he was disappointed. It’s a headmasterly word implying a falling short (I know) and a failure to live up to standards that shouldn’t have to be spelled out, and thus very much a word of the establishment.
This would hardly be worth saying did not Sir Andrew advertise his emancipation from the establishment by, among other things, chairi
ng meetings in his shirtsleeves. But shirtsleeves only take you so far (the prime minister is often in them, after all). No, Sir Andrew needs to take the jacket off his language, too. Were I not on Clare Short’s side already, to read that the head of the Civil Service is disappointed in her would be enough to make up my mind.
6 March. A young man passes wearing a close-fitting leather cap meant to strap under the chin, the strap unfastened and dangling loose. He looks like 1) a racing driver at Brooklands in the 1930s; 2) someone out of Brueghel about to torment Christ. Neither, I would have thought, is the look he is aiming for.
13 March. The last of the History Boys to be cast is Russell Tovey, who is in the NT company and who took part in the first reading of the play. He reads Rudge, the athletic and supposedly stupid boy, effortlessly, but isn’t sure it’s what he really wants to do, having set his sights on playing the more glamorous part of Dakin. This makes me think again about Rudge and I rewrite the part to accommodate some of the actor’s aspirations in the character, which both suits him and improves the play. This is one of the pleasures of writing plays which I can’t see writing novels or poems ever providing.
After the train bombs in Madrid T. Blair commends the Spanish for turning out in their millions to demonstrate against terrorism. These are the same people who thronged the streets in Madrid and in London also in their millions to demonstrate against the war but this is not said by the prime minister. Our fearless leader is a democrat only as and when it suits him.
20 March. Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is out, pupils are never touched and there are often viewing panels in the doors.