A NUANCE OF UNDERSTANDING

Helen: The spotlight was on you and you alone, and you weren't even young men; you were children. ...

David: All right, then. Go on. What did we do with this spotlight?

Helen: You did what any child would do. You danced in it.

                                                                (Terence Rattigan, After the Dance)

That special performance of the Afghanistan plays, The Great Game, which I was talking about last week, was described by General Sir David Richards, Chief of the General Staff, as 'fascinating, entertaining and historically accurate of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan since 1840. … Nothing learnt in the classroom will have the same subliminal effect as this. It is crucial that all of us out there have a more nuanced understanding of the historical background that got us to this point.' (The Times, 3 August)

Unfortunately my great nephew was not among the fifteen officer cadets from Sandhurst who attended the day-long performance at the Tricycle. The theory of fifteen degrees of separation comes pretty close though, and who knows how much closer than a mere fifteen degrees it sometimes comes without our knowing. However, a few days after my own three-evening induction course in the 'nuanced understanding' the general wrote of, I was at the National Theatre for a Saturday matinée of Terence Rattigan's second West End success, After the Dance, rarely staged since its premiere in the summer of 1939. The play is both a bleak indictment of and an elegy for the Bright Young Things, a generation of whom G. B. Stern observed, 'They were suffering not from shell-shock but from the echo of shell-shock.' Rattigan, in my very young day, was the apotheosis of the West End, and I can tell you that West End theatre felt further away this last Saturday from Kilburn High Road than its Tricycle Theatre had seemed from Afghanistan the week before. Such is the theatre's ability to create a potent sense of an era, a place, another world.

Nancy Carroll and Benedict Cumberbatch in After the Dance.

Photo by Johan Persson

As it happens, I have, this past week, been preoccupied by the West End, feeling I must revise one of the early chapters in my book, an essay entitled 'Keeping it West End' in ironic homage to the company manager of Worthing’s weekly rep where, in 1957, I was appearing in The Case of the Frightened Lady. Over a drink in the bar of the Connaught Theatre, after the Monday opening night, Melville Gillam issued what I had been warned was his habitual injunction: 'Keep it West End.' I knew then just how far away we were from getting it West End – let alone keeping it there!

But what is, or rather was, the essence of West End theatre? Noël Coward was once addressed about it at a party: 'Oh, Noël, the West End isn't what it was!' ‘It isn't', The Master replied, 'but then – it never was.'

Watching Rattigan's play was for me spellbinding, the theatrical equivalent of being absorbed in a good book that one doesn’t want to end; and if it was not an utterly perfect performance, it seemed to have all the verities on so many levels – in the writing, staging and acting – the sort of theatrical quality of spell I almost imagined I had not witnessed, and had been missing, since I saw the pre-West End tour of Rattigan’s Separate Tables in Leeds as a teenager in 1954 – with Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman in the leading roles.

Afterwards, I was astonished to spot a familiar name on the cover of a newly reissued Rattigan biography on display in the NT bookshop: Michael Darlow was the author. I knew him, as he had been two years ahead of me at Esmé Church’s Northern Theatre School in Bradford. His substantial book (over 500 pages) is so far fascinating. A surprising contribution comes from, of all dramatists, the radical playwright David Rudkin:

I think Rattigan is not at all the commercial middlebrow dramatist his image suggests but someone peculiarly haunting and oblique who certainly speaks to me with resonance of existential bleakness and irresoluble carnal solitude.

Terence Rattigan, 1949. 

Photo by John Gay. National Portrait Gallery

Since Saturday I have talked to one actress who found the play predictable and the performances somewhat pedestrian. I also bumped into a contemporary of mine, a director, who was in a very bad mood about it: 'Most of the actors have no idea of The West End Style!' Was there ever such a thing? I am going to attempt to anatomize that question in my aforementioned chapter. Meanwhile, here is my more or less finished pastel showing the inside of one West End theatre (the Playhouse to be exact), which you saw in embryo last week.

Dreamboats and Petticoats (Click image to enlarge it)

Postscript

In 1958, an eighteen-year-old Salford girl took two weeks off work to convert a novel she was trying to write into a play, partly because she was so disgusted with Rattigan's Variation on a Theme which she had seen on tour in Manchester. For her, Rattigan and the 'West End Style' symbolized 'safe, sheltered, cultured lives in charming surroundings – not life as the majority of ordinary people knew it. I had strong ideas about what I wanted to see in the theatre. ... Usually North Country people are shown as gormless whereas in actual fact they are very alive and cynical.' Her play was produced by Joan Littlewood in the East End in May 1958. The following year Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey transferred to Wyndham's Theatre, where it became a West End hit. 

Oh, Noël!

A scene from the 1961 film adaptation of A Taste of Honey

FINDING A VOICE

     All I have is a voice
     To undo the folded lie,
     The romantic lie in the brain
     Of the sensual man-in-the-street
     And the lie of Authority
     Whose buildings grope the sky:
     There is no such thing as the State
     And no one exists alone;
     Hunger allows no choice
     To the citizen or the police;
     We must love one another or die.

                                             (W. H. Auden)

I can't imagine how Lorna Want rehearsed herself into the all-singing, all-dancing, all-acting Dreamboats and Petticoats in the last fortnight of The Fantasticks. It is the 1960s nostalgia show to end all and I found it alluring and touching, not only in its boundless lyric drive but in the many touches of prosaic, everyday detail. I recognized many of the numbers, though I was hardly a fan of Top of the Pops at the time, being a cultural snob, a father by 1965 and preoccupied with holding onto the rungs of the ladder at Olivier's National Theatre. I did buy three Beatles LPs, but that was on the strength of there being such respectable features as violin and trumpet solos in 'Eleanor Rigby'.

This show is all about the dreams of very ordinary people expressed through an extraordinary flowering of musical energy. It does not seem like a showbiz con that the rock groups, lady brass players and dancers next to a youth club ping-pong table have a hard-edged West End professionalism to their period charm and exuberance. There is nothing original in the interwoven love stories, yet it never seems like the cynical ticking of effective boxes. The performers exude sincerity, energy, belief and commitment, and their delight is all, carrying with it an elemental conviction.

At the end, as the audience rose to dance, I looked across the stalls of the Playhouse and there was a life-size Grecian maiden in gilded plaster adorning a stage box, gazing at the stage with a beatific smile; it was as if she had been waiting for this moment since the days when audiences were mere gloomy blurred figures in the paintings of Sickert. I decided I had to paint that scene and herewith is this weekend’s work in progress:

The hero of Dreamboats and Petticoats is a shy schoolboy dealing with O-Levels and acne (we have to imagine the latter! In fact he is fresh-faced as well as very good looking). He has an Estuary accent, complete with Fs for Ths, but when he bursts into song he enters another language entirely, another state of being in fact – confident, passionate (even in his laments about being unloved), from the heart and, of course, American. The audience almost takes the transformation of his personality for granted – after all, how else would you sing 'Do You Wanna Dance?' or 'Dream Baby Dream'?

The programme notes remind us of the ecstatic smashing of suburban cinema seats when 'Rock Around the Clock' went on release and that, with the new liberty and comparative affluence, juvenile crime doubled in a decade. But 'Dreamboats' is in the title, and in the show no one so much as lights a cigarette or has a glass of beer. The oldies in the audience purred audibly – I did – with nostalgia, hearing the characters' aspirations to have an American milkshake ('They're 1/6') or a Knickerbocker Glory at the local Wimpy Bar. (Emblematic of this period of cultural transition was the fact that the first Wimpy Bar in the UK opened in 1954 at the oldest Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street.) Were our Happy Hours so innocent?

People still express surprise that I ever had a working-class Bradford accent, but I simply acquired another voice to 'sing' with, and since it was a speaking voice, I spoke with it in life as well as on the stage. The great teenage liberation of the 50s and 60s was all about utterance as working-class boys and girls were released into song and the romance of the classless American idiom and, on a less noticeable scale, countless provincial working-class acting students learnt the West End Drawl and the heroic, noble way of handling verse – their passport into 'The Profession', insecurity and unemployment.

Dreamboats and Petticoats was bookended by two return visits to Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre and its current festival exploring Afghan culture and history. The Tricycle Cinema is a comfortable place to spend a civilized evening. The Art Deco Gaumont State Cinema down the road, which I remember as a vast auditorium, has finally morphed from a Mecca bingo hall into a Ruach Christian Ministries Centre, its grandiose carpeted foyers busy with happy, well-dressed people who seem to be at home in their own community centre.

Spirited, charming children reduced to shadows. The film I saw there on Monday night was a fly-on-the-wall study of a poor family living on the outskirts of Kabul, in wasteland resembling a bomb site. Even the mother, an almost toothless single parent, old before her time, admitted taking heroin herself and offering it to her boy to save him from being bored because ‘there was nothing in the house’. The problem of child addiction is widespread. Follow-up captions told us that the three youngsters, two boys and a girl, all around ten years of age when the film was made and in and out of rehab programmes, were now, two years later, back on the drug.

Q&A afterwards with the Afghan director of the film, a young and cheerful English head of an NGO, and two other Afghans. It emerged that there were also some Afghans in the audience. One’s picture became more confused as the questions and statements from the audience went on, one man asserting that the biggest market for drugs in the country was the American military. I talked to some Afghans afterwards and one told me that the Taliban are blamed for the poppy growing now, but that when they were firmly in power there was no problem with drugs.

How did we ever think we could help? The evening ended uncomfortably and inconclusively.

The ‘stars’ of the film had never been able, we realized, to go back to their Winnebagos, have their make-up and costumes removed, enjoy a good meal and wait for the next juicy role. No, they are still acting out their harsh reality – even now as we consider these words, even now as we contemplate the irony that the only way the children would agree to being filmed was in exchange for the promise that the film would never be shown in Afghanistan. It would, they said, bring shame on them!

On Friday night I caught Part 3 of The Great Game: Afghanistan. As I expected, the previous evening the Army had proved a good comedy house (like the bishops at Hadrian VII). I wonder whether my great nephew, who is at Sandhurst, was there; many of the officer cadets were. General Sir David Richards wants to rewrite one of his speeches (a verbatim quote). Much of the material in the twelve-play anthology has been rewritten to bring it up to date, since it was first performed some months ago. The officer cadets were astonished at how much they learnt about Afghanistan. TiE (Theatre in Education) comes to Sandhurst! Not before time.

The Q&A that night was a letdown: two banners advertising the Guardian were brought on stage and the paper’s 'Security Editor', along with Nicolas Kent, Artistic Director of the Tricycle and begetter of the whole project, sat and held forth. They were but pale figures after the vivid realizations we had witnessed; truth is not always stranger than fiction. In any case, how, sitting in a theatre in the Kilburn High Road, could we tell the difference. Who held the truth about Afghanistan, was it expressed by these real, or the imagined real people of the play? Certainly I utterly believed that Jemma Redgrave was a passionate NGO worker, and was there, determined to force a deal over some commandeered land to save 100 farmers from starving, accepting the betrothal of two preteen girls as part of the bargain: ‘Graham, listen! You know perfectly well that there's no such thing as right and wrong in this business, there's only culture. It's not our job to impose our values. You've put your mother in an old people's home. Have you ever seen anyone homeless in Afghanistan, any old people abandoned? You judge them, let them judge you.’

 Jemma Redgrave, Tom McKay and Nabil Elouahabi in On the Side of the Angels by Richard Bean. Photo by John Haynes

Postscript

I began my Sunday wakening to a morning service on Radio 4 from Eton College Chapel. We were treated to some history of the beautiful chapel, the construction of which was halted when the College's founder Henry VI was deposed by Edward IV. Eton is presently host to a large number of choristers, forming a summer school, and they began with a Spanish motet sung so – ravishingly is probably not the word, and what the text of the motet was I forget and, of course, didn't follow in Spanish at the time – but 'heavenly' style wins over content in such music. The sound was sacred and made one believe in … what? Just now I am remembering Laurence Olivier saying a line in, of all plays, Strindberg's Dance of Death, a searing portrait of marital Hell. At one point, during a duologue with a friend, Olivier had to say words to the effect that he sometimes had thoughts of 'something better'.

Olivier was a past master at this kind of moment, expressing from a great well of weary, defeated anger and grief, a yearning, a faint hope, the more powerful because it was so understated. This morning the 'something better' was associated with Eton's Chapel, which I found I could not remember, and a host of nebulous sensations that there might be a divine being who inspired in humans such music and who might be listening with us now.

But the vision faded with the prayers. Why should we ask God to send us a good harvest? Did he not send the rains which, as this morning's news told us, have devastated the lives of countless people in Pakistan? I do not want to offend: it has been a week of extremes in which I have been privileged to return from my cultural adventures to sleep safe and well fed, a sort of liberal dilettante in a desperate world. What to do?!

Tired, I must go to bed, but I did promise myself to make a better job of those dark figures in the foreground of my pastel drawing first; it seems like a retreat into the cosy morality of the Sunday-school hymn I recall, 'Jesus Bids Us Shine'. What was it? ‘You in your small corner, / And I in mine.’ Even dark figures can be helped, I trust, to shine.  

Post-postscript
Emboldened by your comments last week, I have posted quite a long blog this week and here append the promised image I chanced upon on my way home from the Gagosian Gallery in Kings Cross – the curious amalgam of Disney and Picasso on high:

POPERY, PUPPETRY, PASHTUNS AND PICASSO

In response to your charming comments about Bean, I open with a picture of her relaxing between diplomatic missions:

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I can see the Pope chain-smoking now. Are you old enough to remember? I am, though I never actually saw the play, way back in 1968. It was called Hadrian VII and had been adapted by Peter Luke from Frederick Rolfe's novel of 1904. The hero is a failed candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood, a chain-smoking Englishman living alone and in obscurity with his cat. Somehow he is elected to the Papacy and forces through astonishing reforms. It was funny enough and serious enough for an Anglican canon I knew (John Taylor, later Bishop of Winchester) to arrange to buy out a performance at the Mermaid, a special matinée for that year's Lambeth Conference. Alec McCowen, who scored a huge hit in the lead, received the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, in his dressing room and said the play had never gone better. Pathé News recorded the event: 300 bishops sitting attentively in the auditorium and, afterwards, the Archbishop and the Apostolic Delegate warmly greeting the cast.

A far more remarkable coup de théâtre and de politique will take place this coming Thursday. The Great Game: Afghanistan – a dozen half-hour plays commissioned by Nicolas Kent and produced in three parts at that jewel of a fringe theatre, the Tricycle, in London NW6 – will be performed to a military audience including General Sir David Richards, former commander of the international forces in Afghanistan and our next Chief of the Defence Staff. I have seen two of the three evenings (though you can occasionally see the 'trilogy' in one day) and am looking forward to the third on Monday. But I am sure Thursday is going to be THE occasion as the military watch vivid dramatizations of our first involvement in Afghanistan under Queen Victoria, and just some of the teeming complexities, as portrayed by thirteen playwrights, of Afghan history up to the present: the Soviets, there by 'invitation' to liberate the country, women in Kabul wearing Soviet-issued miniskirts, the Taliban, NATO and NGOs. General Sir David Richards himself is the protagonist of one play. Yes, I will be there on Monday night for Part 3! 

The Great Game. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Talking of things coming in threes, last Thursday I went to the press night of Danton's Death at the National Theatre, Georg Büchner's play about the French Revolution, which has been done twice before at the National – by Jonathan Miller in 1971 and by Peter Gill in 1982. I have now seen all three productions, having had friends or colleagues in the cast on each occasion. I found the experience eerily bloodless each time, despite the current full-blooded Danton of Toby Stephens. Anyway, for the record, The Sunday Times awards this latest production of the German warhorse five stars.

From a learned review of Jonathan Miller's production, I quote part of a letter Büchner wrote:

I find in human nature a horrible uniformity. . . . The individual is foam on the wave, greatness is nothing but chance, the dominance of genius a puppet play, an absurd struggle against an iron law. The greatest of us can only recognize it: to control it is impossible. [Danton is one of the great; he recognizes the futility of his struggle, and is] crushed to nothing under the terrible determinism of history.

Froth is too light a word for Büchner's heavy individualism. As for his message that our best efforts are a puppet play, this was symbolized in Miller's production, 'indelibly' I read (though I can't for the life of me remember it), by a series of dolls and mannequins, some headless and appearing sinisterly in boxes throughout the action. Perhaps this dismal view of humanity as mere puppets accounts for my overwhelming sense, at all three productions, that I was witnessing dead wood. Conversely, some of the best, most moving performances I have seen have been given by puppets: splendid representations of the human spirit. I am thinking of the Bunraku puppets of Japan, Lotte Reiniger's first silhouette film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, and, dare I mention, the latest Toy Story movie which I understand makes adults weep. James Agate once wrote: 'Punch and Judy have no understanding, yet their show is the most complete illusion of life' (and certainly no more exaggerated or bizarre than the Picasso portraits I saw the other day). 'Puppetry', he said, 'is the first and all but the last word in acting: it is the point at which all schools converge.'

Incidentally, I have in one of my books a rare photograph of Henry Irving as Robespierre (Danton's political rival) in his Lyceum staging of Sardou's melodrama in 1899.

So in a busy week spent trying to apply the final polish to my book and attempting a charcoal portrait, I saw not only the guillotine on the South Bank, Kabul in Kilburn High Road, chunks of Afghan wars and revolutions, but also evidence of Picasso’s revolutionary paintings at the Gagosian Gallery, the astonishingly immaculate addition to the Kings Cross area.

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times.

                                                                                      (Henry IV, Part 2, III.i)


Postscript: The Cost of the Information Revolution
A piece of street art I caught sight of on my way home from the Gagosian Gallery was a curious amalgam of Disney and Picasso. The extraordinary image, which I photographed, was on a high chimney stack. I had planned to show it to you but have momentarily mislaid the device that allows me to transpose images from my memory card to my laptop. Meanwhile, just this morning, I heard on the radio that the average email uses the same amount of power as that used to boil seventeen kettles. Should I keep my blogs shorter, I wonder, in the interests of energy conservation, and when I find my device, should I dare post the photo?

DOG DAYS AND TALES FROM THE BRITISH RAJ

Ambassador Bean

Through Bean, our family terrier, I have informally met one of the district's more colourful and intriguing characters, somebody I have passed in the street many times over the years I have lived here and whom I have wondered about in vain. He's betrayed never a flicker when I've looked into his eyes. In appearance he is perfect casting for Henry (my character in The Fantasticks), or indeed an older version of me, except that he is always nattily dressed. I was in a striped cotton sweater this morning, though, like him, I was wearing what I think of as his regulation hat, straw for the summer. His straw sported a scarlet hatband which matched his elaborately patterned scarlet silk waistcoat. His linen suit and walking stick, long white hair and a long wispy beard ('full-blown and blowing') completed his consummate characterization of the English gentleman. 

Bean had taken fright in the pet shop for some strange reason and was pulling me along the street. This was enough to elicit the first remark from him in twenty-nine years: 'She's pulling you along nicely.' Within five minutes I had learned about two of his dogs and that he had been a cavalry officer in the British Raj. He told me that, after two years in India, he had sent a letter to his sister, asking her to give it to his dog, a retriever. The dog carried it round for two days! When, after ten years, he returned home, the dog looked at him for some moments as if trying to remember, and then leapt up, paws on his master's shoulders to greet him.

I also learned that in India, his servant, and the dog he had there, missed a train: our cavalry officer pulled the communication chord to no avail, but at the next station he explained the situation and the servant and dog arrived shortly by special train! I expect more tales from the Raj when next Bean and I meet him.

Six-month-old orphan Bean learning to socialize in last January's snow.

The other day Bean introduced me to a little American family who had been in London only a few hours on leave, here for the first time from the husband's post in Africa. They had found the children's playground at the end of our street, and there, in the dappled shade of a great plane tree, we talked about dogs (they had left theirs behind) and the relative coolness of our heat wave. As we talked I realized they had not so far got the lie of the land here or discovered the treats in store. So I told them about the London overland train that would take them to Hampstead Heath, of which they had never heard, in ten minutes from their local stop. Or, if they took the Jubilee Line Tube to Charing Cross, their little girl could play in the fountains in the neo-classical courtyard of Somerset House, and they could take tea and see some masterpieces in the Courtauld Gallery. I heard there were professional dancers disporting themsleves in the fountains a week or so ago (that I regret hearing about too late!), and I turned down the chance to attend a free lunchtime violin recital of Mozart at St Martin-in-the-Fields the other day. One really must gather the London rose buds while one may.

Counterpoint performed by Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company. Photos by Richard Haughton

Postscript

Well! This afternoon I was out walking with Bean and we met a local artist I know: I was telling her about my cavalry officer and it turns out that he had worked for her as a model! So I too may yet be able to portray him in paint as well as in words.

ENGLISH LORDS AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES

Last Sunday I attended the Midsomer Murders farewell garden party for John Nettles near Great Missenden. It was like a bumper edition of the show - lots of smart and pretty straw hats, though no suspicious looks. John gave a short speech in which he acknowledged his OBE, but said it stood for 'Other Buggers' Efforts'. He told me that the first thing he is going to do is play the Ghost and Claudius in a production of Hamlet at the Sheffield Crucible. Marcia Warren was at the party; she played my housekeeper in the Midsomer episode I appeared in three years back. She told me I was excellent. Seeing her in the repeat on ITV just the other night, I was right to say she was perfect.

Here is a compilation of some of my scenes as Lord Holm in 'Death in a Chocolate Box':



I regretted that the drug-befuddled, misused lord had no last scene in which to show his reaction to his new-found innocence (no, what Aristotle would have called, anagnorisis - a moment of recognition or critical discovery). What were the programme-makers thinking of? The forty-second coda I offer here by way of webcam is an age to hard-pressed producers with all those shots of cars pulling up and away to consider, but it makes me feel better.



My brother rang me up and asked wryly if I had discovered any blue blood in the family tree, since I seem to get away with playing lords. He doesn't do computing so I can't at the moment point him in the direction of Bill Naughton's Joe Brady, my last week's working-class hero. Noble is a word that begs a lot of questions and takes some defining, but one might apply it to Joe, who felt something like the ennobling effect of a day's work as a coalbagger.

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Last Tuesday at the National Theatre I saw the penultimate evening performance of The White Guard by the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov (in an adaptation by Andrew Upton). Extraordinary how relatively few performances it has done. It was the nearest thing to being in Kiev in 1918. Where do all these excellent actors come from? In my ignorance I knew only one of them. The director Howard Davies I worked with long ago. His production I found quite flawless, masterly. One is amazed to think that Stalin saw the Moscow Art Theatre performance twenty times - but perhaps not so amazing if their production was as good as the NT's and, of course, it must have been. Odd how one catches oneself out assuming that the theatre must be better now than it was way back, the further back the worse. On the other hand, I also catch myself out in the reverse attitude, being particularly astonished at how superb so many young actors are nowadays.

  The Days of the Turbins (aka The White Guard), Moscow Art Theatre, 1926. Directed by Stanislavski.

 Set design by Ilya Sudakov

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This week I have read two pieces of writing by my daughter Dora and her friend Ruth in Edinburgh, posted on Ruth's blog Cocktails and Feminism. They both experimented in two consecutive posts, composing 'snapshots' of Edinburgh. If ever you wanted to define the essence of what a blog should be and what it should do, you might look at these delightful and successful experiments in 'Free-Writing'.

BILL NAUGHTON - A CENTENARY BLOG

Bill Naughton (1910-1992)

Photo by Ida Kar

12 June marked the centenary of the birth of playwright Bill Naughton. It was he that in 1963 provided me with my first West End part, the younger brother in All in Good Time, which transferred from Bernard Miles's Mermaid Theatre to the Phoenix. I had to convince as a young working-class lad from Barnsley. It was a cinch; I didn't have to think about it, the years of Southern upper-crust nurture fell away and I was the pre-Theatre School boy again. Bill Naughton was fifty-three at the time, and was Bolton through and through (he had been a weaver, coalbagger and lorry driver), although his best-known work celebrated a London wide boy and sexual adventurer called Alfie. 

During the run of All in Good Time I was offered the lead role in a radio play Bill had written, November Day, the original recording of which I only recently rediscovered. As a way, then, of commemorating a significant anniversary, let me share with you an excerpt from this rare recording, the moving final scene between my character, Joe Brady, and his wife played by Lois Dane. First, to set the scene, I offer a short extract (another sneak preview) from my forthcoming book:

Ironic really that, after all my endeavours in the provinces at 'keeping it West End', and the part that BBC Radio had played in 'grooming' my voice, my first West End play and my first radio play should be in the North Country working-class vernacular. Some actors are not able to lose their native accent, feeling that to do so would be to betray their roots and put on artificial airs. I was one of the many working-class actors of the 1950s who had no such qualms. In any case, as a boy, as I never tire of acknowledging, the radio was my ear's window on the world; what a wide and infinitely coloured world it was and I wanted to be as multicoloured as I could. So I am not sentimentally attached to my native utterance; pragmatically, one searches for the appropriate voice wherever it might come from, but I found that I was especially moved listening again recently to Naughton's November Day, a day in the life of a young married man in the Depression who lands a day's work as a coalbagger.

There is a purity about the script; it has something so honest and authentic, reminding me a little of the plays of D. H. Lawrence in its lack of political posturing and cultural self-consciousness. The spare language is a kind of poetry; one line in particular I remember and love: 'If I had a Clydesdale mare like that o' thine …'. The hero is so busy keeping up with his arduous work and absorbing the rich talk of his newfound workmates and bosses, he speaks little in the central part of the single November day, but all the time one has the sense of him striving and learning, leading to the transformation which happens between the intimacy of waking up to the alarm clock and wrenching himself out of the warm bed, away from his wife and bairn, for the routine of failing to get work and coming back home to breakfast, the shock of being taken on and having grit himself to survive the challenge.

But beyond authenticity, and far beyond sentiment, I found a kinship with the voice of the young character I played. It was as if he were someone I might have been. A hero, yes, perhaps an idealized one, finding, after his exhausting day's work, a moment of fulfilment, even redemption, with his wife and child as he sits naked before the kitchen fire with the baby on his knee. I knew that kitchen and that man, his life with his wife and baby, and felt proud to know them.

The extreme naturalism of Mr Douglas Cleverdon's production, a pattern of recognizable natural sounds, tends to reinforce the impression that Mr Naughton is only cutting and offering a thick slice of life. Mr Edward Petherbridge's Joe Brady, Miss Lois Dane as his wife … and others maintain the same easy, natural atmosphere. But Mr Naughton's apparent artlessness, the exactitude of the external life which he and Mr Cleverdon present, needs neither to make claims nor to point morals. The people among whom Joe undergoes his ordeal are vigorously and cantankerously alive; the ordeal brings the hero to his maturity. To consider the surface of this is to apprehend the depths it covers. 

('A Chronicle and Something More', The Times, 22 July 1963)

Coalbaggers pictured in the Lancashire Evening Post

And yet there was the odd occasion when I might get a sentence to match up almost perfectly with what I felt, and this simple act gave me a glow of satisfaction, even a touch of self-esteem. At times I'd be so overcome by the reconciliation I might achieve between imagination and writing, that I would feel a need to sneak out to the front door, sit on the doorstep, breathe in the sweet, cool air, gaze up at the night sky, and try to think of eternity, the soul, beauty, and images remote from lorries, spades and coal. It was as though something was urging me on in what appeared even to me to be a vain and hopeless quest.

(Bill Naughton, On the Pig's Back: An Autobiographical Excursion, 1987)

REEL LIFE: KRAPP'S LAST TAPE

Nothing I have written, or can write now, seems adequate or even necessary by way of introduction to the intense, sparse poetry of this little masterpiece. It was an RSC production that played Stratford's Other Place and the Pit at the Barbican and was included in the New York (BAM) and Washington season.

Subsequently it was taken on tour by a commercial management, playing an odd assortment of venues in far-flung places: Jerusalem, Tiberias, High Wycombe, Bath, Dublin, and Edinburgh, and the little Arts Theatre near Leicester Square where I had seen the original English production of Waiting for Godot while still a drama student. Royal was in the title of the Dublin venue (the Royal Hibernian Academy Downstairs) where I arranged for the production to be captured on video. It was a small, disused underground car park with grey concrete walls, ceiling and floor and grey dust, and an awkward arrangement of seating for a very small audience. 

There was a single wooden batten on the concrete ceiling in quite the wrong place for us to suspend Krapp's solitary light. When I declared that there was no alternative but to move the batten, the stage manager in her charming Dublin accent said gravely, 'That would mean recourse to masonry nails.' A line worthy of a Beckett character.

Here are two clips, from near the beginning and the end, of the Dublin performance:

And a couple of excerpts from my forthcoming book (to be published later this year):

This is a play about a man and his diary, the record of his life, literally recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. In it the actor performs with a recording of himself – himself, the actor he trusts best in all the world; the actor whose criticism, if he is fortunate, is constructive, however harsh, and only seldom flattering. 'Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago' are the words Krapp commits to a new tape after his first listening session. 'Hard to believe I was ever as bad as that.'

After a 6 p.m. performance of Krapp at Stratford's the Other Place in the summer of 1997, I found myself the centre of a small, informal meeting as I crossed through the café bar to go out and on to the main house for the evening performance of Hamlet. Just one or two people had waited to see me. An elderly gentleman – well, he might have been sixty-five – said, 'I saw Waiting for Godot when it first came out and made nothing of it. I don't know why I came today to see this play, but I enjoyed its spaces in between, the silences, the stillnesses. You see, then I had nothing to fill them with. Now I do.'

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Every time I performed the play I learned to marvel at it the more. It defies categorization. It is an intellectual and elegiac vaudeville sketch for clown and tape recorder, a life’s history in fifty minutes, beginning with the hero slipping on a banana skin and ending as he looks into the abyss. It is a conjuring trick with stage and 'real' time – except that there is no trick. The time the solitary Krapp spends with us in the play is the actual time it takes to sigh and peer at his keys and search his table drawers for bananas, to read his logbook, to play and listen to a particular tape ('Box … thrree … spool … five'), and begin to record another. But the sense of the distances between his present and his pasts, captured in the sound of his voice, evoked by the use of the stop-and-start, rewind and fast-forward buttons, so actual, so arbitrarily, sometimes violently controlling but giving rise to the surprising, disruptive power of his history as it intrudes into his current existence – all this gives the play its deep sense of perspective.

Krapp and His Last Tape. Self-portrait, 1997. Pastel on Card