Something Old, Something New

Blue Murder by Peter Nichols

Library Theatre, Manchester, 1997

Peter Nichols

Here are some highlights of the theatrical year, 1960:

The Aldwych became the London home of the RSC, the new Royalty Theatre opened with Rattigan’s The Visit, and Synge’s Playboy of the Western World was enjoying a spirited revival. Coward scored only a minor hit with Waiting in the Wings, but The Caretaker was well on its way to becoming Harold Pinter’s first big success. Robert Bolt’s historical dramas A Man for All Seasons and The Tiger and the Horse had been well received, and although the familiar team of Brian Rix and Leo Franklyn were doing their usual healthy box office in Simple Spymen at the Whitehall, Albert Finney was continuing to make a name for himself in the Keith Waterhouse/ Willis Hall comedy Billy Liar. While traditional fare was still being enjoyed, change was obviously in the air.

Although some of the younger stars were fresh, the names of others were instantly recognisable: Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike, Michael Redgrave, Celia Johnson, Kathleen Harrison, Michael Wilding, Ian Carmichael, Alastair Sim and Nigel Patrick. Even pre-First World War veterans Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert could be found mugging along with the equally venerable Robertson Hare in The Bride Comes Back at the Vaudeville. Such names reek of the establishment – not in any political sense, but simply in terms of their air of comfortable familiarity. Reliable, thoroughly professional and tremendously popular, they gave audiences exactly what they wanted – first class entertainment.

And the theatrical vehicles conveying this entertainment to the masses were of a very high standard indeed. Craftsmanship, construction and clarity of theme were still goals to aim at, not outmoded concepts to be deplored, and the so-called ‘well-made play’ was enjoying its swan song after nearly a century’s dominance.

Initially a reaction against the 19th century’s insatiable hunger for melodrama, garish plot and cardboard characters, the domestic drama, invariably set in realistic, contemporary interiors, allowed the rapidly increasing middle class audience to see reflections of themselves on stage, and identify with the serious social issues that were often raised.

Arthur Wing Pinero, Somerset Maugham and Frederick Lonsdale pursued the style into this century, then handed the baton on to such other exponents of wit, style and impeccable craftsmanship as JB Priestley, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. Unfortunately the term ‘well-made play’ became a pejorative one following the emergence of the Royal Court and John Osborne’s ground-breaking Look Back in Anger in 1956, although ironically a close study of Osborne’s iconoclastic text reveals that it is only revolutionary in its subject matter and treatment; in terms of structure it follows all the traditional conventions, as do the works of those other names that emerged towards the end of the fifties, Arnold Wesker, John Arden and Harold Pinter.

Lonsdale once explained that the reason he wrote comedy was because “A comedy is a tragedy inverted.” Many would suggest that this is a close enough definition of that other perennial favourite of the mass audience, farce. The subject matter of tragedy is often similar to that of farce: the difference comes in the way it’s treated.

The first home of farce in Britain had been the Aldwych. In 1923, Evans and Valentine’s Tons of Money had reopened the venue following its restoration after damage caused in the First World War, and for the next ten years, Ben Travers provided a steady flow of famously polished farces for the stock cast of Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn, Robertson Hare and Winifred Shorter. But Travers ran out of steam, and by the start of the sixties, the recognised home of farce had shifted to the Whitehall, under the managership of Brian Rix.

The Whitehall opened in 1930 and Rix’s first farce, Colin Morris’s Reluctant Heroes, began a four-year run there in 1950. By the mid-1960s, he had easily overtaken the Aldwych’s record for a continuous run of farces under one manager in the same theatre. Reluctant Heroes was followed by John Chapman’s Dry Rot (1954) and Simple Spymen (1958), One for the Pot in 1961 by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton, and Chase Me, Comrade (1964) by Cooney alone. The form of pure farce was to have an influence on the next great star of British comedy writing for the stage, Alan Ayckbourn, who would make of the genre a distinctly more shadowy beast than it had been before.

The theatre at the start of the sixties was a place of safety, comfort and reliability. Audiences had a pretty good idea what to expect when the curtain went up on a new Noël Coward or Terence Rattigan: the first would make them laugh, the second would make them think and feel – but neither to an immoderate degree and they would not be discomfited. As for farce, the little coterie of highly polished performers Brian Rix had gathered around him at the Whitehall were like old friends.

Such well-worn themes and comforting effects as the mainstream theatre was pursuing at the time may be easy to spoof, but they are less easy to deride. The better a thing is made, the longer it is likely to last, and that is as true of plays as it is of any other artefact. Whether farce, drama or domestic comedy, the best will always survive.

PS

Yeah, reading this one again I’m not really sure what the brief must have been. Something about the state of the contemporary theatre? How it got to be where it was? It’s all a bit unfocused and random, isn’t it? It certainly contains a lot of the big names that most people with any interest in the subject must have heard of, and lots of stuff about those names that those people would probably have known already, so what exactly was I trying to say? It’s all a bit flaccid really.

But at least it was predicated on a play by Peter Nichols, a writer with whom I share a hometown and who, more than any other I know, seems to have mined his own life for much of his creative inspiration. Novelists are famous for writing disguised autobiography, or using their own experiences and characters to shape their books, but the practice is a lot less common in the theatre. Why this should be, I’m not sure. Is it something to do with the popular idea that the theatre has always been somehow more real and truthful and genuine than literary fiction (those are real people up there saying and doing things on our scale, in real time), so playwrights have traditionally been more guarded in what they expose of themselves lest the audience instinctively judge them too harshly? (The playwright is certainly at increased risk of being judged harshly. Apparently Nichols at one point caught sight of the lord chamberlain’s remarks about A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in his capacity as stage censor: ‘it is a play about an over-sexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child written, I suspect, by an over-sexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child’. Some of this was true but some of it wasn’t, and what does it matter anyway just so long as they play works?) But any work of fiction has always been notoriously difficult to pin down like that. The events and the characters and the motives are an impossibly complex melange of truth, reminiscence, emotion and remembered experience, all corralled into a form designed to educate, to move, to entertain… and what bits of that are drawn directly from the author’s own life are surely among the least important or least interesting aspects of it.

As for the play in question here, if I ever knew the first thing about it, I have long since forgotten, and the Wikipedia entry seems to raise more questions than it answers. A murder mystery originally comprising four acts, the original production at the Royal Court in 1995 was put on without the third act ‘due to budgetary constraints’. How can this possibly have worked? Later revivals, subtitled ‘a play or two’, seem to have comprised two acts only, – Act One: Foreign Bodies 1963, Act Two: A Game of Soldiers 1967 – so without having read it, one suspects it was originally two, two-act plays one after the other and the author was obliged to do some kind of cutting and/or melding – another reason for him to lose patience with the medium.

In his later years, Nichols for some reason fell out of favour and he found it increasingly difficult to get his plays accepted. He earned a reputation as being difficult, maybe for this very reason, a sentiment that maybe found its bitterest expression in the title he conferred on his 1984 autobiography, Feeling You’re Behind. It’s sad to reflect now that he still had another 35 years of feeling it to come. If he felt that then, how much more acute must that frustration have grown? And yet he was a comedy writer. Seeing the humour in the pain was his thing. One can only hope it helped.