Making an Exhibition of Myself Read online

  We were confined to camp for the first two weeks; then we burst out, like prisoners suddenly freed. I was a wartime child, so I had still not been abroad. Even the North was another country to me. Liverpool I found very exciting – black, grimy and full of clouds, rain and steam. It was spring, but it always seemed dark. During my basic training, I went to the Liverpool Playhouse three times. I saw Uncle Vanya, The Tempest and The Schoolmistress. John Fernald was the director and he had a fine permanent company that included Gladys Boot, Cyril Luckham, Michael Aldridge and Rosalind Boxall. I watched enchanted. I could not know that I would work with all these actors; or that I would work for John Fernald himself in a little over four years.

  I felt that doing plays with the same company on the same stage in the same town was a definition of what civic theatre ought to be. I knew all about the golden age of William Armstrong at Liverpool and I yearned to spend my days at a theatre linked, as his had been, to its community. This, I suppose, is a theatre person’s dream of life before the fall. If someone offered me a regional playhouse now, with a subsidy that allowed the highest standards (by which I mean paying the actors properly), I would find it irresistible. Unfortunately, it will never happen. No regional repertory now has enough funds to hire a company of top talent.

  I hoped to spend my National Service in the Education Corps. I could not be considered officer material as I did not yet have my degree. But on the strength of my Cambridge scholarship, I was sent from West Kirby to the RAF School of Education at Wellesbourne Mountford in Warwickshire to be trained as a Sergeant (Acting) Instructor.

  Things became far more civilised. We were only three or four to a room; and, best of all, it was only a short bus ride to Stratford. I was able to board the six-thirty bus outside the camp gates and be deposited near the theatre in time to buy a standing place at the back of the stalls. I never failed to get in; the great Shakespeare boom was only just beginning.

  By seeing each play that summer many times, I learnt another lesson about the nature of repertory theatre. What is good to start with gets better and better. What is uncertain or bad tends to get worse.

  This was my third consecutive summer of seeing everything in Stratford. The two previous summers I had cycled over with a school friend from Cambridge. It was nearly a hundred miles; most of the journey was blessedly on the flat, but we prayed for no head-winds. We pitched our tent up river from the theatre, on the municipal camping ground, where the Avon, as yet unpolluted, served as the town’s swimming pool. It rained a good deal, and we were cold. We lived on fish and chips and the occasional visit to the town’s British Restaurant, a place of basic food, the product of the war. And we saw the plays every night. I remember the young Paul Scofield alternating with Robert Helpmann in a mid-Victorian staging of Hamlet. Scofield was a brooding, difficult, Byronic Hamlet. I was transported despite a duff production in which Elsinore became Saxe-Coburg. But it gave Scofield a middle-aged society to fight. I remember, too, Diana Wynyard and Tony Quayle in Much Ado; and a baleful King John with Helpmann in full chrome make-up. In the RAF year, I met Cymbeline for the first time and, by seeing it frequently, learnt to love its tangled complexities. Stratford – a little rundown Midlands market town then, with its large 1930s cinema-like theatre slapped incongruously by the river – was more and more the focus of my ambitions.

  During the day, I was trying to turn myself into a Sergeant Instructor who could teach current affairs. It was a difficult role for someone just out of school, because it demanded at least the appearance of maturity. Gradually, I began to enjoy teaching. School had given me many opportunities for public speaking, and I knew I liked this elemental form of communication. To some extent, too, a teacher (like a director) thinks on his feet and lives in public. This was all useful experience.

  By the end of the summer of 1949, I had hopes that my National Service years were not going to be entirely wasted after all. Then came another upheaval. I was posted to Germany.

  Chapter Ten

  We crossed the border. I looked out of the train window and saw people working in the fields: farmers ploughing, women weeding. It looked much like anywhere else. But it wasn’t anywhere else – it was Germany and these were Germans. I rushed down the corridor to the lavatory and was violently sick.

  I had been conditioned throughout my adolescence to think of Germans as the beasts who produced Belsen and Auschwitz. They were not human. I found it hard to look at them. It took me a long while to get over this, to realise that we all have the same beast within us and that hatred can only breed hatred. I am now a fervent European: it gives us at least the chance to develop tolerance.

  I was posted to the RAF Headquarters for Education at Bückerburg. A demobilisation school was attached to it, providing one-month refresher courses for students returning to civilian life. The rush of people being demobilised was over, but there was still a trickle. I expected, like all my companions, to be sent on to some air base in Germany where I would be the Education Sergeant running the library, teaching current affairs, and presiding over the Gramophone Society. But I was made to wait at headquarters. A Squadron Leader who had been teaching the course in economics had just been hurriedly posted for fraternising with a German girl. The Commanding Officer called me into his office. ‘I see you did economics in Higher Certificate, Hall?’ he began. ‘Yes, sir, but only as a subsidiary subject.’ The CO considered this for a moment. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you can get up a course in economics and business management that will satisfy our applicants.’

  I tried desperately to meet his demands. I dreaded giving refresher courses to veterans who had gone through the war and who held pre-war BScs at the London School of Economics. But these turned out to be the easy ones; they were happy to have time for a month’s reading and a few seminars on general subjects. The difficult customers were the people who wanted to be taught from the beginning. They had to learn with me, at the same time as I learnt.

  Our courses took place in the requisitioned Bückerburg Schloss, an amazing confection of cheap nineteenth-century rococo, with painted ceilings and rampant cupids. My office was an over-decorated salon which I shared with a young Pilot Officer and a pair of Bechstein grands, washed up by the Occupation. The pilot officer was also a pianist, so we whiled away the hours playing music for two pianos. Then the pilot officer changed. Unfortunately, the new man, Kenneth Ewing, was no pianist. But he was almost as mad on the theatre as I was, and subsequently became a leading play agent.

  I only had to teach for a few hours each week, so I spent most of my time reading. Douglas Brown had given me one list, and St Catharine’s had given me another; I was determined to be well prepared before I went up. I was planning to spend my time not studying, but in the university dramatic societies.

  I think I finally wasn’t a bad teacher. I learnt to lead a group, and to handle people. And mapping a journey through a subject on which you have only a general grasp is no bad training for leading a group of actors in the discovery of a play.

  Germany then was still war-torn and miserable. Our weekly cigarette ration was worth more than our pay. As conquerors, we were rather better off than we were in England. There was meat, plenty of food, and we had centrally-heated barracks. I was surprised to be warm for the first winter in my life. But it was disturbing to be living so comfortably in a land of deprivation and rubble. I also found, unsurprisingly, that Acting Sergeants of eighteen were not on the whole very popular with their fellows. The next youngest member of my Sergeants’ mess was thirty-eight. The older men were mostly advanced alcoholics who had sweated for years before being rewarded with their three stripes. They were not at all pleased to see a boy quickly reaching their rank simply because he had passed a few exams.

  For a time, I shared a room with a Sergeant in his late forties. He got drunk every night and never returned from the mess to our bedroom until two or three in the morning. One night, the sound of running water invaded my sleep; I dreamt of
brooks and little waterfalls. It was a lovely sound except that I seemed to hear, amongst the gentle splashing, a man’s voice muttering imprecations. As I became conscious, I saw my fellow Sergeant solemnly pissing into my wardrobe. He had opened the door either because he thought it was the lavatory, or because he wanted, in his drunken animosity, to fill up my boots. His performance was abundant. As he pissed, he muttered, ‘Who does this young fucker think he is? Coming here pretending to be a Sergeant. Pretending he knows better than us …’ I woke him as much as the drink permitted, undressed him and put him to bed. I left my piss-filled boots unemptied until the morning.

  The Sergeants had their revenge on me: they appointed me mess barman. For some four months, I served drinks from 8 p.m. until three or four in the morning. There was one night off a week. Otherwise, I had the torture of listening every night to the Sergeants’ wondrously bigoted, reactionary talk as they travelled inexorably into their accustomed drunken stupor. When they were all completely pissed, I could close the bar and go to bed. I think they only stayed in the RAF for the mess. It was a place where drunkenness was a sign of virility, and costs were low. To me, it was a grotesque version of the English pub. Its nightly purpose was oblivion.

  Eventually, I was given a room on my own. I solemnly covered all the available wall space with postcards from the National Gallery and the Tate. One of my teachers had said to me early on that he wasn’t sure about the strength of my visual sense. The criticism stayed in my head. I consciously trained myself to look at form, pattern and colour. Art galleries, art books and postcard reproductions became part of my discipline. Looking at paintings is now an intense pleasure, and it developed from making myself do it. But I still believe that I hear more keenly than I see. The sound of words and of music are the immediate stimulations.

  Despite the ruined towns and the chronic shortage of food, the Germans poured money into the performing arts. They still had subsidised music, drama and opera because they needed them. I was very impressed. Hanover’s opera house had been destroyed by bombs, but at the Herrenhausen, the old stables of the Elector of Hanover’s palace, a temporary theatre had been constructed. There, I saw Wagner for the first time in my life. It was Tristan und Isolde. The sensuality overwhelmed me: it was a physical experience.

  I went also to the first German production of Albert Herring. It was a very Teutonic view of East Anglia. I had seen the original Glyndebourne production when it toured to Cambridge and had been mystified by the dismissive tone of the critics. It seemed that the comic was thought less worthy than the tragic.

  Sung lines such as:

  I am sorry Miss Pike,

  But I punctured my bike

  aroused particular fury. I thought that the naiveté of the opera, and the pretensions of its characters, expressed the heart of Suffolk. When I directed a revival at Glyndebourne in 1985, Britten, alas, was dead, though Peter Pears, the original Albert, and Eric Crozier, the librettist, saw it. The piece, I like to think, emerged as what it is: that rarest of things in opera, a genuine social comedy. It has a serious heart which defines its mirth: witness its depiction of the pain of adolescence; witness the great threnody on death in Act III. None of this was visible in the facetious German production.

  Hamburg was further away than Hanover, but I went there too. The bomb damage was still apocalyptic. I walked through streets piled high with rubble to performances at the bombed opera house. Only its stage had survived, and a temporary auditorium and stage had been built on it. I saw Verdi and Puccini and more and more Wagner. I went by train across Germany to Oberammergau where I saw one of the ten-yearly manifestations of The Passion Play. It was a dreadful text and the production had more nineteenth-century religiosity than a bad production of Parsifal. But I was excited to see an entire village on the stage – a cast of 1,000 people. Their behaviour was precisely drilled and precisely defined; I had some sense of what Max Reinhardt’s meticulous theatre must have been like. There were frequent Bavarian rain-storms which soaked the actors. The audience was under cover; the stage was not.

  In Germany I saw the great clown, Grock. He stood on a chair playing a diminutive violin that exploded at irregular intervals. His act was a tragic farce, and had a private mystery all of its own as disaster crept nearer and nearer to him. I will go anywhere to see a superlative comic. I love the direct one-to-one relationship with the audience as the comic flatters and then abuses them. It is a contest as acute and as basic (and sometimes as terrible) as a bullfight. It is also in the great tradition of direct dramatic storytelling and has lessons for every actor. All Shakespearean soliloquies are directly addressed to the audience. The actor does not commune with himself, unaware that the audience is overhearing. Instead, he shares himself with his audience. He always tells the truth, from the heart, and asks the audience to share his predicament. Similarly, the baroque aria and the Mozart aria are also direct revelations of self. It is only since the naturalism of the late nineteenth century that the theatre has grown shy of soliloquy, or aria, or aside. The great stand-up comics still show us the way: Max Miller, Ken Dodd, Frankie Howerd, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Barry Humphries – these lewd and anarchic men are my heroes. We know them.

  One Christmas, just before the war, my mother and father took me to the London Coliseum to see the Crazy Gang: six wayward clowns who appeared to be always just about to do something awful, which would almost certainly be dirty. Yet somehow they never got round to doing it. With a detached air, they papered a room, paste flying, ladders collapsing, buckets spilling their paint everywhere. My mother was rather sniffy about these alarming old men. ‘Stoopid,’ she said, in her best Suffolk accent. But I was their slave from then until their last Victoria Palace shows.

  The RAF had an amateur dramatic club at Bückerburg. It was frequented mainly by the bored wives of the officers, or those who had been on the fringes of show business in civilian life. Putting on a play was done in an atmosphere of joyous camp, as if we were all about to enjoy an outrageous party. There was no hope of me directing. The productions were safely in the hands of an enthusiastic and queenly Sergeant, whom I liked very much. I acted, among other parts, a romantic lover in a historical farrago called The Rose Without a Thorn. My entry through the mullioned window of the bedroom at the dead of night produced loud wolf whistles at the Bückerburg Garrison Theatre. I also played Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. I still had no intention of being an actor.

  I tried to learn German, but achieved only moderate success. I have no ability in languages. At various times I have also attempted, with fairly dismal results, to master Italian for my Cambridge degree; and French because I became part of a large French family by my marriage to Leslie Caron. I can read a little in all three languages, but trying to speak them becomes an abominable embarrassment – because, I suppose, I hate making a fool of myself.

  This is a great regret to me. I have never resolved it and deeply envy friends who can easily speak another tongue. They have full access to another culture. There is a kink in my brain – or more probably a deep conceit in my nature – which makes learning languages impossible. Yet I can give a lecture for an hour without notes; it is rare for me to encounter an unfamiliar word in English; and I can write without inhibition. I delight in words, and when directing plays I am keenly responsive to the music and rhythm of dialogue. But I am no good at foreign languages.

  I fell in love in Germany. Her name was Jill and she was a porcelain-faced member of the WRAF in which she was intending to make her career. She was private and shy, and as young and virginal as I was. We had good times together for an entire summer, boating and swimming, and visiting the Harz mountains. We cuddled and I groped feverishly. This, remember, was the pre-Pill age when how far you could go with a girl was a clear indication of her morality. I masturbated lustily in my bed and dreamt of making love to Jill. Being a romantic, I took the whole thing terribly seriously – much more, I suspect, than she did. Just before I was demobilised
, we became engaged. As a consequence I recklessly cancelled all my plans and all my ambitions. I forced myself to think that a career in the theatre would not be wise for a young man about to marry. It was all far too hazardous. I resolved to become a teacher and settle down. I was very tortured and very sad. This decision marked my arrival at university.

  Soon after, Jill and I at last went to bed. This momentous happening was possible because I had celebrated my demobilisation by buying a 1929 Austin Seven for forty pounds, money I had saved in the RAF. It was held together with wire and made driving a real craft for it was totally unreliable. It took us off on a winter’s holiday to the Welsh mountains. On the way, we stopped the first night at a hotel in Leamington Spa.

  How and why our love-making worked, I cannot imagine. I was totally inexperienced and so was she. My knowledge of sex and of a woman’s body was confined to chatter and gossip, my avid reading of Penguin sex-education books, and a great deal of D. H. Lawrence, whose rhapsodic descriptions were, at best, rather unclear. Since both of us had remained virgin until nineteen, we had very little objectivity about our sexuality, or how basically suited we were. Our pleasure in each other seems to me now a wonderment. Certainly one of the great physical sufferings of my youth was being a virgin for so long. Others I knew had by my age been with experienced girls, or had paid for sex. But I was always reluctant to cheapen something precious. That sounds priggish. But I wasn’t a prig; I was passionate. I would have fallen in love with the first whore I laid.

  Sex is the great mystery, as great as death. Yet we commercialise it, and destroy it with fear, prudery and envy. It is the expression of our love, and the means by which nature ensures our future. It gives the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain. At nineteen, I had been given absolutely no education, no counselling and no help in this crucial part of life. Is it really much better for young people now? Knowing how to give pleasure to a woman by loving her is the nearest most men get to being an artist. It is something that should be helped and cherished.