Thiese are sections 10/11 of ‘Nick Ward Plays, adaptations, translations, installations, events’ written in the week preceeding the Chilcott Enquiry in to the Iraq War, November 2009.
http://nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/nick-ward-play-texts/
10. Red Sky at Night (1983, 1985, 1994) – this was a Monday Play for BBC R4 – inspired by the early works of D.H.Lawrence and my 1985 Time Out Award winning play Eastwood; and Odour of Chrysanthemums (1983) which won a Double Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival with my adapatation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Letter to his Father, in which I played Gregor. Sophie Hedderwick is not forgotten. She was in both shows having lied about her age at the audition. Arts warrier with a passionate committment to human rights.
17 year old Soph informed my reading, thinking and theatrical outlook on every level. In Metamorphsis she was a ballet-dancing, classical violin-playing Greta, and remained my key muse-enthusiast until we went our separate ways in 1989. In late 1982 Rod Bolt, a brilliant South African undergraduate director at Corpus Christi College , Cambridge, had co-directed a production of Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Metamorphosis and my own version was a reaction: the family were presented in far more naturalistic terms which set-off the stark acrobatics of the beetle. Berkoff was a far more persuasive influence in my early twenties than Pinter, or anyone, for that matter.
East was a stunningly visceral piece of performance poetry. The deep connection with Pinter came much later: a profound exchange on many levels right up to his death.
One of my chief challenges as a playwright-director is to make sense of this affinity with Harold. Not easy. Hackney boys. (Impossible without the support of the Harold Pinter Estate.)
11. The Judgement (1982 – ?). Drawing on the prose works of Franz Kafka, including Metamorphosis; The Judgement; and Letter to His Father. Just a thought for a piece of Kafka theatre-dynamics. Watch this space.
These shows (1982-83), originated at the Corpus Playroom, St Edward’s Passage, Cambridge,
with music selected by Philosopher Dr Michael Tanner, currently Opera Critic for The Spectator. My great friend Simon Neville did all the technical back-up and managed and lit the shows in Edinburgh. We won the ‘White Light’ Award 1983 in addition to the double Scotsman Fringe First – with only 10 lamps. The prize was a computerised lighting board which we had no idea how to operate, so we stuck with our antequarian dimmer board. Simon’s fades were musical. There was no ‘designer’ – indeed I have never come to terms with the idea that theatre design can be imposed on a process. The design is the process – therefore I am a designer. Simon was a fascinating character. He was an undergraduate philosopher, under Michael Tanner, but suddenly left in year 2 (of three) battling with the question of Free Will. He became a dry stone waller in the Lake District in order to think about it – a Wittgenstinian move.
The degree meant nothing to him compared to the questioning. Getting a degree was not a career move. The last time we worked together was on the Channel Four film Dakota Road in 1990. His role was to drive the actors to the filming location and run 10-15 miles every morning (he also worked as assistant accountant). In the evenings we played chess and he always beat me. Last I heard of Simon he’d settled down with Gertie, a German chick (translator of business journals) he met on the Hamburg ferry, and settled in Greenwich, as a computer programmer.
He was also, in true Simon Neville spirit, reading James Joyces’ Ullysses and Finegan’s Wake (one page per day). Simon belonged to another world, a world of unhurried mental space. He disliked the professional theatre because he couldn’t relate to the money-making values of the people he encountered there. His biography in the Eastwood programme at The Man in the Moon in late 1985, which won an inaugural Time Out Award in 1986, Simon’s last theatre production with me, simply read: ‘Simon’s ambition is never to have an argument with anyone’. He seemed disappointed that I should go and work at the NT Studio rather than set up a theatre on the Fringe and didn’t care to follow me there. He lived on chick-peas and lentils and didn’t trust or understand the motives of the people I introduced him to there. ‘And what exactly is your hippy friend’s role going to be?’ Sue Higginson, the fearsome NT Studio manager asked me after meeting him.
Why is the professional theatre so unattractive to the likes of Simon Neville? Sue Higginson frightened the life out of me in the early days at the studio. She always seemed so exasperated by creative processing (particularly Peter Gill’s), but beneath the icy exterior she had a heart of gold and became my staunchest supporter right up to the final inconclusive Lily Wilde (or A Step in the Cave, as it was titled then) workshop production in 1997 (she wanted to know how it was going to end!). She would sneak me in despite the blacklisting mentality of Richard Eyre, who didn’t attend the showing of Lily Wilde but rejected the play the day after I delivered it via my former agent Judy Daish without having troubled himself to actually read it. Judy called me in to say ‘its the ideas which count, Nick’. I used the delivery fee (it had been a commission dating back to 1995) to fly back to Broome, Western Australia, where I collapsed for two months in a cheap-rent caravan as the Wet Season came in. My master was waiting for me further down the road in Fitzroy Crossing and took me under his great protective black wing. I was finally in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Commissions are useful.
I’ll come back to Sir Richard Eyre. He had perhaps never forgiven me for turning down his extraordinary (and premature) offer to make me his Associate Director in 1988, or perhaps there were other reasons for his complete U turn regarding Nick Ward, playwright-director. Perhaps he didn’t like the way I wrote about his regime at the NT as one of ‘double-headed flirtation with commercialism and false confidence - the after-burn of Thatcherism’ in the 1995 introduction to Nick Ward Plays 1. I was spot on there. Ask Judy Daish. I asked her to check the proof copy and she thought it was ‘very good, very true: publish!’ Ask Nicholas Wright. Ask Nicholas Hytner. Too late to ask Harold Pinter, but believe me when I tell you that he said ’it’s good!’ in his West End dressing room for the revival of The Hothouse in 1996. It was the only book he had in there. He didn’t ask me to sign it and I didn’t offer. Perhaps I should have. Harold always had that effect on me: should I, shouldn’t I? ‘There’s no right time to say anything’ he told me in the Almeida Theatre bar on another occasion. Tom Stoppard was within hearing and cocked an ear, wide-eyed. My one and only Tom Stoppard story.
Red Sky at Night would work well in the theatre. Contact the BBC Radio Script Archive for a copy of the script: http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/insight/script_archive.shtml
The paragraphs which follow (up to the pic of Federico Garcia Lorca) are currently under construction and changing day by day as the memories rush back like a veil has been lifted. I write this having just resigned my degree status at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I hope my reasons for doing such a personally momentous thing will be made clear in this section for my heart will always reside, in part, (my broken-heart?) in ‘Marlowe’s Room’. Read on! Censorship is a crime – self-censorship is a heinous crime, as every good therapist knows. All philosophy is homesickness and all thinking is memory.
1984 marked a big shift in productivity. I set up Cambridge Weekend Theatre operating out of the Corpus Christi College Playroom and began the collaboration with violinist-composer Richard Heacock.
http://www.richardheacock.co.uk/
I always (from the outset) held open auditions, open that is to members of the university and non-members of the university. It was against the rules, but in those days we didn’t stick to College rules (unlike the current undergraduate conformists!): the result of this policy was a healthy blend of actors and musicians – and the shows reflected that. Professor Christopher Andrew, then Dr Andrew and Senior Tutor, finally closed me down and fined me for using the College pay-phone (next to my room in College digs in 12 King’s Parade) to make reverse-charge calls. He fined me £50 in addition to paying the bill (about £3.50, as I remember) which put me seriously in debt and threatened to ’send me down’ if I persisted with theatre directing. Cambridge Weekend Theatre was beneath this MI5/MI6 recruitment operative’s radar so I pressed on. Years later, incidentally, he saw to it that I was banned from my role as a Corpus volunteer rowing coach (2005/6), despite the best results in the post-war period (the men’s second eight went up 9 places in the May Bumps using my four-stroke cycle system in training, and equalling the record). Michael Tanner withdrew his support in June 1983 because I’d fallen in love with Soph and would write me vitriolic letters concerning his unrequited love.
Michael was firmly in the Socratic school of philosophers: unless a chosen Young Man was prepared to enter his ‘erotic’ zone he simply could not teach them as deeply and as whole-heartedly as he could when they did. There was never any sexual impropriety, although most of College thought there was, much to Michael’s vain satisfaction. I was known by the Boat Club as the ‘Tanner Bugger’. I didn’t care. Michael was, and still is, a superb dramaturg without an ounce of distracting creativity. Between December 1981 and June 1983 I would often be in his rooms, including the inner chamber known, speculatively, as ‘Marlowe’s Room’ from 8am to well past midnight. I have never known such teaching. He was my humanist theatrical mentor at this decisive time. I adored the attention.
The great Margot Heineman (Newham College) was also a great encouragement, so was Peter Holland (of Trinity Hall). Margot simply said ‘You have a future in the theatre – that is all you should be doing here – putting on shows’. Her lover, the Spanish Civil War volunteer and poet John Cornfield had been killed (1936) in that terrible struggle against Fascism and she always wore black in rememberence.
She represented the opposite extreme to the Cold War madness of right wing academic reactionaries like Christopher Andrew and she insisted Andrew’s insistence that I should get on with ’some work’ as opposed to mucking around with amateur dramatics be totally ignored. She was serious. She would remind me of the enormous weight of my play-writing and theatre-making predessesors at Cambridge University of which Andrew seemed entirely ignorent.
The then Corpus Christi College Master, Michael McCrum, remained a great ‘underground’ supporter, as did Dr Richard Bainbridge (Corpus Fellow representative on the Fletcher Players committee which voted to back my work.) Michael McCrum had been knocked sideways by the breakthrough Odour of Chrysanthemums, which I had adapted on Michael Tanner’s advice having read the Simon Gray ‘Scrutiny’ review of Peter Gill’s D.H.Lawrence Triology at the Royal Court in the late 60s. I was convinced that by showing the washing of the body of the deceased miner (killed in a pit collapse) we could release a profounder sense of tragedy than The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, Lawrence’s own dramatic response to his own (publishing debute) short story could approximate given the standards of censorship and form surrounding the well-made play of his day. So bowled over had McCrum been by this production he sought my advice about converting the Playroom (a beer-stained party room which we would transform to a steeply-raked auditoruim with ‘illegal’ scaffolding) into the ‘proper’ theatre it is today.
I’d asked him to delay the expensive refurbishment until I’d left or there would be nowhere for me to work. He agreed. He was a wonderfully enlightened man. Classicist. A former headmaster of Eton College who knew how important ‘drama’ can be. His middle (?) son Mark McCrum had started the whole Playroom theatre enterprise in 1979 (with Stephen Fry?). Not sure of my facts here – I guess it started non-eventfully: parties-gigs-shows…
Steve Mcrum was Michael’s youngest son and was a bit of a handsome tearaway. I played Sooty LeNoire in Steve’s hit production of Enid Blyton’s Five Go Over the Top in my freshman’s term (that means first term in Cambridge Uni code- November 1981) – with David Pikard, now director of programming at Glynbourne. Michael McCrum’s eldest son, Robert (Editor in Chief, Faber), is currently considering a re-print of Nick Ward Plays 1, folllowing the revival of interest in my work, spearheaded by young London-based directors Ben Kidd (Apart from George at the Finborough, 2009) and Adam Spreadbury-Maher (The Present at The Cock Tavern Theatre, 2009). He is also, like Michael Billington, wondering what will be included in Nick Ward Plays 2 and Nick Ward Plays 3. That’s the kind of publisher Faber is. Steve McCrum was an inspired and transgressive director (Five go Over the Top was a thrilling example of directorial form over content: Blyton’s tale became sexualised noirish thriller in his hands). He taught me that good comedy should bever be seen as funny in rehearsal. Last I hear of Steve he had eschewed his Eton and Cambridge education and was working as a shoe-shine ‘boy’ in the City of London. I never sank that low! Good comedy is extremely technical.
I am very proud to say that no one in Cambridge University theatre went as far as I did in blending ‘town’ and ‘gown’. Val Widowson was a homeless acting genius who was a regular with Cambridge Weekend Theatre, Donalh McNeil was also a brilliant non-university experimenatalist (his was the bony semi-naked body that we saw asphixiate Grotowski-like by candle light in the collapsed mine shaft in Odour of Chrysanthemums and was stripped and washed down, totally, by his long-suffering wife with no tears, played in the first production by first year undergraduate Ali Cork). We were thrilled to get covered by one of The Guardian’s regional second-stringers Michael Grosevenor-Meyer who wrote of ‘the unmistakable pieta’ created by the final image of the woman with the dead miner in her arms.
If there was a pieta it was entirely unintentional (but I could see Grosevenor-Meyer’s point of view – and for a ’student’ production in Cambridge to get column inches in The Guardian was almost unheard of. It was certainly the first time this had happened in the Playroom’s short history. We were selling out before the review came out but we milked it for the Edinburgh Fringe programme, as we did Michael Tanner’s sound-bite on Metamorphosis ‘The best student production I have seen in Cambridge for 25 years’. He might have added the ‘only’ student production he had seen apart from the infuriatingly amaterish May Week open-air productions which would disturb his peace of mind in the incomparably beautiful Corpus Christi College Old Court. He loathed those staid and under-rehearsed ‘play it for laughs’ productions and would pour scorn on his fellow Fellows like Richard Bainbridge and Oliver Rackham who would strut their thespian stuff and muck in. I admired the mucking in of the the fellow Fellows. Michael would sometimes take pleasure in opening the windows and blasting them with Wagner overtures during the dress rehearsal. There was much bad feeling as a result. The great performance he would often talk about was the undergraduate Derek Jaocbi playing Edward II in the Old Court when Michael was a youngish Fellow. ‘That was brilliant’, he would say. He adored ‘Derek’.
Back to 1984: working with town and gown actors blended meant the work stood out from the self-satisfied aura of much of the Cambridge student drama of that era – and the era that had just passed had been a vintage one, the three outstanding ’stars’ who had dominated Cambridge sudent theatre up to 1982/83 were Simon Russell Beale (then just Simon Beale), Tilda Swinton and Roger Hyams.
Steve Unwin was the director who had really made a mark- his productions were an up-front visceral stripping down of Shakespeare (amongst others, like Athol Fugard). Robbie Stamp from Corpus was another (he directed the flawlesslessly paced production of Berkoff’s East in the Playroom that I refer to above. I was riveted by that). I’d toured Europe as Robin Starvling in Robbie’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in the winter of 1981/2) – with Simon Beale as Bottom and Tilda Swinton as Helena. The set was staves and drums. Leg-warmers were cool – I see they are making a come-back!
Every night Simon held the audience in the palm of his hand. When he did a double-take he seemed to leave his face behind. That’s timing. We were all in awe of Steve Unwin (and his partner Jenny Killick). Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski were two of my theatre-making heroes.
I took part in a three day workshop with Grotowski veterens who visited Cambridge (from Poland) as guests of Trinity Hall and learned from them that ‘devotional’ theatre practice means absolute committment to a form of poetic truth which resides in the cells of the body as much as in the cells of the brain.
Actor-meditators.
Designer Fred Pilbrow came up with a strikingly simple poster of a lightbulb for the Cambridge Weekend Theatre sequence. My name was not on the poster to avoid the intrusively philistine, draconian, (homophobic?) Dr Andrew’s attention. We would meet on Wednesday evenings and aim to get a new, usually short show ready for performances on Saturday and Sunday: it was a chance to experiment with a very wide variety of performance styles.
The material ranged from The Arabian Nights; a Jean Rhys short story ‘River’; the Shakespeare Principle Ophelia/Hamlet/Gertrude scenes; and most enchantingly, Winnie-the-Pooh (with Eyore in a donkey jacket parodying Brechtian alienation effects – played by Cambridge Experimental Theatre veteran, Tim Pemberton.) CET was founded by arch experimentalist Tim Spaul – he shifted perception and tickets. We cross-fertilized and took on the ‘mainstream’ University Drama groups like the Mummers and the ADC (Amateur Dramatic Club) who looked down their noses at us until we whipped their smug asses on the Edinburgh Fringe, where we managed the function room of the Royal Overseas League on Princes Street.
We were years ahead on low ticket prices charging only £1.00 and sold out every night in 1983 when the average attendance across the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was four (4) paying customers per show. Cheap tickets made sense for many reasons. I remember being attacked (verbally) at a Fringe ‘conference’ for ‘undermining’ the boring work of semi-professionals charging between £2.50 and £5.00. When we’re running the NT, Adam, we must, at all costs, maintain Nicholas Hytner’s £10 ticket policy – indeed I would probably make the case for a further reduction, down to, say £7.50 – and make up the shortfall by chucking the dead wood in the river. Watch them squeal as they head for the portable soup kitchen. Some will remain – the real workers.
Within a year and half I was working at the National Theatre Studio where I encountered the extreme prejudice of Peter Gill against the very Cambridge smugness I had been counteracting. There was no way I could get it through to him that my companies had included the likes of Sophie Hedderwick (a school-leaver), Val Widdowson (a tramp) and Donalh McNeil (a wiry Scot who’d left school at 16). Peter was confirmed in his view that the post-war Cambridge University generations had poisoned the realistic and mystical traditions of which he continues to be a prime exponent (and seemed to have no interest in the role of mysterious C16th Cambridge figures like Welsh-originating John Dee and Christopher Marlowe (and others) in the formation of The Shakespeare Principle). It was an ex-working-class-ridden myopia born of a stubborn and jealous nature. Very Welsh! Yet Peter would masochistically surround himself with Cambridge University graduates (like the bookish and extremely knowledgable (and likeable) long-suffering theatre director John Burgess, who first talent-spotted my Lawrence-derived Eastwood at the Man on the Moon, World’s End, Chelsea, Artistic Director Leigh Shine) and in the evenings Peter would furtively frequent the extremely conservative Conservative Club overlooking the river in Hammersmith – there was a good reason for that, I guess, the view was great, the red wine was cheap and it was just next door to the flat he lived in rent-free for many years ‘inherited’ from his great mentor and advocate, George Devine. I love Peter (he taught me how to listen to the word more acutely) but I must enbolden myself to say that he was something of an inverted snob. We know each other pretty well and how he has softened! We enjoyed a prolonged hug together during the interval of Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s excelllent revival of The York Realist at the Riverside Studios (2009). There was hardly a barb in the repartee and we had our photo taken together. Peter is Peter and always will be.
left to right – Adam Spreadbury-Maher, Peter Gill, Nick Ward
The British Theatre is riddled with ‘political’ dishonesty. Big subject, worthy of a book (when I find the time lol – might call it ‘The Secret Rapture of proto new-labourist ‘Eyore’ Eyre and his band, but then again who’s interested in a history of that time?
Very close to formation of New Labour and the destruction of democracy that coterie. We’ll be lucky if we get out of this without some form of military dictatorship. The National Theatre actively seeks to disband their own archives (at least as far as my contribution and interests from 1985-1997 are concerned). I am denied access. Why? I could invoke the Freedom of Information Act but what a drag that would be, Nick. Finding the links with Government is a valid concern and one that is in the public interest. How does the National Theatre handle the pressure of the political class?
Corpus Christi College is the same. For years now I have been writing to its Fellows about my mystical researches regarding Corpus-specific activities in the C16th to the point where I have resigned my degree status (not the only reason), so obstuctive have they been, and so personal in supposing some motive other than my profound need to understand the causes of the great flowering that came about at the Globe. The English Rennaissance was late in coming and its end signalled the demise of the lost art of collaboration. That is way beyond the understanding of an arch Wagnerian like Michael Tanner so he accuses me of ‘pestering’ him with the malice born of the non-abusive academic’s fear of exposure as an abuser in the eyes of those who will never know how extraordinary it was to be taught by the kind of ‘eccentric’ don that was once the pure filament of the Cambridge College tradition (if that construction is not tautology, what is?). Or sneering at my ’semi-lieteracy’ – yes, I am a reformed severe dyslexic seeking access to the Parker Library under the expert guidance of Professor Oliver Rackham, who knows more about the ‘mysteries’ of Corpus than anyone alive.
I like to think that my dyslexia is one of the reasons I have the hyper-acute ear of a dramatist-director. My interest in Marlowe was not awakened by Michael Tanner, it was first awakened when, as a 14 year old, I ‘found’ the Old Court and felt the chill of the site-specific artist run through my veins. These people, these Corpus Fellows, live in these enchanted sacred places and seem to have no ear for the music of the spirits residing in the ancient stones. I call it spectral geography and they sneer suspiciously.
Christopher Andrew is also doing nothing to dispel the public perception that he is protecting his former student operatives in the establishment cover-up of MI5-MI6’s ’s role in the illegal invasion of Iraq. The Chilcott Inquiry is an expensive, time-wasting whitewash as I say elsewhere in this blog-site. That’s the other reason for resigning my degree status. Corpus has become a branch of Government under the Presidency of Professor Andrew and the current Master, Stuart Laing, seems content with that. What is the point of having fundamentally important primary source documents if there is no-one qualified to read them. That’s the Matthew Parker Library. Yes, I have done a Christopher Isherwood and resigned my degree status because the University no longer defends the freedom of speech and inhibits the specialist nature of one whose research aims to throw some small shaft of speculative light on questions raised by the Shakespeare Principle process (in order that we might learn something about how those process-driven productions were put together). What is Rackham hiding?
The National Theatre Blair-coterie was a depressing power-hungry hyper-republican generation (Sir Richard Eyre rabidly so, though not enough to refuse the knighthood) who taught Blair-Brown-Mandy-Campbell how to gain undeserved column inches with PR spin. They will be quickly forgotten. Anthony Minghella will not.
Mike! So in 1984 I was exploring the way theatre can be an internalised dialogue or monolgue-based experience or direct story-telling experience: how many ways can a bookish narrative or non-bookish be handled (Mike Alfreds, who I would later assist on the Shared Experience Three Sisters (1985) was the pioneer in this field and became a regular mentor at this early stage in my development).
What is the point of adapting books for the theatre?
The year culminated in a packed-out, full-length, May Week (June) Winnie-the-Pooh (as a fundraiser for that year’s Edinburgh Fringe – which comprised two additional shows:
Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light and a new version of Sikes and Nancy, which won a Fringe First (from Oliver Twist – Oliver Twist without Oliver!).
This was the season Mark Shenton (with Simon Neville’s backup) produced and transferred to the Croydon Warehouse, Artistic Director Pip Broughton. A decisive year – and I somehow managed to complete my degree in English Literature as well, sufficiently well, to take up a place on the Post Graduate Certificate Course in Radio, Film and Television at the University of Bristol Drama Department in 1984-85, under the great Professor George Brandt. Michael Tanner wrote me a glowing reference (without having seen a single show of mine since he brought the mentoring ‘guillotine’ down, as he liked to put it) and ‘capped’ me for my theatre work. He is (was?) in his mind disinterested, though the opposite in his heart and in his loins. We had our time.
It was the lovable cineaste George who secured David Puttnam as a regular lecturer in Bristol, so we learned all about the wonders and horrors of Hollywood from Puttnam as he was trying to wrest power away from the broker-agents in LA. The power-agents won. Puttnam would fly in from LA specially to teach us – every week – and he did it unpaid and often jetlagged. We filmed the sessions as an exercise. There is a fascinating documenatry to made from that material as Puttnam’s job at Columbia Pictures was in meltdown despite his heroic struggle to change the Hollywood culture. He took us all out to lunch on the final day. George’s Class of ‘85. Hats off to the University of Bristol. Puttnam saw the current crisis at MGM coming. It felt a bit like he was using his seminars with us as a kind of talking therapy – and we appreciated his efforts enormously. Great communicator. Now.
Check it out Pauline Neville-Jones if you can find the time.
Maestro!
Thank you Nick, it was certainly the best thing I ever did! Drop me a line some time maybe I’ll bring the fiddle along to one of your jam sessions
This was a joint effort with Luisa (age 9)… Luisa is also a very promising musician and last week passed her Grade 3 Guitar with distinction.
‘Femme Fatale’ (2009, detail)
