David Hare Plays 2 Read online

  DAVID HARE

  Plays Two

  Fanshen

  A Map of the World

  Saigon

  The Bay at Nice

  The Secret Rapture

  Introduced by

  the Author

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Fanshen

  First Performance

  Act One

  Section One

  Section Two

  Section Three

  Section Four

  Section Five

  Section Six

  Section Seven

  Act Two

  Section Eight

  Section Nine

  Section Ten

  Section Eleven

  Section Twelve

  A Map of the World

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Characters

  First Performance

  Act One

  Act Two

  Saigon: Year of the Cat

  Dedication

  Characters

  First Performance

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  The Bay at Nice

  Dedication

  Characters

  First Performance

  The Bay at Nice

  The Secret Rapture

  Dedication

  Characters

  First Performance

  Epigraph

  Act One

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Act Two

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Scene 8

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The editors at Faber and Faber talk to the author about the plays in this collection.

  Q: You wrote Fanshen in 1974 for the Joint Stock Company. It’s the only play of yours which is based on a book.

  Yes. A couple of years before, Max Stafford-Clark and I had joined up with the producer David Aukin to form a travelling theatre company. The plan was to continue the work of Portable Theatre, which had recently gone bankrupt. Max then brought in William Gaskill from the Royal Court. Bill had always been frustrated at the Court that he couldn’t create a genuine ensemble. Nor had he had time to do the exploratory work with actors that he so loved. So together he and Max began some casual evening workshops, using a book Heathcote Williams had written about the men and women you see speechmaking at Hyde Park Corner. After several months, they collected together this distinctive mix of written word, improvisation and direct observation, and mounted a wonderfully lively play called The Speakers. When I saw it, I knew they were on to something really exciting, and, quite simply, I wanted to be part of it.

  Q: So was Fanshen your idea?

  Not at all. The actress Pauline Melville had read William Hinton’s book and taken it to Gaskill, saying she thought it would make an interesting play. Bill was understandably daunted by it. It’s a six-hundred page history of the experiences of one village during the land-reform programme that transformed China at the end of the 40s. It tells how a backward peasantry was given the chance to use techniques of public appraisal and self-criticism to take control of their own affairs. At the heart of it is the eternal question of how a democracy should police itself to ensure that it is genuinely democratic. Hinton was a farmer from a radical background. He was sent as a tractor technician from the US to help with the programme. Being a polymath, he had accumulated an extraordinary amount of detail. So it was with great caution that Bill gave me the book some time in 1974 and asked me if I thought I could make anything of it.

  Q: I believe the Joint Stock method was to do a preliminary workshop with a group of actors and then to send the writer away for a period on their own.

  Well, yes, that’s what the method became. It was trial and error. As Joint Stock became more celebrated, so the method evolved. Like all good methods, it was flexible. Gaskill had run this country’s leading new play theatre. Max had also presented many living playwrights. So there was never any question of interfering with the authorship of the play. Actors and directors contributed, but they did not dictate. The workshop was there to enrich and inform the play, but it was not intended to provide you either with structure or dialogue. Of course as the writer, you were expected to argue for your point of view – I remember the first reading of the finished play as a particular disaster and finding my back against the wall for several weeks after it – but, finally, you knew you were working with people who had an almost moral sense of the supremacy of the playwright’s imagination. From the perspective of the 90s, with the rise of director’s theatre and the stultifying condescension of so-called ‘writers’ workshops’ which are all the rage in the US – and which consist mostly of directors who can’t write interfering with playwrights who can – it’s impossible not to be nostalgic for those days.

  Q: When the play was finished and in performance, William Hinton came over and insisted on some changes to the text.

  Yes. I had no problem with that. After all, the book had taken him fifteen years to write. His notes had been seized, first by the US Customs, then again by the Senate. When we had asked to make a play from his book, he had not expected us to succeed. Others had tried before and failed. But as soon as he read the reviews he was on the plane. He was a Marxist, and I wasn’t. So, inevitably, there was some trading about emphasis. But I believe the final play achieves a classical balance.

  Q: A number of critics have observed, however, that Fanshen is quite unlike your other plays – that it has a distinctive tone of voice. You wrote differently for the group than when you wrote for yourself.

  Yes, I think that’s fair.

  Q: The play is frequently revived. How does it play now, in the less heady climate of the 90s?

  What’s so interesting is that although you see it from a different perspective, it works just as well. Hinton’s book brilliantly foreshadows the questions which went on to grip all political leaders in the last part of the century. Can you have equity without abundance? How do you reconcile the demands of plenty and the demands of justice?

  Q: This argument, of course, carries on in A Map of the World. Why was this play premiered in Adelaide?

  I almost never do commissioned work. Like a lot of writers, I feel uneasy when asked to write to order. If you say anything at all in advance about a play you’re planning, then you create an idea of it in the producer’s imagination. They’re invariably disappointed when they don’t get what they’re expecting. It’s always seemed to me a playwright should work alone and in silence. That way, when you hand it in, it’s a gift, not a let-down.

  Q: But you broke your rule with this play?

  I liked Jim Sharman so much. He is the son of an Australian circus-owner and had directed Jesus Christ Superstar. He had taken over the running of the Adelaide Festival for 1982. He wanted an American play from Sam Shepard and an English play from me, to run side by side. I had been very struck by reading something the Goncourt brothers said. Somewhere they express their admiration for medieval Japanese painters who, once they had perfected a style, not only started out on a new one, but actually changed their names when they did so. This way they hoped to avoid becoming what the brothers call ‘prisoners of a reputation’. It was irresistible for me to be asked to travel ten thousand miles to try and re-make myself into a different kind of playwright.

  Q: A Map of the World almost overflows with subject matter.

  Perhaps I took on too much. A Martian visiting this planet would of course observe that a minority of us live in great luxury a
nd comfort, and that the majority of us live in squalor and deprivation. Two-thirds of us have never made a telephone call. But I think they would also observe how few of us in the minority ever make any mention of these facts. The wretched of the earth are, for some reason, rarely thought to be a suitable subject for the arts. I was ambivalent about being able to represent the poor themselves. But I did feel qualified to write about our attitudes to them. The centre of the play is a debate in a Bombay hotel between a famous writer, Victor Mehta, who has an exquisite contempt for the crasser side of militant Third Worldism, and a young journalist, Stephen Andrews, who has an equally eloquent anger at people’s readiness to accept the world as it is. Almost any decent writer will recognize something familiar in Victor’s cultivated fastidiousness. And then the balance, I hope, is provided by Stephen’s well-grounded indignation.

  However, plays of Shavian argument always leave me dissatisfied, because they perpetuate the false idea that human beings can be reduced to their opinions. I wanted to add another layer, to address the problem of subjectivity. Those of us who have spent our lives on the left are prone to banging on about something called ‘the truth’. Yet, if we’re honest, we know that the truth is a difficult thing to establish outside an unreliable context of memory and opinion. So there is a second plot. A film is being made years later. It is based on the book Mehta wrote about the original events, but it travesties them. What once seemed certain and clear has by now slipped out of everybody’s grasp.

  Q: The play weaves in fact between the two locations – the hotel itself and the film-set of the hotel.

  That’s right. It sounds complicated, but in my opinion, it plays very clearly. The problems of the play come much more from the figure of Peggy Whitton, the young actress who volunteers to give herself to whichever of the two men wins the argument. Peggy was played first in Australia by Penny Downie, then in England by Diana Quick, then in New York by Elizabeth McGovern. All three reported the same hostility from the public. Nothing they did would make the audience accept the basic likelihood of Peggy’s action.

  Q: Throughout your writing, there are examples of twin plays – one for the stage and one for television.

  Licking Hitler and Plenty are an obvious couple. And now again, A Map of the World and Saigon: Year of the Cat.

  It’s true they were produced at the same time. And yet I think of them as very different. There is no governing metaphor in A Map of the World. It’s far too complex and diffuse for that. Saigon, on the other hand, is about a place which is as much in the mind as in historical reality. When I had visited Vietnam during the phoney peace in 1974 – between the Paris Peace Agreement and the final fall of the South – I had been intensely moved by the town of Saigon. What struck me was that everyone went about their life as if it would go on for ever. And yet in their hearts people knew that the end was near. They just refused to acknowledge it in their daily behaviour. What’s more, when the end did come, the Americans, at least, could not cope with the reality of it. They simply could not accept or understand the fact that they had been defeated. So this suddenly seemed to me the occasion for a wonderful, almost Chekhovian theme: how a whole society may be bent on denying reality.

  Q: Your Vietnam is quite unlike any other film-maker’s. There’s so little violence, so little war.

  The war is there by implication. If you went to Saigon itself then what struck you most most was how absent the war was, not how present. The city still was extraordinarily attractive, almost languorous. The old French avenues, clubs and restaurants still worked their charm. And for many people life remained exceptionally pleasant. It seemed to me a great idea to look at the war from the point of view of a non-combatant – a middle-aged Englishwoman, Barbara Dean, working in a Vietnamese bank.

  Q: It’s one of the few films about the war in which the Vietnamese themselves seem to be human beings, not just vicious dots to be blasted off the screen.

  Good, I’m glad you feel that, because that was the intention. I was tired of films from the American point of view. All about what a tragedy the whole thing was for America. Oh yes? Well, it wasn’t so great for the Vietnamese. By chance, I went back to Vietnam recently and I found its spirit essentially unchanged. They still are a stunningly likeable people, with a very distinctive mix of melancholy and purposefulness. The Cercle Sportif which features so strongly in the film is still there, but now open to a different, more down-at-heel clientele. By a great irony, as I approached the American Embassy where so much of Saigon is set, the Vietnamese were wheeling filing cabinets down the front path. They, in their turn, were now evacuating the building, with the intention of handing it back to the Americans! My visit was a miracle of timing.

  Q: There are these three works which are all about Asia, and then suddenly in The Bay at Nice, you write a play about Russia. Where on earth does this one come from?

  It’s a rogue play, in every sense. But it’s one of which I’m extremely fond. I wanted to write a double bill: one play was to be set in Russia, the other in the US. It was to offer a kind of cold war contrast. Then I had a second notion, which didn’t work at all. In the Greek manner, an essentially serious play would be followed by something erotic. Pornographic, in fact. But stage pornography is incredibly difficult, and I abandoned the task. So instead I ended up with a kind of bastard comedy about spoilt Americans. It was called Wrecked Eggs. It’s not a play I want to preserve in this volume. It was satire, and what’s worse, it was tepid.

  Q: But the first half of the bill was The Bay at Nice?

  All through the 80s I became more and more interested in the visual arts. I remember visiting a Lucien Freud exhibition and experiencing a blind jealousy that a painter could achieve exactly the kind of dramatic portraiture I sought in the theatre, but with an infinitely more effective economy of means. Plays are so much labour, compared with painting.

  Q: The Bay at Nice is set in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. An older woman, a former pupil, is called in to authenticate a painting of Matisse’s.

  Yes, and crucially you must add that it’s set in the 1950s. I wanted to contrast the heady days at the beginning of the century when Valentina studied with Matisse in Paris with some of the deadliest moments of Soviet conformity. Nothing is more exciting than that moment at which an avant-garde first makes its breakthrough. There’s always a curious innocence, even when – as with Man Ray, say, or Picasso – the subject matter is ostensibly quite dark. At one level, of course, The Bay at Nice is about the relationship between the everyday and the sublime, between mediocrity and genius – with, I hope, an equal amount of respect for both. For someone like Valentina’s daughter, Sophia, just to get through the day in the hideous reality of mid-century Russia is as great a triumph, in its way, as any painting of Matisse’s.

  Q: There is a very definite change of tone here in your work. It’s the first play of yours you could call sweet.

  It’s a kind-hearted play, yes.

  Q: It also has a great virtuoso central role.

  By this time I’d worked with some of the greatest actresses in the world. But there’s never been one I admired more than Irene Worth. She’s slightly like Laurette Taylor – at once legendary, and also caviare to the general. Everyone else looks a bit vulgar beside her. You almost have to work in the theatre to appreciate how extraordinary she is. There’s a bone-dry combination of austerity and adventurousness in her acting. You never know what she’s going to do next. But she can break your heart with a single phrase. I still meet people who boast they were lucky enough to see Irene Worth and Zoë Wanamaker in The Bay at Nice.

  Q: The Bay at Nice was followed very quickly by The Secret Rapture.

  I’ve never written a play so fast in my life. I had thought about it a good deal, haunted, as usual, by an opening image – the daughter grieving at the bed of the father. But once I began to write, it was as if my whole spirit had been taken over. I knew I had stumbled on this magnificent theme: that good people bring out the w
orst in all of us. As I have said before, God does not have to do anything in Paradise Lost. It is his very existence which drives the Devil crazy. Once I had hit on this idea, I just couldn’t get the words down fast enough.

  Q: Isn’t there a danger when a writer produces work at this speed? Can’t it seem banal in the cold light of day?

  Ah, well, this is Middleton Murry’s famous objection to King Lear. Murry hated King Lear because it scared him. He said it gave the impression of a writer possessed. The author, he said, was not in control of his material. It was in control of him. Now, to me, that is of course the glory of King Lear – that the greatest of all playwrights produced a work which I’m fairly sure even he did not wholly understand.

  Q: What does the title mean?

  There is a great deal that I cannot justify or explain in the play. The title itself is a mystery. I believed that I had read a theological work which explained that the moment when a nun would finally consummate her marriage to Christ – that’s to say, the moment of death – was technically known as the secret rapture. But when a researcher was set to finding the origin of this phrase, he established that no such term actually exists.

  Q: So you’ve contributed the concept to theology?

  You could say! But, at some deeper level, the play is embedded in the irrational. After all, its mainspring is the injustice of love. We can never say why we will do something for one human being which we will not do for another. For some reason, Isobel is willing to make sacrifices for Katherine which she is unwilling to make for Irwin. It is this basic unfairness which Irwin cannot understand, and which finally drives him to violence.

  Q: Although the play darkens as it goes on, the first half contains a great deal of social satire about the 80s. The older sister, Marion, seems to arrive almost full-blown from your similar portrayal of a Tory MP in the film Paris By Night.

  I’d had this extraordinary experience. I was staying with some friends in the country, and a junior minister came to dinner, freshly exhausted from the Conservatives’ third election victory in 1987. As we were eating, everyone fell to talking about how much money they’d made from their investments in the previous eighteen months. And I sat there like an idiot, the only person in the room who hadn’t realised that this fantastic financial boom had been going on. I’d missed the gravy train. And my first feeling was not one of contempt or of anger, but of utter foolishness, of exclusion. Open, boastful money-making was now woven into the fabric of middle-class English life. At that moment I suppose I knew something had definitively changed.