easy, when they prove stubborn, to distort them, to make them into something else, or to pretend they never existed. This happens more often in the theatre than we care to recognize and it is proof either of incompetence or fundamental contempt for the work in hand.
I believe that when a writer looks at the blank of the word he has not yet written, or when actors and directors arrive at a given moment on stage, there is only one proper thing that can take place at that moment, and that that thing, that gesture, that word on the page, must alone be found, and once found, scrupulously protected. I think I am talking about necessary shape, both as regards a play and its production.
If there is, as I believe, a necessary, an obligatory shape which a play demands of its writer, then I have never been able to achieve it myself. I have always finished the last draft of a play with a mixture of feelings: relief, disbelief, exhilaration, and a certainty that if I could only wring the play’s neck once more it might yield once more to me, that I could get it better, that I could get the better of it, perhaps. But that’s impossible. You create the word and in a certain way the word, in finding its own life, stares you out, is obdurate, and more often than not defeats you. You create the characters and they prove to be very tough. They observe you, their writer, warily. It may sound absurd, but I believe I am speaking the truth when I say that I have suffered two kinds of pain through my characters. I have witnessed their pain when I am in the act of distorting them, of falsifying them, and I have witnessed their contempt. I have suffered pain when I have been unable to get to the quick of them, when they willfully elude me, when they withdraw into the shadows. And there’s a third and rarer pain. That is when the right word, or the right act jolts them or stills them into their proper life. When that happens the pain is worth having. When that happens I am ready to take them into the nearest bar and buy drinks all round. And I hope they would forgive me my trespasses against them and do the same for me. But there is no question that quite a conflict takes place between the writer and his characters and on the whole I would say the characters are the winners. And that’s as it should be, I think. Where a writer sets out a blueprint for his characters, and keeps them rigidly to it, where they do not at any time upset his applecart, where he has mastered them, he has also killed them, or rather terminated their birth, and he has a dead play on his hands.
Sometimes, the director says to me in rehearsal: ‘Why does she say this?’ I reply: ‘Wait a minute, let me look at the text.’ I do so, and perhaps I say: ‘Doesn’t she say this because he said that, two pages ago?’ Or I say: ‘Because that’s what she feels.’ Or: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. But somehow we have to find out.’ Sometimes I learn quite a lot from rehearsals.
I have been very fortunate, in my life, in the people I’ve worked with, and my association with Peter Hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company has, particularly, been greatly satisfying. Peter Hall and I, working together, have found that the image must be pursued with the greatest vigilance, calmly, and once found, must be sharpened, graded, accurately focused and maintained, and that the key word is economy, economy of movement and gesture, of emotion and its expression, both the internal and the external in specific and exact relation to each other, so that there is no wastage and no mess. These are hardly revolutionary conclusions, but I hope no less worthy of restatement for that.
I may appear to be laying too heavy an emphasis on method and technique as opposed to content, but this is not in fact the case. I am not suggesting that the disciplines to which I have been referring be imposed upon the action in terms of a device, or as a formal convenience. What is made evident before us on the stage can clearly only be made fully evident where the content of a scene has been defined. But I do not understand this definition as one arrived at through the intellect, but a definition made by the actors, using quite a different system. In other words, if I now bring various criteria to bear upon a production, these are not intellectual concepts but facts forged through experience of active participation with good actors and, I hope, a living text.
What am I writing about? Not the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.
I am not concerned with making general statements. I am not interested in theatre used simply as a means of self-expression on the part of the people engaged in it. I find in so much group theatre, under the sweat and assault and noise, nothing but valueless generalizations, naïve and quite unfruitful.
I am aware, sometimes, of an insistence in my mind. Images, characters, insisting on being written. You can pour a drink, make a telephone call or run around the park, and sometimes succeed in suffocating them. You know they’re going to make your life hell. But at other times they’re unavoidable and you’re compelled to try to do them some kind of justice. And while it may be hell, it’s certainly for me the best kind of hell to be in.
However, I find it ironic that I have come here to receive this distinguished award as a writer, and that at the moment I am writing nothing and can write nothing. I don’t know why. It’s a very bad feeling, I know that, but I must say I want more than anything else to fill up a blank page again, and to feel that strange thing happen, birth through fingertips. When you can’t write you feel you’ve been banished from yourself.
Old Times
Old Times was first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 1 June 1971, with the following cast:
| DEELEY | Cohn Blakely |
| KATE | Dorothy Tutin |
| ANNA | Vivien Merchant |
All in their early forties
Directed by Peter Hall
The play was produced for television by the BBC in October 1975 with the following cast:
| DEELEY | Anna Cropper |
| KATE | Barry Foster |
| ANNA | Mary Miller |
Directed by Christopher Morahan
It was produced at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, in April 1985 with the following cast:
| DEELEY | Michael Gambon |
| KATE | Nicola Pagett |
| ANNA | Liv Ullmann |
Directed by David Jones
PLACE
A converted farmhouse.
A long window up centre. Bedroom door up left. Front door up right.
Spare modern furniture.
Two sofas. An armchair.
Autumn: Night.
ACT ONE
Light dim. Three figures discerned.
DEELEY slumped in armchair, still.
KATE curled on a sofa, still.
ANNA standing at the window, looking out.
Silence
Lights up on Deeley and Kate, smoking cigarettes.
Anna’s figure remains still in dim light at the window.
KATE (Reflectively.) Dark.
Pause
DEELEY Fat or thin?
KATE Fuller than me. I think.
Pause
DEELEY She was then?
KATE I think so.
DEELEY
