‘The National Theatre building is important, but the human raw material matters most: the administrators, directors, playwrights, actors, stage managers, designers, painters, technicians and musicians.’ Laurence Olivier, 1962. ‘The history of a producing theatre is not what it wanted to do, but what it did.’ Trevor Nunn, 2005.
The NaTiONaL TheaTre sTOry DaNieL rOseNThaL
First published in 2013 by Oberon Books Ltd 521 Caledonian road, London N7 9rh Tel: +44 (0) 20 7607 3637 / Fax: +44 (0) 20 7607 3629 e-mail: info@oberonbooks.com www.oberonbooks.com Copyright © Daniel rosenthal, 2013 Daniel rosenthal is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights. National Theatre Productions 1963–2013 Copyright © National Theatre, 2013 you may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. hB isBN: 978-1-84002-768-6 e isBN: 978-1-84943-943-5 Typeset by Kenneth Burnley & Caroline Waldron, Wirral, Cheshire. eBook conversion by CPi Group Croydon. Visit www.oberonbooks.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. you will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.
Contents author’s Note List of illustrations Prologue
xi xvi xvii 1848–1963 False Dawns
1848–81 1882–1906 1906–12 1913–40 1940–49 1949–60 1961–63
‘a house for shakespeare’ enter the Founding Fathers ‘Dumb Craven stones’ From Bloomsbury to Kensington ‘a small Bill With a Very Great Purpose’ ‘here We Lay stone…’ ‘a Theatre is To Be Built in Chichester’
3 7 14 19 28 35 44
1963–74 Director of the NT Laurence Olivier 1963 1963 1964 1964 1964 1965 1965 1965 1966 1967 1967 1967 1967 1968 1969 1970 1970
‘after a Wait of 100 years, This Will Do for a start’ The architect Who Carried ‘Quiet Conviction’ ‘Olivier Took everybody’s Breath away’ ‘The Men Climb the Andes’ The Censors Within Lasdun’s south Bank ‘Fairyland’ Darkness Visible Farewell to the Opera ‘Batting On a Wet Wicket’ hamlet’s Cronies in an existential Fable ‘Grotesque and Grievous Libel’ The Man Who Played rosalind ‘The Finest-Looking Theatre in the World’ ‘This is Not Going To Be Fun’ a Company in rude Health ‘Dear Larry, here are a Few Jewish snaps’ ‘To Old Vic, a son’
65 71 77 84 88 92 101 105 110 117 122 128 137 140 148 155 159
CONTeNTs
1971 1972 1972 1972 1972 1973 1973
One savaged Tyger, Four haunted Tyrones Farce That affirms the existence of God ‘a heart Transplant on a healthy Patient’ ‘re-Opening the Old, Ugly Controversy’ ‘The Child is Now an adult’ From elysée to Equus Party Politics
167 174 178 188 194 199 204
1974–88 Director of the NT Peter Hall 1974 1974 1975 1976 1976 1976 1976 1977 1977 1977 1978 1979 1979 1980 1980 1980 1980 1980 1981 1981 1982 1982 1983 1983 1984 1985 1985 1986 1987 1988
‘Big is Not always Beautiful’ Nichols and Miller Crash on The Freeway hall’s Marathon and Laughing Matters ‘Our New Palace of Culture’ ‘Waters Muddied By Mistrust’ industrial strife: On and Off stage a Theatre Fit for the Queen ‘Carte Blanche for a Black Box’ Can ayckbourn serve Two Masters? The War of Cooper’s Basins Days of Plenty and Betrayal The spring of Discontent ‘Amadeus has the Taste of an Opera’ Failure on a Grand scale Glory for Gambon Bryden’s ‘Untameables’ The Third Way Mary Whitehouse vs. The Romans . . . ‘Unmistakably a Landmark’ a Change of Direction? Deputies and Dolls Upstream Without a Paddle ‘No end to sir Peter’s year of Misfortune?’ McKellen’s return a Low-Tech Laboratory The Coffee-Table Crisis Meet Lambert Le roux The Coronation of King richard Carbone, King Lear and Cleopatra hall’s revels Now are ended . . .
215 221 226 234 240 246 253 261 268 272 276 283 293 301 304 309 316 321 329 336 342 351 359 373 379 383 391 399 407 415
CONTeNTs
1988–97 Director of the NT Richard Eyre 1988 1988 1989 1989 1990 1990 1990 1991 1992 1992 1992 1993 1993 1993 1993 1994 1994 1994 1995 1995 1996 1996 1997 1997
Churchill’s Daughter and the royal appellation revolve and Rapture Too Few sponsors, Too Many Princes ‘almost an impertinence to applaud’ Sunday in the Park Withdrawals exit aukin, enter Mcintosh a Tale of Two Kings When hytner Met Bennett eyre slows, horrocks sings The Inspector Who Kept Calling Carousel and Colour Mea Culpa and Machinal rejection and ridicule With Arcadia, egos ‘The Greatest Tribute Paid To a Living author’ Kushner’s Trans-atlantic Angels The Long Goodbye ‘how Long has This Been in your head, arthur?’ Poker, Parting and Painters ‘a house of hit Musicals?’ a hard act To Follow Defending ‘Battlestar Dramatica’ sex, Lies and the internet sir richard rides Out
427 435 440 447 454 459 467 472 483 488 493 503 507 512 516 525 533 537 543 549 556 573 576 583
1997–2003 Director of the NT Trevor Nunn 1997 1998 1998 1999 1999–2000 2000 2000 2001 2001 2001–02
‘Only Connect . . .’ From Prison to the Prairies a Tale of Two Cleos return of the ensemble The annus horribilis a House Divided russell Beale: hamlet and humble The Lady Vanishes how succession “Plan a” Became a Five-Way race Donation and Transformation
595 604 609 614 621 633 636 640 645 659
CONTeNTs
2002 2002–03
Journeys to Utopia and Brixton Luckless to the Last
666 673
2003–13 Director of the NT Nicholas Hytner 2003 2003 2003 2004 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2008 2008 2009 2009 2009 2010 2011–12 2013
The Travelex revolution Jerry’s Opera, Kwame’s Kitchen Modern Classics at Christmas History in the Making The hare “Tetralogy” Finally Falstaff and Leigh at Last Making Connections a Horse Called Joey a Naked First and ‘a Director in Captivity’ The Tipping Point Never on sunday? England People Very Contentious Coming to a Cinema Near you ‘Plays, Plays, Plays’ ‘The Only Theatre i Wanted to Work in’ London to Brighton Future Present
epilogue Appendices National Theatre Productions 1963–2013 National Theatre Filmography Bibliography index
689 705 715 722 734 747 754 758 767 775 781 785 793 803 810 814 827 846
Prologue On Friday 21 January 1949, British women busy with domestic chores could tune in to the BBC Light Programme to hear eugene Pini and his Tango Orchestra playing Music for the Housewife. The Radio Times listed this morning highlight alongside an advertisement with cartoon advice on maximising your meat ration: ‘how ever shall i manage, Mother?’ pleads Mrs Medway. ‘i’ve got a bit of steak i can hardly see – and Jim’s bringing a friend home to dinner!’ Mama recommends steak pudding, bulked up with a tin of Foster Clark’s soup.1 For the lucky households with a television set – around 50,000, in a nation of 50 million2 – prime time this Friday evening would mean two hours’ viewing on the only channel: James stewart and Carole Lombard in a romantic comedy, Made for Each Other, followed by 15 minutes of News (sound only).3 Theatregoers heading into London’s West end could start their weekend with Oklahoma! at the Theatre royal, Drury Lane (unreserved seats at three shillings and threepence), High Button Shoes – ‘america’s Newest and Gayest Musical’ – at the hippodrome, or perhaps John Gielgud and sybil Thorndike in st John hankin’s The Return of the Prodigal at the Globe.4 The most significant theatrical performance of the day – perhaps of the decade – had already taken place in the house of Commons. at 11am, MPs filed into the chamber for the second reading of a measure held dear by Gielgud, Thorndike and many other actors: the National Theatre Bill. By committing £1 million of taxpayers’ money to the construction of the National Theatre of Great Britain, on the south Bank of the Thames, the house would realise a dream long held by ‘many people in all walks of life.’ Mrs ayrton Gould (Labour, hendon North) called this ‘a magnificent step forward’ for Clement attlee’s government; Oliver Poole (Conservative, Oswestry) acclaimed ‘a great milestone in the dramatic life of this country’.5 The Bill passed swiftly through the Lords and became The National Theatre act (1949): the building of a publicly funded home for the best playwrights, directors and performers had been enshrined in statute. it would, however, be 1963 before Peter O’Toole strode on stage as hamlet in the National Theatre Company’s inaugural production, in its temporary base at the Old Vic. an entire generation would have elapsed by the time Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre complex opened beside Waterloo Bridge in 1976. These long interludes wearied, but did not exhaust, the National’s champions; their campaign was already more than a hundred years old.
1968
‘This is Not Going To Be Fun’ in March 1968, Peter Brook made his NT debut, with seneca’s Oedipus.1 The production has been unjustly filed under ‘Comedy’ in theatrical folklore, thanks to three endlessly recycled one-liners: two improvised by John Gielgud in rehearsal, the third by an audience member on opening night. it merits more serious examination, for revealing disharmony within the National, and a huge gulf between Brook and Laurence Olivier. The pair’s complex history stretched back to 1953 and Brook’s first feature film, The Beggar’s Opera. starring as Macheath, Olivier felt John Gay’s masterpiece called for ‘18thcentury elegance and artificiality . . . grace and charm’; to Brook, ‘the work breathed the stinking air of hogarth . . . it needed to be violent and harsh.’ Olivier tried to have him fired; the film set became a battlefield. ‘Between us,’ Brook reflected, ‘we spoiled much of the picture’,2 which fared so badly at cinemas that it would be years before British movie producers offered him another job: ‘When you flop to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds, you have to do penance until the people concerned forget you or die off.’3 in 1955, rehearsing with Olivier in the title role of Titus Andronicus in stratford, Brook surprisingly found ‘latent feuds’ from The Beggar’s Opera transmuted into ‘perfect harmony’; they advanced ‘on parallel rails . . . in mutual confidence’, and delivered an interpretation of such power that critics re-evaluated a play dismissed by T. s. eliot as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspiring’ ever written.4 in 1961, Peter hall asked Olivier if he would play King Lear for Brook at the rsC.5 ‘i do want to do Lear again,’ he replied, ‘but this . . . would be one of those rare instances in which i would not be entirely happy about Peter directing . . . This may sound ungrateful after Titus, but my reasons germinate more from his production of Hamlet [in 1955], another great play which does not need “saving” more than Titus or Measure [for Measure, in 1950], which certainly benefited by the dear boy’s saving grace . . . i have produced the play myself once and would like to do it again.’6 This allowed Paul scofield to play Lear for Brook in stratford in 1962. Despite that production’s great acclaim, Olivier deplored the way actor and director had cut the hero down to size, ‘slicing away his majesty’; he dubbed it ‘Mr Lear’.7 he appeared to have valued Brook’s contributions to the NT Building Committee, but they arrived at Oedipus still distant personally,8 and fundamentally at odds about performance. Olivier thrived on the surface detail of make-up and costume, and blocked his productions using peg-dolls; Brook had long been convinced that to go into rehearsal with pre-planned ideas ‘led to deadly theatre’;9 each play should be terra incognita. Brook had warned in The Sunday Times after Olivier’s appointment as Director: ‘in the hall of [the NT] i would put up a great gold sign reading “Beware of Quality” . . . a large slice of the english audience . . . is bedazzled by Quality . . . [and] the . . . death trap for [the NT] could lie in persuading the
‘This is NOT GOiNG TO Be FUN’
audience that it represents the best we have to offer by the seemingly irrefutable evidence of marshalling, even in the smallest parts, the greatest performers of the land.’ Olivier’s banner in the Old Vic foyer might have read ‘Celebrate Quality’; he relished showcasing ‘the greatest performers of the land.’10 Brook made expensive and potentially divisive stipulations for Oedipus: ten weeks’ rehearsal for a play that would last about 90 minutes, and the commissioning of a new version by Ted hughes, based on the script the National wanted Brook to use: David Turner’s recent translation for BBC radio.11 Brook insisted on importing two of his regular collaborators: Geoffrey reeves as associate Producer (today, assistant Director) and the american composer richard Peaslee, instead of in-house composer Marc Wilkinson. Brook outlined his ‘rules of engagement’ by telephone to sunny amey: his only interest in Oedipus ‘would be to attempt something extremely difficult’, requiring great patience from the NT’s costume department and workshops, who would have to do without the usual sketches and wait for Brook and costume designer Jean Monod to see what evolved during rehearsal. On casting, he sounded like a sculptor requisitioning stone: ‘i must be extremely demanding about the quality of the raw material.’ There should be no difference in style between Gielgud (a celebrated angelo in Brook’s Measure for Measure) and the others: ‘everyone must be modest and prepared to help one another.’ Brook initially wanted Joan Plowright as Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife and mother, despite her being only 38, some 25 years younger than Gielgud (‘age does not enter into. it is the nature and calibre of the actress.’) he eventually chose irene Worth (Goneril to scofield’s Lear), who was 51. he rejected Derek Jacobi and other NT regulars, because ‘concealed’ performers with brilliant techniques were no use; he needed ‘revealed’ actors; Colin Blakely, cast as Creon, was a prime example: unvarnished, ready to reveal embedded feelings.12as with Brook’s Marat/Sade (1964), in which rsC juniors had achieved individual ‘glory’ in crowd scenes despite delivering only a few lines, so a member of the Oedipus chorus could make his or her mark. he wanted a company of 35; amey thought the NT might manage 18 or 19. Brook got his way, and 16 new actors would be hired.13 Brook asked Donald MacKechnie, one of Olivier’s assistant directors, to find him some ‘young bulls’, and at the resulting auditions candidates more accustomed to reciting shakespeare soliloquies had to ‘improvise the moving of an imaginary piano up a flight of stairs’; some walked out.14 as to what the group might expect, Brook promised: ‘This play is not going to be fun. it will come to a point where it is an acute, unforgettable experience . . . i will say at my first rehearsal this is an expedition, anyone in this room who is not prepared to go all the way must leave now, if you don’t go now you are in for it.’15 rehearsals began in January 1968, with the press night set for 19 March. MacKechnie observed many sessions at which reeves, a ‘bright, and more importantly a big young man . . . was the perfect foil for the diminutive and introspective Brook’, whose methods turned unnamed backstage staff against the production: ‘Many said “how can we help Peter Brook?” Others, mostly on the slothful side, said “how can we stop him?” or “how can we teach him a lesson?” i think this action . . . was almost unconscious, but . . . appeared . . . concerted at times, and there [were] far too many instances, such as . . . monumental errors in workshops . . . for them all to have been a series of accidents . . . Olivier was not aware of
1963–73 such cabals, and . . . i regret that i did not speak to Laurence about what i thought was going on.’16 MacKechnie argued that by leaving Brook to his own devices, Olivier was testing ‘his own work . . . as Director. had the company been well enough disciplined to work in this new way? Was all that experience with Chekhov, ibsen, shakespeare . . . going to be enough now to sustain the company?’ Brook arranged for a Tai-Chi master to lead the Oedipus cast in an hour of daily warm-ups,17 Gielgud was stretched to his physical and vocal limits.18 ‘it was a nightmare,’ he recalled, ‘like being in the army . . . But i trusted [Peter].’19 Brook described Gielgud plunging in: ‘he tried humbly, clumsily, with all he could bring. he was no longer the star, the superior being. he was . . . struggling with his body, as the others would be later with their words, with an intensity and a sincerity that were his own.’20 in February, to evoke the play’s incestuous, patricidal horrors, Brook arranged the actors in a circle on the floor of the Old Vic rehearsal room and invited them to utter their most obscene or terrifying thought: ‘Wank’, ‘shit’, ‘Cunt’. Then Gielgud: ‘We open on the nineteenth of March.’ after five weeks, Gielgud was anxious that there was still no completed version from hughes. Brook asked how much time his star had been given to rehearse his last West end role, as ivanov. ‘Three weeks.’ Brook promised four weeks on hughes’ language: ‘We are just ready to tackle the text when it arrives. We would not have been ready had it been here sooner.’21 after ‘some tentative false starts’, hughes had overcome his ‘embarrassment’ at starting in on Turner’s text by going back to seneca, ‘eking out my Latin with a Victorian crib.’ he observed the improvisation exercises and was ‘conscious of drawing on [the company’s] single battery of energy: after quite a bit of fluid trial and error, the words crystallised suddenly . . . i was in complete sympathy with . . . Brook’s guiding idea, which was to make a text that would release whatever inner power this story, in its plainest, bluntest form, still has, and to unearth . . . the ritual possibilities within it.’ 22 he delivered ‘unpunctuated lines of syncopated phrases.’23 The Chorus opens the play night is finished but day is reluctant the sun drags itself up out of the filthy cloud it stares down at our sick earth it brings a gloom not light beneath it our streets homes temples gutted with the plague it is one huge plague pit the new heaps of dead spewed up everywhere hardening in the sickly daylight.24 after the scripts were distributed, Gillian Barge, a Chorus member alongside anna Carteret and Jane Lapotaire (all three in their mid-twenties), remembered being split up into groups of about six, given verses . . . , and sent to a dressing room where we worked . . . for a week . . . to render the verse into sounds . . . from the depths of our soul’s being . . . it was crushingly . . . upsetting work; we tore ourselves apart trying to achieve the truth Peter had asked of us . . .
‘This is NOT GOiNG TO Be FUN’
We recorded our efforts and . . . i was terribly shocked on the Monday morning to find that Peter and richard Peaslee had orchestrated the tapes, taken what they found useful, discarded what they didn’t like, and gave us various sounds/noises to be made on various words . . . i would have liked . . . not to be manipulated into giving the production what was needed almost by mistake. . . . i remember getting into a real crisis . . . but [leaving] would have meant sacrificing my place in Olivier’s company . . . so i decided to cheat . . . i was there only in body. Peter noticed . . . and i probably just confirmed his prejudice about english actors. had i been older and wiser i would have spoken to him, but i was shy and frightened of authority.25 MacKechnie found Brook ‘wondrous to behold in these moments when he casts his spell on a company . . . exceptionally good at . . . trapping the tension he detects in an actor and diverting that energy into the work.’ One afternoon in the Old Vic, he noticed Brook becoming ‘a little agitated’ as the crew wheeled onto the stage a box measuring about 18 by 12 inches. This was attached to a reversible system used by cleaners to vacuum the auditorium. The box opened and ‘a grey, shapeless mass’ started to emerge. Brook watched the actors’ reactions. The object was inflated to some six or seven feet in height, its phallic shape and ‘slightly bulbous end’ left the company spellbound. Then it collapsed, reduced to ‘withered impotence’ because ‘some jolly prankster had turned the [vacuum] from blow to suck.’ Brook was outraged, so too MacKechnie: it was ‘shaming and pitiable’ that the NT employed the ‘arsehole’ who ruined ‘an exercise in observation and participation’ by a director of ‘great integrity’.26 The phallus was packed away and stored on the street in an NT van – which was stolen overnight. Following the deflationary sabotage, MacKechnie thought the theft was another ‘inside job’; the van was recovered, minus its cargo. Brook and Monod decided that the actors should wear plain, contemporary clothes, dark trousers and pullovers (with a robe for Oedipus, and a long dark dress for Jocasta). The director designed large flats representing, upstage, the walls of the Theban palace, and cubes ‘the size of small tea chests’, to be used by the Chorus as seats or drums; a much larger cube was left ‘spinning quietly in mid-stage, covered in gold, [reflecting] light like some huge stroboscope’,27 and opening out to represent a crossroads. MacKechnie was urged – he does not reveal by whom – to persuade Brook to alter aspects of the set, and inadvertently let him read the relevant memo, which proved ‘there were forces in the workshops poised to deny him’ and ‘malevolence’ in upper tiers of the administration, though not from Olivier. Brook endured these slights with ‘infinite patience’. at a dress rehearsal on the saturday before the Tuesday opening the stage was set for Jocasta’s suicide: ‘she was to lower herself “onto” a sharply pointed, slim, “gold” pyramid, referred to as The spike, which . . . was to be placed on a small gold box, referred to as The Plinth. One actor placed the spike behind [her], another placed the plinth beneath the spike.’ it should look as though Jocasta disembowels herself through her vagina. The second actor forgot his appointed task and Worth called out, ‘Where’s the plinth?’ Gielgud’s head popped out from the opposite wing and asked: ‘Plinth Philip or Plinth Charles?’ Company and crew
1963–73 collapsed into laughter. Brook, watching from the Gallery, asked, ‘What did you say, John?’ sheepishly, Gielgud repeated himself. ‘Oh, i see,’ said Brook. ‘yes, very funny.’ after another run-through on the Monday, Brook spoke for more than an hour, praising the technical skills of the NT workshops, and urging his actors to maintain discipline and confidence. it was ‘a brilliant, quiet, redefining’ of nine weeks’ work, but MacKechnie was sure Brook ‘was setting something up.’28 all along, Brook had planned to emulate the ancient tradition by which ‘a satyr-play concluded a trilogy of tragedies, performed by half-human half-animal creatures, the actors donning horns and hairy goat-legs’ to displace ‘the tragic action [with] humour, licentiousness and wine’: the Oedipus audience would see a form of bacchanalia.29 after Brook’s Monday pep-talk, the company were allowed to don for the first time elaborate costumes made of golden paper, with matching masks, and invited to improvise ‘a joyous atmosphere’. They ‘gyrated, danced and cavorted’; all but one, who stood dead centre: Frank Wylie, a 32-year-old scot, pulled off his mask, moved downstage centre and shouted ‘This is fucking bollocks! Bollocks! . . . i’m not going to go on with this fucking shit for another fucking second.’ he summoned MacKechnie to the stage. Wylie Donald, what the fuck is going on? MacKechnie Well, Frank, what is going on is a mess, but that is really what Peter suggested it might have been anyway. This is a shapeless thing at the moment, and it can’t be anything else. it has had a bit more energy than the rest of the evening. Wylie Well, i think it’s a load of bollocks. MacKechnie Well, Peter just said try it and see what happens Wylie and where is he? [Pause.] Where the fuck is Peter? Brook was nowhere to be found. MacKechnie had ‘never seen so irate a group of actors.’30 Then reeves confessed that before the improvisation Brook had set off for the Odeon Leicester square to join his wife Natasha Parry and the Queen at the royal premiere of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, in which Parry played Lady Capulet. The Oedipus company knew that their colleague John Mcenery, Zeffirelli’s Mercutio, had been refused permission to withdraw from playing hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, on tour in Oxford, to attend the London screening; actors could not be released ‘just for a social function’. The thought of Brook abandoning the rehearsal to enjoy what Mcenery had been denied was too much for Wylie: ‘i’ll hang the fucking bastard.’ MacKechnie suggested the actors meet Brook early the following morning in the aquinas street rehearsal room. at 10.15am ‘the huge energy’ of the previous evening had evaporated, and ‘even Frank Wylie was as nice as pie.’ Brook, MacKechnie notes, was pleased to have heard of an effective dress rehearsal and that as expected the bacchanalia was a bit shambolic and some people had been a little upset . . . he was not present . . . he knew and i think most of the company knew . . . that what had happened the night before had to happen . . . The inherent angers and disappointments of any rehearsal period had to be given an outlet . . .
‘This is NOT GOiNG TO Be FUN’
i pay [Peter] the highest compliment when i say that . . . his not ‘being there’ was one of the entirely best pieces of direction i have ever witnessed. The inflatable phallus should have been the centrepiece of the bacchanalia, and was replaced by a solid model, some 12 feet tall. Peaslee set the revelry to his arrangement of “God save the Queen”, which was still played over the public address speakers at the end of Old Vic performances. This ‘riffed trombone orchestration’ was played on ‘rasping, raucous slides . . . clever musically, and witty . . . [like] so many musical variations on passing wind.’31 From what Olivier had seen of rehearsals, Oedipus was ‘a wonderful show, infinitely clever’, but to his ‘growing horror it was clear . . . that Peter was determined to risk the whole work by being clever-clever’ with this climactic ‘note of rude and vulgar jollification’; the anthem’s effect, ‘was just childishly insolent and couldn’t have provoked anything other than puzzled boredom in an audience.’ he asked Brook to drop it; in return, Olivier would end the playing of “God save the Queen” altogether. ‘[Peter] gleefully agreed, knowing what was to him, as to quite a few others, the laughable extent of my patriotism.’32 in Olivier’s dressing room the following evening, with Tynan and Dunlop in attendance, the Director tried to persuade Brook to cut the phallus from Oedipus. accounts of the ensuing argument vary considerably. Tynan spoke of a whisky-fuelled, five-hour debate in which Olivier said that this needlessly offensive prop would ‘alienate audiences and the Board.’33 Dunlop has Brook deliberately smashing a glass and then, accidentally, colliding with and fracturing the mirror on the back of the dressing-room door.34 Olivier has Brook standing his ground, then leaving, at which point Dunlop and Tynan persuaded their boss to concede; Olivier felt weak, ‘and weakly i gave in. Peter came back in, and i told him the decision. almost with a crow Peter said, “Well, i’m going for a drink. anyone join me?” The others said good night and left, and i was alone, naked in my misery.’ Brook recalled ‘the big dressing room scene [being] won at the end not only by Tynan and Dunlop but by Ted hughes and his sister/agent [Olwyn] playing their trump card: “if you insist, we’ll withdraw the text and you’ll have to get a new translation and have everyone learn it before the first night.”’35 The Brook/Olivier arguments, simon Callow argues, illustrated ‘a problem inherent in a company without a formal aesthetic, one largely built, in . . . repertoire and personnel, on the taste of a group of individuals: to what extent was the company still itself, even when executing the will of an outside director, someone with a highly evolved aesthetic of his own?’36 When Oedipus opened, writes Brook’s biographer, Michael Kustow, the audience ‘was wrapped in a tapestry of noise that swept the entire space; members of the Chorus were planted throughout the auditorium, live caryatids were bound to the pillars and balconies . . . after ronald Pickup’s account [as The slave] of Oedipus’ self-blinding, blind Tiresias handed a pair of dark glasses to Gielgud . . . who had sat impassively listening to the horrifying speech. The elemental became tangible.’37 For the bacchanalia, “God save the Queen” had been replaced by a jazz band performing “yes We have No Bananas” in Dixieland style. a carriage bearing a veiled object was pulled on by revellers. The glittering red veil fell to the floor, revealing the golden phallus, to a collective gasp. Then, from a seat in the front stalls, the actress Coral Browne, declared loudly to her female companion: ‘Nobody we know, dear.’
1963–73 Cue amazed laughter. Callow and his colleagues in the box office wondered if they should answer the phones: ‘Dirty Old Vic.’38 in The Observer, ronald Bryden identified Oedipus as ‘a kind of cathedral laboratory of the 21st century, a wind-tunnel designed to contain a hurricane of human emotions.’ The press response ‘was deeply divided between those who saw Brook as a genius who could do no wrong, those who wished that Gielgud had not been so totally deconstructed’ and those who yearned for ‘the comparative simplicity’ of Olivier’s performance as sophocles’ Oedipus, 20 years earlier.39 What did the bacchanalia mean? Brook explained on radio: ‘Birth, bed, womb, blood – every word seneca wrote seemed to prepare for the confrontation with this object. The phallus is a religious object . . . We offered not a closed interpretation, but a colourful opening-up of real speculation upon the mystery . . . of the active and masculine force of life.’ To Colin Blakely, the phallus communicated the following: ‘One: you’ve just seen a load of old cock. Two: in olden days the romans used to do this after the play. Three: you see what can happen when you fuck about? Four: don’t go to bed with your mother. Five: don’t take it too seriously, now you’ve been through hell, forget it, you can deal with it. Number five is valid. The rest ultimately is belittling.’40 The stockpile of anecdotes kept growing. ralph richardson arrived at the Old Vic with his wife, Mu, and walked down the aisle to buy a programme, only to find the nearest “usher” lashed to a pillar. ‘When i asked him for a programme all i got were these strangled sounds. he was gagged, you see. The whole experience upset me very much. i’m a very square man.’41 Members of the audience sometimes vomited as the slave described Oedipus blinding himself: his fingers had stabbed deep into his eyesockets the eyeballs and he tugged twisting and dragging with all his strength and he flung them from him42
he hooked them gripping till they gave way
Brook had encouraged Pickup to deliver this three-page speech ‘in slowly mounting shock . . . [like] a creature wading through blood.’43 The phallus prompted some to walk out,44 and the National received outraged letters: ‘i have never before experienced the shock of gratuitous obscenity . . .’45 a week of extra performances was added, and Brook and Olivier planned to bring Oedipus back in the autumn, provided the majority of the cast stayed on. seven of the 35 actors declined; others gave qualified assent, demanding roles in other shows, or better pay; one, recalling Brook’s improvisations, said: ‘yes, as long as it doesn’t mean being a snake for three weeks.’46 Olivier might have killed off Oedipus as “revenge”, but tried hard to prolong it – although one might detect relief, or sarcastic hyperbole, in the letter to Brook confirming that company reluctance precluded the revival: ‘i am an idolater of your work . . . it is a glory for us to have this production . . . Charges of improvidence will inevitably come my way.’47 he hoped to offer Brook another NT show, but it was not to be. even without the hostility described by MacKechnie, Olivier’s Old Vic was surely the wrong environment for a director who had begun his irreversible move away from British centres
‘This is NOT GOiNG TO Be FUN’
of production to his own international research base at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, ‘where he could control the entire theatrical process’48 without being challenged by an employer, let alone one with diametrically opposed views. Brook’s status ‘as a world-class theatrical guru’49 would grow exponentially later in 1968, when he published The Empty Space, a slim volume whose definitions of ‘Deadly’, ‘rough’, ‘holy’ and ‘immediate’ remain influential to this day. Gielgud had become particularly devoted to Blakely and Pickup, and was sad to be leaving Oedipus behind,50 although the part ‘never really satisfied me . . . i couldn’t help secretly suspecting i could have done it better my own way, but that would not have fitted [Peter’s] enormously complicated plan . . . irene . . . achieved it far better.’ Brook felt that Worth had given ‘the outstanding’ performance in a company who all acted to ‘a high standard’.51 Oedipus’ final performance on saturday 27 July was the Company’s 1,500th at the Old Vic,52 and Gielgud joined the celebrations in the basement bar; he was attending a royal reception the next day and left the party threatening to ‘take the phallus to the palace.’53
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Four months later, the Theatres act stripped the Lord Chamberlain of his powers of censorship, and allowed Kenneth Tynan to present hochhuth’s Soldiers, in partnership with the impresario Michael White. in December, Clifford Williams directed a shortened version of his Us production at the New Theatre, where harold hobson (Lord Chandos’ son-in-law) attacked it and The Sun’s David Nathan claimed: ‘Those who tried to ban the play . . . are utterly mistaken . . . The argument is passionate and fierce.’54 Tynan read the positive notices and ‘wept with relief’, but the 1967 libel memo from the NT’s solicitors came back to haunt him. if ‘the pilot of the aircraft in which General sikorski was killed’ were still alive, they had warned, ‘the play might be defamatory . . . if it suggested that he was party to the plot.’ The pilot, edward Prchal, a Czech, sole survivor of the Gibraltar crash, sued the producers, theatre owners, author and publishers,55 which convinced Chandos that Tynan ‘as a controversialist is a piece of cake to his enemies, and a disaster to his friends.’56 Soldiers closed on 6 March 1969 and defeat in the libel case would cost Tynan thousands. When he requested a six-month leave of absence from the National from 1 July 1969, to write a book, Chandos took belated revenge. Tynan could have his break, but the post of Literary Manager would be abolished and replaced by ‘Literary Consultant’, a role filled by Derek Granger (former head of plays at Granada Television) in Tynan’s absence and shared by the two men on the latter’s return.
1979
The spring of Discontent
s
h o rt ly before the November 1978 strike, a message on the staff notice boards announced that Peter stevens was leaving the National. Peter hall was ‘sorry indeed . . . What [Peter] has done to bring this building and a new organisation to life has been magnificent.’1 stevens had ‘come to spend more and more of every working day preoccupied with problems . . . which are repetitive, generally intractable and . . . alien to my temperament . . . [My] responses have gradually become dulled by the protracted inability of the various authorities to put the NT on a practical financial basis.’2 he would become London representative for leading Broadway producers the shubert Organisation, but agreed to stay at the National as long as was necessary to supervise ongoing NaTTKe negotiations and induct his replacement, Michael elliott.3 elliott had progressed from industrial journalism, public relations and marketing to Kimberly-Clark, makers of Kleenex, where he took charge of the industrial division. While hall and stevens opened the National, elliott’s 100-strong team sold tissue-dispensers to petrol station forecourts and protective paper rolls for GPs’ couches. he had founded the amateur Trinity Theatre in Tunbridge Wells, with his wife, Caroline. at 42, with two sons and a daughter, becoming General administrator at the NT would combine his industrial and theatrical experience. hall liked his ‘laid-back’ manner and hired him, with effect from 2 February 1979. his first impressions of the National were ominous: ‘i’d had to cross a picket line to get to my first interview. The place was anarchy.’ so too was much of Britain.4 The Callaghan government’s attempts to impose its 5% limit on wage increases had prompted an autumn strike by 15,000 Ford car workers, members of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), which ultimately boosted their pay packets by 17%. in January 1979 an emboldened TGWU turned to the haulage industry. Picketing by lorry drivers led to fuel shortages and power-cuts. Other unions followed suit, calling unofficial and official action. rats scurried through mounds of uncollected rubbish in Leicester square; the army responded to emergency calls ignored by striking ambulance drivers in Glasgow; in Liverpool, municipal gravediggers downed tools and the dead went unburied. The press tore into Callaghan, led by The Sun, which dubbed the turmoil Britain’s ‘Winter of Discontent’. Opinion polls swung decisively towards the Tories, led by Margaret Thatcher, whose performances in the Commons had benefited from secret lessons with the National’s head of Voice, Kate Fleming; the woman who helped Olivier become a booming bass Othello softened Thatcher’s naturally shrill tones and encouraged her to speak more slowly. in a Party Political Broadcast at the height of the crisis, Thatcher denounced union disruption as ‘a threat to our whole way of life’.5
1974–88 hall and stevens were still negotiating for a new deal for all 400 branch members of NT/NaTTKe, desperate to reduce the high labour costs caused by deficiencies in the stage machinery. They tabled a 4.8% pay rise, but talks reached ‘total deadlock’ over new working patterns for stage-hands. another sticking point was ‘show mobility’: Olivier and Lyttelton crews had to be prepared to work in all other departments, such as the workshops, without additional payment. The stage-hands wanted such activity to trigger automatic overtime, even within normal working hours, and when 14 of them refused ‘mobility’ duties they were suspended.6 elliott ‘dictated a very strong letter [addressed] to the stage staff particularly – they’d better behave otherwise there’d be no forgiveness if they once again transgressed. Then i went to a meeting with the shop stewards and Peter stevens . . . [Their leader] threw my memo on the table and said “What’s this fucking bollocks?” it was a poisonous atmosphere.’ as elliott assumed control – and the country at large returned to normal – three years of simmering Management vs. Union tension finally erupted. Contemporary press coverage, elliott’s written records and other memos and letters from the NT archive chart the day-by-day progress of the longest British theatre strike of the 20th century. Friday 2 and Saturday 3 February 1979 Unofficial action by stage staff causes the cancellation of three previews of Middleton and rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, directed by William Gaskill in the Olivier.7 Tuesday 6 February in the Commons, former arts minister, and NT Board member, hugh Jenkins calls the theatre’s pay offer ‘a reasonable one within the Government’s guidelines.’8 Tuesday 20 February The stage-hands reject the management’s latest offer on pay and show mobility. Tuesday 27 February ratifying a deal is a struggle because the 16 members of the NT Works Committee represent the potentially conflicting priorities of employees in Box Office, Cleaning, administration, safety, Mechanical services, Front of house, Carpenters, Workshops (props, paint-frame, armourers, engineers), stage Props, stage electrics, sound, stage Technicians, Making Wardrobe, running Wardrobe. eight members vote in favour of signing into effect the 1978–79 pay agreement and eight against. Chairman Charlie Malyyon’s casting vote pushes it through.9 Thursday 6 March Despite continued opposition from the stage staff, John Wilson, NaTTKe General secretary, signs the 1978–79 agreement. Wednesday 14 March stage staff vote to continue the ban on voluntary overtime and issue a strike Notice: a complete stoppage from 6pm on saturday 17 until 9am on Monday 19 March. Friday 16 March Wilson instructs the NT’s NaTTKe stewards to call off the strike. at 4.50pm, elliott sends a warning letter to all stage staff indicating that strike action will result
The sPriNG OF DisCONTeNT
in suspension, pending dismissal, on Monday morning. ‘We will not [negotiate] while unofficial action is . . . taken or threatened.’ at 7pm, all 27 stage-hands walk out; performances are cancelled, audiences sent home. Picket lines are set up at the stage and scene dock doors to prevent ‘casuals’ entering the building. The strikers erect several huts near the stage door; a caravan parked nearby serves as their hQ. Saturday 17 March The majority of staff cross the picket line, but cancelled Friday and saturday performances of The Long Voyage Home (Cottesloe), somerset Maugham’s For Services Rendered (Lyttelton, preview) and Strife (Olivier), John Galsworthy’s account of an industrial dispute at a tin mine, cost £20,000 at the box office. Non-striking staff gather props, costumes and wigs from For Services Rendered, which is making the National’s first significant regional tour for almost 18 months, and put them on a van, which heads for Nottingham without the show’s strike-bound scenery. elliott is inside the scene dock as strikers outside start kicking its huge metal door; accustomed to the sheltered life of the corporate board room, he is terrified.10 Monday 19 March strikers threaten and intimidate drivers from Woodhouse hume Butchers and Panificio bakers, who drive away. an express Dairy van passes through the picket lines to make its usual delivery, but the strikers pierce the containers and 10 gallons of milk spill out across the road. Close of Play, simon Gray’s ‘catalogue of family disasters’, is in rehearsal, with harold Pinter directing a cast of nine that includes Michael Gambon as a married GP having an affair with a patient, John standing as his alcoholic brother, and Michael redgrave as their father, a retired professor of medieval literature, now silent and chair-bound. When redgrave, who is suffering from advanced Parkinson’s Disease, arrives at the National, strikers force him out of his taxi and, though he can hardly walk, make him ‘hobble the length of the building to the stage Door.’ The 27 strikers are ‘suspended forthwith pending dismissal’, for ‘gross industrial misconduct’. in the Cottesloe, elliott tells the entire staff that the stagehands have a calculating, money-grabbing agenda, despite, in some cases, already earning more than coal miners. With three auditoriums as ‘ready-made meeting places’, and an intercom system to summon everyone at short notice, the NT’s infrastructure lends itself to elliott’s campaign ‘to win hearts and minds’. several heads of department tell him: ‘you won’t win this. We’ve tried it before.’11 Tuesday 20 March Using information supplied by strikers, the Evening News lays bare a culture of apparently lavish NT spending. Furious head of Press John Goodwin issues a point-by-point rebuttal: • Evening News claim: susan Fleetwood’s Tamburlaine costume cost £2,000 but was considered ‘too opulent’ for the play, so Peter hall had it sprayed black. NT Fact: the dress cost £85. • Evening News claim: £500 was spent on a stereo for the set of No Man’s Land. NT Fact:
1974–88 the shell of a hi-fi unit was bought second-hand for £67.77 and fitted with fake speakers. • E vening News claim: for Betrayal, £1,000 was blown on a Gucci dress never worn on stage by Penelope Wilton. NT Fact: Wilton wore a Burberry suit, in Gucci style, purchased for £110. at 6.45pm, Wilson claims the NT executive does not have legitimate grounds to sack the strikers, which obliges them to withhold letters of dismissal.12 Wednesday 21 March One NT supplier makes a delivery using an unmarked car, but after a CsT Butchers van goes through the picket lines, strikers jam its locks with match-sticks. elliott has told Wilson his challenge ‘makes a total mockery’ of the NT/NaTTKe agreement, which guarantees union sanctions against wildcat strikers. Wilson accuses the executive of ‘a hasty ill-timed attempt to impose discipline in a normal industrial dispute.’ staff refusing to cross the pickets face a new, much tougher policy: ‘Unless you report for work at your normal starting time on Thursday 22 March then we shall be forced to suspend your employment.’ after four unofficial strikes, the Board have run out of patience and vote unanimously to sack the strikers. ‘There shall be no reinstatement. The possibility of re-engagement, preferably selectively, will be considered provided a workable basis for the future can be found.’13 Thursday 22 March an engineer summoned to the National to resolve a telephone fault is ‘jostled’ by strikers as he leaves. The Post Office says engineers will not respond to future call-outs. Christopher Morahan, who has recently taken over from Michael Birkett as Deputy Director, outlines contingency plans for evacuating south Bank plays to the West end (Lyttelton shows from mid-april, Olivier shows a month later), all to be remounted with abstracted or ‘black’ sets. Despite seeing his productions of Strife and The Fruits of Enlightenment left ‘stranded like beached whales’ in the Olivier, Morahan, a lifelong union member, holds a less ‘doctrinaire position’ than hall and elliott about the rightness of the executive’s stance. hall postpones by 48 hours his flight to america to see Bedroom Farce’s pre-Broadway tryout in Washington DC.14 Friday 23 March Douglas Gosling, Financial administrator, argues that performances must proceed on the south Bank to convince the arts Council and GLC not to suspend their grants to a now ‘non-productive enterprise’. inspector Mcilwrick, based at Kennington road police station, rejects requests for police protection of van drivers and NT catering staff at the stage and Goods inwards doors, and offers advice worthy of Lewis Carroll: once a lorry is past the picket line and onto private, NT property, the boys in blue have no jurisdiction, but ‘pickets who follow a lorry down to the back of the building are technically trespassing and an officer should be called to deal with it as trespass. But then the officer becomes a private person and is not an officer of the law as such . . . someone in authority (i.e. Mr. elliott) must . . . ask [the pickets] to leave the private premises . . . The officer should [then] take their names and do a short report: “Trespass”.’15
The sPriNG OF DisCONTeNT
Saturday 24 March at 8.15am a BP tanker arrives with oil supplies for the NT’s boilers, but after speaking to the strikers the driver rings his supervisor and is told to leave. BP drivers (some, perhaps, veterans of the recent TGWU strike) will no longer make NT deliveries, out of regard for the ‘brotherhood of the unions’. as stage door-keeper Jimmy hannah leaves the building he is verbally abused and struck by an apple core. hall takes Concorde to New york and, in Washington, finds the Bedroom Farce company ‘truly delighted’ to see him.16 Sunday 25 March in the Sunday Mirror, Woodrow Wyatt, ‘Britain’s Most influential Columnist’, denounces a labour market in which ‘unskilled, under-worked hospital porters get paid more than qualified nurses’ and NT stage-hands’ wages exceed its actors’.17 Monday 26 March hall, elliott and Goodwin (who has returned early from holiday), open a wider front in the propaganda war, stressing the dispute’s national implications. after unofficial strikes costing £140,000 in lost box-office and other revenue, ‘we are now saying that enough is enough . . . [and] trying . . . to build a position for . . . theatre at large, where unofficial strikes which . . . continually force us to break faith with the public, are not possible.’ More than 600 theatregoers buy £2 tickets for the Olivier, walk past pickets bearing leaflets and placards, and give a standing ovation to a prop-less Strife, the first performance for ten days. ‘it has given us a great deal of encouragement to carry on,’ Goodwin tells the Evening News; John Wilson calls it unnecessarily ‘provocative’. With Lambeth Council instructing its staff not to cross the picket lines, uncollected rubbish continues to pile up outside the NT. The smell of mouldering refuse drifts into the Lyttelton foyer. The spectre of the Winter of Discontent looms.18 Wednesday 28 March Fourteen workshop staff are suspended for joining the still-unofficial dispute. in Punch, sheridan Morley finds the strike ‘all the more tragic’, because for the first time since occupying Lasdun’s building, the NT ‘had closed the rsC’s artistic lead and was actually fielding more hits than the aldwych.’ For £1 a head, audiences in the Cottesloe watch extracts from Lark Rise, The Passion and The World Turned Upside Down.19 Thursday 29 March Time Out reports that the strike committee want to know why they have not been joined on the picket line by ‘all the left-wing playwrights and actors whose works they have serviced.’ a Leader in The Stage laments that ‘to the non-theatregoing public the NT is perilously near attaining the status of a national joke.’ Wilson asks elliott to skip three stages of the NT/NaTTKe disputes procedure and convene a stage iV meeting, which could lift the suspensions: ‘We must . . . bring this unfortunate dispute to an end.’20 Friday 30 March r. C. Osborn of Denton hall & Burgin, the NT’s solicitors, detects a prima facie case for an injunction against the strikers for unlawful picketing. ‘No reasonable effort should be spared’ to gather the evidence needed to attribute ‘intimidation, trespass and nuisance’ to particular defendants, even if this entails subterfuge: ‘When . . . drivers try to cross the picket line . . . it would be helpful if someone could actually stow away in the cab of the vehicle
1974–88 and take a tape recording of any conversation. Witnesses should be in attendance . . . and it may be sensible to engage a professional photographer with a zoom lens to take photographs, which can be produced in court.’ in the Evening Standard, Wilson promises: ‘if those men are sacked . . . they will picket the theatre until the end of time. i don’t know if the theatre is trying to solve an industrial dispute or conduct a class war.’ The Double Dealer’s restoration antics move from the Olivier to the Lyttelton and are performed in front of the 1930s set from For Services Rendered; the latter’s director, Michael rudman, notes that after its successful tour a strong bond has developed between the show’s cast and crew: none of its stage-hands has joined the picket line.21 Saturday 31 March in a Daily Telegraph column headlined ‘Creation? That’s not in the rulebook’, Paul Johnson ‘explores the sterile world of the trade-union activist’; some NT strikers ‘actually enjoy the destructive role which legislation . . . allows them to play. it makes them feel important that their antics can hold to ransom famous producers and playwrights.’22 Monday 2 April Charlie Malyyon fails to report for work after his holiday, fearing that his car will be vandalised by the pickets.23 Wednesday 4 April after two days’ intensive negotiation, talks at aCas break down when NaTTKe fails to give assurances that it will prevent further unofficial strikes and take ‘meaningful disciplinary action’ against the strikers.24 Friday 6 April NaTTKe wants its members’ four-day week reduced to 35 hours basic, with extra overtime; the NT offers a four-day week for the same money and 7.5 hours’ less work. Further compromise, argues Max rayne, would undermine ‘the entire fabric of our democratic existence under the rule of law.’ eighty stage staff are sacked. Wilson has until Monday to take the dismissals to arbitration or agree that the sacked men will be re-engaged if they pledge to take no further unofficial action.25 Monday 9 April NaTTKe rejects the NT ultimatum.26 Wednesday 11 April at an early morning press conference at Conservative Central Office, Mrs Thatcher launches her election Manifesto. its pledges on Trade Union reform might have been copied verbatim from the latest hall/elliott press statement: ‘We cannot go on, year after year, tearing ourselves apart in increasingly bitter and calamitous industrial disputes . . . Violence, intimidation and obstruction cannot be tolerated . . . Too often trade unions are dominated by a handful of extremists who do not reflect the common-sense views of most union members.’ she stakes her campaign on a promise to curb militancy. a Sun cartoon has already depicted Callaghan as hamlet, sweating through ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ while a trolllike NT stage-hand wields a strike placard and, beneath the stage, Thatcher saws up through the boards, about to send the PM tumbling.27
The sPriNG OF DisCONTeNT
Tuesday 12 April The NT/NaTTKe membership votes 153 to 82 against holding a ballot on making the strike official – a blow to Wilson.28 Wednesday 18 April The NT security hut near the stage door is ‘smashed in’. after dropping off much-needed food supplies, a grocer’s lorry reverses out of the scene dock and is confronted by aggressive pickets. Three uniformed policemen step forward to marshall the driver safely on his way – and send him crashing into the rear of a parked police car.29 Monday 23 April With NT losses running at more than £32,000 a week, and thunder rumbling behind him, hall tells his first press conference since the start of the strike that performances will continue, but the NT faced ‘a dangerous and explosive moment . . . with a General election imminent in which trades unionism is being talked about. i am not a union basher. i am a member of three trades unions and i feel this Mickey Mouse situation, which discredits trades unionism, as deeply distressing to me personally.’ The NT Works Committee has passed a motion of no confidence in NaTTKe’s NeC for instructing them not to cross the unofficial picket line. seventy of the sacked strikers are offered re-engagement: resume work on a second disciplinary warning and waive your right to take part in any future unofficial strikes.30 Tuesday 24 April The Guardian reveals ‘internal feuding and confusion . . . at the heart’ of NaTTKe, as Wilson considers blocking the NeC order barring members from crossing the picket line. The south Bank Theatre Board (sBB), which owns the NT’s access road, agrees to take action against the pickets denying access to contractors still putting finishing touches to the building.31 Friday 27 April Len Murray, the TUC’s General secretary, persuades elliott to extend the reengagement deadline to 1 May and soften the resolution formula: staff could resume work on a second warning for six months, not the usual 12.32 Saturday 28 April as the noon deadline for re-engagement passes, only six of the dismissed stage-hands have accepted.33 Monday 30 April The sBB issues a writ against six strikers, to prevent secondary picketing. shop stewards decry this ‘added provocation to an already explosive situation’.34 Tuesday 1 May hall feels good voting Conservative in the General election, because ‘we have to have change.’ Pinter also votes Tory, because of ‘union selfishness and violence at the National’. Mrs Thatcher becomes Britain’s first woman Prime Minister and her victory coincides with the beginning of the end for the strike. The pickets retreat from the stage Door and dismantle their huts. a peace plan backed by Wilson, the TUC, aCas and the NT Board is rejected by the
1974–88 NaTTKe NeC, leaving them ‘in the ridiculous position of endorsing the right of [their] members to flout . . . instructions drawn up by [their] General secretary.’ The Lyttelton press night of For Services Rendered is the first full-décor performance since 18 March. Management attempt to restore normal working conditions, using the 15 stage staff still inside the building, augmented as necessary by casuals and the recruitment of new full-time personnel.35 Friday 4 May after a five-hour hearing, Mr Justice sheen grants the sBB injunction banning secondary picketing at the NT. if the men named in a ‘Consent order re. Trespass and Nuisance’ continue picketing they will face large fines or even imprisonment. in Downing street and in corporate board rooms around the country, this ruling is welcomed as a test case, auguring well for Thatcher’s pledge to curtail secondary picketing throughout industry. The Guardian will suggest that elliott would not have contemplated hiring non-union staff under Labour, who endorsed the closed-shop.36 Tuesday 8 May in Time Out, a listings entry for the National states that its ‘management . . . are now attacking basic union rights by issuing writs against strikers and their union’ and urges readers not to cross the picket lines. Outside the National, men and women, including Vanessa redgrave, carry placards claiming that equity supports the strike.37 Wednesday 9 May half an hour into The Double Dealer, with Dorothy Tutin and Michael Bryant in full cry, demonstrators inside the Olivier begin denouncing the audience as ‘scabs!’ One man runs on stage and stops the show. Police are called and several members of the south London rank and File Group of Local Trade Unionists are frog-marched out. hall walks on stage to apologise for the ‘bedlam’, and the show resumes. Tutin (pictured smiling on the front page of the next day’s Evening News) found the protesters ‘both highly boring and very irritating.’ elliott promises tightened security.38 Tuesday 15 May after the high Court ruling and the resumption of fully-staged performances, the last remaining pickets withdraw. On the pavement outside the National, elliott finds a note, presumably discarded by a NaTTKe steward: ‘elliott came from Kleenex to catch a cold.’ The stage-hand who dismissed his cautionary memo as ‘fucking bollocks’ has swapped the south Bank for a North sea oil rig. ‘This is no time to speak of victory,’ hall tells the Evening Standard. ‘it has been eight weeks of agony for all concerned.’ interviewed in his NT office, he explains to the Evening News’ Clare Colvin that he can now return to rehearsing his Glyndebourne Fidelio, which will open on 27 May. When Colvin mentions that Beethoven’s opera ends with prisoners joyously released, hall surveys the sunlit Thames: ‘i do feel rather as though we’ve emerged from the dungeons.’
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The sPriNG OF DisCONTeNT
On 24 May, Close of Play finally opened in the Lyttelton, five weeks late, and harold Pinter paid tribute to simon Gray, ‘the poor bloody author’ whose spirit had been ‘so encouraging to the company. he could have despaired but he didn’t.’ Pinter himself – praised for his ‘fluent and sensitive’ direction of a play fuelled by Gray’s ‘vituperative wit’39 – could scarcely believe the turmoil was over: ‘We’ve grown to live with that picket line and . . . suddenly it’s not there.’40 On 28 May, all NT shows finally returned to full staging and prices. During the dispute, reduced décor performances in the Olivier and Lyttelton at £2 a seat (against a normal top of £5.30) had sent a vital signal that the theatre remained open, but most played to less than 15% of full-price financial capacity. ancillary revenues (catering, parking, bookshop) also plummeted and strike losses were estimated at £389,000, 10% of the National’s arts Council grant for 1979–80.41 as a first step towards making up that deficit, four forthcoming productions (two each in the Olivier and Cottesloe; the plays not yet specified) were cancelled.42 in 1978, some 164 actors had appeared at the National; that figure fell to 94.43 hall thought elliott performed ‘magnificently’ during the strike,44 which he recalled as ‘farcical. The Trotskyite NaTTKe group and a very, very right-wing cockney group of stagehands who’d come from the Vic . . . [where] they had worked for huge sums of money . . . The country was undergoing a nervous breakdown anyway and we were a classical illustration of the nonsense of it all. it was horrible. Corrupt and ridiculous.’ The strikers’ harassment of Michael redgrave was ‘the most revolting’ moment of the dispute. hall’s most personal memory of industrial strife remained the sunday when he went to suffolk to see his father, reg, retired station-master, and an even stauncher union man than his son: Reg What’s happening at your theatre, boy? Peter Well, there’s an unofficial strike and a picket, trying to stop the actors and public from crossing it. Reg Unofficial picket! sack the lot of ’em!45 Thatcher would soon outlaw secondary picketing and the closed shop, sending trade union membership in Britain into freefall, from 13.5 million in 1979 to 6.7 million in 1998.46 For elliott, the most vivid (possibly apocryphal) story of the strike involved a television journalist interviewing a Cockney striker: Reporter There’s a strong National Front element within the stage staff isn’t there? Striker No, nuffink like that. Reporter What does the ‘NF’ on your t-shirt stand for, then? Striker Well, it’s the National Featre, innit?47 Over the summer, ‘Boycott the National’ posters were pasted onto the front doors of NaTTKe’s solicitors, Blatchfords, and empty shop-fronts around the south Bank.48 in January 1980, 30 of the stagehands who refused re-engagement claimed unfair dismissal at an industrial tribunal, which ruled that it had no jurisdiction, as did an employment appeal
1974–88 Tribunal.49 That August, Christopher Morahan directed the premiere of Nigel Williams’ Line ’Em (Cottesloe), set on a picket line outside a methane depot in Essex, where beleaguered strikers, led by Phil Daniels as a youthful firebrand, try to prevent lorry-loads of gas canisters from leaving the premises, and violent confrontation looms. En route to the Cottesloe for this ‘rather hectic, flustered melodrama’,50 one critic walked past a car park wall still bearing graffito from the spring of discontent: ‘National Theatre – union-bashers’.51 The bitterness of the dispute seemed all the more shocking because theatre should be, and often is, a harmonious “family business”: cast, crew and audience sharing the same space and collaborative atmosphere. Tensions between management and NATTKE did not fade completely, but a boil had been lanced; over the next 25 years, not a single NT performance would be lost to industrial action. Simon Callow, who would make his South Bank acting debut soon after the 1979 strike ended, viewed it ‘as a moment of great psychological importance’ in the theatre’s history: ‘Not merely did it establish . . . who was in control, it galvanised the whole company . . . The Battle of Britain spirit, apparently indispensable to these operations, finally emerged.’52
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