My Library

Today is my sixtieth birthday and instead of writing mawkish (or even morbid) thoughts about what the years have taught me, or about how much I love my family and friends, or how I fear Brexit will wreak terrible damage on poor old Britain, I thought I’d attempt something very different: a celebration of my library, and what it means to me. 

I own several thousand books. I’ve been collecting them since I was about 16 and I sometimes think that my brain has three distinct compartments: my family, my work, and whatever it is that I’m reading. Without a doubt, my library is my most treasured material possession. It starts in the dining room and runs chronologically, from the beginning right up to 1900. It kicks off, inevitably, with Homer and the Bible, soon followed by the Greek tragedies, and then Ovid, Tacitus, Pliny, Seneca, Livy, Plutarch and, of course, Virgil. They quickly rub shoulders with Dante and Boccaccio, Villon and Montaigne, Lope de Vega, Calderon and Cervantes, before we arrive in Britain with Beowulf, Gawain and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Mystery Cycles, and wonderful, sublime Chaucer. You’re then confronted by four big shelves full of Shakespeare, a living monument in his own right, but surrounded by lesser volumes of Marlowe, Donne, Middleton, Webster, J0hnson, Dekker, Ford and so on. And, after Paradise Lost, come the dramatists of the Restoration—Wycherley, Farquhar, Congreve and Vanbrugh—standing alongside thick single volumes of Pope and Dryden, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Keats, as well as translations of Goethe, Schiller and Kleist, Corneille, Racine and Molière, as well as Beaumarchais, Marivaux and Madame Lafayette. After that, of course, are the long uniform lines of Balzac and Dickens, Flaubert and Zola, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës. Squeezed in between them are Turgenev and Edith Wharton, Benito Perez Galdos, Leopoldo Alas and Alessandro Manzoni, as well as Theodor Fontane, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and so many others. And finally, at the bottom, there’s a shelf packed with translations and studies of Ibsen and Chekhov.

For reasons I can’t quite justify, but which make me smile and others laugh, in the living room twentieth and twenty-first fiction is organised alphabetically. The vast majority is European, and much of it is in translation: there’s Zweig and Roth, Moravia and Morante, Malaparte and Thomas Mann, Grossman and Bulgakov, along with Victor Serge and Georges Simenon and Erich Maria Remarque. There’s a whole shelf of Brecht and Benjamin, but another of Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and Somerset Maugham. There’s everything I could lay hands on by John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow as well as JM Coetzee, EL Doctorow, Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, Jiří Weil, Primo Levi, Patrick Hamilton, Arthur Miller, Heinrich Böll, WG Sebald and Günter Grass. And, of course, you can’t ignore several fat and forbidding slices of Joyce and Proust and Beckett and Strindberg and Schnitzler. 

I use an antique glass-fronted bookcase (brought from Hamburg by my mother’s family in 1933) for my slightly random collection of history books, and I see to my despair that there are growing piles of unfiled books on an unused patch of floor. There’s also a wooden table groaning with new books which I’m yet to read. There are a further six or seven shelves for musical scores, literary criticism, photography, philosophy, psychiatry and collected essays. And if you go into my office at the back of the flat you’ll see a long wall of play texts, biographies, books about drama, and so. There’s another floor-to-ceiling bookcase consisting of random books that don’t seem to belong anywhere. And I should mention a midsize bookcase full of outdated reference books and the astonishing collection of German books that Klaus Schiller’s family took with them from Nazi Vienna in 1938, to which I happily give houseroom. 

I live with these books every day of my life, and I love their smell, their calm, their heft. The colours of the spines of many of the old paperbacks have faded in the sunlight, sometimes almost completely, and it’s amazing to see the difference between them and the still brightly coloured covers. Then there are the ones which are all cracked, with the glue dried up and the pages come loose. And when I open them I see the faint pencil marks in the margins—sometimes an illegible word, or an exclamation mark—and notice the dollar bill acting as a bookmark in The Mill on the Floss, the bus ticket in Run Rabbit Run, the Turkish sand that falls out when I open Eugénie Grandet, or the battered and much scribbled over copy of Measure for Measure which I used when I directed it in the early 1980s. I love seeing how this library has been assembled in such peculiar bursts of fascination and interest, with old editions rubbing up against brand new ones, random acquisitions standing beside determined completism. I’m still half-way through my commitment to read all of Dickens: I’ve managed a good eight of them, and there they stand, battered but loved, while the others wait their turn silently, their shiny black spines ready to be broken. Or I recall that year I got so fascinated by the Spanish nineteenth-century novel that I gobbled up five of them in a row. But, meanwhile, other corners of the library lie forgotten—I’ve not read a word of Conrad for years, but I still have all the novels (yes, even The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’) and maybe in old age I’ll fall back in love with him and raise him from his slumbers.

There are some odd things. Thus, there are hundreds of (mostly German, but also Russian and Italian) books in response to the great twentieth century catastrophes, which is perhaps unsurprising from the son of a German Jewish refugee, but still notable. And, while there are many English writers from before 1945, most of my post-war novels are American. There are a handful of African writers—Chinua Achebe, above all—but not many, only the most iconic of Latin American novels and an almost complete absence of writers from that magnificent group of civilisations lying beyond the Urals. Most shameful of all is the fact that the vast majority (maybe as many as 90%) of my books were written by men, and for that I will rightly and inevitably be chastised. In my defence, you should consider that for the third year running I’ve been given a subscription to the New York Review Books utterly amazing ‘book club’, and every month I get sent a new book, so often by a writer I’ve never heard of, many of whom are women, and so, month by month, book by book, the horizons of my library are broadening.

The truth is that when I lie on my sofa and look at the groaning shelves, with their serried ranks of mostly paperback volumes, I see a whole set of friends, reminders of different times in my life, changing interests, evolving tastes. I will, of course, be accused of being canonical, and, to an extent, I take that, but I don’t deliberately exclude anything or refuse to acknowledge the existence or value of difference. I’m acutely aware that my interests (like anyone’s) are the product of my time and place, but what has been assembled here is the result of almost fifty years of enthusiasm and curiosity, not exclusion or snobbery. What intrigues me is the way that one area of interest suddenly inspires another, jumping across languages and cultures, but also upwards and downwards through the centuries. I regard my library as a living, breathing thing: it keeps growing, continuously overflowing its apparently tidy categories, with new recruits rested horizontally on top of the tightly packed upright soldiers, waiting one day for a new home. Not a week goes by when a book doesn’t get introduced, and I keep failing to do the long-promised purge, partly because so few would get the chop. And it’s this sensation of the never-ending pursuit that I find so addictive, so rewarding. I’ll never have read enough books; it’s impossible to read enough books. You’d need five lifetimes for that. But I’ll keep going

I’ve often detected a hint of gentle (and, no doubt, deserved) mockery at my devotion to my library; but, frankly, at the grand old age of 60 I’ve decided to ignore that and declare that it’s fundamental to who I am: a well-educated, well-read and well-cultured European, committed to doing whatever he can do to protect and preserve those endless golden threads of creativity, understanding and love that link us together, across the generations and cultures, right back to the beginning, and onwards to God knows when. My library is a tiny gesture of defiance against those who deny others a literary education or dismiss our extraordinary inheritance as elitist. It’s living proof that the world is bigger and more complex than the shallow certainties of so much political and cultural discourse. Silently it insists that there’s a world elsewhere, not just one written in foreign languages and alien cultures, but in the endless and mysterious vistas of the past. 

Populists and demagogues on both sides despise the complexities and contradictions that such a library demands: they want us to be conformist consumers enraptured by the same products and ideas, untroubled by the grit in the oyster, the stubborn voice that refuses to fit in, the different and the strange. But the two volumes of astonishing Weimar diaries of Count Harry Kessler, let along the magisterial journals of the Goncourt Brothers of Belle Epoque Paris, quickly put paid to such simplicities. Life exists in an infinity of nooks and crannies, sometimes far from the great currents of the world, frequently challenging, often uncomfortable, usually inspiring, and decent books taken in large quantities consistently remind us of that essential fact. 

But the thing I really want to say on my birthday is that the books in my library make me happy. They calm me down when the world feels cruel or absurd. They remind me that human beings have always faced complicated, frequently dark times and that those in power, with their mostly terrible ideas, come and go like the weather (however much damage they’ve left behind); that ingenuity, creativity and love eventually find a way of reasserting the value of human beings in all their fragility, and that satisfying the deep need in human beings for connection, affection and meaning is the best possible antidote to misery, whatever causes it. And this is something I want to celebrate as I mark the not terribly remarkable achievement of having survived sixty years on this battered but still beautiful planet of ours. 

Two Podcasts

Over the last year I’ve been invited to do two podcasts.

This is about Bob Dylan, and especially the early stuff (and the very late stuff).

https://isitrollingbobtalkingdylan.podbean.com

And this is about two of Piero della Francesca’s incredible paintings, The Baptism of Christ and The Resurrection.

https://player.fm/series/my-favourite-work-of-art/stephen-unwin-on-piero-della-francesca

Such fun to do. I hope they’re as much fun to listen to.

Jellyfish

Anybody who’s the parent of a young person with learning disabilities knows that sexuality is one of the biggest challenges you face. How do you balance respect for your child’s autonomy with protecting him or her from people who intend harm? Safeguarding is a huge responsibility, not just for parents but also people who care for the learning disabled, and there are too many examples of sexual exploitation for us to be complacent.

Ben Weatherill’s Jellyfish, which I caught near the end of its run at the National Theatre, faces up to this fraught question directly and is, for the most part, an absolute triumph. Written with scorching wit and crackle, it tells the story of Kelly, a young woman with Down Syndrome, who lives with Agnes, her working class single mum, in Skegness. Kelly’s favourite outing is to the beach, where we first meet her holding up a huge crab for inspection. She soon starts a relationship with the kindly, neuro-typical (and inexplicably middle class) Neil who works on the funfair. But when they start having sex (very much at Kelly’s initiative), Agnes is furious with the young man, and worried sick for her daughter. And when the inevitable happens and Kelly gets pregnant, all hell breaks out. 

Tim Hoare’s beautifully designed production unfolds with admirable economy and Weatherill’s funny and frequently surprising dialogue is brilliantly well served by his cast: Penny Layden, magnificent as the tough and desperately anxious Agnes, and Sarah Gordy, herself Down’s, wonderful as the indefatigable Kelly.  Siôn Daniel Young plays Kelly’s lover with tremendous delicacy and the fourth (possibly unnecessary) character, Dominic, a young lad with Asperger’s is acutely caught by Nicky Priest (himself, I gather, Asperger’s).

For all its jokes and exuberant energy, however, the play is an uncomfortable watch, especially for those of us with disabled offspring.  And this is where my occasional reservation creeps in. There’s a tendency for the writing to trip from shock to shock, as if the sexual feelings of a young woman with Down Syndrome are something we’re meant to find surprising. By confronting this question so directly, Weatherill is doing neuro-divergent people a favour; but the danger is that the play (which has some of the strengths of a soap opera, despite a disobliging comment about Casualty) sometimes feels like a freak show, and the night I went the National Theatre audience gasped every time Kelly showed her entirely natural and unsurprising desires. The slight danger is that the play astonishes audiences by its sense of the exceptional rather than universalises by its common humanity.  

Much as I admired Siôn Daniel Young’s terrific performance as Neil, I wondered whether Weatherill could possibly have explored the contradictions in his character more fully. Agnes reminds him on several occasions of the level of responsibility that he’s taken on, but I had little sense (except for a drowned sister) of what had brought him to the place where he embraces such an undoubted challenge. Certainly, while the play has justified optimism about Kelly’s autonomy, it doesn’t sentimentalise the realities of her disabilities, which Sarah Gordy’s touching and beautifully judged performance makes so clear. There’s a brilliant scene in a hotel bedroom when you see why it might be difficult for Neil to stay with Kelly, but their reconciliation isn’t really explained. We gather that Neil has been sacked from his job as a result of this relationship but there’s little sense of the journey he’s taken to get to such a point that he’s prepared to make such a sacrifice. In other words Neil’s love for Kelly is often stated, but the writing doesn’t quite make the nature of its radical ambition manifest.

The third area that I’d have liked Weatherill to explore more is the social context. Yes, we know that Kelly’s mum works in Morrison’s and is obviously not rich, but it would be good to know how she’s been brought up and educated, what social services have offered and the many struggles that Agnes has no doubt had to fight. There’s no discussion of Mental Capacity (a hugely important subject for learning disabled people) and when Kelly gets pregnant there’s little sense of the support offered by social workers, the health service or disability charities. My point is that society has a responsibility towards Kelly and her mother, and I wish the play had recognised that, or at least challenged it for failing to deliver on it.

I feel a bit mean spirited in offering these reservations, because Jellyfish is a groundbreaking piece of work and I really enjoyed it, and its presence at the National Theatre (from the Bush, where it started out) should not be underestimated.  In fact, in the nearly forty years I’ve been going to the NT, I think this is the first time I’ve seen an actor with Down Syndrome onstage, certainly in a leading part. The walls are finally crumbling and Ben Weatherill and his amazing cast deserve the highest praise for taking a battering ram to the old certainties and making audiences - and critics and theatre managers - think again.  Jellyfish should have a further life, and why not in the West End?  I’d certainly buy a ticket.

All in a Row

The London theatre sometimes makes it hard to be both the father of a profoundly disabled young man and a champion of drama’s ability to talk creatively about the challenges that we all face. 

In 2015 the Park Theatre presented Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now, a play about an 18-year-old boy with profound cerebral palsy. There are many issues with the play, not least - I kid you not - the suggestion that no greater love could a father show his disabled son than to wank him off in the bath. And if I told you that the young man in the play shared the same name and age as my Joey, you’ll understand why it left me stunned and gasping for breath. I’d been warned by an excellent article from Dea Birkett, but the result was even worse than I’d feared. Amazingly, it got good reviews and, the night I saw it, a standing ovation.

Alex Oates’ All in a Row, about the family of an autistic boy with high needs, came with similar health warnings.  I’d heard last year of the plan to use a puppet to portray the boy, and before it opened I wrote a blog about the issues that I felt were raised by this decision. I was much criticised (in a frankly offensive, ad hominem fashion) by the producer for passing judgment on the endeavour before I’d seen it.  And when the play opened there was a huge storm on social media (#puppetgate) and in one or two newspapers, with many people shocked and hurt by the decision.  The play has received a range of reviews, some warm praise, others unequivocal condemnation, especially from people with experience of autism such as Saskia Baron and Shaun May. And so I thought that as a seasoned director and writer, but also as a vocal campaigner for the rights of disabled people, I owed it to everyone involved, as well as to the many people who’d been hurt by it, to see the play for myself. And so on Wednesday I made my way to the Southwark Playhouse and got myself a ticket.

*

Where to start?

As is well known by now, the use of a puppet to represent the young autistic boy has been much attacked, above all because it dehumanises him, reduces him to little more than animal movements and sounds, and drains him of his individuality. Some have defended the noble art of puppetry but, admirable as the young puppeteer’s skills are, this decision leaves a horrible taste in the mouth.  But although it was this that first triggered my concern about the play, I, for one, found it the least of its many problems.  

All in a Row has also attracted much criticism for concentrating on the challenges faced by the parents and neglecting the experiences of their son.  But such parents often face seemingly insuperable challenges, as is evidenced by the dreadful statistics for marital breakdown, mental illness, unemployment, ill health and poverty. They are, I believe, entirely legitimate subject for drama. 

To my mind, the play’s fundamental, and I’m afraid unforgivable, failure is the way that it seems to lay the blame for these problems on Lawrence himself.  There’s a continuous suggestion that if it wasn’t for Lawrence’s autism, their lives would be easier, happier and more comfortable and that his existence is the worst thing that could possibly have happened to them.  

But in my experience, real life is much more nuanced. Having met dozens of parents of severely disabled children I’m constantly struck by their strength and resilience.  I’ve seen how a disabled child can radicalise families in ways that they couldn’t possibly have imagined before. Driven by love - the very same love that makes families do extraordinary things for non-disabled children - they develop remarkable coping mechanisms, and adapt to the particular circumstances with wit, stoicism and astonishing levels of creativity. 

All in a Row presents, instead, a family in a constant state of catastrophe. But while I recognise that it might not make for thrilling drama, the playwright should have realised that the parents would have learnt that swearing and shouting is the very worst way of stopping the panic that is so often the response of the sensitive autist. Their endless hyperventilating simply isn’t believable, because they’d have known better.  There’s no sense in the play of people who’ve gone through the full gamut of emotions and experiences over the last eleven years and adjusted their lives accordingly.    

Nor is there much evidence of people who’ve worked out what their son likes and found ways of celebrating it, of encouraging it, of loving him for it. Instead, these pleasures are constantly belittled. I was appalled that when we heard that there are horses at the new residential school, it’s dismissed as being of no consequence. But my Joey spends hours on a farm and adores horses and other animals: so much so that when the local authority wanted to bring him back to London we specifically mentioned the way that the countryside reduced his anxiety. In other words, most parents come to love and celebrate whatever it is that makes their child happy, and do anything they possibly can to help. Connor Sparrowhawk loved London buses.  Steven Neary loves glam rock. Joey loves animals. Every young person is different, but their families give them whatever they can, with a wry smile, practical affection, and all-conquering love.  

*

The action of All in a Row takes place on the evening before Lawrence is moved to a residential school, 200 miles away from the family home. This had special resonance for me since I remember clearly the moment when Jenny and I first left the fifteen year old Joey at such a place. The reasons were different: Joey (who is also non-verbal) has intractable epilepsy and needed to be in a place where his epilepsy could be safely managed, whereas the autistic Lawrence has high support needs and can be violent and very destructive. But both moves were thought to be for their own good and I recognised some of the conflicting emotions that the fictional parents felt.

The play is confined to the family home, and the outside world is represented by a kindly if occasionally naïve care worker. But what we don’t sense is how the rest of society interacts with Lawrence and his family. There’s a frankly incredible subtext that a complaint about bruising has led to a police investigation and Lawrence’s subsequent move, but I didn’t pick up anything about a social worker, let alone the enormously complex bureaucratic mechanism required to bring about such a move.  We eventually discover that it was the mother who rang the police (betraying her husband and son) but such requests - agonised, conflicted and guilt laden - require a long campaign, supported by compelling evidence of need, presented to local authorities who’re deeply reluctant to commit to the additional expenditure. Most families end up fighting local authorities, with some (we did) resorting to expensive lawyers.  It’s a long, long way from a child being suddenly snatched away and sent off to an unknown location.

My point is that for the vast majority of families with disabled children, the struggles with the outside world are the real cause for their despair, exhaustion and rage.  It’s sometimes said that there is a cabal of special needs parents and that such parents inevitably become campaigners of a better way of talking about and providing for the people that they love. And, certainly, in a society that is largely indifferent to their children they have to become champions, fighting against incredible odds, simply to secure for their child what is their basic human right. 

And it’s this underlying lack of affection that really mars All in a Row. And please don’t think that I wanted a play that showed Lawrence’s parents in a state of endless bliss. And yes, I’m all too familiar with the need for a short break that allows everyone to recharge the batteries, whether it’s giving the marriage a chance, doing some work, or just catching up on sleep. (Which is one of the many brilliant things that KIDS, the charity that I chair, provides). What I wanted to see was more flavour, more contradiction, a greater sense of the self-knowledge that Lawrence’s parents would have acquired, the wisdom, the inner calm. The love, indeed. Instead we saw a husband and wife in terminal breakdown, with their young, non-verbal, vulnerable son being seen as the cause.

But Lawrence isn’t the enemy. Nor are his parents, let alone the carer.  The real danger lies outside, and it’s here that the play slides into the worst kind of dangerous sentimentality. In the last moments, the parents are seen explaining to Lawrence (by use of a ‘social story’) that he’s moving on to a new school and that everything is going to be ‘ok’.  But the dreadful truth - as campaigners like Sara Ryan, Ian Birrell, Mark Neary and many others have shown - is that the ATUs, the residential schools, and the care homes - the supposed ‘safety net’ - too often fail these vulnerable young people. The warm words of inclusivity mask a culture of indifference, while reputation management hides underlying failures of care.  All in a Row touches on these dangers in passing, but more as another cause of grief than as an existential threat, and certainly not as a reason to contest their son’s move.  A play that showed a young autistic boy being reduced to a puppet in one of the appalling institutions documented by Ian Birrell would be a far truer reflection of the tragic fate of so many disabled young people in Britain today than All in a Row.

Alex Oates will understandably and in many ways rightly protest that this isn’t the story he wanted to tell, and that his play is about one particular family at one particular time and place. And, of course, I know that each disabled child is different, each family is different, and each responds in different ways.  But while I recognise that some of the dialogue catches the rhythms of this particular family’s everyday, so much of it is peppered with alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual dysfunction and scatology that the impression is of a family in hell, a poundshop imitation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Or rather of a writer who mistrusts the quotidian and wants to ramp everything up to the maximum.  And so he throws everything into the mix - at one point the mother even makes a tragically misjudged pass at the young carer - and you’re left trying to work out why.  The bitter truth is that an audience with no experience of disabled children would draw the only possible conclusion: this is what happens if you’re unlucky enough to have a profoundly disabled child.  The great disability mantra of ‘no triumph, no tragedy’ has been ignored.

What’s more, the playwright has a very uneasy control of the debate (at one point the kindly young carer surprises everyone by claiming that a disabled child is punishment for bad karma), but there’s a moment in the last quarter of an hour when you can sense him getting to the heart of his argument: it’s when the father declares that it should be acceptable to love someone who you wish was different. This is presented as a bitter but profound truth. The problem with this is its banality, not its courage: you could say the same about everyone.  Yes, I would happily wave a wand and get Joey a scholarship to Oxford and knowing that that’s not going to happen doesn’t stop me from loving him.  But I also look at myself in the mirror and wish I hadn’t lost my hair at the age of 16.  And I have unprintable feelings about the defects of pretty much everyone in my family, but none of that stops me from loving them forever.  We all love people we sometimes wish were different. It’s called being human.

And it’s this sense of self-pitying exceptionalism which I think makes All in a Row so misguided and, frankly, so dangerous. The great fight for dignity, decency and fundamental rights for people with severe disabilities must be rooted in the deepest sense of our shared humanity.  Autistic people with high needs are our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, they are ourselves.  But if we present them as something uniquely challenging, as a bomb that threatens our sanity, our family life, our capacity for love, they will inevitably end up being abused, neglected and forgotten.  But, again, experience tells me something much more positive, something more creative: because the fact is that people with profound disabilities change families and we are all the better as a result of their presence.  And if you don’t believe me, read Sara Ryan’s magnificent Justice for Laughing Boy, her account of the death of her learning disabled son, Connor Sparrowhawk, in an NHS unit (an ATU) and the subsequent campaign for justice.  It’s thick with laughs, love and the absolute determination to make a better world.  

I have three children: each has different needs and each has different abilities.  The eldest studied at Cambridge.  The second has no speech, severe learning disabilities and intractable epilepsy.  And the third is a precocious 10 year old who has just (today!) got a place at the most competitive grammar school in North London. Each of them gives me something different: worries and delights, frustrations and whoops of joy.  But until we see all our children as deserving of the same freedoms, the same opportunities, the same human rights, our society will fail to live up to its fundamental responsibilities. And that, for me, with this play, is the bottom line.  I don’t accept that All in a Row was written or presented by eugenicists, nor did I sign the petition for it to be shut down.  What’s more, I can tell you it’s a perfectly competent (if over-pitched) production with some very committed acting.  I just wish that it approached this difficult subject with more humanity, more imagination, and, above all, more love, not just for Lawrence, but his parents too. 

Families deserve better.  Disabled children deserve better.  

We all deserve better.

England's Chekhov

Noel Coward is cold, artificial and a snob.  That’s how I dismissed him as an ambitious young theatre director starting out in the early 1980s.  In my ignorance, I’d decided that The Master’s plays were heartless and shallow, patronising about ordinary people and shamefully lacking in depth of feeling.  The theatrical revolution of the 1960s had, I assumed, safely swept these glittering ephemera into the dustbin of history and no serious theatre artist could possibly think they were worthy of attention.  Brecht, Ibsen and living young playwrights beckoned.  Why would anyone bother with Noel Coward?

It took a decade or two for me to discover that these relics of a disappeared world were, in fact, intricate and subtle works of art, which anatomized the human heart with tremendous tenderness and startling insight.  I realised that the famously clipped dialogue suggested an aching world of repressed desires and misunderstandings.  What’s more, I saw that far from being a privileged Oxbridge dandy, Coward made his money and name by his talent and capacity for hard work.  He came from lower middle class stock and wrote about people like himself with affection, sympathy and sensitivity. For all his formidable - and self-proclaimed ‘talent to amuse’ - here, I eventually realised, was a dramatist to take seriously.   

To my amazement I find that I’ve now directed five of his plays and am greedy to do more.  Hay Fever (1925) at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, in 2010 with Celia Imrie as Judith Bliss, was the first.  In rehearsing I was astonished to discover just how deeply bohemian the Bliss family is.  With their open sexual relationships, stubborn refusal to conform and deeply unconventional behaviour towards their houseguests, theirs was the most colourful rebellion imaginable against the khaki ghastliness of the First World War.  Polite society is shown to be repressed, hypocritical and absurd, and the noisy, witty and glorious Blisses carry all before them.  This perfectly structured comic masterpiece opened up a whole world for me.

Having achieved global notoriety for his dazzling comedies largely set among the beau monde, Coward surprised his many fans by penning an epic of working class life.  This Happy Breed (1939) - which I directed in Bath in 2011 - is a heartbreaking chronicle of a very ordinary family in South London in the twenty years between the two world wars, and dramatises an area of experience which conventional drama often ignores.  Written on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, the play is patriotic, polemical and occasionally sentimental, but catches with striking power the chiselled scepticism with which many working people view the shenanigans of their ‘betters’.  When we remember that Coward’s mother ran a lodging house in Clapham, we’ll see that in This Happy Breed Coward wrote a homage to his own people.

Turning to The Vortex (1924) - back at the Rose in 2013 - I was confronted by a darker drama of repressed homosexuality, surreptitious drug taking, and an unresolved Oedipal relationship.  Though the influence of Hamlet (and The Seagull, perhaps) is never fully disguised, the 24 year old Coward wrote an astonishing firework of a play which fizzed and blazed and still has the power to provoke, shock and amaze.  There’s certainly nothing remotely cosy or safe in this youthful jeu d’esprit.  Something new had been created and Coward never looked back. 

In 1942, Coward and his company of actors toured wartime Britain playing This Happy Breed in repertoire with his uproarious comedy Present Laughter (1939).  Its central figure, the celebrated actor manager, Garry Essendine (played in my production by Samuel West, also in Bath, in 2016), is a thinly veiled portrait of the playwright: stylish, witty and talented, the part also suggests something of the loneliness of fame, the fickleness of a life in the theatre, and the underlying and all too real difficulties faced by anyone trying to make a living in it. Scratch the surface of this brilliant comedy of manners and you quickly find surprising darkness.  The highly polished façade gives only partial cover to the melancholia and sense of waste lurking beneath.

After the war Coward’s star began to wane.  A new generation of theatre artists dismissed his plays - as I was to do - as merely flippant, with little to say about the challenges of the time.  Certainly, the older Coward was lofty in tone and could be very prickly.  What’s more, in the meritocratic 1960s, his infatuation with royalty and the international jet set, as well as his decision to become a tax exile, put him at odds with the political radicals establishing firm footholds in the culture establishment.  More significantly, many of his later plays don’t live up to the great promise of his earlier ones and it’s fair to see these declining years as that of a great talent starting to stultify.  

An intriguing exception is Suite in Three Keys (1965), a double bill of short plays and one full length piece, set in a luxury hotel room in Switzerland.  They have different sets of characters, but the handsome floor waiter, Felix, is common to all three.  They played in the West End in 1966 with Lilli Palmer and Irene Worth and saw Coward’s own carefully planned swansong as an actor.  It was a remarkable success and received some of the best notices Coward had had for years, with the critic of the Daily Mail describing feeling ‘oddly elated, as if I had recaptured the flavour of an exclusive drink which one tasted when young but has never been mixed quite right since.’ 

The first of the double bill, Shadows of the Evening, is a powerful and haunting meditation on death, while the second, Come Into the Garden Maud, is a delicious, if rather slight, comedy of manners.  But it’s the full length play, A Song at Twilight, which is regarded as the best.  In writing it, Coward had been inspired by two biographical accounts.  The first was the recently published memoir of his great contemporary, Somerset Maugham, which notably omitted any mention of his 30 year relationship with his secretary, Gerald Haxton.  But he also drew on a biography of the essayist and dandy Max Beerbohm, which describes the actress Constance Collier’s descending on him late in life in Italy.  Coward found the situation rich with comic potential: ‘There was Max’s old flame coming to visit him,’ he wrote, ‘but so much more vital still than him that she totally exhausted him in seconds’.  

Although partially a study of the ageing Maugham (Coward’s costume even suggested Maugham’s style), the play was interpreted by some as autobiographical.  And although the tetchy, troubled and misanthropic novelist Sir Hugo Latymer is a long way from the declining but still glamorous Coward, the sense of golden youth facing up to the ravages of age, and the call to resolve certain contradictions in his private life, is all too recognisable.  By conflating these two real life stories, Coward found a way to talk about the challenges of getting old and dramatise the bringing to light of a buried part of his own life.

The play resembles Ibsen in the gradual process of peeling away the evasions and lies that encrust Coward’s central character.  And like Ghosts or John Gabriel Borkman it remorselessly explores the dangers of denying one’s own nature and deliberately extinguishing one’s own capacity for love.   But where his great Scandinavian predecessor is determined to show that the truth, however painful, will set you free, Coward opts, ultimately, for a less exposing form of psychotherapy, which allows for wit, style and grace.  If any play contradicts the accusation of shallowness or artificiality it’s this deeply felt- and surprisingly revealing - miniature.

Coward is rightly admired for his coruscating wit and - perhaps surprisingly - described A Song at Twilight as a ‘comedy’.  But what the play demonstrates, with startling honesty, is that laughter is often a deflection from the deeper truths that trouble us and, while readily deployed to put others down, is more rarely (but more nobly) used to laugh at oneself.  Paradoxically, the play also recognises that facing up to the truth of life carries its own perils, and while Hugo’s nemesis, Carlotta, may argue for a modern acceptance of his disguised true nature, his long suffering wife, Hilde - Latymer’s shield against the probing eyes of the modern world - prefers a philosophical acceptance of the status quo, and, ultimately, a prioritising of stability over confusion, acceptance over challenge and care over cure.  It could be argued that the conclusion offers Coward convenient cover for his own secrets; alternatively, we can say that he is insisting (in a way that is strikingly relevant today) on the sanctity of the private sphere, and a recognition of the inevitable contradictions of the human spirit. 

Through working on these five productions, it’s now clear to me that Coward is much more than the spoilt, heartless snob of my inherited prejudices.  There’s something restless and revealing, paradoxical and inquiring, about this greatest of twentieth century English dramatists.  Though I suspect that Coward might pooh-pooh the comparison, I increasingly see him as our own answer to Chekhov and Ibsen, those great masters of hidden depth and disguised feeling in drama.  It’s certainly right that he is still read and staged by those of us who want the theatre to speak profoundly about the great truths of life.

Puppetgate

The furore about All in a Row raises fundamental questions about art and politics.  What started out as a whisper is now a roar, even before the play has opened.  But what does it all add up to?

I’ve not read Alex Oates’ new play but, as far as I can tell, it’s concerned with the family of a young boy called Laurence, who’s autistic, non-verbal and occasionally violent.   The action takes place on the evening before he is to be sent off to a residential institution where, it’s thought, he’ll be better managed.  I gather that the play goes out of its way to avoid the usual consolations and tries to dramatise, instead, the challenges faced by families of some young people with autism.  

In many ways this is admirable.   Drama which pretends that parenting a child with severe neuro-disabilities is straightforward, is simply failing the truth test, as I can testify from my own experience, among many others.   Certainly the statistics of marital breakdown, depression, joblessness and illness among such families testify to extraordinary levels of stress.  And the steady erosion of statutory support under austerity makes the situation even harder, while the fight for provision, believe me, becomes all consuming.

But it’s not the attempt to describe these realities that has provoked such a reaction. The fury is directed at the decision to use a puppet to represent the autistic young lad.  This, the objectors argue, treats him as a non human, as an ‘other’.   The writer may see Laurence as the object of his family’s concerns, their love and frustration even, but in this way of doing things he isn’t being seen as an individual in his own right, as a human being with human feelings and agency.  And this artistic ‘othering’ reflects broader concerns about the way neuro-disabled people are regarded in society at large, especially in the light of the many accounts of appalling treatment of autistic people in specialist ATUs (Assessment and Treatment Units) and other ‘care’ facilities. It’s not surprising that it has triggered this reaction, as I warned last year when I first heard about it.

The producer, director and writer have, to an extent, tried to engage with their critics, though I gather that the National Autistic Society has withheld its blessing.  The team states that in creating this production they sought out the opinion of many autistic people and their families, and Alex Oates insists that he’s worked as a carer of people with learning disabilities and is deeply committed to the cause.  They also point to the creative potential of puppetry, and reference the power of the best puppet theatre, as well as the impact of the masked face in ancient and oriental theatre.   There is, I believe, goodwill lost behind this confusion.

The creative team also suggests, perhaps with justification, that it would be hard for a very young child actor with severe learning disabilities to act this part.  Of course, the same would be the case with a non-disabled child, and there are always practical and ethical issues with representing children in drama. Indeed, when I wrote (and directed) my own play, All Our Children, about the Nazi murder of disabled young people, I decided to keep the victims offstage.  Not only did I know the practical challenges of introducing very young children with severe disabilities onstage, I decided to focus on the society that ‘othered’ such people in such a way that they were condemned to death for leading ‘lives unworthy of life’, and regarded these victims as the play’s silent, slaughtered heroes.   And when casting Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, I was confronted with the impossible problem of a character with quadriplegic cerebral palsy who, in her mother’s dream, has to get out of her wheelchair and make an announcement while jumping with a skipping rope.  Regretfully, but perhaps rightly, I opted for a non-disabled actor for the part.

The fact is the theatre is a peculiarly difficult art form and anyone who works in it knows that we’re always confronted with compromise.   I gather that the author of All in a Row wants to dramatise the violence that some young autistic people are capable of (violence isn’t unique to autists, of course), and the producers were concerned that a very young disabled actor would find this too upsetting.  But just as a play about the sexual abuse of children would find a way of referring to the subject without involving a child actor in its depiction, so this could have been referred to without being directly represented. There are always ways round these challenges, if you think clearly.

But the deep problem with All in a Row isn’t an aesthetic one, it’s a political one.  Or rather, it’s an example of what can go wrong when aesthetic concerns are allowed to trump real life imperative. It reminds us not to commit to formal innovations without working out what the results will say about - and to - the people in the real life situation.  Brecht always said that new content should inspire new forms, and not the other way round, and he was right in insisting that we should always refer our artistic decisions to the real world beyond the stage door.   If you have no experience of neuro-disability but are concerned about the representation of women in the theatre, imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet was represented by a blow up doll and you’ll see why this decision is so offensive, such a travesty of where we all hope we’ve got to.  

For, if you agree - as I repeat ad nauseam and I suspect Alex Oates would concur - that neuro-disabled people are ignored by culture and society at large, then we desperately need representations that suggest our shared humanity, the things we have in common, not what divides us.  Yes, we should show the realities of segregation, division and suffering and, yes, we should be sober-minded and honest about some of the fundamental challenges posed (social, more than personal), but if we don’t find ways of communicating what unites us, our efforts will simply add to the pain that so many disabled people and their carers experience in everyday life.   ‘The wall is down that parted their fathers’, Bottom declares proudly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in the world of disability and neuro-divergence, our absolute duty is to pull down walls, not build new ones. As I tried to say in my own play, all our children are worthy of dignity, love and the very best that society can give them.

It’s often said that the chief task of drama is to bring to the stage the full range of human experience, in all its scope and difference, its fragility and its visceral reality.  Drama is an encounter with other lives, but through that encounter we can learn about ourselves.   And so it’s dazzlingly clear to me that if you want to create a play about an autistic child and his family, by all means deny the politicians and social workers their reality, even let the parents be represented by shadowy figures, but, please, for God’s sake, give us the breathing blinking eyes of a living young boy, not the corpselike greyness of this ugly puppet.  

People with neuro-disabilities deserve nothing less  We all deserve nothing less.