William Inge Theatre Festival

Peter Shaffer

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The following interview transcript with Peter Shaffer has been carefully broken down into segments involving a variety of topics. Below each segment is a link to the corresponding video clip. Please attribute research sources to Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William Inge Center for the Arts.
Born in Liverpool
	My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London. I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life. I didn’t come south to London until I was nine, and I was only there like three years before the war broke out…the Second World War, which, remember, broke out for English people much earlier than it did for Americans, because you went to war around…yes, around Pearl Harbor time. That was 1941. We…our war began September the 3^rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children. We were evacuated, and I spent my childhood thereafter in many places, many towns in England. I think we moved about eight times during the war, until we became Bevin boys. Prior to that my childhood was spent very uneventfully in the city of Liverpool, which I doubt if I would recognize anymore; it was heavily bombed during the war, and it’s been completely rebuilt, no doubt in the usual hideous manner that cities in England are…have been rebuilt. It was a happy childhood. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Conscripted as a coal miner
	Well, a Bevin Boy is—or was, I should say; it’s long been obsolete—a conscripted coal miner. When they…at the height of the war, in about 1944, I think it was—‘43, ‘44—the government discovered there was about enough coal to run the country—the industrial war effort—for about three weeks, that’s what I was told. And they, I suppose, panicked. It was quite a serious problem, because they had called up all the miners, the miners were now in the army and so forth, so they had to call up, as part of national conscription, people like myself, I would have thought, reasonably unsuited to this job, and made us coal miners. Trained us and sent us down the coal mines, and we worked—that was our national service—we worked in the coal mines. And Bev…it was called after Ernest Bevin, who at that point was the Minister of Labor, and they were known as Bevin Boys, and I worked as a conscript in the coal mines for, well, from 1944 to 1947. My brother, Anthony, my twin brother also, was called up, and we were together, which was a great help. What was the system, as far as I remember, was that it was based, whether you were called or not up to be a miner rather than a soldier, on the last digit or couple of digits on your identification card, or something of that kind…it was like a lottery, really, only a rather malignant lottery. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

London actors
	I grew up in a city where the working actor was Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft and Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson and Edith Evans and Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield and so on and so forth, and they were all working in theatres all up and down the avenue and all over London. And, during the war there was that, in particular, great company. I think they still constitute my most magical of all theatrical memories, the great company headed by Lawrence Oliver and Ralph Richardson, when they did the Henry IV plays, and I remember seeing, I’ll never forget, as long as I live, seeing Henry IV Part I with Ralph Richardson playing Falstaff, by far the greatest Falstaff I’ve ever seen and Lawrence Olivier playing Hotspur, a part he was born to play. Or Olivier playing Richard III, which was much better on the stage. He became later, a little like a pantomime uncle, on the movies, but still very fine, but it was miraculously brought off on the stage. It was really dangerous and astonishing. I remember to this day an incident of when he began the play, how he began it, “Now is the winter of our discontent,” of this strange reptilian limping creature coming to the footlights, coming into a little door at the back of the stage, and the walled garden which the set representing and beginning to say “Now is the…” and then paused, turning, hobbling back up the stage, so all you saw was this misshapen humped back, arriving at the little door he’d just come into and locking it, locking the door and then coming back and saying “Now is the winter…” and we were his. It’s the difference between good and great acting choices. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Fantasies of playwriting
	And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy. I mean, you know, all your wishes could be granted, what would you like to be? Here I am now a celebrated doctor. What a wonderful idea. Okay, that gives you some idea that you want to go into medicine, and I think—I suppose I had, I can’t quite remember whether I had, fantasies about being a working playwright, but I probably did. I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did. And in the coal mines, to while away the infinite tedium of pulling trucks of coal about, I would select, in my head, a play of Shakespeare, and play the entire role through the entire shift, in my head. I’d do that quite regularly. And, I now realize that I probably knew by heart, with many, probably, mistakes, if called upon to do it, the leading roles, particularly the tragic roles of, say, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and would play them quite regularly, in my own head, throughout the shifts in the coal mine. In reality I would have made a very bad actor. I can’t tell the same story twice in the same way without wanting to vary it and alter it, and I don’t think I could have any kind of technical fixatives to make me reproduce the same performance, twice running. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Playwriting as a living?
	I suppose I was living, at the end of my spell in Cambridge, in a state of muted panic, because I saw people going off and immersing themselves in vocations and being excited to get up in the morning and learn something about their chosen professions, and I could feel no enthusiasm for doing any of this at all. I was completely baffled by it, and yoked to this was a—it was fairly paralyzing, as a result—was this firm, sort of puritanical belief that, if I enjoyed doing something, like going to the theatre, it was either, well, a legitimate pleasure reserved for one’s leisure hours, or, if I was going to actually do it for a living, it was wrong, because that was too frivolous. You know, I don’t blame anybody else for this. I blame myself. I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything. They say, “Oh, my father,” who incidentally was a businessman, “repressed me and told me, ‘You can’t do that.’” And I think he would be--would have been--was in fact nervous, of my wanting to write for a profession because, I think, he considered it liable to be extremely un-lucrative. But, I wouldn’t dream of blaming him for promulgating edicts against doing it. I was an accomplice in my own frustration. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Coming to America
	I left England. I found myself unemployable after having come down from Cambridge, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do or be. I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England. And I went off to New York and earned my living at Doubleday selling books and in the public library, in the acquisitions department. I don’t know which job was more tedious…I think the library was, actually. Librarians as a race tend to be tedious. And, I lived in Hell’s Kitchen, as it then was called, and still may be, for all I know. It was West 47^th Street in a rather dreary flat, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience, no. I didn’t make the most of New York; I think I was a bit intimidated by it. And I was there for three years, and I returned to England in 1954 and joined a firm of music publishers called Boosey & Hawkes. Boosey & Hawkes, they were very, very fine music publishing firm, and they had all, or did in those days, had all the great contemporary composers on their publishing list. I mean by great composers Benjamin Britten, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Copland. And I worked for a while in the symphonic music department, and I lasted there a year, and would have lasted longer if the symphonic music department itself had been able to continue with its need for employees, but it didn’t. Publishing music, as such, shrank and shrank and shrank. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

A detective novel
	But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own. I don’t quite know why I did it now, I think just to, again, for amusement, and then my brother Anthony, who was also interested, in fact very much more interested in detective fiction than I am, or I was, teamed up with me, and we wrote two together. He provided the plot of the second and third one, and I did the writing. And they were quite successful, and they were fun to do, and then, you know, that was it. We didn’t do any more. And, I’ve never written another detective story since, but I do think there’s an enormous virtue, for a playwright, in studying the detective story…form, or the thriller form--they’re two separate kinds of form, of course—because narrative, and the organization of material to show it off to its best advantage, its most suspenseful advantage, and its most coherent flow towards a prepared climax, is one of the disciplines that playwrights should have, should want to have, despite what some professors of drama may say. I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright. I think I benefited from doing that. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Five Finger Exercise: Getting Produced
	My first stage play was a play about a family, an unhappy family, divided against itself, and it was originally called Retreats. It had five characters in it: a mother, a father, a young adolescent son, a young adolescent daughter, and a catalyst figure of a German tutor, and that was finally called Five Finger Exercise, and it was produced by HM Tennent, which was the biggest producing firm in England at that time, headed by a brilliant man called Hugh Beaumont, known as Binky Beaumont. And the first day I went there, I gave it to a friend, the manuscript, who gave it to a girlfriend of his, who was a casting director for them, and forgot all about it—I don’t mean I forgot the play, but I forgot that I’d given it, that anything could happen with it, in this way. And a few months passed, and then, one day, the phone rang in my flat, and a voice said: “This is HM Tennent,” and Mr. Perry,” who turned out to be the partner of Mr. Beaumont, who I just mentioned, “Mr. Perry would like to see you tomorrow, if it’s convenient.” And I said, “What about?” I couldn’t sort of put it together, and the secretary said, “Would 2:30 be convenient?” And I said, “Yes.” And I went to his office, I’ll never forget it…it was in—no doubt there are still producing offices there—in the dome of the Globe Theatre on Shaftsbury Avenue. I went up in this tiny elevator, it only took one at a time, and John Perry was an enchanting Anglo-Irish, rather eccentric figure. He was the partner of Hugh Beaumont, and he looked at me and he said, in a rather grandly, drawly way that he had—I can’t quite remember the way he speak, (imitating Perry) but it was quite high up and drawly—he said, “You’ve got to have a maid.” And I said, “Well, I can’t afford one.” And he said, “Don’t be silly. I mean, of course, in your play.” And I thought, this was extraordinary--slightly surrealist conversation, “Why, exactly, should I have a maid?” And he said, “Because this woman, who is this very affected woman, who is the mother of these children, has taken this elaborate country cottage, which she’s not going to do the cooking herself, she’s obviously too incompetent for that. You’ve got to have a maid, and that’s that.” And I said, “Well what would the maid do?” And he said, “I don’t know, make the soufflés, I don’t know. Devise something for her.” And I said, “Well, Mr. Perry I don’t really like those sorts of plays where maids come in and answer telephones and explain the plot and all that kind of thing, and it’s called Five Finger Exercise, it’s a study for five people. I don’t want to waste time on maids, and by the way, does this mean that you’re interested in doing this play?” And he said, “Of course, or you wouldn’t be here, would you? Would John Gielgud be alright as a director?” And what had happened was that he had been going on a holiday, to Venice, Mr. Perry had, and had read this script, because the girlfriend of the guy…the casting director, who was the girlfriend of the guy I’d given the manuscript to six months before had shown it to Mr. Perry who had read it and liked it on the plane to Venice and had been met in Venice by his old friend, John Gielgud, and John Gielgud had said, “Have you got anything for me to direct, I’m terribly bored?” And John, because John is like that, he’s always looking for new work, and John Perry said, “Why don’t you read this?” And John Gielgud sat down on the beach and read it, and liked it, and said, “I’d love to do it.” ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Five Finger Exercise: The story and the cast
	The German boy is employed by this rather affected woman as a tutor for her daughter, and I think that Freddy Brisson, who produced the play, said to me one day, “You know, they don’t…it’s not very common, this, in America. People don’t have tutors. It’s rather unlikely. It’d be an extremely affected mother, who actually had a tutor for her son, and it’s a little la-di-da, and couldn’t you explain it, at least.” You know, he didn’t want me to remove the tutor, but to explain it. So I had to rewrite a lot of the first seven minutes of the play to explain it and to set the scene more of the fact, the affectations of the mother and not…well, let me put it like this, who the audience would be dealing with is a woman who wanted very much to have a country cottage because it was chic and fashionable, not because she liked the country at all, and it simply transplanted a rather over-decorated London house into Suffolk, and all this had to be explained to the audience, which is quite right, I think one has to explain. I deeply believe in very clear expositions. It was missing in Washington. It went very well indeed, and did run quite a long time—I think it ran a year at the Music Box Theatre in New York. It had Jessica Tandy playing the mother, who was very good, and a very good actor called Roland Culver played the father, and, as I said, Brian Bedford, who went on to live here, in this country, and have a very distinguished career, and a very fine actor who is now at the National Theatre, has been for many years, at the National Theatre in Great Britain, called Michael Bryant, and the fifth member of the Five Finger Exercise was Juliet Mills, who was the daughter of John Mills, who played Pamela, the daughter. And it was really very exciting doing it here. It was the first time I had returned to America since my abortive stay in Hell’s Kitchen. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Five Finger Exercise: The film
	It (the film) was set in America, which was wrong. Richard Beymer played the boy, and he appeared uneasy in it, so that was wrong casting. Rosalind Russell played the mother, and I found the performance excessive and shrill. She told us that she was dominating and possessive. She told us, she signaled everything. And I didn’t care for it. It seemed to be over, it seemed to be excessive, and therefore slightly unreal. The melodrama was pumped up by the actors in…instead of being allowed, very quietly, to grow. I think it was either Brooks Atkinson or Walter Kerr who referred to the quietness of the play. One of the reviews contained a reference to the constant brushing of doors closing. Now I was surprised when I read this, because I thought it was actually a rather vigorous and even noisy play. There were many confrontation scenes. But of course, by contrast with American domestic dramas, it was quiet, and should have been kept in that convention in the movie. But it became a kind of brawling American confrontational drama in the family, in the wrong way. I think that’s what went wrong with it, so that it, to me, it appeared shrill and coarse. It lost delicacy and it lost, what Shakespeare called the local habitation. It’s not really set anywhere. I think that a lot of things that are in the past, in movies, translated to another place, loose by that. I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he’s writing about. I think, you just can’t move them about, you know. From Venice it’s a little Venice, California, or whatever you’re doing. It’s a great mistake. I think that’s what went wrong there. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Private Ear and The Public Eye
	The Private Ear and The Public Eye, the bill was called, yes. It wasn’t written for Maggie, no, no, I didn’t even know her then, but she came to play them, yes. She had just opened in London in The Rehearsal, I think it was, yes it was, The Rehearsal of Anouilh, and again, Hugh Beaumont came to me, and presented…I’d done the first play, and I hadn’t written the second yet. I had written the first play called The Private Ear, and I’d given it to Peter Wood who had directed the second version of Five Finger Exercise. Five Finger Exercise was played with a completely new cast after the first run of it, and re-directed by Peter Wood, who was the new, young, sort of, star director, protégé of Tennent's, and he directed the second version, and I sent him The Private Ear, and he said, “This is fine,” because I thought that originally it might go for television. And he said, “No, no, it’s a stage play, and what you need to do is to write something to go with it.” And I said, “Well, I do have another one-act play coming along, which is almost like…well, it’s convenient, because it is almost for the same resources of three people, they’re both three-handers, and so I wrote that, and it was done, and Hugh Beaumont rang me up and said, “I’ve got the perfect person to play. Have you ever heard of a gal called Maggie Smith?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, go and see The Rehearsal of Anouilh, which is playing at the moment,” and I did, and I thought she was extraordinary. And she was, you know, cast overnight, and she did it. She had a great success in it, and she and a great friend of hers, called Kenneth Williams, they’d been together in a revue before that, and they were great, great, great friends. Kenneth died, alas, about two years ago, and Kenneth was a very popular comedian at that time, he played Cristoforou, the detective, and she played both parts. She played the bewildered little girl in the first, The Private Ear, played the secretary who’d met a boy at a concert by accident and was invited to this disastrous evening dinner, and had to listen to music she didn’t like. She was absolutely dazzling all the way through it. rs. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Royal Hunt of the Sun: John Dexter, director
	We were talking about that stage direction, “They now climb the Andes.” I’d written that in a rather peacocky way on a page by itself, and I thought, “Oh, this is going to cause some trouble, because of the…you know, he may just look at me and say, ‘How the hell do you imagine I’m going to do that?’” I don’t know. But I had some ideas, and I opened my mouth to say something at this point, I hadn’t before, interrupted, to explain the sort of thing I had in mind. He, I think, assumed that I was sort of trying to take it back, the idea of this, kind of bold, mimetic theatre. I said, “About this line, ‘They now climb the Andes Mountains.’” And he said, “If you take that out, I’m not directing.” And I’d found my director. I mean, this was the kind of theatre I wanted to get into and never had. I mean my first play, Five Finger Exercise, is a conventionally set play in a living room, and so are The Private Ear and The Public Eye, but the theatre I more and more wanted to write was the theatre where you could write a line like, “They climb the Andes,” or have 3000 Indians massacred onstage, which happened at the end of the first act, or indeed have a huge resurrection myth enacted by actors in huge funerary copper…gold masks with triangular eyes, waiting for the sun to revivify the emperor, Atahuallpa, and validate their myth of light. That was the kind of theatre I wanted to do, and it was really the only kind of theatre John was, basically, interested in doing. So we absolutely clicked. And I must say, he delivered the most stunning production. Whatever anyone thinks of the play, they couldn’t deny that that production was one of the great productions of its era in terms of direction. It was stunning. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Royal Hunt of the Sun: Emblematic Theatre
	The end of the first act, when out of this huge golden emblem of the sun, which is at the back of the stage, when the Indian, defenseless, unarmed Indians, were massacred by the Spaniards in the square at Cajamarca. The Indians—and it was all done as a huge mime of slaughter in which the Indians would die, and rise again, and again be slain, and finally, with this violent drumming and this terrifying noise of dying and slaughter and musical representations of this, the entire cast of Indians raced to the back of the stage, where this gigantic sun, which was twenty foot open, and reached up and pulled out of the sun an enormous cloth of blood-red silk, so that the sun appeared to be vomiting blood all over the stage and ululating and shrieking with these feathers on their heads and these wild gestures, they flung this across the stage, pegged it down, and then dashed out, and fled, up the aisles and away and disappeared. And all you saw was this—because of the air bubbling under the scarlet silk—you saw this, what appeared to be lake of blood, bubbling. It was the most sinister and sickening and terrifying image, and I would watch the audience—and meanwhile John had put the houselights up, it was the intermission, very slowly and gently—and the audience would be completely unaware of this, they would watch for about half a minute, they were just watching what was, in fact, a piece of material, just stirring in the wind. But by that time they were in Cajamarca contemplating the horror of what had happened, and one was forcibly introduced…wonderfully and thrillingly and forcibly introduced to emblematic theatre. It was a piece of cloth, that was all it was. And no amount of actors pretending to lie about as corpses could have done half what that did. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Royal Hunt of the Sun: The masks
	My only piece of contribution to the design of the play was to say to Michael Annals who was a great designer, and he designed The Royal Hunt of the Sun very, very wonderfully, and he said, “Listen, I’ve used up all the feathers and all the pheasant feathers and the cock feathers and all the beads, and I don’t know what to do for the end. I’ve done masks, all the peasants are in masks, everybody’s in masks. What can I do?” I said, “Have you ever seen an Inca funerary mask? They have these great triangular eyes, and they’re made of gold, but not very good gold, there’s a lot of copper alloy in it, so that a kind of red smear comes down the cheeks of the mask. They’re very strange-looking things,” I said, “Why don’t you make one of those up and see what it looks like?” And he did, and he brought it to me, and we both looked at it and thought, imagine nineteen of those onstage, and that’s what we had. It was totally dark, the rest of the stage, except for the priests, the dead body of Atahuallpa, lying there, strangled, dead, the priests, wearing these—in the half-light—very, very eerie masks, and funeral gloves and otherwise black terra cotta robes, nothing else. And slowly the Sun coming up and this finger of light traveling across the stage and moving over the body, touching it, and of course, nothing happens, and then moving on. And the masks were looking up at the sky, watching with such expectation, following and following, and then looked down with such an air of defeat and oppression, and slowly, one by one, they left the stage. You watched the fall of Peru. But what deeply fascinated me was that a very twentieth century audience, a very sophisticated audience, would watch this—and I would have sworn that probably very, very, very few of them actually believed in, even though they were believing Christians, scarcely believed in the act of resurrection, possibly for Christ, but certainly not for anybody else, certainly not for Atahuallpa, found it deeply improbable, but standing--and I would stand and watch them, very often, while this scene was on, and the entire audience was leaning forward, and almost, well, willing it to happen, wanting it to happen, as if one had struck one of the most profound nerves communally in the world, which is the desire for eternal life, the desire for immortality…deeper than anything else. And when I was looking at it, this intense desire to see it happen, even though if the actor had then sprung up to life the next minute they would have said it would be silly. It was truly extraordinary, and people would come up to me afterwards and say, how do you get the masks to move? They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed…that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all. All they actually did was raise them and lower them. What they were seeing was a reflection of their own emotional input, their own desires, their longing for it to work. It was way beside reason--under reason or over reason or however you like to put it—it had nothing to do with logic and reason. It had to do with something much deeper. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Royal Hunt of the Sun: The ending
	The other thing that was even more extraordinary was the end of the play, when, as you know, Atahuallpa was executed on trumped-up charges by the Spaniards, the Inca Atahuallpa. He kept his part of the bargain. He was captured at that massacre, and he kept his part of the bargain. He said, “If you free me I will fill this room with gold,” and he did. He raped Peru to fill the room with gold, and then of course, they broke their word and they accused him of having more than one wife and all sorts of rubbish, and killed him. When he came to be sentenced, he was offered two deaths. The first, to be burnt as a heretic and as a pagan, and as a more merciful death—and I suppose it just is—provided he became a Catholic, converted, he would be garroted, he would be strangled from behind. And Atahuallpa agreed to the second condition, and I was very puzzled for a long time as to why he did, because he--ghastly as burning is--he was not a coward, and for him--who for his whole people was the incarnation of sun, he was called the Son of the Sun, it was his great title—to have converted to another religion which he utterly despised, to convert to Christianity…it seemed to me a very odd thing, a strange thing for him to have done. And, you know, why? It couldn’t have been just to get a more merciful death, although who would have blamed him if he’d chosen that. And I, for a long time, puzzled. I didn’t quite know why he did it, and it was kind of a block in me about writing the final scenes of the play until I read in some book--I think it was a French book, and now I can’t quite remember why I read it—a footnote which illuminated things very much for me. And it said--and typically, I have not been able to identify this book since, but I know I read it—it said, the Inca and all his people regarded himself as the Son of the Sun, the Child of the Sun, and if he died, when it wasn’t the sun’s time for him to die, either accidentally or in battle or was killed by an enemy, provided he kept his body in one piece, the Sun would revive him the next day. I’ll never forget that moment. I got a shiver down my back, and I thought, of course, that’s why he did it. That’s why he converted. He’d be strangled, yes, but because his body was kept in one piece and would be exposed to public view all night and buried in the morning, when the Sun rose, he believed, and they believed--all his subjects believed, the priests believed, everybody believed—that it would touch his body and revive him. And, I thought, oh, but that is the most extraordinary last scene of a play that I can imagine, and indeed, that’s what happened. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Black Comedy: A Chinese convention
	Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It’s the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play. The play is a play about gesture, about what chair is being removed from that room at exactly that moment on what line. It’s a piece of music, and although I wrote it very carefully and put in some things, in parentheses, when I wrote it, I talked to John Dexter and I said, you know, this is very much ad libitum until we get it into the rehearsal room until we see how much we need and who is saying what, because, Albert Finney was the original man who played Harold, and he has a long and vainglorious monologue about who cheated who in a shop, and it’s all very boring and very self-righteous on his part, and it is meant to accompany, the removal from the room, under cover of darkness, of every stick of furniture in the room, and John Dexter and I went to Albert and we said, “Now how do we do this?” Because some of, we hope, some of the monologue is very funny, but if you…we freeze the action every time we get to your funny bits, it’ll look peculiar, and worse than that, it will be very long, because now we remove furniture and you remain silent, and now he speaks, now you speak and he’ll freeze. This can’t be right. And he said, “No, it isn’t. I’ll just keep going.” And I said, “But, you know, if a lot of the, as we hope, a lot of the furniture moving should prove very funny. It’s much funnier than the lines, and your lines will get drowned.” He said, “I don’t care. I don’t care at all. It’s only just padding anyway,” he said, “Let’s just do it.” And so they were played simultaneously, but I couldn’t envisage that fully until I’d seen them do it, and obviously there are certain lines I wanted to emerge, and there are certain actions one wanted to be highlit, and so that was entirely…you know, a wonderful thing about the theatre is that it is an intensely practical art and a practical skill, and rehearsal, which is always the best time, I think almost every playwright would agree, and every actor would probably agree too, is when you put it together, when you try this and that, particularly in comedy. We spent our entire time laughing, slightly hysterically laughing, but laughing all the way through the Black Comedy rehearsals, and I don’t think we would have brought it off—because we had very, very little time—if we didn’t have at that time, the most extraordinary cast. I mean, we had Albert Finney and Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi all in the same cast, and they were great professionals, and so I was able to, you know, work at lighting speed with them, but the text was all there before…when I say it was all there, it was all there when we actually…it wasn’t all there, I’m not telling the truth. It wasn’t all there. It was up there, up to the re-entry of Clea, down the stairs, in the finale, but I did feel that we had seen sight gags continuously since the play began, about being in the dark, and it needed a different kind of joke altogether. I kept thinking, I kept saying to John, it’s another kind of joke, it has to be—I don’t know what—it has to be a sound joke of some kind, and that’s when Mrs. Punnett, the old charlady was born, because I thought it would be a wonderful contrast to have Maggie Smith with a man’s pajama tops on and bare legs, because she has very attractive legs, standing at the top of the staircase, speaking in the voice of an ancient cockney cleaning lady, and that, you know, “I’m just giving your room a bit of a tidy, sir.” Very, very ancient and nosy and malicious old charlady with this very attractive young girl speaking the lines, and believed to be a charlady, it was lovely. That came to us later, and I had to go back to London, it was done at Chichester, the first performance, and write those scenes, and almost phone them in, because we had very little time. We were locked into a schedule, and it was very odd, because where, as in, with Royal Hunt of the Sun, which I done at Chichester the year before, I’d had an enormous rehearsal period, I don’t know what we did in that, I think it was like twelve weeks, it was quite wonderful. It needed it, mind you; a massive production, but we got twelve weeks. The second time, I got rather less than twelve days for the whole thing. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Black Comedy: A laugh
	An enormously fat man in front of me, who hadn’t laughed once, he was the only man in the theatre, I think, who wasn’t laughing, and I decided that if he disliked it, it was a failure--I didn’t know who he was, just that he was in my eye line, and if he liked it it was a success, you know how rational one can be—suddenly laughed like this, like a volcano about to erupt, and he fell in the aisle and began to crawl towards the stage, calling out in a—sobbing with laughter—and calling out to the actors—this was on the first night—crawling down among the knees of the critics and all that saying, “Oh stop it, please stop it, please stop it! I can’t bear it!” It was possibly the nicest thing that ever, ever happened to me as a playwright was that moment, the sheer joy of the man holding his tummy and going, “Please stop it!” It was lovely. That was Black Comedy. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Equus: The genesis
	Well, Equus came about, I think, originally through a conversation I had with a man called James Mossman. He was a great friend of mine. He was, at that time, the head of the BBC arts program, and I was driving with him to his cottage in the country in a very bleak part of England, in Norfolk, in the northeast part of the country, and we were driving to get there through another bleak part of the country which is entirely about stables. I suppose they’re racing stables because Newmarket Racecourse is nearby there, and I’d made some observation about this, so many stables, and James said, “Oh, that reminds me of the most alarming story I heard at dinner this week.” He had been at a dinner of, well, the company was mainly magistrates—what are the equivalent here…not exactly judges, but yeah, sort of civil judges…they haven’t got the power of sentencing you to death, and that kind of thing, but they’re for offenses on a lower level than that—and the company was telling stories, you know, like all professions have the worst stories that ever happened to you. I suppose journalists have what was the worst story you ever covered, and that kind of thing, and they were saying, “What was the worst case you ever tried?” And one person there told a story, according to Jim, to Jim Mossman, and he told the story…or she told the story--it was a woman, apparently—of a boy who was up before her for allegedly having blinded, I think he said, twenty-six horses in an evening, on a day. And apparently, according to James, as well as being the funniest man I ever knew, was also one of the great storytellers, and also a bit of a romancer, he tended to improve on things. Said, “Well this boy was, apparently, the son of very peculiar, rigid parents of a rather strange religious sect, very, ‘Thou shalt not’ about life. Thou shalt not watch television. You shan’t, of course, go with girls, can’t drink, you can’t this, this, and the other. And the boy, very repressed, frightened of the disapproval of his parents, went to work as a stable boy, and there encountered a girl, was apparently enticed by her, and ended up having terrific sex with her on the floor of the stables, watched by the horses.” And that was all James said, actually. I said to him, “But what…you mean he then blinded the horses?” “Yes,” he said. It was almost as if, in a kid of animistic way, he thought the horses would gallop off and tell mommy and daddy, or something like that. I could not get this story out of my head. It was the strangest story I ever heard in my life, and also the…one of the most powerful. You never quite know what’s going to strike your imagination, or something that won’t going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Equus: Talking to the characters
	It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses. It is an unwritable scene. And, you know, playwrights sometimes talk to their characters, and I said, “You know, I don’t know how to write you, I don’t know. I don’t believe this scene, I’ve misheard about this, and I don’t believe that you’d have been so frightened of your parents that you could have done this. What happens if…I bet you you didn’t do it. I bet you couldn’t do it. I bet it never happened. I bet you wanted to do it, but couldn’t do it. I mean, consummate the sexual act with this girl.” And he looked at me in that way, I mean, in one’s imagination, and virtually said, “Of course I didn’t,” and it became much, much plainer to me, that story, there. I said, “But why? Why? Who was there? What prevented it?” “Well the horses prevented it.” “Possibly the source of your worship and involvement was with them.” Now a much more alarming tale began to emerge, and I began to write the story again with this insight, and incorporating much more of the psychiatrist and his own doubts. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Equus: Do your own thing?
	Some people who attacked the play said, “Oh, this is just a charter for lunatics,” to say, you know, just go out and do your own thing. Even the young kids sometimes came up to me, kids and say, “Oh, it’s marvelous. Right on, do your own thing.” And I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Let’s be fair here. I never said ‘do your own thing.’ Would you let Jack the Ripper do his own thing?” You can’t always let people do their own thing. I try and play fair in the play. The boy is not happy and liberated and being tyrannized over by a cruel psychiatrist. Not at all. He’s carefully shown as having nightmares every night of his life, screaming, agonizing nightmares. He’s terrified. He lives in terror. He has, if you like, gone very far into a kind of Dionysia world which is repaying him by tearing him into pieces. He has to be relieved of that, but in the process of being relived from it, Dysart comes to the conclusion that he will also remove the source of his ecstasy and return him to that rather neutered state of a lot of people in the modern world--you see them lining up for buses, going to work any old day in an English suburb—and that he has to do that, because his duty as a doctor compels him to it. Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right. This is very important, to stress this, that it is not just a charter for people to go away and behave ecstatically without any heed to the consequence, or destructively. I mean, his crime is disgusting and appalling, but he is not, by that time, maiming animals. What he is doing is, I imagine, to put it loosely, seeking to evade the judging eye, to put out the eye of God, if you like, or the eye of some judgment on him, to escape, and surely it’s about the divided self in him…what the play’s about. But the mystery of what I believe is called imprinting still remains, very much so, and I think a lot of very strange, unlooked-for things came out of Equus. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Equus: Nudity
	Well, as regards the nude scene, the nude scene at the end of the play is anti-erotic, it’s intended to be anti-erotic, and if you look at the way Dexter lit it, for the moment those two began to take off their clothes, the lighting got whiter and brighter and anti-prurient. It became clinical, so that what you appeared to be watching was almost a kind of operation. When Dysart ended up with that boy at the height of the abreaction being thrown like a landed fish on the bench and wrapped in a blanket, that was not an erotic scene, it was a scene where the patient, eviscerated, is laid on a slab. The erotic scene in the play is the ride, which is done clothed, and in fact, one time we did it naked just to see what would happen, and it looked wrong. It was too literal, and wrong. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Equus: The hooves
	I knew what I didn’t want, and John certainly knew what he didn’t want, which was sort of pantomime horses, horses with sort of, mimetic, very literal horse heads and a lot of whinnying and stamping and waving of tails, and it’s all too jokey, that, once you put tails on they’re comic somehow. Certain things you just do it by instinct, and we tried one thing, and another one…one thing, they had eyes, but that was absurd, and they looked wrong. They also acquired a certain variety of expressions, then, that you don’t want, and one day Napier created these striated masks with these struts of silver, and you looked straight through at the actors’ heads, and the first time I saw it, I thought, “This is marvelous, but it’s very risky. It’s a double image, and isn’t that confusing?” And John said, “But, you’ve written a play about a double image. You’re not actually talking about a horse, alone, are you?” I said, “No.” He said, “But, that…” And I said, “Yeah, maybe. Yes. Yes. Yes, yes.” And so that was that, but we still didn’t have the hooves, and we didn’t have them for a week or two, and John kept sitting…he sat next to me, he always worked with me the same way. We sat at the same table, he’d just pass me notes all the time, just scribble, and he was very discontented. “It’s all so soft, the horses. They’re doing it well, they’re miming, but it’s soft, soft. There’s something missing about all this damn thing.” And then suddenly he stiffened, one morning in rehearsal, and just wrote one word on a pad: H-O-O-F-S. And I said, “Yeah, ‘tis. But those big ones, like Cotharnus, like those big Greek shoes, you know, the theatre, those things that will actually (knocks on table) that’s what you want, is that sound, on wood. That metal biting into the wood. It’s dangerous, or it can be scrapped in that kind of half-wooing, strangely mysterious way that horses suddenly make sort of scraping sounds,” I say, “and tilt them forward a bit so it gives them kind of a nodding and menacing look.” And it worked, almost the first time around, as soon as they…they had to be comfortable, they had to stand on them, of course, and it’s…John’s courage, you know, sometimes I like to think I inspired him, but, my God, did he inspire me. I mean, he led me all sorts of places where I was just sort of…indicating how we would do this, and he’d say, “Well, we try this, and we try this…” He was fearless. He was a great director, possibly the greatest. He was wonderful. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Equus: American vs. English audiences
	When we did the play in England, people were very startled by it, and shocked. It first of all, contained a very graphic and dramatic nude scene, but what I think caused the English to regard—I made a kind of little joke about this, actually—that the English regarded the central event as shocking because it was cruel to horses, and the American audience was fascinated by the bit because it was cruel to psychiatrists. There was some truth in this joke, because when we produced Equus for the first time in New York, the first night—the first time it was ever previewed—it caused a sensation, and people found Peter Firth mesmerizing in the part of the boy, and was absolutely astonishing, and they roared and they all stood up and screamed. I heard a very strange new laughter. Every line of the play that could remotely be interpreted as anti-psychiatric was greeted with applause or laughter. And it was the laughter, I was hearing, of school children let out of school, laughing at someone who was putting down the headmaster. And I thought, and I said to John, “You know the difference between this…” He said, “Well, there’s a difference in the audience.” I said, “Yeah. I think it’s this, that in England you’ll be lucky to find, in any given row, four people who, in any given row, who are in full analysis. In this city, in the first three months of the play, you’ll be lucky to find four people in any given row who are not, and it’s a completely different play here for that reason.” ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Amadeus: The genesis
	Well, the genesis of Amadeus was, I suppose, a long-felt desire to celebrate Mozart in me, but the play actually is not about Mozart, fundamentally. It is about Salieri. It is about the nature of a man’s sense of injustice, and to me the crucial things in the play of Amadeus occur after Mozart’s death, after his death, to some extent, when Salieri, who has been tormenting Mozart throughout the length of the play, finally says to the audience, “I was wondering all this time when I would be punished,” and comes to the conclusion that his punishment lay, because he survived Mozart by thirty years, and was a huge success in Vienna, gigantic success, much more successful on the level of acclaim, than Mozart, when he spent thirty years being called distinguished by people incapable of distinguishing. And this almost horrific situation of being embalmed in fame, which he himself knew to be worthless, interested me very much, and motivated the climax of the play. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Amadeus: Mozart’s music
	I began to read everything I could about Mozart, who I’ve always felt, I suppose, to be the greatest of all composers. I still think so. It’s an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him…he never bores me, and he doesn’t...not only bore me, that’s too strong a word. For example, I think I now know the Beethoven symphonies so well that I don’t much play them anymore or go to concerts. Not because I hate them. On the contrary, I don’t. They are superb, but I think I have received most of what I’m going to receive from them, but I never stop receiving full measure, say from the great Mozart piano concerto or from a visit to The Marriage of Figaro. They are marvelous, inexhaustible works, and they touch an absoluteness in music which I find deeply mysterious and which very few other composers do touch. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Amadeus: Not an objective biography
	Amadeus is not an objective documentary biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. For a start, he never called himself Amadeus. He signed himself, when he did, Amadé, which is, you know, is the French version of it, and a lot of people who criticize the play on that level appear never to have heard of fiction. I would stand by a lot of the details of the play, not actually the giggle, which now irritates me, and I sort of regret it. I think it’s used too much, and I’ve taken it out of the printed version of the play, actually, because it’s liable to be misused and made too much of, but the scatology is true, and a lot of it I got from, or the idea of it, from his letters, particularly to his cousin, Anna Maria Thekla, and I figure if a guy writes scatology, his conversation must be fairly scatological too. Perhaps not the other way around, but certainly that way, I think, it’s a fairly safe assumption. And a lot of people don’t—for the nineteenth century, for example—could not accept the idea of a man writing ineffable music, say the slow movement of the “Clarinet Concerto,” who also is telling fart jokes, but I mean I find that as the great paradox that excites a dramatist, that sort of thing. Part of him is very infantile. He was held back, a lot, I think, in his development by his father. He wrote a lot of letters to his father which either conceal or evade the truth. They have the force, not exactly of lying, but of doctored truth, because he was frightened of his father and always wanted to please him too much, although he did defy him in the end and married the girl that Leopold didn’t want him to marry, and all of that is true. His addiction to billiards and dancing is true, his dressing up is true, but you see, he didn’t…it’s amazing that he had any time to do anything but write, because the outpouring of music is so vast, and the wonder is not only that it’s so prolific, but that it is so perfect once he got started. I think Mozart’s--apart from one or two works written in Salzburg--his greatness begins with his arrival in Vienna and the ten years—1781 to 1791 when he just writes one masterpiece after another. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Amadeus: A rewritten ending
	I particularly wanted to rewrite the end. You see, the problem with the Mozart-Salieri story is that there is no end, in life. One survived the other by thirty-two years. It’s not much of a climax. There has to be a scene between them, a confrontation scene in a play. That’s what drama demands. And I had to supply it. The first scene that I supplied, which involved a long confessional from a drunken and slightly demented Mozart that didn’t really please me very much, and Salieri just stood in a mask and heard it all, and I always wanted to rewrite it, and in Washington I got my chance, and I opened up an enormous can of beans, because I think I wrote a different confrontation scene for that play every night for a week--Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and the actors, Ian McKellen and Tim Curry were superbly supportive. I said, “You know, I’m probably driving you mad,” and they said, “Never mind. We’ll learn a new scene every night, because we want it to be absolutely right." They were marvelous. And Peter would stage it, stage the scene every day for me, he’d set it up, and slowly, over that immensely tormented and tormenting week, we put…we inched up on that scene and, “Well, that’s not it but it’s almost it. That’s not it, but it’s almost there…” And finally I reached what I wanted, and I remember the day when I did. It was the day when I realized the scene concerned Mozart offering the Requiem as an example of his work to the messenger, the masked messenger, and for Salieri literally to eat the manuscript, to devour it, spit it out, as if it were both desirable and poison, and actually to say to him, “We’re both poisoned, Amadeus. I by you and you by me.” And it is, of course, melodrama. It obviously never happened, couldn’t have happened. I like it, that it couldn’t have happened. It became pure theatre at that point. I wanted an atmosphere more like one of the Tales of Hoffmann, using the iconography of Mozart’s last year, the grey messenger. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Amadeus: Peter Hall, director
	In answer to your question about Peter Hall’s contribution, which was massive in all directions—it looked wonderfully elegant, and he presided brilliantly over the whole evening, but in Washington he supported this terrific work of refining and refining and approaching the climax of the play by brilliantly, or brilliantly staging all the versions that I did, all five or six, but particularly the last one when he moved in and staged the eating of the manuscript brilliantly, and the tearing off of the mask, not as a bad director would have done it, from the front, but from the back of lifting it up from behind with this man sitting there, chewing the “Kyrie” in his mouth. I mean, it was an extraordinary image, and Peter can be relied upon to find a great image, many times, and he did, in that. He had many striking images. I loved all the projections in it, the most beautiful projections of the Prata(?) and the Masonic Lodge--just an emblem hung above the stage. It all looked so beautiful. I loved the idea of an ice-blue plastic set, but it was plastic that just shone so you could see the reflections of the actors, those gilded encrusted courtiers moving about underneath, you saw their reflections underneath like figures in a great frozen pond. It was marvelous. I loved it. I loved the look of it, I loved the fact that a candle was lit at the very beginning of the play and burnt all evening on the clavier, the instrument, in the corner, just guttering away during the death of Mozart, just going out at the end of that, and then in the ensuing black mood and black light of the play, Salieri coming forward and saying “I was born a pair of ears, and nothing else,” starting on the end of the play in that atmosphere of ruin, gutted candles, and apparent oblivion for Mozart, but then the music of Mozart’s really conquering at the end. You ended with the last four chords of the Masonic funeral music, and Peter saw very clearly the same vision and physical action and made it work. He’s the most patient and the most admirable, and imaginative, and calm of directors. He’s not, I’m sure, calm inside. I’m sure he’s a furnace of creativity, but he has, in his long and creative life, discovered the most wonderful calm in a rehearsal situation ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Amadeus: Filming in Prague
	Prague is the most complete eighteenth century city you can find, that way we could still do it, and many of the streets, the cobble streets, are exactly as Mozart would have known them, still. That rather severe, geometric late eighteenth century architecture is still there, and was very easy to film. We didn’t have to request the removal of too many, you know, shop signs, or wires, or television aerials, or anything, and that was very good. Although, of course, the acting, the actors were, well, they were English-speaking, but they were either American or English, but there were…it was a mélange of accents, which I think is rather a good thing. I think, in fact, that Vienna, in the eighteenth century, would have been a mélange of accents. It wouldn’t have all spoken the same way. It was kind of melting pot, a meeting place of many cultures, Vienna. One was trying to parallel that, although I think that, in certain areas, it does become too specifically American, and the sound isn’t…it sometimes gets too regional. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Amadeus: Milos Foreman, director
	Atmospherically it’s extraordinary. It does create the atmosphere of central Europe, very much in its intrigue and its gossip and its sordidness. It’s not all that, sort of mushwa acting, and snuff and lorgnettes and all that nonsense you’d usually see in eighteenth century films done by Hollywood. It’s got a kind of reality about it, a smell and a taste, and I think a