"Ah, but underneath!" Gay playwrights

“The love that dare not speak its name” has become the love that just won’t shut up. So said Canadian writer Robertson Davies. Certainly after decades, centuries (depending on who you talk to and what history you read) of repression, homosexuals have taken full advantage of new freedom to express themselves, and heck, just be themselves and not have to hide. I’d suggest this is a natural reaction to being allowed to be, after so long. Not that the struggle is over, not here with bullying and bashings, and certainly not in more repressive regimes where homosexuality is illegal and severely punished. So I dare say the love that won’t shut up will keep talking for some time yet.

Sean O’Connor is a London-based theatre producer and director, and I’ve just read his 1997 book, Straight Acting: Popular gay drama from Wilde to Rattigan.  It struck me as an odd title, as there was very little gay drama as such (not on stage, at least) in that period. But O’Connor is writing about drama written by gay playwrights, who were enormously successful. His main focus is on Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, with sidelines on many others.

I was a bit worried that this book was going to militantly homosexual ie insisting that the plays have to be read from a homosexual point of view, cannot be appreciated unless read in that way, and that you straights have been missing the point for decades. I was completely wrong.  This is an intelligent survey of the writers’ work, with an acknowledgment and an understanding of the lives of these men, and the conditions under which they worked. O’Connor is a good writer.

The most important thing is that these authors wrote good plays. They worked for audiences whether or not they were aware of any possible gay subtext. We’re not that much smarter now than they were then, though it’s pretty to think so. Audiences could spot the characters that were sexually ambiguous just as easily as we can. Nor did the writers simply make all their gay characters women. O’Connor calls this accusation of ‘literary transvestism’  “easy, but not helpful.” Blanche Dubois is not Tennessee Williams in drag and it’s an insult to suggest she is. O’Connor calls this typical of the misogyny and homophobia of theatre criticism. Yes, in a different age, all these men would probably have written different plays. But the plays they wrote were so successful, and often so good, that one wonders what would have been better had they been different.

Rattigan in particular was quite open about what he would have changed if he had been able. The American version of “Separate Tables” was supposed to be quite different. If you don’t know the work, it is two one-act plays that take place at the same English boarding house, some months apart. The main characters are doubled, while the secondary characters appear in both. The second play concerns The Major, who by the conclusion is revealed as both a bogus officer and a man of dubious sexual practices. As written, he is interfering with women in cinemas. On Broadway, free from the Lord Chancellor’s interference, Rattigan wanted to make him homosexual. In fact, you can read the re-written scenes in Rattigan’s collected works. But the US producer thought it would lose audience and went with the original. The movie also went with the original, though it merged the two stories into one timeline. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were going to play both couples at the heart of each story but at that point stepped aside. David Niven gave his best performance as The Major, and won an Oscar for it. I don’t know if the play gets produced nowadays with the original scenes or the alternative scenes. And I don’t suppose it matters.

After reading O’Connor’s book, I bought second-hand The Rattigan Version: The Theatre of Character by B A Young, which is a little dull and disappointing. After O’Connor’s book I was hoping for something more interesting and insightful about his plays.  The readings are shallow. Perhaps Young felt constrained about delving too deeply into the plays with his friend Rattigan still alive, or perhaps he isn’t a good enough writer. Either way, it was a letdown. But Young is right; Rattigan’s is the theatre of character. The plot may be thin, but the characters stay with you.

I read O’Connor is making a movie of Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea,’ one of Rattigan’s major successes. I saw ‘In Praise of Love’ on the West End many years ago, which I thought was a lovely play, and enjoyed the recent film of ‘‘The Winslow Boy,’ less so ‘The Browning Version.’ Rattigan did fall out of favour as too polite and middle-class. But many writers fall out of favour, to our loss, only to come back. Perhaps O’Connor will bring us back Rattigan. 

PS Both these books are out of print - libraries and second hand dealers are they go if you want a read.

"I'll think about it tomorrow." Vivien Leigh

I’m not sure what constitutes a tragic life. I’m sure I don’t have one certainly. Some people’s lives might pass through tragedy or end in one, but I’m not sure you can have a tragic life. I mean, the whole life? It seems unlikely. Maybe those who are born into abject poverty or famine and die early, millions of whom we never hear, but outside of that, such a description reads as indulgent.

Vivien Leigh is one of whom it is often said had a tragic life. There was sadness in her life, haunted by bipolar disorder and battling tuberculosis. Her manic episodes were frightening to behold. They contributed to the end of her marriage to Laurence Olivier and cost her work in her career. And the TB eventually killed her at the young age of 53 in 1967, which sounds like the stuff of melodrama transplanted into late 20^th Century.

However, reading Alexander Walker’s 1987 biography Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh, one is not left with an impression of tragedy. The woman had so much joie de vivre I think she would kick you in the shins if you described her life as tragic or even sad. She had a happy childhood, three long-term relationships with the best men for that time of her life, a career that can be called, with all due caution, wildly successful, and died loved and cared for and wealthy, and had tremendous fun along the way.

Her hospitality and generosity were legendary. She took delight in decorating her stately homes and transforming their gardens. Friends had to put a curb on her spending for opening night gifts lest her impulses lead to her over-spending. Guests at her homes would find fresh flowers from her own garden, cut by her own hand, every day. The weekends, for multiple guests, would be filled with food, drink, games and sports. Few could keep up with her for long, but many loved trying.

She is a testament to the power of positive thinking. Her first sight of both first husand Leigh Holman and second Laurence Olivier prompted her to say to a friend,  “That’s the man I’m going to marry” and she did. She read “Gone with the Wind” and told friends who were positing her and Olivier as Rhett and Scarlett “Larry won’t play Rhett but I shall play Scarlett O’Hara” and similarly declared she would play Blanche Dubois and took that role from theatre to film to her second academy award. Not all her predictions worked out so happily but that’s not a bad average.

All of which is not to dismiss the pain and sorrow that was in her life. But I suppose in the end what you make of another person’s life is the same of what you make of your own. Focus on the positive and things can look good. Focus on the sad and soon that’s all you will ever see. I know where Vivien Leigh would have been looking

"A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Erast Fandorin

Detective novels are a nice trick to pull off. There are so many expectations and tropes and the readers can be so alert to tricks that the writer can have a tough time creating something new, different and at the same time, and in the best sense, generic. Part of their appeal is their familiarity, so the author is left walking the tight rope between doing everything as expected and making it different.

Erast Fandorin is the detective hero of a series of novels by Boris Akunin , a Russian essayist, novelist and translator. At the beginning of the series, he is a young man on the lowest rung of the Russian police in the 19^th century. He is young, thin and keen. It is his enthusiasm that leads him to discover the truth in the first novel, The Winter Queen, which also sees him leap several ranks in the Russian bureaurocracy.

Akunin has said his aim is to write a detective novel in every subgenre available. He has identified sixteen and so intends to write sixteen Fandorin novels. The Winter Queen is a conspiracy mystery. Now here comes a bit of a trick for English readers. I tried to then read the second novel, so I picked out Leviathan, a Agatha Christie type novel – exotic setting, the world’s biggest boat, a closed set of suspects, and a bizarre murder to kick the plot off. However, while this was the second novel translated into English, it is in fact the third novel in the series, after Turkish Gambit. Apparently that ends in Fandorin being appointed ambassador to Japan, which explains his presence on the boat in the first place. But you read the publishers list, and the positions are reversed. It’s not a huge deal, the stories are self-contained, but it is just a little annoying.

Akunin is a prolific writer with one series involving Fandorin’s son Nicholas, another with a crime-solving nun, a third series with every book in a different genre, and a fourth based on the political rivalry between Tsarist Russian and Imperial Germany, but Fandorin is his biggest success. The Fandorin novels are huge in Russia, selling in their many millions and three of them have been adapted into movies. Like Christie’s Poirot and so many other detectives, Fandorin has distinct characteristics. He is expert at reading people, and likes to list his findings and number them. In gambling he is invariably lucky, so finds it dull. Despite his luck, his life is marked by tragedy, giving him a sadness that along with his good looks and slim build makes him attractive to women, even if he is largely self-contained. His other feature is his vanity, shown by his fastidious dress and wearing a corset.

Akunin delineates the difference between the naïve Fandorin of the first novel and this more experienced character in Leviathan very well.  While the stories are self-contained, we seem to follow the life path of Fandorin much more realistically than Poirot or Holmes. I think this is a more modern take on the series novel. Now characters get older, their lives changed, and some of them even die – Inspector Morse for example – and they now longer exist in a mysteriously extended now, such as James Bond.

These are enjoyable books, the mysteries are good, and solutions satisfying. A couple of times I thought I was a bit ahead of the game in The Winter Queen but mainly by focussing on the least likely suspect rather than anything intelligent or insightful. This is part of the appeal of the detective novel, the reader can feel a little bit clever but the author, or the detective, is a little cleverer still.  Leviathan meanwhile had me flummoxed. Now I’ve skipped ahead to The State Councillor, where Fandorin is framed for murder and has to solve it while keeping ahead of the police. The period detail in the novels is fascinating, the other characters well-delineated, much better than Christie, and the writing, even in translation, literate and readable.  I look forward to reading more.

"The #!@ing words are awfully strong." Stephen Sondheim

The Canadian political writer Mark Steyn, who has a background as a theatre critic, says Stephen Sondheim doesn’t fit into the great American songbook tradition, as it is impossible to sing his songs in any other way that the way he wrote them. And when you see singers doing Sondheim songs, they always do them with the same tempi and in the same style as he wrote them.  You rarely hear jazz singers toy with the melody and pace of a Sondheim song as they do with, say, a Cole Porter.

Sondheim I suspect would take this as a compliment. Whereas Porter, Berlin, the Gershwins were by and large writing for the hit parade, with the particular show the means of delivery, Sondheim is very much writing for the moment and the character in the show. This is as much because of his aesthetic as it is because of changing times and expectations. So if his songs are difficult to understand out of context, and difficult to ‘re-interpret’, Sondheim would say he is doing his job.

(While I’ve got you here, I do find the habit of jazz singers of taking a classic song that we all love and thinking ‘You know, I think this would be improved with a different melody and a different rhythm and hell, a few extra lyrics. What did Porter know?” a bit odd, to say the least. Perhaps I am yet to hear a superb jazz singer, which is entirely possible.)

While Sondheim is currently a gold standard of modern Broadway, he is, like the gold standard, getting on. There have just been celebrations for his 80^th birthday, and as someone said, one feature of old age is a tendency to reminisce, what has also been called our anecdotage. When someone like Sondheim starts to reminisce, the best thing to do is encourage him.

And so we have Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim. This covers Sondheim’s career up to ‘Merrily we roll along’. Each chapter begins with a short essay on the provenance and history of each show. Then we have the complete lyrics, often with deleted lines, cut songs, and alternate materials included. And this is all sprinkled with commentary and anecdotes about performers and collaborators, as the title suggests. A second volume, Look I made a hat, taking the story up to 2011, is in the pipeline.

The endpapers are decorated with Sondheim’s three great principles: less is more, God is in the details, and content dictates form. All of which he explores in the body of the book.

Lyrics, Sondheim insists, are not poetry. This will find disagreement in those who want to push the likes of Paul Kelly, or (God forbid) Jim Morrison as poets. But, as Sondheim discusses, poetry is read at one’s own leisure whereas lyrics work with music defining the timing, pace and time you have to take the words in. If your songs are part of a show, there are even more constrictions. Therefore, the demands on the words are very different. Putting poetry to music is fraught with peril, you either work against the rhythm of the poet, or are trapped by it. By the same token, lyrics without music can be a bit flat and uninvolving. It is the relationship between the words and the music that gives lyrics their power.

And he is very particular about what makes a good lyric. Whatever else Sondheim does with words, he does not mince them. In sidebars on other lyricists, he is not afraid to criticise the greats, from Ira Gershwin to Alan Jay Learner to even his own mentor, Oscar Hammerstein.  He believes his pastiche of W S Gilbert’s lyrics in ‘Pacific Overtures’ is better than Gilbert. He praises too, often the same writer. Sometimes these are an aesthetic judgement, other times technical, sometimes bordering on the pedantic, but always well-argued and based on principle. And he is not averse to bringing this judgement on his own work.

His dislike for his work on ‘West Side Story’ is fairly well known. “Somewhere” he recalls as the “a” song, as that’s the word given an entire bar on the highest point of the melody as if it meant something. “I feel pretty” has a Puerto Rican Girl making sub-Cowardian internal rhymes. (He doesn’t like Coward’s lyrics too much either, for that matter.) But his self-criticism lasts into later and more mature work. So if you’ve picked a flaw or two in a Sondheim lyric, I suspect he got there first.

If you’re interested in musicals or writing, this is definitely worth a look. It’s an expensive book (I bought mine online, again a LOT cheaper) but it’s a book I can see myself going into over and over. What can I say? God knows how fond I'm of Sondheim.

"Thank God I'm an atheist." Melvyn Bragg on the King James Bible

As a society we like to focus on the negative. Why this is I do not know. But if an artist wants to be taken seriously, you need to focus on something ugly or horrifying, work out of a Jungian shadow. Everybody is up to something, everyone’s motives are ulterior. Cynicism is the ultimate virtue. But in doing this we miss a lot of positive things. Life is actually a mix of good bad and indifferent, as is art, history and any other field of human endeavour or study.

Everyone’s favourite whipping boy at present is religion. People like to think they gain instant credibility, intelligence and perspicacity by declaring themselves atheist, and dismissing anyone who thinks otherwise as stupid, ignorant, or dangerous – or all three. Do not misunderstand me here; I know any number of atheists who are intelligent, perspicacious, and for that matter lovely, but I also know a lot of people with belief who I would describe the same way. And as for the stupid, ignorant, and dangerous – well, belief or disbelief in God doesn’t seem to affect those descriptors in any way either. Nor am I going to pretend that bad hasn’t been done either in God’s name or by those who claim to represent him, either on a personal or organisational level. Horrible, evil things have been done, and continue to be done, in God’s name. I don’t have to convince you of that.

But what I would suggest, and what is forgotten, is that much good has been done and continues to be done, in God’s name. (And please don’t direct me to ‘debates’ between celebrities, decided by the acclaim of the audience.) And much of it is forgotten and denigrated, because now of course, we are much smarter and more worldly than any generation that came before us, and can see things from perspectives they did not know. I know we think that, because every generation does. But it’s entirely possible we’re wrong.

Melvyn Bragg’s new book The Book of Books: The radical impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011 is the story of the King James Bible and its impact on its readers and the world. As this was the book of the British Empire, and taken to all corners of the globe, you can imagine its impact has been massive. Rather unusually for a modern writer, Bragg focuses on the positive impact it has had. Crazy, right?

The King James Bible is probably the last effective thing a committee ever devised, and while Shakespeare has given us more words, the King James Bible has given us more phrases. It was written to be read out loud, hence the beauty of its language and its rhythms.  And so its impact on our language and our literature has been enormous, right down to the modern day. But Bragg goes much further than that. He suggests modern democracy, wide-spread education, abolition of slavery, female liberation and the war on poverty are all, at least in part, direct results of people being able to read the Bible in their own language, in a beautiful language, and being able to interpret it for themselves.  In doing so, they found the intellectual argument and the spiritual strength to right the wrongs they saw around them. It even led to the Enlightenment and the questioning of the veracity of the Bible itself. A classic own-goal you might think. No, the King James Bible has survived all that and more. There is something to it, much more than can be measured or seen.

We often talk about universal human rights and truths. I’m not sure there is anything natural or universal about them. I think they were created and defined by people, many of them driven by their religious beliefs, and the spread of those ideas to the point where we think of them as universal has been difficult and costly. To dismiss those who did so, and the traditions out of which they came, is insulting and frankly ignorant.

The Book of Books is not as compelling a read as I would have liked but it is well-written and makes a good argument.  And it is a refreshing change from the gloom we have about our history and our culture. Here are admirable men and women and no matter what you think about their beliefs, as Bragg points out, you have to respect the ideas, the strength and the courage those beliefs gave them. These are people who left the world a better place than they found it. How many of us will be able to say the same thing?

The King James Bible: it’s almost worth going C of E for.