‘Late at night. Just back to the flat I’m staying in from reading the play at the [Glasgow] Citizens. It was sweet, sweet, sweet. A marvellous theatre. On its stage you feel like a knife. You can carve any word on any part of the auditorium.’ This is from a diary kept by Howard Brenton, the British playwright, while touring the country to raise funds to defend his play - Romans in Britain - against an obscenity suit. The master dramatist is eighty today - Happy Birthday.
Through a long career, he has written more than 40 plays, some as recently as 2018, according to Wikipedia’s list of works. In 1973, he and David Hare were jointly commissioned by Richard Eyre to write a play for Nottingham Playhouse which resulted in Brassneck. In 1976, Hare directed Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness at the National Theatre’s newly commissioned Lyttelton stage; it won the Evening Standard award for Best Play.
In autumn 1980, the National also staged Brenton’s controversial The Romans in Britain. The campaigner Mary Whitehouse brought a suit against the play’s director under the Sexual Offences Act. It caused a media storm, but was ultimately withdrawn. In 1985, Brenton again collaborated with Hare to bring the powerful Pravda to the National with Anthony Hopkins in the lead. Although Brenton wrote very little for the screen he did, oddly perhaps, write 14 episodes of the Bafta winning BBC spy series, Spooks (between 2002 and 2005). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. Further information can be found at Wikipedia and the Old Cicestrians website.
Brenton has written only two books, both published by Nick Hern. The first was a novel in 1989 (Diving for Pearls) and the second was a collection of articles he’d authored along with extracts from his diaries - Hot Irons (1995). The full work can be borrowed digitally and freely at Internet Archive.
In a ‘Note’, Brenton explains the book contains four diaries: ‘three are travel diaries, one kept while on tour in England doing a reading of The Romans in Britain, one while travelling in Australia in Far North Queensland’s rain forests and one while visiting the Soviet Union towards the end of the Gorbachev era. The fourth diary is, I suppose, a kind of travel piece also: it is the headlong rush through a rehearsal period of a play of mine at the Royal Court in 1992. I made some cuts in the diaries, but they stand as they were written.’
According to the publisher’s blurb: ‘Howard Brenton has long been stuck with the label ‘controversial’. Early in his career he was misquoted as wanting his plays to be like ‘petrol bombs through the proscenium arch’. His Churchill Play foresaw a Britain where political dissidents were interned in concentration camps. His Romans in Britain was prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse. And there have been plays on Rudolf Hess, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Rushdie affair. . . This volume of essays and diaries, however, reveals a much more complex, humane and thoughtful person than the headlines and snap judgments would allow.’
Introducing the first of the diaries, Brenton explains: ‘In 1982 Michael Bogdanov, the director of my play The Romans in Britain, which had been premiered at the National’s Olivier Theatre in 1980, was charged under a section of the Sexual Offences Act in a private prosecution brought by a ‘moral campaigner’, Mrs Mary Whitehouse. She objected to a scene in Act One of the play, an attempted rape of a male Celt by a Roman soldier. The case was a bizarre affair that dragged on for well over a year, through three hearings in a magistrates’ court before we ended up in the Old Bailey. Though it was Michael who was going on trial, one of the most wretched aspects was that it was my play that had put him there. I wanted to do something and decided to go on a one-man tour, reading the play, to raise money for the Theatre Defence Fund, which had been set up to raise money for what we feared was going to be a hefty legal bill.’
Here are two extracts from Hot Irons.
21 February 1982
‘Late at night. Just back to the flat I’m staying in from reading the play at the Citizens.
It was sweet, sweet, sweet. A marvellous theatre. On its stage you feel like a knife. You can carve any word on any part of the auditorium. For half an hour I felt myself overworking, a mess, sweating and straining, knowing that all I had to do was - do it.
You could let the book levitate out of your hand and make the play up on the spot.
I’m high, I must calm down.
The northern audience laughed at the southern dialects, the Legate and Tom Chichester. British audiences have perfect pitch when it comes to regional speech and class.
I did feel tonight I was performing the play. Really I’m only sitting there for two and three-quarter hours, reading it. But by some kind of sleight of hand, or mutual agreement, it’s a performance. Odd.
Someone said to me afterwards, ‘How the hell did they stage it?’ Good.
In the dressing room 1 remembered an acting exercise to fix on characters by thinking of them as animals. A crude but fierce ‘talisman’ of a character. I did that and it helped. I remember the director, Barry Kyle, after eight weeks’ work with Ray Westwell in the RSC rehearsals of The Churchill Play, saying one word to Ray, about to play my Churchill on the opening night: ‘Bulldog.’
The Citizens have every show watched by the assistant director, Kim Dambaek, so notes are given every evening. My reading was no exception. A good system: the National have it, the RSC don’t. Kim said I could syncopate more, go further with throwing my voice about. He also soothed my paranoia about the reading being boring. It is not boring. (Why the hell isn’t it? It should be the most boring thing on earth, someone reading a play at enormous length. Perhaps the expectation is so low that you start on the floor, so everything and anything you can do for the audience, is a plus. I certainly sense the apprehension at the beginning of the reading: ‘Oh my God he’s going to read it - all of it.’ Then ten minutes on, ‘Oh. A woman with a strange hair-do and six dogs at her heels. Oh. I see.’ And you’re away.)
Now, food! Bath! The white wine the Citizens staff gave me to take to my lonely bed.’
1 March 1982
‘Now I’m at Warwick University, a guest of the Student Union. It’s raining. The concrete of the campus is sodden, and the windows are steamed up. I’m sitting in the Arts Centre coffee bar. It’s typical of the ‘Arts Centres’ built in the sixties on university campuses. It’s a white elephant, a car-drive away from any public and ignored by most of the students. It has an ugly main house but a good studio theatre.
I spent a happy and turbulent year here, 1978 to 1979, as ‘Resident Writer’. I got some free teaching. A maths teacher gave me an idea for my new play The Genius [premiered at the Royal Court in 1983], 1 ran a weekly workshop, wrote in the student newspaper, did a farewell improvised play and wrote most of The Romans, sitting in a sun-trap, concrete-walled, little garden at the back of my campus flat. It was an idyll. Rolf Lass, one of the teachers in the English Department and an old mentor from my Cambridge days, even got me reading Anglo-Saxon poetry for the first time.
Sadly all the students I knew in 1979 have left. The generations pass in a university, three years on and nothing of the young people I knew, what they did or thought, is left. There’s no transmission of memory amongst ‘the student body’. They have tradition, but no memory.
I’ve lost my tobacco. The rain’s drenched my trousers. There’s no advertising for the reading. Everything’s grey and smelling of rotting grass. And I have a premonition: they’ve got the day wrong!
Right. To the gents to clean up, to the University bookshop to cheer up, then I’ll go and find Dave Chumbley, organiser of this gig.’
It is also worth noting that Brenton appears often in the diaries of Peter Hall as edited by John Goodwin and published by Hamilton in 1983: Peter Hall’s diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle (also freely available at Internet Archive). Here are several extracts about Brenton.
11 July 1973
‘To the Royal Court to see Magnificence by the new writer Howard Brenton. This is bursting with talent although not fully achieved. He has no sense of overall form yet. But there is a great imagination at work and a wonderful power of speech and character. I also like the way he uses time: following a long first act when a group of young revolutionaries occupy a deserted house, there is an electrifying five minutes of action, a tumult of disaster, which overwhelms the audience after the naturalistic rhythm of what preceded it. Brenton is a writer worth watching. He is also very funny. He deals in caricature, but his voice is assured.’
17 June 1974
‘My first meeting with Howard Brenton. A huge man, shy, a little fat, delivering occasional knockout remarks like a gentle pugilist suddenly lashing out. He is very like his plays, a sure sign of a fine artist. He is the first of the new, young ones to be utterly enthusiastic about the new building and the possibilities of reaching a big audience at the new National. He will write a play for us and he wants David Hare to direct it.’
9 June 1975
‘Fascinating interview in Theatre Quarterly with Howard Brenton: I want to get into bigger theatres, because they are, in a sense, more public. Until that happens you can’t have any worth as a playwright... It’s like getting hold of a Bechstein, hitting a really superb instrument, when before you’ve been shouting about with a penny whistle or a mouth organ. You realise how powerful the new instrument is, and varied, and how much fun.
I think the Fringe has failed. Its failure was that of the whole dream of an alternative culture, the notion that within society as it exists you can grow another way of life which, like a beneficient and desirable cancer, will in the end spread through the Western world and change it. What happens is the alternative society gets hermetically sealed and surrounded. A ghetto-like mentality develops which is surrounded and in the end strangled to death. . . I think in that sense the Fringe was a historical thing. Where it went wrong was when the Fringe audiences became spuriously sophisticated. That was when it was time to get out - it was becoming arty.’
21 October 1978
‘Read Howard Brenton’s new play The Romans in Britain. It’s very exciting, and shattering in its power. The sequence where Caesar and his hordes suddenly turn into modem British troops in Northern Ireland sent shivers down my back. It sounds an obvious parallel, and cheap, but it’s not, and Howard takes no sides. But there is a lot of work on the play still to be done.’
For more extracts from Hall’s diaries see Happy days with Peggy.
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