Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  ‘Plays about people. Their individual souls. The new kind of plays will be the old kind of plays.’

  The night before, during an interval in The Winter’s Tale, I was having a glass of sweet champagne with a writer. ‘What kept the soul of Russia free in the bad years?’ he said. ‘I will tell you. The theatre. During the 1960s and 1970s, do you know what was the most popular play? Chekhov’s Ivanov.’

  ‘Because it’s against authority?’

  ‘No. Because it’s against everything.’

  The complex, even Byzantine, diplomatic strategy of the tour was organized by Thelma Holt, small, dynamic, loquacious, and a great figure in the theatre. She ran the Open Space with Charles Marowitz and the Round House in Chalk Farm before it surrendered to the drug culture and she went into world drama. With a high sense of Catholic morality and utter fearlessness, she thrives on disaster and difficulties which amuse her, entertain her and provide her, if serious enough, with a challenge worthy of her great talents for organization. She had to plan the movement of the three last Shakespeare plays from Moscow to Tbilisi in Georgia. This operation proved one historical fact to my entire satisfaction: in spite of all the horror stories during the Cold War period, the West never had anything to fear from a Russian invasion. On the night they were to load the scenery from the Moscow Arts Theatre, the three British truck drivers were told they couldn’t have permits to make the journey to the Caucasus. What was offered by the state touring organization, the perpetually accident-prone Goskonzert, was a number of open army lorries with Russian drivers forbidden to go more than some two hundred miles a day. The whole trek, it was calculated, would take five or six days, so the scenery wouldn’t arrive in time. Could we get a Jumbo jet, or should we decline to go? For most of the night, ministers, ambassadors, hugely important people, were bombarded with phone calls. At last, the British drivers, who had brought the productions from England, were given permits. After many hours’ delay they set off to cover unknown, potholed and mountainous roads with two interpreters, one of whom hardly spoke English, and the single available map, which they had to promise to return.

  Our hotel in Tbilisi was said, in a 1982 guidebook, to have a swimming-pool on the roof and ‘terrible plumbing’. We found the swimming-pool locked up, in a temperature soaring to the nineties, and the plumbing, one actor said, ‘makes your bathroom sound like Fingal’s Cave’. In any event, the tower block hotel did little justice to the town, set in a steep valley by a fast-flowing, dark brown river. The streets of archways, trees and fretted balconies make Tbilisi look like a dusty Nice without the cafes or a more beautiful New Orleans.

  With its moustachioed men, sloe-eyed women, flower markets, perpetual singing and Cossack dancers, Tbilisi feels less like a communist city than a set for a musical comedy by the late Ivor Novello. Yet Stalin was a Georgian; a local taxi driver had a picture of the dictator on his dashboard, and children still went up on the funicular to the Stalin Park of Recreation overlooking the city.

  So we waited in Tbilisi, as touring thespians used to hang around Crewe Junction, for the sets and costumes. We were entertained by the directors of the Rustaveli Theatre. We sat under trees, beside a railway line, drinking red wine as soft and smooth as any Chianti and eating course after course of savoury meat pasties, cheese pies, spring onions, corn bread, strawberries and fat sausages held in square pancakes. During the first course, the toasts began, and they continued, almost without interruption, through the prolonged feast. A Georgian director would stand and fill his glass. The interpreter then said, ‘This gentleman would like to pronounce a toast to the ladies.’ The gentleman would place one hand on his heart and, in basso profundo tones, say something like, ‘What is life without spring, without flowers, without heart? And flowers, heart and spring are united in one wonderful blessing. That is woman!’ We would all clap loudly, stand, clink glasses and see off another bottle of Georgian red. In this way art, peace, the theatre, our ‘better halves’ as the Georgian interpreter called them, and absent friends, such as William Shakespeare, were celebrated. When the toasting began it seemed an unstoppable process; if you feel a toast coming on, it’s impossible to keep it down. After a certain amount of wine I rose to my feet and, as a train thundered by, heard myself proposing a toast to peace between all nations and good luck to Sir Peter Hall and the British truck drivers.

  My toast was sadly ineffective. Somewhere, after days of travel, our drivers had to fill up with diesel. The concrete tanks in which the fuel was stored had cracked and were half filled with water; this caused the engines to stall somewhere in the Caucasus, and telephone calls to Tbilisi were at best unreliable and at worst impossible. So The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest and Cymbeline were played on a bare stage by a cast wearing sun hats and their own skirts and jeans. Needless to say, the plays appeared even more exciting in these conditions. The best performance is always at the last run-through, before anyone dresses up or worries about the set. Nothing then gets in the way of the acting or the words.

  The opera house in Tbilisi is an imposing building where the inhabitants of the city can bring their children to fill in their colouring books and chatter among the gilt and plush. There were some visiting English critics who went to see the director and he told them he wanted to do more Weber. ‘You mean Der Freischutz?’, Michael Billington, who was of the party, asked him. ‘Or perhaps Oberon?’ ‘Oh, no,’ the director shook his head impatiently, ‘I mean Andrew Lloyd Weber.’

  When Geraldine James and I went to see Salome they locked us into our box, which we found sinister. The leading role was taken by a mountainous singer who was clearly not going to undertake the Dance of the Seven Veils. When the time came for this number, she removed a satin house-coat and stood, completely covered by a thick, black, nylon nightdress, waving a scarf amid a number of children dressed as Walt Disney animals. I saw a man in the circle eagerly viewing these proceedings through a telescope. We had arrived in Tbilisi without the headless corpse needed for Cymbeline. We wondered, in the opera house, if we could pluck up the courage to ask for the loan of John the Baptist’s head.

  We had all been warned, before we went to Russia, not to have sex with strange partners. An actor who ignored this warning in the Peking Hotel was robbed of his money and his Raybans. ‘Take care of Georgian men,’ a lady from the Moscow Arts Theatre warned the English actresses. ‘They will put you on the back of a horse, or shut you in the boot of their car, and drive you away into the hills.’

  The mixture of sunshine, flowers and English actresses was clearly irresistible to the locals. One Shakespeare star was walking along the street when a young Georgian came up to her and asked her age. Somewhat taken aback she said, ‘Thirty.’ ‘That will do,’ he said. ‘I am twenty-three and you have very nice breasts. I know a quiet courtyard near to here.’ Another actress was making a telephone call when an eager Georgian entered the kiosk and solicited her urgently; whereupon she punched him sharply in the stomach. He looked at her with huge, sad eyes and said in a plaintive voice and perfect English, ‘You shouldn’t have done that. You see, I’m a very decent chap at heart.’ Geraldine James was offered an aphrodisiac in the lift. It’s fair to say that in all these cases the suitors retired defeated, no doubt to spend years of their young lives denouncing the coldness of English women, until they were liberated from the Russian yoke and could devote themselves to the more macho business of killing each other.

  Only one more encounter sticks in my mind. I was sitting on the terrace of the Tbilisi Hotel, wondering how I could persuade a waiter to take my order, when I saw a huge, laughing Georgian drinking a bottle of champagne with one great hand on a make-up girl’s knee. I thought that if I went to sit with them I might be offered a glass, and indeed I was and much else besides. As I drank gratefully I felt a weight like a Sunday joint on my leg and discovered that my kind host had transferred his hand from the make-up girl’s knee to mine; then came a curiously moist sensation in my left ear and I discovered in
terror that I was being kissed. The foreplay was broken off, however, when he offered to buy my spectacles for forty roubles. When I told him that I couldn’t be left to stagger short-sightedly round the Soviet Union, he withdrew his favours, saying, ‘You English have a great deal of charm and absolutely no business sense.’

  When we left from Tbilisi airport we saw our trucks full of scenery arrive and gave them a cheer for a brave attempt. I suppose I fell in love with Russia in Moscow, and out of love in Georgia. Moscow, the town the Three Sisters pined for, is full of unexpected beauty: the churches in the Kremlin, the view across the river, the streets full of peeling stucco and once-elegant houses, the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, where Chekhov, who called for a glass of champagne and refused all further medication as he was dying, lies under a little stone hut next to his wife the actress. In the same cemetery a general, monumental in stone, is for ever answering a telephone – to what eternal commander-in-chief no one knows. The people look forbidding, solemn, marked by that impossible ideal, Communism, which, like Christianity, seemed to demand too much of humanity and, falling into the wrong hands, led too easily to horrible brutality. And yet those who scowl at you on the metro will welcome you into their tiny, overcrowded flats and lay out every morsel of food, every ruinous slice of ham and herring, every hoarded scrap of red caviare, with more vodka and wine than you can cope with, blowing three months’ salary on a single evening with friends. They have been slaughtered, tyrannized, spied on and betrayed. They remain stoic, funny, smoking and drinking far too much, with their heads full of poetry and music. I wasn’t to come back to Moscow for five years, when my schoolgirl daughter Emily was a grown-up student and the high hopes of glasnost had somehow got lost between the free market economy and the Mafia.

  Chapter 20

  Once upon a time, much more than twenty years ago, a girl’s voice on the telephone was telling me she wanted to see me urgently, about something very important. She arrived and was extremely beautiful, with heavy eyelids and long, blonde hair. She was dressed in white. Without much preliminary chat she told me that she had discovered that she was an angel of God. She decided to share this secret with various religious leaders so she called on a Catholic cardinal, who said perhaps he could find her work with young people. An Anglican bishop asked if she had a family history of mental instability. A leading Methodist said he could recommend a reliable psychiatrist. She had come to me as the statutory atheist for a fourth opinion, and I told her that I had no doubt at all that she was, in fact, a genuine angel. This seemed to reassure her, because we then went to lunch at Alvaro’s in the King’s Road, and saw each other from time to time until she took up with a colony of Sufis and emigrated to France. A short while ago, almost in the present, I went to lunch in the country, near to where I live, and there was the angel again: a smiling, short-haired, middle-aged woman wearing woollen stockings and sensible shoes, surrounded by her cousins. Time devours most things, including angels.

  My family were completely unmusical; when my father’s fingers strayed, as they often did when we weren’t being sufficiently entertaining, to feel for the wireless, it was never to find a concert, always to follow the adventures of Paul Temple and Steve, or to stop the mighty roar of London’s traffic to meet some of the interesting people who were In Town Tonight. Words were his music and he had no need of an orchestra. He would repeat lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets: ‘Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul / Of the wide world dreaming on things to come’, ‘When in the chronicle of wasted time’, ‘From you I have been absent in the spring, I When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim’ and ‘Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing’, proving the immortality of these poems of love and despair. If he had no classical music in himself he wasn’t therefore fit for treasons, stratagems or spoils, but for Shakespeare.

  My musical tastes came from my unbounded admiration for Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Performing for my long-suffering parents I would sing and tap dance in a top hat, trying to manage a silver-knobbed cane, but as my dancing was rudimentary and I have never been able to sing in tune these performances must have been even more embarrassing than my one-boy Elizabethan tragedies. I had a banjolele, a small drum set and a kazoo; and I could just about get through ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day to Get Caught in the Rain’. My favourite of all the films was Top Hat.

  I’m steppin’ out, my dear,

  To breathe an atmosphere

  That simply reeks with class

  And I trust that you’ll excuse my dust

  When I step on the gas.

  Puttin’ on my top hat . . .

  The effect, as I sang this clumping down the stairs, must have been truly awful.

  The next step in my musical education came at Oxford, where I was introduced to Mozart and Brahms and W.C. Handy. My closest friend, Henry Winter, sharpening his thorn needles and polishing his records with a velvet pad, played me The Magic Flute, the Brahms Fourth Symphony and ‘St James Infirmary Blues’. His soul was full of music but, as I have said, he went on to become a country doctor and, in an extraordinarily Wagnerian end to his life, murdered his mistress and, swallowing the contents of his medical bag in a parked car, committed suicide.

  I came to opera, as I came to murder, late in life. I was asked to write an article on a month in the life of Covent Garden and I saw all the operas then in the repertoire, culminating in a new production of Luisa Miller with Pavarotti and Ricciarelli. Gautier was commissioned to write a guide book on Greece and, with the money he made from it, was able to visit Greece for the first time; in the same way I came to the opera house because of a job.

  I also came to opera with all my prejudices intact. I had been led to believe that the plots were improbable and that no rational audience could take to a drama in which lawyers, soldiers, cigarette-makers and courtesans not only fall instantly in love on first clapping eyes on each other, but are able to burst into elaborate song about it without exciting the instant mirth of their friends and relatives. The words of these songs, I suspected, would not be tolerated if translated into ordinary dialogue. In short, I agreed with Beaumarchais that if a thing is not worth saying then people sing it. But two of the greatest operas ever written derive from works by Beaumarchais and no one would dream of complaining that the singing in The Marriage of Figaro spoils the play.

  In that first season of opera my enlightenment began. I discovered many of the plots are about real people in recognizable situations. The stories of Carmen, Violetta and Rigoletto are true and moving, and Da Ponte’s libretti for Mozart are among the best plays ever written. I also began to understand the dramatic role of the music; for what is sung is what we all feel beneath the flat and polite surface of our lives. The aria is the subtext of our trivial conversations; only in the opera house does it come out into the open. A man and a woman may meet and say no more than ‘What was the traffic like in the Marylebone Road?’ but somewhere inside one of them may be singing ‘How strange this is’, ‘Sia per me sventura un serio amore? / Che risolve, o turbata anima mia?' (‘Would a real love be a misfortune for me? / What do you say, my troubled spirit?’). Opera is all subtext; we are spared the chat about the weather and the traffic information. The tenor or soprano within us all, and struggling to get out, is released.

  So our deepest feelings, but not our spoken comments, easily translate into operatic numbers. Who would not recognize the crying aria from La Festa Dei Bambini (The Children’s Party), the terrible, vengeful lament ‘O la mia alimonia from II Divorzio, the seductive duet ‘Are you / Am I coming up for a drink?’ from L’Appuntamento (The Date), the fearful ‘Is He after My Job?’ quartet from La Conferenzia Dei Venditori (The Sales Conference)? These and many other old favourites are the perpetual accompaniment of our inner lives.

  I had learnt these important lessons about the operatic theatre and came to play Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini in the car, in the bath, when I was working or getting dress
ed. I had no idea that I would ever be fortunate enough to take part in a production at Covent Garden. I was extremely surprised when John Tooley rang and suggested I might translate Die Fledermaus, an opera which Covent Garden used to perform in a strange assortment of languages, each character apparently speaking his or her favourite tongue, around Christmas time.

  My experience of translating was limited to Feydeau farces, which had achieved some success at the National Theatre (mainly due to the genius of the French author) and a German play called The Captain of Kopenick, the end of which I changed, much to the author’s surprise. Translation seems to me a matter of finding an English equivalent to the play’s period, keeping as closely as possible to the spirit of the original. The ideal is that the audience should think they are watching a play in a foreign language which they happen to understand perfectly. Although full of pitfalls, this is a far easier task than writing a play of your own. Accordingly I accepted John Tooley’s suggestion with enthusiasm. I would have, he told me, about four years before the first night. Accustomed to write for papers coming out tomorrow or television shows due to go into rehearsal next month, I said that would probably be enough time.

  I had, I realized, been over-confident. I should have read Auden’s essay on the extraordinarily difficult business of translating opera libretti. He starts with a quotation from an old translation of Ernani, which illustrates the depths of banality into which the translator may fall in pursuit of rhyme and words which have to be forced to fit the music:

  SILVA: The cup’s prepared, and so rejoice;

  And more, I’ll let thee have thy choice.

  [He proudly presents him a dagger and a cup of poison.]

  After this dire warning Auden goes on to define the task:

  In comparison with the ordinary translator, the translator of a libretto is much more strictly bound in some respects and much freer in others. Since the music is infinitely more important than the text, the translator must demand no change of musical intervals or rhythms to fit it. He, therefore, has to produce a version which is rhythmically identical, not with the verse prosody of the original as it would be spoken, but with the musical prosody as it is sung. The difficulty in achieving this lies in the fact that verse prosody is both quantitative like Greek and Latin verse and accentual like English and German.