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KH: This is an interview on the 7th September, with Alan Plater. Can I just begin with a general question about your first memories of going to the theatre?
AP: Well my very first memory of going to any theatre would be very late in the 1930s, as a very tiny boy, being taken to the Palace Theatre in Hull – a Music Hall – to see, among other people, Sandy Powell who was a great comedian of the time. The first great radio comedian, who coined the phrase ‘Can you hear me mother?’. I think he was a Sheffield man originally. And also to see Harry Roy and his band - a Big Band - when the bands were… these were the pop stars of the day. And these are very, you know powerful memories. And in fact you know, forty years down the line, I actually worked with Sandy. I did a documentary for the BBC about the history of the seaside, which we did with the cast of a summer show that was working in Brighton that year. And they were veterans of variety; I think that was the billing. So I actually said to Sandy, ‘You were the first person I remember seeing, in The Dapper Chap’. He was still a dapper chap when he was eighty something.
KH: That’s amazing!
AP: And one of the great gentle comedians. He was, he was… everything was almost thrown away. So the first formative memories, a lot of them are to do with Music Hall rather than legitimate theatre, if you like. And I remember going to the Tivoli – the Tivoli theatre in Hull – during the war, which was known as the Fisherman’s Theatre, which was sort of a down home Music Hall if you like. Seeing Big Bill Campbell and his Rocky Mountaineers… no, Big Bill Campbell and his Rocking Mountain Rhythm, who were a cowboy band. I mean, these extraordinary acts which flourished at that time.
But it wasn’t ‘til I suppose the immediate post-war period that I started to… I was taken to see plays. My sister, who’s six years older than I am, was - is - a great… and is a great theatre goer… she would take me to see things, and then I started going off my own bat, under the influence of our English teacher at school, who would say, ‘You should go to the theatre, boys and girls’. And we had a very successful weekly repertory company called The Salberg Players. And we… and I remember seeing plays which - here we go! - they seemed to have very little to do with life as I knew it. They all seemed to be – and this is facetious – but they all seemed to be about posh people living in posh houses, drinking gin and tonic, and talking in sentences. And I suppose at that time the idea began to form that theatre could be…[different]. What I didn’t get was the energy and, if you like, the vulgarity of music hall and of variety. It was all a little bit precious.
I always remember going when we were in the sixth form, you know and you’re a sixth form kid and you know everything, you know what the world’s about and you’re going to fix it. I remember voluntarily going to see Othello with the Old Vic Company on tour. And then as a student going to – I was a student in Newcastle – going to the Theatre Royal – one of the loveliest theatres in the land – saw Tyrone Power doing A Devil’s Disciple, and a production of Twelfth Night, probably the Old Vic again, with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Michael Hordern, Michael Hordern playing Malvolio. I mean, it was just extraordinary. And these were things that blew my mind.
So I saw this change in the theatre… the formative thing, I have to say - and this is not an original observation! - must have been about ‘57/’58 when I saw Look Back in Anger. And again I can’t remember whether it was a touring production or a rep production, but I came out and my head was ablaze, because suddenly I’d never seen a play like this before. And nor had anybody else I think. And interestingly, I saw my English teacher - or ex-English, I think that I’d left school by then - and I was really high on this. I said, ‘Hey, wasn’t that wonderful Sir?’ (I think I still called him sir). And he saw himself as… thought rather as a something of a Noel Coward figure, and he said, ‘Well actually I thought it was all rather adolescent.’.
And the weird thing is I could see why he thought that, because I could climb in – which must have been the embryonic playwright – I could climb inside his head, and I could see why he thought it was adolescent and shrill. Because in a sense it was, and is, all those things. But I could also see why he was wrong. It’s called the generation gap. And what John did… I mean, when I got… I got to know him slightly over the years and I said, ‘God! You started more people writing than anyone in the business.’. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m ever so sorry. Very sorry.’ I said, ‘Well you’ve got a lot to answer for!’. [Laughs] Because it released emotion and passion, and I think that’s what I’d missed in these rather strange plays I used to go to see.
And I don’t know what any of them were, in retrospect, though it must have been, you know, the Hugh and Margaret Williams, and possibly Rattigan and people like that, which were all very sort of tight lipped and inhibited, yes. And I think what else I missed was, everyone talked RP, this is what actors did in those days. And the great actors of that period – Olivier, Gielgud – spoke beautifully. And I thought, ‘well, people out on the street don’t speak beautifully’.
And if I’ve got a quest, and this has been going on all my writing life, it is to write a kind of dialogue that is… it’s not replicating the way people speak in real life, but is, if you like, I hope a poetic echo of it, like Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals. I mean, I’m trying to write about the people drinking down the Boar’s Head, and in fact wrote a play set, in effect, in the Boar’s Head. The lovely poetic thing that exists in everyday speech and people don’t even know they’re doing it. Anyway that’s a long rambling answer – you’ll get a lot of those. Stop me if I go on!
KH: No, that’s fine, that’s fantastic. When you were talking about dialogue and regional accents, and capturing the way people speak, in the past you’ve mentioned Joan Littlewood as being an influence on that. I wonder if you can just say a little bit about that.
AP: Yes, I mean I remember reading an interview with Joan, and I can’t remember where it was, or when it was, but she did some radio work with a wonderful producer called Olive Shapley, who worked for the BBC North region in the thirties and forties. I mean, a key figure actually in a lot of all this. Very left wing, probably a card carrying communist, but we will never… [know]. MI5 will be able to tell you, [Laughs] it’ll be on their files somewhere.
But Joan did some pioneering documentary work in radio, among other places, in Hull. And she did programmes about the fishing community. And she said somewhere, she said ‘You could walk the streets of Hull and hear the people speaking poetry’. I thought, ‘Wow! That’s rather good’. So I started paying more attention. And I know what she meant. I should have known as a native Geordie - I mean, I come from Jarrow, and people speak in [these] wonderful strutting accents, the Geordie… the Tyneside… all those Tyneside… I mean, there’s no such thing as one Tyneside accent, there’s a whole set of wonderful variations. But it is an accent that sings. The Hull accent doesn’t sing in quite the same way, but it operates at two levels I think. You get the surface of what is being said, and underneath it there’s, you know, all the implications, the attitudes. People can… you can learn a lot from the way people say things, as much as what they… And this is subtext, this is the classical stuff that Chekhov was doing, you know, 150 years ago. And it’s the essence of drama, the difference between what is actually said, and what’s going on behind the eyes. And what is left unsaid is as important as what is… And Hull is full of that, it seemed to me. I mean any Yorkshire man - as you will know, living there - can convey many layers of meaning with the use of the word ‘aye’. [Laughs] And I found illustrations of this. I’m very grateful that I was [born when I was]. We used to go farming in the summer when we were kids, you know, in the later years at school, harvesting when farming was labour intensive. And we used to work on a farm in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in a place called Catfoss, for a man called Major Burke, ex-army. And the guys on the farm – the regular, proper workers – all spoke in the old East Riding accent. And we were talking over the lunch break one day about one of us getting work… going to work on a different farm. And one of the guys said, ‘Tha’ll get minder theer’, meaning they won’t pay you as much. ‘Tha’ll get’… and ‘minder’ - because we had a language scholar with us - is an old Middle German word meaning less. And it had survived in these…[parts]. It’s probably gone now, but ‘tha’ll get minder theer’. And it was like a foreign language. But that was poetic.
So that… yes that… so Joan made me listen, she made me… she didn’t know it, because I think we’d never met at the time. I mean again, I got to know her later on in life. She just made me listen. And writing, especially drama, begins with listening and looking. I mean [it’s] all writing can be. What else? Margaret Attwood, asked by Melvin Bragg, how do you write? She said there’s only… it’s always the same, it goes in the eyes, and in the ears, and out the fingers. That’s all there is. And I think that’s what I love about, you know my favourite dramatists are people who’ve got ears. You know whether it’s… I mean look at the late Henry Livings (a great friend of mine), David Mamet, you know, Alan Bleasedale…, any of the Liverpool gang, Bleasedale and Willie and all of them. And… and Jack Rosenthal yes, who heard this lovely music of speech, and translated it into something that grows bigger than what a tape recorder can give you.
Interview continued...
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