First Performed June 1989, Leicester Haymarket Studio.
Looking at You (revived) Again
This play was commisioned by the National Theatre Studio (my comtemporaries were already being commisioned by the National Theatre proper). The studio was a place where the less than mainstream was allowed to play out its largely pointless existence. After the play was delivered, it was met with silence, no response whatsoever, after six months. It wasn't deemed even good enough for a reading. Or was it?
Peter Gill, one of the establishment who saw himself as very much down the sensitive poetical end of the mainstream, later admitted, in a moment of astonishing public candour, (in a public meeting at the Riverside Studios where the question was asked about that play by a member of the audience) that he had tried to suppress the play 'because he was jealous of it'.
The offending play was taken up to Coventry by Simon Usher, to David Gothard (who had once dismissed Downfall as "Yobboe chic") at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. Gothard, an outsider himself, and eventually to be even more of one, albeit a well connected one, now had formed a different opinion of me recognising in the young yobboe something of the authenticity as a writer he always searched for, and welcomed me and the play, and authorised a production in the studio theatre there, which starred Tony Rohr and Veronica Quilligan and Suzannah Doyle, an all Irish cast. This was the beginning of a long association between me and Tony Rohr.
Simon Usher was, and remains, one of my few supporters, and a life-long friend. With his English First from Oxford, he was the very out of place, very literary, literary manager of the Royal Court when we met, but was soon dismissed from his post in a coup that was formed funnily enough when he and I were in Liverpool doing a week's workshop with young local actors. Simon Usher was himself eventually to be edged out of existence in the theatre world, which doesn't take kindly to intelligence.
It wasn't so much a play as a poem in dialogue form, written in a manner about as much contrary to the accepted and approved style as it was possible to get. After all, that kind of writing had been laid to rest with Christopher Fry and TS Eliot and Ionescu by the Osbourne epiphany in the 1950s. Only Beckett had survived the cull.
The sparks flew between Tony Rohr and Veronica Quilligan who were both majestic. Suzanah Doyle, a young actress at the time, more than held her own with the giants alongside her- this all meant it was a performance to behold. The cast ensured that the surreal or absurd aspects of the play were dripping blood sweat and tears, a very human and beautiful production, under Simon Usher's very detailed and sensistive direction, who orchestrated the somewhat alarming fireworks as if he was reading Yeats to the cast. Anthony Lamble suplied a subtle set that gave a suitable cradle for events.
The critics hated it. However Jenny Killick came from the Bush in London and offered to bring it down; there it ran for a few weeks, gathering some more condemnation, Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard reached for his hat, and scorn was poured, and the play could barely fill that tiny threatre of 40 seats. The failure of Britain's poetic dramatist was made official- social realism was triumphant as it had been in 1956.
In France, a only three years later, the same play, not good enough for a reading at the NT Studio, filled the 850 seat Odeon Theatre for a few weeks.