Gray’s green-eyed monster
An interview with Benedict Nightingale in The Daily Telegraph, 15th June 1987
Some six or seven years ago Simon Gray bought Stuart Sutherland’s autobiographical “Breakdown” in a London bookshop and read it with growing excitement on his tube journey back home to Highgate. Here surely was a television play, a stage play, or something quintessentially suited to the Gray talent and the Gray pen.
After all, consider the tale it tells. A Professor of psychology, something of a fast liver himself, is happy enough for his wife to have an affair – until he learns that his lover is one of his own best friends. The discovery causes him an agonizing breakdown. “Jealousy into madness,” Gray says wryly. “The Othello trail”.
Plenty of rope here for Simon Gray’s gallows humour, plenty of acid to fuel his corrosive ironies. But the story took its time deciding to be what in fact it has become: Melon, the stage play (which opens for previews at the Haymarket on Wednesday), with Alan Bates as the stricken protagonist. Indeed, it might never have been written had not Gray, temporarily as it turned out, given up cigarettes last summer.
It was quite a trauma for a 60-a-day man. He felt simultaneously high, since he was chewing nicotine gum, and raw inside. Moreover, his customary compulsion to work became even more intense, since there was no way of interrupting himself with a relaxing puff. “I go mad anyway if I don’t write,” he explains. “I have to be at the typewriter, therefore I have to use the typewriter, therefore I have to find a sentence to write, and therefore something has to happen.”
What happened on this creatively fraught occasion he now describes as “the most personal play, the most naked play about emotion I have ever written.” The psychologist of the original has become that favourite gray professional, a publisher, second or third cousin to the protagonist of Otherwise Engaged. Sutherland’s pathological memoir has been transmuted into what Gray is half-inclined to call a tragedy, though it’s a word he nervously disowns as soon as he’s used it.
“It’s about someone who though he was in control, thought himself on top, and he has to accept that he isn’t. Rather, the earth opens under his feet. It seems to me that the lurking horror of life is that things aren’t as we see them. The tragic experience is that what you think world is, the world is not. But I’d rather describe the play as a sad story told, I hope, with some brio.”
Brio and darkish emotion have certainly combined to a marvelous theatrical effect in much of gray’s previous work, from Butley to Otherwise Engaged to The Common buy xanax 2mgbuy xanax from canada Pursuit, a tale of literary and sexual politics which failed in London in 1984 but has since proved a smashing success in New York. Yet if one asks the inevitable interviewer’s questions – can he define his themes, generalize about his concerns, explain that cruel rueful, sardonic tone of his? – he becomes hesitant and politely evasive. Surprisingly so, since until three years ago he toiled in academia, teaching Eng Lit., and remains a reflective, articulate person.
For instance, he’ll tell you he’s a bit concerned about the state of the British theatre, what with the West End increasingly opting for saleable ‘events’ rather than solid work, and the National failing to take the risks a subsidized theatre should. Again, he’s happy to discuss his preference for the stage over television, even though (he says) many of his plays seem to insist on being written for the small screen. “The production process in the theatre is infinitely more exciting. I like the collaborative sense, being at rehearsals and previews, talking to the director at the end of every day, changing what needs to be changed. It can be a very different play by the time if opens.
But about the plays themselves – well, he declares himself more concerned with their shape, form, structure and theatrical effectiveness that with their meaning. If they have any unity of vision and mood, he’s no idea what it is. “But obviously each one embodies something of me simply because I’ve written it. I suppose they’re personal essays, or progress reports, or letters to a friend, saying this is my understanding of my journey so far, this is my sense of the world at 40, 45, 50, until I cease writing because of old age or death.”
Nevertheless, he doesn’t reject the suggestion that even before Melon, they have tended to show people precariously surviving in a pretty discomforting environment, usually contemporary London. “Yes, it has become a rougher, harder place. And I suppose most people do lead lives of quiet desperation. We’re close to the end of our tethers day to day – but on good days we don’t notice it. I don’t know anyone who’s happy or anyone who’s altogether unhappy, anyone who doesn’t have moments of happiness.
“If you want to know about happiness, you should study dogs. They live in a permanent state of anxiety. Where is the bone, when is the walk coming, what’s the person going to do next? And yet there’s a passage somewhere between agitation and sleep when they do seem to achieve a sort of happiness.” Almost like human beings, says Gray. Very much like the characters in his plays, one might add.