DIARY
To get a bad notice on your birthday has been the unfortunate fate of many playwrights and Shakespeare, coming up for 426, gets a somewhat cool blast from Bernard Richards, English tutor and fellow of Brasenose, in the Times. True, Mr Richards appreciates the 'beautiful and resonant poetry', but he suspects that today's audiences watch the plays with `boredom, irritation, puzzlement, anxiety or indifference'. If this is so, then huge numbers of people must queue up and pay out good money to be bored and irritated, for a good Shakespeare production is sure-fire at the box office and often pays off the losses on contemporary drama. Mr Richards's case is that Ben Jonson was wrong when he wrote that Shakespeare was for all time, and that in fact he wrote mainly about Elizabethan manners and morals and has little that is illuminating to say of universal significance. For this reason he chides producers who want to bring the plays up to date, and says they might be better treated as 'music on original instruments'. Mr Richards is right about the silliness of some attempts to update the plays, as in the production which had Petruchio arrive on a motor- bike and make a speech about his broken- down horse. There was also a grim time when all the sets looked like particularly repulsive corners of the Hayward Gallery, all the costumes were in varying shades of muddy brown and dusty black and the actors shied nervously from anything that sounded like a familiar quotation. I think things are better now. You can't write anything about Shakespeare without get- ting shoals of unsolicited and unwelcome mail from the Francis Bacon Society. The Idea that a cold-hearted, corrupt and time- serving Lord Chancellor could have writ- ten the plays has always seemed to me ridiculous. Reading Professor Schoen- baum's admirably sensible Documentary Life leads inevitably to the conclusion that they were either written by William Shakespeare or someone else with exactly the same name. In spite of cool notices (from Greene and Mr Richards) I wish him a happy birthday.
The truth is that great works of art don't need updating and artificial attempts to do so are often counter-productive. I happened to see a recent report to the Ministry of Education on the teaching of English literature. It gave suggestions as to how the teachers should approach the Class Novel' (this is not, it seems, a work on snobbery but the novel the class is studying at the time). The pupils are to be asked to write blurbs and advertising mate- rial for the book, or suggest a cast for the television adaptation. There seems to be a
JOHN MORTIMER
certain reluctance to study the text, or even to get on with reading another novel.
Being involved again in a subsidised theatre will, I know, mean a turn with the begging-bowl around the City. I was arguing with a businessman who was saying that through history governments had nev- er sponsored the arts. I suggested that the ruler of the Vatican State had a good deal to do with the Sistine Chapel, and the King of Spain with the paintings of Velazquez. Richard Luce has done very well in getting more government money for the arts, although it is absurd that we should still lag behind other European countries. Business sponsorship is welcome of course; the trouble is that it is easy enough to get City corporations to finance Traviata, to which they can take their Japanese buyers, and much harder to get them to stump up for a play about unemployment in Liverpool. Business support also fluctuates wildly when interest rates rise or stock markets tumble, which makes it difficult for theatres and opera houses, to plan ahead. And first nights get filled up with the sponsors' clients, who would rather be somewhere else. A potent sign of the times was the appearance, recently, of a portable telephone in the stalls during an overture at Covent Garden.
Living in the country, with friends who hunt, and having just re-read the wonder- ful description of the wolf hunt in War and Peace, I wish we could sort out our attitude `They've run out of cash again, Skipper.' towards the death of animals. Those out for a day's hunting often don't see a fox killed. Are all the hunt protesters vegeta- rians? If not they must know that there are far more horrific scenes in abattoirs than ever occur in the hunting field. I suppose they are not so much activated by pity for foxes as by dislike for the hunters, who are seen as upper-class twits; yet not only Trollope but Trotsky hunted, as did a Labour MP, Reggie Paget, until the end of his days. I wish I knew exactly when killing animals becomes so inexcusable. There was a small posse of protesters outside a fur-coat shop the other day, and I won- dered if all of them eschewed leather shoes and handbags. Whatever the answer may be, hunting has produced much fine litera- ture and I still cling to my sporting friends because of the dialogue. This is an ex- change between a mounted couple, unmar- ried, both in their sixties, he a lustful master and she still a 'goer' with a number of lovers. The master moved his horse near to the lady's and was heard to murmur, 'I say, Patricia, any chance of a gun in your shoot?' To which she replied, 'Awfully sorry, Harry. I'm afraid I'm fully syndi- cated at the moment.' It would be sad if an anti-blood sports Bill put an end to con- versations like that.
Iam off on a book tour of the States and Canada, a city a day, an unknown quantity of radio and television stations and rubbery chicken looming up at literary lunches; the novelist's life wavers uneasily between that of the hermit and the commercial traveller. It has its compensations. If you are a good listener you can learn a lot from the interviews. What happens is that some eager young lady or gentleman journalist arrives in your hotel room, switches on a recording machine which frequently fails to work and, at the end of an hour, you know all about their husbands, wives, children, problems with school, eating habits, health worries and views on the environment, and they have, with any luck, learnt very little about you. Several years ago I arrived in Sydney and I knew that a journalist was coming from Perth to interview me. In- deed, when I got into my hotel bedroom there was a lady standing there. I thought that, for a change, I would actually confide in the interviewer, so I poured her a large drink, sat her down and said that she could ask me any questions she liked and I would do my best to answer her truthfully. I would have no secrets from her, I prom- ised. She could ask about my secret fears, my income tax, my past, present and dreams of the future. She finished her drink and said that was very kind of me, but in fact she was the maid who had only come in to turn down the bed.
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