AND ANOTHER THING

Fond memories of a playwrights' convention at Buckingham Palace

PAUL JOHNSON

Playwrights fascinate me. Though they spend their lives, as I do, dealing in words, they fling them at a living audience watch- ing a stage. So they require a quite differ- ent inner ear to the one I need to concoct formations of words to be read by one per- son in solitude.

Then there are the profound differences of structure. My books and articles have beginnings, middles and ends and are con- ceived, and written, as wholes. Playwrights work quite differently. They do not neces- sarily start with a plot at all. Tom Stoppard told me that he gets the idea for a single dramatic incident, then expands it back- wards and forwards into a story. J.B. Priest- ley said he liked to 'shuffle people around in time to see what will happen to them'. He said to me, 'I have always felt that Ibsen worked in roughly the same way.' I asked John Osborne if he thought of a plot first. `Good heavens, no. I start with a character and get him into messes.' (With Osborne it was always 'he': women were life-threaten- ing appendages, a key element in the 'mess- es'.) Osborne interested me particularly, as a writer, because he had a touch of what can only be called genius, which I would define as talent heightened to the point at which it becomes inexplicable. He could create a theatrical moment so intense but ephemer- al that, afterwards, you could not really explain why it had seemed so magical. Oddly enough, he displayed the same quasi-genius as a prose writer. His brilliant autobiographies are dotted with such moments, amid the atrocious rancour and embarrassing special pleading. He also found, late in life, in writing for this jour- nal, that he could produce the perfect diary paragraph, a little playlet in itself, with a magnificent curtain.

Osborne is popularly associated with anger and vituperation but the incident which remains most vividly in my memory shows him in an entirely eirenic light. It was at a large evening party which the Queen gave at Buckingham Palace last July. There were over 800 guests, I was told, a cross- section of British life, from the Prime Min- ister downwards — or upwards. The idea for this party, the first of its kind given by the Queen for many years, came from the fertile brain of Belinda Harley, a bouncy girl who had been advising the Prince of Wales. At all events it seemed to me a spectacular occasion. All the public rooms at the palace were open and the guests could wander at will. The band of the Irish Guards played softly. There were excellent champagne and eats. The royal librarian had gone to enormous trouble to find inter- esting manuscripts and drawings and put them into showcases. The Queen did her considerable best to talk to everyone pre- sent and many other members of her family were bidden to attend and make them- selves agreeable. Most of those who were there, I imagine, will remember the party for the rest of their lives as a grand occa- sion which was also fun.

There were little tables where you could sit and talk and eat, and around one I found myself part of a group of playwrights. There were Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter and one of the younger ones David Hare, I think. And there was John Osborne, who has already recorded the event in The Spectator. He was in mellow and benevolent mood, and the following exchange took place. (Others may recall it differently, but this is my version.) Osborne: 'Is not this delightful? On my way here, I said to Helen, "We are in for a dreadful evening — it will be a bore — we shall know nobody — and we must contrive to leave as soon as we can politely do so." And now, here we are and I am enjoying myself hugely. Music, food, drink, the com- pany — everything marvellous. Look at us here, sitting round this table. They say that writers are quarrelsome, but here we are, on the best of terms, just having a good time. So God bless the Queen, say I.'

Myself (aside): 'This will not last.'

Wesker: 'I agree with John. However, might I take this opportunity, Harold, to remind you — you can scarcely have for- gotten — that on the last occasion you dined at my house, you ruined the evening for us all by being gratuitously rude to the principal guest?'

Horrid pause.

Pinter (taken aback, being more accus- tomed to opening the offensive rather than being at the receiving end of an unexpected salvo): 'Have a care what you say, Wcsker.'

Wesker: 'Ruined the evening for all of us. Moreover, your motive in going for my friend was simply that he was rich, and an American.'

Myself (hastily and not entirely accurate- ly): 'No, Arnold, I don't feel that what you say can be entirely right. I have known Harold for many years and I can't say I have ever known him be rude to anyone. Indeed, I'd go so far as to claim that he is constitutionally incapable of being rude.'

Pinter (triumphantly): 'There you are. Paul is quite right. I am constitutionally incapable of being rude. So shut your **** gob, Wesker!'

Osborne: 'There, there, children enough of this. We can't have the Queen coming round and discovering us at odds. [Imitating Queen's voice.] Auow. I thought I'd find my playwrights like a little nest of singing-birds so what is all this squawking? Stop it at once or I'll have you thrown to the corgis.'

Osborne's serene final period was a case of all passion spent, I think. He could not even be bothered to get annoyed with gos- sip columnists, though they continued to pester him. The truth is, after a lifetime of battering women verbally, and being bat- tered in return, he had found repose in the arms of a beautiful, talented and supremely patient lady, who protected him from the world and himself and gave him a rest from the rage, of life.

It could not last and it did not last, but at least Osborne enjoyed a few years of tran- quillity. That is when I knew him and I shall always recall him as a wise, relaxed and gently amusing creature, a great writer tak- ing his ease after a lifetime's work and bat- tles. Good-night, sweet-sour prince, and may flights of avenging angels sing thee to thy rest!