Close of Play
Hope Centre, Bristol, October 1983
CLOSE OF PLAY
by Simon Gray
CAST
Professor Jasper Spencer O.B.E - Ian Legge
Daisy (Nanty to the family) - June Wyton
Jenny (Dick’s widow) - Linda Simmonds
Margaret (Ben’s wife) - Josephine Lawlor
Benedict (the youngest son) - Robin Seavill
Henry Spencer (the second son) - Tony Smith
Marianne (Henry’s wife) - Sue Roberts
Matthew (Dick and Jenny’s son) - Paul Bailey
DIRECTED BY
Mike Luker
PS
I was aware of Simon Gray before this, as I’d seen his titles on the spines of Methuen paperback scripts in the obscure and vanishingly small drama sections of all good bookshops, but I’d never really explored his oeuvre. I was familiar with Butley, for instance (I can only have read it, I hadn’t seen the film version), so Otherwise Engaged had been the first one I got to know well. It had, I think, either opened in Oxford in 1975 or visited there shortly before moving into the West End, in a Harold Pinter production, and if I’d been able to afford it I would have gone to see it. I’ve always liked Alan Bates who was starring in it, and when I found out later from the cast list in the Methuen script that the actress engaged to do the topless scene was in fact Jacqueline Pearce, my chagrin at having missed it only increased. (Servalan in Blake’s 7 be damned, I had known her long before that in the Hammer films Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile, and it was her pain-filled eyes and soulful voice in the latter which had stayed with me and informed, I now realise, the plot of my short story Recoil.)
As it was, during my year away in Germany I managed to catch a TV production of Otherwise Engaged (can’t remember now how they translated the title) which struck me at the time as unusual in that the topless scene was all present and erect, I mean correct. It might sound a bit schoolboyish to still be going on about this sort of thing so many decades later, but back then, not only did female nudity still retain the intrigue of an undiscovered country for me, such exposure on the small screen was a lot rarer than it is today, and no British TV company at the time would have put on such an uninhibited version of the text. The first naked woman I ever saw live had been the actress playing Jill in a production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus at the Bristol Old Vic.
(Germany, be it noted, had a refreshingly progressive view of the English stage in general, it seemed to me. In the school I was working at, for instance, the sixth form were studying Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking as a set text in their English classes. No such equivalent luck for us in our German classes, or even in our English classes come to that; bloody John Webster, if you were lucky. And in Berlin just before Christmas we all went to see Pinter’s No Man’s Land in German at a theatre on, I think, the Kurfürstendamm. I was very familiar with this play – don’t know why, can’t understand a word of it, but it’s got some wonderful language and an atmosphere of chilly doom – so I was most intrigued to see what the local audience would make of this exchange in the second act between the main two crusty old buffers (Richardson and Gielgud at the Peter Hall-directed original at the National):
HIRST: You did say you had a good war, didn’t you?
SPOONER: A rather good one, yes.
HIRST: First rate. Kill any Germans?
SPOONER: One or two.
HIRST: Well done.
Of course, it got a big laugh. There must have been many people in that Berlin audience for whom the war would still have been a clear memory. In 1977 it was barely thirty years before. As I write this now, in 2023, it would have been like us looking back to the Poll Tax riots, or Thatcher’s resignation, or Operation Desert Storm, or, for that matter, the Reunification of Germany, Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.)
Pinter, of course, was a good friend of the playwright Simon Gray (and Ayckbourn as well, now I come to think if it), and directed several of his works both on stage and film. So with Close of Play, although the characters were your standard West End upper-middle-class moneyed whingers about whose plight I cared not a fig, I was happy to audition for it as the quality of the writing was assured, and a large proportion of it was spoken by my character Benedict, the younger son, who never stops talking all the time he’s on stage, swigging from a bottle of whisky throughout, and ending the play in a state of drunken collapse. I forget now what it was he was drinking to forget. Maybe he just liked the taste. Anyway, it was great fun waving a bottle of frothy apple juice around for a couple of hours and showing off my incredible memory. (Someone told me later that cold tea would have been better than apple juice since it creates fewer bubbles when agitated and so looks more convincing as an alternative to whisky, but who wants to stand on stage drinking cold tea all evening?)
In fact, I suspect this was probably one of those plays which was always going to be more fun for the amateur cast than it was for the audience, because the speeches are very long indeed. I’ve just checked the script again and at one point the character Henry (Michael Gambon) speaks for three whole uninterrupted pages. My character Benedict isn’t far behind him in some places but even then, looking at the script now, I can’t remember word one of any of it. The yellow highlighter still burns my retina, but the glow no longer penetrates to the memory banks. (FWIW, in the original production, my part was created by that elegant and literally aristocratic actor Sir John Ronald Leon, Bart, better known by his stage name John Standing, who created the role at the National in 1979, a couple of years after playing Judy Geeson’s clerical brother in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), a film which never seems to get any better no matter how many times you watch it. I was very happy to follow in his illustrious footsteps.)
One final reminiscence. In his book The Art of Coarse Acting, Michael Green notes that in his day, actors playing reporters on stage demonstrated their character’s philistinism by always keeping their hats on indoors. In similar cliché’d manner, in order to correctly portray this economically comfortable, pampered baby of a man, I wore a cravat or foulard. It might even have been paisley. I chose it myself in Debenhams. It was mostly yellow, with green patterning. And it must have stuck the right note because my performance got me nominated for a local amateur acting award that year. Not bad for a working-class non-drinker who would never wear a tie to work ever again.