Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [59]
18 October
‘Please say thank you to your husband.’ These words, said by a middle-aged woman, foreign, German Jewish at a guess, seem to sum up what Harold has done with Mountain Language. Of course there will be other very different reactions and I gather from Richard Eyre (Director of the National Theatre) there have been already. But what I saw that first Monday at 6.15 spoke for all women outside all prisons. The performances were of a strength which even given Harold’s committed direction – committed to perfection – took me by surprise. Eileen Atkins, with only two lines to speak but an infinity of expressions, was the star. About the same period Harold gives an interview to Omnibus. Afterwards he gets a stack of letters: ‘At last someone has spoken out … I have been feeling voiceless, but now you …’ His political stance is widely described as ‘courageous’. But Harold didn’t have to be courageous to take a stance, he just had to be Harold! He loves speaking out against the established order; it comes naturally to him.
An extraordinary incident eight years later brought the relevance of Mountain Language – even in England – sharply into focus.
22 June 1996
Some unfortunate Kurds, in exile in North London, performed Mountain Language, having hired stage guns from the National Theatre. They were all arrested by thirty to forty armed police. Who refused to read the National Theatre weapon-certificate of harmlessness. And what is more – this is the unbelievable fact – refused to allow them to speak Kurdish to one another. Talk of life imitating art …
5 July
We went to see this Mountain Language in Hoxton. A ramshackle hall and rooms in a little street, guarded by a very young soldier in camouflage uniform and with a machine gun. Many Kurdish women and children: an impression of very pale faces, heart-shaped, big dark eyes, strongly marked eyebrows, not very tall but well made. Rana Kabbani told me once that the famous Circassians, from whom the most beautiful members of the harem were taken, were actually Kurds. The performance began with the terrifying enactment of what had happened to them the other night, which also acted all too neatly as a Prologue to Harold’s play. During the play itself, however, they actually showed the torture, which, as ever with Harold, according to the text, was supposed to take place offstage. Afterwards I congratulated the actor via an interpreter and told him he was ‘very convincing’. Actor: ‘It was easy for me to be convincing because I myself was tortured just like that.’
In general, however, taking part in marches and demonstrating outside embassies, whether to protest the imprisonment of poets such as the Russian Irina Ratushinskaya and the Malawian Jack Mpanje or the fate of the people of the East Timor, filled one with a proper sense of gratitude at living in England with the privilege of speaking up. As to the efficacy of such things, it was well put by Christopher Hampton when, along with other members of English PEN, we were getting together a fund-raising evening known as The Night of the Day of the Imprisoned Writer: ‘If one guard kicks one prisoner less hard, it will have been worth it,’ he said.
And there were the lighter moments as when I found myself marching with Ian McEwan, Caroline Blackwood and other writers, carrying white flowers for peace, in the general direction of 10 Downing Street. (Having chosen to parade with a long white lily, I felt like the Angel Gabriel in a pre-Raphaelite picture about to annunciate something or other.) The policeman who was walking alongside us asked me: ‘What’s the name of that gentleman ahead? I know his face awfully well from this kind of thing.’ Me: ‘E.P. Thompson, author