Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [86]
In view of Harold’s general preoccupation with politics and the oppressed in many, many countries, it should be recorded that the first play he wrote in the nineties could not possibly be argued to be political even by the most wily interpreter of his art. This was the play he called Moonlight, written in late 1992 and first performed the next year. In my opinion it derived fundamentally from another very different human experience, his mother’s death, peacefully in a nursing home in Hove in early October, at the age of eighty-eight. Moonlight is redolent of death; it is the story of a dying person, actually a man nursed by his wife, whose sons refuse to come home to say goodbye to him. What tipped Harold into writing a play was, I believe, the fact that he was actually rehearsing to play the part of Hirst in his own play No Man’s Land at the Almeida Theatre at the time. Having spent most of his time with his mother in the summer, now he had to interrupt rehearsals to rush down to Hove at the end. Thereafter, even more importantly, he was closeted in a dressing room with three other actors, Paul Eddington, Gawn Grainger and Doug Hodge. This comradeship was very important to him. Going down to see his father, now alone aged ninety, Harold began scribbling in the train. He gave me the odd bulletin: ‘A mother, a father, two brothers.’ He began toiling throughout the frosty nights, in his Super-Study across the garden. ‘Maybe a daughter,’ he said one evening. The characters were, as usual despite my protests, known as A, B, C & D. Now we had E.
January 1993
Mauritius. Royal Palm Hotel. Harold has hired a ‘manual typewriter’ (last of a dying race) and last night got back to the yellow pages, scrutinizing the airline paper he had scribbled on in first class all night on the way here. This was because the noise from the headset worn by Lester Piggott in the row ahead was extremely loud: Lester is deaf but we are not. It proved however creative. More characters have entered. The play begins with a daughter called Bridget. Now Harold types and types and is totally happy. I hear the rat-tat-tat of the typewriter even when I’m swimming in the ocean.
13 January
Even a cyclone, hoving somewhere in the Indian Ocean near us, does not disturb Harold’s rhythm. In fact it rather inspires him. Read Moonlight as it has become. School of No Man’s Land, if one can talk like that. Harold even scribbled away on his little pad at dinner. I didn’t mind as I was trying to think of a way to scrape acquaintance with Lester Piggott, my hero forever. All my life I always used to bet on him.
15 January
Did the timing. Fifty-four minutes. Harold very firm: ‘This is a full-length play.’ But later more scenes come to him. We’re up to sixty-one minutes. And we’re going to have dinner with Lester tomorrow night! With all my timings, Harold calls me his editor. Not so. I was the midwife saying, ‘Push, Harold, push,’ but the act of creation took place elsewhere and the baby would have been born anyway. Harold very firm that E, now Bridget, who is a ghost, is dead because she has committed suicide.
3 February
Doug Hodge ‘crazy’ about Moonlight: wants to be involved. And Ian Holm has put himself forward as Andy, the father, which touches Harold very much, with their shared history over The Homecoming so many years ago.
7 September
The first night of Moonlight. Harold, typically, found himself near a woman at the first preview who sorted through her Sainsbury’s bag of shopping throughout the play. The next morning (after the first night) Harold said, ‘Let’s face the music’, the familiar phrase, and went downstairs to fetch the papers. ‘Good God, it’s on the front page of the Guardian!’ And so it was. A large photo of Anna Massey, Ian Holm in bed, and a rave review. Benedict Nightingale insisted on saying he