The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [32]
How vulgar, how almost cruel it all was; I gloatingly savour now that I am absolutely out of it at last, now that I can sit in the sun and look at the calm quiet sea. This solitude and quiet after all that babble, after all that garish row, a deep undynamic stillness so unlike the fine dramatic silences of the theatre: Tempest scene two, or the entry of Peter Pan. So unlike too the strange familiar and yet exciting hush of an empty theatre. Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate. How I enjoyed rending expectant silences with noise, noise as structure, noise as colour. (I once directed a thriller which began with a long silence and then a scream. That sound became famous.) Yet, or perhaps consequently, I do not care greatly for music. Noise yes, music no. I admire the intricate and essentially silent musical drama of ballet, but opera I detest. Clement used to say this was a case of envy. I must admit I envy Wagner.
The theatre is a place of obsession. It is not a soft dreamland. Unemployment, poverty, disappointment, racking indecision (take this now and miss that later) grind reality into one’s face; and, as in family life, one soon learns the narrow limitations of the human soul. Yet obsession is what it is all about. All good dramatists and directors and most (not all) good actors are obsessed men. Only geniuses like Shakespeare conceal the fact, or rather change it into something spiritual. And obsession drives to hard work. I myself have always worked (and worked others) like a demon. My mother’s training made me a compulsive worker. She was never idle and she did not tolerate idleness in others. My father enjoyed a certain amount of fixing and mending, but he would have liked to sit sometimes quite vacantly and watch the world drift by, only he was never allowed to. My mother was not ambitious for him in a worldly sense—she scorned the successful world of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle, though I think that the prospect of it always hurt her in some obscure way. She simply wanted my father to be always usefully employed. (Fortunately discussing books with me counted as useful.) She did not profess to understand his office work, she showed no curiosity about it and I suspect she had no idea what he did. She organized him at home. She also organized me, but this was easy because I was only too ready to be obsessively industrious. Journalists have often asked me how it was that I first started to write plays. I did not, as has been unkindly suggested, turn to writing out of disappointment with my career as an actor. I started to write when I was still quite young because I could not bear to waste time when I was unemployed. I early saw the demoralization of so many of my out-of-work companions. ‘Resting’ is one of the least restful periods of an actor’s life. Those times were also, of course, my university. I read and I wrote and I taught myself my trade.
Since there has been quite a lot of uninformed and not always unmalicious speculation on the subject let me now say something about my plays. They were always intended to be ephemeral, rather like pantomimes in fact; and they existed only in my direction of them. I never let anyone else touch them. Unless one is very talented indeed there is no resting place between the naive and the ironic; and the nemesis of irony is absurdity. I knew my limitations. The plays were also said to be only vehicles for Wilfred Dunning. Why ‘only’? Wilfred was a great actor. They do not make them like Wilfred any more. He started his career in the old Music Hall in the Edgware Road. He could stand motionless, not moving an eyelid, and make a theatre rock with prolonged laughter. Then he would blink and set them off again. Such power can be almost uncanny: the mystery of the human body, the human face. Wilfred had a face which glowed with spirit; he also had, with the possible exception of Peregrine Arbelow, the largest face I have ever seen. It is true that he was in a sense the only begetter of my work as a dramatist, and when he died I