It was Alan Bates who played the messy, destructive, middle-aged teacher in "Butley." Written by Simon Gray, a university teacher himself, the play opened four years ago, and became a long-running success. Bates has now come to represent the archetypal Gray hero -- and this week he is in the first of two new television plays by Gray. Actor and playwright have established a rare working partnership -- explored here by Sheridan Morley

Messrs Bates, Gray & Co

ALAN BATES FIRST came together with playwright Simon Gray in "Butley." The script, written in 1971, had been sent by Gray to Harold Pinter whom he wanted to direct it and Pinter in turn gave it to Bates.
"That was a marvellous part for me," says Bates. "Bitchy and true, the reluctant London University tutor doing his ineffectual, middle-aged, middle-class English best to survive the chaos around him. I did the film of it, too, so altogether Butley and I lived together for about two years. In some ways, perhaps I loved that part too much -- I couldn't bear to let it go. So then when these two television plays came along from Simon, first 'Plaintiffs and Defendants' and then 'Two Sundays,' I couldn't resist them. Since then I've also been in 'Otherwise Engaged,' his current play at the Queen's Theatre, so we seemed to be locked together, at any rate for the time being.
"Not that the plays have a great deal in common: Butley was on the downward slide, enjoying the spectacle of his own disintegration, whereas Peter in 'Plaintiffs and Defendants' is a solicitor very much in control, albeit unfulfilled and disillusioned. But that's not the same as letting go. Then again, the teacher in 'Two Sundays' is totally different, though all Simon's plays seem to have the habit of looking into the reality of people's existence and saying 'This is where we are, isn't it awful?'
"I suppose the plays he writes could best be called sad comedies, but through them runs a tremendous sense of separation, of people being alone however much they may seem to be together. Maybe that's why I like them so much."
It's not hard to see what, apart from Ben Butley, brought the playwright and the actor together; for Bates too tends to stand vaguely apart from the world around him. He is a private man who shuns showbiz ritual. Now 41, married with twin sons, he has managed to miss very little of what's been happening in both theatre and cinema over the past two decades: Bates played Cliff, Jimmy Porter's friend, in the original Royal Court production of "Look Back in Anger;" he was Mick in the Arts Theatre production of "The Caretaker" which made Pinter's name, while in the cinema he starred in John Schlesinger's first feature film, "A Kind of Loving," as well as such later classics as "Zorba the Greek," Losey's "The Go-Between" and Ken Russell's "Women in Love."
"As an actor I've never really been typed in a recognisable way; I want every part I play to cut across the previous one, so people won't know what to expect next. I don't go in for funny noses, though, or quirky walks to make the people I play look any different -- they just are the way they're written and I play them like that. It's not for me to "take over" a character completely -- it remains the creation of the author."
Like Albert Finney, Bates has done little television in recent years, though after an early stage success in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and before "The Caretaker" he did ten plays in a row.
"The parts were usually teddy boys in Armchair Theatre which gives you some idea how long ago that was; but they did provide the training I needed for the small screen, and that's not something you ever really forget however long you may stay away. Doing these two new plays though was a marvellous return for me because the director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, assembled virtually the same cast for them both so we had something like a repertory company going for a while (some of whom have gone on with me into the stage play) and as a result we were able to explore all kinds of cross-currents running between the scripts."
Alan Bates was born in a village called Allestree outside Derby, on 17 February 1934; his father sold insurance and Alan was the eldest of three sons. At the age of 11 he decided to be an actor. After a grammar school education in Belper, Bates won his place at RADA though his training there was interrupted by National Service. But by the time he got back to RADA he found he had a wealth of experience which could be used in his acting. Afterwards he went straight into rep with Frank Dunlop's Midland Theatre Company, and six months after that heard about the "Look Back in Anger" auditions -- and went along. His success at the Court led to the offer of a lucrative seven-year film contract. Unhesitatingly, he turned it down.
"I just didn't want that much work without the freedom of choice. Looking back I'm amazed I had that much resistance at the time but I'm glad I did because the films I eventually made on a freelance basis, films like 'The Entertainer' and 'Whistle Down the Wind,' were much more valuable in terms of my career.
"What films teach you is to trust in your own personality, but if you stay in them too long you lose the pace and rhythm of the live theatre which is much faster. Directors? Well, Lindsay Anderson [for whom Bates did David Storey's "In Celebration" and "Life Class"] taught me more than most; he showed me that acting wasn't to do with power games or insecurity or trying to prove anything. It's to do with knowing yourself, not hiding behind technique or disguises."
A company actor in the sense that he works well with a lot of other players, Bates is not enthusiastic about the star system. He thinks it is too easy to be a star in the conventional sense; that what you have to be is an individualist, but one working closely with others so that any statement made by the production becomes a collective one.
Though a meticulous actor who's obviously thought long and hard about his trade, Bates is not a great believer in forward planning. "I usually know what film I'm doing next, but that's about it. The only answer is to play the parts you really like and have the courage of your own basic taste. The valid tests are 'Is it good?' and 'Does it interest me?' -- in the end it's only the script that matters.
"Money? I've been lucky enough to earn a good deal lately, and I can't say it doesn't mean anything to me because I happen to know it's sitting there. Certainly before I had any it was important, but now it's not really a first consideration.
"One day I'd quite like to direct a film, but until the right script comes along there's not much you can do -- I even tried writing one once but it was terrible so i gave up after the second scene.
"It always sounds ridiculous for an actor to say he has a difficult life. But to succeed as an actor you do make sacrifices of a kind: you stiffen your nature, you learn disciplines and you come to look for different rewards. But if it's all you can or want to do, then that's it."

SIMON GRAY IS a busy man. His two new television plays ("Plaintiffs and Defendants" and "Two Sundays") together with his current West End triumph ("Otherwise Engaged") and the screenplay for "Butley" (filmed and soon to be released) add up to a considerable amount of work for a man who is still only a playwright in the spare time he gets from teaching English at the University of London's Queen Mary College.
"I'd been working on various drafts of all the three new plays for quite some time. They just happened to get finished simultaneously, so then it seemed to make sense that the two television scripts should be done as a pair -- they do after all have a certain mood in common and to a limited extent the characters that Alan Bates and Dinsdale Landen play in 'Plaintiffs' are reverse mirror images of the ones they play in 'Two Sundays.' But I don't mean to suggest that the plays are sequential or anything like that. They stand alone in the sense that they are quite self-contained."
Self-contained is what Mr Gray's characters usually are, though he himself is determined they should not be considered his alter egos. "True, the main character in 'Otherwise Engaged' is called Simon and the central figures in both 'Two Sundays' and 'Butley' are teachers, but that's really all we've got in common."
So how come Alan Bates recurs so often as the central figure? "Because he's the most human actor of his generation -- and because any playwright would consider himself lucky to get him once, let alone four consecutive times in as many years. I recognise in his face so many faces, and there's a gorgeous vulnerability about him which is, I suppose, what I've tried to give some of my leading characters. But I've never sat down and written a script specifically for Alan. It's just that as one goes through the list of actors one comes back to his name again and again. Besides, i think it may help a playwright and an actor to work together more than once -- after a while, in rehearsal, one no longer has to finish the sentences and you acquire a kind of intuitive understanding of each other. Look at Finney and Peter Nichols, or Tom Courtenay and Alan Ayckbourn."
Gray is now 38. The second of three sons of a pathologist, he was born on Hayling Island on 21 October 1936, and after a Westminster schooling went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he edited a magazine called Delta and won a six-month travelling studentship which took him to Spain where he wrote the first of his four published novels.
"But Cambridge gave me the idea that I wanted to teach and to write and that's more or less what I've been doing ever since at Queen Mary College. when I wrote 'Butley' I thought there'd be accusations of treachery since it was quite clearly set in my own study at the college, but no one seemed to mind.
"Unlike Butley, you know, I love teaching: ever since I married and we had the two children it's provided a kind of security and a feeling of continuity. After 'Butley' was sold around the world and as a film I suppose I could have given up, but teaching seems to me a much better thing to do than play writing. The anarchic contempt that Butley expresses for it is bound to be what one feels at the worst moments, but they're very occasional."

IT WAS KENITH TRODD, the BBC producer of both "Plaintiffs and Defendants" and "Two Sundays" who first got Gray into writing for television. In 1965 he read a short story of Gray's and asked if he could buy the television rights. Gray agreed, provided he could write the script himself. After a while Kenith Trodd took over the weekly Wednesday Play and Simon Gray wrote "Death of a Teddy Bear" for him. It won a Writer's Guild Award and things began to get easier.
Gray's first play for the stage was "Wise Child," written in 1967; but that, too, had its origins in television. "I wrote it first as a script for television but everyone was appalled and said it was far too tasteless so my agent sent it to Michael Codron who thought it would do for Alec Guinness and that was how it became a stage play. Even so, it caused a fair amount of alarm and indignation: Alec appeared in drag and night after night his fans used to demand their money back because they hadn't recognised him and thought they were being cheated. Simon Ward played his son and one night there were two Americans in front: 'There's something funny about that boy,' said one. 'Yeah,' said the other, 'but the mother -- she's got problems too.'"
"Wise Child," which was something less than a smash hit, was followed by "Dutch Uncle" for the RSC, an unqualified disaster. An adaptation of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" for the National Theatre did not bring great notice, nor a television play called "Spoiled," which subsequently had an all too brief run at the Haymarket. Then, some might think none too soon for Mr Gray's sagging fortunes, came "Butley."
"I'd actually had that play in a drawer for about ten years; occasionally I'd get it out, read it, fiddle with it and put it back. Then suddenly one day I realised what was wrong with it, fixed it up and my agent sent it to Pinter to direct and the rest you know."
But the success of "Butley" seems to have affected Gray curiously little except in banking terms.
"When you have a wife, two children and five animals your life isn't so liable to sudden change, though we did buy a cottage in the country, I'll admit; but for a playwright, success works the way the tax system ought to work: you have mentally to spread it back so that it covers all the unsuccessful years as well. The success of 'Butley' has been ludicrously disproportionate to the amount of work involved: 'Dutch Uncle' was infinitely harder to write, and I can think of at least one novel which is infinitely better than anything I've written for stage or screen but that's still not sold 2,000 copies."
However much he managed to earn as a writer, though, Gray would continue to teach. "As long as I can do both I always will. There's a terrible danger for a writer who dies nothing else -- the danger that his sources will dry up. Every play has to start with some kind of event, after all: 'Plaintiffs and Defendants' started because I'd been involved in a long lawsuit with a shop over a chair. Then we were sued by our neighbours in the country because some builders had trespassed on their land. All in all it's been a litigious year -- and I began thinking about solicitors.
"For the other play, 'Two Sundays,' my first title was 'In the Midst': it's about a man of 40 who sleeps around out of boredom, uncertainty, doubt... maybe I do write about self-doubt more than most.
"But the sad thing about television for a writer, you know, is that however well you put a play together it's done once, maybe twice, and that's it: on the other hand if you write for the theatre and turn up with a bad play, the poor actors are stuck with it night after night until the management can find a replacement so maybe there is a case for brief runs. Yet actors can always go on to something else -- playwrights take a bit longer to readjust to success or failure before they can go on to the next project. Especially if, like me, they're never sure what the next project is going to be." |||