LIFE SUPPORT
LINKS

Bates Archive
Spotlight

Iews: | SundayTimes
Bates Interview

| Sunday Telegraph
Gray Interview
Programme Essay
West End re|Times
Independent
Daily Telegraph
Sunday Times
Sunday Telegraph
Sunday Observer
Time Out
Applause
 

BATES
ARCHIVE

News
In Memoriam

SPOTLIGHTS

Knighthood
American
Film Theatre
Fifties TV
Al Hirschfeld

FEATURES

Biography
Timeline
Photo Gallery
Actors Centre
Piffle
Ephemera

ARCHIVE

Theatre
Film
Television
Audio
Interviews
Writing

t h e a t r e

A New Shade of Gray

SIMON GRAY has just published a novella called Breaking Hearts whose high point, to my filthy mind, is the juicy encounter between a lesbian dominatrix and her seducee. Hot stuff, I tell him. Was it embarrassing to write?
"No," he says, unhelpfully. Oh come on, I persist. It must have been a bit. Lesbian sex - it's most men's naughtiest fantasy. "I wrote it in Greece - it's a very erotic place."
Hardly the most intelligent line of questioning to pursue with one of Britain's leading playwrights, but by this stage I've grown desperate. The Simon Gray I'd expected to meet was a deliciously indiscreet raconteur, bursting with bilious anecdotes. The frail, diffident 60-year-old sitting before me, however, is a pale shadow of the outspoken, chain-smoking lush revealed in diaries such as How's that for Telling 'em, Fat Lady? (his diary of the American tour of The Common Pursuit) and Fat Chance (his account of the the great Cell Mates disaster of 1995).
Though the author of Butley, Quartermaine's Terms and The Common Pursuit still consumes his Silk Cuts with heroic abandon, the liquid fizzing in his lunchtime glass contains nothing stronger than elderflower cordial. And bitchiness, like alcohol, is in short supply.
Still it's worth a try. Has he seen Stephen Fry since Cell Mates? "No." It's going to happen one day, isn't it? "I guess." Has he played out the scene in his head? "I expect courtesy on both sides."
There was a time when Gray was almost as famous for his feuds as for his plays. First came the mammoth row with critic James Fenton (who had accused Gray of selling out); then the tiff with his old friend Harold Pinter (who had resented being unflatteringly portrayed in one of Gray's television plays); and finally the big falling out with Fry, who walked out of his starring role in Cell Mates soon after it began its West End run.
These days, it would seem, Gray has learnt to bite his tongue. It still rankles that he was widely cast as the villain of the Cell Mates affair ("I had one journalist bleeding down the phone at me saying, 'That poor man! Look at what you've done to him' "). But he claims to have exorcised most of his bitterness in his cruel but horribly readable diary Fat Chance. It must be some consolation that he got a very good book out of the disaster. "I'd rather have had the play than the book."
Two years on, Gray should have more reason to be cheerful with the publication (by Faber) of his well-received novella and the opening of his latest, Pinter-directed play, Life Support, at the Aldwych Theatre (starring Alan Bates).
Unfortunately his health has conspired against him. He is still weak after undergoing surgery for a punctured colon, and to make matters worse he has been advised to give up his beloved drink.
A tall order, one might think, for a man who used to consume three bottles of champagne a day before moving on to the Glenfiddich. But Gray insists that it hasn't been an ordeal. "I quite like some aspects of it. Like not feeling irritably comatose all of the time."
Oddly, he says, alcohol never had that big an effect on him. His legs got wobbly, but he didn't lose control, grow boisterous or end up with hangovers. "I could think in exactly the same way whether I was drinking or not." He has since learned from a specialist that he is among the 30 per cent of heavy drinkers who can booze with apparent impunity. But if drink had no effect, why did he do it? "Habit," he says.
Perhaps it's the strain of those stints in hospital - last year, over five days, he was misdiagnosed as having ever more severe forms of cancer, then he caught near-fatal pneumonia - but Gray's conversation often veers between the elegiac and the morbid. One minute it's death by shark (my fault - we share the obsession); the next it's all the funeral and memorial services he attends these days; the next it's the futility of fame. He has no thoughts, he says, for posterity: "When we go, we're gone."
If he had to choose his golden era, though, it would be the stretch in the early Eighties between Quartermaine's Terms and The Common Pursuit. "Holden Caulfield liked to divide writers into two categories. The top category are those he'd like to phone up. I kind of feel that the only time I'd want to phone up the author of something I'd written was then."
The criticisms most frequently levelled at Gray's oeuvre are that it rarely departs from the world he knows (most of it is set in publishing or academe, reflecting his eight years as a research student at Cambridge and a further 25 lecturing at Queen Mary's College, London) and that he's too prolific. The latter annoys him: "There's a peculiar reverence for what I'd call impotence. The less you write, the more distinguished what you write is. But then I think of all the people I truly admire - Dickens, Shakespeare, Aeschylus - and it seems to me that what has marked them all out is a kind of fertility."
Gray is not insinuating that he's in the same league. Indeed, in his Eeyore-ish way, he rather enjoys the fact that he has had almost as many flops as successes: "I'm not on the school syllabus. My plays aren't revived at the National. But I don't know if I'd want the pressure off. It cloaks the poverty of one's life. I write plays. I do it for a living. I can't do anything else, it's true."