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 t h e a t r e

'An awful effort at nonchalance':
Carole Nimmons and Alan Bates in "Life Support."
Photograph by Mark Ellidge

On its last legs

10 August1997. ONE OF THE hardest things to explain is why a play leaves you completely cold. In the case of Simon Gray's new play, "Life Support" (Aldwych), the question is even harder to answer because it has, on the face of it, quite a lot going for it.
It is set in a London hospital room where Gwen Golding lies unconscious, on a life-support machine. Her husband Jeff (Alan Bates) is a writer: they were on a trip in Guadeloupe when Gwen was stung by a bee and collapsed. Technically she is still alive. You see in the cast list that she is played by Georgina Hale and you think, surely to goodness she won't be lying there without a word until the end: so perhaps Gwen will recover.
Enter Dr Pat O'Brien (Frank McCusker), a sharp-eyed young party who seems to be the representative on earth of Mr Rolls, the consultant. O'Brien is a master of the meaninglessly upbeat bedside chat, full of wise saws and the latest instances of miraculous recovery. The awesome air of clinical efficiency and noncommittal optimism cannot hide the fact that nobody knows what to do or what to expect. Gray's jokes are both elegant and cruel: a combination that gives English humour its characteristically sadistic charm.
Bates is completely at home in this atmosphere. No other actor can wield whimsical humour, flippant brutality and murderous understatement with such insinuating, subversive elegance. This is the kind of performance that makes you sit back and expect an experience, substance, revelation.
The subject of this play is guilt. What cause is there in nature? Is it me? The Judeo-Christian tradition, which has made such a first-rate job of shaping our moral natures, has conditioned us to look behind every untoward event for some malignant cause. The contributions of Messrs Luther, Calvin and Freud, together with those of English education, have ensured that a lot of people find the malignant cause to be themselves. Guilt becomes a compulsion, almost a pleasure.
Jeff recalls that Gwen used to call him a fraud, sometimes in affectionate mockery, sometimes almost in earnest. Why? Because he invented adventure stories sitting in hotel rooms. But surely, is not that what many writers do? Is having an imagination a crime? Either way, Jeff and Gwen went off to Guadeloupe to have a real adventure for his next book. If they had not, he thinks, she would still be alive. But just a minute: at the beginning we heard that it was Gwen who insisted on going with him. Has Jeff forgotten that? Or has Gray? Is Jeff confused? Or is his author not fully in control of his material?
Soon Jeff begins to hallucinate. Gwen talks to him from her bed, reminding him of details of their lives together, his failures, her failures, how they came through. Bates is wonderful during these deeply contrived moments, keeping sentimentality at bay with an awful effort at nonchalance. Next, Jeff's secretary Julia (Carole Nimmons) arrives with some contracts to sign, but also because Jeff asked her to confess to the unconscious Gwen that she and Jeff are lovers. This was the moment when I felt real unease setting in. You can imagine somebody in Jeff's state of mind fantasising over such a confession, even wanting to hear it, but not Julia going along with it. The insight that some people need to make confessions when they cannot be heard is fine, but the way Gray uses it is preposterous. Unless, of course, the whole scene is another hallucination of Jeff's -- but that really leaves you marooned and disoriented. It is not that you do not believe in people having hallucinations: they do, especially in moments of great stress, illness or grief. Besides, Jeff's actor brother Jack (Nickolas Grace) is a liar and fantasist to a degree that is not far from hallucinating, so perhaps it runs in the family.
No, the reason why the play finally leaves you unmoved is that Gray uses hallucination as a shortcut and a cop-out, a trick to open up a plotless situation and bring into it a sense of past events. The play becomes a monologue of guilt, real and/or imaginary, in which the other characters are either props or prompters and could themselves be unreal. The result is a freak: a play about guilt which has no moral content. Gray will reply: don't be so dim, this play is about how Jeff feels, a picture of his mind. Fine, but what is all that feeling about? Guilt in the sense Jeff feels it is a moral concept, but how can you look at it in a moral way if you are not sure which events are real?
What exactly happened in Guadeloupe in any case? From the medical point of view the story is ludicrous. A bee sting that traumatises you actually kills you very quickly. How, on two bicycles, did Jeff and Gwen get from a remote country road to a cafe full of people, and how is it that she could still stand up and drink, let alone have a row with him? Did all this really happen? And how did he then get to her London? And, though I will not give away a crucial and shocking piece of narrative, I have to point out that urinating on a bee sting does not neutralise the poison, as Dr O'Brien pleasantly suggests. Or is he, too, a hallucinatory figure?
Harold Pinter directs the play with, in the circumstances, an astonishing sense of delicacy and precision. This is the seventh play by Gray he has directed since Butley 26 years ago, and I wonder whether, in "Life Support," Gray might not have finally written a play inspired, consciously or not, by Pinter's work. If so, perhaps he should now direct one of Pinter's plays. He would realise that hallucinatory effects are not the same thing as hallucinatory plays, and that the evasions of a character are not the same as the evasions of his author. Harry and James in "The Collection" will never know what happened between Stella and Bill, and the audience won't either; but Stella and Bill do, and they use this knowledge as a weapon in a power struggle. Gray's characters inhabit an entirely different no man's land. Do they sleep or wake? Does Gray? Sometimes there is little to distinguish between nihilism and self-indulgence.

15 August 97
To: John Peter, The Sunday Times, Theatre
Re: 10 August review of Simon Gray's LIFE SUPPORT

Dear Mr Peter:

I am writing about your negative review of "Life Support." I have seen the play several times, and reviewed it (in an amateur capacity--I'm an art director) for an Internet web site.
I'm concerned not because we disagree (like many of your colleagues, I like the play) but because you have written a review based in large part on your confusion about the story. (I didn't detect general audience confusion in June.) Let me comment on three of your points:

A) You say that it's an overstatement to call JG a fraud for fictionalizing his adventures.

Gray is aptly named, I've always felt. His best characters are not heroes or villains: they are fallible humans, caught by him in medias res. JG isn't living some sort of hideous lie for making up his adventures, but he feels tainted, knows he has taken shortcuts.
As Alan Bates says about JG, in his Times interview with Simon Fanshawe: "JG has chanced through life, taken the easy route, but been canny enough to turn it into something successful. It's a play about confronting all that fakery."

B) You say that it was Gwen's idea to go on this trip anyway, so JG isn't to blame for her misadventure. "Has Jeff forgotten that? Or has Gray? Is Jeff confused? Or is his author not fully in control of his material?" and: "What exactly happened in Guadeloupe in any case?"

You have missed a central detail of the play, and it has coloured your judgement of the whole. JG's over-rehearsed fiction (which he relates again and again) about the bee sting occuring while Gwen has a roadside pee - as opposed to the truth, which he finally reveals to Pat - is clearly set out by Gray:
· Gwen insists on going to Guadeloupe.
· JG retalliates by putting them through rigors which he usually makes up.
· While biking in the heat, they stop at a cafe, and (in spite of the fact that they are both alcoholics) JG orders beer. They get drunk, have a row, and in the midst of this Gwen is stung by a bee.
· A "military type" at a nearby table tries to help. His actions are misunderstood by JG, who assaults him.
· Gwen is taken to hospital; JG spends a night in jail (to sober up).
· A doctor in Guadeloupe offers to end Gwen's life: but JG gets her back to London to Mr Rolls, and simplifies and fictionalizes his account of the bee sting, to hide all the guilty secrets: he leaves out the row, the drink, his fear that he prevented the officer from saving Gwen's life, his last angry words to Gwen.

C) You are disturbed about the scenes with Julia (who is JG's literary agent, by the way, not his secretary) and brother Jack. Hallucinations? shortcuts and cop-outs? Unreal props and prompters? How can one look at the play in a moral way if one is not sure which events are real?

As a theatre critic you intuit that Gray is not presenting a narrative drama that stays firmly rooted in reality. Your explanation is that JG is hallucinating, and that the secondary characters are simply there to move his monologue. Mine is that Gray is employing dramatic license to give us more insight.
Benedict Nightingale calls this play "sardonic tragedy, black comedy." Gray's exaggerations and excursions into the absurd, mine areas of our psyches that are untouched by fact, exposition, straightforward story-telling. He's telling us that JG would try anything to bring Gwen back. It's an evocation of his love and desperation, of the foolish gestures we all have made. (Similarly: the Goldings would undoubtedly, in real life, have friends. Gray distills the story by removing them and revealing JG's emotional isolation. And the Jack/JG exchanges capture a whole lifetime of sibling rivalry between winner and loser.)

I doubt very much that this play is inspired, "consciously or not," by Harold Pinter's work. But it's no accident that Pinter has directed it so beautifully. He is at home with ambiguity, and knows just how to pull back the curtain and reveal the inner doings of our messy, contradictory, human hearts and souls. As do Simon Gray and Alan Bates.
Of course, great playwrights don't unfailingly write great plays (though I do think that this is one of Gray's finest). I'm sure of this, however: Gray and Pinter - whether inspired or just getting on with it - are incapable of creating and staging a sloppy and self-indulgent work such as you describe. They are simply too meticulous, masters of their craft. Gray has written this play with subtlety and delicacy, Pinter has directed it with clarity and economy, and Bates delivers, as you say, "the kind of performance that makes you sit back and expect an experience."
So: "Life Support" glowed with a gleam, but you were looking away, to paraphrase Thomas Hardy and JG. I think that you owe it to yourself to see the play again. Let me know if you find "substance and revelation" on second viewing, as I did. Even better, let the author and the public know.
With my best regards.

9th September
Dear Karen:

I'm so sorry that this is such a delayed response - I'm only just back from nearly a month away.
Thank you for your letter to me, your letter to John Peter, and your review. The first and the third of these gave me much pleasure. The second could hardly give me pleasure - I had avoided reading John Peter and therefore had no idea that he'd been blankly incompetent, innocently assuming that he'd merely been ill-disposed.
You deal with him, if I may say so, with perfect judgement both in tone and in content. I wonder if he's so far honoured you with a reply. [He has not.-KR] I think I'm sufficiently insensed to write to him myself. If I do, I shall keep you informed.
Meanwhile, again my gratitude. Enclosed is a copy of Breaking Hearts. I hope you enjoy it.

Best wishes,
Sincerely, SG

PS. Re Jack. What you describe* is certainly what I intended. I'm not sure, though, that if I'd been well I wouldn't have found myself looking at those two scenes again with a view to sliding into them a touch more obliquely. But there are probably a number of things I would have looked at closely if I'd been around for rehearsals.

*In my letter to Gray, I had said: "I am curious about Jack, who has been called a caricature, slimy, manipulative, one-dimensional. I don't agree. To me, the Jack/JG relationship is about family: the ties of obligation, loving but not liking, sibling rivalry. (If Jack is a manipulative loser, certainly JG is no prize as a brother!) In Jack's second visit, I saw brotherly duty and an element of sincerity, not necessarily at odds with his desire to get the cheque. I hope that you intended this ambiguity; it deepens that long moment of non-connection, makes it even more tragic."